The next big plague is coming, and despite making progress on pandemic preparedness, the U.S. might still suffer mass casualties. Here’s why.
By Olga Khazan
Ominous pathogens seem to arrive every few years: SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, COVID-19 in 2019. The World Health Organization calls these viral threats “Disease X,” both to encourage policy makers to think broadly about what the next pandemic might be, and because it could be anything. At this rate, 2025 is not looking good.
After an inept coronavirus response, will the United States do better when the next pandemic strikes? Experts generally agree that America learned from the past year, and that the next public-health crisis won’t be…
Persistent hype around mRNA vaccine technology is now distracting us from other ways to end the pandemic
By Hilda Bastian
At the end of January, reports that yet another COVID-19 vaccine had succeeded in its clinical trials — this one offering about 70 percent protection — were front-page news in the United States, and occasioned push alerts on millions of phones. But when the Maryland-based biotech firm Novavax announced its latest stunning trial results last week, and an efficacy rate of more than 90 percent even against coronavirus variants, the response from the same media outlets was muted in comparison. The difference, of course, was the timing: With three vaccines already authorized for emergency use by the…
The subscription service is Amazon’s greatest — and most terrifying — invention
By Ellen Cushing
Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. …
Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work
By Joe Pinsker
The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone’s salary, including the CEO’s, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers’ work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay —…
They don’t just protect members at all costs — they condition officers to see themselves as above the law
By Adam Serwer
In May 2020, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old with a smartphone camera, documented the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Most Americans who watched the video of Floyd begging for his life, as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, saw a human being. Robert Kroll did not. The head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis saw a “violent criminal” and viewed the protests that followed as a “terrorist movement.” …
Of all the injuries we suffered, mine is the worst. My brain injury has shaken my confidence in my own personality, my own existence.
By Hana Schank
The worst things can happen on the most beautiful days. My family’s worst day was a perfect one in the summer of 2019. We picked my daughter up from camp and talked about where to go for lunch: the diner or the burger place. I don’t remember which we chose. What I do remember: being woken up, again and again, by doctors who insist on asking me the same questions — my name, where I am, what month it is — and telling me the same story, a story that I am sure is wrong.
“You were…
More Americans are telling their boss to shove it. Is the workplace undergoing a revolution — or just a post-pandemic spasm?
By Derek Thompson
Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in May than any other month on record going back to the beginning of the century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers, about five of them quit last month.
Low-wage workers aren’t the only ones eyeing the door. In May, more than 700,000 workers in the bureau’s mostly white-collar category of “professional and business services” left their job — the highest monthly number ever. …
The recent effort to make the anniversary a federal holiday is undermined by the simultaneous attack on critical race theory and curricula focused on the enduring legacy of slavery
By Kellie Carter Jackson
When you are Black in America, how do you celebrate progress? How do you honor the history and memory of emancipation, liberation, and advancement? How do Black people mark a moment when a positive change transformed the trajectory of their lives, their nation? For many Black Americans that moment has been Juneteenth, or June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, received word that they were free, some two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. But when I think about Juneteenth, I am mostly stuck on that…
Kodak changed the way Americans saw themselves and their country. But it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age.
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
When I was in fifth grade, my class took a field trip to the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, New York, as the fifth graders at my rural elementary school, 30 minutes south of the city, did every year. Housed in a Colonial Revival mansion built for the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company in 1905, the museum is home to one of the most significant photography and film collections in the world. But our job there was to stare at old cameras the size of our bodies, marvel at the luxury of having a pipe organ…
A common ideology underlies the practices of many ultra-wealthy people: The government can’t be trusted with money.
By Abigail Disney
When ProPublica published its report last week on the tax profiles of 25 of the richest Americans, jaws dropped across the United States. How was it possible that plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett could pay nothing in income taxes to the federal government? What sneaky sleights of pen, what subterfuge, what acts of turpitude could have led to this result?
The shock stems, in part, from a disturbing reality: Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. …
