As a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, security guards hustled representatives into a secure location. Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, Delaware’s sole member of the House, tried to convince several of her Republican colleagues to put on masks. They refused, and laughed at her — behavior that was captured in a viral video. In the days since, House Democrats Pramila Jayapal, Brad Schneider, and Bonnie Watson Coleman have tested positive for COVID-19. They blame their GOP colleagues’ carelessness for their diagnoses. On Tuesday, I asked Blunt Rochester to reflect on what happened, and why. She agreed to let me share the story as she told it to me, edited and condensed for clarity. …

By Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard

If you’re like most Americans, there’s a good chance you’re going to wear a cloth mask today. Doing so makes sense. It remains the official recommendation in the United States, and it is something we’ve both advocated since the beginning of the pandemic. Both of us wrote articles as far back as March urging people to wear homemade cloth masks. We’re also the authors (along with 17 other experts) of a paper titled “An Evidence Review of Face Masks Against COVID,” which was just published in peer-reviewed form in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. …

By Erin Kissane and Alice Goldfarb

A year into the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, we still lack a complete understanding of who is getting sick, and where, and when. Demographic data from many states are astonishingly incomplete, and even widely collected information, such as the age of patients at the time of diagnosis or death, is so inconsistently presented that it has been impossible to assemble into a clear national picture. The federal government is now making more demographic data available, but the information continues to emerge at a snail’s pace.

This has left government outsiders to try to assemble the data — groups like us, the COVID Tracking Project, which is housed at The Atlantic. For more than nine months, we’ve compiled data from states to create a composite national picture of the pandemic. Time and again, we have seen that a lack of federal support has left overburdened state public-health authorities to fend for themselves, resulting in incomplete reporting, incompatible data definitions, and inconsistent data pipelines. …

By Ibram X. Kendi

“Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America. Do not represent who we are,” President-elect Joe Biden said during Wednesday’s siege.

“The behavior we witnessed in the U.S. Capitol is entirely un-American,” read a statement from a bipartisan and bicameral group of elected officials that included Senators Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Mark Warner as well as Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Tom Reed.

“We’re the United States of America. We disagree on a lot of things, and we have a lot of spirited debate … But we talk it out, and we honor each other — even in our disagreement,” said Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma. “And while we disagree on things — and disagree strongly at times — we do not encourage what happened today. …

By Jon D. Lee

Long before the first needle pierced the skin to deliver Pfizer/BioNTech’s highly anticipated COVID-19 vaccine, social media was rife with speculation and fearmongering. Alongside pertinent questions about safety, efficacy, and the historic rapidity of the vaccine’s production were conspiracy theories: that the vaccine was unsafe, unhealthy, itself the product of a conspiracy. Some claimed that the vaccine would alter your DNA or give you the disease itself. Others stated that the vaccine contained a microchip, perhaps placed there by Bill Gates, that linked to cell towers via 5G technology to allow for population surveillance. …

By Graeme Wood

The U.S. government is relatively coup-proof because, like the president who heads its executive branch, it is bloated and sluggish, and due to its sheer inertia, resistant to being jostled far out of position. That does not stop some from occasionally trying — and yesterday a crowd of deranged seditionists, encouraged by specific Republican officials, took a hard run at the government and tried to knock it down. It did not fall, and today the sun rose. Let’s see what we’ve learned.

(1) The president is still a coward. Donald Trump’s attempt on Saturday to hector Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud, released by The Washington Post, revealed that he believed every conspiracy theory about the election and — like some kind of idiot savant — had mastered even small details without developing any higher mental function. He really believes that dark forces have stolen his victory, and when he incites his followers to behave accordingly, he asks them to supply courage where his own is lacking. This limitation was always going to stop him from waging a civil war. A man who has spent his life avoiding situations that would demand physical courage, and despising those who have it, will be at his most cowardly in a moment like this. …

By Adam Serwer

The Capitol building of the United States was breached yesterday by a mob seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election at a sitting president’s behest. Waving Trump banners and Confederate flags, it forced the evacuation of the building and temporarily delayed the timely ceremonial counting of the electoral votes.

The immediate catalyst for the assault on the Capitol was the president himself. After addressing thousands of his supporters who had come to protest the results of the election, Donald Trump called his defeat an “egregious assault on our democracy,” urging the crowd to “walk down to the Capitol. We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. …

By Silas House

As a novelist, I often travel the country to talk about my books. During those events, almost invariably someone will ask me why my home state of Kentucky is so conservative. Many of these people ask why we’ve kept Mitch McConnell in office for almost 36 years. They take their anger at him out on me.

Once, a fellow writer told me I shouldn’t have been invited to a literary conference because of my state’s complicity in McConnell’s obstructionism during Barack Obama’s presidency. “Aren’t you ashamed to be a Kentuckian?” he asked, spittle flying from his lips. …