Last fall, only a handful of people had reason to regularly think about Kelly Loeffler, then a cryptocurrency executive and hands-off owner of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Dream. Now, as a member of the Senate running in a special election, she is functioning as the focal point of the women’s basketball league’s most prominent culture clash.
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In April 2009, a new type of influenza began spreading through the American West: H1N1, or swine flu. Vaccine developers had been preparing for a moment like this after several deadly flu pandemics in the twentieth century. They began cultivating the virus for a new flu vaccine, and the vaccine was ready just a few months later in October. It still wasn’t fast enough to prevent a pandemic. Kids, who are among the most vulnerable to the flu, went back to school in September, and the swine flu spread around the world. Читать дальше...
In early May, after eight weeks in quarantine, Italy embarked on fase 2 of its coronavirus response and, step by step, relaxed its restrictions. From that day, families were once again allowed to meet one another, and restaurants could reopen, if only for takeout. Most shops, bars, and museums reopened in mid-May, while schools and nurseries remained closed. Physical distancing, though, has remained in effect.
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For a number of reasons, the history of American slavery has been in the news over the past year. The New York Times’s 1619 Project–commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves, the Black Lives Matter movement, renewed interest in the idea of reparations, the ongoing controversy about removing monuments to Civil War traitors, Republican pandering to neo-Confederates, and new historical research have all contributed to renewed interest in the topic.
Years before the Nineteenth Amendment would be ratified, Elizabeth Cady Stanton devised a history of women’s suffrage. In her telling, the movement traces its origins to a convention, which she convened, in a small town in upstate New York. Stanton fixed the origin of women’s suffrage there and then, as historian Lisa Tetrault methodically recounts in The Myth of Seneca Falls, to elevate herself as a rightful movement leader, and along with it, her possession of the correct strategy. She accomplished... Читать дальше...
Luis Elizondo wanted me to believe. I’d spent the past few hours nursing Diet Cokes at the Chart House bar north of San Diego while Elizondo, a retired Army counterintelligence special agent and former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program, drank beers and told me war stories. It had been about half a year since Elizondo went on CNN in primetime and declared: “There is very compelling evidence that we”—meaning sentient earthlings—“may not be alone.” In that appearance, as he spoke to anchor Erin Burnett... Читать дальше...
