Tag: much time
Five COVID Numbers That No Longer Make Any Sense
The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection prevention. They’ve also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative
The Keys to Lifelong Friendship
“The Friendship Files,” my series of interviews with friends about their friendships, began with an idle thought. Having written a lot about both friendship and dating apps, I was curious about Bumble BFF. Did it work? Did it feel like dating? What do you do on a friend date anyway? So I interviewed two young women who became best friends after using the app. It was intended as a onetime article, but the conversation was so fun, genuine, and sometimes
Coachella Defeated My Cynicism About Music Festivals
In an ill-fated attempt to hype myself up for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, I went on YouTube to look at an inflatable blue gorilla—a stage prop for the hip-hop act Brockhampton, who had announced that Coachella would be the group’s last booking ever. The festival unfolds in two identical three-day lineups over consecutive weekends; I was attending the second weekend, and I wanted a taste of how the first one had gone. In the video I
Ukraine and the Words That Lead to Mass Murder
In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away
12 Reader Views on Where America Is Going Wrong
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Soon after, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers, “What worries you most about the direction of the country?” For Adam, the answer is rooted in a perception that we’re underestimating what is at stake when we act:
The thing I worry about
Fiction: ‘Cromer’ – The Atlantic
In New Malden, they owned a corner shop together. It was the place where you could get the gossip magazines and newspapers from Seoul. Then, when everyone got smartphones, it became the place to get your smartphone cases: cute cats, cows, hippos. Gel pens, too. The students picked out a few colors while they got their fizzy drinks or, when it grew warmer, waited their turn at the shaved-ice machine that Harry had convinced his wife they should
How the Pandemic Has Shaped Babies’ Development
Two years is a long time in any child’s life. It’s half of high school and most of middle school, time enough for a grade schooler to notch several inches on the kitchen doorframe and for toddlers to leap from first words to conversations. For the babies born in March 2020, just as the pandemic was declared, two years make up their whole lives.
From the minute these children were born in empty maternity wards to now—as their parents are
How Many Lives Could the FDA Have Saved From COVID?
The first COVID-19 vaccine could arrive before Election Day, Donald Trump avowed in the summer of 2020. But government regulators wanted things to work out differently: “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he wrote on Twitter. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd.”
Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In
When Cancer Broke My Spirit
“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated
The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School
The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron variant, other experts and some politicians have warned that plans to pull back on the policy should be put on hold.