Tag: recent months
Why Britain Changed Its China Stance
As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.
From 2020 onward, however,
America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe. He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive
Your Negative COVID Test Is Basically Meaningless
In early May, 27-year-old Hayley Furmaniuk felt tired and a bit congested, but after rapid-testing negative for the coronavirus two days in a row, she dined indoors with friends. The next morning, her symptoms worsened. Knowing her parents were driving in for Mother’s Day, she tested again—and saw a very bright positive. Which meant three not-so-great things: She needed to cancel with her parents; she had likely exposed her friends; a test had apparently taken three days to register what
Don’t Wait to Get Your Kid Vaccinated
Karen Ocwieja delivered her twin sons last June, just weeks before Delta broke across the American Northeast. For months, she and her husband sheltered the boys, who’d been born premature, limiting their exposures to friends, family, and other kids, hoping to guard them from COVID’s worst. But all four of them still ended up catching the virus this January—the boys’ first bona fide illness. Then, in May, the twins tested positive again. Born with Ocwieja’s antibodies from pregnancy and
The Exercise Bike’s Long Journey
A pair of exercise bicycles are resting 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, about 370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland. In 1912, these same bikes sat alongside rowing machines, an “electric camel,” and other pieces of state-of-the-art equipment in the gymnasium of the RMS Titanic. The bicycles had a single flywheel and were mounted in front of a large dial whose red and blue arrows marked the rider’s progress toward the distance of 440 yards, a quarter
The Next Big COVID-Vaccine Gamble
Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, the spring weather’s just barely warming, but regulators in the United States are already wringing their hands over a tricksy fall brew: the contents of the COVID shot that vaccine makers are prepping for autumn, when all eligible Americans may be asked to dose up yet again (if, that is, Congress coughs up the money to actually buy the vaccines). In a recent advisory meeting convened by the FDA, Peter Marks, the director of
What Do Female Incels Really Want?
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“We were all ugly,” Amanda, a 22-year-old student from Florida told me, recalling the online community she found when she was 18. “Men didn’t like us, guys didn’t want to be with us, and it was fine to acknowledge it.”
This Reddit forum was called r/Trufemcels, and she
What Did All Those COVID Infections Get Us?
I, as far as I can tell, have not yet been infected by the virus that causes COVID-19. Which, by official counts, makes me an oddball among Americans.
Granted, I could be wrong. I’ve never had a known exposure or symptoms, but contact tracing in the United States is crummy and plenty of infections are silent. I’ve taken many coronavirus tests, but not that many coronavirus tests, and it’s always possible that some of their results missed the mark.
If
Xi Jinping’s Terrifying New China
China’s social media was briefly aflutter this fall about an impressive feat in the popular online fantasy game Honor of Kings. A player had completed a “pentakill,” or five kills in a row, but something just smelled wrong: The user in question was 60 years old, according to the verified account information—hardly the type to be an expert gamer. Even more mysterious, why was this person brandishing digital weaponry at 3 a.m.? Was the player in fact a teenager
Worried About the Supply Chain? Stop Buying So Much Stuff
Lately, news stories about the supply chain tend to start in similar ways. The reader is dropped into an American container port, maybe in Long Beach, California, or Savannah, Georgia, full to bursting with trailer-size steel boxes loaded with toilet paper and exercise bikes and future Christmas presents. Some of the containers have gone untouched for weeks or months, waiting for their contents to be trucked to distribution centers. On the horizon, dozens of additional vessels are anchored and idle,