Events

Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus argues that "quarantine fatigue is real," and it may be healthier to start relaxing self-isolation (for many people) than to continue it: Public-health experts have known for decades that an abstinence-only message doesn’t work for sex. It doesn’t work for substance use, either. Likewise, asking Americans to abstain from nearly all in-person social contact will not hold the coronavirus at bay—at least not forever. I’m not talking about the people who...

I read the news today, oh boy: Close to 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials called on Attorney General William Barr to resign, which he won't do because he's this close to total world domination. Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord agrees. Chicago will open six new Covid-19 testing sites around the city in an effort to get to 10,000 tests per day. Pilot-journalist James Fallows says "air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time." Cranky...

So believes NYU media professor Jay Rosen about how President Trump will try to win this fall: The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the...

Illinois has had a stay-at-home order in effect for over seven weeks now, though last week the state and county opened up forest trails and other outdoor activities that allow for proper distancing and discourage people clumping together in groups. So today I drove up to the northern suburbs to the site of the largest Civilian Conservation Corps project undertaken during the agency's run from 1933 to 1940. It was good to get outside. Not my fastest-ever pace, but still respectable, and somehow I got...

Writing for the Washington Post, Michele Norris has had enough of white dudes toting firearms at "peaceful" protests: We’ve gotten far too accustomed to the image of white protesters carrying paramilitary-level firearms in public spaces. The presence of guns — often really large guns — at protests has become alarmingly normalized. It is time to take stock of what that means. Accepting and even expecting to see firearms at protest rallies means that we somehow embrace the threat of chaos and violence....

The US unemployment rate exploded to 14.7% in April as 20.5 million people officially left the workforce, with millions more people leaving full-time work and others not even trying to find new jobs. April's job losses were more than 10 times the 1.9 million reported in September 1945 as the US demobilized from World War II. Once you've absorbed that, there's more: Illinois has passed 3,000 Covid-19 deaths, meaning more people have died of the disease in Illinois than died nationwide in the 9/11...

A pool of warm air running all the way up the Rocky Mountains to Alaska has forced a blob of cold air down into the eastern United States. This has started driving temperatures down all throughout the northeast, with a forecast drop to 10°C below normal here in Chicago and possible snow as far south as Philadelphia. In May. Ah, well. We all feel like it's March 68th, anyway. And yes, this cold snap is a consequence of climate change.

The differences in the way Democrats and Republicans have approached the pandemic shouldn't surprise or shock anyone, but one might still expect Republicans not to say the quiet parts quite so loudly. Last week, 3.2 million more Americans filed for unemployment benefits, bringing the total to 33.5 million since mid-March and the unemployment rate to nearly 20%. The last time we had 20% unemployment, Herbert Hoover (a Republican, let's remember) sat on his ass in the Oval Office waiting for the market to...

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee from 31 December 2015:

Remember slow news days? Me neither. Republican legislators and business owners have pushed back on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's plan to re-open the economy, preferring instead to force their employees into unsafe situations so they can return to making money. Professional dilettante Jared Kushner's leadership in getting a bunch of kids to organize mask distribution went about as well as one might predict. More reasonable people simply see how it means we're going to be in this a while. California...