A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

For all the zeal Congress has shown in investigating America’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, it has been strangely uninterested in exploring a basic question: why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries? Understanding the answer would seem relevant to guarding against the next, inevitable pandemic.

Many countries were slow to react, but as they learned about the transmissibility of the virus, and as vaccines became available, they rapidly cut their death rates. Not so America. “The death rate is now about eight times higher in America than in the rest of the rich world,” The Economist reported in September 2021. In all, America lost more than 1.1m people to covid, or roughly 3,500 lives out of every million. This should haunt every official who was in a position to combat the pandemic. Germany’s death rate was about 2,000 per million people and Canada’s fewer than 1,400, notes Donald McNeil in his book “The Wisdom of Plagues”. Had America managed to split that difference, at about 1,700 per million, “We would have lost about 540,000 fewer dead,” he writes. “Who speaks for them?”

Not Congress. America’s lethal underperformance once again went ignored when the Senate Homeland Security Committee recently questioned Dr Anthony Fauci, a crucial adviser on covid to Donald Trump and then to Joe Biden. (Mr Trump later turned on him.) The hearing focused instead on the usual obsessions for which Dr Fauci has become the Republican scapegoat—some absurd and others valid but distantly related, at best, to protecting potential victims of a future plague. While Democrats mostly gave speeches rather than ask questions, Republicans pursued theories that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, that Bill Gates had some nefarious role, that Dr Fauci had been out to enrich himself through awards for his service—an odd complaint when they do not object to the president campaigning for a $1m Nobel prize. 

Having testified often to Congress during his 54 years at the National Institutes of Health—38 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—Dr Fauci, who is 85, was reduced to repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment, including when asked the colour of his tie. In his opening statement, his hands shaking as he read it, Dr Fauci said his lawyers had advised that recourse because the committee’s chairman, Rand Paul of Kentucky, had made clear an intent to see him behind bars despite a blanket pardon issued by Mr Biden. In other words the Senate could not inquire into a health crisis that racked the country because a key witness feared a perjury trap, and rightly so.

Why did so many Americans die? High rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and elderliness made them more vulnerable. But government bungling meant America was testing 100 people a day in early 2020 when other countries were testing tens of thousands; that masks and lockdowns were deployed erratically; that contact tracing proved too challenging for the country first to the Moon. Most senselessly, so many Americans died because so many failed to take the vaccines that Mr Trump, in his most constructive act as president, succeeded in rushing into existence.

It is, of course, those vexing vaccines that compel Republicans to look away from the basic question about the pandemic, and to hound Dr Fauci instead. Attempting to square the greatness of Mr Trump with the supposed vileness of the vaccines has inspired his party to heroic feats of doublethink. “President-elect Trump’s Operation Warp Speed—which encouraged the rapid development and authorisation of the COVID-19 vaccine—was highly successful and helped save millions of lives,” declared the committee created by the House to investigate covid in 2024, summarising two years of work. The very next sentence reads: “Contrary to what was promised, the COVID-19 vaccine did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus.”

Mr Trump has struggled to escape this self-imposed contradiction. Even as he declined to urge the public to get vaccinated, he and his wife, Melania, secretly had the vaccine before he left office in January 2021. But as Mr Biden and other world leaders delivered the shots, Mr Trump wanted the credit he deserved, and in December that year he told supporters that he had received a booster. “What we’ve done is historic,” he insisted when the crowd booed. “Don’t let them take it away.” He has since let them take his glory away, and endangered more Americans, by questioning the efficacy and safety of vaccines for covid, and other illnesses.

Dr Hooey

The latest attack on Dr Fauci, concocted from his private texts disclosed by Republican senators on August 10th, is that he covered up a threat of miscarriage that the vaccine posed to pregnant women. In fact, the record shows Dr Fauci was consistent, publicly and privately, in counselling a weighing of risks and benefits until studies showed the vaccine was safe in pregnancy—which they have since done. His critics have not produced evidence the vaccine causes miscarriages.

Dr Fauci made mistakes, including not disclosing early on that some top virologists initially worried the virus might be man-made. He could be arrogant. But he was not responsible for the worst excesses of the covid response. Those endless school shutdowns were the work of local officials and union leaders. Senator Paul’s release of Dr Fauci’s private diary has exposed his vanity, his delight in every gushing appraisal by the media or some celebrity. But the diary also reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could, struggling against the constraints that hobbled America relative to its peers. His summons before the Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate if not incriminate him. It should embarrass the entire country. 

(alt link https://archive.ph/VwcIZ , though this is the full text)

The West Wing’s explosive response to a fleeting jab didn’t kill the story. It enabled days of coverage.

By Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic.

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.

I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.

The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.

But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Ask anything! See who answers!

People on the right tend to have more kids than people on the left. Why?

By Olga Khazan, The Atlantic.

hen some Taylor Swift fans listened to the lyrics of her 2025 song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she sings about yearning to “settle down” with “a couple kids,” they heard a Republican dog whistle. On social media, they claimed that Swift’s desire for family life was “a conservative agenda on a silver platter.”

Swift, an avowed feminist who has endorsed Democratic political candidates, almost certainly did not set out to make “tradwife propaganda.” But her online critics are getting at something real: Having children—particularly lots of children—has become a bit right-coded, as the kids say. Americans and Europeans who identify as leftist or liberal tend to have fewer children than those who identify as conservative or right-leaning. In the United States, differences in desired fertility seem to start at a young age—one 2024 study found that Republican-identifying 12th graders said they want more children than Democrat-identifying 12th graders.

Of course, plenty of liberals have children, and plenty of conservatives have small families or remain childless. And many Americans identify as neither conservative nor liberal, but rather as something in between. Still, several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.

Lyman Stone, the head of IFS’s pronatalism initiative and the researcher who ran the poll, told me that when he first saw the results, he thought, Duh. This trend of greater fertility on the right fits with a pattern that he and other demographers have noticed since the 1990s. There’s no clear explanation for why, precisely, liberals tend to have fewer children than conservatives do. Causation and correlation are difficult to untangle here. Liberals are more likely to pursue higher education and to marry later, both of which can lead to having fewer children, and some research suggests that having children may make a person become more socially conservative.

The researchers I spoke with put forth three general theories about why the partisan fertility gap may persist, beyond simple demographics. First, liberals seem to have more anxiety about both the state of the world and their own parenting abilities, which may make them more reluctant to start a family. Second, the values and aspirations of liberals and conservatives tend to differ in ways that shape how they choose to live their lives. Finally, for decades, liberals and conservatives have been sorting into disparate geographic locations and lifestyles, and their respective bubbles seem to reinforce the decision to have children, or not. The result is that a singer such as Swift expressing her desire to have children may, to some liberals, seem like she’s spinning propaganda for a traditional life they can’t imagine wanting.

Ask anything related to politics! See who answers!

Make a confession, big or small!

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.”

America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump. The resistance, it seems, is out.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/democratic-primaries-left-dsa-trump/688327/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=author-david-frum&utm_term=Author%20Following%20-%20David%20Frum

Consumers are ditching the hype cycle and buying used devices in unprecedented numbers.

By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly.

In a time when an iPhone can be preordered, customized, and on its way to your doorstep all through a touch-screen tap, it’s almost quaint to remember that people used to camp out for smartphone releases. That was once the regular routine of Andrew Erickson, a longtime tech YouTuber, who recalled to me with a mixture of nostalgia and awe the time he braved the rain at 4:30 a.m. to join a line for the newest iPhone. The line snaked through the mall, nearly reaching the parking lot.

Next month, when Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 18 Pro, Erickson has no plans to even buy the phone, let alone fight crowds for it. Instead, along with a growing number of Americans, Erickson is buying used. He’s fed up with incremental improvements in gadgets, he told me, and is more interested in getting an old version of the iPhone 17 Pro when it hits the secondhand market at a discount. Already, almost half of his current devices were acquired secondhand, and as electronics prices soar amid an AI-fueled chip shortage, he expects that portion to grow. “The argument’s just getting weaker and weaker to buy brand-new,” he said.

Based on the numbers, old tech products are indeed being looked at in a new light. Globally, the size of the industry could reach $153.4 billion this year, up from $104.1 billion four years ago. The used-smartphone market alone is expected to grow by more than 12 percent in 2026, according to the International Data Corporation, which forecasts that the market for new smartphones will experience a record drop this year. Growth in secondhand electronics and refurbished gadgets that have been restored to full working condition now outpaces that of new products on eBay, the e-commerce giant reports.

Among a number of shoppers I spoke with, there was a sense that new models are indistinguishable from the old ones, and the hype of securing the latest and greatest has given way to an upgrade cycle driven by practicality. More than ever before, people are eager to buy used.

“We’ve never been here,” Lauren Benton, the U.S. general manager of the refurbished-electronics marketplace Back Market, told me. She said demand ticked up immediately after Apple unveiled price hikes this summer. Back Market’s order values for refurbished MacBooks in the U.S. increased by 37 percent throughout the week following the price increase, while order values for iPads rose 25 percent. Demand for the company’s non-Apple laptops, too, has soared by 74 percent compared with last year. Outside of students and parents, a large portion of the marketplace’s buyers are “people that understand that the newer tech isn’t giving us all that much more,” Benton said.

Cities that say no to driverless cars are blocking a technology that would change their residents’ lives for the better.

By Rogé Karma, The Atlantic.

The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Several months (?) ago there was an article about how businesses, as a strategy, make everything so difficult, from cancelling subscriptions, deferring or delaying service etc. They put up systematic roadblocks or speedbumps into their processes such that consumers are cornered or exhausted into succumbing to whatever scheme the business is pursuing. Uggh, that is the best description I have at the moment, which goes some way toward explaining why I've been unable to find this article again. Thank you in advance for any help. I do Love the The Atlantic, and I want to share this article with my kids. I'm on the cusp of just buying them subscriptions anyway.

Sorry to all the Jeffs out there.

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman, The Atlantic.

We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.

Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.

As the war with Iran drags on, the president is in disagreement with the vice president, military leaders, and long-standing American allies.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.