—A bus full of students returning to Budapest, Hungary, from a field trip to France, slammed into a pylon while driving through northern Italy and killed more than a dozen people.
—The Taliban has claimed credit for a bomb that exploded in a crowded Pakistani market and killed more than 50 people.
—Storms, including a tornado, killed four people in southern Mississippi and destroyed homes in the city of Hattiesburg, where the mayor declared a state of emergency.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
A Deadly Tornado Cuts Through Southern Mississippi
AP
A tornado struck the southern Mississippi city of Hattiesburg early Saturday in the dark and ripped roofs off homes, downed trees, and killed four people. The tornado was part of a violent storm rolling across the area, bringing sheets of rain and heavy winds. Hattiesburg is a city of about 46,000, and a search is still underway there for those who might be trapped in their homes beneath debris. Pictures of the damage sent out by the city and residents showed crumpled homes and trees in the street. A fire station received heavy damage, as well as William Carey University, a private Christian college, where the windows shattered and parts of the roof tore off. The mayor of Hattiesburg declared a state of emergency. The National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi, issued a severe weather warning for the state and parts of Arkansa, telling people to expect hail the size of golfballs, winds gust up to 60 miles per hour, and possibly more tornados.
A wide shot of all the homes damaged looking towards Edwards Street in downtown Hattiesburg. pic.twitter.com/elmJ2hA10c
A Bombing Attack in a Pakistani Vegetable Market Kills 22 People
AP
A bomb exploded Saturday in a vegetable market in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region of Kurram and killed at least 22 people and wounded 50 others. The blast happened in the city of Parachinar, a mainly Shia Muslim area near the border of Afghanistan. A sectarian militant group called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a banned Sunni extremist faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility, and has carried out similar attacks in the area in the past. There are varied accounts of what caused the blast, with some saying it was an improvised explosive device hidden in a box of vegetables, and others saying it was a suicide attack. Some of the wounded were airlifted to a hospital in Peshawar, the capital of another province nearby. It’s expected the death toll will rise as other wounded victims die from their wounds. The region of Kurram has been the site of increased violence lately, as the Pakistani army carries out operations to fight extremists in the area. In 2015 a bomb blast in the same market killed more than 20 people.
A Bus Full of Hungarian Students Returning From a Field Trip Crashes in Italy and Kills 16 People
AP
A bus full of Hungarian students returning from a ski field trip in France crashed into a pylon while driving through Italy and killed 16 people, injuring about 40 more. Police in the nearby city of Verona, in the north of Italy, said the victims were teenage students, parents, and teachers on their way back to Budapest. Officers are still investigating the cause of the crash, and said there was no other vehicle involved and it appears the bus veered off the road of its own accord. A driver who was following the bus as it crashed told an Italian radio station he’d noticed a problem with one of the wheels on the bus and had tried to alert the driver, The Guardianreported. After slamming into the pylon the bus caught fire, and some of its 55 passengers were thrown out of the windows while others were trapped with the flames. The survivors were taken to local hospitals, and at least one person was placed in a medically induced coma.
Eventually we might all have to deal with COVID-19—but a shorter, gentler version, thanks to vaccines.
Boghuma Kabisen Titanji was just 8 years old when the hyper-contagious virus swept through her classroom. Days later, she started to feel feverish, and developed a sparse, rosy rash. Three years after being fully dosed with the measles vaccine, one of the most durably effective immunizations in our roster, Titanji fell ill with the very pathogen her shots were designed to prevent.
Her parents rushed her to a pediatrician, worried that her first inoculations had failed to take. But the doctor allayed their fears: “It happens. She’ll be fine.” And she was. Her fever and rash cleared up in just a couple of days; she never sickened anyone else in her family. It was, says Titanji, now an infectious-disease physician and a researcher at Emory University, a textbook case of “modified” measles, a rare post-vaccination illness so mild and unthreatening that it doesn’t even deserve the full measles name.
They’ve aligned themselves with forces they despise. But lefty anti-vaxxers don’t see the contradiction.
Conspiracy theorists who discount the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and other public-health mandates are often portrayed in the media as right-wing. That’s for good reason: a not-insignificant number of the most vocal conspiracists tie their ideology firmly to President Donald Trump and the right-wing MAGA movement he inspired. Videos of angry red-state demonstrators pushing back against school boards and other local authorities in public hearings, and repeating outlandish, baseless misinformation, have made the rounds in traditional media.
But in the hills of western Massachusetts and in neighboring regions of upstate New York, a traditionally left-leaning area, these theories also hold purchase. I grew up in the region and started my journalistic career there. I’ve been arguing with residents, many of whom are close friends, about vaccines for more than a decade. But despite my efforts, and the efforts of many others, a stubborn resistance to reality has set in here, and only deepened since the pandemic began. Late last month, Do We Need This?, a group of anti-vaxxers and vaccine-mandate opponents, held a “festival” in the region to raise money for their cause, suggesting a $20 donation for entry. They shared the proceeds with other national vaccine-skeptic groups, including NY Stands Up!, the Informed Consent Action Network, and Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense.
On the day that SpaceX’s first space tourists launched, Elon Musk was there at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, to see them off, cheering as the private astronauts walked to the Teslas that would take them to suit up. And after they landed safely, having orbited Earth about 45 times, Musk was there again to congratulate them in person.
The Inspiration4 mission marked SpaceX’s fourth successful human spaceflight, and a SpaceX official says the company wants to fly paying customers “three, four, five, six times a year at least.” In this era’s space race among private companies, Musk’s SpaceX pulled ahead on essentially every measure but one—giving the CEO a lift above the atmosphere. Branson did it, Bezos did it—so why hasn’t Musk himself flown yet?
Dear Evan Hansen was lauded on Broadway, but the film adaptation only emphasizes its flaws.
When Dear Evan Hansen premiered on Broadway in 2016, it drew near-universal praise from New York’s theater critics. Ben Platt, playing an anxious teenager who becomes an internet celebrity after misrepresenting his role in a local tragedy, was showered with plaudits, and the show ended up winning six Tony Awards—the most of the season—including Best Musical and a leading-actor trophy for Platt. A film version was thus hardly a surprise. But when the director Stephen Chbosky’s extremely faithful adaptation premiered as the opening-night movie of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—the movie will be released in theaters this Friday—the reviews that followed were … broadly bad.
What changed? It wasn’t the story or the songs. Dear Evan Hansen the film is written by Steven Levenson, who wrote the narrative of the Broadway show, and largely retains the score, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (a few of the least compelling numbers have been cut; others have been added). And while the cast around Platt is mostly filled out by movie stars rather than Broadway veterans, the performances from actors such as Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, and Amandla Stenberg are uniformly solid. Did something get lost in translation, or is this an emperor’s-new-clothes moment revealing that Dear Evan Hansen never was any good in the first place?
The pandemic keeps changing, but these principles can guide your thinking through the seasons to come.
Updated at 9:28 a.m. on September 21, 2021.
For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with SARS-CoV-2. We know it better than we once did. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it—but that it can and will exact a heavy toll.
Still, this virus has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we’re not paying attention. It is changing all the time, a tweak to the genetic code here and there; sometimes, those tweaks add up to new danger. In a matter of weeks, the Delta variant upended the relative peace of America’s early summer and ushered in a new set of calculations about risk, masking, and testing. The pandemic’s endgame shifted.
Conventional wisdom says that venting is cathartic and that we should never go to bed angry. But couples who save disagreements for scheduled meetings show the benefits of a more patient approach to conflict.
For decades, when Liz Cutler’s husband, Tom Kreutz, did something that bothered her, Cutler would sometimes pull out a scrap of paper from the back of her desk drawer. On it she would scribble down her grievances: maybe Kreutz had stayed late at work without giving her a heads-up, or maybe he’d allowed their kids to do something she considered risky. The list was Cutler’s way of honoring a promise she and her husband had made. They would talk about their frustrations only in scheduled meetings—which they held once a year for a time, and later, every three months. It’s a system they’ve adhered to for more than 40 years.
Any psychologist will tell you that conflict is both an inevitable and a vital part of a close relationship. The challenge—which can make the difference between a lasting, satisfying partnership and one that combusts—is figuring out how to manage conflict constructively.
Today’s fictional North is defined by nostalgia for an icier time.
This article contains spoilers for The Terror and The North Water.
Of all the horrors of a 19th-century European voyage to the Arctic—noses and cheeks turned necrotic by frostbite, snow blindness, sea madness, broken bones badly knit—perhaps most ghastly was scurvy. The disease often starts with stiff limbs and ulcerating skin. Gums bleed and blacken, then engorge and protrude over the teeth or their absent weeping sockets like a dark second set of lips. This tissue is actively rotting, so living men smell dead. Odors and sounds become agonizingly, even dangerously, intense; hearing a gunshot can kill. And because many sufferers hallucinate that they are among the foods and comforts of home, some doctors called the affliction “nostalgia.”
After winning her award, Michaela Coel delivered the rare message meant for those outside the glitzy room in which she stood.
When the camera turned to Michaela Coel after she won an Emmy for limited-series writing, she looked overwhelmed. The creator, star, writer, and co-director of I May Destroy You kept her head down, her shoulders slouched. Next to her, Coel’s former co-star Cynthia Erivo whispered something into her ear—a pep talk, maybe. But for a few seconds, Coel remained still, as if the weight of her first, historic Emmy win might keep her from going onstage.
Luckily, it didn’t. Coel gave one of the night’s shortest speeches, and perhaps its most revealing. In her remarks, Coel did something unusual: She thought about her audience, tried to reach beyond the other entertainers seated in the room with her. “Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable,” she said. “I dare you … Visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear—from it, from us—for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.” She spoke directly to the potential storytellers hoping to one day be onstage. And she didn’t just advise them; in a night of pomp and circumstance, she reminded them of the value of quieter triumphs.
Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to pray while holding a dying man’s hand is an offense to basic Christian values.
Devotees to the cause of religious liberty may be startled to discover during the Supreme Court’s upcoming term that the latest legal-theological dispute finds the state of Texas locked in conflict with traditional Christian practice, where rites for the sick, condemned, and dying disrupt the preferences of executioners.
A recent stay in Ramirez v. Collier has again put Texas on the defense in a series of cases about whether death-row inmates have the right to be joined by clergy of their choice in the execution chamber. Earlier this month, the Court agreed to hear John Henry Ramirez’s claim that Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to lay hands on and pray over him in the execution chamber is a violation of his constitutional rights; lower courts had held that silent prayer would suffice, which Ramirez protested. The Court issued a stay in a similar case in June 2020, when another Texas inmate, Ruben Gutierrez, asked for a Catholic priest to join him as he was killed. The Court has likewise intervened in Alabama, which has banned all clergy from its execution chamber, a policy that Texas enacted two years ago but reversed in April. Now Texas says it will allow clergy of any faith, provided they are vetted and pass a background check—though still with other limitations, as Ramirez shows.
Behind shipping delays and soaring prices are workers still at mortal risk of COVID-19.
At this point, the maddeningly unpredictable Delta variant has changed the expected course of the coronavirus pandemic so much that it can be hard to know exactly what you’re waiting for, or if you should continue waiting at all. Is something like before-times normalcy still coming, or will Americans have to negotiate a permanently changed reality? Will we recognize that new normal when it gets here, or will it be clear only in hindsight? And how long will it be before you can buy a new couch and have it delivered in a timely manner?
Somehow, that third question is currently just as existential as the first two. Everyday life in the United States is acutely dependent on the perpetual motion of the supply chain, in which food and medicine and furniture and clothing all compete for many of the same logistical resources. As everyone has been forced to learn in the past year and a half, when the works get gummed up—when a finite supply of packaging can’t keep up with demand, when there aren’t enough longshoremen or truck drivers or postal workers, when a container ship gets wedged sideways in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes—the effects ripple outward for weeks or months, emptying shelves and raising prices in ways that can seem random. All of a sudden, you can’t buy kettlebells or canned seltzer.
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