News Today: What We're Following

How the Pandemic Defeated America

Ed Yong

A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.

In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19—infected 10  million people around the world and killed about half a million.

I’m Traveling, Even Though I’m Stuck at Home

Rick Steves

For the past 30 years, I’ve spent every summer abroad in Europe. Now I’ve realized that traveling isn’t just a pastime—it’s a mindset.

For many people, travel is a way of life. When not on the road, we dream of being on the road. As we fly home from one trip, we’re planning the next. That certainly describes me. And yet, several months into the pandemic, I’ve realized that the essence of traveling requires no passport and no plane ticket. A good traveler can take a trip and never leave her hometown.

For the past 30 years, I’ve spent four months in Europe each year, writing guidebooks, producing travel television, and leading bus tours. Since mid-March, I’ve slept in the same bed. I’ve eaten dinner at the same table with the same person. A weekly venture to the supermarket is my big excursion. There’s nothing in my pockets, nothing on my calendar, and the only things I’m wearing out are my favorite slippers. I’m home for my first Seattle summer since 1980.

A fan blowing in a subway station — Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

We Need to Talk About Ventilation

Zeynep Tufekci

How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission?

I recently took a drive-through COVID-19 test at the University of North Carolina. Everything was well organized and efficient: I was swabbed for 15 uncomfortable seconds and sent home with two pages of instructions on what to do if I were to test positive, and what precautions people living with or tending to COVID-19 patients should take. The instructions included many detailed sections devoted to preventing transmission via surfaces, and also went into great detail about laundry, disinfectants, and the exact proportions of bleach solutions I should use to wipe surfaces, and how.

[ Read: A Dire Warning From COVID-19 Test Providers ]

My otherwise detailed instructions, however, included only a single sentence on “good ventilation”—a sentence with the potential to do some people more harm than good. I was advised to have “good air flow, such as from an air conditioner or an opened window, weather permitting.” But in certain cases, air-conditioning isn’t helpful. Jose-Luiz Jimenez, an air-quality professor at the University of Colorado, told me that some air conditioners can increase the chances of spreading infection in a household. Besides, “weather permitting” made it all seem insignificant, like an afterthought.

Kent Phillips / Walt Disney World Resort / Getty

Why Is Anyone Going to Disney World Right Now?

Shirley Li

Superfans know the Florida theme park is a dangerous destination during the pandemic. But to them, a visit means more than a vacation.

Almost as soon as Serena Lyn stepped back inside the Magic Kingdom, she burst into tears. It’d been four months since the theme park and crown jewel of Walt Disney World’s Florida stronghold had shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before the parks closed, Lyn had been visiting them twice a week; it was part of her job as a Disney blogger and an Instagrammer with more than 71,000 followers. As a devoted Disney fan who’d moved with her husband, two kids, and dog to Orlando, close enough to the parks to see their fireworks shows every night, not being able to set foot inside Disney World had been painful.

So when the employees—“cast members,” in park parlance—greeted Lyn and her fellow returning annual passholders on July 9 with a warm welcome outside of the shops along Main Street, Lyn became overwhelmed. “I was bawling,” she said when we FaceTimed a week after she attended Disney World’s grand reopening. “I looked around, and everyone was crying.”

‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail’

Adrienne LaFrance

It is time to stop pretending. Our children are staying home.

In March, we were all living in 15-day increments. Working from home and distance learning, for those who had the terrible luxury of such things, would be a weeks-long affair, surreal but temporary. Fifteen days to flatten the curve. Fifteen days to slow the spread.

Scientists warned us even then that a return to normalcy would take longer, but the telescoped timeline had obvious appeal. You can put up with almost anything for just 15 days.

Acting on the chance to get it right was essential, but we now know it was not temporary. We’ve seen the failures—in testing, in containment, in federal and state leadership—compound in catastrophic ways. And as our pandemic summer has stretched on, many of us have let go, one by one, of experiences from the world we used to inhabit. We bid goodbye to sleepaway camp, to live music, to distant travel, to boisterous weddings, and to spontaneity in general. Today, a new realization is dawning, and as the debate over schools reopening rages, we must acknowledge it plainly: We aren’t going back to how it was. And we shouldn’t.

What Kasich Gives Biden

Peter Beinart

The Republican ex-governor amplifies the Democratic candidate’s remarkably simple message to voters.

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich would speak at the Democratic National Convention in August. For one party to dragoon a notable from the other side into endorsing its presidential candidate is hardly unprecedented. And most of the time, it makes no difference.

But, every now and then, a partisan defector perfectly amplifies the message his endorsee is trying to send. Joe Biden is running against an incumbent who appears largely unperturbed by the death of 140,000 of his fellow Americans, except to the extent that it hurts his reelection prospects. The former vice president’s core message is that, unlike Donald Trump, he will put country above party and human compassion over political self-interest. The simplicity, even corniness, of this message wins Biden few points for cleverness among pundits. But polls suggest that it resonates with voters. And Kasich, because of his own political and personal journey, underscores that message in a unique way.

A gloved hand using a sponge to clean a tiled wall — Getty / The Atlantic

Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time

Derek Thompson

People are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security.

As a COVID-19 summer surge sweeps the country, deep cleans are all the rage.

National restaurants such as Applebee’s are deputizing sanitation czars to oversee the constant scrubbing of window ledges, menus, and high chairs. The gym chain Planet Fitness is boasting in ads that “there’s no surface we won’t sanitize, no machine we won’t scrub.” New York City is shutting down its subway system every night, for the first time in its 116-year history, to blast the seats, walls, and poles with a variety of antiseptic weaponry, including electrostatic disinfectant sprays. And in Wauchula, Florida, the local government gave one resident permission to spray the town with hydrogen peroxide as he saw fit. “I think every city in the damn United States needs to be doing it," he said.

Dear Therapist: Is My Middle Child a Monster?

Lori Gottlieb

I’m so tired of people seeing only her bad traits.

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have three terrific kids, ages 6, 4, and 2. Our oldest is cautious, helpful, and precocious. Our youngest is easygoing, affectionate, and goofy. Our middle child is persistent, bold, imaginative, and tenderhearted. Her personality is not as easy as her siblings’, but she’s a great kid. If she makes me want to pull my hair out five times a day, then she makes me laugh, surprises me, or melts my heart 10 times a day.

The problem comes from others. Our elderly next-door neighbor dotes on the oldest and youngest and all but ignores the middle one. More than once, she has asked whether our doctors have diagnosed her with any disorders. I just look at her as if I don’t understand her question. I’ve had others “praise” me for being so patient with our middle child. These kinds of comments make me so angry and sad.

A man leaps off a ladder toward a group of happy-face balloons — Jan Buchczik

‘Success Addicts’ Choose Being Special Over Being Happy

Arthur C. Brooks

The pursuit of achievement distracts from the deeply ordinary activities and relationships that make life meaningful.

“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldn’t it?

Maybe—but maybe not. It might well be the story of someone whose never-ending quest for more and more success leaves them perpetually unsatisfied and incapable of happiness.

Physical dependency keeps alcoholics committed to their vice, even as it wrecks their happiness. But arguably more powerful than the physical addiction is the sense that drinking is a relationship, not an activity. As the author Caroline Knapp described alcoholism in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story, “It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.” Many alcoholics know that they would be happier if they quit, but that isn’t the point. The decision to keep drinking is to choose that intense love—twisted and lonely as it is—over the banality of mere happiness.

Can Anything Be Done to Rein In the President’s Speech?

Kate Shaw

Trump’s words are dangerous, and society must find ways big and small to push back.

This president doesn’t speak like other presidents, that much is clear. Since taking office in January 2017, President Donald Trump has used the bully pulpit in ways that break, often dramatically, from the rhetorical norms that preceded him. The president seemed to cross a new red line this week, as he took to Twitter to suggest—without legal foundation—postponing the November election. This latest rhetorical escalation has increased the urgency of a long-simmering question: Can anything be done to rein in the speech of a president unmoored from reality and unmoved by decency?

The answer is yes, and it hinges on understanding both the nature of presidential speech, and that speech’s dependence on a variety of mechanisms for actually reaching the public.