april 2007

More Americans are now hospitalized with COVID-19 than ever before. Their sheer numbers are overwhelming health-care workers, whose ranks have been diminished by resignations and breakthrough infections. In many parts of the country, patients with all kinds of medical emergencies now face long waits and worse care. After writing about this crisis earlier this month, I heard from a number of readers who said that the solution was obvious: Deny medical care to unvaccinated adults. Such arguments were aired last year, as the Delta variant crested, and they’re emerging again as Omicron spreads. Their rationale often goes something like this:

Every adult in the U.S. has been eligible for vaccines since April. At this point, the unvaccinated have made their choice. That choice is hurting everyone else, by perpetuating the pandemic and, now, by crushing the health-care system. Most of the people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated. It’s unethical that health-care workers should sacrifice for people who won’t take care of themselves. And it’s especially unethical that even vaccinated people, who did everything right, might be unable to get care for heart attacks or strokes because emergency rooms are choked with unvaccinated COVID patients.

Democrats and civil-rights advocates were devastated when Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked a change in Senate rules last night and allowed a Republican filibuster to kill crucial voting-rights legislation.

But for activists, the long battle over voter protections hasn’t been entirely in vain: It’s fundamentally changed the center of gravity in the Democratic Party to the point where those two holdouts are likely to be the last Democrats ever elected to the Senate who support maintaining the filibuster, at least for voting rights.

Read: How Manchin and Sinema completed a conservative vision

The leading Democratic Senate challengers for 2022, even in tough swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, have already indicated support for changing the rules. They’re not alone: Key party constituencies are pledging to withhold support for Democrats who do not back filibuster reform. The movement has been as striking among incumbents, including those from tough swing states. Ultimately, every Democratic senator except Manchin and Sinema voted to change the filibuster rules in an attempt to pass the party’s twin voting-rights bills last night. That level of agreement seemed very much an uphill climb one year ago.

Hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States each year, and this dramatic influx of titles largely runs the calendars of the publishing and media industries—usually to the detriment of any work that isn’t brand new. Even best sellers or novels by famous authors get lost in the deluge, and books that were beloved on release can fall off readers’ radar quickly. But many were popular or critically acclaimed for good reasons, and they’re worth revisiting.

Here is a list of 15 fiction titles from the past two decades that you may have forgotten about in the years since. Some are from familiar names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich; others are by authors you may not have heard of at all. These selections include plenty of drama, and there’s an undercurrent of gentle comedy, even in novels with dark themes or plots. Their characters define love in many different ways, and they seek fulfillment across geographies and time periods—contemporary London, Vichy France, Nigeria, North Korea. Ultimately, these stories are bound together by a compassion for their characters’ struggles and shortcomings—a quality that only our finest writers are able to cultivate.

You never know exactly what you’re going to get at a Trump rally—a creative variation on the “Lock her up” chant? A brand-new conspiracy theory? But you can always rely on the former president to brag about the size of the crowd. He will remark happily upon the gridlocked traffic getting into the event. He will exclaim that he cannot even pinpoint exactly where the crowd ends. And periodically, he will demand that videographers pivot their cameras around to capture the full extent of his devoted following.

For Donald Trump and his supporters, crowd size is more than just a bragging point. It’s proof that they are part of the American majority. “A person that comes here and has crowds that go further than the eye can see … and has cars that stretch out for 25 miles, that’s not somebody that lost an election,” Trump told the crowd at his rally in Florence, Arizona, on Saturday.

Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, including America, Jews are the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites are many things, but they aren’t lazy. They’re animated by one of the most durable and deadly conspiracy theories in human history.

This past Saturday in Texas, another one found his mark. According to the latest news reports, Malik Faisal Akram traversed an ocean to accomplish his task, flying from the United Kingdom to America in late December. On January 15, he took Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel hostage for more than 11 hours. When it was all over, Akram was dead and his captives were not. The hostages escaped after their rabbi engineered a distraction, drawing on security training he had received from the Anti-Defamation League and other communal organizations. Something else most people don’t realize is that many rabbis need and receive security training.