May 23, 2021

Buoyed by Federal Covid Aid, Big Hospital Chains Buy Up Competitors.



Covid Killed His Father. Then Came $1 Million in Medical Bills. Insurers and Congress wrote rules to protect coronavirus patients, but the bills came anyway, leaving some mired in debt.



The best laptop ever made. I have the very-similar 13 inch version this laptop, use it still, and agree. Its like shall never be seen again.



May 22, 2021

Once Tech’s Favorite Economist, Now a Thorn in Its Side. Paul Romer’s call for government activism, particularly toward the big tech companies, reflects “a profound change in my thinking.”



Novelty Means Severity: The Key To the Pandemic.



Is This the World’s Most Aging-Friendly City? Arnsberg, Germany’s Department of Future Aging has made it a prototype for how cities around the world can help their older residents thrive.



The World Loses Under Bill Gates’ Vaccine Colonialism.



Biden’s Drilling Moratorium Is Not A Moratorium.



Cutting unemployment benefits won’t bring back workers — but will hurt millions of families, new research finds.



How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy.



What if the U.S. had a national maximum wage?



The numbers are grim. Republicans are winning at normalizing voter suppression.



May 21, 2021

Inside ‘TALON,’ the Nationwide Network of AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras.



What Can and Can’t Be Learned From a Doctor in China Who Pioneered Masks.



Researchers develop direct-acting antiviral therapy to treat COVID-19.



What We Spent in a Month. Six American families open their doors — and their wallets — to show us how much life costs.



Before ruining millions of vaccines, Emergent failed inspections, raked in cash.



Finding quasars: Rare extragalactic objects are now easier to spot.



The Particular Psychology of Destroying a Planet.



Bipartisan Privacy Bill Promising Easier Opt-Outs and Tech Transparency Actually Has a Chance of Passing.



The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet.



May 20, 2021

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.



Covid-19 proved bad indoor air quality makes us sick. We can fix that.



Seriously, just tax the rich.



The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization.



The Milky Way likely matured much earlier than previously thought.



Changed by pandemic, many workers won’t return to old jobs.



Stop Worrying About Free Beer and Doughnuts. We’re in the Middle of a Pandemic. For too long, we’ve believed the myth that incentives backfire. But there’s nothing wrong with bribing people to get vaccinated.



Rich people actually do have trouble understanding what it’s like to be poor. A recent study shows that people with power embrace a “choice mindset” — and apply it to those with fewer resources.



How the Storming of the Capitol Became a ‘Normal Tourist Visit.’



The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis. What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age.



The Filing Cabinet. The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century. Like most infrastructure, it was usually overlooked.



It’s Time For A Summer Slowdown. Your workers are burned out. Give them back their summers.



Microsoft will truly, finally kill off Internet Explorer in June 2022.



War With China Over Taiwan Is Not A Fictional Worry.



How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory.



Europe to Reopen for Travel, Easing Rules for American Tourists. Some sanity there at least.



Climate change could make overwinter ‘zombie’ fires more common.



Vaccine for UTIs could be available in a few years, Duke researcher says.



May 19, 2021

Long working hours killing 745,000 people a year, study finds.



Slowly But Not Surely: Airline Leisure Travelers Coming Back, But Not Business Travelers. International Still Crushed.



Two Paths to a Military Coup. Revelations about the break-down of civilian-military relations under Donald Trump show the many ways authoritarian clowning undermines democracy.



Where Covid’s Car-Free Streets Boosted Business. Yelp data shows greater consumer interest at restaurants on pedestrian-friendly “slow streets” that limited vehicle traffic during the pandemic.



We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying.



Friendship is a greater reward – and challenge – than romance.



Government Money That’s Gone Into Vaccine Development Is Being Privatized by a Handful of Companies.



It Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine Success.



Why So Many People Are Resisting Vaccination. Short article if I’d written it. It would’ve just been “Because They Are Infinitely Large Dumbasses.”



Leaked Police Docs Show a Lot of Disturbing but Also Dumb Plans Made by the Boogaloo Bois.



Climate change added $8 billion to Superstorm Sandy’s damages, study says.



Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen.



May 18, 2021

Charting the expansion history of the universe with supernovae.



Vaccine Passports Are a Reality, Whatever They’re Called. It will be impossible to escape some proof of immunity to reengage in activities such as education, travel and entertainment.



How Vaccine Hesitancy Is Driving Breakthrough Infections in Nursing Homes.



Republicans are sprinting away from democracy.



U.S. Economic Rebound Proves More a Grind Than a Boom.



The debt hawks are flapping their wings. Post-pandemic Europe, Adam Tooze writes, can’t entertain a return to pre-crisis fiscal rules.



Vaccines didn’t stop the Yankees’ covid-19 outbreak. But the case proves how well they work.



May 17, 2021

Manufacturing mRNA Vaccines is Surprisingly Straightforward.



The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill.



Top 25 Most Popular Foods in Algeria.



Drag Commodity Traders Out of the Shadows. We need strong laws and regulations to shed light on this powerful sector of the global economy.



La France de plus en plus à droite.



On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez.



The making of a myth. Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.



The Credit Card Hustle by the Banks & the Fed Hits Rough Spot.



The Next Big Gasoline Shortage Is Coming. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot ignore the warning signs for future catastrophes.



May 13, 2021

Health Conspiracy Theorists Hate Living in the World They Helped Create. “Vaccine passports” and talk of mandatory vaccinations have been boogeymen for health conspiracy theorists for decades. But they helped get us here.



One of the World’s Longest-Running Experiments Sends Up Sprouts. After lying dormant in buried bottles for 142 years, 11 seeds germinated on the Michigan State University campus after scientists planted them.



The transatlantic institutional anti-mask campaign, summarised.



Increased levels of education associated with greater trust in vaccine.



Lasting immunity found after recovery from COVID-19.



Plant scientists’ research attention is skewed towards colourful, conspicuous and broadly distributed flowers.



How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body. Decades before ‘Zoom fatigue’ broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind. Lift weights. It helps.



U.S. inflation soars in April to 13-year high, CPI shows, and reveals fresh stress on the economy.



Vizio TV buyers are becoming the product Vizio sells, not just its customers. Vizio’s ads, streaming, and data business grew 133 percent year-over-year.



May 12, 2021

Chip Shortage Forces Carmakers to Leave Out Some High-End Features.



Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin.



Covid Testing Has Turned Into a Financial Windfall for Hospitals and Other Providers.



The Climate Tipping Point We Want.



Policymakers Used to Ignore Child Care. Then Came the Pandemic.



Why Confederate Lies Live On. For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.



German aerosol researchers have told the government that Covid-19 spreads almost exclusively indoors through aerosols – and criticised measures that focus on restricting outdoor activity.



US millionaire CEOs saw 29% pay raise while workers’ pay decreased – report.



What has grown most in the pandemic? Billionaire bank balances – and food bank queues.



A New Wave of Jim Crow Laws Is Here.



‘Stark contrast’: how Covid pass is helping Denmark open up.



An Animal Friendship Thought to Have Ended 250 Million Years Ago Is Still Flourishing Off the Coast of Japan.



Behind every algorithm, there be politics.



The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars. How do Internet atheism and Internet feminism help us understand the current cultural moment.



Stopping Drug Patents Has Stopped Pandemics Before.



At $49.1 Trillion, the U.S. Stock Market Is Larger than the Combined GDP of the U.S., China, Japan and Germany.



May 11, 2021

The global chip shortage is starting to have major real-world consequences.



Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.



It’s not just teenagers—millions of workers over 55 earn minimum wage.



When the Tab Comes Due. Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage.



How Being Polite with Police Can Backfire. When it comes to interactions with the police, the law favors direct speech. But that’s not always the way we’re trained to speak to people in power.



There’s Noise Pollution at the Bottom of the Ocean. Anthropogenic sounds have made it all the way down into the deepest place on Earth—Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench.



Doomsday for bad bosses.



How Joe Biden could vaccinate the world.