Rates of Covid-19 are far higher among the poor, according to a federal analysis reported by The Washington Post. For Medicare beneficiaries also eligible for Medicaid, the rate of coronavirus cases was 1,732 per 100,000. For those with incomes too high for Medicaid, it was just 320 per 100,000. Earlier in the pandemic, poor neighborhoods […]
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WASHINGTON — When Shy Rodriguez heard about one of the hottest trends in education during the pandemic — “learning pods,” where parents hire teachers for small-group, in-home instruction — she knew immediately it was something she could never afford for her sons. Like many parents, Ms. Rodriguez, a single mother and nursing assistant in Wilkes-Barre, […]
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SAN DIEGO — Last month, I learned that my uncle died of Covid-19. Not long after, his mother passed away from the virus, too. Since my parents are essential workers, I’m starting my senior year of high school worrying whether they’re next. I live in one of San Diego’s most infected ZIP codes. And I’m […]
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ImagePreschoolers at a summer school session in Monterey Park, Calif., last month. School will look very different this year, and it leaves parents with difficult choices and little support.Credit…Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images It’s the newest front in America’s parenting wars. Parents, forced to figure out how to care for and educate their […]
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WASHINGTON — Just six days before Joseph R. Biden Jr. tapped Kamala Harris to be his running mate in the presidential election, the California senator released sweeping environmental justice legislation. The timing, climate activists said, was important if not prescient. The Climate Equity Act, an expanded version of a bill Ms. Harris and Representative Alexandria […]
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EVIL GENIUSESThe Unmaking of America: A Recent HistoryBy Kurt Andersen It used to be called the New World. Now it’s run by a man who wants to make it great “again.” Sometime between then and now, the writer Kurt Andersen argues in his essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn’t-know, saxophonely written new book, America lost one of […]
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The United States long reserved its most lucrative occupations for an elite class of white men. Those men held power by selling everyone else a myth: The biggest threat to workers like you are workers who do not look like you. Again and again, they told working-class white men that they were losing out on […]
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ImageProtesters calling for economic relief this week in New York.Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images When Congress expanded unemployment insurance this year to meet the staggering economic toll of the pandemic, it had one less-noticed effect: It made America’s fractured jobless benefits system more fair. Starting in April, the federal government provided $600 weekly payments […]
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In March, with the coronavirus lockdown in full swing, Chrissy Sample was feeling anxious. Furloughed from her job and stuck at home with her 8-year-old son, she was also pregnant with twins, who were due in mid-July. Although she often felt immobilized by an intense pain in her legs and lower abdomen, her doctor regularly […]
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The United States long reserved its most lucrative occupations for an elite class of white men. Those men held power by selling everyone else a myth: The biggest threat to workers like you are workers who do not look like you. Again and again, they told working-class white men that they were losing out on […]
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NAIROBI, Kenya — For Esther Adhiambo, this year was supposed to be a year of endings and new beginnings. She was expecting to complete high school, enroll in a university and get a job to help her single mother, who runs a small tailoring business in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Instead, for Ms. Adhiambo and other […]
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I am trying to think of when I first realized we’d all run smack into a wall. Was it two weeks ago, when a friend, ordinarily a paragon of wifely discretion, started a phone conversation with a boffo rant about her husband? Was it when I looked at my own spouse — one week later, […]
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There she was. After more than three weeks on the ventilator, after battling weakness and delirium on the general medical floor and a stay at the long-term rehab hospital where she rebuilt the strength to walk again, my patient had made it home. The dark shadows beneath her eyes were fading. Her skin was tanned. […]
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In late March, when TV journalist Chris Cuomo announced that he had COVID-19, his brother Andrew, the governor of New York, tweeted in response: “This virus is the great equalizer.” Around the same time, Madonna expressed a similar sentiment. Posting a video filmed in a bathtub filled with rose petals, she said, “That’s the thing […]
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It was not surprising when three-quarters of the house tested positive. There were 12 people in three bedrooms, with a bathroom whose door frequently required a knock and a kitchen where dinnertime shifts extended from 5 p.m. well into the evening. Karla Lorenzo, a Guatemalan immigrant who cleaned houses in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, […]
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THE SYSTEMWho Rigged It, How We Fix ItBy Robert B. ReichBREAK ’EM UPRecovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big MoneyBy Zephyr Teachout One of the mysteries in politics for decades now has been why white working-class Americans began to vote Republican in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. After all, it […]
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The scale of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic shutdowns it caused set in motion a series of debates and questions about what the world may look like once its stranglehold on society loosens: Will we travel less? Will we work at home more? Will norms in schools and at large-scale public events be changed […]
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Photo: GaudiLab (Shutterstock) For anyone familiar with the racial or gender pay gaps, it ought to be a familiar statistic: a typical Black woman will make 62 cents for every dollar a white man makes. That gap has necessitated its own awareness day: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, set to take place this year on […]
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Disruption, disorder and disease are gripping the United States as the 2020 election draws near, leading to an unusual degree of unpredictability about our political future. Despite current state and national polling that favors Democrats, we still can’t say for sure whether the nation will tip left or right. “Modern democracies are currently experiencing destabilizing […]
Read More Disruption, disorder and disease are gripping the United States as the 2020 election draws near, leading to an unusual degree of unpredictability about our political future. Despite current state and national polling that favors Democrats, we still can’t say for sure whether the nation will tip left or right. “Modern democracies are currently experiencing destabilizing […]
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In the bedroom of her East Village apartment, Alison Mazur relaxed into her chair and sighed contentedly while an aesthetician coated her nails in taupe polish. It was the first professional manicure-pedicure she’d had in four months, since coronavirus restrictions forced salons across the country to close their doors. Ms. Mazur had to put her […]
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Cities are remarkably resilient. They have risen from the ashes after being carpet-bombed and hit with nuclear weapons. “If you think about pandemics in the past,” noted the Princeton economist Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, “they didn’t destroy cities.” That’s because cities are valuable. The New York metropolitan area generates more economic output than Australia or Spain. The […]
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One of the country’s best-known restaurateurs, Danny Meyer, announced five years ago that his Union Square Hospitality Group would gradually eliminate tipping. The group’s decision began an industrywide examination of the age-old practice, but adopting it proved complicated, especially in New York State, where laws governing tip distribution are strict. Still, especially in recent months, […]
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ImageA closed-off street in Oakland in April.Credit…Jeff Chiu/Associated Press One month into the coronavirus crisis this spring, Oakland, Calif., began to restrict car traffic on some streets — ultimately on 21 miles of them — to create outdoor space for residents who suddenly had nowhere else to go. Other cities have also responded with remarkably […]
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Black business owners are more likely to be hindered in seeking coronavirus financial aid than their white peers, a new study has found. The study looked at how more than a dozen Washington-area banks handled requests for loans under the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. It was conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a […]
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Governors Island, a 172-acre oasis in the middle of New York Harbor, has become one of New York’s City’s most popular summer playgrounds with hammocks, biking and spectacular water views. But the island’s managers want it to be a greater resource for those who need it the most, especially during the pandemic — poor and […]
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As the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the United States, some public K-12 schools may be able to reopen safely, but doing so will not be cheap. A recent report from the Council of Chief State School Officers estimated that public K-12 schools will need as much as $245 billion in additional funding to […]
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Dumebi Adigwe, a rising sophomore studying mathematics at Harvard University, has no idea where she is going to live. This week, Harvard announced it would allow only up to 40 percent of its nearly 6,800 undergraduates on campus in the fall, the vast majority of them freshmen, and that all classes would be held online. […]
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But the most eloquent part of Biden’s speech was this: “We must reward work as much as we’ve rewarded wealth.” I’m not sure Biden has put it exactly this way before; I couldn’t find an earlier instance on Google. But I hope he repeats that sentence a lot going forward. It’s an admirably simple expression […]
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But even a mildly active hurricane season this year could be disastrous. Florida is still dealing with exploding Covid-19 cases and an unemployment system that has been so slow and inconsistent in providing aid that it is facing a class-action lawsuit. Those catastrophes have disproportionately fallen on low-income people. In response to Covid, the federal […]
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