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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

+

Contents

+ +

From New Yorker

+ +

From Vox

+ +

+As a new year and a new administration begin, we explore life in transition, from the new utopias to parents bucking the “baby bust” to Congress’s newcomers. +

+

+If one can summon any optimism nearly a year into a grim and persistent pandemic, this is the moment to do it. +

+

+It is a new year, after all (good riddance, 2020!). Nearly 20 million Americans have rolled up their sleeves and received a dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. And no matter your political affiliation, a new administration and transformed Congress and Cabinet perennially serve as a kind of reset button for America, each unfamiliar face a reminder of how wide open the possibilities are. So we cross our fingers in unison and hope for the best. +

+

+It only made sense that the latest issue of The Highlight look at life in this tenuous transition. From the beautiful and remote communities — the new utopias — where corona-cationers flock to avoid restrictions (and high numbers of Covid-19 cases), to the would-be parents bucking the pandemic “baby bust” trend and getting pregnant anyway, to first-term lawmakers’ inauspicious introduction to Capitol Hill, we confront a world in flux. With so much change afoot, we turned to poets, too, for words of inspiration and provocation at a time when people need a little bit of both. And if that doesn’t move you, perhaps a crystal to bring on positive thinking will. +

+
+
+
    <img alt="Art depicting a human silhouette surrounded by colors and waves." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cps2VM9qa3anZdU5S_wHh5RVnuU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22244108/Vox_PoemsForANewYear_Lede_Final.jpg" />
+  <cite>Sarah Gonzales for Vox</cite>
+
+

+Poems for a new year +

+

+7 poets — including Saeed Jones, Alex Dimitrov, and Patty Crane — meditate on the year we’ve had, the one ahead, and our dark, persistent past. +

+

+By Vox Staff +

+
+
+
    <img alt="Rep. Mondaire Jones speaks outdoors surrounded by signs that read, “The people have spoken.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/P6i4nPx12RCUEB2_UTghVlTaxSs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22246300/GettyImages_1229685695.jpg" />
+  <cite>Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Rep. Mondaire Jones.</figcaption>
+
+

+Class of 2021: Mondaire Jones on his “jarring” start as a first-term lawmaker +

+

+The New York Democrat discusses the growing progressive movement in his party, and how the US Capitol riot is shaping his priorities. +

+

+By Li Zhou +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/47XS9nV2CajbO3okgkO-xX4f71I=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22260993/GettyImages_1253641601.jpg" />
+  <cite>Getty Images/iStockphoto</cite>
+
+

+The new utopia +

+

+Coming Thursday +

+

+For a certain jet-setting sect, wide-open spaces with views, few Covid-19 cases, and the freedom to go maskless are all the rage. But who pays the price? +

+

+By Sarah Khan +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LxyiG_lZBV1wiIwKDyROXRPXNLA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22221608/GettyImages_820874922.jpg" />
+  <cite>Getty Images</cite>
+
+

+New crystal, new you? +

+

+Coming Friday +

+

+As crystals’ soothing popularity continues, one — carnelian — attracts those in search of self-improvement and positivity. Is it too good to be true? +

+

+By Jaya Saxena +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_8ifZJR0rc2DQZxv-zLK29imcYw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22260992/GettyImages_78392851.jpg" />
+  <cite>Getty Images</cite>
+
+

+What “baby bust”? New and soon-to-be parents on choosing to have kids in dark times. +

+

+Coming Monday +

+

+“Maybe it’s like a psychological trick to make yourself feel better, but I don’t regret it.” +

+

+By Chris Chafin +

+ +

+7 poets — including Saeed Jones, Alex Dimitrov, and Patty Crane — meditate on the year we’ve had, the one ahead, and our dark, persistent past. +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YYgW4HsU995yniG4Y5QuEoQvF0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png" />
+
+
+

+Part of The “New” Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. +

+
+

+Good poetry can help us hold two opposing ideas in our minds at once. +

+

+For instance: A new year is a blank page, waiting for us to write on it. It is a chance to begin all over again. A new presidential administration offers us the same chance. After the year we’ve had, we have to believe in the possibility of a fresh beginning. +

+

+But also, how can you turn the page on 2020, much less on four years of tumult under Donald Trump? How can you imagine that what was written won’t keep bleeding out into 2021? +

+

+Last year’s police brutality protests turned into this year’s off-duty cops rioting at the Capitol; last year’s hopes for a quick vaccine to quell the pandemic turned into this year’s 4,000 people dead in one day. And no matter what happens under a new administration, our losses will stay lost. There are no fresh starts, and there are no blank pages, and we have to believe that, too. +

+

+To try to pull apart this moment, we turned to poets from across the country and asked them to send us poems for a new year. The poets represent the country, including 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry Saeed Jones; 2020 US youth poet laureate Meera Dasgupta; former inaugural poet Richard Blanco; and former Academy of American Poets chancellor Jane Hirshfield. +

+
+
+
+ +
+
+
+

+In their work, the ideas of a fresh beginning and lingering wounds live and mingle together. They jostle against each other until both feel clear and vital and inescapable. Each on its own, each at the same time. +

+

+In “Poem of Blood,” Mahogany L. Browne dares us to just try to forget the past — and reminds us of exactly who cleans away the messiness when white people start talking about a fresh clean start. “But i’m an old broad now,” she writes, “& I got plenty of anger to lend / the days have bled from two weeks / ’til forever / & i got blood on my mind.” +

+

+But in Dasgupta’s “groceries on the moon,” forgetfulness becomes a vacuum, a blank space in which to inscribe and re-inscribe our old mistakes, and the mistakes of our parents. “i do not remember a great white before,” she tells us. “i do not remember the beginning. i do not / remember floating or saturn saying i do.” +

+

+Perhaps most redemptive of all is Hirshfield’s “Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me.” This poem does not take place in a world without pain: Here, “the feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,” and “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.” And yet, Hirshfield counters, “Joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.” +

+

+Art exists to help us understand two impossible ideas at the same time. The world is unbearable, but we have to bear it, and that contradiction is why we have art. More specifically, that is why we have poetry, so that what we cannot express in prose can find meaning. So that what we cannot bear in life, we can find a way to bear in verse. +

+

+These poems for a new year are here to let words bespangle, bewilder. Even as we try for a fresh start and fail, joy still stays joy. +

+

+—Constance Grady +

+
+

+It Isn’t Fair, It Isn’t Right +

+

+Saeed Jones +

+

+The color of a memory is the difference
between haunted and hunted. In Mississippi,
red white and blue don’t mean “remember
this is America.” They mean “history is a gun
and every bullet in its chamber wants you
to forget.” They mean “we tried our best
not to be America and failed and now we keep
forgetting to forget and, anyway, who did you
vote for? No need to ask us. You already know.”
They mean the white man in the White House
tweeted this morning that he’s being lynched.
Outside my hotel — no, I’m not from around here —
on the street corner, there is a plaque that tells me
where I can find the body of the town’s first white
settler. But it’s almost sundown and I’ve been told
darkness in Mississippi is not a metaphor so I chase
the shadows back into the hotel. At the bar, I beg
the bartender to make me a stronger drink. He tries
and he fails. I’m scared and Black and mostly sober
at the hotel bar and reading an essay about lynching
when some Ole Miss frat boys explode into the room,
cheering in a dead language, and my heart doesn’t
even wait for me to get the check. My heart is already
gone. My heart is cowering in the hallway in front
of my hotel room because I have the key and I just
now got the check and I keep forgetting to forget
that the America I was born in will not be
the America in which I die. +

+

+Saeed Jones is a poet and author of the Kirkus Prize-winning memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise. (Copyright 2021 by Saeed Jones.) +

+
+

+New Year Re-Solutions, 2021 +

+

+Richard Blanco +

+

+Stop closing the shades, let the sun glow again
like a god who loves and wakes me to me
in the wake of its divine light traveling millions of miles
to ripple mauve and amber into my window, raise
my shut eyes open, done dreaming. Breathe.
Let my coffee’s steamy soul rise and bless me
every day with its aroma before I take my first sip.
Name each day a miracle, linger again in its mystery
of possibilities. Breathe. Set the mime-hands of my watch
back two minutes every day, until time and me disavow
each other’s obligations. Open the newspaper, but read
between the black and white lines for its lies. Breathe.
Stop walking my dog, let him dog-walk me unleashed
through his park. Let his nose compass me toward
the smells of all I’ve stopped taking in: the sweet, ancient dank of mud and mosses, the
incense of pine tree bark. Let his ears point me to listen again
to all I’ve become deaf to: the wind harping through
the strings of leaved branches, the opera of wrens
gossiping about the weather’s secrets. Breathe. Don’t deal
with the mail every day, let bills and notices pile up
like a house of cards until it collapses on the kitchen counter.
Take up cooking again, but add music to my recipes:
sway my hips as I beat eggs to conga beats, tap my feet
as I chop shallots to the staccato of piano keys, sing along
as I strum the sauces slow and tender to the croon of a folk guitar.
Bake all the desserts I deserve, dip my finger into the frosting first, bite into the crust, lick
the plate clean, feast on my life. Breathe. Indulge
myself more often alone in the living room
where I’d forgotten to live. Take down my old photo albums
from the shelves, stare at all the dusty years of myself
in those eyes I had forgotten were mine and still love me. Breathe. Sit on the porch every
night, but stop asking the moon: Who am I? Accept the moon as simply
the moon, and me as simply me, just as bright
and wise, just as scared and delicate as I was
last year, and will be this year, and the next and
the next, perfectly imperfect in the nothing of
my everything, breathing as if each breath
is forever my first and my last. +

+

+Richard Blanco is an engineer, writer, and award-winning poet. He’s the author of the 2019 book How to Love a Country and the 2013 inaugural poet of the United States for the inauguration of President Barack Obama; he was the first Latino to hold the role. +

+
+

+Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me +

+

+Jane Hirshfield +

+

+The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shifting its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend—
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking +

+

+Jane Hirshfield’s ninth book of poems is Ledger (Knopf, 2020). A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of #PoetsForScience, she was elected in 2019 to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. +

+
+
+
+
    <img alt="Art of a moon full and as a crescent." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xXtXKarY6JKO4jceglUKUA5EOq8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22245755/Vox_PoemsForANewYear_Spot_Final.jpg" />
+
+
+

+groceries on the moon +

+

+Meera Dasgupta +

+

+“The emptiness of space is a blank slate, offering us the opportunity to start over, on an endless canvas that can support our continuous cycle of learnings and failings.”
―Aneesh Abraham, Super Dense Crush Load: The Story of Man Redux +

+

+I. +

+

+$2.00 - oxygen
$3.99 - H2O
$0.99 - space rocks
$15.00 - daylight
and so they bound towards the sun. my
to-do becomes an orbital body amongst
cosmic spaceships. the list lets loose like
an old flag on mars. +

+

+

    +

  1. +

    +we like to believe in alternate realities.
    that behind every black hole is another boy joyriding
    a shopping cart through aisle fifteen. a mother
    pulling her son away from the shelves of produce.
    how she bargains breath for their safe passage
    through a jettison of asteroids. from the ground,
    we wish upon them like shooting stars.
    there is a strength in numbers. i want to climb orion’s
    belt to see if there is a kingdom on the other side.
    if there is a god managing the checkout line from behind a
    curtain of satellites where thousands of heroes whisper
    the show must go on.
    i wonder if there is an icarus pulling a sort of gravity from the
    moon as he falls. a single father against an empire.
    born of a half-life and shipwrecks. he leaps off of the edge
    of the universe into an ocean. here the heavens call to
    him. find me. find us. find you. find you. +

    +

    +

      +

    1. +

      +i do not remember a great white before. i do not
      remember mother banging the door straight off the
      hinges for the neighbor’s potpourri or when she put
      her hands on her hips and swore to turn on the damn
      lights. i do not remember the beginning. i do not
      remember floating or saturn saying i do.
      somewhere, man bought the moon
      and got a supermarket on a pockmarked
      plain. a tower of vegetables for a sale price
      of 1.99. and an automated speaker system
      screeching melodies into a vacuum.
      here, silence becomes a microphone
      in the dark. the fridges gleam like the
      cold comets of space blinking back at each
      other in the moments between celestial
      explosions.
      they become an eye at the center of the
      universe. here, we can bargain with the
      sky. +

      +

      +Meera Dasgupta is the 2020 United States youth poet laureate. Born in Queens, she is a senior at Stuyvesant High School, 2020 United Nations Global Goals ambassador, Climate Speaks winner, and more. +

      +
      +

      +Poem of Blood +

      +

      +Mahogany L. Browne +

      +

      +The first to go are your breasts
      Hanging like sandbags
      Sad & remembering who they used to be
      The way a wind chime whistle
      can sound like a refrain: stay home, daughter +

      +

      +No one wants to talk
      About a woman’s body during a disaster
      Like she’s the disaster
      Walking & moving slow toward the sun +

      +

      +They rather talk about the things they can’t want
      to change until it’s voting season, or tax season or killing season +

      +

      +Extra Extra!
      Another black girl is forgotten ’til dust
      The poets only remember her boyfriend’s name
      Or her brother’s shoe size
      they only remember the black girl body
      after she is gone +

      +

      +The pastor reads from Genesis
      we nod
      pay tithes
      pass the plate
      & erase her initials from
      the scoreboard +

      +

      +Even the black feminist forgets she was once a girl child
      She closes her eyes & calls her son Prophet +

      +

      +Tells Prophet to never trust women
      Then twists his dreads w/homemade beeswax
      Her fingers cracked like stomped earth
      Her scalp tingling w/bad news
      & the news say
      a disaster is coming
      call it Irma, Katrina, Rona +

      +

      +America got
      a penchant for baby’s breath & blood milk
      But the blocks still hot in Brooklyn
      & the nannies still push strollers full of babies they ain’t birth
      Cause the Governor warns stay home
      But the landlord echoes rent due +

      +

      +Go head America
      wreak havoc on the plantation
      & charge the sharecropper to remove the sewage +

      +

      +Stay safe
      Stay home? +

      +

      +Or
      watch the next internet sensation
      rely on old hip-hop t-shirts
      & yoga pants while
      Lizzo teaches her how to be human +

      +

      +Yo
      even the trees look at black bodies like
      Welcome back
      & the baby in the stroller ain’t heard this lullaby
      since they dreamt Similac
      brown organic raw sugar go for double the price
      @ whole foods
      get in line
      6 feet, fam
      don’t sleep, fam +

      +

      +paychecks from the government
      courtesy of the taxes already paid three times the amount
      since the last two runs around this weak ass moon +

      +

      +Gil Scott Heron was right
      Here we all smack slapped
      against the light of a smudged badge #
      Glint my eyes
      Flint in my sky
      everybody wants my census report
      but don’t nobody want to give me healthcare
      the water got blood in it
      the trees got a memory
      my city ain’t on fire
      but the fog is heavy
      each building swaddled in grey shit
      that make us sick
      cover your mouth
      cover your nose
      stay inside
      stay home
      or be run over
      & up on by the white woman who walks her dogs
      so close you can hear what she’s thinking
      6 feet who?
      the neighbors don’t see me
      but the broken man on the corner do
      my breasts, old with age
      they sag like my spirit
      he timberland boot & black mask bark
      he play brave
      stomp his feet
      & take up more sidewalk
      then there is concrete
      he howls at the sky
      like it aint 12pm
      like we ain’t in a crisis
      his eyes dart from my chest to my cheeks
      but i’m an old broad now
      & I got plenty of anger to lend
      the days have bled from two weeks
      ’til forever
      & i got blood on my mind
      i dare him one time
      kiss my teeth loud
      then dare him w/the clearing my throat
      it sounds like a funeral
      it distracts him from the sound of key rings
      turning into knuckle rings
      but he knows the different between frail & feral
      he replaces his mask
      corks his speech
      & lets me pass
      an unhinged door on tilt
      ‘O can you hear the wind sing?
      so close to death, so close to life,
      little water, little daughter,
      come home +

      +

      +Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, educator, and the executive director of Bowery Poetry Club and poetry coordinator at St. Francis College. She is the author of several books, including the new novel Chlorine Sky (Crown Books for Young Readers), published in January. (Copyright 2021 by Mahogany L. Browne.) +

      +
      +

      +Eternity +

      +

      +Alex Dimitrov +

      +

      +The light before noon and what it does to the mind. +

      +

      +How you leaned against doors at parties, cried in bodegas,
      read bathroom graffiti and did not ask for help. +

      +

      +Some nights Second Avenue seemed to go on forever.
      Some nights above a bar there was a plane that felt right. +

      +

      +When you stood in parking lots, under the moon
      you went silent. +

      +

      +You thought about chance. History.
      How cruel it is to be anyone. +

      +

      +“You know,” a friend told you,
      “we can talk about the past +

      +

      +but it’s another country
      without one way to get there.” +

      +

      +Maybe that’s easy.
      You’ve seen what fog does to bridges. +

      +

      +Maybe you forgot you could do anything before death. +

      +

      +Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love & Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press), which will be published in February. He lives in New York. +

      +
      +

      +Poem for a New Year +

      +

      +Patty Crane +

      +

      +Glinting shards of dropped branch-ice
      litter the white ground under the maples, +

      +

      +each glassy fragment containing
      its unique memory of tree,
      that, as the day warms, thins and spreads +

      +

      +into a gleaming tangle of light,
      a crazed mirror held up to the future. +

      +

      +Hope isn’t anyone’s to give.
      It has to be found.
      And I come out here to find it, +

      +

      +to take each moment as it comes.
      A kind of borrowing. +

      +

      +A lone mourning dove arrives
      in the smoky-blue sky of its feathers,
      and lands, slender as a cupped hand, +

      +

      +among the seeds scattered on the stone walkway,
      its faint tracks in the snow-dust—briefly mine. +

      +

      +Patty Crane is the author of Bell I Wake To (Zone 3 Press, 2019), something flown (Concrete Wolf, 2018), and Bright Scythe (Sarabande Books, 2015), her translation of poems by Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. +

      +
      +
      +
      +
      + +
      +
      +
      +

      +

      2. +
    2. +
+ +

+The New York Democrat discusses the growing progressive movement in his party, and how the US Capitol riot is shaping his priorities. +

+

+

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YYgW4HsU995yniG4Y5QuEoQvF0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png" />
+
+
+

+Part of The “New” Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. +

+
+

+Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) was among those on the House floor when rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6. The newly elected Congress member was listening to remarks during the certification of the presidential election results — typically a routine, even somewhat dull proceeding in the transfer of power — when security abruptly announced the building had been breached by a mob. Jones, along with dozens of other new Democratic and Republican members, had been sworn in just three days earlier. +

+

+“My life literally flashed before my eyes, and I know that’s true for many of the approximately 200 other members of Congress who were [there] at the time,” Jones told Vox. +

+

+Jones has had a disquieting first few weeks. By their 10th day on the job, he and other new members — including Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Marie Newman (D-IL) — had endured the Capitol attack, helped finally certify election results after two months of baseless objections, and impeached the president for an unprecedented second time. +

+

+It’s been a “jarring” beginning, Jones, 33, told Vox, emphasizing that the riot — and the role some of his colleagues played in inciting it — has only strengthened his resolve to enact serious progressive reforms that “will ensure that members of Congress are sane and responsive to the American people.” +

+

+Jones, who is one of the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress, is part of a new wave of progressives elected to the House, signaling just how energized the left-leaning wing of the Democratic Party continues to be. Since the election of “the Squad” in 2018, when members including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) upset longtime incumbents — in part by running on policies to the left of more centrist Democrats — this young, diverse group of new lawmakers are bolstering their numbers on the Hill. Jones, campaigning on a progressive platform that won the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, beat out competitor Adam Schleifer, a pharmaceutical heir, who outspent his campaign five to one. +

+
+
+
+ +
+
+
+

+As their ranks continue to grow, “progressives in Congress are more powerful than they have ever been,” Jones says. A former staffer at the Justice Department during the Obama administration, Jones previously told NBC News that his trajectory has come as a surprise — and that he never thought he’d get elected to Congress “growing up poor, Black and gay,” in the district he now represents. +

+

+Jones, who was elected by his peers to represent the first-term members in Democratic leadership, will also be a key advocate for the new lawmakers, and a spokesperson for their concerns in weekly meetings. As their envoy, Jones makes sure Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others are aware of where the class stands on different subjects, including impeachment. +

+

+Jones spoke with Vox about what it means to be a Capitol Hill newcomer in a strange time, and why he’s so focused on democracy reforms. +

+

+This interview has been edited and condensed. +

+

+Li Zhou +

+

+What has it been like to join Congress and have to process the attack on the Capitol, as well as the impeachment of President Trump, within the first two weeks of being in office? +

+

+Rep. Jones +

+

+It’s been a jarring experience. I had expected to be giving my first floor speech in connection with the For the People Act, or the Covid-19 relief bill that Joe Biden has unveiled. But instead, my first speech was in connection with the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump, after having nearly died the week before, at the hands of not just the president of the United States but his Republican co-conspirators in the House, who helped to incite last week’s violent insurrection. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+Could you talk about your experience the day of the Capitol attack and what was going through your mind that day? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+I was on the House floor with the Democratic leadership team, listening to debate during what historically has been a routine proceeding: certification of the November presidential election. +

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+There was an abrupt announcement by security personnel that Capitol security had been reached by the mob outside, and that we would need to lock the doors to the House chamber from the inside. Minutes later, there was a very loud banging sound at one of the doors behind me from a mob of domestic terrorists. We were told to look under our seats and to pull out gas masks in case tear gas needed to be used. We were also told to prepare to lie down on the ground in the event of gunfire. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+How has this experience shaped your view of Congress — and how does that compare to expectations you had? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+It makes me even more committed to enacting critical democracy reforms, including those contained in the For the People Act, which would help elect better people to Congress. If you pass automatic voter registration to enfranchise an additional 50 million people nationally, you will get more Democrats elected to the United States Senate who will actually legislate in the best interest of the American people, rather than question the need for $2,000 survival checks, as [outgoing Georgia Republican senator] Kelly Loeffler did, because she has no commitment to helping everyday folks. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+What does accountability look like to you for the attack on the Capitol? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+I am laser-focused on holding Trump’s co-conspirators in Congress accountable both through expulsion and criminal prosecution and public shaming. Because these people need to know that they can never do what they did last week again. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+Could you talk about the new perspective and ideas you’re most excited to bring to Congress? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+We need more people in office for whom policy is personal — whose lives are affected by the policies we are enacting in Washington. I’m Black, openly gay, and was raised by a single mother who relied on Section 8 housing and food stamps just to get by. That’s exactly the perspective I’ve already been bringing to our policymaking discussions. +

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+For too long, our political system has been designed to serve the wealthy and well-connected, but we have a real opportunity under unified Democratic control to change that and fight for a bold agenda that will improve the lives of working Americans throughout this country. +

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+This work clearly has to start by fixing the root of our problems: our broken democracy. The insurrection we saw on January 6 started with the myth of voter fraud, which the GOP is using to lay the foundation for another decade of suppressing the votes of people of color, working people, and young people. +

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+We must pass the For the People Act (or HR 1) to fight back against the ongoing assault on our democracy; that means ending partisan gerrymandering, establishing small-dollar public financing for congressional campaigns, and automatic voter registration. We must also expand the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 hyperpartisan, conservative majority poses an existential threat to democracy itself. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+What is the top policy proposal that you plan to focus on as Congress continues to get underway? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+COVID-19 relief is the No. 1 priority. And No. 2 has to be democracy reforms. Democracy reforms will ensure that members of Congress are sane and responsive to the American people. And that we get better policies, ones that actually help working people in this country rather than the superrich. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+When it comes to Covid-19 relief, could you talk a bit about the provisions that you see as most important for the next bill to include? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+Definitely $2,000 survival checks and direct aid to states and local governments. You know, I have been supportive of monthly $2,000 checks for every adult, and monthly $1,000 checks for every child since early last spring. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+As someone who has been elected to represent the freshman class and be part of Democratic leadership, could you talk a little bit about what that role entails? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+Well, I meet every week with the House Democratic leadership team, and I confirm the needs and concerns and desires of the freshman class, which is a diverse freshman class, both ideologically and in terms of life experience. It gives me an opportunity to advocate for things like the impeachment of this president, when that was still being considered. +

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+I was able to say I’ve spoken to every single member of the freshman class, and they’re all supportive of impeachment. It also allows me to advocate for the freshmen by pushing for them to have opportunities to lead and to legislate, so that they can show their districts that they are getting things done. +

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+Li Zhou +

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+Given the ideological diversity that you mentioned, within both the freshman class and the Democratic caucus overall, how do you plan to keep on advancing progressive ideas? +

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+Rep. Jones +

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+Progressive policies are broadly popular with the American people. And in many instances, representatives in Congress have not caught up with public opinion. Progressives in Congress are more powerful than they have ever been. Our ranks have grown. And so has popular support for programs like Medicare-for-all and student debt cancellation. So I plan to work with other progressives on leveraging our votes to improve legislation. +

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+Li Zhou is a politics and policy reporter for Vox. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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