Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Trump’s COVID Coverup - During the 2020 campaign, the former President tested positive days before debating Joe Biden and kept it secret. - link

• The Supreme Court Looks Ready to Overturn Roe v. Wade - Lawyers and Justices on both sides—with the possible exception of John Roberts—appeared to be past pretending that the Mississippi case is about anything less. - link

• The Uncertainties of the Omicron Variant - The new coronavirus strain is worrisome—but its effect won’t be the same everywhere. - link

• Will the Omicron Travel Restrictions Work? - Attempts to slow the pandemic by screening international arrivals have a mixed record of success. - link

• Chris Cuomo’s Personal Journey - The self-evaluation will be televised. - link

From Vox

• There need to be consequences for Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Islamophobic comments -

  

Inaction normalizes anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment.

Congressional leaders are struggling to respond to anti-Muslim comments made by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), an uncomfortable reminder of how accepted Islamophobia has become among Republican lawmakers, who’ve broadly been silent in the wake of these statements.

Two weeks ago during a floor speech, Boebert referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of three Muslim House lawmakers and the only one to wear a hijab, as a member of the “jihad squad.”

“The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother husband, the other one, over a million dollars in campaign funds,” she said in her remarks.

Over the Thanksgiving recess, Boebert again made anti-Muslim remarks in a speech, claiming that once while riding an elevator Omar was on, she saw a worried Capitol Police officer approaching. In her comments at the November event, Boebert said they had nothing to fear from the Democrat because she wasn’t wearing a backpack, insinuating that Omar could have been a suicide bomber.

This week, it was reported that Boebert has told this story in public more than once. (Omar has said she never witnessed Boebert have this exchange with an officer.)

Boebert later apologized to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment,” but has yet to publicly apologize to Omar, and went on to accuse Omar of anti-American rhetoric in a phone call the two had earlier this week, according to a statement she later made.

Boebert’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Thus far, Republican leadership has been quiet on the matter, issuing no public condemnation of Boebert’s comments. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Friday that Boebert had already apologized for her comments and reached out to Omar, even though the call they had didn’t have a resolution. “This party is for anyone and everyone who craves freedom and supports religious liberty,” McCarthy said of the GOP.

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have condemned Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks but have yet to put forth a formal resolution or penalty regarding her statements. Beyond a statement condemning Boebert, Democrats and Republicans have a couple of options for punishment, including a resolution denouncing these comments, a formal reprimand or censure, or the stripping of committee assignments. At this point, neither party has publicly announced further action they would take.

Pressure for a more serious punishment is building: On Thursday, five Democratic House caucus chairs called for Boebert to be stripped of her committee assignments, much like Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene were in the wake of posts they made seeming to promote political violence. The caucus chairs argue that inaction in the face of Boebert’s comments effectively condones Islamophobia and sends a message about what types of extremist comments Congress is willing to accept.

“There must be consequences for elected representatives who traffic in anti-Muslim and racist tropes that make all Muslims across the country less safe,” the lawmakers write.

Researchers have indeed found that Islamophobic rhetoric by politicians has real-world consequences and has been directly linked with hate speech targeted toward Muslim Americans. If Congress doesn’t impose more penalties regarding this incident, lawmakers could — whether they mean to or not — further normalize anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, affecting not only Muslim lawmakers but millions of Muslim Americans as well.

In their lack of response, Republicans, in particular, have shown that their party isn’t willing to denounce such Islamophobic statements. And this creates the appearance that the party is open to embracing the hateful rhetoric that former President Donald Trump and others have used.

“The truth is that Islamophobia pervades our culture, our politics, and even policy decisions,” Omar said at a press conference on Wednesday. “The most pervasive is the constant suggestion that all Muslims are terrorists and should be feared. So when a sitting member of Congress calls a colleague a member of the ‘jihad squad’ and falsifies a story to suggest that I will blow up the Capitol, it is not just an attack on me, but on millions of American Muslims across this country.”

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LaZp-GwmzzWSr-

How Congress acts in response to this incident — and others like it — sets a tone that extends far beyond its halls.

Congressional inaction condones Islamophobia

Congressional inaction toward Boebert’s comments only helps normalize them, and the fact that Boebert hasn’t faced more immediate consequences from either party makes it seem as though expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment are acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats’ outright condemnation was important, but the delay in additional disciplinary action has been surprising to Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“I believe that so far the response from the Democratic leadership is weak and late and doesn’t meet the seriousness of these attacks,” Awad told Vox. “Islamophobia has unfortunately become a reality of our life as American Muslims. It has not been tackled with the vigor and the swiftness it needs to be dealt with.”

Meanwhile, the Republican response to Boebert’s comments further reaffirms leadership’s seeming willingness to accept or look past the bigotry and rhetoric of its members.

The decision to stay silent on this front follows Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s treatment of a video posted by Gosar that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawing weapons against President Joe Biden. At the time, McCarthy did not publicly condemn Gosar. As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, Republican leadership has sought to address internal conflicts, but focused less on the issue of Islamophobia.

McCarthy has spoken out about other discriminatory statements caucus members have made in the past. Though he did not do so immediately after they came to light, he did publicly denounce several anti-Semitic and violent statements Greene had made. More recently, McCarthy responded to her comments comparing being required to wear masks to the Holocaust by saying, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.”

As the Post notes, however, his approach to colleagues making extremist comments seems to have shifted since his statements about Greene in May, with some speculating that he’s now focused on building support for winning the House speakership — and keeping the base satisfied to do so.

McCarthy’s approach, when it comes to Boebert’s remarks, has been indicative of many rank-and-file Republicans’ reactions to her statements as well. While Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) are among those who have spoken out and criticized Boebert’s comments, many others in the caucus have shied away from confronting them directly. Greene, meanwhile, echoed Boebert’s “jihad squad” rhetoric in her own tweet this week.

It’s another sign that many Republicans are willing to stay quiet when it comes to criticizing bigotry and extremism by their members, putting Democrats in a position where they have to be the ones to act. Republicans have been quick to decry certain forms of bigotry they have said they’ve seen in the Democratic caucus, for instance attempting to censure progressive lawmakers — including Omar — for criticisms of Israel that some perceived as anti-Semitic. Democrats have also criticized Omar for similar reasons.

“Republicans have long been critical of Omar for her criticisms of Israel, and members of both parties have denounced some of her statements as antisemitic,” the Washington Post’s Jacqueline Alemany and Marianna Sotomayor write. “In 2019, House Democratic leaders swiftly condemned Omar’s suggestion that Israel’s allies in American politics were motivated by money rather than principle. Omar apologized later that day.”

Congress is known for moving slowly in general, though the response to the Boebert comments has taken a while. Democrats responded after a week and a half regarding the video Gosar posted depicting violence toward Ocasio- Cortez. Gosar had posted that video around November 7 and was censured by the House on November 17. Boebert first made her floor speech using the term “jihad squad” on November 17 and then used the term at another event, video of which was posted on November 25.

Democrats have argued that there could be downsides to punishing Boebert; they worry that doing so could further raise her profile and boost her ability to fundraise from conservative voters. Greene brought in more than $3 million in fundraising in the first quarter of this year after her committee assignments were stripped. Some Democrats have also said they don’t want to be in a position of constantly disciplining Republicans who make extremist and racist statements, according to Politico.

Still, as was evident in the punishments levied on Gosar and Greene, Democrats act when they feel it is necessary. As the Hill reported, Democrats considered a resolution to condemn Islamophobia earlier this week but were focused on putting pressure on House Republicans to act. In an MSNBC interview Thursday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Democrats were still discussing what the “appropriate action” is.

“It’s not an option to ignore it because it might help her raise money,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) stressed at a press conference earlier this week. Punishment “sends a message to the rest of our colleagues that this is unacceptable.”

Political statements can be tied to real-life violence

In the wake of Boebert’s latest statements, Omar has been the target of anti-Muslim vitriol and death threats, an apparent consequence of the recent Islamophobic remarks. Researchers have found that the rhetoric used by public officials could have an impact on the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence — a major reason it’s important for House leadership to push back against it.

“There’s a through line between what is said about me … what my colleagues have said … and the death threats I receive,” Omar said this week.

At the Wednesday press conference, Omar played one of the threatening voicemails — a message filled with racist and Islamophobic slurs — she’s received following her call with Boebert. Omar and other progressive women of color including Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have long faced numerous death threats since they’ve been elected.

There have also been several recent examples of political speech being tied to actual violence. Participants in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol have referenced comments by Trump and said he instructed them to go to the building. Trump had called on a crowd to “fight like hell” prior to the storming of the Capitol, telling attendees “we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue … and we are going to the Capitol.”

Research has indicated that anti-Muslim rhetoric can be linked to hate crimes, based on the limited data that law enforcement sources currently have. A 2016 study from California State University San Bernardino, for example, found an 87.5 percent increase in hate crimes toward Muslim Americans after Trump called for a ban on Muslim people entering the country.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Awad notes that anti-Muslim rhetoric has been normalized by many politicians, who’ve leveraged Islamophobia to energize members of their base. A 2021 CAIR survey found that 69 percent of Muslim Americans said they’d experienced an instance of anti-Muslim bigotry since the 9/11 attacks, and 95 percent said they’d speak out if they heard negative comments about Muslims and Islam.

“We have been fighting — as an institution and as a community — Islamophobia for the past 20 years,” Awad said. “Over the years, it’s been elevated, normalized, and legislated. We have the most influential people in our lives trafficking in Islamophobia believing that it will get them somewhere with their base.”

Tlaib echoed this point this week, emphasizing the effect Congress’s actions in this case could have.

“I’m also here today in support of the 3.45 million Muslim neighbors in our country, because it’s also their lives that are put in grave danger when people like Rep. Boebert are allowed to use their national platform and elected office to spread hate and dangerous racist rhetoric that enables violence toward Muslims,” Tlaib said.

Lawmakers would be making a mistake if they weigh nullifying the political benefits Boebert could extract from any punishment more heavily than making a decisive statement against Islamophobia.

• Wanted: Clear goals to end the pandemic -

  

American policymakers still haven’t explained what the goal of pandemic policy truly is.

This is an excerpt from the newsletter for The Weeds. To sign up for a weekly dive into policy and its effects on people, click here.

Nearly two years after the discovery of Covid-19, we still don’t have a good answer to the biggest question: When will the pandemic end?

One obvious complication is that the coronavirus has proven very good at unexpected twists and turns, as it recently reminded us with the omicron variant.

But part of the problem, experts told me, is that US officials have never done a good job making it clear what the end goal even is and what it would mean for the country to return to something closer to normal. (While much of the US has started to move on, restrictions remain in place, particularly in schools, public transportation, and health care settings.)

“It’s been a major problem,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “If you’re not articulating what the metrics are that are driving your public health decision-making, it makes everything more opaque to the general public.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, the public was told the goal was to “flatten the curve” — a vague premise meant to ensure health care systems aren’t overwhelmed. Besides that, it was never clear whether the goal was “Covid zero” — true elimination of the virus — or something else.

We now know that the elimination of Covid-19 is unlikely, if not impossible. The coronavirus spreads too quickly, and is too adaptive, to truly eliminate. So a more reasonable goal would be to treat it a bit like the flu: a threat we mitigate with vaccines and other treatments, but to some extent learn to live with.

What, specifically, that looks like remains unclear.

What we can say is Covid-19 isn’t like the flu yet. America seems to be seeing a fall-winter spike in cases, and omicron could make things worse. But precisely because a surge could require new precautions again, it’s important to set a clear goal.

“If you have a set of policies that restrict people’s behavior, having pretty clear guidelines about when you will pull those back seems like a reasonable thing,” Robert Wachter, chair of the University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine, told me.

Authorities could tie restrictions to rates of cases or hospitalization (the latter will become more relevant as more people get vaccinated). The specific threshold will always be somewhat arbitrary, but the idea is to pick a number that is low enough to ensure the virus is under control and that the public can look at to understand if restrictions are warranted.

For example: A community could tie school mandates for masking and quarantining to staying below 10 daily new cases per 100,000 people for two weeks. If cases remain below that threshold, the mandates end. As cases rise toward and above that threshold, restrictions phase in.

Then there’s the vaccination rate. A community could ease restrictions as its vaccination rate climbs to 70, 80, or 90 percent. Higher is always better, but experts say it’s these higher thresholds that can provide solid community protection, barring new virus variants that evade immunity.

In the current context, some of these goals might seem unfeasible — a 90 percent vaccination rate is very high, and no state has hit that threshold. But an ambitious goal can acknowledge how far we are from beating Covid-19, and potentially provide motivation for officials and the public to work to improve things.

Another possible goal might be based on the time since vaccines became readily available: After two months of widespread vaccine availability (to allow people to get two shots and let them take effect), restrictions could ease.

These goals aren’t exclusive to one another, and could be tracked together.

But first, US leaders have to make their goals clear. From the start of the pandemic to now, that hasn’t been the case — and it’s made any light at the end of the tunnel harder to see.

There’s still racial discrimination in housing

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research investigated whether there’s racial discrimination in housing — and found evidence that there is still significant levels of racist actions.

For the study, researchers Peter Christensen, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Christopher Timmins used a bot to send correspondences to property managers in the 50 largest US cities. Posing as renters, they used names that invoked associations with racial and ethnic groups: white, Black, or Hispanic. They then gauged if names associated with each group received different response rates.

Sure enough, there were significant differences: Response rates were 9.3 percent lower for Black renters, and 4.6 percent lower for Hispanic renters. Black renters faced higher levels of discrimination in the Midwest and Northeast, while Hispanic renters faced higher levels of discrimination in the Northeast and South.

NBER

The three worst cities for Black renters: Chicago, Los Angeles, and Louisville, Kentucky. And for Hispanic renters: Louisville, Houston, and Providence, Rhode Island. (Yes, Louisville is on both lists.)

The researchers noted that “non- response to a renter of color corresponds to a 40.2% reduction in the probability of a subsequent lease by a renter of color” — meaning this does translate to a reduced likelihood of a renter living at a property. More broadly, this trend contributes to racial segregation and inequality, since housing is a crucial ingredient to economic prosperity in America.

• Long hours make bad neighbors -

  

Americans’ excessive and unpredictable work schedules are making us lonely, self-centered, and powerless.

In the darkest days of the early Covid-19 pandemic, when millions of Americans were struggling to feed their families and living in constant fear of a deadly virus, something unusual happened. Neighbors all over the country started coming together to help one another, buying groceries, picking up medicine, and generally caring for each other at a time when even venturing outside the house was infused with uncertainty and fear.

New mutual aid organizations sprang up and saw unprecedented participation and donations — Bed-Stuy Strong, for example, in central Brooklyn, mobilized more than 1,200 people and distributed $1.2 million worth of food, according to founder Sarah Thankam Mathews.

Part of the reason for this outpouring was the overwhelming need and a desire to do something to help. Part of it was that some Americans, finally, had time on their hands. The “massive crisis response” of Bed-Stuy Strong was fueled in part, Mathews said, by “a lot of people losing their jobs or having to do much less work at their jobs.”

Prior to the pandemic, work was a huge obstacle to community involvement, with lack of free time the most common reason Americans cited for why they didn’t volunteer. Covid-19 has shown that in an extraordinary moment, Americans can come together, but in our ordinary lives, we often just don’t have any extra time to give to others.

That shouldn’t be a surprise given the way that American work culture swallows up our days. Whether you’re working 80 hours a week at a high-pressure office job or trying to make ends meet with multiple hourly gigs, “the end result is that you are left with very little time that you would see as being open,” Jenny Odell, author of the book How to Do Nothing, told Vox.

We know that long work hours and unpredictable schedules are bad for us as individuals — they contribute to heart disease, anxiety, depression, child care struggles, and more. But the time pressure Americans experience may be harming us on a broader social level as well.

When you’re working constantly — or when you’re perpetually on call, never sure if or when you’ll have to go to work — you might not have the energy to volunteer with your local mutual aid group. You might not have time for political activism, even if it’s a cause you care about. You might not be able to get together with others in your workplace or your industry to advocate for better conditions because your schedules never overlap enough to organize.

“Part of being a member of a community is coordinating your time with others,” Daniel Schneider, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Vox. With the rise of precarious and unpredictable work in today’s economy, many people simply can’t do that.

An inability to engage with our communities hurts everyone, contributing to social isolation, a decline in worker power, and an inability to tackle problems like climate change that require people to work together. But policies that give Americans back some of their time, through paid leave and more predictable scheduling practices, can help free them up to act communally. And for people who already have some semblance of control over their time, there are ways to push back against the hyperindividualistic ideal of constant productivity and self- optimization.

One way to do that is “trying to develop other ways of talking about and evaluating time,” and advocating for “larger collective structures that make it easy and possible for more people to see their time differently,” Odell said. That may sound easier said than done — yet the reward is a world in which we all have more energy not just for ourselves, but to support and care for one another.

American capitalism in the 21st century has all but destroyed the concept of free time. For some, that destruction has been insidious. Work hours for salaried employees have been slowly rising for years — in 2014, the average such worker put in 49 hours a week, with 25 percent working more than 60 hours.

Child care availability hasn’t kept pace with this rise in hours, and the pandemic has forced many parents, especially moms, to work and care for kids at the same time. Even time that’s not spent on work or family is supposed to be somehow “productive” — the precarity of American jobs and the rise of hustle culture have led to a “feeling that you need to get something out of all of your time,” and an emphasis on “squeezing results out of every minute of your day,” Odell said.

That’s if you’re lucky. While salaried workers have been descending deeper into overwork, many low-wage hourly workers are subject to unpredictable schedules that change from day to day or week to week, sometimes with almost no notice.

In a sample of about 150,000 service-sector workers surveyed by The Shift Project, which Schneider co-directs, just 20 percent have a regular daytime shift. Two-thirds get less than two weeks’ notice of their schedules, and 10 percent get less than 72 hours’ notice. Meanwhile, two-thirds say they have to keep their schedules open just in case they are called to work on a particular day.

The problems of salaried workers and hourly workers aren’t the same — the former tend to make more money and have greater control over their time, even if it doesn’t always feel as though they control it. In both cases, the lack of open time affects everything from sleep to hobbies to how we experience time with our families. It also affects our ability to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Take the case of unpredictable schedules. Research suggests that such work arrangements could be “toxic” for community and political involvement, Schneider said. Unpredictable schedules lead to increased work-life conflict, Schneider said, from difficulty finding child care to trouble finishing school.

It stands to reason that if being on call all the time makes it hard to coordinate with day care providers and college classes, it makes it hard to coordinate with volunteer groups too. The people most able to devote time to Bed-Stuy Strong, Mathews said, tended to be people with jobs that were neither too demanding nor too precarious — “jobs that are structured to allow you life outside of your job.”

Unpredictable schedules can also make it difficult to organize within a workplace. Having a constantly changing work schedule means you likely see different coworkers every day, limiting your ability to form close relationships with anybody, sociologist Hana Shepherd has found. Related conditions of the modern workplace, like understaffing and overwork, also make it harder for coworkers to form close relationships with each other. When workers can’t bond with one another, it’s more difficult for them to form unions or other groups to push for better working conditions.

Another barrier to organizing is that “these schedules wear people down,” Schneider said. “To do the hard work of organizing and self- advocacy, that takes reserves — that takes resources.” Being constantly on call for a schedule that’s always changing depletes those resources — be it time, money, or energy — leaving little left over for forming coalitions or pushing for change.

Even for salaried workers, the contemporary American economy encourages isolation and discourages communal behavior. Research shows that being in a hurry can make people less likely to help a person in distress. “If you are feeling very possessive about your time,” Odell said, “you’re not necessarily going to be listening to your environment” — including the people around you and their needs.

Many forms of community engagement require a level of awareness of the world around you that’s difficult to maintain if you’re always focused on your own productivity. To be involved in mutual aid, for example, “you have to know what people need” and “you have to be very responsive to a situation that’s changing” — a tall order if you’re working a 10-hour day, putting your kid to bed, and then staying up late working on your side hustle.

For some people, the pandemic put a temporary pause on the pressures of work, either because they gained new flexibility by working from home or because they were laid off but had enough savings to get by (others saw only more pressure as they went to work in essential jobs or tried to care for kids while working). But now, a return to offices and the need for the unemployed to find new jobs may be contributing to a decline in involvement with mutual aid, with one group reporting a 70 percent drop in volunteers.

Even something like reducing your environmental impact is more difficult if you’re overworked. As Alden Wicker reported for Vox in 2019, cutting down on household waste “can be a lot of undervalued, unpaid work” — researching sustainable alternatives, going to different stores to find washable silicone storage bags or bulk dried beans. That work is a lot harder — maybe impossible — if you’re already operating on a time deficit.

So are other types of conscious consumerism. People may want to support their local small businesses rather than shopping at Amazon or other big-box retailers, but visiting several different stores to find, say, surgical masks or the right size diapers for your kid takes more time and energy than many people have at the end of a workday.

Overall, the conditions of American capitalism affect different categories of workers in different ways. But for many people, the pressure to maintain our precarious lives makes it all too hard to look out for anyone but ourselves.

That’s a problem because the various interlocking crises facing America and the world today, from the pandemic to climate change, demand collective consciousness and action. None of that is possible with Americans’ current relationship to our time. “You get into this constricted posture,” Odell said, in which “everything around you is either something you can have or use, or it’s an obstacle. Or it just doesn’t exist.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are straightforward policy changes that would give Americans back some control over their time.

Predictable scheduling laws, for example, offer protections for workers like advance notice of scheduling changes and the right to request a different schedule. These laws, already in place in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, and elsewhere, are typically modest in scope, requiring just two weeks’ advance notice of any change. Yet even this small reform was shown to improve Seattle workers’ sleep and happiness, and decrease the amount of hardship they reported in their lives. “Was it a silver bullet? No,” Schneider said. “But it really did move the needle.”

A similar law, the Schedules That Work Act, has been proposed at a federal level, but so far has made little headway in Congress. Beyond scheduling, policies like paid leave and a universal basic income could help change the conditions that force Americans into a single-minded focus on our own time and work, Odell said. A more “portable” safety net, with benefits like health care uncoupled from our jobs, could be helpful as well.

Meanwhile, American expectations of work and workers will have to adjust as well. As a culture, we define good workers as putting in long hours and always being present at work, Youngjoo Cha, a professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington, told Vox. “Those kinds of cultural notions have to change.”

Companies can do their part by allowing time off and flexibility — and by providing those benefits to everyone, regardless of family status, Cha said. That way, parents (especially moms) are less likely to be stigmatized for taking time off, and child-free people are able to take time too, rather than always being expected to fill in for coworkers who have child care responsibilities. Cha has found that at companies where flexible work policies are offered in a gender-neutral and consistent way, employees report greater well-being and are less likely to equate long hours with success.

All these broad-based reforms could help free up some of our time and mental energy for causes larger than ourselves and goals more lofty than getting through another day. Individual Americans may be able to make changes in their lives too, if they’re in a position to do so. Hourly workers who are constantly on call and juggling multiple jobs and family obligations may not have the luxury of rethinking how they spend their time, Odell said. But people who do have some control over their schedules can adjust the way they plan their days. Odell recalls a time a few years ago when two friends “gently shamed” her out of working after 5 pm. Such conversations among friends and colleagues can start to change norms away from always working and toward a more expansive ethos that allows for collective well-being. Today, Odell said, “I’m really careful about how I talk about time and values to people.”

Another small prescription: talking to strangers, if you feel safe doing so. “Just being reminded that every person that you pass by has a whole history, and they have their own problems, and they’re often way more interesting than you thought” is a great way to build empathy, Odell said.

It’s not on any one person to completely change the structure of American life. But by looking outside ourselves a little more, if we can, we may be able to make such change more possible.

After all, “community care is, really simply, part of being human,” Mathews said. “It’s how we survived for this long.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• BCCI increases age limit for match officials, support staff to 65 years - Among other decisions, the Board has inducted Brijesh Patel and MKJ Majumdar in the IPL Governing Council

• Laxman ‘has to apply’ for NCA’s post, panel formed to investigate CVC’s betting links: Jay Shah - On the IPL 2022 Mega Auction which is slated for next year, Jay Shah said: “The IPL Governing council will take a call on this”

• Sindhu enters final of BWF World Tour Finals, beats Yamaguchi in semis - It will be Sindhu’s third final appearance in the tournament

• ‘Welcome to the club’: Kumble and cricket fraternity laud Ajaz Patel’s 10-wicket haul - ‘Simply unreal. Well done young man - Ajaz Patel,’ said Ravi Shastri

• Shifting base got him into cricket, switching to spin made it all possible for Ajaz - Ajaz Patel rise in international cricket was built on success at the domestic level.

From The Hindu: National News

• Indian economy fastest in world to come out of Covid pandemic impact: Amit Shah - After the BJP came into power in 2014, Mr Shah said, 80 crore people were brought into mainstream by opening their bank accounts and providing other facilities

• Veteran journalist Vinod Dua passes away - Vinod Dua, a Hindi broadcast journalism pioneer with stints in Doordarshan and NDTV, was moved to the ICU of Apollo Hospital on Monday.

• SKM forms five-member committee for dialogue with Government on pending demands - Pending demands include MSP, compensation to kin of farmers who died during the movement against the agri laws and withdrawal of cases against the protesters

• Suvendu uses TMC tools to strengthen BJP - Former Trinamool leader has cemented his key position in the saffron party amid disarray

• MLC election: ‘JD(S) to announce stand in two days’ - Former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy reacts to speculation about tie-up with BJP

From BBC: Europe

• Ready for power: Team Scholz promises a new Germany - Next week will see a handover of power from the Merkel era and this is what to expect.

• Russia Ukraine: Biden warns Russia against Ukraine ‘red lines’ - Intelligence officials fear Russia could invade Ukraine as soon as early 2022, US media reports.

• Eitan Biran: Cable car survivor returned to Italy after custody battle - Eitan Biran, the sole survivor of a cable car crash, is now in Italy after a custody battle.

• Austria ruling party picks Nehammer for chancellor - Karl Nehammer is chosen as party leader and next chancellor in a bid to end days of turmoil.

• Covid-19: Ireland closes nightclubs and tightens Covid rules - Taoiseach Micheál Martin announces a number of new restrictions in a televised address.

From Ars Technica

• What will it take to end deforestation by 2030? - Here’s how nations can put the brakes on deforestation. - link

• COVID vaccinations spike in US as delta rages and omicron looms - Vaccines expected to offer some protection from omicron as speedy spread continues. - link

• New Peacemaker trailer gives us a redeemable villain we might learn to like - “Maybe I’m a grower, not a shower. An individual you don’t like and then learn to like.” - link

• iPhones of US diplomats hacked using “0-click” exploits from embattled NSO - NSO’s stealthy Pegasus malware gives full remote access to infected devices. - link

• AT&T failed to fix Ohio man’s broken Internet service for a month - Fixed wireless user just needed a new antenna, but AT&T couldn’t figure out the problem. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Why did the chicken cross the road? -

  Because of a rotten banana or whatever.

  submitted by /u/HoldingAces35
  [link] [comments]

• Two men and a woman are stranded on an island after a plane crash… -

  … Resourceful, they waste no time, build a house, find food and water, and globally have it good. After one month, the woman goes to the two men and says:

  “Okay guys, let’s be frank. I have my needs, you have your needs, let’s do it. We’ll take turns, one day it’s you”, she says to the first guy, “and the other day it’s the other”.

  And so they have a whale of time taking turns, enjoying their business together for one whole month. However, unfortunately, the woman dies after that month, because of a rotten banana or whatever. The two men mourn the loss of their playmate and partner for the following week. Then, one man goes to the other and says:

  “Okay man, let’s be frank. I have my needs, you have your needs, let’s do it. We’ll take turns, one day it’s you, and the other day it’s me.”

  And so they have a good time taking turns, enjoying their business together for one whole month. The first man then goes to the other and says:

  "Okay man, I need to talk to you.

  • Yeah, me too actually.
    • We had a fun month, but I think we should stop.
      • Yeah, I felt this way too. I feel what we’re doing is not natural.
        • That’s right. Let’s stop."

          So they nod their head in common understanding. The second man then says:

          “Well then, shall we bury her?”

  submitted by /u/Radagast50
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