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Save this story for later. George Floyd Square, the intersection in Minneapolis where Floyd died, last May, features a mural that says “You Changed the World, George.” And, in the eleven months since Floyd’s agonizing death, captured on video, we have seen changes ranging from mercenary corporate endorsements of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to personal reckonings with the role of race in American society as well as substantial legislative and policy changes regarding...

Is the President’s do-nothing approach to the pandemic finally becoming a threat to his political future?

Save this story for later. In a few months, a small British financial think tank will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of a landmark research report that helped launch the global fossil-fuel-divestment movement. As that celebration takes place, another seminal report—this one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the world’s largest investment house—closes the loop on one of the key arguments of that decade-long fight. It definitively shows that the firms that jo...

Save this story for later. “Dawaee”—“thanks”—began the official message from the Pueblo of Acoma at the news on Monday that Deb Haaland, the congresswoman from New Mexico, had been confirmed as the Secretary of the Interior, becoming the first Native American ever appointed to a Cabinet position. Holly Cook Macarro, the chairwoman of the American Indian Graduate Center, reached for a Chippewa word from her Red Lake Nation, in northern Minnesota: “Gichi-ogim...

Why did we ever find all of this so amusing?

Save this story for later. On January 31st, generals in Myanmar seized power, after their political allies lost an election in a landslide to the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. She was detained, along with other party leaders, and remains under house arrest. Since then, Suu Kyi’s supporters have poured into the streets to demand the restoration of democracy, and civil servants and workers across the country have walked off their jobs. “If we stop going t...

Save this story for later. Last weekend, forty-three members of the United States Senate voted to acquit former President Donald J. Trump of inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th, which claimed the life of a police officer and four protesters and could have resulted in the deaths of members of Congress. Fifty Democrats and seven Republicans voted to convict Trump, but they fell far short of the sixty-seven votes that would have made him, in addition to being the only Presiden...

Failures in renewable-energy generation accounted for only a small percentage of the state’s recent power outages.

Save this story for later. A few days after Joe Biden’s Inauguration, Donald Trump made his first post-Presidency endorsement of a Republican candidate, in a four-way race to chair the Arizona Republican Party. Trump offered his “complete and total” endorsement to Kelli Ward, a physician and twice-failed U.S. Senate candidate, who has vigorously promoted Trump’s Big Lie about election fraud. (On January 6th, as the attack on the U.S. Capitol unfolded, Ward tweeted, “Sen...

What made the U.K. variant so much more successful than the original virus? One possibility is pure chance. It could have been amplified through some superspreader event, like the variant that took root at an employee conference at the Boston biotech firm Biogen, in February, 2020, which eventually accounted for more than three hundred thousand infections. Or perhaps it got seeded in a school or a church, and spread rapidly among a tightly knit population. But, as researchers went back and stud...