Mark Rykoff News Today

Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the days breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons.

Editor’s letter Who will be left to report on the crisis of local news? It’s a troubling question. While a few major national outlets have prospered, in much of the country local reporting is disappearing as large papers retrench and small ones shut down. A great part of this is happening under the radar, because after the lights are turned off, there is nobody left to write the story. In this week’s Last Word, though, journalist Will Oremus reports on what’s happening in hi...

Editor’s letter There’s a specific feeling I get whenever I fly into New York’s JFK airport and start to make the drive home. It feels exactly like turbulence. The roads around the nation’s busiest international air hub are littered with moon crater–size potholes, which make for a juddering and profanity-filled (“Oh, my poor bleeping suspension”) experience. This isn’t a uniquely New York problem: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE...

Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the days breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons.

Editor’s letter Editor-in-chief America needs two viable, sane political parties. Parties provide voters with a coherent choice of governing philosophies, and galvanize people to unite behind an agenda and candidates; without opposition, any party inevitably falls prey to corruption and extremism. Liberalism and conservatism are yin and yang, parts of a whole, each contributing insights and values to guide the zigzag path forward. But when parties become enamored with unpopular and foolish...

Editor’s letter A month before the first American died of the coronavirus, scientists already had designed the vaccine. In a Massachusetts lab last Jan. 13, Moderna researchers used the genetic sequence of the virus, made public by China, to design an mRNA molecule that teaches the immune system to recognize and neutralize it. By February, their vaccine had actually been made and shipped to the National Institutes of Health to start clinical trials. This largely unknown time line shows tha...