Day: May 8, 2020

For weeks now, the federal government has issued warnings to the American public about deceptive or just plain crooked companies selling at-home coronavirus test kits that weren’t authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — despite some of them claiming that they were. That’s now changed.

If you want to get tested for Covid-19 without leaving your home, you now have two FDA-authorized options to choose from. On May 7, the FDA granted an emergency use authorization for at-home saliva collection for Covid-19 tests developed by a lab at Rutgers University. The lab, RUCDR Infinite Biologics, joins LabCorp’s …

The United States has endured over 78,000 coronavirus deaths as of May 8, far more than double the second hardest-hit country. Unlike most comparable countries, the trajectory of the per-day death toll has not yet meaningfully bent down here nor has the number of new cases diagnosed each day.

By contrast, Germany and Japan combined have had just over 9,000 confirmed Covid-related deaths. Though Japan didn’t get off to a great start, the number of new cases per day has been hovering around 200 there. In Germany, it’s around 1,000. In either case, the new case numbers are …

Most Americans think snooping on a partner’s phone is a bad thing to do, but that hasn’t stopped more than a third of people in committed relationships from doing it anyway, according to Pew research published Friday. As many of us find ourselves cooped up with our partners and our phones for the foreseeable future, the researchers suggest that using this technology is not necessarily great for the health of our long-term relationships.

As tempting as it may be to snoop, please don’t.

Pew’s study, conducted last October, involved surveying nearly 5,000 US adults who were asked a wide …

One of my favorite episodes of The Ezra Klein Show was my conversation with Jenny Odell, just under a year ago. Odell, a visual artist, writer, and Stanford lecturer, had just released her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and we had a fascinating conversation about the importance of maintenance work, the problem with ceaseless productivity, the forces vying for our attention, the comforts of nature, and so much more.

A lot has changed since then. Odell’s book became a sensation: It captured a cultural moment, made it onto Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019 …

The green benches in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons were mostly empty, just Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a few members of Parliament, sitting spread out.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, wearing black robes, still commanded the room. But when it was time for a member of Parliament to ask a question, Hoyle glanced upward at a television screen mounted on the wood-paneled walls of the chamber.

On that screen appeared a member of Parliament — maybe with headphones, maybe just a tad too close to the camera, maybe framed with carefully curated bookshelf — ready to speak.

This is the …