Month: May 2020

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 …

The Justice Department has dropped its case against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, erasing his guilty plea in the Mueller probe and ending a years-long saga over his sentencing.

In a court filing Thursday, the Department of Justice said that “based on an extensive review and careful consideration of the circumstances … continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice.” The filing was signed by Timothy Shea, who’s currently serving as the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about his contacts …

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

We have somehow made it to May, beloveds, and by the traditional publishing calendar, that’s when the beach reads start to come out. This year, many of us probably won’t be spending time at the beach, but nevertheless, a variety of light and frothy books have begun landing on my desk. For that reason, I spent …

Hillary Clinton wore a black breathing mask imprinted with the word “VOTE” in Twitter and Instagram posts this weekend, posing in what appeared as a homespun effort to pitch “the must-have accessory for spring.” The posts bear an unassuming hashtag: #MaskingForAFriend.

But behind this hashtag and those fun posts — as well as similar ones by celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger — are a group of tech billionaires trying to answer a weighty, almost existential question: How can we make sure a devastating pandemic never happens again?

That’s one of the main focuses for a group formed by major tech philanthropists …

In April 2019, a woman named Tara Reade reached out to me with a clear, consistent story to tell about her experience as a staffer in Joe Biden’s Senate office in 1993. I spent hours on the phone with her, and many more tracking down possible witnesses and documents, trying to confirm her account.

Reade told me that a senior aide told her Biden liked her legs and that he wanted her to serve cocktails at a fundraiser for him, a request she found demeaning and declined. When she later complained to others in the office that Biden would put …

In 1991, a group of eight people entered a giant dome, a closed-system biosphere intended to be self-supporting. They called themselves “Biospherians,” wore space-age jumpsuits, and planned to stay two years, growing their own crops, recycling waste and air, and performing an “experiment” to see if it would be possible for human life to be sustained in such an environment. The structure was called Biosphere 2 (because Biosphere 1 is Earth), and it was a huge media sensation.

If you remember the media coverage of Biosphere 2 — or the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Biodome, which is (very) …

Moments after signing a proclamation honoring National Nurses Day on Wednesday, and in the middle of a pandemic that has already claimed tens of thousands of American lives, President Donald Trump reaffirmed his support for throwing out the Affordable Care Act.

While speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday, Trump was asked about a federal lawsuit, Texas v. California, which was brought by a coalition of Republican state attorneys general and seeks to have the landmark health care law thrown out entirely.

“Obamacare is a disaster, but we’ve made it barely acceptable,” Trump said.

Wednesday was the deadline …

A video showing the last moments of a young unarmed black man’s life has sparked outrage among criminal justice advocates across the country — and has led a Georgia prosecutor to call for a grand jury to investigate the fatal shooting.

Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was shot and killed in the Satilla Shores neighborhood on February 23, 2020, following an altercation with a white father and son. The men — Gregory and Travis McMichael, the former a retired district attorney investigator and police detective — armed themselves and followed Arbery in Travis McMichael’s pickup truck after seeing him jog by; they …

Three Russian doctors working to treat coronavirus patients have mysteriously fallen out of windows in recent weeks, underscoring the country’s struggling health care system — and leading to suspicions of foul play.

On April 24, Natalya Lebedeva, the chief of emergency medical services at a training base for Russian astronauts, fell out of a window at the hospital where she was being treated for a Covid-19 infection and died.

Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, the top doctor at a hospital in Siberia, fell out of a window during a conference call at her hospital and died on May 1 after a …