Month: May 2020

As Hong Kong approaches the anniversary of its massive pro-democracy protests, China is moving to impose a sweeping national security law that could directly undermine Hong Kong’s freedoms and special status, and inflame tensions after a year of political turmoil.

The National People’s Congress — a rubber stamp for the Chinese government — is set to pass legislation that is intended to curtail foreign interference or activities that undermine the state. That could directly target the antigovernment activists who have challenged Beijing’s authority. The Chinese government has tried to blame outsiders, including the US, for fomenting the pro-democracy …

Outrage may be flowing toward Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of the Atlantic, after news came on Thursday that the magazine laid off almost 20 percent of its staff. But she will not be the last billionaire owner of a major news outlet who will have to make hard decisions in the next few weeks.

Over the last decade, billionaires like Powell Jobs have picked up prestige media outlets and won respect from those who saw these deals as a form of civic leadership and public service. Not every publication could get bought by a billionaire, to be sure, …

Much thievery is committed with the aim of enriching somebody’s personal coffers, usually the thief’s. And that’s true of some art theft as well; paintings or sculptures are stolen so they can be sold on the black market, or used as a bargaining chip.

But sometimes art disappears for reasons that are difficult to understand. On April 20, 2015, thieves made off with two paintings by the young Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova, who was exhibiting at Galleri Nobel in Oslo, Norway. Kysilkova is a talented painter, mostly of people in emotionally charged moments, but she wasn’t particularly well-known at …

These days, I prefer listening to looking. Staying at home means a lot of my work and social life happens on Zoom, and staring at a computer screen for so many hours each day feels draining. So when I want to give my eyes a rest and my emotions a boost, I go hunting for podcasts.

And in the era of Covid-19, there are a lot of great new podcasts to be had.

I’m not talking about the newsy or informational ones, which dig into the science and policy questions surrounding the pandemic. Those are useful, too, but we’re …

When the world eventually opens back up after the Covid-19 crisis, many parts of society, the economy, and the workplace will not be what we remember. For so-called knowledge workers, people whose jobs typically require analytical thinking as well as computers, not only will their offices look different, but the way in which they work will be altered, too. It might never be the same.

The giant forced experiment of remote working en masse brought about by the pandemic will likely last longer than many thought. Tech companies seem to be taking the concept especially seriously. Facebook recently …

A friend of mine, another journalist, texts me every few days with the latest coronavirus case and death counts from Singapore. On Monday: “Singapore is now at 28k cases and 22 deaths.” I checked the Johns Hopkins dashboard on Wednesday morning to confirm: 29,364 confirmed Covid-19 cases and still just 22 deaths.

All of us are amateur epidemiologists now, and my friend’s fascination with Singapore is all about the country’s remarkably low case fatality rate. Based on those numbers, just 0.07 percent of people in Singapore who contracted the coronavirus have died from it. Compare that to the …

In winning the Oregon GOP primary for the US Senate Tuesday, Jo Rae Perkins became the seventh Republican congressional candidate who openly supports QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that maintains the president is secretly fighting “deep state” operatives and Democratic pedophiles.

Perkins won a four-way race for the party’s Senate nomination, earning just short of 50 percent of the vote. Former naval officer Paul Romero finished second with 30 percent. Perkins will face off with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the general election on November 3, which Merkley is expected to win.

Nevertheless, her victory — which came …

The anti-lockdown protests that have garnered so much attention in the United States in recent weeks may seem like a uniquely American phenomenon. Wired’s Emma Grey Ellis called them an “American mess,” describing them as “a modern permutation of an identity crisis with roots very deep in America’s individualist history.”

The protests have been compared to other American political movements, from Trump rallies to the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, which took its own name from the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a seminal event in US history that helped spark the American Revolution and came to symbolize …

President Trump sent two tweets Wednesday morning threatening financial retaliation against states that are trying to make it easier to cast a ballot during the coronavirus pandemic, saying he will “hold up” funds for two swing states encouraging people to vote absentee: