Author: Michelle Korhonen
Nobel peace prize honoree Malala Yousafzai is calling for an end to “gender apartheid.” COVID is no longer a global health emergency but will the coming year see a “cholera comeback”? And if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by election coverage here in the U.S. for the November event, keep in mind that 2024 is going to be a “mega-election year” on Earth — more elections than ever in the history of elections, some election watchers say. These are a few of the buzzwords in the world of global health and development and humanitarian causes that we cover for Goats…
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t. Isn’t this what writers do as well, when they enter the minds of their characters? The exile will always be at least slightly alien to her adopted culture. At the…
Read one way, the decision this week by a federal judge to block JetBlue’s acquisition of Spirit Airlines is a milestone in the effort to revive American antitrust law. President Joe Biden has made competition enforcement a central part of his economic policy, and the JetBlue ruling marks the first time that federal regulators have ever won a lawsuit to stop a major U.S. airline merger. In his opinion, William G. Young—who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985—explains in admirably plain language that absorbing Spirit would allow JetBlue to raise prices and reduce service on the routes where the…
For Jews, the events of October 7—the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—were horrifying and traumatizing. But what has happened in the three months since is also deeply unsettling, though in a different way. Much of the world, rather than offering empathy and compassion for Israel, has turned on it.Hamas’s malevolent actions helped produce a sharp rise in anti-Semitism and in anti-Israel rallies in cities across the world. Earlier this month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas, launched in…
Netflix’s new series captures the anxieties of early adulthood.NetflixJanuary 19, 2024, 8 AM ETWho would have guessed that the next great Pokémon show would be an office comedy? Netflix’s new animated series Pokémon Concierge is set on a small island resort where human and nonhuman guests can get away from it all—if they can figure out how to relax. The show is designed to be a guaranteed hit with children—four short episodes, cute animal characters, almost no plot—but, given its workplace setting, it’s just as much fun for an adult audience. The show introduces Haru (voiced by Non in Japanese…
McAlester Regional Health Center’s administrative offices in McAlester, Oklahoma. Mitchell Black for KFF Health News hide caption toggle caption Mitchell Black for KFF Health News McAlester Regional Health Center’s administrative offices in McAlester, Oklahoma. Mitchell Black for KFF Health News McALESTER, Okla. — It took little more than an hour for Deborah Hackler to dispense with the tall stack of debt collection lawsuits that McAlester Regional Medical Center recently brought to small-claims court in this Oklahoma farm community. Hackler, a lawyer who sues patients on behalf of the hospital, buzzed through 51 cases, all but a handful uncontested, as is…
This article contains spoilers through the Season 5 finale of Fargo.In the latest season of Fargo, one scene is re-created from the 1996 movie on which the show is based—but with a twist.The first episode finds Juno Temple’s character, Dorothy Lyon, known as Dot, watching TV and knitting on the couch when two masked kidnappers enter. It’s the same scenario that, in the Coen brothers’ original film, Jean Lundegaard (played by Kristin Rudrüd) finds herself in. But whereas a panicked Jean is quickly captured after she tumbles down the stairs, Dot fights back. Armed with household items, she burns the…
An American Cancer Society report estimates new cancer cases this year will hit a record high of more than 2 million.
Environmentalism has never been a stable ideology, and its adherents have never been a monolithic group. But, in Minneapolis, the green community has fractured as a wide array of self-described environmentalists find that they don’t agree on very much anymore.Back in 2018, Minneapolis generated national headlines for being the first major American city to eliminate single-family zoning. Under a plan called Minneapolis 2040, the city legalized duplexes and triplexes in all residential neighborhoods. The plan led to a frenzy of ambitious regulatory changes meant to yield denser, transit-accessible, and more affordable homes across the city.The stated goals of Minneapolis 2040…
Compared with the worst days of the pandemic—when vaccines and antivirals were nonexistent or scarce, when more than 10,000 people around the world were dying each day, when long COVID largely went unacknowledged even as countless people fell chronically ill—the prognosis for the average infection with this coronavirus has clearly improved.In the past four years, the likelihood of severe COVID has massively dropped. Even now, as the United States barrels through what may be its second-largest wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, rates of death remain near their all-time low. And although tens of thousands of Americans are still being hospitalized with…