Peter Wehner

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic , a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center , and Egan visiting professor at Duke University .
He writes widely on political , cultural , religious , and national-security issues , and he is the author of The Death of Politics • Can the late politician ’ s words help us through the current moment ?
• The president is defaming the memory of a woman who died nearly 20 years ago—and inflicting pain upon her family today .
• Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the pandemic , polarization , and politics .
• The country is witnessing the steady , uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump .
• The Party of the Aggrieved The pandemic has revealed the animating forces of the Republican Party in the age of Trump .
• Trump is utterly unsuited to deal with this crisis , either intellectually or temperamentally .
• Francis Collins speaks about the coronavirus , his faith , and an unusual friendship .
• The Trump Presidency Is Over It has taken a good deal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain .
• The presidential candidate tapped into the deep longings of an exhausted country .
• Senator Mitt Romney ’ s decision to vote to convict President Donald Trump is an extraordinary act .
• The Downfall of the Republican Party To see men and women who had a positive vision beaten down and broken by Trump is a poignant thing .
• There Is No Christian Case for Trump When faith is treated as an instrumentality , it ’ s bad for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• Two of the president ’ s prominent evangelical supporters are literally demonizing his opponents .
• The Exposure of the Republican Party The GOP will not be a great or good party until those who lead it straighten their backbone .
• The Presidency Deserves Respect—Even When the President Does Not If Trump critics think they ’ re going to win a race to the bottom with the president , they ’ re wrong .
• Trump Betrayed the Kurds .
He Couldn ’ t Help Himself .
Humiliating his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American allies in harm ’ s way is far worse .

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.
Mike Segar / Reuters The Indictment of Donald Trump—And His Enablers Will the Republican Party now abandon its Faustian bargain?
Michael B. Thomas / Getty Morality Is for Trump What Colors Are to the Color-Blind The majority of his enablers, though, still know right from wrong.
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: … Four Forces Bind Trump’s Supporters More Tightly Than Ever Reckoning with their enduring adherence to a broken man
James Estrin / NYT / Redux My Friend, Tim Keller The Christian leader was an intellectual, but he possessed a pastor’s heart.
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. The Faith of Gary Haugen The founder of International Justice Mission found in his religion a source of courage.
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: … MAGA Is Ripping Itself Apart The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty Depraved, Deranged, and Doing Real Damage The former president is a grotesque man presiding over a grotesque party.
Damon Winter / The New York Times / … Accountability Arrives for Donald Trump A man of borderless corruption must prepare to face the consequences.
Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty Vengeance Is Trump’s The former president is threatening retribution. What we need, instead, is forbearance.
Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; The Atlantic Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Civil War The congresswoman is too influential within the GOP—and too representative of its views—for her calls for secession to be dismissed.
Mark Peterson / Redux The Institutional Arsonist Turns on His Own Party Donald Trump threatens to use his core skills—peddling conspiracy theories, spreading lies, sowing distrust—against the GOP.
Stanislav Beloglazov / Getty; Tasos Katopodis / Getty; … The GOP Is a Battering Ram Against Truth For Trump, the violence on January 6 was a bonus.
Getty The Trump Abandonment Has Begun The former president’s newest critics ought to show some contrition.
Katie Martin / The Atlantic My Friend, Mike Gerson A beautiful writer with an even more beautiful soul
Ronda Churchill / AFP / Getty More MAGA Than Ever It’s hard to overstate how radicalized and anarchic the base of the Republican Party remains.
Mark Peterson / Redux The Desecrations of Michael Flynn The former national security adviser is fusing deranged political ideas with a mangled version of the Christian faith.
Meg Kinnard / AP; The Atlantic The Perfect Candidate for a Fallen Party Herschel Walker illustrates where Trump has taken the GOP.


Erika Hayasaki

Erika Hayasaki is an associate professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California , Irvine .
She is a 2018 Alicia Patterson Fellow and the author of The Death Class : A True Story About Life • An Act of Love and Desperation Chloe Le got a mild case of COVID-19 .
Her husband , Ted , ended up in the ICU .
Chloe spent weeks in a race against a bottlenecked system , trying to donate her plasma to Ted and hopefully save his life .
• Studying twins has long offered insight into the interplay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the next frontier .
• Cultural messages tell women that making art and having children are incompatible pursuits .
But science suggests that women may become more creative after having kids .
• Can Your DNA Tell You the Healthiest Way to Live Your Life ?
Genetic-sequencing companies are going beyond ancestry and disease risk to offer specific lifestyle recommendations .
• How childhood memories shape us , even after we 've forgotten them • By applying characters ' fictional psyches to real-life problems , a cosplay enthusiast turned a passion for comic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The story of one teenager 's near-death experience inside the grain bin that killed his friends • The intensely challenging job of law enforcement is linked to many health issues .
I met a former officer who tried to protect my high school friend and learned the effect her death had on him .
• Frontotemporal dementia , unlike Alzheimer 's , often hits people in the prime of their lives , and can make them act like a completely different person .
• How Many of Your Memories Are Fake ?
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy , researchers find what goes into false memories .
• Fueled by social networking , the growing “ death movement ” is a reaction against the sanitization of death that has persisted in American culture since the 1800s .

Erika Hayasaki is a professor in the literary-journalism program at UC Irvine and the author of Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family
Courtesy of Chloe Le / The Atlantic An Act of Love and Desperation Chloe Le got a mild case of COVID-19. Her husband, Ted, ended up in the ICU. Chloe spent weeks in a race against a bottlenecked system, trying to donate her plasma to Ted and hopefully save his life.
Erika Hayasaki Identical Twins Hint at How Environments Change Gene Expression Studying twins has long offered insight into the interplay of nature and nurture. Epigenetics is the next frontier.
Hein Koh How Motherhood Affects Creativity Cultural messages tell women that making art and having children are incompatible pursuits. But science suggests that women may become more creative after having kids.
Mad Dog / Triff / Rattiya Thongdumhyu / … Can Your DNA Tell You the Healthiest Way to Live Your Life? Genetic-sequencing companies are going beyond ancestry and disease risk to offer specific lifestyle recommendations.
Minnikova Mariia / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / … Traces of Times Lost How childhood memories shape us, even after we've forgotten them
Louise McLaren/Flickr Batgirl's Psychologist By applying characters' fictional psyches to real-life problems, a cosplay enthusiast turned a passion for comic books into a mental-health career.
Shawn Nystrand/Flickr Drowning in Corn The story of one teenager's near-death experience inside the grain bin that killed his friends
Lucas Jackson/Reuters Life of a Police Officer: Medically and Psychologically Ruinous The intensely challenging job of law enforcement is linked to many health issues. I met a former officer who tried to protect my high school friend and learned the effect her death had on him.
Glen_Wright/flickr A Lesser-Known Dementia That Steals Personality Frontotemporal dementia, unlike Alzheimer's, often hits people in the prime of their lives, and can make them act like a completely different person.
Murad Sezer / Reuters How Many of Your Memories Are Fake? When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories.


Hannah Giorgis

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic , where she covers culture .
• Why People Are Obsessed With a Terrible Polish Erotic Thriller Thanks to the pandemic , Netflix ’ s first summer hit is a shallow movie full of sun , sex , and spit .
• Four seasons in , Issa Rae ’ s HBO show is becoming the friendship study it was always trying to be .
• A national discussion has erupted , again , over racism in food media .
But that discussion is one part of the problem .
• Why @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Donating to Bail Funds The popularity of these donations signals a quietly radical shift in many people ’ s attitudes toward American policing .
• What One Woman ’ s Shattered Career Reveals About the Music Industry HBO Max ’ s On the Record details sexual-assault allegations against the rap mogul Russell Simmons—and homes in on the lives derailed by sexism .
• Mindy Kaling ’ s Never Have I Ever joins a handful of new coming-of-age films that break with history to put young women of color at the center of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ B Were Once Disparate .
Andre Harrell Changed That .
The industry icon , dead at 59 , ushered in a new sound by bridging two musical worlds .
• Foodie Culture as We Know It Is Over A wave of culinary experts is responding to the pandemic with an accessible and empathetic approach to home cooking—and audiences can ’ t get enough .
• Quarantine Could Change How Americans Think of Incarceration Nationwide forced isolation , along with media coverage of the pandemic ’ s toll in U.S. jails and prisons , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• The Problem With Celebrities Urging Fans to Donate During a Pandemic As millions of people struggle with layoffs and lost wages , now is not the time for wealthy stars to be asking ordinary Americans to give money .
• For people hoping to travel after the crisis passes , Pinterest helps them envision a future that feels impossible to imagine right now .
• Netflix ’ s The Platform , a film about a vertical prison filled with gluttony and cannibalism , is striking a chord with American viewers now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to shop less and stay at home more , it ’ s time to rethink food consumption altogether .
• The Best Kind of Food to Cook During a Pandemic I chose risotto , but any recipe that requires your full , constant attention is a good distraction from anxiety .
• The 25-year-old rapper ’ s new EP , Suga , makes it easy to root for her—and for her potentially industry-shifting lawsuit against her label .
• The writer ’ s new series , Twenties , makes fun of entertainment that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work has faced .

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Along with Michelle Duster, Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Hannah recently co-wrote Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells . Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, she was the special projects editor at The Ringer. At The Atlantic, she primarily covers culture.
Jonathan Prime / Amazon Studios A Political Rom-Com That Feels Ripped From a Bygone Era Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue is an escapist fantasy that can’t quite escape the real world, no matter how hard it tries.
SBS Productions A Movie About an Affair That Breaks With Convention The queer drama Passages makes poignant observations about power, desire, and the psychological contours of creative life.
Magnolia Pictures Kokomo City Sees Its Subjects for Who They Are A new documentary offers a complex portrait of Black transgender sex workers, with the snappy production values of a Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee film.
Vanessa Clifton / Netflix The Indignity and Joy of Starting Over After a Breakup Survival of the Thickest stars the comedian Michelle Buteau as a brokenhearted stylist intent on making “beautiful thickums” feel good about themselves.
Craig Blankenhorn / Max And Just Like That Addresses Its Che Diaz Problem Midway through its second season, the Sex and the City reboot has given some unexpected depth to its most hated character.
Yale Archive / Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures How the Negro Leagues Shaped Modern Baseball A new documentary examines the afterlife of Black baseball’s golden eras, and what was lost with their demise.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: … 11 Undersung TV Shows to Watch This Summer A guide to the best under-the-radar series from this year, available on a streaming service near you
Bettmann / Getty When Making Art Means Leaving the United States A new book expands the history of the Black Americans who nurtured their creativity overseas.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: … A Podcast About the Airport Best Sellers We Can’t Escape On the podcast If Books Could Kill, hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri dive into the murky details of mass-market hits.
Photograph by Chantal Anderson for The Atlantic Usher Knows What It Means to Burn The R&B legend discusses masculine vulnerability and how he brought Hotlanta to Vegas.
Alima Lee Kelela Knows What Intimacy Sounds Like The elusive R&B singer wants to help you feel your feelings: “If you came to the club to dissociate, I’m ’bout to make you cry.”
Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic To Grandmother’s TikTok We Go Older influencers who share laundry hacks and old family recipes are helping Gen Z get through the holidays.
Getty; The Atlantic The World’s Newest Republic How one nation’s sovereignty movement is setting off a chain reaction among former British colonies in the Caribbean
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Paras Griffin; Prince … George Clooney’s Tequila Is Taking Over Rap All of a sudden, it seems like Casamigos is name-checked in every song.
Netflix How Reality Dating Shows Stoke Racial Tensions Lauren and Cameron, Love Is Blind’s breakout stars, have succeeded not because of the show but in spite of it.
Merrick Morton / HBO Barry Isn’t a Comedy Anymore. But It’s Become an Even Better Show. Season 3 of Bill Hader’s HBO series about a listless hitman, which ended Sunday, marked a stark shift toward the show’s darker impulses.
Universal / Everett; The Atlantic The Review: Knocked Up Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis discuss Hollywood and the way it depicts abortion (or doesn’t).
Mario Anzuoni / Reuters; Charlie Le Maignan / … Pop Music’s Nostalgia Obsession Why do older sounds seem to dominate music lately?
Chauncey Hare Under the Fluorescent Lights Chauncey Hare captured the drudgery of office life in order to protest it.


theatlantic--2020-04-24--Save the Postal Service

Save the Postal Service

After years of indifference to the plight of the USPS from Republican-led Congresses , things finally seemed to be improving .
On February 5 of this year , the House passed the USPS Fairness Act by a vote of 309–106—including support from almost half of House Republicans—and sent it to the Senate .
But the bill is still sitting there , and in the interim , COVID-19 struck .
The volume of mail the USPS is delivering has already fallen by nearly one-third compared with last year , and it is now projected to lose $ 22 billion over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still doing their jobs , despite the risks ; so far 1,219 postal workers have tested positive for the coronavirus , and 54 have died .
The CARES Act included a $ 500 billion bailout for large corporations , but no help for the Postal Service .
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin threatened to use any loan money to coerce the USPS to raise its package-shipping rates , allow him to oversee the hiring of senior USPS staff ( including a new postmaster general ) , and demand union concessions .
Trump confirmed this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ package on April 24 , declaring that no loans would go to the USPS if it didn ’ t quadruple package rates .
Trump ’ s willingness to block proposed bailout funds to the USPS—a 245-year-old government service—may reflect his personal grudge against Jeff Bezos , the CEO of Amazon ( and owner of The Washington Post ) , combined with an ignorance of how the USPS actually works .
But it also reveals a conservative hostility to the Postal Service that antedates the current crisis .
In its 2018 report , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) suggested drastic service and facilities cuts , more noncareer labor and outsourcing , and an end to the American Postal Workers Union ’ s collective-bargaining rights .
Just like the first USPS crisis , sparked by the pre-funding requirement , this one is unnecessary and politically manufactured ; and just like that earlier crisis , it is also very real .
It threatens the center of America ’ s $ 1.6 trillion mailing industry , which employs 7.3 million people .
The Postal Service can ’ t simply file for bankruptcy ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like FedEx , UPS , or Walmart—which even together could not handle the U.S. mail , contrary to some privatization fantasies .
But with the USPS now projecting it will run out of operational funds by September , Trump could cripple the nation ’ s mail by blocking aid , forcing the USPS to prioritize which vendors to pay and which services to curtail .
The USPS has said that it needs $ 89 billion in assistance , including $ 25 billion in grants .
Priscilla Southwell : In the pandemic , every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Senate Democrats hold the line in future stimulus packages for USPS relief ?
Do they have the political will to save universal postal service along with 630,000 government jobs—80 percent of them good-paying career positions ?
To preserve the USPS is not to merely conserve it as some relic of the past .
The 1970 Postal Reorganization Act says that the USPS should “ bind the nation together.
” Who else will distribute stimulus checks ( as the unemployment rate climbs past 14 percent ) , census forms , online purchases , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact , anything that takes postage ?
How else can Americans vote by mail—as they now do in six states , and may soon need to do in all 50 ?
Postal workers are out there right now , delivering face masks and test kits , and hopefully one day soon they ’ ll be delivering vaccines as well .
In 2011 , during the last postal financial crisis , I wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post warning of what we ’ ll lose if we lose the Postal Service .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provides—that ’ s the jobs , the path into the middle class , and the glue holding communities together .
So much has changed since then , but that much remains the same .

When I carried the mail in Durham, North Carolina—back in the 1990s, before I became a historian—an older man used to greet me joyfully, “Here comes Uncle Sam!” To him, and to others on my route, I represented not just the chance of a letter, but also a connection to the federal government—and to an institution that had probably provided a relative with a steady job, and a path into the middle class. The United States Postal Service is among the country’s most popular institutions, enjoying approval ratings as high as 90 percent. The USPS delivers 48 percent of the world’s mail to 160 million homes. Yet in late March, as the Postal Service struggled to deal with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump threatened to veto a version of the $2.2 trillion bipartisan CARES Act stimulus package that contained a $13 billion grant to help the USPS keep meeting its payroll, gassing its vehicles, and paying its suppliers. What he finally signed instead included a $10 billion loan that would require approval by the Treasury Department.
Read: The postal service is a civic institution, not a business
Trump’s move triggered a wave of disbelief, with people taking to social media to thank letter carriers and buying stamps to keep the USPS afloat. But the truth is, the Postal Service has been under attack by conservatives for years. Trump’s personal hostility to the USPS—“the Post Office is a joke,” he said on Friday—merges with a long-standing Republican embrace of both postal privatization and the trope that the USPS is a mismanaged business. The Trump administration is now playing a costly game of chicken to get what it sought long before the current crisis: drastic service and facilities cuts, more noncareer labor and outsourcing, and a rollback of employee rights and benefits. If it succeeds, we’ll all be the poorer for it.
America’s post office was a revolutionary idea, born in 1775. From the start, it was intended to serve as a political and information network, a sharp contrast with European countries’ postal services, which primarily existed to bring revenue into the treasury. Today’s USPS is the direct descendant of the original U.S. Post Office Department.
On March 18, 1970, the successors of the original post riders revolted against both their employer and their union leaders in an eight-day nationwide illegal wildcat strike , demanding a living wage and job dignity as well as greater union democracy. The roots of the Postal Service’s current financial crisis lie in the compromise legislation that followed the strike, the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act. The act replaced the Post Office Department with a hybrid government agency and corporation that would provide full collective-bargaining rights to employees, become financially self-supporting, and continue to provide universal service at reasonable rates. Although the USPS provides a service mandated by the Constitution and federal law, it has received no federal funds since 1982, relying on postal product sales to keep revenue ahead of expenditures.
The Post Office has historically provided an avenue toward middle-class stability for a wide variety of Americans—veterans, new immigrants, rural migrants—but for no group has it been more important than for African Americans. The Post Office was for many years the nation’s largest employer of black workers; in the decades that followed its conversion into the USPS, blacks were at least twice as likely to work for the Postal Service as whites. The Postal Service today is 37 percent minority and 37 percent female.
Read: From clerk to postmaster at one of the U.S.’s oldest post offices
Conservatives, who had previously argued for the privatization of the Post Office, continued those efforts after the 1971 creation of the Postal Service. But not until 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, did those efforts gain much traction. That year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, imposing a unique burden on the Postal Service by requiring it to pre-fund retirees’ health benefits through annual payments of roughly $5.5 billion, for 10 years. These obligations, the rise of the internet, and the Great Recession combined put the USPS in the red, where it remains today: The USPS had $11 billion of outstanding debt at the end of the last fiscal year (which was up to $14.4 billion as of April 1). Excluding those debt payments, it should be noted, the USPS has finished each year with revenue surpluses for most of the past decade—as a 2018 Trump administration report documented.
The Postal Service survived the 2008–09 crisis in a diminished state. American homes and businesses did not stop growing or depending on the USPS, but hundreds of post offices and mail-processing centers were shuttered, many others had their hours cut, some services were reduced, and the postal workforce has lost 126,000 career positions since 2009.
After years of indifference to the plight of the USPS from Republican-led Congresses, things finally seemed to be improving. On February 5 of this year, the House passed the USPS Fairness Act by a vote of 309–106—including support from almost half of House Republicans—and sent it to the Senate. But the bill is still sitting there, and in the interim, COVID-19 struck.
The volume of mail the USPS is delivering has already fallen by nearly one-third compared with last year, and it is now projected to lose $22 billion over the next 18 months. Postal workers are still doing their jobs, despite the risks; so far 1,219 postal workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, and 54 have died. The CARES Act included a $500 billion bailout for large corporations, but no help for the Postal Service. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin threatened to use any loan money to coerce the USPS to raise its package-shipping rates, allow him to oversee the hiring of senior USPS staff (including a new postmaster general), and demand union concessions. Trump confirmed this strategy as he signed the latest stimulus package on April 24, declaring that no loans would go to the USPS if it didn’t quadruple package rates.
Trump’s willingness to block proposed bailout funds to the USPS—a 245-year-old government service—may reflect his personal grudge against Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon (and owner of The Washington Post), combined with an ignorance of how the USPS actually works. But it also reveals a conservative hostility to the Postal Service that antedates the current crisis. In its 2018 report, a Trump-appointed task force (led by Mnuchin) suggested drastic service and facilities cuts, more noncareer labor and outsourcing, and an end to the American Postal Workers Union’s collective-bargaining rights.
Just like the first USPS crisis, sparked by the pre-funding requirement, this one is unnecessary and politically manufactured; and just like that earlier crisis, it is also very real. It threatens the center of America’s $1.6 trillion mailing industry, which employs 7.3 million people. The Postal Service can’t simply file for bankruptcy; the USPS is not a private corporation like FedEx, UPS, or Walmart—which even together could not handle the U.S. mail, contrary to some privatization fantasies. But with the USPS now projecting it will run out of operational funds by September, Trump could cripple the nation’s mail by blocking aid, forcing the USPS to prioritize which vendors to pay and which services to curtail. The USPS has said that it needs $89 billion in assistance, including $25 billion in grants.
Priscilla Southwell: In the pandemic, every state should vote by mail
Will House and Senate Democrats hold the line in future stimulus packages for USPS relief? Do they have the political will to save universal postal service along with 630,000 government jobs—80 percent of them good-paying career positions? To preserve the USPS is not to merely conserve it as some relic of the past. The 1970 Postal Reorganization Act says that the USPS should “bind the nation together.” Who else will distribute stimulus checks (as the unemployment rate climbs past 14 percent), census forms, online purchases, letters, parcels, books, magazines—in fact, anything that takes postage? How else can Americans vote by mail—as they now do in six states, and may soon need to do in all 50? Postal workers are out there right now, delivering face masks and test kits, and hopefully one day soon they’ll be delivering vaccines as well.
In 2011, during the last postal financial crisis, I wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post warning of what we’ll lose if we lose the Postal Service. That isn’t just the services it provides—that’s the jobs, the path into the middle class, and the glue holding communities together. So much has changed since then, but that much remains the same.


theatlantic--2020-01-30--We Don’t Have Enough Masks

We Don’t Have Enough Masks

Nor were her masks designed to protect people from coronaviruses .
Brown tells me she ’ s been emailing with a virologist in the hope of getting expert advice on what—if anything—she can tell people about their effectiveness against transmission of the new outbreak .
But he responds with long answers about how it depends on the properties of any given virus , and how much a contagious person is secreting , and how closely the person comes into contact with others .
Essentially , no masks are perfect , and their value always depends on the context in which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of fear , even a small chance of protection can become extremely valuable to people who feel they have few other actions to take .
This may be why some people in the U.S.—still at very low risk of contracting the new coronavirus—have newly begun wearing masks .
Americans are now diving into and depleting global stock that could be needed elsewhere , in order to don masks as they go about their daily life .
In the past few days I ’ ve noticed growing numbers on the streets of Boston and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the T and subway and Amtrak in between , despite a lack of any new recommendation for their use .
Masks have been strongly suggested and even temporarily made mandatory in some places by the Chinese government , but no U.S. authority has done the same .
Saad Omer , an infectious-disease epidemiologist and the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health , says that it can ’ t hurt if healthy people simply choose to wear masks in the U.S. , but if there ’ s a benefit at this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ People want to feel empowered ; there ’ s nothing worse than a lack of feeling of self-efficacy.
” At the same time , any unfounded sense of protection or immunity carries at least some possibility of detracting from effective preventive measures .
As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends : Wash your hands often , with soap and water , for at least 20 seconds , or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer .
Disinfect frequently touched surfaces .
Don ’ t carry around used tissues , even if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Stay home as much as possible when in the pathogen-spewing phase of any respiratory disease—be it coronavirus , influenza , or other .
Bringing a contagious disease to work or onto the subway poses a hazard to others that can ’ t be totally eliminated with a mask .
And , maybe the most difficult recommendation : Avoid touching your eyes , nose , and mouth .
Most of us touch our faces several times every hour , mindlessly , and this is often how we catch viral illnesses .
Despite never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we self-infect by rubbing our nose or eye after touching a mucus-misted surface .
The physical barrier of an elective face mask could help protect us from ourselves , by minimizing inadvertent face touching .
But most of the value of masks is in situations where they are clearly necessary , even crucial .
And in times of shortage , proper and judicious use becomes especially worth considering .
In a café yesterday , I sat next to a man wearing a surgical mask and coughing beneath it .
But his commitment to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wasn ’ t covering his nose .
The value of a mask worn incorrectly can plummet to nearly zero .
This point was made clear by a widely shared video last week , in which Wing Hong Seto , an infectious-disease specialist at Hong Kong University , demonstrated proper technique .
“ It works ; we ’ ve done many studies , ” he says , but emphasizes that fitting the mask tightly around one ’ s nose is crucial .
( I debated the social value of correcting the man in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Information about the novel coronavirus is rapidly changing. As a result, some of the information or advice in this article may be out-of-date. You can find The Atlantic’s most current COVID-19 coverage here
Wendover Brown runs a boutique business in San Francisco selling hand-sewn face masks. Her patterned products are called Vogmasks (pronounced “vogue masks”). They are meant to look more like clothing than medical devices—cosmetically palatable respirators for people trying to avoid air pollution or allergens. Most months, Brown says, she sells a few thousand.
Last week she was shocked to get an order from Dubai for 100,000. That was one of several enormous requests from around the world, amid concerns about the new coronavirus.
Cheaper, standard surgical masks—the expandable rectangles of paper—are reportedly in short supply in many places, as are N95 respirators used in health-care settings—the cup-shaped devices that seal tightly to the face with elastic bands. (N95 is the designation used by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, indicating that a mask can block inhalation of 95 percent of airborne particles.) Even though Vogmasks carry no such formal certification, boutique suppliers like Brown are selling out as people grasp for longer-term, business-casual mask options.
Brown had to turn down those huge orders. “This isn’t what we do,” she says. “I have no ability to fill that kind of order.”
Nor were her masks designed to protect people from coronaviruses. Brown tells me she’s been emailing with a virologist in the hope of getting expert advice on what—if anything—she can tell people about their effectiveness against transmission of the new outbreak. But he responds with long answers about how it depends on the properties of any given virus, and how much a contagious person is secreting, and how closely the person comes into contact with others. Essentially, no masks are perfect, and their value always depends on the context in which they’re used. In moments of fear, even a small chance of protection can become extremely valuable to people who feel they have few other actions to take.
Read: The deceptively simple number sparking coronavirus fears
This may be why some people in the U.S.—still at very low risk of contracting the new coronavirus—have newly begun wearing masks. Americans are now diving into and depleting global stock that could be needed elsewhere, in order to don masks as they go about their daily life. In the past few days I’ve noticed growing numbers on the streets of Boston and New York and New Haven, and on the T and subway and Amtrak in between, despite a lack of any new recommendation for their use.
Masks have been strongly suggested and even temporarily made mandatory in some places by the Chinese government, but no U.S. authority has done the same. Saad Omer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, says that it can’t hurt if healthy people simply choose to wear masks in the U.S., but if there’s a benefit at this point it’s likely psychological: “People want to feel empowered; there’s nothing worse than a lack of feeling of self-efficacy.”
At the same time, any unfounded sense of protection or immunity carries at least some possibility of detracting from effective preventive measures. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends: Wash your hands often, with soap and water, for at least 20 seconds, or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Disinfect frequently touched surfaces. Don’t carry around used tissues, even if they still have some usable real estate. Stay home as much as possible when in the pathogen-spewing phase of any respiratory disease—be it coronavirus, influenza, or other. Bringing a contagious disease to work or onto the subway poses a hazard to others that can’t be totally eliminated with a mask. And, maybe the most difficult recommendation: Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth. Most of us touch our faces several times every hour, mindlessly, and this is often how we catch viral illnesses. Despite never being especially close to anyone sick, we self-infect by rubbing our nose or eye after touching a mucus-misted surface.
The physical barrier of an elective face mask could help protect us from ourselves, by minimizing inadvertent face touching. But most of the value of masks is in situations where they are clearly necessary, even crucial. And in times of shortage, proper and judicious use becomes especially worth considering. In a café yesterday, I sat next to a man wearing a surgical mask and coughing beneath it. But his commitment to the cause seemed low; the mask wasn’t covering his nose. The value of a mask worn incorrectly can plummet to nearly zero. This point was made clear by a widely shared video last week, in which Wing Hong Seto, an infectious-disease specialist at Hong Kong University, demonstrated proper technique. “It works; we’ve done many studies,” he says, but emphasizes that fitting the mask tightly around one’s nose is crucial. (I debated the social value of correcting the man in the café, but did not.)
When Seto says the surgical mask “works,” he is referring especially to the way medical-grade masks have an absorbent lining to trap what we cough or sneeze up. Hypothetically, any physical barrier will help minimize the amount of particulate matter one spews into the air, but a mask worn inside out or loosely tied loses much of its effect. As for the degree to which surgical masks worn by healthy people help prevent the inhalation of a respiratory virus, the evidence is less clear. The CDC offers no certification to attest to exactly how much airborne matter is blocked by such masks, unlike N95 respirators. But a 2019 study in JAMA did find that doctors who wore surgical masks seemed to get the flu at no higher rates than those who wore N95s.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
The real importance of the run on masks at this moment may be that it is emblematic of broader, uncomfortable truths about outbreak preparedness. Supplies of many basic medical products like masks and respirators rely on international trade, which becomes unpredictable during emergency scenarios. Imports could be cut off during a pandemic, either by border shutdowns or rising demand within a country. In the U.S., for example, only 5 percent of surgical masks purchased annually are made here.
State health departments do recommend that hospitals keep an emergency store of respirators, but only enough for very short periods. The New York Department of Health advises hospitals to keep “at least a three-day supply of N95 masks readily available for use in a variety of emergency situations.” This assumes that more will be available for purchase. But there’s no guarantee that will be true: During the 2009 flu outbreak, hospitals ran low on masks. The CDC keeps a national stockpile for emergencies, but its latest reported numbers are lower than other countries’. The 2009 flu used up more than 75 percent of the stockpile.
Read: A historic quarantine
Brown says that one of the people trying to place a bulk order with her was a buyer for a medical-device supplier, which alarmed her. “The boutique sector is totally unequipped to meet the needs of the population in an emergency,” she says. And crucial questions of efficacy remain. The evidence that most masks now common in China can even meaningfully filter out air pollution, let alone viruses, is inconclusive, according to Wong Chit Ming at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. In the U.S., testing of the efficacy of individual mask brands is up to individual manufacturers—both to conduct and to share their results. Brown does this for Vogmasks, but the CDC doesn’t recognize such products as medical equipment, and so consumers don’t have a standardized system of certification to show which masks might be useful and which are glorified cheesecloth.
Brown is quick to say that the face-mask market is full of cheap products of unknown benefit. And even if boutique products like hers did clearly help prevent disease, her supplier is in South Korea—which is experiencing its own shortage of surgical masks. In the event of a pandemic that saw borders shut down, supplies of all sorts of masks could be expected to dwindle. Taiwan has already halted exports and is reportedly inspecting people at borders to ensure that no one is smuggling N95 or surgical masks out of the country.
This threat of shortages of basic medical tools extends well beyond masks. In a serious pandemic, the U.S. is not prepared to be isolated for long. Many of the CDC guidelines for use of respirators involve rationing and judicious use, even in hospitals. Supplies more potentially vital than masks, including antibiotics, antivirals, and saline, are also mostly produced internationally. Even many of the vitamins that fortify our highly processed, white-bread diets come from China. This level of dependence is not generally considered a matter of national security, but some believe it should be.
Among the proposed solutions is the idea that hospitals could be required to purchase vital medical devices and drugs from companies based in the U.S. (and whose supply chains could endure a global shutdown). Another is that a supply of products necessary for survival could, like the public water system, be managed in a centralized way—with government agencies even manufacturing these essential products.
Both of those options would substantively alter the state of global commerce, and might be feasible for only a handful of wealthier countries. Many places simply don’t have the resources or capacity to be self-sufficient, nor would such redundancy of production lines make sense. Given these realities, the pertinence of an orchestrated international response in times of health crisis becomes only more clear. The global medical community has the capacity to address extremely dangerous outbreaks. In isolation, most countries do not.


theatlantic--2020-04-25--Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

But the “ extraordinary ” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary .
Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan , China , and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes .
The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments , but an acceleration of them .
Read : No , the internet is not good again As surprising as it may sound , digital surveillance and speech @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China .
Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector , rather than the federal and state governments , currently takes the lead in these practices , which further values and address threats different from those in China .
But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here , and toward the growing involvement of government , is undeniable and likely inexorable .
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States was largely wrong .
Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet , and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society ’ s norms and values .
Beginning in the 1990s , the U.S. government and powerful young tech firms began promoting nonregulation and American-style freedom of speech as essential features of the internet .
This approach assumed that authoritarian states would crumble in the face of digital networks that seemed to have American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ internet was a vehicle for spreading U.S. civil and political values ; more speech would mean better speech platforms , which in turn would lead to democratic revolutions around the world .
China quickly became worried about unregulated digital speech—both as a threat to the Communist Party ’ s control and to the domestic social order more generally .
It began building ever more powerful mechanisms of surveillance and control to meet these threats .
Other authoritarian nations would follow China ’ s lead .
In 2009 , China , Russia , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ announced their “ agreement on cooperation in the field of international information security.
” The agreement presciently warned of a coming “ information war , ” in which internet platforms would be weaponized in ways that would threaten nations ’ “ social and political systems.
” During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations , the United States helped secure digital freedoms for people living in authoritarian states .
It gave them resources to support encryption and filter-evasion products that were designed to assist individuals in “ circumventing politically motivated censorship , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in 2010 .
And it openly assisted Twitter and other U.S. tech platforms that seemed to be fueling the Arab Spring .

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on April 27, 2020.
COVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”
Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs. We need “to make sure that, when we’ve made it past this crisis, our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live,” warns the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley. “Any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life,” declares the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency.”
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.
Read: No, the internet is not good again
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. government and powerful young tech firms began promoting nonregulation and American-style freedom of speech as essential features of the internet. This approach assumed that authoritarian states would crumble in the face of digital networks that seemed to have American constitutional values built into them. The internet was a vehicle for spreading U.S. civil and political values; more speech would mean better speech platforms, which in turn would lead to democratic revolutions around the world.
China quickly became worried about unregulated digital speech—both as a threat to the Communist Party’s control and to the domestic social order more generally. It began building ever more powerful mechanisms of surveillance and control to meet these threats. Other authoritarian nations would follow China’s lead. In 2009, China, Russia, and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation announced their “agreement on cooperation in the field of international information security.” The agreement presciently warned of a coming “information war,” in which internet platforms would be weaponized in ways that would threaten nations’ “social and political systems.”
Evelyn Douek: The internet’s titans make a power grab
During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the United States helped secure digital freedoms for people living in authoritarian states. It gave them resources to support encryption and filter-evasion products that were designed to assist individuals in “circumventing politically motivated censorship,” as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2010. And it openly assisted Twitter and other U.S. tech platforms that seemed to be fueling the Arab Spring.
In these and so many other ways, the public internet in its first two decades seemed good for open societies and bad for closed ones. But this conventional wisdom turned out to be mostly backwards. China and other authoritarian states became adept at reverse engineering internet architecture to enhance official control over digital networks in their countries and thus over their populations. And in recent years, the American public has grown fearful of ubiquitous digital monitoring and has been reeling from the disruptive social effects of digital networks.
Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.
The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious cyber operations from abroad.
These constitutional limits help explain why, since the Russian electoral interference, digital platforms have taken the lead in combatting all manner of unwanted speech on their networks—and, if anything, have increased their surveillance of our lives. But the government has been in the shadows of these developments, nudging them along and exploiting them when it can.
Ten years ago, speech on the American Internet was a free-for-all. There was relatively little monitoring and censorship—public or private—of what people posted, said, or did on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. In part, this was due to the legal immunity that platforms enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And in part it was because the socially disruptive effects of digital networks—various forms of weaponized speech and misinformation—had not yet emerged. As the networks became filled with bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content, private platforms faced growing pressure from governments and users to fix the problems.
The result a decade later is that most of our online speech now occurs in closely monitored playpens where many tens of thousands of human censors review flagged content to ensure compliance with ever-lengthier and more detailed “community standards” (or some equivalent). More and more, this human monitoring and censorship is supported—or replaced—by sophisticated computer algorithms. The firms use these tools to define acceptable forms of speech and other content on their platforms, which in turn sets the effective boundaries for a great deal of speech in the U.S. public forum.
After the 2016 election debacle, for example, the tech platforms took aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries. YouTube has an aggressive policy of removing what it deems to be deceptive practices and foreign-influence operations related to elections. It also makes judgments about and gives priority to what it calls “authoritative voices.” Facebook has deployed a multipronged strategy that includes removing fake accounts and eliminating or demoting “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter has a similar censorship policy aimed at “platform manipulation originating from bad-faith actors located in countries outside of the US.” These platforms have engaged in “strategic collaboration” with the federal government, including by sharing information, to fight foreign electoral interference.
The platforms are also cooperating with one another and with international organizations, and sometimes law enforcement, on other censorship practices. This collaboration began with a technology that allows child pornography to be assigned a digital fingerprint and placed in centralized databases that the platforms draw on to suppress the material. A similar mechanism has been deployed against terrorist speech—a more controversial practice, since the label terrorist often involves inescapably political judgments. Sharing and coordination across platforms are also moving forward on content related to electoral interference and are being discussed for the manipulated videos known as deepfakes. The danger with “content cartels,” as the writer Evelyn Douek dubs these collaborations, is that they diminish accountability for censorship decisions and make invariable mistakes more pervasive and harder to fix.
And of course, mistakes are inevitable. Much of the content that the platforms censor—for example, child pornography and content that violates intellectual-property rights—is relatively easy to identify and uncontroversial to remove. But Facebook, for example, also takes down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, “cruel and insensitive” speech, and bullying speech, which are harder to identify objectively and more controversial to regulate or remove. Facebook publishes data on its enforcement of its rules. They show that the firm makes “mistakes”—defined by its own flexible criteria—in about 15 percent of the appealed cases involving supposed bullying and about 10 percent of the appealed hate-speech cases.
All these developments have taken place under pressure from Washington and Brussels. In hearings over the past few years, Congress has criticized the companies—not always in consistent ways—for allowing harmful speech. In 2018, Congress amended the previously untouchable Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to subject the platforms to the same liability that nondigital outlets face for enabling illegal sex trafficking. Additional amendments to Section 230 are now in the offing, as are various other threats to regulate digital speech. In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate “harmful content” on his platform. In a speech seven months later defending America’s First Amendment values, he boasted about his “team of thousands of people and [artificial-intelligence] systems” that monitors for fake accounts. Even Zuckerberg’s defiant ideal of free expression is an extensively policed space.
Against this background, the tech firms’ downgrading and outright censorship of speech related to COVID-19 are not large steps. Facebook is using computer algorithms more aggressively, mainly because concerns about the privacy of users prevent human censors from working on these issues from home during forced isolation. As it has done with Russian misinformation, Facebook will notify users when articles that they have “liked” are later deemed to have included health-related misinformation.
But the basic approach to identifying and redressing speech judged to be misinformation or to present an imminent risk of physical harm “hasn’t changed,” according to Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management. As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and “authorities” (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.
Over the past decade, network surveillance has grown in roughly the same proportion as speech control. Indeed, on many platforms, ubiquitous surveillance is a prerequisite to speech control.
The public has been told over and over that the hundreds of computers we interact with daily—smartphones, laptops, desktops, automobiles, cameras, audio recorders, payment mechanisms, and more—collect, emit, and analyze data about us that are, in turn, packaged and exploited in various ways to influence and control our lives. We have also learned a lot—but surely not the whole picture—about the extent to which governments exploit this gargantuan pool of data.
Police use subpoenas to tap into huge warehouses of personal data collected by private companies. They have used these tools to gain access to doorbell cameras that now line city blocks, microphones in the Alexa devices in millions of homes, privately owned license-plate readers that track every car, and the data in DNA databases that people voluntarily pay to enter. They also get access to information collected on smart-home devices and home-surveillance cameras—a growing share of which are capable of facial recognition—to solve crimes. And they pay to access private tow trucks equipped with cameras tracking the movements of cars throughout a city.
Derek Thompson: The technology that could free America from quarantine
In other cases, federal, state, and local governments openly work in conjunction with the private sector to expand their digital surveillance. One of the most popular doorbell cameras, Ring, which is owned by Amazon, has forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 law-enforcement agencies in the United States. Ring actively courted law-enforcement agencies by offering discounted cameras to local police departments, which offered them to residents. The departments would then use social media to encourage citizens to download Ring’s neighborhood application, where neighbors post videos and discuss ostensibly suspicious activity spotted on their cameras. (A Ring spokeswoman said the company no longer offers free or discounted cameras to law enforcement.)*
Meanwhile, the company Clearview AI provides law-enforcement agents with the ability to scan an image of a face across a database of billions of faces, scraped from popular apps and websites such as Facebook and YouTube. More than 600 law-enforcement agencies are now using Clearview’s database.
These developments are often greeted with blockbuster news reports and indignant commentary. And yet Americans keep buying surveillance machines and giving their data away. Smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home are in about a third of U.S. households. In 2019, American consumers bought almost 80 million new smartphones that can choose among millions of apps that collect, use, and distribute all manner of personal data.. Amazon does not release sales numbers for Ring, but one firm estimated that it sold almost 400,000 Ring security devices in December alone.
America’s private surveillance system goes far beyond apps, cameras, and microphones. Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to most Americans, data brokers have developed algorithmic scores for each one of us—scores that rate us on reliability, propensity to repay loans, and likelihood to commit a crime. Uber bans passengers with low ratings from drivers. Some bars and restaurants now run background checks on their patrons to see whether they’re likely to pay their tab or cause trouble. Facebook has patented a mechanism for determining a person’s creditworthiness by evaluating their social network.
These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings, which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.
The response to COVID-19 builds on all these trends, and shows how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good. As Google and Apple effectively turn most phones in the world into contact-tracing tools, they have the ability to accomplish something that no government by itself could: nearly perfect location tracking of most the world’s population. That is why governments in the United States and around the world are working to take advantage of the tool the two companies are offering.
Apple and Google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.
Edward Tenner: Efficiency is biting back
The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.
The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.
COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.
We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.


theatlantic--2020-03-27--A New York Doctor’s Warning

A New York Doctor’s Warning

Kerry Kennedy Meltzer : I ’ m treating too many young people for the coronavirus Every day , in our hastily assembled COVID-19 unit , I put on my gown , face shield , three sets of gloves , and N95 respirator mask , which stays on for the entirety of my 12-hour shift , save for one or two breaks for cold pizza and coffee .
Before the pandemic , I would wear a new mask for every new patient .
Not now .
There are not enough to go around .
The bridge of my nose is raw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of bleeding .
But I consider myself one of the lucky ones .
My hospital still has a supply of masks—albeit a dwindling one—to protect me and my colleagues .
Many of my patients clearly haven ’ t received the message to stay home unless they ’ re in immediate need of professional medical assistance .
Their fevers and coughs alone are not enough to even earn a test .
I hand them discharge paperwork and a printout about how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus , tell them to self-isolate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next person .
If they didn ’ t have the coronavirus before coming to our hospital , they probably do now .
So much for gatherings of 10 people or fewer .
Meanwhile , my colleagues tend to patients in the critical-care bay with dipping oxygen levels , patients who can barely speak and may need breathing tubes .
Earlier in the month , we were told that positive-pressure oxygen masks , such as CPAP machines , were risky , as they would aerosolize the virus , increasing health-care workers ’ risk of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ running dangerously low on ventilators , we have attempted using CPAP machines to stave off the need for medically induced comas .
Read : How the pandemic will end Nevertheless , we need to perform an alarming number of of intubations .
Our ventilators are almost all in use , and the ICUs are at capacity .
Although our hospital has received extra vents here and there from other hospitals in the region that can spare them , those few additions are merely a stopgap .
Will we soon have patients sharing vents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first hospital to attempt that unusual and suboptimal practice , which gained traction after the Las Vegas shooting , when scores of young trauma patients were vented in pairs .
But these COVID-19 patients have delicate lungs , which makes vent-sharing far more dangerous .
Nevertheless , we ’ ve already started studying the mechanics of how to make this happen , as a last-ditch effort .
By next week , we may simply have no choice .
Those hundreds of relatively healthy patients we sent home may return to the hospital en @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I greeted a patient I had discharged only one week prior .
When I saw his name pop up on the board , my heart sank .
He is just shy of 50 , with hardly any past medical history , and he had seemed fine .
Now he was gasping for air .
His chest X-ray was no relief—COVID-19 for sure .
I needed to admit him to the hospital , and set him up with oxygen , heart monitoring , and a bed .

China warned Italy. Italy warned us. We didn’t listen. Now the onus is on the rest of America to listen to New York.
Fred Milgrim, pictured here hours before his shift as an emergency-medicine doctor at a hospital in Queens. Dr. Milgrim will ride his bike over the Queensboro Bridge to get to his shift. (JUSTIN J. WEE)
In the emergency-department waiting room, 150 people worry about a fever. Some just want a test, others badly need medical treatment. Those not at the brink of death have to wait six, eight, 10 hours before they can see a doctor. Those admitted to the hospital might wait a full day for a bed.
I am an emergency-medicine doctor who practices in both Manhattan and Queens; at the moment, I’m in Queens. Normally, I love coming to work here, even though in the best of times, my co-residents and I take care of one of New York City’s most vulnerable, underinsured patient populations. Many have underlying illnesses and a language barrier, and lack primary care.
These are not the best of times; even for my senior attendings, it is the worst they have ever seen. Here, the curve is not flat. We are overwhelmed. There was a time for testing in New York, and we missed it. China warned Italy. Italy warned us. We didn’t listen. Now the onus is on the rest of America to listen to New York. For many people around the country, the virus is still an invisible threat. But inside New York’s ERs, it is frighteningly visible.
Kerry Kennedy Meltzer: I’m treating too many young people for the coronavirus
Every day, in our hastily assembled COVID-19 unit, I put on my gown, face shield, three sets of gloves, and N95 respirator mask, which stays on for the entirety of my 12-hour shift, save for one or two breaks for cold pizza and coffee. Before the pandemic, I would wear a new mask for every new patient. Not now. There are not enough to go around. The bridge of my nose is raw, chapped, and on the verge of bleeding. But I consider myself one of the lucky ones. My hospital still has a supply of masks—albeit a dwindling one—to protect me and my colleagues.
Many of my patients clearly haven’t received the message to stay home unless they’re in immediate need of professional medical assistance. Their fevers and coughs alone are not enough to even earn a test. I hand them discharge paperwork and a printout about how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, tell them to self-isolate, and then I move on to the next person. If they didn’t have the coronavirus before coming to our hospital, they probably do now. So much for gatherings of 10 people or fewer.
Meanwhile, my colleagues tend to patients in the critical-care bay with dipping oxygen levels, patients who can barely speak and may need breathing tubes.
Earlier in the month, we were told that positive-pressure oxygen masks, such as CPAP machines, were risky, as they would aerosolize the virus, increasing health-care workers’ risk of infection. But in recent days, running dangerously low on ventilators, we have attempted using CPAP machines to stave off the need for medically induced comas.
Read: How the pandemic will end
Nevertheless, we need to perform an alarming number of of intubations. Our ventilators are almost all in use, and the ICUs are at capacity. Although our hospital has received extra vents here and there from other hospitals in the region that can spare them, those few additions are merely a stopgap. Will we soon have patients sharing vents? We wouldn’t be the first hospital to attempt that unusual and suboptimal practice, which gained traction after the Las Vegas shooting, when scores of young trauma patients were vented in pairs. But these COVID-19 patients have delicate lungs, which makes vent-sharing far more dangerous. Nevertheless, we’ve already started studying the mechanics of how to make this happen, as a last-ditch effort.
By next week, we may simply have no choice. Those hundreds of relatively healthy patients we sent home may return to the hospital en masse in respiratory failure.
On Wednesday, I greeted a patient I had discharged only one week prior. When I saw his name pop up on the board, my heart sank. He is just shy of 50, with hardly any past medical history, and he had seemed fine. Now he was gasping for air. His chest X-ray was no relief—COVID-19 for sure. I needed to admit him to the hospital, and set him up with oxygen, heart monitoring, and a bed.
Last week, I saw an elderly woman on dialysis. She had arrived with a mild cough. But her vital signs were normal—no fever. After her chest X-ray came back clear, we decided to send her home. But before her ride came, she spiked a fever to 102. Change of plans. With her age and complex medical problems, she would need to be admitted.
The next night, I saw a stretcher wheeling past me with a resident riding on top, performing chest compressions on the patient.
Only after we pronounced the patient dead did I learn her name. She was my patient from the night before. She went into cardiac arrest before she even got a bed in the ward. My first COVID-19–positive death. The numbers have been mounting ever since.
A few days ago, FEMA finally arrived to help with this crisis. It has brought more tests, hopefully more vents, and a morgue in the form of a truck to help with the ever-growing number of dead bodies. I wonder if this help will be enough. My colleagues and I discuss this pandemic with a sardonic sense of helplessness. Some of us are getting sick. Our reality alters by the moment. Every day, we change our triage system. Each day could be the day that the masks run out. There is much we think but are too afraid to say to one another.
I do not want to see you in my hospital. I do not want you to go to any hospital in the United States. I do not want you to leave your home, except for essential food and supplies. I do not want you to get tested for the coronavirus, unless you need to be admitted to a hospital.
Thomas Kirsch: What happens if health-care workers stop showing up?
For those of us at the forefront, knowing who has COVID-19 won’t change our ability—or inability—to treat patients. The problem is, and will be, our shortage of healthy personnel, personal protective equipment, beds, and ventilators. A nasal swab is not the answer anymore.
If you have mild symptoms, assume that you have the coronavirus. Stay home, wash your hands, call your doctor. Don’t come to the emergency department just because of a fever or cough. Receiving a test won’t change our recommendation that you remain in self-isolation. We don’t want you to expose yourself to those who definitely do have the virus.
Social distancing, while still crucial, came too late in New York to prevent a crisis. Maybe, just maybe, extreme measures can prevent this from happening in other cities around the country.
In spite of all this morbidity, the doctors at the hospital received one piece of good news yesterday. A coronavirus patient was successfully taken off a ventilator after two weeks, a first for our Medical ICU and a victory for the staff and, of course, the patient.


theatlantic--2020-03-26--Amazon Is Struggling to Pay Workers in Quarantine

Amazon workers who can ’ t prove they have COVID-19 , meanwhile , find themselves in a more difficult situation .
Nicole Jackson , who works at the Chicago facility with Zamarron , hasn ’ t been back to her job since March 9 , when she came down with a fever and a cough , and began to experience shortness of breath—telltale symptoms of the coronavirus .
She told me her doctor wouldn ’ t test her for COVID-19 , because the tests are in short supply .
But he did tell Jackson to stay home , so she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to try to get quarantine pay .
She was unsuccessful and missed weeks of pay .
The day after I emailed Amazon , she heard from a caseworker who began to work on processing her paycheck again .
Like many other companies , Amazon is allowing warehouse workers to take unlimited unpaid time off through the end of March .
But workers say they can ’ t afford to go without their paychecks , even as they fear returning to work .
Tonya Fondren , who is also employed in Amazon ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work for two weeks because she has lupus .
She ’ s afraid to return to work , because her weakened immune system makes her more susceptible to the coronavirus .
But Fondren told me she will soon be returning anyway , simply because she ’ s out of money .
Though Chicago has a local paid sick-leave ordinance , she says Amazon ’ s system shows she has accumulated only 22 minutes of paid sick time .
Some workers at Whole Foods , which is owned by Amazon , reported similar problems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the New York area , who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation , told me he started having flu-like symptoms on March 14 .
A doctor told him he could not be tested for COVID-19 , because tests were being rationed , but that he should stay home from work until 48 hours after his symptoms had abated .
His regional HR office told him he did not qualify for the company ’ s two weeks of quarantine pay , because he did not have a positive COVID-19 test or a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ focus in recent weeks has , rightly , been on the safety of health-care workers and other first responders .
But the people who allow Americans on lockdown to get groceries and deliveries are , in many ways , also vulnerable and indispensable .
And they ’ re growing frustrated that they ’ re not treated as such .
“ We ’ re one of the few essential businesses that doesn ’ t have valorization in the culture as first-responder heroes , ” said another Whole Foods worker in Chicago , who requested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fired .
He ’ s an asthmatic whose sick-pay situation is still unclear .
“ We ’ ve always been treated as disposable , and now we have to go to work.
” For some workers , it ’ s already too late .
William Elmore , a Walmart employee in the Spokane area , came down with what he thought might be COVID-19 on February 20 .
He told me he got in touch with his company ’ s personnel manager and requested a leave of absence , which was approved , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the next two days .
Once he was back at work on February 23 , he said , his boss told him he had too many attendance “ points , ” and he would be let go .
A few weeks later , Walmart announced it would be offering paid sick leave to employees with COVID-19 .
Elmore said he won ’ t be eligible to be rehired until August , when his points reset .

Loress Burke, a worker at an Amazon warehouse in New York, was coughing throughout our interview when we spoke recently. She tried to get tested for COVID-19, but her doctors instead told her to stay home for two weeks. In line with Amazon’s new policy, the company said it would pay her for the length of her quarantine. But there is a catch: She was told she won’t be paid until after she returns to work. That’s a problem, she said, because she cares for her disabled sister and needs the money now. “I got the idea that they weren’t sure how this is working, because this is as new to them as it is to us,” Burke told me.
Burke’s ordeal highlights the struggle some workers are facing in getting paid for their sick days, even as their companies roll out new policies offering paid leave because of the coronavirus pandemic. Many employees are no doubt fortunate to be working at companies whose services are still in demand. Nevertheless, large companies such as Walmart and Amazon have struggled to adapt and explain their sick-leave policies amid a fast-moving pandemic.
Where retail workers once might have received a set number of hours off, the crisis has raised complicated new questions about employee absences. What should happen to workers who are immunocompromised, for example? Or to those who feel sick but aren’t able to get a coronavirus test? Unlike white-collar workers, many of whom enjoy liberal sick-leave policies, blue-collar workers can’t always be confident they’ll be paid for their time away. While an asthmatic office worker can easily work from home, many retail and delivery workers with underlying health conditions make agonizing calculations about whether to risk their health or their income.
Read: Exclusive: Amazon confirms first known coronavirus case in an American warehouse
This doesn’t appear to be an issue of intentional malpractice by companies, but rather a failure to catch up with the severity and frequency of COVID-19 cases, and to reconcile company policies with fast-changing state and federal guidance that affect the lives of workers and their families.
Still, even unintentional delays hit workers hard. Interviews with Amazon, Walmart, and Whole Foods employees painted a picture of confusion about the new policies and who is eligible. (The Atlantic reached out to these companies for comment and has yet to hear back on most of our queries.)
Workers might, for example, fall ill before a new policy goes into effect. Or they might embark on a lengthy process of attempting to prove they’re really sick and wait for weeks to get paid—longer than many of them can afford to go without money.
Walking out of O’Hare Airport on March 18 after a trip to Spain, Christian Zamarron, an Amazon warehouse employee in Chicago, was stopped by an official who told him that because he had recently visited a country with a large coronavirus outbreak, he should stay home from work for 14 days. Zamarron said he thought it wouldn’t be a problem, because Amazon had recently granted two weeks of paid sick leave to workers who test positive for COVID-19, or who are placed into quarantine. But several Amazon employees, including Zamarron, told me the process to get paid for their time in quarantine has been byzantine and, in certain cases, unsuccessful entirely.
As soon as he realized he’d be missing work, Zamarron said, he called Amazon’s employee resource center, the company’s HR equivalent, to make sure he’d get paid. After an hour on the phone, he finally got through to someone and explained his predicament. The person told him he was eligible for an unpaid leave of absence.
He asked whether he could receive paid leave instead, according to Amazon’s policy, and was told a case manager would reach out to him within a few days. But he didn’t hear from anyone for more than a week, and he wasn’t paid. When a case manager finally got in touch, it was to provide him with unpaid leave-of-absence forms. Zamarron, who had traveled to Spain with another Amazon co-worker, grappled with what to do. “Either we take the hit, and we don’t get a check for two weeks,” he told me, “or we go to work and infect our co-workers.”
Hours after I emailed Amazon about his case, Zamarron got a call from a human resources representative who said Zamarron and his co-worker would be retroactively paid for their time away from work. (Amazon denied that my email prompted the payment.)
Another Amazon employee, who leads an informal workers’ union, told me he does know of cases in which the paid-leave policy was implemented correctly. But those workers either tested positive for COVID-19, or Amazon itself ordered them quarantined.
Amazon workers who can’t prove they have COVID-19, meanwhile, find themselves in a more difficult situation. Nicole Jackson, who works at the Chicago facility with Zamarron, hasn’t been back to her job since March 9, when she came down with a fever and a cough, and began to experience shortness of breath—telltale symptoms of the coronavirus. She told me her doctor wouldn’t test her for COVID-19, because the tests are in short supply. But he did tell Jackson to stay home, so she emailed Amazon’s employee resource center to try to get quarantine pay. She was unsuccessful and missed weeks of pay. The day after I emailed Amazon, she heard from a caseworker who began to work on processing her paycheck again.
Like many other companies, Amazon is allowing warehouse workers to take unlimited unpaid time off through the end of March. But workers say they can’t afford to go without their paychecks, even as they fear returning to work. Tonya Fondren, who is also employed in Amazon’s Chicago warehouse, has been absent from work for two weeks because she has lupus. She’s afraid to return to work, because her weakened immune system makes her more susceptible to the coronavirus. But Fondren told me she will soon be returning anyway, simply because she’s out of money. Though Chicago has a local paid sick-leave ordinance, she says Amazon’s system shows she has accumulated only 22 minutes of paid sick time.
Some workers at Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, reported similar problems getting sick pay. One employee in the New York area, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation, told me he started having flu-like symptoms on March 14. A doctor told him he could not be tested for COVID-19, because tests were being rationed, but that he should stay home from work until 48 hours after his symptoms had abated. His regional HR office told him he did not qualify for the company’s two weeks of quarantine pay, because he did not have a positive COVID-19 test or a county quarantine order.
Read: Grocery stores are the coronavirus tipping point
Much of the focus in recent weeks has, rightly, been on the safety of health-care workers and other first responders. But the people who allow Americans on lockdown to get groceries and deliveries are, in many ways, also vulnerable and indispensable. And they’re growing frustrated that they’re not treated as such.
“We’re one of the few essential businesses that doesn’t have valorization in the culture as first-responder heroes,” said another Whole Foods worker in Chicago, who requested anonymity because he feared he would be fired. He’s an asthmatic whose sick-pay situation is still unclear. “We’ve always been treated as disposable, and now we have to go to work.”
For some workers, it’s already too late. William Elmore, a Walmart employee in the Spokane area, came down with what he thought might be COVID-19 on February 20. He told me he got in touch with his company’s personnel manager and requested a leave of absence, which was approved, so he stayed home from work for the next two days. Once he was back at work on February 23, he said, his boss told him he had too many attendance “points,” and he would be let go. A few weeks later, Walmart announced it would be offering paid sick leave to employees with COVID-19. Elmore said he won’t be eligible to be rehired until August, when his points reset.