| 1. U.S. Covid Deaths Approach 500,000 “More Americans have perished from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.” 2. Storms Exposing A Nation Primed For Catastrophe “As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways.” 3. Interest Surges in Top Colleges, While Struggling Ones Scrape for Applicants “The nation’s most-selective four-year institutions, both public and private, saw a record-breaking 17 percent increase in applications this year.” 4. The Boredom Economy “By limiting social engagements, leisure activities and travel, the pandemic has forced many people to live a more muted life, without the normal deviations from daily monotony. The result is a collective sense of ennui — one that is shaping what we do and what we buy, and even how productive we are.” 5. What Are Sperm Telling Us? “From 1973 to 2011, the sperm count of average men in Western countries had fallen by 59 percent. 6. Rush Limbaugh and the Petrification of Conservatism “Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.” 7. A Timely Record of Solitude “You acclimatize to the wrong climate. You acclimatize to the indecent.” 8. Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes? “There is, it turns out, much demand for these old VHS tapes, price tags notwithstanding, and despite post-2006 advancements in technology. Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.” 9. Henry Louis Gates Jr. on African-American Religion “To Gates, the Black church is the soil in which Black culture and political action flowered.” 10. The Most Serious Security Risk Facing the United States “But none of this would have happened … if Washington hadn’t decided years ago to neglect cyberdefense and focus instead on paying programmers around the world to find and weaponize vulnerabilities in existing software — gaps known as ‘zero days’ in the industry — that grant those that wield them ‘digital superpowers.’” 11. Midnight Oil “Where once was righteous outrage at a broken system, there is now self-help. And grinding.” 12. The Activists Working to Remake the Food System “It’s no coincidence that as Americans have grown ever more estranged from the sources of their food and the largely unseen labor required to produce it, food itself has become a national obsession, from televised cooking shows and the deification of chefs to Instagram #foodporn. This could easily be dismissed as late-empire hedonism, thrown into sharp relief by pandemic lockdowns that divide those who must stay out in the world, picking tomatoes and restocking grocery shelves, and those with the luxury of sheltering at home to await their contactless deliveries. But the fetishizing of food suggests anxiety, too, and a yearning, however inchoate, to reconnect with our origins.” 13. Amazon’s Great Labor Awakening “Will the unprecedented unrest caused by Covid-19 turn into a durable movement inside the company?” 14. The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew. “Federici is a longtime advocate of the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor and was a founder of the Wages for Housework movement in the early 1970s. It is a form of gendered economic oppression, she argues, and an exploitation upon which all of capitalism rests.” 15. The Rise of the Wellness App “The pandemic decimated nearly all sectors of the U.S. economy — except the tech industry. Marketing stress reduction became a clever grab for attention, which is now our economy’s biggest commodity. Think about the companies you turned to the most for comfort. Apple, Netflix, Facebook and Zoom were among the companies that raked in billions during the pandemic.”
Every week I, Matt Thomas, read the Sunday New York Times so you don’t have to, bringing the articles everyone’s talking about as well as hidden gems from America’s “paper of record” to your inbox. Reached your limit for free articles? Subscribe to the New York Times or see if you can access it through your school or local library. This newsletter is free, but if you’d like to support its production, you can buy me a coffee.  | 
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