4.28 Biden: “Twenty million Americans lost their job in the pandemic — working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion — in the same exact period. Let me say it again: 650 people increased their wealth by more than $1 trillion during this pandemic. And they’re now worth more than $4 trillion.”
4.28 Biden speaks to Congress: “Autocrats will not win the future. America will. And the future belongs to America.” Axios: Snap polls were overwhelming: A CBS News/YouGov poll found 89% of speech-watchers thought Biden was presidential, 85% approved and 78% said the speech made them feel optimistic about America.
4.28 F.B.I. agents executed search warrants at the home and office of Rudolph Giuliani, seizing cellphones and computers from, and stepping up a criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine.
4.27 W.W. Norton pulled Philip Roth: The Biography and cut ties with its author, Blake Bailey, after he became the subject of multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Bailey’s literary agency also severed ties.
4.27 Jeff Stein in The Washington Post: “Since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, polling has found substantial support among Americans for providing more government aid for those in need. That is partially due to the nature of the current crisis, which for a time opened a deeper economic hole than the Great Recession. But the shift is also the result of a reorientation on economic policy — on the left and on the right — that has transformed the political landscape. On the right, congressional Republicans may still fret about higher deficits — but the most popular politician among their voters does not. As a candidate and as president, Donald Trump blew past Republican concerns about the deficit, pushing for trillions in additional spending and tax cuts and running unprecedented peacetime debt levels. And on the left, Democratic lawmakers have increasingly learned to ignore fears about spending too much. Party leaders have said they suffered crippling political defeats in the 2010s precisely because they did not deliver enough meaningful economic relief under Obama — a mistake that they see an opportunity to correct under Biden. Democrats also repeatedly tout the 2017 Republican tax cut, which is expected to add approximately $2 trillion to the national debt, as a reason to be skeptical of GOP concerns about fiscal restraint.
4.25 Nomadland wins the Best Picture Oscar.
4.21 Adam Grant in The New York Times: Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021. As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded. In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish. In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness. The term was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes, who was struck that many people who weren’t depressed also weren’t thriving. His research suggests that the people most likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next decade aren’t the ones with those symptoms today. They’re the people who are languishing right now. And new evidence from pandemic health care workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing in the spring of 2020 were three times more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
4.21 Jonathan Chiat in New York: The problem with Romney’s insistence on working within the system is not that he fails to take systemic racism seriously — it’s that he fails to take the unfairness of the system itself seriously. He is instructing Black Americans to put their faith in an electoral process that inherently devalues them and refuses to permit even modest measures to redress its imbalance. If Romney wants Black people to value the system, he should care about making the system less undemocratic.
4.20 Derek Chauvin convicted on three counts in the murder of George Floyd. Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post: “This moment shouldn’t feel so much like a victory. But it does. . . So many times, that simple acknowledgement of humanity has apparently been too much to ask. The police officers who killed Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Eric Garnerand so many other Black men either were acquitted of wrongdoing or never even charged. Chauvin’s conviction is a tremendous relief — and, one hopes, a beginning.”
4.20 Coffee with Steve Silverman
4.19 Fritz Mondale dies at 93.
4.16 Helen McCrory dies at 52.
4.14 Washington Post: Out of every 100,000 Americans, 172 have died of the coronavirus. In the European Union, that rate is 143 per 100,000, and in South America, it is 139. The global average among the 177 countries that Hopkins publishes data on is 38. If the United States had the same average rate as the European Union, then 91,031 deaths would have been prevented; if it had the same rate as South America, that number would be 107,126. And if it were able to match the mortality rate of its northern neighbor, Canada, 358,583 deaths would have been prevented
4.13 Michael Gerson in the Post: “Each day, Carlson gives a pure, accurate depiction of Trumpism. This viewpoint is not focused on the working-class economic dislocation caused by globalization, or even the moral panic resulting from rapidly changing cultural norms. It is an argument in favor of cultural purity, of social hygiene. Note Carlson’s use of “dirtier” in describing immigrants, and his reference to toilet hygiene. Trumpism is an argument that Western society, and American society in particular, is being infected by dirty outsiders who are destroying the country’s very nature.”
4.9 Prince Philip dies at 99.
4.3 With 3.3 seconds left in an NCAA semi-final game, UCLA ties the score, before Jason Suggs of Gonzaga sinks a three pointer from mid-court as time expires for an electrifying 93-90 win.
4.3 Charles Barkley: “Man, I think most white people and Black people are great people. I really believe that in my heart, but I think our system is set up where our politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, are designed to make us not like each other so they can keep their grasp of money and power. They divide and conquer. I truly believe in my heart most white people and Black people are awesome people, but we’re so stupid following our politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, and their only job is, ‘Hey, let’s make these people not like each other. We don’t live in their neighborhoods, we all got money, let’s make the whites and Blacks not like each other, let’s make rich people and poor people not like each other, let’s scramble the middle class.’ I truly believe that in my heart.”
4.2 At the Capitol in Washington, a disturbed man drives a car into two police officers and kills one before being shot to death.
4.2 The U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs in this morning’s March jobs report — huge momentum for the pandemic-slammed labor market.