Commentary

More than half of states are registering “high” or “very high” levels of the coronavirus in wastewater testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Nationally, emergency department visits due to covid are increasing. On Wednesday, the White House announced that President Biden tested positive with his second coronavirus infection. As with his first bout, he is experiencing mild symptoms and has started Paxlovid treatment.

It’s all about the gaze. When we look at someone, what do we see? Are we taking in the truth of that person, or is our vision tainted by our own assumptions about what matters about them? If that stranger is not the kind of person we usually consider, why do we claim the authority to write the definitive version of their story?

I’m standing across the street from the apartment where I lived, back in 1983, in this city’s River West neighborhood. The street looks substantially the same, though I’m sorry to discover that Harry’s Chapel, the tavern that used to be two doors down, where a 12-ounce glass of Miller High Life on tap sold for a quarter, is gone.

Last week’s jaw-dropping $1 billion donation from billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University, enabling tuition-free medical school for most students, probably kicked off a lot of celebrations from Homewood to Name-Your-City-Here. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was already ranked among the nation’s best (second only to Harvard University, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings).

Money dominates the headlines during elections, whether it’s a city race or the race for the White House. We want to know who’s funding whom, who’s raised the most money, and who’s being backed by which big-money PAC. If it feels like the role of money in politics has gotten more powerful, it’s because it has.

After the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last weekend, political participants, pundits and observers on all parts of the political spectrum should take a deep breath and dial down the rhetoric. Thankfully, Trump was not seriously wounded, or worse, in the attack. If he had been killed, the ramifications for our country are too horrifying to consider.

The Donald Trump allies behind Project 2025, the plan to shift the federal government to the ideological right and expand presidential power, want to abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” I didn’t know that tracking weather and climate change was an “industry.” I thought it was science.