In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent. The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan. […]
September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the […]
The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own. Over the week of June 30, Arizona reported 55 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people per day. That’s 34 percent more than the second-worst state, Florida. […]
Covid-19 is upending our lives and forcing us to make complex decisions with little information and conflicting guidance from authorities. Summer, typically the season of staying up late and popsicles in the park, offers no escape. Many of us are already turning to the fall, and the fate of schools. What will we do with […]
Covid-19 testing in the US improved dramatically over the first half of 2020, but things now appear to be breaking down once more as coronavirus cases rise and outstrip capacity — to the point that the mayor of a major American city can’t get testing quickly enough to potentially avoid spreading the virus. “We FINALLY […]
Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19. In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well. In Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, for example, there have been at least 80 positive cases since August 3, and more than […]
Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Phil Nichols doesn’t get a lot of unannounced visitors at the long-term sober-living house in Cincinnati where he lives. The two US marshals waiting at the door on a March afternoon in 2018 told Nichols they had information […]
In the past half-century, the global production of meat has undergone a seismic shift. While meat was once mostly raised on small farms, today almost all the meat we eat comes from industrialized “factory” farms, known as “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. More than 90 percent of the world’s meat supply comes from CAFOs. […]
The US rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine was halted Tuesday as regulators race to investigate rare blood-clotting complications linked to the shot. The move may force thousands of people scheduled to receive the shot this week to scramble for an alternative. Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease […]
Most people who get the coronavirus will fully recover and go right back to their lives. But the latest research suggests that at least 10 percent have long-term symptoms, even after their body has apparently cleared the virus. The condition, known as “long Covid,” has emerged as a scary feature of the pandemic — a […]