Discover Top Posts Tagged with #remove interruptions

A key lesson of the pandemic.

COVID lockdowns were a giant experiment. It was a failure. Here, a key lesson of the pandemic, excerpted from ‘The Big Fail,’ by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean.

#chapters #covid-19 #public health #lockdowns #remove interruptions

Convinced that teachers are brainwashing children to be left-wing ideologues, conservatives are quickly grabbing control of the American classroom.

Republicans are obsessed with insuring that primary and secondary schools produce Republican voters—through a process of GOP political indoctrination drawing on Leninist methods. Jonathan Chait: Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.

More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.

Education has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled. Schoolhouses are being conscripted into a cataclysmic war in which no compromise is possible — in which a child in a red state will be discouraged from asking questions about sexual identity, or a professor will be barred from exploring the ways in which white supremacy has shaped America today, or a trans athlete will be prohibited from playing sports.

#the national interest #remove interruptions #education #politics #ron desantis #The York Magazine #The Intelligencer

An access map.

When writing about abortion, there’s a tendency to build a narrative around the most shocking scenarios — a patient who is denied the medication they need in the middle of a miscarriage or who discovers a fatal fetal anomaly late in pregnancy having no choice but to endure a stillbirth. Such stories illustrate the cruel fate that will befall some when the Supreme Court likely guts Roe v. Wade in June, but telling them doesn’t help an abortion seeker navigate getting the care they’ll need in a state set to legislate the procedure into oblivion.

That’s why the Cut and New York have put together a directory allowing anyone in need to look up abortion services and practical support tailored to their needs as well as a guide explaining what to do if abortion is further restricted or banned in their state. As Irin Carmon writes in the introductory essay below, these resources are part of “a tradition of informal information sharing about how to end a pregnancy” that has “been kept alive by a network of grassroots organizers who not only were expecting Roe to fall but have already been working under barriers that belie this supposedly constitutional right.” The whisper network is now a shout: This magazine can help you get an abortion.

— Catherine Thompson, senior editor, the Cut

#life after roe #abortion #roe v wade #politics #remove interruptions

We consulted architects and planners to create an achievable, replicable plan — one suited to a city embracing its public spaces as never before.

New York and Curbed recruited a team of designers and consultants, led by the architecture firm WXY, to approach the streets as a matrix of overlapping, interrelated networks. The allure of more humane cities has generated an entire library’s worth of plans and pilot projects, both top-down and grassroots, for areas like Downtown Brooklyn and Soho. A few years ago, a consortium of Harlem business and organizations collaborated on a plan to redesign East 125th Street. In 2019, the City Council passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to develop a five-year citywide plan. But this torrent of good intentions and expertise has fragmented the issue further by producing more schemes to ignore, postpone, and gripe about. Most New Yorkers’ concerns are exquisitely parochial: The only time a Bronxite is likely to care about, say, the width of Soho’s sidewalks is if it makes parking there even worse.

Before: 1. The bus can’t move until the truck does, the truck can’t move until the crosstown car gets through the red light, and the car can’t move until pedestrians are done crossing. 2. Restaurant shed + tree + scaffolding = please step into oncoming traffic. 3. An intrepid cyclist is boxed in by construction, a double-parked van, and a bus pulling into traffic. 4. Streetery bumper cars. 5. You’d have to be suicidal to ride in the street here. 6. Hope nobody needs that hydrant. 7. The way to hail a cab is by standing where it can hit you. 8. Every trash can is different and in a different spot. 9. Disappearing curb. 10. No audible signals for people who are blind or have low vision. 11. Rough curb cuts suitable for high-clearance wheelchairs only. 12. The other side of the street is so far away. Photo-Illustration: nightnurse images

After: 1. On 34th Street, buses own the road. 2. Kit-built streeteries: No more splintery plywood. 3. Enclosed trash bins eliminate piled-up rat feast. 4. A sidewalk shed that isn’t a grimy tunnel of support columns. 5. Streetside trash bins that trucks can grab and dump. 6. Extra-wide lane for bikes, scooters, and other human-powered transit. 7. Sidewalks wide enough for everyone. 8. Raised crosswalk with tactile corner ramps: slows drivers, safer for everyone else. 9. Buses, unleashed, become actual rapid transit. 10. A zone for delivery trucks to unload your Amazon box; bikes do the last few blocks. Photo-Illustration: nightnurse images

#urbanism #planning #getting around #cityscape #remove interruptions #nyc #new york city #curbed #streets

The author of ‘Low Life’ and ‘Kill All Your Darlings’ tried to keep a safe distance from herself — and her own desires. Until, at 66, she broke free

#lucy sante #profile #remove interruptions #new york magazine #transgender #trans author #coming out #books #kill all your darlings

The strangest things happen to other people’s bodies. Then they began happening to my own.

Let’s begin with an action scene: I was in midair, tumbling sideways, heading for the floor of the Columbus Circle subway station. Not a place I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be was on the downtown 1, five or ten yards away, doors standing open. I’d made this connection more than a thousand times, though usually getting off the 1, not on it.

This time, I was out of practice and I got it wrong. After stepping off the downtown B or C, I took the wrong stairway and had to double back to get over to the right side of the 1. When I climbed up the correct stairs, the stairs I used to fly down every morning, straight from the optimal train door on my precisely plotted commute, I saw the 1 arriving.

And then — well, if I knew exactly what happened, it wouldn’t have happened, would it? What I registered went like this: I sped up, or I meant to speed up. Someone cut across my path. I tried to steer around them and my legs … my legs did something else. Or did nothing. The extra walking and climbing had taken too much effort, and my intentions lost contact with my legs. I reached out and tried to brace myself on someone’s shoulder; they were wearing a black-on-white shirt; I was so undone I was trying to make physical contact with a total stranger on the subway platform. I missed. All that was left was to hit the station floor, so I did.

#health #first person #remove interruptions #medicine #new york magazine #tom scocca #new york city