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Published 28 October 2021

·  Why Lockdown Skeptics Like Me Lost the Argument

·  Does High Voter Turnout Help One Party?

·  Slavery-Era Georgia Law Is Key Defense Argument in Trial Over Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing

·  Brazil Senate Wants Bolsonaro Charged with Crimes Against Humanity for COVID Response

·  There’s Still Time to Fix Climate—About 11 Years

·  Climate Change Magnified Recent California Deluge

·  Longer, More Frequent Outages Afflict the U.S. Power Grid as States Fail to Prepare for Climate Change

·  Title 42 Explained: The Obscure Public Health Policy at the Center of a U.S. Border Fight

·  ‘These Deaths Are Preventable’: How the U.S. Fails to Take Away Guns from Domestic Abusers

·  Ahead of Jan. 6, Willard Hotel in Downtown D.C. Was a Trump Team “Command Center” for Effort to Deny Biden the Presidency

·  The Expert in American Life

Why Lockdown Skeptics Like Me Lost the Argument  (Toby Young, The Spectator)
If there is not going to be another lockdown, it is not because sceptics like me have won the argument. For at least a year, sceptics have been arguing that that non-pharmaceutical interventions don’t work, pointing to numerous research studies showing that the rise and fall of infections in different regions of the world has no correlation with stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, business and school closures, etc. But this argument has fallen on deaf ears.
The sceptics have to accept some responsibility for their failings. Common sense dictates that if you confine most people to their homes then infections will start to fall, so if we’re going to persuade people that lockdowns don’t work we need a compelling theory as to why that hypothesis is false. We never came up with one. We also got a lot of things wrong at the beginning, such as saying there wouldn’t be a second wave and, when the second wave was upon us, claiming it was a ‘casedemic’ not an epidemic. I don’t think we got more things wrong than the enthusiasts —take their prediction that daily infections would rise to 100,000 after ‘freedom day’, for instance — but given that we were arguing against the prevailing wisdom we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. In retrospect, I wish I’d been more cautious.

Does High Voter Turnout Help One Party?  (Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, National Affairs)
When it comes to election administration, Republicans around the country tend to emphasize concerns about fraud, while Democrats fret over voter suppression. Though we should take these public officials at their word when it comes to their primary motivations, it’s clear that there is a coincident partisan rationale for the parties’ respective positions: Both are convinced that higher turnout will help Democrats and hurt Republicans. This widely shared conviction is mistaken. Put simply, there is no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.