As the Biden administration fires a $1.9trn pandemic-relief bazooka, we consider how governments might rethink welfare: providing more-flexible benefits, investing in human capital and acting as an insurer against the gravest risks. The simple pleasure of human touch, so constrained of late, is not an emotional luxury—it’s a physical need. And why it’s so hard to coin a word.
Back in 2014, Google released in-depth diversity data for its workforce for the first time. 1.1 percent of its tech team identified as Black. Six years later, after millions of dollars spent and a much-hyped partnership program with historically Black colleges and universities across the country, that number is up to 2.4 percent.
How did such a promising effort yield such incremental change?
Guest: Nitasha Tiku, tech culture reporter at the Washington Post
Australia is what I would call a sporting country. Cricket, rugby, and Australian Football are all incredibly popular sports.
Australia has also really punched above its weight in the Summer Olympics, earning an oversized number of medals given its population.
Their performance at the Winter Olympics, however, has not been so great.
Learn more about the extremely unlikely way that Australia won its first Winter Olympics Gold Medal on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In 1988, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, was so good that it became the inspiration for a book, movie and, eventually, the television series “Friday Night Lights.” And in the decades since, as West Texas has weathered the unsettling undulations of the oil industry, football has remained steady.
So after the pandemic hit, the town did what it could to make sure the season wasn’t disrupted. And at Odessa High School, where the football team struggles to compete against local rivals, the members of their award winning marching band were relieved they could keep playing.
In Part 2 of Odessa, we follow what happened when the season opened — and how the school weighed the decision to start against the possible risks to students’ physical and mental health.
Turns out Adidas wants to be like Nike (and it’s also getting a Peloton). AMC’s sales have plummeted 90%, but it found $300M in cash under its seats. And Johnson & Johnson’s latest vaccine movies reveal it’s actually Batman.
$ADDYY $AMC $JNJ
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In the year since the pandemic began, the coronavirus has severely impacted inmates and staff in U.S. jails and prisons. According to The Marshall Project, in the last year, over 380,000 prisoners tested positive for the coronavirus. Of those, 2,400 died. The close quarters make social distancing nearly impossible, leaving the incarcerated population vulnerable.
Josiah Bates, staff writer at TIME, reflects on how the pandemic has played out behind bars — in both jails and prisons. We also hear from Ronnie Hoagland Jr., who contracted COVID-19 while incarcerated in a Texas county jail.
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.
Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.
Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.
President Biden said last night that he wants states to make all US adults eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine by May 1st. In the coming days, he and VP Harris have plans to travel to sell the relief bill to the American people, and the first round of direct payments could be going out as soon as this weekend.
Mississippi just approved the first anti-trans law of 2021, which would require public schools and universities to make athletes compete according to their sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. The ACLU is campaigning hard against these sorts of laws, and more than 500 NCAA athletes signed a letter this week asking the NCCAA to stop holding championship events in states with these kinds of laws or bills in the works.
And in headlines: New York's state assembly will open an impeachment investigation into Governor Andrew Cuomo, Derek Chauvin is now facing an additional third degree murder charge, and someone named Beeple makes $69 million selling an NFT JPG.
The bill known as HR 1, or the For the People Act, should be called “the Federal Takeover of Elections Act,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose says.
LaRose, who oversees Ohio's elections, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why HR 1, a bill the political left touts as positive election reform, is an unconstitutional power grab at the expense of the states.
We also cover these stories:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says the House could unseat Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., asks Pelosi to allow the Capitol to revert to standard operations pre-COVID-19.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “can no longer serve as governor,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says.
