Police Officer Killed In US Capitol Identified As 18-Year Veteran

<div class="ins_instory_dv"> <div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Police Officer Killed In US Capitol Identified As 18-Year Veteran" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-04/flpdhceo_william-billy-evans-650_625x300_03_April_21.jpeg" title="Police Officer Killed In US Capitol Identified As 18-Year Veteran" /></div> <p class="ins_instory_dv_caption sp_b">The officer was identified by US Capitol Police as William "Billy" Evans.</p> </div> <b class="place_cont">Washington, United States:</b> <p>A US Capitol police officer was killed and a second injured Friday after a vehicle rammed through security and crashed into a barrier at the Washington complex, forcing it into lockdown less than three months after a mob assault on Congress.</p> <p>Capitol Police shot dead the driver after he jumped out of the car and lunged at them with a knife, Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told reporters.</p> <p>No information was available on the identity of the attacker or his motivation. Pittman said there was no existing police file on the suspect.</p> <p>But Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee indicated that a terror link was not suspected at this stage.</p> <p>"It does not appear to be terrorism-related, but obviously we will continue to investigate," said Contee.</p> <p>News reports said President Joe Biden, spending the Easter weekend at his Camp David retreat, had been informed of the attack.</p> <p>The slain officer was identified by US Capitol Police as William "Billy" Evans, an 18-year veteran of the force.</p> <p>"Please keep Officer Evans and his family in your thoughts and prayers," Pittman said in a statement.</p> <p>House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered flags lowered to half-staff on the Capitol in the victim's honor while the Senate's chief Republican, Mitch McConnell, offered prayers.</p> <p>"I'm heartbroken for the officer killed today defending our Capitol and for his family. I'm praying for the officer injured and his family," tweeted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.</p> <p><strong>'Seek cover'</strong></p> <p>The attack came as psyches remained scarred and security tight after the January assault on Congress by hundreds of supporters of then-President Donald Trump.</p> <p>National Guard troops were mobilized Friday and staff at the huge Capitol complex ordered to stay away from windows and seek cover after alerts went out over the incident shortly after 1 pm (1700 GMT).</p> <p>While Congress was on recess for the Easter holiday, text messages sent to staffers still working inside told them to avoid windows and said no one could enter or leave the building.</p> <p>"If you are outside, seek cover," the messages said, while television footage showed what appeared to be the injured officers being loaded onto gurneys and into ambulances.</p> <p>Following the attack, the blue sedan could be seen crashed into a security barrier on one of the streets leading to Congress. </p> <p><strong>Heightened security after January 6</strong></p> <p>In the January 6 attack, hundreds of extremist Trump-backers smashed into the Capitol building yelling threats against politicians and shutting down the legislature.</p> <p>One Capitol Police officer died as a result of the attack, as well as four others individuals who took part or were nearby.</p> <p>Since then security officials have said there is an ongoing threat from extreme-right groups and Trump supporters.</p> <p>More than 300 people have been charged in the January attack, including members of armed extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and 100 more are expected to be charged, according to Justice Department court filings.</p> <p>In recent weeks some security around the complex has been loosened, with the number of armed National Guard troops at the Capitol reduced and a security fence that created a broad perimeter around the Capitol complex removed.</p> <p>But permanent barriers remain in place on all the roadway entrances to the Capitol, well-manned by police and national guard.</p> <p>"I drive through this checkpoint and wave to the officers guarding it nearly every day that I'm in Washington. I'm heartbroken to learn of an officer's death in today's attack," tweeted Representative Angie Craig.</p> <p>Security officials, including the Capitol Police and National Guard, were faulted for reacting slowly to the crowds who stormed the Capitol on January 6.</p> <p>But, Pittman said, they also remain on edge. "This has been an extremely difficult time for the US Capitol police after the events of January 6, and after the events that have occurred here today," she said.</p> <p><i>(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)</i></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-capitol-attack-police-officer-identified-as-18-year-veteran-2405139">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-capitol-attack-police-officer-identified-as-18-year-veteran-2405139</a>

news world Police Officer Killed In US Capitol Identified As 18-Year Veteran

The officer was identified by US Capitol Police as William "Billy" Evans. Washington, United States: A US Capitol police offi...

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Has Lil Nas Been Indoctrinated Into The Illuminati?

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://api-assets.infowars.com/2021/04/satannasx210481986.jpg" /></div> <p><strong>Infowars’ Brian Wilson breaks down the symbolism in rapper Lil Nas X’s new music video “Montero,” discusses the release of his controversial ‘Satan Shoes,’ and proposes the possibility that he has covertly pledged himself to the music industry’s faction of the Illuminati.</strong></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/has-lil-nas-been-indoctrinated-into-the-illuminati">https://www.infowars.com/posts/has-lil-nas-been-indoctrinated-into-the-illuminati</a>

news Has Lil Nas Been Indoctrinated Into The Illuminati?

Infowars’ Brian Wilson breaks down the symbolism in rapper Lil Nas X’s new music video “Montero,” discusses the release of his controversia...

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One weird trick to fix our broken child care system

<p>When I graduated from college in the mid-2000s, I moved to Seattle to find a job waitressing. After weeks of handing over résumés, I was still unemployed. Then I saw an advertisement in the local alt-weekly for a teacher’s assistant position at a preschool, just across the street from the University of Washington. I’d babysat, usually for around $2 an hour, since fifth grade. Infants, toddlers, 4-year-olds: I’d spent endless hours with them all, sometimes all at once, sometimes even overnight. I had great references. I got the job, which paid $8 an hour — just over the state’s then-minimum wage of $7.16 — almost instantly.</p> <p>In the toddler room, where kids were between 1 and 2 years old, another teacher and I handled the care of a dozen squawking, endlessly curious kids. The job, as anyone who’s worked in a child care center or preschool can tell you, is incredibly physical; I was sore every night in some new way.</p> <p>This was before the Affordable Care Act, and I had no health insurance. I caught colds and flus from the kids, got the familiar tingle of strep throat, but instead of getting antibiotics, I let it ride out, lucky it didn’t get worse. I was living with three friends in a small house nearby and watched as the $500-a-month rent, plus $80 a month for a subsidized bus pass, ate up the majority of my paycheck. I tried to cut costs by grazing on the leftovers of the food provided for the kids for breakfast and lunch. My small savings, accumulated over the summer while working at a dude ranch, began to dwindle.</p> <p>When a friend told me about a nanny agency that could get me at least $13 an hour, paid time off, and a stipend for health insurance, how could I say no? I could’ve taken some night classes to get my early childhood accreditation, but that would bump my pay by a dollar, maybe slightly more. I loved those kids, and I honestly loved the group care environment, which would stand in stark contrast to my long, lonely days as a nanny. But I couldn’t survive on the pay long term. So I became a statistic: one of hundreds of thousands of workers who leave early childhood care and education — an umbrella term for home child care, child care centers, and private and public preschools for children under 5 — every year for higher-paying work, whether at the Starbucks down the road or in the K-8 public school system.</p> <p>The vast majority of early childhood jobs, at least as they’re currently conceived, are not good jobs. The pay is breathtakingly low: In 2019, the median was <a href="https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-workers.htm">$11.65 an hour</a>, or $24,230 a year. As a result, turnover is incredibly high. A recent study in Louisiana found that every year more than one-third of early childhood educators <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0162373720985340">leave their jobs</a>. Not for competitors, not for slightly higher-paying jobs. They leave the sector altogether.</p> <p>Between 43 and 54 percent of early childhood workers are <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05493">enrolled</a> in some form of government assistance; in most states, the share of the workforce living below the poverty line is somewhere between <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/workforce-index-2020/the-early-educator-workforce/early-educator-pay-economic-insecurity-across-the-states/">15 and 25 percent</a>. An <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05493">ongoing study</a> of 49 early childhood education (ECE) centers in Seattle and Austin found that 42 percent of the workforce was food-insecure. Like other fields with low pay and the subsequent stress and anxiety that accompany poverty, workers have higher rates of chronic disease and are two to five times more likely to report clinically depressive symptoms.</p> <p>Child care workers are paid so little, yet the cost of care continues to rise. “Child care is my second mortgage,” one friend, who’s solidly middle-class enough to have a first mortgage, told me. “I’m lucky that I don’t have student loans, because there’d be no way for me to pay those plus what I’m paying for two kids,” said another. Parents love their children’s teachers and caregivers, but when confronted with the reality of their low pay, they also wonder: Where is all the money going?</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <aside><q>Early childhood care is a total market failure, and has been, whether we realized it or not, for decades</q></aside> </div> <p>These are the hallmarks of a broken system. The cost of care places an unsustainable burden on parents, working to hollow out the middle class and close it off to lower- or working-class parents, but the wages keep many practitioners teetering on the edge of poverty, prompting many of those most adept at the work to seek employment elsewhere. Early childhood care is, as one policy expert put it to me, a total market failure, and has been, whether we realized it or not, for decades.</p> <p>How do you fix a fundamentally broken system? It’s not as simple as blowing it up and starting over. The failure is so textured, so tied up in ideas of gender and race, of women and work, of “choice” and “kids are best cared for at home,” solutions thus far have largely been piecemeal: Add an incentive here, cut a cost there, even take the big step of establishing universal pre-K. Some of these reforms have meaningfully changed kids’ (and parents’) lives, but the entire process feels, as Lea Austin, executive director of UC Berkeley’s <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/">Center for the Study of Child Care Employment</a>, put it to me, “like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.”</p> <p>The first step toward lasting reform has to be a conceptual one, the sort that will have cascading effects on the entire sector and our society as a whole. We can start thinking of early child care and education the same way we think about public parks or sanitation or libraries or public schools: as a public good, foundational to a functioning society regardless of whether you directly benefit from its existence. Like other public goods, access shouldn’t be limited by employment, income, or location, and those who make it run should, at the very least, be paid a living wage.</p> <p>This scenario is only possible, of course, when and if early childhood care is robustly funded with tax dollars, just as public schools are. To be clear, tax dollars are already being used to inadequately prop up the system, whether in the form of vouchers for parents, pay supplements for teachers, incentives for practitioners to pursue ECE degrees, or government assistance programs such as Medicare and SNAP for child care workers who cannot pay their bills or provide for their families with their current wages. What if we stopped using tax dollars and massive additional portions of our income to keep pouring water in the bucket, and just plugged the hole?</p> <p>That sounds like a straightforward solution, and in some ways it is. In other ways, it’s endlessly complicated. The conversations most people have about child care usually start with the astronomical cost, touch on the difficulty of waiting lists, glance toward the difficulty of finding a “good fit” (often code for perceived quality), and then stop. Families somehow figure out a way to make it work, even if that means someone dropping out of the workforce, relying on informal “kith and kin” care, or emptying out savings, and then everyone breathes a deep sigh of relief when the youngest kid hits kindergarten. The struggle to pay for care is acute, but ultimately too short-lived to accumulate political might.</p> <p>That can change. Regardless of whether you have children, whether you have three in care or yours have already left the home, we can identify the burden — and the way it exacerbates racial inequities, sustains the gender pay gap, discourages parenthood, and generally makes life really, really hard for millions of people — and agree it doesn’t have to be this way.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>In the United States, child care (like <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22297809/student-loan-debt-cancel-forgiveness-middle-class">paying for higher education</a>) is conceived of as an individual problem, with individual solutions. There is an alternate reality for the United States, a clear fork in the road we didn’t take. Back in 1971, the Comprehensive Child Development Act made its way through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. Building on the success of Head Start, which had launched in 1965, the Child Development Act would’ve made high-quality child care available for all on an affordable, sliding scale basis. Nixon vetoed the bill — a move that, as Anna K. Danziger Halperin, a historian of the child care movement, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/06/richard-nixon-bears-responsibility-pandemics-child-care-crisis/">explains</a>, “surprised even officials within his own administration.”</p> <p>The reasoning, according to Halperin, was fear from the right wing of the Republican Party that the bill would encourage women to join the workforce, thereby destroying the “integrity” of the middle-class family unit, while also providing solutions that felt dangerously close to communistic, “un-American” care. There was also conservative concern that the bill was an “overreach” into the lives of low-income people, and that its primary beneficiaries were families of color. As Elizabeth Palley, a professor who studies the history of child care, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/21432940/child-care-bailout-covid-economy-work-parents-great-rebuild">told</a> Vox’s Anna North, “White people don’t want to pay for Black people’s children to be cared for.”</p> <div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1617366607_5234_285275" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22414716,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wTwND4cz55A6h69MjVWwzMapr8k=/0x0:1373x1392/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vT4ZC-kYWHhX6rANpqhd8aGhpbY=/0x0:1373x1392/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XJZq9QnHNw9U1hCaYeB3ZbN5Iww=/0x0:1373x1392/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1t88FTYvPkspNet75cRS0egAIZg=/0x0:1373x1392/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5fq-M8-VfNvdRu-QV2d9N-nLdE4=/0x0:1373x1392/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/A41jHhZz7cZ7vWzcuW-luMmLCNM=/0x0:1373x1392/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IjaQcpIpD_qkABuBh_Po7zo34B8=/0x0:1373x1392/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6Frs-1jKxKD8e-C9TgL25z2-m-o=/0x0:1373x1392/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wTJaWOFPzBJKFGO2TNh4SLpWxII=/0x0:1373x1392/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="A child care worker’s hand holds a book while reading to three young girls" data-upload-width="1373" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EUKfZLFnZ_ucRp3d5He3cGdDNb0=/0x0:1373x1392/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/q8Pbqf2cxBGDiAUf3C16ynmmgI4=/0x0:1373x1392/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lfQ1g_y_hpuX0Xfb1JnaIrs_vPI=/0x0:1373x1392/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IrjkLovQ-cCfwk0m5m14RMVNtxc=/0x0:1373x1392/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8FJzX8pnpxycFVoyfRaRjwDjUjo=/0x0:1373x1392/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9DNv_OCYoeuEeSVB0cPaG3pZcg8=/0x0:1373x1392/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VNGy_anpTdFMmAH188B1tbUIumA=/0x0:1373x1392/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/uta190b02wXu8XbWjmeVIYuO5Ss=/0x0:1373x1392/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YZUG8Cil8vNXqH4qTHHu31ttOsU=/0x0:1373x1392/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pys-wDmi4UwgIP-jHa4nK8xl3aA=/0x0:1373x1392/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1373x1392):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22414716/Spot1_v2.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span></figure> </div> <p>Decades later, patriarchal fear is still alive and well, as evidenced by the state of Idaho’s rejection of $6 million in early education funding in March. “I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home, and any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going,” state Rep. Charlie Shepherd <a href="https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/208/idaho-republican-votes-against-education-funds-convenient-for-mothers-to-come-out-of-the-home/277-645ae7a7-601e-4557-9d7c-f8df5c22949c">said</a> during the discussion of the bill. “We are really hurting the family unit in the process.”</p> <p>It’s too simple to just blame a bunch of right-wing conservative men for where we’ve found ourselves; the idea of child care as an individual responsibility was, however inadvertently, supported by feminists as well. After Nixon vetoed the Child Development Act, the broad coalition that had worked to get it through Congress dispersed, including various feminist groups whose focus shifted to getting more women into jobs and combating the gender discrimination that faced them once there.</p> <p>“They stopped fighting for child care, and other sorts of collective issues, and really focused on individual professional success,” Halperin tells me. “When you think of child care as a personal choice, it creates all of these new inequalities. Women of color, Black and immigrant women — they end up caring for the children of professional women. Those professional women, in turn, don’t want their whole paycheck going to child care, so it gets undervalued and underpaid.”</p> <p>This attitude has long been part of the critique of second-wave feminism. In its focus on getting women into the workforce, the movement lost sight of the inequities that were reproduced and exacerbated in the process. Indeed, many white, educated women were satisfied with the child care situation as it was, even with low pay levels for workers, because it still fundamentally worked for <em>them</em>. As more and more of those women entered the workforce, regulations that govern the ratio between children and caregivers expanded, and insurance, real estate, and staff turnover costs continued to rise.</p> <p>Finding affordable, reliable care has never not been a problem for lower-income women, particularly for women of color. But as early as 1979, Columbia professor Jane Price, author of <em>How to Have a Child and Keep Your Job</em>, was referring to the difficulty of finding care, particularly in the suburbs, as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/09/archives/westchester-weekly-croton-author-sees-a-childcare-crisis.html?searchResultPosition=1">a crisis</a>.” Price predicted that the problem, if ignored, would only get worse, and she was right. Between 1970 and 2000, the cost of care per child rose <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1-Investing-in-Children-%3A-Changes-in-Parental-on-%2C-Furstenberg/89d01df48596e4d3e43f4dbaf05a138cafb90dfe?p2df">200 percent</a>; today, the average cost of care for families with children under 5 hovers around <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2019/06/20/471141/working-families-spending-big-money-child-care/#:~:text=The%20results%20of%20the%20child,and%20Human%20Services'%20definition%20of">10 percent of a family’s monthly income</a>, with many families paying <a href="http://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20200107_family_budget_burdens.page">considerably more</a>.</p> <p>The pandemic has clarified <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/3/25/22345214/child-care-covid-19-daycare-american-rescue-plan">just how dire the situation has become</a>, and there are hopeful steps forward in raising pay and creating universal or sliding scale programs in pockets all over the United States. President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan includes <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/1/20/22238757/joe-biden-covid-19-stimulus-child-care">more than $25 billion to support child care centers</a> and $15 million in child care assistance to families, as well as a $3,600 annual tax credit for every child under 6 (and $3,000 a year for children between 6 and 17). Richard Nixon he is not; his <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/3/31/22357179/biden-two-trillion-infrastructure-jobs-plan-explained">forthcoming infrastructure bill</a> will have a child care component, too.</p> <p>But any lasting solution to our current crisis demands a shift in our thinking when it comes to accessing high-quality early childhood care: from a personal responsibility to a public good. If you have children, this shift will directly benefit them — but it will also benefit you, as their parent, and whoever else’s mental and financial load is lessened as a consequence. It will benefit employers, who, as the pandemic has shown, rely on their employees having access to reliable care. It will benefit their coworkers without children. And, for countless reasons, it will benefit the caregivers themselves, providing a pathway into the middle class, but only if we transform ECE work into a “good job.”</p> <p>There’s a pretty straightforward way to do this: Pay early childhood teachers like public school teachers. Providing quality care is expensive. It just is. In fact, it is too much for individual families to bear — just like hiring teachers to provide care for K-12 students would also be too much to bear, and is the reason we have a publicly funded school system. Even if you don’t have children, you can see the benefits of a public school system. The same should hold true for a publicly funded care system, in whatever form that might take.</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <aside><q>There’s a pretty straightforward way to do this: Pay early childhood teachers like public school teachers</q></aside> </div> <p>Right now, <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/workforce-index-2020/the-early-educator-workforce/early-educator-pay-economic-insecurity-across-the-states/">depending on the state</a>, a pre-K teacher with a bachelor’s degree can make up to 50 percent less than a kindergarten teacher. In Vermont, the difference is about 17.2 percent — the sixth-smallest such gap in the country. Lawmakers know it’s still not enough. <a href="https://legislature.vermont.gov/bill/status/2022/H.171">H 171</a>, currently moving through the legislature in Vermont, with two-thirds of the House of Representatives signed on as co-sponsors, aims to close the pay gap entirely, while also paying off existing student loans for educators in the system in order to increase retention.</p> <p>The state bill, if passed, would add an estimated $13 million to the yearly budget. As with its <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/21432940/child-care-bailout-covid-economy-work-parents-great-rebuild">previous bailout of the industry</a> during the height of the pandemic, the legislature seems to understand that a healthy economy is only possible with a healthy child care system. H 171 promises to fundamentally remake the child care system in the state: No family would be asked to pay more than 10 percent of their income for care, hundreds would be able to stay in their profession, and it would significantly decrease the 10.9 percent of Vermont care workers who, as of 2020, lived in poverty. Just imagine the effect that a similar bill would have in Tennessee (where 22.9 percent of the ECE workforce is in poverty), or Nebraska (29.2 percent), or New Mexico (27.4 percent).</p> <p>“The people who do the work are the linchpin of good child care and good early learning,” Lea Austin, with UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, explains. “The stability of the workers in a particular program, the continuity of their relationships with children, all that is disrupted when we have turnover. It’s disruptive to the children and their families, and it’s disruptive to the centers, who have to do the hiring, recruiting, training, and all those costs, and it’s disruptive to the employees who remain in the program, who have to take on extra work. There’s a ripple effect, all around.”</p> <p>There’s a ripple effect when the job is unstable, and there’s a different ripple effect when you stabilize the job. Decrease the stressors in workers’ lives — their need to worry about groceries or their own children’s care or health care — and they become better workers. This is particularly important for child care and child education, which calls workers to be fully engaged and attentive. “It seems obvious,” Austin says, “that we would want anyone working with children to be healthy and supported and as present with children as they possibly can be. We have to provide the conditions for them to do so.”</p> <p>Most advocates, policymakers, and caregivers that I spoke to agreed that a publicly funded system should not simply require existing elementary schools to extend care. This is where choice can really be preserved: If you’d rather your child go to the home of a certified caregiver in your neighborhood, or someone from your same cultural or linguistic background, those caregivers can also receive funding. They’re entrepreneurs and small-business owners, who, as any politician will tell you, form the backbone of the American middle class. And, in this case, they’re almost all women, and an <a href="https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/05/12/the_forgotten_essential_workers_women_of_color_in_child_care_491313.html">estimated 40 percent</a> are women of color.</p> <p>“When we talk about universal child care, that doesn’t mean that all kids, from 0 to 5, need to be in school,” Juliet Bromer, a research scientist at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, tells me. “It means honoring these places and spaces that families have long relied on. For some people, that might be a center, but for many, it is not.” Bromer points out that when we talk about “quality,” we often talk about low ratios of teachers to children and accreditation, which is important but misses less quantifiable components. “One dimension of quality, especially for Black and brown children, is being in a setting where you’re really able to see yourself,” Bromer said. “That really happens with home care, particularly for Black boys, who, in a school setting, have to have this sort of vigilance.”</p> <p>That’s exactly the sort of care that small providers like Miren Algorri, who has run a child care center in Chula Vista, Texas, since 1997, wants to provide. It’s most possible when she and her employees are making a living wage, which is what she, along with her union, <a href="https://childcareprovidersunited.org/">Childcare Providers United</a>, has been agitating for in the state of California.</p> <p>“If we could have quality care, and keep this small ratio, it would be a dream come true,” Algorri says. “To have that peace of mind, knowing that at the end of the month, we’d have some money left to buy a book! I’d have an extra $20, as opposed to wondering, ‘How do I pay my electric bill?’ I live very close to the border, so a lot of my colleagues are postponing their medical checkups, because they usually go over the border to Mexico. Why should we have to do that? Why do I have to put my health on the back burner so I can continue to perform as a public worker?”</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>Like many forms of feminized labor, child care has long been thought of as part of the domestic, private sphere — something that comes “naturally” to women and, as such, something that any woman can do well, instead of a discrete skill. I’m personally good with children not because I’m a woman, but because I spent years figuring out how to do the work, and I’m not nearly as good with kids as the people who’ve made this their life’s work. Not even the scarcity of child care over the past year and the rippling effects on the economy and millions of parents’ mental health has effectively driven home just how essential, how valuable, this work really is.</p> <p>“The job of caring for and educating young children is so hard, and so complex,” Lea Austin explains. “People understand that it’s low-paid work, but they have no idea how low. I’ve found myself in meetings, even with people who work in the sector, in various policy roles, and you put out that number, that the median wage for a child care worker is $11.65 across the country, and that more than half of ECE workers use aid programs, and sometimes there’s an audible gasp. When people make that connection and understand the consequences, they find it shocking and egregious.”</p> <div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <aside><q>“Our work is infantilized and minimized, and the vast majority of it is done by women like myself, a woman of color”</q></aside> </div> <p>Yet most people don’t make that connection. As Austin explains, “work performed by women and performed by women of color is historically undervalued. We have a convergence of those two categories in the ECE workforce.”</p> <p>“Don’t get me started on the racism and sexism,” Algorri told me. “Our work is infantilized and minimized, and the vast majority of it is done by women like myself, a woman of color.”</p> <p>It’s incredibly difficult to elevate any occupation that’s undervalued. When a type of labor is not considered a skill or is conceived of as something that people “naturally” want to do for free, it keeps wages down. When wages are low, employers have to lower their necessary qualifications, which in turn reinforces the idea that the work is unskilled. In most child care centers in the United States, teaching assistant positions require only a high school diploma or GED, plus a background check. Teacher positions require an associate or bachelor’s degree in ECE, but the pay bump is so small that many who obtain their certification, which extends to children in third grade, move to the K-8 system. Various government programs have attempted to “upskill” the profession, encouraging existing care workers to pursue certification, but the low pay remains a consistent barrier.</p> <p>“I’ve seen providers have to close their doors because they cannot find or pay an assistant,” Algorri says. “I’ve been lucky, but I’ve sacrificed a lot to keep the quality of assistants over the years. It’s disheartening, because providers will have to downsize, going from a license for 14 kids down to eight or six, because they just can’t afford to keep paying, which then causes issues in the community because people need care for infants or toddlers but they can’t find it anywhere.”</p> <p>There’s demand, in other words, but at current pay levels, inadequate supply, which can lead to “child care deserts” — places where infant to 3-year-old care is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to find, no matter the cost — in urban, suburban, and rural areas. In <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fcrawling-behind-america-s-child-care-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it%2F9781684334278&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fthe-goods%2F22360152%2Fchild-care-free-public-funding" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/crawling-behind-america-s-child-care-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/9781684334278","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22360152/child-care-free-public-funding","xcust":"___vx__p_22124193__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It</em></a>, Elliot Haspel points out that as many as 95 percent of Americans live in child care deserts, where three or more children are in need of care for every available spot; people with above-average income are as likely to live in these areas as people with less income. The number of centers and homes providing care simply cannot keep pace with the demand. Before the pandemic, centers, some of them the only infant-to-3-year-old providers in the area, were closing at alarming rates. As of March 2021, an estimated 20,000 care centers have <a href="https://www.thelily.com/20000-day-cares-may-have-closed-in-the-pandemic-what-happens-when-parents-go-back-to-work/">closed permanently</a>.</p> <p>In its current figuration, child care is not a lucrative business. Unlike so many other industries, demand is simply not enough to spark the creation of new businesses. That’s how broken the market is, and without a significant refiguration of funding sources, it’s not going to change. In Texas, like many states, the state workforce commission has allocated funding to subsidize students pursuing degrees in “high-growth, high demand, and emerging occupations that are critical to the state and local economies.” Depending on the location in Texas, targeted occupations include registered nurses, electricians, dental hygienists, respiratory therapists, and many more.</p> <p>As Cathy McHorse, who heads up the United Way’s <a href="https://www.unitedwayaustin.org/success-by-6-plan/">Success by 6</a> program in Travis County (home to Austin), told me, early childhood educators are nowhere to be found on the list. “Child care would qualify,” McHorse says. “But we can’t be a ‘targeted’ occupation because the job doesn’t make a living wage. You’d get the degree, and your wages wouldn’t change.”</p> <p>Betsy, who currently lives in South Carolina, has a bachelor’s of science in child development. She’s worked in the field for 14 years, and most recently worked as a teacher’s aide for a Montessori public charter school, pulling in $19 an hour because of previous experience. She lives in a 600-square-foot apartment with her dog, and had to take on a second job waiting tables to cover costs. “I was so miserable and exhausted,” she says. She lost her Montessori job with the pandemic, but has been making solid money — around $25 an hour — tutoring kids doing remote school. Now those kids are back in full-time school, and she’s applying to preschool teacher and kindergarten assistant positions. The highest she’s been offered is $15 an hour, which, she says, you can make at Target for a lot less effort. She’s decided to drive for Uber Eats instead.</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1617366607_2702_285276" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22415070,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ERYPXmw4AWA_Lr55qW0IF-PLDd4=/0x0:1214x1094/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Xm9wt870oqwS2r5Xaz3k7C4oU4A=/0x0:1214x1094/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QpE8vYFxnlujdUO_dOXLda1tc0E=/0x0:1214x1094/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Zs6_rJjvn_EfTqtpCUnnRA6BkyU=/0x0:1214x1094/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BJjULiQQJwfFiIVotzqy129-x6A=/0x0:1214x1094/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pL_PzVBBLtn-9wRgOyoUwyr1eIE=/0x0:1214x1094/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2EtgHNcxCMBUr3VXWdPSauT_mLM=/0x0:1214x1094/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_d0Yn0adsQX4rPFkdDCP0D3nLZc=/0x0:1214x1094/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NzY4qf_AnEKD5Q5hfe49GaG2lU4=/0x0:1214x1094/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="Three children climb on an oversized set of number blocks." data-upload-width="1214" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3CJM5RuAof1G9MTNx8IHC9y90bw=/0x0:1214x1094/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QLbhEQjoZ9GUQoAUi8ppC2onJR0=/0x0:1214x1094/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/roUQ_mNtswf2FHOLM5sG-bsXpdw=/0x0:1214x1094/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZaasU3ET7_OsYsAFHNkRmRPYdFE=/0x0:1214x1094/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_vxWgK97MgP6e5uo4y0KxbPGW6o=/0x0:1214x1094/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JFJ-HCAmdYRgwA0VEl6v3RL83PY=/0x0:1214x1094/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/f3D1WFChPJdGf9Hm0xTNItb1Mac=/0x0:1214x1094/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/954p4bcy0F6ZvZ3C93dOS00pgxM=/0x0:1214x1094/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XRdfC4LgS0TPZdXgAtZEgMiuKWw=/0x0:1214x1094/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Jbm8vbVvXNT5Ys12bwwzWPd5O50=/0x0:1214x1094/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1214x1094):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22415070/spot1_v3.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span></figure> </div> <p>In Missouri, Danielle has worked as a senior development teacher at a center that doubled as a university learning laboratory for four years, and has a degree in ECE with a focus on teaching young children. Her salary is currently just over $28,000, and even though she splits rent for a small home with her partner who works at a nonprofit, they still struggle to cover costs from month to month and live paycheck to paycheck. Her student loans have been in forbearance since she graduated from college in 2019. She recently watched a coworker leave her position to work at a bank, where she now makes double her old salary. Other coworkers regularly leave for fast food jobs.</p> <p>At a previous center, the director would often tell workers to be mindful of just how lucky they were, despite their low pay, to have health insurance and paid leave. “But these are basic needs of employees,” Danielle tells me. “Health insurance is a need, not a want. Paid leave is necessary for teachers to still maintain their own lives outside of work.”</p> <p>“It makes me feel so underappreciated that teachers working in K-8 are taken more seriously and paid way more than ECE educators,” she continues. “But there is a vast difference in how our society views K-8 teachers compared to ECE.”</p> <p>All over the country, there are people who feel called to the work, who want to continue doing the work, but simply cannot afford to keep doing the work. Because in the end, none of the piecemeal solutions actually address the real problem: that instead of figuring out ways to make care into a public good and caregiving into a good job, many people still think that women, preferably children’s own mothers, should be doing this work for free.</p> <p>“Here in Charleston, there are many [ECE] jobs that start at $9 and $10 an hour,” Danielle explains. “The profession seems to be looked at as a babysitter, something that a housewife can do for some extra cash,” she says. “But that’s not how we provide quality education and care, and that’s not a living wage.”</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>Over the past 50 years, the decline of the American middle class has been inseparable from the decline in unionized manufacturing jobs, which paid well enough for many families to be supported by a single salary. As those jobs disappeared, more and more middle-class women entered the workforce, spiking the demand for child care outside the home. The two shifts cannot be untangled: As one sector declined, another rose, at least in part, in response. Both were performed by a mix of workers with and without college degrees, but for many reasons, including a burst of anti-union sentiment and a resistance to viewing child care as a skilled profession, the child care workforce did not unionize en masse. Even as the workforce became more and more essential, the jobs never even came close to providing the sort of pay and benefits that made a manufacturing job a potential pathway to the middle class.</p> <p>Those manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, at least not in any approximation of what they once were.</p> <p>Instead of waxing about their decline, we could shift our attention to transforming a whole sector of existing jobs, jobs with incredibly high demand, jobs that serve as the backbone of our personal and public lives, into good, middle-class jobs. This transformation could have cascading effects on the lives of the existing, majority-white middle class, many of whose middle-class salaries depend on the ability to access care. The greatest economic effect, however, would be to open up the middle class to over 2 million caregivers — and remember that <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/racial-wage-gaps-in-early-education-employment/">40 percent</a> are women of color.</p> <p>UC Berkeley’s <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/">Center for the Study of Child Care Employment</a> has calculated what it would cost to transform <a href="https://cscce.berkeley.edu/financing-early-educator-quality-a-values-based-budget-for-every-state/">each state’s current system</a> into one that was “values” based, with a “well-qualified and fairly compensated early care workforce” providing high standards of care. In Missouri, where Danielle lives, the proposed increase in funding would raise salaries for early educators with bachelor’s degrees to $49,626 (on par with elementary and middle school educators) and teacher’s assistants to $29,776. Both positions would come with benefits including paid time off and health insurance.</p> <p>With this proposal, Danielle’s current income would be doubled. “It would change my life significantly,” she says. “It could lead to me living a comfortable, less stressful life. I could pay off my debts, my student loans, and even be able to save for my future.” Doubling pay might seem extreme, but these salary increases aren’t exorbitant. What they are is stabilizing: for the millions of kids in care, for the millions of parents who depend on it, but also for the millions of women who do this work.</p> <p>“The stimulus plan is an interesting opportunity to say, we’re capable of making significant investments in people when everyone can see the need,” Molly Sullivan, the director of national initiatives at First Children’s Finance, says. “We don’t often publicly talk about not being able to afford child care. It’s often a private struggle that we keep out of the spotlight, and I think there’s an opportunity to see this as a wake-up call. It’s okay to acknowledge that what we were doing in the past wasn’t working, so let’s build a system that didn’t exist.”</p> <p>That system will be complicated. You can read about <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-13/how-universal-pre-k-affects-infant-daycare-costs">what happens</a> when you extend universal pre-K, as New York, Boston, Nashville, San Antonio, Charlotte, and a handful of other cities have, and don’t consider what sucking the older students out of the system does to drive up the price of toddler and infant care. You can deliberate whether the funding should come directly from the federal government or remain the provenance of the states, and how that will reinforce existing discrepancies in educational outcomes in places like Idaho and Mississippi that refuse federal dollars. Some people told me there’s too much demand in some areas with universal pre-K, with the same long waiting lists as private preschool, and others directed me to complicated rules about when a pre-K student enters the system, which then make it difficult to give a kid an extra year, if they need it, before moving on to kindergarten.</p> <p>It’s a tangled set of problems, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural prejudices — and an undeniable part of the current quagmire, as Anna North <a href="https://www.vox.com/22321909/covid-19-pandemic-school-work-parents-remote">recently argued</a>, is the sheer number of hours that Americans have to work to arrive at a living wage. But as Sullivan put it to me, “as a country, we have proved that we can tackle big, complicated, incredibly complex things, from the WPA to the Covid vaccine rollout. This is just an area where policy has not really ventured yet.” At least not in a substantive way that doesn’t just fiddle with the margins — and at least not since 1971, when Nixon chose that other fork in the road, and mired us in our current, broken approach.</p> <p class="c-end-para">We’ve shown that we can care about inequities even when they don’t primarily affect us. We’ve shown that we can support public projects even when we are not the primary beneficiaries. If you’re drowning in child care costs right now, probably none of this will get done in time to help you. That’s the thing about conceiving of child care as a public good: It will serve you, someday, in ways you might not yet appreciate. A public good is good, in some way, for everyone. Plug the hole in the bucket, and the benefits overflow.</p> <p><em>If you’d like to share your experience as part of the hollow middle class with The Goods, email</em> <a href="mailto:annehelenpetersen@vox.com"><em><strong>annehelenpetersen@vox.com</strong></em></a> <em>or fill out</em> <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScc-Rm_NMsyRPfevs25lhxHFoq2k72fwxyhGpgEOpWbSxZjoQ/viewform?gxids=7628"><em><strong>this form</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22360152/child-care-free-public-funding">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22360152/child-care-free-public-funding</a>

vox One weird trick to fix our broken child care system

When I graduated from college in the mid-2000s, I moved to Seattle to find a job waitressing. After weeks of handing over résumés, I was sti...

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There’s a new lawsuit attacking Obamacare — and it’s a serious threat

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/amePZ9hlJTfNQZPq7QA8Utm1ZiE=/0x178:3000x1749/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19655409/73523183.jpg.jpg" /></div> <p>Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.</p> <p>A team of conservative activists filed a lawsuit last year which asks the courts to strike down several key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The plaintiffs’ legal arguments are at odds with longstanding precedents, but the case is assigned to a very conservative Republican-appointed judge. And that judge has <a href="https://affordablecareactlitigation.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/kelley-order-on-mo-dism-2-25-21.pdf">already signaled</a> that he’s likely to rule in those plaintiffs’ favor.</p> <p><em>Kelley v. Becerra</em> is the fourth round of litigation attacking major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It seeks to take out several provisions of Obamacare governing which forms of preventive care — things like birth control or vaccinations or cancer screenings — must be covered by health insurers. And it primarily relies on the kind of legal arguments that fell out of vogue in the federal courts more than 80 years ago.</p> <p>But there’s a twist. Though the primary legal argument in <em>Kelley</em> is tough to square with existing legal precedents, five members of the Supreme Court recently signaled that they intend to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/8/21317323/supreme-court-obamacare-little-sisters-clarence-thomas-pennsylvania-birth-control">abandon longstanding legal principles</a> in favor of the same interpretation of the Constitution proposed by the <em>Kelley</em> plaintiffs.</p> <p>The case, which was filed in a federal court in Texas, is being heard by Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer who once ruled that the Affordable Care Act must be <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/18/20858157/fifth-circuit-obamacare-texas-united-states">repealed in its entirety</a>. (That case is now before the Supreme Court, and a majority of the Court appeared likely to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/10/21558447/supreme-court-obamacare-california-texas-john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-amy-coney-barrett">reject key parts of O’Connor’s arguments</a> when the case was argued last November.)</p> <p>So the Affordable Care Act’s preventive care provisions could be in for a rough ride. Their immediate fate rests in the hands of one of the most partisan judges in the country. And a majority of the justices recently signaled that even fair-minded judges should look upon these provisions of Obamacare with extreme skepticism.</p> <p>Several provisions of the Affordable Care Act require group and individual health plans to cover various preventive treatments and to <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/300gg-13">not “impose any cost sharing requirements,”</a> such as copays, for them. When Congress wrote Obamacare, however, it did not itemize which treatments must be covered. Instead, it delegated that power to three different government bodies.</p> <p>An expert panel known as the United States Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), for example, has the power to place many health services on the list of services that insurers must cover without imposing out-of-pocket costs on patients. Another panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may add vaccines to the list. And the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, may require insurers to cover “preventive care and screenings” for women and children.</p> <p>Congress had a very good reason for writing the statute in this way. If Obamacare had itemized which health services insurers must cover when the law was written in 2010, then Congress would have needed to pass an entirely new law in order to add new items to this list. Covid-19 did not even exist in 2010, for example. So, if Congress had decided to itemize which vaccines insurers must cover in 2010, it couldn’t have known to include the Covid-19 vaccine on that list. (The federal government is <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210211005937/en/U.S.-Government-Purchases-Additional-100-Million-Doses-of-Moderna%E2%80%99s-COVID-19-Vaccine">purchasing Covid-19 vaccines for public use</a>, but once the initial vaccination campaign is over, it may make sense for private insurers to take over the burden of paying to vaccinate children or teenagers when they reach a certain age.)</p> <p>The three federal panels and agencies have <a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits/">placed about 80 items on the preventive services list</a>. That list includes things like blood screening for newborns, vision screening for children, contraceptive care, pap smears, and screening for conditions like <a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/">depression, hepatitis, HIV, and some forms of cancer</a>.</p> <p>And yet, the plaintiffs’ theory in <em>Kelley</em> could potentially endanger patients’ access to all of these health services — although the full implications of this lawsuit are a bit nuanced. If the plaintiffs’ theory prevails, insurers could be free to refuse to cover preventive care services or, at the very least, to impose new costs on patients who seek those services.</p> <p>The plaintiffs in <em>Kelley</em> are an array of religious conservatives, and what Judge O’Connor labels as “Free-Market Plaintiffs,” who wish to purchase health plans that do not cover some of the preventive services that insurers are currently required to cover.</p> <p>Some of these plaintiffs, for example, object to a requirement that insurers <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/11/private-insurers-must-cover-prep-at-no-cost-to-high-risk-patients.html">pay for pre-exposure prophylaxis (“PrEP”</a>), drugs that are very effective in preventing the transmission of HIV, because those plaintiffs believe that PrEP “<a href="https://affordablecareactlitigation.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/kelley-order-on-mo-dism-2-25-21.pdf">encourage[s] and facilitate[s] homosexual behavior</a>.”</p> <p>The plaintiffs raise a number of legal claims against Obamacare’s preventive care provisions, including a pair of constitutional arguments.</p> <p>The first of these arguments claims that the PSTF and the ACIP, the two expert panels empowered to add items to the list of preventive services, are not composed of “officers of the United States” and therefore cannot wield regulatory power.</p> <p>The Constitution provides that “officers of the United States” may <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii">only be appointed by the president</a>, the “courts of law,” or the “heads of departments.” ACIP members — members of the panel that deals with vaccinations — are <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/members/index.html">appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services</a>, who unquestionably qualifies as a “head of department.” But members of the PSTF are <a href="https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/about-uspstf/current-members">appointed by the director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality</a>, and the director of this agency may not qualify as a “head of department.”</p> <p>This argument about whether the members of these two panels were properly appointed, however, could prove to be a bit of a sideshow in the <em>Kelley</em> litigation because the plaintiffs raise a different constitutional argument that is very likely to prevail in the Supreme Court.</p> <p>Under current law, Congress has broad authority to delegate regulatory power to federal agencies. As the Court held in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10855858816503634838&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Mistretta v. United States</em></a> (1989), Congress may permit agencies to regulate private entities so long as it “lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform.”</p> <p>Dissenting in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-6086_2b8e.pdf"><em>Gundy v. United States</em></a> (2019), however, Justice Neil Gorsuch proposed replacing this longstanding rule with a vague new standard that would effectively empower the Supreme Court to <a href="https://www.vox.com/22276279/supreme-court-war-joe-biden-agency-regulation-administrative-neil-gorsuch-epa-nondelegation">veto any regulation promulgated by a federal agency</a>. And, while Gorsuch wrote that opinion in dissent, five justices have since <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/11/26/20981758/brett-kavanaughs-terrify-democrats-supreme-court-gundy-paul">signed onto the general framework that Gorsuch laid out in <em>Gundy</em></a>.</p> <p>The framework laid out in Gorsuch’s <em>Gundy</em> opinion is complicated, and important parts of that opinion are so vague that it’s not possible to predict its full implications. But the heart of Gorsuch’s approach is that there should be strict constitutional limits on Congress’s power to delegate regulatory authority to agencies.</p> <p>A federal law permitting agencies to regulate, Gorsuch wrote in <em>Gundy</em>, must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”</p> <p>And that brings us to the Supreme Court’s decision in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-431_5i36.pdf"><em>Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania</em></a> (2020). <em>Little Sisters</em> involved a Trump administration regulation that permitted employers with religious or moral objections to birth control to refuse to cover contraceptive care in their employee’s health plans. But, in his majority opinion upholding this Trump-era regulation, Justice Clarence Thomas also strongly suggested that the provision of Obamacare governing women’s preventive care is unconstitutional.</p> <p>That provision, which permits HRSA to lay out “comprehensive guidelines” regarding which “preventive care and screenings” for women should be covered by insurers, gives HRSA “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/8/21317323/supreme-court-obamacare-little-sisters-clarence-thomas-pennsylvania-birth-control">virtually unbridled discretion</a>,” according to Thomas — a clear sign that Thomas and the four other justices who joined Thomas’s opinion believe that this provision is unconstitutional under the framework Gorsuch laid out in <em>Gundy</em>. (Thomas elected not to strike down the provision because “no party has pressed a constitutional challenge to the breadth of the delegation involved here.”)</p> <p>The other preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act — the ones dealing with vaccinations, pediatric care, and other preventive care services — are <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/300gg-13">similar to the provision dealing with women’s health care</a>. And thus they are also potentially vulnerable under the approach that Gorsuch laid out in <em>Gundy</em> and that Thomas laid out in <em>Little Sisters</em>.</p> <p>In the short term, it is exceedingly likely that O’Connor will strike down the challenged provisions of the Affordable Care Act. O’Connor hears an unusually large diet of Obamacare-related cases, including the case where he <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/18/20858157/fifth-circuit-obamacare-texas-united-states">ruled that the entire law must be repealed</a>, because conservative litigants often intentionally file challenges to Obamacare in O’Connor’s court in the hope that the case will be assigned to him.</p> <p>Yet, because O’Connor so frequently hands down orders benefiting anti-Obamacare litigants, his opinions sometimes reveal the limits of the judiciary’s power to diminish access to health care.</p> <p>In 2018, for example, O’Connor issued an injunction forbidding the federal government from enforcing the requirement that health insurers cover birth control, at least with respect to individuals who “object to the Contraceptive Mandate for sincere religious reasons.” But, as O’Connor lamented in a more recent opinion, this injunction had little effect “because <a href="https://affordablecareactlitigation.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/kelley-order-on-mo-dism-2-25-21.pdf">few, if any, insurance companies are currently offering contraceptive-free policies</a>.”</p> <p>So, even though O’Connor issued an order that permits insurers to offer contraceptive-free policies to people who object to birth control on religious grounds, the insurers themselves have elected not to do so.</p> <p>A likely reason for this decision by health insurers is fairly straightforward. The cost of birth control is much less than the cost of a pregnancy. Indeed, one of the Obama administration’s arguments for requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care is that insurers would <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/obama-birth-control-rule-change-why-its-not-cave/">break even or even save money</a> if they provide free contraceptive coverage to their customers.</p> <p>For similar reasons, many insurers may still choose to cover many preventive treatments even if they are no longer required to do so. It may be cheaper, for example, for an insurer to pay for <a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-children/">vaccines</a> rather than to pay to treat the disease prevented by that vaccine.</p> <p>But not all preventive treatments are likely to be cost-effective from the perspective of an insurance company driven solely by a profit motive. According to the National Cancer Institute, for example, the median age when a cancer patient is diagnosed with that disease is <a href="https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/age#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20most%20recent,in%20people%20above%20this%20age.">66 years old</a> — which means that the majority of cancer patients are over the age of 65 and therefore are eligible for Medicare.</p> <p>For this reason, health insurers may not be willing to offer free cancer screenings to their patients, on the theory that the cost of paying for cancer treatments is likely to be picked up by the federal government.</p> <p>The biggest victims of the <em>Kelley</em> litigation, in other words, could be patients who put off being screened for deadly diseases until after those patients are eligible for free care under Medicare — thereby risking that, by the time the disease is discovered, it may be too advanced to treat it successfully.</p> <p>And yet, given the Supreme Court’s opinion in <em>Little Sisters</em>, there is a very good chance that this fate will await cancer patients and other people whose lives could be saved by preventive care.</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/2/22360341/obamacare-lawsuit-supreme-court-little-sisters-kelley-becerra-reed-oconnor-nondelegation">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/2/22360341/obamacare-lawsuit-supreme-court-little-sisters-kelley-becerra-reed-oconnor-nondelegation</a>

vox There’s a new lawsuit attacking Obamacare — and it’s a serious threat

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A team of conservative activists filed a lawsuit last year which asks the courts to strike down s...

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Ask a book critic: The history of the end of the world

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z9dtsno4Hs3XwUC__BPV6x-3tKo=/0x291:5000x2909/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19887196/ask_bookcritic.jpg" /></div> <p>Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/ask-a-book-critic">Ask a Book Critic</a>, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.</p> <p>If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vox-quick-hits/id1549029999"><em>Ask a Book Critic</em></a>, part of <a href="https://www.vox.com/22219152/vox-quick-hits-short-form-podcasts">Vox Quick Hits</a>. Hear a new episode of <em>Ask a Book Critic</em> — always under 10 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vox-quick-hits/id1549029999">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vVk1QMzM5MzU0NjAwMQ">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1f0Iedxo7ITTKo0SnSK3jI?si=7hODSL6ZS7ia9mdtZB5Qyg">Spotify</a>.</p> <p>Now let’s get started.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>I am a sucker for every Hallmark movie. Big-city character moves to a small town, adapts to a new place, budding romances, finding oneself, and usually a dog. I think, especially during these times of immense uncertainty, I take comfort from stories where everything is packaged up nicely and everyone drives off into the sunset, happily ever after. I also love great narratives and storytelling, and while I love my cheesy Hallmark movies, the storytelling can sometimes leave something to be desired.</em></p> <p><em>So, do you have any feel-good warm and fuzzy romance books that include some fantastic storytelling?</em></p> <p>Try <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fbeach-read%2F9781984806734&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/beach-read/9781984806734","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Beach Read</em></a> by Emily Henry. It’s about a women’s fiction writer who gets into a contest with a literary fiction novelist where they each agree to switch genres for the summer. Hijinks and romance ensue, and it’s all extremely fun to read.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>I love a sprawling nonfiction book that tells me all about a city. Think</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fmidnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil-a-savannah-story%2F9780679751526&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil-a-savannah-story/9780679751526","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil</a><em>. The last book that has come close for me is</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fboom-town-the-fantastical-saga-of-oklahoma-city-its-chaotic-founding-its-purloined-basketball-team-and-the-dream-of-becomin%2F9780804137331&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/boom-town-the-fantastical-saga-of-oklahoma-city-its-chaotic-founding-its-purloined-basketball-team-and-the-dream-of-becomin/9780804137331","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Boom Town</a> <em>by Sam Anderson, writing about Oklahoma City. I’m sure there are others, but I am in a dry spell.</em></p> <p>The two authors I think you should check out are Erik Larson and Thomas Dyja. Larson’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-devil-in-the-white-city-murder-magic-and-madness-at-the-fair-that-changed-america%2F9780375725609&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/the-devil-in-the-white-city-murder-magic-and-madness-at-the-fair-that-changed-america/9780375725609","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Devil in the White City</em></a>, about a serial killer in Chicago during the World’s Fair, is kind of a gimme, so it’s most likely already on your list. But if it’s not, check it out! It’s good! Larson is great at recreating the compulsive pacing of a thriller within the dense historical detail of nonfiction.</p> <p>Less of a gimme: Dyja is an urbanist who writes histories of cities. His last book, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-third-coast-when-chicago-built-the-american-dream%2F9781470843441&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/the-third-coast-when-chicago-built-the-american-dream/9781470843441","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>The Third Coast</em></a>, was about Chicago, and this year he published <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fnew-york-new-york-new-york-four-decades-of-success-excess-and-transformation%2F9781982149789&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/new-york-new-york-new-york-four-decades-of-success-excess-and-transformation/9781982149789","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>New York, New York, New York</em></a>, about the city’s transition from its chaotic state of nature in 1978 to the rampant inequality it faces today. A fun bonus here is that Dyja capitalizes all the nouns he thinks are important, like he’s writing from the 18th century, which adds an interesting flavor to the reading experience.</p> <p>Bonus recommendations: <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fgolden-gates-fighting-for-housing-in-america%2F9780525560210&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/golden-gates-fighting-for-housing-in-america/9780525560210","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Golden Gates</em></a> by Conor Dougherty uses San Francisco’s housing crisis to delve into the problem of income inequality more generally. For more of a philosophical examination of the power of cities, check out N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction series <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-city-we-became%2F9780316509848&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/the-city-we-became/9780316509848","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>The City We Became</em></a>, which <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/5/1/21242844/nk-jemisin-interview-the-city-we-became-vox-book-club">we read in the Vox Book Club</a>.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>Was wondering if you have any recommendations for a very particular 2020–21 book mood at the intersection of post-apocalyptic and alternate history fiction: in-depth histories of the end of the world. Think the alternate timeline part of</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2F11-22-63%2F9781451627299&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/11-22-63/9781451627299","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>11/22/63</a><em>, the book-within-a-book from</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2F1984-9789387873247%2F9780451524935&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/1984-9789387873247/9780451524935","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>1984</a><em>, lots of</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fworld-war-z-an-oral-history-of-the-zombie-war-9780307346612%2F9780307346612&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/world-war-z-an-oral-history-of-the-zombie-war-9780307346612/9780307346612","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>World War Z</a><em>, or the first couple chapters of lots of post-apocalyptic fiction (</em><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-stand-9780307743688%2F9780307947307&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/the-stand-9780307743688/9780307947307","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>The Stand</a> <em>does it decently if anecdotally,</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fstation-eleven-9781594138829%2F9780804172448&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Station Eleven</a> <em>was mostly unsatisfying in this regard). Basically, I’m looking for something that does a deep dive into this world-building (world-destroying?) as an end in itself, rather than a convenient device to either resolve a plot point or set the stage for the A-plot. The more gratuitous political and social detail, the better!</em></p> <p>I’m going to direct you to <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Ftoo-like-the-lightning-book-one-of-terra-ignota%2F9780765378019&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/too-like-the-lightning-book-one-of-terra-ignota/9780765378019","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Ada Palmer</a>, a history professor at the University of Chicago whose far-future books have really intensive and careful world-building with a lot of information about how the politics of the world are organized. Also check out <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fparable-of-the-sower%2F9781538732182&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/parable-of-the-sower/9781538732182","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Parable of the Sower</em></a>, an Octavia Butler classic that moves through the apocalypse with intense detail, and <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fa-canticle-for-leibowitz-9780553273816%2F9780553273816&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/a-canticle-for-leibowitz-9780553273816/9780553273816","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>A Canticle for Leibowitz</em></a>, in which a Catholic monastery attempts to preserve 20th-century scientific knowledge after a devastating nuclear war.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>I’m a 68-year-old grandmother, retired, disabled with a wonky back. Besides the Mrs. Pollifax books, are there any reads about senior women having creative, life-altering adventures that don’t heavily involve matriarchal family stuff?</em></p> <p>I am going to assume you are already aware of Agatha Christie’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fmiss-marple-the-complete-short-stories-a-miss-marple-collection%2F9780062073716&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/miss-marple-the-complete-short-stories-a-miss-marple-collection/9780062073716","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Miss Marple</a> books, but if not, they are classics for a reason. (Charming old lady becomes an amateur detective, solves crimes.) Otherwise, I would recommend Ann Patchett’s <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fstate-of-wonder%2F9780062049810&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/state-of-wonder/9780062049810","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>State of Wonder</em></a>, which is about two women scientists trying to develop fertility drugs in the Amazon basin — the point-of-view character is 42, but her research partner is older and the most compelling figure in the book, really. Also try <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fremnant-population%2F9780345462190&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/remnant-population/9780345462190","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Remnant Population</em></a> by Elizabeth Moon, about a woman in her 70s living on a space colony who decides to stay behind by herself after the rest of the colony is shut down.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>I was wondering if you could recommend some fiction books to me based on this specific problem I have been experiencing for some time now. I have found that for the past year or so, I have enjoyed reading nonfiction books more than fiction reads (and I am definitely more of a fiction person).</em></p> <p><em>Some of the nonfiction books I have loved in recent times are:</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fcan-t-even-how-millennials-became-the-burnout-generation%2F9780358315070&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/can-t-even-how-millennials-became-the-burnout-generation/9780358315070","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Can’t Even</a> <em>by Anne Helen Petersen,</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Ftrick-mirror-reflections-on-self-delusion%2F9780525510567&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/trick-mirror-reflections-on-self-delusion/9780525510567","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Trick Mirror</a> <em>by Jia Tolentino,</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fknow-my-name-a-memoir-9780735223721%2F9780735223721&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/know-my-name-a-memoir-9780735223721/9780735223721","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Know My Name</a> <em>by Chanel Miller, and</em> <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fcatch-and-kill-lies-spies-and-a-conspiracy-to-protect-predators%2F9780316486637&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/catch-and-kill-lies-spies-and-a-conspiracy-to-protect-predators/9780316486637","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Catch and Kill</a> <em>by Ronan Farrow.</em></p> <p><em>Are there any fiction books which you think might mirror the nonfiction ones I have liked?</em></p> <p>It sounds like you are in a place for books that spend a lot of time thinking about how media is shaping the way we think. Luckily, there’s actually a ton of ambitious fiction coming out right now about just that!</p> <p>I have three recommendations for you. First, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fself-care-9780143135197%2F9780143135197&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/self-care-9780143135197/9780143135197","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Self Care</em></a> by Leigh Stein is a dark satire about two women working for a pop-feminist wellness company. It starts with one of the protagonists drinking wine from a mug that says “male tears” and lying on one of the office’s lavender velvet chaise lounges, compulsively hate-reading her mentions after she tweeted something mean at Ivanka Trump, and then it just goes on from there.</p> <p>Second, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Ffake-accounts-9781948226929%2F9781948226929&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/fake-accounts-9781948226929/9781948226929","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>Fake Accounts</em></a> by Lauren Oyler is about a woman who learns her boyfriend is an infamous Instagram conspiracy theorist. It starts off in January 2017, right as Donald Trump is taking office and the polite, progressive New York media is aghast at the online disinformation mill, and the narrator finds herself caught between enjoying condemning her boyfriend, whom she’s been thinking about dumping anyway, and relationship inertia. Oyler is an extremely talented and insightful literary critic (way meaner than I am, if you want to expand your critical reading list), and a lot of this book is a critique of both contemporary literary fiction and of the way we’re taught to think and speak by the larger media ecosystem.</p> <p>Finally, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fno-one-is-talking-about-this%2F9780593189580&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fculture%2F22358382%2Fask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://bookshop.org/books/no-one-is-talking-about-this/9780593189580","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer","xcust":"___vx__p_22122423__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'><em>No One Is Talking About This</em></a>, by the poet Patricia Lockwood, aims to be a stream-of-communal-consciousness novel in which the consciousness is Twitter. The plot is hard to describe because so much of the experience of this book is about the language, but know that it is astonishingly good and beautiful and overwhelming, and it resolves into this very lovely, very tender place at the end.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p><em>If you’d like me to recommend a book for you, email me at constance.grady@vox.com with the subject line “Ask a Book Critic.” The more specific your mood, the better!</em></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer">https://www.vox.com/culture/22358382/ask-a-book-critic-parable-of-the-sower-canticle-for-leibowitz-ada-palmer</a>

vox Ask a book critic: The history of the end of the world

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic , in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to...

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UK Adds Pakistan, 3 Other Nations To "Red List" Amid Rise In Covid Cases

<div class="ins_instory_dv"> <div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="UK Adds Pakistan, 3 Other Nations To 'Red List' Amid Rise In Covid Cases" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2020-04/4ed5sghg_uk-flag-650_625x300_29_April_20.jpg" title="UK Adds Pakistan, 3 Other Nations To 'Red List' Amid Rise In Covid Cases" /></div> <p class="ins_instory_dv_caption sp_b">There have been calls for inclusion of some European countries too where Covid cases have surged.</p> </div> <b class="place_cont">London:</b> <p>Britain said on Friday it would add Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan and the Philippines to its travel "red list", banning entry to people arriving from those countries unless they are British or Irish nationals.</p> <p>Those who come to Britain from countries on the red list will be refused entry, while returning Britons must submit to 10 days of mandatory quarantine in hotels.</p> <p>From 4 AM on April 9, Pakistan, Kenya, the Philippines and Bangladesh will be put on the list, the government said, joining about three dozen other nations mainly in Africa, the Middle East and South America.</p> <p>There have been calls for the inclusion of some European countries where COVID-19 cases have surged, but the government has said it currently has no plans to do so.</p> <p><i>(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)</i></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/uk-adds-bangladesh-kenya-pakistan-philippines-to-travel-red-list-amid-rise-in-covid-19-cases-2404817">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/uk-adds-bangladesh-kenya-pakistan-philippines-to-travel-red-list-amid-rise-in-covid-19-cases-2404817</a>

news world UK Adds Pakistan, 3 Other Nations To "Red List" Amid Rise In Covid Cases

There have been calls for inclusion of some European countries too where Covid cases have surged. London: Britain said on Friday it wou...

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