With all indoor activities still closed, Monica and I took off on a 4 borough bike ride. Started in midtown Manhattan and went down to Tribeca before heading to the Lower East Side for breakfast. From there we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and went for coffee in Greenpoint. Over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens and then the 59th Street Bridge (this will always be the name) back into Manhattan. Headed north for lunch in the Upper East Side. Outdoor dining is back and an Irish pub was the perfect stop. Next we kept heading north and crossed the pedestrian bridge onto Randalls and Wards Islands before heading into the Bronx via the Triborough Bridge (again this will always be the name). Our final destination was the Bronx Brewery which has a backyard open.
Images of NYC Coming out of COVID-19
Apple Going ARM
This will be the first time in the 36-year history of the Mac that Apple-designed processors will power these machines. It has changed chips only two other times. In the early 1990s, Apple switched from Motorola processors to PowerPC. At WWDC in 2005, Steve Jobs announced a move from PowerPC to Intel, and Apple rolled out those first Intel-based Macs in January 2006. Like it did then, the company plans to eventually transition the entire Mac lineup to its Arm-based processors, including the priciest desktop computers, the people said.
Apple has had the best processors for consumer facing products for years, so this is a long time coming. There will be some issues, and one that came to mind was running Windows in a virtualized space or Bootcamp. However, the need most had to run Windows is lessening as more and more and services have moved some their offerings to the cloud while being accessible in the browser. There will always be outliers on the margins, but any pressure on Intel is a good thing at this point.
Always Read Margaret Sullivan
That argument can be dismantled in a nanosecond. Should the denialist views of, say, Alex Jones of Infowars on the Sandy Hook massacre be given a prestigious platform, too? But Cotton is a prominent political figure, you say? By that logic, the lies of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway should be welcomed on news-discussion shows daily because she’s close to the president.
Perhaps a more useful way to think about many of these tough issues is to consider the role of journalism in democratic society: to dig out and present the information that helps citizens hold their elected officials accountable.
What if we framed coverage with this question at the forefront: What journalism best serves the real interests of American citizens?
So many in the press have become nothing more than stenographers for those in power, and as this piece points out that has to change.
Perfect Use of Tik-Tok
Open the Gyms Now, Really?
Eight instructors at the Feb. 15 meeting had the coronavirus but they hadn’t known yet — they were asymptomatic.
Over the course of the next 24 days, by March 9, the virus spread across fitness classes to 112 participants, according to the research team at Dankook University Hospital.
The Newsletters Chosen for my Inbox
It seems that every media outlet, company, and person on the internet has a newsletter now. For a while I signed up for so many that I ended up reading none. Now I have paired down what reaches my inbox, and it feels like a perfect balance. Here are the newsletters that I find are must read.
The Daily Book – New York Times
Theatre Update – New York Times
Stop Using Third Party E-Mail Apps
Several users of popular email app Edison Mail this morning are reporting that they are able to see email accounts of other users within the iOS app. In what appears to be a major privacy breach, users report that after enabling a new sync feature, they have full access to these other email accounts.
Popular e-mail apps like Spark, Newton, and Edison all require access to your data to implement the features they advertise. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s really not needed. Use the default e-mail apps or the apps provided by your e-mail provider. So GMail app for Google users, Outlook if you host on Microsoft (no do not use for Gmail), or your built in app that comes with your machine. That is the list. Most corporations will block third party apps for good reason, but you should follow that same practice for your personal e-mail as well.
Incompetence Leads to Excess Death
By suddenly halting travel from Europe, the Trump administration ignored a timeless lesson of human migration: slamming borders shut usually has the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than ending cross-border movement, sudden immigration bans or caps create large and often unmanageable rushes of people hoping to make it across the border before it is too late. These surges occur immediately after bans are announced, when returning travelers rush to meet real or imagined deadlines, and often in the days and weeks beforehand, in anticipation of expected announcements. And when some of the people rushing to cross the border are carrying a potentially deadly virus, the result can be catastrophic.
The US government has screwed up every bit of the response, and the worst part instead of learning and adjusting they have doubled down on the crazy.
A History of Pandemics and Institutional Racism
In the United States, that pandemic did nothing to blunt structural racism. “The 1918 pandemic revealed the racial inequalities and fault lines in health care,” Gamble says. At the time, black doctors and nurses hoped it would prompt improvements. “But nothing changed. After the pandemic there were no major public health efforts to address the health care of African Americans.”
An unreal and sobering read that goes into detail on the history of pandemics.