Hello and happy Friday! Some of you might have noticed that this correspondence skipped a week. The reason for that is simple: I didn’t have any new stories to share with you and, perhaps more significantly, by the end of the day I was too exhausted to write it. Like a lot of folks, I’ve recently become well acquainted with the pandemic wall: that feeling of total burnout and fatigue from the endless news, stress, and isolation of this past year.
If this sounds familiar to you, I can assure you that you’re not alone. As it turns out, we’re all exhausted and this feeling is perfectly normal. Some things I’ve committed to doing to help myself scale the wall—or, at the very least, prevent myself from running into it head first—is to get more fresh air, to go on semi-frequent runs, and to set aside some time for things that do not involve a screen (reading, journaling, etc.) If you have any strategies that work for you, please share!
In podcast news: I made my debut on The Bunker’s Start Your Week podcast! There’s nothing in it that you probably haven’t heard about by this point, but tune in if you want to hear my decaffeinated-self run through the news of the week.
What I’ve written
When it comes to the pandemic, a lot has changed under Joe Biden: The United States rejoined the World Health Organization, imposed a mask mandate, and signed up to COVAX, the international initiative aimed at equalizing vaccine distribution around the world.
One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is its vaccine nationalism: Like most other wealthy countries, the U.S. is predominantly focused on reserving the lion’s share of available doses for itself. High-income countries have secured nearly 60 percent of the 7.2 billion vaccine doses purchased so far, despite representing just 16 percent of the global population. And while they spar over who gets doses first (I’m looking at you, EU), many of the poorest countries around the world haven’t received any at all.
There is nothing wrong with governments wanting to put their own populations first. But doing so won’t shield them from the coronavirus, nor will it aid global economic recovery. The new COVID-19 variants from Brazil, Britain, and South Africa prove that uncontrolled outbreaks anywhere can threaten the safety of people everywhere—including countries that are widely vaccinated. I explain why and what wealthy countries can do about it
India’s farmers’ protest has attracted a lot of attention this week—most notably from Rihanna and Greta Thunberg—so I thought I’d re-up my piece from December about what brought on the demonstrations and why the Indian government’s efforts to dismiss those participating in them as “anti-national” are falling flat. Read all about it here
What I’ve read
This essential long read from The New Yorker on the race to dismantle Trump’s immigration policies:
As Hannah Flamm dug into the case of Maria, the fourteen-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras, she realized how many Trump-era changes had affected the girl’s life. I tallied at least half a dozen, upon reviewing hundreds of pages of legal records. “If Maria had reached the border before Trump came to office, there’s no question she’d be an asylee today,” Flamm told me. “She’d be a high schooler with legal status. And she would never have been separated from her mother.”
This fascinating piece from The New York Times on our most underrated sense (and how the pandemic is changing our perception of it):
Smell is a startling superpower. You can walk through someone’s front door and instantly know that she recently made popcorn. Drive down the street and somehow sense that the neighbors are barbecuing. Intuit, just as a side effect of breathing a bit of air, that this sweater has been worn but that one hasn’t, that it’s going to start raining soon, that the grass was trimmed a few hours back. If you weren’t used to it, it would seem like witchcraft.
Ben Smith’s latest column on the media’s fraught relationship with Twitter (I, for one, agree with Emily):
Newsrooms themselves are struggling to determine their own identities in a polarized nation and a subscription economy. And many of the battles over Twitter are really battles over journalism itself, and over whose perspective and judgment is central in an era when the country and the industry are wrestling with big questions of race and gender and power.
What I’m thinking about
How nothing—not even a coup—should interrupt a good workout. Just ask this PE teacher in Myanmar. (And yes, it’s real.)
Until next time,
Yasmeen
P.S. The Atlantic and WNYC have teamed up to bring us all a new weekly podcast called The Experiment! The first episode is out now—give it a listen on your favorite podcast app.