Peter Coy | I Got to the Bottom of All Those Flight Cancellations – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“The rash of flight cancellations over the winter break — is it a major blunder by the airlines or the forgivable consequence of the outbreak of Omicron? I looked into this over the past couple of days and my conclusion is that it’s a little of each.

First, the case against the airlines. They’re running with a precariously low ratio of employees to passengers, leaving themselves vulnerable to surprises like Omicron, the more contagious new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, which drastically thinned the ranks of flight crews.

This fall, some airline executives even bragged to Wall Street analysts about how they were able to do more with less — providing more flights per employee. “We estimate that we can fly a schedule 10 percent larger than 2019 with the same number of employees we needed in 2019,” Gerald Laderman, the chief financial officer of United Airlines Holdings, told analysts on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 20.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

Thank you Peter Coy, this was interesting. The comments are not pleased that you point out the airlines viewpoint, but it seems clear, few saw the success of omicron coming. I do often hate the way I feel mistreated when I fly, so I enjoyed the anger your piece stirred up. FYI, we watched a show on PBS called, Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops, narrated by Richard Gere, a series of five short films featuring 12 world-renowned climate scientists, that was made in January 2021. It explains very well the feedback loops that are approaching tipping points, and there are more than I knew about, and this is my beat. I recommend this 58 minute film to everyone. It looks bad for humans. We should probably think seriously about flying around a lot less on carbon based fuels.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Opinion | Joe Biden Can’t Save Roe v. Wade Alone. But He Can Do This. – The New York Times

By David S. Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel Rebouché

Mr. Cohen, Ms. Donley and Ms. Rebouché are law professors with expertise in reproductive health.

“The constitutional right to abortion has never been more fragile than it is heading into 2022. The Supreme Court has allowed S.B. 8, Texas’ drastic — and clearly unconstitutional — ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, to remain in place for months, making Roe v. Wade virtually a dead letter in the state. Even worse, a Supreme Court decision that’s expected this summer is likely to either gut Roe or overturn the precedent altogether, paving the way for total abortion bans in about half the states around the country.

If the high court refuses to uphold abortion rights for all Americans and with Congress hopelessly stalemated over legislation that would codify a federal right to abortion, the Biden administration can and should act boldly to protect abortion access. But it will require some outside-the-box thinking — and a willingness to experiment with tactics that may well fail. If President Biden supports abortion as a critical right, as he has suggested, then he and his administration must take risks and get creative in pursuit of that goal. The anti-abortion movement has repeatedly pushed the envelope without fear of defeat. It’s time for activists and politicians who support abortion rights to do the same.”

Linda Greenhouse | Do We Have the Supreme Court We Deserve? – The New York Times

“When I left the daily Supreme Court beat back in 2008, the Week in Review, as The Times’s Sunday Review section was then called, invited me to offer some reflections on nearly 30 years of writing about the court, its cases and its members. The long essay ran under the headline “2,691 Decisions,” a number based on an editor’s calculation of how many decisions the court had issued during my time on the beat. I ended it with an observation about the “vital dialogue” between the court and the country. This was my conclusion:

“The court is in Americans’ collective hands. We shape it; it reflects us. At any given time, we may not have the Supreme Court we want. We may not have the court we need. But we have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve.”

A friend who recently came upon that article challenged me. “Do you still think we have the Supreme Court we deserve?” she asked.

Actually, sadly, my answer now is no.

It’s not that I think the country simply deserves a Supreme Court that happens to agree with me; I was finding plenty to disagree with back in 2008. Justice Samuel Alito had taken Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s place in early 2006, wrenching the closely divided court to the right. In June 2007, Justice Stephen Breyer, during an impassioned oral dissent in a highly charged case on what measures public school systems can take to maintain racial diversity, lamented that “it is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” “

Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla’s Ambitions? – The New York Times

By Hannah Beech

Photographs by Adam Dean

Dec. 30, 2021

“GORO, New Caledonia — From the reef-fringed coast of New Caledonia, the Coral Sea stretches into the South Pacific. Slender native pines, listing like whimsical Christmas trees, punctuate the shoreline. The landscape, one of the most biodiverse on the planet, is astonishingly beautiful until the crest of a hill where a different vista unfolds: a gouged red earth pierced by belching smokestacks and giant trucks rumbling across the lunar-like terrain.

This is Goro, the largest nickel mine on a tiny French territory suspended between Australia and Fiji that may hold up to a quarter of the world’s nickel reserves. It also poses a critical test for Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, which wants to take control of its supply chain and ensure that the minerals used for its car batteries are mined in an environmentally and socially responsible fashion.

Tesla’s strategy, the largest effort by a Western electric vehicle maker to directly source minerals, could serve as a model for a green industry confronting an uncomfortable paradox. While consumers are attracted to electric vehicles for their clean reputation, the process of harvesting essential ingredients like nickel is dirty, destructive and often politically fraught.

Because of its nickel industry, New Caledonia is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters per capita. And mining, which began soon after New Caledonia was colonized in 1853, is intimately linked to the exploitation of its Indigenous Kanak people. The legacy of more than a century of stolen land and crushed traditions has left Goro’s nickel output at the mercy of frequent labor strikes and political protests.”

Lori Teresa Yearwood | The Bill for My Homelessness Was $54,000 – The New York Times

By Lori Teresa Yearwood

Ms. Yearwood is a reporter covering housing for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

“My descent into homelessness felt as though it happened in the blink of an eye. It was as if one moment I was standing in a meadow next to my horses, stroking their manes, and the next I was lying inside a plastic garbage bag on a park bench, wrapping clothes around my shivering body.

In fact, it happened over the course of 12 devastating months from 2013 to 2014. The house I was renting in Oregon burned down. My mother died of a cancer that, until a short time earlier, no one knew she had. My family fell into a bitter dispute over her inheritance and ostracized me. My beagle died. I was emotionally burdened to the point of being unable to run the business I had owned for nearly a decade, let alone pay my rent. Eventually, I was told to pack my bags and leave the new place I had rented after the fire.

My journey into homelessness was traumatic, but it was also incredibly expensive, and that’s what I want to focus on here. By the time I walked away from that park bench two years later, I had accrued more than $54,000 in debt.”

Readers Pick the Best Book of the Past 125 Years – The New York Times

In October, as we marked the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we invited readers to nominate the best book published during that time. This was a nod to our history: In its first few decades, the Book Review often asked readers to anoint the best books, the best short stories, the best poems. We wanted this project, like those early ones, to reflect readers’ tastes and preferences.

Responses began pouring in from all 50 states and 67 countries. In November, we presented a list of the 25 most-nominated books (one per author) for a vote. After tallying more than 200,000 ballots, the winner, by a narrow margin, is …

THE WINNER

To Kill a Mockingbird

By Harper Lee

“I grew up in a small, insular, white, Protestant town in the West, and this book first exposed me to the cruelty of racism. I do believe it changed my life and made me a person who cares about social justice. Plus, it is beautifully written with characters I have loved my whole life. I always wanted to be Scout.”

Nancy Foxley, Fort Collins, Colo.

“I am 52. I grew up in public housing, on welfare, parented by angry, erratic alcoholics, with little guidance and even less continuity. Atticus, Jem, Scout, Calpurnia and Dill taught me everything I needed to know about life, love, friendship and honor. These lessons reverberated throughout my life and I truly believe that my path would have been very different without them.”

Corina Jensen, Stanhope, N.J.

“Each time I read it with my students, I find in the author’s words something brilliant and entirely new to discuss with my classes. ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’”

Ronnie Madanick, Dade County, Fla.

“I grew up in a small, insular, white, Protestant town in the West, and this book first exposed me to the cruelty of racism. I do believe it changed my life and made me a person who cares about social justice. Plus, it is beautifully written with characters I have loved my whole life. I always wanted to be Scout.”

Nancy Foxley, Fort Collins, Colo.

“I am 52. I grew up in public housing, on welfare, parented by angry, erratic alcoholics, with little guidance and even less continuity. Atticus, Jem, Scout, Calpurnia and Dill taught me everything I needed to know about life, love, friendship and honor. These lessons reverberated throughout my life and I truly believe that my path would have been very different without them.”

Corina Jensen, Stanhope, N.J.

Our critic reconsiders “To Kill a Mockingbird”

When you revisit in adulthood a book that you last read in childhood, you will likely experience two broad categories of observation: “Oh yeah, I remember this part,” and “Whoa, I never noticed that part.” That’s what I expected when I picked up “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was voted the best book of the past 125 years by readers in a recent New York Times poll. Two decades had passed since I’d absorbed Harper Lee’s 1960 novel. And yes, there was a huge amount I’d missed on my first time through, ranging from major themes (the prevalence of child abuse) to minor details (unfamiliar words, like “flivver”).

Inexcusable lapses in reading comprehension also surfaced, such as the fact that I hadn’t realized Mrs. Dubose — the cranky neighborhood villain — was a morphine addict. (“Mrs. Dubose is a morphine addict,” Atticus states in the book. In my defense … well, I have no defense.) As an adult, I can perceive why the novel might hold enduring appeal for many and enduring repulsion to perhaps just as many. I cannot fathom the complexities of teaching it to elementary school students in 2021, especially after reading online accounts from teachers on both the “pro” and “against” sides.

Read more

THE RUNNERS-UP

2. The Fellowship of the RingBy J.R.R. Tolkien

“The depth of lore for an imagined world and the story of friendship that it accompanies lay the foundation for the rest of the fantasy genre that would follow. Yet few stories live up to the standards set by Tolkien.”Owen Clarke, Provo, Utah

3. 1984By George Orwell

“It still resonates with us up to this day, around 70 years after it was written. Its warning against the excesses of human pride and hunger for power and its challenge to use our love of freedom to guard against these problems are timeless and universal.”Kathlynn Rebonquin, Mandaluyong City, Philippines

4. One Hundred Years of SolitudeBy Gabriel García Márquez

“As a piece of literature, it was an earthquake moment, shattering the expectations of a typical realist novel and spawning influences in authors and works from Japan to India and beyond. Out of all the works to have emerged in the last 125 years, none has created a ripple effect, or changed the landscape of literature, as much as this has.”Rizowana Hussaini, Guwahati, India

5. BelovedBy Toni Morrison

“It’s not a bump in the night, subtle haunting. It’s loud and sick. There are images and emotions from ‘Beloved’ that are stuck in my mind now permanently. This ghost story has taught me more about the legacy of slavery than history books ever did.”Brontë Mansfield, Chicago, Ill.

THE NOMINATIONS

The story of the nominations we received is not consensus, but diversity — not just in the sheer number of books that readers nominated, but in the ways that they interpreted what “best book” meant. Of the more than 1,300 books nominated, 65 percent were nominated by only one person. And only 31 percent nominated a book that made it to our list of 25 finalists. Here are some titles that speak to the breadth of readers’ choices.

• Science Fiction

  Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

  “A bone-chillingly beautiful and heartbreaking tale of exactly what could happen if we don’t take steps now as a society to address social inequalities and the climate crisis.”

  Courtney Daron, Anaheim, Calif.

• Nonfiction

  The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

  “A beautifully written, sweeping history of the past century in America. Never heavy-handed, Wilkerson’s storytelling places real people in real places, making it possible for any reader to grasp the various impacts of inequality and inequities that still plague America.”

  Patricia Methe, Cincinnati, Ohio

Opinion | Poland Could Be the Future of Europe – The New York Times

By Karolina Wigura and Jaroslaw Kuisz

Ms. Wigura is a sociologist and historian of ideas. Mr. Kuisz is a political analyst who is writing a book about Poland’s illiberal turn.

“WARSAW — Not long ago, Poland was seen as the most successful example of democratic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, a leader in European integration. It was enjoying, as the longtime European commissioner Gunter Verheugen wrote, a “new golden age.”

Today, the country is again ahead of others. Only this time, it’s in the vanguard of European disintegration and democratic dismantling. The government, led by the Law and Justice Party, has picked fights with the European Union, co-opted the courts, created legislation designed to muzzle independent media and taken a hard-line approach to women’s rights.

What happened? The answer, at least in part, lies in the past. Deprived statehood for centuries and overseen by external powers, Poland possesses a traumatic, nervous sense of itself. The current government has tried to channel that anxiety, inveighing against migrants, Brussels and liberals to create a fortress mentality. Despite occasional setbacks, such as the president’s decision to veto a controversial media bill, it has succeeded.”

Mike Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty. – The New York Times

By Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni

Published Jan. 12, 2021Updated Jan. 13, 2021

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WASHINGTON — For Vice President Mike Pence, the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and 11 months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Trump’s ego, after all the tongue-biting, pride-swallowing moments where he employed strategic silence or florid flattery to stay in his boss’s good graces, there he was being cursed by the president.

Mr. Trump was enraged that Mr. Pence was refusing to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed relentlessly, alternately cajoling and browbeating him. Finally, just before Mr. Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count last Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the vice president’s residence to push one last time.

“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told him, according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

Aaron Carroll | Here’s What the CDC Got Wrong With its New Covid-19 Guidelines – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/opinion/covid-isolation-guidelines.html

“. . . The recommendations also changed for quarantine, which is what uninfected people do if they are exposed. If they are boostered appropriately, they need only be careful for the next 10 days (i.e., wear a mask when around others). If they are unvaccinated, or in need of a booster, they now need only quarantine for five days if they never become symptomatic, and then be careful the next five. The recommendations also say that if for such people — even if unvaccinated — a quarantine “is not feasible,” they can just mask for 10 days. (The C.D.C. also recommends if possible getting tested five days after the exposure, whether or not you are vaccinated and boostered.)

These numbers are mostly averages — sometimes best guesses — as to how people respond when exposed or infected. They’re also pretty much equally applied to the fully vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, as if those two populations are the same.

This is puzzling. Covid itself hasn’t changed that much for those who are unvaccinated. If they get infected, there’s no reason to believe they shouldn’t still follow the original guidelines and isolate for 10 days. This is a very infectious disease, and they are at risk not only to themselves, but also to those around them. Hospitals are still full of unvaccinated people, and nothing had led us to believe that the danger is gone for them.

On the other hand, vaccinated people, especially boostered people, are at very low risk for bad outcomes, less likely to get infected if exposed and less likely to be infectious for longer periods of time.

It seems as if even at this late date, the C.D.C. is trying to appease everyone, and therefore pleasing no one.”  . . .

David Axelrod | It’s Not Over for Joe Biden – The New York Times

“You can’t always get what you want, so get what you can:

In 2010, some voices on the left vigorously argued that an A.C.A. without a government-run option to compete with private insurers was not worth passing. Yet some Senate Democrats resisted the public option, so Mr. Obama passed the law he could, convinced it would still do enormous good.

For months, Mr. Biden has been trying to balance the expansive social and climate agendas of progressives with the reticence of Mr. Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and other moderate Democrats.

Mr. Biden and congressional leaders tried to thread the needle by halving the size of his Build Back Better proposal while including pieces of as many of his original plans as possible, funded in shorter increments. The theory was that the popularity of these programs would compel future Congresses to continue them.” . . .

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

I agree with David Axelrod. I am sorry that the climate mitigation part is not mentioned as savable, and I’m curious. Is it still on the table? Manchin has said he would support it in a smaller bill, while his critics say he is lying, because of his steadfast support of coal, oil and gas interests, millionaires and billionaires. Can someone enlighten me on this question?