10 Sunday Reads
Avert your eyes! My
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The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can). (The Atlantic)
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Which world leader has the worst pandemic record? The competition is fierce Populism seems to be a comorbidity in a pandemic, raising its deadly toll. It’s impossible to cover all the outrages by populist demagogues and assorted tyrants. Every world leader made mistakes, but there’s something uniquely malignant about the manipulations and deceptions of the most outrageous players.(Washingt