• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

FOR THOSE OF us who have been following every possible safety measure—washing our hands until our skin starts to crack, sewing T-shirts into face coverings, redirecting our neighborhood walks as soon we see someone approaching a block away, thereby confusing the hell out of our dogs—scenes of anti-quarantine protests on the news have been surreal. It’s still unclear how grassroots this movement really is; reporting suggests that the largest Facebook groups protesting shelter-in-place restrictions are run by a family of pro-gun activists known for their coordinated manipulation efforts. But whether they’re astroturfed a little or a lot, real protests have been taking place, often with great cinematic eeriness. It makes sense that we—we journalists, we influencers, we everyday citizens—would want to get to the bottom of what’s happening, and feel compelled to express our disgust and concern and despair.

In The News

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Republicans say they're less afraid of Covid-19 than Democrats, and new research based on cell phone data shows they're acting like it, too. The pandemic has played out differently in red and blue America from the start. In early March, polling data showed a wide gulf between how seriously Democrats and Republicans took the threat. Trump had been downplaying the severity of the outbreak for weeks, and his boosters at Fox News were pushing the same message. That appeared to explain the divergence in public opinion, but the role of geography couldn’t be ruled out. The disease began its assault on American soil in some of the most Democratic areas of the country: Seattle, New York City, San Francisco. The partisan divide in perceived risk could have been nothing more than a reflection of the partisan divide in people’s actual risk.

In The News

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Mueller is done and Rosenstein is on his way out the door, but federal and state authorities around the country are still investigating the president and those in his orbit.

In The News

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

LIKE MANY REPORTERS and editors in DC or New York, I have been yelled at by Michael Cohen. It's been almost a rite of passage for anyone writing about Donald Trump over the past decade. There was no bone too small for his long-time lawyer and fixer to pick when it came to published criticisms of the real estate developer. My turn came in June 2012, when he called to yell at me over an item the magazine I then edited had written about Trump's forthcoming hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. He had no real specific complaint or factual dispute. He just didn't like the criticism leveled at Trump by the competitors on the hotel bid, who wondered how he’d ever command the rates the hotel would need to survive. It was probably one of the top three eviscerations I’ve faced in my professional life. When he was done with his initial yelling, about 45 minutes in, Cohen conferenced in Ivanka, who wanted to argue about just how much care and quality her father would bring to this historic project in the Old Post Office Pavilion. The whole episode sucked up about two hours start to finish.

In The News

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared an altered video of a press briefing with Donald Trump, in which CNN reporter Jim Acosta's hand makes brief contact with the arm of a White House Intern. The clip is of low quality and edited to dramatize the original footage; it's presented out of context, without sound, at slow speed with a close-crop zoom, and contains additional frames that appear to emphasize Acosta's contact with the intern. And yet, in spite of the clip's dubious provenance, the White House decided to not only share the video but cite it as grounds for revoking Acosta's press pass. "[We will] never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern," Sanders said. But the consensus, among anyone inclined to look closely, has been clear: The events described in Sanders' tweet simply did not happen. This is just the latest example of misinformation roiling our media ecosystem. The fact that it continues to not only crop up but spread—at times faster and more widely than legitimate, factual news—is enough to make anyone wonder: How on Earth do people fall for this schlock? To put it bluntly, they might not be thinking hard enough. The technical term for this is "reduced engagement of open-minded and analytical thinking." David Rand—a behavioral scientist at MIT who studies fake news on social media, who falls for it, and why—has another name for it: "It's just mental laziness," he says.

In The News