Newsweek 1/29-2/5/2021

1972 Newsweek wrote that “what President Nixon needs to win re-election, an aide says, is not so much an economic boom as ‘arguable prosperity’—and his success or failure in achieving it promises to be the central issue of the fall campaign.” The economy regained strength throughout that year, and Nixon won reelection in a landslide. In President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, economic woes also played a prominent role. COVID-19 led to financial turmoil and turned a record-low unemployment rate of 3.5 percent in February 2020 into 14.7 percent only two months later. 1960 “This striking electron micrograph shows the influenza virus, Type B, magnified 40,000 times,” said Newsweek, showing the “spectacular dispersion and activity of the vicious virus.” In December, the WHO identified two new, more contagious strains of COVID-19, discovered in the…

PRIVATE COMPANIES CAN CHOOSE WHAT TO OFFER THEIR CUSTOMERS by Froma Harrop SO, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HAS been booted off Twitter, as of now forever. Facebook also gave him the heave-ho. Apple and Google, meanwhile, have tossed the riot-friendly Parler app out of their stores. Parler became a social media cave for the Trump-inspired looters, vandals, cop killers and other social misfits who rampaged through the Capitol. But Amazon may have delivered the harshest blow by refusing to store Parler’s data in its cloud-computing service. Having lost the presidency, the Senate majority and now major platforms for disseminating lies and calls to violence, Trump World, or what’s left of it, automatically shifted into self-pitying snowflake mode. With quivering voices, its members accused the tech companies of censorship. When Simon & Schuster announced it would not…

IF THE COVID-19 VACCINE IS TO liberate us, we urgently need new ways to deliver it. Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) recently proposed enlisting retired medical professionals. Just a few days later, University of Massachusetts leaders Dr. Michael Collins and Martin Meehan, formerly a seven-term Democratic Congressman, called for a “Vaccine Corps” made up of college students and recent graduates. Both are great ideas. Even better: Let’s combine them, bring retired health care workers and young adults together, and create an intergenerational service corps that can quickly and efficiently vaccinate millions of Americans. Bringing the two generations together combines the different life experiences and skills of both, making for a powerful pairing. Retired doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists could provide the shots and monitor patients for reactions. Young adults, as Collins and Meehan…

ACCORDING TO THE BUREAU OF Labor Statistics year-end report, 2020 ended with 9.8 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic and an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent—much improved from the all-time high of 14.7 percent in April, but a still worrying number with new strains of COVID-19 popping up and the pandemic continuing to wreak havoc on the economy. Four-time Pulitzer Prize-nominee and best-selling author Fawn Germer tackles strategies for getting back to work after a job loss or work gap and renewing your career in her new book, Coming Back: How to Win the Job You Want When You’ve Lost the Job You Need (St. Martin’s Press, January). At a time when employment is precarious for so many, Germer’s practical advice for staying relevant is welcome. In this excerpt,…

If you’ve been fired or furloughed, what’s the first thing to do? Get mad. Get sad. Feel it. Then, make a to-do list, starting with checking in with your network and updating your resume and LinkedIn profile. Keep adding to your list so you always have one more thing to do and never lose momentum. Do something every day to move yourself closer to your goal. What’s the most important thing to highlight on a resume or in an interview? That you have independently added the new skills and education that make you current and relevant. Companies care more about what you are going to do in the future than what you did 20 years ago. So, show that you are insatiably curious and innovative. You can take classes from the most esteemed…

THE DAY BEFORE PHOTOGRAPHER Nick Ut was scheduled to receive the Medal of Arts from Donald Trump, another famous soon-to-be medal recipient publicly declined the honor: Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots and longtime friend of the president. Belichick, who was scheduled to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom the same week that Ut was to be honored, cited the “tragic events” of the Capitol riot as his reason for turning down the award. Ut, however, was undeterred. Born in Vietnam and a photographer for AP for more than 50 years until his retirement in 2017, Ut saw the medal ceremony as a highly personal, not political, moment and a capstone to his long and storied career. While he is most famous for his Pulitzer-Prize winning photo of…