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There’s been quite a bit of news about COVID-19 booster shots lately, and it’s been more confusing than reassuring. Public health officials don’t agree on whether everyone needs a booster yet, and in the same way that the vaccines were rolled out to different groups of people one category at a time as government agencies reviewed studies to make sure they were safe and effective, boosters are being doled out to certain people first. Here’s where we stand for now. If the vaccines work, why do I need a booster? The three vaccines that are currently available in the U.S.—from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson-Janssen—are still highly effective in protecting you from getting COVID-19 disease. They are slightly less effective in protecting you from getting infected with the virus in the first place, but people who are vaccinated still have a five times lower rate of infection with SARS-CoV-2 than people who aren’t vaccinated, and a more than 10-fold rate of hospit...

There are some actors so intense, their nerve endings sizzling so close to the surface, that they can make you want to look away. That’s Jake Gyllenhaal , as a disgraced Los Angeles police detective demoted to 911 dispatcher, in Antoine Fuqua’s stripped-down cop drama The Guilty. The film is opening in select theaters and will be available on Netflix on Oct. 1 as well, though Gyllenhaal’s performance is a test of what we look for in, and take away from, those two modes of watching . Viewing at home, you can take a break if the intensity of Gyllenhaal’s performance becomes too much. But the big-screen effect would surely be different: you may want to look away from Gyllenhaal, a jittery hypnotist, but it’s doubtful you’ll be able. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] On the eve of his trial for a crime whose nature is only hinted at (though we can guess), Gyllenhaal’s Joe Baylor receives an emergency call that sets off every sensor. The woman on the line, her voice vibrating w...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Sept. 27 release of its annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR) confirmed what many expected: the number of murders rose in 2020 across the U.S. According to the FBI’s data, the percentage of homicides increased 29% from 2019 to 2020. This was the largest single-year increase in murders since the Bureau began tracking such statistics in the 1960s. Across the country, the homicide rate rose from 5.1% (per 100,000 people) to 6.5%. Overall, violent crime was up 5.6%. Property crimes dropped by 7.8%, however, and the number of robberies and burglaries reported also declined. And earlier this month, the FBI also released its annual hate crime data, which was at the highest level it’s been in 12 years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The immediate response from some law enforcement advocates was to present the data as justification for increased policing amid an increasingly contentious climate as related to police reform; negotiations in Co...

As the full implications of Texas’s severe abortion law come into view, experts on reproductive rights are justifiably concerned about a potential increase in unsafe abortions. And while the specter of coat hangers may seem anachronistic in an era where medication abortions can be safely self-managed at home , we know that some women who lack access to health care will take desperate measures to avoid the physical, psychological, emotional, social and economic trauma of being compelled to gestate and give birth against their wishes. But others will not be able to avoid it, and that means women being forced to continue carrying unwanted pregnancies to term. We’ve been here before, of course—most recently in the decades from 1945 to 1973, now known as the “Baby Scoop” era, when more than 1.5 million pregnant girls and women in the U.S. were sent away to maternity homes to surrender children in secret. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] By the 1960s, more than 200 homes for ...

In the past 11 years alone, Haitians have suffered natural disasters, rising gang violence, outbreaks of cholera and COVID-19, and political instability, including the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse . The crises left many in the hemisphere’s poorest nation feeling they had no option but to leave—despite the difficulties they face in fleeing to other countries. In late September, Americans were confronted with the reality of those difficulties too. An estimated 15,000 people arrived in Del Rio, Texas, during the month, below a bridge connecting the city to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña. A majority were Haitian nationals, migrants and asylum seekers who ended up living in tents or under tarps, in conditions similar to those in other camps that have formed along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read more: Caught Between U.S. Policies and Instability at Home, Haitian Migrants in Tijuana Are in a State of Limbo On Sept. 24, Depa...

A month into New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s term, Andrew Cuomo has become a ghost. Almost nobody in the governor’s office mentions his name. In a recent hour-long interview, Hochul called him only “this past governor,” when she referred to him at all. When I asked about a model of a ship on display in her New York City office, a staffer informed me that it was “a him thing.” Until August, most of New York politics had been a “him thing.” The Empire State is usually dominated by wannabe emperors, men with massive egos like Cuomo or Eliot Spitzer. The state that birthed the women’s suffrage movement has never elected a woman as governor, or mayor of New York City. Even though she served for six years as Cuomo’s lieutenant, Hochul—a trim 63-year-old Irish Catholic with a voice like Caroline Kennedy and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Buffalo Bills—is in many ways an accidental governor. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] She found out she was getting the job the same way...

When health experts talk about the remarkable efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines , they typically point to their ability to prevent severe disease and death. Fully vaccinated people can still get “breakthrough” infections from the virus that causes COVID-19—but compared to an unvaccinated person, they’re more than 10 times less likely to be hospitalized or die from their illness, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) research . Officials often point to these impressive figures as evidence that we can tame COVID-19 into a mostly mild illness that behaves like a routine cold or flu, and thus with which we can coexist . After all, the vaccines were not designed to quash viral spread entirely; they were designed to defang the virus by preventing its worst outcomes. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But people like April Zaleski know COVID-19’s worst outcomes aren’t limited to severe disease and death, even for the fully vaccinated. Zaleski, a 32-year-old ...