Syndicated columns

COVID-19 is now endemic, meaning the coronavirus is here to stay and health officials must pivot from treating it like a one-time emergency to managing the disease in perpetuity. The same must be true of long COVID.

In the U.S., the average woman spends so much more time on chores than the average man that to equalize the load, women would have to quit the housework entirely on Sept. 5 for the remainder of the year. And that represents progress: The gender gap in chores narrowed a bit from last year, when women would have had to quit on Aug. 29, a day I dubbed “Equal Housework Day.”

If all goes well, Japan will become at least the fourth country with a moon mission this year, making lunar exploration more active than it’s been in five decades. The renaissance is being led by nations not usually considered leaders of the space race, which is an important development for the entire planet.

It was “the summer of girl power,” a tour de force by a glittering troika. With pink dream houses, songs and sequins, Barbie, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé buoyed the economy and sent women’s confidence soaring.

How many of us have seen a school bus come to a stop and activate its warning lights and stop arm, and yet a driver proceeds to pass the bus anyway? Imagine the fear that the bus driver must feel, as he or she is tasked with the responsibility of transporting children to and from school every day.

So what exactly should we do when people consider extant art racist? In 2020, the Vermont Law School decided that the solution was to use acoustic tiles to cover a pair of murals. The U.S. Court of Appeals recently rejected the claim by artist Samuel Kerson that the decision violated his rights under the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act. But even if the court’s interpretation was correct and federal law doesn’t protect a work from being covered, the ruling shouldn’t be the end of the matter; not, at least, for those who love art.

Major Republican donors have questions for presidential candidate Tim Scott’s campaign about a potential political liability, according to reporting by Axios: He doesn’t have a wife. The U.S., after all, hasn’t had a single president in 139 years.

When I’m around young adults I like to ask them how they are thinking about the big commitments in their lives: what career to go into, where to live, whom to marry. Most of them have thought a lot about their career plans. But my impression is that many have not thought a lot about how marriage will fit into their lives.

President Biden must be amazed at his good fortune.

A year ago, defying predictions that President Joe Biden’s agenda was dead in the water, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA is sort of the Holy Roman Empire of legislation – as in being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. That is, it isn’t actually about reducing inflation; it’s mainly a climate bill, using tax credits and subsidies to encourage the transition to a low-emission economy.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign may be floundering as he struggles to win over Republican voters with his deadpan robotic demeanor, and he may be shuffling campaign staff like he’s taking a mulligan, but the damage he did to Florida to get himself to this moment is still rippling through the state.

The best way to think about Georgia’s sprawling indictment against Donald Trump and his allies is that it is a case about lies. It’s about lying, conspiring to lie and attempting to coax, coerce and cajole others into lying. Whereas the attorney general of Michigan just brought a case narrowly focused on the alleged fake electors in her state (Trump is not a defendant in that one), and special counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment narrowly focused on the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has brought a case about the entire conspiracy, from start to finish, and targeted each person subject to her jurisdiction for each crime committed in her jurisdiction.