Skip to main content

The Atlantic Daily: Stay Home Anyway

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

BRYAN R. SMITH / AFP / GETTY

In a normal year, July would signal a bit of relief, a kind of seventh-inning stretch for the nation. But this year’s will likely bring more of the same: Americans won’t be getting a vacation from this virus.

Here’s what to consider on the eve of the new month:

Coronavirus testing could break down again. Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal warn of looming test shortages and delayed turnaround times for results, which would threaten the country’s ability to monitor and contain the virus.

In cities, summer leisure will rely more and more on shared public spaces. “The summer of social distancing will also be one of social closeness between neighbors, illuminating divides of class, ethnicity, and place—as leisure has always done,” Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Just because you can do something now doesn’t mean you should. Julie Beck thoughtfully considers the temptation to relax one’s safety measures: “It would be easy to give up. It would feel so good to give up. … Don’t give up.”

GETTY / ANNALISE PASZTOR / KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC

What to read if … you want practical tips:

What to read if … you’re waiting to hear whether universities are opening for the fall:

Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributor and a tenured professor at Georgia Tech, argues that college presidents face poor incentives when deciding whether to hold in-person classes.

What to read if … you’d like to take a brief vacation from Earth’s dramas entirely:

Tune in to the rhythms of faraway galaxies: Astronomers are currently monitoring a particularly strange signal from afar.


Sign up for the Daily here.

The Atlantic https://ift.tt/3eZEDtO June 30, 2020 at 11:54PM

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Explaining models with Triplot, part 1

[This article was first published on R in ResponsibleML on Medium , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. Explaining models with triplot, part 1 tl;dr Explaining black box models built on correlated features may prove difficult and provide misleading results. R package triplot , part of the DrWhy.AI project, is aiming at facilitating the process of explaining the importance of the whole group of variables, thus solving the problem of correlated features. Calculating the importance of explanatory variables is one of the main tasks of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). There are a lot of tools at our disposal that helps us with that, like Feature Importance or Shapley values, to name a few. All these methods calculate individual feature importance for each variable separately. The problem arises when features used ...

The con behind every wedding

With her marriage on the rocks, one writer struggles to reconcile her cynicism about happily-ever-after as her own children rush to tie the knot A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce. That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.” Continue reading... The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xZTguV October 07, 2017 at 09:00AM