The Most Famous People in America

Bobby: Though it’s important to note that Exceedingly Popular Academics Online is ALSO the most divisive. There’s actually more disagreement about that category than any other category Lindsey: I feel like BECAUSE it’s so divisive, we get to ignore it, even though it’s number one. Bobby: Totally. So let’s look at sports as number two.…

Republicans Killed the Obamacare Mandate. New Data Shows It Didn’t Really Matter.

ImageThe Affordable Care Act has survived many attempts to stop it, including the stripping of the individual mandate. Credit…Tim Gruber for The New York Times Health economists long had a favorite metaphor for explaining why Obamacare’s unpopular individual mandate was good policy: the three-legged stool. Obamacare would work, they’d explain, only if it did three things:…

Mushrooms, the Last Survivors

The mushrooms sit on high, behind glass, above bottles of Armagnac and mezcal in a bar at the Standard hotel in Manhattan’s East Village. They are barely recognizable at first, just eerie silhouettes resembling coral growths in an aquarium, blooming in laboratory-teal light: tightly branched clusters of oyster mushrooms in hot pink, yolk yellow and…

Help! My Boss Is a Conspiracy Theorist

Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, or a request to remain anonymous. Letters may be edited. QAnon bosses My pretty intelligent, chill, fun boss seems to be buying into the conspiracy theory nonsense ever since “antifa” showed up in the Seattle area. He mentioned…

C.D.C.’s Contentious Testing Guidance on Covid-19 Was Not Written by Its Scientists

Here’s what you need to know: ImageTesting at the Wyandotte County Health Department in Kansas last month.Credit…Christopher (KS) Smith for The New York Times A much-criticized testing recommendation on the C.D.C.’s website last month was not written by C.D.C. scientists. A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about…