Runners compete in fundraising obstacle course race

How are we going to use the results of the May 17 primary to measure Donald Trump’s influence over the North Carolina Republican Party? Read more

By 1840, when John Motley Morehead took office as governor of North Carolina, the illiteracy rate for white North Carolinians was 26%. Based on national studies, we can infer that the illiteracy rate for enslaved Black residents could not have been lower than 95%. The state did not have a single city with more than 20,000 residents and it had only recently established even the rudiments of public education. That was despite the state Constitution, then more than 60 years old, mandating that legislators establish a public school system. (Some things never change.) The relatively few North Carolinians with both education and ambition were leaving the state for more energetic places that offered opportunity and a better life. Read more

Before the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020, patients who preferred to obtain medical services through video chats or phone calls were unlikely to be reimbursed for those expenses. Medicare, for example, covered telehealth visits only for patients in remote rural areas and only if they journeyed to some other institution — a doctor’s office, say, or a clinic — in order to consult with a provider based elsewhere. Other third-party payers followed similar protocols. Read more

The planet and its national and international institutions are not even close to facing the realities that confront us. Instead, we live in a fantasy la-la land, or what Greta Thunberg might call blah-blah land. No one is more insanely deluded than Vladimir Putin, who launched a horrific and unnecessary war in which he could unilaterally decide to use nuclear weapons at any moment, based in grievance and an obsolete nostalgia for empire. Read more

Think about it this way: If Justice Samuel Alito gets his way and the Trumpist Supreme Court majority voids Roe v. Wade, many states will be forced to begin criminal investigations of women who suffer miscarriages. Don’t give me that crying act, sweetheart. In this state, abortion is murder. Read more