Opinion

We need a hero. How else to explain what motivates thousands of New Yorkers to go out on their rooftops or throw open their windows at precisely 7 p.m. every night to scream and yell and applaud and bang on the pots and pans — all to show the beleaguered and literally life-risking nurses, doctors and hospital staffers working in the epicenter of a global pandemic how much they are appreciated, even loved.But in a time of a public health crisis without precedent for all but a handful of living Americans, we also need villains — a role that a handful of vulture capitalists straight out of centra...

The strain of the coronavirus pandemic should have the entire health care system focused intently on quality and safety. Yet the dismissal of Bellingham, Wash., doctor Ming Lin shows how misguided business practices can hold back medical providers in a time of crisis.Lin practiced at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, where he was an emergency room doctor, for 17 years. As the coronavirus crisis mounted, he took to social media to publicize conditions at the hospital he found appalling — a lack of separation of suspected COVID-19 cases from other patients and a dearth of testing for the vi...

Along with surgical masks, ventilators and intensive care beds, the nation’s blood supply is under heavy strain during the coronavirus pandemic.The American Red Cross announced a “severe blood shortage” on March 17 as COVID-19 spread and planned blood donation drives had been canceled. While social distancing and staying out of public spaces continue to be sound policy to tamp down the pandemic, the need for a robust blood supply is urgent and will be ongoing for weeks to come.This need has little precedent, and the federal Food and Drug Administration must act accordingly by broadening the po...

We always knew that Donald Trump was out of touch with most Americans. The fact that he thinks we’re going to kill ourselves if the economy doesn’t improve soon shows how clueless he is about how resilient we are.Only someone of privilege could believe that being without money is worse than death. Obviously, he wasn’t referring to the people who live from paycheck to paycheck and are broke every other week.Of course, everyone is worried that so many people are out of work. We aren’t naive enough to believe that even when the coronavirus pandemic is over, everyone’s job will be waiting.Some com...

President Trump’s new mantra is, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem,” which was the themeof his press briefing Monday, just eight days into his “15-day challenge” to practice social distancing.That is quite a pivot. Now he intends to roll back the CDC’s self-quarantine guidelines designed to stem the coronavirus and explore ways to “open up the country again” by Easter Sunday, which defies the warnings of his own medical experts.There’s a hole in his plan, however: The “problem” he cites is that people are dying. The problem is that Americans are getting sick at an exponential r...

Diana Hernandez has one foot in the Ivy League, where she’s an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and another in the grittier streets of the South Bronx, the mostly working-class area where she lives. Walking down a Bronx boulevard the other day, she witnessed scenes much different from the TV news version of the coronavirus crisis, where suburbanites stuff payloads of squeezably soft toilet paper and price-gouged Purell in the back of luxury SUVs.Instead, Hernandez wrote that she witnessed Bronx shoppers at her local Dollar T...

The GOP has an image problem. For some reason, bigots and other undesirables seem to think they can run for office as Republicans and win.Sometimes the candidates are right. More often, they’re wrong. But that’s not the issue. What’s concerning is that there’s something about the Republican Party that makes loathsome candidates think they are welcome there.It is unlikely that many Americans are paying attention to the congressional race in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District. But everyone should.Arthur Jones is on the Republican ballot again. The Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier is makin...

PG&E has no equal when it comes to chutzpah.This is a utility that is in bankruptcy proceedings after causing 111 deaths and destroying more than 20,000 structures in the last decade. This is a utility that admitted to a federal judge that it did not meet its 2019 wildfire safety plan risk-reduction targets.But that didn’t keep PG&E attorneys last week from asking the bankruptcy court to approve more than $450 million in bonuses for its employees and executives. That’s right. The utility that has become synonymous with failure wants to hand out rewards for its shortcomings last year.We’re not ...

While world leaders focused this week on coping with the coronavirus, Vladimir Putin’s attention was elsewhere.The Russian president was busy setting himself up as president for life.After 20 years as president or prime minister, the 67-year-old former KGB spy organized a brazen end run around Russia’s presidential term limits that will permit him to serve two more six-year terms after his current mandate expires in 2024.This internal coup frees Putin to pursue his bitter vendetta against the West, which he blames for all Russia’s troubles. Indeed, he justified his power grab by arguing that R...

On Monday there was a lot of buzz about a piece on the clickbait-ish, Beltway-access-lapdog website Axios which looked at possible cabinet picks in a Joe Biden administration in 2021, and which was truly remarkable in two ways.First, of course, were the names themselves — a weird hodgepodge of high-profile picks that seemed guaranteed to anger every voter in one way or another, from clueless $500-million-burning billionaire Mike Bloomberg to run the World Bank to the idea that a Biden secretary of the Treasury would either be the ultimate Wall Street insider, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, o...

One thing that’s been really striking about the long-running (too-long-running?) series of Democratic presidential debates is how many hours have been spent jawboning about universal health care plans like “Medicare for All” and how little time has been spent debating something else that could save tens of thousands of American lives.That thing is universal higher education, which — unfortunately — is often simplified by friend and foe alike into “free college.”OK, so most people agree that it should be easier and less expensive to attend college, in an economy where a diploma is frequently de...

Working quiet emotional miracles, Zoe Kazan is the simmering kettle in the middle of an inferno in “The Plot Against America,” and she deserves every available award for her work in this fine, eerily evocative HBO adaptation.She’s not top-billed: Winona Ryder is, and Ryder’s good, in a flamboyant, outsized way. Kazan works differently, befitting her domestic anchor of a character. There is nothing extraneous in her performance. There is, however, a world of heartache behind her eyes and a supernatural ability to judge the proper tone and rhythm of a scene.Premiering Monday, HBO’s six-part mini...