Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

NBC News: Black People Are In A Mental Health Crisis. Their Therapists Are Busier Than Ever
The last year has been one marked by collective trauma. Covid-19 brought on a wave of loss, anxiety, stress, fear, economic instability and isolation across the country, creating, within the pandemic, a mental health crisis. Images of Black people shot and killed by police, mass protests, the shock of the Capitol riot and the opening up of the deep, systemic wounds of racism have brought on another level of trauma. Through it all, Black therapists, who are disproportionately underrepresented in their field, have been in high demand. (Gaines, 5/27)

Huffington Post: Can America Close The COVID Vaccine Race Gap?
The U.S. vaccination campaign has in many respects been a mind-boggling success, with a reach and a pace that most other peer nations can only envy. But some population groups here have fallen conspicuously behind, and one of them is Black Americans, whose vaccination rate is about two-thirds that of white Americans, according to estimates from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. A similar differential exists in Detroit, where the citywide vaccination rate is the lowest for any jurisdiction that the state tracks on its website. What makes the gap especially disturbing is that it seems unlikely to go away soon. More than half of all American adults are now fully vaccinated, the White House announced this week. But in Detroit, Deputy Mayor Conrad Mallett Jr. told me in an interview, “it would be fantastic if we could get to the middle or high 40s” by September. (Cohn, 5/26)

The Atlantic: What Breakthrough Infections Can Tell Us
With 165 million people and counting inoculated in the United States, vaccines have, at long last, tamped the pandemic’s blaze down to a relative smolder in this part of the world. But the protection that vaccines offer is more like a coat of flame retardant than an impenetrable firewall. SARS-CoV-2 can, very rarely, still set up shop in people who are more than two weeks out from their last COVID-19 shot. These rare breakthroughs, as I’ve written before, are no cause for alarm. For starters, they’re fundamentally different from the infections we dealt with during the pre-mass-vaccination era. The people who experience them are getting less sick, for shorter periods of time; they are harboring less of the coronavirus, and spreading fewer particles to others. Breakthroughs are also expected, even unextraordinary. They will be with us for as long as the coronavirus is—and experts are now grappling with questions about when and how often these cases should be tracked. (Wu, 5/27)

The Marshall Project: “He Died Like An Animal”: Some Police Departments Hogtie People Despite Knowing The Risks 
The U.S. Department of Justice in 1995 warned that people may die when police tie handcuffed wrists to bound ankles. (Neff and Siegel, 5/24)

The Hechinger Report: Black Teachers Are Facing Racial Battle Fatigue On Top Of A Stressful Job
Teaching was already a very stressful job, and the pandemic year has only made it worse. Many Black teachers are facing racial battle fatigue. (Barmore, 5/24)

Politico: The Tortured Saga of America’s Least-Loved Policy Idea
As a health care advocate in Massachusetts and later as an aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, I first opposed and later embraced the “individual mandate” as a pathway to increase health insurance coverage for millions of people. At the time of my switch in 2004, the mandate was considered a conservative idea and seemed like a way to achieve one of liberalism’s most cherished goals, universal coverage. It succeeded and has helped to make Americans healthier. But it proved to be a flashpoint, and has outlived its usefulness as a policy tool. Now, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of hoping that the Supreme Court will kill it rather than use it to kill the Affordable Care Act. (McDonough, 5/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Bill And Barney, Two Old College Pals, Help Save The World From Covid-19
A half-century ago, freshman Barney Graham rolled onto the Rice University campus in a new 1971 Ford Mustang. To blow off steam that year, he launched water balloons off the dorm roof with his new roommate Bill Gruber, who drove a hand-me-down Dodge Monaco. Barney, a top high-school athlete and valedictorian from a family farm in Kansas, starred in intramural sports at Rice. Bill, a high-school academic star from a Houston suburb, said Barney made up for his own athletic deficiencies when they played football and softball. ... Last year, the two men returned to competition, this time in a race to stop the pandemic. (Hopkins, 5/25)

Inside Climate News: Fighting Attacks On Inconvenient Science—And Scientists
Any scientist whose research might conceivably threaten the bottom line of powerful corporate interests risks facing an orchestrated campaign to destroy their reputation. That’s the message of a commentary, published May 17 in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, that spins a cautionary tale about the fragility of scientific integrity by drawing on the disturbing history of a popular weed killer. (Gross, 5/24)

The New York Times: Why Apple And Google’s Virus Alert Apps Had Limited Success
When Apple and Google announced last year that they were working together to create a smartphone-based system to help stem the virus, their collaboration seemed like a game changer. Human contact tracers were struggling to keep up with spiking virus caseloads, and the trillion-dollar rival companies — whose systems run 99 percent of the world’s smartphones — had the potential to quickly and automatically alert far more people. Soon Austria, Switzerland and other nations introduced virus apps based on the Apple-Google software, as did some two dozen American states, including Alabama and Virginia. To date, the apps have been downloaded more than 90 million times, according to an analysis by Sensor Tower, an app research firm. (Singer, 5/27)