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Stranger Than Fiction
A brief daily note of things you might find interesting or useful
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TOP NEWS
U.S. COVID-19 cases reached 430,000 yesterday. 1,973 deaths from Covid-19 occured in the 24-period on Wednesday, as of 8 p.m. New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Illinois reported their highest daily death tolls. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up a disproportionate share of fatalities. The U.S. death toll is 14,600, larger than the total number of 2009 H1N1 deaths over an entire 12-month period.
The WSJ reports: “New York’s racial data followed a report from Chicago that found black residents accounted for 71% of the city’s coronavirus deaths although they make up just 29% of the population. In Michigan, black people made up 40% of the state’s reported deaths but 14% of the state’s population, according to state and federal data. Similarly, in Louisiana, black people make up 70% of Covid-19 deaths, while representing 32% of the state’s population.”
Globally coronavirus cases topped 1.5 million, with more than 88,000 deaths.
U.S. lawmakers are working on a bill to provide billions of dollars in new funding for small-business loans. Many businesses who already applied for loans have said they’re still waiting to receive their money. Some employers, such as Equinox, Macy’s and Steelcase are using the excuse that unemployment benefits will pay their laid-off workers as much or more than if they continued to employ them.
Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign, paving the way for Biden to become the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sanders acknowledged his “path toward victory is virtually impossible," and that if he “had a feasible path to the nomination, I would certainly continue the campaign. But it’s just not there.”
WHAT I’M READING + WATCHING + LISTENING TO
THE COMMENT
“Systrom had never been one to criticize Zuckerberg in front of his employees. But after months of what he saw as obstruction and bigfooting, he wrote a long internal message to his team saying he disagreed vehemently with Zuckerberg’s undercutting of Instagram. By the fall of 2018, Systrom started confiding to his close friends that if Zuckerberg wanted to run Instagram like a mere department of Facebook, maybe it was time to let him.” - Sarah Frier, Bloomberg Businessweek and author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
THE STRANGEST
THE AV ROOM