Inching Closer To 500,000; Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturism; What Happened In Texas?

Plus, inside a restaurant’s final days. by Jill Hudson [Chris Duncan, whose 75-year-old mother Constance died from COVID-19 on her birthday, photographs a COVID-19 Memorial Project installation of 20,000 American flags on the National Mall as the United States crosses the 200,000 lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic on Sept. 22, 2020 in Washington, D.C. The U.S. will likely cross the mark of half a million lives lost to COVID-19 in the coming days.]( Win McNamee/Getty Images The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 is on track to pass a number next week that once seemed unthinkable: Half a million people in this country dead from the coronavirus. [Losing half a million lives to this disease]( was unimaginable when the first few people died of COVID-19 in the U.S last February. After nearly a year, it's easy to forget how suddenly the pandemic upended our lives. NPR would love to see your photos. [Click here to send your images]( and tell us your story. What will it take to finally halt the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S.? [Here's a look at how herd immunity works](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- Stories You May Have Missed [This 2017 photo shows a slogan is on the storefront of Journey, a former substance abuse treatment center, in Lake Worth, Fla. Now closed, it was one of two centers owned by Kenneth Chatman, who is now serving a 27-year federal prison sentence for health care fraud and money laundering convictions.]( Lynne Sladky/AP A decade ago, the Affordable Care Act mandated that private insurance programs cover people suffering addiction. [It helped many patients find healthcare]( through rehab as the opioid epidemic exploded. But it also created a kind of addiction gold rush. Three novels and two story collections — selected from a longlist of 15 — are currently in contention for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize. [The work of this year's finalists]( covers everything from Native American land ownership questions to the intersections of Blackness and queerness to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the past year, calls to defund police departments have increased after a series of high-profile killings by police. NPR looked at how one city in Texas implemented big police funding cuts. [Listen here](. [Drs. Katie Ross and Dan Dworkis discuss the care of several patients in the emergency department's COVID-19 unit. The doctors' muffled voices are hard to hear over the sound of air filtration units humming and monitors alarming.]( Scott Kobner/Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Dr. Scott Kobner is the chief emergency room resident at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. [His black-and-white photos]( show the suffering, anxiety and chaos unfolding in overrun COVID units. Across New Orleans, thousands of homes were decorated and dressed up for Mardi Gras. People [drove from house-to-house]( because the city canceled parades due to COVID. A lingering mistrust of the medical system among many Black Americans is rooted in the infamous U.S. study of syphilis in the 1930s that left Black men in Tuskegee, Ala., to suffer from the disease. [Read the story]( or [listen here](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Podcasts Of The Week Andrew Harr/Bloomberg via Getty Images Printer companies have a peculiar business model: They sell printers for extraordinarily cheap. Turns out the real money is in the ink. ([Planet Money]( Octavia Butler was one of the premier science fiction writers of the 20th century and is revered as a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Her visionary works of alternate futures reveal striking parallels to the world we live in today. ([Throughline]( In Supernova, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a gay couple coming to terms with the fact that Tucci's character is experiencing early onset dementia. ([Pop Culture Happy Hour]( Eight years after Katlin Smith whipped up a batch of grain-free, paleo-friendly muffins in her Atlanta kitchen, her company, Simple Mills, is available in 28,000 stores and does roughly $100M in annual revenue. ([How I Built This With Guy Raz]( We've heard about how hard it's been for restaurants to stay open during this pandemic. But what we often don't hear is that closing can be just as tough. ([The Indicator From Planet Money]( ljubaphoto/Getty Images A year into the pandemic, working mothers feel “forgotten.” ([Fresh Air]( Millions of Texans have been without power or potable water for days following unusually harsh winter weather. The Republican governor blamed the outages on renewable energy but that is only 10 percent of the story. ([The NPR Politics Podcast]( When A.J. Jacobs set out to thank everyone who made his morning cup of coffee, he realized the chain of thank-yous was endless. Hear his ideas on gratitude—and how to make it count. ([TED Radio Hour]( Many of us missed having a sense of connection in the last year: a hug from a friend, a kiss from a lover, the casual brush past a stranger on a crowded street. Celebrating our bodies, and the pleasure they can give us, can be the starting point for an extraordinary relationship with ourselves and the world. ([Life Kit]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. --------------------------------------------------------------- Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can [sign up here](. Looking for more great content? 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