Whether to escape the real world or gain more perspective on it, reading books is an essential part of my mental health and happiness—and I know I'm not alone. My colleagues and I rounded up the 22 books we loved the most this year, and it's quite a list.
New nonfiction titles in 2024 shed light on how abortion went from being a GOP fringe issue to one of its main pillars in just 10 years (The Fall ofRoe: The Rise of a New America, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer); how the trajectory of mafioso John Gotti shares eerie parallels to that of our president-elect (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz); and how 400 helicopters now swarm the floor of the Grand Canyon every day, "one every 90 seconds, to expel rich tourists who sip champagne, snap selfies, and leave 15 minutes later" (A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon, by Kevin Fedarko).
Then, of course, there was a host of excellent new novels that touched down in the past year, including Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino's imaginative interstellar bildungsroman, and Colored Television, a hilarious novel by Danzy Senna which grapples with "race in an America where diversity is often deployed cynically by those already at the top, along with the tension between the written word and the visual mass entertainment that has largely replaced it," as reviewer Noah Lanard observes.
One of the best parts of our list looks back at older novels that our journalists discovered for the first time this year and found immensely relevant despite their age. I reviewed Sarah Thankam Mathews' 2022 novel, All This Could Be Different, one of the best things I've read in five years or so, a gorgeously written story that I found to hold "lessons on how to create community and sustain love in the capitalistic pressure cooker of our times."
And I was touched by my colleague Ruth Murai's review of John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy, about a Japanese American boy, Ichiro, who spends two years in a federal prison for his refusal to serve in the army. "Reading No-No Boy," Murai writes, "I was overcome with grief for my family, for Ichiro, for Okada, and for the millions of immigrants Trump has promised to remove from their communities and detain in camps when he reclaims the White House."
Eric Trump promised to build a "very large," ethical wall. It seems to come with a big, beautiful door.
BY RUSS CHOMA
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In an interview this week, Eric Trump promised that his father will build a “very large wall” between the incoming first family’s private business interests and any government business. Then, apparently without a hint of irony or shame, he took the stage at a crypto conference—which he attended as a representative of the crypto company his father has deep financial ties to—and spoke passionately about how President Trump would bolster the crypto industry as a whole.
The younger Trump sat for the interview with Reuters while in Abu Dhabi for the pro-crypto conference and said a number of potentially reassuring things about how his family intends to avoid conflicts of interest between the Trump Organization and the Trump presidential administration. But he stopped short of offering ironclad safeguards.
“There’s going to be, obviously, a very large wall between anything having to do with our company and anything to do with government,” Eric Trump told Reuters, promising to take the obligation seriously and pointing to his father’s first term as an example. While many government ethics expert agree that President Trump did not do enough to prevent conflicts the first time around—he refused to divest ownership of the Trump Organization, for example—Trump did refrain from making new deals with foreign investors between 2017 and 2021. Of course, Trump continued to do business with his pre-existing foreign partners, giving them preferred access at his 2017 inauguration and refusing to disclose exactly how much money foreign governments paid to rent hotel rooms at his various properties.
But this week—during the very same interview in which he pledged to take ethics issues seriously—Eric Trump described a far narrower promise: no new Trump Organization deals directly with foreign governments. That notably wouldn’t cover new deals resembling business partnerships the Trumps currently have in countries like India, Indonesia, Turkey, Oman, and, most recently, Saudi Arabia. It’s also not clear whether the promise not to deal directly with foreign governments includes Trump’s ongoing partnerships with LIV Golf, the golf league owned by the Private Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund which, at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, invests profits from Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, did not directly respond to a question about foreign deals, but said Donald Trump had already taken steps to remove himself from any conflicts and would be sacrificing even more wealth by serving as president.
“President Trump removed himself from his multi-billion-dollar real estate empire to run for office and forewent his government salary, becoming the first President to actually lose net worth while serving in the White House,” Leavitt responded. “Unlike most politicians, President Trump didn’t get into politics for profit – he’s fighting because he loves the people of this country and wants to make America great again.”
The final plan for how Donald Trump and his progeny will handle these potential conflicts hasn’t been released—a formal arrangement is currently being negotiated between Trump’s attorneys and the Office of Government Ethics. But despite, Eric Trump’s pledge to take the ethics issue seriously, he almost immediately appeared to undermine his own words.
Taking the stage at the same conference, Eric Trump told the crowd that his own family saw value in crypto as a way to circumvent the gatekeepers in the traditional investment world. He touted World Liberty Financial, the crypto company Trump founded earlier this year.
Then, Eric Trump riled up the crowd by asking if they liked current Gary Gensler, the current Securities and Exchange commissioner who is widely viewed as an enemy in the crypto world.
“Gary Gensler waged war against the industry that we all love and everybody knows it,” Eric Trump told attendees. Then he lauded Paul Atkins, a pro-crypto lawyer who Donald Trump has picked to replace Gensler.
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Trump will face new viral threats, but anti-vax forces are twisting words to suggest a dark plot.
Mother Jones illustration; Getty
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In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, professional conspiracy peddlers are hard at work finding ways to gin up panic and paranoia—even if their preferred candidate is about to take office.
The fear mongering is ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—and any vaccine that could fight it.
Some have suggested that the Deep State is already seeking to undermine Trump’s second presidency by plotting a civil war or scheming ways to prevent him from entering the White House. Those ideas, however, have been slightly too vague and lack the urgency of a good and salable conspiracy theory. So many players in the space have settled on something more specific: claiming that “a wave of deadly pandemics,” in the words of one, will strike the United States beginning on January 21.
As with any conspiracy theory that has a chance of taking root, the notion has the benefit of drawing from real life. Cases of avian flu are mounting; if it continues to spread, how Trump responds to that public health emergency could be a major part of his second presidency. And last week, a mysterious flu-like outbreak was identified after killing dozens of people in Congo, where it is circulating alongside a new strain of mpox that is also spreading elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa.
But the real focus of this latest round of Trump-tied conspiracy-peddling isn’t any genuine viral threat, but a gross distortion of the words of Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director for the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and a recognized expert in the field.
While appearing on MSNBC on December 4 to talk about infectious disease prevention under the upcoming Trump presidency, Hotez said “We have some big picture stuff coming down the pipe,” referring to avian flu, new strains of Covid, and other potential outbreaks. “All that’s going to come crashing down on January 21 on the Trump administration. We need a really really good team to be able to handle this.”
Hotez’s simple quote explaining how Donald Trump and his staff will have to face the prospect of infectious disease outbreaks when he becomes president was instead taken by people with a monetary interest in misunderstanding him as either as a dark prophecy or a threat to deliberately unleash disease.
Alex Jones, for one, immediately seized on the comments, saying on Infowars that Hotez’s statements were “an attempt to terrorize,” as well as to promote “forced shots, lockdowns, tyranny, further global collapse.”
“Do what we say politically or we’re going to release this,” Jones added. “That’s the message.”
The same sentiment was repeated by Mikki Willis, a filmmaker who produced Plandemic, the pseudoscientific, pseudo-documentary series that argued Covid-19 was deliberately created and unleashed as part of a tyrannical global plot. Willis shared a post about Hotez’s comments on Telegram, adding, “Apparently, all we need to do to avoid the next Plandemic is to stay home on Jan 21st. Cool.” Dozens of verified Twitter accounts, whose paid access to the site boosts their posts and replies, also shared videos of Hotez’s comments in ways that cast dark suspicion. Just one such post has been viewed three million times.
The spinning of his remarks led to an immediate wave of harassment targeting Hotez; the conspiratorial and anti-vaccine site Natural News ran an approving roundup collecting online comments bashing the doctor, including one suggesting he should be arrested and jailed so he can be forced to “explain how he knows this.”
Because this strain of conspiracy rests on the notion another pandemic is about to occur, it also created a useful and profitable news peg for people looking to sell bogus pandemic preventatives. The stories about Hotez on Infowars and Natural News are surrounded by ads for various supplements, private-label colloidal silver products, and in the case of Natural News, founder Mike Adams’ nine-hour audiobook on surviving what he calls the “global reset.”
Some of these wares are pricey: the video site Brighteon, which bills itself as a YouTube alternative and mainly hosts conspiratorial content, including Natural News’, is selling a “Next Pandemic Preparedness Survival” package, originally priced at $600. It features interviews with a variety of characters from the medical freedom, anti-vaccine and pseudomedical worlds, including several people who earned notoriety during the earlier days of the Covid pandemic. Among them are Stella Immanuel, the Houston doctor who not only falsely claimed that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for Covid, but that gynecological problems like endometriosis are due to having sex with demons;retired chiropractor Bryan Ardis, who advanced a complicated conspiracy theory about snake venom in vaccines; prominent anti-vaccine attorney Thomas Renz; and Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former biochemistry researcher who advanced misinformation about vaccines for years before appearing as the main character in Plandemic.
All of this fear mongering and scapegoating ultimately serves multiple purposes: ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—whatever it may be, before it even appears—as well as preemptively creating hostility against any vaccine that might be developed to fight it in order to peddle fake cures.
But there’s more lurking beneath the surface. Hotez is Jewish; he wrote in a Twitter thread that he’s seeing a disturbing increase in the overlap of anti-science and antisemitic content, including flyers in which syringes are drawn in the shape of swastikas mailed repeatedly to his home. His thread also singled out a past claim by Robert Kennedy Jr., the prominent anti-vaccine activist who Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting Covid had been engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
“Our antivaccine friends appear energized for some reason,” Hotez wrote, sharing a screenshot of another threat. “Doesn’t take much to figure out why. I anticipate a rough few years ahead.”
Last year’s toll: 263 million cases and almost 600,000 dead.
Dengue and malaria patients are treated in an isolation ward at Civil Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, in this 2022 file photo. PPI/ZUMA
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This story was originally published by the Guardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).
Biological threats such as rising resistance to drugs and insecticides, and climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts, world health leaders warned.
Globally, there were 263 million cases last year, 11 million more than the previous year; the vast majority (94 percent) occurred in Africa.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said: “No one should die of malaria; yet the disease continues to disproportionately harm people living in the African region, especially young children and pregnant women.”
There was now “an expanded package of life-saving tools” that protected against the disease, he said, but a need for more investment and action in the African countries with the highest rates.
About $4 billion went into fighting malaria globally last year, less than half of the $8.3 billion that official control plans consider necessary. That has meant gaps in the provision of tools such as medicines and insecticide-treated bed nets, with the most vulnerable groups often missing out, said the report.
Only half of those at risk of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa slept under insecticide-treated nets, and only 45 percent of pregnant women in the region had the recommended three doses of preventive malaria therapy. About 80 million people in countries where malaria is found are refugees or internally displaced, making it harder for them to access prevention and treatment services.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis is increasing rates of extreme weather events that cause flooding, creating breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disrupting access to healthcare in countries such as Pakistan and Madagascar, the report said.
Earlier this month British health officials warned that they were seeing rising numbers of malaria cases in travelers returning to the UK. In 2023, there were 2,106 cases of imported malaria, up 26 percent on the 1,555 reported in 2022. Six people died from the illness. Provisional figures recorded 753 cases in the first half of 2024.
A separate report published last month by the Malaria Atlas Project and Boston Consulting Group, with funding from the Gates Foundation, predicts that Africa will see more than 550,000 additional deaths from malaria in Africa between 2030 and 2049 due to extreme weather events such as floods and cyclones.
Resistance to drugs that have been the gold-standard treatment for malaria is spreading, the report said, and mosquitoes are increasingly resistant to the insecticides used to treat bed nets.
However, the report included grounds for optimism, including the introduction in 17 countries so far of malaria vaccines for young children that have cut death rates by 13 percent. And the development of new bed nets made more effective by using more than one type of insecticide to combat resistance accounted for 78 percent of nets delivered to sub-Saharan Africa last year.
The WHO has certified 44 countries and one territory to be free of malaria, including Egypt in October. There are 83 countries where malaria is considered endemic and 25 of those now report fewer than 10 cases a year.
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