Everything you think you know about how our democracy functions is about to change. It’s hard to think of an issue that’s inspired broader center-left consensus than the Republican threat to the right to vote. Jacobin informs us that “There’s Less Than Two Years to Save American Democracy.” A piece in The Atlantic keeping us to a tighter schedule says we’ve already arrived at the “Last Chance to Save Democracy.” “American democracy,” CNN concurred in early June, “is about to show if it can save itself.” I myself called our political moment “Democracy’s Moment of Reckoning” not long ago. Joe Biden is worried. Ilhan Omar is worried. And Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have let us know that they’re worried, too. In a recent ad called “Transmissions From the Future,” they play haggard versions of themselves in 2055 urging the passage of the For the People Act as jackboots from an unnamed regime ram at their door. “This future doesn’t have to be,” Bloom says. “Save democracy while you can.” Heeding Bloom’s harrowing warning, Senate Democrats finally moved to advance the For the People Act last Tuesday. They failed. Republicans used the filibuster to prevent the opening of debate; Democrats have yet to assemble the votes to eliminate or significantly modify the filibuster. Publicly undaunted, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted in a floor speech that the quest to save American democracy would continue. “The fight to protect voting rights is not over,” he said. “In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line.” That specific fight is obviously important, and Democrats may well find some way to pass voting rights legislation between now and the midterm elections. But the broader project of “saving American democracy” is doomed for one fairly straightforward reason: America is not a democracy. At the federal level, we simply don’t have a democratic system to save.

Recently I had occasion to circulate the following survey among a small circle of my friends and associates. In the interest of transparency, I share the results with you here. DEAR FRIEND,  If you are receiving this email, it is because at some point over the last 18 months you have expressed an interest in Bob Odenkirk's role in the 2019 adaptation of Little Women, in particular the scene where he is reunited with the titular little women after a long absence, embraces them, and then exclaims, "My little women!" Here is that scene again, for your reference. 

A second massive LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes the data of 700M users, which is more than 92% of the total 756M users. The database is for sale on the dark web, with records including phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries. The hacker who obtained the data has posted a sample of 1M records, and checks confirm that the data is both genuine and up-to-date … RestorePrivacy reports that the hacker appears to have misused the official LinkedIn API to download the data, the same method used in a similar breach back in April.

Prices for the drug have become untenable, now there's at least a slightly more affordable option.

Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 11 today, and the software maker is committing to make it a free upgrade for Windows 10 users. Much like how Windows 10 was free for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, this new Windows 11 version will be free for existing Windows 10 users. All you’ll need is a PC that meets the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11, which is now a 64-bit CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. Windows 11 will be delivered through Windows Update in much the same way as Windows 10 updates have been made available previously.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) on Sunday insisted that infrastructure like roads and bridges is a "women's problem" because they do the "shopping." Cassidy made the remarks on NBC's Meet the Press, where he was arguing on behalf of a bipartisan infrastructure bill. "If you go home and talk to constituents who are stuck in traffic for an hour and a half getting to work and an hour and a half getting home -- three hours a day that they don't spend with their family -- they want a bridge coming to a town near them," Cassidy explained.

By Wallace Shawn Elites want to wish away the last four years, but they ignore the former president’s 50 million fans at their peril.

“There’s another population of people who came and never left: those freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes.”

The decisions were a major blow to attempts to rein in Big Tech. The judge said one of the complaints, from the Federal Trade Commission, lacked facts and gave the agency 30 days to refile it.

A California farmer decides it makes better business sense to sell his water than to grow rice. An almond farmer considers uprooting his trees to put up solar panels. Drought is transforming the state, with broad consequences for the food supply.

A user named Landon keeps popping up on Citizen app broadcasts, raising questions about whether he's an employee.

Scientists have discovered that an extinct native mouse thought to have been wiped out more than 150 years ago is thriving on islands off Western Australia. Researchers compared DNA samples from eight extinct native rodents and 42 of their living relatives to study the decline of native species since the arrival of Europeans in Australia. The results showed the “extinct” Gould’s mouse was indistinguishable from the Shark Bay mouse, which is found on several small islands off the coast of WA. “The resurrection of this species brings good news in the face of the disproportionally high rate of native rodent extinction,” Australian National University evolutionary biologist Emily Roycroft said. Roycroft said native mice accounted for 41% of all Australian mammals that had become extinct since European colonisation started in 1788. “It is exciting that Gould’s mouse is still around, but its disappearance from the mainland highlights how quickly this species went from being distributed across most of Australia to only surviving on offshore islands in Western Australia,” she said. “It’s a huge population collapse.” Gould’s mouse (Pseudomys gouldii) was common and widespread before European settlement in eastern inland Australia, according to the NSW environment department. It was named after English ornithologist John Gould’s wife, Elizabeth, and disappeared rapidly after the 1840s, potentially due to introduced cats. The mouse was slightly smaller than a black rat, and quite social, living in small family groups that sheltered by day in a nest of soft, dry grass in a burrow. It usually dug burrows at a depth of 15cm under bushes. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America or PNAS.

The son of former New York mayor and Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani received no support for his bid to be the next governor of New York in a secret vote by local Republican leaders this week. In May, Andrew Giuliani announced he was seeking the GOP nomination for the 2022 contest, claiming he was a born politico. “I’m a politician out of the womb,” he said. “It’s in my DNA.” But leaders of the New York Republican Party are not feeling it. As the Democrat & Chronicle reported, Giuliani, who served in the White House under ex-President Donald Trump, received no votes from GOP county chairs or members of the Republican state committee at a straw poll in Albany on Monday. According to the New York GOP, more people chose to abstain – 10% – than vote for Giuliani, who has described his views as “very, very similar” to the former president he served. US Congressman Lee Zeldin led the way with 85% of the vote, followed by former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino with 5%, the party announced.

Noted local criminal Mark McCloskey played host to a barbecue/political rally on Sunday afternoon, drawing tens of admirers to the sweltering parking lot of a closed outlet mall in St. Louis County to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the time he pulled a gun on a crowd of people who otherwise would never have noticed or cared he existed. Despite the fact that none of the big names who had been billed to speak at the June 27 event showed up, and despite the fact that ticket sales were so dismal attendance was opened to the public for free at the last minute, St. Louis' most gun-surrendering lawyer plowed right ahead with the First Annual Pink Shirt Guy BBQ and RINO Roast in the St. Louis Mills parking lot. Grievance and untethered delusion topped the menu at the event, with McCloskey and a roster of speakers largely unknown outside the fever swamps of the far right taking turns condemning everything from critical race theory (their newest and most nonsensical bogeyman) to "cultural Marxism" (George Soros' fault of course, but how dare you level accusations of antisemitism) to the "radical left" agenda of (hahahahaha) Joe Biden. The whole gun-and-pony show was in service of McCloskey's deeply stupid run for U.S. Senate, because if there's one thing that qualifies a man for public office in the Republican party in 2021 it's a willingness to point a firearm at those with whom you disagree politically.

Immune cells are still organizing to fight the coronavirus months after inoculation, scientists reported.

If you haven’t yet, I heartily recommend reading this delightful Business Insider feature about turmoil within a hip cookware brand called Great Jones. Fun details abound, of the sort that reliably enliven each next entry in the When Startups Go Awry genre: Toxic, capricious executive behavior; clueless and high-handed management; a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations of the petty, born-rich founders and the material needs and capacities of the people doing actual work for the company; blundering idiot investor/boardmember types just kind of making everything worse from afar all the time. The good stuff.

The authorities in Winthrop, Mass., are investigating whether a white man who shot and killed two Black people on Saturday after crashing a stolen truck into a house was acting out of racial and religious hatred. The suspect, Nathan Allen, 28, had made “anti-Semitic and racist statements against Black individuals,” said Rachael Rollins, the district attorney in Suffolk County. She said investigators had found “some troubling white-supremacist rhetoric” in Mr. Allen’s own handwriting. Mr. Allen drew swastikas and wrote about “the superiority of the white race” and about how white people were “apex predators,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. Ms. Rollins said her office was investigating the shooting as a hate crime and believed Mr. Allen had acted alone. To many people, Mr. Allen “likely appeared unassuming,” given that he was married, had a Ph.D., was employed and had no criminal history, Ms. Rollins said.

A federal court on Monday dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Facebook.

There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive to temperature, something expected for viruses used in vaccine research. It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.” For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Normandin’s experience is a twist on the decades-old prediction that robots will replace workers. At Amazon, machines are often the boss—hiring, rating and firing millions of people with little or no human oversight.