Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
The Omicron surge has left parents screaming into the abyss--some quite literally. As the journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer reports, a group of Boston moms recently met up to express their pandemic rage by letting out a primal yell in "the frigid January darkness" outside a local high school.
This month marked a breaking point, as skyrocketing case counts shut schools and created a child-care crisis.
- COVID parenting has passed the point of absurdity. "Parents were defeated long before Omicron," Moyer writes. "Now we've reached a stage of the pandemic where finding the right words to describe our lot is simply an exercise in absurdity."
- Parents aren't the only ones frustrated with school policies.High-school students are walking out over COVID, our staff writer Joe Pinsker reported last week.
- Kids shouldn't have to be "resilient.""It's a parent's job to be resilient for them, to spare them from our fears and worries," Mary Katharine Ham writes. "The longer we abdicate, the more damage we will do."
- Here's how kids' media are handling the pandemic.Shows like Sesame Street "have achieved a level of clarity and directness in their pandemic coverage that can be hard to find in outlets geared toward older audiences," Kate Cray reports.
The rest of the news in three sentences:
(1) The United States plans to help bolster fuel supplies to Europe amid concerns Russia could cut supply lines.
(2) The White House withdrew its vaccine and testing mandate for large businesses following the Supreme Court's decision blocking it.
(3) The SAT is going all-digital in 2024, the standardized-testing company College Board announced.
Today's Atlantic-approved activity:
You'd need a snorkel to boop these noses: Decompress from your day by scrolling through these award-winning photographs from under the sea.
A break from the news:
Is old music killing new music?
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
