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You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

Students and parents gather outside the Governor's Mansion to urge Gov. Greg Abbott to drop his opposition to public school mask mandates Aug. 16 in Austin, Texas. | (Eric Gay/AP Photo)

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

In the weeks leading up to, and following, the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, residents and observers expressed concerns that the event would turn into a “COVID super-spreader,” but Chicago health officials say that hasn’t happened.

During a press conference Tuesday, Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said that statistics compiled by the city have not shown any significant impact on COVID case numbers since the event wrapped up more than two weeks ago.

“We’re not seeing any connection related to Lollapalooza,” Arwady said. “We’ve not had new data suggesting it was a super-spreader. We’ve not seen any change in terms of the demographics (of COVID-impacted patients) here in Chicago. We see no connection between that event, or any of the other large events that we’ve had.”

According to figures released by the city on Aug. 12, approximately 203 Lollapalooza attendees later tested positive for...

The other day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likened mask and other health mandates to “medical authoritarianism.” The Republican added that we may be witnessing “the most significant threat to freedom in my lifetime, certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

This is a preview of the Paul Krugman newsletter, which is now reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week.

As terrible as many things in the world are, climate is unique in posing an existential threat to civilization. And it’s horrifying that so many political figures are dead set against any serious action to address that threat.

Despite that, there’s still a chance that we’ll do enough to avoid catastrophe — not because we’ve grown wiser but because we’ve been lucky. We used to believe that achieving big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be difficult and expensive, although not nearly as costly as anti-environmentalists claimed. Over the past dozen years or so, however, we’ve experienced a technological miracle. As nicely documented in an article by Max Roser, the costs of solar and wind power, once dismissed as foolish hippie fantasies, have plunged to the point that quite modest incentives could lead to a rapid...

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

In the wake of the Taliban’s recent capture of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, it looks like the Republican Party is quietly scrubbing traces of the former president’s deals with the militant Islamist group.

Global warming is fake news. Anyway, it isn’t man-made. And doing anything about it would destroy the economy.

Opponents of action against climate change have always relied on multiple lines of defense: If one argument for doing nothing becomes unsustainable, they just retreat to another.

That’s what we’re seeing now, as conservatives argue against the Biden administration’s push for climate-friendly public investment. As it happens, this push is taking place against a background of unprecedented heat waves, huge forest fires, severe drought in some places and catastrophic flooding in others — phenomena that scientists have long warned would become more common as the planet gets hotter.

Given these events, as The Times recently reported, Republicans have toned down their climate denial — in some cases pretending that they never denied the science in the first place. Thus Senator James Inhofe, author of 2012’s “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming...