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Here's the list of the top 10 trending Google Flights destinations searched for in the US for 2022. 1. London, UK 2. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 3. Paris, France 4. New Delhi, India 5. Toronto, Canada 6. Rome, Italy 7. Mumbai, India 8. Vancouver, Canada 9. Lisbon, Portugal 10. New York, NY

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Accelerating deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses fueled a second straight year of worsening life expectancy, down to the shortest it has been since 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The estimates, published in a new report now analyzing the "final data" on American death certificates tracked by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, make official a steep decline first reported by the agency based on "preliminary data" back in August. The final estimates differ only slightly from the provisional ones released earlier this year. At the time of the August report, federal authorities had already received data on more than 99% of death certificates for 2021. Americans born in 2021 are expected to live 76.4 years, the report's authors now estimate. That is down from a peak of 78.8 years in 2019. Death rates worsened for every age group. Adjusted for age, the death rate climbed by 5.3% from 2020 to 2021. That is smaller than the 16.8% increase from 2019 to 2020, for the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift also reflects a widening gap relative to America's international peers, most of whom had already outpaced the U.S. before the pandemic. An analysis published by the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this month tracked life expectancy "rebounding in most comparable" large and rich countries for 2021 as America's dropped. The U.S. continues to rank lowest among countries with large economies. COVID-19 was the third highest cause of death in the U.S. for 2021, behind heart disease and then cancer. 416,893 Americans had the disease as the underlying cause on their death certificates, up from 350,831 in 2020.

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A humiliating personal fact: two years ago, when the first season of Emily in Paris came out, I watched it and had the closest thing I’ve ever had to a breakdown. It was the antisocial first winter of the pandemic, and I was, at the time, not doing much with my days besides working a job that involved handling digital advertising for this magazine. I had a lot of shame about this job, which more and more struck me as mindless work for a radically unserious person. We would publish an article about the threat of far-right nationalism, or a review of a book about surveillance capitalism, and then I would turn the piece into a Facebook ad. Was “marketing,” even for a good cause, fundamentally slimy, hypocritical, and beholden to capital’s most powerful and destructive digital actors? Was I? Emily in Paris spectacularly confirmed my suspicions. Watching it at the well-meaning suggestion of a friend, who thought I might be amused by its outrageous portrayal of millennial women, I felt almost violently interpellated. Emily, everyone agreed, was catastrophically dumb, hooked to her phone, skilled at the non-art of digital branding and nothing else. Her savviness in marketing was enabled by an inner emptiness that left her sublimely incurious about life’s loftier realms. In one episode, she meets a semiotics professor at a café, who tells her (prompting, of course, a marketing epiphany) that “when two things are next to each other, you’re forced to compare them.” The viewer is supposed to apply the statement to Emily and the semiotician: he’s cool where she’s ringarde, he’s got a Barthes paperback where she’s got that huge honking phone. But right there on my computer, the two things that were next to each other were the Netflix tab and the Facebook Ads Manager tab. Was my work for n+1 any different from Emily’s work for Savoir? Was I, in fact, any different from her? The more I watched, the more real despair I felt, identification striking me like a French laundry truck. Emily and I were the same age, same demographic profile. Like her, I speak no French and don’t know the third arrondissement from the twelfth. And I thought about Instagram ads all day, too.

THE EMILY IN LITTLE PARIS event seemed to promise, if not liberté, at least some degree of sororité: here was a place where everyone was Emily. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a “pop-up event” before—the term has always reminded me of erections, and I don’t like lines—but, as an indulgent friend and I approached the mass of people grouped on Centre Street, I intuitively understood the gist of the thing: the attendee is prompted to live life like Emily.

It was not hard, either, to discern a powerful strain of Emily-ness among the attendees. The lines for each Experience teemed with white women (“where are the fruity men?” my friend whispered), a sort of surprising percentage of whom were wearing berets. One person was trotting around a poodle, who was also wearing a beret, and every so often I’d glimpse a cluster of beret-clad little kids—Emilys Junior. Wandering around the event’s periphery, I asked a few visitors what they liked about the show. One woman told me she liked the scenery. Another—an Australian—told me that she’d lived in Paris before and found the show “authentic.” “I mean, I didn’t do the things Emily did,” she amended. “But today I am!”

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On this self-report questionnaire, cats almost universally demonstrate high levels of antisocial behavior and indifference to the suffering of others.

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The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing. The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people. Most people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted individuals, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the U.S. government or simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. The device — a relic of the vast biometric collection system the Pentagon built in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — is a physical reminder that although the United States has moved on from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the tools built to fight them and the information they held live on in ways unintended by their creators. Exactly how the device ended up going from the battlefields in Asia to an online auction site is unclear. But the data, which offers detailed descriptions of individuals in addition to their photograph and biometric data, could be enough to target people who were previously unknown to have worked with U.S. military forces should the information fall into the wrong hands.

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We are, as human beings, charged as how we treat our fellow man . . .

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LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%

Roughly 21% of Generation Z Americans who have reached adulthood -- those born between 1997 and 2003 -- identify as LGBT. That is nearly double the proportion of millennials who do so, while the gap widens even further when compared with older generations.

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One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.” . . . The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views. . . . “It was my birthday, and we had just come back from a birthday dinner with some friends,” Tim explains on our video chat. “You can see some unwrapped birthday gifts in the background, and I’m pretty sure the shirt I was wearing was a gift from Ben, who was the friend that convinced us to pose for photos for Wikipedia.” They tell me that he and Tamara are not big high-fivers, and they have no personal connection to the “down low/too slow” maneuver. The participants just realized that move didn’t have any photos on Wikipedia and saw it as an opportunity. Tim and Tamara tell me that they met three years before the photo was taken. Tamara, who was in college, went to a restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. where Tim, who was 30 at the time, was performing guitar and singing. Tamara thought he was hot. Tim thought the same about Tamara. Pretty soon, they were a couple. But by the time the high-five photo shoot happened, Tim was about to move to Scotland to start a Ph.D. program in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Tamara was in a transitional period too: She had graduated from UCLA and was preparing for a physician’s assistant grad program. Because of their uncertain futures and the prospect of going long-distance, it didn’t make sense to stay together. Or so they thought. “I got eight months in the divinity program and realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt aimless,” Tim says. “I had to get out of the ivory tower and figure out the basics of my life.” Tamara has a different take: “The romantic version of the story is that he saw on social media that I had gone on a date with someone else and decided to fly home and marry me.”

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Jorgensen, who was raised as a Baptist and attended elementary school in Chicago before his family moved west, married Bezos’ mother, Jacklyn, while they were both in high school in New Mexico — and was just 19 when Bezos was born. The marriage lasted less than two years. Jorgensen, who later admitted to being “a bad father and a bad husband” who drank too much, split for good when Bezos was 3, according to Stone’s book. He promised Bezos’ mother and her new partner, Bezos’ adoptive father, that he would never bother them again. By the time Stone tracked Jorgensen down in 2012, Jorgensen, who was as a child a circus unicycle performer, owned a bicycle shop in Phoenix, had not seen in his son in nearly half a century, had forgotten his adoptive name, and was “utterly confused” to learn that he was the father of the Amazon CEO, Stone wrote. Jorgensen wrote to Bezos soon after about his regrets, which Bezos eventually responded to, telling Jorgensen that he “empathized with the impossibly difficult choices that his teenage parents were forced to make and said that he had had a happy childhood nonetheless,” according to Stone. “He said that he harbored no ill will towards Jorgensen at all, and he asked him to cast aside any lingering regret over the circumstances of their lives.” Jorgensen died March 16, 2015, according to his stepson, Darin Fala. Jorgensen’s obituary simply notes that he was survived “by his son, Jeff,” and makes no mention of the Bezos family name.

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Switzerland has voted as many times as all of the other countries in the world put together in the past century. The Swiss vote practically all the time. Every three months, to be exact.

Recent Swiss initiatives have tackled the dehorning of cattle, a minaret building ban, phasing out of nuclear energy and the establishment of a national minimum wage of 4,000 Swiss francs per month. In February, the canton of Geneva voted on whether or not to abolish a tax for dog owners (no) while the entire country was asked if they agreed or not with the Parliament’s recent proposal to criminalize homophobic behavior (yes). These initiatives can add up to dozens of topics in the busiest voting months.

Nationalistic proposals have in some instances been validated by the popular vote, showing the limits of consensus in a country dominated by a conservative culture. In 2009, members of the Democratic Union of the Center (or UDC), Switzerland’s largest party, a nationalist party ranging from center-right to far-right stances, won 57 percent of federal votes for their proposal to ban minarets in the country.

. . .

One recent trend consists to hire Swiss companies to collect signatures: For 2 to 5 Swiss francs ($2.09 to $5.23) a signature, according to the perceived level of difficulty of the topic, the companies will gather the 100,000 signatures by approaching potential signers on the street. The recent boom of companies in the business of collecting signatures creates a twofold problem: First, parties with larger budgets have a higher chances of passing  the signature phase, as hiring a company requires being able to spend at least 200,000 francs ($207,267) before a campaign even begins. Second, because these companies hire underpaid staffers to collect signatures, these workers can be tempted to lie about the core of the initiative, and are sometimes encouraged to do so by their employer in order to achieve their task faster.

. . .

A few weeks ahead of each vote, Swiss citizens receive a very neatly laid-out, roughly 100-page booklet that outlines the issues at stake in the election, in the language of the canton they live in. Written by the Federal Council, the executive body of the Swiss confederation, it aims to illustrate the arguments and counter-arguments of all the initiatives at stake.

To me, the most fascinating aspect of this participatory democracy is how often the Swiss seem to vote against their own interests, by refusing a sixth week of paid holidays, more comfortable retirement plans or a national minimum wage that would be the envy of all neighboring countries. The Swiss essayist Jean Ziegler calls this phenomenon the ”opacity of the consensus:” “a dominant ideology to which very few Swiss citizens, even among the most lucid, can escape.”

. . .

Equally fascinating is how soothing the consensus can feel: most Swiss people would agree that the process of voting on a popular initiative makes it easier to accept the outcome, even when it was not their choice. At least they were part of the process. And it’s not just true for citizens, but for politicians as well. “I belong to the small left-wing minority that consistently loses almost all of the time,” Reynard said. “In the past three years, quite frankly, we lost all of our battles: the minimum wage, the sixth week of paid holidays… but you know what? When the Sunday comes, and we do lose, we tell ourselves that we’ll be back the next day with a new idea.” At least this time he can celebrate a victory.

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Surprisingly compelling.

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Anyone experiencing a sudden loss of smell could be a "hidden carrier" of the coronavirus, even if they have no other symptoms, according to evidence compiled by leading rhinologists in the UK.

In South Korea, China, and Italy, about a third of patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 have also reported a loss of smell — known as anosmia or hyposmia — leading ear, nose, and throat experts in the UK have reported.

"In South Korea, where testing has been more widespread, 30% of patients testing positive have had anosmia as their major presenting symptom in otherwise mild cases," the president of the British Rhinological Society Professor, Clare Hopkins, and the president of the British Association of Otorhinolaryngology, professor Nirmal Kumar, said in a joint statement.

The professors said that many patients around the world who have tested positive for COVID-19 are presenting only the symptoms of loss of smell and taste — without the more commonly recognised symptoms of high fever and coughing.

"There have been a rapidly growing number of reports of a significant increase in the number of patients presenting with anosmia in the absence of other symptoms," the statement says. "Iran has reported a sudden increase in cases of isolated anosmia, and many colleagues from the US, France, and Northern Italy have the same experience."

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Israeli doctor Gai Peleg, who is currently working to save lives in Parma, Italy, told Channel 12 that things are only getting worse as the number of patients keeps growing. As his department receives coronavirus patients who are terminally ill the focus is to allow patients to meet loved ones and communicate with them during their last moments despite the quarantine regulations. Other reports claim that, as the numbers of dead increases, some families find themselves unable to secure a proper burial for their loved ones. Peleg said that, from what he sees and hears in the hospital, the instructions are not to offer access to artificial respiratory machines to patients over 60 as such machines are limited in number.  

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Uber took stock of the effect the coronavirus outbreak has had on its business in a call with investors on March 19th, and the early numbers are pretty grim. The company’s gross bookings in Seattle, a city hit hard by the novel coronavirus, is down by 60-70 percent, the company’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said.

And while the company didn’t release exact numbers for other US cities, Khosrowshahi says they are assuming similar declines in other big markets that have also been affected, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City.

“We are seeing a similar pattern — if I plot curves, there’s a difference in timing — but the curves in SF, LA, NYC are looking similar in shape,” Khosrowshahi said, “and my guess is some of them will be higher by 5 percent, some of them may be lower by a couple of percent. But there are going to be a lot of cities around the world that look like Seattle, at least that’s what the curves are looking like.”