“One of the sad stories of this pandemic is that we’re losing people that we couldn’t afford to lose”

He has delivered revelatory reporting on some of the defining stories of our time. But a close examination reveals the weaknesses in what may be called an era of resistance journalism.

By Ben Smith @ NYTimes.com, May 17

It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.”

In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities.

The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.

Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.

The records were simply put on restricted access, a longstanding practice to prevent leaks, a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes [....]

Op-ed by Uri Alon, Ron Milo and Eran Yashiv @ NYTimes.com, May 11

People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown.

[Mr. Alon and Mr. Milo are professors of computational and systems biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Mr. Yashiv is a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University and at the London School of Economics Center for Macroeconomics.]

"The five sailors had gone through at least two weeks of isolation and tested negative twice in a row before they were allowed back on the ship, the Associated Press reported. Once they returned to the ship, the sailors developed influenza-like illness symptoms before they tested positive a second time, AP wrote. "

Add asterick to "let it wash, we'll have herd immunity."

On the dense big city thing, Kimmelman recommends we read:

(found retweeted by Andrew Sullivan; a reminder: he is a longtime AIDS survivor.)