Month: May 2021

Categories
Health

La pandemia me enseñó a valorar la rutina

The Importance of Routines, Even Interrupted by a Pandemic

I thought the reward for me was peace of mind. What I didn’t know is that he gave me other little trophies as well: When I went to the gym five days a week, there was a little voice in my head that said, “You deserve two slices of pizza.” When I cleaned the house on Sunday mornings, I always got a beer in the afternoon. And sometimes you are not even aware of the rewards you are giving yourself for the routine and I think those are the most important. With these rewards, I’m good to myself and telling myself that I’ve done something, so I deserve something.

“You’re forcing yourself to anticipate the rewards,” says Duhigg. “All of this is very good.”

For Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias, “Routines and rituals are an integral part of maintaining my sanity,” she told me. Wang’s routines include “my analog diary where I keep a journal, manage my appointments, and write down tasks that, along with a number of other notebooks and folders, organize things so that life feels less overwhelming.”

Just as important – and perhaps more difficult – is maintaining routines. While writing appointments is important, I remember getting up at a specific time to meditate, my work at 1 p.m., and my phone break are acts that remind me of where the still waters will be. What could it turn out to be? be a rough sea.

“When you change a habit in your life that you previously thought was important,” said Duhigg, “you just need to be aware of how you are changing that habit on purpose.”

However, external forces sometimes overwhelm the ability to sustain oneself. After five years of constant routine, the pandemic came. The first day I worked from home, my routine fell apart. They told us it would be a week, then two, then next month, then late summer, and then maybe after Thanksgiving. Sooner or later we would probably go back to the office. I started to sleep later; When the gym closed, I had to find a new way to work out, and when everything I’d considered part of a normal day for myself started to fade away, I didn’t realize how depressed I was.

Categories
Entertainment

Watch John Legend’s Full Duke College Graduation Speech

Watch John Legend's Full Duke University Commencement Speech

John Legend prepares our graduates for success for 2021. On May 2, the “Wild” singer delivered a powerful speech to Duke University graduates. This is John’s first return to a large audience since February 2020 and he prepared some precious words of wisdom especially for the occasion. Everyone should take his advice to heart.

John admitted the 2021 class didn’t have the typical college experience. “I feel your pain: you lost something that you won’t get back. I’m not going to gloss over it – it sucks,” he said. “Last year you had to pause to see yourself not only in competition with one another, but also in community with one another.”

He continued, “We all had to slow down, social distance, cover our faces, stop filling our days with maximum productivity, and just protect each other, keep each other alive, take care of each other.” John encouraged graduates to remember that “Love should be your North Star. Let it guide you.” See his full remarks above.

Categories
World News

Why India’s Outbreak Is a Menace to the World

Why India's Outbreak Is a Threat to the World

The coronavirus wave in India, where countless pyres cloud the night sky, is more than just a humanitarian disaster: Experts say uncontrolled outbreaks like India’s also threaten to prolong the pandemic by allowing more dangerous variants of the virus to spread and possibly evade Vaccinations.

The United States will start restricting travel from India later this week, but similar restrictions on air travel from China that President Trump imposed in the early days of the pandemic proved ineffective.

“We can ban any flights we want, but there is literally no way to keep these highly contagious varieties out of our country,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health.

As the coronavirus spreads among human hosts, it invariably mutates, creating opportunities for new variants that can be more transmissible or even deadly. A highly contagious variant known as B.1.1.7 knocked down the UK earlier this year and is already well entrenched in the US and Europe.

Recent estimates suggest that B.1.1.7 is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus. Another worrying variant, P.1, is wreaking havoc across South America.

On Friday, India recorded 401,993 new cases in a single day, a world record, despite experts say its real numbers are well above reports. Peru, Brazil, and other countries across South America are also experiencing devastating waves.

Virologists aren’t sure what is driving India’s second wave. Some have pointed to a native variant called B.1.617, but researchers outside of India say the limited data suggests that B.1.1.7 could be to blame.

With 44 percent of adults receiving at least one dose, the United States has made great strides in vaccinating its citizens, although experts say the country is a long way from achieving what is known as herd immunity if the virus doesn’t get away easily can spread because it can. t find enough hosts. The hesitation of the vaccine remains a formidable threat to reaching that threshold.

However, vaccines are still hard to come by in much of the world, especially in poorer countries. In India, less than 2 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. “If we are to leave this pandemic behind, we cannot let the virus run wild in other parts of the world,” said Dr. Yeh.

Initial evidence suggests that the vaccines are effective against the variants, but slightly less effective against some.

“For the moment the vaccines remain effective, but there is a trend towards less effectiveness,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease doctor and epidemiologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

Vaccine manufacturers say they are ready to develop booster vaccines that would address particularly problematic variants, but such a solution would be of little help to poorer nations who are already struggling to get their existing vaccines. Experts say the best way to prevent dangerous variants from developing is to contain new infections and immunize most of humanity as soon as possible.

Dr. Michael Diamond, a viral immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said the longer the coronavirus circulates, the more time it has to mutate, which could eventually threaten vaccinated people. The only way to break the cycle is to make sure countries like India get enough vaccines.

“To stop this pandemic, we have to vaccinate the whole world,” said Dr. Diamond. “There will always be new waves of infection if we don’t vaccinate worldwide.”

Categories
Business

This is why it’s necessary to get second Covid shot

Here's why it’s important to get second Covid shot

Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Monday he was not yet concerned about the number of Americans who missed their planned second dose of Covid vaccine.

“We’re not sure if these people will come back anytime. They just didn’t come back on time,” said the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

However, Gottlieb said receiving the second Covid shot is necessary to receive the full protective benefits of the vaccines for months to come. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots. (Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine, the third emergency approved in the US, only takes a single dose.)

“My advice to anyone would be that we don’t know the shelf life of this response, even if you are young and there is evidence that you are already starting to derive a robust immune response with that first dose,” said Gottlieb, who sits at Pfizer’s Tafel. “If you really want the vaccine to work over the long term, you really should get the second dose.”

On Friday, the White House chief medical officer, Dr. Anthony Fauci that approximately 8% of US citizens who received the first dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines did not come back for the second shot.

“The number of people who have not yet returned to the second dose is low compared to historical standards or historical norms,” ​​said Gottlieb, who headed the FDA in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. For example, he said, the response rate for the Covid vaccine is better than for the two-dose shingles vaccine.

Gottlieb admitted that it is possible that a higher percentage of US vaccine recipients could skip the second shot if more young people get the shot. This is partly because “younger people know they can derive a more robust immune response from just the first dose than older people, who really need that second dose to get full immune protection,” he repeated.

People who haven’t yet returned for the second shot aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong on purpose, Gottlieb added. He praised the pharmacies that deliver vaccines for “trying to implement reminders for these patients.”

“Often it is only lost for tracking. It is not people who purposely do not come back,” said Gottlieb. “There are some situations I’ve spoken to people who are worried about the second dose, the side effects supposedly associated with the second dose compared to the first dose. But right now the percentage of people who came back are because this second shot is pretty high. “

Nearly 105 million people in the United States, nearly a third of the population, have been fully vaccinated, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to CDC data, about 147 million, or about 44% of the US population, received at least one dose.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion Inc., and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel for Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.

Categories
Politics

Swiss Billionaire Quietly Turns into Influential Pressure Amongst Democrats

Swiss Billionaire Quietly Becomes Influential Force Among Democrats

These types of spending – which are usually handled through nonprofit groups that don’t need to disclose much information about their finances, including their donors – have been welcomed by conservatives after regulatory changes and court rulings, particularly those of the Supreme Court, eased campaign spending restrictions were made in 2010 in the Citizens United case.

While progressives and election guards denounced the developments as too powerful for wealthy interests, democratic donors and activists increasingly used dark money. During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic-affiliated groups spent more than $ 514 million on such funds, compared to approximately $ 200 million spent by Republican-affiliated groups, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Some of the groups funded by the Mr. Wyss Foundations played a key role in this shift, although the relatively limited disclosure requirements for these types of groups make it impossible to definitively determine how they spent funds from the Wyss Foundations.

Mr. Wyss and his advisors have developed a “strategic, evidence-based, metric-driven and results-oriented approach to building a political infrastructure,” said Rob Stein, a democratic strategist.

Mr. Stein, who founded the influential Democracy Alliance Club of Big Liberal Donors in 2005 and recruited Mr. Wyss to join, added that “unlike most affluent political donors right and left,” Mr. Wyss and his team “know how is going to achieve measurable, sustainable effects. “

85-year-old Wyss was born in Bern, visited the USA for the first time in 1958 as an exchange student and was enthusiastic about the American national parks and public areas. After getting rich and running the Swiss-based medical device manufacturer Synthes, he began donating his fortune through a network of foundations to promote nature conservation, environmental protection and other issues.

The foundations gradually increased their donations for other Democrat-backed causes, including abortion rights and minimum wage increases, and eventually for groups more directly involved in partisan debates, especially after the election of Mr Trump.

Categories
Business

Class and Covid: A Key Hyperlink in Layoffs Worldwide

Class and Covid: A Key Link in Layoffs Worldwide

In the United States and many other countries, lower-income, lower-educated adults are harder hit economically by the coronavirus pandemic.

The relationship between class and Covid-19 isn’t inevitable, however: it doesn’t exist in some of the most egalitarian societies in Europe and Asia, according to a new Gallup global survey conducted from July 2020 to March 2021.

Globally, 41 percent of workers in the poorest 20 percent of their county’s income distribution said they had lost their job or business due to the pandemic, compared with 23 percent of workers in the richest 20 percent. This job loss gap is similar between those with a college degree (16 percent who lost a job or company) and those without (35 percent).

The gap in economic vulnerability is closely related to the prevailing income inequality that has accompanied the pandemic. In the economically most egalitarian countries (as measured by the Gini coefficient for household income), workers with lower incomes and lower levels of education were protected from mass unemployment, including through national measures to prevent job loss.

Public health experts have long understood that socioeconomic status is closely related to health outcomes and susceptibility to infectious diseases. Some countries – including the US, England and France – have found that Covid-19 has resulted in higher deaths in low-income communities, as well as blacks and some ethnic minorities.

Most of these gaps appear to be due to work-related exposures rather than non-compliance with safety guidelines. Black people in the United States are more likely than whites to report social distancing and mask use, but at the start of the pandemic, they were about 30 percent more likely to work in jobs that required close physical proximity. This is evident from research to be published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

The earnings gap is even wider: workers in the bottom third of the income distribution were four times more likely than workers in the top 10 percent to be in a job that required close physical proximity. With the exception of doctors and a few other professions, highly skilled workers rarely need to be in direct contact with other people.

The overexposure of low-income workers to personal and personal work has created a twofold risk for the less affluent: increased threats of physical and economic harm. For example, in the United States, the unemployment rate of food preparation and service workers rose from 5.5 percent to 19.6 percent from 2019 to 2020 as people stopped eating out.

Around the world, lockdowns and social distancing have destroyed lower-income jobs that require less education. In 103 of 117 countries in Gallup’s World Poll data, workers in the bottom quintile of household income distribution had significantly higher job loss rates than those in the top. University graduates fared significantly better than graduates with less than 16 years of education in 97 out of 118 countries and territories.

Updated

May 3, 2021, 6:22 p.m. ET

Ungraduate workers in low-income countries fared worst, although they tended to live in areas with much lower Covid-19 fatalities during the survey period than in high-income countries in Europe and North America . More than two in three non-college workers lost their jobs or business as a result of Covid-19 in the Philippines and Kenya, even though the per capita death rate was 7 percent and 2 percent of the United States, respectively.

More than half of those without a university degree lost their jobs in Zimbabwe, Thailand, Peru and India. The rate of job or business loss among workers with a university degree in these countries was at least 10 percentage points lower.

While the economic damage has generally been worse in low-income countries, the United States is distinguished among high-income democracies by high job losses and a wide gap between those with and without college degrees. Of the 31 OECD member countries with data, the United States had the third largest gap in job loss between college graduates and non-holders, after Chile and Israel (eight percentage points).

Chile, Israel and the United States also share the difference that they have high levels of income inequality. More egalitarian countries – including France, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Germany – kept job losses low overall and did not see a significant gap in job loss rates between those with and without university degrees.

Globally, pre-pandemic income inequality predicted significantly higher job losses and a greater role for socio-economic status in shaping those job losses. The effect of inequality remains significant even after controlling for the cumulative per capita deaths from Covid-19 and the rigor of government policies to suppress disease and other factors that vary from country to country, as measured by Oxford University scientists.

More egalitarian countries tend to have more trusting populations, research shows, and create conditions that seem to lead to cooperation and effective collective action.

It is possible that elected officials in more egalitarian countries are more likely to develop measures to protect workers from dismissal – as is the case in Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, which are in the lower quintile of global inequality measures, as well as Ireland, Australia and Great Britain, which are in the second lowest quintile in inequality.

These guidelines directed income support to companies affected by the pandemic in order to maintain their workforce. Other more egalitarian countries – such as France, Germany and Switzerland – have used and expanded existing employer subsidy programs to keep workers loyal to employers.

No such guidelines were issued in Chile or Israel while the US government launched the Paycheck Protection Program. This program shared features with successful European policies, but came too late to prevent mass layoffs, as Federal Reserve economists have noted, with too many administrative and eligible complications.

Despite these restrictions, according to an analysis by US Treasury Department economists, the layoffs in the US would have been drastically worse without them. The federal government has increased spending significantly in other ways to reduce the damage done to the laid-offs, such as subsidized unemployment insurance and direct payments to low- and middle-income households.

But there’s a good reason why it’s best not to get laid off at all: Previous recessions have shown that millions of laid-off workers will never return to their employers.

In addition, recent data from Gallup’s Great Job Survey shows that people laid off and rehired as a result of the pandemic saw sharp drops in job satisfaction and continued to struggle to meet monthly expenses. Globally and in the US, the world survey shows that those laid off as a result of the pandemic were significantly more likely to see a decline in their standard of living compared to the previous year.

Jonathan Rothwell is a Principal Economist at Gallup, a resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting scholar at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy. He is the author of “A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society”. You can follow him on Twitter at @jtrothwell.

Categories
Health

Charts present the severity of the second wave

Charts show the severity of the second wave

A woman wearing a protective face mask walks past graffiti amid the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on a street in Mumbai, India, on March 30, 2021.

Francis Mascarenhas | Reuters

India’s second wave of Covid-19 infections shows no signs of slowing as the country’s overstretched health system faces supply shortages of hospital beds, oxygen, drugs and vaccines.

The World Health Organization said last week that every third new coronavirus case worldwide is reported in India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been criticized for allowing large crowds to gather for religious festivals and election campaigns in different parts of the country. Commentators said the mass gatherings have likely turned into super-spreader events.

The second wave cases increased in February when India reported an average of 10,000 infections per day. However, in April the situation worsened and ended the month repeatedly setting new global records for daily cases. India started May reporting more than 400,000 new cases.

Nearly 7 million cases were reported during the month, a large fraction of the more than 19 million cases India has seen throughout the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Scientists say the increase in cases is partly due to variants of the coronavirus currently circulating in India.

“There are at least two major dominant variants, one is a British variant and one is an Indian variant,” Manoj Murhekar, director of the National Institute for Epidemiology, Chennai, told CNBC on Friday.

The Indian government reportedly said last month that 80% of the cases in Punjab are due to the highly contagious British variant known as B.1.1.7.

The Indian variant is now known as B.1.617 and has several sublines with slightly different characteristic mutations. The WHO classified it as a variant of interest in their epidemiological update on the pandemic last week.

Maharashtra, home to India’s financial capital Mumbai, is the hardest hit state and the epicenter for the second wave.

India’s richest state was put on hold in mid-April to break the chain of transmission. The Maharashtra government reportedly extended the restrictions until May 15.

Murhekar told CNBC that very little is currently known about what proportion of infected cases are due to a variant. He said India needs to step up its surveillance for variants so that it has meaningful data from every region and state that has variants circulating in each region.

Since the start of its mass vaccination campaign in January, India has administered more than 154 million doses of vaccine as of April 30, according to the government.

This means that just over 10% of the population received at least one of the two required shots. However, the percentage of people who completed their vaccination is only about 2% of the total population, and it was around 27.9 million in April.

From May, India will open vaccinations for people over the age of 18.

Murhekar said the kind of herd immunity India needs to reduce transmission can only be achieved through vaccination.

“It will basically take many days and many months before we have a critical mass vaccinated against Covid,” he added.

However, the country is facing vaccine shortages and several states have reportedly run out of supplies.

The supply crisis is expected to last through July, according to the CEO of Serum Institute, a leading Indian vaccine maker that makes AstraZeneca’s shot. Adar Poonawalla recently told the Financial Times that his company would increase vaccine production capacity from about 60 million to 70 million doses per month to 100 million.

The other vaccine that is being given is Covaxin from Bharat Biotech.

New Delhi recently approved Sputnik V, developed in Russia, and approved overseas-made vaccines that have received emergency clearances from the U.S., UK, European Union, Japan and World Health Organization-listed agencies.

– CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed to this report.

Categories
Business

UNICEF chief urges the world to assist India ‘now’ as Covid instances soar

UNICEF chief urges the world to help India ‘now’ as Covid cases soar

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore told CNBC that she was “very concerned” about the current Covid-19 crisis in India and urged the world to send urgent aid to the country.

During World Immunization Week, Fore also said it was a “race to save lives” through vaccination, especially in some of the world’s poorest countries with “very fragile” health systems.

India is in the midst of a deadly second wave of the virus. On Saturday, daily coronavirus cases in the country went over 400,000 for the first time; The total number of cases in India has now exceeded 19 million and more than 215,000 people have died of Covid in the country.

“It is worrying for a number of reasons. First, is it a forerunner of what could happen in other countries, particularly in African countries, with much weaker health systems?” Fore said last week.

“It’s worrying because their healthcare system is overwhelmed. It’s the need for oxygen and therapeutics that we just haven’t seen in this pandemic in another country of this magnitude.”

People wearing face masks wait to receive a vaccine against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a vaccination center in Mumbai, India, on April 26, 2021.

Niharika Kulkarni | Reuters

Fore said both UNICEF and COVAX’s global immunization program had sent aid to the country, and help from other nations made a big difference. “But it is not enough because India is part of our supply chain. So this is where we source a lot of the vaccines and we now have to help India as the world,” she added.

UNICEF is the United Nations agency responsible for helping children around the world.

“Help us now”

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has stopped paying attention to other routine vaccinations, warned Fore. Around 60 routine vaccination campaigns have been halted around the world as countries focus on fighting the pandemic.

To address these challenges while helping recovery from the global pandemic, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and other partners are supporting a global strategy known as the Immunization Agenda 2030. The initiative aims to save 50 million lives on “an ambitious new global strategy to maximize the life-saving effects of vaccines through stronger immunization systems”.

Fore said around half of the world’s vaccinations come from routine UNICEF vaccinations for children.

“Polio, measles, yellow fever … all of these are vaccines that children need, but they are also vaccines that adults need. So we are asking families to come to primary health clinics in their own communities, bring in and have their children If you are vaccinated against these childhood diseases, you will also get a Covid vaccine and we can save 50 million lives, “she said.

When asked if she had a message for world leaders today, Fore said, “Well, help us now.”

Henrietta H. Fore, Managing Director of UNICEF on July 05, 2018 in BERLIN, GERMANY.

Ute Grabowsky / Photo library via Getty Images

“We are concerned that the world is ignoring things like routine vaccinations. We cannot lose this population, our children, to an epidemic while we worry about Covid as a pandemic for our world. Please help us now,” she said added.

Despite the ongoing global pandemic, Fore said it was time to focus on such initiatives.

“People are now realizing that vaccines are important, that vaccines work, that they save lives, and right now we are in a race to save lives,” she said.

“So if we can save them through a routine vaccination program that targets everyone in a society, both routine vaccinations and Covid will help.”

Global investment

However, Fore told CNBC that it can be difficult to focus global investments on supporting the programs.

“The Covax facility called for $ 23 billion, which sounds like a huge amount, but when you look at global GDP and opportunities, it’s a very small number,” she said.

“So they realize that we as a world can afford this, and if we could bring out vaccines for children and adults in the years to come, we would be a world that would have more justice, more fairness and better health across the board.”

Categories
Health

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely within the U.S., Specialists Now Consider

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

A better approach would be to have a trustworthy person address the root cause of hesitation – fear, suspicion, misunderstanding, easy access, or a desire for more information, said Mary Politi, an expert on health decisions and communication at Washington University in St. Louis.

People often need to see others in their social circle accept something before they’re ready to try, said Dr. Politi. Highlighting the life benefits of vaccination, like seeing a family member or sending their children to school, might be more motivating than the nebulous idea of ​​herd immunity.

“That would resonate more with people than that somewhat elusive concept that experts are still trying to figure out,” she added.

Although children spread the virus less efficiently than adults, all experts agreed that vaccinating children would also be important in keeping the number of Covid cases down. In the long term, the public health system must also take into account babies and children and adults who fall into a higher risk group.

Annoying scenarios remain on the way to this long-term vision.

If enough people are not protected over time, highly contagious variants can develop that can breach vaccine protection, bring people to the hospital, and put them at risk of death.

“This is the nightmare scenario,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University.

How common and how severe these breakthrough infections are may determine whether the United States can keep hospital stays and deaths down, or whether the country is in “maddening turmoil” every few years, he said.

“I think we’re going to look over our shoulders – or at least, public health officials and infectious disease epidemiologists will look over their shoulders and say, ‘Okay, the varieties out there – what are they doing? What can you? ” he said. “Maybe the general public can’t care too much about it again, but we have to.”

Categories
Business

Assist, We Can’t Cease Writing About Andrew Yang

Help, We Can’t Stop Writing About Andrew Yang

“The media leans towards celebrity, novelty and energy,” said Bronx US Representative Ritchie Torres, who endorsed Mr. Yang.

The candidate’s Trumpian provocation version is a series of Twitter controversies about slightly misguided enthusiasm for bodegas and subways. The Daily Show launched a spoof Twitter account last week with a big-eyed Mr. Yang excitedly explaining gems like, “Real New Yorkers Want To Go Back To Times Square.”

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Mr. Yang was less amused than usual by the exertion. “It seems like a strange time to take advantage of the Asian tourist tropics,” he said sourly. “I wish it was funnier.”

The joke is likely on its critics too. Like Mr. Trump, he simply benefited from the attention. When his campaign asked the fairly narrow group of Democratic primary voters who get their messages from Twitter how they would characterize what they see about the candidate, 79 percent said it was positive.

While Mr. Yang is not new to the city, he is new to its civil life. He has never voted in a mayoral election. The provocative heart of his presidential campaign, a pledge to alleviate the dystopian, robot-driven social collapse by giving $ 1,000 a month to an evicted citizenry, makes no sense in the city budget, so he replaced it with a cash bonus program rather traditionally the poor aligned. It’s unclear how many people still think he’s the free money candidate.

The best in his campaign are working for a consulting firm led by Bradley Tusk, a former advisor to Mayor Bloomberg and disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Mr. Tusk, who also advised Uber, has guided Mr. Yang to a comprehensive, pro-business center and kept him out of competition from other candidates for the left wing of the primary electorate.

Mr. Tusk told me in an unguarded moment in March that Mr. Yang’s great advantage was that he came into local politics as an “empty ship”, free of firm views on city politics or alliances. When I asked the candidate what he thought of the remark, Mr. Yang took no offense. “A lot of New Yorkers love someone who walks in and is just trying to figure out how best to approach a particular problem, how free from a number of obligations to existing special interests,” he said.