I often find myself filled with awe while reading the news. Some stories on some days jump out at me. No, they blow my mind.
To capture that sense of wonder, from time to time, I’m going to flag items in the news that grab me. They’ll tend to come from the Times, because that’s the paper I read most often in print. And print is where I tend to see these stories. For me, there’s something about reading a newspaper that allows me to discover the news.
Excerpts of the stories (with links) appear below; of course, I encourage you to read the entire article.
To start…
More than a billion people need eyeglasses
This front-page story by Andrew Jacobs reports on the more than a billion people worldwide who lack eyeglasses. The headline: “A Health Crisis That Costs $1.50 to Correct.” It resonates with me because I have been nearsighted since the third grade. I cannot imagine living without vision correction. And yet, as the story tells us:
“More than a billion people around the world need eyeglasses but don’t have them, researchers say, an affliction long overlooked on lists of public health priorities. Some estimates put that figure closer to 2.5 billion people. They include thousands of nearsighted Nigerian truck drivers who strain to see pedestrians darting across the road and middle-aged coffee farmers in Bolivia whose inability to see objects up close makes it hard to spot ripe beans for harvest.
Then there are tens of millions of children… across the world, whose families cannot afford an eye exam or the prescription eyeglasses that would help them excel in school.”
Americans who voted for Obama and then Trump are in play.
Here’s the second story, by Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, who report on people who voted for Obama in the 2012 presidential election then voted for Donald Trump four years later.
“The swing of Obama voters to Mr. Trump proved a decisive factor in the 2016 presidential election. Of the more than 650 counties that chose Mr. Obama twice, about a third flipped to Mr. Trump. Many were in states critical to Mr. Trump’s win, like Iowa, Michigan Ohio and Wisconsin.
John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University, has estimated that 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Mr. Obama ended up voting for Mr. Trump. Among white voters who had never been to college, it was 22 percent.
Now, as the country lurches into another election season – this time the prize is control of Congress – a crucial question for Democrats is whether they will be able to lure these voters back.”