Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are friends with a lovely couple. We have many things in common and enjoy hanging out with them. The problem is their kid. They have a son the same age as our younger son and the boys like hanging out with each other. At first that seemed like a great bonus to this friendship. But the longer we’ve been friends, the clearer it has become that their kid is a horrible person—rude, spoiled, insolent, a liar, and frequently downright mean to our kid (although our kid doesn’t seem to care and still wants to hang out with him). The parents do nothing to address his bad behavior. In fact, they coddle him. I know we need to mind our own business and not make comments on their objectively garbage parenting style, but can we distance our kid from theirs? Is it too weird to hang out with the parents and just never bring our own kid along? As a side note, we could leave our son with his older brother; they don’t have any other kids so we don’t really have an “adults only” option.


—Keeping My Mouth Shut Is Hard

Buffets - from the humblest hotel breakfasts to the grandest casino banquets - are struggling to stay afloat as new health restrictions come into place and wary diners eschew the self-serve dining tradition.

The appeal of all-you-can-eat food, with no waiter there to judge your food pairings or quantity, led the Washington Post this month to describe buffets as an "offer [of] public gluttony at an affordable price".

As many buffets go out of business across the US, others are innovating and trying desperately to keep the business model relevant and appetising.

In March, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates food safety for the federal government, recommended "discontinuing self-service buffets and salad bars" until the pandemic subsides.

White parents often avoid talking openly about race with white children because of the unfounded fear that it will call attention to differences that kids wouldn’t otherwise notice. Some insist their kids are just too young for such conversations.

If parents don’t explain why these inequities exist — that they exist because of longstanding systemic racism in this country — children will assume they must be justified or “natural.”

We asked experts to share some of the problematic things white kids commonly say and how parents can respond in order to further the conversation and create a teachable moment.

"As the women's movement went mainstream, I loved the options for women it created, but also felt there was a demonizing of men, an undervaluing of the family, and a blindness to how boys and men were being harmed that would have profound effects on families, boys, addiction, careers, male unemployment, the global economy and so on," he explained. "When I uncovered reasons that were not part of the public consciousness, I felt I had something to contribute."

Farrell soon discovered that there was little serious attention being paid to the space of boy's development, either in academia or anywhere else. The subject was, in Farrell's words, "a national afterthought."

What was not an afterthought to Farrell were the big disparities in outcomes of every kind between boys and girls in America. Disparities that crossed ethnic, racial and geographic boundaries.

"Before age 9, boys and girls commit suicide equally," Farrell told a Tedx audience. "By age 10 to 14, it is twice the amount for boys. Between 15 and 19, it is four times the amount, and by ages 18 to 24, it is six times the amount. That's staggering." Often, these tragedies seem to share one circumstance: the lack of a father in the home.

The governor of Texas has warned that he could reimpose a lockdown on the state if coronavirus prevention measures were not heeded, as states across the U.S. battled to get the pandemic under control.

Friday brought 63,900 new cases nationwide - a new record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University analyzed by CNN.

Bioethicist Dr Zeke Emanuel said up to 250,000 Americans could die directly from the coronavirus by the end of the year.

In mid-March, as the Seattle region grappled with a coronavirus outbreak, a community health center caring for the area's Native American population made an urgent request to county, state and federal health agencies: Please send medical supplies.

What it received almost three weeks later left staff members stunned.

"My team turned ghost white," said Esther Lucero, chief executive officer of the Seattle Indian Health Board.

Sweden’s controversial decision to refuse coronavirus lockdown measures is taking its toll — with the number of deaths up to 17 times higher than its Nordic neighbors, according to reports.

Fatalities in the Scandinavian nation topped 1,300 on Thursday — far worse than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all implemented containment measures, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.

By comparison, Denmark has reported 321 COVID-19 deaths, Norway has reported 150 deaths and Finland has reported just 75, the data shows.

Katdare’s experience is one of the more dramatic in a phenomenon that has become common in India lately: health-care workers being subjected to violence and abuse as they try to contain the virus. Assaults have been reported across the country as people panic about catching the disease from medical workers or being stigmatized for having contracted it themselves.

On the cracked country roads of Lexington, deep in the Mississippi delta, an empty yellow school bus drives slowly, making life-sustaining drop offs on the way.

Here, in the poorest county, in America’s poorest state, the coronavirus has yet to ravage the jurisdiction with infection. There has been one recorded Covid-19 death in the county, Clinton Cobbins, Lexington’s first African American mayor. But even now the coronavirus still poses a serious threat to life.

In Holmes county consolidated – the school district to which Lexington belongs – every single child qualifies for free school meals, a marker of pervasive poverty. For many, said superintendent Dr James L Henderson, breakfast and lunch at school are the only nutritious meals a student will eat in a day. For a few, they are the only meals.

When the coronavirus pandemic led to statewide school closures, Henderson, who was born in the county, left for most of his adult life, but returned in 2018 to assume his position, was left with a significant dilemma: how to feed the 3,000 children under his authority.

Anxiety has become the most common mental-health disorder in the country. Unfortunately, it does not only affect adults.

According to the National Institute Of Mental Health, almost 32 percent of adolescents have an anxiety disorder.

However, the troubling part of this statistic is that anxiety is only becoming more prevalent as the years go on, increasing 20 percent since 2007.

So, why is anxiety in teens on the rise?

At least 430,000 people have traveled from China to the United States on direct flights since the COVID-19 disease surfaced last year - with nearly 40,000 arriving in the two months after President Trump imposed travel restrictions.

Additionally, there were more than 1,300 direct passenger flights and 381,000 travelers arriving to the United States from China in January. Around a quarter were Americans.

The New York Times reports that thousands of these passengers flew directly from China as US health officials were just beginning to gauge the severity of the outbreak.

The first reported cases of coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of last year.

The city has coronavirus hate-crime fever, NYPD data shows.

Crime stats released Thursday show a spike in attacks against perceived carriers of the COVID-19 bug.

The data shows there have been 23 hate crimes against victim’s whose protected category is classified as “other” so far this year — a 475-percent increase from the 4 reported over the same period last year.

The crimes are categorized that way even though a majority of victims are Asian, officials said.

“Recent Coronavirus-related incidents fall under the anti-other category as there are two motivating factors behind these crimes,” the accompanying statement said. “The victim’s race (anti-Asian) and the perception that they have the Coronavirus (anti-disability).”

Beaches in the Hamptons are starting to fill up earlier than normal and rental properties are now scarce with New Yorkers fleeing the city as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread.

The beachside communities in Long Island have seen a surge in population ever since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a stay-at-home order to help stop the spread of the virus.

The unusual surge so early in the year has prompted local leaders in the Hamptons to urge Gov Cuomo to ban non-locals from the area during the outbreak.

Locals in the Hamptons, which is usually a summer hotspot for New Yorkers getting out of the city, have reported larger than normal crowds at beaches and busier beachside parking lots.