In essence, after weeks of Republican efforts to downplay the assault and to urge America to move on, it showed how raw the Jan. 6 attack was, and how much worse it was than previously known.

“The footage is horrific. We all witnessed a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. That was horrendous. It was violent. It was criminal. And everyone involved in that terrorist attack should be fully prosecuted and should go to jail for a very long time,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Capitol reporters.

The correct measure of the danger here is not what the average individual rioter would do. It’s the behavior of the mob, and mobs of nice, normal, nonviolent people can and do kill.

California, as the biggest state in the nation, and one where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else? I hope California keeps being weird. But it needs to do better.

California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. That’s rekindling past cliches about the state — incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas — even as it struggles with surging COVID-19 infections, a safety net frayed by the pandemic’s toll, crushing housing costs and wildfires, all fueling an exodus of residents.

We should be wary when we’re told that Biden’s campaign promise of Building Back Better quietly means Making America California Again. It’s great news for the whiz kid technocrats of the Democratic Party — but if history is a guide, California Love is often bad news for the working class.

The fact is, there is no scientific evidence to support continued school closures. Quite the opposite, evidence is piling up that such closures are doing irreparable harm to children.

Barely a day goes by when another expert who’s looked at the evidence or a parent who has lived with the stresses of kids at home doesn’t call for the return of in-person instruction. In intellectual and moral terms, the debate over reopening schools has been won…

Small schools and districts are held as examples of “safe reopenings” even though many have had to go between virtual and hybrid models. Positive cases and quarantines routinely occur, but there’s a lack of reliable and transparent metrics utilized to show reported and tracked cases.

…for those that don’t survive, like Sammy’s and the dozens of others lost so far this year, what have we lost, beyond the quantifiable economic measures of a business (jobs, taxes, an investment)? [.] The first thing we lose is a physical space that has become, in its own way, a tactile Jewish Place.

What helped kosher establishments weather the storm so much better than the rest of the industry? We Jews love food and dining out. Kosher diners clamored to get back into restaurants as soon as they could amid the pandemic over nearly all other forms of entertainment. Whenever restaurants in New York and Los Angeles will be allowed to fully open, there will be a metaphorical stampede of diners.

Marina del Rey’s historic Jerry’s, which had served Jewish deli staples to the Westside neighborhood for more than four decades, has closed once again. The news is yet another blow to Jerry’s owners and local fans, who have watched the business seesaw between opening and closing (and rebranding) in the same location over the past decade, while other Jerry’s locations across Los Angeles and the country close altogether.

The 27-year-old writer grew up modern Orthodox in Boca Raton before going to Yale and Yale Law School (where he is now a student), and The Orchard is set in the same milieu. The high school students at Kol Neshama Academy in fictional Zion Hills, Florida, are meritocrats in the making—wealthy, ambitious, Ivy-bound. The only exception is the book’s narrator, Aryeh Eden, who has transferred there as a senior from a very frum yeshiva in Brooklyn.

It would be difficult to survive the harrowing years of adolescence without reading a book by best-selling author Rachel Cohn, the reigning Queen of YA Lit. Cohn’s most celebrated works, from novels to screenplays, include Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, and the Dash & Lily series, which she co-authored with Jewish writer David Levithan. She also served as executive producer and wrote one episode of the Dash & Lily Netflix series adapted from the books.

Samuel is now a staff writer at Vox’s Future Perfect, and this is her first foray into children’s books. (Her first book for adults, “The Mystics of Mile End,” is a lovely exploration of Jewish life in Montreal.) “Osnat and Her Dove” very much encompasses the scope of her work: an exploration of Jewish heritage and mysticism; a deeply feminist but not at all didactic tale with magical prose.

…while all of us bear some responsibility for what happened to Britney, most of what happened to her is the result of the decisions made by powerful media figures who kept mocking her and photographing her regardless of the clear consequences to her mental health. They did not build the system in which they were working, but they had agency within that system regardless.

What the documentary suggested to me is the very real possibility that Timberlake’s solo career was laid on the societal shaming of Britney Spears. Examine the sequenced releasing of songs and his media promotion of the 2002 album, which centered on the couple’s breakup.

This was the era of the celebrity-industrial complex, when Perez Hilton made his name following Paris Hilton around… Celebrities, once distant, suddenly seemed within reach. Everyday folks were no longer satisfied with aspiring to fame; they wanted to relate to the famous. But to really relate, they had to do something that made the powerful seem less powerful — like snickering at a woman with multiplatinum records when her perfectly manicured image started to chip.