Monday, May 23, 2022
Tuesday brings the next big batch of primaries, as voters head to the polls in Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia — plus we get a little bonus electoral action thanks to several runoffs in Texas and a special election in Minnesota. And thanks to former President Donald Trump’s attempt to dislodge multiple incumbents who refused to overturn the 2020 election, Georgia is the election on everyone’s mind this week, but there are even more races of note in the other four states — 11, to be exact. Here’s the lowdown on each of them.
Seventeen years ago, a sculpted Spaniard tore through the French Open draw.
It took the Indiana Fever 18 games to reach two wins in 2021 — a difficult season that ended with a league-worst mark of 6-26. But Indiana recorded its second win this season in just its fourth game, a spirited 92-86 overtime win on the road last Friday against the New York Liberty.
There are certain divides in the American electorate that we return to over and over again to explain why people think and vote the way they do. Age, gender, race, education — you know the drill. But other, harder-to-see divisions can be just as important, if not more so. Those hidden divisions aren’t about vital statistics or affiliations. They’re about how people see the world.
The path to the Stanley Cup is going through one of hockey’s signature rivalries this spring, with the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers squaring off in the NHL’s Western Conference semifinals. (The Flames took Game 1 in a wild 9-6 shootout on Wednesday night; Game 2 is Friday night in Calgary.) Not only will the series determine who carries the banner for all of Canada in hopes of ending its painful 29-year Cup drought, but it represents a fierce clash between provincial neighbors with almost as much history, and hostility, on the ice as off.
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Veronica wasn’t sure how the new disease she’d heard about on the news would affect her. It seemed unreal. She and her friends had just been joking about a game on the Google Play Store, in which the goal was to wipe out humanity with a deadly virus. “We joked about it. We were like … this is the apocalypse,” she said. “And then it happened.”
During Boston’s conference final-opening loss to Miami on Tuesday night, Marcus Smart stood on the sideline in resortwear, nursing a foot injury and politicking with officials. He did what he could; cameras caught him during a timeout harping on rotations and assignments. But Derrick White, starting in his stead, mustered just 3 points on four shots, and, during the deciding third quarter, the Celtics’ offense stuck to predictable patterns while their defense broke down.
From the moment he burst onto the scene with a then-record 52 home runs as a rookie in 2017, Aaron Judge’s seemingly limitless potential has captured the imaginations of the New York Yankees and their fans. Not only did Judge win American League Rookie of the Year honors that year, but he immediately finished second in MVP balloting at the age of 25, while his team came within a win of making the World Series. If that was Judge’s introduction to stardom, he and the Yankees appeared well-positioned to recapture the franchise’s past glories in the years ahead.
Has modern birth control made abortion a thing of the past? That’s what lawyers for the state of Mississippi want the U.S. Supreme Court to think. In a brief in the the pending case that could overturn abortion rights nationwide, Mississippi’s lawyers wrote, “[E]ven if abortion may once have been thought critical as an alternative to contraception, changed circumstances undermine that view.” Access to birth control has improved, they noted, and some methods’ failure rates are “now approaching zero.” According to Mississippi’s lawyers, effective birth control means people don’t need abortions anymore.