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What candles could tell us about COVID

Before submitting that one-star review for the lousy scented candle you bought that has no scent, you may want to be tested for COVID-19. Yes, in this very strange year, stinky candles may turn out to be our canaries in the coal mine. An anecdotal study by Kate Petrova, a Harvard Study of Adult Development at Bryn Mawr College research assistant, found that spikes in negative reviews of the candles mirror surges of COVID-19 infections in America. Saying her project was “just a fun exercise in data visualization — not a peer review study,” Petrova has drawn interest nationwide ...

Educating about the vaccine

Elected officials at all levels need to start right now on working to convince the public that the COVID-19 vaccines we’ll soon be able to take are safe. They’ll have to help us put disinformation aside and see that the only way we’ll put this pandemic behind us is with as close as we can get to universal vaccination. For a variety of reasons, that’s going to be a challenge: Anti-vax conspiracy theories have many believing all kinds of untrue tales about implanting chips and “marking us for elimination.” These vaccines have already been tested on thousands of volunteers ...

Can our house be saved?

America is in dire straits, mired in problems and seemingly unable to solve any of them. We have a pandemic that’s killing Americans by the tens of thousands in addition to causing unrest over any effort by our government to try to protect us via mask mandates and shutdowns. We have racial unrest that’s spawned protests even locally and images of police in riot gear clashing with protesters have become so common that they don’t even faze us anymore. Then there’s perhaps the ugliest presidential election in modern American history. It’s an election in which the incumbent, ...

Relocating tourney tough, but right call

Yes, the Maui Invitational men’s college basketball tournament was moved to Asheville, N.C., for all the right reasons. The health of players, coaches, fans and Maui residents had to come first. It would have made absolutely no sense to fly teams here to play in an empty, or near-empty, Lahaina Civic Center. Open the doors and pack it with boosters as the pandemic surges across the country? That could have been catastrophic for our island. We understand, but that doesn’t make missing Texas’ thrilling, buzzer-beating championship win over North Carolina any easier to swallow for ...

AG Barr can take the heat

Bill Barr can take the heat and on Tuesday the stalwart Attorney General guaranteed he’ll get it when he said “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” Mr. Barr told the Associated Press that allegations of “particularized” fraud, with some that “potentially cover a few thousand votes,” are being explored. But President Trump is down by 150,000 votes in Michigan, 80,000 in Pennsylvania, and 20,000 in Wisconsin. As for the idea that voting machines were compromised, Mr. Barr said the feds “have looked into ...

A symbolic milestone

The American economy is a wonderful engine of prosperity left to its own devices, and on Nov. 24 it proved this again with another surge in equity prices that pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 30,000 for the first time. Stock prices rise and fall, but this symbolic milestone of optimism for the future shows the economy’s resilience despite the COVID-19 plague. We’ve lost track of the many doom and gloom predictions, especially since politicians shut down the economy in March. Remember the disaster that was supposed to follow the end of enhanced federal jobless benefits ...