American Shoppers Are a Nightmare, The Segway is 20, No End In Sight for Pandemic … and More

Earlier this month, a restaurant on Cape Cod reportedly was so overwhelmed with rude customers that it shut down for a “day of kindness.” America’s ultra-tense political climate, together with the accumulated personal and economic traumas of the pandemic, have helped spur this animosity, which was already intense and common in the United States. But it’s hardly the only reason that much of the country has decided to take out its pandemic frustrations on the customer-service desk. For generations, American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares. The pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling of being served.

President Biden’s top aides were told on Friday that experts studying the mysterious illnesses affecting scores of diplomats, spies and their family members were still struggling to find evidence to back up the leading theory, that microwave attacks are being launched by Russian agents. The report came in an unusual, classified meeting called by the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, according to several senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The purpose of the meeting was to assess the investigations and efforts to treat victims of the so-called Havana syndrome — the unexplained headaches, dizziness and memory loss reported by scores of State Department officials, C.I.A. officers and their families.

This week, Walt Disney World announced more details about its new Galactic Starcruiser hotel opening in the spring, an immersive, two-day “Star Wars” experience that evokes the feeling of being in the movies. The tech will be more advanced than any other Disney experience, including Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland and the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge lands. Admission to Hollywood Studios is included in the price, as is all of your food and non-alcoholic beverages. But really, for $4,809 for two nights’ accommodations for two guests in a studio, they could throw in a space beer or two.

No one—not even the literary agent who had submitted the proposal to editors, swearing them to secrecy—knew what the invention was. All they knew was the single word of the book’s title: IT. The tech bubble was bursting, and all across Silicon Valley, paper fortunes were vanishing. Now here was something different, something that felt new because it was old: a real invention, not just lines of HTML. Soon IT was on Lycos, on NPR, in the New York Times, on late-night talk shows. An IT message board thrown onto the internet by two entrepreneurial brothers received 100,000 hits in its first 24 hours. The explosion of the IT story in the winter and spring of 2001 represented an entirely new kind of media frenzy, the birth of virality as we now know it. And then IT, too, popped. In December 2001, a year after the initial leak, the world finally learned what IT was, as Dean Kamen presented his invention on Good Morning America. With great fanfare, an actual curtain raised to reveal a bulky two-wheeled scooter. The Segway did not change the world. It was not bigger than the PC. It ended up a joke, the province of mall cops and G.O.B. Bluth on Arrested Development. The Segway flopped so badly that one of its first boosters still keeps his in the garage, “to remind me,” he said, “of my own fallibility.”

The pandemic is not coming to an end soon — given that only a small proportion of the world population has been vaccinated against Covid-19, a well-known epidemiologist told CNBC. Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was part of the World Health Organization’s team that helped eradicate smallpox, said the delta variant is “maybe the most contagious virus” ever. “I think we’re closer to the beginning than we are to the end [of the pandemic], and that’s not because the variant that we’re looking at right now is going to last that long."

Up until a few weeks ago, corporate leaders felt confident about what to expect this fall. Offices would reopen after Labor Day. Business travel would resume more broadly. Long-delayed work gatherings, conventions and off-site meetings would finally take place. The pandemic has, once again, upended many of those plans. The swift, startling resurgence of Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations across the U.S. is causing corporate leaders to rip up playbooks for the next few months. No longer is a September return a target for many companies. Some employers, such as banking giant Wells Fargo and managed-care company Centene Corp., have in recent days shifted return-to-office dates to October. Meanwhile, a range of other prominent companies now predict it will be 2022 until most workers return.