The Unbearable Lollapalooza, LOTR Unleashes Orcs in 2022, Florida Is Stupid … and More

Lollapalooza was held this past weekend in Chicago, with an estimated 100,000 people flocking to the city’s Grant Park for each day of the four-day music festival. The festival went ahead despite surging cases of the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus both in Chicago and across the country. Organizers required attendees to wear masks at any indoor spaces, and all guests had to show either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test in order to enter the festival. Some 600 people were turned away on Thursday, the festival’s first day, for not having either.

The Florida Hospital Association reported more than 10,000 Covid hospitalizations, the most statewide during any point in the pandemic. The head of Florida’s largest hospital association warned that the skyrocketing number of Covid hospitalizations is unlike anything the state has seen before — even as Gov. Ron DeSantis downplays the spike. The Florida Hospital Association on Monday reported 10,389 Covid-19 hospitalizations, the most statewide during any point in the pandemic. This follows Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting over the weekend that the state had more than 21,000 new coronavirus infections on Friday. It was the highest one-day total for Florida, which now makes up roughly one and five new cases nationally. About 95 percent of those hospitalized are unvaccinated, and Mary Mayhew, the president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, said the Delta variant that is sweeping through Florida is infecting young and unvaccinated people and is much different than the previous strain.

Amazon's long-awaited The Lord of the Rings series has a release date, but don't go rushing to stake out the best spot in your living room just yet. The show will premiere on September 2nd, 2022, with new episodes dropping on Prime Video each week. Filming on the as-yet-untitled series wrapped up today. Production began in February 2020, but it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The series takes place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A cast of old and new characters will have to resist a newly resurgent evil during the Second Age of Middle-earth.

Apple on Saturday removed Unjected, a dating-and-community app for unvaccinated people, from its App Store, in a move that the app's owners likened to censorship. The app violated Apple's policies for COVID-19 content, an Apple spokesperson told Insider on Saturday. The company cited published interviews in which Unjected's founders said their app was for "likeminded unvaccinated individuals." Unjusted had been downloaded about 18,000 times.

Scientists discovered that natural gas deposits deep within the Siberian permafrost increased the release of methane following a heatwave in the summer of 2020. These findings don’t necessarily mean the permafrost is beyond repair, the scientists suggest. The amount of methane being released from these deep methane reserves are relatively small compared to, say oilfields in Libya or wetlands in India, Froitzheim says. To have any chance of halting the release of methane from the permafrost we need to immediately begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and other industries.

What is it about space that seems to resonate with our current zeitgeist? If I were a cultural critic—rather than, say, a man who is about to try to expense a pack of Zero-G Skittles because of “research”—I would probably speculate that space crystallizes both freedom and isolation in a way that chimes with our experience of the pandemic. On the one hand: the promise of infinite vistas, strange new planets, an open expanse stretching forever in every direction; this is how the world looked to me at the start of the summer, when I emerged, vaccinated and blinking, and said, “Maybe I will go see a Fast & Furious movie.” On the other hand: the terrible fragility of life sealed off behind special masks and suits, the loneliness of unfathomable removal from other human beings, the sense of enduring indefinitely in cramped indoor spaces; this also seems to vaguely ring a bell from my experience of the past 18 months.