Peter Carbonara

A look at the events, innovations, technology, sports and arts that will bring us joy next year.

The music-streaming behemoth is the No. 1 company on Newsweek’s first annual list of the Most Loved Workplaces in America. This is how they did it.

Environment lawyer turned controversial vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubts the safety and efficacy of Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines and said he would urge his 92-year-old mother Ethel not to take either one. Kennedy made his remarks in an interview with journalists from NewsGuard, a website that rates online news sources for accuracy.Asked whether he’d advise his mother to be vaccinated, Kennedy said, “The Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? No absolutely not.” Asked if he would tell he…

In an interview with journalists from NewsGuard, a website that ranks online news sources for accuracy, environmental lawyer and vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of having a financial stake in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Fauci categorically denied the allegation.Kennedy alleged in the interview, published by Newsweek, that Fauci had misused his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Healt…

Kamala Harris, 56, was sworn in as the 49th vice president of the United States today by associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor using two Bibles that hold great personal significance for her. On Tuesday Harris tweeted, “When I raise my right hand and take the oath of office tomorrow, I carry with me two heroes who’d speak up for the voiceless and help those in one.“One of the Bibles that will be used is a Harris family heirloom that had been owned by Regina Shelton, an Oakland, Californ…

After this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, you might think the best thing about 2021 will simply be that it isn’t 2020. Certainly, an end to the health and financial challenges, the pain, incivility and grief that have marked the past 12 months will be most welcome—although it may take several months into the New Year to get us there. But the absence of awful is not enough to make 2021 a good year; we need not just a respite from the heavy weight put upon us by the pandemic but the p…

With two weeks to go before the election, the nation’s financial health is top of mind for Americans. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly nine out of 10 registered voters say the economy is the most important factor in their decision about who to vote for—ahead of response to the pandemic, crime, race relations and a dozen other key issues. Additionally, nearly half of those polled said that President Donald Trump’s recent COVID-19 diagnosis had made them even more worried about the econom…

Robert Haberkorn is a 55-year-old contractor from New Jersey. He and his son, Joe, 32, like KISS. A lot. On a dreary Tuesday night in February they’ve come to see the band’s Allentown, Pennsylvania, stop on its current “End of the Road Tour,” advertised as their last ever. (A 2000 reunion of the original members of the band was also supposed to be their swansong, but never mind.)“This is my 65th time tonight since 1977,” Haberkorn says. “My first one was at Madison Square Garden in December ’77…

¡Spangled!, put out by Nonesuch records, is a collaboration between Guatemalan born singer/guitarist Gaby Moreno and composer/arranger Van Dyke Parks, has been ten years in the making. But the CD, part a nostalgic tour through several different styles of retro Latin American pop and part lushly orchestrated protest music, sounds perfectly timed to the remarkably ugly and xenophobic political moment America has been living through the past few years.Moreno, 38, says, “Our plan was to celebrate th…

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is a documentary film by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier that paints a beautiful and terrifying picture of what human beings are doing to the Earth.Since the early 1980s Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting what he calls “intentional landscapes,” the big and lasting marks that human activities like mining and farming are making on the planet. The film is the third collaboration between Burtynsky and documentary filmmak…

Woodstock, as you may have already heard to an excessive degree by now, defined in some ways the entire baby boom generation. You know, three days of peace, love and understanding and all that jazz.The truth is this: There were some 400,000 people who actually attended the event over three days in August 1969. But most of us experienced it through the documentary—and the soundtrack—that came out about six months after the event.The music was all-in-all pretty great, and a lot of acts from Joe Co…