The project is going to take a decade and will convert one third of the streets — about 33 hectares of land — into public space. This started in 2016, when they introduced “Superillas” (superblocks) to the city center to reduce traffic and curb pollution. I love this kind of large scale urban innovation.

More good news on the vaccine front: the approach from Oxford looks to be highly effective and is cheaper and easier to store than the two mRNA-based vaccines announced last week. The Oxford vaccine requires mere refrigeration, not a deep freeze, which should make it available pretty much anywhere in the world.

Tim Carmody with an incredibly thoughtful piece about two diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with the pandemic, as a third wave rises higher still and the winter holidays approach.

Interesting week for Vox: two cofounders are leaving and now Williams, who served as editor-in-chief for the past six years. Ofori-Atta helped launch The Trace, which was focused on reporting on the epidemic of gun violence in America.

Capital B, much like The Trace, will be a non-profit with both a local and national focus.

Scoop from Yashar Ali that Vox’s second co-founder, after Matt Yglesias left to start writing at his own blog again , is headed to the New York Times. That leaves Melissa Bell, currently Vox’s publisher.

Generally, I think it’s an ok thing when co-founders feel like they can leave. If they’ve done their jobs right, they can be proud the thing they built carries on.

This one’s a bit personal for me, given I threw my support behind Colonel Moe Davis, the imminently qualified Democrat who ran to represent my home district of NC-11. Beyond my personal disgust towards Cawthorn, this piece captures an essence of the next generation of Republicans that we all need to prepare for. They’ve been forged by a decade of Tea Party astroturfing, McConnell’s cynical abdication of all responsibility and shame, and the proto-authoritarianism of Trump. Younger people may be trending in a slightly more liberal direction overall, but the next generation of conservative leaders are going to be more vile than anything we’ve seen before.

Benjamin Mullin and Keach Hagey, in The Wall St. Journal:

BuzzFeed Inc. has agreed to acquire Verizon Media’s HuffPost in a stock deal, the companies said Thursday, uniting two of the larger players in digital media as companies across the sector search for ways to jump-start growth.

The acquisition is part of a larger deal between BuzzFeed and Verizon Media, a unit of Verizon Communications Inc. Under the pact, the companies will syndicate content on each other’s platforms and look to jointly explore advertising opportunities. Verizon Media will get a minority stake in BuzzFeed as a result of the tie-up, the companies said.

Verizon Media is also making an undisclosed cash investment in BuzzFeed in addition to the stock deal for HuffPost, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder and chief executive, will run the combined company. BuzzFeed will lead the search for a new editor in chief of HuffPost.

That’s quite an arrangement — I’d even forgotten HuffPost was acquired by Verizon (when it bought AOL) in the first place.

I don’t much understand the point of having two media properties with ideologically overlapping audiences (though I’m sure they know how much overlap there actually is demographically). Maybe the idea is to share infrastructure and build a backend and ad business that stands up to the Google/Facebook online advertising duopoly?

Sarah Zhang has a great piece in The Atlantic about the two vaccines announced this week:

Both vaccines, from Moderna and from Pfizer’s collaboration with the smaller German company BioNTech, package slightly modified spike-protein mRNA inside a tiny protective bubble of fat. Human cells take up this bubble and simply follow the directions to make spike protein. The cells then display these spike proteins, presenting them as strange baubles to the immune system. Recognizing these viral proteins as foreign, the immune system begins building an arsenal to prepare for the moment a virus bearing this spike protein appears.

It’s truly amazing that almost exactly a year since the virus was first diagnosed, and only nine months after the DNA of COVID-19 was sequenced, we have a viable vaccine. Two actually! Not only that, no one was quite sure the mRNA approach would even work — this is cutting edge science based on years of research, but it is an entirely new approach. What a testament to human ingenuity!

A truly incredible resource from Texas Monthly.

A compelling, if equally depressing, piece by Nathan Tankus looking at the dire straits of the economy as we head into winter with a third COVID-19 wave in full bloom and no sign of help on the horizon from a distracted and gridlocked Congress. Perhaps this is why Mitch McConnell is trying to sabotage the Fed as a Democratic president takes over? [via Lawrence Wilkinson’s excellent Roughly Daily]