What Happened Today: August 05, 2022
Monkeypox health emergency; Spain turns off the A/C; pay-for-play podcasting
The Big Story
For just the fifth time since 2001, the White House declared a national health emergency on Thursday, this time related to the ongoing monkeypox outbreak. Following on the heels of the World Health Organization’s similar declaration at the end of July, the White House is now “prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus,” said President Biden’s health secretary, Xavier Becerra, at a briefing Thursday afternoon. “We urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus.” Severe monkeypox infections are rare, and while both treatments and a vaccine are in short supply, production should increase with the emergency declaration.
Roughly 25% of the world’s cases have been traced to the United States, though it’s likely that the 6,600 people estimated to have contracted the virus is an undercount, as quality testing remains elusive. No one in the United States has died from the virus. The vast majority of all infections thus far—more than 99% in total—are in men who have sex with men. Debates about direct warnings to the gay community, and whether or not advising men to limit their male sexual partners amounts to stigmatization, have divided state and federal public health officials. That division in turn has perpetuated confusing and inconsistent public health messages and mitigation strategies regarding the threat of the virus. Don Weiss, a director of surveillance for the New York City health department, wrote a letter in June criticizing agency leaders for not more forcefully communicating the risks to the gay community. “This disease is entirely preventable had we the courage to send out prevention messages,” Weiss wrote, who was reassigned within the agency after posting his letter online. “We seem paralyzed by the fear of stigmatizing this disease while we totally ignore the epidemiology.”
Read More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/04/monkeypox-gay-safe-sex/
In the Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ Continuing their retaliatory response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week, Chinese officials have suspended defense talks with their U.S. counterparts. The Chinese foreign ministry, meanwhile, said on Friday that it would lobby sanctions, largely symbolic, against Speaker Pelosi because of her “egregious provocation.” Finally, China said it would also cease the ongoing discussion their military leaders had maintained with U.S. counterparts over climate change mitigation, rounding out a series of diplomatic reprisals that, along with China’s ongoing live ammunition war games around Taiwan, amounts to what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday is an overreaction. The fraying of U.S.-Sino relations will likely continue as China escalates its military drills near Taiwan throughout the weekend. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying defended China’s response as “justified and necessary,” adding that China is engaged in a “fight against hegemony, against interference, and against secession.”
→ Female orthopedic surgeons are “nearly twice as likely to have cancer as women in the general population,” Mother Jones reports, “and nearly three times as likely to have breast cancer”—a result of orthopedists’ and surgeons’ growing reliance on fluoroscopy, an imaging technology that blasts operating rooms with radiation. The use of fluoroscopy in the OR has “multipl[ied] 31-fold between the 1980s and the 2000s,” and while medical personnel using fluoroscopy are typically given lead vests, those vests leave many areas completely unprotected—especially areas around the armpit and chest. “I’m standing right next to the x-ray machine,” said one female orthopedist after learning of this alarming data, “and I’m going, ‘The arm hole on this [lead vest] goes down pretty much down to my waist. There’s no way any of my breast tissue is being protected right now.’”
→ The natural gas shortages looming over Europe have prompted the Spanish government to bar its citizens from setting their air-conditioners to below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The new decree will also kick in for the winter, with all businesses and public buildings, including theaters, airports, and railways, not allowed to turn the heat higher than 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Though not currently the law for private homes, it could soon apply there as well, with the government only now making the climate control a recommendation for residents. As part of Europe’s effort to limit its dependence on Russian gas export, the law comes in the midst of brutal heat waves pummeling Spain, where temperatures peaked over 104 degrees this summer, and business leaders and some public officials fear the restriction will drive away tourists. Fines for those caught turning down the thermostat could be as high as €600,000 for “serious violations.”
→ We’ve entered “the golden era of pay-for-play podcasting,” Ashley Carman writes in Bloomberg, “when guests pay handsomely to be interviewed for an entire episode.” Prominent podcasters can fetch tens of thousands of dollars from their “guests,” a practice especially popular with wellness, cryptocurrency, and business podcasts. These glorified commercials, meanwhile, are often not disclosed to listeners, or are disclosed but not clearly. At the end of each episode of Dave Asprey’s “biohacking podcast” called “The Human Upgrade,” for instance, which charges guests as much as $50,000 to come tout the life-changing benefits of their magic machines, Asprey tells listeners that the podcast “may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services” from people who “may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein.”
→ Tweet of the Day:
Ark Encounter, a Kentucky theme park featuring a large replica of Noah’s Ark, is suing its insurance companies after some rainfall—not a result of God’s wrath, mind you—damaged the grounds surrounding the enormous boat. This local headline captured the irony of the lawsuit, which alleges that rainfall led to water runoff that caused $1 million in damages. Prior to this latest lawsuit, the creators of the park made national headlines after they received state and local subsidies for their business despite requiring each person working in Noah’s Ark—a staff of 900—to sign a statement saying that they rejected the science of evolution, that homosexuality is a sin, and that they regularly attend church.
→ Visa and Mastercard will no longer allow their cards to be used on Pornhub, the most popular pornography website in the United States and one of the most visited websites in the world, after a court ruled that the credit card companies could be held liable for any illegal content that appears on the site. This comes after a lawsuit against MindGeek, Pornhub’s owner, charged that Pornhub knowingly kept child pornography on its site and that Mastercard and Visa helped Pornhub and its customers circulate the illegal content. In a statement, Mastercard said that “new facts from last week’s court ruling made us aware of advertising revenue outside of our view that appears to provide Pornhub with indirect funding. This step will further enforce our December 2020 decision to terminate the use of our products on that site.” Visa issued a similar statement but added that it “strongly” disagrees with the court’s logic that Visa is responsible for content uploaded to Pornhub. This is not the first time Mastercard and Visa have been forced to respond to allegations of Pornhub’s criminal and unethical activity. In 2020, after a scathing opinion piece in The New York Times alleged that Pornhub “monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags,” Visa and Mastercard severed ties, nearly bankrupting Pornhub, before they resumed working with the site a few weeks later.
→ In an effort to bring the immigration crisis to Washington, D.C.’s attention, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona have begun bussing migrants from their border states up to Washington, D.C., depositing some 7,200 asylum seekers from Central and South America at Union Station in the nation’s capital. These new arrivals are overwhelming the already-inadequate resources for the homeless and hungry in D.C., with the city’s mayor now calling in the National Guard for help. Addressing the growing concerns and outrage from D.C. officials and residents, Gov. Abbot wrote, “Your recent interest in this historic and preventable crisis is a welcome development—especially as the president and his administration have shown no remorse for their actions, nor desire to address the situation themselves.”
→ Quote of the Day:
There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate … This is why we have always fought: We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.
Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, in a July 23 speech that received swift condemnation from Hungarian Jewish groups as well as the International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors and led to the resignation of one of Orbán’s longest-serving advisers, who called the speech “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels.” It did not stop Orbán from receiving a warm welcome at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas on Wednesday, where he told the crowd that “the globalists can all go to hell.” The CPAC audience was also receptive to Orbán’s policies supporting families and children; since 2015, Hungary has introduced a slate of pro-family policies, from loan forgiveness programs for women who have children, to generous subsidies for families who want to purchase a home.
→ Map of the Day:
Today’s map of the day is the map of your home that Amazon just spent $1.7 billion to get its hands on. This morning, Amazon announced the purchase of iRobot Corp., the producer of the iRobot self-guided vacuum that maps your house and then vacuums it for you. While the product itself is sure to make Amazon money, it’s the data that counts: In Amazon’s efforts to sell consumers “smart home” devices—networked speakers, lights, thermostats, etc.—it doesn’t have a very good sense of what your home looks like and thus what your house might need. By adding the iRobot to its catalog of smart home products, Amazon is about to get a beautiful map of your well-vacuumed residence.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Gnat Who Tormented Titus For Tisha B’Av, a previously unpublished poem by the Jewish literary giant, Cynthia Ozick.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/gnat-tormented-titus-cynthia-ozick
Tisha B’Av Listening The Tablet Podcast team shares these stories of loss, history, and hope from the “Unorthodox” podcast archive.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/holidays/articles/tisha-bav-jewish-podcasts
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Your Weekend Reads
→ For The New Yorker, Jon Baskin writes on the recent publication of “Something to Do with Paying Attention,” a novella culled from the late David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, a posthumous novel his longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, cobbled together from the mountain of material left behind by Wallace, who died by suicide. Wallace spent almost a decade on the unfinished book and told friends often of his struggle to separate the good and the bad from what he’d written. “The ability to see what’s useful and what isn’t wasn’t just what Wallace believed that he needed to complete his final novel; it was also the virtue of mind he hoped it would cultivate in his readers,” Baskin writes of both the book and the concerns that preoccupied Wallace at the end of his life:
Only one of several artists in his generation to call for a “new sincerity” (a term that he never actually used, though he is justly associated with the tendency) in culture, he was virtually alone in suggesting, with anything like a straight face, that American civic and political life might offer a proper receptacle for that sincerity. Remarkably, in the years that followed the publication of “The Pale King”—years that included events such as Occupy Wall Street, nationwide social movements for racial and gender equality, and the rise of Trumpism—the notion that American artists should make their work subserve political movements became prominent and then virtually inescapable. At times, these causes tempted artists into a kind of grandstanding that was at odds with the valorization … of acts undertaken for “no audience.” Still, it is possible that Wallace’s most meaningful influence on the writers and literary commentators who followed him came neither from his stylistic innovations nor his broadsides against postmodern self-consciousness but, rather, from his insistence that literature should aim at a moral purpose that was higher than itself.
Yet the difficulty that Wallace had in finding an object for this purpose proved predictive in a different sense. His inability to locate institutions not already corrupted in near-fatal ways, nor causes dignified enough to hold his skepticism at bay, hinted at the fickle, fugitive quality that would attend so many of the public passions of the ensuing decade. It also suggested why our artists and intellectuals cycle so reliably between utopian evangelism and ironic anti-politics. If Wallace believed that we should pursue the “moral equivalent of war” in the social realm, as James (the pragmatist philosopher, not the apostle) put it, he was also alive to the possibility that our moral wars would be about as decisive, and lead to just as much disillusionment and cynicism, as our military ones.
Read More: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/david-foster-wallaces-final-attempt-to-make-art-moral
→ “It is hard to avoid the impression that Pelosi—an unpopular, doddering octogenarian—is auditioning for the role of America’s Franz Ferdinand,” Malcolm Kyeyune writes for Compact about the U.S. House speaker’s trip to Taiwan this week. To what extent Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taipei is a true catalyst for conflict remains to be seen, but it’s clear nonetheless that the United States is tempting fate with a Chinese showdown—and all the “while having no real plans for what it will do once the shooting starts.” Indeed, the lack of planning and similarly poor responsive action in the thick of things is on full display now with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, for which “the politicians of America’s European NATO allies have absolutely no plan, no recourse, no means of extracting themselves from the looming social and political crisis that will hit them this winter because of the loss of Russian energy supplies.” Despite the obvious lesson to be applied here to China, Kyeyune argues, Western elites are wasting precious time to prepare for contingencies.
To take but one example, China currently dominates the global market on inputs necessary to make generic antibiotics. The U.S. is thus almost entirely reliant on China for the basic medical innovation that separates us from the middle ages, when mere cuts could turn lethal due to bacterial infection. Were America in 2022 a serious imperial power, plans would already have been in place to build up massive stocks of medical supplies and to shift production home.
This is not being done. In fact, pretty much nothing of the sort is being done, despite the U.S.’s extensive reliance on China. Instead, America’s loyal mandarins are editing the definition of “recession” on Wikipedia, in order to pretend the U.S. isn’t currently in one. In case U.S. antibiotics supplies are cut off, Americans will almost certainly be asked to take special measures to avoid getting sick, because at no point did the current American elites bother to ensure that easily treatable sickness would still be easily treatable in 2024, rather than a possible death sentence.
Read More: https://compactmag.com/article/america-isn-t-ready-for-war-with-china
→ Author and critic William Deresiewicz talked with Tara Henley about a piece he’d written for The American Scholar, about his alienation from the progressive left, a movement he still considers himself a part of—although he prefers the version from around 2016, not the more recent version, “which seemed to me not only to place the wrong emphasis on what progressive politics should be, but also to be based on, in many cases, suppression and distortion of reality.” Nearing publication of the critical piece, it was suddenly axed at TAS and ultimately published at UnHerd, the piece from Deresiewicz gets into the backstory of what happened to the article, and the unfortunate lack of conviction of his editor who appreciated the content but seemingly feared the repercussions of publication:
[The editor’s] initial reaction to the essay was like, “You know, on the one hand I find this really challenging, but I’m really glad that it’s challenging. And you’re saying things that I’ve kind of suspected but didn’t want to admit to myself.” I thought, “Great.” Then two weeks later, he came back to me and said, “I’ve decided that I can’t, in good conscience, publish this.” I asked him for his reasons. He gave me reasons that just really didn’t hold water. The best interpretation is that he felt that by criticizing the left, I was giving aid and comfort to the right. Kind of whataboutism.
First of all, I’m not even sure I believe that that was his motive. I suspect that it was the usual scenario, where there were young staff who told him that they were going to quit en masse if this horrible piece was published, even though he was retiring. I don’t have evidence of that; that’s just my suspicion. Even if what he told me was his genuine reason, I think that’s one of the things that has really crippled open and honest discussion on the left—this feeling that if we criticize ourselves, we are helping Donald Trump and his minions. To me, it’s precisely by not criticizing ourselves that we’re helping the other side, because we’re keeping ourselves stupid. And politically stupid.
Read more: https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/transcript-william-deresiewicz
Nd so it goes…