The Big Story
Restaurant and grocery store prices continue to rise just as farming organizations and agricultural officials in several regions of the globe warn that food production is slowing down because of inflation, shortages on supplies like fertilizer, and other complications related to the pandemic that strain basic operations. Worldwide, that means food prices were up 28% over the past year, according to a new report by the United Nations. And because supplies remain expensive, there’s “little room for optimism about a return to more stable market conditions even in 2022,” an economist said in the UN report. Growers will be greatly impacted in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where the food-production drop will be equivalent to the food needs for as many as 100 million people. For Western nations, basic supplies like bread, dairy, and meat will still be on shelves, analysts say, but prices will continue to climb while nonessentials and specialty food items will be as much as 20% more expensive and, at times, unavailable to consumers. Prices for generally less expensive fast-food options rose in 2021 by 8% in the United States, the largest jump in more than 20 years.
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-food-items-are-getting-more-costly-in-2022-11640601008
The Rest
→ After reviewing some 1,000 cases of those suffering from so-called Havana Syndrome, the Central Intelligence Agency said in a new report that the mysterious condition was not the result of an adversarial foreign power using microwaves or other energy devices as weapons against members of the U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military communities. Since 2018, journalists such as Adam Entous in The New Yorker have written popular accounts of the Havana Syndrome that have foregrounded a common belief among victims, a group made up entirely of American elite officials and administrators, that “the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for … the Russian military-intelligence service have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers.” In his reports, Entous has conceded that “there is so far no evidence to support this theory,” but that has not deterred the suspicion of the victims who suffer from the nausea, vertigo, and headaches they attribute to the syndrome. Following the CIA’s report, a group of those suffering from the condition wrote that the CIA’s findings “cannot and must not be the final word on the matter.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/politics/havana-syndrome-cia-report.html
→ Earlier this week, Albert Bourla, the top executive of Pfizer, which produced the COVID-19 vaccine used by Israel and other nations, was awarded the $1 million Genesis Prize in recognition of his professional commitment to the Jewish people, an honor that rankled Shmuel Shapira, a former head researcher within the Israeli Defense Ministry who oversaw the development of another vaccine that was delayed and ultimately not used by Israeli officials. “[The Pfizer vaccine] is a mediocre vaccine,” Shapira said in an interview this week, suggesting that other scientists in Israel were more deserving of the Genesis Prize. “A lot of people got infected after they were vaccinated. Calling the vaccine moderately effective is pretty generous.”
→ Russian officials continue to deny they’re preparing a military invasion into Ukraine, but leaders in Europe are shoring up their alliances and making arrangements to be able to combat the attack they see as increasingly likely to occur. The prime minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, after two days of talks with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said, “Poland unequivocally supports Ukraine in its pro-Western aspirations,” adding that it was important Russia know “that it is dealing with a united front without exceptions.” After his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was told that Russia would not cross into Ukraine territory but added it was incumbent on Moscow to back up the diplomatic assurance by de-escalating tensions at the Ukrainian border, where Russia forces remain. “It is deeds and actions and not words that make all the difference,” said Blinken.
→ After a volcanic eruption on Saturday in the South Pacific Ocean, the New Zealand navy began distributing much-needed water and essential supplies to the small island of Tonga today, which was struck by a resulting tsunami that destroyed villages, killed at least three people, and polluted the water supply for its 105,000 residents. Analysts say the force of the eruption was equivalent to an impact 500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb deployed during World War II. Damage to critical infrastructure will take weeks to repair, with internet connections expected to take at least a month before they are restored on the island.
→ In a new analysis by The Wall Street Journal, the high-risk high-reward SPACs (special-purpose acquisition companies) are turning out to be mostly risk for the investors who plowed money into them during the pandemic. Known as blank-check shell companies, these investment vehicles allowed speculators to take stakes in a private entity and then list that new SPAC on a stock exchange. Like crypto coins, NFTs, and meme stocks, SPACs attracted celebrities and big-name financial investors, but with stock prices for SPACs minted in the past two years down 40%, inflation rising, and regulation on the horizon, investors are fleeing SPACs in droves. As many as 13 SPAC deals were terminated between January and November of last year, with another 10 terminations since.
→ New reports continue to document startling violent attacks against Jews across the nation, this time in both New York City and Idaho. New York law enforcement have opened an investigation into a video and report that a woman attacked an 8-year-old Jewish boy. According to a Washington Post report, the woman spat on the boy and yelled at him and his siblings, who were standing outside a Brooklyn synagogue. “Hitler should have killed you all,” she said, according to police, before adding that she knew where the children lived and that she would kill them. In Boise, a woman awaits her day in court on felony charges for assaulting a Jewish woman, stomping on her neck, and demanding that she convert to Christianity. Both of these attacks came in the weeks before a gunman took over a synagogue in West Texas and kept a rabbi and congregants hostage.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/20/ny-antisemitism-woman-jewish-synagogue/
→ In light of the new effort in congress to enact new presidential policies about how the United States conducts military strikes with drones and other weapons, journalist Mattathias Schwartz runs down the recent history of the Pentagon’s handling of these types of strikes, saying that it acknowledged that many mistakes have been made but did little to correct what went wrong to cause them. “To be blunt, the Pentagon is out of control,” he writes:
→ If you’re perennially forgetful or suffer from a severe case of something just on the tip of your tongue, it may not be a sign of your brain losing a step or slowing down. In fact, it could be the opposite. According to a new study published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, forgetting isn’t a loss of available information as much as it is the brain selectively reacting to environmental cues and stimuli to free up access to other essential pieces of memory. The memories, researchers say, don’t go away—what changes is how and why our brains access what they need in a given situation. “Forgetting is actually a form of learning that alters memory accessibility in line with the environment and how predictable it is,” one of the scientists said.
Read more: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-theory.html
→ Doing our part at Tablet to shield you from both the mundane and the profane that makes reading the internet such a drag, we are now pleased to announce the debut of The Tab: a curated weekly digest from Tablet magazine that collects recently published articles, newly relevant archival hits, recipes, highlights from The Scroll, and more. Laid out in an attractive PDF for reading on a tablet or desktop, or to be printed on letter-sized paper, The Tab takes you into Shabbat and through the weekend, for free.
Direct download the inaugural issue here. And bookmark The Tab archive to get your new edition every Friday at 10 a.m. ET.
Your Weekend Reads
→ Culture critic and journalist Freddie deBoer has penned something of a hybrid guide and urgent warning for aspiring writers and thinkers on his Substack. Along with notes about how he got into the word racket, he offers an analysis of the condition that’s stymied the free flow of bold ideas and idiosyncratic authorship over the past several years and left us with “an entire profession of people who are saying the exact same thing and saying it the exact same way.”
For a long time now, media has been overtaken by a cult of expression which forbids any style or mode other than contemptuous blank irony. It is remarkable how uniform and homogenous the style of writing is on Twitter, which is where media culture is defined. It seemingly hasn’t evolved in a decade. Condescending, sarcastic, amused that you would think to say something so dumb, endlessly superior, contemptuous of all sincere values except the one being used as a bludgeon in the fight at hand. Absurdist in an entirely prescriptive way, novel in a tired way, funny in a humorless way. All of it is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a strange and highly mannered form of humor that flourished in an obscure offshoot of an internet forum which migrated to a bigger platform and metastasized into something called Weird Twitter, and was subsequently popularized and imitated so frequently it took over the forum completely. For reasons that elude me, it’s been the dominant style on the world’s most influential social network for going on a decade and appears often in published commentary as well.
…
Throw a rock in the pond of contemporary writing, and you will hit someone making an incredibly dubious connection between some new fad in social justice politics and pop culture ephemera. (“Rosey From the Jetsons Really Knew How to Hold Space4.”) Writers are forever screaming at you about matters of life-and-death oppression, and yet somehow it’s still all frivolous and unserious.
Read more: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/for-your-edification-or-enjoyment
→ Too many choices on Netflix has become too many choices of streaming platforms where you have to wade through tens of thousands of titles to find a movie worthy of your time. Back in the days of Blockbuster video rental stores, the choices were fewer, but often the pleasures could be greater. Here, Jason Guriel shares his appreciation of the VHS tape:
There’s great pleasure in repetition and ritual. My family came to know a lot of dialogue by heart. We anticipated the lines we cherished collectively, even if the teleplays weren’t exactly “Birches.” It never occurred to us to scrutinize the credits and look up the writers of these lines we’d internalized. Where would we have even started? There was not yet a search bar to feed names to. The critic Camille Paglia once likened the creative team behind a beloved M&Ms commercial to “folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.” The shows and movies my family adored were of similarly mysterious provenance. No algorithm had placed them before us; they described a specific constellation that we had strewn across the sky, and that only we could see. A bespoke set of stars.
Read more: https://yalereview.org/article/jason-guriel-against-the-stream
→ But if you’re less inclined to rewind, you can filter through some of the junk with this guide to 2021 movies by the critic A. S. Hamrah, who’s made something of an art out of the capsule review. He’s sympathetic to the pain of dealing with streamers or theaters that ask for more money and time and do little to make the experience of watching a film pleasurable. “Every way to see a movie now, in a theater or at home, subtracts something from it,” but sometimes it’s worth it. Here he is on The Card Counter, one of the better releases from last year.
When Barack Obama put Paul Schrader’s film The Card Counter on his list of his favorite films of 2021, Variety noted that he also liked the movie Quo Vadis, Aida?, which the trade paper called “a 2020 Bosnian war film.” Variety described Schrader’s film as “an edgy character study,” neglecting to mention that the former president was giving his thumbs-up to a movie about the illegal torture of prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib during the war in Iraq, a subject covered in the Senate report that Obama, bowing to CIA pressure, refused to fully declassify.
Schrader, ever the productive irritant, does not let his characters off for the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program administered under George W. Bush. His protagonist, a former Abu Ghraib guard turned professional gambler, played broodingly by Oscar Isaac, has served time for this crime but can’t shake his guilt. He goes by the name William Tell, tell being a funny word for a professional card player to pick. Tell was at least punished for torturing prisoners, unlike the people who ordered him to do it. We see his training and the lead-up to his crimes in ugly, harrowing flashbacks, filmed by Schrader and his cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, as loud, wide-angle nightmares.
Read more: https://thebaffler.com/latest/time-is-a-rabid-dog-hamrah