What Happened Today: January 25, 2022
Courts reject COVID mandates; Biden attacks a reporter; Mike Pesca speaks
The Big Story
The United States’ high courts are pushing back against COVID-19-related health mandates introduced by the White House and state leaders. On Tuesday the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced that it was dropping a contentious emergency order requiring companies with 100 or more employees to mandate that workers be vaccinated or risk financial and other penalties for failing to enforce the rule. In place since early November, the policy applied to some 80 million workers in the United States. OSHA, a division of the Labor Department, decided to withdraw the rule following a Jan. 13 ruling by the Supreme Court that ordered a stop to the mandate for businesses but upheld a vaccination requirement for healthcare workers pending appeals in the lower courts. Meanwhile, in a separate ruling, the New York Supreme Court struck down Gov. Kathy Hochul’s statewide mask mandate, declaring it unlawful. In his opinion explaining the decision, New York State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Rademaker wrote that the rule, requiring New Yorkers to either wear masks or provide proof of vaccination in all indoor spaces, violated the state constitution and usurped an authority that belongs “solely to the State Legislature.” Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the state is requiring schools to continue enforcing mask mandates pending legal appeals. It appears that New York’s schoolchildren—the population perhaps at the lowest risk from COVID-19—will be the last group still forced to wear masks.
Read it here: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/biden-administration-withdraws-employee-vaccine-requirement-following-supreme
Backpages: Mike Pesca Speaks: The inside story of the Slate meltdown
The Rest
→ On Monday, as the United States put 8,500 troops on standby for possible deployment to Eastern Europe, Ukrainian leaders called for calm and downplayed talk of an imminent invasion by Russia. “There are risky scenarios. They’re possible and probable in the future,” Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview Monday on Ukrainian TV. “But as of today … such a threat doesn’t exist.” The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council offered the same conclusion in a separate statement Monday: “As of today, we don’t see any grounds for statements about a full-scale offensive on our country.” At the same time, the United States and European Union are finalizing plans to impose sanctions on Russia, while NATO repositions ships in the Baltic Sea and moves fighter jets closer to the conflict zone.
→ What kind of inflammatory remark would cause President Biden to call a journalist a “stupid son of a bitch”? The offending question—cover your children’s ears!—was about inflation. “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?” Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy asked the president Monday, triggering the kind of needlessly personal insult—“More inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch”—that was routinely taken as a sign of impending fascist takeover when it came from President Trump. Doocy reported afterward that the president had called him and apologized. The Scroll does not employ any meteorologists, but best we can tell, the sky has not yet fallen.
→ Some people do employ meteorologists, though, and those folks are warning that an intense storm known as a winter bomb cyclone could hit the Northeast and mid-Atlantic this weekend. The storm, which could bring snow, ice, strong winds, and heavy rains, should start moving up the U.S. East Coast Friday into Saturday and is expected to “create considerable impacts” for the affected regions, according to a warning from the National Weather Service.
→ The global shortage of semiconductor chips, a crucial component in modern cars, computers, and home electronics, has left the United States vulnerable to sudden disruptions in the supply chain. In 2019, manufacturers around the world had an average of 40 days’ supply of chips on hand, but that was down to five days as of late last year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce. “This tells you how fragile this supply chain is,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday. “A COVID outbreak, storm, a natural disaster, political instability, a problem with equipment—really anything that disrupts a facility anywhere in the world—we will feel the ramifications here in the United States.”
→ Truck drivers in Canada are leading a mobile strike through Saturday to protest vaccination requirements at the U.S. border. Despite getting little attention in the press, the truckers—who are organized under the banner “Freedom Convoy 2022” and who started their protest after the U.S. closed its border to unvaccinated drivers—have raised more than $3.5 million from 46,500 donors, according to Canada’s newspaper National Post. A Facebook page for the group has 397,000 members. Current estimates in the Canadian press put the number of trucks involved at roughly 1,200, but that could grow throughout the week. The strike could also lead to backups at the border, slowing the delivery of goods into the United States.
→ Israel, which reported the highest number of Omicron cases in the world over the past week, could be nearing the peak of the highly infectious COVID-19 strain. In the fifth major wave of COVID-19 infections in one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, more than half a million people in the country were actively infected with Omicron as of Monday afternoon, according to Health Ministry statistics. “Once we stop seeing a rise in new infections, we’ll continue to see a rise in serious cases,” said Prof. Eran Segal, a top adviser to Israel’s government. “I hope that by next week we’ll reach a peak, and we’ll see stability and the beginning of a drop.”
→ Neil Young, the gifted and highly irritable songwriter, has issued an ultimatum to the music- and podcast-hosting platform Spotify: “It’s me or Joe Rogan.” In an open letter posted to his website, Young accuses Spotify of “spreading false information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them” and demands that his music be removed from the site. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately today that I want all of my music off their platform. They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
→ Following his less-than-spectacular leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO) during a global pandemic, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is headed for reelection. Tedros spent the early months of the pandemic showering China with effusive praise for its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. In late January 2020, following a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Tedros praised China for “setting a new standard for outbreak control” and commended the country’s leaders for their “openness to sharing information.” But that’s all water under the bridge now as Tedros was just nominated to another five-year term at the WHO starting in 2022, a race we’d say he has a good chance of winning given that there are no other nominees. Viva free elections in elite multinational institutions!
→ Almost a million miles away from where it started when it launched on Christmas Day last year, NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope is nearing its final destination after nearly a month of travel. “Too enormous to fly to space in its final form, the telescope had to launch folded up inside its rocket,” The Verge reports. “Once it reached space, JWST began an extremely complex routine of shape-shifting and unfurling, a type of choreography that no spacecraft had ever performed before.” The telescope’s unprecedented size, which made the telescope’s space travel so hazardous, will allow it to look farther into space, and thus further back in time, than any other telescope in existence.
Sean Cooper gets the inside story on Mike Pesca who has just returned with The Gist, a top 20 podcast on the Apple news charts with 100 million lifetime downloads, after a long absence following a blowup with his previous employer. For seven years he produced the show at Slate, until he was suspended over a dispute with other staffers over the rules for how journalists are allowed to talk about race. Since then, Pesca split with Slate, three top editors left, and five employees have been let go.
On Monday, the host of the podcast The Gist, Mike Pesca, will introduce listeners to the show’s second season, picking up where he left off last February. At the time, he and the show were suspended by Slate, the magazine and podcast network where Pesca ran the program for some 1,400 episodes—a seven-year run he’s cheekily referring to now as the podcast’s first season. It’s a popular podcast that Pesca says has seen 100 million lifetime downloads with 20 million of those in 2020. The only difference between the two “seasons” is that Pesca will now oversee the show under his own media company, Peach Fish Productions, after he walked away with the show from Slate last year, following a seven-month investigation into his conduct as a white man talking with colleagues about race.
If you had a visceral reaction to that last sentence, of one of disgust or exhaustion to read of another account of a workplace fissured by a debate about white men and racism, you will presumably hold a firm opinion about Pesca’s innocence or guilt as either a casualty or an impediment of the institutional transformations that have been taking place over the past several years with regard to racial equality in media, education, and the corporate sphere. In contrast to dozens of similar prior dustups, however, Pesca’s case is noteworthy because it clarified that this debate about racial fairness, insofar as that is what this debate is actually about, has plateaued into a deadlocked stalemate where no one will get what they want—with organizations collapsing under the strain of perpetual internecine warfare, and activist-oriented reformers with no more enemies or institutions left to vanquish.
“As soon as we met him, we were like, oh, this is the Slate-est guy who doesn’t work at Slate,” David Plotz, who was then editor-in-chief, recently told me, remembering back to 2014, when Pesca made the move from NPR. “And then eventually he became the Slate-est guy that worked at Slate.”
Already well known for a house style (and perhaps obsessive attachment to being perceived) as funny and contrarian, the magazine had embraced podcasts early. They slotted Pesca into the audio department for a new show that borrowed from the loose, conversational tone of afternoon sports radio to provide an on-demand program for commuters, but one that was produced in the Slate ethos. It was a hit right out of the gate, and The Gist’s audience, along with several other popular Slate podcasts, went on to account for as much as 25% of Slate’s revenue by 2018.
In those four years, two other significant things happened: Slate implemented Slack, the workplace collaboration and chat tool, and Donald Trump won the presidency. The expectation from the Slate editorial leadership was that Slack would become an officewide water cooler where staffers would cross-pollinate their opinions and sharpen their ideas for their magazine pieces and podcast segments. But it quickly became a time suck, with staffers glued to the Slack channels, arranged by topics like politics and industry news, as a kind of internal social media that blurred the line between the professional and the personal.
“It seems crazy to me now, in retrospect, just how active Slate Slack was. People were just chatting with each other across all these different channels, all day, all night, about everything,” Leon Neyfakh, a former Slate magazine writer who launched the Slow Burn podcast series while on staff, told me. Much like Twitter, Slack polarized Slate staff around news and politics, and with the option to reward each other with +1’s and emoji endorsements that could be seen by all, it gamified a conversation that never stopped. At Slate, where being sardonic and scathing was the coin of the realm, there was, current and former Slate employees told me, an additional incentive for staffers to prove their mettle by turning against each other.
“People felt like they were on opposite sides of some high stakes, moral issue and people would do all the normal stuff that they do when they feel attacked on something that feels personal to them,” Neyfakh said, as he himself would “dig in on something or be performatively acerbic in a way, to perform for the people who I knew agreed with me.” Less a friendly or productive editorial conversation, Slack mirrored the ongoing politicization of nearly every issue in the wider culture. For those staffers who found themselves seeking to find nuanced discussion with colleagues about topics like immigration policies or various social justice movements, conversations quickly became arguments that cannibalized collegial goodwill, and as Neyfakh observed, “genuinely [made] them distrust each other or confirm their worst suspicions about each other.”
… To read the rest of the Pesca profile, click here:
Canadian Truckers are not protesting US vaccination requirements. They are protesting Canadian vaccination
mandates for Canadian truckers returning to Canada from the US. The convoy is travelling to Ottawa, Canada’s capital and the seat of the Canadian government.