What Happened Today: March 31, 2022
What Happened Today: March 31, 2022
America’s breakup with COVID-19; Yale admin pilfers $40 million; NASA spies farthest star
The Big Story
While some Americans are moving on to life after the pandemic, others argue COVID-19 isn’t quite done with the United States just yet. Yesterday afternoon, President Biden rolled up his shirt sleeve for his second booster dose (the president prefers the Pfizer flavor) after delivering a speech touting the administration’s new Covid.gov website and the FDA’s authorization for the second round of Pfizer and Moderna boosters for those who are four months out since their first booster and also in the over-50 crowd or immunocompromised. “This isn’t partisan. It’s medicine,” Biden said as he rallied for the latest round of the vaccines. Medicine, true enough, but the debate about the vaccines remains, as ever, a divisive issue, with roughly 25% of Americans unvaccinated and 25% who’ve gotten vaccinated but haven’t received the booster. The disparity in vaccine status is driven in part by the roughly 80 million cases of infection, a grand sum that includes those who’ve gotten the virus more than once and those who had some vaccine shots already—a population, in other words, with varying degrees of immunity if not ample fatigue with the pandemic.
In Colorado, state officials are lumping the infected and vaccinated into one giant pool that accounts for 90% of the state’s residents with “some antibody protection” as they declare the virus endemic and ease off most of their public health restrictions. New York City has scaled back some of its COVID-19 protocol, including dropping the mask mandate in schools and, like Chicago, lifting proof of vaccination to eat out in restaurants. Governor of Missouri Mike Parson said yesterday the emergency response there is now over effective tomorrow, joining Colorado in treating the virus as endemic, while Missouri’s public health office winds down its contact tracing and throttles the daily data collection on rates of infection. Up in the air and in public transportation hubs, the theatrically secure TSA extended its mask mandate through at least April 18, a restriction that drew a legal challenge from 21 state attorneys general on Tuesday and continues to lead to fights over compliance: Between Jan. 1 and March 21, the Federal Aviation Administration has logged 635 disruptions in which passengers tussled with flight crews on having to don the face cloth while in the cabin.
In The Back Pages: Armin Rosen on Tyler, The Creator’s Artistic Purity
The Rest
→ The U.S. Attorneys Office in Connecticut won a guilty verdict on charges of wire fraud and tax evasion against Jamie Petrone, a 42-year-old Yale administrator in the university’s medical school who pilfered more than $40 million worth of computers and electronics over a nine-year period. The scheme worked for so long because Petrone kept her orders on behalf of the department below the $10,000 threshold that requires additional authorization, which allowed her to ship the laptops and gear to herself or a partner who then resold the items and kicked back the payments to her bank account. Undone by an anonymous tip to Yale officials who then took a closer look at the cooked books, Petrone’s scheme provided her a lavish life, with four properties to her name and a fleet of luxury vehicles that included a Range Rover, two Mercedes, two Cadillacs, and a Dodge Charger.
→ Speaking of curious administrative oversight at elite medical schools, Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year med student at Wake Forest, has raised internet eyebrows after her viral tweet about how she was drawing blood from a patient when she “missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice” after the patient caught sight of her pronoun pin (she/her) and remarked, “Well, of course it is! What other pronouns even are there? It?” Gregg Re, a producer for Fox News, reached out to Wake Forest to ask if Rosario was providing variable treatment to her patients. Initially Wake Forrest’s communications office demurred, saying Rosario’s tweet did not “in any way reflect the quality of care and compassion” but that “federal law does not permit us to share specific information” about her professional status. A day later, federal laws must have changed quickly, as Re shared the latest update:
→ The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Navy, granting it the authority to use a service member’s vaccination status in determining how that member will be deployed on assignment. The highest court’s decision came after a federal judge’s ruling earlier this year sided with 35 Navy SEALs who’d refused the vaccine on religious grounds against the Department of Defense’s vaccine requirement. In his concurring opinion with the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said “the district court, while no doubt well-intentioned, in effect inserted itself into the Navy’s chain of command, overriding military commanders’ professional military judgments.” In their successful challenge of the Navy SEALs’ use of the religious exemption, the U.S. attorneys did not seek a challenge to the district court’s finding that the SEALs could not be disciplined for their refusal of the vaccination.
→ The continual blending of politics and Silicon Valley messaging platforms continues apace, with The Washington Post (which is its own type of Silicon Valley messaging apparatus) reporting on Facebook’s aggressive campaign to malign its rival TikTok. In a series of emails written by staff at Targeted Victory, a firm hired by Facebook with experience in competitive political races, staffers ran various initiatives to place op-ed pieces, letters, and media stories that blamed TikTok for controversial or dangerous social media trends that had originated on Facebook. Other efforts involved pushing positive coverage of Facebook alongside a need to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to one Targeted Victory email. With a long string of controversies in recent years and the decline in standing with today’s younger digital-savvy set, Facebook has made a direct attack on a popular competitor that fits with previous deployments of advocacy shops to help repair their public image.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
→ While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences board of governors deliberates on what kind of disciplinary action it will take against Will Smith for slapping Chris Rock across the face at Sunday’s Oscars, comedy fans were forking over thousands of dollars for scalped tickets to the six sold-out shows that Rock had scheduled this week over three days at the Wilbur Theater in Boston. The major price spike and intense media attention on Rock’s Boston stint was no doubt driven by an appetite to hear Rock make his first formal response to the incident, but showgoers were largely left disappointed, as the closest Rock got during last night’s show was his question for the audience, “So how was your weekend?” As Rock told the crowd, he was “still processing” the Oscar brouhaha, but he otherwise stuck to his routine about what it’s like to be a rich, single father of two girls trying to date in his 50s. As one critic noted of the fans’ reaction on the way out, “Nothing about Will Smith. You guys just wasted all your fuckin’ money.”
→ Recent estimates from the United Nations put the total number of those who’ve fled the Ukraine to other nations at about 4 million, but with most men conscripted to stay and fight the Russian invasion, women and children migrants often alone encounter human traffickers and other dangers as they seek out shelter and safety in unfamiliar terrain. Those safety issues, and conflicting reports about Russian success and failure in certain Ukrainian cities, partly explain why some 370,000 migrants have crossed back over the Polish border to the Ukraine since the Russian invasion, either to their homes or to somewhere else in the country. “It’s always better at home,” one woman with a three-old-son told Politico as she waited to board a train. “I left to gather my strength, and now we will go back to wait out the end of the war in Ukraine.”
→ If you’re in the business of helping other people spend their money, the best bet these days is the feel-good realm of ESG—the increasingly popular domain of environmental, social, and governance issues where wealth funds and corporations put on a good show about how concerned they are about what really matters. A new analysis by Morningstar shows some $142 billion flowed into the ESG sector in the last quarter alone, which brings the total value of assets managed by 2,900 ESG investment funds to a whopping $2.7 trillion. That’s good news for the financial service consultants that help nudge investors into the poorly defined but easily claimed mantle of ESG holdings. One industry analyst found that as of last October there were 100 consultant firms that specialized in ESG client advisory, double the number of outfits from the year prior.
→ NASA said yesterday that the most distant star ever seen was captured in an image by the Hubble Space Telescope, which spotted the star known as Earendel (which is Old English for “morning star”) 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. About 50 times bigger than the sun, Earendel was formed approximately a billion years after the Big Bang.
Tablet Senior Writer Armin Rosen writes today for the magazine about the ongoing evolution of music artist Tyler, the Creator, and unpacks why he’s emerged as one of the last real bona fide commercial stars saying anything of general interest:
Here’s another surprise we can add to humanity’s season of reality inversion and upheaval: 31-year-old Tyler, the Creator, former rap provocateur and teenage gross-out artist, has matured into one of the last major American pop stars capable of saying anything interesting and true.
As revealed through the legions of children at FTX Arena in Miami on March 20, Tyler has bridged the generation gap between moody millennials and diffident Zoomers better than nearly any of his peers. Call Me If You Get Lost, his chart-topping album from last summer, is a half-satirical fantasy of escape and material fulfillment wrapped around a dark personal saga of sexual ambivalence and betrayal. Structured as a tribute to DJ Drama’s influential run of rap mixtapes in the 2000s, many of which came out before most of my fellow concertgoers in Miami were even born, Call Me has two songs that run beyond the patience-testing eight-minute mark. But the record is apparently not too challenging to have stopped it from becoming wildly popular among the TikTok-conditioned youth. On his arena tour, a complex and monumentally scaled performance-art piece whips crowds of teenagers into a terrifying frenzy. Many of these fans were in kindergarten when the first mixtapes from the Tyler-led hip-hop collective, Odd Future LA, thrilled and horrified an earlier generation of listeners in the late 2000s.
So what gives? The L.A. rapper whose lyrics got him banned from entering the United Kingdom, who dropped uncomfortably hostile diss-tracks about the father he never met, and fantasized about stabbing Bruno Mars in his esophagus, has grown into the rare artist capable of being both profound and original without trading in the ability to make fun music. If the United States and the earth in general have become ever more hateful and stupid places since Tyler Okonma burst onto the scene in 2008, Tyler—of all people—has found his depth as everything else got shallower, as did his Odd Future comrades Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean, who also evolved from youthful terrors into folk geniuses. In the case of Tyler, a rapper condemned for rape fantasies and his frequent use of the word faggot is now an unassailable old-school paragon of artistic purity.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. Tyler’s entire career traces the familiar process through which the raw and unformed emotional lives of teenagers prime them for actual wisdom. Present-day Tyler is the mature expression of a young person’s angst, his music a chronicle of how the fire warps in the winds of a progressing life.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/tyler-the-creator-armin-rosen