What Happened Today: July 28, 2022
Kensington’s state of emergency; Ukraine blacklists Western politicians; Lolcow Journalism
The Big Story
“It’s a humanitarian crisis,” Philadelphia’s councilman at-large, Allan Domb, told me about the city’s Kensington neighborhood—now the largest open-air drug market in the United States. One evening last November, Domb rode with a city cop through the streets of Kensington and encountered what he described as a nightmare, stopping the cruiser over and over again because of the number of drug users that were so high they “were just laying down in the middle of the road.”
A subsequent ride-along convinced Domb that the problem had grown beyond the scope of what the city could fix by itself. “We saw the aftermath of seven shootings that night—all drug related,” he said. “This is the root of a lot of the violence.” Since the start of 2022, more than 1,345 people have been injured in Philadelphia shootings, and 311 people have been murdered—a six-month homicide rate that already exceeds the total killed in the entirety of 2016. As in several other cities across the nation, gun violence has flourished here since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But so too has the drug trafficking, particularly in Kensington, leaving scores of dead drug users in its wake.
Three months ago, Domb and the rest of the 17-member city council unanimously voted to declare a state of emergency in Kensington. FEMA has never deployed an emergency crisis operation to an urban neighborhood where the only disaster is human-made—but Kensington doesn’t exactly have a precedent.
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In the Back Pages: Lolcow Journalism
The Rest
→ The Ukraininan government is moving to revoke the citizenship of three of the country’s wealthiest Jewish businessmen—a move adopted just days after Kyiv placed several prominent Western intellectuals and politicians on a blacklist. Ukraine accuses the individuals on the blacklist, which includes Tablet writer and esteemed strategist Edward Luttwak, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of “promoting Russian propaganda.” The list is somewhat baffling since, as Luttwak told the website UnHerd, he has since the start of the war “relentlessly argued” for Western nations to send more arms to Ukraine and “personally lobbied defense ministers of NATO countries.” Meanwhile, prominent Jewish businessmen Igor Kolomoisky, Hennadiy Korban, and Vadim Rabinovich have had or will soon have their Ukrainian citizenship stripped. Technically, the action is being taken because the men have foreign citizenships as well, and dual citizenship is prohibited by law in Ukraine. However, that law is essentially not enforced, as Ukraine is home to several hundred thousand residents with dual nationalities, leaving “several alternate theories … circulating, including that Zelensky is purging oligarchs with checkered pasts in an effort to prove to the United States and other Western countries that Ukraine has no tolerance for corruption.”
→ Four former employees at ByteDance allege that the company used TopBuzz, its now-defunct news app, to pin pro-China stories to the top of users’ news feeds. These allegations come amidst growing concerns that TikTok, also owned by ByteDance, might be used by Chinese officials to collect the data of U.S. users. As The Scroll has previously reported, Chinese TikTok employees have routinely accessed the data of non-Chinese citizens despite assurances from the company to the contrary. The TopBuzz employees do not allege that the app was promoting anything terribly controversial—mostly panda videos and unofficial advertisements for the country’s beaches—but orders to include that content came from the top of the company. “This was not something you could say no to,” one of the former employees said of those panda videos and beach pics. “If they don’t do it, somebody’s going to jail.”
→ Quote of the Day:
I heard crying coming from the ground floor, so I hurried down. Then I saw a monkey hunching over my child.
A father from the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, where macaque monkeys are sneaking into nurseries or opening sliding doors to enter houses, sending the city into a panic. “They are so smart, and they tend to sneak up and attack from behind, often grabbing at your legs,” said Masato Saito, a city official. Surrounded by mountains and forests, Yamaguchi is accustomed to seeing monkeys; the attacks, however, are extremely rare, causing concerned city officials to hire monkey-hunting teams armed with tranquilizer guns. The hunters have captured one monkey so far—he was killed after it was determined that he was in fact one of the marauding monkeys—but there have been more attacks since, bringing the total number of attacks to 58 in just the past three weeks.
→ On a recent earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that users would be seeing twice as much content from accounts they don’t follow—a huge shift from the company’s previous practice of letting friends fill each other’s news feeds with vacation pics and baby photos. “One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you’ll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram,” Zuck said. How terrific! Surely Facebook users are sick of having so many friends in their lives and are yearning for more interaction with manipulative algorithms. “Right now,” according to Zuckerberg, “about 15% of content in a person’s Facebook feed and a little more than that of their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don’t follow. We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year.” This comes as Meta chases the huge user growth that TikTok has had—largely by filling peoples’ screens with strangers’ videos.
→ In the first antitrust lawsuit brought by President Biden’s recently appointed Federal Trade Commission commissioner, and in a move that portends poorly for Meta’s ambitions to dominate the virtual reality sector, the FTC filed for an injunction on Wednesday to block Meta from purchasing Within, the creator of Supernatural, a popular VR workout app. “Meta could have chosen to try to compete with Within on the merits” instead of buying the company outright, the FTC said in its lawsuit. Meta, meanwhile, has charged that the lawsuit is “based on ideology and speculation, not evidence.” This has been Meta’s long-standing line on Khan, who penned an influential article as a law student at Yale that mapped out an alternative framework for resisting Big Tech’s monopolistic practices—especially at the cutting edge of innovation, as with Meta’s moves in the VR sector.
→ Tweet of the Day:
Today’s thread comes from Aki Ito, a senior correspondent at Business Insider who looked at whether employees are complying with “return to work” orders and if employers are meaningfully enforcing them. The answer: no and no. “At companies requiring office attendance 5x/week, more than 50% of employees are coming in less than they’re supposed to,” Ito found. “So what are companies doing to punish these rule breakers? The most common response: nothing.” Read the thread and see the data here:
→ In the coming days, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will speak to Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One topic on the agenda: the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia on a drummed-up drug possession charge since early March. Blinken announced the meeting with Lavrov hours after Griner testified in a Russian court that she had mistakenly packed the “hashish oil” in her bag—a crime in Russia that could carry a 10-year prison sentence. Blinken also described the “substantial offer” the United States recently made to the Russians: a prisoner swap exchanging Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for Griner as well as former police officer Paul Whelan, who was arrested in Russia on charges of spying in 2018. “We put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago to facilitate their release,” Blinken said. “Our governments have communicated repeatedly and directly on that proposal, and I’ll use the conversation [with Lavrov] to follow up personally and, I hope, move us toward a resolution.”
→ Video of the Day:
In this animation of cell organelles by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno, the camera zooms in—way in, to a magnification of 10,000,000—and shows how transport motors in the cytoskeleton resemble a rush-hour sidewalk with pedestrians hustling around a city.
→ Eli N. Evans, “the poet laureate of the southern Jews,” as one scholar called him, has passed away. Born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1936, Evans went to Yale Law School before serving as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson. Evans went on to author three books on the history of Jews in the south and to spend almost 50 years working to support a wide range of causes, from Jewish education to biomedical research and the civic life of New York City. It was for his efforts as both a writer and philanthropist—“his dual contribution to American letters and as a philanthropist of uncommon originality and leadership”—that, in 2001, led him to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Read More: https://crm.covenantfn.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=697
→ Comment of the Day:
We’ve been noticing that some of the most interesting ideas in The Scroll are coming up after the news is over, in the comments. To highlight those especially thoughtful additions, we’re introducing the Comment of the Day with the response of Scroll regular “Not From Texas” to Katherine Dee’s recent piece “Blame Generation X,” in which he offers some historical context regarding which generation is “responsible for woke”:
It is true that PC started in the 1990s. (Exact date: “Hey ho, Western Civ has to go,” Stanford, fall 1989.) However, the widespread anti-political attitude of Gen X contained it to the crazier reaches of campus. The millennials being responsible for Woke is a half-truth. It’s really mainly the younger millennials/Gen Z that are responsible for making it a generational trait.
But the authoritarian nature and content of Woke are, without any doubt, a product of the older generation, the Boomers. It is they who pioneered these bad trends on campuses way back in the 1970s and 1980s. It went from fringe, to contained threat, to rampage over about 30-40 years.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
The New Kibbutz: Tablet contributing writer Matti Friedman on how Kishorit, a self-described neurodiverse kibbutz, is redefining Israeli communal living at a time when these communities are on the decline.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/kibbutz-matti-friedman
Staying Cool: The Unorthodox podcast crew chats with Lisa Loeb about her new summer-camp inspired record, Camp Lisa, and with cantor turned jazz singer Yisroel Leshes, who talks about digging into the rich archives of 1920s-1940s Yiddish theater and reinterpreting those songs for a modern audience.
Listen Here: https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/unorthodox/episode-326-lisa-loeb-yisroel-leshes-jewish-camp-music
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.
Lolcow Journalism
Did Gawker get its false story about Thomas Chatterton Williams from an anonymous internet message board?
By: Katherine Dee
On Monday, Gawker published a story alleging that Bard College professor and author Thomas Chatterton Williams had attended the Austin premiere of Alex’s War, Alex Lee Moyer’s indie documentary about Alex Jones. The article was short, written in a sneering tone, and implied that by attending the documentary film premiere, Williams, who describes himself as a liberal, was endorsing Jones and thereby exposing himself as hypocrite and possibly a closet right-winger. The problem, as Williams subsequently pointed out, is that he wasn’t at the film premiere, wasn’t in the city where it took place, and had never been contacted for comment by the Gawker writer, Tarpley Hitt, who made the allegations.
According to a tweet by Williams, Gawker had an “established pattern of defamation” with him. He cited the Gawker Staff Guidelines distributed by Editor in Chief Leah Finnegan, which listed his name on an approved roster of people Gawker could target in its articles.
The article about Williams has since been completely removed from Gawker’s website, but Gawker briefly offered a partial correction appended to the original post (which it retitled “Losers Pal Around Alex Jones Premiere” from “Thomas Chatterton Williams Pals Around with Fellow Losers at Alex Jones Premiere”):
Update: On Monday, we were tipped off that Thomas Chatterton Williams attended this premiere. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We apologize for the error.
The claim was challenged on Twitter by Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the popular podcast “Red Scare,” who did attend the premiere. On Instagram, Khachiyan had reposted a photo of Williams in a “Red Scare” T-shirt that was taken in a different setting along with photos of the event and speculated that this had led to Gawker assuming Williams had attended the premiere.
But there’s another possibility for how the false story was hatched that, like Khachiyan’s theory, also underscores how much digital journalism relies on scouring the internet for gossip that can be repacked as news stories. It’s possible that Hitt was skimming the imageboard lolcow.farm, which mixes gossip about “very online” personalities with a 4chan-like irreverent sensibility. In fact, two days prior to the Gawker article, a photo of Thomas Chatterton Williams had been posted on lolcow in the middle of a conversation about photos taken at the Jones film premiere.
Read more here.
Well, my word. I've moved up from the lower reaches to the main show. Maybe I'm famous now. Thanks to Sean, Jacob et al. 😉
I finally ponied up and subscribed. This is my third favorite SubStack… an excellent way to stay abreast of current events without becoming mired in tribalistic muck. Keep up the good work, gentlemen.