What Happened: 2023 Edition
Stuff we think is worth a second look (because we're off today but still love you)
Today’s Scroll features some of our favorite stories we’ve published this year. We will be off tomorrow and Thursday, but back in your inbox come Friday!
→ January 6: Continuing the ongoing wave of unionization efforts across several sectors of the economy, a group of 300 workers at a Microsoft subsidiary voted on Tuesday to form a union. Primarily composed of quality-assurance staffers responsible for making popular video games such as Doom, the group has found a seemingly sympathetic ally in management after Microsoft said it was willing to engage in collective bargaining. Whether that willingness holds through negotiations remains to be seen, but such open arms this early stands in stark contrast to Microsoft’s Big Tech rival, Amazon, which has spent millions of dollars to aggressively attack union efforts at several of its warehouses, even as reports of degraded employee conditions continue to drip out in the press. The labor love from the Seattle software giant also won’t hurt Microsoft’s chances to finally acquire Activision Blizzard, the video-game whale whose employees have expressed interest in forming a union.
→ January 10: With all that downtime between votes in the House, lawmakers should be able to fine-tune their stock portfolios for another blockbuster year of trades. As sometime-congressional watchdog Unusual Whales notes in this Tweet, American lawmakers rode the volatility of the worst market since 2008 to wonderful success, somehow beating the market with terrific margins. While the S&P was down 18% last year, Democrats on the whole were only down less than 2%, and Republicans were up about 0.5%. Note that despite widespread public support for legislation to ban lawmakers from trading stocks while using their access to proprietary information in the routine course of congressional business, lawmakers decided last year to not pass any such regulation.
→ January 17: After decades of the one-child policy that was abolished in 2016, China for the first time in 60 years recorded a population decline, which means the country that had been the most populous worldwide will lose the designation to India before the end of the summer. One China analyst at the Asia Society Policy Institute cautions that China’s younger generation continues to marry later in life, toiling in careers that increasingly take the place of starting a family. A “growing mood of inertia and hopelessness” has been “percolating for a number of years but finally boiled over during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the analyst writes, pointing to a cell phone video that went viral last year. “Once you’re punished, this will affect your family for three generations!” In the viral clip, a China policeman warns a couple who’s refusing to leave their apartment for a quarantine camp. “We’re the last generation, thank you,” the man says, before slamming the door.
→ February 14: The six largest oil companies made more money last year than any year prior, a windfall that topped a collective $200 billion as Western leaders urged them to increase oil production to compensate for Russian fossil fuels. Resisting pressure from activists and Western officials in recent years to accelerate efforts to decarbonize operations, oil companies like the American ExxonMobil were well positioned to respond to the sudden demand for their fossil fuels, and their stock grew in kind, rallying more than 50% in 2022. Oil producer BP’s CEO Bernard Looney said last week he was slowing the company’s plan to cut oil and gas production 40% by 2030 as part of its switch to renewable power, a decision driven by the fact that “governments and societies around the world are asking companies like ours to invest in today’s energy system,” Looney told the Financial Times.
The Curse of the Kanye cost Adidas an estimated $632 million in revenue in Q4 2022 after it parted ways with the wayward artiste.
The number of U.K. regulator-approved vaping products surged from about 2,000 in 2021 to 10,000 in 2022.
It’s approximately 22% more deadly to drive in the United States since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, 41 million vinyl records were sold, versus 33 million CDs—a flashback to 1987 numbers.
Chicago and Brooklyn are about the same size in population, but Chicago has had almost four times the number of shootings and murders this year, as of Feb. 26.
About 57% of American adults want to ban tobacco, but 59% want to legalize marijuana.
The film To Leslie, which garnered English actress Andrea Riseborough an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, had only earned $27,322 at the box office when her nomination was announced.
The number of U.S. households making more than $150,000 that are still renters increased by 87% between 2016 and 2021, to 3 million.
Roughly 25 million Americans are behind on their personal loans, the highest number since 2009.
The number of new tech start-ups with a valuation of more than $1 billion fell 85% in 2022, and the value of their IPOs dropped 94%.
→ February 14: Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study—a rate of despair that’s twice as high as it is for boys and a more than 20% increase from a decade prior. Also, roughly 1 in every 3 teen girls had seriously contemplated suicide, the study found, a significant increase from 19% in 2011.
→ February 22: Settled science on the history of our universe just became a little less settled after researchers reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature that six mega galaxies were found to have existed sometime within 600 million years of the Big Bang. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology were stunned to find six galaxies that appear to weigh billions of times more than our sun, suggesting a string of galaxies that preceded the creation of our universe. “The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” Pennsylvania State University’s Joel Leja, who collaborated on the project, said in a statement. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”
→ March 1: Following the Feb. 4 chemical disaster after the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in Ohio, six senators from both sides of the aisle backed a new bill titled Railway Safety Act on Wednesday. A rather substantial clampdown on the railroad industry, which has leveraged an aggressive lobbying arm to lessen safety requirements and penalties for violations, the bill could roll those relaxed standards right back into the books as the new law of the land. But the evenly split group of Republicans and Democrats will face challenges from other lawmakers who want to leverage the high-profile crash for their own political capital. Already, House Republicans are saying any legislative maneuvers should come after a splashy congressional probe that would offer plenty of chances for legislators to go viral as they make examples of the train execs who’ve spent years behind doors trading campaign donations for reduced government oversight.
→ March 15: In the past five months, U.S. border patrol agents have seized 21 million fentanyl pills at the Nogales port of entry in Arizona on the Mexico border—more than what had been taken from traffickers at that port over the entirety of the year prior. At the Nogales port, now considered the largest funnel of the synthetic opioid from Mexico drug labs into the United States, border agents are finding pills stuffed into car batteries and bicycle tubes and affixed to the bodies of mules, with one pedestrian attempting to cross the border wearing 19,800 pills taped around her thighs. Pills coming through border ports have accounted for 96% of all fentanyl seizures along the border this year.
→ March 27: After a weekend of intense protests in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday that he would delay a parliamentary vote on a contentious overhaul to the nation’s judiciary because the mounting opposition proved too divisive to move forward. “I am not ready to divide the nation,” Netanyahu said during a prime-time address. “When there’s an option to avoid civil war through dialogue, I take time off for dialogue.” To be sure, the prime minister does not intend to abandon his plan because of the challenge posed by what he described as “an extremist minority”; only until a Knesset session in April will he pause the voting process to determine the fate of a reform that would reduce the power of the judiciary by giving the government both more power over the appointment of judges and the ability to overturn a Supreme Court ruling.
April 4: Perhaps panicked by the recent discovery of uranium particles enriched as high as 83% in a February IAEA inspection of Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear site, the Biden administration is reportedly talking to European partners and Israel about proposing to the mullahs a possible deal that would temporarily throttle further weapons development. The agreement would cap Iranian enrichment at 60%—weapons grade is 90%—in return for some relief of economic sanctions from the West. But recent reports suggest the Iranians have no interest in the deal unless it involves the full reinstatement of the Obama-brokered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Meanwhile, Iran continues to strengthen its ties with Russia, including the development of a new bilateral payment system that allows Iran to forgo using the U.S. dollar in trade agreements.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
A film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
In the midst of an IRS audit and with grandpa arriving any moment and the family’s Lunar New Year celebration only hours away, we enter the claustrophobic lives of Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), laundromat owners and first-generation Chinese Americans who are coming undone. Their receipts don’t add up; their marriage is falling apart; their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is dating a woman despite their wishes; grandpa is here demanding breakfast.But just as it seems that her world is about to end, Evelyn learns through some sci-fi space-time high jinks that the end of her world is hardly cause for concern—that, indeed, her world is but one among billions, some with differences so great they can’t even support human life, but others with differences that metastasize out of the negligible: Instead of saying yes to a marriage proposal, Evelyn says no, and from that one decision spawns an infinity of new ones.
As she traverses the multiverse, Evelyn gathers skills from these endless iterations of her identity, using them to fight the evil forces threatening the lives of those she loves. A genre-bending film of extravagant creativity and warmth, Everything Everywhere All At Once is just that: a kung fu thriller, a multigenerational family drama, a story about motherhood and marriage, an existential adventure, a Buddhist meditation on bagels. In the infinity of options that exist (and the film will toy with quite a few doozies), some will be abysmal and some beautiful, but most will fall in the ambiguous mean, where there’s only, as Joy puts it in the film’s sweet finale, “a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.” This movie is such a time.
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Grandpa Sold Sheets to the Klan
A Jewbilly’s Advice to his Big City Brethren
By Zaq Harrison
To my East Coast, Big City Liberal Jewish brothers and sisters: Please just shut up. Antisemitism is not rising; Hillary isn’t responsible for Jew hatred, and it didn’t suddenly appear after she lost the most winnable election in history. I get it—until 2016, the worst antisemitism most of you ever had to deal with was when you were a teenager and some knucklehead called you a Jew Bagel. Just because you never lived with antisemitism until recently doesn’t mean it wasn’t always here. You’re like the guy in Field of Dreams; you didn’t see the players on the field until one day, poof, they were there.
I am a Jewbilly, born and raised in Appalachia. Our Jewish community was so small and insignificant that even Chabad took a pass. I grew up in a strictly kosher home, and my family was in the ham business. Our Jewbilly roots run deep here: My kin have been walking them thar hills for more than four score and seven. As kids we went “swimmin’ in the crick,” and while I didn’t hunt like all of my classmates in school did, I looked forward to the second Saturday in April, which was opening day of trout season. How did we end up there, in quintessential hickville? The mule died.
Sounds idyllic but it wasn’t. What you call bullying today, my father called valuable life lessons. Most days I got my ass handed to me on the playgrounds and in the classrooms. Things changed for the better when I broke that kid’s nose in sixth grade. Pop was prouder of me on that day than he was at my bar mitzvah.
Pop had his trials as well. My uncle shared the story that a high school classmate told my pop during the war that he hoped Hitler would kill all of the Jews, then sucker-punched Pop and broke his nose. I asked my uncle what happened to the other guy, and he just smiled and said they took him to the hospital.
If you grew up in greater New York and went to public school, you likely had three days off for the Jewish High Holidays: two for Rosh Hashanah and one for Yom Kippur. If your school district wasn’t predominantly Jewish, then most of the teachers were.
In Appalachia we also had three days off for the hillbilly High Holidays: Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving and the Monday following, the first day of deer season, aka the hillbilly Yom Kippur.
So, yes, it’s true, my grandpa sold sheets to the Klan. James Bacon, the late journalist and famed “Mr. Hollywood Confidential” wrote about my Grandpa Sam in his nationally syndicated column decades ago. Jim Bacon told me the following: The townsfolk in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, pulled Grandpa aside one day and asked him, “Sam, we hear you are selling to those boys in the Klan.” Grandpa, who was a well-known peddler in the area, nodded his head. They said, “Sam, you realize these are not nice people. You understand they don’t like you.” Grandpa nodded his head.
They asked again, “So, Sam, why the hell are you doing business with these bastards?” Grandpa looked up and explained that “the sheets cost me a nickel apiece, I sell them ‘special order’ at $1.50 each. They need lots of sheets. מאכן א לעבן. Machan a Leban.” That’s Yiddish for I’m making a killing off of these idiots. Leave me alone to make my living.
The Jewbilly lesson I learned from Grandpa and Pop is when someone says or does something antisemitic, it is usually just them being stupid. Everyone has a job in life; for some it’s being stupid. No whining or complaining. Our job is to know who we are and never compromise that—never. If it comes down to it, don’t hesitate to protect yourself and your family. As for the locals … we might have been in the ham business, but Pop always said, “Don’t hold your breath. You’re never getting invited over for Christmas dinner.”
We had a strictly Kosher home and we sold hams for a living. Machan a Leban. I can live with that.
Zaq Harrison was a former IDF Lone Soldier whose Grandpa sold sheets to the Klan.
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Pretty sure my wife’s family would have done the same but left West VA for Brooklyn in 1920. There are no stories from that time, sadly...
Thank you for a big smile.