What Happened Today: April 13, 2022
Brooklyn shooter arrested; Blowback from the tech monopolies; California’s reading problems
The Big Story
Once again, Congress is pushing legislation that threatens to rein in Big Tech’s monopolistic control of American life, which now extends from access to information (Google) to what we buy from whom (Amazon) to the news we read and are barred from reading (Meta). Spooked by the possibility of antitrust legislation being passed that could threaten their economic dominance, the Silicon Valley CEOs are intimating darkly that such measures could threaten the United States’ national security. “We are deeply concerned about regulations that would undermine privacy and security in service of some other aim,” Apple CEO Tim Cook warned Tuesday in a rare public appearance during a talk at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington, D.C. Nevermind Apple’s record of undermining the privacy and security of its users—e.g., the secret $275 billion deal the company signed with China in 2016 after Cook personally lobbied Chinese officials, a deal that led to enormous sums of technology being shared with a country that is a direct strategic competitor of the United States and is notorious for violating the privacy of its citizens. Then, too, there was Apple’s and Google’s decision to remove a voting app created by Russia’s opposition party from their stores, bowing to pressure from the Kremlin. As the economic analyst Matthew Stoller pointed out on Twitter yesterday, in 2016 Google “secretly tried to develop a censored version of its search engine in China that would help the Chinese government surveil its citizens.” So what is it that now has these companies warning of the security risks associated with allowing more competition in the tech industry? One proposed change, outlined in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, aims to prevent tech companies that control a particular marketplace—the way Amazon, say, controls its online retail store—from giving an advantage to their own products or content by, for instance, making it rank higher in search results. Another new rule, part of the Open App Markets Act, would restrict app stores from requiring developers to use the in-house payment system; at present, the Apple App Store not only requires that all apps do so but also takes a 30% cut of each transaction.
In The Back Pages: A Rabbi, a High School Student, and a Yale Physicist Walk Into a Room …
The Rest
→ The man suspected of carrying out the attack on a Brooklyn subway platform Tuesday morning in which 10 people were shot and 29 injured has been taken into custody by law enforcement, the New York Post reported on Wednesday afternoon. No motive has yet been established for the mass shooting, but the suspect, Frank James, 62, has been identified as the creator of a YouTube channel to which he’s uploaded more than 450 videos over the past three years in which he delivers racial tirades about a coming race war in the United States, comments on current events, and discusses his violent fantasies. In several videos, James, who is Black, compares the plight of Black Americans—of whom he is critical—to Jews during the Holocaust. “The seed is already planted for a Nazi party to rise in this country again, and I believe it will,” James says in one video. In another scene, after comparing American Blacks and Jews, he says, “For us not to understand or to think that somewhere along the line this cannot happen to us is to beg to die, is to beg to be fucking re-enslaved, and we will be, because we never stopped being slaves.”
→ The suspect in a string of antisemitic attacks in New Jersey last Friday, including the stabbing of an Orthodox man, allegedly called Hasidic Jews “the real devils” and told family members “it’s going to be a real blood bath” before carrying out his crime spree, according to police documents that were obtained by NJ Advance Media. The suspect, 27-year-old Dion Marsh, is facing multiple charges, including attempted murder, for allegedly carrying out one violent carjacking, attempting several other carjackings, and stabbing a man in the chest in the heavily Jewish area of Lakewood—all in the span of a single day.
→ California, that glorious kingdom of progress, now leads the United States in illiteracy. New data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 23.1% of Californians aged 15 and up are unable to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, and make low-level inferences. It follows, then, that parents want to pull their kids from California’s failing schools: From 2018 to 2019, CA’s public schools lost 23,000 students, and from 2019 to 2021, more than 160,000 students left the state’s school system—a loss of 3% of the total student body. Catholic schools, charter schools, and homeschooling have all become more popular in recent years—as has leaving the Golden State for good. Since 2010, California has seen a net population decrease of almost 2 million people.
→ In a purge of the Kremlin’s senior leadership, Vladislav Surkov—a member of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and one of the architects of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy since 1999—has been arrested along with 150 members of Russia’s secret security forces, the FSB. Putin is turning on his top advisers as he searches for someone to blame for his failing war in Ukraine, which has now led to tens of thousands of Russian casualties and to crippling sanctions being imposed against the country. Underlining Putin’s displeasure, and sending a clear message to those advisers still left, Surkov was sent to Russia’s notorious Lefortovo prison, a 19th-century complex where the KGB tortured and executed political dissidents.
→ Suicides among children in the United States are rising at an alarming rate. From 2007 to 2017, the number of children aged 10 to 14 who committed suicide more than doubled, and in 2020, more than 500 children aged 10 to 14 committed suicide, making it the second most common cause of death in that age group after accidental injuries. The COVID-19 pandemic, meanwhile, has made a growing health crisis worse; in the first seven months of lockdown, emergency rooms saw a 24% increase in mental health emergencies for those aged 5 to 11 and a 31% increase for those aged 12 to 17. Additionally, suspected suicide attempts landed nearly 51% more girls aged 12 to 17 in the emergency room in early 2021 compared to the same period in 2019. Based on these numbers, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a “national emergency in children’s mental health” in October and called upon Congress to dedicate funding to increasing mental health services in schools.
Read More: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/the-mystifying-rise-of-child-suicide
→ If you impersonate a DHS agent in order to infiltrate the United States Secret Service—potentially as part of an Iranian assassination plot—you get out on bail. If you are accused of committing misdemeanor crimes as part of the Jan. 6 Riots at the Capitol, meanwhile, you might be denied bail and forced to spend months in prison awaiting trial. Such are the mysterious workings of the American criminal justice system. On Tuesday, Judge G. Michael Harvey, a magistrate judge in the District of Columbia, released two men on bail who have been accused of pretending to be federal law enforcement, bribing secret service members with free rent, and amassing a cache of weapons in their apartment. Judge Harvey explained that because there was no act of violence (the suspects were caught before they could kill anyone, after all), the men should not be denied bail.
→ Maybe the lesson here has less to do with “anti-Zionism” than with the fact that you shouldn’t send your children to college in the United States.
→ Employees are beginning to get paid in cryptocurrencies. According to Deel, a startup that helps companies pay employees in any of 150 global currencies, and that introduced the option of paying workers in cryptocurrencies in 2021, employees are increasingly signing up to be paid in “Crypto Withdrawals,” with portions of their paycheck going directly into their Coinbase accounts. Data from Deel shows a 10% month-to-month increase in the number of employees enrolling in Crypto Withdrawals, which Alex Bouaziz, one of Deel’s founders, sees as yet another sign that crypto is maturing into a mainstream currency. “This is game-changing for crypto companies,” he said.
→ The hilarious and unpredictable Gilbert Gottfried, whose groaning squawk of a Brooklyn accent made him beloved by children as the voice of the parrot in the animated Disney movie Aladdin, and who was one of the purest and funniest standup comedians of his generation, died on Tuesday at the age of 67. Gottfried had been suffering from myotonic dystrophy, a genetic disorder that causes progressive muscle wasting, his family revealed after his death. The comedian is survived by a wife, Dara Kravitz, and two young children.
Tablet contributor Benjamin Samuels attends a talk given by a semi-secret Yale club where a rabbi joins a Jewish physicist to muse on unity in the laws of nature
Menashe, doing his PhD on low-dimensional topology, shrugs me off when I ask about politics at Yale. “I come from Brazil,” he says, with a huge smile. “There’s no Shabtai in Brazil. So, I will take it!”
Shabtai is a semi-secret Jewish club at Yale, of which Menashe is a member. They do talks around the country and invite intellectuals to talk about academic subjects in a Jewish context. This one is being held on a Thursday night in early April in an apartment in the downtown New York City neighborhood of Soho, where former industrial spaces were long ago converted into art galleries and luxury lofts. The evening’s speaker is the Yale physicist Nir Navon, who is preparing to give a talk under the heading “A Jewish Physicist’s Musings on Unity in the Laws of Nature.”
It takes a little while for the talk to get going, and the crowd waits anxiously in corners.
I wander over to the bookshelves on the far side of the apartment, where a large Asian student is rifling energetically through a collection of old Chinese books. He thrusts one up in the air.
“Do you know how valuable this is?” he whispers. I shake my head.
“This is extremely valuable,” he says, and replaces it tenderly. Then something else catches his eye, and he skips around to the opposite side of the bookshelf.
“My God!” he shouts, and shows it to me. The title is in Chinese.
“Nietzsche’s Dust of the Idols,” he yells. “A first printing!” In English translation, the title of Nietzsche’s book is, in fact, not ‘dust,’ but Twilight of the Idols, but never mind that. He makes his way through the crowd, seeking out the hostess. When he finds her, he slaps the book vigorously and says something very fast in Cantonese.
A rabbi walks in with a yarmulke tamping down a huge Jew fro that gives him the look of an orthodox Seth Rogen. He shushes everyone and introduces the host, who comes on and gives a short speech. “Behind every mitzvah, there is a mitzvah steeped in academia,” he says. Then he bows out of the way. A young man with big eyes in a suit sits at an angle to the camera, joined by a middle-aged man in a T-shirt and jacket.
“I am Nir Navon,” says the second man, taking a seat in a low chair.
“I will only ask you once to speak up,” says Seth Rogen.
“I want to gauge who I am speaking to,” says Nir Navon. “Raise your hand for what you are—from the least perfect to the most perfect. A student?” Most people raise their hands. “A scientist? A physicist?” Two or three students decide that they qualify as physicists. “A Chasid?”
Everyone laughs and applauds, but no one raises their hand. The host’s wife seems a little on edge and sits down on a drum.
Nir Navon tells the room about his childhood in Belgium. He went to an engineering school at the behest of his mother. She told him that if he was still interested in mathematics after a year, he could go wherever he liked. When the year was up, he thanked her and left for the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
One common theme in his musing is asymmetry. Phase transitions particularly interest him—the oddly specific temperatures at which elements suddenly mutate into forms with totally different properties.
“The definition of symmetry is that you can do something to a system, and the system won’t change.” He spins his finger slowly in the air a number of times. “You can turn a circle over and over and over again. … It will always be identical …
“If God had put us at the center of the universe,” he says, “it would have violated all kinds of symmetries. There are no special directions, no special speeds.”
“Except the speed of light,” pipes in his interviewer, Alex.
The universe is sprawling and symmetric, which makes it worth noticing the lines drawn at weird junctures: the speed of light, the freezing point of water. Nir sounds hesitant to ascribe their inviolability to God.
“But the speed of light, the Planck length, these arbitrary looking numbers,” says a student, clearly intimidated. “Don’t they seem like proof that someone set them like that?”
Navon is dismissive. He mentions Stephen Weinberg, the particle physicist who did early experiments on the probability of the universe supporting life. He warns the room against constructing an anthropocentric universe. It’s hard to tell how he feels about a universe whose laws were drawn from a hat—he’s evasive. But Alex, who is Greek Orthodox, jumps on it. “The fact that the universe supports life is an incredible co-in-ci-dence,” he says, hitting the fourth syllable so that the word sounds like two things colliding.
“When I was young, I learned about this result called Monstrous Moonshine. It is very profound and complicated. I can’t explain it without advanced mathematics, but it pulls so many different fields together in one co-in-ci-dence.” Alex motions grandly at the rabbi, who looks thoroughly bewildered. “You see God in … mountains. … But I see it in the Monstrous Moonshine!”
The longer the evening stretches, the less happy Navin looks. He stays slouched against the kitchen counter for the entire hour. The interviewer rubs his thighs and stops prompting him. Around half an hour into the talk, the questions dry up. The person who doesn’t sense this is my friend Dust of the Idols, who waggles his fingers politely and starts to tell the room that he entered Yale as a mathematics student before deciding that mathematics didn’t deal with the right questions and turning to Greek and Buddhist metaphysics. He rubs his chin and asks calmly if Nir, as a particle physicist, has anything interesting to say about Zeno. “Because if you move,” he says happily, “then you don’t move.”
“So there’s no such thing as motion,” Navon says. “Now what? Here. I move. Your question is meaningless.”
Dust of the Idols seems a little hurt, but people finally laugh, so some of the tension diffuses, which is a win. Then someone asks about the existence of God, at which point he relaxes and begins joking with the rabbi about losing tenure.
“God’s already in the title!” says the rabbi.
“No,” says Nir Navon. “We left it out of the title on purpose. It’s hidden behind the title.”
At 10 p.m., the rabbi starts waving his hands like an air traffic controller.
“I don’t want to make this into a sermon,” the rabbi begins, and he tells a joke about rabbis and undergrads. Then he gets serious and starts shooting off verses. In Gan Eden, Adam and Eve try to hide from God, who is all-seeing. God knows exactly where they are, but he still asks, “Eichah?” Where are you? Where are we? the rabbi wants to know.
Navon tried this bit too. His was, “Science tells us ‘how’ and religion tells us ‘why.’” Still, neither of them really seem willing to segregate the universe into questions that religion can answer and questions that science can. The crowd here is full of mathematicians, anyway, not Chasids, musing about whether or not there is unity in nature’s laws instead of whether there are laws within nature’s unity. The kabbalists were as serious about their numbers as string theorists are about the beginning of the universe—pretending otherwise just makes both less interesting.
Benjamin Samuels is the editor of Bard High School’s samizdat newspaper, The Underground.