What Happened Today: August 12, 2022
Salman Rushdie stabbed at a literary event; AG Garland requested FBI sweep; the social benefits of WFH
The Big Story
Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed by an attacker shortly after taking the stage for a literary event at Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, on Friday morning. Rushdie was airlifted by helicopter to a nearby hospital, and his condition was not known at the time of publication. Following the 1989 release of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s novel that fictionalized elements of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini deemed the book blasphemous against Muslims and issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder. For the better part of the 1990s, the Booker Prize-winning author lived in hiding under police protection. In 2012, a state-affiliated organization inside Iran announced a $3 million bounty for Rushdie’s murder.
Only recently having resumed a more public life as a literary figure, Rushdie was scheduled to speak on Friday about the protection and freedom offered in the United States to writers facing exile and persecution. Attendees to the event say there was virtually no security presence to prevent the single attacker who easily rushed the stage and began stabbing Rushdie. One doctor in the crowd, Rita Landman, said she came onstage to offer medical help to Rushdie, who’d suffered several stab wounds, including one to his neck.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/12/nyregion/salman-rushdie-stabbed-new-york
In the Back Pages: Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday that he’d “personally approved” the search warrant used to sweep President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club for confidential White House documents. Garland had also requested that the warrant be unsealed by the federal court judge in Florida who authorized the unprecedented sweep of a former president’s private property.
Citing anonymous courses, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the FBI had been seeking “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.”
Trump, for his part, said he would support the release of the warrant on Thursday and suggested later, on his own social media platform, that the notion of the nuclear weapons document was a “hoax” and that FBI agents had planted information during the sweep.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI had recovered photographs, “the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone,” and roughly 20 boxes of documents labeled with various degrees of government confidentiality.
While a president can freely and easily declassify or classify almost any document they wish while in power, some materials, like documents on the identity of intelligence spies or about nuclear weapons, cannot be stripped of their classified status. That said, some estimate that there has been more raw information classified by the U.S. government than the grand total of non-classified information. As Graeme Wood notes in The Atlantic, a physicist named Peter Galison made a count of all classified material in 2004 and found that “about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.”
→ Following the FBI sweep of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, an Ohio gunman—who had made calls on social media for others to take up arms against the FBI—was shot and killed while attempting to break into an FBI office in Cincinnati. In several posts on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, the 42-year-old gunman wrote that others should “be ready for combat.” Armed with an AR-15 rifle and a nail gun, the gunman had attempted to breach the Cincinnati office but fled the scene when he was confronted by agents. After posting to the platform, “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I,” the gunman died in a subsequent shoot-out with state troopers.
→ Quote of the Day:
We know that COVID-19 is here to stay.
An epidemiologist at the CDC following Thursday’s announcement that the CDC would be significantly easing its COVID-19 restrictions. Unvaccinated community members exposed to the virus will no longer be asked to quarantine at home, away from schools and businesses. And the same set of policies will apply to vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike, in light of how many vaccinated people have gotten infected and how many unvaccinated people now have immunity from previous infections. Unchanged, however, are masking guidelines. Despite the growing body of evidence pointing to the ineffectiveness of masks at real-world disease mitigation, the CDC will still encourage everyone to “wear a mask in public places where there are a lot of people around.”
→ The invasion of Ukraine has led to energy insecurity across Europe, which in turn has brought E.U. nations closer together. The European Union is now considering a proposal to build a gas pipeline that will link Portugal and Spain to central Europe via France. “I made the case that we should really tackle such a project,” said Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, noting that there would be “other connections between north Africa and Europe that will help us to diversify our [energy] supply.” This would be a crucial resource for Germany, which had been largely reliant on the gas supplies Russia has drastically reduced since being hit with Western sanctions.
→ Today’s geopolitical shake-ups are having ripple effects across the landscape of higher education. The number of Chinese students coming to the United States for school on F-1 visas has more than halved compared to pre-pandemic numbers. Chinese students appear to have grown wary of American universities amid inflamed tensions between Beijing and Washington, D.C., and feel more welcome in countries like the United Kingdom or Singapore. Meanwhile, universities and colleges are scrambling to recruit more international students, who they depend on to fill their coffers. The war in Ukraine, though, has upended the international student base—especially the thousands of medical students from India who were studying to receive their medical degrees in Ukraine until the war broke out. After fleeing the country and returning to India, these students have been left in limbo, unable to continue their studies in a country that won’t recognize online training for doctors. “Our future is at stake,” said one of the students, “and the Indian government is in mute mode.”
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/
→ One source of hope for our under-enrolled universities: students from across the pond. In the United Kingdom, as many as 1 in 5 students from private British high schools are “turning their backs on Oxbridge” to come to the United States for college, according to The Daily Mail. These students cite Oxbridge’s new admissions policies, which seek to take more students from state schools than private schools, as well as restrictive COVID-19 policies as their reason for wanting to leave.
Image of the Day:
→ A quinceañera photo shoot on the new Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles, a bridge that has brought out the best and worst of Los Angeles. The best: skateboarders trying to ride the concrete arches and guys selling haircuts from the center of the four-lane bridge. “Every tweet, Instagram, and TikTok made from the bridge is a pure output of joy,” the writers at “Dirt,” a daily entertainment Substack, contend. “For a fleeting moment, we are unified around good, agenda-less L.A. content.” Then, however, comes the worst, with the city clawing back control of the public space—largely to lease it out to paying movie or advertisement production companies, for whom the city will shut the bridge down completely.
→ Einstein’s theory of gravity is safe for now, after a new 900-page paper puts to rest one of the long-standing puzzles of his theory: whether Kerr black holes, or black holes that rotate, are ultimately stable. Physicists have long known that stationary black holes (which exist in mathematical problems but not in nature) are stable, but what about the ones spinning out there across the galaxies? Professors Elena Giorgi of Columbia University and Tablet contributor Sergiu Klainerman of Princeton have spent several years making the case that these black holes are indeed stable. Their research paper is the result of an effort totaling 2,100 pages’ worth of work that “does indeed constitute a milestone in the mathematical development of general relativity,” according to a colleague. And what would have been the consequences of rotating black holes being unstable and thus bringing Einstein’s theory of gravity into question? “God knows what,” Professor Giorgi said.
Read More: https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-holes-finally-proven-mathematically-stable-20220804/
→ Graph of the Day:
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, many states have experienced abortion-law whiplash as bans go into effect, lift due to legal challenges, and then snap into place again. “It changed day by day and hour by hour,” Dr. David Turok, director of surgical services at the Planned Parenthood in Utah, told The New York Times. “There were days where we had people show up and wait in the waiting room, and we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to see them.” Aside from the psychic stress of such unpredictability, patients are also being stranded in legal limbo as they eye the clock anxiously. Time is not on their side.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/11/us/abortion-states-legal-illegal.html
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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.
Your Weekend Reads
→ The COVID-19 pandemic kicked people out of the office, many of them aren’t coming back, and Malcolm Gladwell fears it’s the end of the world as we know it. In a recent podcast about corporate leadership, Gladwell, who co-runs a podcast media company, shed literal tears about how no one working from home will ever feel as though they’re part of something bigger than themselves—and it’s bumming him out. “I’m really getting very frustrated with the inability of people in positions of leadership to explain this effectively to their employees,” he said. “If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point?”
While tedious, the lamentations of the C-suite’s favorite monger of pop contrarianism nonetheless inspired a terrific essay from the proprietor of the Substack “House of Strauss," Ethan Strauss, on why work from home is great for society, actually. Not just because it finally allows workers to reclaim some of their domestic existence after a decade or more of constant email, Slack, and other 24/7 intrusions that forced the workplace into our homes, but also because it placed tens of millions of people back into their communities of choice, which were filled with other remote workers. There, Strauss realized, was an abundance of neighbors and regular human interactions that sparked a real feeling of social connection that was more often than not simulated and fake in the realm of the pre-pandemic office.
That’s the thing about WFH reaching critical mass in certain parts. Gladwell envisions a bunch of lonely, enervated pajama jockeys, and maybe that’d be me if everyone else drove off to work every morning. But no, many people are around, WFHing or retired, and so I say hello to a bunch of them whenever taking a dog walk break.
…Their collective presence in my life has been simultaneously steadying and energizing. I’m now convinced that we are meant to live this way, connected to a surrounding community rather than dependent on Netflix for our intake of humanity.
Strauss raises one important caveat about WFH: the continued divide of the laptop class and those who must still report to a workplace. It’s real and it will likely only get worse. That said, people who work from home have more time to break free and see their family, friends, and the world around them. And there’s a major potential societal benefit to regularly untethering an excessively educated cohort of overachievers from machines designed to turn them into bots waging wars of moral partisanship:
In the meantime, I just want one of the cohorts to get less insane. In my opinion, a major driver of modern societal dysfunction is that the highly influential laptop class has lost its collective mind, possibly because so many of these minds experience social life through the screen. Personally, I’m for whatever we can do to get our college-educated Slack addicts shifting towards some semblance of sanity. If they’re happier and more grounded, they’re less likely to push for nihilistic social policy as some weird form of atonement.
Read More: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/work-from-home-is-good
→ Owner of a bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, for almost 45 years with his wife, Richard Howorth argues here in a New York Times op-ed about the deleterious effects on U.S. literary culture if the proposed corporate merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster goes through. Currently being challenged in court on antitrust grounds by the Department of Justice, the merger would further consolidate a book industry dominated by the Big Five publishers, which account for roughly 80% of the U.S. book market. Already, Howorth writes, the major houses have made aggressive moves away from publishing new, experimental, or innovative authors in favor of supporting books they know, or are pretty sure, will become best-sellers. That has created an increasing homogenization across today’s new releases, which means that “a customer may be left with a book less well made, less appealing, less diverse, more expensive, and whose author makes less money.”
The immense resources of a Penguin Random House or a Simon & Schuster will train mostly on a small percentage of its authors; the rest of the authors whom they publish will hope to take advantage of what collateral prestige and opportunity exists by being published in the company of household names.
The number of copies of best-sellers sold rose nearly 30 percent from 2017 to 2019, while all other book sales fell by 16 percent. The number of “midlist” titles (books with modest print runs and sales expectations) is being greatly diminished, which means that fewer books of quality—or indeed, fewer potential best sellers—will have the chance to be published and read.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/penguin-simon-schuster-publishing.html
Salman Rushdie's attacker was not even born when that fateful fatwa was issued some thirty odd years ago, ordering believers to go after the author. Could this be checked as the outcome of a mind experiencing *social life through the screen*, as Ethan Strauss said? *If they’re happier and more grounded, they’re less likely to push for nihilistic social policy as some weird form of atonement.*
What Ethan Strauss said. Perfectly put.
The benefits versus drawbacks of WFH depend a lot on the circumstances. The lockdowns from spring 2020 to spring 2021 deprived many of much of any contact, whether at work or school or around the neighborhood. Now we're back more into what WFH was like before the pandemic. More social contact at work (which is beneficial for both personal and work reasons, at least where I work) or more personal contact outside of work. It's a trade-off.
The real difference compared to early 2020 is that *far more workers* are now in this situation than a few years ago. That will definitely alter the future of work.
I'm not worried about what Gladwell is worried about, though. Working at the office is not going to disappear. It hasn't at my office. About a quarter of the employees now come in every day, all day. Fewer than 10 percent are WFH all the time, a number that has shrunk from above 95 percent a year ago. I expect it to continue to shrink. The rest of us are in between.