What Happened Today: March 29, 2022
Terror wave hits Israel; Inflation trouble for Dems; Translating Kanye’s genius
The Big Story
A shooting in the city of Bnei Brak that left at least five people dead is the third in a wave of recent terrorist attacks in Israel and brings the total number of people killed over the past eight days to eleven. According to Times of Israel reporter Judah Ari Gross, it may be “the largest number of Israelis killed in terror attacks in one week since 2006.” Israeli law enforcement and media sources have identified the gunman responsible for the shooting Tuesday night as Dia Hamarsha, a 27-year-old man who had reportedly been arrested in the past on terrorism-related charges. Initial reports indicate that two other men who are suspected of being involved in the shooting were arrested by Israeli law enforcement near the scene. Hamarsha was reportedly shot and killed by security officials near the scene of the attack. While the previous two attacks over the past week—a mass stabbing in the southern city of Beersheba that killed four civilians and a shooting in Hadera that killed two border guards––both involved Arab Israeli citizens who had previously attempted to join the Islamic State, Hamarsha was a Palestinian from a West Bank village near Jenin who appears to have entered Bnei Brak illegally, possibly as a worker on a construction site in the area. Bnei Brak, which is just east of Tel Aviv, is known as the home to a large community of religious Jews. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian terrorist group, claimed responsibility for the killing. Reports indicated that Hamarsha was on a motorcycle, but in a graphic video that appears to show part of the attack and is circulating on Israeli social media, a gunman who is on foot and carrying what looks like an M16 rifle opens fire on a motorist before fleeing out of the frame.
Read more: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rjxh1plqc
In The Back Pages: On Translating the ‘Jeen-Yuhs’ of Kanye West
The Rest
→ Inflation, which hit a 40-year high this month, is the issue of most concern to American voters going into the midterm elections, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll that surveyed 1,990 registered voters from March 23 to 24. Almost a third of respondents, 32%, picked inflation as the most important issue facing the country, with 76% saying that inflation had impacted them “somewhat or a lot.” In second place was the economy and jobs at 27%, and immigration was third, with 21% of voters picking it as the most important issue. Only 35% of people polled said they “strongly or somewhat” approve of President Biden’s performance on the economy. These are bleak results for Democrats ahead of the upcoming congressional elections.
Read it here: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/600087-inflation-tops-list-of-issues-for-voters-ahead-of-midterms-poll?rl=1
→ Video that was reportedly taken in the West Bank village of Jenin Tuesday night, near where the suspect in the deadly Bnei Brak shooting is from, shows what appears to be a celebration after the attack that left at least five people dead.
→ It just got a little bit harder for Americans trying to buy a new home as the S&P Case-Shiller price index, a measurement of U.S. housing prices, found that prices were up more than 19% year over year in January 2022, an ongoing climb on the cost front just as the housing supply fell to a new low. Inflation and supply chain woes have further intensified the housing market dysfunction as home mortgage interest rates inch closer to 5% (in the largest three-week interest rate hike in 35 years) and home developers struggle to source enough materials like steel to finish the HVAC systems, cabinets, and windows. “We expect shortages of materials will stay with us throughout this year,” Robert McGibney, an executive at KB Homes, told investors during a recent earnings call. Though some housing analysts have welcomed the rising mortgage rates as a way to throttle the bidding wars and wild price swings that have become the norm, all of these factors translate to a brutal dynamic for individuals seeking to buy a home right now. Those same constraints, however, appeal to large capital investors like the Toronto-based company Tricon Residential, which now owns 30,000 single-family units it rents to approximately 75,000 Americans across the country. Tricon and other housing-market speculators buy as many as 800 homes a month, outbidding individual buyers with all-cash offers while they deploy teams of contractors to fix up the houses for the rental market—a growing business that captures those same would-be buyers with rents up 15% on average last year, almost twice the overall rate of inflation.
→ Three of the negotiators involved in the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia earlier this month developed symptoms of a suspected poisoning, The Wall Street Journal reports. After attending the talks, Roman Abramovich, one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Russia who’s used his long-standing relationship with President Putin to try to end the invasion of Ukraine, was blind and unable to eat after the peace negotiation. His symptoms, along with those of the others, who suffered peeling skin and pain in the eyes, led those familiar with the incident to suspect the negotiators were poisoned. The negotiators all have since recovered from what has been a familiar Russian tactic of poisoning political opponents. In 2020, President Putin’s vocal critic Alexei Navalny became violently ill after a nerve agent attack, and in 2018, one woman died and three people were hospitalized in Britain in what British authorities believed was a retaliatory nerve agent attack against a former Russian military officer who’d defected to the United Kingdom.
→ As China suffers from its largest wave of COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, more than 125 million elderly people are now at risk of getting severe COVID-19 or dying from the virus. Among the country’s quarter-billion people aged 60 or older, fewer than half have received three jabs of China’s Sinovac vaccine, and some 45 million are still unvaccinated entirely. The country’s low vaccination rate is compounded by the ineffectiveness of China’s homegrown vaccine: A study from the University of Hong Kong found that two doses of the Chinese vaccines still provide “insufficient” antibodies to ward off severe illness. China’s older population was slow to get vaccinated, largely owing to the success of President Xi Jinping’s “zero-Covid” policy, which used surveillance and draconian restrictions to keep rates exceptionally low—until now. The country’s case count is approaching 150,000, and cities across China are announcing emergency lockdowns.
→ While most art lovers were shut out of museums, galleries, and art fairs during the pandemic, the art-collecting elite still found a way to get some new work on their walls. Year 2020 marked a 10-year low in the art market, amounting to a total of $50.1 billion in sales, but 2021 saw art and antique sales returning to pre-pandemic levels, reaching $65.1 billion. NFT sales, meanwhile, increased by 36,900% [sic], from $30 million to $11.1 billion. This is good news for art collectors—and especially art collectors from Russia who may be looking to move some funds. Despite unprecedented and expansive sanctions from the West across a wide range of industries and asset markets, the art market remains, per a 2020 report from the U.S. Congress, the “largest unregulated market in the United States,” with Russian oligarchs still able to use shell companies and intermediaries to purchase high-value artworks and then store them in bonded warehouses all over the world.
→ The legal marijuana industry is booming, but weed shops are facing a surge of robberies. In Washington State, where recreational weed use was legalized in 2012, the industry sees $1.4 billion in sales, bringing the state more than half a billion dollars in tax revenue. Yet dispensaries and pot shops are routinely targeted by thieves: Armed robberies are up almost 100% in 2022, with 67 incidents this year to date compared to 34 in all of 2021. This year has also seen three store workers killed during such robberies. Marijuana shops are burglarized because (obviously) they’re full of marijuana, but also because they’re full of cash. The stores cannot accept credit cards as marijuana remains illegal according to federal drug laws, and thus barred from many traditional banking services. Adán Espino, the executive director of the Craft Cannabis Coalition, says allowing the stores to accept credit cards would go a long way toward solving the problem. “How much longer do we have to put our employees in danger before we do something about this?” he said. “People are starting to get shot.”
Scroll Editorial fellow David Sugarman on Kanye West, Coodie Simmons, and ‘Jeen-Yuhs’
The static gives way to Kanye West in a flak vest freestyling; Ye managing his presidential campaign; Ye considering a tweet. “Don’t tweet that?” he asks, showing it to Coodie Simmons, the filmmaker behind Jeen-Yuhs, a revelatory new docuseries on Netflix. Coodie says he should.
“We need that translation,” Ye says. “I be needing a translator real bad.”
Coodie agrees—“Mm-hmm”—and then cuts to the credits.
It is understandable that Ye, who has shaken the faith of even his most ardent followers—be it by going on a Sunday worship tour or making a lackluster run for the White House or bickering with his ex-wife on social media—would desire a translator. It’s also a task that Coodie and his co-director, Chike Ozah, embrace in this three-part documentary that charts Kanye’s early years as a producer in Chicago and New York, the arduous creation of his award-winning debut, and his past few years struggling with mental health while launching his global fashion brand and making some of the most compelling music of his career.
Coodie translates Kanye on multiple levels: first by moving him from one medium to another, from Kanye’s music to this docuseries. Kanye’s voice—his bombast and insecurities—is familiar, if not too much so. It can become tiring, the Kanye noise. But here we have footage, in the first episode, of a young Kanye stalking the offices of record labels, desperately trying to get anyone to listen to his music. He is ignored, or politely tolerated, but never celebrated for work he feels is nothing less than world-historically significant. This footage of Kanye’s dedication and debasement and grit—wandering halls, working without doubts or breaks—gives us, in a documentary tightly structured around the artist’s rise and fall, our underdog hero. Kanye is reintroduced to us as someone we feel good rooting for.
But the essence of what gets translated in this docuseries is something else altogether. The translator’s true task, Walter Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator,” is not to change something from one language or medium to another but to capture “what it contains in addition to information”—to capture “the unfathomable, the mysterious, the poetic.” For these qualities of the original to be translated, Benjamin argues, they must be possessed in equal measure by the translator. So it is in this new docuseries, a Kanye West biopic concurrently about Coodie Simmons. While translating Ye, Coodie narrates his own life and rhapsodizes about faith and his late father and parenthood and art and missed chances. As a narrator and thinker, Coodie is kind and wise and rueful—all traits that distinguish him from the docuseries’ ostensible subject and give the series an energy that makes it something genuinely joyful and mysterious, Kanye’s barbed genius getting translated into Coodie’s beatific jeen-yuhs …