What Happened Today: May 12, 2022
NATO courts Finland and Sweden; Facebook retaliates; Pulitzer’s “for the pullets”
The Big Story
Finland’s top officials said today that they will initiate the process to join NATO “without delay,” an abrupt shift in the European security landscape and a reversal of the Nordic nation’s history of military neutrality toward Russia stretching back to the Cold War. Just six months ago, Finland’s public sentiment polled around 20% in favor of joining NATO, but following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, polls now show 80% support for the move to join and thus expand the same Western military alliance that President Vladimir Putin identifies as a major threat to Russia’s national security. Sweden, too, is reversing its long-held stance of neutrality and is expected to follow Finland’s lead in applying for NATO membership, with a majority of the Swedish Parliament in support of the measure that’s scheduled for a final vote tomorrow. The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that both Nordic nations would be quickly brought into the alliance, and though ratification of new members can take upwards of a year, Stoltenberg echoed assurances already made by Germany, Britain, and the United States that Finland and Sweden would receive military support while they await the umbrella protection of NATO’s Article 5, the crucial collective security guarantee that says an attack on any member nation requires a response from the alliance as a whole. Sharing an 810-mile border with Russia and centuries of military tension, Finland’s newfound interest in joining NATO is not sitting well with the Kremlin. Russian officials have maintained since the end of the Cold War that the alliance is no longer about protecting European nations but is a Western-led effort to encircle Russia by putting hostile powers on its borders. “This cannot fail to arouse our regret,” said Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov, a sentiment echoed in a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which promised “retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature.”
In The Back Pages: Tabbie Winner Joshua Cohen Takes Home a Pulitzer
The Rest
→ With some U.S. cities facing baby formula shortages of more than 50% the normal supply amid a nationwide supply crunch, and online sellers gouging desperate parents with prices as high as triple the regular value, federal officials are struggling under pressure to close the gap. “We are doing everything in our power to ensure there is adequate product available where and when they need it,” said Robert Califf, the FDA commissioner, though it’s not exactly clear how much the FDA will help. The shortage is driven in part by labor scarcity and the complex nature of formula production, which isn’t easily scaled up, and because of a recall of a defective Abbott Nutrition formula linked to at least two infant deaths. A major formula maker, Abbott said this week that if the FDA granted its approval, it could increase its output by reopening its facility where the bacteria-infected formula was produced, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. (As The Scroll previously noted, the FDA waited months before responding to damning evidence from an Abbott whistleblower that showed intentional falsification of records to obscure the danger from FDA inspectors.) In any case, the shortage has sharpened public attention on the formula market, where Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who would like you to please stop eating meat—and who said recently “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef”—has pumped $3.5 million into a North Carolina startup, BIOMILQ, that creates synthetic breast milk in a bioreactor as an alternative to the traditional “animal protein.” Gates’ support will go a long way to help the startup clear the regulatory hurdles that should, theoretically, ensure the formula created entirely in a laboratory contains sufficient nutrients.
→ Last night, Russia cut the flow of its gas to Europe for a second time this week, a retaliation against Western sanctions that has rapidly pushed up gas prices, with the European wholesale gas price benchmark currently quadruple the price it was at this time a year prior. Russia has repeatedly leveraged its control of Europe’s energy supply by closing off the pipelines as well as issuing sanctions on any Russian companies selling gas to Gazprom Germania, a collective of German gas companies owned by the government. “It’s becoming evident once again that Russia is using energy as a weapon,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s economic minister. “On the whole, the situation is escalating.” Russia continues to supply about 40% of the natural gas consumed in Europe, a number likely to remain high even amid growing sanctions on Russian energy exports as Germany shuts down its nuclear power production, leaving it with few alternatives to meet immediate resource needs.
→ Cerebral, a flashy telehealth startup known for its slick social media ads, was hit with a subpoena last week over allegations that the company violated the Controlled Substances Act by overprescribing ADHD medications. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth services exploded in popularity: About 14% of health visits were conducted by video in 2019, a rate that exploded to 70% in 2020, causing the industry’s profits to grow over that same one-year period from $26 billion to $62 billion. With a $4.8 billion valuation and a $300 million investment from SoftBank, Cerebral was one of the pandemic’s biggest telehealth winners, but it also raised red flags about whether its convenient, low-cost delivery of Adderall led to the overprescription of the drug. Now a former executive is suing the company, alleging that Cerebral’s chief medical officer instructed employees to prescribe Adderall to all of their ADHD patients to increase customer retention, and the Department of Justice has issued its subpoena, leading Cerebral’s nurses to cease writing new prescriptions for the drug.
→ After Colombian drug lord Dairo Antonio Usuga was extradited last week and brought to the United States to face trafficking charges, his colleagues shut down dozens of towns across the country, forcing all residents to stay at home or risk being killed. Usuga—or Otoniel, as he is known—ran the “Gulf Clan” in northern Colombia before his high-profile arrest by the Colombian military. The Gulf Clan’s complete shutdown of 138 municipalities is a clear sign that, despite the capture of its leader, it remains a powerful force. “Drug trafficking will not end with the capture of Otoniel,” said Camilo Gonzalez Posso, the president of Colombian think tank Indepaz. “When they captured Pablo Escobar, they said drug trafficking would be over, and today there is more of it than back then.” Twenty-four people were killed during the Gulf Clan’s shutdown, and hundreds of cars destroyed.
→ Tweeting its support for those “disproportionately harm[ed]” by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ACLU shared a list of victims that included LGBTQ folks (many of whom are men) alongside a laundry list of other identity groups but failed to include women—certainly the people most impacted by a decision that severely limits female autonomy and freedom. The ACLU, it seems, has lost its way—an argument that Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, recently made in The Atlantic and that Liel Leibovitz, writing in Tablet, pointed out in 2018. Bazelon follows Leibovitz in noting the sea change in how the ACLU thinks about its core mission. In 1978, the ACLU famously defended the right of neo-Nazis to hold a public parade in Skokie, Illinois—a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors. Surely this went against the beliefs of those working in the institution, but not against the organization’s highest value: protecting free speech, no matter how deplorable. In the wake of a 2018 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, however—a protest for which the ACLU helped the organizers secure a permit, and which ended in violence and catastrophe—the ACLU issued new guidelines, telling its lawyers to carefully consider representing groups “whose values are contrary to our values.”
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/wanted-smart-dedicated-lawyers-who-will-defend-free-speech
→ U.S. casinos just had their best month ever, raking in $5.3 billion in earnings. This record-breaking revenue report follows a banner year for betting in general, with sports betting—illegal across the United States until 2018 and now legalized in two-thirds of the country—more than doubling its 2021 revenue compared to 2020, bringing in $4.3 billion. With inflation soaring and the economy tilting toward a recession, it’s unclear what’s in store for the industry; some studies suggest that economic downturns inspire people to gamble in the hopes of hitting a payday, while other studies find that a recession motivates gamblers to tighten their belts. The truth is anyone’s bet.
→ During last year’s standoff between Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and Australian regulators over whether the social media company should pay news outlets whose articles are posted and shared on Meta’s platforms, Facebook deliberately pulled down the pages of government and nonprofit organizations publishing important health and emergency information. These explosive allegations, which were initially noted last year in The Scroll, have now been corroborated by documents disclosed by Facebook whistleblowers that were published by The Wall Street Journal on Friday. The standoff between the world’s 13th largest economy and the social media giant began at the behest of traditional media companies. One vocal—and very powerful—supporter of the new regulation was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born founder and CEO of News Corp (which owns The Wall Street Journal), whose mostly legacy media outlets had seen their published content filling the pages and coffers of Meta and Google. As Facebook and Australian officials wrangled over how they’d treat the platform’s reposted news content, Facebook took the escalatory move of pulling all news pages and posts from the site. In the process of doing so, however, Facebook also blacked out 17,000 pages belonging to public service organizations, hospitals, and even the Australian federal government. While Facebook claims that these pages were taken down by accident, documents shared by the whistleblowers—shown to the WSJ journalists and also filed with U.S. and Australian federal officials—prove that this was not an accidental algorithmic malfunction but a broad and purposefully punishing show of power.
→ Thousands of feet below the icescape of Antarctica, scientists have detected a large reservoir of running water—a disconcerting discovery that suggests the ice around the southernmost continent is being thawed by rising temperatures. The team of scientists from the Columbia University Electromagnetic Research Consortium deployed electromagnetic modeling technology to detect the water beneath the ice. As the earth warms, so will the water in this underground reservoir. With warming waters below and warming air above, the ice sheet that covers most of Antarctica—more than a mile thick in some places—will melt into the ocean and raise the world’s sea level at a faster rate than previously predicted.
Tabbie Winner Joshua Cohen Takes Home a Pulitzer
In 1976, Saul Bellow won for the first time the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an award that eluded his grasp four times prior. When the 1960 jury nominated Henderson the Rain King, the advisory committee declined the selection and gave the hardware to another novelist (Allen Drury) who hadn’t been in the running. When both The Adventures of Augie March and Mr. Sammler’s Planet were under consideration by the jury, in 1964 and 1971 respectively, the advisory board pulled the award all together. In 1965, Bellow’s Herzog was up again, but lost to Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House. That Bellow ultimately won for Humboldt’s Gift is a bit rich in that the novel’s narrator, Charlie Citrine, an author, finds much truth when his friend Humboldt, a poet, observes, “The Pulitzer is for the birds—for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak, the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer prizewinner passes.’”
Humboldt’s own opinion on the Pulitzer aside, it’s worth noting that when the author Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel, The Netanyahus, this week, he was vaulted into a rarified strata as the first American writer to win both that award, such as it is, and a Tabbie. Tablet Magazine’s own honor, inaugurated last year, was bestowed upon the “fun, weird, surprising, heartening, generative, and ultimately altruistic efforts by humans in the past year,” among which our panel of esteemed judges placed Cohen’s novel. For many years, before his novels garnered accolades from high and low alike, Cohen was a frequent Tablet contributor, writing arts coverage for the magazine as far back as Obama’s first term, including a five-part series on how the modern office and its culture of bureaucracy shaped Kafka, an insurance attorney by day, and how that in turn shaped modern literature.
More recently, in 2018, Cohen shipped off to Azerbaijan—“a nation bordered by threats and built atop lies”—where after a journey into its mountains, he sought to meet, learn from, and understand, at least a little bit, the remote high-altitude community of Jews who, it seems, count among their ranks some of the richest men of Eastern Europe: “I was headed there to enact a submission of my own: to fall down at the Adidas-sneakered feet of the Mountain Jews—a sect of overwhelmingly short, hairy, dark-skinned Semites—who, as craggy cloudbound slope-dwellers, seemed perfectly positioned to offer me the wisdom I was seeking.”
That piece pairs well with the epistolary conversation between Cohen and Tablet’s book critic, Marco Roth, who swapped out a traditional book review for an exchange between the two writers on the state of American letters and Jewish letters and America itself on the occasion of Cohen’s 2017 novel, Moving Kings.
Cohen: Let’s not pretend that you’re not reviewing the book because we’re friends. As we both know, you’re not reviewing the book because reviewing is too much work for the money (the no-money) …
Roth: Well, as long as we’re on the warpath against pretense, I did write a review for (I hope) some money. Only, not for the first time, I’ve outsmarted myself by messing around with genre and have now been thrust into the role of your earnest straight-man interlocutor. Why don’t we start with some background on what led you to write a novel that I summed up in my head as “Jewish Michel Houellebecq,” that is: brutal and unsparing in its portrayal of people and what hopes it offers to readers. You and I have often lamented that American Jewish novelists, of our time period if not always of our generation, have been afflicted with a plague of niceness, sentimentality, and high-mindedness: “Everything Is Illuminated in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” So I understand the appeal of writing against that particular grain, especially at a moment when White House strategy is directed by Jared Kushner channeling the ghost of Roy Cohn. Who, if not ourselves, will emancipate us from the cultural taboo of showing Jews at their absolute worst?
Cohen: I like that question—it’s like Hillel 2.0. “If Jews do not present Jews at their absolute worst, who will? But if Jews present Jews only at their absolute worst, who are we?”
Or maybe we should have a holiday: The Day of Emancipation from the Cultural Taboo of Showing Jews at their Absolute Worst. Put it in Cheshvan—the only Jewish month with no major holidays. (Also: It’s the month of Kristallnacht.)
I think about this question, or I think about versions of this question, a lot: How did we become so polite? So sentimental, nostalgic, genteel? The answer, I’m convinced, lies in the “we”: in the process by which “we” became “we,” not the Exodus or Sinai or Exile processes—but America. In America, Jews came to write for Americans. Which is to say, “we” came to write in the English, or American, language.
That Americanized authorship, Cohen argues, might increase a writer’s appeal to a larger audience, but at the cost of something specific and idiosyncratic–a loss that ultimately undermines the quality of the literature.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/marco-roth-joshua-cohen-moving-kings
I've really been enjoying getting these newsletters in my inbox, thanks for everything you do!
Please be more accurate when writing. It was in fact Ukraine and not Russia that shut off 1 of its 2 gas pipelines to Europe. So Ukraine cut off approximately 25% of the gas destined for Europe. Likely as blackmail for more arms. Who knows why zElensky does things like that?