What Happened Today: November 30, 2022
House forces rail contract as strike looms; Uber carjackers pose as drivers to rob passengers; the glamor of Canadian assisted suicide
The Big Story
Despite the long-standing ties between unions and the Democratic Party, the Democrat-led House easily passed a resolution on Wednesday afternoon that seeks to prevent an impending national rail strike scheduled for Dec. 9 by forcing rail companies and unions to accept an earlier agreement on labor conditions. “I don’t like going against the ability of unions to strike, but weighing the equities, we must avoid a strike,” outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the effort, said Wednesday. The dispute centers on workers getting paid sick leave, which 3 of the 12 rail unions say they are willing to fight for by walking off the job. The bill now heads to the Senate. It is the first time lawmakers have intervened in rail contract negotiations in more than 30 years.
President Biden has backed the efforts to force a contract leading to blowback from several rail-workers unions. “Congress, I think, has to act to prevent it. It’s not an easy call, but I think we have to do it. The economy is at risk,” Biden said on Monday. If negotiations fail, the president said, supply chains across several industries could grind to a halt, and if the strike lasted more than two weeks, some 765,000 Americans could be out of a job.
It’s possible that legislators who’ve broken with party leaders and supported the hold-out unions will be able to secure an additional House measure or an amendment in the Senate that adds upwards of seven more days of paid sick leave to the contract. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas anticipates there would “be significant Republican support” for the measure. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s move to use Congress to force the unions to sign the deal without the paid sick days baked in. “Please don’t tell me the rail industry can’t afford it,” Sanders said. “Rail companies spent $25.5 billion on stock buybacks and dividends this year.”
Read More: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/lawmakers-rail-unions-slam-bidens-call-to-impose-labor-contract
In The Back Pages: Better Living Through Surveillance
The Rest
→ In Baltimore, police say car thieves are now targeting Lyft and Uber drivers, stealing their cars and phones so they can continue to pick up passengers whom they can then rob at gunpoint. One Lyft driver picked up four men who held him up at gunpoint, stripped him of his Jordan sneakers, watch, and phone, and stuffed him in the trunk. While trapped inside, he told police, he heard the group pick up new customers and rob them. While stepping into his Uber, another victim was pistol-whipped from behind, pushed into the car, and forced to send money to the thieves from his phone’s Cash App. “The safety of riders and drivers is paramount at Uber,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that news coverage of the carjackings is “deeply concerning.”
→ The research of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford president and a leading neurobiology scholar, is now under review at a major science journal after concerns of scientific misconduct and deliberate alterations of research data were brought to light. Tessier-Lavigne is a groundbreaking academic whose work in the 1990s on how neurons connect in the brain led to a handsome perch pulling $1.76 million a year at biotech outfit Regeneron, before he began slumming it for $1.5 million at Stanford in 2021. Several of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers have been recently called out for their use of what appears to be intentionally doctored images, which Stanford on Monday said were either not made by Tessier-Lavigne or not significant enough mistakes to “affect the data, results, or interpretation of the papers.” Elisabeth Bik, a biologist who also has taken up the odd side hustle of a misconduct investigator, told The Stanford Daily that the errors, because they appear part of a pattern, should not be ignored. “Dismissing these as not affecting the data is not very reassuring. The reader might wonder how many non-visible errors might be present in other parts of the data,” Bik said. Tessier-Lavigne has authored several major papers that count among some of the most cited in the field.
Read More: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-research-under-investigation-for-scientific-misconduct-university-admits-mistakes/
→ Thread of the Day:
Brian Johnson, the social media influencer known as the Liver King, whose mini-empire built on videos about eating raw organs and his heavily marketed ancestral lifestyle natural supplements—why is it always supplements?—is taking heat for not being so natural after all. In what appears to be a leaked series of emails written between Johnson and an unidentified bodybuilding coach, the king of natural living was bulking up his muscular physique as part of his goal to attract more social media followers, but he was doing so with a monthly $11,000 diet of human growth hormones and other performance-enhancing drugs. Rumors of being on the juice have trailed Johnson since he launched his Liver King persona, but in several podcasts preceding the recent leak of emails, he’s repeatedly claimed he wasn’t taking steroids or otherwise juicing. Promising a more thorough engagement with the latest revelations, Johnson told Rolling Stone, “In a weird way, I’m grateful for the recent events that have shed light on this complicated-as-fuck topic.”
→ Video of the Day:
Borrowing from the early works of George Saunders, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons has gone lux-dystopic in its latest ad campaign promoting the beauty of assisted suicides, with the video here showing the final days of a terminally ill young woman the retailer filmed while ferrying her between Instagram-ready exotic locales before her scheduled death in a doctor’s office. “Last breaths are sacred,” the now-dead woman says. “When I imagine my final days, I see bubbles. I see the ocean. I see music.” The company anticipated there would be some uncharitable interpretations of its glamorization of suicide as a demonic brand ploy to sell high-end denim, but as top executive Peter Simons said, “At some point I think you have to decide in life what you want to do and is your heart in a generous place—and then you have to create a new reality.” That new reality is becoming increasingly enticing to Canadians since 2021, when officials relaxed assisted suicide laws, allowing the procedure for physically sick people even if they didn’t have a terminal illness. Some 10,000 Canadians were euthanized in 2021, a figure that is likely to only increase in 2023—now that Canadian officials have said that people with mental health conditions could also qualify for assisted death.
→ The new front-runner for the worst idea of the year was greenlit by San Francisco’s board of supervisors on Wednesday when it approved the city’s police to use lethally armed robots to kill suspects—with the SFPD already in possession of a dozen such machines. Now approved “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous” suspects as the SFPD sees fit, the remote-controlled killing machines raised the alarm for several civil rights organizations who see the continued domestication of weapons of war by urban police squads as one part of the ongoing use of military technology against citizens. “We’ve already seen this with military-grade Predator drones flying over protests, and police buzzing by the window of an activist’s home with drones,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matthew Guariglia in a post on the organization’s website. Not all police departments have embraced the killer robots, or at least the controversy they kick up. Oakland police scratched their killer robot fleet after an Intercept report showed investigators were considering arming a robot to shoot a shotgun shell.
→ German officials wringing their hands over the fate of their nation’s energy supply might want to grab a glass of milk from the dairy cows now being investigated by Dr. Robert Pieper, the lead on a team at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment that’s trying to figure out if cows fed THC-rich hemp will pass on a buzz in their milk. It’s a significant issue as hemp growers continue to proliferate on the rise of CBD oils and rubs but sometimes run out of places to dispose of their leftover biomass after the CBD is removed from their plants. Cows would make natural consumers of the material, but according to Pieper’s team, cows that get a little too much of the buds and leaves on a plant can pass on some THC into the milk and exhibit red eyes, complicated tongue play, “abnormal posture,” and an “unsteady gait” that sometimes interfered with how much milk they produced.
→ The Forward ran a charming little interview with Tony Kushner yesterday, in which the playwright offered the surprising revelation that he and Steven Spielberg, his collaborator on the recently released movie The Fabelmans, have on more than one occasion gone to shul together. The Fabelmans is the fourth Spielberg movie on which Kushner has served as screenwriter. For The Forward’s Curt Schleier, the partnership has been a natural one, but there’s a point of commonality that he leaves unmentioned, one with particular relevance to the new film. We learn from The Fabelmans, a lightly fictionalized telling of Spielberg’s own story, that the director’s mother was a gifted, if frustrated and underemployed, concert pianist. Kushner, meanwhile, is the child of not just one but two musicians. His mother was a bassoonist; his father, a clarinetist and conductor. If anything, Kushner’s father saw his playwright son as a fellow member of the “family business.” In a 2006 documentary, the elder Kushner proudly calls Tony “a Tchaikovsky,” which he meant as a comment on both his son’s gayness and his virtuosity. Seeing the Kushner-Spielberg partnership in quasi-musical terms should cheer those eager to see it live on. Spielberg has shown himself to be supremely faithful to his musical collaborators. John Williams has scored 29 of his films. —Gabriel Sanders, Tablet’s director of business development.
→ Tweet of the Day:
Kanye West/Ye made his daily submission to the antisemitism content machine by walking out of a podcast when host Tim Pool wouldn’t entertain the idea that the Jews were controlling the corporate press to censor his ongoing spiral into racist conspiracy theories. Ye was fresh off a controversial dinner with Donald Trump to which he brought conspiracy theorist Nick Fuentes, which continues to drag Trump down. Even his longtime ally Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-again incoming Israeli prime minister, had to come out against Trump in an interview with Common Sense on Wednesday. “President Trump’s decision to dine with this person I think is wrong and misplaced,” Netanyahu said. “He shouldn’t do that. I think he made a mistake. I hope it’s not repeated.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Fuck David Mamet by Clayton Fox
America’s most daring and insightful playwright tried to warn us that we were going haywire. By making him a hate object, American theater has made us all poorer.
The Sports Mitzvah by The Franchise
Ep. 6: How the world of professional sports reshaped a rite of passage for American Jewish teens.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Better Living Through Surveillance
The fast-growing, multi-billion dollar “Femtech” industry is selling women information about their own bodies—but is it making them healthier?
Bea’s New Year’s Resolution was to track the number of times she defecated in 2022. Not just that, she nervously clarified. She was going to track everything: what she ate and when; her glucose levels; her menstrual cycle; the number of times she had sex; how often she bathed; how these things impacted her mood. She was on a quest to capture the most holistic picture of herself possible, and there was a suite of gadgets and apps that were going to help her do so.
Almost every sector of the technology industry struggled in Q3. Cryptocurrency crashed; startups dematerialized; funding evaporated; stocks plummeted; even FAANG companies, which once could be relied on for their job security, experienced massive layoffs and hiring freezes. But amid the chaos, one of the big exceptions was “femtech,” a subset of the health technology field. Bea and millions of other women are embracing body optimization lifestyles in pursuit of a fully “quantified self”—the nearly decade-old buzzword yuppies and tech companies use to describe the datafication of one’s health. These self-optimizing women are also a multibillion dollar growth industry.
Health tech drives the consumerization of healthcare by producing the things that make it easier for people like Bea to install surveillance systems on her body. Services like Circle Medical or Ever/body make scheduling annual check-ups or even cosmetic procedures a click away, and prescriptions for Adderall or Hormone Replacement Therapies orderable via apps on your phone.
Femtech does the same, but specifically for women. While the tech sector was rife with disappointing funding announcements, Maven Clinic, a teletherapy start-up focused on women’s health, announced in November that it had raised a $90M round of funding. According to at least one market insights report, femtech is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% in the 2020s—making it a $13.3 billion market. The consultant class is also bullish. McKinsey declared the “dawn of the femtech revolution” in February of this year. For McKinsey, femtech is on the cusp of disruption, but there’s still “plenty of white space to fill.” In other words, it’s already making real money, but with half the planet’s population as potential customers, there’s ample room for growth. Femtech also taps into the even larger “wellness” trend that is rapidly replacing older health and fitness products with a more new age approach that emphasizes how people look and feel. In 2021, McKinsey estimated the global wellness market’s value at an astronomical $1.5 trillion.
Bea decided to self-optimize because she was plagued by a series of relatively minor but continuous maladies. She experienced unexpected emotional crashes that made it hard for her to focus on her work, earning her a Performance Improvement Plan from our supervisor and a warning that she had three weeks to “get her act together.” An untamable and mysterious anxiety pushed her to often overshare about every ache, pain and rumbling. Prone to diarrhea, constipation, and fads, she was the first and only woman I’ve ever known to publicly embrace the “Hot Girls Have IBS” slogan popular on social media.
Bea claimed to have a gluten intolerance, though not an allergy per se. Her period made her manic; she experienced Seasonal Affective Disorder during the summer—too much sun could do that, you know. And so she tried everything: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, SSRIs, hormonal birth control, a menagerie of restrictive diets, self-care regimens dreamt up by “post-colonial” health experts, having her birth chart read, juice fasts, crystals. With each failed attempt, she found that her body remained “in the way” until one day, she landed on a new approach: if she quantified the problem, maybe she would understand it better.
And if she understood it better—her own body and moods, that is—then maybe she could master them.
Complete bodily surveillance became a vehicle for freedom: change one input here, get another output there, and nothing ever had to be “wrong” again. If things felt off, she’d always know why. Bea didn’t empty her bladder between 9:35 and 9:42 AM yesterday. She drank a milliliter less coffee than usual. Her glucose levels were 4% lower than usual. If things felt off, where Bea might once have consulted her horoscope or headed for hot yoga, she now quantified herself instead, as a laboratory clinician might log the activities of an organism under observation. The data was then decoded for insights: “My coconut water is usually refrigerated, and yesterday, it wasn’t.”
The secret of femtech’s success, it seems, is not in curing any particular ailments or even in making people healthier but in transforming the patient into a customer and making that customer more clearly defined. Femtech offers the same solution as every other digital technology: better living through more data.
Femtech start-up 28 describes itself as “the world’s first hyper-personalized, cycle-based fitness and holistic wellness experience for women.” It provides “free daily streaming exercises and nutrition profiles designed for hormone health and science-based emotional insights into yourself, your relationships, and your work.” According to the company, the profiles it generates “are tailored to your current physical and emotional state, all hyper-personalized to where you are in your natural cycle and controlled by you.”
Recently, skincare company L’Oreal partnered with the period-tracking app Clue to “help women better understand the relationship between skin health and their menstrual cycle.” In other words, L’Oreal used period-tracking data to help promote products that would allegedly be beneficial at different points during a cycle.
Some journalists have raised concerns about the industry, though not for the reasons you’d think. A recent article in Quartz argued that femtech was not sufficiently inclusive. By “defining women by their biology, these products only focus on the needs of cis rather than trans women.” This critique, if listened to, could also be lucrative for these companies. Why should femtech be limited to cis-women and in what ways can it be better tailored to trans women, who also feel insecure in their womanhood, and may be even more vulnerable to marketing that promises a “more authentic” identity via any number of goods and services.
In the realm of disease, “chronic illness” is susceptible to becoming an identity in and of itself—one that provides meaning and community. Considering that up to 45% of women suffer from chronic illnesses—often nebulously defined ones like fibromyalgia—it’s not hard to imagine these communities developing their own subcultural niches that a smart company could exploit with branded consumer products and lifestyle accessories. Poorly understood afflictions like chronic migraines—or, more recently, long COVID—provide lucrative opportunities. Healthcare companies that emphasize wellness over more rigid standards of health can offer a buffet of treatment options to those affected. At the same time, they give an appealing alternative to the all too real flaws of the existing factory healthcare model and offer the allure of emotional validation to people sick of hearing from “traditional” providers that it’s all in their heads.
Outside of chronic illnesses is fertility, which is also poorly understood and emotionally fraught. For The Financial Times, Elaine Moore writes about how egg freezing is one of the fastest-growing treatments in fertility services:
An entire start-up sector has evolved to encourage women to see it as a relatively low-stakes way to control their fertility. Kindbody is known for its pop-up clinics in distinctive yellow and white vans offering free fertility checks.
Egg freezing, it says, is a way to “own your future.” [One company's] adverts compared the cost to buying a frozen berry acai bowl every day, making it look more like a cozy lifestyle option than a surgical procedure.
She goes on to write that birthrates after egg freezing are less than one in five. What happens if this becomes the norm? For many women and families, these procedures are life-changing and transformative. But how many women will be misled about the reality of their own fertility because egg-freezing and IVF procedures are being marketed as easy, frictionless options? As my grandmother often told me, “Hope is the last thing that dies.” When is it time to stop trying? It’s not merely that these companies are rewriting reality to trivialize the gravity and unreliability of these procedures, but that for many women, these remain sources of hope that might end up being tragically misplaced. And does a profit-driven company have any incentive to tell women that it might be time to give up?
Femtech companies aren’t just disrupting “women’s health” with clever branding opportunities, often euphemistically referred to as “more sensitive care”; they are disrupting the way women feel. Just as Tinder produces lifelong daters whose matches lead not to committed relationships that would take them off the site but to more swipes, consumerized medicine’s goal is to produce lifelong patients.
For femtech companies, womanhood is either a problem to be solved or a costume to be worn; they can get away with selling both.