What Happened Today: September 12, 2022
VP Harris on the U.S. southern border; COVID-19 forced 500,000 out of workforce; Alcaraz becomes youngest No. 1 tennis player with U.S. Open victory
The Big Story
In her first extensive interview with the national media in several months, Vice President Kamala Harris told Chuck Todd of NBC News on Sunday that she believed the U.S. southern border “is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system,” which Harris attributed to the Trump administration. Harris was in Houston over the weekend to lead a National Space Council meeting at the Johnson Space Center, but her protracted absence from the media spotlight, along with her proximity to the border with Mexico, all but ensured the conversation would touch on immigration, as the number of migrants detained at the border continues to break all-time records.
To what extent there’s a difference in practice between the immigration system and the federal U.S. border policy, the perception of the lax enforcement at the U.S. southern border combined with authoritarian repression and deteriorating economic conditions across Latin America continue to drive an unprecedented number of migrants to attempt illegal crossings into the United States. Roughly 2.35 million migrants were detained in the one-year fiscal period ending last July, a 63% spike compared to the previous year. Dangerous water crossings, intense heat, predatory smugglers, and falls along border walls led to a record-breaking 750 deaths of migrants along the border this fiscal year, though both the number of migrants traveling to the border and the loss of life are expected to increase as massive cohorts of migrants flee Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries across Latin America. “We have never seen anything of this scale in the Americas,” Ricardo Zúñiga, a state department diplomat and special envoy of President Joe Biden, told the Financial Times. “We have never had … such a large movement of people across the whole region at the same time.”
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/bf23df65-e230-4aaf-9dce-3aa72aa22c86
In the Back Pages: Ron Biton Runs the Game
The Rest
→ Following Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kharkiv, where the military is clawing back territory long held by Russia, the Russian army has begun attacking critical infrastructure in the area, causing blackouts and water shortages across Ukraine’s northeast. “Even through the impenetrable darkness,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “Ukraine and the civilized world clearly see these terrorist acts.” By this morning, water and electricity were mostly restored. Russia’s loss of ground in the Kharkiv region—including Ukraine’s recovery of the city of Izium—signals “the effective collapse of one of four Russian regional commands in Ukraine,” according to The New York Times, and now leaves Putin with a range of bad options, from sending more troops to the warfront, many of whom are not fully trained, to pulling troops back from one of the other three regional commands, putting those territories at risk.
→ Number of the Day: 500,000
The number of American workers who have left the labor force because of falling sick from COVID-19, according to a study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. After analyzing data collected by the Census Bureau and focusing on those who had weeklong, illness-related absences from work that the authors suggest would likely be the result of COVID-19, the study concluded “that workers with weeklong COVID-19 work absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.” The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, also suggests that these numbers are likely to become an annual norm if current COVID-19 infection rates persist.
→ Approximately 1 out of every 150 people worldwide are enduring some modern form of slavery, a 20% uptick since 2016 that researchers at the U.N. International Labour Organization attributed to the significant economic upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The new study found that some 50 million people are now either being forced to work against their will or pushed into arranged marriages under threats of violence or other forms of coercion. But the rise in forced labor isn’t confined to the world’s poorer nations. More than half of the world’s forced labor is taking place in upper-middle- and high-income countries, with private sector employers accounting for 86% of forced labor employment. Either because of debt bondage or extreme poverty, forced labor workers are predominantly laboring in the agriculture, domestic, construction, and manufacturing industries.
→ The FBI unsealed its file on Aretha Franklin, a 270-page document that tracks “the Queen of Soul’s” travels across the country and her work as a civil rights activist during the 1960s and ’70s. The extensive surveillance, much of which focused on Franklin’s close relationships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, refers to her performances during the height of the civil rights movement as “communist infiltration” events. Following King’s murder, when Franklin was slated to perform at a memorial concert in Atlanta, a note was entered into her file that expressed concern that the “huge memorial concert [...] would provide [the] emotional spark which could ignite racial disturbance in the area.” That performance was eventually canceled. Another informant made a note in Franklin’s record in 1973 recommending that the Bureau abstain from bringing in the singer in to be questioned. “In view of the fact that there is no evidence of involvement by Miss Franklin in [radical black] activities and in view of her fame as a singer, it is felt that it would not be in the best interests of the Bureau to attempt to interview her.” While FBI agents did not discover that Franklin was secretly a soldier in the Black Liberation Army, they did find that she was repeatedly the target of death threats, including one by someone posing as an FBI agent.
→ Quote of the Day:
I kept thinking of all the times I’d taught my science students about fossils. And now, here I’d found a significant one.
Lisa St. Coeur Cormier, a former high school teacher from Canada, on the 300-million-year-old fossil she found while walking her dog on the beach on Prince Edward Island in Canada. The fossil is some 100 million years older than fossils from the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs lived, making the mostly buried fossil, which had likely just been exposed by that day’s waves, an especially awesome discovery. “Something like this comes along every 50 to 100 years,” said John Calder, a geologist and paleontologist who, upon receiving photos of the find, rushed to get experts to the site to retrieve it. Calder and a crew from Parks Canada arrived at the site a few days later and rushed to remove the fossil from the sand before it was washed away with high tide. The fossil, now in safekeeping, will soon be shipped to a paleontology lab in Nova Scotia for analysis.
→ Five years after a federal mandate in Harris County, Texas (which includes greater Houston), eliminated cash bail for those charged with misdemeanors, a new study has found that public safety has improved and fewer low-level offenders are spending time in jail. The federal mandate came after a class-action lawsuit was filed against the county, alleging that those unable to afford bail were being held in jail longer than those who could, violating the constitution. One of the plaintiffs in the case, for example, was arrested for driving with an invalid license and then spent time in jail because she couldn’t afford the $2,500 bail. Almost two-thirds of the United States’ jail population—some half a million people—are in jail awaiting trial, often for months or years. The study analyzed more than 500,000 such misdemeanor cases in the Harris County judicial system from January 2015 to May 2022 and found, following the federally mandated reforms, a 15% drop in guilty pleas, a 17% drop in the likelihood of a jail sentence, and a 15% drop in convictions.
→ About 81% of college graduates end up marrying other college graduates, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found, offering fresh figures to the growing chasm in the United States between those who have college degrees and those who do not. The study also found that of those first-generation college students who do manage to make it to graduation, 52% of them will marry other first-generation graduates. The earning power of “continuing-generation college-educated” partners—the study’s term for partners who both have bachelor degrees and whose parents all have bachelor degrees—far outstrips that of first-generation college-educated couples, by an average of almost $60,000. The difference between their median net worth, meanwhile, was even greater: The median net worth of two continuing-generation college graduates was about $569,700 in 2019; for two first-generation college graduates it was $236,600.
→ Four months after his 19th birthday, Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz became the youngest-ever world No. 1 men’s tennis player on Sunday after he defeated Casper Ruud in the final of the U.S. Open championship. The trophy and No. 1 ranking cap off a remarkable run for Alcaraz in New York, including a five-hour five-set quarterfinals battle against the Italian Jannik Sinner, a budding rival that now flanks Alcaraz as part of the sport’s new guard poised to take over from the aging Big Three of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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Ron Biton Runs the Game
Tablet columnist Matti Friedman on how Ron Biton went from emulating The Notorious B.I.G. in his living room to making beats for Israel’s biggest stars
When Ron Biton writes a hit, which seems to happen every few hours, he likes to start by freestyling, just as he did when he was 14 and angling to be The Notorious B.I.G. of the ninth-grade rap scene in greater Haifa. So that’s how I’ll start:
Who is Ron Biton? Everyman. His name is the Israeli version of “John Smith.” He wears shorts and slides like everyone in Ramat Gan, which is Anywhere, Israel. If you see him on the street, he could be going to his job in real estate or vegetable wholesaling, but actually he’s got his divining rod out, feeling the subterranean vibes of the people. He’s the pop doctor, his stethoscope pressed to the sound of now. He’s everywhere and nowhere, always in the credits and never in the clip. If you’re Israeli, you’ve heard him, whether you know it or not, and you’ll hear him again, whether you want to or not, probably today.
Biton, who is 32, is at the top of his game but has no obvious affectations and doesn’t brag. When he says that with a laptop and a good producer he can make a hit in a few hours, he’s just describing the way things are. Is the order for sleek pop with that Middle Eastern feel that Israelis crave? No problem: Noa Kirel’s “Pouch,” an ode to the lowly fanny pack, featuring the country’s pop queen and some wailing Turkish zurna, has 38 million views on YouTube—that is, more than four times the number of people who speak Hebrew.
Western pop that could come from anywhere, with a hip-hop verse that uses fresh as a Hebrew word and rhymes it with esh, “fire”? That would be “Million Dollar,” as in, “you look like a million bucks”—35 million views. Straight-up feel-good Mizrahi pop? “Good Morning World,” an ode to life in Tel Aviv that will make you want to ride your electric scooter down the beach promenade. A ballad that sounds like something Marvin Gaye might have sung if Marvin Gaye were a Gen Y Israeli with grandparents from Yemen? The first Hebrew K-pop hit? When do you need it?
Biton isn’t a solo genius. His strengths lie in concept, lyrics, and timing, and he’s always part of a team. “For a song to work, the puzzle has to fit together perfectly: How the singer performs, how they look, their personality. The mix. It has to be the right song, the right sentence, and it has to come out at the right time. It’s roulette with more than 36 numbers,” he told me. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s “cosmic”: “A song has its moment and its fate.”
Fate and teamwork aside, Ron Biton’s name recurs so often in the hits of the past few years that it’s clear he’s figured out something deep about what Israelis want and thus about who we are. I made the trip to Ramat Gan, and we hung out in his living room, under a picture of the deity from his Road to Damascus: Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ron-biton-israeli-music-haifa