Robinhood's Imperiled Investors; Bison Management; and River Management

#Hahhah Levintova, "Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "From its founding, [Robinhood's] business model was dependent on customers trading frequently, allowing the company the chance to earn a different kind of a commission -- known as PFOF, or payment for order flow -- from every transaction." "Lawmakers, financial experts, and regulators have pointed out that the order flow payments present glaring conflicts of interest. One of them is that the pay-per-trade system incentivizes brokers and market makers to encourage more -- rather than more-informed -- trading." 

According to a recent lawsuit, market makers paid just 17 cents per 100 shares on regular stocks, but 58 cents per 100 shares on options contracts." "Robinhood is stuffed with video game-like elements that lure investors into trading more, which is a losing strategy for most."

"This March, the House Financial Services Committee echoed concerns that platforms like Robinhood, 'encourage behavior similar to a gambling addiction.' " "Robinhood is ultimately encouraging users to act against their own financial interests by making frequent trades -- while PFOF and its related profits pile up for the app and its superrich collaborators." "Typically, brokers take 20 percent with the rest going to the customers as price improvement. Robinhood's contracts flipped this ratio, giving it 80 percent."

Michelle Nighwis, "The Long Road Home," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "In the early 1700s, North America was home to an estimated 20 million to  30 million bisons, more than enough to circle the equator if laid nose to tail." "In 1874, after Congress passed a bill restricting bison hunting, President Grant vetoed it. Twelve years later there were fewer than 300 free-roaming plains bison left in the entire United States." "Over the past century, the expansion of industrial farming and the continued absence of large herds of free-roaming bison have shrunk the total extent of the North American tallgrass prairie from the size of Texas to little bigger than Delaware, turning it into one of the most endangered landscapes in the world."

The treaty [the Linnii Initiative] -- signed by more than 30 tribes and First Nations in the U.S. and Canada -- 'really is about renewal and and restoration and cooperation' says Blackfoot researcher Leroy Little Bear, one of the original organizers of the Linnii Initiative. "While there are now an estimated half million bison on the North American plains, some 30,000 managed primarily for conservation other than commercial sale, politics has kept the fences in place, and only a few bison are fully free-ranging." 

#Jeremy Miller, "The Whisper of a River," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "In plain terms, 'vocational passage' means that the fish can migrate and complete their life cycle without human intervention," "In less than a century, the San Joaquin River was transformed from a free-flowing salmon superhighway into a corridor of agriculture and commerce." "In spite of the limitations, the salmon have shown tantalizing  signs of revitalization."  

The salvation of the San Joaquin River and its salmon, Julie Rentner, president of the Chico-based River Partners, believes, will ultimately depend on replacing the 'siloed and segregated' water policy that has dominated California for decades with a more holistic, ecosystem-based form of management.  

Horrors of Xinjiang Camps; Material-Laden Deep Waters; and More

 #Peter Hessler, "Year of the Bunny Hill," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "Currently, there are about thirty American correspondents left in China -- the government expelled many last year, as part of a tit-for-tat exchange with the Trump Administration."

"In China, where very few people know somebody who has been infected, the government pandemic strategy has enjoyed broad popular support, and, in a repressive political climate, it's particularly unlikely that citizens will question what's going on in Xinjiang." But [Peter Hessler] "can also recognize these same qualities -- dedication, meticulousness, attention to detail -- applied to horrifying effect in eyewitness accounts of the Xinjiang camps. The strategy is zero tolerance: essentially, the government has approached Ulghurs and other Muslim people as if they could be stamped out with relentless vigilance." 

#Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Deep," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "Under international law, countries control the waters within two hundred miles of their shores. Beyond that, the oceans and all they contain are considered 'the common heritage of mankind.' This realm, which encompasses nearly a hundred million square miles of seafloor, is referred to in I.S.A.-speak as the Area." 

"It has been estimated that, collectively, the nodules on the bottom of the ocean contain six times as much cobalt, and three times as much nickel, [as on land]." "The 'sunlight zone' extends down about seven hundred feet, the 'twilight zone,' another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that -- in the 'midnight zone,' the 'abyssal zone,' and the 'hadal zone '-- there's only blackness, and the light created by life itself." "All marine photosynthesis takes place in the sunlight zone. Beneath that, food is in such short supply that the occasional dead whale that falls to the ocean floor represents a major source of nutrients." 

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Viral Theories," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "The market and the institute have at times served as shorthand for the broad sets of possible answers about the origin of the virus: that it was 'zoonic,' meaning that it traveled directly from animals, or that it was transmitted by an accidental 'lab leak' from a place such as the Wuhan Institute." 

"According to official figures, COVID-19 has killed almost four million people; however, a study by 'The Economist' concludes that the true number may be close to thirteen million. Partisanship, in whatever form, can't be the guide here." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Letter writer Allen Frances, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. "But one must consider the fact that the history of psychiatry is filled with fad diagnoses  that lead to fake epidemics: while human nature is remarkably stable, the ways of labeling emotional diseases are changeable and subject to fashion."

*Lindsey Botts, "Open Season on Wolves," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "Wisconsin set a target quota of 119 wolves outside of tribal lands, but issued almost 2,400 hunting tags -- more than twice the estimated number of wolves in the state." "State legislatures are resurrecting barbaric old laws designed to increase hunting, reduce wolf populations and stymie any hope of further recovery."

*Kate Gordon, "Ocean's Eleven Zillion," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "Herring numbers have been trending down, but climate is not the only reason. Overfishing could be a factor. Habitat destruction is almost certainly another -- the eelgrass that herring lay eggs on has gotten trashed by waterfront development, chain ;dragged by moored or anchored boats, and the 'Cosco Busan' oil spill." 

Homeschooling; Jim Crow Again; Public Transit; and More

 #Casey Parks, "Going Home," The New Yorker June 21, 2021. - "(Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent on reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)" "Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent." "In 2020, around seventy percent of Detroit public school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state." 

"Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college, refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade." " 'United States History for Christian Schools,' first published in 1991, stated that most slave-holders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery 'is an example of the far reaching consequences of sin.' " 

"Betsy DeVos's first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding, while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs." 

"About half of Detroit's students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city."

#Ari Berman, "Facing Down Jim Crow Again," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. "The basic idea is the same: to couch voting restrictions in race-blind language to disenfranchise new voters and communities of color." "There are strong similarities between the Mississippi plan of 1890 and the Georgia plan of 2021." President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asked the Georgia state legislature to appoint its own presidential electors to overturn the will of the voters. 

The overall election board in Georgia has the authority to take over up to four county election boards it deems underperforming. "And since November, at least nine GOP-controlled counties have dissolved their bipartisan election boards to create all-Republican panels." 

"By the early 1900s, only 7percent of Black residents were registered to vote in seven Southern states, according to data compiled by the historian, Morgan Kausser, and Black turnout fell from 61 percent of the voting-age population in 1880 to 2 percent in 1912." The states-right jurisprudence of the post-Reconstruction era has been resurrected.

#Rachal Monroe, "The Go-Between," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. -"The half-dozen ransomware negotiations specialists and the insurance companies they regularly partner with, help people navigate the world of cyber extortion. But they've also been accused of abetting crime by facilitating payments to hackers." "By 2015, The F.B.I. had estimated that the U.S. was subjected to a thousand ransomware-recovery attacks per day; the next year, that number had quadrupled.:

"In 2018, the average payment was about seven thousand dollars according to a ransomware-recovery specialist [online company, Covewear (sp?)] By 2020, further increases in average payments caused some cyber-insurance companies began to exit the market. "Around three quarters of Fortune 500 companies eventually invested in kidnap-and-ransom insurance, but there was some discomfort with an industry that turned a profit by funneling money to the Mafia, terrorist groups, and criminal gangs." "These days, some ninety per cent of kidnappings are resolved, when specialists are involved, the success rate rises to ninety-seven percent."  

#Aaaron Wiener, "A Ride, Not a Privilege," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The cuts that cash-strapped transit agencies proposed, before being bailed out by Congress -- eliminating 40 percent of New York's City's subway services, a fifth of the DC regions Metro stations, and two-thirds of Atlanta's bus routes -- wouldn't have been their instant demise, but it was hard to see a way out of the death-spiral of mutually reinforcing service cuts and ridership losses."

"There's something for everyone in good public transit. It's essential to curbing climate change. The American Public Association estimates that every dollar spent on transit generates $15 in economic activity."

#Tom Philpott. "Empire of Dirt," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The Gateses own 242,000 acres nationwide, an empire of dirt more than 1.5 times the size of Chicago, and worth a cool $5 billion." "The world's cache of arable land is shrinking under pressure from sprawl, pollution, and desertification. Between 1940 and 2015, the average price of an acre of farmland increased six-fold, and economists expect that trendline to steepen."

Juneteenth; ACT UP; and Voter Fraud Fiction

 #Jarrell Ross, "Who made Juneteenth?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - [Robert C. Conner, author of 'General Gordon Granger Behind Juneteenth'] Gen. Granger's General Order No. 3 "declared absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves." "As word spread, so did jubilation, shock, religious awe and anger. But Black people have always been involved in the fight to make our own American lives, demanding something of the country that stole so much from us, that fact is by folktale and firm record, key to the Juneteenth story." 

#Michael Specter, "In the Midnight Hour," The New Yorker, June 14, 2021. - "ACT UP was born, in 1987, when tens of thousands of Americans -- mostly gay men -- had died of AIDS, and more were dying every day, even as the government remained largely indifferent." 

"ACT UP helped establish the first successful needle-exchange programs in New York City. It also took on insurance practices like the exclusion of single men who lived in predominantly gay neighborhoods."

"By 1990, the F.D.A. had adopted this approach (known as the 'parallel track'), which would make  selected drugs available to H.I.V. patients." "Today, drug candidates for life-threatening conditions are frequently put on a parallel track for 'expanded access.' " 

"The politics of AIDS -- 'gay-related immune deficiency,' or GRID -- was an early designation, as if a medical condition might have a sexual orientation, was inevitably a connection with homophobia." 

"During the late eighties, countless T-shirts bore the logo, and 'Silence = Death' stickers could be found on what seemed like every newspaper box or wall in New York City." "When people of color raised issues of particular concern to them, they routinely met the rejoiner, 'What does this have to do with AIDS?, or were told, 'We don't have time.' " "In the end, in what was called ACT UP's 'tragic split,' was precipitated more by disagreements over research than by disagreements over race."

"Any list of the most important medical trials of modern times would have to include the AIDS Clinical Trials Group Protocol 076 study, which was launched in 1991. That study was designed to determine      whether the antiretroviral AZT, administered during advanced pregnancy, would have prevented H.I.V. transmission from mother to child."

#Sue Halpern, "Anti-democratic," The New Yorker, June 14, 2021. - "Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last year's election was about 0.00006 percent of total ballots cast." "Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast  ballots, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University." "In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for 'technical infractions,' such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the polls." "Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers."

"The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohost of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the the ultimate goal of the current Republican effort. It's up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy."

ADDENDUMS:

*Letter writer Annamarie Pluhar, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "There are millions of spare bedrooms in the United States, many of them in the homes of seniors who live alone. In the midst of an affordable-housing crisis, helping seniors find housemates who can offer companionship in exchange for reduced rent is a win-win proposition."

*Letter writer Arthur Hoolerman, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "As the country's population ages, the loneliness epidemic will only become more pronounced. A higher moral imperative than objectivity is the alleviation of suffering. If a senior's life is improved by the harmless private fiction of  rebo-pet possessing real emotions, it is a good thing."

*Hannah Fry, "Maps Without Places," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. "Back when long distance travel was provided by horse-drawn stagecoaches, departure timetables were suggestive rather than definitive."

Abortion Burdens; GOP Content Creators; and Natural Gas Setbacks

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Undue Burdens," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Mississippi imposes a twenty-hour waiting period after mandating in-person counselling." "Cruelly, fifteen weeks is well before the point at which a fetus would be viable outside the womb, and that is also the point at which the Supreme Court has said that a woman's interest n controlling her own body outweighs any other interests the state has."

"The Guttmacher Institute tallied twenty-eight  new restrictions signed into law in the four days between April 26th and April 29th alone." About ninety per cent of the counties in the United States lack an abortion clinic." Early in June, the Texas state legislature approved  what is known as a 'trigger law,'  which would go into effect if Roe is overturned. It would ban abortion almost entirely as would similar trigger laws that exist in in a dozen states, such as Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah.

#Tim Murphy, "Mr. Troll Goes to Washington," Mother Jones , July + August 2021. Th GOP's most ambitious officials view their primary responsibility less as public servants than as content creators, churning out an endless stream of takes, memes, studies, and podcasts. So any podcasts." "There was no issue grave enough to take seriously, too petty to weigh in on. Anything could be resolved via tweet, precisely because nothing really can: the ephemerality was the point."

"The biggest crises in America right now, according to Cruz, CPAC, and Trump, are the interlocking threats of Big Tech and 'cancel culture.' But with a nudge from Trump, the right has become ever more dissociated from reality, channeling the energy into an endless series of fights over 'deplatforming' and who's triggering whom."

#Rebcca Leber, "Gaslit," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "Burning natural gas in commercial and residential buildings accounts for more than 10 percent of US emissions, so moving toward homes and apartments powered by wind and solar electivity instead could make a real dent. Gas stoves and ovens also produce far more indoor air pollution than most people realize; running a gas stove and oven for just an hour can produce unsafe pollution levels throughout your house all day." 

"The gas industry also has worked aggressively, with legislation in seven states to enact laws -- at least 14 more have bills that would prevent cities from passing cleaner building codes." "Over the past hundred years, gas companies have engaged an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat." 

"In some of the most populous cities -- particularly in California, New York, and Illinois -- well over 70 percent of homes now rely on gas for cooking. Indeed, the data shows that California's buildings emit more nitrogen oxides than power plants, and only slightly less than cars." "In California's most populous cities  -- which account for 8 percent of construction-related greenhouse gases -- phase out all gas-fired [appliances], other states will likely follow suit." "The industry has spent a century convincing Americans to fall in love with gas stoves, just as the public begins to fully understand the risks of what used to be its favorite appliance." 

ADDENDUM:

*Monika Bauerlein, "Are You Screwed Without Trump?" Mother Jones, July + August 2021. -  "For one thing, 2020 proved that even a deluge of batshit crazy can't save the traditional business model. More than 16,000 news jobs disappeared last year, a rate not seen since the crash of 2008." 

"As Mojo voting rights reporter Ari Berman discovered, the parallels between today's wave of anti-voting legislation and the white supremacist movement that ended Reconstruction are stunning."

*Jacon Rosenberg, "Inflation," Mother Jones, July +August 2021. - "A just-so story emerged about how low-employment and higher wages inevitably result in inflation, a framing in which unemployment has a natural rate, but inflation is always an ill to be eradicated." "Inflation hysteria is always a class war of one kind or another, waged on behalf of the asset-holders against perceived forces of 'social destabilization.' " "It's about the wrong kind of people getting too much stuff."

Vaccine Culture War; Elder Care Growth; and Telemedicine Facts

#David French, "Can we escape the vaccine culture war?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "After all, the history of the pandemic is intertwined with the culture war, and from the beginning, the response to COVID has broadly split between blue and red, urban and rural, with virtually every important issue decided by your response to a single, vital question: How dangerous is COVID-19?" "[Heavily] Republican white evangelicals are more reluctant to take the vaccine than any other religious community." Vaccine hesitancy is strongly concentrated in the red states.

"When Trump drew the line in the sand, minimizing the virus in the first months of the pandemic, millions of his supporters drew that line right with 'him -- and not as a self-consciously partisan pose, rather, as a deeply held belief and tribal identification." "Partisan tribalism is the primary cause of Republicans reluctance, and it's the reason while evangelicals are disproportionately hesitant to take the vaccine." "Once an issue becomes political, why evangelicals are often more partisan than they are religious." [Existing] data shows that "white evangelicals are more ideologically aligned with a singe political party than any other religious sub-group. in the U.S." 

"From lockdowns to masks to schools to shots, all too many of us are; still living in the political culture created by Donald Trump, the man who faced the great challenge of his presidency, and responded by trying to lie his way to health, prosperity, and that elusive second term." 

#Abigail Abrams, "Elder care grows up," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "Nursery homes and other group facilities are inherently petri dishes for pathogens." 

In most states, older adults must have a monthly income under $2,382, and $21,000 or less in assets to qualify. That leaves many middle-income American with too much money for Medicaid but unable to afford expensive care. Roughly 8 million seniors  fall into this category, a number expected to reach 14.4 million by 2029, according to a 'Heath Affairs' study.

"Homecare workers earn a mean hourly wage of $1,250, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than 15% live in poverty, and more than half rely on some form  of public assistance, like food stamps." "Some 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, and the Census Bureau projects the number of seniors will reach 74.6 million by 2060, with the majority expected to need long-term-care services at some point." 

#Janie Ducharms, "No therapists still need couches?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "In a series of TIME/Harris poll of national surveys conducted this winter and spring, about half of respondents reported using telehealth since the pandemic began, compared with about 25% who said they had beforehand." "High prices mean both therapy and teletherapy remain unattainable for many." More than 125 million people in the U.S. now use telemedicine facilities, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.

Training more clinicians from underserved backgrounds is the single most impactful way to encourage people of color to get help."

ADDENDUMS:

Sean Gregory, "A turning point for athlete mental health," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "According to the 'British Journal of Sports Medicine,' the reported prevalence of mental health symptoms and disorders in elite male athletes in team sports varies from 5% for burnout and alcohol use to 45% for anxiety and depression."

*Raj Panjabi, Alarms don't ring themselves," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "For every $1 a county invests in community health workers, an estimated $10 is returned to society, creating jobs and setting up for a faster way out of the next pandemic." 

Business Cycles; Death of a Hospital

 #Charles Duhigg, "Cool Story, Bro," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Economics is a science of cycles. There is the business cycle and the inflationary cycle, the rhythms of housing booms and credit busts." "John Maynard Keynes wrote that the marketplace is frequently guided by 'animal spirits' that 'depend on spontaneous optimism rather than a mathematical expectation.' " "Financial affairs have an 'instability due to the characteristic of human nature.' "

"After the First World War, a group of speculators promised easy stock-market profits through a new fad: the mutual fund. Today, the mutual funds are among the safest and most popular investments." "Jeff Epstein, an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, who runs a SPAC of his own, said, 'We've just lived through one of the greatest wealth-accumulation periods in history, and a lot of the public has been blocked from participating."  Virgin Galactic, which proposed to send customers into space for a substantial payment, forecast 2020 revenues of thirty-one million dollars, but the company had collected only two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars. "It is still unclear when, if ever, it will send customers into space."

"If an everyday investor had brought one share of stock in each of his SPACs on the first day the stock traded, three of those investments would have lost money. Many other SPACs have done much worse. Some public shareholders lured by impossibly rosy financial protections, have lost enormous amounts of money investing in companies that otherwise would likely have never been sold to the public."

#Chris Pomorski, "Death of a Hospital," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Philadelphia is one of the poorest big cities in the United States, with about a quarter of its 1.6 million residents living below the poverty line." "Hospitals in the U.S. are estimated to be closing at a rate of about thirty a year. Most closures happen for financial reasons, in places where there are relatively few privately insured patients. Increasingly, hospitals are regarded as businesses like any others: at least a fifth of hospitals are now run for profit."

"In the decades after the Second World War, the cost of hospital care rose significantly, spurred by expensive procedures, and by the adoption of medical insurance." "Medicare and Medicaid, which account for more than sixty per cent of all U.S. hospital care, often pay less than the cost of treatment: according to an analysis by the American Hospital Association. In 2018, Medicare and Medicaid underpaid the cost of care by a combined $76.6 billion." 

"The nurse-consultants sometimes second-guessed the diagnoses of residents. 'They were thinking about the bottom line, and we were just thinking about the patients,' Christy Johnson, a former resident said." 

"Since 2008, American hospitals have been involved in more than a thousand mergers and acquisitions, resulting in large, powerful health systems with influence on the price of hospital care and the reimbursement rates paid by private insurers."

The Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, along with another medical center, St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, for a hundred and seventy million dollars, by American Academic Health System, a company controlled by the California private-equity firm Paladin Healthcare Capital. Joel Freedman, the founder and C.E.O. of Paladin, had managed a sizeable hospital in Washington, D.C., and a few smaller ones in Los Angeles.

In early April, the Hahnemann University Hospital foretold the demise of Hahnemann by laying off a hundred and seventy-five employees, including sixty-five nurses. Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, told the article's author that Hahnemann's demise reminded her of the retail sector, where hedge funds and private equity have used leveraged buyouts to purchase chains like Sears and Toys R Us, and then stripped their assets, including  real estate, on a route to bankruptcies. "Patients were released without clear follow-up care and often ended up back in the E.R. within twelve hours."

The story of Hahnemann is as much about the structural forces that have compromised many American hospitals -- stingy public investment, weak regulation, and a blind belief in the wisdom of the market -- as it is about the motives of private-equity firms."

#Shreya Chattopadhyay, "By the Numbers," The Nation, 6 . 14 - 21 . 2021. 

$236B - Total US military aid to Israel from 1946 to 2018.

$38B - US military aid pledged to Israel from 2019 to 2028.

0 - Number of countries set to receive more US military aid than Israel between 2019 and 2028.

59% - Share of US foreign military aid in 2021 set to go to Israel.

50 - Number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the US's most advanced stealth aircraft, purchased by Israel from Lockheed Martin with US funds.

51:1 - Ratio of US military aid received by Israel to US humanitarian assistance received by Palestinians in 2021.

1 - Number of countries that are allowed to use US military aid for their own domestic weapons industry.

Cobalt Frenzy; Auto Safety; and Self-Help Books

@Nicolas Niarchos, "Buried Dreams," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "Southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world's known supply." "In Congo, more than eighty-five per cent of the people work informally, in precarious jobs that pay little, and the cost of living is remarkably high."   

"According to a recent study in "The Lancet,' women in some southern Congo 'had metal concentrations that are among the highest ever reported for pregnant women." "Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger. Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, a Catholic charity that tries to stop child labor, said, 'If the kids don't make enough money, they have no food for the whole day.' "

"Copper has been mined in Congo since at least the fourth century, and the deposits were known to Portuguese slave-traders from the fifth century onward. Cobalt is a byproduct of copper production." One of Niarchos's sources said that as many as a hundred and seventy thousand 'creuseurs' work informally in his province. Creuseurs around Kolwezi frequently complained to Niarchos that Chinese-owed mines had replicated the harsh conditions of China's own mining industry.

#Andrew Maranty, "The Left Turn," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "The mission of Justice Democrats is to push for as much left-populist legislation as Washington will accommodate." "Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and law professor at Harvard, has said that since the Reagan era, "many citizens have come to expect ' a government that can't do anything except cut taxes."  

"Obama was stuck within a preexisting order, but Biden is inheriting a more fluid moment." "In other countries, parties decide which policies they favor, then select candidates who will implement them; in  the United States, the parties are more like empty vessels whose agendas are continually contested by internal factions."

#Nicholas Lemann, "Regulate This," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. "In the early days of the automobile, efforts to reduce driving fatalities focused on highway design and driver education, not on the car itself. They aimed at preventing car crashes from taking place. The 'second collision' refers to the way injuries occur when an accident does take place: it's the collision of passengers with the interior of the car." 

"An N.H.T.S. report from 2015 estimated that between 1960 and 2012, auto safety measures had saved 613,501 lives, and that the fatality rate per mile of travel fell by eighty-one per cent...." 

#Louis Menard, "User Manuals," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Canons define a tradition, a culture, a civilization, by excluding things that don't belong to it." "There are overlapping literary domains, actually, since people tend to believe, not unreasonably, that knowing how to do things for yourself also makes you feel good about yourself." [The 'canon' in the title of Jess McHugh's 'Americanon' (Dutton) consists of thirteen Americanon books....] 'Self-help, she says, 'is in some ways the most American genre of literature. Still, as Beth Blum has pointed out in 'The Self-Help Compulsion' (2020), reading books for life advise is an ancient practice."

"Since the United States was founded on the principle of 'no aristocracy of birth,' which was supposed to distinguish the New World from the Old, it makes sense that how to, and self-help should be central to American life -- and that a book about those books should be called 'Americanon.' " "One reason the 'Americanon' books, and books like them, have been so popular in the United States may be that they fill a vacuum left by the absence of civic education, or that McHugh calls 'civic religious...." We should not want all Americans to think alike.

U.S. Democracy Always Messy; Enemy Combatant Rights; Stolen Black Land; and Israel's Occupation Violence

 #Eric Foner, "The New Party Bosses," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021 - "And if you think our current moment of hypertension, political polarization, abusive language, widespread efforts to suppress the vote, and violet clashes over electoral outcomes is unprecedented, think again. As far back as the 1790s, opponents called George Washington a British agent, and Thomas Jefferson, a lackey of revolutionary France." "The founders considered unrestrained democracy as dangerous as tyranny." "Instead, Grinspan [Jan, author of 'The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy.' (Bloomsburg) ] argues that Gilded Age political campaigns, subordinated substance to mass spectacle with large nightly parades of touch-bearing partisans, incessant political rallies, and spellbinding oratory laced with scurrilous attacks on opponents."

"The election of 1876, remembered today for the compromise that made Rutherford B. Hayes president, and ended Reconstruction, brought to the polls 82 percent of eligible voters, the highest participation rate in American history." During the 1870s, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden headed a commission that sought to do precisely this: It proposed a new charter for New York City that imposed a hefty property qualification to take part in elections for the Board of Finance." 

"The changes were most extreme in the South, where white supremacist Democrats disenfranchised nearly all Black voters, as well as a substantial number of poorer white ones, via poll taxes, literacy tests, and 'good character' requirements." 

"In 1910, only 4 percent of adult Black Georgians were registered to vote." "By 1924, for the first time in American history, fewer than half the eligible voter cast ballots."

#Elie Mystal, "For the Sake of Justice," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. -"To be seen to retire 'in order' to let Biden pick his successor would betray [Justice] Breyer's own career-long objective of making decisions based on what is right for the country, not for one party." "Where I [Mystal] see a court that is 6-3 in favor of conservatives, Breyer likely sees nine individuals trying to noodle things out the best they can." "In reality, the court is divided by partisan politics, whether the justices wear their MAGA gear underneath their robes or not." "Breyer can live in a world of wishes, rainbows, and unicorns, where consensus-building is a thing, but I submit those of us who have some of our human rights on the line do not have the luxury of watching Breyer tilt at windmills while he plays chicken with death." 

"The truth is that lifetime appointments are an absurd way to staff a federal judiciary in a country that shrugged off monarchy two and a half centuries ago."

#David Cole, "On Principle," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. In New York City's lawyer, Michael Ratney's lawsuit on behalf of enemy combatants, 'Rasul v. Bush,' after losing in the lower courts, won in the Supreme Court, and was the first of several landmark rulings rejecting the Bush administration's claims of unchecked power in the 'war on terror.'  The case ensured that Guantanamo detainees could challenge their detentions -- and helped create the pressure that forced the Bush administration to release more than 500 of the men detained there. 

#Kali Holloway, :The Century-Long Fight," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. - "A 2001 Associated Press investigation found that 406 Black landowners, through unscrupulous means and white terror, 'lost more than 24,000 acres' that are today 'owned by whites or corporations' and are worth tens of millions of dollars." 

"During the early 1900s, in places across America, white vigilante mobs committed anti-Black pogroms and then seized Back-owned properties for themselves." "From the 1950s onward, roughly 15 million acres --a staggering 90 percent of Black-owned farmland -- was lost, largely seized by the US Department of Agriculture to settle debts owned by Black farmers as a result of the department's racist lending practices." 

#Saree Makolisi, "The Nakba Is Now," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. - "Mobs of Jewish supremacists sometimes protected and sometimes actively assisted by state security forces, have been terrorizing Palestinian citizens of the state: smashing their shops, breaking into their homes, dragging them from their cars and beating them savagely in the street. Such events are routine in the West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinian residents is protected by the Israeli army and invariably goes unpunished." "But the spectacle of racial violence that has swept through cities from Acre and Jerusalem does not just look uncannily like Israel's primal scene; it also reminds us just where we have been all along." 

"As in countless other areas across the land, a group of Jewish setters have been using legal proceedings (or to be precise, the proceedings enabled by the Israel's legal system, which are totally at odds with the requirements of international law) to try to take over Palestinian homes and turn their occupants, already refugees, into refugees twice over." "The removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers has been going on, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes on a smaller one, for more than 70 years."

"While the Israeli courts and the Israeli state routinely enable the establishment of new settlements on Palestinian land, there is no mechanism in the Israeli legal system for a Palestinian family to reclaim the land or property forcibly taken from them by the Zionist National Fund." The stark reality is there for all to see: the hideous spectacle of a once apparently formidable state project unraveling into the elementary racial violence out of which it was born." 

Spiritualists Surge; and 'Postponement Fatigue'/'Re-entry Anxiety' Are Common

 #Casey Cep, "Kindred Spirits," The New Yorker, The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for physic services on platforms old and new." "The surging numbers are reminiscent of the late nineteenth century when somewhat between four million and eleven million people identified as Spiritualists in the United States alone." "In the years following the Civil War, when around three quarters of a million dead soldiers haunted the country, spirit photographs were  in high demand."

#Eliana Dockerman, "Ready to commit," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "In a typical year, Americans throw 2 million weddings, according to the wedding website, 'The Knot.' "Last year, about 1 million couples in the U.S. postponed their nuptials. canceled them altogether, or had a legal ceremony and delayed the reception." "Landis Bejar, a licensed mental health counselor, says that such anxiety is now common. She founded AisleTalk, a company that specializes in counseling couples as they plan their weddings. She saw a 33% uptick in business from 2019 to 2020, and is on track to see an additional 26% bump this year." 

"Brides and grooms have been forced to become amateur public-health prognosticators." "Couples have begun to express what Bejar calls 'postponement fatigue,' the inability to get excited about a wedding date, because they fear they'll have to reschedule and replan for a second, third, or even fourth time." "After all, we're all a little traumatized. Psychiatrists have dubbed fears of returning to normal life, 're-entry anxiety,' and the American Psychological Association reports that about half of all Americans feel anxious about resuming in-person, indoor interactions."

#Clara Nugent, "Emissions tests for airlines," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "The pandemic succeeded at something policymakers and campaigners have been powerless to do: ending decades of almost uninterrupted rapid growth in aviation carbon dioxide emissions, although they are still  projected to grow by a lot. Before COVID-19 hit, the aviation sector's carbon emissions were expected to be three times as great in 2050 as in 2015. Analysts now put the figure at closer to 2.3 times." "In recent months, dozens of airlines have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050."  

"Only a third of business travelers in the U.K. expect to return to their prepandemic habits, according to an April poll."

Farming Harm; St. Louis Strife; Teacher Solidarity; and More

 #Bill McKibben, "Junk," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "The epoch of hunting and gathering produced 'a period of greater longevity and general health than in almost any other time before or since.' " "Jared Diamond memorably called farming the biggest mistake in human history." "Through its dependence on an agriculture that 'concentrates on maximizing the yield of the most profitable crops,' it has done 'more damage to the earth than strip mining, urbanization, even fossil fuel extraction.' " "Chicken production has increased by more than 1,400 percent -- while the number of farms producing those birds has fallen by 98 percent."

Matt Bitten has written that: "Global sugar production has nearly tripled in the past half-century, and so has obesity; the number of people worldwide, living with diabetes, has quadrupled since 1980." "Now the United States supplies Mexico with 42 percent of it food." "Chilean children went from seeing 8,500 junk food advertisements a year to seeing next to none." 

"Instituting fairness in race and gender means, in part, undoing land theft, racial and gender-based violence, and centuries of wealth accumulation by most European and European-Americans, means that it is still being compounded. This means land reform; this means affordable nutritious food regardless of the ability to pay..." 

#Robert Greene II, "Crucible City," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "The labor strife underscored the need for solidarity among white and Black workers as American capital consolidated, and liberal Republicans began to retreat from the egalitarian promise of Reconstruction during the Gilded Age." Walter Johnson, author of 'St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States' (Basic Books), documents the divisions among Missouri Germans over the course of Reconstruction... mirrored the divides within the Republican Party and the United States itself." 

"The fear of interracial solidarity and social democracy was a major presence in the minds of America's elite during the Gilded Age, and the early Jim Crow years." 

"The city [St. Louis] continues to be riven by racial and class injustice, and Johnson traces these divisions, in part, to all the missed opportunities."

#Bryce Covert, "Power in the Union," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "Expanding on waves of activism, teachers were able to band together and compel school districts to adopt protocols for masks, ventilation, testing and even vaccination. But if teachers hadn't flexed their collective muscle, it's likely they would  have been forced back into school buildings without any say at all."

'The reluctance of teachers to return to school buildings stems, in large part, from having worked in substandard conditions for so long. About half of the country's school districts need to update or replace systems or features in their buildings. In 41 percent of districts at least half of the school buildings need to upgrade their ventilation or HVAC systems."

#Mustafa Bayoumi, "A Counsel for the People," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - During his tenure, Cyrus Vance Jr., Manhattan D.A., has also been criticized for being weak on prosecuting crimes committed by the elite. "Unsurprisingly, the  people who get caught up in this legal maw are mostly poor and people of color. And Vance's office has often been considerably more punitive than the D.A.s in other boroughs of the city, something that most of the lawyers vying for his seat have vowed to change."

"In New York City, most of these cases are small crimes of desperation, according to experts, often involving stealing a sandwich or shoplifting hygiene products. New York City County Defender Services (NYCDS), which serves Manhattan, told 'The City' that well over a quarter of the people it represented in 2018 were cases in which petit larceny was the top charge -- 308 of 1,092 people were homeless." "

#Joanne Lipman, "The great reopening," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "A Pew survey in January found that 66% of unemployed people have seriously considered changing occupations -- and significantly, that phenomenon is common to those at every income level, not just the privileged higher earners." "During the pandemic, nearly half of all employees with advanced degrees were working remotely, while more than 90% of those with a high school diploma or less had to show up in person, 'Co-Star ' found." 

"Faced with the impossible task of handling the majority of children and homeschooling, 4.2 million women dropped out of the labor force from February 2020 to April 2020." 

#Dorothy A. Brown, [author of 'The Whiteness of Wealth'] "Reform taxation to narrow the wealth gap," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2921. - "In 2018, the top 1% of taxpayers, by income, received 75% of the benefits from stock ownership. (as opposed  through a retirement account), and in 2019, only 15% of families owned stock that way."

"One estimate places stock ownership as contributing 23% toward the racial wealth gap for Black and Hispanic households."

Racehorse Mistreatment; VMI's Racist Charges; and Leadership Flaws

 #William Finnegan, "Blood on the Tracks,"  Odyssey," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - Since the beginning of this year, thirty-five horses had died at Santa Anita." "Racehorses, especially those running on oval tracks, give their lower legs a terrible pounding, straining ligaments, tendons, joints." Racehorses are "drugged, whipped, trained, and raced too young, pushed to the breaking point and beyond; though they're social animals, they spend most of their lives in solitary confinement in a stall." 

"Perhaps most important to racing's bottom line, however, have been the extraordinary investments in breeding farms and racing stables by Saudi royals, and, especially by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum."

"The movement to abolish horse racing -- its cultural indictment as animal slavery -- has been gaining momentum on social media, for years."

"The Water Hay Oats Alliance had its dream come true in 2020: legislation passed that will establish a national regulatory body, under the aegis of the United States Anti-Doping Agency."

#Molly Ball, "Stonewalled," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - An independent investigation of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), ordered by the state of Virginia, is probing the racial climate on campus after reports of racist behavior from lynching threats to the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. "White students also seemed to feel no compunction about using the 'N' word... 'You heard it several times a day,' " said one of the cadets. "Black cadets have reported a slew of disturbing incidents in recent years, including students wearing blackface and using the 'N' word. In 2017, a group of white cadets dressed up as 'Trump's Wall of  Halloween,' with 'graffiti' reading 'KEEP OUT' and a slur for Latinos." " 'Once Trump got into office, VMI became a different place,' says Keniya Lee, a 2019 gradate who is Black. 'People felt like they could do thing, say things, tell certain people they don't belong.' "  

Molly Ball's article also detailed the steady stream of racial slurs cadets posted on Jodel, an anonymous chat app.

"By the time VMI began admitting Black students, it was the last public college in Virginia to do so, and the federal government had threatened to withdraw funding."

[VMI's] "honor code is cherished for its simplicity: 'A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those that do.' A single violation results in expulsion, enforced by a cadet-run Honor Court."

#Nina Burleigh, "Smash the State," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "The president of the United States of America is the  emcee, clad in the casual costume he wears for events slightly more important than golfing, but less serious than his official duties -- including foreign leaders and rousing the rabble at rallies." "The CDC was everything evangelical Christian fanatics wanted to root out."

"The pillar of Trump's political power, contrary to popular belief, was not the 'deplorable' rabble that -- inexplicably in the eyes of coastal elites and progressives.-- voted against their own interests on things like national health care, and taxing the superrich. Trump's true backers were crony capitalists and stone-cold anti-government ideologues." 

"Corporate libertarians and white evangelical Christians got Trump elected with bold aims: nothing less than the remaking of America into a quantum-age Wild West in which money talks and bullshit walks, women stay home or teeter around on fxxk-me shoes, useless animals go extinct." 

#Elie Mystal, "Juvenile Judgment," The Nation, 5.31- 6.7.2021. - "The justice who wrote the opinion condemning a man to life in prison for a crime he had committed before he finished high school was the same justice who was accused of trying to rape a girl while he was in high school: Brett Kavanaugh." "There is no requirement that judges engage in actual fact-finding to determine 'incorrigibility' before sending a juvenile away forever."

"He [Kavanaugh] argued, in angry, sneering tones, that his youthful indiscretions (the ones he admitted to at least) should not bar him from getting a lifetime job." "Kavanaugh has a habit of doing this in his opinions: making bad opinions and then adding language suggesting he was just going along with the crowd." "Kavanaugh closed his opinion by telling the teenage Jones to plead his case for clemency to the 'state legislators, state courts, or Governor.' "

Concerns About COVID-19 in India and Mississippi, and Sharing Vaccines

 #Billy Perrigo, "India's Disaster," TIME, May24/May 31, 2021. - "The true scale of the COVID-19 surges in India is impossible to accurately quantify. Officially, confirmed daily cases are plateauing just under 400,000, but remain higher than any other country has seen during the pandemic. Experts warn that the real umbers are far bigger, and may be rising fast as the virus rips through rural India, where two-thirds of the population lives, and where the testing infrastructure is frail."

"The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates the true number of new daily infections is around 8 million --the equivalent of the entire population of New York City being infected every day. Official reports say 254,000 people have died in India since the start of the pandemic, but the IMHE estimates that the true toll is more than 750,000 --a number researchers predict will double by the end of August." 

#Michael J. Mins, "Our eyes on the virus," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "In Mississippi, for example, only 31% of the population has received at least one [vaccine] dose." "As we navigate the next chapter of the pandemic, and work our way closer to normality, it is essential that we leverage accurate and highly accessible  rapid testing to keep schools, workplaces, and travel open in the safest way possible."

"Despite national support, the U.S. has failed to adopt a robust at-home rapid testing strategy that could make these kinds of tests available to all Americans at little or no cost to them."

#Gregg Gonvalses, "Sharing the Vaccine," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "Luckily, $16 billion is sitting unused in the US Treasury right now, appropriated in the American Rescue Act for vaccine-related efforts just like this." "We are at the start of a race to vaccine the entire world, and there are larger tasks to accomplish -- particularly a massive tech transfer and industrial scale-up. The effort to vaccine as many people as we can, as the virus tries to outpace us, is the most urgent global priority of our time."

"The Biden Administration did the truly unexpected. Bucking the gigantic pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, it sided with low- and middle-income countries (LIMICs) by supporting a waiver provision to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that would set aside some intellectual property rights in order to expand the production of COVID-19 vaccines, which are now manufactured primarily by only a handful of companies in the world's richest nation."

#Katie Engelhart, "Home and Alone," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "Older people are more likely to live alone in the United States than in most other places in the world. Nearly thirty per cent of Americans over sixty-five live by themselves, most of them women -- forty-three per cent of Americans over sixty-five identify as lonely." 

"Research from the A.A.R.P. and Stanford University has found that social isolation adds nearly seven billion dollars a year to the total cost of Medicare, in part because isolated people show up to the hospital sicker and stay longer."

"Robots are increasingly being used to win the affinity of a human. For robots to win this affinity, "it doesn't have to seem real; real enough will do." "If some experts worry about robots being inadequate caregivers, others fear that older people will come to prefer certain kinds of care from a machine. And then what might we lose?"

Robots have advanced to the point that they can "determine how 'adventurous' a person is, then adjusts how often it suggests new activities."

"In 'A Biography of Loneliness,' from 2019, the historian Fay Bound Albert writes that 'concern about loneliness among the aged... is a manifestation of broader concerns about an aging population in the West, and considerable anxiety over how that population will be supported in an individualistic age when families are often dispersed.' "

"The 1965 Older Americans Act (O.A.A.), is a lesser-known part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. At the time, around  thirty per cent of elderly Americans were living in poverty. (Today, around nine per cent are.)"

#Wes Moore, (CEO of Robin Hood), "Implement universal housing vouchers," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Millions of American families faced a housing emergency even before the COVID-19 crisis, with over 11 million households spending over 50% of their income on rent, according to the Urban Institute." "When low income families receive housing vouchers, data shows that they are less likely to experience food insecurity, be separated from their children, and experience domestic violence."

I nvestigate Police Shootings; End Cash Bail; "Fundamental" Gun Rights; and Vaporizing Juul

 #Johiah Bates, "Create an independent body..." TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The solution proposed by activists: appoint investigate bodies to decide whether to prosecute police shootings." "During her 2019 campaign for the presidency, now-Vice President Kalama Harris proposed what might be a complementary body, 'a national Police Systems Review Board,' which would collect data and review police shootings..." 

#Katurah J. Herron, ACLU head in Kentucky, "Abolish cash bail," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Nearly half a million people in the U.S. -- 43% of them Black -- are currently detained before trial. The bail system, which often requires defendants or their families to [gather] up large sums of cash in a short window, is reminiscent of 19th century debtors' prisons." "Combined with these measures, ending cash bail is one way to dismantle inequities faced by people who enter the U.S. criminal-justice system." 

#Kelefa Sanneh, "Guns and Butter," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "For decades, the group [N.R.A. board] found ways to portray its product as a defense of liberty, shifting its focus from guns to gun rights, more generally." "Starting in the nineteen thirties, the N.R.A. turned its attention to fighting proposed laws that would limit the sale or use of guns." N.R.A. editorials that cited the Second Amendment, that Matthew Lacombe, the political scientist who authored 'Firepower' (Princeton University Press), reviewed, tended to portray guns as a means with which to resist tyranny from one's own government." 

Carol Anderson, the historian who wrote the 'Second Amendment: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomberg), argues that the Second Amendment is 'steeped in anti-Blackness,' but it does not follow that every effort to curtail its publications is therefore pro-Black. 

Jamall Greene, a legal scholar at Columbia University, worries that the endless search for 'fundamental' rights makes disputes like this one more intractable problem. "But the legalization of same-sex marriage was the kind of sweeping and definitive victory that naturally leads advocates to wonder how many more might be attainable. "Observing these reversals, one can see what Greene calls 'rightsism' is less a philosophy than a strategy, by which a minority cause can achieve a fuller political victory than might otherwise be possible." 

#Jamie Deauchame, "How Juul got vaporized," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - There are hundreds of lawsuits against Juul: "They claim that Juul purposely designed its stylish, flash-dive-like device and favored nicotine e-liquids to appeal to teenagers." "In 2020, about 2,000 high school students and 5% of middle-school students said they had vaped some sort of cigarette in the past month." "In 2015, the World Health Organization commissioned a report that warned e-cigarettes might damage the lungs and expose users to carcinogens."

"To this day, health experts and anti-vaping advocates often point to Juul's ill-fated Vaporized campaign as evidence that it purposely hooked teenagers, and engineered a brand-new addiction." "If the company kept marketing in ways that could be seen as targeting kids, Juul was going to be lumped in with Big Tobacco, an industry infamous for preying on young people with its marketing." 

ADDENDUM:

*Jamine Aguilira, "End Family Detention," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The U.S. has three detention centers specifically for immigrant families." 

Israeli/Palestinian Conflict; Cheneyism; and Burnout

 #Steve Coll, "Ceasefire and Impasse," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "In more than a thousand air and missile strikes, Israel said it targeted Hamas commanders and military infrastructure; but although Israeli forces adopted rules of attack designed to protect noncombatants and Palestinian children, casualties mounted." The fighting coincided with shocks inside Israel's recognized borders, where mob violence and attempted lynchings sundered ties between Jewish and Arab citizens and neighbors." 

"Netanyahu has been in power continuously since 2009, but his accommodations of far-right political parties and millenarian settler movements, coupled with hi rejection of reconciliation with Palestinians have failed to deliver durable security." 

#Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, "Israelis can't go back..." TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - Ayelet Gundar-Goshen "can't ignore the fact that that all of the doctors and executives are Jews, while the cleaners and medical workers are mostly Arabs. "For some of the Jewish majority, 'restoring the peace' means that Jews will return to their comfortable lives, while Arabs continue to suffer from poverty and discrimination." .S.

#Salam Khashan, "A doctor's account of life..." TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "It was extremely difficult to get medical aid across the Egyptian border and it still is." "We have international laws against the murder of civilians. The message Palestinians receive from the international community is that Israelis are above these rules."

"On WhatsApp, more than 100 groups formed to organize attacks on Arabs. One message told volunteers to bring 'flags, bats, knives, guns, bras knuckles, wooden boards, pepper spray, anything that would hurt them." "But Arabs point to the reality of their lives in Israel: they are just over 20% of the population and about half of the poorest municipalities." 

"Netanyahu's government passed a law in 2018 that removed Arabic as an official language, and gave Jews an 'exclusive right to national self-determination.' " 

#Nicholas Lemann, "Cheneyism," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Hawks are now homeless in both parties, actually, and that poses a challenge to Joe Biden, whose tendencies are non-isolationist, but also un-Chaney-like. Yet the Biden Administration, so ambitious in domestic policy, has been far quieter in foreign policy." 

"The Blinken-Kagan article criticized the Obama Administration , in which Blinken served, for 'doing too little' in Syria, and criticized Trump for pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Biden has not reversed these policies, or dramatically rejected most of Trump's other foreign policy positions... ." "Better to endorse her [Cheney's] stance on Trump, and to find a part for the U.S. to play in the Middle East that involves trying to reduce bloodshed and suffering, not provoking it."

#Jill Lepore, "It's just too much," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Around the world, three out of five workers say they're burned out. A 2020 U.S, study puts that figure at three in four," "If burnout is... universal and eternal, it's meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just... the hell of life." 

"Burnout for [Byung Chul] Han, a writer for 'The Burnout Society,' is depression and exhaustion, the sickness of  society that suffers from 'excessive possibility,' an 'achievement society,' a 'yes-we-can' world in which nothing is impossible."

" 'Burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels,' 'Harvard Business Review' reported in 1981." "In 2020 polling, only forty-seven per cent of Americans belonged to an institution of faith." 

Burnout may be looked at as a combat metaphor. "In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work for many people has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including          politics and like online, like yet more slaughter."

Black Dressmaking; HGTV Matters; Even Kni,etting and Home Ec

 #Judith Thurman, "Eye of the Needle," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "[Dressmaker's] Lowe's driving ambition, she told Mike Douglas, as a guest on his talk show in 1964, was to  prove that a Negro could become a major dress designer."

"Women of color have been dressing First Ladies at least since the 1861,when Mary Todd Lincoln hired Elizabeth Keelay as her personal [designer.]" Mary Todd Lincoln, like Jackie [Kennedy], was a Francophile and a clotheshorse."

"The American South has never been a bastion of modernity in fashion. Even in the North, chic women of Lowe's generation -- of of Jackie's -- looked to Paris." 

"A black dressmaker could not get credit or rent a workplace in the downtown business district; her clients had to visit her in a segregated neighborhood."

#Ian Parker, "Fixer-Upper," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "American cable-TV subscriptions peaked twenty years ago. The broader category of linear  pay television -- cable and satellite combined -- peaked in 2009, when subscriptions were maintained by eighty-eight of American households."

"An hour of HGTV may cost about two hundred thousand dollars to make." "An increasing number of network's shows in recent years have centered on contests or celebrities. But he rest is renovation. The implication that the hosts are involved in day-to-day management is less authentic." 

"HGTV's audience is still seventy per cent female, but according to Scott Feely, at 'High Noon,' there's evidence that scenes of demolition help 'help the men around.' " "According to Loren Ruch, ninety per cent of HGTV's renovations involve open floor plans." HGTV's primary value to its corporate parent lies for the moment in the "size of its library, which includes nineteen hundred episodes of 'House Hunters,' in its various formats." 

#Patricia Marx, "Stand Up Straight!" The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Remarkably, I am not among the estimated eighty per cent of Americans who suffer from back troubles." "A study reported in the 'Annals of Internal Medicine' in 2017 found that subjects who interrupted their sitting every half hour reduced their chances of dying by fifty-five per cent." "A survey among seven hundred  and seventy-eight software workers in lockdown last spring, found that shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain had doubled."

"Sander Gilman, a historian, said over ZOOM, in regard to 'Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture,' that he regards posture as a critical construct, a way to read an individual's social status, and 'a means for society to separate the 'primitive' from the 'advanced,' the 'ugly' from the 'beautiful,' and the 'ill' from the 'healthy.' " 

"At Ellis Island, immigrants' spinal bumps and bows were thought to indicate moral weaknesses, and provided grounds for denying people entry into the country." 

#Jelani Cobb, "The Battle for Georgia," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Today, eighteen Fortune 500 companies have operations in Georgia, the same number as in Florida, a state with twice the population." "To the extent that there is an impediment to the leadership's plunging the state into its ugly past, it will not likely to be love of democracy or the Constitution. It will be for reverence of another piece of paper that embodies deeply held American values: the dollar bill."

#Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Yarn shops, like bike or record shops, can be alienating to newcomers; patrons and employees sometimes act like members of an exclusive club who share the the language of obscure wool blends." 

"The easiest type of hat to knit is a flat rectangle, folded and sewn together, which produces floppy corners that resemble cat ears. [Kat] Coyle, owner of 'Little Knittery,' knit three prototypes, and within a few days, her group had named it the Pussyhat, a reference to Trump's hot-mike moment with Billy Bush." "After Coyle posted the Pussyhat pattern to the site, [her group] worked with more than a hundred and seventy-five yarn shops around the world, which served as drop-off and pickup points for knitters and hat recipients.' 

" 'Revelry,' which is often called the Facebook of knitting, has nine million accounts -- about a million of which are active every month." " 'Revelry' became the largest crochet-and -pattern database in the world."

"Knitting was also a tool in the war against society's great fear: idleness. Anyone yielding a pair of needles takes on an air of industry, and one newspaper writer during the Revolutionary War, extolled the 'Knot of Misses' busy at their needles... . where they exclude idleness from their solitary moments." 

#Margaret Talbot, "Measure Twice," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. Home economics was a movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century with high ambitions." "Home economics offered a feminism palatable to non-feminists, a social-reform vision that highlighted personal habits. They promoted training in baby care on a utopian model, as in the practice houses, but for the most part did not agitate for shared or government-subsidized child care." 

"As Danielle Dreilinger, author of 'The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live' (Norton) shows, these home economists had remarkable success. They created the seven food groups, they recommended daily allowances, and other approaches to virtuous eating." "Later, home ec collaborated cozily with the food industry, encouraging women to favor canned and frozen goods, and cake mixes, and coming up with recipes that provided convenience, and generated sales for their products." 

"Women on farms worked, on average, between sixty-four and seventy hours a week, and this, along with bearing many children was killing them younger." "Takeout and technology have deskilled us. Young people leave school unprepared for adulting, clueless about laundry, primed to annoy one another when they cohabit with housemates or partners." "Th new banquets of food shows, and how-to videos tend to be clear on one thing: neither the cooking nor the comforting is women's work only." 

#Maggie Doherty, "Adjunct Hell," The Nation, 5.17 - 24.2021. - " 'No Future' has become more of a lament than a rallying cry. The future is no longer something to protect or reject; it's something that's slowly being taken from children and adults alike. We're facing climate apocalypse, widening inequality, and a global pandemic. Is it any wonder that birthrates and rates of happiness are down in the United States, while rates of mortality and suicide have been rising? Can any of us imagine the future?"

After forecasting such a troublesome future, the author goes on to focus on the dire state of graduate and adjunct workers, but she still sees hope amid the despair. "Along with egregious working conditions, rage is fueling graduate and adjunct union drives across the country, one of the small signs of hope in a grim landscape of higher ed. The Service Employee International Union has organized academic workers at more than 60 campuses across the country. The United Auto Workers now represents over 8,000 graduate and adjunct workers nationwide."

Chain Gangs; U.F.Os; Limb Regrowth; and Separation Anxiety

#Winfred Rembert, "Hard Labor," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Have you ever seen a Black person tap-dance in front of white people just to show humbleness?" 

"The white boys really turned the prison camp into a chain gang." "The chain gang is one of the most ruthless places in the world. The state owns prisoners, so there are rules and regulations, but the country owns the chain gang, and there are no rules and regulations." 

"They put you in this wooden box, where you can't stand up and you can't sit down. You're in a crouch. You can't see out. It's dark, except for daylight coming in trough the cracks, and it's real hot in there -- sweating hot." Rembert found a way to avoid being put into the box: he would do crazy things, prompting everyone to say: 'that nigger crazy!' "One thing is for sure -- when inmates think you're crazy, you can survive. They don't mess with you. That tells you something about prison life. When you look at it from the outside, you can't see what's going on, but when you're up close you realize what you're up against."

Rembert has one observation from his years serving on a chain gang that may be controversial: he says that "because the white prisoners were a threat to run, the guards would shackle them to each other."

#Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The U.F.O. Papers," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. "Its officials were evenly split between those who thought that the 'flying discs' were of plausibly 'interplanetary origin,' and those who chalked up the sightings to rampant misperception." 

Deputy Secretary of Defense, David Norquist, publicly announced the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, whose report is anticipated in June.

"Astronomers have determined that there may be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable exoplanets in just our galaxy." "The government may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo."

#Matthew Hutson. "Growing It Back," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "In the past half century, scientists have come to see the brain with its trillions of neural interconnections, as a kid of computer. But Michael Levin, a development biologist at Tufts University, argues that the cells in our bodies use bioelectricity to communicate, and to make decisions among themselves about what they will become." (Salamanders can regenerate their several limbs and tails; if you remove a leg and graft on a tail, the tail morphs into a leg.)" "Cell groups, [Levin has said] are capable of following lots of different plants; they shift their goals depending on what their neighbors are doing."

None of the developmental biologists that Matthew Hutson spoke with expressed any doubt that we would some day be able to regrow human limbs.

#Sam Knight, "Separation Anxiety," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Om September 18, 2014, the people of Scotland voted no to independence by fifty-five to forty-five per cent, a margin of slightly less than four hundred thousand votes." The Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is explicitly pro-immigration -- it wants Scotland's population to be more attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people. 

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland and leader of the S.N.P., would like to introduce a universal basic income, and wants Scotland to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, five years ahead of the U.K.

ADDENDUM:

*Rebecca Mead, "A Giant Mystery," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Hill figures, or geoglypha, are scattered across southern England, whose chalk downs offer ready-made canvases to landscape artists." "The sample taken from the deepest layer of the giant dated from between 700 and 1100 A.D., most likely near the midpoint of the range, around the tenth century."

China's Reeducation Campaign; Media-Approved Lynchings; and North Korean Hacking

#Raffi Khatchadourian, "Ghost Walls," The New Yorker, April 12, 2021. - "As he, [Xi-Jinping], cleared   away the obstacles to life long rule, he eventually subjected more than a million government officials to punishments that ranged from censure to execution. Communist theoreticians  long debated the role that nationalities should pay in the march to utopia... ." "Xinjiang's insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam which emphasizes mysticism, not politics." "He [Chen Quanguo, a Party secretary] dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize, and to surveil."

"In 2005, the Chinese government began pacing surveillance cameras throughout the country, in a projcct called Project Skynet. After Xi Jinping came to power, China rolled out an enhanced version, Sharp Eyes, envisioned as a system of half a billion cameras that were 'omnipresent, fully networked, always on, and fully controllable.' " 

"About twenty-five million live in Xinjiang -- less than two per cent of China's population -- but, according to an assessment based on government data,  the end of 2017, the region was responsible for a fifth of all arrests in the country." "Chen Quanguo's crackdown was aimed at a single goal: moving a large percentage of Xinjiang's population into an archipelago of fortified camps for political reeducation." "Xinping had compared separation and radical Islam to a disease." 

In a typical cell, the "doors were chained to their frames and could not be opened more than a foot; detainees had to shimmy through." In the cell of a detainee named Sabit, "five bunk beds were crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot space, with three cameras and a microphone hanging from the ceiling." 

"As a government document made clear, reeducation was intended to sever people from their native cultures" 'Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.' " "Every morning they had to stand and proclaim their fealty to the state: 'Ardently love the Chinese Communist Party! Ardently love the great motherland! Ardently love the Chinese people! Ardently love socialism with Chinese characteristics!" 

"Adrian Zenc, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen's crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps -- a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others." "In the year that Sabit had been confined, Chen Quanguo was transforming Xinjiang. Cherished symbols of Muslim heritage were systematically targeted for destruction. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged, with minarets pulled down, and decorative features scrubbed away or painted over." 

"As a recent Freedom House report notes, 'China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. It's tactics have ranged from digital intimidation and threats of lawsuits, to unlawful deportations.' "  

#Channing Gerand Joseph, "Media Monuments and Hooded Headlines," The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - "Two decades into the 21st century, more than a century and a half since the legal abolition of slavery, and other forms of racist terror -- much of it promoted and perpetuated by the news media." "Papers not only reported of lynchings in a manner that implied or explicitly indicated approval, they even published ads from racial terror groups." "American papers typically assumed that the victims of lynchings were guilty and deserved their fates."

" 'In practice, lynchers enjoyed immunity from state or local prosecution,' David Garland,  a professor of sociology at New York University wrote in 2005,' " "Lynching 'was usually regarded with broad approval by large sections of the communities in which the lynchings occurred, and it was tolerated (and often applauded) by local politicians and law officials' ".

#John Seabrook, "Scooter City," The New Yorker," April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "New York also engineered and built a subway system, above ground and below ground, which before the COVID- 19 pandemic hit, carried five and a half million riders every week day -- a landmark of American people -- movings the city may never reach again if remote work is here to stay." "Transportation wonks hailed scooter-sharing as the best solution to their 'last closest mile' problem." The N.Y.P.D. issued numerous  citations for bike riders, and sometimes took away bikes. "The lockdowns in the face of the pandemic brought scooter-mania to an abrupt halt."

"In the U.S., sixty per cent of all car trips are less than six miles. "If cities are going to meet the zero-emission goals they've set, and if automakers like Ford and G.M. are going to electrify their fleets by 2030, respectively, as they pledged, automobiles will have to become smaller, lighter, and more efficient, given the limits of lithium-ion-battery technology."

"In 2019, cars and trucks killed twenty-nine cyclists in New York City, a twenty-year high." "Ridership on the subway is still at only thirty-five per cent of its pre-pandemic levels; bus ridership is at about fifty per cent in NYC."

#Ed Caesar, "Rocket Men," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "Only Pyongyeng, the capital, emits a recognizably modern glow. The dark country is one of the last nominally Communist nations in the word -- a Stalinist personality cult centered on Kim Jong Un, the peevish, ruthless scion of the dynasty that has ruled North Korea since 1948, after the peninsula was divided." 

"A tiny fraction of one per cent of North Koreans has access to the Internet." North Korea, moreover, is the only nation in the world whose government is known to conduct nakedly criminal hacking for monetary gain." According to the U.N., many of the funds stolen by North Korea hackers are spent on the Korean Peoples' Army's weapons program, including the development of nuclear weapons."

"On February 4, 2016, the U.S. Federal Reserve received instructions from Bangladesh to make dozens of payouts, totaling nearly a billion dollars, to various accounts including one in Sri Lanka and four in the Philippines."

"The North Korean regime has long been considered a fundamentally criminal enterprise." "According to many estimates, about seven thousand North Koreans work in the country's cyber program. The employees are split between the General Staff Department of the military, which assists the Army's operations, and the Reconnaissance General Bureau." "North Korean hackers have conducted operations in more than a hundred and fifty countries."

#Elie Mystal, "Racism Never Sleeps," The Nation, 5. 17 - 24.2021. - "As always, white supremacists are pretty sure Black people should just be happy to be here, and any one of us who is not smiling and thankful under the yoke of unruly white rule is a dangerous Negro who should go back somewhere else." "That's the relentless of white supremacy. Every trauma must be dissected, every pain must be justified, and the prevailing white majority claims the sole right to determine whether those pains and traumas are legitimate, as if white people are the sovereigns of reality itself." "Black people are always on trial. We are always being policed: in how we fight, how we mourn, and how we die."

Living Longer; Asian Nationalism; and Aviation Pollution

 #Brooke Jarvis, "Good Years," The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. - "Between the Spanish flu of 1918 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, global life expectancy doubled." "For much of human history, our early years were so stalked by disease and infection and diarrhea that between a third and a half of us never escaped our own perilous childhoods." "Even in modern American cities, people born into poor neighborhoods can expect to live as many as thirty years fewer than people who are born into affluence ones across town." 

"An editorial in the journal 'Age and Aging' had noted that the latest trends seemed to be favoring the second theory, with extra years being achieved not through better overall health, but 'predominantly through the technological advances that have been made in extending the life' of people who were sick, and experiencing various degrees of suffering." "Doctors wo specialize in aid in dying often distinguish between 'despair suicides,' the most familiar version, and 'rational suicides,' those sought by people who have, in theory, weighed a terminal or painful or debilitating diagnosis, and made a measured, almost mathematical, choice about how to deal with it."

#Thomas Meaney, "Rising in the East," The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. - "[Benedict] Anderson, [author of "Imagined Communities'], and his generation of scholars saw nationalism in Asia as the work of, on the one hand, elites who were educated by colonialism, and then turned against it, and, on the other, mobilizations by peasants and urban youth whose total consciousness merely needed to be stirred." 

"The more empires tried to cultivate loyal subjects capable of working in their colonial bureaucracy, the more they produced frustrated, overeducated, dangerous, students who coordinated across borders." "Asian radicals were also tracked by a pervasive system of surveillance maintained by imperial intelligence departments."

#Rafia Zakaria, "The Argument," The Nation, 5.3 -10.2021. "At the height of the pandemic, the grounding of air travel in 2020 led to a 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from aviation." "Prior to the pandemic year, the United States, with just over 4 percent of the world's population, was responsible for 24 percent of all emissions from passenger flights And within the US, just 12 percent of adults take 68 percent of the flights."

"American tourists who fly on a whim and imagine that their recycling efforts and use of cloth bags makes up for the huge costs they impose on the climate should be taken to task."

#[Rep.] Mark Pocan, "Q & A," The Nation, 5.3 - 3 - 10.2021. - "For them to argue about whether or not some of their workers have to urinate in bottles because of the schedules they're put on, to fight on a point like that -- which could so easily be disproven -- was really a huge miscalculation. It shows the arrogance of corporations that get too big." "If you look at the 1950s,when you had the highest rates of unionization, you had the lowest rates of income inequality. Since then, union membership has decreased from around 33 percent of the workforce to around 10 percent." 

#Kali Holloway, "Justice for George Floyd?" The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - Eric Nelson, Derek Chauvin's defense attorney, leaned "into the fallacy of superior Black strength, and what the neuroscientist Carl L. Hart labels the 'drug-crazed Negro' myth. In his opening statement,  Nelson compared Floyd's 6-foot, 3-inch frame with Chauvin's 5-foot, 9-inch height, a contrast to paint Chauvin as helplessly dwarfed by Floyd." 

"Studies show that white people believe Black people are inherently more aggressive, larger, more threatening, and less susceptible to pain than white people, stereotypes that make victimhood off-limits to Black people."

ADDENDUMS: 

*Mark Hartsgaard, "Emergency Now!" The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - " 'Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and the ice melt of 2020, routine, and could render a significant portion of the earth uninhabitable,' warned a recent 'Scientific American' article."

*Paulina Cachero, "Close the digital divide," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "And the Biden Administration has proposed spending $100 billion to invest in 'future-proof' broadband networks, while Republicans pitched $65 billion." "According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 16% of U.S, adults are not digitally literate because of lack of access and language barriers."

*Linda Harts, founder and CEO of The Memo, Time, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Studies show companies with diverse and inclusive cultures outperform organizations that do not invest in diversity."