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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+New research finds potential unintended consequences from “one of the greatest public health successes of the past 25 years.” +

+

+Alcohol has really bad health consequences, and the US doesn’t take that seriously enough. While America may have taken smoking more seriously, it continues to kill nearly half a million people every year. Alcohol-related deaths number almost 100,000 annually. +

+

+A new job market paper by Anne Burton, an economics PhD candidate at Cornell University, looked into how smoking bans at bars and restaurants affected alcohol consumption, violent crime, and fatal drunk-driving crashes. Her most notable finding was a 4 percent increase in fatal drunk-driving crashes associated with the implementation of these bans in areas with high levels of smoking. If accurate, this would be a significant harm policymakers need to consider when designing other policies that attempt to curb the use of harmful substances. +

+

+While smoking bans indoors have become pretty ubiquitous, this research may have new relevance as states begin liberalizing marijuana laws and cracking down on e-cigarettes and vaping. Policymakers have to determine if tamping down or easing up on drug restrictions affects the use of other potentially dangerous substances. If legalizing marijuana has the unintended consequence of increasing cigarette usage or cracking down on e-cigarettes pushes those consumers to smoke cigarettes more, that’s a big problem. Burton’s research looks to see if a policy that worked to stop smoking actually could have led people to drink more and led to measurable increases in drunk driving fatalities. +

+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bRuqWhX8jXdJc14e-fVCJPa8PG8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22176228/GettyImages_1215179164.jpg" />
+  <cite>Apu Gomes/Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>Illustrating the potential complementary nature of some drugs, a woman who was released from jail because of the coronavirus pandemic, smokes a pipe loaded with methamphetamine, while her boyfriend smokes a cigarette next to the 110 Freeway in Los Angeles on May 25, 2020.</figcaption>
+
+

+But first — from one drinker to another (probably) — why drinking and smoking are actually very, very bad and why we should care if more of it happens: +

+

+From 1999 to 2017, a study by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) tracked nearly a million alcohol-related deaths in the United States. In a 2010 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, researchers systematically reviewed the existing evidence linking alcohol and violent crimes and concluded that the “extensively documented correlations” between alcohol and crime represent “‘true’ causal effects of alcohol use on crime commission.” That’s a big deal. That means the researchers believe it’s not just an association and that some other factor is making people both drink heavily and commit crimes — it’s that alcohol is a big factor in whether some crimes even happen at all. +

+

+“The number one substance that is involved in arrests and incarceration is alcohol in the United States,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert and professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, told me. “In terms of the damage — people think of illegal drugs as the drivers of the criminal justice system, [but] none of them come close to alcohol.” +

+

+However, as a country, we’ve been overwhelmingly focused on regulating other drugs. My colleague German Lopez wrote a piece titled “Imagine if the media covered alcohol like other drugs.” Here’s my favorite excerpt: +

+
+

+What’s worse, public use of this drug has become widely accepted in some circles. In New Orleans, several men and women in their 20s and 30s shouted that they’re going to get “wasted” — a slang term for coming under the effects of alcohol. Some have even turned drinking alcohol into a game that involves ping pong balls and cups. One popular holiday, St. Patrick’s Day, appears to celebrate the dangerous drug... +

+

+No other drug comes close to the staggering fatalities of these two. Illicit fentanyl, which has consumed widespread media attention due to the opioid epidemic in the past few years, was linked to fewer than 30,000 overdose deaths in 2017. And marijuana — another drug that federal law enforcement officials have warned is dangerous — reportedly caused zero overdose deaths in the past few thousand years. +

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+

+Cigarettes are also extremely bad for health — though we’ve done more as a country to combat their use. They remain the leading cause of preventable death in the US, killing more than 480,000 people every year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adds that “for every person who dies because of smoking, at least 30 people live with a serious smoking-related illness.” +

+

+Do more people drive drunk after smoking bans are implemented? +

+

+Burton wasn’t the first to study smoking bans and their relationship with alcohol consumption as well as events associated with drinking like drunk driving and violent crime. +

+

+Economists Scott Adams and Chad Cotti of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and UW Oshkosh, respectively, looked into the relationship between smoking bans and drunk driving between 2000 and 2005. They began their study by noting that “the expected effect of smoking bans on drunk driving is ambiguous” since smokers might choose to go out less, lowering the number of people drinking in total. However, their research indicates that “fatal accidents involving a drunk driver increase by about 13 percent” following the implementation of a smoking ban — an astonishing finding. +

+

+Adams and Cotti looked into what might be happening here, and after reviewing case studies they settled on two theories. The first is “cross-border shopping,” where smokers are willing to drive farther to go to a bar in a neighboring jurisdiction that allows smoking, thereby increasing the number of miles driven after drinking. One example they point to is Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, which is one large metropolitan area split into two counties. Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is, enacted a smoking ban in 2005, after which there was a 12 percent increase in fatal accidents in Ramsey County, which contains St. Paul. +

+

+The second theory is that bars are differentiating themselves within jurisdictions with smoking bans by providing outdoor seating or by not enforcing the ban, and that is leading smokers to drive more as well. +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/npdhTkSJNLX3nG9y0NuQ38wCmz0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22176284/GettyImages_1180048075.jpg" />
+  <cite>Robert Alexander/Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>A “No Smoking” sign on the side of a brick building in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.</figcaption>
+
+
+

+Burton’s study, which builds on this research, looked at smoking bans in bars and restaurants from 2004 to 2012. She pulled from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the Nielsen Consumer Panel to measure alcohol consumption and the location of alcohol consumption by smoking status. She turned to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for information on alcohol-related crimes. +

+

+Burton found no statistically significant effect from the bans on whether people remained smokers or on violent crime. However, she did find that for those who drink, the bans increased how much they drank and that in high-prevalence smoking areas, there was a 4 percent increase in fatal drunk-driving crashes but only among high-prevalence smokers. Among all subjects, there was no increase in accidents. This means in the other subgroups, there were slight decreases or no effect on drunk driving. However, Burton told me the 4 percent finding among high-prevalence smokers was the only statistically significant finding. +

+

+Burton inferred that the 4 percent observed increase in drinking was likely happening at bars and restaurants because there was no effect or a slight decline in alcohol purchased for home consumption. She said she isn’t very concerned about the increase in drinking observed in her study — it amounts to about one drink a month, and there was no evidence that people were all of a sudden binge drinking or engaging in especially dangerous drinking behavior. +

+

+But there are concerns with the drunk driving findings, which other researchers have pointed out. +

+

+Drunk driving may not be affected by smoking bans, and if it is, it’s fixable +

+

+Before I get into the arguments against Adams, Cotti, and Burton’s findings, I want to make something clear: At the end of the day, the documented health benefits to smoking bans like reductions in secondhand smoke exposure largely outweigh any of the costs, like a small increase in drunk driving in some places. Additionally, there are simple ways to eliminate potential increases in drunk driving. +

+

+Following the release of Adams and Cotti’s research (which originally showed an association between smoking bans and fatal drunk driving accidents), several researchers dove into the question in order to test their findings. +

+

+NIAAA-funded research in 2013 examined the effect of New York’s and California’s statewide bar and restaurant smoking bans on “alcohol-related car crash fatalities” and found no association. They tested Adams and Cotti’s hypothesis about jurisdiction shopping by looking at communities along the Pennsylvania-New York border but found no effect on drunk driving accidents. +

+

+Andrew Hyland, chair of the department of health behavior at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center who was one of the authors of the 2013 paper, told me that the biggest concern his team had with Adams and Cotti’s findings was that their research did not include counties where they found zero drunk driving fatalities, which could have biased their observed effect upward. +

+

+“Zero events is a very important piece of information,” Hyland told me. +

+

+Importantly, Hyland’s research only looked at statewide bans. That means it doesn’t rule out the most plausible jurisdiction-shopping story: one where a city has banned smoking but the state has not, so it’s easy to find a bar just a few miles away that lets people indulge in both vices. +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F7bA5305DmMNAXQGzj7MhLARIkM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22176123/Screen_Shot_2020_12_16_at_3.23.50_PM.png" />
+  <cite>Anne Burton</cite>
+  <figcaption>Figure 5 in Burton’s paper “The Impact of Smoking Bans in Bars and Restaurants on Alcohol Consumption, Smoking, and Alcohol-Related Externalities,” published November 13, 2020.</figcaption>
+
+
+

+As statewide smoking bans have proliferated over the years, this jurisdiction-shopping effect is becoming less plausible, highlighting an easy way to eliminate this concern — passing statewide bans everywhere. +

+

+Looking to Burton’s research, concerns with her findings can be boiled down to measurement error and whether she was actually able to isolate the effect of smoking bans. +

+

+Self-reported measures of alcohol and cigarette consumption can be unreliable. First, because of something called “social desirability bias,” people will often say what reflects better on them rather than the truth. In this case, smokers ashamed of the habit might report fewer cigarettes smoked than is true; heavy drinkers could do the same with their alcohol intake. +

+

+Second, there’s the issue of “recall bias” — it’s actually just really hard to remember exact numbers when it comes to things like this. +

+

+“If you add up all the alcohol that Americans say that they drink, you come to the conclusion that roughly half of all alcohol is poured down the drain, because nobody claims it. ... That means people aren’t very good at reporting their drinking,” Humphreys told me. +

+

+For tobacco use, researchers have been able to corroborate survey data with biomarkers (which can’t lie to pollsters). But for alcohol, this type of analysis isn’t possible. +

+

+“She’s trying to do the best that she can with the data that she has available,” Hyland said of Burton’s research. “The question is, is that sufficient to make a statement that smoke-free policies are causing a 4 percent increase in [drunk driving] fatalities.” +

+

+Burton defends her use of survey data here by saying that even though there could be errors in self-reporting, those errors are likely uncorrelated with the implementation of a smoking ban. She believes the implementation of a smoking ban shouldn’t affect how people respond to survey questions about their alcohol consumption and thus the change between those two points in time should still show the effect of smoke-free policies. +

+

+Measurement error could also exist in Burton’s reliance on data from the BRFSS and Nielsen. These sources provide data at the individual and household level, respectively. In order to compare county-by-county numbers, Burton used provided “weights” to extrapolate the given information. But the problem is, neither of these data sets is designed to be representative at the county level. So her county-by-county data could be fuzzy. +

+

+As with most research, the biggest problem is trying to isolate the cause of the effect being studied. Aren’t jurisdictions that implement smoking bans likely to have implemented other public health measures around the same time? +

+

+Burton controls for a few of these, like state blood alcohol concentration limits for driving under the influence and whether the state has a cigarette tax, but says in the future she hopes to go further and include workplace smoking bans and other anti-smoking measures that could be driving the results she finds here. +

+

+Notably, Burton did not control for the cost of alcohol or taxes on alcohol in her results. This is troubling since these have a well-documented effects on demand and could be confounding her results. +

+

+“I don’t think that small increases in alcohol consumption by themselves are a bad thing,” Burton told me. “The biggest concern is trying to compare the protective effects from secondhand smoke exposure, particularly for bar and restaurant workers ... against the cost of those potential increases in drunk driving fatalities.” +

+

+She’s right — and luckily, the small increase in drinking and the ambiguous effect on drunk driving she found are far outweighed by the benefits of smoke-free laws. +

+
+
+
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/boyJsDJdgdYPAdEYoPVbc252oUY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22176294/GettyImages_1192557497.jpg" />
+  <cite>Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images</cite>
+  <figcaption>A woman smokes at Sophie’s, a neighborhood bar, in January 1995 in the Lower East Side, New York City, eight years before the city would ban the practice.</figcaption>
+
+
+

+Smoking bans are good, actually +

+

+“Smoke-free policies in worksites and hospitality venues have been one of the greatest public health successes of the last 25 years,” Hyland told Vox. +

+

+While there is still some debate around the potential increase in drunk driving, there is a vast, peer-reviewed, scientific literature around the harms of secondhand smoke inhalation, and around the massive health benefits associated with the sharp decline in smoking in part due to smoke-free policies. +

+

+We know that smoking bans have been effective at reducing secondhand smoke exposure. Bans in restaurants, bars, and other hospitality establishments have the added benefit of ensuring that workers are not forced to carry the health costs against their will simply due to their place of employment. Bans have also been effective at reducing smoking and “reducing opportunities to smoke, changing smoking norms, and reducing smoking rates.” +

+

+Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, cancer, and death. Research has shown that heart attack admissions “rapidly declined” after the implementation of 100 percent smoke-free laws. +

+

+All of this to say that if there was in fact a small increase in fatal drunk driving accidents as a result of these bans, the bans were still worth it. +

+

+It can seem callous to think about policy in these terms, but it cannot be understated how much anti-smoking policies have improved health and general well-being. And that benefit far outweighs the potential that there could be some small increase in drunk driving fatalities. Especially since that risk could be curbed with other anti-drunk driving measures and by universalizing anti-smoking laws at bars, restaurants, and other hospitality establishments. +

+

+“Reading this paper makes me more confident in the value of smoke-free laws,” said Humphreys. “Because what it shows is there is no effect on violence, there is no effect on drunk driving ... and the claimed increases in drinking amount to a teaspoon of wine a day. So even if I believed that we could measure the alcohol consumption that accurately in big panel studies, which I don’t, I don’t care.” +

+

+

+

+

+

+

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+

+ +

+My research shows that people think highly of others who conform to rules out of benevolence, which is a good way to sell mask-wearing. +

+

+Governors, mayors, and public health officials are sounding the alarm about rising levels of Covid-19 across every part of the country. The disease is surging, the death toll is soaring, and it’s clear that some states need more restrictive measures to control the spread. +

+

+What continues to frustrate so many leaders is that nine months into this pandemic, science and data have painted a clear path for how to beat the virus and reduce transmission. But the disappointing and deadly truth is that in many cases, it’s difficult to get Americans to follow the rules. +

+

+Boosted by a president who celebrates breaking rules and deliberately defies science and time-tested norms of civility, millions of Americans have been flagrantly flouting simple requests to wear masks in public, to refrain from congregating in large groups, or to limit their unnecessary travel. With the rule-makers themselves publicly disregarding the recommendations of experts and scientists of their own administration, rule-breaking Americans have quickly followed. +

+

+As it happens, the US loves rule breakers; the ethos of breaking with tradition is in our country’s DNA. New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die,” Western states like Arizona famously celebrate rugged individualism, the country’s founders are revered as rebels who defied a demanding government, and even a reality TV star could be elected president. +

+

+But in a pandemic, what public health officials are pleading for is a little more conformity. Flattening the curve requires Americans to all take fairly uniform actions — wearing masks, not gathering — for the betterment of the whole of society. It isn’t a time to bristle at being “told what to do.” President-elect Joe Biden has already signaled that he intends, unlike President Trump, to follow the science and issue a national 100-day mask-wearing campaign. While we wait for the months-long rollout of a vaccine to hundreds of millions of Americans, people must fall in line with this and other public health recommendations if there’s to be any hope of beating the virus. But will they? +

+

+While it may seem unlikely that Biden and public health officials can really encourage many more Americans to follow rules, there are ways to bring Americans together to support conformity. This, in turn, could help get Americans through the last several months of the pandemic with tens of thousands of fewer lives lost. +

+

+It’s important to think carefully about the message, because there’s more than one type of conformity. The type we think about most often — self-focused conformity — describes actions taken to fit in with a group. (These can be conspicuous inactions, too, such as some Trump supporters refusing to wear masks.) +

+

+But my research with collaborator Matthew Wice, assistant professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz, looks at others-focused conformity, what we call “benevolent conformity,” and shows how following norms or rules can benefit others. +

+

+In one study, we asked more than 300 participants to think back to a time when they saw someone conform to their group. Some participants were asked to think about an instance when someone conformed because they wanted others to like them. Others were asked to think about a time when someone conformed for others’ sake. We then asked all of our participants to report what they thought about this person whose public behavior differed from their privately held beliefs. Did this person have a strong moral character? Were they competent people? Were they kind and friendly? +

+

+While participants in our research scoffed at conformity when it was perceived as selfish, they respected and appreciated benevolent conformity, seeing it as courageous and praiseworthy. Our experiments showed that Americans found people who conform to protect others’ feelings or to maintain group harmony to be warmer, more competent, and more authentic. +

+

+This is a key lesson for Biden and for governors who seek to enforce conformity to help protect people from a deadly virus. They should emphasize that sometimes conformity takes courage. This point should be made loud and clear: In the battle against Covid-19, the courageous and commendable thing to do is to put other people first. +

+

+So when presented with the idea that following Covid-19 safety measures is “weak” or “un-American,” public health experts should flip this argument on its head: emphasize the benefits of people’s helpful actions. Wherever possible, leaders must employ the benevolent conformity Americans seem to gravitate toward and respect. +

+

+Emphasizing a strong sense of shared identity can remind Americans that the real reason for adhering to safety measures is not just to fit in, but also to protect the group to which they belong. When adhering to simple safety measures can save tens of thousands of American lives, wearing a mask is not an act of blind obedience, it is an act of patriotism. As vaccines begin to be deployed (with vaccine hesitancy still high) and the pandemic reaching new heights, this kind of messaging will be increasingly urgent to get us back on track. +

+

+Our research makes one thing clear: Americans love rule breakers, but they also hold a special place in their heart for benevolent, other-focused rule followers. If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that sometimes, we need to conform for others’ sake. +

+

+Shai Davidai is assistant professor in the management division of Columbia Business School with expertise in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, economic inequality and social mobility, social comparisons, and zero-sum thinking. A social psychologist, his research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole. +

+ +

+The critic at large (40) and critic at small (5) talk Mickey’s Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol. +

+

+A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s beloved novella about a miserly old man and the three ghosts who visit to teach him about the spirit of Christmas, is one of my favorite stories ever written. +

+

+I’ve loved it since I was a child obsessed with Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the 1983 animated short starring beloved Disney characters in the major roles. Nominated for an Oscar, Mickey’s Christmas Carol proved a boon to the studio’s animation division at a time when it was flailing. It also became a regular feature of Christmas TV for much of my childhood, turning up every year to retell its familiar tale. +

+

+What surprised me to learn as a kid was that there have been many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, across all manner of genres and styles and characters. If there’s a beloved troupe of characters, the odds are good that they’ve taken a crack at A Christmas Carol at one point or another. Mr. Magoo has played Scrooge. Fred Flintstone has played Scrooge. Yosemite Sam has played Scrooge. And, of course, Scrooge McDuck has played Scrooge, opposite Mickey Mouse’s Bob Cratchit. I loved this story, so I consumed as many versions as I could. +

+

+My childhood also saw the release of a different adaptation of this story that has stood the test of time: the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, Statler and Waldorf as Jacob and Robert Marley, and the very human Michael Caine as Scrooge (in one of the renowned thespian’s best performances). A bit of a box office and critical disappointment at its release, The Muppet Christmas Carol has gone on to become a holiday classic for many. +

+

+But I wondered what a child of today might make of both Mickey’s and Muppet Christmas Carol, and fortunately for me, I just happen to know Vox’s esteemed critic at small, Eliza, who is 5 and 5/12. (I doubt the copy desk will let me put that in the headline. Sorry, Eliza, for mis-aging you.) +

+

+Eliza and I sat down to talk about just what makes A Christmas Carol so timeless and what makes an adaptation of the story successful. +

+

+Emily and Eliza on adaptation choices +

+
+
    <img alt="Scrooge gives the Cratchit children gifts in Mickey’s Christmas Carol." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3CD4lYeAPDCb-blR7oCFTjc3Xbk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22193903/Screen_Shot_2020_12_23_at_12.19.32_PM.png" />
+  <cite>Disney</cite>
+  <figcaption>The Cratchit children and Scrooge celebrate a Christmas together.</figcaption>
+
+

+Emily: When you’ve watched as many adaptations of A Christmas Carol as I have, you start to spot small, telling differences among them. Which story elements from the original work do screenwriters choose to prioritize over others? And which story elements do they leave out entirely? +

+

+Even a book as slim as A Christmas Carol can’t be adapted with 100 percent faithfulness, and any given screenwriter must make choices about whether to underline the ghost story, the good Christmas cheer, the story of an old man’s regret, Dickens’s social conscience, or the occasional stabs at dry humor. There are a bunch of possible takes hiding within this one tale, and each is as valid as the last. +

+ +

+Mickey’s Christmas Carol mostly chooses to make Dickens come to Disney, rather than sending Disney to Dickens. The special borrows the familiar story elements and sends them through the Disney prism, so that, say, Goofy is playing the ghost of Jacob Marley, while Jiminy Cricket plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. At the center is Alan Young as Scrooge McDuck, and his performance is the special’s greatest asset. (Young had first played Scrooge McDuck in a 1974 children’s record version of A Christmas Carol that was largely adapted for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.) +

+

+The special’s tone lurches all over the place, something that is not helped by its 25-minute runtime. It’s surprising it comes together at all — there’s no way the slapstick of Goofy should work with the creepiness of Marley’s ghost, but it kinda does — but it’s always hampered by being a Disney production first and a Dickens adaptation second. In the end, it suggests that the moral of this story is mostly “Be nice to other people, okay?” which is a good lesson to impart but not really the focus of the novella. +

+

+The Muppet Christmas Carol is altogether stronger. It doesn’t force the Muppet characters into roles they wouldn’t fit particularly well, so that Michael Caine’s work as Scrooge can have the weight it requires. (He’s one of the best Scrooges ever.) But it does allow, say, Fozzie Bear to step in as Fezziwig — or should I say Fozziwig — which is exactly the sort of tiny, comedic cameo where one of the sillier Muppets can be very funny. +

+ +

+The Muppet Christmas Carol finds a great middle ground between the book and the Muppets, right down to having Gonzo (as Charles Dickens) recite chunks of text from the book directly to viewers (with Rizzo the Rat on hand to provide comic relief). It’s not my favorite adaptation of this story, but it’s darn close. +

+

+Eliza, what did you see as the chief adaptation choices made by these two specials? +

+

+Eliza: The Muppet Christmas Carol looked like Sesame Street, and Mickey’s Christmas Carol was a cartoon. The Spirit of Yet to Come in Mickey’s Christmas Carol had eyes [in its hood]. The Muppet Christmas Carol one didn’t have eyes and was gray with lines. The Mickey’s Christmas Carol one was brown. Plus, when the Mickey’s Christmas Carol spirit threw Scrooge in fire, he said, “SCROOOOOOOOOGE!” and the other one was way more quiet. +

+

+Oh! I was going to ask something about Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Why did the Spirit of the Future drop Donald Duck, who was playing Scrooge, in fire? +

+

+Emily: [desperately trying not to explain hell to a child] Well, uh, it was to show he had been bad. And if he stayed bad, he would go and get burned up. +

+

+Eliza: [looking very concerned] Oh. +

+

+Emily: But that’s only if you’re bad. [disconcertingly long pause] He was pretty bad. Wait. Donald Duck doesn’t play Scrooge in Mickey’s Christmas Carol! He plays Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. +

+

+Eliza: No, that’s a smaller girl duck. +

+

+Emily: All right. +

+

+Emily and Eliza on Ebenezer Scrooge +

+

+Emily: Few characters in English literature are as memorable as Ebenezer Scrooge, who (if nothing else) shows off Dickens’s skill for naming characters with exactly the right series of syllables, such that you instantly understand who they are. +

+

+Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have played Scrooge over the years. It’s impossible to get an exact count, since stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol remain staples of regional theaters and the like. But the list of “notable performances” on Scrooge’s Wikipedia page is formidable, with seemingly every actor over 40 with a patrician air and stentorian bluster having taken a crack at the part. Why just this year, The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln played Scrooge from the stage of London’s Old Vic. +

+

+Scrooge has become such an immortal character because he somehow speaks to our worst and best selves. There are days when we want to say “humbug” to the world and days when we’re so full of good feeling that we could pop. We want to believe that it’s not too late to change our ways, and Christmas often brings out a fond feeling for our fellow human beings. +

+

+Eliza, did you like Scrooge? +

+

+Eliza: I didn’t like him at first, but then I liked him! +

+

+Emily: What didn’t you like about him? +

+

+Eliza: [excited] The movie is kind of like the Grinch! +

+

+Emily: Eliza! A deliberate comparison between two disparate works! That’s the backbone of much critical analysis! +

+

+Eliza: The Grinch didn’t like Christmas. But what’s different about the two movies is that the Grinch stole Christmas, and Scrooge doesn’t do that. +

+

+Emily: Yeah, you’re right. Scrooge doesn’t have that level of ambition. +

+

+Emily and Eliza on the many ghosts of Christmas +

+
+
+ +
+
+

+Emily: Broadly speaking, A Christmas Carol fits into a longstanding tradition of telling ghost stories during the Christmas season. Indeed, there are spooky Christmas stories stretching back to medieval times, and ghosts popping up at such a festive time of year were one of the handful of Christmas traditions hanging on in Dickens’s day. +

+ +

+In 1843, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, Christmas was often treated as just another day, with few people even getting time off work — that’s why Bob Cratchit asks if he can have the day off. So A Christmas Carol is an attempt to reinstate Christmas as an important holiday on both a plot level (the characters are taught to keep Christmas every day of the year) and a more metatextual level (a Christmas ghost story would have seemed properly festive to Dickens’s readers). +

+

+But forget all that heady nonsense. I just love ghosts. What about you, Eliza? Who were your favorite Christmas spirits? +

+

+Eliza: The Spirit of Christmas Present in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. He opens the roof of a house, and the person inside goes “EEEEEK!” +

+

+Emily: I like when he goes right up next to the window, and his eye’s really big. +

+

+Eliza: And I like Jacob and Robert Marley from Muppet Christmas Carol! My favorite song is “Marley and Marley.” +

+

+Emily: Great song. A real bop. Which one of the ghosts would you want to be? +

+

+Eliza: I would want to be the Spirit of Christmas Past. Too bad I couldn’t fly for real into the past! I would go back in time to all the Christmases and get all the [Lego] Advent calendars that we’ve done. We’ve done three, and four when we’ve finished this one. I’ll get all the other boxes that have been thrown away, and I’ll bring them home to the present. +

+

+Emily: I think the ghosts are cool. I wish I could meet the ghosts. +

+

+Eliza: Me too! It’s too bad that all the people in the world can’t be the ghosts. If everybody wanted to, they could be the ghosts, but if one person or two or maybe 100 didn’t want to, they could just not be it. [pause] I wish I could just go through the screen, so we could talk and interview in person. +

+

+Emily: I’d like that! I’ll have to come visit when all of this is over! +

+

+Eliza: Then you could meet my whole family! +

+

+Emily: Well, I’ve met your mom and your dad, and I met you when you were a baby. +

+

+Eliza: Yeah, but you haven’t met my grandpa and grandma! And you’re in luck! I’ve got two grandpas and grandmas. +

+

+Emily: I don’t have any grandpas or grandmas anymore. +

+

+Eliza: Why? +

+

+Emily: [aggressively backpedals] +

+

+Emily and Eliza (and Nora) on quills +

+

+[Eliza’s younger sister, Nora, the critic at tiny who is 2 and 3/4, enters the room.] +

+

+Eliza: Nora! You should ask your question! +

+

+[Nora approaches and whispers something in Eliza’s ear.] +

+

+Eliza: Ask her! +

+

+Nora: You can’t write with a leaf! +

+

+Eliza: A leaf? Oh, a feather! Mickey and Donald Duck paint with a quill. She wants to know why they do that? +

+

+Emily: Well, they’re just writing with them. They’re not painting. People would take feathers and make the tips really sharp. Then they would dip them in little ink pots and write things down. But now we have pens, and those are just a lot easier to use. +

+

+Eliza: My drawing desk has a little circle to put a bottle of ink in, and then you can put a pen in it. It’s George’s desk. He lived in our house before we did. +

+

+Emily: Does that answer your question, Nora? +

+

+Nora: [stares] +

+

+Emily and Eliza on A Christmas Carol’s enduring appeal +

+
+
+ +
+
+

+Emily: A Christmas Carol is one of the most successful books ever written. Almost everyone alive knows some version of this story, and there are plenty of adaptations that have nothing to do with Christmas at all. (See also: McConaughey, Matthew, in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.) Dickens’s story is beautifully structured, appropriately festive, and just the right amount of creepy. It’s no wonder so many filmmakers have tried their hand at adapting it, though many have failed. +

+

+Eliza, why do you think this story has endured so long? +

+

+Eliza: Because it’s about Christmas. +

+

+Emily: I like the way it’s about looking at your life and seeing the things that should and could be better and using Christmas as a way to make your life better and be a better person. But I also like the ghosts. I wish I could meet the ghosts. +

+

+Eliza: Me too! +

+

+Emily: I’m gonna ask you the question I always ask you: Who is the character you are the most similar to? +

+

+Eliza: I don’t know. +

+

+Emily: I think you’re the most similar to that little bunny who carries the turkey in The Muppet Christmas Carol, because you’re nice and you like to help. Who’s your mom most similar to? +

+

+Eliza: Maybe the bunny? +

+

+Emily: I think I’m most similar to one of the Cratchits, because I have to work and work for a boss who doesn’t appreciate me, and all the ink gets frozen — +

+

+Jen, Eliza’s mom and Emily’s boss, offended and eavesdropping from outside the room: WHOAAAAAAAAA! +

+

+Eliza: Mom, you’re in the middle of the bunny and Scrooge. +

+

+Jen: That’s a good answer. +

+

+Emily: Your mom is nothing like Scrooge, Eliza. Not even a little bit. +

+

+Eliza: I know who’s like Scrooge! +

+

+Emily: Who? +

+

+Eliza: Donald Trump! +

+

+Emily: Wow. Eliza with the hot takes. I hope he’s visited by three ghosts this Christmas, who convince him to change his ways. +

+

+Eliza: Me too. +

+

+Correction: This article originally said A Christmas Carol was published in 1863. It was published in 1843. We have corrected the error. +

+

+

+

From The Hindu: Sports

+ +

From The Hindu: National News

+ +

From BBC: Europe

+ +

From Ars Technica

+ +

From Jokes Subreddit

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