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<title>06 April, 2023</title>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="covid-19-sentry">Covid-19 Sentry</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-preprints">From Preprints</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-pubmed">From PubMed</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-patent-search">From Patent Search</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-preprints">From Preprints</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>Covid-19 effects on medical industry</strong> -
<div>
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant influence on the medical system and pharmaceutical sector in practically every nation on the planet. Communication with patients in their homes away from clinics was a typical practice in order to give safety actions to the healthcare team; however, health services have been interrupted on many levels throughout the world. The financial success of hospitals and health insurers was impacted by these measures. Another difficulty in this circumstance was the inability of medication manufacturers to get active medicinal components from Chinese companies. The considerable disruption of international trade and travel has had a negative effect on the actual economy. Different procedures based on currently available drugs were used to treat coronavirus infections.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/ntmb6/" target="_blank">Covid-19 effects on medical industry</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Preprints as a medium for public debate on the COVID-19 pandemic: Observations on the blurring of internal and external scientific communication</strong> -
<div>
The growing popularity of preprint servers, notably during the Covid-19 pandemic, prompts a reevaluation of their role in science communication. This study delves into discussions and commentators on preprint servers, applying systems theory and boundary objects to scholarly and science communication. The approach is to analyze a sample of COVID-19-related pre-prints of bioRxiv and medRxiv and examine their comments and associated Twitter posts. Using mostly quantitative methods, the data was split in two groups: comments by biomedical peers and non-peers inside and outside academia. The results show that almost half of the comments can be attributed to peers, who also discussed different topics than the rest of the sample. On Twitter, the proportion of comments from peers was significantly lower, and the social network of academic and non-academic communities is intertwined. In summary, pre-prints can be seen as boundary objects that stabilize rather than blur the distinction between science and non-science. In this way, they promote the dissemination of knowledge and inter-disciplinary discourse. However, communication between scientists and the public remains ambivalent due to high barriers to entry. Challenges remain for integrating discussions into the peer review process without diluting standards and encouraging engagement from experts and laypersons.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/75gs6/" target="_blank">Preprints as a medium for public debate on the COVID-19 pandemic: Observations on the blurring of internal and external scientific communication</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>AI-Guided Discovery of Novel SARS-CoV-2 PLpro Inhibitors: Accelerating Antiviral Drug Development in the Fight Against COVID-19</strong> -
<div>
The global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the urgent need for effective antiviral drugs. The papain-like protease (PLpro) is a key viral enzyme involved in the replication and immune evasion of SARS-CoV-2, making it a promising target for antiviral drug development. In this study, we employed an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery platform, LIME, to generate novel inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 PLpro. LIME is based on generative language models that can generate diverse, valid, and synthetically accessible compounds. The LIME software was used to identify potential inhibitors with strong binding affinity and specificity to the target protein. The top 13 hit compounds were tested in vitro, and the top 5 inhibitors with strong binding affinity and specificity were selected for further analysis. A top candidate molecule, CSEMRS-1376, exhibited similar binding energies and structural similarities to the known SARS-CoV-2 PLpro inhibitor, XR8-89. Computational analysis of the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) profiles of the hit compounds and XR8-89 showed that both CSEMRS-1376 and XR8-89 demonstrated favorable ADMET profiles. Overall, the LIME software successfully identified several novel molecules, including CSEMRS-1376, with strong potential as a therapeutic agent against SARS-CoV-2. The study highlights the potential of AI-driven drug discovery platforms, such as LIME, to accelerate the drug development process and pave the way for more efficient and effective therapeutics.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.05.535700v1" target="_blank">AI-Guided Discovery of Novel SARS-CoV-2 PLpro Inhibitors: Accelerating Antiviral Drug Development in the Fight Against COVID-19</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Accumulation in the Skull-Meninges-Brain Axis: Potential Implications for Long-Term Neurological Complications in post-COVID-19</strong> -
<div>
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been associated mainly with a range of neurological symptoms, including brain fog and brain tissue loss, raising concerns about the virus’s acute and potential chronic impact on the central nervous system. In this study, we utilized mouse models and human post-mortem tissues to investigate the presence and distribution of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the skull-meninges-brain axis. Our results revealed the accumulation of the spike protein in the skull marrow, brain meninges, and brain parenchyma. The injection of the spike protein alone caused cell death in the brain, highlighting a direct effect on brain tissue. Furthermore, we observed the presence of spike protein in the skull of deceased long after their COVID-19 infection, suggesting that the spike’s persistence may contribute to long-term neurological symptoms. The spike protein was associated with neutrophil-related pathways and dysregulation of the proteins involved in the PI3K-AKT as well as complement and coagulation pathway. Overall, our findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein trafficking from CNS borders into the brain parenchyma and identified differentially regulated pathways may present insights into mechanisms underlying immediate and long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 and present diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.04.535604v1" target="_blank">SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Accumulation in the Skull-Meninges-Brain Axis: Potential Implications for Long-Term Neurological Complications in post-COVID-19</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>The purinergic receptor P2X7 and the NLRP3 inflammasome are druggable host factors required for SARS-CoV-2 infection</strong> -
<div>
Purinergic receptors and NOD-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome regulate inflammation and viral infection, but their effects on severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection remain poorly understood. Here, we report that the purinergic receptor P2X7 and NLRP3 inflammasome are cellular host factors required for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Lung autopsies from patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reveal that NLRP3 expression is increased in host cellular targets of SARS-CoV-2 including alveolar macrophages, type II pneumocytes and syncytia arising from the fusion of infected macrophages, thus suggesting a potential role of NLRP3 and associated signaling pathways to both inflammation and viral replication. In vitro studies demonstrate that NLRP3-dependent inflammasome activation is detected upon macrophage abortive infection. More importantly, a weak activation of NLRP3 inflammasome is also detected during the early steps of SARS-CoV-2 infection of epithelial cells and promotes the viral replication in these cells. Interestingly, the purinergic receptor P2X7, which is known to control NLRP3 inflammasome activation, also favors the replication of D614G and alpha SARS-CoV-2 variants. Altogether, our results reveal an unexpected relationship between the purinergic receptor P2X7, the NLRP3 inflammasome and the permissiveness to SARS-CoV-2 infection that offers novel opportunities for COVID-19 treatment.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.05.531513v1" target="_blank">The purinergic receptor P2X7 and the NLRP3 inflammasome are druggable host factors required for SARS-CoV-2 infection</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Lower prevalence of Post-Covid-19 Condition following Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infection.</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Background: Different SARS-CoV-2 variants can differentially affect the prevalence of Post Covid-19 Condition (PCC). This prospective study assesses prevalence and severity of symptoms three months after an Omicron infection, compared to Delta, test-negative and population controls. This study also assesses symptomology after reinfection and breakthrough infections . Methods: After a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, cases were classified as Omicron or Delta based on ≥ 85% surveillance prevalence. Population controls were representatively invited and symptomatic test-negative controls enrolled after a negative SARS-CoV-2 test. Three months after enrolment, participants indicated point prevalence for 41 symptoms and severity of four symptoms. Permutation tests identified significantly elevated symptoms in cases compared to controls. PCC prevalence was estimated as the difference in prevalence of at least one elevated symptom in cases compared to population controls. Findings: At three months follow-up, five symptoms and severe dyspnea were significantly elevated in Omicron cases (n = 4138) compared to test-negative (n= 1672) and population controls (n= 2762). PCC prevalence was 10.4% for Omicron cases and 17.7% for Delta cases (n = 6855). Prevalence of severe fatigue and dyspnea were higher in reinfected compared to primary infected Omicron cases, while severity of symptoms did not significantly differ between Omicron cases with a booster or primary vaccination course. Interpretation: Three months after Omicron, prevalence of PCC is 41% lower than after Delta. Reinfection seems associated with more prevalent severe long-term symptoms compared to a first infection. A booster prior to infection does not seem to improve the outcome of long-term symptoms. Funding: The study is executed by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment by order of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.05.23288157v1" target="_blank">Lower prevalence of Post-Covid-19 Condition following Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infection.</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Superior antibody and membrane protein-specific T cell responses to CoronaVac by intradermal versus intramuscular routes in adolescents</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Strategies to improve the immunogenicity of COVID-19 vaccines are necessary to optimise their protection against disease. Fractional dosing by intradermal administration (ID) has been shown to be equally immunogenic as intramuscular (IM) for several vaccines, but the immunogenicity of ID inactivated whole-virus SARS-CoV-2 at the full dose is unknown. This study (NCT04800133) investigated the superiority of antibody and T cell responses of full-dose CoronaVac by ID over IM in adolescents. Participants aged 11-17 years received 2 doses IM or ID, followed by the 3rd dose 13-42 days later. Humoral and cellular immunogenicity outcomes were measured post-dose 2 (IM-CC versus ID-CC) and post-dose 3 (IM-CCC versus ID-CCC). Doses 2 and 3 were administered to 173 and 104 adolescents, respectively. S IgG, S-RBD IgG, S IgG FcγRIIIa-binding, SNM-specific IL-2+CD4+, SNM-specific IL-2+CD8+, S-specific IL-2+CD8+, N-specific IL-2+CD4+, N-specific IL-2+CD8+ and M-specific IL-2+CD4+ responses fulfilled the superior and non-inferior criteria for ID-CC compared to IM-CC, whereas IgG avidity was inferior. For ID-CCC, S-RBD IgG, surrogate virus neutralisation test (sVNT), 90% plaque reduction neutralisation titre (PRNT90), PRNT50, S IgG avidity, S IgG FcγRIIIa-binding, M-specific IL-2+CD4+, interferon-γ+CD8+ and IL-2+CD8+ responses were superior and non-inferior to IM-CCC. The estimated vaccine efficacies were 49%, 52%, 66% and 79% for IM-CC, ID-CC, IM-CCC and ID-CCC, respectively. More in the ID groups reported local, mild adverse reactions. This is the first study to demonstrate superior antibody and M-specific T cell responses by ID inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and serves as the basis for future research to improve immunogenicity of inactivated vaccines.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.05.23288005v1" target="_blank">Superior antibody and membrane protein-specific T cell responses to CoronaVac by intradermal versus intramuscular routes in adolescents</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Structural epitope profiling identifies antibodies associated with critical COVID-19 and long COVID</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Antibodies can have beneficial, neutral, or harmful effects so resolving an antibody repertoire to its target epitopes may explain heterogeneity in susceptibility to infectious disease. However, the three-dimensional nature of antibody-epitope interactions limits discovery of important targets. We describe and experimentally validated a novel computational method and synthetic biology pipeline for identifying epitopes that are structurally stable and functionally important and apply it to the SARS-CoV-2 proteome. We show patterns of epitope-binding antibodies associated with immunopathology, including a non-isotype switching IgM response to a Membrane protein epitope which is amongst the strongest immunological features associated with severe COVID-19 to date (adjusted OR 72.14, 95% CI: 9.71 - 1300.15). Consistent with a hypothesis that the mechanism driving the non-switching response was T independent B cell activation, we find that B cells secrete IgM and proliferate on exposure to virus-like particles lacking Spike. We also identified persistence (&gt; 1 year) of this response in individuals with longCOVID particularly affected by fatigue and depression. These findings point to a previously unrecognized coronavirus host-pathogen interaction. We demonstrate that the Membrane epitope is a promising vaccine and monoclonal antibody target, which may complement spike-directed vaccination broadening immunological protection.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.11.22277368v3" target="_blank">Structural epitope profiling identifies antibodies associated with critical COVID-19 and long COVID</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>How to survey citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 public health measures? Evidence from three survey experiments</strong> -
<div>
The extent to which citizens comply with newly-enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different “face-saving” questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to 11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/gursd/" target="_blank">How to survey citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 public health measures? Evidence from three survey experiments</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>GRAPHENE FIELD EFFECT BIOSENSOR FOR CONCURRENT AND SPECIFIC DETECTION OF SARS-COV-2 AND INFLUENZA</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the need for devices capable of carrying out rapid differential detection of viruses that may manifest similar physiological symptoms yet demand tailored treatment plans. Seasonal influenza may be exacerbated by COVID-19 infections, increasing the burden on healthcare systems. In this work, we demonstrate a technology, based on liquid-gated graphene field-effect transistors, for rapid and ultraprecise detection and differentiation of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 surface protein. Most distinctively, our device consists of 4 onboard graphene field-effect electrolyte-gated transistors arranged in a quadruple architecture, where each quarter is functionalized individually (with either antibodies or chemically passivated control) but measured collectively. Our sensor platform was tested against a range of concentrations of viral surface proteins from both viruses with the lowest tested and detected concentration at ~50 ag/mL, or 88 zM for COVID-19 and 227 zM for Flu, which is 5-fold lower than the values reported previously on a similar platform. Unlike the classic Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test, which has a turnaround time of a few hours, our technology presents an ultrafast response time of ~10 seconds even in complex media such as saliva. Thus, we have developed a multi-analyte, highly sensitive, and fault-tolerant technology for rapid diagnostic of contemporary, emerging, and future pandemics.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.04.22280705v2" target="_blank">GRAPHENE FIELD EFFECT BIOSENSOR FOR CONCURRENT AND SPECIFIC DETECTION OF SARS-COV-2 AND INFLUENZA</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>How Interactions During Viral-Viral Coinfection Can Shape Infection Kinetics</strong> -
<div>
Respiratory virus infections are a leading cause of disease worldwide with multiple viruses detected in 20-30% of cases and several viruses simultaneously circulating. Some infections with viral copathogens have been shown to result in reduced pathogenicity while other virus pairings can worsen disease. The mechanisms driving these dichotomous outcomes are likely variable and have only begun to be examined in the laboratory and clinic. To better understand viral-viral coinfections and predict potential mechanisms that result in distinct disease outcomes, we first systematically fit mathematical models to viral load data from ferrets infected with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) followed by influenza A virus (IAV) after 3 days. The results suggested that IAV reduced the rate of RSV production while RSV reduced the rate of IAV infected cell clearance. We then explored the realm of possible dynamics for scenarios not examined experimentally, including different infection order, coinfection timing, interaction mechanisms, and viral pairings. IAV coinfection with rhinovirus (RV) or SARS-CoV-2 (CoV2) was examined by using human viral load data from single infections together with murine weight loss data from IAV-RV, RV-IAV, and IAV-CoV2 coinfections to guide the interpretation of the model results. Similar to the results with RSV-IAV coinfection, this analysis showed that the increased disease severity observed during murine IAV-RV or IAV-CoV2 coinfection was likely due to slower clearance of IAV infected cells by the other viruses. On the contrary, the improved outcome when IAV followed RV could be replicated when the rate of RV infected cell clearance was reduced by IAV. Simulating viral-viral coinfections in this way provides new insights about how viral-viral interactions can regulate disease severity during coinfection and yields testable hypotheses ripe for experimental evaluation.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.05.535744v1" target="_blank">How Interactions During Viral-Viral Coinfection Can Shape Infection Kinetics</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
We measured brain injury markers, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 participants with COVID-19; 111 provided acute sera (1-11 days post admission) and 56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses provided subacute/convalescent sera (6-76 weeks post-admission). Compared to 60 controls, brain injury biomarkers (Tau, GFAP, NfL, UCH-L1) were increased in acute sera, significantly more so for NfL and UCH-L1, in patients with altered consciousness. Tau and NfL remained elevated in convalescent sera, particularly following cerebrovascular and neuroinflammatory disorders. Acutely, inflammatory mediators (including IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) were higher in participants with altered consciousness, and correlated with brain injury biomarker levels. Inflammatory mediators were lower than acute levels in convalescent sera, but levels of CCL2, CCL7, IL-1RA, IL-2Rα, M-CSF, SCF, IL-16 and IL-18 in individual participants correlated with Tau levels even at this late time point. When compared to acute COVID-19 patients with a normal GCS, network analysis showed significantly altered immune responses in patients with acute alteration of consciousness, and in convalescent patients who had suffered an acute neurological complication. The frequency and range of autoantibodies did not associate with neurological disorders. However, autoantibodies against specific antigens were more frequent in patients with altered consciousness in the acute phase (including MYL7, UCH-L1, GRIN3B, and DDR2), and in patients with neurological complications in the convalescent phase (including MYL7, GNRHR, and HLA antigens). In a novel low-inoculum mouse model of SARS-CoV-2, while viral replication was only consistently seen in mouse lungs, inflammatory responses were seen in both brain and lungs, with significant increases in CCL4, IFNγ, IL-17A, and microglial reactivity in the brain. Neurological injury is common in the acute phase and persists late after COVID-19, and may be driven by a para-infectious process involving a dysregulated host response.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.03.23287902v1" target="_blank">Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>A second update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Investigating the role of host genetic factors in COVID-19 severity and susceptibility can inform our understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms that influence adverse outcomes and drug development. Here we present a second updated genome-wide association study (GWAS) on COVID-19 severity and infection susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 from the COVID-19 Host Genetic Initiative (data release 7). We performed a meta-analysis of up to 219,692 cases and over 3 million controls, identifying 51 distinct genome-wide significant loci—adding 28 loci from the previous data release. The increased number of candidate genes at the identified loci helped to map three major biological pathways involved in susceptibility and severity: viral entry, airway defense in mucus, and type I interferon.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.24.22283874v2" target="_blank">A second update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>SARS-CoV-2 infection and post-acute risk of non-Covid-19 infectious disease hospitalizations: a nationwide cohort study of Danish adults aged ≥50 years</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Reports suggest that the potential long-lasting health consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection may involve persistent dysregulation of some immune populations, but the potential clinical implications are unknown. In a nationwide cohort of 2,430,694 50+-year-olds, we compared the rates of non-Covid-19 infectious disease inpatient hospitalizations (of ≥5 hours) following the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection in 930,071 individuals with rates among SARS-CoV-2 uninfected from 1 January 2021 to 10 December 2022. The post-acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with an incidence rate ratio of 0.90 (95% confidence interval 0.88-0.92) for any infectious disease hospitalization. Findings were similar for upper- (1.08, 0.97-1.20), lower respiratory tract (0.90, 0.87-0.93), influenza (1.04, 0.94-1.15), gastrointestinal (1.28, 0.78-2.09), skin (0.98, 0.93-1.03), urinary tract (1.01, 0.96-1.08), certain invasive bacterial (0.96, 0.91-0.1.01), and other (0.96, 0.92-1.00) infectious disease hospitalizations and in subgroups. Our study does not support an increased susceptibility to non-Covid-19 infectious disease hospitalization following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.03.23288102v1" target="_blank">SARS-CoV-2 infection and post-acute risk of non-Covid-19 infectious disease hospitalizations: a nationwide cohort study of Danish adults aged ≥50 years</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Spatial Variation in Excess Mortality Across Europe: A Cross-sectional Study of 561 Regions in 21 Countries</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Objective: To measure the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 at the subnational level by estimating excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to an expected baseline mortality level. Design: Statistical and demographic analyses of regional all-cause mortality data. Setting: The vital statistics systems of 21 European countries. Participants: The entire population of 561 spatial units in 21 European countries. Main Outcome Measures: Losses of life expectancy at ages 0 and 60 for males and females. Results: Evidence was found of a loss in life expectancy in 391 regions, while only three regions exhibit notable gains in life expectancy in 2020. For 12 regions, losses of life expectancy amounted to more than 2 years, and three regions showed losses greater than 3 years. Geographic clusters of high mortality were found in Northern Italia, Spain and Poland, while clusters of low mortality were found in Western France, Germany/Denmark and Norway/Sweden. Conclusions: Regional differences of loss of life expectancy are impressive, ranging from a loss of more than 4 years to a gain of 8 months. These findings provide a strong rationale for regional analysis, as national estimates hide significant regional disparities.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.04.23284990v1" target="_blank">Spatial Variation in Excess Mortality Across Europe: A Cross-sectional Study of 561 Regions in 21 Countries</a>
</div></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Evaluation of Safety &amp; Efficacy of MIR 19 ® Inhalation Solution in Patients With Mild COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: MIR 19 ®;   Combination Product: Standard therapy<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   National Research Center - Institute of Immunology Federal Medical-Biological Agency of Russia<br/><b>Completed</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>LACTYFERRIN™ Forte and ZINC Defense™ and Standard of Care (SOC) vs SOC in the Treatment of Non-hospitalized Patients With COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Sesderma LACTYFERRIN™ Forte and Sesderma ZINC Defense™;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Jose David Suarez, MD;   Sesderma S.L.;   Westchester General Hospital Inc. DBA Keralty Hospital Miami;   MGM Technology Corp<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Nasal Treatment for COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Optate;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Indiana University<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Effect of a Health Pathway for People With Persistent Symptoms Covid-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Other: usual care and follow-up by a nurse;   Other: Personalized Multifactorial Intervention (IMP)<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Saint Etienne<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>RCT for Yinqiaosan-Maxingganshitang in the Treatment of COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Chinese Herb;   Diagnostic Test: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Chinese University of Hong Kong<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Study to Understand the Effect and Safety of the Study Medicine PF-07817883 in Adults Who Have Symptoms of COVID-19 But Are Not Hospitalized.</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   SARS-CoV-2 Infection<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: PF-07817883;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Pfizer<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Traditional Chinese Medicine or Low-dose Dexamethasone in COVID-19 Pneumonia</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 Pneumonia<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Other: conventional western medicine treatment;   Drug: Dexamethasone oral tablet;   Other: Traditional Chinese medicine decoction<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   China-Japan Friendship Hospital<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Clinical Study on Safety and Effectiveness of Mesenchymal Stem Cell Exosomes for the Treatment of COVID-19.</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 Pneumonia<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Biological: Extracellular Vesicles from Mesenchymal Stem Cells<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Inpatient COVID-19 Lollipop Study</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   COVID-19;   Diagnostic Test<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Device: Lollipop<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   University of Wisconsin, Madison<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Study of the Safety, Tolerability and Efficacy of NP-101 in Treating High Risk Participants Who Are Covid-19 Positive.</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: NP-101;   Other: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Novatek Pharmaceuticals<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Effectiveness of Testofen Compared to Placebo on Long COVID Symptoms</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Long Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Testofen;   Drug: Microcrystalline cellulose<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   RDC Clinical Pty Ltd<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Care for Veterans Post-COVID</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Behavioral: Concordant Care Training;   Behavioral: Education Packet Training<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   VA Office of Research and Development<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Complementary Self-help Strategies for Patients With Post-COVID Syndrome</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Post-COVID-19 Syndrome<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Behavioral: Complementary self-help strategies in addition to treatment as usual;   Other: Treatment as usual<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Universität Duisburg-Essen<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Safety &amp; Immunogenicity of RVM-V001/RVM-V002 or RVMV001+RVMV002 (Co Administered as Separate Injections) in Healthy Individuals</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   Infectious Disease;   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: RVM-V001 30 µg;   Biological: RVM-V002 30 µg;   Biological: RVM-V001 (15 µg) + RVM-V002 (15 µg) co-administration<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   RVAC Medicines (US), Inc.<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>HH-120 Nasal Spray for Post-exposure Prevention of SARS-CoV-2</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: HH-120 Nasal Spray;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Huahui Health<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-pubmed">From PubMed</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Chemical Composition of Honeysuckle (<em>Lonicerae japonicae</em>) Extracts and Their Potential in Inhibiting the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and ACE2 Binding, Suppressing ACE2, and Scavenging Radicals</strong> - Honeysuckle (Lonicerae japonicae) has been used in functional tea products. The chemical compositions of the water and ethanol extracts of honeysuckle were examined in the present study, along with their potential in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binding to ACE2, suppressing ACE2 activity, and scavenging reactive free radicals. Thirty-six compounds were tentatively identified from the honeysuckle extracts using HPLC-MS/MS, with ten reported for the first time in honeysuckle. Both…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Surfactin-like lipopeptides from <em>Bacillus clausii</em> efficiently bind to spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2</strong> - The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) rapidly spread across the globe, infecting millions and causing hundreds of deaths. It has been now around three years but still, it remained a serious threat worldwide, even after the availability of some vaccines. Bio-surfactants are known to have antiviral activities and might be a potential alternative for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In the present study, we have isolated and purified, a surfactin-like lipopeptide produced by a probiotic…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Repurposing immune boosting and anti-viral efficacy of <em>Parkia</em> bioactive entities as multi-target directed therapeutic approach for SARS-CoV-2: exploration of lead drugs by drug likeness, molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation methods</strong> - The COVID-19 pandemic has caused adverse health (severe respiratory, enteric and systemic infections) and environmental impacts that have threatened public health and the economy worldwide. Drug repurposing and small molecule multi-target directed herbal medicine therapeutic approaches are the most appropriate exploration strategies for SARS-CoV-2 drug discovery. This study identified potential multi-target-directed Parkia bioactive entities against SARS-CoV-2 receptors (S-protein, ACE2,…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Attitudes and concerns regarding booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine among Egyptian patients with autoimmune and rheumatic diseases: a cross-sectional survey study</strong> - CONCLUSIONS: There is a low acceptability rate of booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine among Egyptian patients with ARD diseases. Public health workers and policymakers need to make sure that all ARD patients get clear messages about accepting the COVID-19 booster dose.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Paxlovid (Nirmatrelvir/Ritonavir): A new approach to Covid-19 therapy?</strong> - Despite the need for novel, effective therapeutics for the COVID-19 pandemic, no curative regimen is yet available, therefore patients are forced to rely on supportive and nonspecific therapies. Some SARS-CoV-2 proteins, like the 3 C-like protease (3CLpro) or the major protease (Mpro), have been identified as promising targets for antiviral drugs. The Mpro has major a role in protein processing as well as pathogenesis of the virus, and could be a useful therapeutic target. The antiviral drug…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Efficacy of pentasodium diethylenetriamine pentaacetate in ameliorating anosmia post COVID-19</strong> - CONCLUSION: This study confirmed the efficacy of DTPA in treating post-COVID-19 anosmia.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Propolis effects in periodontal disease seem to affect coronavirus disease: a meta-analysis</strong> - This meta-analysis aimed to investigate the effects of propolis on the severity of coronavirus disease symptoms by reducing periodontal disease. PubMed, EMBASE, SciELO, Web of Science, and SCOPUS databases were systematically searched. Studies have been conducted analyzing propolis’s effects on COVID-19 and periodontitis. The study was conducted according to the PRISMA statement and registered in PROSPERO. Risk of Bias (RoB) assessment and meta-analysis of clinical studies were performed (Review…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Reduced serological response to COVID-19 booster vaccine is associated with reduced B cell memory in patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease; VARIATION (VAriability in Response in IBD AgainsT SARS-COV-2 ImmunisatiON)</strong> - CONCLUSIONS: Patients with IBD have an attenuated response to three doses of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Physicians should consider patients with higher anti-TNF drug levels and/or zinc deficiency as potentially at higher risk of attenuated response to vaccination.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Comprehensive structural analysis reveals broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants</strong> - The pandemic of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread around the world. Mutant strains of SARS-CoV-2 are constantly emerging. At present, Omicron variants have become mainstream. In this work, we carried out a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the reported spike protein antibodies, counting the epitopes and genotypes of these antibodies. We further comprehensively analyzed the impact of Omicron mutations on antibody epitopes and classified these antibodies according to their…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Phosphatidylglycerol-specific phospholipase C from Amycolatopsis sp. NT115 strain: purification, characterization, and gene cloning</strong> - Recently, phosphatidylglycerol (PG) focused on its important role in chloroplast photosynthesis, mitochondrial function of the sperm, an inhibitory effect on SARS-CoV-2 ability to infect naïve cells and reducing lung inflammation caused by COVID-19. To develop an enzymatic PG determination method as the high-throughput analysis of PG, a PG-specific phospholipase C (PG-PLC) was found in the culture supernatant of Amycolatopsis sp. NT115. PG-PLC (54 kDa by SDS-PAGE) achieved the maximal activity…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Antiviral Activity of Cell Membrane-Bound Amphiphilic Polymers</strong> - We demonstrate that cholesterol-modified polyethylene glycol has antiviral activity, exerted by anchoring to plasma membranes and sterically inhibiting viruses from entering cells. These polymers distribute sparsely on cell membranes even at binding saturation. However, the polymers have sufficient elastic repulsion energy to repel various kinds of viruses with sizes larger than the mean distances between anchored polymers, including SARS-CoV-2 pseudoparticles. Our strategy can be applied to…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Effects of Omicron Infection and Changes in Serum Antibody Response to Wild-Type, Delta, and Omicron After a Booster Dose With BNT163b2 Vaccine in Korean Healthcare Workers</strong> - CONCLUSION: Booster vaccination with BNT162b2 was significantly less effective for the neutralizing antibody responses to omicron variant compared to the wild-type or delta variant in healthy population. Humoral immunogenicity was sustained significantly high after 4 months of booster vaccine in the infected population after booster vaccination. Further studies are needed to understand the characteristics of immunogenicity in these populations.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Cyanometabolites: molecules with immense antiviral potential</strong> - Cyanometabolites are active compounds derived from cyanobacteria that include small low molecular weight peptides, oligosaccharides, lectins, phenols, fatty acids, and alkaloids. Some of these compounds may pose a threat to human and environment. However, majority of them are known to have various health benefits with antiviral properties against pathogenic viruses including Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Ebola virus (EBOV), Herpes simplex virus (HSV), Influenza A virus (IAV) etc….</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Heat shock protein 90 facilitates SARS-CoV-2 structural protein-mediated virion assembly and promotes virus-induced pyroptosis</strong> - Inhibition of heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90), a prominent molecular chaperone, effectively limits severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, but little is known about any interaction between Hsp90 and SARS-CoV-2 proteins. Here, we systematically analyzed the effects of the chaperone isoforms Hsp90α and Hsp90β on individual SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins. Five SARS-CoV-2 proteins, namely nucleocapsid (N), membrane (M), and accessory proteins Orf3, Orf7a, and Orf7b were…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>CCL12 induces trabecular bone loss by stimulating RANKL production in BMSCs during acute lung injury</strong> - In the last three years, the capacity of health care systems and the public health policies of governments worldwide were challenged by the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Mortality due to SARS-CoV-2 mainly resulted from the development of acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Moreover, millions of people who survived ALI/ARDS in SARS-CoV-2 infection suffer from multiple lung inflammation-induced complications that lead to disability and even death. The lung-bone axis refers…</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-patent-search">From Patent Search</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Return of the Non-stop Trump News Cycle</strong> - The former President’s indictment in Manhattan means the reprieve from his dominance of American media is officially over. Will it be any better this time? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-return-of-the-non-stop-trump-news-cycle">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>An Architect’s Dream of Rebuilding a Battered City in Ukraine</strong> - Max Rozenfeld has spent much of the war imagining how the destruction of Kharkiv presents opportunities for reinventing its future. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/an-architects-dream-of-rebuilding-a-battered-city-in-ukraine">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>What Israel’s Crisis Reveals About Its Democratic Compromises</strong> - Amid widespread protests, the Prime Minister has halted a package of illiberal reforms. What are the roots of his effort—and of its rejection? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-israels-crisis-reveals-about-its-democratic-compromises">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>America’s First Indicted Ex-President Is Very Sorry—for Himself</strong> - Notes on Donald Trump’s day in court. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/americas-first-indicted-ex-president-is-very-sorry-for-himself">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The People v. Donald J. Trump</strong> - Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is effectively accusing the former President of defrauding voters in 2016. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-people-versus-donald-j-trump">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>Your phone is ruining your vacation</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="A giant phone sitting on a sandy island with palm trees, a beach ball, and a life ring.." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dVq_9mV9KxGTQXWNTKfpkLdiMvs=/289x0:2021x1299/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72153537/GettyImages_1361920348.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
If you are reading this from the beach, for the love of god, put away your phone. | akinbostanci via Getty Images/iStockphoto
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
When in Rome — or Cabo or Tokyo — put down your phone.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tEEYA4">
Many of us have been there: sitting in the middle of some beautiful destination on a much-anticipated getaway, on the beach or in the mountains or wherever strikes our fancy, and … staring at our phones. The little screen so often trumps the giant screen that is real life, even in moments when the intention is to take a break from the little screen and the <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/2/20/18210498/smartphones-tech-social-media-teens-depression-anxiety-research">day-to-day stress</a> it brings with it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HsRZt8">
There are plenty of ways our phones make travel easier. We have fast, immediate access to reviews, ratings, and recommendations to help guide our decisions. We snap pictures to capture memories and share them with others. And, of course, there’s GPS — truly, we ask ourselves, how did anyone<em> </em>ever find anything<em> </em>before the existence of Google Maps? The truth is, they did find things, and everything turned out fine.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WtAQEd">
For all the ways modern technology can improve our vacations, it can also make them worse. It’s an obvious point that checking your work emails when you’re supposed to be off sucks. What’s perhaps not so obvious is that posting to Instagram when you’re on a boat floating by a glacier in Patagonia kind of does, too. When you’re back at the hotel, Instagram and the picture you just took will still be there for the posting, but the glacier won’t (not only because you left, but also, eventually, because of climate change).
</p>
<aside id="ziwC7v">
<div>
</div>
</aside>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RoCW67">
Living and dying by internet recommendations sometimes means that <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23388038/positano-travel-instagram">we all end up in the same places and have a miserable time for it</a>, and we’re so focused on checking off the prototypical what-to-do boxes that we forgo more niche activities we might enjoy more. We stare at Google Maps for the majority of a 20-minute walk to get to the restaurant a handful of YouTube influencers say is a must-try, missing the 15 restaurants that might have been great in the interim. Getting the picture for Instagram <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/28/17054848/smartphones-photos-memory-research-psychology-attention">may help us enjoy and remember</a> the visuals of a place more, but that can come at the expense of the rest of the experience. We often pull out our phones to entertain ourselves during some downtime, not realizing that the exercise <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2016.1160807">might actually make us more bored</a>.
</p>
<div class="c-float-right">
<aside id="3ALUgO">
<q>We’re accidentally ruining our time away a little bit because we just can’t quit the portable internet device we carry around with us 24/7</q>
</aside>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CPWR8r">
I’m not saying we all need to throw our phones into the ocean when we go on vacation, but it is worth pausing to ask whether we’re accidentally ruining our time away a little bit because we just can’t quit the portable internet device we carry around with us 24/7.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pNdGry">
“People primarily use their phones for leisure, that’s how phones are marketed, that’s how they’re sold. They’re lifestyle enhancers, they’re leisure devices,” said Andrew Lepp, a professor at Kent State University who studies the impact of mobile phones and social media on behavior. “The question then is: Do they enhance our leisure or do they distract from it? It can do both, but if we’re not careful, it can diminish our experience of leisure.”
</p>
<h3 id="5aPn8j">
Your phone on vacation might be kind of fine … until you get sucked in
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QgKARH">
It is at the very least difficult — though not impossible — to abandon your phone entirely when traveling. The device often serves as your plane ticket, your credit card, and your tour guide. In the age of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/qr-code-menus-restaurants-pandemic/671888/">QR code menus</a>, you often need a phone to figure out what a restaurant is serving. At some hotels, it turns into your room key, too. (That these scenarios are less than ideal for people without a smartphone is worth chewing on, but that’s a separate story.)
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="G63gXr">
Some of this is generally positive. It’s nice not to have to memorize trip details because you can keep them on your phone; it’s great to be able to grab an Uber in a few taps. When your phone frees up space in your brain for other activities, that’s a plus. The problem is that once you look at your phone for one thing you do need it for, it’s easy to get sucked in. Who among us hasn’t gone to check the weather, only to get distracted by whatever notifications have appeared and never figure out whether it’s supposed to rain?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4D8mYR">
“There’s a functional purpose to the technology that facilitates our experience, but the convenience of having it in our hand lures us into the trap of relying on it too extensively to document when maybe we’re better off experiencing,” said Nathaniel Barr, a professor specializing in cognitive psychology at Sheridan College whose <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563215001272">research has examined the ways we use smartphones as a sort of extended mind</a>. It’s not bad to use your phone to externalize some tasks, like storing your hotel reservation or remembering your itinerary, but the problem arrives when you start using it to check social media and read work emails just as you always would.
</p>
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Lauren, a finance manager for a large manufacturing company in New Jersey, checked her work email while waiting for a flight to Florida on a Sunday evening in March. She decided to text her boss about one message regarding an upcoming audit with her thoughts. That opened up a can of worms of communications that she wasn’t able to escape for much of her trip — instead, she wound up with a constant stream of texts and calls from colleagues.
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When I asked why she responded to the initial Sunday evening email, she joked, “Because I hate myself, I have no idea.” Lauren, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as to not put her complaints about her job on blast, just can’t stay away from work — she’s been forwarding emails to colleagues intermittently throughout her trip. And it’s not just work that has her distracted. “I was lying by the pool and had a book in my hand, a drink on my other side, but still, I was scrolling on Instagram, I don’t even know why. There was nothing even that interesting,” she said. Leaving her phone in her room isn’t an option — it serves as her room key, too.
</p>
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The distracting effects of phone use can cancel out some of the phone’s benefits, explained Alixandra Barasch, a marketing professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. She pointed to the specific example of taking photos. Her research has shown that taking photos <a href="https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspa0000055.pdf">increases the enjoyment of positive experiences</a> and that it can lead people to better remember what they saw as they pay closer attention to the visual details of their surroundings to figure out the picture. But once the person goes to post the photo they just took on social media, the scenario shifts. “Whenever social media or other types of sharing becomes part of the experience, it actually distracts from our photo-taking benefits,” Barasch said.
</p>
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People experience “self-presentation concerns,” she explained, meaning they get anxious when thinking about how others will view their lives and experiences. “The same trade-off applies if I’m taking notes, if I’m tweeting, having text-based conversations — that’s good if it immerses you, if it makes you attend to new details that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed,” she said. “But the downside is when you’re thinking about how others are going to view it.”
</p>
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<q>“We have limited attentional resources because we’re human”</q>
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Being so focused on any one thing, including photos, might mean missing out on other important parts of a vacation experience, too. Those taking photos are less likely to remember what they hear, say, from a tour guide, or they don’t pay attention to what their food tastes like or the music they’re hearing. My colleague Brian Resnick <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/28/17054848/smartphones-photos-memory-research-psychology-attention">had a great story</a> a few years back on how smartphones affect your memory. “We have limited attentional resources because we’re human,” Barasch said.
</p>
<h3 id="7mzoE1">
That little entertainment device might actually accomplish the opposite
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Using your phone more can make you feel more anxious and, perhaps more surprisingly, more bored — the opposite of what one sets out to accomplish when vacationing. Lepp said that just 15 minutes of staring at social media on their smartphone can cause an increase in boredom and a decrease in positive emotions. In other words, when you pull out your phone to entertain yourself, you might be accomplishing the opposite.
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“When you think about activities that really make you feel good, like a deep sense of enjoyment, that really absorb your attention, those are activities that are challenging, that require a little bit of skill,” Lepp offered up as an explanation.
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There just aren’t a lot of activities that a phone presents us with that can sustain our concentration for a prolonged period of time. “A lot of what we do on the phone is relatively simple,” Lepp said. “Scrolling through social media is probably one of the most time-consuming things a person does on the phone, and it doesn’t take any effort at all, so we get bored quickly.”
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Make a plan to stay off your phone for your next getaway — and try to stick to it
</h3>
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There’s no surefire way to make sure you don’t sabotage your next trip because you can’t get off your phone — and let’s be honest here, you’re definitely bringing it with you. It’s a good idea to try to set limits for yourself ahead of time. You might want to delete certain apps altogether, especially because phones are designed to suck you in, like a little vibrating siren song that never stops. Or you can just try to be extra intentional about staying away.
</p>
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<q>“Closing that gap between our intentions and our actions is incredibly difficult”</q>
</aside>
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How well any of this might work is a bit of an open question. “That requires us to have self-control, and the research shows that if there’s one thing humans have a hard time with, it’s doing the things they say they want to do,” Barr said. “It’s the say-do gap. We all have the best of intentions — to eat healthier, to exercise more, to save money — and closing that gap between our intentions and our actions is incredibly difficult.”
</p>
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Emily, from Texas, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, set out to be intentional about her phone use on a recent trip to New Orleans and was largely successful. She says her screen time dropped from eight hours a day, adding “don’t judge me,” to two or three. “In the mornings, whenever I first woke up, I would catch myself and say, ‘Okay, you’ve been on your phone too long, let’s get up, go take a shower, and get out,’” she said. “I just wanted to experience life, and you’re not really experiencing life if you’re on your phone.”
</p>
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I, too, tend to think about being on my phone too much and missing out on life a lot, including and especially when I’m traveling. And still, whenever I’m on vacation, I catch myself staring at Instagram and sneaking into Slack and peeking at emails multiple times a day instead of taking in whatever is going on around me. My phone once again morphs into a device for wasting time, this time from an exotic location.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5G5qzT">
<em>We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-squeeze"><em>The Big Squeeze</em></a><em>.</em>
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NF25sR">
<a href="http://vox.com/big-squeeze-newsletter"><em>Sign up to get this column in your inbox</em></a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fEmYHz">
<em>Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email </em><a href="mailto:emily.stewart@vox.com"><em>emily.stewart@vox.com</em></a>.
</p></li>
<li><strong>On Yellowjackets, teen girl friendship hurts like cannibalism</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="A group of teenagers in classical robes sit in the forest around a candlelit table." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MGiZeKdpyPxCzLK6Bf6HOmj1TRY=/209x0:3757x2661/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72153351/ac50653a57a44f6600595ccdb983e70a63_Yellowjackets_202_2594_R.0.jpeg"/>
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The Yellowjackets sit down to their cannibal feast on “Edible Complex.” | Showtime
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The cannibal feast of the hit Showtime drama has finally begun.
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The cannibal feast that <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22771675/yellowjackets-review-pilot-recap-showtime-crash-cannibals"><em>Yellowjackets</em></a> promised viewers in the first moments of its pilot episode has finally begun. Showtime’s critical smash began last year with a horrific vision of a girl’s soccer team, stranded in the wilderness for over a year after a freak plane crash, hunting, killing, and ritually devouring one of their teammates. Throughout the first season, though, it was never clear how the titular Yellowjackets got to the point of eating one another’s flesh — until now. In “Edible Complex,” the second episode of the second season, the surviving Yellowjackets devour the roasted body of one of their old teammates.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="x0z47q">
Our protagonists haven’t quite gotten to the point of the highly ritualized cannibalism that we saw in the pilot episode. Team captain Jackie is already dead of (mostly) natural causes when the Yellowjackets eat her, and they don’t cook her intentionally. They’re trying to cremate her, but a fluke snowdrift transforms the funeral pyre into a roasting oven when they aren’t looking.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5trPNl">
Still, with “Edible Complex,” <em>Yellowjackets</em> shows us how they take their first steps into the world of cannibalism. Most impressively, it keeps their cannibalism motivated by deeply relatable teen girl emotions. The cannibalism is a survival strategy, but it’s also a metaphor.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xrJLP2">
When the Yellowjackets start to eat Jackie’s body, they do it because they’re starving to death. They also do it because Jackie was what they were told to aspire to be, so much so that they loved her almost as much as they hated her — until the only thing there was left for them to do was eat her all up.
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<div style="width: 100%; height: 175px;">
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<strong>Jackie (Ella Purnell) appears only briefly</strong> in the opening credits of <em>Yellowjackets</em>. We see her, ponytailed and perky on a soccer field, drawing a line across her throat in a vicious threat to someone we can’t see. Then she notices the camera, grins, and tosses us a sultry “just kidding” wink.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="d4xXsB">
That’s who Jackie is: Casually bitchy to the extent that it helps her keep her underlings in line. Unwilling to commit to her threats. Always, always aware that she is being watched, and hence always protecting her image.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NU1SBh">
Jackie is aware that there’s a certain type of teen girl it pays to be, and she is able to embody that type apparently effortlessly. She is always pretty and put together, but not overly so. She’s dating the most popular boy in school. In the first episode, the Yellowjackets coach tells Jackie that he named her team captain not because she’s the best player on the field (she isn’t), but because the other girls defer to her. She’s a natural leader, he tells her.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="s2M9gL">
In suburban New Jersey, that appears to be true. When the other Yellowjackets get into an argument that escalates into a shouting match at a party later that night, Jackie’s the one who’s able to defuse the situation. She tells each girl to take turns telling everyone else something they admire about the other, and sets the example of going first. The fight ebbs away without further incident.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mVhHOP">
When the Yellowjackets are stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash, however, Jackie’s leadership skills vanish without a trace. She has no practical abilities and is unwilling to learn any. She is unable to help the team find food or water or shelter. She slacks off on the communal chores of cooking and cleaning. Gradually, the rest of the team starts to defer to strong-willed Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) instead of Jackie because, unlike Jackie, Taissa has ideas that will keep them fed.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="azvkBZ">
Over the first season, we see most of the Yellowjackets gradually abandon the more frivolous and ornamental requirements of suburban girlhood. They stop wearing makeup, and they let their clothes get gradually grubbier. Taissa crops her hair short. Jackie, however, keeps wearing makeup the whole way through the first season, and she remains fastidious about her wardrobe. She is preserving her image for an audience that no longer exists.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SjVxCj">
That audience is boys, who are the source and the sign of Jackie’s power: The rest of the girls defer to her because she is the kind of girl who popular, desirable boys like. That’s part of why Jackie holds on to her boyfriend Jeff, even though she finds him boring, isn’t particularly attracted to him, and plans to dump him as soon as they graduate. Jeff is what makes Jackie someone the other girls want to be like, a figure to whom they can aspire. Without Jeff, Jackie cannot be queen bee.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I77zCd">
In the wilderness, though, there is no Jeff. The only boys are Coach Scott, who is gay, and their dead coach’s sons Travis and Javi. Javi is too young for any of the Yellowjackets, and while Travis (Kevin Alvis) is both age-appropriate and straight, he is the wrong kind of boy. He’s nerdy and uncool, someone who cannot grant a girl status by proxy. Jackie at first snubs him. She’s unbothered when Travis pairs off with Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), whom Jackie considers to be a burnout.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5pmzsO">
As the months wear on in the wilderness, though, and Jackie’s status tumbles ever more precipitously, she changes her mind about Travis. Toward the end of the first season, she decides to seduce him.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NmhFcc">
Jackie presents her decision to sleep with Travis even though he’s still with Natalie as practical: Winter is coming, they’re most likely going to die, and she doesn’t want to die a virgin. When the other girls learn of her decision, though, they see immediately that it’s also a display of power on Jackie’s part. Even here, in the wilderness on the edge of death, Jackie is still the kind of girl who can take ownership of any boy she pleases.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iQfNDO">
It’s Jackie’s betrayal that first drives the group into the state of semi-feral predatory glee we see them relishing in the opening moments of the pilot: They charge at Jackie and Travis with a knife, ready to kill them both. Their plans are foiled, but that impulse is still lingering in all of them when they are faced, starving and weak, with Jackie’s succulently roasted corpse: wouldn’t it be great to get her? Wouldn’t it be perfect if they could harm her, punish her for her sins, for being more popular and powerful than all the rest of them? And simultaneously, wouldn’t it be great to become her, to have Jackie’s perfect hair and perfect smile and perfect life?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MFksEk">
To aspire and to punish all at once, they eat her. That’s true for no one more than Jackie’s best friend, Shauna.
</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="PZDSsf"/>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="A6cYAI">
<strong>Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is the one</strong> who actually takes out her knife and cuts into Jackie’s dead body at the end of “Edible Complex.” She’s been eating Jackie for longer, though. Before Jackie’s corpse is baked, one of her ears snaps off her frozen head. Shauna pockets it and eats it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2GoW7u">
Shauna’s friendship with Jackie is at the center of the first season of <em>Yellowjackets</em>. Jackie’s power over Shauna is, in a way, a more intense version of the power she wields over the rest of the Yellowjackets. She remakes quiet, studious Shauna in her image, painting makeup onto her face, trying to set her up with Jeff’s dorkier friends, telling her where to go to college, pushing her to join the Yellowjackets even though, as Shauna yells during their final climactic fight, “I don’t even like soccer!”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ui4pKx">
Shauna allows Jackie to do all this because she is under Jackie’s sway, awed by her power, and wants to be her. She also allows Jackie to do all this because she loves her. But Shauna’s love for Jackie is laced with sadistic resentment. Before the group is stranded in the wilderness, Shauna secretly sleeps with Jeff.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uSDAus">
“I’m not jealous of you, Jackie,” Shauna says during that final fight. “I feel sorry for you. Because you’re weak. And I think that deep down, you know it. I’m sure everyone back home is so fucking sad to be losing their perfect little princess, but they’ll never know how tragic and boring and insecure you really are. Or how high school was the best your life was ever gonna get.” Jackie is so furious at this rant that she storms outside on her own, and that’s how she ends up freezing to death.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4xwNXu">
Shauna’s lying in her big speech — she’s clearly jealous — but she’s also telling the truth. Jackie is insecure, and she is unlikely to take the world by storm after high school, while smart girl Shauna is ready to go to a good college and make something of herself. That’s one of the things Shauna has to remind herself of when she starts to feel too jealous.
</p>
<aside id="2oeCkI">
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</div>
</aside>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tZwaCi">
In season two, Shauna hallucinates Jackie’s corpse laughing at her as she paints makeup over its frozen face. “You know Jeff only had sex with you because I made you into someone else,” Dead Jackie tells her. “And you only had sex with him so you could imagine being me.” Then she cuts into her arm and tells Shauna to eat her dead body.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QRjfPp">
Part of the poignancy and the creepiness of Shauna putting makeup on Jackie’s corpse comes from the fact that Shauna is reasserting Jackie’s old social power, the power of boys and makeup and high school popularity contests. Shauna used to envy that power, longed for it, imagined taking it for her own by sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend, as if she could absorb it into her body through sympathetic magic. Then Jackie gives her another way of taking that power: eating her flesh.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jhXJaC">
In the present day of <em>Yellowjackets</em>, Shauna (now played by Melanie Lynskey) is a middle-aged housewife, married to Jeff, with a teenage daughter she resents who reminds her of Jackie. She is living out the future she used to comfort herself by imagining for Jackie, punishing herself with it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="laPsVf">
“The thought of you with someone else always scared me,” she tells Jeff in “Edible Complex,” clearly referencing Jackie. “But it also turned me on. Someone else’s tongue in your mouth. Their smell on you. I used to think that made me some kind of pervert.” Now, she says, “I like being the way I am.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MXXT1P">
Eating Jackie, Shauna gets Jackie’s tongue in her mouth and Jackie’s smell on her hands. Shauna eats Jackie because she hates her and she eats her because she loves her and she eats her because she wants to be her. It’s messy and it’s bloody and it’s grotesque, but it’s as emotionally true as TV about teenage girls ever gets.
</p></li>
<li><strong>What the new D&amp;D movie gets — and misses — about the game</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="In a still from the movie Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, from left, actors Rege-Jean Page, Michelle Rodriguez, Chris Pine, Sophia Lillis, and Justice Smith in a scene as they climb a hill covered in skeletons and bones." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QXUn0hda-VaPApBD7YqpkJvLubM=/496x0:1748x939/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72153315/dnd_still.0.jpeg"/>
<figcaption>
Paramount Pictures/eOne
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The real treasure was the friends we made along the way (but actually).
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BIxwBI">
If Dungeons &amp; Dragons fans have suffered from bad dice rolls with past movies based on the venerable role-playing game, the new one, <em>Dungeons &amp; Dragons: Honor Among Thieves</em>, is more like a critical hit.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8PU8Dc">
It’s fun, it’s funny, and most of all, to this regular player, it feels like D&amp;D. Although the movie is packed with fan-service references and <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23664885/1980s-dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-cartoon-honor-among-thieves-cameo-death">Easter eggs</a>, you don’t have to know anything about the game before you take your seat. And that seems to have worked for a lot of people, judging by the movie’s <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/date/2023-04-02/weekly/?ref_=bo_da_nav">top box office spot</a> on its opening weekend.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kK4eMG">
Directed and co-written by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (<em>Game Night</em>, <em>Vacation</em>) — longtime D&amp;D players themselves — <em>Honor Among Thieves</em> is conscious of the pitfalls of its source material and, largely, avoids them. Complex gameplay concepts like spellcasting and character classes are smoothed over; they’re just portrayed in use without being too explicit about the details, making them fit for a mass audience. (The directors <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23664760/honor-among-thieves-directors-interview-dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-rules">told Polygon</a> that while this was intentional, they still stuck as closely to the rules that govern the game as they could on screen.) All the attention paid to creating that balance between honoring the game and making a good movie results in a film where the creators’ love for D&amp;D really shines through, welcoming existing fans as warmly as it invites new ones in.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Mq9aVI">
What the film captures is the chaos and ridiculousness you’d find in an actual D&amp;D game. This means lots of moments that feel like someone got either a bad roll of the dice — resulting in unexpected misfortunes or failures — or a good one, where some highly unlikely scenario works out in the characters’ favor. Without the context of the system of chance that undergirds the game, it might seem like bad writing when the characters jump into a deadly gelatinous cube yet emerge unscathed — but sometimes all the constitution save rolls succeed! Goldstein and Daley deftly evoke the seat-of-your-pants storytelling traditional to D&amp;D without actually letting the movie suffer from it.
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NRVFKBJOWkX6yayj9JEVuLDSUh4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8635113/spoilers_below.png"/>
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<h3 id="lQKQEj">
How <em>D&amp;D: Honor Among Thieves</em> captures the heart of the game
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="89WTJX">
Almost unanimously, the D&amp;D players I talked to about the movie brought up one scene as a moment they really recognized from the game table: The adventuring party is being lectured at length by the paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) on a set of strict rules for how to cross a trap-filled bridge … and then the guy standing closest to the bridge just puts a foot on it casually, making the whole thing collapse into a fiery pit below.
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<div>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="In a scene from the movie D&amp;amp;D: Honor Among Thieves, Xenk (Rege-Jean Page), a paladin wearing ornate metal armor, looks disapproving, with a ruined bridge behind him." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hxJ7HurMVQYv_S3FevV74YRcVj0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24564038/Screenshot_2023_04_05_at_12.54.32_PM.png"/> <cite>Paramount Pictures/eOne</cite>
<figcaption>
This is also the look on your DM’s face when you ruin a complicated puzzle they made instead of solving it.
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</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3sXo7U">
“Often these games go completely off the rails, and just incredibly ridiculous stuff happens, and there’s this feeling of, like, world-spanning troublemaking,” <a href="https://zenarch.itch.io/">game designer</a> and writer Chance Feldstein told me. As a fellow D&amp;D player, they said what they most wanted the movie to deliver was that sense of unpredictability. “There has to be the epic fantasy element, but there also has to be that, ‘Oh, my God, how did that happen?’ part of it.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kccOTw">
That’s not to say every proverbial roll worked well on screen — the pacing was very fast and sometimes whiplash-inducingly uneven, with odd tangents and some moments where even a die-hard D&amp;D fan might wonder about the plot choices. Weird digressions, cookie-cutter-evil villains, and context left unexplained can work out fine in a D&amp;D game but don’t play so well on the big screen. And the sheer amount of story packed in was almost too much.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7LEC6C">
“There was so much plot in this movie, it felt like it should have been a season of a TV show,” Feldstein says. (Good news for fans: <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/01/dungeons-and-dragons-live-action-series-paramount-plus-rawson-marshall-thurber-eone-paramount-pictures-1235215486/">Paramount+ is working on that</a>.)
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eKdpSv">
Any movie based on Dungeons &amp; Dragons necessarily has to contend with the game’s <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/dungeons-and-dragons-racism-b2137947.html">oft-cited</a>, <a href="https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/1/13/orcs-britons-and-the-martial-race-myth-part-i-a-species-built-for-racial-terror">problematic</a> history. While Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned publisher of D&amp;D, <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23488097/dungeons-dragons-race-species-rule-change-announcement-wotc-unearthed-arcana">has been tackling</a> some of the worst old stuff, there’s more work to do. <em>Honor Among Thieves</em> reflects that effort — one that’s often pushed forward or inspired by players themselves.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1E7YL9">
<a href="https://thekatreturns.itch.io/">Kat Jones</a>, game designer and game design professor at the University of Cincinnati, points out that many players today are fully aware of the game’s history and work to reimagine it more equitably, using tools like “homebrew” or player-created content. “You’ve got dungeon masters who do their own thing, player groups that take it in their own direction,” they say. “There is that agency to do things and tell stories that maybe weren’t originally intended.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uL0sKX">
For me, though, the part that was most like a real D&amp;D game was how much each character changes and grows. This choice in the movie — to give each of the titular band of thieves their own character arc — is a bit of an outlier for the usual Hollywood ensemble piece, which more often focuses on one or two main characters. There’s a complexity in these relationships and motivations that the average moviegoer might not be expecting in a big action-fantasy film. That feels like it comes more from a really good RPG. Jones says she thinks that’s what the movie succeeds on: “Each of them had their own thing that they needed to overcome in order to be their best self. When it’s done right, role-playing games can really home in on that.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="L5xDeo">
In an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHEKsUl26Y0&amp;t=265s">interview at SXSW</a>, Daley said that was purposeful: “It was something we spent a lot of time on, making sure that each of the characters had something to say, that they were unique in their own right, and they also had an arc.”
</p>
<h3 id="uPyqQU">
The movie honors D&amp;D’s more transformative properties
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7OiKPx">
One of the most magical things that can happen in Dungeons &amp; Dragons, the game, is that a group of players often starts with one set of objectives and then, as they learn more about their team and themselves, find they really want to achieve something different and better. The film has that, too.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LXuhBf">
For instance, Chris Pine’s character, the bard Edgin, started out with a plan to bring his wife back from the dead (tired fantasy trope alert), but his motives for doing so were selfish. By the end of the story, he has the ability to carry out his big plan, but he makes a totally different choice, to save his barbarian BFF and platonic co-parent Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) — and he’s driven by what’s good for his daughter instead.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XSreTh">
That’s so D&amp;D! When we play, that’s what role-playing aficionados are looking to do; explore our characters’ expectations and assumptions about what they want to do and who they want to be, and how those change over the course of the events that they influence and are influenced by — often through and with other characters and players, just as in the movie. What often results are intensely personal, deeply valuable experiences.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1ju9Uw">
Like the young sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), who struggles with the burden of a legendary surname and a crisis of self-confidence but manages eventually to tap into his fledgling powers to save the day. Or the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), who joins the party with a vocal animosity against humans — as in, the whole species — and comes to value her human comrades as people.
</p>
<div>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The four main characters in Honor Among Thieves, standing in a large stone arena with crowds watching from high above them." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bim5ZfV8XRbZICUa-j4qFp60brg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24564004/trailer_screencap_dnd.jpeg"/> <cite>Paramount Pictures/eOne</cite>
<figcaption>
The main characters of <em>D&amp;D: Honor Among Thieves</em>, from left, Simon (Justice Smith), Doric (Sophia Lillis), Edgin (Chris Pine), and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez).
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tZ6Txc">
This kind of internal change is something that interests <a href="https://www.sarahlynnebowman.com/about-sarah-lynne-bowman/">Sarah Lynne Bowman</a> so much, she’s made a career out of studying how RPGs allow people to transform themselves, both in playing games and in their real lives. Bowman, a professor of game design at Uppsala University, now works on the <a href="https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research/games-and-society-lab/transformative-play/Transformative-Play-Initiative/">Transformative Play Initiative</a>, and says the psychological basis for why this kind of game has such an impact on players is both ancient and modern.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Q2usf4">
“It’s a combination of community and co-creative storytelling; that’s a really profoundly important thing that we’ve been doing since the dawn of time, probably since the beginning of culture,” Bowman says. She explains that RPGs specifically allow us to “embody different characters that we create.” So we get to try different personalities and traits on for size.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zn0U1S">
“It’s something that allows us to not only explore aspects of ourselves that we don’t normally get to express, but also to share those with other people, and to create different kinds of social formations that maybe weren’t available to us in our daily social lives,” she says.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Oglcwb">
That’s what makes RPGs so special: You can take these emotional journeys as a different person, navigating what your own priorities are and how you relate to the world. Ideally, you take a journey that pushes you into being better somehow; a better person, a better teammate, a better parent, a better friend.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Qbrdo2">
Game scholar and <a href="https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/">designer</a> Jonaya Kemper has a term for that: <a href="https://nordiclarp.org/2020/05/18/wyrding-the-self/">navigational play</a>, or using games to imagine yourself differently, in a way that might feel safer than in your real life.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9ScNT0">
“We have all these interesting studies that when people design their characters, sometimes they’re aspirational. … So it’s like, ‘I always wanted to be a performer. I’ll play a bard!’ Or, ‘I always felt like I could save people, I want to be a knight.’ That’s the navigation,” Kemper says. “We see people explore their identity, like, how do I feel about my sexuality? How do I feel about my gender identity? How do I relate to my culture? How do I relate to my parents? … And these are the things that really transform people’s lives, regardless of the game you’re playing.”
</p>
<h3 id="knkenT">
In its cultural resurgence, D&amp;D is also trying to evolve itself
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rJkIi8">
It’s frankly kind of a miracle that Dungeons &amp; Dragons has such radical transformative properties — it was built by people who were happy to uphold a certain kind of status quo.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WcgJ8H">
These games “came out of the basement of conservative white men in the Midwest,” notes <a href="https://jamesmendezhodes.com/rpg">James Mendez Hodes</a>, a writer, game designer, and cultural consultant who has worked on, among other things, the tabletop RPG Avatar Legends, an adaptation from the show <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em>. “[D&amp;D co-creator] Gary Gygax’s own politics, and then the influences on them, of Tolkien’s politics … and, worst of all, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/21363945/hp-lovecraft-racism-examples-explained-what-is-lovecraftian-weird-fiction">Lovecraft’s politics</a>: These all shine through in the games they influenced. So historically, these games have spoken to a pretty specific group of people who align with the quote-unquote ‘mythical norm.’”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kq0ORG">
This concept, from writer Audre Lorde, is the existence of a societal standard that privileges a certain kind of person (Kemper cites this same idea in her essay “<a href="https://nordiclarp.org/2020/05/18/wyrding-the-self/">Wyrding the Self</a>”). As <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/odece/sites/default/files/attached-files/rba09-sb4converted_8.pdf#:~:text=We%20speak%20not%20of%20human,%2C%20Christian%2C%20and%20financially%20secure">Lorde put it in 1980</a>:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6vf7vB">
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ft0u18">
For D&amp;D, and many <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/4/3/21191762/tabletop-rpgs-guide-how-to-role-playing-games-dnd-dungeons-and-dragons-online">tabletop role-playing games</a> that followed it, that norm has historically been the white, straight, cisgender man.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uzQ4En">
But that’s starting to change, as evidenced by the fact that the movie only has two straight white guys in lead roles, and one of them (Hugh Grant’s Forge Fitzwilliam) is basically a non-playable character, or NPC.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2ZeqPt">
Some of it is thanks to broader representations in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/6/14/17461488/dungeons-dragons-explained">wider pop culture</a> of the people who play D&amp;D. Even people who don’t know much about the game might have seen it on shows like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1824317/"><em>Community</em></a> or <a href="https://collider.com/stranger-things-season-4-dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-storytelling-explained/"><em>Stranger Things</em></a> — and each of those depicted a diverse set of players.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sCCs8Z">
“It’s a good time for people to get involved in Dungeons &amp; Dragons; it’s a time when it’s booming,” says Bowman. “There’s millions of people playing it online, which we didn’t use to think was really possible. And there’s just tons of streaming shows with all different kinds of representation.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="V8IhVI">
There’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMNzZiN0-P0">Dimension 20</a>, and also Disco Does D&amp;D, a <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/disco_does_dnd/about">livestreamed game</a> played by some of the cast of <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em>, a show that reaches a wide audience and is very conscious about trying to be inclusive and representative.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="W1rqb9">
“It’s become much less fringe,” says Keith Ammann, a longtime player and the <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Keith-Ammann/157457316">author of several books on game tactics</a> in D&amp;D, comparing social attitudes today to those of even 15 years ago. “I think you’re already seeing a significant change, simply in the fact that upon hearing about Dungeons &amp; Dragons, somebody would say, ‘That sounds cool, I’d like to try it sometime.’”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="A7T2Fc">
<em>Honor Among Thieves</em>’ band of adventurers, far from the same-same cast of, say, the <em>Lord of the Rings</em> movies, largely look like the actual <a href="https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1640160379643863042">people who might<strong> </strong>play D&amp;D</a> in the year 2023. It’s no longer a cishet-white-teenage-boys-in-the-basement thing — if it <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-a-new-generation-of-gamers-is-pushing-for-inclusivity-beyond-the-table">ever really was</a> — but the perception, and how D&amp;D players were portrayed in popular culture, often reflected the stereotype rather than the reality.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4cOcwi">
There’s no doubt D&amp;D has its problems, certainly historically (Gygax, one of its creators, believed <a href="https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=204621&amp;sid=8b2610783d00803716db9989e49a1d69#p204621">women didn’t play RPGs because their brains were too different</a> from men’s), but even as recently as 2022, when publisher Wizards of the Coast had to pull an entire people from a new book because the depiction of them was <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23339180/dnd-spelljammer-racist-hadozee-apology-errata">so horribly racist</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1mUqGm">
Not long after that, Mendez, who also works as a cultural consultant with Wizards of the Coast on their other massive property, the card game Magic: The Gathering, was brought on to review other forthcoming D&amp;D content, like the recent heist-themed <a href="https://dnd.wizards.com/products/keys-from-the-golden-vault">Keys from the Golden Vault</a>. In an interview with Vox, he says his work is aimed at rethinking game material that might reinforce racist, sexist, anti-gay, and other oppressive behaviors.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yGybV4">
“If games present topics related to systemic oppression in nuanced, realistic and productive ways, then those same experiences, if we opt into them and have forewarning, can be cathartic and evocative,” says Mendez. That means paying attention to both the large game concepts, like how characters are created, and the small things like how a language handles naming.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0DGTBO">
“The best outcomes for me are when someone from a community which has historically not felt comfortable in a hobby space where there aren’t a lot of people who look like you or identify like you, [from] a community of people who have to sort of push down their own identity and code-switch and mask really hard in order to fit in with the mainstream … can pick up a game and see that the game already thought of them,” he says.
</p>
<h3 id="8dNRl5">
To meet the future, D&amp;D will need to welcome more people in
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fIpv8j">
It’s clear from the combined marketing push around the movie that Hasbro is hoping to entice more people to play the game itself through the sheer fun and spectacle of <em>Honor Among Thieves</em>. But, great, because that’s also what we in the RPG community hope happens.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KqETqX">
“I’m hopeful that it introduces the hobby to people who wouldn’t have considered it before,” says Mendez. “I’m also hopeful that it brings new directions to role-playing as a culture. I think that having that mainstream attention to a niche hobby creates an opportunity for new cultural perspectives.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hf8TTj">
If you’re wondering how much the movie is like <a href="https://www.polygon.com/deals/21294556/dnd-how-to-play-dungeons-dragons-5e-guide-spells-dice-character-sheets-dm">playing D&amp;D</a>, well, it is, but it’s an idealized version of a D&amp;D campaign.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8QDR0U">
“Most of the creators I know in the scene just love the hell out of this movie because they finally see, okay, someone who really likes the material and isn’t just riffing on it for their own purposes but really doing something,” says <a href="https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/torneren">Evan Torner</a>, a professor of film studies at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the school’s Game Lab. “We understand that film has its own language, but this is a film that uses that language to remind us that we’re all kind of kids with stupid plans.”
</p>
<div class="c-float-right">
<aside id="2HGJnF">
<q>“This is a film that uses that language to remind us that we’re all kind of kids with stupid plans”</q>
</aside>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nhuRzb">
Sure, at heart we might all be kids with stupid plans, but when you’re playing with your friends, it becomes something else, too. People who might have started out not knowing each other very well, or even disagreeing with each other, are transmuted through the alchemy of role-playing into something more like family. That found, or chosen, family theme resonates clearly in the movie, especially in Edgin and Holga’s relationship.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XMu4xc">
“They nailed the fact that there are a lot of players, particularly queer players, for whom D&amp;D is really about found family on both an in-character and out-of-character level,” says Feldstein.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Sq6d05">
And when you have family on your side, and everyone works together, even the wildest plans can sometimes lead to victory.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="esXYGa">
There’s a scene near the end of <em>Honor Among Thieves</em> where the group finally gears up to face the biggest, baddest opponent, Sofina (Daisy Head), a scheming, ultra-powerful wizard who has nearly murdered them all before at some point or another and by all rights should succeed this time. Her eventual defeat — at the hands of Edgin’s young daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), who, in an unlikely twist, uses an invisibility spell to sneakily slap a magic-suppressing bracelet on Sofina’s wrist — might have felt anticlimactic to some of the audience, as the main characters then take turns dispatching the incapacitated wizard in just a few rounds, and the fight’s over pretty quickly.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qr5uan">
For a D&amp;D player, though, this was absolutely chef’s-kiss perfect: There’s nothing quite like saving the world with some creative combination of a low-powered spell and a random trinket you forgot was in your character’s inventory until just now.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HeWinu">
“It’s like looking down at your character sheet and being like, ‘What do I have to face this completely impossible situation?’ And you’ve got what you need,” Torner said.
</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Union Home Ministry recommends CBI probe against Oxfam India</strong> - The Home Ministry found that Oxfam India continued to transfer foreign contributions to various entities even after registering under the FCRA, which prohibits such transfers.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Masha Moskaleva: Girl who drew anti-war image handed to mother</strong> - The Russian girl was taken away from her father after her school reported the picture to the authorities.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Italy watches as ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi lies in hospital</strong> - Colleagues express hopes that he will return to politics amid reports that he has leukaemia.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The cost of the Ukraine war for one Russian regiment</strong> - The decline of the “elite” 331st regiment can be measured in loss to machinery and personnel.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Warning post-Brexit border checks could deter EU imports</strong> - The Cold Chain Federation says planned new measures will put off some suppliers and push up food prices.</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a madcap love letter to fans</strong> - Who needs a plot? This roller coaster of a movie made my inner 10-year-old jump for joy. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1929552">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>After the death of Stadia, VP Phil Harrison has left Google</strong> - There’s now nothing left of Google’s once-grand gaming ambitions. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1929515">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>How Pink Floyd inspired research into medieval monks and volcanology</strong> - Study combines medieval European, Middle Eastern texts with ice core and tree ring data - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1929373">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Operation Cookie Monster: Feds seize “notorious hacker marketplace”</strong> - Genesis Market sold user data and a tool that mimics each victim’s web browser. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1929514">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Meta introduces AI model that can isolate and mask objects within images</strong> - “Segment Anything” model uses image segmentation to isolate objects on command. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1929377">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Why are lesbians bad at cooking?</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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Because lesbians prefer eating out.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/starfyredragon"> /u/starfyredragon </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d3dsc/why_are_lesbians_bad_at_cooking/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d3dsc/why_are_lesbians_bad_at_cooking/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A British Jew is to be knighted by the King.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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He is to kneel in front of him and recite a sentence in Latin when he taps him on the shoulders with his sword. However, when his turn comes, he panics in the excitement of the moment and forgets the Latin. Then, thinking fast, he recites the only other sentence he knows in a foreign language, which he remembers from the Passover seder:
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“Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot.”
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Puzzled, His Majesty turns to his advisor and whispers, “Why is this knight different from all other knights?”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/WJMorris3"> /u/WJMorris3 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d4y84/a_british_jew_is_to_be_knighted_by_the_king/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d4y84/a_british_jew_is_to_be_knighted_by_the_king/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>They say Donald Trump was charged with crimes that would have been ignored if someone else had committed them</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
I guess orange really is the new black.
</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/KarmicComic12334"> /u/KarmicComic12334 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12cfvb1/they_say_donald_trump_was_charged_with_crimes/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12cfvb1/they_say_donald_trump_was_charged_with_crimes/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>My wife asked me to stop acting like a flamingo</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
I had to put my foot down.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/PM_me_your_pee_video"> /u/PM_me_your_pee_video </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d5rq0/my_wife_asked_me_to_stop_acting_like_a_flamingo/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12d5rq0/my_wife_asked_me_to_stop_acting_like_a_flamingo/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Cinderella wants to go to the ball, but her wicked stepmother won’t let her… As Cinderella sits crying in the garden, her fairy godmother appears and promises to provide Cinderella with everything she needs to go to the ball, but only on two conditions.“First, you must wear a diaphragm.”</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Cinderella agrees.“What’s the second condition?” “You must be home by 2 a.m. Any later and your diaphragm will turn into a pumpkin.” Cinderella agrees to be home by 2 a.m.
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The appointed hour comes and goes and Cinderella doesn’t show up.
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Finally, at 5 a.m., Cinderella shows up, looking love-struck and very satisfied.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“Where have you been?” demands the fairy godmother. “Your diaphragm was supposed to turn into a pumpkin three hours ago!!!”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“I met a prince, Fairy Godmother. He took care of everything.”
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“I know of no prince with that kind of power! Tell me his name!”
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“I can’t remember, exactly… Peter Peter, something or other…”
</p>
</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/YZXFILE"> /u/YZXFILE </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12cxz9j/cinderella_wants_to_go_to_the_ball_but_her_wicked/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/12cxz9j/cinderella_wants_to_go_to_the_ball_but_her_wicked/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
</ul>
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