How Cities in the American North Can Reckon with Their Monuments - There are no statues honoring the Confederacy to be found in Boston or Cambridge, but there are plenty of historic memorials that obscure the achievements of Black Americans. - link
The Power of Dave Chappelle’s Comedy - He has always understood the risk, in riffing on the racial absurdities of American culture, of reinforcing rather than undermining them. The absence of concern of this kind about the impact of “The Closer” is striking. - link
Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek” - How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval. - link
At COP26, Could India Become a Champion, Not Just a Casualty, of the Climate Crisis? - If the nation’s call to leadership in the twentieth century was decolonization, in this century it is decarbonization. - link
Dave Chappelle, Netflix, and the Illusions of Corporate Identity Politics - The controversy over the comedian’s latest special is most telling not for its lessons on cancel culture or comedy but as a window on the streaming platform’s approach to so-called content. - link
From Vox
A contrarian take on the disinformation panic -
Jake Angeli, 33, a.k.a. Yellowstone Wolf, from Phoenix, wrapped in a QAnon flag, addresses supporters of US President Donald Trump as they protest outside the Maricopa County Election Department as counting continues after the US presidential election in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5, 2020. | Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
Joe Bernstein on what we know — and don’t know — about disinformation.
If you’ve followed the news over the last few years, you’re probably convinced that we’re living in a golden age of conspiracy theories and disinformation.
Whether it’s QAnon or the January 6 insurrection or anti-vaccine hysteria, many have come to believe that the culprit, more often than not, is bad information — and the fantasy-industrial complex that generates and propagates it — breaking people’s brains.
However, I read an essay recently in Harper’s magazine that made me wonder whether the story was as simple as that. I can’t say that it changed my mind in any profound way about the real-world consequences of lies, but it did make me question some of my core assumptions about the information ecosystem online. It’s called “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation,” and the author is Joseph Bernstein, a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News.
Bernstein doesn’t deny that disinformation is a thing.The problem is that we don’t have a consistent definition of the term. What you find in the literature, Bernstein says, is a lot of vague references to information “that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the state of the world.”
A definition that broad, he argues, isn’t all that useful as a foundation for objective study. And it’s also not that clear how disinformation is distinct from misinformation, except that the former is considered more “intentionally” misleading. All of this leads Bernstein to the conclusion that even the people researching this stuff can’t agree on what they’re talking about.
But the bigger — and much less understood — issue is that certain interests are invested in over-hyping disinformation as an existential crisis because it’s good for business and because it’s a way of denying the real roots of our problems.
I reached out to him for this week’s episode of Vox Conversations to talk about where he thinks the disinformation discourse went wrong and why it’s not all that clear whether the internet broke American society or merelyunmasked it.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years making noises about disinformation and misinformation and what a great problem it is, and I have to say, you’ve really made me pause and think hard about how easily I’ve bought into the conventional wisdom on this stuff.
But let’s just start there: Do you think people like me, that have been worrying publicly about disinformation, have been part of a panic?
Joe Bernstein
I think that the idea of bad information on the internet is a poorly understood and at times poorly discussed topic. That is a huge topic. That is a new topic. That is a very important topic, but that like many problems, it helps to define them. And if you have trouble defining them, it helps to think about why. And when you start thinking about why, it helps to think about who is trying to define the problem and why.
And so, I’m not comfortable even necessarily calling it a panic because I think, especially as we’ve seen with this series of revelations in the Wall Street Journal over the past couple of weeks, and then the testimony of the Facebook whistleblower, these are real problems. It’s just not clear to me that we understand completely what’s at stake or that we understand completely how these categories that are being kind of tossed around — and I’ve at times tossed them around too, mis- and disinformation — how they’re being used.
And that’s really what I wanted to do: not to say that several private companies having monopoly power over the flow of information is a thing we should just be happy with and live with, but that when we talk about the problem, we should understand who wants to address it and why.
Sean Illing
It might surprise people to learn that even the researchers studying disinformation can’t come up with a coherent or consistent definition of the term.
Joe Bernstein
This is one of the things that I played for laughs in the piece. What scholars would say is that they have a lexical problem. Everyone knows there’s an issue, but everyone is attacking this issue using the same word, with a different idea in their head.
So the most comprehensive survey of the scholarly field is from 2018. It’s a scientific literature review called “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation.” And the definition they give of disinformation — and this is a good, broad survey of the field — this is the definition they give: “Disinformation is intended to be a broad category describing the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world.”
Now, as far as I can tell, that definition basically applies to anything you could come in contact with online. And Sean, I should make the point, this trickles down to the definitions that tech companies use when they define mis- and disinformation. So — I’m not going to get this exactly right — but TikTok’s definition of misinformation is something like, “information that is not true or information that could mislead or is not true.” There’s just not a lot of there there. There’s a lot of good research, but for something that aspires to be kind of an objective science, there’s not a good objective foundation.
Sean Illing
A big problem here is that we’re desperate for some kind of neutral definition of disinformation so that it’s possible to call something “disinformation” without it appearing political, but that doesn’t seem possible.
Joe Bernstein
Yeah. And then, one of the interesting things to me was when I looked up the etymology of the term — it’s actually a borrowing from a Russian word that was popularized in the early years of the Cold War: dezinformatsiya. It was initially defined in the 1952 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which was kind of a propaganda encyclopedia meant for English consumption. Its definition was as follows: “dissemination in the press or on the radio of false reports intended to mislead public opinion. The capitalist press and radio make wide use of dezinformatsiya.”
I don’t mean to be a complete relativist and say there aren’t things that are true or false. Of course there are. But on the internet especially, context is very, very important, and it’s very hard to isolate particular nuggets of information as good or bad information.
Sean Illing
What’s a better definition of “disinformation”? How’s it distinct from “misinformation” or “propaganda”?
Joe Bernstein
I like the word propaganda better than I like the words mis- and disinformation because I think it has a stronger political connotation. I think there is a broad understanding among the people who study and the people who talk about mis- and disinformation in the media, that disinformation is more intentional than misinformation, and misinformation tends to be poorly contextualized but nevertheless true or “truthy” information.
What I wanted to do with this piece is make it clear that these definitions have politics behind them, in the way people who use them have politics behind them. I don’t even think there’s necessarily anything wrong with using these terms, as long as it’s clear that there are interests.
And I’m not implying some kind of broad conspiracy. I take pains to say — maybe I didn’t say it enough in the piece — that there are people who are operating in utter good faith, who care deeply about public discourse, who are studying this problem. I just want some recognition that the use of these terms has a politics behind it, even if that’s a centrist or kind of a conventional liberal politics. I would like that to be a feature of the discussion.
Sean Illing
A big claim in your piece is that the disinformation craze has become a vehicle for propping up the online advertising economy, and it might sound counterintuitive to say that Big Tech companies like Facebook would enthusiastically embrace the idea that “disinformation” is a major problem.
What does a company like Facebook stand to gain here? Why are they selling this so hard?
Joe Bernstein
Well, one of the things that got me thinking about this was, I started with kind of a buzzword that I have used; the “information ecosystem.” It just kind of makes intuitive sense. We have a world, the natural world of information, and then something’s polluted it. And so then I started thinking about other industries that pollute, and that have gotten in trouble for polluting.
So like the tobacco industry — which has been a major point of comparison to big tech recently — well, cigarettes give people cancer. Or the fossil fuel industry, it pollutes and it’s contributing to climate change. And there’s good science behind that. And yet these industries have spent years fighting the science, trying to undermine the science.
And I was very surprised when I thought about the timeline of how long it took Facebook to be blamed, for throwing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor and for Brexit, to when Mark Zuckerberg essentially publicly admitted misinformation was a problem. And we intuit that’s true, but I don’t think the science is necessarily there. I don’t think the study of media effects on politics is necessarily there yet.
I mean, we’re still getting the political science on the effect of Father Coughlin on, I believe, the 1936 election. These are questions that are going to be resolved over time. But you had Mark Zuckerberg out there in public basically saying, “We’re going to fight misinformation.”
Partially, that’s because I think Facebook has never had a particularly coherent press strategy. But part of it, I think, is that Facebook realized very quickly, as did the other big tech companies, that rather than in a kind of blanket way say, “This isn’t true. These claims, there’s no empirical basis behind them,” I think they realized that co-opting, or at least sort of putting their arms around the people who are doing this research, was a better strategy.
And I started to wonder why. From a public relations perspective, it makes good sense. But also, I started to think about the nature of the claim itself, that people being exposed to bad information are necessarily convinced by that information. And then, that’s when I kind of had a “eureka” moment, which was that’s exactly the same way that Facebook makes money. What Hannah Arendt calls the “psychological premise of human manipulability,” which is kind of a mouthful.
And so, if we accept that people are endlessly convincible by whatever bullshit they see on Facebook, on the internet, in some ways we’re contributing to the idea that the ad duopoly, Facebook and Google and just online ads in general, works.
I’m kind of going on, but there’s a terrific book that I read around that time by a guy who’s now the general counsel of Substack. He’s a guy named Tim Wong, who worked at Google for a long time. The book is called Subprime Attention Crisis. And it’s basically about how much of the online ad industry is a house of cards.
One very interesting fact about the Facebook whistleblower disclosures to the SEC, and one that got almost no press attention, is that she claims, based on internal Facebook research, that they were badly misleading investors in the reach and efficacy of their ads. And to me, the most damaging thing you could say about Facebook is that this kind of industrial information machine doesn’t actually work.
And so that kind of flipped everything I thought about this on its head. And that’s when I started to write the piece.
Is ignoring the pandemic a crime against humanity? -
Protesters wearing masks depicting President Jair Bolsonaro protest the government’s Covid-19 response in Brasilia, Brazil, on October 20. | Andressa Anholete/Getty Images
Brazilian lawmakers may try to make the case, though experts are skeptical of how far it could go.
Brazil has the world’s second-highest official Covid-19 death toll, just after the United States, with more than 600,000 fatalities. Manaus, the capital of the Amazonas, had a deadly first wave that saw mass graves, and a dangerous second where it ran out of oxygen. Through it all, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed what he once called the “little flu,”dismissed public health measures, and promoted unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine while undermining proven approaches, like vaccines.
Now some Brazilian lawmakers are trying tohold Bolsonaro and his associates accountable. A Senate committee will vote Tuesday ona more than 1,000-page report outlining the government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 outbreak and vaccination campaign. The result of a months-long inquiry by a congressional panel, the report recommends charges for Bolsonaro, among them falsification of documents, misuse of public funds, and charlatanism.
The report says crimes against humanity come into play as “the entire population was deliberately subject to the effects of the pandemic, with the intention of trying to reach herd immunity through contagion and save the economy.” The report specifically ties these “crimes against humanity” to Indigenous peoples, saying the virus was an “ally” of the Bolsonaro government in its anti-Indigenous policies.
The “crimes against humanity” charge raises a question beyond Bolsonaro, and Brazil, about how to hold leaders accountable for real malfeasance and negligence during public health emergencies, like the still- unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. And does malfeasance rise to the level of egregiousness the world typically associates with war and repression — or at least could it?
The question is largely untested, specifically at the International Criminal Court, the venue to which the Senate committee may refer the “crimes against humanity” charge, if senators agree to it in the final vote. (Lawmakers are likely to refer the other allegations to the prosecutor-general, but he is a Bolsonaro ally and is unlikely to pursue criminal charges against the president or any of his associates.) The ICC, based in the Hague, is sometimes called the “court of last resort,” stepping in when nations themselves cannot or will not prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
It seems unlikely thatBolsonaro’s Covid-19 gross mismanagement will be taken up by the court, many experts said — but deliberate mishandling of a disease could still fit within the definition of “crimes against humanity.”
If this case is referred to the ICC, it may be the first test of whether leaders can face criminal consequences for public health disasters of their own making.
Should leaders be held accountable for Covid-19 malfeasance?
The ICC could take up a case against Bolsonaro in theory.Brazil is party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that brought the court into force in 2002. That means if crimes against humanity happen in Brazil, the ICC has jurisdiction, said David Bosco, an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University who’s researched the ICC. (Not all countries are signatories, including the United States, which feared American troops might be subject to prosecution for actions overseas; the Trump administration even sanctioned some top ICC officials.)
But even if the Senate does follow through, a referral to the ICC prosecutor is just that. It’s ultimately up to the ICC to take up a case, examine it, and pursue it. Typically, cases are referred by states themselves (or the United Nations Security Council), but it seems unlikely that the Bolsonaro government is going to refer itself. The ICC doesn’t have an obligation to pursue any referral from an outside group or even lawmakers, though the ICC can initiate its own investigations. The ICC has 15 investigations underway, and 12 preliminary investigations, according to the ICC’s website, none of them in Brazil right now.
As troubling as the allegations against Bolsonaro are in this big report, they are not a neat fit for a crimes against humanity case.
It’s worth starting with what the law says. The Rome Statute says a crime against humanity exists “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.” That could be widespread or systematic murder, or forced disappearance, or, as the very last provision says: “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”
David Scheffer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who helped lead the US delegation on ICC talks two decades ago, said the catchall nature of the last one is deliberate. “It is obvious that other types of assaults on your civilian population are going to emerge in the future, and you have to provide for that in the statute,” he said. “It’s hard to think of a better example than intentional mismanagement of a Covid-19 pandemic or some other pathogen. And so I would argue that, yes, that’s fair game.”
The investigations and prosecutions that the ICC takes up involve some of the most brutal crimes, and so the bar is incredibly high: To prove crimes against humanity, of any sort, prosecutors have to prove knowledge and intent.
“Disease can be a weapon, and so you could certainly imagine that constituting a crime against humanity,” Bosco said. “But negligence or disinformation, that would be a harder fit.”
It’s especially tricky with a still-evolving event like the Covid-19 pandemic. The science changed, and is changing. The origins of the disease, different possible treatments, the mask-wearing of it all — expert opinion shifted throughout the pandemic. A robust pandemic response also takes resources that leaders might not have, and not all countries have access to lifesaving medical interventions like vaccines.
As experts pointed out, it is a very high bar to prove knowledge and intent, and that’s ultimately what the ICC prosecutors would have to investigate and prove in any case involving crimes against humanity. Trying to parse that out in an evolving pandemic and with a new pathogen is an extraordinary task. But, as Scheffer said, as the scientific consensus coalesces, public officials “need to be responsible enough to follow the procedures and policies that can defeat and overcome the public health threat to their populations.”
Experts I spoke to say there really isn’t an obvious precedent for a crime against humanity case in a public health setting; the closest examples, like destruction of water systems in Darfur, Sudan, came in the context of a larger conflict. Covid-19 has killed nearly 5 million people globally, and failures in leadership around the world likely exacerbated the toll. Other leaders have made missteps, or denied the seriousness of the pandemic at points, that may have contributed to Covid-19’s spread, from India’s Narendra Modi to the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson to Donald Trump in the US.
But deliberate intent to allow a disease to spread has to be carefully and precisely separated from what was done in error, or ineptly. The ICC is dealing with some very tough and longstanding investigations, which makes it seem unlikely it would take up a case like this. “Bolsonaro’s response to Covid has been egregious, but for both legal and pragmatic reasons, I don’t see it being something that the ICC will take up,” said Rebecca Hamilton, an associate professor at Washington College of Law.
Bolsonaro is already facing referrals to the ICC, mostly from Indigenous and environmental groups. A few weeks ago, a group accused Bolsonaro of “crimes against humanity” for the “widespread attack on the Amazon, its dependents and its defenders that not only result in the persecution, murder and inhumane suffering in the region, but also upon the global population.”
Another ICC referral could certainly raise the profile of those other cases, and, especially since the Senate’s report focuses a lot on the Covid-19 fallout on Indigenous communities, Scheffer said the cases all might look a lot stronger together. “The ICC has a thick file on Brazil right now, a very thick file,” he said.
And it is still remarkable that lawmakers in Brazil are making the case not only that Bolsonaro failed at the pandemic, but also that some of his actions constitute a crime against humanity. It’s an attempt to hold Bolsonaro himself accountable and potentially to secure guardrails for the next pandemic or public health crisis. If leaders faced the threat of criminal prosecutionfor putting their populations at grave risk, they might not pursue those policies at all.
House isn’t selling? Blame the ghosts. -
Zac Freeland/Vox
The Nyack, New York, home is a looker. A baby-blue Victorian clocking in at more than a century old, and endowed with a prime view of the Hudson River and proximity to New York City, it might even have inspired an Edward Hopper painting. Perhaps less desirable, however, were the three ghosts allegedly loitering around the property.
Helen Ackley, who lived in the house from the 1960s to the early 1990s, believed the ghosts resided in her home, telling the New York Times that she once saw one while she was painting the living room ceiling and that another one waltzed in her daughter’s bedroom. The third ghost, she said, was seen by her son and was a Navy lieutenant during the Revolutionary War. It may have all been fun and games until, after decades of calling the place home, Ackley made moves to sell the property at the tail end of the 1980s.
In 1989, an out-of-town buyer emerged, someone who was unaware of the house’s well-known local reputation for being haunted. The unlucky man, Jeffrey Stambovsky, a bond trader from New York City, eagerly put down $32,000 on what he thought would be his new $650,000home. Until, that is, he learned of the home’s mysterious past. Spooked, Stambovsky sued, demanding his down payment back. New York’s State Supreme Court, in a 3-2 decision that has become a staple in many law school classes, decided in his favor.
“As a matter of law, the house is haunted,” wrote Justice Israel Rubin for the court in what would later come to be called the Ghostbusters ruling.
The case of Stambovsky v. Ackley is a quirky artifact of legal history, but it also prompts questions about the flimsy underpinnings that hold up the institution of homeownership. A home is the largest and arguably most important asset any American will ever own. Its value rests on a variety of factors, like architectural style or the size of the kitchen, but most uncomfortably, it rests on subjective beliefs around what is and isn’t desirable. Part of that subjective evaluation includes the paranormal. Good schools can bump up a home price. Ghosts lurking by the basement door, not so much.
In fact, paranormal activity affecting property prices is common enough that a cottage industry has sprung up trying to clear homes of anything supernatural before a sale. It’s a reflection of just how tenuous the value of a property is that the whispers of ghosts can inflict a real cost.
That’s why the Ghostbusters case isn’t the only time that the legal system has had to wrestle withthe question of what to do with purportedly haunted houses or places where there has recently been a death.
Four states have laws on the books regarding paranormal activity and real estate, according to Zillow. In New York, as the Stambovsky case settled, if a seller invents and maintains that their property is haunted and then allows a potential buyer to remain ignorant of the “home’s ghostly reputation,” the court will rescind the sale.
In New Jersey, if homeowners are asked, they’re required to disclose whether there are “psychological impairments.” In Massachusetts and Minnesota, the laws go in the other direction: Instead of ensuring that the buyer has information about paranormal activity, the law protects a seller who may choose to withhold that info.
Caring about ghosts in your home isn’t just for the superstitious, it’s for a market-conscious buyer as well. Even if just 10 percent of people would be uncomfortable buying a home where there are rumored to be ghosts, that reduces the value of the property, because it can reduce demand.And 10 percent could be an underestimate: A 2009 Pew survey found that nearly a fifth of Americans said they had “seen or been in the presence of a ghost.” A more recent 2019 YouGov poll found that roughly 45 percent of Americans believed in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings.
It’s unclear how many people would allow that belief to affect their home-buying decisions— particularly in a market as hot as this one — but a dissentingjudge in the Ghostbusters case wrote that Stambovsky sued because, “as a result of the alleged poltergeist activity, the market value and resaleability of the property was greatly diminished.”
David Chapman, a real estate professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, wrote about the Stambovsky case and how to teach it in a paper subtitled You don’t have a ghost of a chance. Chapman, a real estate agent, says he’s had clients refuse to buy properties if they think there might be something strange going on in the home. “I had a client that carried a box, some sort of Geiger-counter-looking-thing, and she would put it in front of each house and it would determine whether we would even go into the house at all,” he tells Vox.
Chapman also notes that America’s aging housing stock could change how frequently this comes up. “My wife and I own a lot of houses that were built between 1895 and 1920, so if you look at the amount of owners that had been through those homes, I would guess that there were not very many of those that somebody did not die in the house,” he says.
According to Freddie Mac, more than 50 percent of single family homes were built before 1980 — and the older the home, the higher the chance that someone died there.
In his written opinion, Judge Rubin from the Stambovsky case sarcastically quipped that while buyers are legally responsible for screening their purchases, strictly applying that standard “to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying the structural engineer and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale.”
While the image of a psychic accompanying would-be buyers to each property might be comical, it’s not as far-fetched as the judge made it sound. A cottage industry of spirit-related businessesexists to assist buyers and sellers grappling with the ghosts that may or may not be lurking beneath the floorboards. The website DiedInHouse.com was started in 2012 after its founder got a call from a tenant who noticed paranormal activity in her home. Now, people can pay $11.99 to get a report about whether anyone has ever died in the house they are considering purchasing.
For some, the knowledge of whether there was a death — or even a murder —in the house recently isn’t enough. That’s where Jane Phillips comes in.
Jane Phillips is a self-proclaimed ghostbuster whotravelsthe country offering “paranormal energy clearing services” to real estate agents and homeowners alike. Her business is often driven by agents who are having difficulty getting a listing sold; they call Phillips, she clears the house, and, she tells Vox, that makes it possible for the house to sell.
A mortgage banker before becoming a professional psychic, Phillips is in tune with the real estate world.She runs her business out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but says she does business “all over the world.”
One of her clients, a Santa Fe real estate agent named Suzanne Taylor, uses Phillips’ services frequently when selling homes. “I buy and sell a lot of properties that are distressed and very old…so I use Jane all the time,” she says, explaining that she’ll spend hundreds of dollars each time Phillips comes to a house and “clears” it of any negative or supernatural energy.
Phillips has a checklist, she explains, that helps her rule out things like a loose screen door that could be blown open by the wind. “An oncologist is always going to see cancer,” Phillips adds. “I’m a paranormal, so I’m always looking for it to be paranormal… but I have to put some reason and logic in.”
Along with using essential oils, a pendulum, and some L-shaped rods, Phillips explains, she taps into her “intuition and psychic abilities to remove interfering and dark energies.”
For some buyers, a little spiritual cleansing is enough to make a sale — particularly in a housing market this hot. Over the last year, demand for homes has spiked, exacerbating an already dire housing shortage in the United States. Research by Freddie Mac shows that the US is short 3.8 million homes to satisfy the existing demand. This has made people more willing to overlook a lot of their preferences around homes in order to get their hands on any property — even violent deaths in the home.
“Given a choice, people would rather not buy [a home] that has a psychological problem, but when they don’t have a choice, they will,” Chapman says.
Owning a home in the United States is not simply a way to find shelter in a place where you’d like to live; for many, owning a home is a bet on the future value of that property. Yet, as one of the primary wealth-building tools Americans have access to and are encouraged by government policy to pursue, the bet of homeownership can be remarkably risky.
Unlike many other physical assets, a home’s value is predicated on more than just the cost of the physical materials. Things outside of an owner’s control like the quality of nearby schools, the crime rate, changing fads about what type of house style is “in” and, of course, whether or not it is haunted, play an important role. And, importantly, neither the buyer nor the seller need themselves to be believers in the paranormal for it to affect the value of the home.
While it can be a bit funny to think of something like a poltergeist affecting your retirement nest egg, it becomes sobering to consider the more insidious ways that subjective evaluations can affect homeowners. Most notably, Black Americans have faced a racism penalty when selling their homes: Many find their homes undervalued relative to their white counterparts, finding a decreased demand to live in Black neighborhoods can negatively impact the value of their homes.
As for the Nyack house, it turned out to be a case study in never knowing how public opinion will end up affecting the market: While Ackley lost the case, the publicity ended up actually working in her favor.
After the Ghostbusters ruling became a curiosity, it increased the value of the home for people who were interested in living in a haunted house. Roughly 30 years after the case was settled,film director Adam Brooks, musician Ingrid Michaelson, and singer/rapper Matisyahu have all lived in the home.
Jerusalem Demsas is a policy reporter specializing in housing for Vox.
From The Hindu: Sports
Rahul Dravid formally applies for head coach’s post - It is reliably learnt that he is the first and only choice of BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah.
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Lewis hits fifty before South Africa restricts West Indies - Both South Africa and West Indies started their Super 12 campaign on a losing note.
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Namibia eyes Scotland scalp in opening Super 12 match - It was a historic moment for Namibia which has a population of 2.5 million and doesn’t boost of any cricketing legacy.
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | High-flying England face Bangladesh challenge in tricky conditions - Teams have been successful in chasing so far in the World Cup at this venue
Hardik Pandya’s shoulder injury ‘not serious’ but team management will ‘wait and watch’ - Pandya, who did not bowl in the IPL last month, is playing only as a batter right now and scored 11 off 8 balls on Sunday night, looking distinctly uncomfortable against pacers before being hit on the shoulder by a short ball.
From The Hindu: National News
Govt. notifies framework for traffic management of drones in lower airspace - Current air traffic management (ATM) systems have not been designed to handle the traffic from unmanned aircraft, the framework issued on October 24 stated.
Water auditing needed to minimise wastage in industries: expert - ‘Excessive use is another challenge in agriculture activity’
Jayalalithaa death: SC wonders if panel “virtually becoming a judge of his own cause” - Apex court hearing a plea by Apollo Hospitals accusing Commission of Inquiry (CoI) of bias
People to face torture with extension of BSF jurisdiction: Mamata - “In the garb of extending BSF’s jurisdiction, people will be tortured. There was no need to do so, the BSF does not even have the authority to lodge an FIR,” the CM said during an administrative meeting of Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts.
Mahila Police’ case: AP High Court directs State to file counter in four weeks - The court also issued notices to the Chief Secretary of Andhra Pradesh (AP) Government, Principal Secretary (Home) and chairpersons of AP Police Recruitment Board and AP Public Service Commission.
From BBC: Europe
Berlin attack: First aider dies 5 years after Christmas market murders - Sascha Hüsges was badly injured when he rushed to help victims of the 2016 Christmas market attack.
Crimean gold must return to Ukraine - Dutch court - The legal wrangle has dragged on for seven years, since Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine.
Turkey dispute with US eases after threat to expel envoys - Ten Western ambassadors had angered the Turkish president by urging a jailed activist’s release.
German IS woman jailed for Yazidi girl’s death in Iraq - A Munich court jails a jihadi bride for 10 years for the agonising death of a Yazidi girl in 2015.
Covid: Biden sets new rules as air travel to the US reopens - All foreign travellers to the US will be required to show proof of vaccination or a negative test.
From Ars Technica
iOS 15.1 brings delayed SharePlay feature to iPhones and iPads - iOS also adds ProRes video-capture support on the iPhone 13 Pro. - link
Tesla pulls Full Self-Driving update after sudden braking spooks drivers - Automaker released another new version of its controversial software today. - link
Viewing website HTML code is not illegal or “hacking,” prof. tells Missouri gov. - Professor demands that governor halt “baseless investigation” and apologize. - link
Resident Evil 4 VR analysis: Use Sidequest to access what Facebook denies you - Not every classic 3D game works in VR, but RE4 sure does. - link
Four revelations from the Facebook Papers - Trove of leaked documents paint damaging picture of company that has prioritized growth. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A man walks into a brain store to buy a new brain -
He goes to the clerk and says
“Hello, I’d like to purchase a new brain”.
The clerk replies with “Sure, here are some of our brains we have on sale” “Here’s the brain of a physicist, 5 dollars.”
“Here’s our second deal for today. The brain of an anti-vaxxer, 10,000 dollars”.
The man, completely confused, asks “Why is the brain of an anti-vaxxer more expensive than of a physicist?”
A man met a beautiful girl and he decided he wanted to marry her right away. She protested, “But we don’t know anything about each other.” He replied, “That’s all right; we’ll learn about each other as we go along.” -
So she consented and they were married, and they went on honeymoon to a very nice resort.
One morning, they were lying by the pool when he got up off his towel, climbed up to the 30-foot high board and did a two-and-a-half-tuck gainer, entering the water perfectly, almost without a ripple. This was followed by three rotations in jack-knife position before he again straightened out and cut the water like a knife. After a few more demonstrations, he came back and lay down on his towel.
She said, “That was incredible.”
He said, “I used to be an Olympic diving champion. You see, I told you we’d learn more about ourselves as we went along.”
So she got up, jumped in the pool and started doing laps. She was moving so fast that the ripples from her pushing off at one end of the pool would hardly be gone before she was already touching the other end of the pool. After about thirty laps, completed in mere minutes, she climbed back out and lay down on her towel, barely breathing hard.
He said, “That was incredible! Were you an Olympic endurance swimmer?”
“No,” she said, “I was a prostitute in Venice and I worked both sides of the canal.”
A man who just got a raise decides to buy a new scope for his rifle. He goes to a rifle shop and asks the clerk to show him a scope.s -
The clerk takes out a scope and says to the man, “This scope is so good, you can see my house up on that hill.”
The man takes a look through the scope, and starts laughing. “What’s so funny?” asks the clerk.
“I see a naked man and a naked woman running around in the house,” the man replies.
The clerk grabs the scope from the man, and looks at his house. Then he hands two bullets to the man and says, “Here are two bullets. I’ll give you this scope for nothing if you take these two bullets, shoot my wife’s head off and shoot the guy’s dick off.”
The man takes another look through the scope and says, “You know what? I think I can do that with one shot!”
4 guys meet in hell. A Bodybuilder, a Muslim, a Buddhist monk, and an American. -
Satan comes over, whip in hand, and says:
-Those who endure 10 whiplashes can go to Heaven, the rest will stay here in Hell!
The American glances at the bodybuilder and is about to argue when Satan interrupts him,
-Everyone can choose 1 thing to place at your back and protect you from the whiplashes. Let’s start.
The bodybuilder steps up, with full conviction, he chooses a large and heavy metal shield to protect his back. Then, Satan starts with the whiplashes,
1…2… And the shield breaks apart. The 3rd never came, the bodybuilder screamed ‘Please NO, I give up!’
The Muslim steps forward this time. With a smug face, he asks for the physical manifestation of his faith to protect his back. He had done lots of terrible things, but it was all in the name of faith and it would protect him now.
1…2…3…and his faith began to waver…4…5…6… And the sound of something breaking could be heard. Before there was a 7th, he cries out pathetically ‘stop, stop, stop. Please stop!!’
Here comes the Buddhist monk’s turn. He asks for no protection, for pain is in the mind, he will hide behind nothing, and his body would endure any torment!
1…2…3… And he grits his teeth…4…5…6… Tears could be seen in his eyes…7…8…9…10… There is snot coming out of his nose and his back is badly mutilated. But he made it.
Now it’s the American’s turn. He is asked, by Satan, what does he choose to protect his back. The American ponders for a little while, and then calmly says,
A woman asked an Army General when the last time he had made love to a woman. The general replied “1956, ma’am.” The woman, in disbelief said “1956?! That long? Come with me and let me make your night better.” The woman and general went back to her apartment and made passionate love for over an hour. Afterwards, the woman cuddled up to the general and said “Well, you sure haven’t forgotten anything since 1956…” The general looked at her, confused, and replied “I sure hope not, it’s only 2130 now.”
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png){kind=logo}