What’s Left in the Democrats’ Shrunken Spending Bill? - As the White House pushes for an agreement, some progressives are expressing dismay at the changes demanded by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. - link
At the U.N. Climate Summit, Could India Become a Champion, Not Just a Casualty, of the Crisis? - If the nation’s call to leadership in the twentieth century was decolonization, in this century it is decarbonization. - link
Who Gets to Escape the Taliban - The chaotic American withdrawal forced individual soldiers, aid workers, and journalists to decide which Afghans would be saved. - link
Pope Francis and Joe Biden Will Meet in Rome but Not, Alas, in Glasgow - The Pontiff and the President have common goals on climate change—and similar problems at home. - link
The Enduring Appeal of “Dune” as an Adolescent Power Fantasy - When you’re a teen-ager like Paul Atreides, it can seem like authority figures are always forcing you to do pointless, excruciating things. - link
From Vox
Is it okay to harvest pig kidneys to save human lives? -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
We’re starting to grow pigs to take their organs and put them in humans. Wait, what?
“David is a great transplant surgeon. Five of his patients need new parts — one needs a heart, the others need, respectively, liver, stomach, spleen, and spinal cord — but all are of the same, relatively rare, blood-type. By chance, David learns of a healthy specimen with that very blood-type. David can take the healthy specimen’s parts, killing him, and install them in his patients, saving them.”
The story raises many important ethical questions, but the core one is simple: Is it okay to sacrifice one life to save five? In this case, only the most hardened utilitarian would say yes. Treating a human being as nothing but a container for organs strikes many as intuitively repugnant, even if so doing would spare five others an early death.
Until recently, the question of trading a life for another through organ donation was largely hypothetical, grist for prize-winning sci-fi novels. But on September 25, Robert Montgomery showed that you could implant a pig kidney in a human, and the question became very concrete, very fast. No, we’re not killing humans to harvest their organs, as Thomson or Kazuo Ishiguro imagined. But we’re killing intelligent animals for their organs, and the moral consequences of that should weigh on us.
Montgomery, a surgeon who runs the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center, performed the landmark operation on a dead subject. With the consent of the family, the body of the deceased was maintained using a ventilator for 54 hours, to see how an implanted pig kidney would function.
The kidney functioned about as well as a human kidney transplant, at least during that short window of time. At a press conference announcing the surgery, Montgomery noted that the implanted kidney, attached to a leg, “began functioning and making large amounts of urine within minutes,” a key function of the kidneys. He also said that levels of creatinine (a waste product produced by muscles and filtered out by the kidney) in the donor’s blood were normal, another sign of sound kidney functioning. He predicted that we could be seeing transplants of pig kidneys into living human donors within a year or two.
“If human organs are imagined as the fossil fuel of the organ supply, then pig kidneys are the wind and solar: sustainable and unlimited,” Montgomery concluded.
Joe Carrotta for NYU Langone Health
The NYU Langone Health surgical team examines the porcine kidney for any signs of hyperacute rejection. The organ was implanted outside the body to allow for observation and tissue sampling during the 54-hour study period.
For the 750,000 Americans with end-stage renal disease and the millions of others who care for them, this news is a massive game changer. A recent study found that some 43,000 people die every year in the US for lack of a kidney donation. That’s more people than die annually due to homicide, HIV, or car accidents. Pig kidneys could drop that number to zero.
But here’s the thing that should give us pause: The pig used in Montgomery’s surgery was subsequently euthanized. There are some 63,000 new patients every year who might benefit from a kidney donation. Assuming each donor pig is stripped of both of its kidneys and then euthanized, that’s more than 30,000 pigs killed every year to extend human lives.
Nevertheless, Montgomery’s breakthrough forces us to confront two questions: Is it morally justifiable to slaughter thousands of pigs annually to keep humans alive? And is it more morally justifiable than other methods that could also end the kidney shortage?
The ability to transplant pig kidneys into humans would undoubtedly save many human lives, which is, of course, a good thing. But it behooves us to take seriously the moral consequences of such an act, especially if we begin performing it on a wide scale.
The pig kidney breakthrough
Implanting other species’ organs and tissues into humans — or xenotransplantation, to use the technical medical term — is a very old idea.
But more reputable figures have attempted xenotransplantations too. Keith Reemtsma at Tulane University performed 13 chimpanzee-to-human transplants in the 1960s, all but one of which failed within a couple of weeks of the proceduredue to organ rejection or a resulting infection. One patient lived for another nine months before dying.
A major problem in all these efforts was rejection: the recipient’s immune system interpreting the donated organ as a foreign body and attacking it as if it were a hostile organism. This is also sometimes a problem with human-to-human transplants. But rejection has become less of an issue with humans after the development of better immunosuppressant drugs, which prevent immune attacks on donated organs.
The NYU team went a few steps further than immunosuppressants: They used organs from genetically engineered pigs.
The pig whose kidney was implanted in the NYU surgery was a GalSafe pig, a genetically modified pig variety approved by the Food and Drug Administration this past December. It’s produced by Revivicor, a subsidiary of the biotech firm United Therapeutics; Montgomery specifically thanked Martine Rothblatt, United Therapeutics’ chief executive, in his announcement. The FDA did not evaluate GalSafe pigs for xenotransplantation per se, but Revivicor has been vocal about its ultimate intention being the use of gene-edited pigs as a source for transplants.
The gene modification prevented production of what’s known as the alpha-gal biomolecule. Alpha-gal is present in all mammals besides primates (including humans), and its presence causes primate immune systems to reject organs. By preventing these pigs from producing that molecule, the gene edits enabled them to act as human donors much more effectively.
The ethical quandary posed by pig kidneys
The benefits of pig-to-human kidney transplantation are obvious and profound. A recent study in the American Journal of Nephrology estimated that between 5 million and 10 million people worldwide suffer from kidney failure severe enough to require dialysis, or another kidney-replacement treatment (like transplantation).
Dying for lack of a transplant is awful, but so is being forced to live on dialysis. Dialysis is immensely physically draining, often preventing people from working or traveling; the rate of depression in people on dialysis is more than double that in the general population.
Some kidneys can be recovered from deceased donors, and indeed that serves as the source of most kidneys in the US. In 2020, 17,583 deceased donor kidney transplants were performed. But while there are actions that could be taken to improve recovery of kidneys from deceased donors, the simplest way to solve the kidney shortage would be for living humans to step up and give more. Humans only need one kidney, and only 0.014 percent of people in the US would need to donate a kidney each year to end the waitlist.
Pig kidneys, in that sense, are not strictly medically necessary. Voluntary living human donors could fill the gap.
But in practice, a much lower percentage than that donates a kidney. In 2020, there were only 5,234 living donor transplants — a far smaller number than deceased kidney transplants and a waitlist of more than 106,000.
Indeed, in only one country in the world are there enough human donors to provide kidneys to all who need one: Iran. And there’s one likely reason for that: Kidney donors in Iran are paid for their service. Here in the US and in most of the world, paying a kidney donor is illegal.
Having donated a kidney myself, I can report that while totally manageable, it’s also inconvenient and temporarily painful. And yet we ask people to provide this service, and save a life, for free — or worse, if they have to take unpaid leave for the surgery, we ask them to pay for the privilege of saving a life.
But some bioethicists are vocally opposed to compensating donors for saving a life, for fear that such a system would harm poor people. Such objections make compensation very politically difficult to enact. Polling suggests a strong majority of Americans would support paying for kidney donations if so doing would improve the supply of kidneys (which it would), but it’s hardly a political issue driving many votes.
Until policy on compensation changes, the advancement of pig-organ transplantation could be our best bet for ending the kidney waitlist.
Which forces us to consider the moral quandary of exchanging a pig life for a human one.
Pigs are remarkably intelligent animals. They have good memories, love to play and explore, recognize each other, and have sophisticated social lives. Purdue animal scientist Candace Croney even taught pigs to play video games. (The pigs loved it.)
So imagine an animal like your dog, but perhaps smarter, being killed to save the life of a human. Would you be willing to kill your dog in that case? Does the question disturb you?
Montgomery agreed that the practice raises important animal welfare questions. When I asked him about the euthanizing of the donor pig, he raised the question, “Is it more humane to euthanize the pig and remove both kidneys for two transplants, or to remove one kidney and have the pig sustain the recovery period, where there’s pain and risk of infection?” It’s also not clear who would care for a donor pig that did survive, and who could pay for that care.
The question is even tougher when you get to organs like hearts, lungs, and pancreases, which cannot be given by a living donor. Currently only a few thousand people a year receive heart transplants, mostly because there is such a minimal supply, but the American Heart Association has argued as many as 100,000 people a year could benefit, which is plausible when you consider that heart disease is the single biggest cause of death in the US, killing more than 650,000 people in 2018.
Genetically engineered pig hearts that could work for humans could dramatically extend lifespans for people with heart disease, and the same goes for lungs, liver, and other organs. But in each such surgery, a pig would have to die for a human to live.
“I would not insist on the pig surviving the surgery, because that’s an uncertain benefit and would require twice as many pigs to be used,” Singer wrote. “What I would like to see is that all pigs involved in the procedure — including at the research stage, which obviously will continue for some years, and including the pigs’ parents — are reared in conditions that meet not only their physical needs but their psychological and social needs — so not in a factory farm. That seems a minimum quid pro quo for the benefit the pig is conferring on humans.”
(Revivicor declined to comment when asked about the living conditions of its pigs.)
Singer is a utilitarian. He believes that ethics is about maximizing the welfare of humans and animals, and so is willing to make trade-offs like these that still involve the deaths of sentient animals.
Christine Korsgaard, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, is very much not a utilitarian. She’s perhaps the most eminent Kantian philosopher in the world today. Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century thinker who serves as Korsgaard’s main inspiration, argued human beings must treat each other’s common humanity as an end in itself, not a means to their own ends.
This idea can be hard to grasp, but the important thing to know is it places limits on how much harm you can inflict on someone or some animal in order to produce some greater good. You have to respect the humanity or dignity of all rational beings (including animals).
Korsgaard objects to pig-to-human organ transplants on basically those grounds. “I do not think it is justifiable to kill an animal so that we can use her organs for a person, any more than it would be justifiable to kill one person to use his organs for another person,” Korsgaard wrote me in an email. “I think the pig does have a prior claim on her own life and her own organs. If you kill a pig for her organs, you are treating her as if she is ours, a mere resource for human use, as if she exists for us rather than for herself.”
Genetically modifying the pig compounded this wrong, she wrote, as humans changed the pig’s biology so it could better serve human ends. “Women don’t exist to make homes for men; people of color don’t exist to provide cheap labor for white people; animals don’t exist to provide food, labor, and organs for people,” Korsgaard concluded.
I am more of a consequentialist like Singer than a Kantian like Korsgaard. But Korsgaard’s arguments have incredible force. Just like factory farming, using pigs for organs turns them into a kind of industrial commodity for humans, rather than living creatures who deserve to live full, wonderful lives. There is something distasteful about that, even if the good of increased organ supply outweighs the concern.
Mostly, the development makes me sad that humans have been so unwilling to step up and donate kidneys to each other — or create the policies that would encourage such an act — that they are resorting to taking them from another species. Donating a kidney is a routine, safe procedure, one that humans could and would likely be more willing to provide if compensated.
If the alternative to a world where thousands of pigs are killed for their kidneys every year were one where Medicare carefully screened kidney donors and paid them each $50,000 or however much is necessary to get a full supply of kidneys, then the latter world seems infinitely preferable. No person, and no pigs, would have to die.
But that is not the actual counterfactual at hand. The counterfactual is the current world, where politicians have banned compensation for organ donation and organs are in persistently short supply. Compared to that counterfactual, pig organs seem like a step forward.
The morbid appeal of “botched” plastic surgery -
Beth Hoeckel for Vox
Cosmetic procedures are on the rise. So is our voyeuristic fascination with how they go wrong.
Haley Layne, who stars on the British internet documentary series Hooked On The Look, has spent about half a million dollars on plastic surgery. While she’s 32 procedures closer to achieving what she considers the “perfect body,” the 28-year-old needs, by her estimate, at least another 10. “Once you get to this level, there’s never any stopping,” Layne admitted on the show. “You have to maintain [this look] for the rest of your life.”
Part of this maintenance has involved 13 breast operations over the past two years. It has resulted in four trips to the emergency room. When Layne nearly doubled the size of her existing breast implants from 650 cubic centimeters to 1200 ccs, her body couldn’t handle them, and she needed reconstructive surgery to repair the damage to her breast tissue. (For context, the average breast implant size is between 300 and 400 cc.) Still, Layne wasn’t deterred from trying to increase her cup size.
Layne is practically a caricature of Western standards of beauty, with long blond hair, bulging J-cup breasts, and a peach-shaped derrière that appears out of proportion to her petite waist. She is a real- life distortion of the “slim thick” body type sought by many American women today (an ideal appropriated from Black and brown body types). In fact, Layne’s physique serves as an endorsement for some of the fastest-growing plastic surgery procedures in the country, as well as the most popular: liposuction, breast augmentation, lip injections, and the now- mainstream Brazilian butt lift (BBL).
Why, then, has her appearance been subject to ridicule, morbid and voyeuristic fascination on plastic surgery forums, and, among a devoted group of fans, erotic observation? To her harshest critics, Layne’s surgical pursuits seem delusional. Her body is “too plastic,” “cartoonish,” or “botched” beyond repair. Commenters on social media, some of whom are rabidly fascinated by plastic surgery extremities and faults, bemoan the loss of her pre-surgery features, claiming she was “so cute and natural” before she went “too far.”
Layne is just one of the many not-quite-stars who’ve gained tabloid-level notoriety for their plastic surgery preoccupations. In the early 2000s, “makeover” reality television shows like The Swan, Extreme Makeover, and Addicted to Beauty helped normalize the dystopian concept of a plastic surgery transformation for regular people while reinforcing Eurocentric standards of beauty. These shows eventually gave way to media that sought to divulge the darker realities of these procedures. Perhaps the most culturally enduring show to date from this genre is Botched, aseries that followed two Beverly Hills surgeons who consult with patients to try and reverse the damages from their botched procedures. (Layne was briefly featured in its sixth season.)
Over the course of its seven-season run, Botched developed a cult following, one driven by our lurid interest in plastic surgery nightmares. A growing online subculture of plastic surgery patients, enthusiasts, and voyeurs has thrived on the visual schadenfreude of scrutinizing certain “botched” figures such as Layne’s.
This mix of revulsion and fascination with the human form has a name: body horror, a term generally used to describe works of fiction depicting grotesque images, intended to frighten and reveal social anxieties. The overwhelming impulse toward pity or fear or even derision — “You paid money to look like that?” — applies to real-life bodies we gawk at, whether through a screen or on the streets.
It speaks to how we, the observers, are perhaps more shaken by the pretense of artificiality than any actual body-modification procedures or the industry that peddles them. In this way, the botched body becomes a warning, a reminder of the unspoken standards we are held to. What’s most revealing, and most similar to when we find ourselves drawn to horror movies, is our inability to look away.
Sometime over the past two decades, the stigma attached to getting plastic surgery lessened dramatically. More celebrities opened up about the work they’ve had done. Influencers began filming their procedures and sharing in-depth information about their surgeries. And more people started seeking out work: According to data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 18.4 million cosmetic procedures were performed in the US in 2019, compared to 13.1 million in 2010. Advances in plastic surgery and the popularity of minimally invasive procedures such as Botox and filler meant it was easier and more affordable for people to tweak their appearance without needing to fully go under the knife.
Part of this cosmetic procedure craze, which is attracting young and even teenage patients, has been attributed to social media — its ability to amplify certain physical traits and, through fillers and Facetune, disseminate beauty ideals to the masses. Tweaking one’s face is not only normalized but also driven by the internet’s accelerating trend cycles. See: the saturated demand for brow lifts, BBLs, and facial (especially lip) injections. That has greatly affected our understanding of what’s “normal” or “natural.”
“I think of it as the Kardashian-ization of our young people,” said Anthony Youn, a Michigan-based plastic surgeon. “The Kardashians have popularized a certain facial ideal that many people aspire to have: high cheekbones, slightly tilted eyes or arched eyebrows, hollow cheeks, plump lips, and a chiseled jawline.”
What passes for the norm today looks very different from the standards of the 2000s. Desirable traits — and the unnatural, funhouse-mirror versions of them — are more identifiable and more achievable than ever before, thanks to the influx of images and information on the internet. Yet there remains a fine but fluid line that separates normative ideals of beauty (Bella Hadid, although she’s denied ever having surgery) from apparent artificiality (Haley Layne), even if both likely poured thousands of dollars into achieving their given looks.
For many, the second-worst outcome of a procedure, besides death, is one that is — or appears — botched. It’s a sign of a bad doctor or an illicitly performed procedure. In some cases, as online viewers have speculated, it’s a reflection of a person’s self-delusion.
“Botched can refer to surgical complications, in cases where the surgeon didn’t perform the procedure satisfactorily,” explained Youn. “It’s also used more subjectively to describe the appearance of a patient. This person might be happy with the result of their procedure, but others might dislike it and call it ‘botched’ because they think it’s too much.”
The verb “botch,” which has origins from the Old English word bocchyn, originally meant “to repair or fix.” Over time, this definition changed to signal a clumsy repair job, which is closer to how the word is used to refer to plastic surgery today. The word is frequently tossed around (often in a derogatory manner) by an online subculture of plastic surgery patients, enthusiasts, and voyeurs. In some cases, botched patients have shared videos of their follow-up procedures and recovery on social media to educate or build an audience after a surgical mishap.
On subreddits like r/BotchedSurgeries, users share and discuss images of a person’s botched results, typically after they’ve healed from surgery. These screenshots are gleaned from the social media accounts of plastic surgery enthusiasts — Layne, influencers, models, regular people — and labeled under various categories, such as “extreme plastic surgery,” “lip filler migration,” “too much filler,” “extreme body mods,” and “before and after.”
The fixation on faulty BBLs and overfilled lips can seem frivolous and mean- spirited; in many ways, it’s a direct contrast to the body positivity movement that has saturated the internet. Even when it comes to celebrities and influencers whose job it is to put their bodies on display, observers obsess over the perception of appearing “natural.” The illusion is shattered when it’s clear that even the rich and famous can look “botched,” despite all odds. As a result, viewers are forced to confront the unattainable reality of hard-earned beauty: that plastic surgery is not a guaranteed solution to our insecurities. It requires a person to engage in a cycle of constant upkeep that could transform them from beautiful to uncanny. Layne, at least, is honest about how she never plans to stop.
The focus on the human body — as a site for disfigurement, transmutation, or sexual violation — can be traced back at least to the 19th century. The genre of body horror began with works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and extended to films like Eyes Without a Face (1960)and The Fly (1986). Scholars have long speculated about society’s fascination with horror as it relates to the body in fictional settings. In most modern cases, however, the bodies fixated on are real, not fake — but we treat them like they are.
Many have claimed that this fear of body modification and disfigurement reflects our social anxieties: over the advancement of biological science and Western medicine, the perceived loss of agency over our bodies, algorithm-influenced beauty standards, or bodies that fall outside societal norms.
In recent decades, the body horror genre has seen more works that spotlight surgical procedures, specifically cosmetic surgery. The patients in fictional films like Faceless and The Skin I Live In are typically subject to horrific violence and pain inflicted upon them against their will by crazed surgeons or scientists. This kind of “surgical horror,” according to Gothic scholar Xavier Aldana Reyes, is “the logical conclusion to the postmodern subject’s fear of advances” in science and technology. The genre tackles questions of individual agency and vulnerability in the modern world. The body “becomes the object under attack by tyrannical individuals or, in some cases, companies or systems of punishment,” wrote Aldana Reyes in his book Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film.
“We’re interested in but afraid of the artificial,” Aldana Reyes told me. “When we talk about horror, the idea of the uncanny tends to come up, like the phrase ‘uncanny valley.’ It seems like we’re interested in the tipping point at which something human tips over into the unnatural or the artificial. To what extent do we lose our sense of self in the process? What constitutes us, and how much of it is external?”
Some modern fictional works, however, have begun to invert this dynamic by giving patients a sense of command over their physical alterations instead of portraying them as tragic freaks. The 2012 film American Mary follows a medical school dropout who performs extreme body modification surgery on consenting patients. Rather than conform to the “mad doctor” trope, the surgeon is depicted as a likable, complex protagonist, while her patients are given backstories and agency over their surgical procedures.
Reality shows like Botched and Plastic and Proud try to humanize their patients, but these attempts are often paradoxical. Behind the facade of cosmetic surgery, these shows hint at a person grappling with his or her own desires, fears, and mental health, who is worthy of the audience’s compassion and time. Yet this type of media depends on a base level of voyeurism. Viewers display varying levels of empathy for those who need surgery (for reconstructive or gender-affirming purposes) versus those seeking out cosmetic, and therefore arguably unnecessary, procedures.
Ultimately, this morbid fascination and disdain is just a cover for that same old set of fears: that people, particularly women, are subject to the harsh whims of a society that demands they look a certain way (some far more so than others); that our bodies, despite our efforts, are at their core unruly and ungovernable; that we’re actually not so different from the people we gawk at after all.
Popular procedures like breast augmentations, brow and butt lifts, and facial fillers are marketed as tools for assimilation, for crafting a body and face to fit a certain standard of beauty. It’s an ideal that devalues anyone who falls outside the Eurocentric norm, particularly Black and brown women who are expected to conform to the unattainable.
The real winner here is the plastic surgery industry, which has been touted as the solution to these anxieties. And the real villain is the very present danger of actual complications and risks that can afflict patients (remember Layne’s four emergency room visits?). Still, there is something perhaps a little transgressive, however intentionally, in the aesthetic of a “botched” body such as Layne’s. What we care about as a society isn’t the “natural,” it seems, but what can successfully be perceived as such while checking all the elusive boxes. With such an impossible standard to live up to, why not run all the way in the other direction?
Terry Nguyen is a reporter for The Goods at Vox. She broadly covers consumer and internet trends, and technology that influences people’s online lives and behaviors.
The rise of the influencer sex worker -
Sunmi
Platforms like OnlyFans mean people with big followings online can earn money. Where does that leave the sex workers who were there first?
There’s a maxim on the internet known as Rule 34, which posits that “if it exists, there is porn of it.” Rule 34 is typically cited in cases of bizarre noncanonical cultural pairings — smutty fanfiction about, say, Hagrid the half-giant from Harry Potter falling in love with Harry’s owl Hedwig. But there is another, less-discussed rule, one that essentially amounts to its inverse and has only become more apparent over the past decade. Let’s call it Rule 43: If you exist visibly enough on the internet, someone will want porn of you.
When it happens for the first time, it can take you by surprise. “I thought he was fucking with me,” my friend Marie told me a few months ago, recalling her first messages from a stranger who propositioned her for paid, virtual sex work. “I thought this person was going to have this ridiculous conversation with me and screenshot it and put it all over the internet. I was hesitant. And then I did some research.”
Marie — whose name, like that of many sources in this story, has been changed to protect her from the potentially severe consequences of being identified for performing online sex work — has more than 100,000 Instagram followers thanks to a stint on a popular reality show. She’s a born hustler, and has been since we met in middle school — something she attributes to her mother, an immigrant who worked at grocery chains and mall stores to support their family.
She is also very conventionally “hot,” which is sort of a weird thing to say about a platonic friend but is relevant here, in a story about how she became an ur-example of an increasingly omnipresent trend: women who’ve cultivated some sort of identifiable digital persona being sent money by men in exchange for videos, photos, or even just a text back.
The money isn’t always about sex. Maybe the man knows you’re a struggling artist and gets a thrill out of posing as your sponsor. Perhaps he’s grown so accustomed to the system of casually contributing to random GoFundMes and Patreons and Substacks that sending a hot girl $50 over CashApp simply feels natural. The money itself pretty much means the same thing: Hey, notice me.
A lot of the time it is about sex, though. Marie often gets DMs from men asking her to show them her breasts (enough women on the internet have had this experience that it’s become its own meme). Ask any influencer — even, grossly, influencers who have yet to turn 18 — how many times they’ve been asked by strangers to start an account on OnlyFans, the platform best known for paywalled access to nude and lewd images from specific creators, and they’ll tell you it’s a lot. One of my coworkers and I were both approached by the same man on Twitter, on the very same day, asking us to send him photos of our feet for money.
It is not new that many men tend to talk to other people with a sense of entitlement or aggression. What is new is how seamlessly a DM slide can become a business arrangement, how influencers of the Instagram-lifestyle variety and regular people alike have used this as a meaningful stream of revenue. Thanks to a pandemic that left many people at home substituting screens for IRL intimacy and the rise of platforms that merge sex work and social media, vanilla content creators are turning to sex, in all its myriad forms, as a side hustle.
<img alt="An illustration of a vaguely angelic woman lit by a phone, with others scrambling for attention
There are those who might view the increasing number of possibly lonely people paying for digital intimacy and those willing to sell it as a tragic consequence of innumerable economic and social trajectories. The concept of the e-girlfriend, who offers a facsimile of love and sex to one or many of her followers, is to some a sign of a rapidly approaching dystopia. But maybe those people just don’t know what they’re missing out on.
“They have direct access to me, and they can ask me for things that they want to see. They’re willing to pay for it,” Marie explains. “And I’m willing to take their money.”
Perhaps this is the beginning of a mutually beneficial ecosystem, one where concepts such as sex work have more fluid meanings and fewer taboo connotations. “Sex” and “work” are already extremely fraught and often nebulous concepts, even more so when combined.
If our baseline understanding of sex work is the consensual exchange of sexual services, not a single sex worker or academic expert I spoke to for this story could give me a hard definition of where the line begins and ends. But if the idea of sex work becomes less stigmatized, will full-service sex workers who are more at risk of legal and physical consequences be subject to less stigma too? Or, as many established sex workers argue, will the influx of influencers on platforms like OnlyFans contribute to the ever-widening gap between creators making a living online and those barely making anything at all?
This work, though sometimes lucrative, is inherently precarious. In late August, OnlyFans announced it was banning “sexually explicit” content from its site in an effort to appear legitimate to major financial institutions, and in what many sex workers viewed as yet another example of an internet company profiting off their labor, then selling them out once it thought it didn’t need them anymore. OnlyFans reversed its statement just days later, but it won’t be the last time sex workers are forced to reevaluate their entire businesses based on the whims of faceless technocrats.
Despite all that, there are still those who seem to have the hustle figured out. In April, after being approached by foot fetishists on Instagram, Marie launched an OnlyFans account devoted to pictures of her feet for a monthly subscription fee of $12.99. She says she made more than $1,000 in the first few days. You meet enough people making it work — earning money from those who worship them yet avoiding the potentially awkward or messy or, above all, risky reality of having sex with another person — and it starts to feel like the American dream.
In their earliest days, cam sites and online porn were considered to be, as the stereotypes went, for losers. As one California alt-monthly noted in 1998, the most fervent consumers of cam sites were (wrongly) considered “just lonely geeks in rooms dimly lit by flickering computer screens paying $5.99 a minute to watch sweaty, silicone-injected women strip and slither to their keystrokes.” And yet business was booming; cam sites like Babes4u were grossing as much as $60,000 per month by charging users $19.95 for 20 minutes of personal interaction. Porn was “one of the few industries actually making money on the Internet, and lots of it,” the Associated Press wrote in 1997. Perhaps that’s because porn has almost always been the quickest to adapt to technological innovation, from the portable camcorder to home televisions to, by the late ’90s, livestreaming.
It’s easy to argue that the ’90s were the perfect time to be a porn star. Promising performers could land lucrative deals with studios like Vivid Entertainment or Wicked and partake in relatively swanky shoots, seamlessly coordinated by a network of distributors, advertisers, and agents. But by the late 2000s, websites like Pornhub, Brazzers, RedTube, and YouPorn — all of which are now owned by the Canadian company MindGeek — disrupted the studio system by hosting videos (many presumably pirated) in central libraries and offering most of them for free. Much as the internet did for all other culture industries, it forced the porn establishment to cut costs anywhere it could.
Today, as Shira Tarrant explains in her bookThe Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know, most online porn is amateur, unscripted, low budget, and hardcore. Wages have fallen: Tarrant estimates that a female performer who films three anal scenes a month would make about $40,000 a year, while a single anal sex scene could net an actor around $2,000. In the ’90s, it was far more common for performers to sign multi-film contracts; one talent agent estimated that in the year 2000, the average female porn star could make around $100,000 per year.
Something else happened around the same time that would affect the kind of porn people wanted to watch. Expensive-looking scripted films starring well-known actors were out; instead, people wanted to see porn that made them feel like they could be watching just anyone. Developing parasocial relationships with porn stars or celebrities is as old as celebrity itself, but social media has helped bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, teaching us to value a creator’s perceived authenticity over all else.
It’s not a coincidence that social media has risen alongside the desire for DIY porn. In 2019, “amateur” topped Pornhub’s list of most-searched terms. In the years since, dozens of celebrities — Cardi B, Tyga, The Real Housewives of New York’s Sonja Morgan, and Dorinda Medley — have joined platforms like OnlyFans to show off slightly more risqué bikini pics, or anything only their most fervent followers would bother looking at, for a price.
Social media forced everyone, from the most uninteresting nobody to the planet’s biggest stars, to learn how to offer themselves up for digital consumption. Those who were particularly adept at this skill necessitated new terms like “influencer,” who seemed to make money just by being themselves. The transactional nature of the relationship between influencer and follower has become only more explicit: Sending casual tips to creators is now encouraged on Twitter, Twitch, and Spotify, and with link optimizers such as LinkTree, anyone can make their Venmo, CashApp, or OnlyFans accessible without directly advertising it. The leap to online sex work — if you think sending a few pictures to a follower who sends you a bit of cash in return “counts” as sex work — isn’t a difficult one to make.
OnlyFans launched in 2016, and by 2019 it had 60,000 people posting content. That number is now more than 1.5 million. Though it has long been favored and populated by sex workers, nude models, and porn performers, the company takes pains to advertise itself as a platform for the more palatably generic “creators.” Log on to OnlyFans.com, and you’ll be greeted by a rather boring-looking white-and-aqua interface, which suggests you follow people like fitness mentor “Coach Lindsay” and cooking expert “Baked By Josie.” The only way to get to the good stuff, per se, is by searching for a particular user or, more commonly, by following a link in their Instagram or YouTube profiles. Converting regular followers into paying subscribers could theoretically be as easy as adding a “link in bio.”
Microinfluencers who leverage their relatively small followings to make money on OnlyFans often fill the role of e-girlfriends for their most devoted fans, providing mutual intimacy between muse and patron. This increasingly popular dynamic is not without its critics. One writer on Medium described it as “tricking your brain into thinking you have female intimacy and affection … into thinking someone cares about you romantically, and gaining a sense that a woman values your existence.”
It is certainly true that the advent of the internet has coincided with a crisis of loneliness. A 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of US adults said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. The average household size in the US has also declined, leading to a 10 percent increase in people living alone. While groups such as incels or the Cancel Porn movement like to blame feminism or the mass accessibility of porn for this, experts see the culprit as our culture around work, achievement, and individualism.
Elizabeth Bernstein, professor of women’s studies and sociology at Barnard College, says that in her decades of studying sex workers, a common characteristic of male clients is a stressful or demanding work schedule. “They would eat alone, live alone, and spend all day hunched over a desk,” she says. “You have a culture of overwork, and the pandemic is only accelerating that.” Recent research shows that people put in more than two additional hours per day when they’re working from home.
Whatever the causes, more people are looking for connection online. “The conventional forms of how we used to think about romance and intimacy are on the decline, and the pandemic has escalated that dramatically,” explains Phillip Hammack, a professor of psychology and director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory at the University of California Santa Cruz. “A lot of people who used to be reluctant about what I could call digital or networked intimacy were like, ‘Well, it’s not safe for me to develop a dynamic in person, so I’m going to go for this.’ I think what a lot of people have found is that they still get a lot of meaning out of those dynamics. They feel seen; they feel like they can express a part of themselves more freely, perhaps more than they ever knew they could.”
It’s a typical Friday night, and Chloe (not her real name) finally closes her laptop after finishing the workweek. Then she takes off her shirt and starts taking pictures. “I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I have to do this before I can be in weekend mode,’” she says.
She’d already been thinking about starting an OnlyFans account for a year when, one night in January 2020 — two drinks deep and in possession of some really good, recent selfies of her ass — she thought, “fuck it.” She’d often been DMed by men on Instagram, where she’d already built a small but loyal following of dudes who were enamored by what she calls her “online hottie” persona, asking if she’d ever join OnlyFans. Once she did, she figured OnlyFans could be another way to build her platform as a writer. “I hook them with a thotty pic, and hopefully they’ll stay and read my work,” Chloe says. She posts on her account once or twice a week, and says she makes about $1,500 each month (and for the record, she says, some of the men did stay and read her writing).
<img alt="An illustration of a woman with a phone and notifications popping up with dollar signs."
Her setup is often fairly bare-bones, though sometimes she’ll turn on her ring light or use a small tripod to capture a good angle. Whenever a new, sexy outfit comes in the mail from inexpensive online fashion brands like Shein, she’ll snap a few more pictures. “They’re super casual, just taken on the front-facing camera on my phone,” Chloe says. “I think a lot of subscribers really like that because it’s not polished. It’s the fantasy of a girl who just took this picture for you really quick and sent it to you.”
After a record 22 million Americans were laid off at the start of the pandemic, unemployment peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020, with the brunt of the effects concentrated among women. One March 2020 survey found that 52 percent of gig workers worldwide had lost their jobs, while another 26 percent had their hours decreased. A Pew Research Center study conducted in January 2021 found that two- thirds of unemployed adults had “seriously considered” changing their careers to something potentially better-paying or more stable. The creator economy, composed of a growing number of people monetizing their own digital content, was waiting to scoop them up by promising an audience so willing to watch you be yourself that they’ll literally pay you for it.
That’s what happened to Helena, a 24-year-old in Denver, when the restaurant where she worked closed due to the pandemic. She’d tried her hand at standup comedy, as well as a few stints on cam sites, for years. But it was on Twitter where her surreal, internet-speak jokes landed her a cult following.
Guys would often slide into her DMs, asking if they could buy her a virtual drink. “I’d be like, ‘Over Venmo? I’m gonna spend that at like, Target,’” she says with a laugh. Normally, she says, it was only 10 bucks or so, but it felt worthwhile to keep her Venmo handle in her bio.
Helena had previously done some camming on sites like MyFreeCams, where users can choose when to stream themselves and cater to their viewers’ tastes for cash. On OnlyFans, her monthly subscriptions cost $10, and the content is “80 percent pics and videos of my ass” plus JOI (jerk-off instruction) videos, where one talks into a camera and tells the person on the other end how and when to masturbate. She says 1,500 people signed up on the first day.
“It was probably, like, the most money I’ve ever made in one day,” Helena says, even after the 20 percent cut that OnlyFans takes from every creator. “I felt insane. I remember being in my apartment thinking, ‘This is fake, and I’m gonna get arrested.’” She’s now financially stable, she says, and has good health insurance for the first time in her adult life — all thanks to her OnlyFans.
Neither Helena nor Chloe — both of whom are white, cis, thin, and able-bodied, and therefore more likely to be rewarded by algorithms that exploit their users’ biases — have particularly huge followings; none of their follower counts go beyond 100,000 on any social media site. What they do have, however, are legible and largely consistent personal brands across platforms, along with the privileges afforded by conventionally attractive bodies. Even before they joined OnlyFans, which helped mainstream the concept of the e-girlfriend, their followers already cared about them more than they would a woman in a random Pornhub-video thumbnail.
This, naturally, gives them an enormous advantage on OnlyFans, which has a mostly unusable search function and does not suggest NSFW accounts on its homepage, making it extremely difficult to build a following on the site directly. The only real way to do so is by starting somewhere else — such as on Instagram or Twitter, or by using commonly searched-for terms to boost their personal profiles on Google — then converting a fraction of those people into paying subscribers.
As Charlotte Shane points out in her excellent New York Times Magazine feature on OnlyFans, “Newbies aren’t precluded from accruing a large base of followers or developing smaller groups of die-hard fans, and some manage it well. But attracting paying admirers for one’s self-created work doubles the amount of labor required to get paid anything at all.” Meanwhile, as the creator economy has skyrocketed, the money it generates continues to concentrate at the very top. Algorithms that exploit our existing biases toward white, thin, wealthy women make it far easier for those who fit these standards to profit from their bodies.
OnlyFans is notoriously tight-lipped about how much money its creators earn, but one data scientist estimated that the median OnlyFans creator makes $180 per month, with the top 10 percent of active OnlyFans accounts making 73 percent of all the money on the site. Other creators have guessed that those in the top 1 percent earn between $5,000 and $9,000 per month. This ignores things like tips and one-off payments for extra photos — Marie used to send a mass text to her subscribers every day, with a link to a paywalled photo of her feet they could choose to buy for anywhere between $5 and $100 a pop — but the subscriber numbers alone reveal a deeply unequal spread of wealth.
The pay gap between white and Black sex workers also exists online, just as in the real world. Actress and sex worker Erika Heidewald has explained how Black sex workers are discriminated against by social media algorithms that often reward white people and light-skinned people. “There’s just a discriminatory stereotype of how much different sex workers can charge based on their looks,” she told Okayplayer in 2020. “If you’re Black it can be harder to fight for the higher prices that you deserve.”
There’s been a consistent, vocal backlash to the influx of celebrities leveraging their fame to dip their toes into sex work, especially when it’s debatable whether they’re doing sex work at all. Abby, a 21-year-old Scottish sex worker, told the New Statesman that her OnlyFans subscriptions drop every time a new celebrity joins the platform, pushing her and other existing creators down in the pecking order.
When those same celebrities and influencers then boast about the amount of money they make, it strikes sex workers as harmful and insensitive. “If ‘sex work’ is just another layer to your edgy public image, if you can leave the industry any time without that work EVER negatively impacting your future, if you’re like ‘lol here’s my tits’ without a care in the world abt losing custody or housing then seriously stfu,” former sex worker @JuniperFitz wrote on Twitter.
Perhaps no backlash was more fierce than when former Disney Channel actress Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans in August 2020 and made a million bucks in a single day, which rose to $2 million within the week and broke OnlyFans’ previous records. “To witness a celebrity gentrifying a platform and making obscene amounts of money without acknowledging the plight of sex workers is truly a slap in the face,” OnlyFans creator Aussie Rachel told Rolling Stone. Yet the ability to boycott OnlyFans when it turns against sex workers, such as when it announced (and later retracted) a new policy banning porn, is itself a privilege many can’t afford. For many Black, POC, disabled, plus-size, and queer sex workers, OnlyFans simply holds too much of the market share to risk losing the business.
The rise of the “influencer sex worker” is only the latest example of what some have referred to as the “gentrification of sex work” facilitated by the internet. Yet even as cam sites have been making certain types of sex work less physically dangerous since the ’90s, this sort of gentrification has less to do with the internet and more to do with changing economic realities. For an essay published in the journal Sexualities, Barnard College’s Bernstein studied class- privileged sex workers from 1994 to 2002, many of whom graduated from college but still couldn’t find jobs that paid livable wages. She found that neoliberal economic squeeze — decreasing wage stability, a lack of access to health care — was changing the class profile of who did sex work.
When performer Savannah Solo (her professional name), a 22-year-old from the southern US, joined OnlyFans on New Year’s Day in 2020, she thought the only way she could succeed on the platform was to “be really, really sexy,” she says. In the beginning, she marketed herself the way she’d seen other women do it, with lingerie and an aura of seriousness. But like every influencer story goes, she only hit the jackpot when she learned to lean into what made her different. She started posting goofy TikTok-style videos on Twitter about being a new OnlyFans creator, centering her content around her love of Star Wars, cosplay, and walking around the house naked.
“You can look in the mirror and be like, ‘God, I have amazing tits. I bet people would pay to see these titties,’” she says. “And then you hop on [OnlyFans], and you try to sell your amazing titties for a week, and you realize it’s way harder to sell pictures of your boobs when people can Google ‘boobs.’ You have to figure out what makes your boobs special.” Now, Savannah says, her audience is mostly “someone who’s looking to giggle while they jerk off.” She says she’s made enough money on OnlyFans to buy herself a house.
As online sex work becomes more of a nationwide conversation, some worry about glamorizing a potentially dangerous industry. Revenge porn, leaked nudes, blackmail, harassment, and stalking are very real possibilities for many people with an online presence, especially women, and especially women who are sex workers. In 2020, the New York Post outed a 23-year-old EMT who joined OnlyFans to make ends meet; she later had to raise money to help support her legal battles with the paper. A car mechanic in Indiana lost her job when her manager discovered her account.
Alexandra Ayers, a Bay Area romance novelist who has experience in the sex work industry, warns young women of these risks on her TikTok account. “A lot of girls are being misled into thinking it’s something that it’s not,” she tells me. “With OnlyFans, [the content] is permanent. It’s easier to find you than you think. It’s just very concerning to see how [huge] the information gap is with these young girls.”
Even if you hit the OnlyFans jackpot, however, to join an internet platform as a sex worker is to have your livelihood predicated on the decisions of corporate interests that likely don’t want to be associated with you. OnlyFans, for instance, has long attempted to shed its reputation as a hub for porn, instead promoting its chefs and fitness influencers. When the site believed it would be unable to continue its relationship with big banks, OnlyFans planned to penalize the sex workers who made it famous — before ultimately walking back its statement that it would ban “sexually explicit” content.
Ever since the internet has existed, sex workers have been at risk of being booted from it. The biggest blow over the last decade came in 2018, when then- President Donald Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), creating a rare modifier to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 is the guiding principle for American internet companies, the law that protects platforms from liability for the behavior of its users, but FOSTA (sometimes known as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, the name of an early Senate version of the bill) declared that platforms used to aid sex trafficking or prostitution could, in fact, be held liable in civil or criminal court. Crucially, it failed to distinguish between nonconsensual and consensual sex work. And despite outcries from sex workers and free speech groups, it effectively destroyed many safer avenues for sex work, such as Backpage, that allowed workers to screen clients and share information.
“I’m worried all the time about my account getting closed down,” says Lohhtuz, a 30-year-old full-service sex worker, OnlyFans creator, and nail artist in Nottingham, England. “I’m very cautious about what I can and can’t message in my DMs. If my Instagram got deleted, that would really affect new customers and OnlyFans subscribers coming in. That would be awful for me.”
The risks Lohhtuz (the worker’s online handle) takes on as an escort are much more severe than those she deals with on the internet. While selling sex for money is legal in the UK, brothels are illegal, meaning Lohhtuz can’t work in the same space as another escort. She stresses that being able to would provide more safety and support on the job. One of the biggest threats to sex workers’ physical and economic safety is law enforcement itself, which has a horrifying history of assaulting sex workers in the US.
Police disproportionately target sex workers of color: From 2016 to 2020, 89 percent of people charged with prostitution in New York were people of color, as were 93 percent of people arrested for patronizing a prostitute, according to a ProPublica investigation. At the very bottom of the hierarchy are those who use sex work as a means of survival, often trans individuals and people of color disenfranchised by mainstream society, many of whom find clients on the street and are exposed to the most dangerous conditions.
The privilege divide between full-service sex workers and those who work only online has heightened during the pandemic, where internet sex work has become increasingly normalized but in-person contact has become more stigmatized.
“My optimistic view is that this shift is taking us toward more destigmatizing sex work and understanding that sex work does not intrinsically mean exploitation,” says Hammack, the psychology professor, likening it to the dwindling stigma around online dating over the course of the 2010s. “It’s important to recognize that both parties can get meaning, value, and connection — and arousal, of course — out of the situation.”
Lohhtuz sees two sides to the argument:
I can’t say that, yes, OnlyFans is sex work. How many of these people are actually going through that anxiety when you’re waiting for a stranger to come to the door, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you’re relying on that money to be able to pay rent that month? There’s such a big difference. So some part of me thinks, could the OnlyFans-type girls be a category of their own? Or can we bring it all together so that none of us are seen as dirty people or sluts or whores? I don’t have the answer to that. I want it to become destigmatized, but I can’t help but sometimes see those who have no idea what it’s like to be worried about money and start from the bottom, and say, “We’re with them.”
When Marie landed a full-time job in a corporate industry over the summer, she had to deactivate her OnlyFans account. That meant giving up the income source that, in just three months, had netted her $50,000. She’s bummed, but hopes her new career will be more stable and just as lucrative in the long term. “I wish there wasn’t such a stigma against people who are in control, who are businesswomen and killing it,” she says of OnlyFans creators. “They’re creating shoots, they’re editing content, they’re figuring out new marketing ideas, and they’re labeled as whores. But that whore makes more than [$10,000] a month.”
In December, I got a Twitter DM from a man named Ron asking if I’d like to be his findomme, a virtual dominatrix who consensually humiliates another person while controlling their money. Financial BDSM, in other words. “Hello Goddess,” he wrote. “Would love to discuss the details if you’re interested.”
Ron told me that he’d read some of my work and thought I seemed open-minded, and that he knew even if I never replied, at the very least I wouldn’t say something cruel. After asking more questions, I found out he’s a 34-year-old in the South who works in IT, whose marriage ended because he’d become addicted, in his words, to dominatrix porn and lost interest in being with women in person. Over the past eight years, he’s had about 20 to 30 findommes and estimates he’s spent around $50,000.
He told me he’s at a stage in life where overproduced sexual content “without any substance” doesn’t do it for him, and that he isn’t interested in professional sex workers. “I think the prospect of convincing a ‘normal girl’ into a findomme who’d make me her bitch is kinda appealing,” he says.
This, to me, feels like the allure of the influencer as sex worker, the thrill of a person whose online persona you’ve already come to know being willing to take the next step, even if you have to pay for it. Creators I’ve spoken to describe their relationships with their OnlyFans subscribers as almost wholesome, more intimate and nuanced than the way they speak about their followers on other platforms. Others have pointed out that at strip clubs, for instance, they’d be subject to racial and sexual harassment, whereas their OnlyFans subscribers have been respectful and kind.
Sex work still exists at the intersection of one of society’s most stubborn taboos, the idea that intimacy and capital can be combined. Yet the online creator industry fueling this dynamic will most certainly continue to grow. OnlyFans may be the most well-known of such platforms, but subscription-based sites that offer greater access to creators are exploding, and sex workers are more explicitly welcome on sites like JustForFans and ManyVids. Porn performers have long embraced cryptocurrencies as a method for avoiding censorship from financial services, and some are making bank on NFTs.
Just like Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone an opinion columnist, the mere act of using social media has turned us all into creators, hustling for as many microtransactions on as many platforms as we can.
If the American dream is getting paid for doing what you love, and what you love is to present an idealized version of yourself on the internet and amassing an audience of people who love looking at you in return, the difference between “influencing” and sex work is, arguably, only a matter of spectrum. It’s Rule 43 again: If your livelihood depends on pleasing an audience, what a large percentage of your audience is going to want is to see you naked. It’s still up to you whether to give that to them, but the pipeline from influencer to sex worker has never been clearer.
Either way, you are already for sale. Your face, your body, your saddest drunk texts, your ugliest outbursts are already out there, preserved by any number of internet companies that bank on you scrolling past their privacy policies without actually reading them.
Online sex work can feel like a subversion of that dynamic, which by definition is built on one-sided agreements between companies and human beings. In one of these scenarios, you aren’t privy to the actual transfer of money or even informed what, exactly, is being bought. The transactions take place down an endless, invisible assembly line, repackaging human bodies and the secrets between them as data points to help the wealthiest people in the world stay that way. In the other, you’re in charge of what you’re giving and to whom.
The creator economy is the logical conclusion of you and me realizing that the internet ultimately leaves us all to fend for ourselves, fighting against one another for whatever scraps of attention and money we can find. It isn’t pretty or glamorous; it’s survival.
Nobody really wins this game. But just like in life, if you’ve got a sense of humor and a great ass, it’s a hell of a lot easier.
From The Hindu: Sports
Sourav Ganguly has stepped down from ATK-Mohun Bagan’s Board of Directors: IPL Source - BCCI president Sourav Ganguly has stepped down from the Board of Directors of the Sanjiv Goenka-owned ISL club ATK-Mohun Bagan as it could have cause
T20 World Cup | I am not racist: Quinton de Kock says fine with taking knee, available to play for South Africa - South Africa wicket-keeper de Kock asserted that Black lives mattered to him due to his family background and not because of an international campaign
Boccia, a Paralympic sport of strategy and skill, slowly gains popularity in India - Ahead of the boccia championship in Dubai, athlete Sachin Chamaria throws light on this lesser-known paralympic sport
ICC T20 World Cup | Much would depend on how Afghanistan batters handle potent Pakistan attack - Pakistan will certainly go into this contest as favourites but Afghanistan is not a side that can be taken lightly now
Watch | IPL welcomes two new franchises - RPSG wins bid for Lucknow and CVC Capital bags Ahmedabad
From The Hindu: National News
Three held guilty for gang-rape of Rewari teenager three years ago - Five accused in the case acquitted
Bypolls: a test for Congress’ bid to bounce back in northeast - A challenge for BJP too to achieve simple majority mark in Assam
Delhi riots case: Court says mobile data has pornographic material, can’t be given to co-accused - “From the look of those photographs and videos, it cannot be made available to anyone,” the judge said
Training for local body heads in extreme poverty eradication held in Kollam district - An intensive drive will be held with the support of the public to identify the poorest of the poor. In the next stage, microplans will be formulated for their uplift, attaining the goal within the next five years
AAP claims BJP-ruled MCDs have barred media from recording, airing House proceedings live - “The mayor of the BJP-led South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) issued a ‘Tughlaqi farman’ yesterday, stating that journalists will not be allowed to record or live telecast the proceedings of its House. A similar tyrannical order was issued by the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) as well,” Saurabh Bharadwaj told reporters.
From BBC: Europe
Covid: Moscow shops and restaurants shut in partial lockdown - Russia closes non-essential services and sends workers home amid record Covid deaths.
UK boat detained by France amid fishing rights row - A minister says his officials are “urgently” investigating the situation surrounding the detained boat.
Rémy Daillet: Conspiracist charged over alleged French coup plot - Rémy Daillet is accused of forming an extremist group to plan attacks against the French state.
Covid passes set to stay as Europe heads for winter - There have been protests but much of Europe has accepted the QR codes as a means of extending freedoms.
Emiliano Sala: Flight organiser convicted over plane deaths - David Henderson found guilty of endangering safety of an aircraft in which footballer and pilot died.
From Ars Technica
Pixar’s Lightyear turns Buzz into a non-toy astronaut—with new voice—in 2022 - Debut trailer follows name-only tease in March, looks unbelievably epic. - link
US Copyright Office says you can fix a game console (but only the optical drive) - New DMCA exemption also lets users fix other types of software-enabled devices. - link
Mystery of deadly US infections solved; aromatherapy spray at Walmart to blame - The room sprays contain gemstones—and a deadly bacteria found in the tropics. - link
X-rays may have revealed the first planet outside our galaxy - Process may point to a general means of finding very distant planets. - link
Today’s best deals: LG OLED TVs, Roku 4K streamers, Xbox Game Pass, and more - Dealmaster also has deals on webcams, PS5 and Xbox games, and Dell monitors. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Convincing your girlfriend that she’s crazy is called gaslighting and it’s a dick move. -
Convincing her that she’s a robot with artificial intelligence and implanted memories is called bladerunning and it’s a Philip K. Dick move.
A 70 year old man goes into a brothel. He picks out a young pretty woman, …. -
… they go up to her room, strip down and climb into bed.
The old man performs like a teenager, the prostitute is amazed at how energetic and agile he is, she tells him if he can do it like that again, she’ll give him one for free.
He says “Yeah, I can, but I need to take a 20 minute nap, and while I’m asleep, I need you to hold my old pecker.” She agrees, he wakes up 20 minutes later and goes at it again, just as vigorously as before.
The girl is amazed at the old man’s stamina, and repeats her freebie offer, the old man tells her that once again, he’ll need a 20 minute nap and she’ll have to hold his dick while he’s asleep. She does as he asks, he wakes up 20 minutes later and he goes at it again, with even more enthusiasm than previously.
The hooker catches her breath, and needing to satisfy her curiosity, asks the old man “I can understand why you need the nap, but why do you need me to hold your dick while you’re sleeping?”
The old man replies “Oh, that’s just so you don’t steal my wallet.”
A nun, badly needing to use to the restroom, walked into a local Hooters. The place was hopping with music and loud conversation and every once in a while the lights would turn off. Each time the lights would go out, the place would erupt into cheers. However, when the revelers saw the nun, the room went dead silent. She walked up to the bartender, and asked, “May I please use the restroom? The bartender replied,”OK, but I should warn you that there is a statue of a naked man in there wearing only a fig leaf." Well, in that case I’ll just look the other way," said the nun. So, the bartender showed the nun to the back of the restaurant. After a few minutes, she came back out, and the whole place stopped just long enough to give the nun a loud round of applause. She went to the bartender and said, “Sir, I don’t understand. Why did they applaud for me just because I went to the restroom?” “Well, now they know you’re one of us,” said the bartender, “Would you like a drink?” But, I still don’t understand," said the puzzled nun. “You see,” laughed the bartender, “every time someone lifts the fig leaf on that statue, the lights go out. Now, how about that drink?”
A penis has a sad life. His hair is a mess; his family is nuts; his next-door neighbor is an asshole; his best friend is a pussy, and his owner beats him habitually.
The shop owner points to three identical looking parrots on a perch and says:
“The parrot to the left costs 500 dollars”.
“Why does the parrot cost so much?” the customer asks.
The owner says, “Well, it knows how to use a computer.”
The customer asks about the next parrot and is told “That one costs 1,000 dollars because it can do everything the other parrot can do plus it knows how to use the UNIX operating system.”
Naturally, the increasingly startled man asks about the third parrot and is told “That one costs 2,000 dollars.”
Needless to say this begs the question “What can IT do?”
To which the owner replies “To be honest I have never seen it do a thing but the other two call him boss!”
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22960728/Carrotta_NYU_Xenotransplant_233.jpg){kind=spacer}
Joe Carrotta for NYU Langone Health
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png){kind=logo}
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22960296/Vox_Illustration2.JPG)
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22960299/Vox_Spot1.PNG)