Russia and China Unveil a Pact Against America and the West - In a sweeping long-term agreement, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the two most powerful autocrats, challenge the current political and military order. - link
What Happened After the Chicken-Pox Vaccine? - In the COVID era, the success of the varicella vaccine in the nineties is staggering to contemplate. - link
What the January 6th Papers Reveal - The Supreme Court ruled to give the House Select Committee access to a trove of documents detailing election-negating strategies that Donald Trump and his advisers entertained—including a military seizure of voting machines—but he continues to peddle a counter-narrative in which he’s the victim. - link
I Can’t Stop Thinking About This - On the Internet, where attention is the currency, obsession has become a default register. - link
A Novel That Teaches Us How to Read Each Other - Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough for Snow” challenges our assumptions about what it means to uncover our stories—and our selves. - link
From Vox
Is the FDA too cautious? -
The FDA logo amid protective face masks, seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland, on January 11, 2022. | Jakub Porzycki/Getty Images
The pandemic revealed the flaws in the FDA’s risk assessments.
Nobody is happy with the FDA.
Almost a year ago, Vox’s Dylan Scott reported that the Food and Drug Administration had been “demoralized and tarnished during the Trump era.” Things haven’t gotten much better for the embattled agency in the months since.
In December, epidemiologist Michael Mina detailed the “frustrating secret” behind why it was so difficult to get rapid tests: The FDA’s “onerous but remarkably useless check boxes,” he wrote, were slowing the approval for different at-home options. Mina explained that the FDA was holding fast to processes that didn’t allow it to consider “the ample data around the world” and was forcing companies to compare rapid tests to lab-run PCRs, preventing hundreds of millions of tests from being purchased by Americans.
If this type of problem seems familiar, it’s because it is. Throughout the pandemic, the FDA has faced criticism about its seeming inability to adapt its processes for an emergency.
It’s the sort of tightrope walk you can only watch with your face behind your hands. Act too quickly, miss something, and lives hang in the balance, not to mention Americans’ dwindling faith in institutions. But it’s just as dangerous to act too slowly when approving needed treatments or tests, to be inflexible in the face of new evidence — lives hang in the balance if you do nothing, as well. And time and again, the FDA seems tohave chosen to fear the dangers of action over inaction.
In a statement, FDA spokesperson Michael Felberbaum defended the organization’s pandemic response, arguing it ”made the most appropriate and timely decisions regarding the products we regulate using the best available science, with the health and safety of the American public in mind.”
“Our decision-making must strike a careful balance between the potential risks and benefits of a variety of public health, legal and regulatory considerations,” he said in an email. “These considerations are never as clear-cut as some like to suggest.”
But critics argue the agency could have moved faster. As Conor Friedersdorf reported for the Atlantic last summer, when the FDA was considering authorizing Covid-19 vaccines for children ages 5 to 11, it askedPfizer and Moderna to gather more safety data, rather than rely on existing evidence that the vaccines were safe for adults and teenagers. Eventhe American Academy of Pediatrics believed the existing evidence was sufficient to grant authorization: “The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children ages 5–11 years based on data from the initial enrolled cohort, which are already available,” they wrote in a letter to the agency.
The delay approving rapid tests followed the same script. As ProPublica’s Lydia DePillis and Eric Umansky found last November, the source ofthe FDA’s delay “appears to be a confounding combination of overzealous regulation and anemic government support.” While tests were approved in other countries that prioritized “accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy,” the FDA blocked the use of such tests in the United States.
It was the same story again when it came to human challenge trials. The FDA brushed off the idea, despite thousands of Americans stepping forward early in the pandemic to volunteer to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, to more rapidly study the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines. Human challenge trials are a controversial approach, but notably, the United Kingdom was willing to approve this research method in February 2021 because of its potentialto help “accelerate” vaccine development.
As months pass and these events pile up, an uneasy question has risen to the forefront: What if the FDA’s failures during the pandemic happen all the time, and most people are just now noticing? If the institution itself is broken, the danger could be far greater than just this moment.
What if the FDA has always been broken?
George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok has been beating this drum since long before Covid-19 was a concern. Tabarrok, a leading libertarian thinker advocating for institutional reform of the FDA, gained traction criticizing America’s pandemic response. Recently, I asked the economist: what if this goes beyond Covid-19?
Tabarrok has coined a haunting phrase to describe his concerns with the agency: “The FDA is conservative because when it approves a bad drug, its error is visible, but when it fails to approve good drugs, the dead are buried in an invisible graveyard.”
In an interview, he pointed me to a 2017 paper by Leah Isakov, Vahid Montazerhodjat, and Andrew Lo titled “Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design.”
The paper explores the trade-offs the agency faces between what it calls Type I and Type II errors, or false positives and false negatives, respectively. A false positive would be approving a drug that is either harmful or ineffective, and a false negative would be failing to approve a drug that would be helpful or even potentially lifesaving.
Type I errors are much more salient to the FDA than Type II. The agency can drive down the rate of false positives to near zero by being stingy with its approvals — after all, you’ll never approve a drug that harms people if you never approve drugs.
Optimizing for the appropriate levels of risk in both directions — ensuring important treatments are quickly approved, while also guarding against the approval of dangerous or worthlessdrugs — is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. So how does the FDA score?
According to Isakov, Montazerhodjat, and Lo: badly.
They find that the FDA is way too conservative when assessing clinical trials for therapies of “terminal illnesses with no existing therapies such as pancreatic cancer.” These are the areas where you would hope the FDA would be overly willing to approve therapeutics since the risk of death and disability are already high for patients.
In the early 1980s, when I headed the team at the FDA that was reviewing the NDA for recombinant human insulin … we were ready to recommend approval a mere four months after the application was submitted (at a time when the average time for NDA review was more than two and a half years). With quintessential bureaucratic reasoning, my supervisor refused to sign off on the approval—even though he agreed that the data provided compelling evidence of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. “If anything goes wrong,” he argued, “think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.”
In Miller’s telling, the agency was overly sensitive to the possibility of making a Type I (false positive) error — and to safeguard the agency’s reputation, they withheld a drug from the public.
And even as the organization has worked to speed up its processes during the Covid-19 pandemic,the agency failed repeatedly on balancing risks.
According to Institute for Progress senior biosecurity fellow Nikki Teran, the US “requires antigen tests to be 80 percent as sensitive as the gold standard RT-PCR tests.” That means, in theory, that an antigen test in the US “needs to be over 30,000 times more sensitive” than in the UK, where Teran notes there are more than 150 different rapid antigen tests available (and for complicated reasons, 30,000 times more sensitive in a clinical trial does not actually mean 30,000 times better in real life).
According to the FDA, as of February 9, just 15 emergency use authorizations have been granted for over-the-counter at-home tests. The agency says there are a few common errors preventing it from authorizing antigen tests, and most boil down to poor data: too few patients tested, not enough proof people know how to use the tests,incorrect types of samples, and more.
Disregarding Mina’s argument that data doesexist, just not in the format the FDA wants, there’s still another thing to consider as the FDA rejects applications: The alternative to a complicated test that doesn’t work well is often no test at all.
There are dangerous parallels in history to the current Covid-19 crisis. According to Steven Salbu, then an associate professor of business at the University of Texas Austin, “in the late 1980s the FDA adopted a de facto blanket ban on HIV home-testing kits.” Salbu writes that an FDA spokesperson explained this policy by pointing to the potential for “improper drawing of blood samples, the possibility of blood samples being held for long periods of time, and the potential for blood samples to be affected by temperature changes during in-mail transit.”
So the FDA, seeing that there could be problems with the capability for HIV tests to be performed perfectly accurately at home, chose instead to allow no at-home tests to exist. Sounds familiar.
“Now, my view is that for people who have AIDS and cancer and heart disease, it’s always an emergency for them,” Tabarrok said. “Right? It’s always been like a pandemic for them. And now, I hope that people will come to appreciate the opportunity cost of more safety of FDA delay and apply this more broadly.”
Yes, the FDA’s sloth like action on rapid antigen tests is part of a history of antipathy, skepticism, and delay towards all home tests. The FDA banned HIV tests for 25 years, tried to regulate pregnancy tests as med devices before courts stopped them, slowed genetic tests etc…
Maybe the FDA’s problem isn’t about risk tolerance
Scientist and writer Hilda Bastian disagrees that the FDA was too slow on vaccines. She has pointed out that the agency has moved pretty quickly relative to its normal vaccine authorization process. And that’s not the only thing Bastian finds a little unnerving.
“By the end of the year, Pfizer will have produced an estimated 3 billion doses, the most of any company,” she wrote in the Atlantic in August 2021. “That lightning-fast progress is awe-inspiring—and a little nerve-racking. … The FDA has to be thorough, especially with the first of a new type of drug with completely new production processes.”
A recent controversy over the FDA approval of an Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm, showcases the double bind the agency is in.
As Vox’s Dylan Scott has explained, the approval of the drug, which “came over the objections of [FDA’s] own scientific advisers, who cited a lack of evidence for the drug’s effectiveness,” has raised flags that innovation on future Alzheimer’s treatments will decline. Ultimately, Medicare decided to significantly limit which patients could receive the drug — according to the New York Times, officials “concluded that there remain significant doubts about whether the potential benefits of Aduhelm for patients outweigh the safety risks.” (A STAT investigation suggested troublingly close contact between Biogen, the drug manufacturer, and FDA officials.)
This episode pushes back against the narrative that the FDA is too conservative. Instead, it indicates that the relevant question may not be “how risk-averse is the agency?” but instead, “in what situations has it been willing to take risks?” In the case of Aduhelm’s approval, some have alleged that the agency has been too close to the pharmaceutical industry. But when it came to a worldwide emergency, suddenly an abundance of caution ruled the day.
And maybe, as physician Benjamin Mazer suggests, the problem is actually “the long-standing and gradual erosion of the agency’s scientific standards.” Mazer points out that 30 years ago, roughly 40 percent of drugs qualified for a regulatory shortcut, but by 2018, 60 percent of them did.
Whether the FDA’s caution is confined to its decision-making during the Covid-19 pandemic or if it suffers from a much deeper-rooted illness is still up for debate. At the very least, the scrutiny on the FDA demands a rethinking of whether the agency’s risk tolerance is in line with the nation’s best interests.
Why book banning is back -
A display of banned or censored books is featured at Books Inc independent bookstore in Alameda, California, on October 16, 2021. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
The fight over books in schools is part of a much bigger struggle, revealing where conservatism is today.
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve likely seen headlines about an escalating push to ban books in schools across the country.
Be it the removal of the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from a Tennessee school district’s eighth-grade curriculum or attempts to yank classics like The Handmaid’s Tale from library shelves, incidents of grassroots (and mostly conservative) pressure against schools to control the materials children can access have seemingly grown in frequency and intensity.
According to a new American Library Association report, there were 330 “book challenges” in the fall of 2021, an uptick from the same periods in recent years. “Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades,” the New York Times reported last month.
Viewed in a broader national context — there are roughly 99,000 public K-12 schools in the US — these numbers are still far too low to describe as a national crisis. But free speech advocates insist the new campaigns are worth paying attention to — and worrying about.
The rise of book bans, in their view, is the tip of a deeper iceberg: a growing movement on the right to use the levers of local and state governance to control teachers and push an ideologically slanted vision of what children should learn about American culture, society, and history.
“You’re seeing really powerful movements under way to constrain expression. It’s not about discussing ideas objectively. It’s about not discussing them at all,” says Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Acadia University who tracks free speech in education.
On the local level, the effort manifests in parent- and activist-led drives to remove books from shelves and curriculums. On the state level, there’s been a push to pass “critical race theory” bans that constrain teachers’ speech and “educational transparency” rules that sometimes go as far as putting teachers on publicly accessible webcams and forcing them to seek parental permission if students try to join LGBTQ clubs.
This movement is picking up steam. According to Sachs, every single Republican-controlled state where the legislature is currently in session is considering a new “educational gag order” bill. Many even target university education, which traditionally enjoys much wider latitude to discuss politically controversial ideas.
It’s too early to judge the campaign’s effects yet, but all the activity offers an instructive window into where the energy on the American right is today. A conservative movement that once claimed to stand for limited government is increasingly embracing the coercive use of law to commandeer a culture it fears it has lost.
The local level: book challenges in schools
It is certainly not new to hear conservative parents lamenting that schoolbooks are corrupting their children’s minds. The complaints run along some familiar themes: Writing by leftist radicals will steer youth toward political extremism; literature from LGBTQ authors encourages them to adopt “alternative lifestyles”; books that discuss sex and sexuality push them toward risky behaviors.
At the local level, citizens can act on these concerns by mounting “book challenges” — basically, make a case to libraries and public schools that a book should be removed from shelves because it is inappropriate for children. In late January, the school board in St. Louis suburb Wentzville voted to ban Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in response to parental challenges targeting the book’s depictions of sexual abuse. In November, the school board in Indian River County, Florida opted to pull All Boys Aren’t Blue, an essay collection by author George Matthew Johnson about his experiences as a queer Black man.
According to the American Library Association (ALA), the most common arguments in challenges prior to 1999 were about sexual content or obscene language. That year marked the US publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which transformed the censorship scene. The ALA reports that, in each year between 2000 and 2009, Harry Potter books were at the top of the group’s most challenged book list nationwide, primarily because of concerns among Christian parents who believed the books were glorifying witchcraft.
<figcaption>Copies of Harry Potter books on display at the Clean Well-Lighted Place For Books in San Francisco,
California, on December 21, 2004.
Free speech experts say what’s happening now represents an escalation from that period: that there is a new wave of censorship sweeping America’s schools targeting literature relating to race, LGBTQ identity, and sex. In 2020, the most recent year the ALA has published data on specific titles, the two most challenged books were Alex Gino’s Melissa (a middle grade book about a trans child, formerly published as George) and Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (a young adult adaptation of Kendi’s research on racism in America).
“We used to call it the ‘Red Scare.’ We’re increasingly calling it the ‘Ed Scare,’” says Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at the anti-censorship group PEN America.
Conservative parents aren’t the only ones trying to take books off of shelves. In 2020, the seventh-most challenged book nationwide was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which (per the ALA summary) was “banned and challenged for racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a ‘white savior’ character, and its perception of the Black experience.” The eighth most challenged book was John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which contained “racial slurs and racist stereotypes.”
Moreover, it’s not clear just how widespread the Ed Scare is. The 330 challenges that the ALA reported from September to December of 2021 is an increase relative to the same months in prior years, but still a minuscule number compared to the roughly 99,000 public schools in the country — a case perhaps of media attention and social media virality inflating the threat.
But Friedman argues that this analysis of the ALA numbers is misleading. For one thing, the figures are most likely an undercount, as teachers and librarians are often afraid of the consequences of reporting censorship campaigns. The current rise of book challenges is also geographically uneven: According to Friedman, challenges are less common in blue states than in red ones. Looking purely at national numbers obscures significant trends toward censorship in certain states and communities.
There’s some evidence to support this claim. An NBC investigation in Texas, a state that Friedman points to as the epicenter of the Ed Scare, found a significant uptick in book challenges near major cities:
Records requests to nearly 100 school districts in the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin regions — a small sampling of the state’s 1,250 public school systems — revealed 75 formal requests by parents or community members to ban books from libraries during the first four months of this school year. In comparison, only one library book challenge was filed at those districts during the same time period a year earlier, records show. A handful of the districts reported more challenges this year than in the past two decades combined.
To be sure,these numbers do not tell us what percentage of these challenges were successful. But the big percentage increase over previous years is strikingly suggestive.
To understand what’s happening here, we need to look at the bigger picture of contemporary education politics in America. The intensifying push for book challenges at school districts isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The state level: CRT bans and “transparency”
There is currently a broader move on the American right against what they see as out- of-control “wokeness” in American education. Activist groups like Moms for Liberty, think tanks like the Goldwater Institute, and Republican politicians across the country have all focused considerable resources to push for greater censorship in K-12 schools.
This isn’t to say the school district-level book challenges are being coordinated at a national level; Friedman says many are flaring up on their own. Rather, cues from conservative national media and leaders appear to be inflaming grassroots passions — producing a phenomenon Sachs describes as “three different conservative educational projects … converging.”
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
An even mix of proponents and opponents to teaching Critical Race Theory are in attendance as the Placentia Yorba Linda School Board discusses a proposed resolution to ban it from being taught in schools in Yorba Linda, California, on November 16, 2021.
If book bans are the first of these projects, then “critical race theory” bans are the second — and arguably the more significant. In a recent report for PEN America, Sachs wrote that more than 120 such bills had been introduced in state legislatures since January 2021. Of these, 12 have passed in 10 different states, and more than 80 remain live in their respective statehouses.
Generally speaking, the aim of these bills is to regulate what teachers can do in classrooms. They often prohibit a set of loosely defined concepts related to race from being taught, on occasion specifically singling out certain texts (The 1619 Project is a common target).
Frequently, they aim to prohibit certain kinds of classroom activities that conservatives have become fixated on, like “privilege walks,” where students form a line and are asked to take a step forward every time the teacher mentions a form of social advantage that applies to them (setting aside how you feel about them — “privilege walks” have their detractors — it’s not clear how prevalent such exercises are in K-12 schools). Sometimes — as in Idaho’s bill, the first ban passed in the nation — they merely prevent teachers from “compelling” a student to affirm certain ideas about race.
As opposed to book challenges, which are bottom-up censorship with parents and local activists leading the charge across school districts, CRT bans are top-down — state-level rules, often influenced by model legislation drafted by national conservative groups. Yet while different groups and political actors may be pushing them, both types of campaigns are fueled by the same set of political ideas and circumstances.
Once again, Texas is a clear example of what this looks like in practice.
Book challenges began gathering steam in school districts in late 2020 and the first half of 2021. In September 2021, the statehouse passed its first critical race theory ban — a bill that required teachers to present “diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one” in any discussion of “currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs.”
This loose language has had predictably perverse consequences. One school district leader told teachers that “if you have a book on the Holocaust” in your classroom library, “you [make sure to] have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” That the Texas law does not have explicit provisions on classroom libraries illustrates the problem: The broad wording, characteristic of many of these bills nationwide, sows fear and overreaction among teachers, librarians, and administrators.
In October 2021, Republican state Rep. Matt Krause sent a letter to school districts detailing a list of 850 books that he believed “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Examples include Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an Amnesty International adaption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and a picture book titled “Pink is a Girl Color” … and other silly things people say. Krause’s letter appears to have successfully prompted several book removals in Texas schools.
In November 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered the Texas Education Agency, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and the Texas State Board of Education to “immediately develop statewide standards to prevent the presence of pornography and other obscene content in Texas public schools.” While that may seem anodyne, many saw it as coded language targeting literature that contained frank discussion of sexuality or LGBTQ identity.
“The fact that this is labeled as pornography is misleading,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, told Spectrum News Austin. “It’s clear that this is politically motivated.”
Finally, in December 2021, the statehouse passed yet anotherCRT ban. The new bill did not fix the vagueness in the first one that gave rise to an educator both-sidesing the Holocaust, but did contain new regulations on curriculum (like an explicit ban on requiring that students read The 1619 Project).
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” is displayed at a New York City bookstore on November 17, 2021.
And it’s not just Texas. Such efforts are under way across the country, with ambitious Republican politicians in states ranging from Virginia to Florida to Tennessee trying to capitalize on the political energy surrounding the Ed Scare. Their efforts appear to be escalating.
Recently, Sachs has begun tracking a third prong of this campaign — so-called “educational transparency” provisions being proposed in 2022 legislative sessions. The phrase “educational transparency” is a clever stroke — who’s against transparency? And many of the transparency provisions, including an influential model written by the Goldwater Institute, merely require schools to post their readings on publicly accessible websites.
But some, Sachs writes, are more egregiously panoptic:
In Florida, one lawmaker recently introduced legislation that would allow parents to scrutinize video recordings of their children’s classrooms for signs of “critical race theory.” Another in Mississippi wants to stream them live over the internet. And at least two bills in Missouri propose letting members of the publicattend teachers’ professional development workshops.
One especially disturbing bill, Arizona’s HB 2011, goes even further. It amends the state’s law requiring parental permission for sex education to cover student participation in LGBTQ clubs. Schools now must “seek consent” from parents if a student attempts to join a club “involving sexuality, gender or gender identity”; it also requires that schools provide the group’s charter to parents as part of the permission process.
“The transparency bills are designed to surveil or monitor, almost in a Big Brother sense, what goes on in a school,” Sachs tells me. “It’s about surveilling these people in a way that makes them vulnerable to bullying and censorship.”
Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, made this strategy explicit in a series of tweets explaining his support that affirms Sachs’s concerns. “With curriculum transparency, every parent in the country can become an investigative reporter,” Rufo wrote.
The national level: The right’s illiberal turn
Stephani Bercu is a parent in the Leander Independent School District, a suburban district outside of Austin home to one of the earliest skirmishes in the current Texas book-banning offensive. In December 2021, after a year-long process, the Leander Independent School District officially removed 11 books from lists of acceptable material in optional student reading clubs.
According to Bercu, what she sees as a fight over free expression in Leander started earlier than most people think. She dates it back to the summer of 2019, when a local library announced that it would host Drag Queen Story Hour, an event where drag queens read books to children.
The event incensed local conservatives, creating so much controversy that the Leander library ended its sponsorship of the event altogether. A local progressive church rented out the library room to host the event on its own dime, even changing it to “Family Pride and Story Time” to come across more tamely.
Bercu sees the ultimate success of the campaign as the beginning of a wider effort to control free expression in Leander. “[This is] where I think it starts for our city,” she told me.
What happened in Leander that summer was in some ways preordained. Earlier that year, in May, Catholic conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari came across a Facebook ad for a Drag Queen Story Hour in Sacramento. “This is demonic,” a clearly furious Ahmari tweeted. “To hell with liberal order.”
Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Drag queens Athena Kills, center, and Scalene Onixxx arrive to awaiting adults and children for Drag Queen Story Hour at Cellar Door Books in Riverside, California, on June 22, 2019.
This rage powered a subsequent essay by Ahmari in the Christian magazine First Things, railing against what he saw as an unwillingness among cultural conservatives to use the law to establish their values. “Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism,” Ahmari wrote.
What that looked like, in practice, was seen in Leander just weeks later.
Today, Ahmari’s essay is seen as one of the foundational texts for what’s called the “post-liberals” or “New Right” — a loose ideological group of conservatives who believe in the aggressive use of government to crush liberal influence over culture. Leading proponents of educational censorship, like Rufo, often fall into this camp.
This brand of conservative sees itself as standing athwart a liberal elite monoculture, where Hollywood, academia, and even Silicon Valley collude to push the country in an increasingly liberal direction. Its vehemence is driven by what the movement views as decades of political defeats on cultural issues from abortion to gay marriage.
Much like book challenges, this New Right is not entirely new. It’s a manifestation of a crusading zealfor culture war that’s always been a part of the conservative movement but became dominant in the Trump era.
But the resurgence of book banning on the right can feel a little discordant with conservatism’s other fixation: cancel culture.
To take an example in the realm of education, many conservatives for years have bemoaned the state of free speech on college campuses, alleging that professors and left-wing students shout down any right-wing viewpoints. In this conversation, they pose as champions of open discussion, even gaining support for some liberals.
There are profound differences in scale and scope between the campus speech wars and the ant-CRT campaign. The former tend to be unconnected eruptions on different campuses, events that are often overblown by a media fixated on elite colleges. The latter is an honest-to-goodness push to enact laws designed to censor teachers and restructure curricula along right-wing ideological lines (and influenced by model legislation from conservative organizations). That some on the right are existentially concerned about the former, while actively supportive of the latter, is revealing.
Though they mainly target K-12 schools, anti-CRT laws may also end up presenting a significant long-term threat to campus free expression. Some are worded broadly enough to restrict faculty rights; at Iowa State University, for example, the administration instructed professors that the state’s CRT law applies in classrooms. According to Sachs, roughly 40 new bills currently contain provisions that apply to higher education.
Whether this becomes a major problem for universities remains to be seen. More broadly, it’s not yet clear how effective the right’s new push to control education will be.
The book-banning campaigns, while objectionable, are hardly as widespread as liberals and free speech advocates sometimes seem to suggest. Most of the state-level CRT bans have only recently come into effect, making it too early to measure their impact on classrooms. It’s possible that requiring teachers to put reading lists on a website will not actually harm them, and that the more clearly objectionable rules pushed under the guise of “transparency” never become law.
But what’s undeniable is that the use of law to reverse progressive cultural victories has gained new purchase on the right. And education is the domain where they’re trying to show proof of concept.
Why the Olympic monobob event is only for women -
What the monobob does and doesn’t do for gender equality.
Bobsledding (or bobsleighing) is one of the oldest Olympic sports, dating back to the very first Winter Games in 1924. Back then, women were barred from competing in nearly every event except figure skating. Of the 250 athletes that arrived for the first Winter Olympics, only 11 were women.
Times have changed. The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing is considered the most gender-balanced to date, with female athletes making up 45 percent of the roster. But sexist regulations and outdated “science” still creep in. Who could forget the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, when the Norwegian handball team was fined for refusing to wear bikinis? Or questionable testosterone tests that barred female sprinters from competing in an event?
As for bobsledding, it wasn’t until 2002 that female athletes were invited to participate in the Games, but only in a single event: the two-woman bob. Since 1932, men have had two events (the two-man and four-man bob). In 2022, a new all-women bobsledding event was introduced: the monobob, a single-woman sled. But is it actually leveling the playing field? Maybe, but not entirely in the way you might think.
Ataash, Beastia and Chancellor impress - Ataash, Beastia and Chancellor impressed when the horses were exercised here on Thursday (Feb. 10) morning.Inner sand:600m: Silver Steps (Zeeshan), C
COVID-19 hits Indian Open golf yet again, cancelled for third year running - The tournament was first conducted in 1964 and has been held every year since then.
ESPNcricinfo awards | Rishabh Pant wins ‘Test Batting Award’, Kane Williamson is ‘Captain of Year’ - The Test bowling award went to Kyle Jamieson for his 5 for 31, which helped New Zealand become the first World Test champions.
India vs West Indies third ODI | Dynamic India aim to polish off West Indies - Rohit-Dravid combo’s willingness to experiment stands vindicated
Someone else took credit for decisions I took in Australia: Rahane - Rahane remains confident of making a comeback into India’s Test squad
From The Hindu: National News
Rajya Sabha member Jose K. Mani calls for setting up a tribunal for wildlife accidents - The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 has failed in preventing wildlife raids on human settlements, he says
Uttarakhand Assembly elections | PM Modi’s ED, CBI do not scare me: Rahul Gandhi - “I don’t listen to him because I am not afraid of him or his CBI and ED,” the former Congress president said in an election rally in Uttarakhand
Special relationship with Afghan people, UNSC resolution to continue to guide Afghan policy: India - Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said this in Rajya Sabha
SC allows ED to rely on forensic auditors’ report for charge sheet against Unitech ex-promoters - The top court allowed Sanjay and Ajay Chandra, currently lodged in Mumbai jails, to have video conference meetings.
Man arrested for duping job-seekers in Cuddalore - The Cuddalore District Crime Branch police on Thursday arrested a 38-year-old man on charges of cheating job aspirants of lakhs of rupees by promising
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine tensions: Russia begins military drills with Belarus - The US has called the 10-day drills an “escalatory” action amid tensions over Ukraine.
How suicide became the hidden toll of the war in Ukraine - A deep stigma around suicide in Ukraine is standing in the way of saving soldiers’ lives.
Freedom Convoy: Paris protest banned by police ahead of arrival - Paris police are taking no chances ahead of a Canada-inspired blockade to protest at Covid measures.
Russian gallery security guard accused of drawing eyes on painting - The painting was sent for restoration after the Russian guard allegedly drew eyes on it.
Salah Abdeslam: Paris attacks defendant denies killing anyone - Salah Abdeslam claims he chose at the last moment not to blow himself up during the Paris attacks.
From Ars Technica
May the 25th be with you: Obi-Wan Kenobi poster, premiere date revealed - May 25 premiere date coincides with 45th anniversary of A New Hope’s release. - link
Nintendo Direct headlined by Mario Kart 8’s 48 new upcoming racetracks - Switch surprises: Portal, No Man’s Sky, Earthbound, Mario Strikers, Live-A- Live… whew! - link
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From Jokes Subreddit
A man wanted to literally die with his $$$, so he trusted a third of his money to a Priest, a third to a Doctor, and a third to his Lawyer to bury him with it when he died. -
After his death, at the man’s funeral the priest whispered to his dead body and placed a bag in his coffin. The doctor then proceeded to whisper to the body and placed a bag in there as well. Then the lawyer went and dropped off a bag and moved on.
As they were carpooling back from the funeral the lawyer asked what the priest whispered. The priest — with tears in his eyes — said that he had to confess he spent some of the money on an orphanage so that some hungry kids would not starve and that he feels bad for what he had done, but that he had no choice. The doctor then admits that he too had to let him know that one of his patients needed a surgery that he alone could not do, that he spent some of the money to save the person’s life. The lawyer looks at them with scorn and says, “how could you? You have betrayed a man’s last and dying request!” The doctor and priest look at the lawyer and asks, “so your bag had all the money he entrusted you with?” To which he replies, “damn right, I wrote the check for the full amount, not a penny less!”
A rabbit is hopping through the woods. Hop! Hop! Hop! When he comes upon a giraffe. Now, this giraffe is about to smoke some weed. The rabbit looks up at the giraffe and say, “Giraffe, don’t smoke weed! Weed is a drug and drugs are bad, come running with me through the forest!” -
The giraffe looks at the weed, then looks at the rabbit, then back at the weed.
The giraffe tossed his blunt aside and they go running through the forest together. Run! Run! Run! Hop! Hop! Hopping along.
Soon they come to a clearing with a sheep.
This sheep is about to shoot up heroin.
The rabbit says to the sheep, “Mr Sheep, don’t do heroin! Heroin is a drug and drugs are bad for you! Come running with us through the forest!”
The sheep looks at the heroin, then looks at the rabbit, then back at the heroin.
The sheep tossed his needle aside and they go running through the forest together.
Run! Run! Run! Hop! Hop! Hopping along.
Soon they come to a clearing and in this clearing is a tiger.
Now, this tiger is about to drink a can of beer.
The rabbit looks at the tiger and says, “Mr Tiger, don’t drink beer! Alcohol is a drug and drugs are bad for you! Come running with us through the forest!”
The tiger looks at his beer, looks at the rabbit and back his beer.
He takes a claw and cracks open the beer and proceeds to carefully place it down beside him.
He gets up and walks over to the rabbit, lifts up a paw and starts mauling the shit out of the rabbit!
The giraffe and sheep are in shock.
And they scream, “Dude, what the fuck!? He was just trying to help you!”
The tiger turns to them and growls, "Every time that fucking rabbit does cocaine, I end up running through the fucking forest!
Sam died and left $50,000 in his will for an elaborate funeral. As the last attenders left, Sam’s wife, Rose, turned to her oldest friend, Sadie, and said: “Well, I’m sure Sam would be pleased.”
“I’m sure you’re right” replied Sadie, who leaned in close and lowered her voice to a whisper: “tell me, how much did it really cost?” “All of it” said Rose. “50,000.”
“No!” Sadie exclaimed “I mean, it was very nice, but really…….$50,000?”
Rose nodded. “The funeral was $6500. I donated $500 to the church for the priest services. The food and drinks for another $500. And the rest went towards the memorial stone.” Sadie computed quickly: “$42,500 for a memorial stone? Exactly how big is it?” “Seven and a half carats.”
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