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From Vox
The lofty goals and short life of the antiracist book club -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
After George Floyd’s death, many white Americans formed book clubs. A year later, they’re wondering, “What now?”
“What if at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, we wrote that Jefferson was a racist, misogynist rapist who owned human beings, and had a really good library? What if his plaque said all of these things and that he was a founding father?”
Mary Dempsey fired off the question to the five other members of her Zoom-based book club one Tuesday night in late September. She wanted the group to examine America’s unconditional reverence for white men who did horrible things and question why the historical record was grossly unbalanced and whitewashed.
The members of her book club, all of whom were white and spread out across Washington, DC, and the Philadelphia region, included two parents and their daughter and three longtime friends. They met every six weeks to discuss a book, and that evening’s text was Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause by West Point historian Ty Seidule. The conversation, however, had quickly taken them on a new tangent.
“I’d be really against that, Mary — putting out at the memorial that he was a disgusting guy as well,” Byron Fiman shot back. “I would put things about that in the history books, but being able to separate them: He was a wonderful leader, wonderful president, and a bad guy.”
“I don’t think he considered Blacks humans — they were something different,” Carmen Vaughan volunteered.
The discussion was just one of many the group has had since it launched along with a slew of other antiracist book clubs in June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a then- police officer in Minneapolis ignited massive racial justice protests around the world.
On social media, as cities from Portland to Miami became the sites of major uprisings, groups of white people, along with some people of color, joined together to announce their plans to read in order to fight racism and become aware of how inaction equals complicity. It wasn’t enough to be “not racist,” so many strived to be actively against racism — to be “antiracist.”
Organizers established reading schedules, wrote lengthy inaugural posts to entice strangers, and posted surveys to determine their reading lists. They shared photos of authors for inspiration and snappy tweets from activists and thinkers, like one from author Ijeoma Oluo: “The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism. … Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.” On Facebook, the activity was identical — thousands of people in dozens of groups shared news articles and announced their plan to read books.
Members pledged to learn more about racial inequality, sending antiracism books flying off the shelves, including Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Carol Anderson’s White Rage.
By November 2020, however, when then-President Donald Trump was voted out of the White House, much of the chatter across these groups had slowed, with many profiles going completely silent by Black History Month in 2021.
Today, just a few of the antiracist book clubsformed during the height of protests soldier on. They’re taking their time to learn how America got this way — and why violent, racist terror persists — but are at a loss for how to incite change. Amid a backdrop of debate over critical race theory and Republicans’ attempts to ban antiracist teachings and trainings, they want to acknowledge and reckon with America’s racism, but they’re stuck under the weight of all the history they never learned.
The bonds of family and friends are one reason it felt natural for the DC-Philly book club to keep going, reading and regularly meeting to unpack new takeaways about the marginalization of people of color throughout American history. The conversation went in countless directions, displaying the group’s eagerness to cover ground, and after going through several rounds of circular discussion and debate, they arrived at a familiar dead end — one that was obvious, though perhaps not to some of them.
“How do you pierce that complacency of people who don’t have skin in the game? The people who, for example, are beyond childbearing age, so abortion isn’t an issue for them. Or they’re just white and privileged and this doesn’t affect them,” Carmen Vaughanasked the group. “Why is it that so many of us are so complacent?”
“Why are you that way?” her daughter, Emily, replied.
“Huh?” Vaughan asked.
“What have you done since the Texas abortion bill?”
“Right,” Vaughan acknowledged. “That’s a good question.”
Throughout August and September, I sat in on three antiracist book clubs, some of them several times. One had about a dozen members scattered across the country in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Wichita, Kansas. The group began as a small localized community of white women on Facebook in the wake of Floyd’s murder but expanded after several months with the addition of men and people of color.
They meet every week to discuss just one chapter of a book, taking their time to sit with what they’ve read and consider how it plays into their lives. Recently, they plowed through two dense chapters of Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and discussed microaggressions — the subtle moments of discrimination that build up over time — and feeling helpless in the face of racism. Some white members opened up about moments they felt like they’d been racist in the past week, and members of color described the psychological toll of what it was like to be Muslim in the years after 9/11 or to be a Black girl facing racism at the hands of a high school teacher.
A virtual Virginia-based club of five (there are a total of 10 mostly white members who rotate in and out based on availability) used a lunch break to discuss their text — the six-hour PBS documentary Latino Americans — in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month.
This club developed from a Facebook group of about 50 people, mainly colleagues in education, that came together in June 2020. The group has been strict about only reading books written by people of color: Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemison, On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed, and A Time to Dance by Padma Venkatraman.
Before sharing their thoughts on a subject, members would take several minutes to express gratitude for the group, pointing out how their conversations pushed them to make different choices in their everyday lives.
“We’ve spent a year and a half on this incredible journey of self-discovery, challenge, and accountability,” Shannon Goff, a Southern California-based member of the multi-time-zone club, said in a phone interview. “We’ve created a space where it’s safe to say, ‘I fucked up.’”
In phone calls, members told me that they want to overcome the insurmountable feeling of knowing so little. In some small way, they want to undo the one-sided education that has blinded them for far too long. Oppression runs deep in the annals of American history, they confirm each time they get together, and they act like archaeologists excavating tragedies buried deep.
Their continued effort is in direct contrast to a modern-day culture war being carried out in schools. As police killings gave birth to these book clubs, the outcry —and calls to understand systemic racism in the wider context of American history through undertakings like the New York Times’s 1619 Project — has inspired conservative pundits and legislators to carry out an agenda againstcritical race theory by introducing and passing legislation to counter its instruction.
In turn, any teachings that confront race, racism, discrimination, and slavery are being labeled as dangerous indoctrination, with consequences for teachers and school leaders. A Tennessee teacher was fired for teaching a poem about white privilege and a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay about Trump’s presidency negating Barack Obama’s; a Texas administrator told teachers that any books used to instruct students on the Holocaust had to provide “opposing perspectives”; the role of texts by Pulitzer Prize-winning Black women authors like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison in the classroom is being questioned.
Ultimately, student education stands to suffer the most. There’s growing backlash from the left, too, as criticsblame“wokeness”— another hodgepodge term assumed to mean being too fired up about injustice — for Democrats’ inability to pass landmark legislation under President Joe Biden.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Children hold up signs during a rally against critical race theory being taught in schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, in June.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Though critical race theory is largely an academic idea that appeared in American law schools in the late 1970s and which looks at racism as a system, it has become a lightning rod that has led lawmakers and school boards to attempt to ban teachings that confront racism, discrimination, and even slavery.
As some of the country pushes back against social justice progress, the book clubs try to hold the line. But they’re admittedly stuck in their own loop, their own pendulum swing of false progress. They so desperately want to gain knowledge — and they do — but to what end?
In one-on-one conversations with Vox, book club members said they were simply excited to dish about the facts that caused them the most intellectual distress, like federal housing policy that prevented Black people from building wealth through homeownership (learned from Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America) or that American Indians had developed sophisticated societies in the Western Hemisphere by the time Europeans razed their civilizations (learned from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States), though they admit they don’t know what to do with the information.
“I’m now thinking about how nonwhites have experienced America,” John Vaughan of the DC-Philly book club said. “It never entered my consciousness. Until recently, I didn’t think too much about it.”
His wife agreed. “The books that we have read have brought home the enormity of the problem, how widespread and how deep it is,” Carmen said, who like her husband was reading books by writers of color for the first time in her life. “They have made me understand, finally, in my 70s, what institutional racism is. I never quite got that before. I was always thinking on a one-to-one level and missing the forest for the trees.”
“I don’t feel that I’m somehow obligated to do anything in particular. I don’t feel white guilt or anything like that. I’m conscious of all the injustice meted out by the white ruling class in this country. I’m aware of that,” John said. “I’m white, and I’ve been privileged all my life, and yet, quite honestly, I don’t feel personally guilty for anything. I didn’t personally do anything bad.”
They feel resigned to the same “benign neglect” that they’ve chosen their whole lives, the couple told me. But John, on his way to retirement, feels hopeful that he can pursue activities connected to social justice. Carmen, already retired, is still searching for what to do. “I march. I vote. But there’s still a feeling of futility. I have the best wishes to do something about it, but I really don’t know what. I’m a reader so, when in doubt, go read about it, I guess,” she said with a laugh.
The sentiment is the same for other people across the other book clubs. Many want to do more but say they can’t find the time. They’re also unsure of what more they can do.
Danielle Victoria, the founder of the Virginia-based book club, told me the experience has encouraged her members to call out racism when they see it and advocate for their students. For her, as a biracial, white-presenting woman, she’s learned more about the difficulties her Black father faces as he moves through the world. She worked with her fellow book club members to raise money for various causes and get active in local elections. “It’s made us much more compassionate and not so stuck in cancel culture,” she said.
Publishers greenlit a flurry of books about race and racism after observing demand for such stories skyrocket in 2020; the flood of books on the topic is expected to keep swelling into 2022. In late May 2020, sales of civil rights titles saw a jump of 330 percent and books about discrimination jumped 245 percent, according to the industry tracker NPD BookScan. Two books in particular were sold out everywhere: Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
Both authors say they believe that more education about racism can move the country forward, but they caution that the book clubs can be a virtue-signaling trap.
“We can’t address a problem that we don’t recognize, but if reading is not followed by action, it is functionally meaningless,” DiAngelo said in a phone call. DiAngelo has been writing about whiteness for 25 years, she told Vox, but it’s her third book, White Fragility, published in 2018, that struck a nerve in 2020. Most of the book clubs Vox observed on Zoom and social media started with DiAngelo’s book, with some appreciating the context it provides and others taking issue with her tone.
One book club member, a white woman, told me that DiAngelo is not the right messenger on antiracism because DiAngelo is a white woman. Others have argued that the book is merely self-help that centers whiteness and doesn’t inspire greater outward action.DiAngelo recognizes her role in what’s been criticized as “the antiracism-training industry,” and said she expected that the public hoopla around antiracism reading would die down. (Kendi, too, has critics, who say his antiracism work as a Black public intellectual is part of a broader system that monetizes talking to white people about race, and that his quest to label policy as either racist or antiracist is flawed because it lacks nuance.)
“I worried this would happen,” DiAngelo said. “The media put it in front of people and people responded, but they aren’t responding now that the media isn’t putting it in front of them.” Plus, the comfort of racial apathy is highly seductive, she added, explaining that there’s an immediate excitement in getting involved and engaged, but that often, it’s not interesting anymore when it’s time to do the hard work. These book clubs involve a level of self-focused marveling — “Looking at ourselves is a form of whiteness, but we do have to look at ourselves,” DiAngelo said.
Kendi shared in DiAngelo’s hope for the promise of the book clubs to foster change. “I was pleased to see so many people deciding to organize themselves into groups to read these books together. At the same time, I knew that some people were organizing or joining them because it was the thing to do,” he told Vox. “I was hoping that while people joined because it was the thing to do, they might also end up being transformed.”
Michael A. McCoy/Washington Post via Getty Images
“I was hoping that while people joined [antiracist book clubs] because it was the thing to do, they might also end up being transformed,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist.
DiAngelo and Kendi are left with the question of what the decline in activity means. Is antiracism dead? Are people tired? Are some readers still just feeling relief over a presidential election that took place more than a year ago?
For DiAngelo, the shift in attention away from antiracist education is about how adaptive the system of racism is. “We can see that there was enough of a cultural shift that following the summer of 2020, the country almost looked like the pre-civil rights era — the Voting Rights Act has been fundamentally dismantled, that there are municipalities and school districts where it’s literally illegal to say racism exists,” she said. “That we can be in the place we are in now shows you how racism adapts. I hope that is sobering and reinforces how racism is highly protected. We can’t relax or let our guard down.”
Kendi said he believes the backlash against critical race theory has led some readers to be less public about their antiracism journeys. “In so many places in this country, people have been threatened and ostracized and ridiculed for simply wanting to educate themselves about the truth,” he said.
“I definitely think that the backlash against those of us who are writing about racism has had its effects,” Kendi added. “I think that the levels of engagement and attention now are not at the level that they were about this time last year.”
But the authors don’t want to discount the reading and learning that book club members have done.
“We do need to be able to trace the past into the present. If you see the past as separate from the present, you’re going to come up with deeply problematic explanations for current conditions,” DiAngelo said. And it always helps to be less racist in your personal life, especially when white people have the power to take years off the life of a person of color by packing on the stress that comes with racism. Being less racist on a personal level isn’t a small thing, DiAngelo said, but it isn’t going to change the structures that are curbing voting, for example.
“Awareness itself doesn’t necessarily lead to structural transformation,” Kendi said, sharing the recommendation that the book clubs use a session or two after reading a particular book to decide as a group or individuals how they are going to directly apply what they’ve learned to their lives. “That could be helpful because it builds into the structure of the book club, not just the reading, not just the growing awareness, but the actual action,” he said.
Organizing a protest matters, DiAngelo said, but she’d like to see people really think about their skills and see how they can effect change within their fields and local communities. But ultimately, the reading is a starting point that people must follow up on: “If you can’t see systemic racism and you can’t see your relationship to it, how are you going to challenge it?” DiAngelo said.
Antiracist book clubs aren’t the only thing on the wane. The latest polls on Americans’ attitudes toward Black Lives Matter show that support for the movement that surged in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder quickly receded and has stayed the same for the past year, according to a Pew survey. Similarly, support has ebbed for defunding the police.
The decrease in support for these movements aligns with the nature of what is known as “white racial sympathy,” Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College who studies white racial attitudes, told me. White racial sympathy is when a white person feels distressed over the suffering of a Black person or Black people, but history shows us that white racial attitudes aren’t stably sympathetic toward Black people, Chudy said, and are dependent on the type of Black person killed by an officeror the circumstances of the tragedy that happened to them.
This is why Chudy believes that the book clubs must serve as catalysts for future engagement in political change, not just spaces where white people avoid the “What next?” question of how to take their discussions from Zoom to the political sphere. If they’re not calling their representatives, attending protests, volunteering for campaigns, and voting for candidates who promote an antiracist agenda, they’re upholding the status quo, despite being steeped in antiracist literature, Chudy explained.
For Kendi, it’s imperative that, despite the current backlash against antiracism, we recognize that a critical mass of people still believe in racial justice and can deliver radical change. “Among those who continue to appreciate Black Lives Matter, do they now have a stronger awareness of the movement for Black lives? We should also pay attention to how supporters are even more firmly committed to building a different type of world,” he said.
DiAngelo says white people in book clubs should stay the course until they can be fundamentally changed. “People will often ask me, ‘What do I do?’ If you have integrated an antiracist perspective into your worldview, that becomes less of a question because it’s so much a part of how you see the world and how you respond to the world. And it becomes more of how to be in the world rather than ‘What do I do?’”
More than a year in, even Goff, the Southern California book club member, wasn’t so sure.
“Part of our frustration in the [book club] is that many members want to nip this thing in the bud,” Goff said, referring to systemic racism. “But it’s not going to happen. This is a long-term century’s change. Maybe by the time we reach the end of our lives, we’ll see the needle move more than a tiny bit.”
Why it’s not quite time to panic about inflation -
The last time you checked out at the grocery store, your bill was probably a bit higher. | Scotty Perry/Bloomberg via Getty Images
How to think about rising prices, explained by an economist who thinks about this all the time.
Rising prices are definitely a thing right now, and it’s hard not to let a little bit of worry creep in. The United States isn’t experiencing 1970s-level spiraling inflation, but for people leaving the grocery store or a restaurant, the receipt is often a little bit higher than it used to be.
The consumer price index, which measures what consumers pay for goods and services, rose by 6.2 percent from a year ago in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the quickest annual clip it’s risen since 1990. Over the course of the month, prices crept up by 0.9 percent. The data shows prices are up almost everywhere, including gasoline, energy, shelter, food, and new and used cars and trucks. Among the few price indexes to decline were airline fares and alcoholic beverages.
October’s inflation numbers came in above economists’ expectations, and to politicians, the media, and other observers, they are a bit jarring — especially those who have been arguing that much of the current inflation in the economy is temporary.
There are a lot of open questions in the pandemic economy, including what’s going on with supply chains and labor, and inflation remains an issue no one is quite sure how to solve. Regardless of what the experts say, for regular people, the economic landscape can be a little nerve-wracking, especially when it comes to prices. Inflation makes people feel bad about the economy, even when there is plenty to feel good about, too.
I reached out to Claudia Sahm, a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute and former Federal Reserve economist, to ask how to parse the latest inflation numbers. Sahm isn’t an inflation hawk and has for some time pushed back against fearmongering on the issue, but she acknowledged that the October situation isn’t good.
Wages aren’t broadly keeping up with inflation across all jobs, though they are in some sectors, such as hospitality. However, Sahm notes, the economic situation — and pandemic situation — is much better for many people this year than it was last. She’s not hitting the panic button on prices, but she worries about the implications for the reconciliation bill in Congress, and emphasizes that the Fed is paying attention to what’s going on.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
So the October inflation numbers were not good.
Legitimately, October wasn’t a good month. Prices really across the board — with some exceptions — rose in October. The increase that we saw in total aggregate prices was as large as the big increases that we saw early in the summer.
What had happened between, say, June and October was that the level of prices had stayed high. We haven’t seen outright declines in prices, but inflation had been stepping down, which has been the forecast, the expectation, of Fed officials, the White House, myself personally, a lot of other professional forecasters. It hasn’t stepped down as fast — the peak earlier this year was much higher than I certainly expected. But this is a step backward. Inflation moved back up, so that means off of the high level of prices, we have moved up, again, pretty notably.
CPI is over 6 percent year-over-year. This is not good news.
Is there a broader context you think people should pay attention to here?
There’s a good, bad, and ugly of inflation. There are good reasons that inflation comes down, like we start working out supply chains and labor shortages. And there are bad reasons, and my bad case is Covid-19 comes back and we get scared and pull back. Prices are supply and demand. We look at lower inflation and say, “Yay, this is a good thing.” But lower jobs is bad.
Covid has been the root of all evil through this entire pandemic. It comes, slows some, then it comes back with a surge, then it slows, then it comes back with a surge. Just like you can’t draw a straight line through the Covid cases and the Covid deaths, you cannot draw a straight line through the economic recovery. We are pointed in the right direction, particularly after the vaccines came out, but not every month.
How does this tie into what else is happening in the economy?
People are exhausted. Workers, businesses are exhausted. We are moving in the right direction, but it is painful. One of the pain points is higher prices. Another big pain point is not having a job. Inflation is felt more broadly because the unemployment rate is back down. It’s still above where it was before, but we’re really moving on that.
Far fewer people are in these dire straits than were happening earlier in the pandemic, but everybody is facing some price increases. But the vast majority of Americans fill up their cars with gas, and they notice it’s a lot higher. It’s a much more diffuse pain, it’s not as severe, but people hate inflation. Inflation has both a reality and a life of its own. It’s just like taxes — taxes are something you pay, but they’re something we all just broadly hate.
Both because jobs have been coming back and also because the federal government put out a lot of economic relief, people — especially those who are at the very top of the heap — have, on average, enough money to pay those extra prices in the majority of cases.
When you look at the price at the pump, you think, “Ahhh,” and you’re staring at it. But if you’re staring at it, that means you put gas in your car. And if you look at the consumption numbers adjusted for inflation, these things have gone up, and that is because people have more money. Prices are rising, but their bank accounts rose faster.
There’s a hardship, but when you look back to the Great Recession, where there was much less relief, real consumer spending did not rise like we are seeing this year, and inflation, frankly, it was rising faster. That was worse. Inflation wasn’t as high as it is now, but at the end of the day, it’s, “Can you eat?” not just, “How much did you pay for the food?”
How does all the government support during the pandemic play into this?
Low-income people spend a bigger part of their budget on necessities, food, on housing, on medical care. It puts a squeeze on them if you hold income constant. If you have more money in their pocket, it really does help. The stimulus, for a family of four, it was almost 20 percent of median family income in all three rounds. Low-income people have more in liquid assets, more in wealth, than they have had in a very, very long time.
It’s amazing, because we are coming out of the worst recession in living memory, a massive global pandemic.
Inflation, it’s not good, I’m not sugarcoating it, but there was a lot of good done. The American Rescue Plan [the stimulus bill signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this year] was the absolute best policy, particularly in an environment with high inflation. You look across the world in developed countries, they all have inflation. And you know what the difference is in the United States? We put thousands and thousands of dollars in people’s pockets at the beginning of the year.
It really made a big difference to people’s lives. The fact that higher inflation is eating away at the wealthy, the lenders, the bond market people, I have no sympathy. I loved the packing plant that was complaining in the news because they couldn’t hire enough workers. Maybe if you hadn’t killed so many of your workers, right?
Inflation is too high, it’s causing problems, but it’s not our biggest problem right now. Covid is.
There’s a trope about inflation that the Fed’s behind the curve; inflation hawks say the same thing over and over again. We are not living the same moment as the ’70s, the ’50s. There was no global pandemic. If that’s how you’re going to approach this, something is missing in the model, and frankly, it just wastes so much time. There are real problems, there are real solutions, and they are going to tank that legislation in Congress.
The inflation debate has already clearly cut down the size of the kids, care, and climate legislation, as I like to call the [Build Back Better reconciliation bill]. The midterms are coming. We will not have a united government; they will not pass anything like this again for years. And inflation will come back down. Even if it stays above 2 percent, you’re going to say climate change, children, education, and housing are less important?
It’s not about inflation, it’s about the size of government. It’s not about the taxes, it’s not about the debt, it’s about how much government should be active in people’s lives. I feel like economists are the accessories to the murder of good long-term policy, and it’s frustrating.
It’s a tough line to walk, because I don’t want to pretend like prices haven’t risen a lot. I believe in fact.
So I hear you that there are a lot of other things going on in the economy, but people really do feel inflation. People see the numbers — my mom’s been complaining her Christmas baking is more expensive this year. How worried should normal people be? Because a lot of them are starting to feel a little panicked.
You learn a lot as a policy expert if you engage with people, and I listen because I cannot tell someone how to feel. I cannot tell someone what should you expect in the future. I can’t help but bring in, “Hey, but what about those checks? And it’s the pandemic, and the supply chain, and prices fell for a long time, we’ll get back there. Gas prices will go down.” You can bring facts into it, but I can’t tell them how to feel.
And, frankly, what we are seeing, I’m not surprised. If you told me inflation would be 6 percent year-over-year right now and asked me what the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey would look like, I could tell you. People really dislike inflation. There are a lot of people, particularly older people, who have lived through periods of high inflation where it got out of control and policymakers were asleep at the wheel. They haven’t seen what Jay Powell’s Fed is going to do.
Most people don’t trust government at all, and a lot of people don’t trust facts either; we have lots of problems here. If a politician you look up to or a talking head on the news tells you that you should be freaking out about inflation, it’s going to get worse.
I do worry about an inflation spiral, but in the Michigan survey, they ask about the buying conditions for large household durable goods, big household purchases. It is at its lowest level, at least going back decades and decades.
That made me so relieved, because when I’m thinking about this inflation spiral, in countries that experience high and rising inflation, what fuels that spiral is that people look at the high and rising prices, and you ask them if they should buy now, and they say yes, because prices will be higher. If I ask you if it’s a good time to buy and you say no, that means you’re not going to start hoarding things and creating more price pressure.
People hear inflation hawks, and that’s where the fear goes — in the economy, the trust in government, the questions about where we are headed. But for me, there’s this disconnect, because yes, prices are bad, but we helped a lot of families.
It’s a tough time right now. Precarious is too strong of a word, because I don’t see the makings of an inflation spiral — vaccines are coming out, Covid is coming down. But some days it’s a good day, and some days it’s a bad day. And sometimes it’s really good — half a million jobs really good. Other times, it’s inflation rising almost a percent month-over-month — really bad.
As people head into the holidays and start to look at prices, a lot of them are just going to think, what in the world is going on? What would you say to normal people on how to think about inflation right now as they go to the store or the gas station or shop for presents? To people who worry Christmas is going to be a lot more expensive?
There are families who are going to be able to buy Christmas presents and who have been able to fill their gas tanks and get to work this year who in 2019 couldn’t. We have gotten a lot of money to a lot of people who have very little. We have gotten money, frankly, to 80 percent of households. That’s good; universal makes it more popular.
We have millions of families that are supported by people who do not work at a living wage, who do not have financial security, they had nothing in the bank. A lot of them have something in the bank now. Their kids are going to have Christmas.
The other thing is that we get to see our family for Christmas this year. I would have paid a lot of money last year to go have Christmas with my family, and there was no amount of money I could pay, because my parents are older and they weren’t vaccinated.
If I have to buy my son one Gameboy game instead of two this year, well, Grandma’s going to get to watch him open it, and that’s worth a lot. A lot of people are going to have a better Christmas than last year, and there are going to be a lot of families who have a better Christmas in 2021 than they did in 2019.
You can’t look at these bank account numbers that are higher now and say, “Oh, it’s going to be the worst Christmas ever.” For people who lost loved ones because they died of Covid in 2021, that’s going to be a really bad Christmas. But that has nothing to do with the toys in the store and the price tags attached to it.
Amazon’s favorite electric vehicle company is now worth more than Ford or GM -
Rivian, an electric car maker, is planning an initial public offering and has plans to start delivering its first vehicle, a pickup truck, in the coming weeks. | Courtesy of Rivian
Rivian just had one of the biggest IPOs in stock market history.
Rivian went public on Wednesday, marking the largest IPO in the United States since 2014. The electric pickup and SUV manufacturer priced its stock at $78 a share and raised about $12 billion, which the company plans to spend on boosting production and designing more vehicle models. While that price set Rivian’s valuation at around $70 billion, the carmaker’s market capitalization surged above $90 billion, after the stock started trading at nearly $107 a share on its first day.
Rivian filed for an initial public offering back in August. The 12-year-old company, which is backed by Amazon and considered one of the biggest threats to Tesla, is now one of the world’s most valuable automakers, worth billions more than Ford or GM — even though, as of October, it’s only delivered 156 vehicles. Rivian’s first vehicle, a $73,000 pickup, started shipping in September, and a second model, a $75,500 seven-seat SUV, is supposed to be released next year.
Rivian’s timing is good in some ways. This summer, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that called for electric vehicles to account for half of all new auto sales in the United States by 2030, and a growing number of legacy automakers have committed to shifting their production to electric vehicles in the next two decades.
But as the world continues to struggle with the pandemic, Rivian faces some serious challenges. A shortage of semiconductors has caused delays and production halts across the auto industry. There also aren’t that many charging stations available across the US, leaving some potential EV buyers worried about running out of juice.
“It’s a big deal that more public infrastructure is available,” Jeremy Michalek, an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon, told Recode in August. “Probably the first priority is making sure there are enough fast chargers available on highway rest stops so that you can take your vehicle wherever you want to go.”
Like Tesla, Rivian is selling home chargers and developing a nationwide charging network. The company plans to have 10,000 stations available by the end of 2023, many of which will be in remote areas. Also as Tesla has done, Rivian is taking an AI-focused approach to its vehicles. Rivian has invested heavily in its hands-free, semi-autonomous driving technology with a suite of features called Driver+, which sounds a lot like Tesla’s Autopilot. In a lawsuit, Tesla even accused Rivian of stealing its trade secrets after hiring its former employees.
But a big difference between Rivian and Tesla is the type of electric vehicles the two companies are selling. After being founded in 2009 and remaining secretive for years, Rivian announced in 2018 that its first models would be a pickup truck and an SUV meant for off-road driving. That’s a notable difference from Tesla, which has focused primarily on selling cars and crossovers. (Tesla announced its first pickup truck, the Cybertruck, in 2019, but deliveries have been delayed until 2022.)
Rivian is also appealing to commercial clients, including its own influential backers. After participating in two funding rounds for the startup, Amazon last year committed to buying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian by 2030. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and three other passengers on Blue Origin’s first flight with humans aboard even rode in a Rivian SUV to the launch site.
Ford, which has its own plans to release an electric version of its popular F-150 pickup truck next year, has also invested more than half a billion dollars into the electric car startup.
But while EVs are getting more popular globally, the US faces slower growth than China or Europe. Last year, global electric vehicle sales grew by 41 percent, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental energy policy advising organization. While sales of electric vehicles in the US trail behind those in China and Europe, sales of hybrid cars are growing, a sign that more consumers could warm to electric vehicles down the line.
In a recent Pew survey, some 7 percent of Americans said they owned an electric or hybrid vehicle, and 39 percent said they’d consider buying one. The higher price of EVs is certainly a contributing factor to the slower adoption rate in the US. But the price of batteries, which are the costliest part of electric vehicles, is falling, so Americans could see cheaper EVs in the future.
Pandemic-era hurdles have also plagued the auto industry. Rivian, which was originally supposed to release its pickup truck in July, twice postponed delivery of the vehicles. Late last month, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told customers who had preordered vehicles that Covid-19 had interfered with everything from “facility construction, to equipment installation, to vehicle component supply (especially semiconductors).” The same chip shortage forced Tesla to rewrite code for its vehicles, and experts are worried that a lack of semiconductors could delay production of the new electric Ford F-150.
Still, if Tesla’s runaway success is any indication, Rivian stands to find eager, outdoorsy customers who want an EV that goes off-road. Considering the present challenges, the company is leaning hard on standing apart from Tesla and the growing number of legacy automakers that want a slice of the EV market. GM will start delivering an electric version of its GMC Hummer truck before the end of the year. And Jeep is expected to release an electric version of its Wrangler by 2023. President Biden has already given one a test drive.
Update, November 10, 2:15 pm: This story was updated to include news of Rivian going public.
From The Hindu: Sports
Sinner shines - Sinner shone when the horses were exercised here on Thursday (Nov. 11) morning.Sand track: 600m: Commandment (T.S. Jodha), Empower (P. Shinde) 38.5. F
The Hindu Speaks On The State Of Indian Cricket | Exclusive webinar for digital subscribers - Discuss the state of Indian cricket with our senior sports correspondent Amol Karhadkar on November 18, at 5 p.m.
Tokyo Paralympics champion Pramod Bhagat nominated for Para Badminton Player of Year - Reigning world champion Bhagat was also named along with Manoj Sarkar for the newly introduced Para Badminton Pair of the Year, with five other nominees.
Pullela Gopichand: I did not want my autobiography to be dull and preachy - Ahead of the launch of his autobiography ‘Shuttler’s Flick’, badminton coach and former player Pullela Gopichand reveals how he channelled his hurt to devise a winning strategy and bounce back stronger
New Zealand is strongest cricket team across all formats right now: Atherton - New Zealand registered a sensational five-wicket win over favourites England here on Wednesday in the first semifinals.
From The Hindu: National News
Water level dips in Idukki reservoir - Level steady at Mullaperiyar dam
Depression begins to cross the TN coast on Thursday evening - The Meteorological department has withdrawn red alert for extremely heavy rains for Chennai and neighbouring districts
Ruckus in Punjab Assembly after CM Channi’s remark against SAD leader - Heated exchanges took place between the Congress and Shiromai Akali Dal members, with the opposition party MLAs rushing to the well of the House
Recent rain in Kerala damaged crops worth ₹493.4 crore - Deadline to apply for compensation extended to November 15
Delta remains main COVID-19 variant of concern, others now negligible in sequencing data: INSACOG - Delta variant, which was first detected in India in October last year, led to the devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the country
From BBC: Europe
Mireille Knoll: Killer of French Holocaust survivor jailed for life - A man is sentenced for murdering 85-year-old Jewish woman Mireille Knoll in 2018.
Belarus accused of state terrorism over migrant crisis - Poland’s prime minister says Belarus is flying in migrants and sending them to the border.
Belarus migrants: What routes do they use to reach Minsk? - The migrant crisis along the EU’s borders is the result of increasing numbers arriving in Belarus by air.
Paraguay: Police probe Stradivarius violin theft motive in double murder - Three German citizens are arrested in Paraguay over the murder of an archaeologist and his daughter.
Missing French teenage jogger found alive says she escaped kidnappers - The 17-year-old was found in a state of shock about 10km from where she had gone for a run.
From Ars Technica
Rad Power’s RadWagon 4: A great e-bike at a surprisingly low price - This sub-$2,000 e-bike is thoughtfully designed and a joy to ride. - link
SpaceX is beginning to get the hang of human spaceflight - “I think we’re incredibly grateful with the partnership that we’ve had.” - link
White House hails vaccine mandates as number of unvaccinated drops 40% - Meanwhile, the White House estimates over 900,000 kids 5-11 have their first dose. - link
Watch Live: NASA’s Crew-3 mission set to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket - “Each one of these flights is really a gift for us.” - link
Apple will no longer break Face ID on repaired iPhone 13s - Apple backs off from “serialization” limits built into the OS and display. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A man is flying a plane over the Amazon, when he suddenly crashes…. -
But he’s ok, don’t worry. He’s staggering through the jungle when he suddenly realizes he’s surrounded by bloodthirsty savages. And he thinks, “Man, I am totally fucked.”
“No”, a voice booms out from the heavens, “You’re not fucked.”
The voice continues, “Listen to me very carefully. Grab the spear from the savage next to you, run up to the chief and stab him in the chest.”
So the man, with nothing to lose, grabs the spear from the savage next to him, runs up to the chief and stabs him in the chest.
The man, as he’s standing over the chief who’s now dying in a pool of blood, looks up at the heavens and ask, “Now what, Lord?”
And the voice booms back, “OK. Now you’re fucked.”
A lawyer dies, and somehow manages to go to heaven -
When he gets there, he’s greeted by St. Peter himself. The lawyer says, “What happened? I wasn’t in an accident and I’m too young to die. I’m only 52!”
St. Peter says, “Nope, by our records, you are 84, and that’s a pretty good life.”
The lawyer yells, “84! How did you figure that?”
St. Peter responds, “We added up your client billing time sheets.”
Bert, at 75 years old, always wanted a pair of soft spike golf shoes like Freddie Couples, so seeing some on sale after his round, he bought them and he was so delighted with his purchase decided to wear them home to show the missus. -
Walking proudly into the house, he sauntered into the kitchen and said to his wife, “Notice anything different about me?”
Margaret at age 73, looked him over and replied, “Nope.”
Frustrated as all get out, Bert stormed off into the bathroom, undressed and walked back into the kitchen completely naked except for the new golf shoes.
Again he asked Margaret, a little louder this time, “Notice anything different NOW???”
Margaret looked up and said in her best deadpan response, “Bert, what’s different? It’s hanging down today, it was hanging down yesterday, and it’ll be hanging down again tomorrow.”
Furious, Bert yells out, “AND DO YOU KNOW WHY IT’S HANGING DOWN, MARGARET?”
“Nope. Not a clue”, she replied.
“IT’S HANGING DOWN, BECAUSE IT’S LOOKING AT MY NEW GOLF SHOES!!!!”
Without missing a beat, Margaret replies, “Shoulda bought a new golf hat, Bert.”
It’s still my cake day (I think), so here goes: Fanny Green -
An Irish man went to confession at his Catholic Church. ‘Father’, he confessed, ‘it has been one month since my last confession. I had sex with Fanny Green twice last month’. The priest told the sinner, ‘You are forgiven. Go out and say three Hail Mary’s then put $5 in the collection tray’.
Soon after, another man entered the confessional. ‘Father, it has been two months since my last confession. I’ve had sex with Fanny Green twice a week for the past two months.’
This time, the priest questioned, ‘Who is this Fanny Green?’
‘A new woman in the neighborhood’, the sinner replied. ‘Very well,’ sighed the priest, ‘Go and say 10 Hail Mary’s then put $25 in the collection tray’.
At mass the next morning, as the priest prepared to deliver the sermon, a tall, voluptuous, drop-dead gorgeous red-headed woman entered the Church. The eyes of every man in the church fell upon her as she slowly sashayed up the aisle and sat down right in front of the priest.
Her dress was emerald-green, very short, and she wore matching, shiny emerald-green shoes.
The priest and the altar boy gasped as the woman in the green dress and matching green shoes sat with her legs spread slightly apart, just enough for them to realize she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
The priest turned to the altar boy and whispered, ‘Is that Fanny Green?’
The bug-eyed altar boy couldn’t believe his ears but managed to calmly reply, ‘No Father, I think it’s just the reflection from her shoes’.
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