Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Growing Fear of a Wider War Between Russia and the West - U.S. officials warn that tensions over Ukraine could trigger a once unthinkable conflict pitting Russia against NATO. - link

• At Home with the Families Affected by Texas’s New Anti-Trans Orders - After Governor Greg Abbott called medical care for trans children “child abuse,” their families began weighing their options. - link

• How Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Upended Germany - In the wake of Russia’s attack, Germany has reoriented its energy policy and committed to dramatic military expansion for the first time since the Cold War. - link

• Zach Williams Reads “Wood Sorrel House” - The author reads his story from the March 21, 2022, issue of the magazine. - link

• Zach Williams on Letting Go of Logic - The author discusses “Wood Sorrel House,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine. - link

From Vox

• Animal sounds are a marvel of evolution. We can’t afford to drown them out. -

  

  The air around us is vibrating with sonic lessons, says an award-winning biologist. All we have to do is listen.

  Earth can be a noisy place. Humans are especially efficient at filling the environment with sounds, from speech to music to heavy machinery. Plenty of other creatures contribute to the global soundscape as well: crickets trill, birds chirp, wolves howl, and whales sing their low, mournful-sounding songs. It’s easy to take these sounds for granted nowadays. But for most of our planet’s history, they didn’t exist.

  “For 3 billion years, life was nearly silent, its sounds confined to the tremors of cell walls and the eddies around simple animals,” David George Haskell, a writer and professor of biology at the University of the South, writes in his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. “At first, sound on Earth was only of stone, water, lightning, and wind.”

  Haskell is no stranger to writing about the natural world. His first book, The Forest Unseen, is a record of the goings-on in a single square meter of old-growth forest in Tennessee, and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. He followed that with The Songs of Trees, which explores the webs of interconnections that shape the lives of 12 trees around the world. In Sounds Wild and Broken, Haskell turns his ear to the vibrating air around us to write a book that is equal parts meditative observation of nature and treatise on our responsibility to the planet.

  I spoke with Haskell about the first animal sounds, humans’ impact on the world’s soundscape, and the looming crisis of what he calls a “sensory extinction.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

  In the beginning, there were “hums and fizzes”

  Neel Dhanesha

  What did the ancient world sound like?

  David George Haskell

  Earth was not silent. There were waves crashing on shores, geologic rumbles and bellows coming from deep down in the Earth’s belly, the sound of thunderstorms rolling in over the horizon, and softer sounds, like the sounds of rain and wind going through the leaves.

  But if we could teleport back, there would be no singing insects, no birds, no frogs. It was a strange world — familiar in some ways, but also deeply, deeply alien because this was a different planet than the one we live on now in terms of acoustics.

  It was shocking to me, in researching this book, how long the time period was that Earth lacked any communicative sound — the sound that evolved for the purpose of carrying a signal from one creature to another, usually one animal to another. It took hundreds of millions of years after even complex animals evolved for those first communicative sounds to evolve, as far as we know.

  Neel Dhanesha

  What were the first sounds made by organic life? And were they heard?

  David George Haskell

  The very first sounds made by organic life were the hums and fizzes of bacteria and single-celled creatures. They’re busy little creatures, chemically. All those reactions and shifts in the cell surface shape cause vibrations in the surroundings, and those vibrations actually stimulate the growth of other bacteria.

So they are sensitive to one another, but as far as anyone knows, they’re not communicating. No bacterium is singing to find a mate or to shout out warning signals.

From the start, life was making some sound. But the question of communicative sound is a different one. The first physical evidence dates to about 270 million years ago, to an insect that looks like a cricket. [The fossil was found in southern France.] The wing of this insect has a little ridge with a row of knobs on it. And there is no function for that ridge that we know of, other than making a sound. When the wings rub together, they make a little raspy sound in a way that’s analogous to how modern crickets and katydids sing. This early fossil, named Permostridulus, has a much cruder device [than modern crickets]. But it’s recognizable as a singing device.

LISTEN: What a Permostridulus chorus might have sounded like

Neel Dhanesha

Why did this cricket-like creature decide to sing?

David George Haskell

Intention is really hard to fossilize. What we can say is that modern insects make sounds partly to attract mates. Perhaps Permostridulus was doing the same — and think of the advantage in doing that, because Permostridulus itself was just a few centimeters long. But if its sound is audible over, say, 10 to 20 meters, it has increased the presence of its body by about 10 or 20 million times in terms of area. It can be found by potential mates with much more accuracy and speed.

So a mating display is one possibility. The other is a defensive signal: If you pick up a lot of insects now, they’ll give a little buzz or chirp that sounds weird and alarming and makes you want to drop it. Lab experiments have shown that mice and spiders and other creatures, when confronted with these alarm chirps, do indeed let go of the prey. Permostridulus may have made a sound to surprise predators and gain itself a means of escape.

Neel Dhanesha

That sort of implies that the animals around this creature could hear it.

David George Haskell

I think one of the reasons that communicative sound took so long to evolve was that right from the get-go animals were sensitive to vibrations in the water or in the air. If you made a sound, you were at risk of becoming someone else’s lunch, so the first singers had to be creatures that could get away quickly. Permostridulus probably had pretty good jumping legs; it certainly had wings that it could use to fly away.

On the vertebrate side, frogs were among the first creatures that made sounds, and they have powerful jumping legs. To this day, frogs are very vocal, but salamanders make almost no sound whatsoever even though they’re just as legit an amphibian as the frogs. Making a sound would be far, far more costly for them [because they can’t jump away].

How animal sounds bloomed

Neel Dhanesha

Your book draws a connection between flowers and sounds, which came as a surprise. How are the sonic world and the world of flowers linked?

David George Haskell

The fossil and ecological evidence is pretty clear that the evolution of flowers, by about 100 million years ago, helped boost the diversity of sound. They did this in a few ways: first, they formed partnerships below-ground with bacteria that turned nitrogen into nutrients. That increased productivity, which then increased the amount of food and energy available up the food chain into the insects.

Even more important, though, is that flowers, by producing nectar and pollen, fruit, and lush foliage, provided habitat for bees, ants, butterflies, moths — you name it. All the terrestrial insects were connecting to flowering plants, where pollinators and herbivores specialized on particular plant families and co-evolved with them.

Every time a new species evolves, there’s a potential for innovation, and so as species split into two and four and eight, the potential for new sounds [and] ways of communication really took off. Flowering plants became a trigger for animal diversification in evolution that then led to more diverse sounds in the world.

Neel Dhanesha

As you write, though, there are two big exceptions to this relationship between flower and sound diversity.

David George Haskell

One is that flowering plants are really not a thing in the oceans. As the continents fragmented and created inland seas and new seashores, and the oceans separated somewhat from one another, that created an awful lot of ecological diversity, which created new possibilities for flourishing and expanded biodiversity. When we drop a hydrophone [an underwater microphone] or a fishing net into the oceans, what comes up through sound or as dinner are the descendants of those creatures that really diversified 100 to 150 million years ago.

Another big exception is mammals. This is our own story — the evolution of lactation and its effect on the human voice. Young animals had to suckle on this incredibly nutritious milk, which is an amazing way for mothers to pass on energy and nutrients instead of just giving them regurgitated food or letting [them] find their own food.

Suckling involves using jaw and throat muscles in new ways. The mammalian jaw and throat was transformed by the gift of milk. Evolution then got to work putting that to use to modify sound. When I’m speaking, I’m using muscles down in my throat and my tongue in the back of my mouth and my lips and my jaw and my hyoid [neck] bone. No reptile can do this because they’ve got very slack, unsophisticated jaws compared to us. They do other things marvelously well, but speaking is not one of them.

Cover design by Nayon Cho for Viking

A “sensory extinction” is threatening the world as we know it

Neel Dhanesha

You spend a significant portion of your book examining other ways we impact the soundscape, and you write about what you call a sensory extinction. What do you mean by that?

David George Haskell

What makes life work is connections between species and individuals within them. We connect through the senses. And we’re pumping massive amounts of sound into some ecosystems that block the capability of animals to live. There’s a sensory crisis of just total overload.

We’re setting off explosions in the oceans, through seismic exploration for oil, that are audible over hundreds of miles — loud enough to kill things that are unlucky enough to be nearby, and drive away others. Around interstates or heavy industry in some cities, there’s so much sound that insects and birds and frogs can’t hear one another.

Human life also is extremely negatively affected. Noise isn’t just an annoyance; it causes cardiovascular disease, prevents children from learning, and fragments neighborhoods. A sensory crisis is a real crisis causing measurable harm, and also intersects with some of these other problems.

Neel Dhanesha

You write that if there’s a sonic hell, it’s in the ocean. Why not cities?

David George Haskell

For some people in cities, there is a sonic hell. But the city is a paradoxical thing in that — for humans, at least — its sounds can also be a source of energy and vitality.

In the oceans, though, we are pumping the sound in through drilling and shipping and exploring with seismic guns, but we’re not suffering. We are the creatures creating the hellscape for others.

Ocean species are fully immersed in sound. Sound penetrates all of their tissues. They hear it all throughout themselves. We’re immersing these beings who have no agency and no choice in the matter in an experience that is devastating to them.

Neel Dhanesha

In other words, sound can be both an indicator of a problem and also an issue in itself, especially for beings that are particularly sensitive to it.

David George Haskell

It is a problem in itself, and the fact that it is an indicator is scientifically useful because you can then go measure sound.

One thing we’re learning is that alongside the crisis of too much noise is a crisis of silencing. In tropical forests, for example — and we know this from the testimony of Indigenous peoples as well as through digital recording devices in the rainforest — we’re losing the diversity of sounds of living beings from many of those ecosystems, partly through processes that are pretty obvious. When you cut down a rainforest and put a palm oil plantation in, or you turn a prairie in the Midwestern US into corn or wheat fields, you lose almost all species that were there before. When ecosystems change their acoustic signature over time, it’s probably because they’re losing some species.

Neel Dhanesha

Why should people be worried about that?

David George Haskell

I think there are multiple levels for why we should care about the diversity of sound. To have a vital and just future on this planet, we need fully functioning forests, because forests are where medicine and food and fuel and soil and clean air and clean water come from. The same is true for prairies and healthy oceans. By listening to these habitats, we can ensure a better future for ourselves and for those who come after us.

Think of a piece of music. Out of silence comes a brief experience of narrative and form, beauty and connection. That’s what the narrative arc of the planet is doing: coming out of and going into silence, with a brief expression of beauty and form and narrative and connection and meaning in the middle. There’s no single composer, no solitary musical genius. Instead, there are billions of musical geniuses out there, all creating this beautiful anarchy of sound.

We should care for that reason as well. It’s harder to encode that in a piece of policy legislation.

LISTEN: A meadow in Tennessee. [“In the murmurs of cells and the voices of animals, we hear solar energy refracted into sound,” Haskell writes in his book. “We are acoustic conduits for plant-snared light as its escapes to air.”]

Neel Dhanesha

What can we do to avoid the sensory extinction crisis?

David George Haskell

We can become more attuned to the soundscape of our own worlds. Listen to our neighborhoods and ask, “What is broken here, and what might I do individually or collectively to fix [it]?” There’s nothing like sitting down with a room of people and hearing the diversity of voices and perspectives and trying to work through that as a lesson in the meanings of political engagement.

Because we live in a globalized world economy, we need to be in solidarity with people working in their local environments elsewhere. We need to engage at the regional, national, and international levels by voting. The soundscapes of the oceans and tropical forests, which are in a particular crisis now, are affected by our political structures.

We also need to consider the soundscapes of our cities. In general, mainstream environmental groups have neglected where most people live, and where a lot of other species live next to humans, which is in cities. The reorientation of the environmental movement toward environmental justice in cities is part of what we need to be working toward.

Audio courtesy of David George Haskell; more sounds from the book can be found on his website.

• Can TV take down the cult of the tech founder? -

  

  The Dropout, Super Pumped, and WeCrashed try to break up our love affair with tech founders. They don’t totally succeed.

  For a moment, closer to the start of this century, startup founders stood somewhere between rock stars and gods. From the aughts through the mid-2010s, founders ruled Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley ruled America. Every company was going to disrupt something and change the world. Everyone idolized Steve Jobs, flash mobs were a thing, and, similarly, anything seemed possible. It was in this Obama era of techno-optimism that a number of millennial startup founders — Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and WeWork’s Adam Neumann — came to prominence, both among venture capitalists and regular Americans. It was the moment before each would fall.

  Over the last few years, a treasure trove of books, podcasts, and reporting has been released about these erstwhile founders. These stories of fraud and bad behavior provided easy fodder for the entertainment industry to create shows: The Dropout, about Theranos; Super Pumped, about Uber; and WeCrashed, about WeWork. It’s no wonder: Holmes, Kalanick, and Neumann are young, charismatic, and complicated people who represent a kind of dashed American dream. Each tried in their own way to supposedly make the world a better place, while a combination of founder worship and free-flowing venture capital heightened their worst impulses. Their stories write themselves, and streaming services are tripping over themselves to be the first to air them.

  But by elevating these stories in the way they do, they might be falling into the same trap they intend to warn against. These founders have already been given too much cash and attention. Putting them at the center of TV shows, even if they’re critical, risks reading like a hagiography rather than a cautionary tale.

  Of course, these stories are particularly tantalizing, especially to the tech companies producing them. Holmes, whose blood analysis hardware never actually did what she said it did, was found guilty of defrauding investors and is facing jail time. While Kalanick and Neumann aren’t in legal trouble, they’ve both exhibited their fair share of bad behavior — bad enough that they were also ousted from the companies they founded. Just to give a taste, the ride-hailing founder was recorded berating a driver who said it had become difficult for him to make a living. Kalanick held meetings at strip clubs and fostered a company culture that allowed the sexual harassment of female employees. His top executive floated digging up dirt on journalists critical of the company (at a dinner meant to improve Kalanick’s image among journalists, no less).

  The hard-partying office-leasing CEO Neumann transported weed on a company jet across international borders, padded his own pockets by leasing his company real estate that he owned personally, and treated his staff like dirt. Perhaps most shamefully, he claimed his office-leasing company was going to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” That’s to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s money these founders burned through, without profit (or revenue, in the case of Theranos) in sight, while acting like they were God’s gift to the world.

  Previous biopics of tech founders like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Network in 2010) and Apple’s Steve Jobs (Jobs in 2013 and Steve Jobs in 2015) were definitely critical of their protagonists, but these films were made when their companies were held in relatively high esteem. Back then, people certainly worried about social media consumption, but Facebook hadn’t yet become a tool for genocide and upending democracy. Apple was still being lauded for its revolutionary iPhone and had yet to receive widespread condemnation for labor violations in its factories and its use of conflict minerals mined by children. We didn’t yet know mottos like “move fast and break things” actually broke things, and that those things were often people. The films were also made before the government sued Facebook for illegal monopolization and reportedly began looking into suing Apple for antitrust behavior around its App Store.

  Elizabeth Morris/Showtime

  The latest crop of tech entertainment has also been informed by the myriad societal changes that have happened since the halcyon days of these hyped-up unicorns. The Me Too movement rose up to hold men in power accountable for sexual harassment and marginalization of women — longstanding issues in Silicon Valley. Black Lives Matter protests targeted the systemic oppression of people of color in the US, while tech companies’ top positions remained largely white and male. Wealth inequality grew and Americans blamed billionaires, many of whom made their money in tech. And, finally, a global pandemic killed millions around the world, spurring people across industries to reconsider work’s place in their lives. The hustle culture these startups thrived on — “Always be hustling” (Uber), “Rise and grind” (WeWork) — became passé.

  As such, these new shows make a concerted effort to tell of the collateral damage these companies have caused. We see the Uber driver whose car was repossessed, the cancer patients who didn’t realize the blood tests they were getting from Theranos weren’t real, the women at Uber and WeWork who suffered sexual harassment at the hands of lionized boy wonders.

  But, in all these shows, these nods feel a little weak. While we’re more aware of the other characters, they are not center stage. This isn’t primarily the story of an Uber driver or a cancer patient or a female tech worker. It’s still a story of tech founders, and we’re still, largely, in thrall to them. The cult of the founder has been complicated, but it has not been undone.

  In these shows, criticism of these flawed protagonists is tempered by sympathy. We learn that Holmes was sexually assaulted at Stanford and infer that she deepens her voice to succeed in a world made for men. We learn that Neumann was basically a failed door-to-door salesman before WeWork and that his wife, Rebecca, was grieving over her father going to jail when she told WeWork’s summer camp that it was women’s calling to help men. We learn that Travis Kalanick, when he wasn’t joking about a service for women on demand called Boob-er, counted women like Austin Geidt and Arianna Huffington as top advisers. Of course, people wouldn’t have made shows about these people in the first place if they were purely evil or unrelatable. That wouldn’t be good TV.

  The shows are also careful to distribute blame — rightly so — beyond their protagonists and onto the economic and cultural environment of Silicon Valley that enabled and encouraged these founders to fly too close to the sun. Softbank CEO and chief WeWork investor Masayoshi Son instructed the already overconfident Neumann to think way bigger. Kalanick’s acolytes and board members played into his ego and promoted the idea that founders know best. Holmes wasn’t the only person who considered herself to be the next Steve Jobs. But perhaps more of the blame resides with the founders.

  Michael Desmond/Hulu

While casting about on his yacht, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison advised Holmes that he’d shipped software fraught with bugs, but she should’ve known that’s not the same as deceiving people in need of medical care. These founders didn’t seem to understand that people (Uber) and office space (WeWork) don’t scale in the same way software does. For some reason, their visionary talents didn’t extend to themselves or their behavior. So keen were they on cementing their own glory by changing the world, they upheld a lot of its worst parts. The tech companies producing these shows had to look no further than their own backyard for trainwrecks of stories that don’t disappoint.

And perhaps it’s no coincidence that these stories of tech hubris are being produced by other tech platforms like Hulu and Apple TV, as well as premium cable network Showtime, which are engaged in their own questionable battles. The streaming wars — in which tech companies are tripping over themselves to produce ever more content for already-saturated audiences — are just one more indication of the continued frothiness around tech companies. While fighting to quickly bring their audiences the content they want, they might not have time to fully internalize the lessons of the stories they’re telling. Like with the easily gotten venture capital that drove Theranos, Uber, and WeWork to bad behavior and, by extension, to the silver screen, we have to wonder: Is it sustainable?

• A new Supreme Court case allows the justices to fix one of their worst anti-worker decisions -

  

  Circuit City v. Adams is one of the most indefensible decisions of the modern era. Its shadow hangs over the Court this month.

  Laws mean nothing if they cannot be enforced against people who violate them, which is why there is an entire branch of government — the judiciary — whose job is supposed to be applying the law to individual cases. But at least when it comes to employment law, the Supreme Court has spent the last two decades permitting most employers to immunize themselves from lawsuits through a practice known as “forced arbitration.”

  Forced arbitration allows an employer to order its workers to sign away their right to sue the company, or lose their jobs. Instead, any disputes must be resolved in a private arbitration process that gives extraordinary advantages to corporate parties over individuals. (Forced arbitration is also very common in ordinary consumer transactions, but your bank or cellphone company can only refuse to do business with you if you refuse arbitration. Your boss can most likely fire you.)

  In the final two weeks of March, the Supreme Court will hear three cases asking just how much power companies have to force their workers into arbitration.

  The first two, Morgan v. Sundance and Viking River Cruises v. Moriana, are fairly narrow. But the third case, Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, involves one of the original sins of the Court’s forced arbitration jurisprudence. The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925, the statute the Court relies on in forced arbitration cases, explicitly exempts “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” But, in Circuit City v. Adams (2001), a 5-4 Court held that most workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce can be forced into arbitration.

  The issue now before the Court in Saxon is whether workers who load and unload cargo from airplanes count among the rare workers who are not vulnerable to forced arbitration under Circuit City. Under existing law, answering this question is needlessly complicated — although it is worth noting that a Trump-appointed judge wrote the lower court’s opinion holding that these workers are not subject to forced arbitration.

  But if the Court actually followed the text of the Arbitration Act, then this wouldn’t be a difficult case at all. Indeed, if the Court cared about what the Arbitration Act actually says, none of its decisions enabling forced arbitration would apply to workers.

  Forced arbitration hurts workers

  Congress enacted the Arbitration Act to, in the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, permit “merchants with relatively equal bargaining power” to resolve disputes through private arbitration. And, when used by parties with relatively equal power, arbitration is benign and can even be beneficial. Resolving a dispute through arbitration can be quicker and less expensive, and merchants within a particular industry can select an arbitrator who is more familiar with that industry than most judges.

  Starting in the 1980s, however, the Court started to read the Arbitration Act to permit companies to require ordinary consumers and employees to agree to arbitration as a condition of doing business with that company. Under Circuit City and Epic Systems v. Lewis (2018), an employer can order an employee to agree to forced arbitration or else immediately be fired.

  Employers, moreover, have powerful incentives to do so. A 2015 study of forced arbitration in the workplace, for example, found that workers are a little more than half as likely to prevail before an arbiter as they are to prevail in litigation against their employer.

  And when workers do prevail in arbitration, they are typically awarded about a fifth as much money as a worker who prevails before a judge.

  There may be some instances where workers would prefer arbitration to litigation. Arbitration is common in unionized workplaces, for example, in part because the union can help ensure that a fair and impartial arbitrator will be selected to hear a dispute. And opponents of forced arbitration typically do not object to agreements to arbitrate a dispute after that dispute arises — a new federal law prohibiting forced arbitration in sexual misconduct cases, for example, targets “predispute” arbitration provisions where workers are often forced to sign away their right to sue before they are even contemplating legal action against their employer.

  But there’s a reason many employers try to force workers into arbitration before a dispute arises. When workers are forced into arbitration, their employers are far less likely to suffer meaningful consequences if they break the law.

  Circuit City is egregiously wrong

  To understand why the Court’s decisions allowing workers to be exploited in this way are wrong, it helps to be familiar with two provisions of the Arbitration Act and a small amount of constitutional history — and specifically how the Supreme Court has changed its interpretation of the word “commerce” over time.

  The first relevant provision says that an agreement to arbitrate disputes typically shall be “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable.” Importantly, this provision only applies to contracts pertaining to a “transaction involving commerce.”

  The second relevant provision is the one exempting workers from the Arbitration Act. It provides that “nothing herein contained shall apply to contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Notice that this language also uses the word “commerce.”

  The word “commerce” also appears in one of the most important provisions of the Constitution — a provision that permits Congress to “regulate commerce … among the several states.” This is the constitutional provision that gives Congress much of its authority to regulate private businesses.

  But the scope of Congress’s power over interstate commerce, and the proper meaning of the word “commerce” itself, has historically been one of the most contentious questions in American law.

  Beginning in the late 1800s, conservative Supreme Court justices started reading the word “commerce” very narrowly. Under this now-discredited reading of the Constitution, the power to regulate interstate “commerce” included the power to regulate the transportation of goods across state lines, but it did not include the power to regulate manufacturing, agriculture, or other methods of producing these goods.

  The Court abandoned this narrow reading of the word “commerce” in 1937, however. Under the modern reading of the Constitution, Congress’s authority to regulate commerce extends broadly to all “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.”

  Recall, however, that the Arbitration Act was enacted in 1925, when the antiquated reading of the Commerce Clause was still ascendant. Thus, as the Arbitration Act was originally understood, it did not apply at all to employment contracts involving workers engaged in manufacturing, agriculture, or anything else other than the transit of goods (and people) across state lines.

  Again, the Arbitration Act only extends to contracts “involving commerce.” And in 1925, that word was understood quite narrowly.

  This historical understanding of the word “commerce” also explains why the Arbitration Act exempts “seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” This provision broadly exempts all workers who were understood to be subject to congressional regulation in 1925.

  Indeed, this is the best way to read the Arbitration Act. The Congress that enacted the law in 1925 couldn’t possibly have known that the Supreme Court would shift its understanding of the word “commerce” a dozen years later. And the lawmakers who voted for the Arbitration Act most definitely could not have anticipated that, 76 years after the Act became law, the Supreme Court would abruptly decide to apply it to all workers.

  Even if the Arbitration Act is read anachronistically — giving the word “commerce” its modern definition and not the definition that prevailed in 1925 — the law still should be read to exempt all workers.

  Under this anachronistic reading, the reference to contracts “involving commerce” must be read quite broadly — broad enough to encompass nearly every workplace in the United States. But, under the modern reading of the word “commerce,” the exemption for “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” must also be read just as broadly to encompass every employee of these workplaces.

  The point is that, in either reading of the word “commerce,” the Arbitration Act must be read to exempt all employment contracts. If the Act is broad enough to encompass nearly all workplaces, then so is the provision exempting “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.”

  Circuit City’s error is that it did not apply a consistent reading of the word “commerce” to the entire Arbitration Act. It read the provision stating that the Arbitration Act applies to any contract “involving commerce” using the modern understanding of the word “commerce,” extending the scope of the law to nearly every workplace in the nation.

  But Circuit City also read the provision exempting “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” using the antiquated meaning of the word, ensuring that only workers engaged in the transit of goods would be exempted.

  By changing the definition of the word “commerce” midway through the statute, the Court’s conservative majority effectively rewrote a narrow federal statute with a broad exemption for all workers, and turned it into a broad federal statute with a narrow exemption for only some workers.

The particular question in Saxon, the case currently pending before the Supreme Court, involves Latrice Saxon, a supervisor for Southwest Airlines who manages workers who load and unload cargo onto airplanes that travel across state lines. Her job also sometimes requires her to load and unload that cargo herself.

Saxon, in other words, does not actually transport goods across state lines. But she does do work that makes it possible for her employer to transport goods across state lines. So, under Circuit City’s mangled understanding of the Arbitration Act, Saxon is an edge case. It is not immediately clear if Saxon qualifies as a worker “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” under the extremely narrow definition of those words embraced by five justices in Circuit City.

A federal appeals court determined that Saxon does qualify as a worker engaged in interstate commerce under Circuit City — though, notably, the lower court placed great significance on the fact that Saxon herself spends a considerable amount of time loading and unloading cargo. The lower court concluded that this would be a much harder case if Saxon merely supervised other workers who perform the physical act of placing cargo on airplanes and removing other cargo.

And it would be; one of the many reasons the Court abandoned the antiquated definition of the word “commerce” in the 1930s is because it’s really not possible to draw a clear line between workers who transport goods and workers who do other forms of labor.

What about a human resources manager who hires and fires workers who load cargo onto planes, but who never actually loads cargo themselves? How about a dispatcher who assigns truck drivers to transport goods across state lines, but who never actually drives a truck themselves? How about a factory worker who loads goods into crates, so that those crates can then be loaded onto airplanes? What about a corporate executive who oversees a company that earns 2 percent of its profits from transporting goods across state lines? Or an insurance salesperson who sells policies to airlines which insure cargo that travels across state lines?

There aren’t really clear answers to any of these questions under the fabricated legal rule the Court invented in Circuit City. So long as Circuit City remains good law, judges will necessarily have to draw arbitrary lines between workers deemed to be close enough to the transit of goods to keep all their legal rights intact, and workers deemed so far removed from such transit that they are vulnerable to forced arbitration.

This is a bad way to do law. The better approach is to overrule Circuit City, and to interpret the Arbitration Act as it was written.

Saxon offers the Court a chance to do so, although Republican justices have historically been great fans of forced arbitration, so that outcome is unlikely.

There still is a good chance that even this Court will hold that Saxon is not subject to forced arbitration. But if the Court rules narrowly, future judges will undoubtedly be forced to make arbitrary decisions about who is exempt from the Arbitration Act.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Ristretto and Sim Sim please -

• Ind vs SL, 2nd Test | Mendis, Karunaratne show fight before India reduce Sri Lanka to 151/4 at tea on Day 3 - The visitors are chasing a mammoth target of 447

• Shreyas Iyer named ICC ‘Player of the Month’ - New Zealand all-rounder Amelia Kerr bags honour among women

• Women's Cricket World Cup | England's title defense falters after loss against South Africa - England is yet to register a win after three matches

• Joshi, Bhagat shine as India bag 21 medals at Spanish Para Badminton International -

From The Hindu: National News

• Somu Veerraju conveys good wishes to Pawan on JSP formation day -

• People of all religions take part in mosque inauguration - Residents of Ballupete, irrespective of their faith, contributed to its construction

• 13,735 disputes resolved in Lok Adalat in Dharwad -

• 5.13 lakh migrant workers registered under Awaz scheme - Strict guidelines soon for agents bringing migrant workers to State

• Andhra Pradesh: House-to-house survey taken up to check health condition of villagers in West Godavari - Doctors, paramedical staff monitoring the situation round-the-clock after suspected hooch deaths

From BBC: Europe

• US warns China against helping Russia in Ukraine - US officials say Russia asked China for military support and help in evading sanctions.

• Ukraine war: ‘Sky turned red’ as missiles hit Lviv military base - “It doesn’t matter where you live” - fear after a deadly attack on military base close to Polish border.

• Zhytomyr: Aerial attacks hit city that is corridor to Kyiv - Zhytomyr, in north-west Ukraine, is facing intense daily attacks. Why is it being bombed so heavily?

• Ukraine war: 21 children flown to UK for cancer treatment - The children and their families arrived on an urgent flight after a plea from Polish officials.

• War in Ukraine: Russian forces accused of abducting second mayor - The news comes as Ukraine says Russia is trying to create “pseudo-republics” to break up the country.

From Ars Technica

• A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time - It helped popularize the interactive computing paradigm we take for granted today. - link

• Check out the first five minutes of Showtime’s Man Who Fell to Earth - People attending SXSW this weekend were treated to the series’ world premiere. - link

• Learning physiology by looking at the poisons that shut it down - A cute book, but not nearly as good as Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook. - link

• Activists are reaching Russians behind Putin’s propaganda wall - Tinder, other apps give activists a way to share what’s really happening in Ukraine. - link

• Soldier Boy and Crimson Countess revealed in The Boys red-band teaser - Hit series shows no sign of pulling back on its bloody outrageousness. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A man walked into his bedroom and see his wife is packing her suitcase -

  He asks, “What are you doing?”

  She answers, “I’m moving to Germany. I heard prostitutes there get paid € 400 for doing what I do for you for free.”

  Later that night, on her way out, the wife walks into the bedroom and sees her husband packing his suitcase. When she asks him where he’s going,he replies,

  “I’m coming too I want to see how you live on € 800 a year

  submitted by /u/nikan69
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• I told my daughter, “Did you know that humans eat more bananas than monkeys?” She rolled her eyes at me, but I persevered. “It’s true!” -

  “When was the last time you ate a monkey?!”

  submitted by /u/808gecko808
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• Poor Irish Family -

  A poor Irish family lives on a farm and they rely on their single cow for income.

  One morning, the father walks outside to find their cow dead.

  “There is nothing that could help get us out of poverty now,” says the dad as he shoots himself.

  The mom walks outside and sees the dad and the cow on the ground.

  “I can’t live without my husband,” she says as she shoots herself with her husband’s gun.

  The daughter walks outside and sees her mother, father and cow dead.

  “I can’t live any longer without my family,” she says as she jumps into the river and kills herself.

  The oldest son, 23 years old, walks outside looking for the family and sees them all dead.

  “Is there anyway to bring them back,” he yells at the sky.

  Poof! A female leprechaun appears.

  “I will bring your whole family back to life, even the cow,” she says, “if you can fuck me 5 times in a row. If not I get to kill you.”

  The boy fucks her 3 times in a row and he dies.

  The middle son, 19 years old, comes out and sees the leprechaun. She gives him the same offer as his brother.

  “I will bring your whole family back to life, even the cow,” she says, “if you can fuck me 5 times in a row. If not I get to kill you.”

  The son agrees to do it but can only do it 4 times. He dies.

  The youngest son, 15 years old, comes out and is given the same offer.

  “I will bring your whole family back to life, even the cow,” she says, “if you can fuck me 5 times in a row. If not I get to kill you.”

  The son says, “What if I fuck you 10 times in a row?”

  The leprechaun thinks. She says, "I will bring back your family and give you my pot of gold.

  The son says, “Wait, how do I know you will survive it?”

  “What do you mean?” says the leprechaun.

  “The cow didn’t.”

  submitted by /u/Hi_This_Is_God_777
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• There was a little old man who was in very good shape but noticed one morning that he was suntanned over his entire body with the exception of his penis… -

  So he went to the beach, completely undressed and buried himself in the sand except for his penis.

  Just then, two old ladies were strolling along the sand one walking with a cane. Upon seeing this thing sticking out of the sand she began to move it about with her cane, remarking to the other little old lady, “there ain’t hardly no justice in this world.“ The other little old lady asked“what do you mean by that?“

  Well, she said:

  When I was 20, I was curious about it.

  When I was 30, I enjoyed it.

  When I was 40 I asked for it.

  When I was 50, I paid for it.

  When I was 60, I prayed for it.

  When I was 70, I forgot about it.

  And now that I’m 80, the damn things are growing wild, and I’m too old to squat.

  [I know , I know, not that great of a joke. But, I found it in a box of old stuff dated in the 1950s and 1960s]

  submitted by /u/Doc-in-a-box
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• Gas prices are so high… -

  That even the coronavirus stopped traveling..

  submitted by /u/TheBravan
  [link] [comments]