A Person of the Year: Jamie Raskin - How one politician devoted his fight for democracy to his lost son. - link
The Year in Climate - A summer that really scared scientists. - link
Inside an Oklahoma City Abortion Clinic - The staff is struggling to meet the needs of Texas patients, with no relief in sight. - link
The Baby-Box Lady of America - With the help of safe-haven laws, which allow parents to anonymously surrender their babies, Monica Kelsey has installed more than ninety baby boxes—mailbox-like receptacles for infants—in five states. - link
We Wish You a Wary Christmas! - Season’s greetings from the callous and rash. - link
From Vox
Does it still make sense for vaccinated people with Covid-19 to isolate for 10 days? -
Katie Lucey administers a Covid-19 test on her son at a PCR and Rapid Antigen pop-up testing site on Wall Street in New York City on December 16. | Ted Shaffrey/AP
Omicron — and short-staffed hospitals — could force the US to rethink isolation rules.
A lot of people are going to contract the new omicron variant in the coming weeks. Some of them will feel sick and, as has always been the case, those people should isolate themselves. Others may be identified through regimented testing for work, school, or travel, and have no symptoms at all.
Right now, all of those people who test positive for Covid-19 — symptomatic or not, vaccinated or not — are urged to isolate themselves for 10 full days. Some public health experts are asking: Does that still make sense?
The forthcoming omicron wave won’t be the same as the ones that preceded it. More than 60 percent of America’s population is vaccinated, and the coronavirus itself is also different: The early evidence suggests with the omicron variant, people might recover and clear the virus from their bodies faster, especially if they’re vaccinated, and they may therefore be contagious for a shorter period of time.
The CDC guidance for when and how long fully vaccinated Americans should isolate was last updated in October. It still recommends that if a person, vaccinated or not, tests positive for Covid-19, they should isolate for 10 days, staying home, keeping away from anybody else who lives in their house, using a different bathroom, and wearing a mask as much as possible. (For vaccinated people who think they may have been exposed to Covid but aren’t sure, the guidance is not to isolate but to get tested after several days.)
Some experts argue it’s time to consider shortening the isolation window after a positive test or even changing the guidance to rely more on test results and less on timing.
The stakes are high. A 10-day quarantine for a child in school or somebody with a job that can’t be done remotely can be a major inconvenience. The CDC is already relaxing its guidance for schoolchildren, saying those who have been exposed to somebody with Covid-19 can continue to attend classes as long as they continue to test negative. But some of these experts are urging a broader reassessment of similar recommendations for people who contract the virus.
The length of quarantine windows could also determine whether or not US hospitals have the staff to handle the surge of Covid-19 patients expected as omicron sweeps across the country in the coming weeks and months.
The preliminary data out of South Africa indicates that people who are hospitalized with omicron are staying in the hospital for a shorter period of time. That may mean the virus is now clearing the body more quickly, said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-diseases researcher at the University of California San Francisco.
It’s too soon to be certain about that. But if this pattern does hold up, that would be a reason to reevaluate the recommendations.
“We have to keep on reevaluating if isolation can be shortened,” Gandhi said, “as we transition to a society where there will be a lot of omicron exposure, given how infectious it is, but hopefully continued protection against severe disease due to cellular immunity.”
Rapid tests should, in theory, also make it easier to revise the isolation protocols. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said the evidence suggests vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection are contagious for less than the current 10-day isolation window. He would like to change the protocols so that vaccinated people who test positive continue to take rapid at-home tests.
Once they test negative, as long as they feel healthy, he said, they shouldn’t need to isolate.
“One thing we could do today is to start saying, ‘Use those home tests when you have a breakthrough,’” he sad. “‘When you’re negative and you feel good, go back to your life.’”
Rapid at-home tests could then serve as a kind of contagiousness test, replacing a strict time-based guideline to let people know when to start and stop isolating. Even small adjustments could help: As Adalja put it to me, being able to return to normal life after nine days instead of 10 can make a real difference.
Other experts agree that it could make sense to reduce isolation periods for fully vaccinated people who aren’t experiencing symptoms. But it takes time to get the sturdiest empirical foundation for these policy changes.
“We will not have the evidence base on which to assess the impact of changes in these protocols for week or months and omicron will be on us before that,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, said.
So we are working with imperfect information at a critical point in the pandemic: It’s imperative to constrain spread as much as possible, but there’s also a risk in asking health care workers to quarantine for too long when hospitals are expecting a swell of Covid-19 patients.
The current isolation guidelines pose a staffing challenge to hospitals
We don’t know how many people have been strictly following the CDC’s guidance after they test positive. But hospitals do with their staffs.
Right now, hospitals are typically asking their staff members who test positive to quarantine for the full 10 days — and they are already seeing positive tests skyrocket, even with omicron still accounting for only a fraction of US cases, according to the available data.
Houston Methodist Hospital saw the number of positive tests among its staff members grow from 46 the week of December 6 to 200 the following week.
“We must follow the CDC and OSHA guidelines, which require the 10 days of quarantine,” Stefanie Asin, a spokesperson for Houston Methodist, said in an email. “If they change the guidelines, we will follow suit with our own policies.”
Even if the variant does tend to cause milder illness on average, as some early indications suggest, a certain percentage of infected people, especially unvaccinated people, is going to end up getting really sick. The bigger the denominator (infected people) gets, the bigger the numerator (hospitalized patients) will too. The more hospitalizations we see, the more deaths will be added to the 800,000 American lives lost so far and the higher the risk that there will not be beds or nurses for people who come to a hospital with non-Covid medical emergencies.
The crunch will be even more acute if a wave of sick patients hits hospitals where doctors, nurses, and staff are sidelined for days with mild or asymptomatic cases. Omicron appears adept at evading immunity from vaccines and causing mild or asymptomatic breakthrough infections for some people, though the vaccines still provide strong protection against severe illness. But that change in the virus could lead to a lot of nurses and doctors testing positive — and being required to quarantine, even if they don’t have symptoms or if they feel better quickly.
As hospitals have said throughout the pandemic, staffing is as much of a constraint on their ability to deliver care as physical beds or supplies. Before omicron hit, nearly 99 percent of rural hospitals already said in a recent survey that they were experiencing a staffing shortage; 96 percent said they are having trouble finding nurses specifically. These hospitals tend to be in communities with lower vaccination rates, where the need for care is expected to explode as omicron takes over.
Even though the CDC recommendations are thus far unchanged, isolation protocols in some industries are already starting to change ahead of the omicron wave.
The NFL announced this week, after a rash of positive tests that put several of the coming weekend’s games in jeopardy, that it would relax its isolation policies for vaccinated players who test positive. Instead of requiring them to return two separate negative tests taken 24 hours apart, those players no longer need to wait a full day between tests. Any two negative tests are sufficient to allow a player to return to practice and games. (At the same time, the league is also reinstating mask requirements and is putting restrictions on what players and coaches can do outside team facilities, steps not widely seen outside of the NFL.)
This kind of transition is necessary, Adalja argued. We are moving from a reality in which Covid-19 is a world-altering public health emergency to one in which it is one of many viruses circulating and infecting people all the time. In the first scenario, blanket one-size-fits-all guidelines had value.
But as we move into the second, individual cases should be treated individually, he said. A vaccinated person with no symptoms is not the same as somebody who isn’t vaccinated and feeling sick. There should be a protocol that allows the former to return to life as soon as possible, while giving the latter a way to know when they can do the same.
There’s one big hurdle: Ending quarantines based on test results depends on tests being available and on people being willing to take them. Some people might not because testing every day at current rates could get expensive. The Biden White House sought to ease the cost burden for tests with its plan to have people submit their receipts to their insurer for reimbursement, but that could prove too cumbersome for many people to follow through.
In the years to come, as the coronavirus continues to circulate without, it is hoped, causing massive waves of hospitalization and death, this guidance will be less necessary; the CDC will offer its recommendations and people will decide whether to heed them.
That’s already how we handle flu and other seasonal illnesses, and it’s likely it will eventually be true of Covid-19 too. “Precision medicine is when we craft recommendations based on individual characteristics,” Adalja said. “As this becomes more endemic and managed by individual physicians, you will see naturally a move toward precision medicine.”
For individuals, that transition may happen over years. But for hospitals anticipating an imminent surge of omicron patients, considering a new policy for isolation is urgent. They’ll need all hands on deck to care for their patients.
Why we need a better flu shot -
A universal flu vaccine is closer than you think.
The flu vaccine is something many of us take for granted. Every year, starting in the early fall, “free flu shot available” signs start to line pharmacies and clinics. But in the US, only around half the population actually gets the vaccine. When talking about the flu, many equate it to a terrible cold, inconvenient at worst. But annual strains of influenza are estimated to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. The reality is, we’ve been living with influenza for so long that we often forget just how dangerous it can be.
The reason we need an annual vaccine for the flu in the first place: The virus is particularly prone to change. That ability to mutate is also what makes it particularly good at causing pandemic-level threats. The last four pandemics before Covid-19 were caused by an influenza virus. Experts warn that another one is inevitable and that our seasonal flu vaccine isn’t going to stop it.
For 80 years, the way we research and make our annual flu vaccine has remained the same. It’s a costly and timely process that involves predictions and chicken eggs. The result is a seasonal flu vaccine that’s certainly good enough, but we can do better. And now researchers are closer than ever to a big achievement: something like a flu vaccine that remains effective year after year, regardless of the strain. Something that could stop an outbreak before it starts; something like a universal flu vaccine.
Is Jeremy Strong the bad art friend? -
Jeremy Strong accepting the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actor in a Drama on January 12, 2020, in Santa Monica, California. | Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Champagne Collet
Eccentricity in artists used to be normal. Has the internet changed that?
Is Jeremy Strong a bad art friend?
The actor, acclaimed for his Emmy-winning role as Kendall Roy, the tragic, brooding golden-boy-turned-black-sheep of the family in HBO’s drama Succession, has flown relatively under the radar as himself — until recently. Earlier this month, a well-timed New Yorker profile of the actor went viral. In it, writer Michael Schulman portrayed the actor as mirroring his character’s intensity and self-centered focus in real life. Highlights include the time he nearly bankrupted a Yale theatre club in order to fete Al Pacino, famous friends (like Matthew McConaughey) calling Schulman for character references at Strong’s request, his stint following Daniel Day-Lewis around like a puppy, his penchant for quoting philosophers, and the repeated implication that Strong is the only Succession actor who doesn’t get that the show is a dark comedy.
The profile garnered the kind of reaction you’d expect: Social media users boggled at Strong’s behavior, especially what Schulman depicts as his pretentious, pseudo-method-acting process, which includes everything from spontaneous script ad-libs to refusing to rehearse with his scene partners in advance. While some embraced Strong’s affectations, many online seemed to feel that Strong’s all-or-nothing personality would be insufferable to have to deal with on a regular basis, on-set or off, and that his behavior toward colleagueswasparticularlyegregious. The conversation was especially fierce on Twitter — as in “Jeremy Strong” trended on the platform for a full week — which is somewhat fitting, given that Succession seems to be in a constant dialogue with the kind of overtly performative viewers who are, like Kendall, in New York media and on Twitter, and obsessed with both.
But if the worst thing that anyone can say about a guy is that he’s really intense, or maybe even annoying, perhaps that’s not worth the extended social media critique that Schulman’s profile generated. The backlash raises a question: Is “acting normal” something we really want from artists? Is there really no room for eccentricity?
Following the profile, several of Strong’s friends within the industry put up messages of support, including Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Aaron Sorkin. None are strangers to charges of pretension. Sorkin, who directed Strong in Trial of the Chicago 7, spoke on the record to Schulman for the profile, describing Strong’s desire to be authentically tear-gassed for the role. In an open letter posted by Chastain, however, Sorkin wrote that he regretted “help[ing] Mr. Schulman create what I believe is a distorted picture of Jeremy that asks us to roll our eyes at his acting process.” (He also clarified that Strong would never endanger anyone else on set.)
Actors and their processes have long been mocked, inside and outside of acting circles, and with various degrees of understanding. But getting into character is something that’s commonplace for every working actor, including Strong’s Succession co-stars. (See: Brian Cox’s empathy for the often-monstrous Logan Roy in this recent GQ interview.) Strong’s widely heralded performance in the final episode of season three may have ended the conversation when it comes to him, but it’s just one in a recent spate of public debates over the value of eccentric artists — and an increasing need to denigrate and even pathologize eccentricity itself.
A somewhat comical recent example of eccentric artistry comes from the culinary arts, via Floriano Pellegrino, chef and owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Bros in Lecce, Italy. Bros became briefly notorious earlier this month after travel blogger Geraldine DeRuiter made a post mocking the pretentious, overpriced, and frequently inedible 27-course meal she and her friends had there.
In response, Pellegrino issued a fascinating manifesto involving different artistic depictions of horses. “Contemporary art does not provide you with answers, but offers great questions,” he wrote to Today. “Contemporary cuisine should do the same. A chef should not offer easy answers, but challenge you with interesting questions.” While some of the questions Bros evoked were certainly interesting — how does one drink citrus foam from a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth? — others were pedestrian and annoying, like why the menu didn’t accommodate vegan dieters or those with food allergies. Still, Pellegrino’s point was clear: My right to be obnoxious in the name of Art supersedes your right to have a meal that’s tidy and unsurprising. It’s not an argument you could make at most restaurants, but it’s not without merit.
Questions of eccentricity and the rights of artists were even more complicated in the extended public debate surrounding Robert Kolker’s viral New York Times Magazine article, “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” The article — the title of which is now the stuff of legend — details, in depth, the stunning quirks and lack of self-awareness demonstrated by a writer named Dawn Dorland, who donated her kidney to a stranger and then insisted on making sure everyone around her knew about it. (Which, it turns out, is what donation experts want you to do.) Dorland gradually realized that a woman she considered a friend, Sonya Larson, had not only plagiarized a locked Facebook post Dorland had made about the donation for a short story of Larson’s own, but had also spent years mocking Dorland with a group of Boston writers Dorland once considered friends and colleagues. Larson had been a far more successful writer than Dorland, but just as Larson’s short story was receiving major attention, Dorland’s plagiarism claims torpedoed her career. Not a great look for Dorland, given that Larson, who is Asian American, had used her version of Dorland’s kidney donation to critique race and class privilege.
Initially, the public reaction seemed to be overwhelmingly in Larson’s corner. Much like Schulman’s profile of Strong, the author gives Dorland just enough rope to hang herself. Kolker later explained that he had attempted to “present both Ms. Dorland’s and Ms. Larson’s side faithfully,” but Dorland comes across as cluelessly self-absorbed. Kolker chose his contexts very carefully and omitted many extenuating facts on Dorland’s side, and subsequent revelations complicated the narrative he presented.
Increasingly, Dorland seemed to many like the victim of a hate campaign — a woman who’d had a major life event stolen from her, weaponized against her, and used to make fun of her over the course of years, all for the sin of being a little over-earnest and socially awkward. Larson’s circle mocked her for everything from making heart signs with her hands to using smug hashtags. “She just can’t stop being … herself,” Larson opined.
At worst, perhaps this was just an episode torn from Reddit’s Am I The Asshole that deserved the judgment “Everyone Sucks Here.” What it became, however, was a referendum on the limits and value of eccentricity, in art and in life. The titular question arises when Dorland says that Larson made her feel like a “bad art friend” for not wanting her own experience used. While many writers defended Larson’s right to steal from and transform any story she ran across, in the time-honored writerly tradition, many others felt that the malice involved — seemingly a result of intolerance of Dorland’s own complicated eccentricity — made the stakes much different from a simple case of artistic inspiration.
Part of the difficulty of interpreting the people at the center of these viral profiles and blog posts is that all of them are artists. There’s a sacrosanct creative liberty that artists often demand and receive from the rest of us — the towering personality of the diva, for example. There’s an expectation that the actor who’s allowed to be histrionic and demanding, or the writer who’s allowed to be oversharing and impassioned, will ultimately create better art.
If artistic license is the idea that’s fueling this ongoing conversation, the bigger question is about people, not the things they create. “My plagiarist fiercely maintains her right to an artistic vision,” Dorland wrote at one point. “But don’t we bankrupt our art of its value if we don’t treat our human subjects with empathy?”
In an era where personality tests from Hogwarts houses to Myers-Briggs types are all the rage, personalities that can’t be easily labeled — that don’t fit neatly into well-understood, orderly boxes — may receive less grace than others who do. Ironically, even as society shifts toward much more nuanced understandings of neurodivergent brains, disordered personalities, and social anxieties, we sometimes fail to put that understanding into practice when confronted with the complex personalities of actual people.
Increasingly, particularly on the internet, one of the worst things you can be is “cringe” — to be so awkward, un-self-aware, over-earnest, passionate, or guileless that you inadvertently become a target of bullying for personality traits that in effect harm no one. Not only has “cringe culture” become de rigueur on many parts of the internet, but the group experience involved in bullying or mocking anyone who happens to get categorized as cringe becomes justification for the mocking and bullying to continue. That seems to be what happened in the case of Sonya Larson’s group chat: As one brave friend eventually confessed, “When you enter a groupthink mentality where you are willing to dehumanize someone, you stop seeing them as a person.”
The assumption the rest of us tend to make in order to justify attacking the eccentrics in our midst is that they don’t know how they come across. Certainly that’s how Schulman portrays Strong — unaware that there’s a joke and that he’s the brunt of it. Perhaps that’s not the case, though. Strong, Dorland, and Pellegrino each seem to have some idea of how they’re being perceived, and to choose, despite the risk of increased mockery and pain, to continue being themselves, at their most extra and obnoxious.
Making this choice is a rite of passage for many of us — for the theater kids hamming it up, the fangirls shrieking too loudly at concerts, the excited nerds geeking out about obscure subjects, and on and on. The choice to embrace effusive displays of sincere feeling will always bring the risk of vilification. Perhaps when the next viral profile drops, we might push past the knee-jerk mockery, recognize the capacity for eccentricity in ourselves, and extend a little kindness.
From The Hindu: Sports
WFI president slaps over-aged wrestler after he insisted on competing in U-15 Nationals - Interestingly, the wrestler trains at the academy which belongs to Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh in U.P.’s Gonda
BCCI CMO Abhijit Salvi resigns after hectic run in COVID-19 times - Abhijit Salvi’s role had gained significance in COVID-19 times with regular testing and bubble life becoming an integral part of international cricket.
Ashes Test series | England collapses again as Australia turns screw in second Test - With two days left, Australia extends their lead to 282.
The Ashes | England all out for 236 on Day 3 - England collapses after a wicketless first session on Day 3
Mike Marqusee’s ‘War Minus the Shooting’, 25 years on, closely mirrors both cricket and the nation as they are today - It is amazing how much the book, now reissued, seems like an augury of both the cricket and the politics of today
From The Hindu: National News
Tripura government plans ‘Vision 2047’ to build secure, prosperous future: Biplab Kumar Deb - The Chief Minister of Tripura maintained that before finalisation of the document, suggestions would be sought from specialists, intellectuals, and people from all walks of life.
Ex-SC Judge Nanavati who probed Godhra, anti-Sikh riots passes away at 86 - Former Supreme Court Judge Girish Thakorlal Nanavati died of a cardiac failure at 1:15 p.m. on December 18 in Gujarat, family members said
Naqvi hits out at ‘Talibani mentality’ opposing women empowerment - Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said those who opposed making the social evil of instant triple talaq a crime or raised questions on removal of restrictions on Muslim women travelling alone for Haj are “professional protesters”
A total of 261 Rohingya Muslims residing in Punjab: State government to Supreme Court - “Out of these 261 Rohingya Muslims, 191 are residing in Dera Bassi and 70 in village Handesra. Further, out of 261, 227 are in possession of UNHCR certificates,” an affidavit said.
Afghan crisis, regional connectivity to be focus of India-Central Asia dialogue on December 19 - External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is hosting the dialogue being attended by his counterparts from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
From BBC: Europe
Covid-19: Omicron spreading at lightning speed - French PM - Restrictions are tightening across Europe as countries battle a new wave of Covid-19 infections.
Russia Ukraine: Moscow lists demands for defusing Ukraine tensions - Moscow says Nato should abandon hopes of Ukraine joining and Nato states should get rid of weapons.
Russia-Ukraine: Can a solution be found for war in Ukraine’s east? - The West fears a Russian invasion so hopes of a peaceful solution to the conflict look slim.
Gardener Omar Raddad wins fight to re-open notorious murder case - A Moroccan gardener convicted of the notorious killing of a French heiress is fighting to clear his name.
Sweden’s Gavle Christmas goat torched… again - A giant straw goat that is an annual highlight in the city of Gavle is burned down by an arsonist.
From Ars Technica
Google warns that NSO hacking is on par with elite nation-state spies - ForcedEntry is “one of the most technically sophisticated exploits.” - link
Anti-5G “quantum pendants” are radioactive - Dutch authority for nuclear safety issues warning, bans 10 scammy “negative ion” products. - link
Reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes - Add to a charity haul that’s raised nearly $9,000 in just three days. - link
Vaccine trial finds a glitch with children in one age range - Company is adding a third dose to the trial after finding a low immune response. - link
Putting the fear of bass into mosquitofish—with a robot - A notorious invasive species stays scared for weeks after seeing a fake predator. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
What weighs more, a gallon of water or a gallon of butane? -
The gallon of water. Butane is a lighter fluid.
obligatorynotmyjoke
Edit: Guys I know that a gallon is a measurement of volume, but a gallon of Butane is literally a lighter fluid than water cause it’s less dense
