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 G.O.P. and the Ghosts of Iraq - Ukraine shows that Republicans have moved a long way from the Party of George W. Bush. - link

• Hip-Hop at Fifty: An Elegy - A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.” - link

• The Allure of Exotic Animals in Strange Places - Thefts from the Dallas Zoo made headlines. But Texas is a hotbed for ownership of all kinds of rare species. - link

• What’s the Path Forward for Haiti? - As the international community contemplates another armed intervention, a reckoning with history is long overdue. - link

• What if the Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action? - The conservative majority may strike down consideration of race in school admissions. What will that mean for colleges? Plus, how the culture wars came to the Catholic Church. - link

From Vox

• Save the “massive, living, beautiful, breathing, majestic boxes of carbon” known as whales -

  

  Ships, noise, and climate change are killing whales. Here’s how to change that.

  It has been a bad winter for the whales.

  While the total number of whales washed ashore — beached — on the East Coast since January is lower than in recent years, the quick succession of deaths over the past few months is “unusual,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the body that monitors and sets regulations to protect whales in the US, told the New York Times late last month.

  The majority of the 22 beached whales on the East Coast found this season died from ship strikes, or collisions with vessels. Every year, cargo, cruise, and fishing vessels kill an estimated 20,000 whales. These ship strikes are a result of the overlap between whale feeding grounds and maritime shipping lanes, and an increase in vessels on the ocean, says Douglas McCauley, the director of the University of California Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. Other human-caused dangers — namely noise pollution and climate change — are also contributing to whale deaths, McCauley added.

  Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory

  McCauley’s lab allows anyone anywhere to submit issues of concern affecting our oceans, like ship strikes, on its website. The laboratory team then selects submissions, studies them, and builds solutions to address the issues.

  “It’s a big ocean, but, unfortunately, in many parts of the world, ships and whales overlap in the same space,” said McCauley. This is why the laboratory, along with a team of scientists from around the world, developed Whale Safe.

  Whale Safe is a tool that tracks both whales’ and cargo ships’ movements, and then shares this data publicly and with shipping companies. Speed matters. When ships go slower, they’re able to avoid or at least decrease the severity of collisions with whales. Shipping companies receive grades from Whale Safe based on how well they adhere to NOAA-recommended speeds in waters where whales are active.

  I spoke with McCauley to discuss ship strikes, the science behind Whale Safe, and the importance of ocean conservation.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  How is this data collection preventing collisions between whales and ships?

  On the front end, for detecting the whales, Whale Safe uses a three-part system. One is an underwater hydrophone that is equipped with some onboard computing and AI that is constantly listening for whales, and then automatically detecting when they’re present.

  The second tech node is a remote sensing feature, sort of like a weather forecaster for whales. Then based on past tracking where people have put microsensors on whales, we use that data to build a forecast of whether it’s more or less likely to expect to see endangered whales — specifically blue whales, one of the most endangered whales — in the area. Lastly, humans are some of the best technology out there for whale detection. So we use a citizen science app that actually pulls in data when people see whales.

  On the back end, we track the ships to tell when they slow down and what companies they’re connected to. And then the same way that on campus we assign grades, we assign grades here, transparently, to the different companies based on whether they slow down when there are whales present. We publish those grades and have conversations with the companies about ways that they can actually do better for whale conservation.

  I was hoping you could explain why you think it is just as important to collaborate with private entities as it is to work on the public policy side of things.

  Some of this has been a learning process for me, as someone who knows a lot about whales and other creatures of the sea, and not so much about how things work with our own species. But part of that learning journey was understanding the real power and opportunity there is for the private sector to be a force for change.

  So realizing that, we really tried to jump in and engage with the businesses. By and large, it has been really positive. We create these report cards at the company level, and we share them with the companies. Many companies don’t want to run over whales, they want to know how to help, and they want to know how well they’re doing.

  We have some A’s and we have some F’s; it’s been a little bit of a challenge to try to figure out how we get the companies that don’t seem to care about whale conservation to care the way their peers care.

  It’s great to hear that some of these companies are really wanting to collaborate. I’m sure we’ve just skimmed the surface of what the laboratory has worked on, but is there anything else that you think is important to mention?

  Whales themselves are massive, living, beautiful, breathing, majestic boxes of carbon that capture and sequester carbon and then lock it away when they die in the deep ocean. Healthy whale populations create what’s called a whale pump, which means that when they eat at depth and then poop at the surface, they fertilize the surface waters, which then are more productive and suck down and sequester more carbon.

  These ships that we’re asking to slow down when whales are around actually reduce their emissions the same way that cars driving a little bit slower drive more efficiently. One of the outcomes of this particular solution is that you get a win for the whales, but you also are getting a win for climate.

  Outside of ship strikes, what other human-caused threats to whales are there?

  Getting entangled by fishing gear is another leading cause of whale injury and death. Whales that get wrapped up in gear like the ropes of lobster pots or discarded nets can get horrific lacerations and sometimes end up starving or drowning.

  Another major threat is underwater noise pollution generated from ships, oil and gas exploration, or military activities. These damaging and disorienting sounds can disrupt their ability to feed and communicate with one another.

  But the elephant in the room is climate change. Climate change is causing the oceans to warm, become more acidic, and less rich in oxygen. This affects the food chains whales depend upon and will certainly impact how well whales are able to hang on.

  The New York Times reported that this year on the East Coast, there has been what NOAA considers an unusual, quick succession of whale deaths. What factors, or combination of factors, do you believe are contributing to this concerning trend?

  I think this article actually did a good [job] debunking suggestions (sometimes funded by oil and gas) that offshore wind development is linked to these whale deaths. The Marine Mammal Commission, a coalition of some of the best whale experts in the US and world, noted that there is no evidence to link this recent bout of deaths to offshore wind. This is not to say that we don’t need to be extremely careful where we site offshore wind installations and to monitor and control their impacts on marine life. This type of caution is needed with any new invasive development we put in the ocean. But carefully and intelligently installed offshore wind, in some areas, can be part of a solution to fight climate change. which in the long run poses a greater threat to ocean health.

  Ship strikes and entanglement were noted to be associated with many of the dead whales that could be examined by marine mammal experts.

  How can we continue to limit human-caused dangers to whales?

  The good news is that these are solvable problems. Ship collisions with whales can be controlled by working with marine shipping to slow ships down to safer speeds in areas where there are lots of whales.

  And there are new kinds of technologies available that reduce entanglement. For example, there are some very exciting new innovations that allow lobster fishers to continue to do business without all the ropes that have proven to be so lethal to whales.

• Why is it so hard to charge electric vehicles on the road? -

  

  Electric car owners are finding out how hard it can be to charge EVs at public charging stations.

  A loud pop echoed through the Walmart parking lot, an alarming sign that something was wrong.

  Cass Tippit had plugged his 2017 Chevrolet Bolt into an Electrify America public charging station in Chipley, Florida, and after about 15 minutes, he heard the noise and saw that the screen on the charger had gone dark. “The dashboard of the car lit up like a Christmas tree,” he said.

  Tippit unplugged the car, but the Bolt wouldn’t start. It left him stranded for hours and was the start of an ordeal that would last weeks.

  Across the country, Anson Long found himself in an eerily similar predicament. He connected his 2022 Rivian R1T truck to an Electrify America charging station at the Fashion Valley Mall in San Diego. As he and his friend started to head to the mall, “We hear a loud boom, an explosive-type sound,” Long said. “We look back and see a black cloud of smoke come out” of the power unit next to the charging station.

  Long rushed back to his car and stopped the charging. He tried to remove the plug from the charging port, but it wouldn’t come out. He, too, was stranded for hours and found himself chasing a solution for weeks.

  hey @ElectrifyAm i just plugged in my @Rivian r1t and 1 minute later i hear a loud boom and now i have a bunch of error codes and i can’t even unplug my car…. took you guys 7 hours to get a guy out and that even wasn’t help. what’s the deal???? now my car is fried too… pic.twitter.com/6I7RsmZG0S

  — Anson (@snkrticians) January 29, 2023

Both Tippit and Long had fallen into one of the biggest cracks in the United States’ electric vehicle infrastructure. As battery-powered cars and trucks transform from local runabouts to cross-country road-trippers, drivers are becoming increasingly reliant on public charging stations. In many cases, however, they’re pulling up to plugs only to find them inoperable. Even worse, a handful have had their cars bricked. And when something goes wrong, it’s hard to figure out who’s responsible.

According to a 2022 J.D. Power survey, one in five EV drivers didn’t charge their vehicle during a visit to a public charging station last year, mainly due to outages or malfunctions.

“The dirty secret of EV charging is how unreliable public networks can actually be,” said John Lawrence, senior sales manager at SparkCharge, a company developing mobile charging systems.

These gaps are emerging at a critical time for the industry. Electric cars are more popular than ever. Almost 6 percent of cars sold in the US last year were electric, topping 800,000 vehicles.

These vehicles demand more chargers. There are currently more than 148,000 EV charging points across 56,000 stations in the US. The White House wants to nearly triple that number by building a national network of 500,000 EV chargers, and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $7.5 billion to fund their construction. Earlier this month, Tesla also announced it would open 7,500 chargers in its proprietary supercharger network to all EVs. This is all a key part of the US strategy for reducing the climate impact from transportation, the largest source of greenhouse gases in the country.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Meanwhile, EVs have moved beyond the realm of tech-savvy early adopters willing to shell out for new Teslas. Plenty of EVs now have six figures on their odometers and are in the hands of second or third owners. And many of those vehicles depend on public charging because the owners don’t have chargers at home.

It’s these owners who will make or break the transition to cleaner vehicles. Most Americans buy cars secondhand, and they’re not looking for a toy. They need a reliable way to get around. So the experiences of EV drivers now, good or bad, will shape public perception and the pace at which more people switch to cleaner vehicles, regardless of whatever subsidies the government offers. Unreliable chargers threaten to drive the transition off course. According to a 2022 survey by Autolist, the top three reasons people decided against buying an EV were cost, concerns about range, and worries about where to charge them.

The clock is ticking for widespread EV adoption, too. States like California and New York have now set 2035 as the final year to sell new fossil fuel-powered vehicles.

There are solutions, however. Companies are working to bridge the gaps in EV charging infrastructure by increasing availability and lowering installation costs. But red tape, competing charging standards, and inadequate consumer protections mean that regulators will likely have to step in as well to smooth the road ahead.

The emerging divide in EV ownership

While Tippit and Long saw their charging problems start in similar ways, they played out differently.

Long spent hours on the phone with Electrify America and Rivian, going through both of their troubleshooting steps. No dice. It was around 8 pm on Saturday. An Electrify America technician finally arrived at midnight. The technician went through the checklist again, then tried to pry out the plug with a crowbar. Nada. Long called it a night, left the truck at the station, and took a two-hour Uber ride home.

The following Monday, he went back to the mall along with four people from Electrify America and three from Rivian. The Rivian team disassembled the front of the car and disabled the power system, while the Electrify America technicians provided mechanical persuasion to the plug.

Finally, the plug relented. The charge port looked burned, and the plug was discolored. “It looked like one of the [charging] pins was welded,” Long said.

Long had purchased his truck new for $100,000 just two months before the incident. Rivian towed the truck to their service center and offered Long a loaner car as well as ride-hail credits while they investigated. The company ended up replacing the battery and charge port, and Long had his truck back three weeks later. “I paid not a dime,” he said.

Tippit wasn’t so lucky. After he found that his car wouldn’t budge, other Walmart customers reported seeing sparks and smoke from the nearby power unit, the gray metal boxes near the charging station that take in electricity from the grid. Then the smell wafted over. “You could smell burning electricals. It just smelled like a fried thing,” Tippit said.

Electrify America told him to tow the car at his own expense to the nearest dealer, where it sat for more than a week. He paid $350 to replace a high-voltage fuse in the car just so the dealer could diagnose it. The battery was toast. It would cost more than $20,000 to fix. He’d bought the car used a month earlier with 25,000 miles on the clock for $23,000.

The 2017 Bolt has an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty, but General Motors, the parent company of Chevrolet, blamed the charging station for the problem. All the while, no one offered a loaner car or travel reimbursements. Electrify America eventually told Tippit that the company would reimburse him if he fronted the cost of the repair. He ended up totaling it out with the insurance company.

Cass Tippit

While manufacturers love to advertise their new EVs, used electric vehicles are poised to become a larger market. In 2021, there were 1.4 million EVs registered in the US, not including plug-in hybrids. Americans buy about 40 million used cars in a year, compared to about 17 million new cars. The average car in the US stays on the road for 12 years.

But as Tippit found out, used EV owners may be on their own if something goes wrong. That could deter more budget-conscious buyers.

“This isn’t 2010,” he said. “Everyone who has an electric vehicle is not some hedge fund manager who has it because it’s a flashy way to show off some sort of status. We bought this car because it was economical and because it’s the way the future is moving.”

A spokesperson for Electrify America said the company is still investigating its charging problems.

The basics of EV charging, explained

Given the ubiquity of cellphones, laptops, and wireless headphones, it’s easy to overlook the fact that charging a battery is actually a sophisticated operation. On the scale of small devices, it’s as simple as plugging a cord into a wall outlet and letting the small bits of electronics in the power brick handle the job. But when it comes to managing the energy needed to propel a 4,500-pound vehicle, the complexity and risk grows.

The fundamental challenge is that the power grid operates on an alternating current (AC) while almost all battery-powered devices run on direct current (DC). Strictly speaking, the electronics that perform this task compose the charger, and when it comes to public charging stations, there are two types of chargers at play: the ones built directly into the EV and the ones in the stations themselves.

Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The on-board charger faces space and weight restrictions. “That is limited in how much power it can realistically convert,” said Matthias Preindl, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University.

If you’re on the road and only have a few minutes, you need to be able to inject a lot more power into the battery than the on-board charger can handle. That’s where DC fast chargers, like the systems from Electrify America and the Tesla Supercharger network, come in.

In these systems, the task of converting electricity is offboarded to the charging station. The plugs at the charging stalls are just dispensers. The actual DC chargers are in gray metal utility cabinets nearby, which look similar to the pad-mounted transformers you can find scattered across cities near power lines. They provide a huge amount of power directly to the battery, topping it off in as little as 20 minutes. But DC chargers require sophisticated hardware to connect directly to the grid, adding to their cost.

EVs also have different plug shapes to worry about. There are two main fast charging standards in North America: Tesla and Combined Charging System, or CCS, which is used by just about every other manufacturer. (There’s also CHAdeMO, but no new EVs use this standard.)

For Tesla, the workflow is pretty straightforward. The company makes both the fast chargers and the EVs. This helps keep mishaps to a minimum, and drivers know exactly who to call if something goes wrong. This will soon change as Tesla charging stations accommodate other carmakers.

Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Electrify America and other public DC chargers, on the other hand, are designed to be able to charge everything from BMW’s tiny i3 to the monstrous Hummer EV. Each manufacturer has different needs, so communication between the car and the charging station is critical. If something is lost in translation, bad things can happen, as Tippit and Long found out. It can also be difficult to figure out whether the problem was due to the car or the charging station, and thus who is accountable.

Preindl said any number of potential hardware or software issues could have caused their chargers to malfunction, but when dealing with the massive amount of electricity in a DC fast charger, something as trivial as leaving a tiny gap between the plug and the charge port on the car can be dangerous.

“If a plug doesn’t make good contact, locally it creates high current and acts effectively like a welder,” Preindl said. “It welds the receiver and the plug together.”

But it’s important to put these public charging stations into context with their competition. Conventional gas stations come with their own risks but rarely get national news coverage. Every year, there are about 4,000 fires at gas stations across the US, leading to as many as 43 injuries, three deaths, and $30 million in damages, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

The road ahead for EV charging

Of course, gas stations have their benefits, too. Since they’re so common, if one pump is out at a gas station, a working pump is usually not too far away. Drivers can also shop around for the cheapest fuel.

EV drivers, on the other hand, have to plan carefully and keep close track of which public fast chargers are operating and have open slots. Otherwise, they could end up waiting a while to recharge or, worse, stranded. They may also need separate apps or accounts with every charging provider, making the process more tedious than it needs to be.

Electrify America currently operates the largest public EV charging network, with more than 800 stations hosting 3,500 individual chargers. The company was formed by Volkswagen in 2016 as part of its punishment for cheating on emissions tests. Drivers have complained of poor maintenance and a high rate of outages across the network. The stations also seem to struggle in the cold.

Other public networks, like ChargePoint and EVgo, have experienced similar reliability issues.

So beyond safety, a nationwide EV charging network — particularly one that offers fast charging — needs to be abundant, reliable, accessible, and cheap in order to compete with gasoline and diesel. Right now there’s progress on all of these fronts: Thousands more charging stations are in the works; new designs are bringing down costs and installation timelines, and plugging in gaps with new types of charging systems. Still, there are some annoying problems that the government will have to step in to resolve as well.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

So what comes first, the electric cars or the charging stations?

“What we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of interest to deploy infrastructure ahead of the market as a sort of way to hold real estate on the expectation that EVs will come,” said Scott Shepard, research director at the consulting firm Guidehouse, studying vehicle electrification.

Electrify America is planning to expand to 1,800 stations with 10,000 individual chargers in the US and Canada by 2026. Oil companies like BP are even starting to invest in EV charging. They already own the gas stations, and many are sitting on record profits and looking for places to stash their cash.

DC fast chargers, however, have to climb over additional hurdles. They require specialized equipment to connect since they use so much electricity at once. In particular, they often need medium-voltage transformers that step down voltage from the power grid to a level cars can use. There’s a shortage of these devices that could take up to two years to resolve, according to Shepard. Fast charging stations also require special permits, which can add three to six months to their construction timeline. The building costs can easily amount to millions of dollars.

FreeWire is a company trying to get around this problem by integrating energy storage into fast charging stations. That allows the station to dispatch much more power while charging than it actually draws from the grid at any given moment.

“Our golden ratio is 10 to 1, so we have a 200-kilowatt charger but we use 20 kilowatts of input power, and the battery just acts as a buffer,” said Arcady Sosinov, CEO of FreeWire. “It works just like the hot water tank in your home.”

FreeWire

This speeds up the deployment time. Sosinov said his company deployed 30 fast charging sites in British Columbia in 30 days in December.

Mobile charging is another way to close gaps, according to Lawrence at SparkCharge. Rather than driving to a charging station, EV owners can request electricity to be delivered to them while they eat at a restaurant or go to a concert, “almost like the UberEats of EV charging,” Lawrence said. Essentially giant portable batteries, mobile charging sites can serve as waypoints to extend the range of EVs, even when there’s no connection to the grid.

Regulators can also pave over some of the potholes in EV charging. The government could force the charging networks to be interoperable so users don’t have to register separately for each station.

They could also make manufacturers stick to a narrow set of plug standards. While Tesla and CSS represent the two main types of charging ports, CCS is more of a set of guidelines than a binding rulebook. (“It’s super loosey-goosey,” according to Sosinov.)

Regulators could impose tighter standards to make charging more consistent across different cars and charging networks. The government could also establish clear rules about who is liable if a car ends up damaged or bricked at a charging station.

These are important issues to resolve not just for safety reasons, but to ensure that drivers remain confident in electric cars and trucks. The goal is not to prevent every possible problem, but to make sure that a negative experience won’t put an owner off EVs forever.

Long said he comes from a family of EV owners and his R1T truck was the second EV he’s personally owned. His ordeal at the charging station hasn’t dissuaded him at all.

Tippit’s Bolt was his first EV. He grew to appreciate its convenience and fuel savings. But getting his car bricked and totaled made him more skeptical of public charging stations. He replaced it with a used Tesla Model 3, granting him access to the Tesla supercharger network. “So far, so good,” he said.

• The brewing war over who goes hungry in America — and how to feed them -

  

  The Republican fight over SNAP benefits has deep historical roots.

  At the onset of the pandemic, as tens of millions of Americans found themselves suddenly out of work and food bank lines stretched for miles, Congress passed lifeline legislation to keep people in distress fed. The emergency spending injected billions of extra dollars into food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

  A year later, President Biden boosted those expanded benefits to ensure they went to the lowest-income participating households. Thanks in part to that aid and other assistance programs launched or expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic, food insecurity avoided the sharp increase that occurred during the Great Recession.

  But at the end of this past month, the pandemic-era expanded SNAP benefits expired for more than 30 million people in 35 states and territories, slashing the average participant’s monthly food assistance from around $251 to $169, with some groups suffering much steeper benefit cuts. Food banks are once again bracing for a surge in need, with one in Kentucky reporting a mile-long line days after the cuts. Advocates fear that the loss of the extended benefits — which were killed by a congressional deal made in December to keep the government running — could send millions of additional Americans off the “hunger cliff.”

  Mario Tama/Getty Images

  And while Biden’s proposed spending budget announced earlier this month includes funding for breakfast and lunch in low-income school districts and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, the budget has zero chance of passing the Republican-controlled House intact. Indeed, the House GOP has its sights set on restricting SNAP access and reducing its benefits, having introduced a work requirement bill on March 14 with more bills to come, per Politico.

  It should shock the American conscience that in the wealthiest and one of the most agriculturally productive countries — awash in cheap food, no less — one in 10 households still live with food insecurity, a grim reality with which we’ve become startlingly comfortable. But hunger, as we learned during the pandemic and in its aftermath, is a policy choice.

  Defining hunger in America

  In the 2021 fiscal year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent $182.5 billion across its 15 food assistance programs, the vast majority on SNAP — virtually double what it spent before the pandemic in 2019. On top of programs like SNAP, the agency also supports part of the sprawling network of some 400 food banks nationwide — where donated food is stored — along with more than 60,000 food pantries and soup kitchens where that food is distributed.

  Despite its enormity — and despite the fact that hunger has always been a problem in the land of plenty — this network of food assistance is relatively new. St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, Arizona, the US’s first real food bank, opened its doors in 1967, and while the food stamp program has its origins in the late 1930s, it didn’t start to resemble its current form of SNAP until the 1960s and ’70s.

  The government wasn’t comprehensively measuring hunger at the time, and there wasn’t even consensus on how to define it, but that all began to change in the late 1980s. An expert panel of nutritionists, working with the US Department of Health and Human Services, straightforwardly defined hunger as the discomfort and pain brought on by lack of food. They also defined “food insecurity,” a much more important metric in understanding hunger in America — a country in which prolonged hunger is rare but the more nuanced and temporal state of food insecurity isn’t. And that state is defined as occurring whenever there is “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited and uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”

  In 1995, the US Census Bureau and the USDA began to extensively measure food security with an 18-question survey about households’ food intake and access over the prior 12 months, and in 2006 began to place households on a continuum based on their answers. It ranges from high food security — meaning zero problems or anxiety about consistent food access throughout the year — to very low food security, meaning that during some points of the year, one or more members of the household reduced their portions or skipped meals because of a lack of money.

  The survey isn’t perfect — it relies on self-reported data over 12 months, so there’s a lag and a level of uncertainty — but it gives anti-hunger advocates and policymakers a broad understanding of food insecurity in America. And early on in the pandemic, the Census Bureau launched the regular Household Pulse Survey, which includes questions on “food insufficiency” — meaning sometimes or often not having enough to eat — which gave somewhat more real-time data on food access.

  The main findings from food insecurity surveys? The groups most likely to experience food insecurity are people who live below the poverty line, Black and Hispanic households, single parents, and households that include an adult with a disability.

  Rural Americans experience food insecurity at higher rates than those in cities, and food security can vary widely by state. For example, 15.3 percent of Mississippi households experience food insecurity, while only 5.4 percent of New Hampshire households do (food insecurity is highest in the South).

  “When we talk about food insecurity numbers, we’re talking about people who are concerned — really facing a constant struggle — with whether or not they can afford sufficient food for themselves and their families,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director for the Food Research & Action Center, an organization that advocates for stronger food assistance policy.

  For some, that concern can wax and wane with one’s financial standing, said Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Utah who closely followed food insecure families for her book How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America. During some periods in a year, a parent might be able to take on more shifts at work and feel more confident about their ability to pay for groceries, but emergencies — like car accidents or broken appliances or a sudden pandemic — can quickly plunge them back into food insecurity.

  “Those kinds of acute crises often precipitate food insecurity, where you have to spend the money that you were going to be devoting toward your food toward something else,” Fielding-Singh said.

  And surveys can’t tell us about the psychological burden of food insecurity, she added: “Feeling like you don’t know if you have enough money to pay for your groceries over the course of a month, or you don’t know if you’re going to be paid on time in order to pack your kid’s lunch … I think that living with that kind of underlying uncertainty is really psychologically damaging.”

  Food insecurity rates hovered around 10 to 12 percent of households from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, peaking in 2011 at 14.9 percent in the wake of the Great Recession and falling back down to pre-recession levels by 2017. Thanks to the slate of food assistance programs over the course of the pandemic, they didn’t climb back up.

  

  However, the forecast ahead for food insecurity is murky. As we emerge from the worst of the pandemic, workers are benefiting from strong wage growth, low unemployment, minimum wage hikes, and slowing inflation, each of which will affect how much people can spend on food. But for many low-income households, their future will also depend on the future of SNAP and other food assistance programs, which are under threat from a brewing war in Congress.

  Hunger is a policy choice

  That it’s obvious doesn’t make it any less true: The most effective way to reduce food insecurity is to reduce poverty, the ebbs and flows of which practically mirror food insecurity rates. According to the USDA, the average consumer spends 10.3 percent of their disposable income on food, but for the lowest-income households, it’s a staggering 30.6 percent, and around 15 percent for the second-lowest bracket.

  While the long-term war on poverty is waged, there are some shorter-term battles to be fought as well.

  The Food Research & Action Center has a long wish list for the Biden administration and Congress to strengthen federal food assistance, from big-ticket items like increasing benefits to expanding SNAP access for low-income college students.

  Simply increasing enrollment could go a long way. SNAP participation among eligible people is relatively high (82 percent), but that’s not the case for WIC: In 2019, enrollment was at just 57 percent due to a variety of factors, including confusion around eligibility and restrictions on what can be purchased. And until 2020, WIC benefits were still issued on paper vouchers in many states, instead of a debit card, which increased stigma (SNAP has been issued via debit cards since 2004).

  One of the most significant achievements would be a return to universal free school lunch, a pandemic-era policy that lapsed late last year. “If a child is hungry, that is all they think about all day,” a director of food and nutrition at a Connecticut public school district told Vox’s Anna North. “If we don’t prioritize hungry children, I don’t know what we prioritize. I don’t know what else is more important than that.”

  Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

  Universal free school lunch wouldn’t just reduce food insecurity but could also help improve childhood education: After New York City launched universal free school lunch in 2017, students’ math and reading test scores improved.

  If Congress doesn’t move on the issue, the burden will fall to the states. Some states, like Massachusetts and Nevada, extended universal free school lunch to the end of the 2023 school year, while California and Maine went further, making universal free school lunch and breakfast permanent, which went into effect at the start of this current school year (New Mexico’s governor is expected to sign similar legislation into law soon). Most Colorado public school students will receive free school lunch and breakfast next school year, and other states are mulling free breakfast and lunch programs, too.

  “That is a really exciting trend,” said Fielding-Singh. “And before the pandemic, that was completely politically unfeasible.”

  But the massive, pandemic-era expansion of the welfare state has shrunk significantly over the last year as the immediate threat of Covid-19 has receded. The House, now under GOP control, has called to reduce SNAP benefits for adults without children, and Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) introduced legislation on Tuesday that raises the maximum age for work requirements from 49 to 65, changes that would all but guarantee an uptick in child and adult food insecurity.

  Sarah Silbiger/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images

  It’s the first shot fired in what could be an ugly fight over adjustments to SNAP in negotiations for this year’s Farm Bill, which is rewritten every five years (SNAP accounts for nearly 80 percent of the bill’s spending).

  That frustrates advocates like Vollinger, who points to strong support for food assistance programs, even among conservatives. “It’s not as if this is an issue where we don’t know what to do,” Vollinger said. “There are strategies that are pretty clear and workable and doable, if there’s the political will to do them.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Vyasa, Fearless Joey, Moon’s Blessing and Dawn Rising please -

• Baby Bazooka and Irish Gold impress -

• Boxing World Championships | Nitu, Preeti, Manju enter pre-quarters - Nitu, who lost in the quarter-final during the last edition, opened her campaign in the best possible way.

• NZ vs SL, 2nd Test | Double centuries for Williamson, Nicholls put New Zealand on top - New Zealand declared its first innings at 580-4 on the second day

• Bracewell replaces injured Will Jacks in RCB squad for upcoming IPL season - Jacks, who was bought by RCB for ₹3.2 crore at the player auction in December last year, suffered a muscle injury while fielding during England’s second ODI against Bangladesh

From The Hindu: National News

• Dairy cattle require special care to augment milk production during summer: experts - There is a 20-25% reduction in milk production during summer, say farmers

• Children in romantic relationships are at risk for online bullying and abuse, says helpline - Out of 491 distress calls over the last six months, mostly from young girls, the RATI Foundation helpline registered 117 cases of cyberbullying and 31 cases where intimate content was shared non-consensually

• Will you vote for party that supports PFI, asks C.T. Ravi - BJP national general secretary C.T. Ravi has said that it was left to the people to decide whether they wanted a party that protected the nation or a party that supported jihadi forces

• KTU permits Type 1 diabetic students to carry medicines, snacks to exam halls - The students will have to obtain prior permission from the college authorities

• A few retd judges, some activists want judiciary to play role of Opposition: Rijiju - Mr. Rijiju also hit out at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his remarks in London on democracy in India, saying the person who speaks the most says he is not allowed to speak.

From BBC: Europe

• Putin arrest warrant: Biden welcomes ICC’s war crimes charges - The International Criminal Court accuses the Russian leader of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.

• Can Vladimir Putin actually be arrested? - BBC correspondents Anna Holligan and Steve Rosenberg on the difficulties of detaining a president.

• France pension protests: Crowd clashes with police over government reform by decree - A second night of unrest grips France after the government pushed through pension changes without a vote.

• Italy leaves children of same-sex parents in limbo - Italy’s right-wing government prompts an outcry by halting registration of children of same-sex parents.

• Turkey’s Erdogan seals deal on Finland joining Nato - A vote on Finland’s membership now goes to Turkey’s parliament, but Sweden’s bid is still held up.

From Ars Technica

• Google won’t honor medical leave during its layoffs, outraging employees - Ex-Googler says she was laid off from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth. - link

• Anthropic introduces Claude, a “more steerable” AI competitor to ChatGPT - Anthropic aims for “safer” and “less harmful” AI, but at a higher price. - link

• Bent nails at Roman burial site form “magical barrier” to keep dead from rising - Cremated remains were also covered in brick tiles and a thick layer of lime. - link

• Google tells users of some Android phones: Nuke voice calling to avoid infection - If your device runs Exynos chips, be very, very concerned. - link

• Microsoft is testing a built-in cryptocurrency wallet for the Edge browser - Crypto wallet would join coupons, cash back, and “buy now, pay later” add-ons. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What Asian stereo type do you hear the most? -

  Personally I’ve got a Yamaha surround sound system.

  submitted by /u/CaptainBeans_
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• A chemist froze himself at -273.15 °C, everyone said he was crazy -

  He was 0K

  submitted by /u/RuthlessWolf
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• Nobody upvotes a cake joke on cake days anymore -

  Feeling desserted

  submitted by /u/appleboi_69420
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• A man and his wife are having trouble with their sex life -

  So the man goes to the new sex toy shop, walks up to the counter and explains his situation.

  The clerk says “I’ve got just the thing for you, it’s called magic penis” and retrieves it from the shelf behind him.

  Man: how does it work? Clerk: I’ll show you… “magic penis, counter!” magic penis flips out and starts schlupping all around the counter

  Man: wow! That’s great, I’ll take it!

  The man goes home and shows his wife. Man: honey I got something that will help us in the bedroom! It’s called magic penis! Wife: ok, how does it work? Man: I’ll show you… magic penis, table!

  magic penis starts schlupping around the table

  The wife gets excited. The next day, the man goes to work and the wife stays home. She starts to get ready.

  Wife: magic penis, pussy!

  The magic penis goes to work and she has the time of her life and has orgasm after orgasm… but she doesn’t know how to stop it or turn it off. So she gets into the car and starts driving to the hospital and starts to speed. A cop pulls her over, walks up to the car and says “why were you going to fast?!”

  Wife: I can explain! Cop: well let me hear it? Wife: I have this magic penis… Cop: magic penis my ass!

  submitted by /u/SteamyPork
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• Einstein, Newton and Pascal play hide and seek together -

  Einstein, Newton and Pascal play hide and seek together.

  It’s Einstein’s turn to count, and he closes his eyes. After counting to 10, Pascal runs away and hides.

  Newton, on the other hand, very calmly draws a square on the ground, 1 meter on each side, in front of the place that Einstein counted, and goes to the middle of it and starts to wait.

  When Einstein reaches 10, he opens his eyes and immediately says, “Newton, I found you!!” he shouts.

  Newton smiles and says calmly: “You didn’t find me, you found Newton per square meter. So you found Pascal.”

  submitted by /u/CyberKommandant
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