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

• Joe Biden, Once Again, Lucks Out with His Enemies - In his State of the Union address, the President offered a strong performance—with an assist from House Republicans. - link

• Why Some Florida Schools Are Removing Books from Their Libraries - “If I weren’t living through it, I wouldn’t believe it’s happening,” one parent, who has worked as a substitute teacher, said. - link

• Joe Biden’s Innovative Attempt to Reshape the American Economy - In his State of the Union address, the President will likely emphasize landmark legislation designed to create an ambitious industrial policy. - link

• Turkey’s Earthquake Response Is as Political as the Conditions That Increased The Devastation - The ethnic minorities and refugees leading the community response in Turkey already knew not to rely on the government. - link

• The Myth of the Iowa Caucuses Got Busted - The Democratic Party charts a new path for its Presidential candidates, avoiding the cornfields. - link

From Vox

• The forgotten victims of the Adderall shortage -

  

  People with narcolepsy need stimulants, too. But many pharmacy shelves are empty.

  Kelsey can’t do her job without her medication. The resident physician in Wisconsin, who is in her early 30s, takes the generic version of a stimulant called Concerta to treat her narcolepsy as well as her attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Untreated, her ADHD makes it difficult to keep focus and do routine tasks, and the narcolepsy makes it impossible to stay awake.

  “If I sit down for any length of time, like to read a book or emails, I’ll pretty much fall asleep within five minutes or so,” Kelsey said. “Around noon, I get this heaviness, that feeling like you are absolutely going to fall asleep no matter what you do.”

  But starting last fall, it became progressively harder for Kelsey to get her medication. At first, her regular pharmacy needed a few extra days to get it in stock. By January, none of the nearby pharmacies in her insurance’s network had it. She had to wait two weeks for her insurance to agree to cover the more expensive brand-name version of the drug at an out-of-network pharmacy, which was the only place and the only version of the drug she could find. She had to go without her medication for most of that time.

  Without it, Kelsey can’t drive or do certain parts of her job. She was doing a research rotation last time she ran out of her meds, so she was able to keep working. But she has a surgery rotation coming up, and she has no idea if she’ll have her meds by the time it does.

  “I can’t operate without medication. It’s not safe,” Kelsey said. “I can’t be a functioning doctor.”

  Many people like Kelsey who rely on prescription stimulants are finding the pharmacy cupboards bare. Adderall, which uses amphetamine salts as its active ingredient, is the most well-known of these drugs, and ADHD is the most well-known condition they treat. But methylphenidate-based stimulants like Concerta and Ritalin are also increasingly hard to find. And they don’t just treat people with ADHD, though the effect of the shortages of them has gotten nearly all of the attention from media, lawmakers, and drug monitoring agencies.

  People who have narcolepsy need these drugs, too. They’ve largely been invisible because there are so few of them. Recode spoke to several, nearly all of whom wished to remain anonymous or not use their full name because they didn’t want an often stigmatized medical condition to become public.

  “Narcolepsy can be incredibly debilitating if left untreated,” Keith Harper, board president of the Narcolepsy Network, a patient support organization, said.

  The major cause of the problem appears to be remote-only telehealth companies, which were the beneficiary of a pandemic-era rule change that allowed providers to prescribe controlled substances like stimulants without ever seeing their patients in person. These services advertised aggressively on social media platforms like TikTok, promoting their ease of access to diagnoses of — and drugs to treat — ADHD. Some have been accused of overprescribing drugs through rapid and possibly inaccurate diagnoses, which led to a spike in demand for prescription stimulants that rigid regulatory restrictions made it impossible to meet. Once Adderall went into a shortage, patients had to look for alternatives, including Concerta and Ritalin.

  Now those drugs, too, are in short supply. That means many people with narcolepsy can’t get access to the medications they need. Some say it’s ruining their lives.

  The telehealth boom was an ADHD boom, too

  Narcolepsy is a rare neurological sleep disorder. The cause is unknown, although research has linked it to low levels of hypocretin, a chemical in the brain that controls wakefulness and REM sleep. It has several symptoms, but the best known is excessive daytime sleepiness, which can cause a sudden onset of sleep. There is no cure, but prescription stimulants are one way to treat narcolepsy as well as a similar disorder called idiopathic hypersomnia. For many people who otherwise can’t stay awake, these medications are life-changing.

  While an estimated 200,000 people in the United States have narcolepsy, millions of people have ADHD, which is believed to affect about 10 percent of children and 4 percent of adults. ADHD can be treated with the same stimulants, though the effects are different. Prescription stimulants also have a high potential for abuse and addiction, so they’re regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration as controlled substances. This classification means their production and distribution are tightly managed — everyone from the manufacturers to the patients are subject to various restrictions — and only a certain number of them can be made every year.

  JB Reed/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  This can cause shortages even in normal times, and the pandemic was not a normal time. Telehealth boomed, and telehealth apps took advantage of the suspension of a rule that patients had to be seen in-person to prescribe controlled substances. A social media-fueled increase in awareness of ADHD and its symptoms caused some people to realize that they had the condition. Working from home brought new distractions that made it too difficult for people with untreated ADHD to function, so they sought out help. Some telehealth apps promised to provide it the next or even the same day.

  Accordingly, the health information technology company IQVIA reported that prescriptions for Adderall and its generic versions increased from 35.5 million in 2019 to 41.2 million in 2021. Healthcare analytics firm Trilliant Health found that prescriptions for Adderall increased by nearly 25 percent between the beginning of 2020 and 2021 for the 22 to 44 age group, a rise it attributed to the growth of digital health platforms. Neither IQVIA nor Trilliant had data for methylphenidates available.

  Some ADHD patients have credited the telehealth apps for providing treatment that was far more accessible than what they were limited to before, when they had to wait months and might spend hundreds of dollars to see a provider in person. But there have also been allegations that the apps’ providers were being pushed to prescribe potentially dangerous medications to patients for a disorder they may not even have. Some apps are reportedly being investigated by the federal government, as is at least one pharmacy that filled telehealth prescriptions. All have denied any wrongdoing.

  Drug availability is not accessibility

  Last October, the FDA declared that Adderall was in shortage. Teva, one of the largest manufacturers of both the brand and generic versions of Adderall, blamed labor and manufacturing issues along with increased demand for its shortage, which it says will last until at least March. Several other Adderall manufacturers said they were also experiencing issues, blaming it on a shortage of the active ingredient, supply constraints, and demand increase. Teva’s reason was simply “other.”

  But the FDA does not consider methylphenidate to be in a shortage, and told Recode that it was “not aware of any nationwide availability concerns,” although there were perhaps some “temporary, localized supply issues.” But the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), which also tracks drug shortages, does consider certain methylphenidate drugs to be in shortage.

  “Our definition of a shortage is definitely more patient-focused, and the FDA’s is definitely more overall market,” said Erin Fox, who leads the University of Utah’s Drug Information Service, which provides content for the ASHP’s drug shortage center. “They’re probably just looking at the overall numbers and not thinking about the access issues and logistics that patients have to go through to actually get the product.”

  Notably, the ASHP listed Adderall as being in shortage months before the FDA did. It’s possible that the FDA will follow the ASHP on methylphenidate, too. And the methylphenidate shortage appears to have started months after Adderall’s did, possibly or partially in response to it. Some providers and patients have said that when Adderall ran out, they switched to other stimulants, creating an unexpected increase in demand.

  There’s also a shortage of information about methylphenidate supply from major pharmacies and drug manufacturers. Rite Aid said that it is “aware of the nationwide shortage of these medications,” while Walgreens admitted that it has “seen some intermittent supply issues with the generic form of [Concerta].” CVS did not respond to request for comment. Recode also reached out to multiple methylphenidate manufacturers that the ASHP said were having trouble manufacturing enough of the drug to meet demand, including Amneal, Camber, Lannett, Sun, Teva, and XL Care, with questions about availability. None responded.

  Mario Tama/Getty Images

  Even if the drugs are technically available as far as the FDA is concerned, they may not be accessible. The active ingredient might be the same, but that doesn’t mean all methylphenidate drugs are created equal. Some people find certain generic versions of Concerta to be less effective than others, but those generic versions may be all they can now find. Some pharmacies have even started restricting their limited supply of stimulants to their existing customers, making them unavailable to anyone new whose regular pharmacy ran out. Or, as Kelsey found, a version of the drug that their insurance doesn’t cover may be all that’s available, or it may be in a pharmacy that’s out of network, making the only source of the drug prohibitively expensive.

  Meagan Turner, a 30-year-old psychotherapist in Atlanta who has narcolepsy, ended up calling around to several pharmacies to fill her Adderall prescription recently, only finding it at a small independent shop that her insurance didn’t accept. She spent about $300 out of pocket and hopes the shortage is over by the next time she needs a refill.

  “Considering that even some days I can take Adderall and still need a nap, not having Adderall leaves me falling asleep left and right, or just being wildly not-present since all my energy is focused on keeping my eyes open,” Turner said.

  Making or taking a controlled substance means everything is harder

  The United States is subject to drug shortages even when there isn’t a pandemic wreaking havoc on supply chains. It isn’t helping matters that many health insurance plans refuse to cover certain pharmacies or drugs. But with controlled substances, the problem becomes even more difficult to solve as manufacturers can’t just make more drugs in response to more demand.

  The DEA sets a quota for the maximum amounts of controlled substances that can be made in a year. There are also rules and restrictions on their manufacture and distribution. That quota can be changed, but the DEA refused to do so for 2023, despite acknowledging reports of shortages in methylphenidate drugs and the FDA-declared shortage of amphetamine salts.

  “We are aware that the pharmaceutical industry is claiming that there is a quota shortage for the active ingredients in ADHD drugs,” the agency told Recode. “Based on DEA’s information — which is provided by ADHD drug manufacturers — this is not true.”

  “DEA is committed to ensuring that all Americans can readily access needed medications,” it added.

  The controlled substance rules make filling prescriptions more difficult for patients, too. These drugs are subject to federal laws, state laws, and even pharmacy-specific policies. Patients have to get a new prescription from their provider every time (no refills). They also run the real risk of getting flagged as a drug seeker. Healthcare providers run the risk of getting in trouble if they send too many prescriptions out for the same person.

  On top of all that, controlled substance laws don’t allow patients to fill their prescriptions until a few days before their current one runs out, giving them a tight deadline to find an alternative source if their pharmacy is out of stock. For people with narcolepsy, once they run out of their medication, the process of getting more becomes infinitely more difficult. Not only are they then suffering from the symptoms of unmedicated narcolepsy, but they may also feel even worse due to the rebound effect of suddenly going off of their drugs.

  “They literally expect someone whose body doesn’t know when it is day or night to have their shit together enough to make sure that during a two-day window they can spend hours driving all around the city to multiple pharmacies, stand in line, and find their medication?” said Lynne, a 30-year-old marketing freelancer in Florida who has narcolepsy.

  Lynne has traveled as many as 300 miles to find a pharmacy with her stimulants, although it only had half of the amount she needed. She’s currently splitting the few pills she has left in half and quarters while she looks for another pharmacy that has them in stock.

  “I’m barely getting by,” she said. “To me, these meds are my life.”

  We know the shortage will end, but we don’t know when

  It’s possible the stimulant shortage will get worse and last for months. Meanwhile, many manufacturers are unable to say when they’ll be able to supply more of these drugs, and government agencies seem to be doing little to help. One thing that may have an impact is when President Biden lifts the pandemic public emergency in May, as the suspension of the in-person visit rule may go with it. But some medical professionals and organizations are advocating for the Biden administration to revise that rule, and Done, one of the major ADHD telehealth apps, is paying lobbyists to push to end the in-person requirement.

  Several telehealth apps have already stopped prescribing stimulants or shut down entirely when the scrutiny of their practices began last spring. If the DEA is cracking down on certain services for overprescribing, that may have a chilling effect on the ones that remain, including Done. But patients can always take their telehealth app-provided diagnoses to another provider and try to get prescriptions through them.

  Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

  At least one lawmaker is paying attention. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) wrote to the FDA and the DEA regarding the Adderall shortage last December, demanding that the two agencies work together to fix the shortage and ensure that people with ADHD can get their Adderall again. (The letter doesn’t mention other stimulant shortages or people with narcolepsy.)

  For people who take Concerta, however, there is a new hurdle. The authorized generic version of it was discontinued in January, which may cause another sudden spike in demand for alternatives when their manufacturers are already struggling.

  Brian, a former nurse in his 50s who lives in San Diego, has severe narcolepsy and says he’s basically housebound without Concerta, which he takes the authorized generic version of. Even showering is risky without that medication, he says. Two weeks ago, his usual pharmacy finally ran out. The only place he could find more was a pharmacy in Palm Springs.

  To be able to make the two-hour drive, Brian took his last pill, knowing that if the pharmacy was out when he got there, he wouldn’t be able to get back. He says he spent at least $250 between gas, food, and an Airbnb to spend the night because he couldn’t drive there and back on the same day. But he got his medication — for this month, anyway.

  In a few weeks, he’ll have to do it all over again. But this time the authorized generic will have been discontinued. He has no idea what he’ll do then.

  “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “It’s a nightmare disease.”

• The case for better-seats-cost-more movie tickets -

  

  AMC’s new plan is … good?

  Let’s say I want to take myself to see Magic Mike’s Last Dance on Friday at the AMC 34th Street theater in Manhattan. Could happen! And if it does, I have two options: I can buy a regular ticket for $26.88. Or I can pick a seat in the middle of the theater and pay … $1 more.

  If this was a Knicks game or a Broadway show, this would be no big deal: Consumers are very familiar with the idea of paying more, or less, for seats based on desirability and demand: Front-row tickets for Taylor Swift cost thousands of dollars; nosebleeds to see Foreigner in Las Vegas are more affordable.

  But for the beleaguered movie business, this is a new idea. AMC Theatres, the world’s largest movie theater chain, announced their “Sightline” plan earlier this week: Most tickets sell for the regular price, but a limited number of seats in the center of the theater will cost $1 or $2 more per ticket. It’s debuting the plan this weekend at some of its locations in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City.

  It also rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Which is presumably why AMC CEO Adam Aron, whose company announced the program on February 6, took to Twitter two days later to defend it, chalking the move up to “inflationary times.”

  (2/3) In inflationary times, costs rise, so prices rise. Under the old system, our only option was to raise prices on all seats. Sightline lets us raise prices only on our most popular seats, but we can also hold the line on Standard seats & actually cut prices on Value seats.

  — Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) February 8, 2023

Aron also noted that AMC will sell the least-desirable tickets at a discount (more on that in a minute) and — unlike his company’s earlier press release, which presented the move as an inevitable one that would roll out to all of AMC’s theaters by the end of the year — he couched it as a “test” the company would “carefully monitor.”

That’s uncharacteristic defensiveness from a CEO who has spent the last few years operating at Musk-level bluster (for background on Aron and his recent conversion to meme stock ringleader, see this excellent Businessweek profile). And it shows you just how ingrained the idea of one-size-fits-all ticketing is at American movie theaters. As well as the problems inherent with any announced price hike, particularly at a time when Americans have been seeing price hikes on everything from energy to eggs.

So maybe pay-by-seat movie tickets won’t be here to stay, but they probably should be. They make sense, and the theater business has deep, systemic problems — some created by its own missteps and the rest by big changes in the way we consume entertainment. If you still like seeing movies in a room with other people instead of on your couch or on your phone, you’re going to have to roll with some changes.

“They should have done this years ago,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter. “I’m amazed that no one has done it yet.”

Pachter, like Aron, points out that variable pricing exists in just about every other entertainment venue, along with plenty of other transactions that we all intuitively understand: When you’re on an airplane, you’re well aware that the person sitting next to you could have paid much more, or less, depending on when they bought their ticket.

We’re also used to paying different amounts for movies based on the time and place we view them: You can shell out the US average of $11 a ticket for a movie when it comes out, or wait months and pay less to rent it at home. Or wait even longer, and pay nothing (not really nothing, but it will feel that way) when it shows up as part of your Netflix or Disney+ or HBO Max subscription.

The movie business has also periodically floated attempts to do variable pricing based on the kind of movie theaters show. In the late 1990s, then-Universal Studios owner Edgar Bronfman Jr. suggested that movies that cost more to make should have more expensive tickets, and was roundly panned. But AMC played with the idea in 2019 without much fanfare, and got very little grief for it; by the time last year’s The Batman debuted, AMC hiked prices for that movie (as did other exhibitors) and bragged about it; it expects to do the same for other would-be blockbusters.

And as Aron has said, variable pricing can also mean viewers pay less to see a movie, though studios generally won’t allow theaters to lower prices beyond a certain level. Still, in theory, AMC’s new seating plan means I could see Magic Mike at a discount, since AMC is cutting the price of “value tickets” — in this case, the ones in the neck-creaking first row — by $2. But in order to get that discount I’d need to join AMC’s fan club, and there was nothing on the Fandango ticketing app telling me that option existed. So let’s be clear: This is an attempt to generate more money per ticket, not less.

It’s also an attempt to generate more revenue for a deeply troubled business. Even before the pandemic, movie-going had become something people do less and less each year, for a litany of reasons: They don’t like the experience, or the movies they used to watch are streaming instead. Or they’re just happy to scroll TikTok and YouTube.

In 2002, Americans went to the movies an average of 5.2 times per year; by 2019, per the Motion Picture Association, that number had declined to 3.5 times per year. The trend doesn’t seem like it’s going to improve post-pandemic: Last year, when the industry celebrated box office hits like Top Gun: Maverick, the per capita average was still an anemic 1.9, according to estimates from media investor Matthew Ball.

This leads to a vicious cycle: Smaller audiences in theaters have pushed more studios to move more movies to streaming — good luck finding a rom-com in a theater these days — which means audiences get trained not to go to the movies, which pushes more movies to streaming. All of which leads to empty theaters.

That’s why AMC is frequently mentioned as a bankruptcy candidate. And why the owners of Regal, the second-biggest theater chain in the US, filed for bankruptcy last month and will shutter 39 locations. The industry is still trying to figure out novel ideas to get people back into theaters: As analyst Rich Greenfield notes, this month Paramount and theater chains seemed to successfully lure older audiences to see 80 for Brady, a movie about … older people who like Tom Brady … by charging lower prices. But any clear-eyed industry observer will tell you that there are simply too many movie screens and that more of them will go away in the future.

In the meantime, theaters are figuring out how to reduce costs, via smaller staffs and online ticketing, and raise prices in less obvious ways, like pushing more expensive food. (Though that still didn’t save Alamo Drafthouse, a really excellent chain of boutique theaters, from filing Chapter 11 a couple of years ago, either).

Eventually, they’re going to want to raise prices on tickets, one way or another: “They’ve done a great job of jacking up concessions,” says Pachter. “The next thing is to charge us more.”

That’s probably not what you want to hear. But if you still like going to the movies, you’re going to have to get used to it.

• How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry -

  

  The accidental origins of the chicken on your plate, explained.

  Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone.

  The reason? We eat so many chickens. So, so many. In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion of them, up from 8 billion in 1965. On Sunday alone, Americans will likely eat a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings as they watch the Eagles take on the Chiefs at Super Bowl LVII. And that makes it all the more astonishing that, according to chicken industry lore, the system that makes it possible for us to eat so much chicken in the first place originated with a minor clerical error.

  The story begins 100 years ago in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, ten times more than the 50 Steele had ordered.

  Five hundred hens was a lot — bigger farms at the time had only 300. Returns weren’t really an option in these pre-Amazon days, so she kept them anyway, feeding and watering the chicks by hand in a barn the size of a studio apartment — 256 square feet — that was heated by a coal stove. Four and a half months later, over 100 of the original 500 chicks had died, but she still made a sizable profit off the two-pound survivors — almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation — and began to ramp up her operations.

  Her husband, David “Wilmer” Steele, quit his job in the Coast Guard to help Cecile expand and within three years, they were raising 10,000 chickens. Word of the Steele family’s success spread, and by 1928 there were hundreds of farmers in the area raising chickens primarily for their meat (before Steele, most farmers raised chickens just for their eggs).

  National Archives and Records Administration

  By today’s standards, a 10,000-chicken farm is tiny — a single industrial-style chicken barn will now house upward of 40,000 birds at a time, and farmers usually own several barns apiece. But in Steele’s day, her operation was massive. And the hatchery accident occurred at a fortuitous time — it was the Roaring Twenties, a decade of immense economic growth in the US, which meant Americans had more money in their pockets to eat more meat. Simultaneous advancements in agricultural refrigeration and transportation, along with the rise of chain grocery stores and the expansion of agriculture financing, made that meat more plentiful.

  Around this time there were also seemingly small advances around nutrition that had huge implications for mass agriculture. One was the discovery of vitamin D in 1922, according to Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. Chickens would often die of rickets when kept indoors during cold winter months (rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, stemming from lack of sunlight). That helped cap the number of chickens that could be raised at any given time, especially in cooler climates. But once farmers began fortifying chicken feed with vitamin D, they could suddenly raise them in larger numbers indoors and year-round.

  Not only was Steele’s timing lucky, but so was her location. The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.

  Delaware Public Archives/Delaware Agricultural Museum

  Steele’s accident set off the chicken revolution as we know it. In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the US. Today, it’s about 44 percent. Over time, chicken benefited from perceptions that it was healthier than red meat, and became cheaper to produce, thus cheaper for consumers. Today grocery stores charge $4 to $10 a pound for beef and pork, while chicken can cost as little as $1.80 a pound. Bacon and steak may take center stage for meat lovers, but when it comes to what’s for dinner, the answer is more often poultry.

  Steele didn’t live to see where her experiments ultimately led. With earnings from their burgeoning poultry empire, Steele and her husband — who had become a state senator in 1937 — bought a $10,000 yacht named The Lure. One October day in 1940 they took it out fishing with three guests, and while near Ocean City, Maryland, the carburetor backfired, causing the boat to explode. The others survived, but tragically, Cecile and Wilmer Steele did not.

  Through a mix of coincidence and ambition, Steele set off a race to put chicken at the center of the American plate, changing the face of agriculture forever. In the process, we bent the chicken to our will, pushing the species to its biological limits, polluting waterways and our lungs along the way, all to supply a growing population with cheap protein.

  The chicken of tomorrow — and today

  There’s disagreement over when and where humans first domesticated the spry, tropical, multi-colored red junglefowl of South and Southeast Asia — the ancestor of modern-day chickens — but the latest research estimates it occurred over 3,000 years ago in what is now Thailand. Over the following centuries humans brought the species through China, India, the Middle East, Northeast Africa, Italy, Britain, and up to Scandinavia, and at some point it was likely cross-bred with India’s gray junglefowl. Chickens have been in the Americas almost as long as Europeans, first stepping foot on what is now the Dominican Republic in 1493, on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage.

  As prevalent as chicken is today, archaeologists believe they were first domesticated for cockfighting, not farming — the ancient Greek city of Pergamum even built a cockfighting amphitheater. And even up until the 1940s, chickens played a small role in agriculture compared to beef and pork. That all changed, due to Steele and other pioneers in the 1920s and 1930s, but also sophisticated breeding techniques in the decades that followed, which transformed the chicken from a small egg-layer into a giant, meat-producing machine.

  In 1946, two decades after Steele demonstrated how to raise thousands of chickens for meat indoors, a legion of scientists, government employees, meat producers, and volunteers launched a nationwide contest — called The Chicken of Tomorrow — to design a bigger bird. At the time, chickens were bred to lay a lot of eggs, but the grocery chain A&P wanted a chicken that could provide as much meat as possible. And that meant a bird with a big breast.

  Out of 40 final contestants, California farmer Charles Vantress came out on top. Vantress cross-bred two varieties — the New Hampshire Red and the Cornish — to create a hybrid bird that, most importantly, converted feed to muscle more efficiently than his competitors (judges scored chickens on 18 criteria in total). For his achievement, Vantress was celebrated with a parade through Georgetown, Delaware — a 40-minute drive from Cecile Steele’s farm — replete with a Festival Broiler Queen (the industry calls chickens raised for meat “broilers.”)

  UConn Photograph Collection, Archives and Special Collections/UConn Library

  Vantress went on to dominate the field of poultry genetics, eventually selling his breeding lines to chicken giant Tyson Foods in 1974. Twelve years later, Tyson merged his company with a breeding competitor called Cobb to form Cobb-Vantress and by 2016, almost half of the world’s chickens raised for meat were the “Cobb 500” breed.

  Around the same time, there was also a leap forward in animal feed. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, a class of antibiotics that revolutionized modern medicine. Two decades later, American scientists discovered that feeding the antibiotic aureomycin to farmed animals made them grow much faster, a revelation that sparked the rapid adoption of antibiotic use on the farm (one that public health officials, worried about growing antibiotic resistance in humans, have been trying to reverse for decades, with little success).

  Human health concerns played a role as well: By the 1970s, public health professionals had increasingly linked consumption of dietary fat to rising rates of heart disease, culminating in a 1977 Senate report — Dietary Goals for the United States — that advised Americans to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats … which will reduce saturated fat intake.”

  They recommended chicken, turkey, and fish instead — and for once, Americans listened to experts’ medical advice. Between 1970 and 2019, US beef consumption per person fell 28 percent, while poultry consumption has increased by 173 percent. (Pork consumption per person, despite the industry’s efforts to mimic the success of chicken with the “other white meat” ad campaign, remained largely unchanged over the decades.)

  

  Soon food companies got to work. The chicken nugget was invented in 1963 by an American poultry scientist as a frozen, breaded “chicken stick,” but it wasn’t until the 1983 national launch of the McNugget, which was concocted by a French chef, that it shot into the stratosphere. Stores quickly sold out amid long lines and 40 years later it’s still a top earner for the company. In 2019, Americans ate an estimated 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets.

  Chicken has also undergone a cultural makeover. Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken, notes that chicken was long considered feminine, while beef was considered masculine. According to the humorism system of medicine developed by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, chicken “was mainly just considered a weak and delicate food suitable for weak and delicate people,” Rude said.

  But over time, chicken has changed into the meat of choice for bodybuilders and paleo dieters, due in part to the rise of nutrition science, which classifies foods by their constituent parts — protein, fat, and carbohydrates. “Chicken contained protein so it was like other meats, but less fat so it was superior to them according to dietary guidelines published in the 1980s,” said Rude. “You can still see this sort of idea of red meat and masculinity … But chicken has definitely made a lot of inroads.”

  As much as the chicken has come to be an affordable source of protein, breeding over 9 billion of them for meat in the US each year has proven to be an environmental, labor, and animal welfare catastrophe. We’ve changed them, and in turn, they’ve changed us — and the planet.

  What our love for chicken has done to chickens (and us)

  If you went inside one of the industrial barns that are home to America’s 9 billion chickens, you’d find most of them sitting down in their own waste. It’s not because they’re lazy, or that they like to hang out in manure. It’s because most of them simply can’t walk.

  Courtesy of Mercy For Animals

  The Chicken of Tomorrow contests of the 1940s gave way to a new breed of bird so top-heavy that their skinny legs can easily buckle under the weight of their enormous body. Back then, it took 84 days for chickens to reach their “market weight” of three pounds; today it takes almost half the time to grow more than twice as big.

  A now famous study by Canadian poultry researchers illustrates just how far poultry companies have pushed chickens’ biology. The researchers took breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005, and fed each bird the same diet for 56 days. At the end of the experiment, the 1957 breed had reached two pounds, the 1978 breed reached four pounds, and the 2005 breed reached a gigantic 9.2 pounds.

  

  Making chickens grow bigger and faster may be good for the consumer (and the poultry companies), and counterintuitively, today’s rapid-growth model has a smaller carbon footprint than slower-growing, “heritage” breeds. But the rapid-growth model of today is godawful for the chickens, saddling them with a long list of health problems. And as we’ve covered at Vox, the societal shift of replacing beef with chicken means we’re killing far more individual animals for food. Because chickens are so small, you have to kill about 100 of them to get the same amount of meat you would from one cow.

  And over the last 50 years, despite a growing US population, the total number of cattle raised and slaughtered for beef each year has actually declined by a few million. Meanwhile, the number of chickens killed annually has increased by 6 billion. Another way to think about it: In 1970, around 16 chickens and one-fifth of a cow were slaughtered for each American. In 2020, it was 23.5 chickens and less than one-tenth of a cow. And while conventionally raised cattle hardly have it great, chickens suffer far more.

  

  Raising and slaughtering chickens is dangerous, precarious work, too. Most chicken farmers work on contract and take on huge amounts of debt to start their farm; the margins are razor-thin, leaving some to say they feel more like a serf than a farmer, while slaughterhouse work is considered to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

  Simply living near a chicken farm or slaughter plant can be bad for your health. That much is apparent in Steele’s home state of Delaware which, despite making up less than 0.1 percent of the US land mass, raises 6 percent of the country’s 9 billion birds. Over 500 million are raised in the Delmarva Peninsula alone each year.

  Sacoby Wilson, a professor of applied environmental health at the University of Maryland, said pollution from chicken manure comes in many forms: Nitrates can contaminate wells, ammonia can cause respiratory issues, and “poultry dust,” or particulate matter, can cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Last year, the Environmental Integrity Project — a nonprofit that advocates for stronger enforcement of environmental laws — found that Delaware and Maryland were the only states where 100 percent of their estuaries were impaired with pollution, in large part due to the high amounts of chicken manure that leaks into streams near farms.

  Socially Responsible Agriculture Project

  “Chicken waste is hazardous waste,” Sacoby said. “It needs to be treated the same way we treat other major industries.” But animal farms are largely exempted from air and water regulations.

  ---

  When Cecile Steele took a chance a century ago and raised 500 birds instead of 50, she had no idea of the long chain of events she set off, and passed away many years before chicken took over our plates. But she sparked a wholesale transformation of our farming and food systems, our air and water, and the chicken itself — a transformation that made meat more affordable than ever, but with a high cost diffused throughout society and the environment.

  It occurred at a time in American history when such costs could hardly be conceived of, a time when people had suffered immense poverty and hunger for years during World War I. But in the 100 years since, we’ve overcorrected, valuing abundance and affordability over public health and environmental sustainability while pushing over 9 billion chickens — and hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers — to their limit.

  Devry Becker Jones

  And there’s seemingly no relief in sight. “The problem is we have this food system geared towards incredibly efficient meat production, so it just keeps going and keeps increasing,” Rude said. “There’s no indication that global meat consumption will decline.”

  But over this next century, we may witness another overhaul of our food system. Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first chicken made directly from animal cells, known as “lab-grown” or cultivated meat. One hundred years from now — if artificial intelligence hasn’t put journalists out of work — a future writer might regale us with the story of the next Cecile Steele. Instead of a farmer, she could be a scientist in a lab somewhere, cooking up the chicken-free chicken of 2123.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Intense Belief shines -

• Invincible, True Faith, Jersey Legend and Stormy Ocean impress -

• Mayank’s delightful double ton takes Karnataka to a position of supremacy - Skipper dominates the last two partnerships as the host goes past the 400-mark; Kaverappa’s fiery spell prises out two Saurashtra batters

• Cristiano Ronaldo scores four for Al Nassr to pass 500 club career goals - Cristiano Ronaldo, who celebrated his 38th birthday on Sunday, has scored 503 league goals for five clubs in five different top-flight leagues

• Ind vs Aus 1st Test | Rohit scores ton; Jadeja-Axar extend India’s lead to 144 runs on Day 2 - Rohit Sharma (120 off 212 balls) batted with composure to bring up a hard-fought century, his ninth in the format

From The Hindu: National News

• PM unable to reply to issues raised by Opposition in Parliament: Stalin -

• CM announces distribution of ‘podu’ pattas from month-end - Undertaking to be taken from beneficiaries against resorting to forest cutting further

• Stage set for political slugfest over rubber in Central Travancore - The UDF is organising a farmers’ protest against policies of State and Central governments on February 11; LDF plans a similar event that will be inaugurated by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at the same venue the next day

• Bandi threatens to demolish domes of new Secretariat -

• Hindenburg report: Stock market goes by sentiment, how to protect Indian investors from sudden volatility, SC asks govt and SEBI - Assuring SEBI it does not intend to go on a ‘witch hunt’, a three-judge Bench led by CJI Chandrachud flagged the court’s concern for Indian investors and highlighted the need to protect them

From BBC: Europe

• Turkey-Syria earthquake: Freezing weather adds to despair as quake toll passes 21,000 - Tens of thousands of people have spent a freezing-cold fourth night in makeshift shelters.

• Ukraine war: Belgorod locals live in fear but won’t blame Putin - Belgorod residents fully back Putin’s war, despite the fear and fury of life on the front line.

• Turkey and Syria earthquake: Bodies found in search for volleyball team - A school group of 39 people were in a hotel in southern Turkey when the building collapsed.

• Amsterdam bans cannabis in its red light district - The city council introduces the new laws in a bid to reduce disruption by tourists in the area.

• Roger Waters: Former Pink Floyd star’s UN speech criticised by Ukraine - Roger Waters tells the United Nations Security Council that Russia’s invasion was “not unprovoked”.

From Ars Technica

• Rocket Report: SpaceX’s Super Heavy is lit, Court strikes down Georgia spaceport - " … it was dislodged and caused mischief downstream." - link

• A quick look at the Switch’s new Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulation - Nintendo’s oldest handhelds are finally playable on its newest handheld. - link

• Earthquake deaths top 20,000 as survivors face cholera, other health threats - WHO warns of “secondary crisis” as water disinfection tablets ship alongside trauma kits. - link

• Valve waited 15 months to patch high-severity flaw. A hacker pounced - Vulnerability had a 8.8 severity rating. Valve took its time patching anyway. - link

• SpaceX completes a hot fire test of its massive Super Heavy rocket [Updated] - “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad, that is success.” - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What’s the difference between having sex with a hooker, your girlfriend and your wife? -

  Hooker says, “are you done yet?”

  Your girlfriend says, “you’re done already?”

  And your wife says, “beige, we should definitely paint the ceiling beige.”

  submitted by /u/sexxc
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• A man goes to a priest to confess. -

  “Forgive me father, for I have sinned” says the man.

  “What did you sin, my son?” the priest asks him.

  “Well, me and my wife went to my sister-in-law for dinner, we had dinner, then as soon as we were going to go home, the weather, father, it was getting cloudy and it look like it was about to rain, so my sister-in-law asked us to stay for the night” says the man.

  “Then what happened?” asks the priest.

  “Well, we took her up on her offer then later at night I got the urge to fuck my sister-in-law, so I did” says the man.

  “My son, that’s a big sin you have done, ask God for forgiveness and he may forgive you” says the priest.

  “Thank you, father, but that’s not all” the man said back.

  “What else is there my son” the priest asks him.

  “Well after a few weeks, my mother-in-law invited us to dinner, and after dinner, it was getting cloudy and was about to rain again, so my mother-in-law asked us to stay overnight, that night I got the urge to fuck her, and so I did” confesses the man.

  The priest looks out outside and it sees the sky about to get cloudy turns to the man and says “Okay, I think it’s about time for you to get the fuck outta here.”

  submitted by /u/nothinlefttochoose
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• BREAKING NEWS! Viagra as treatment for sunburns… -

  It doesn’t cure it but it sure keeps the sheets off of your legs at night…

  submitted by /u/unselfishdata
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• A bloke starts his new job at the zoo and is given three tasks… -

  First is to clear the exotic fish pool of weeds. As he does this a huge fish jumps out and bites him. To show who is boss, he beats it to death with a spade. Realising his employer won’t be best pleased he disposes of the fish by feeding it to the lions, as lions will eat anything.

  Moving on to the second job of clearing out the chimp house, he is attacked by the chimps who pelt him with coconuts. He swipes at two chimps with a spade killing them both. What can he do? Feed them to the lions, he says to himself, because lions eat anything, and hurls the corpses into the lion enclosure.

  He moves on to the last job which is to collect honey from the South American Bees. As soon as he starts he is attacked by the bees. He grabs the spade and smashes the bees to a pulp. By now he knows what to do and shovels them into the lions cage because lions eat anything.

  Later that day a new lion arrives at the zoo. He wanders up to another lion and says “What’s the food like here?” The lion says: "Absolutely brilliant. Today we had Fish & Chimps with Mushy Bees.

  submitted by /u/tom_the_pilot
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• Brothers -

  There were two evil brothers. They were rich and used their money to keep their ways from the public eye. They even attended the same church and looked to be perfect Christians.

  Then, their pastor retired and a new one was hired. Not only could he see right through the brothers’ deception, but he also spoke well and true, and the church started to swell in numbers. A fund-raising campaign was started to build a new assembly.

  All of a sudden, one of the brothers died. The remaining brother sought out the new pastor the day before the funeral and handed him a check for the amount needed to finish paying for the new building.

  “I have only one condition.” he said. “At his funeral, you must say my brother was a saint.” The pastor gave his word and deposited the check.

  The next day at the funeral, the pastor did not hold back. “He was an evil man” he said. “He cheated on his wife, abused his family, swindled his friends and the poor…” After going on in this vein for a small time, he concluded with “But, compared to his brother, he was a saint.”

  submitted by /u/gary6043
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