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

• How to Prevent Gun Massacres? Look Around the World - Australia, Britain, Canada, and other countries have enacted reforms that turned mass shootings into rare, aberrational events rather than everyday occurrences. - link

• Will an Emergency Law Used to Keep Out Migrants Become Permanent? - At the start of the pandemic, the Trump Administration invoked an obscure provision called Title 42 to effectively stop migration. Even as other COVID restrictions are lifted, anti-immigration politicians insist that it remain in place. - link

• America’s Redistricting Process Is Breaking Democracy - Democrats have tried to keep up with Republican gerrymandering—and everyone is losing. - link

• The Baby-Formula Blame Game - At a House committee hearing this week, the F.D.A. and Abbott passed the buck. With parents scrambling to feed their children, who’s responsible for the shortages? - link

• What Makes a Mass Shooter? - The authors of “The Violence Project” note that mass shootings have risen alongside overdoses and other deaths of despair—which is not a coincidence. - link

From Vox

• The best $17.59 I’ve ever spent: A totally normal alarm clock -

  

  I figured that maybe I was hopeless, but my third try at being an alarm clock person actually worked.

  At the beginning of the movie Freaky Friday (2003), the mom character (Jamie Lee Curtis) pulls on the feet of her daughter (Lindsay Lohan) as she clings to the bars on her bed’s headboard. An alarm clock blares as they start their day with a battle of physical and mental wills. The bedside clock is small and black, with loud red digits. Its face reads 6:00 as it shrieks.

  When I was in high school, I too engaged in a battle of wills each day with my mother and my alarm clock. My mom didn’t yank my feet, though. “I would put my face right down by your head and whisper in your ear and (try to) kiss your cheek,” she recalled in a recent text message. That annoyed me so much that I would eventually relent and get up. (I now find it sweet.) I remember lying in bed before school picturing this “Freaky Friday” scene, wondering what my life would be like if I had a headboard.

  I have never loved waking up early. Though I recognize that it’s virtuous in some slices of our culture to wake up at dawn to rise and grind, I prefer not to do that. I famously slept through my last morning of high school. I generally strive to be responsible and on time, but waking up — especially when my apparently powerful internal clock tells me it’s not time — has historically been a challenge for me.

  During the pandemic it became that much more challenging. My time became silky and slick, like an eel determined to elude my grasp. I had nowhere to be any day. I let myself sleep in later and later in the name of self-care. Each night, I went to bed early. Each morning, I woke up right before my workday needed to start. As time went on, I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t being a little too kind to myself. Maybe I would feel better if I got up at a regular time each day and didn’t spend the 30+ minutes before and after sleep funneling blue light into my eye bulbs via my phone.

  I recalled reading about how Arianna Huffington, a paragon of hustle culture, recommended tucking your phone into its own designated bed each night. Her company, Thrive, called this product a “family bed,” as it can charge up to 10 devices at once. The phones, sleeping head to toe, resemble Charlie’s grandparents in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

  The phone bed can be purchased for $65 — down from its original price of $100 — on Thrive’s website. It is mini and made of wood, with white sheets and velvet and satin lining. A couple months into the pandemic, I was almost tempted to get one. I had started to dread my weekly Screen Time updates. I shielded my eyes each Sunday from the unimpeachable evidence of my minutes and hours squandered. If a calm night of sleep away from the chaos of the phone could be bought, who was I to say no?

  In the end, I could not justify the phone bed. I realized I could just put my phone in a drawer for free. And while the phone bed sort of solved one problem, it didn’t solve the more immediate one: that I would need a device to wake me up if I actually wanted to sleep away from my phone.

  ---

  In May of 2020, my boyfriend kindly bought me a more straightforward solution: a normal alarm clock. I started plugging in my phone in the living room each night, setting the alarm in my room, and waking up to a hideous screeching blare each morning. I felt good!

  After about a year, this clock sort of stopped working. Either that, or my body again became too powerful. I started sleeping through the alarm, once waking up disoriented at 8:58 before a 9 am meeting. I brought my phone back into my room as a backup alarm, which sort of defeated the purpose of the whole enterprise.

  I decided to try again with a new, nicer alarm clock. I splurged on a fancy Swiss quartz clock with excellent reviews. I found that this clock’s alarm was soft, elegant, and tasteful — and therefore useless to me. A delicate chime does not rouse me from my reverie. I require a screech. I brought my phone back into my room.

  After that second failure, I figured that maybe I was hopeless. I had already made two earnest attempts at — and spent some money on — trying to be an alarm clock person. Maybe, I thought, I should resign myself to blue light and scrolling.

  I sheepishly set up stricter screen time limits on my iPhone — in a moment of ambition and/or delusion, I set my Twitter limit to 15 minutes a day. As I scrolled in bed, the hourglass would pop up on my screen as an on-the-nose reminder of the passage of time, of my one wild and precious life slipping away from me in 15-minute intervals. (Apple apparently resisted using the hourglass image for a long time because they thought users wouldn’t know what it meant. I know what it means! I can waste all the time I want and the sands will keep flowing.)

  As the months dragged on without an alarm clock and I waded deeper into my phone each night — into Instagram highlights of random people’s moms and Wikipedia rabbit holes about the ex-husbands of various celebrities — the more I felt I needed to give an alarm clock at least one more try.

  So last September, I took myself to my local hardware store and asked the sales clerk at the front if I could “see” the clock radio above the register. She didn’t know what I was talking about. I pointed to it. She said that she had never seen anyone buy one, but she got it down for me. I took it from her and went, “Hmm.” She said that I could always return it later if I didn’t like it.

  I bought it! For $17.59 I had a new, normal alarm clock radio. It has a little black AM/FM cable that reminds me of a rat tail, a removable power cord, and loud, red digits that tell me the time.

  ---

  My third clock is assertively not the Wirecutter recommended pick. It’s unsexy and utilitarian. It has two alarm settings. I can make a beep go off on AL-1, then get a local radio station blasting via AL-2 a few minutes later. I can snooze it many times — though I find I wish to less and less lately. The prospect of hearing more of its beeps before coffee is a true deterrent. I love it.

  This object hasn’t been without its challenges. For the first few weeks I had it, I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the alarm. So I unplugged it each morning and reset it each night. I read recently that, “Before electricity, London clockmakers used to send assistants to the Greenwich observatory with pocket watches to get the exact time and bring it back, like hot soup in a takeout container.” I felt like one of those soup assistants as I flipped between my phone clock and my new clock, trying to align the latter to the exact right time.

  The constant resetting was a pain, but also an opportunity to reflect on the nature of time, and how I have ultimate power to control how it is distributed (via this clock) but not how it flows onward (everywhere else). I was tickled by the feeling that I got to decide what time it was.

  Time only moves one direction on my alarm clock, as in life. It is humbling to know that if I miss my target minute, I have to go all the way back through all the possible times again. The gulf between 2:59 and 3 is vast, as is that between 8:05 and 8:04.

  As I unplug and reset, I contemplate time and what I know about it. Time is money. Time is up. A flat circle. Of the essence. It’s also an imposed system. An instrument of social control! A benchmark for productivity. A commodity. A social contract. A scourge. A metaphor. A philosophical conundrum. The bedrock of capitalism. “The key-machine of the modern industrial age.” It is both naturally occurring (see: the sun, “biological clock”) and constructed by humans. It flies when we’re having fun, and weirdly compresses and blooms and clusters and disperses when we are two years into a pandemic.

  My little clock holds all of this (sort of)! And I get to set it! That is a wonder to me. James Gleick, a science journalist, wrote last year that “Far from anchoring us in time, clocks cast us loose from the past, dislocate us from our natural sensation of continuity.” To him, clocks make visible each moment replacing the prior. The clock keeps moving even if I don’t feel like it. It reflects a socially agreed-upon version of reality. I am glad to be an active participant.

  My alarm clock is rich: It is a locus of metaphor and dislocation and social history imbued with unique power. But it’s also just a cheap device from the hardware store. I’m happy that it wakes me up.

After weeks of resetting my clock, I eventually just read the paper instruction manual that came in the box. I learned how to operate the device properly. It was actually very simple.

Lora Kelley is on the editorial staff of The New York Times Opinion section.

• The philosopher who resisted despair -

  

  Albert Camus and the search for solace in a cruel age.

  In March 1946, the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus sailed across the Atlantic to deliver a speech at Columbia University. It was his first and only trip to America. Camus had achieved worldwide fame with the publication of his 1942 novel, The Stranger, and his stature as an artist and a member of the French resistance had grown considerably over the course of the war.

  The Nazis had been defeated the year before and there was a belief that some kind of final victory over fascism had been achieved. But in his address, Camus did not oblige that sentiment. The philosopher, who was expected to talk about French theater and philosophy, lingered on the pathologies that produced Nazism. He went further, arguing that the postwar world had fallen into complacency. The war was over but a certain kind of plague persisted:

  Contemporary man tends more and more to put between himself and nature an abstract and complex machinery that casts him into solitude. … With so much paper, so many offices and functionaries, we are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared. Where no one can come into contact with anyone else except across a maze of what we call formalities.

  The point of the talk was to say that the entire Western world lived in a civilization that elevated abstractions over experience — that ultimately removed people from the reality of human suffering.

  I doubt Camus would change his posture were he to give that talk today. The world of 2022 is different from the world of Nazi barbarity Camus was reacting against, but it’s not as different as we would hope. A great power in Europe is trying to conquer a weaker power driven by some claim to historical greatness and a notion of its geopolitical primacy. It’s hard to look at the images of bombed-out apartment buildings and mass graves in Ukraine and not think of Europe in the aftermath of WWII.

  Camus’s earlier work, when he was writing books like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, was more about the strangeness of the human experience. But his oeuvre took a turn as he witnessed the horrors of the war, his attention fixed on the ways in which people justify violence and lawlessness. Indeed, Camus’s whole philosophy became a response to human brutality, and that’s what makes him such an essential voice at this historical moment.

  Against abstraction

  Camus was one of the intellectual stars of midcentury Paris. But unlike contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was always an outsider. Most everyone in that milieu went to one of the elite universities, like the Sorbonne or the École normale supérieure. Camus grew up in a working-class neighborhood in French Algeria and went to a public university.

  He was raised as a French citizen in Algeria, where most of the inhabitants were indigenous Arabs and Berbers who had lived there for centuries before the French showed up. Living as a French citizen in a colonized state helped give shape to his philosophy and politics. He loved the French people who were born in Algeria and made a home there, but he was also outraged by the treatment of Arabs and Berbers — hundreds of thousands of whom were killed by French forces — and spent years condemning it as a young reporter for a left-wing newspaper.

  The Algerian experience made Camus wary of either-or approaches to politics. Having witnessed the extremism on both sides — French occupiers and their Arab resisters — and the cycles of violence and retaliation, he was determined to find a space for dialogue, or at least impose limits on the killing.

  No one, he insisted, had a monopoly on truth or justice. “I want Arab militants to preserve the justice of their cause by condemning the massacres of civilians, just as I want the French to protect their rights and their future by openly condemning the massacres of the repression.” He was widely mocked as a moderate for this stance (even as he lobbied behind the scenes on behalf of countless political prisoners during Algeria’s war for independence). I’m not sure Camus ever had an adequate response to the criticisms. The best he could muster was to say that the goal was to stop the spiral of violence and retaliation and that meant condemning the sorts of tactics that made resolution impossible.

  In the spring of 1940, shortly after Camus had moved to Paris, the Germans invaded France. He tried to enlist in the army but was declined due to an early bout of tuberculosis. He instead became the editor of the French resistance newspaper, Combat, and produced some of his best work as a columnist there. It’s really that period that crystallized so much of his thinking.

  From the start of the war, Camus was preoccupied with the hazards of ideological politics and abstract ideals. “It was impossible,” he wrote, “to persuade people who were doing these things not to do them because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way to persuade an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology.”

  This is what he saw in Nazism: a political plague that obeyed its own implacable logic and destroyed the hosts — and everyone else. Beyond that specter, he could sense the impending battle between capitalist and Marxist ideologies, both of which, in their own ways, were based on unchallengeable ideas of progress.

  After the war, Camus’s philosophical work became even more political. He published his book-length essay The Rebel in 1951, which precipitated his public fallout with Sartre. Camus condemned the excesses on both sides of the Cold War — a stance that alienated Marxists like Sartre — but he was always interested in closing the gap between theory and action:

The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified. … One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood.

The Rebel is a flawed book, and it does, at times, feel too removed from historical realities. But the weaknesses of the book reflect the doubt at the core of Camus’s political philosophy. It wasn’t about drawing some kind of moral equivalence between fascism and communism. It was an attempt to understand a peculiar form of nihilism that had come to dominate the 20th century.

For Camus, nihilism wasn’t so much about belief in nothing; it was about refusing to believe in the world as it is. And killing in service to some idea is just as nihilistic as believing that nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted.

The persistence of compassion

That human tendency toward nihilism was on Camus’s mind when he spoke at Columbia in 1946. “Nihilism has been replaced by absolute rationalism,” Camus said, “and in both cases, the results are the same.”

The upshot of Camus’s speech at Columbia was to take all the anguish over the atrocities of World War II and turn it into something ennobling. It’s natural to be indignant in the face of such horror, but there was a sliver of consolation here. Camus asks us to reflect on that common outrage, realize what it says about the value of human life, and commit to being a more engaged human being.

Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague is all about our shared vulnerability to loss and suffering. Something like a pandemic sweeps into our lives and disrupts our reality. The routines, the diversions, the daily comforts — it all explodes under the intensity of emergency. Suddenly, everyone is facing the same situation and there’s nothing to do but resist. “I know it’s an absurd situation,” the protagonist Rieux says at one point, “but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.” The same is true of war (Camus himself insisted that the plague in the novel was an allegory for the Nazi occupation).

Camus has been much on my mind these last few months. The great irony of Putin’s war is that it seems to have reinforced the very thing it was intended to destroy: the Ukrainian identity. In The Rebel, Camus says we can see the roots of human solidarity in moments of crisis, when people have to resist what’s taking place, whether it’s a biological plague or a military occupation. And when that happens, we look around and see others doing the same thing. We see others saying “no” and “yes” at the same time — no to the destruction of human life, yes to the community that emerges out of that refusal.

Amid the horror is solace — there’s something deeply satisfying about doing things in the world with other people. The immediacy of a war or a natural disaster collapses the barriers between us because it’s so clear what has to be done. And while nothing redeems a tragedy, there’s at least some comfort in the solidarity that emerges from it.

The problem is that solidarity often slips away in the mechanics of everyday life. But the empathy and love fueling that desire to help in a crisis is a constant possibility. Camus thought this didn’t happen automatically — it was a choice we each had to make — and that we could carry the spirit of collective action into the post-crisis world. He also thought that acting with other people, caring about other people, made us happy and was thus an antidote to despair.

The striking thing about Camus is that he imagines life itself as a kind of emergency in the sense that it can end at any moment. The decision to live in spite of that awareness carries a moral obligation: to not add to the already random suffering in the world. Seeing that principle transgressed has a way of renewing our commitment to it.

The antidote to despair

Camus always said that he was pessimistic about the human condition and optimistic about humankind. Maybe that’s a contradiction. But I always thought the deeper point was much simpler: We’re born into a world that doesn’t seem to have any purpose, that we know will end, and yet we go on living anyway.

For Camus, that meant that there is something in humanity that transcends the fact of our condition. That’s the source of our collective dignity — and it’s the part of humanity that always has to be defended.

This can all sound a bit abstract from a distance. What’s the average person supposed to do about all the horrors in the world? You can look anywhere — from the conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen and Syria to the barbarity of mass shootings in places like Uvalde, Texas — and be horrified by the suffering, but you can’t do anything about it.

That outrage you feel, though — that’s the spark of common humanity that Camus was always affirming.

At the end of his speech, he told the audience that their job was to take that spark and commit to being a more attentive human being. That meant seeing people as people, not as abstractions or obstacles. It meant not letting our ideas about the world become more important than our experience of the world.

Camus always returned to the myth of Sisyphus as the model of human defiance. The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone. His point was that we’re all rolling our boulders up a hill, and that life is most meaningful when we push together.

• Stop scolding people for worrying about monkeypox -

  

  The obsession with managing public opinion gets in the way of managing public health.

  In the past few weeks, more than 350 cases of monkeypox — a viral disease that’s a much milder cousin of smallpox — have been reported in more than 20 countries worldwide. That’s a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Monkeypox has surfaced periodically in the Congo Basin and in West Africa since its discovery in the 1950s, but past outbreaks haven’t involved cases in this many countries, or this degree of apparent person-to-person spread.

  Still, because as far as we know from past outbreaks monkeypox usually isn’t very contagious and a good vaccine already exists, it ought to be possible to contain even this apparently larger outbreak. Hence many public health officials have emphasized, in their communications about monkeypox, that people shouldn’t worry or overreact.

  Panic is never a good public health strategy, but in attempting to preemptively tamp down public fear, I think experts are failing to learn one of the most important lessons of Covid-19: that we’re too afraid of “alarmism” when outbreaks hit, and should spend less time telling people not to overreact and more time telling them what’s actually going on.

  The impulse on the part of the public health community to try to manage public emotion — rather than provide the public with facts — has dogged us throughout the pandemic, often making it harder to make good decisions. Assurances that people didn’t need masks, meant to protect the supply for health care workers, lastingly damaged trust and masking rates. The CDC’s initial decision not to track breakthrough infections — seemingly meant to show confidence in the vaccines — made it harder to tell how long vaccine-based immunity lasted.

  There are some solid epidemiological reasons to conclude that monkeypox doesn’t pose the same threat to the world that Covid-19 did in 2020. But instead of condemning alarmism, experts should acknowledge the many reasons for that alarm. The world is horribly vulnerable to the next pandemic, we know it will hit at some point, and the undetected spread of monkeypox around the world until there were dozens of cases in non-endemic countries — despite the fact it typically has low transmissibility — shows how profoundly we’ve failed to learn the lessons from Covid-19 we need to avoid a catastrophic repeat.

  Experts should focus more on communicating what they know about monkeypox, pandemics, and the fragility of our current system, aiming to tell people what they can do and the policies they can support in response to their justified fear — instead of preemptively warning against “panic.”

  Monkeypox, explained

  Monkeypox was first identified in research animals in the 1950s, and can cause flu-like symptoms and a characteristic rash with round red blisters all over the body when it infects unprotected humans. The fatality rate has historically ranged from zero to 11 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

  For decades, outbreaks among humans were rare, in significant part because the smallpox vaccine protects against monkeypox, and smallpox vaccination was common. In recent years, though, monkeypox cases have been on the rise as vaccination against smallpox, which was eradicated in 1979, began to wane. According to the CDC, Nigeria has reported 450 monkeypox cases since 2017 — not a lot, but a significant increase from case rates in previous decades.

  Despite that rise and the more recent spread to new countries, there’s reason for optimism that we can prevent a large-scale pandemic of monkeypox. While the variant causing the current outbreaks isn’t fully understood, and we should not rule out that the virus is substantially more transmissible than we’re used to, the disease in general is a known quantity. Even under pessimistic assumptions about the transmissibility of this new variant, it is much less transmissible than the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, which originally had an R0 of 2-3 and now has an R0 of 8-10 for people without preexisting immunity. Unlike Covid-19, monkeypox is thought to be only contagious while patients are symptomatic, which provides additional reason for optimism about containment.

  But optimism should not equal complacency.

  A large international outbreak of a disease that was previously thought to be very hard to transmit person-to-person is bad news, period. There are still a lot of unknowns here, and until we know exactly what happened and have slowed the growth of new cases, the chance of this variant of monkeypox being substantially more transmissible — and hard to contain — is not so low that we can confidently assert that everything will be fine.

  The lessons of Covid-19

  Writing this article, I had an eerie sense of déjà vu. I wrote a similar one in early February of 2020, when Americans were just starting to hear about Covid-19. In that article, I rounded up some takes on the then very novel coronavirus that were in the headlines at the time:

  “Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued. The flu “poses the bigger and more pressing peril,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?” an epidemiologist argued in the LA Times. Other outlets have agreed. An ex-White House health adviser has told Americans to “stop panicking and being hysterical.”

  Bad call, I argued at the time. We didn’t know yet how transmissible the coronavirus was. We didn’t know if the early numbers out of China, where the first cases were recorded, were misleading. (It’s now believed they almost certainly were.) “That’s just far too much uncertainty to assure people that they have nothing to worry about,” I wrote. “And misleadingly assuring people that there’s nothing to worry about can end up doing harm.”

  Obviously, Covid-19 has done quite a lot of harm, to the tune of more than 1 million dead in the US alone. But we’re at risk of forgetting some of those major lessons from early 2020.

  Last week, CNN quoted the CDC’s Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, as saying: “There really aren’t that many cases that are being reported — I think maybe a dozen, a couple dozen — so, the general public should not be concerned that they are at immediate risk for monkeypox.”

  This seems true, technically. Most Americans are not at immediate risk of exposure to monkeypox, just like in early February 2020 they weren’t at immediate risk of exposure to the coronavirus (there may have only been a few dozen cases in the US at that time). But this neglects the factor of exponential growth. The thing that’s scary about infectious disease is that a few cases can rapidly become more cases, and eventually become lots of cases. Monkeypox probably isn’t very transmissible, but until we’ve actually contained it, we don’t know how easy it will be to contain, and the fact there aren’t very many cases yet just isn’t that reassuring.

  “‘No reason for alarm’ is bad science as well as bad risk communication,” I quoted risk communications expert Peter Sandman as saying in that 2020 story. “Telling people not to worry about an emerging infectious disease because it isn’t a significant risk here and now is foolish. We want people to worry about measles when there’s very little measles around, so they will take the precaution of vaccinating their children before it’s imminently necessary. We want people to worry about retirement when they’re years away from retiring, so they will start saving now.”

  Yet the impulse to focus on assuring Americans they shouldn’t panic about monkeypox is very much on display.

  “There’s certainly no reason to panic,” Daniel Bausch, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, told CNN. Reason ran an article titled Don’t Panic Over Monkeypox. “Don’t worry — at least about this,” Geoffrey Smith, a University of Cambridge poxvirus virologist, told the Washington Post.

  I agree with the more nuanced opinions each of these experts share when they’re given a bit more space to expound on their views. It’s straightforwardly true that monkeypox should be easier to contain with contact tracing and vaccination than Covid-19 was.

  But everyone’s insistence on prefacing that nuance by telling me not to worry drives me nuts, and I think reflects a mistake in our thinking about pandemics.

  Being alarmed about pandemics is completely reasonable

  A fact that should not need saying in 2022: Pandemics cause immense human suffering and death. Even if a disease kills only one in 1,000 people who get sick with it, if it hits a billion people worldwide, that’s a million dead. Infectious disease has killed more people than any war in history, and experts keep on warning us that a pandemic much, much worse than Covid-19 is very much possible and really could happen.

  The 1918 flu was deadlier than Covid-19, and deadly in particular to healthy young people. A repeat would be devastating, and the world isn’t particularly prepared. Smallpox, when it existed, had an estimated 30 percent mortality rate. The US has vaccines stockpiled in case a lab accident, terrorist act, or bioweapon ever unleashes it on the world again, but vaccinating the whole world against a disease — as we’ve seen with Covid-19 — is hard to do as quickly as a contagious disease can move.

  It’s not just diseases from nature, either. With rapid advances in biological engineering, it’s now entirely possible to make diseases that could put smallpox and the flu to shame. “Gain of function” work on making deadly diseases deadlier is ongoing. A small group of bad actors could unleash a virus that kills millions of people — and the systems in place to prevent that are limited, underresourced, and inadequate for the stakes.

  In that light, all the focus on telling people not to worry about monkeypox seems a little silly. There are genuine concerns about not crying wolf, about preserving credibility so that when you tell people ‘this is the big one’, they listen. But institutions that initially failed to say “this is the big one” about Covid-19 in February 2020 — and told us, instead, to worry about the flu — aren’t going to repair their damaged credibility by maintaining the same course.

  The course I’d like to see them take instead is the one Sandman, the risk communications expert, recommended with Covid-19: “Instead of deriding people’s fears about the Wuhan coronavirus,” he wrote, “I would advise officials and reporters to focus more on the high likelihood that things will get worse and the not-so- small possibility that they will get much worse.”

  Taking “worry” off of center stage

  Many of the biggest missteps of the last few years have happened when our public health and communications institutions have tried to manage public reactions to what they have to say: from Fauci saying that he dismissed mask-wearing early on in the pandemic out of fears of causing mass panic, to worries that endorsing booster shots (even as the evidence grew they were needed) would make the vaccines look bad, to the FDA’s earlier seeming reluctance to authorize vaccines for children under age 5, despite data justifying it, out of concerns that authorizing Pfizer and Moderna at different times would confuse the public.

  In general, I’d like to see public health officials step back entirely from trying to manage our feelings about outbreaks. Don’t tell us to worry or not to worry, or not to worry yet. Don’t tell us to worry about something else instead. Tell us what measures are being taken to contain the monkeypox outbreak, and prevent the next monkeypox outbreak, and prevent the next outbreak of something much, much worse than monkeypox. By all means, explain the reasons to think monkeypox is likely not very transmissible; that’s important information you have relevant expertise on, unlike trying to manage the public’s feelings.

  And for its part, the media should stop asking public health officials “should I worry?” instead of asking them the questions they are much more equipped to answer: What policies would have prevented this outbreak? What measures need to be in place to contain it? What scenarios are plausible from here?

  In many cases, “don’t worry” is just being used as shorthand for “there’s good reason to think monkeypox won’t cause a global pandemic” — which, to be clear, is a true claim. But I think it’s worth spelling out the longer claim, rather than treating worry as the key consideration. People shouldn’t be encouraged to view outbreaks through the lens of “should I be scared?” but rather through the lens of “will this be contained, what will it take to contain it, and if it’s not contained, what effects will it have on the world?”

  Once you have the accurate facts about monkeypox — and about the risk of pandemics generally — whether you’re worried by those facts isn’t really a question for the CDC.

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• Preview | In its maiden IPL final, Gujarat Titans faces marauding Buttler’s Royals - Rajasthan Royals will look to the in-form Jos Buttler to inspire the team in its first IPL final since 2008, facing debutants Gujarat Titans, who have impressed by topping the table

• Liverpool to play for Ukraine people in Champions League final: Klopp - With the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid taking place in Paris instead of St. Petersburg because of Russia invasion of Ukraine, coach Jurgen Klopp has said his team is playing for Ukraine

• NBA Conference Finals | Jimmy Butler’s 47 points force Game 7 for Heat, Celtics - Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler shook off his bad form to singlehandedly carry his team to a 111-103 victory over Boston Celtics to tie the NBA Eastern Conference Finals at 3-3

From The Hindu: National News

• A.P. SC Commission to allocate 2.5 acres of cultivable land to slain Dalit youth’s family - The youth was allegedly murdered by ruling party MLC on May 19

• Uttar Pradesh Budget a ‘deceit,’ says Lalji Verma; Finance Minister Suresh Khanna intervenes, asks him to keep facts right - The Yogi Adityanath government on May 26 presented its maiden Budget of the second term with a focus on education, employment, empowerment of women and farmers besides law and order.

• ‘John Luther’ movie review: Jayasurya’s evenly-paced thriller falters only in the last act - Debutant director Abhijith Joseph, who also scripted the film, does not tread new ground, but is sure of what he is doing

• Thrikkakara byelection | No-holds-barred campaign ends today - The LDF and UDF left no stone unturned in their electioneering in Thrikkakara as it emerged as a battle of prestige between Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and Leader of the Opposition V. D. Satheesan

• Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren gets more time to appear before EC in mining lease case - Earlier, Mr. Soren was asked to appear before the Election Commission either in person or through his counsel on May 31

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine war: Troops could quit Severodonetsk amid Russian advance - official - Russian forces are in part of Severodonetsk and could surround local troops, an official says.

• Ukraine conflict: The families living in an underground station for three months - Families who have been sheltering in a metro station since the start of the war now fear eviction.

• Liverpool v Real Madrid: A heavyweight final - Liverpool will look to win European club football’s most prestigious prize for the seventh time when they face Real Madrid in a mouth-watering Champions League final in Paris on Saturday.

• Severodonetsk: Ukrainian man cycles from besieged city, dodging Russian shells - Evading the Russian forces besieging Severodonetsk, a man cycled to safety amid bombs and shells.

• Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu freed after 20 years - Fusako Shigenobu, 76, was jailed for her part in a hostage siege at the French embassy in the Hague.

From Ars Technica

• Sony accelerates push into car sector in diversification drive - Wants to supply electric and autonomous vehicle sensors by 2025. - link

• Mining museums’ genomic treasures - Museums hold billions of biological specimens, many of which still contain DNA. - link

• Rethinking air conditioning amid climate change - ACs and refrigerators help keep people safe—but they also further warm the planet. - link

• Are TikTok algorithms changing how people talk about suicide? - Social media users have adopted terms like “unalive” to avoid platform censorship. - link

• US college VPN credentials for sale on Russian crime forums, FBI says - Trafficked data could lead to subsequent attacks, agency warns. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Uvalde citizen gets pulled over -

  A very cute blonde was pulled over for speeding by an Uvalde motorcycle officer. When he walked up to her window and opened his ticket book, she said, “I bet you’re going to sell me a ticket to the policeman’s Ball.”

  The cop replied, “No, ma’am. You’re thinking of the Border Patrol , the Uvalde Police don’t have balls.”

  submitted by /u/Difficult_Antelope14
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• Studies say most stabbings are committed by someone close to the victim. -

  Within arm’s length, to be specific.

  submitted by /u/Sydniswans
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• How many Texas cops does it take to save children from an active shooter? -

  Still under investigation.

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  Edit: For those who assume I think any part of this situation is funny… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy. Also who gave me a Wholesome award? That’s seriously messed up.

  Edit 2: For those claiming it’s “too soon”… I respectfully disagree, I think this is the perfect time. The pain won’t ever go away for those families - there will never be a time when they’ll think “Sure, it’s been long enough - go ahead and laugh about it.” However, the anger and shock felt by the general public will begin to fade as other news stories and other tragedies steal our attention. Better to elicit stronger emotions now and hopefully, in a tiny imperceptible way, increase the likelihood of meaningful change.

  submitted by /u/yrthegood1staken
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• My attractive female neighbor is completely paranoid. She thinks I’m following or even stalking her -

  She is worried that I may be obsessed with her and any time she hears a noise in her house she is…purified? Oh, wait: petrified. Sorry, it’s not easy reading a diary through binoculars from a tree.

  submitted by /u/fhqwhgadsz
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• Why is it okay to have unprotected sex with an Uvalde police officer? -

  Because they never come inside.

  submitted by /u/LiterallyAHippo
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