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 Good, the Bad, and the Embarrassing in America’s COVID-19 Response - Were Americans too unruly, or did elected officials expect too little of them? - link

• Why Won’t Amnesty International Call Alexey Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience? - The Russian regime has used both its vast media infrastructure and its judicial system to vilify its opponents. - link

• Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State - Survivors detail the scope of China’s campaign of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities. - link

• A Deportation Nightmare in the Bronx - Arrested for jaywalking, a DACA recipient spent the pandemic in ICE detention because of what New York City officials admit was an “operational error.” He could be deported as soon as next week. - link

• The Untold Story of Queer Foster Families - In the nineteen-seventies, social workers in several states placed queer teen-agers with queer foster parents, in discrete acts of quiet radicalism. - link

From Vox

• The Republican revolt against democracy, explained in 13 charts -

  

  The Trump years revealed a dark truth: The Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. These charts tell the story.

  The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American democracy today. It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become hostile to the most basic democratic norm: that the other side should get to wield power when it wins elections.

  A few years ago, these statements may have sounded like partisan Democratic hyperbole. But in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on the charge of inciting it, they seem more a plain description of where we’re at as a country.

  But how deep does the GOP’s problem with democracy run, really? How did things get so bad? And is it likely to get worse?

  Below are 13 charts that illustrate the depth of the problem and how we got here. The story they tell is sobering: At every level, from the elite down to rank-and-file voters, the party is permeated with anti-democratic political attitudes and agendas. And the prospects for rescuing the Republican Party, at least in the short term, look grim indeed.

  Today’s Republicans really hate Democrats — and democracy

  1. Trump’s supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas

  

  This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called “MAGA voters” by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.

  These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.

  They go further than “merely” believing the 2020 election was stolen, a nearly unanimous view among the bunch. Over 90 percent oppose making it easier for people to vote; roughly 70 percent would support a hypothetical third term for Trump (which would be unconstitutional).

  “The MAGA movement,” Blum and Parker write, “is a clear and present danger to American democracy.”

  2. Republicans are embracing violence

  

  The ultimate expression of anti-democratic politics is resorting to violence. More than twice as many Republicans as Democrats — nearly two in five Republicans — said in a January poll that force could be justified against their opponents.

  It would be easy to dismiss this kind of finding as meaningless were it not for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill — and the survey was conducted about three weeks after the attack. Republicans recently saw what political violence in the United States looked like, and a large fraction of the party faithful seemed comfortable with more of it.

  These attitudes are linked to the party elite’s rhetoric: The more party leaders like Trump attack the democratic political system as rigged against them, the more Republicans will believe it and conclude that extreme measures are justifiable. A separate study by political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found that “Republicans who believe Democrats cheated in the election (83 percent in our study) were far likelier to endorse post-election violence.”

  3. Republicans see Democrats as something worse than mere rivals

  

  

  Democracy is, among other things, a system for taming the disagreements inherent in politics: People compete for power under a set of mutually agreeable rules, seeing each other as rivals within a shared system rather than blood enemies.

  But in the United States today, hyperpolarization is undoing this basic democratic premise: Sizable numbers of Americans on each side see the members of the other party not as political opponents but as existential threats.

  The rise of this dangerous species of “negative partisanship,” as political scientists call it, is asymmetric. While many Democrats see Republicans in a dark light, a majority still see them more as political rivals than as enemies. Among Republicans, however, a solid majority see Democrats as their enemy.

  When you believe the opposing party to be an enemy, the costs of letting them win become too high, and anti-democratic behavior — rigging the game in your favor, even outright violence — starts to become thinkable.

  4. Republicans dislike compromise

  

  America’s founders designed our political system around compromise. But for years now, majorities of Republican voters have opposed compromise on principle, consistently telling pollsters that they prefer politicians who stick to their ideological guns rather than give a little to get things done. It’s no wonder the past decade saw unprecedented Republican obstructionism in Congress (more on that later).

  The hostility to compromise on the GOP side has at least two major implications for democracy.

  First, it has rendered government dysfunctional and ineffective — and consequently has decreased public trust in government. Second, it has pushed Democrats in a more polarized direction; in 2018, Pew found, Democratic support for political compromise plummeted to roughly Republican levels. This seems in part like a reaction to years of GOP behavior: If they aren’t going to compromise with us, the Democratic logic goes, then why should we compromise with them?

  But the more Democrats eschew compromise, the more cause Republicans have to see them as fundamentally hostile to conservative values — and to redouble their intransigence. It’s a doom loop for political coexistence.

  5. The Republican Party is a global outlier — and not in a good way

  Pippa Norris/Global Parties Survey

  The Global Party Survey is a 2019 poll of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world. The survey asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities.

  This chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU. Its closest peers are almost uniformly radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment).

  The verdict of these experts is clear: The Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world.

  How things got this bad

  6. The Republican turn against democracy begins with race

  Larry Bartels

  Support for authoritarian ideas in America is closely tied to the country’s long-running racial conflicts.

  This chart, from a September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters, analyzing the link between respondents’ score on a measure of “ethnic antagonism” and their support for four anti-democratic statements (e.g., “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”).

  The graphic shows a clear finding: The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale, the more likely they are to support anti-democratic ideas. This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump. “The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism,” he writes.

  For students of American history, this shouldn’t be a surprise.

  The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act cemented Democrats as the party of racial equality, causing racially resentful Democrats in the South and elsewhere to defect to the Republican Party. This sorting process, which took place over the next few decades, is the key reason America is so polarized.

  It also explains why Republicans are increasingly willing to endorse anti-democratic political tactics and ideas. In the past, restrictions on the franchise served to protect white political power in a changing country; today, as demographic change threatens to further undermine the central place of white Americans, many are becoming comfortable with an updated version of the Jim Crow South’s authoritarian tradition.

  7. Partisanship causes Republicans to justify anti-democratic behavior

  Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik

  This chart is a little hard to parse, but it illustrates a crucial finding from one of the best recent papers on anti-democratic sentiment in America: how decades of rising partisanship made an anti-democratic GOP possible.

  The paper, from Yale’s Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, uses a number of methods to examine the effect of partisanship on views of democracy. This chart shows a particularly interesting one: a “natural experiment” in Montana’s 2017 at-large House campaign, during which Republican candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs during an attempted interview just before Election Day.

  Because many voters cast their ballots by mail before the assault happened, Graham and Svolik could compare these to the in-person votes after the assault in order to measure how the news of Gianforte’s attack shifted voters’ behavior.

  The blue lines represent precincts where Gianforte did worse on Election Day than in mail-in ballots; the red lines represent the reverse. What you see is a clear trend: In Democratic-leaning and centrist precincts, Gianforte suffered a penalty. But in general, the more right-leaning a precinct was, the less likely he was to suffer — and the more likely he was to improve on his mail-in numbers.

  For Svolik and Graham, this illustrates a broader point: Extreme partisanship creates the conditions for democratic decline. If you really care about your side wielding power, you’re more willing to overlook misbehavior in their attempts to win it. They find evidence that this could apply to partisans of either major party — but only one party nominates candidates like Trump and Gianforte (who won not only the 2017 contest but also his reelection bid in 2018 and Montana’s gubernatorial election in 2020).

  8. The crucial impact of the right-wing media

  Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, Rene Lindstadt, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen

  The chart here is from a study covering 1997 to 2002, when Fox News was still being rolled out across the country. The study compared members of Congress in districts where Fox News was available to members in districts where it wasn’t, specifically examining how frequently they voted along party lines.

  They found that Republicans in districts with Fox grew considerably more likely to vote with the party as it got closer to election time, whereas Republicans without Fox actually grew less likely to do so. The expansion of Fox News, in short, seemingly served a disciplining function: making Republican members of Congress more afraid of the consequences of breaking with the party come election time and thus less inclined to engage in bipartisan legislative efforts.

  “Members with Fox News in their district behave as if they believe that more Republicans will turn out at the polls by increasing their support for the Republican Party,” the authors conclude.

  How America’s political system creates space for Republicans to undermine democracy

  9. Republicans have an unpopular policy agenda

  Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets

  The Republican policy agenda is extremely unpopular. The chart here, taken from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s recent book Let Them Eat Tweets, compares the relative popularity of the two major legislative efforts of Trump’s first term — tax cuts and Obamacare repeal — to similar high-priority bills in years past. The contrast is striking: The GOP’s modern economic agenda is widely disliked even compared to unpopular bills of the past, a finding consistent with a lot of recent polling data.

  Hacker and Pierson argue that this drives Republicans’ emphasis on culture war and anti-Democratic identity politics. This strategy, which they term “plutocratic populism,” allows the party’s super-wealthy backers to get their tax cuts while the base gets the partisan street fight they crave.

  The GOP can do this because America’s political system is profoundly unrepresentative. The coalition it can assemble — overwhelmingly white Christian, heavily rural, and increasingly less educated — is a shrinking minority that has lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential contests. But its voters are ideally positioned to give Republicans advantages in the Electoral College and the Senate, allowing the party to remain viable despite representing significantly fewer voters than the Democrats do.

  10. Some of the most consequential Republican attacks on democracy happen at the state level

  

  This map from the Brennan Center for Justice shows every state that passed a restriction on the franchise between 2010 and 2019. These restrictions, ranging from voter ID laws to felon disenfranchisement, were generally passed by Republican majorities with the intent of hurting turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies.

  Republican state legislators were sometimes explicit about this: “Voter ID … is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania,” then-state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai bragged during the 2012 presidential election cycle.

  Because Republicans dominated the 2010 midterm elections, Republican statehouses got to control the post-2010 census redistricting process at both the House and state legislative level, leading to extreme gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states unlike anything in Democratic ones.

  Conservative control of the Supreme Court enabled this state-level push. In 2013, the Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement — that states with a history of racial discrimination would be required to get permission from the Justice Department on their maps and other major changes to electoral law. In 2019, another Court ruling paved the way for further partisan gerrymandering.

  11. The national GOP has broken government

  

  Today’s Senate, where you need 60 votes to get virtually anything done, is a historical anomaly. Its roots can be traced to the unyielding GOP opposition to President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned the Senate into a dysfunctional body in which priority legislation was routinely subject to a filibuster. When Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, McConnell found a new way to deny Obama victories: blocking his judicial appointments.

  These actions were an expression of an attitude popular among Republican voters and leaders alike: that Democrats can never be legitimate leaders, even if elected, and thus do not deserve to wield power.

  It’s still Trump’s GOP

  12. Republicans didn’t care when Trump abused his power

  

  

  The Trump presidency was a test of Republican attitudes toward democracy. Time and again, the president abused his authority in ways that would have been unthinkable under previous presidents. Time and again, members of Congress, state party leaders, right-wing media stars, and rank-and-file voters looked the other way — or even cheered him on.

  The chart here, which shows two NBC polls taken about a year apart, is particularly striking. It shows that support for Trump’s first and second impeachment among Republicans remained exactly the same among Republicans: 8 percent.

  Trump was impeached the first time because he tried to interfere with the integrity of the 2020 presidential election — attempting to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into opening up a bogus investigation into Joe Biden. Trump was impeached the second time because he ginned up a mob to attack the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the votes from the Electoral College.

  And yet in both cases, the percentage of Republicans who supported impeaching him was the same — a measly 8 percent. There’s just very little popular appetite in the GOP for punishing anti-democratic excesses by Trump, regardless of the circumstances.

  13. Trump and Trumpism could return in 2024

  

  This chart shows the results of a Morning Consult poll on the 2024 Republican primary held after Trump’s second impeachment trial. It found that 54 percent of Republicans would choose Trump again, even when given a wide range of alternative possibilities. Six percent would choose his son Donald Trump Jr. — who obviously wouldn’t run if his father did — putting the Trump family support in the GOP primary electorate at around 60 percent.

  This shouldn’t really be surprising.

  All the reasons for the GOP’s turn against democracy — backlash to racial progress, rising partisanship, a powerful right-wing media sphere — remain in force after Trump. The leadership is still afraid of Trump and the anti-democratic MAGA movement he commands.

  More fundamentally, they are still committed to a political approach that can’t win in a majoritarian system, requiring the defense of the undemocratic status quo in institutions like the Senate and in state-level electoral rules. Republicans still control the bulk of statehouses and are gearing up for a new round of voter suppression bills and extreme gerrymandering in electorally vital states like Georgia and Texas.

  It’s very hard to see how any of this gets better. It’s very easy to see how it gets worse.

• The Golden Globes don’t “predict” the Oscars -

  

  Except when they do.

  The 78th Golden Globe Awards were handed out on Sunday, February 28 — about two weeks before the nominations for the 93nd Academy Awards, a.k.a. the Oscars, are set to be announced on Monday, March 15. (The Oscars will take place April 25; the usual timeline was pushed back by about two months this year because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.)

  The Golden Globes are known to be an oddball ceremony, partly due to their open bar. This year they were even weirder than usual, since the pandemic made the customary packed ballroom unsafe. Instead, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted from opposite coasts, joined by a small number of masked and socially distanced front-line workers as guests. Some of the awards presenters took the stage in person; others read nominees’ and winners’ names through a screen. And winners accepted their awards from home, beamed into the ceremony via videoconferencing software while all decked out in their ball gowns and tuxes and, in some cases, hoodies.

  This year, the big winners in the film categories were Nomadland (Best Drama and Best Director), Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Best Comedy or Musical and Best Lead Actor for Sacha Baron Cohen), and Soul (Best Animated Film and Best Original Score). The rest of the movie awards were spread out: Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I Care A Lot, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 all took home awards, as did HBO Max’s Judas and the Black Messiah, STXfilms’s The Mauritanian, Hulu’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and A24’s Minari.

  NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

  It’s tempting to clock any film’s trophy count at the Golden Globes as evidence that the Globes function as an “Oscar predictor.” That’s a natural assumption, because both shows honor movies with a glitzy, star-studded televised ceremony. Plus, the Globes take place about two months before the Oscars and kick off the awards season that culminates in the Oscars.

  But is there anything to the idea that Globes results predict the eventual Oscar winners?

  (Note: The awards that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hand out are called “Oscars” for reasons that are disputed. But “Oscars” and “Academy Awards” are generally used interchangeably to refer to the ceremony.)

  No — because the Golden Globes aren’t set up to be an Oscar predictor

  Walt Hickey, writing at FiveThirtyEight, noted that in 2013, the Golden Globes had a success rate of only 48 percent in predicting the Oscars’ eventual Best Picture winner. That’s not abysmal, but it’s not great either.

  One of the issues is structural: The Golden Globes give out two Best Picture awards — one for drama and one for musical or comedy — while there’s only one Best Picture Oscar. The awards for Best Actor and Best Actress are also split into drama and comedy/musical categories at the Globes, but the Supporting Actor and Actress categories — along with Best Director and Best Screenplay — are not.

  Similarly, while the Oscars separate screenplays into Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, the Globes lump them all into one category.

  These disparities mean it’s virtually impossible for the Globes to “predict” wins in a meaningful fashion. But the Globes nominations do tend to track near the Oscar nominations (though there are always a few outliers). And since 2010, the Oscars have been able to nominate up to 10 films for Best Picture, making it technically possible for all 10 Golden Globe Best Picture nominees (in both the drama and comedy/musical categories) to also earn a Best Picture nod at the Oscars.

  Sometimes, the results of the Globes track moderately closely with the Oscar results. In 2019, Green Book won three Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, then went on to win in the three equivalent categories at the Oscars. In 2017, the powerhouse La La Land broke records by winning seven awards at the Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical; it later won six of the 14 Oscars it was nominated for. And Moonlight, which took home the Best Motion Picture – Drama award at the Globes, was the eventual Best Picture winner at the Oscars — though not until after a historic snafu.

  But as an Oscar predictor, the Globes are still fairly inaccurate, or at least they don’t work in any logical order. The 2020 Best Picture winners at the Globes were 1917 (in the drama category) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (in the comedy or musical category). But at the Oscars, both of those films were bested by Parasite, whose Best Picture win at the Globes was in the rarely tapped foreign language category. The 2018 Best Picture winners at the Globes were Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (in the drama category) and Lady Bird (in the comedy or musical category) — but both missed the major awards at the Oscars. And two years prior, in 2016, The Revenant won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, beating out eventual Oscars Best Picture winner Spotlight.

  There are plenty of other categories at the Globes, however, and the awards have a much better track record when it comes to predicting the Oscars’ Best Actor and Actress winners. In January 2016, Jason Bailey found at Flavorwire that over the past decade, the Globes boasted a nearly 90 percent accuracy rating for predicting the Oscars’ acting awards, versus Best Director (40 percent) or Best Picture (50 percent).

  NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

  But if you’re looking to win your Oscar pool this year, you’re best off also checking who ultimately wins the top prizes at the various guilds: The Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Producers Guild of America (PGA) are typically the strongest predictors of the eventual Oscars Best Picture winner; the Screen Actors Guild Awards (given out by SAG-AFTRA) is usually the place to check for performance frontrunners (alongside the BAFTAs and the Globes); the Writers’ Guild (WGA) helps predict the screenwriting awards; and so on. FiveThirtyEight’s prediction model from 2016 has a great rundown.

  No — because the people who vote for the Golden Globes don’t overlap with the people who vote for the Oscars

  The reason for the overlap with industry-specific awards is simple: A high percentage of the people who vote for the Academy Awards also belong to guilds like the DGA, PGA, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA. So people’s votes often overlap, disparate categories notwithstanding.

  The people who vote for the Golden Globes, however, are an entirely different group, and they’re not industry voters. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association hands out the Golden Globes, and there is virtually no overlap between the HFPA and the Academy.

  In brief: The membership of the HFPA never surpasses 100 and is ostensibly made up entirely of journalists based in Southern California who work for foreign publications — though even that status is hard to verify in a few cases. Currently, its membership numbers 87. That small membership means it’s known for being unpredictable, and it’s sometimes accused of letting publicity and favors skew the results.

  The Academy, on the other hand, is made up of nearly 10,000 members, all of whom work or previously worked in the filmmaking business in some capacity or another — actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, and more. Academy voters still skew overwhelmingly white, male, and over 60, but new rules instituted in 2016 (after the #OscarsSoWhite controversy) are changing that.

  But then again, maybe

  The thing about awards buzz is that it’s generated by journalists and critics, and also by the way film studios try to market their films to voters. A great deal of this happens through the distribution of screeners for major films, which are sent to people who belong to major voting bodies (guilds and critics’ circles, as well as the Academy) to help ensure they can watch as many films as possible and aid them in filling out their ballots.

  NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

  In 2021, voting members of the Academy must submit their Oscar nomination ballots by Friday, March 5 — only five days after the Golden Globes. And given how wild and confusing this awards season has been, it’s reasonable to bet that plenty of Oscar voters still have a stack of screeners sitting on their coffee tables as you read this.

  So while they’ve probably watched the favorites by now — Nomadland and The Trial of the Chicago 7 and One Night in Miami — a Golden Globes win for an underdog like I Care A Lot or The Mauritanian might push a voter to give the film or performance another look in what little time remains before they must submit their ballot. And thus, Rosamund Pike or Jodie Foster, both of whom have been part of awards conversations but not frontrunners in the Best Actress category, may still have a chance; you never know.

  That means that while the Golden Globes aren’t established “predictors” for the Oscars, they can still influence the Oscars. A surprise win at the Globes, if it inspires enough Academy members to watch a film they haven’t yet seen, or to reconsider a film or performance they had forgotten about, could give a film the extra nudge it needs.

  And in 2021, that matters, because at this point it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen between now and the end of April, when Hollywood convenes (probably largely virtually) for the Oscars. In a year when Oscar buzz has been muted without the usual rounds of red carpet premieres, parties, meet-and-greets, and relentless campaigning — and when films that wouldn’t normally seem like Oscar bait, like Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, are taking home trophies — the field feels wide open.

  So, nobody really knows. Nomadland’s and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s big night at the 2021 Golden Globes could be an indicator of future success, or it may not have any bearing at all. Other films that won big at the Globes may enjoy a boost. And that’s why, seemingly against all reason and sense, we keep talking about the Golden Globes.

• The 2021 Golden Globes proved we no longer need the Golden Globes -

  

  The stranger-than-ever ceremony was also a drag.

  Nobody “went home” from the 2021 Golden Globes with an award, because pretty much everyone who won a trophy was already at their house. Thanks to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the always-bizarre ceremony was even weirder than usual this year.

  There were a handful of big winners. Netflix’s The Crown netted four awards: three for stars Emma Corrin, Gillian Anderson, and Josh O’Connor, plus the title of Best TV Series – Drama. The streaming network did well overall, raking in honors for The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Best Screenplay, Aaron Sorkin); I Care a Lot (Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Rosamund Pike); The Life Ahead (Best Original Song); The Queen’s Gambit (Best Limited TV Series and Best Actress in a Limited Series, Anya Taylor-Joy); and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, Chadwick Boseman).

  Other wins were more spread out. Pixar’s Soul won Best Animated Film and Best Original Score. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, as well as Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Sacha Baron Cohen’s lead performance. And Chloé Zhao won both Best Director and Best Motion Picture – Drama for Nomadland.

  There were also a few great moments. Taylor Simone Ledward, wife of the late Chadwick Boseman, gave a moving speech about what her husband would have said if he’d been there to accept his award for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom:

  Watch Chadwick Boseman’s wife, Taylor Simone Ledward, accept the late actor’s #GoldenGlobes win https://t.co/gMrpbjjqwe pic.twitter.com/Wx1jjdugXU

  — Variety (@Variety) March 1, 2021

And Jane Fonda, who received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for her outstanding contributions to entertainment, praised many of the year’s best films and exhorted the audience regarding the stories they tell. “There’s a story we’ve been afraid to see and hear about ourselves in this industry, a story about which voices we respect and elevate and which we tune out, a story about who is offered a seat at the table and who is kept out of the rooms where decisions are made,” she said. “So let’s all of us, including all the groups that decide who gets hired and what gets made and who wins awards, let’s all of us make an effort to expand that tent so that everyone rises and everyone’s story has a chance to be seen and heard.”

Yet the overwhelming feeling at the end of the Golden Globes is one of … limpness. Certainly, without some of the glamour and in-person excitement, the show was bound to feel weird.

But why did it feel like the Golden Globes spent the whole evening arguing for their own irrelevance? The best you can say about the sketch comedy bits was that they felt like they were trying really hard. The awkward cutaways to nominees chatting on video screens felt forced and strange. It was never really clear why the ceremony had to air live, when most of the acceptance speeches would have been just as effectively shared as an Instagram Story. And the weirdest part of all was that these issues weren’t really new. So are the “normal” Golden Globes still worthwhile?

We say no. Here are three reasons why.

Reason 1: This year’s show was awful

NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Did the 78th Golden Globe Awards have their bright spots? Sure.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s bicoastal hosting job was plagued with weird timing mishaps, but they landed several funny jokes in spite of the technical issues. Fonda’s speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award was a terrific call for better diversity in Hollywood that doubled as a humblebrag about how many awards screeners she’s managed to watch in quarantine. And getting a glimpse into stars’ homes thanks to videoconferencing software is still a lot of fun. (Nomadland’s Zhao best fit the evening’s aesthetic in a sweatshirt, her hair in long braids. She had a very “I am watching the Golden Globes for no particular reason” vibe.)

But by and large, the Globes were an awful awards show that proved nobody involved in the production had bothered, say, to watch the Emmy Awards, which were held last September under very similar circumstances (a global pandemic led to hundreds of live feeds from nominees’ homes) but which managed to put on a much, much, much more entertaining telecast.

If the Globes wanted to set low expectations, they started right out of the gate. The night’s opening award — Daniel Kaluuya winning Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his work in Judas and the Black Messiah — featured a lengthy portion when Kaluuya was clearly speaking but viewers could not hear him, and producers briefly tried to shut down his speech altogether.

Similar technical mishaps popped up throughout, with Fey and Poehler occasionally stepping over each other and the show trying to play off several winners with loud music that didn’t seem to have the desired effect, leading to a weirdly chaotic scene of people talking in their homes while music played over them, with neither element especially audible. The sound and lighting quality for the various nominees scattered all over the planet was … variable, to say the least.

But even beyond technical issues, these Globes were particularly bad. The choice to end every segment with video windows of the five nominees up for the next award made some degree of sense, but then they were made to chat with each other, as if to find a way to suggest that stars are just like you and don’t quite know what to say to their coworkers on Zoom. Some gamely tried to get a conversation going; others just smiled placidly while they waited for something else to happen.

The 2020 Emmys were far from perfect, but they went off largely without a hitch, and the team behind that show clearly thought out how to direct traffic during a live event being carried out in multiple locations. The Golden Globes, with months of lead time, clearly didn’t put much effort into measuring up. And to be clear: These are the Emmys we’re talking about. The famously terrible Emmys.

Some of that inability to find the right tone for the evening surely stems from an attempt to recreate a boozy awards show of old (more on that below). But first, we need to look at the shoe hanging over the evening’s affairs, just waiting to drop: the investigative reporting from this year that has shown the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to be a non-diverse, absurdly corrupt institution.

Reason 2: The HFPA seemed constantly aware that it’s a terrible organization

Todd Williamson/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

The organization that gives out the Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), came into this year’s ceremony unusually embattled. The group’s membership consists of about 90 people, and they’re supposed to all be journalists who write about Hollywood for non-American outlets.

But a Los Angeles Times investigation published a week ahead of the event detailed a history of unethical practices and turmoil. Another LA Times story revealed that none of the HFPA’s current members are Black. In fact, the HFPA, which doesn’t publish the names of its members, admitted just ahead of the ceremony that they hadn’t had a Black member in their ranks in 20 years. As the ceremony approached, calls for the organization to become more inclusive grew louder. And those calls were echoed during the ceremony itself.

HFPA Board Chair Meher Tatna, HFPA President Ali Sar, and HFPA Vice President Helen Hoehne stood onstage early in the evening and pledged, without specifics, to do better and become more inclusive. But even if the HFPA leadership hadn’t said anything onstage, the night’s hosts and presenters would have made sure they couldn’t miss the point.

Fey and Poehler called out the organization immediately at the top of the telecast, with Fey referring to the HFPA as “around 90 international (no Black) journalists.” While accepting the award for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen (hyperbolically) referred to the organization as “the all-white Hollywood Foreign Press.” Sterling K. Brown, who came onstage as a presenter with his This Is Us co-star Susan Kelechi Watson, proclaimed, “It’s great to be Black — back — at the Golden Globes.” Dan Levy, accepting the award for Best TV Series – Musical or Comedy for Schitt’s Creek, said, “In the spirit of inclusion, I hope this time next year this ceremony reflects the true breadth and diversity of film and television being made today because there is so much more to be celebrated.”

It remains to be seen what the Globes will do going forward. The bigger question, though, may be whether adding Black members to its ranks will be more than just a Band-Aid, an effort to distract from the organization’s big problems with kickbacks and corruption.

The HFPA makes most of its money and draws most of the Golden Globes’ prestige from the fact that NBC pays the group millions of dollars for the rights to broadcast the awards show. If people stop watching, or if stars decline to participate, that revenue stream — and what remains of the show’s clout — will fall apart.

At present, the HFPA’s public promise to diversify its membership seems poised to mollify anyone who might be getting restless about the Globes’ place near the top of the awards show heap. But there’s no guarantee its efforts will amount to anything more than lip service. And given the HFPA’s failure to address the allegations of corruption, you have to wonder if there’s more dissent in their future.

Reason 3: Without booze, why watch this show?

Handout/HFPA via Getty Images

The most prevalent reason to watch the Golden Globes has always boiled down to: The stars get drunk! Don’t like the lugubrious, stately snore that is the Oscars? Find the weird chaos of the Emmys overwhelming? Well, the Golden Globes are the awards show that doesn’t take itself seriously! Beautiful people get buzzed and make speeches! It’s fun to see!

The Globes have always made idiosyncratic choices that often seem intended to get more and bigger stars to attend. Those idiosyncratic choices in and of themselves rarely have rhyme or reason to them, but if you land the right mix of tipsy stars and a host with a nice buzz going, you can get some pretty fun television out of the whole deal. The awards almost don’t matter.

But that’s just it: The awards almost don’t matter. The Globes serve as a kind of informal kickoff to awards season. Even though other prizes are handed out well before the Globes are, those other prizes are not presented on television, which means that for many people with a casual interest in Hollywood acclaim, the Globes are where it all begins, the Iowa caucuses of awards season, if you will.

And like the caucuses, the slightest of mishaps can easily expose the inherent weaknesses in the system underpinning them. The pandemic-addled 2021 awards revealed just how shaky the Globes are as an awards show to begin with. The comedic bits were particularly rough (outside of Poehler and Fey’s occasional one-liners), the speeches went on and on and on, and the show was too preoccupied with figuring out why it was even happening to just settle down and have a good time.

One moment in the broadcast’s second half particularly stands out as an example of this. Jason Sudeikis, clearly surprised to have won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Series for his work on Ted Lasso and clearly feeling the wee early hours in the United Kingdom (where Ted Lasso is shooting its second season), stammered through a long acceptance speech that contained numerous false starts and never quite found its footing.

Don Cheadle, nominated in the same category for Showtime’s Black Monday, made a circular motion with his finger to try to get Sudeikis to wrap it up. Sudeikis gamely played along, saying that, yes, he needed to wrap things up. But where the moment might have had some comedic zip to it in person as the two actors fed off each other, it fell flat over videoconferencing software. Rather than a potential burst of comedic inspiration, it was a desperate moment of two actors trying to save what already felt like a punishingly long ceremony from slipping even further into boredom.

The Golden Globes are a hidebound institution that should probably be junked in favor of something else. It’s doubtful they could do anything bad enough to actually lose their contract with NBC or their solid viewership. But if any Golden Globes ceremony was going to risk sending the awards down the tank, it was this one. The 2021 Golden Globes were simply putrid. Maybe it’s time to come up with something new.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Too much ‘moaning and groaning’ about Motera pitch: Viv Richards slams critics of Indian tracks - The West Indian batting legend says England didn’t prepare well for the challenge in India and should work harder and learn to adapt

• Vijender Singh’s next pro bout on rooftop deck of casino ship in Goa - His opponent will be announced later

• Tiger Woods thanks golfers for red shirt tribute - An 82-time PGA Tour winner, Woods famously wears a red shirt and black trousers on Sundays.

• Premier League | Man Utd frustrated by penalty row in Chelsea stalemate, Bale stars for Spurs - A Curtis Jones strike and a Kean Bryan own goal gave Liverpool a 2-0 win over bottom side Sheffield United.

• India vs England | Rohit has proved himself in tougher home conditions - The India opener has emerged as a reliable batsman in overseas Tests as well, as evidenced in his performance Down Under

From The Hindu: National News

• Coronavirus | India reported 106 deaths in the last 24 hours - Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat have shown a surge in new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours

• ‘We are not part of it,’ says Veerappa Moily, distancing himself from ‘G-23’ Jammu meet - Veerappa Moily was one of the group of 23 leaders who wrote to Sonia Gandhi in August last year urging her to ensure “full-time” and “visible” leadership

• Cheppad church now monument of national importance - ASI writes to NHAI to propose new alignment for widening National Highway 66

• Maharashtra govt can cut taxes, reduce fuel prices, says Devendra Fadnavis - Maharashtra BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis on March 1 said the MVA government in the State was misleading people on fuel price hikes as it can cut taxe

• Bhima Koregaon case: Supreme Court to hear bail plea of activist Navlakha on March 3 - A three judge Bench of the apex court comprising justices U.U. Lalit, Indira Banerjee and K.M. Joseph would take up the appeal of Navlakha.

From BBC: Europe

• Armenia opposition breaks into government building - Armenia’s embattled PM is now in open dispute with the armed forces chiefs.

• Barcelona: Catalan police make several arrests over financial issues at Spanish club - Catalan police make several arrests after searching the offices of La Liga side Barcelona.

• Sarkozy: French verdict due in ex-president’s corruption trial - Ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy denies wrongdoing in a case involving a lawyer and judge.

• Why this teen set up a prize-winning fake cosmetics shop - Polish teenager Krystyna Paszko’s idea won an EU prize - she tells the BBC the story behind it.

• Coronavirus: False vaccine claims debunked - Misleading claims about coronavirus vaccines have been spreading online.

From Ars Technica

• Action-packed meta-fantasy, space opera herald a bright future for Asian film - Chinese A Writer’s Odyssey and Korean Space Sweepers make for a great double feature - link

• All the little things that add up to make iPadOS productivity a pain - Apple did a good job with the big stuff, but myriad little things undermine that. - link

• Inside the stunning Black mythos of Drexciya and its Afrofuturist ’90s techno - The history of an experimental music-and-mythos project with Black Diaspora at its core. - link

• Clubhouse’s security and privacy lag behind its explosive growth - The platform has promised to do better after a string of incidents. - link

• FDA authorizes J&J COVID vaccine after unanimous vote [Updated] - An FDA advisory committee voted Friday 22-0 in favor of authorization. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A German girl married a Spanish man -

  A German girl married a Spanish man & went to Spain. She can’t speak Spanish. Each time she wants to buy chicken legs, she would lift her skirt& show her thighs to enable the seller understand her.

  This went on for sometime. One day she wanted to buy banana. So She took her husband to the shop. Because her husband speaks Spanish very well.

  submitted by /u/kgangadhar
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• Nobody will upvote a cake joke in my birthday -

  I feel desserted.

  ​

  Happy cake day to me :)

  submitted by /u/neocraven
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• I own the world’s worst thesaurus. -

  Not only is it awful, it’s awful.

  submitted by /u/Kartikey15
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• A man receives a message from a neighbour. -

  “Sorry sir I am using your wife…day and night… When you are not present at home…In fact, much more than you do. I confess this now because I am feeling very guilty. Hope you will accept my sincere apologies.” The man is down with a heart attack and admitted to the hospital

  The next day he receives another message
  “Sorry sir spelling mistake, it’s not wife but wifi”.

  submitted by /u/nabimchord
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• Don’t you dare hit that drum again! -

  If you do, there will be repercussions!

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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