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 Biggest Challenge Facing Joe Biden’s New Economic Team - The President-elect’s advisers are keenly aware that many of the Administration’s policy proposals will likely have to go through, or around, Mitch McConnell. - link

• The Duelling Realities of the Coronavirus in Russia - People have learned to live with the pandemic, though not necessarily with all of its precautions and limitations. - link

• Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses - As the pandemic makes an already terrible housing crisis worse, a new version of house-sitting signals a broken real-estate market. - link

• Atul Gawande on Coronavirus Vaccines and Prospects for Ending the Pandemic - The New Yorker staff writer, now a member of President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, discusses when a vaccine might be ready for distribution, who should receive it, and whether eradicating the virus is possible. - link

• How the Fight Against COVID-19 Is Bringing About a Perilous Rise in Preventable Diseases in Poorer Nations - For many of the world’s poorest children, the death and devastation have only begun. - link

From Vox

• Mysterious monoliths are appearing across the world. Here’s what we know. -

  

  We don’t know where the mysterious monoliths come from. But we do know they’re art.

  Into the fiery, plague-ridden nightmare-scape of 2020, like a gift from some benevolent higher being, has come a source of true wonder and delight: the wandering monoliths of Utah, Romania, and California.

  The monoliths are long vertical slabs of metal, each 10 to 12 feet tall. They appear with no warning and disappear just as quickly: First, one in the Utah desert, which emerged on November 18 and vanished on November 27. Second, one outside the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt, which appeared on November 27 and disappeared on December 2. And most recently, one at the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, which appeared on December 2 and was taken down on December 3.

  They look like alien artifacts. In part, that’s because they are heavily reminiscent of the monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, where vast black monoliths are deposited by aliens to guide human beings from one stage of evolution to the next.

  Kubrick or no Kubrick, all three of these real-life monoliths are eerie, solitary objects. No one knows whether another will suddenly appear, or whether it, too, will vanish into the night.

  We know very little about these monoliths at all, in fact, and that seems to be part of their point. They are a beautifully inexplicable phenomenon, and proof that the world still contains marvels.

  Here’s what we do know about the monoliths — and why we keep talking about them.

  A monolith timeline

  Luke Phillips/Twitter; Utah Department of Public Safety; Andrei Carabelea/Facebook

  The first monolith was discovered in November in a remote desert canyon in Utah’s Red Rock Country. A helicopter crew counting bighorn sheep noticed a flash of metal looming up from the ground and flew down to investigate, and there it was: deeply embedded in the red rock of the canyon floor, an enormous smooth metal triangular prism, just standing there.

  “What the heck is that?” one of the workers mutters in a video released by the Utah Department of Public safety. “Okay, the intrepid explorers go down to investigate the alien life form,” another cracks.

  The canyon is remote and inaccessible without a helicopter, Utah’s Division of Wildlife Services told the New York Times. “It’s a tough place to get to on vehicle and on foot,” a spokesperson said. Officials for the Department of Public Safety added that they had no idea how long the monolith had been there, although Reddit sleuths used Google Maps Earth View to work out that it was installed sometime between August 2015 and October 2016.

  The Utah Department of Public Safety announced the “unusual find” on Facebook, with a cheeky alien emoji appended, and the story took off inexorably from there. A mysterious artifact that is an art project but also maybe from aliens, discovered out of nowhere in the middle of the desert, here in the grinding misery of a plague year — what’s not to love about that?

  Plenty, argued BASE jumper Andy L. Lewis and adventure guide Sylvan Christensen, who filmed themselves removing the monolith from the desert on November 27. They say they did so for environmental reasons. “This land wasn’t physically prepared for the population shift,” they declared in a joint statement. The statement goes on to say that the rapid descent of masses of monolith-gawkers into the pristine desert landscape, with no infrastructure set up to support them, caused permanent damage to the delicate ecosystem.

  View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Sylvan Christensen (@sylvanslacks)

“Let’s be clear: The dismantling of the Utah Monolith is tragic — and if you think we’re proud— we’re not,” they wrote. “We’re disappointed. Furthermore, we were too late.”

But the very day the Utah monolith would disappear, a new monolith surfaced. On November 27, Romanian newspapers reported finding another monolith outside the city of Piatra Neamt, on the plateau of Bâtca Doamnei, near an archaeological site.

Like the Utah monolith, the Romanian monolith is a vast triangular prism, 10 to 12 feet tall. But where the Utah monolith had a flat, reflective surface, the Romanian monolith is covered in looping lines, and there’s a welded seam near its base.

In a statement published to Facebook, Piatra Neamt Mayor Andrei Carabelea quipped, “My guess is that some alien, cheeky and terrible teenagers left home with their parents’ UFO and started planting metal monoliths around the world. First in Utah and then at Piatra Neamt. I am honored that they chose our city.” (The English translation is courtesy of the Independent.)

But unlike Lewis and Christensen, Carabelea did not seem to harbor any worries about what monolith-based tourism would do to the natural landscape of the area. On the contrary; he said he hopes the monolith will attract more tourists.

But four days after it arrived, the Romanian monolith vanished overnight. Its disappearance so far remains a mystery.

And on the same day the Romanian monolith vanished, a new monolith appeared in California, at the top of a mountain off a hiking path. According to local news reports, the California monolith is another triangular prism, 10 feet tall and about 18 inches wide: around the same height as the Utah and Romanian monoliths, but a little narrower. Like the Utah monolith, it has a smooth surface. It appears to be made out of stainless steel. Unlike the Utah monolith, it hasn’t been embedded into the ground. A hard push could topple it over.

On December 3, it got that push. A group of young men who apparently drove five hours from San Luis Obispo County livestreamed themselves destroying the monolith on the blockchain site DLive. Dressed in camo gear, night-vision goggles, and Trump paraphernalia, the group chanted “America First” and “Christ is king” as they rocked the monolith back and forth.

“Christ is king in this country. We don’t want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space,” a man in the video says. “So let’s tear this bitch down.”

Once they’d brought the monolith to the ground, they put up a wooden cross in its place, and then dragged the monolith down the mountain. “It was fine, because it was funny,” a man says toward the end of the stream.

The wooden cross, too, has now been taken down.

There are a lot of theories about the monoliths. Here are the big ones.

HBO

So where are all these monoliths coming from?

It’s not clear that they’re all from the same source. The building style and materials used vary sharply between locations, and a possible explanation would be that the Romanian and Californian monoliths are the work of copycats following in the example of whoever made the Utah monolith.

Are they some sort of cynical guerrilla ad campaign? Considering that the Utah monolith dates back to 2015, that seems unlikely: It would be a hell of a slow burn of a marketing push.

One popular theory notes that the Utah monolith site is close to some of the 2015 shooting locations for the HBO drama Westworld, and suggests that it might be a leftover prop, or a prank by a member of the Westworld crew.

Another theory suggests that the monoliths are an anonymous art installation or series of installations, created either by the same team or by an original artist in Utah and then copycats.

And in that case, the most pressing question becomes: Who is the artist?

A strong early contender was the minimalist sculptor John McCracken, who died in 2011. McCracken’s signature works were his “planks”: freestanding slabs of metal he would lean against a wall. McCracken himself used to say he believed his planks influenced the designer of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He believed in aliens, and he wanted his work to resemble alien artifacts. “Even before I did concerted studies of U.F.O.s,” he once said, “it helped me maintain my focus to think I was trying to do the kind of work that could have been brought here by a U.F.O.”

Art Newspaper noted shortly after the Utah monolith appeared that it bore a striking resemblance to one of McCracken’s planks. And McCracken’s son Patrick McCracken told the New York Times that his father had once envisioned setting up art installations in remote places for viewers to stumble upon in the wild.

“He was inspired by the idea of alien visitors leaving objects that resembled his work, or that his work resembled,” Patrick said. “This discovery of a monolith piece — that’s very much in line with his artistic vision.”

Finally, David Zwirner, owner of the David Zwirner Gallery, which represents McCracken’s estate, told the New York Times he believed the Utah monolith to be a genuine McCracken. Everything seemed to be lining up to indicate that John McCracken sculpted the Utah monolith, at the very least, and maybe the Romanian monolith, too, and left secret instructions to a team to reveal them after his death.

But the tide has turned against the McCracken theory. Upon reviewing photos of the Utah monolith more closely, Zwirner has retracted his original statement to the Times and concluded that McCracken, who preferred to make his sculptures by hand, would not have built the machine-made Utah monolith.

“I love the idea of this being John’s work, but when you look closely at the photos of the Utah monolith, you will see rivets and screws that are not consistent with how John wanted his work to be constructed. He was a perfectionist,” Zwirner said in an emailed statement to Vox. “While I know that this is not John’s work, I also know that he would have enjoyed the Utah location and would have greatly appreciated the mystery surrounding this work. We all think it is a wonderful homage.”

Evidence seems to be mounting now that the monoliths are the work of one or more artists heavily inspired by the work of John McCracken. But who could the mystery artist(s) be?

The monoliths might be the work of an art wizard. If not, it is still fun to think about art wizardry.

Zardulu

The performance artist Zardulu describes herself as a wizard, and her work as modern mythmaking. Zardulu likes to stage stunts and happenings that seem to exist right at the edge of our sense of what is plausible, and that then take off as viral news stories: a three-eyed fish in the Gowanus Canal; a raccoon riding an alligator in Florida. She’s also claimed credit for New York’s iconic Pizza Rat. She has a savvy sense of what a watching news audience is likely to find overwhelmingly delightful, and her goal is to weave unexpected pockets of wonder and delight into the fabric of everyday life.

“I take my fantasy and present it as reality to an unknowing audience,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2017. “Thus creating a true surreality.”

I DMed Zardulu on Twitter to get her take on the monoliths, because she seemed likely to have thoughts on how they function as modern myths.

“I think they’ll find that the Utah one was installed at the height of my productivity, in late 2015,” she wrote back immediately. She added, “If you look back, you’ll notice we talked a lot about my work in Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia.”

I asked her if she was taking credit for the monoliths.

“No,” she said. Shortly afterward, she elaborated, “Most of my projects aren’t intended to have an immediate effect. I often leave things as objects to be found. Sometimes it’s faux documentation in the research section of a library, sometimes it’s an installation waiting for an unknowing audience. Sometimes that takes days, sometimes it takes five years.”

It is in a sense Zardulu’s life’s work to plant false stories in the press, so I would take the suggestion that she is responsible for the monoliths with a hefty heaping of salt. Nonetheless, it remains true that Zardulu was extremely active in 2015 (that was the Pizza Rat year), and that Reddit sleuths seem to have dated the monolith’s arrival in Utah to sometime between April 2015 and October 2016.

It is also true that in 2017, Zardulu sent me a link to a story about the discovery of a werewolf-like skull in Macedonia with the note, “Was just reminiscing about my trip to Eastern Europe ;)” (The skull was a coyote, she says.)

The monoliths might not be intentional art. They still matter.

Adam Gray/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Regardless of who created and installed the monoliths and why, they matter now. They’ve reiterated themselves across our landscape like a living meme. They are all over the internet. They are a myth. They are maybe, no matter who made them, art.

“The phenomenon of public interest in the object is more important to me than whether we call it art or not,” says Pedro Lasch, an artist, Duke professor, and creator of the public art course ART of the MOOC: Public Art & Pedagogy. “People can end up going down a rabbit hole in these discussions of whether something is art or not, but ultimately I think they can distract us from a conversation about why we find something so fascinating.”

Lasch notes that the monoliths reiterate many existing tropes in both minimalism and land art, especially the work of Robert Smithson, who incorporated natural landscapes into works like “Spiral Jetty” and who was fascinated by aliens and science fiction. The design and characteristics of the monoliths aren’t particularly new, he says — but the way they have traveled across social media suggests they speak to this moment.

“Part of me wonders whether it’s related to how desperately we need social media and news that have nothing to do with the drastic state of our political affairs,” he says. “And minimalism and a shiny metal surface is as far as it gets.”

The monoliths may or may not be genuine Zardulu works, but they strike me as Zardulist in spirit as much as they are clearly inspired by both McCracken and Smithson: a piece of something otherworldly and strange, dropped into this exhausting and mundane world. Something to take us out of our day-to-day lives in a year defined by quarantine and strife, and into a realm where eerie and uncanny things can happen without explanation. Something we can use to think through our largest preoccupations — what we’re doing to the environment, how we welcome immigrants, or whether we are alone in the universe.

The monoliths are works of art doing the purest thing that art can do, which is to push us beyond the boundaries of our selves.

Or maybe it was aliens!

• The pandemic was great for Zoom. What happens when there’s a vaccine? -

  

  A look at what’s in store for Zoom in a post-pandemic world.

  If 2020 was the year Zoom rode the pandemic to skyrocketing success, 2021 could be the year the video conferencing company comes back down to Earth.

  Zoom started trading on the stock market in April 2019. At the time, it was known for being a rarity: a newly public tech company that actually turned a profit. One year later, the world was on lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic, and Zoom went from being a niche business software popular among tech companies to the way people did just about everything.

  Not only did that mean a sharp rise in Zoom meetings for the millions newly working from home, but also Zoom birthdays and baby showers for everyone else. For many, it became an indispensable lifeline to the outside world, with a free option that limited calls to 40 minutes and an unlimited paid option that enabled people to do many of the things they used to do in person. As people joked at the time: Having a corporate Zoom account was the new having a car.

  It was one of several video conferencing options already out there, but it captured the public imagination and market share more than most. Zoom became a verb. The reason? It just worked.

  Zoom has grown years in just months. At this time last year, Zoom had on average 10 million daily meeting participants. It now has 350 million. Zoom was the most-downloaded iPhone and iPad app of the year, beating perennial favorites like Instagram and YouTube. The company’s revenue is four times what it was in 2019.

  Now, as we close in on two years since Zoom’s public debut, numerous headwinds make the company’s future less certain. Giant software companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Google have mostly caught up on video chat technology, offering vastly better products than they did before Zoom entered the scene. What’s more, businesses that are cutting costs amid a recession are less amenable to additional spending on software when they can lean on the contracts they already have. Microsoft Teams, which has a Zoom-like video conferencing feature, is essentially free for companies paying for Microsoft’s Office suite. Slack, another best-of-breed workplace app that was acquired by Salesforce this week, also comes with a video component.

  Perhaps most pressing, with multiple viable coronavirus vaccines likely to start distribution, we might not need to video chat so much next year. Zoom’s stock dropped nearly 20 percent in November after the news that Pfizer’s vaccine was highly effective in late-stage trials. It’s still up nearly 500 percent from this time last year, and Zoom has more than quadrupled sales year over year.

  Zoom, for its part, says it welcomes a vaccine, despite the stock dips.

  “Hopefully we provide a good enough service — and it’s my true intention that we provide a good enough service — that people want to use us, calamity or not,” Aparna Bawa, Zoom’s chief operating officer, told Recode.

  Zoom’s customer base is in transition

  Just nine years ago, disaffected Webex engineer Eric Yuan left Cisco to found Zoom. Now, Zoom is not only more popular than Webex, a video conferencing service that’s been around since the 1990s, Zoom appears more popular than all of its competitors. But that enthusiasm among users hasn’t translated to sales at the same scale.

  US traffic to Zoom’s website is nearly 30 times what it was in the beginning of the year, according to data from online analytics firm SimilarWeb. In October, monthly visits to Zoom were three times higher than visits to Google’s Meet and Hangouts combined, according to the firm, which can’t track web visits to Microsoft Teams because it doesn’t have its own domain distinct from microsoft.com.

  Zoom had double the number of app downloads in October as Google Hangouts, and four times as many as Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. But Zoom downloads have slowed from highs earlier in the pandemic.

  “Customers are still using the platform, you’re just not seeing the volume of new customers coming on as it was in the past six months,” Charlie Rogers, a software research analyst at 7Park Data, told Recode. “A lot of customers who would buy Zoom have already got it.”

  In other words, Zoom might be nearing market saturation because so many people already have an account.

  And being popular with the masses doesn’t necessarily lead to more income, especially since Zoom has a popular free tier with a 40-minute call limit as well as free unlimited usage for students K-12. Corporate users are more likely to have the paid version — and they’re less likely to turn off their service, when, say, a vaccine makes it possible to meet people in person.

  Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

  Zoom’s largest revenue segment — 62 percent — comes from companies with more than 10 employees, but customers with 10 or fewer employees are growing much faster, making up 38 percent of the company’s revenue, up from 20 percent at the end of last year. That segment of customers has grown as more individuals have adopted the paid service, but it’s also a more volatile segment, because smaller customers can switch to a service offered by one of Zoom’s competitors more easily.

  Last quarter, 18 percent of total revenue came from customers spending $100,000 or more, down from 33 percent at the end of last year.

  “The real jewel isn’t about consumer or SMBs [small and medium-sized businesses], the real gold is to win enterprise,” Ryan Koontz, senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told Recode. That’s because each contract means numerous paid licenses within an organization as well as longer-term subscriptions. As Koontz put it, for enterprises, “The cost of change is very high.”

  Put differently, Zoom competitors with an existing enterprise customer base have an advantage because those customers are more likely to stick with the same provider.

  About half of companies surveyed by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) have Zoom while 75 percent currently have Teams (many companies pay for multiple software subscriptions). Thirty percent have Cisco’s Webex, after a recent decline.

  These numbers are still up for both products, since the pandemic began. And when narrowing the data to bigger Fortune 500 companies, the market share for Teams and Webex rose this quarter, while Zoom’s declined.

  Additionally, many companies that have Zoom are spending less on it. Microsoft Teams is the main reason company chief information officers cited for leaving or spending less with Zoom, according to ETR. (A number of CIOs cited security as another reason for leaving the service.) Many of those companies already pay for Microsoft’s Office 365, which has business staples like Excel and Word. Included in the cost of the software suite is access to Microsoft Teams and its video conferencing features, making Teams a no-brainer for companies trying to cut costs.

  This is an argument Zoom is used to.

  “When Eric [Yuan] founded this company, video conferencing was then thought of as a saturated market. There were lots of very large legacy providers including Microsoft that continued to bundle different services,” Bawa said. “And Zoom still has done pretty darn well.”

  Zoom still has plenty of enterprise users, and it’s also popular among small businesses. While this smaller, fast-growing segment isn’t as profitable as big companies, these customers are still important for Zoom’s future.

  “Don’t underestimate the number of small- and medium-sized businesses,” Wayne Kurtzman, research director of social and collaboration at market research firm IDC, said. “The market has room for multiple leaders.”

  The video conference feature war

  While Zoom earned popularity because of its dependability and ease-of-use, its competitors have gotten a lot better in these respects by simplifying their services and bulking up the quality of their video calls. Now, the baseline service that Zoom and its competitors offer is pretty similar. They all have video conferences that are pretty easy to join, work pretty well, and are pretty secure. So all these companies are currently fighting to differentiate themselves with new and better products.

  This year, Zoom had to fix security concerns to bring its service more in line with its competitors. A series of high-profile security mishaps — including Zoombombing, a vulnerability that let websites hijack Mac cameras, and Zoom routing calls through China — eventually led Zoom to bulk up its security. In addition to fixing the issues that led to the mishaps, Zoom hired former Facebook security executive Alex Stamos as an outside consultant and began offering end-to-end encryption in October.

  “Zoom is catching up at a really quick rate to those like Teams and Webex,” Frank Dickson, program vice president within IDC’s cybersecurity products research practice, told Recode.

  Bawa said Zoom’s enterprise customers are a testament to the bolstered security.

  “The validation is that we have a significant number of our large enterprise customers that go through multiple rounds of security review in financial services, in the government sector, defense — you name it — retail, et cetera,” Bawa said. “And we have passed them and continue flourishing in those accounts, expanding our footprint.”

  So now, the competitive battleground for video conferencing software is all about new features. Both Microsoft Teams and Cisco’s Webex have added at least 100 new features since the pandemic. They’ve added noise cancellation software to deal with the sounds of working from home: babies crying, dogs barking, neighbors mowing their lawns. They also started offering live transcription. Microsoft also introduced Together Mode, which places conference attendees against a shared digital background to give them the feeling of being in the same room. To accommodate its governmental customers, Webex even added a new feature that allows legislators to emulate voting on laws.

  “A direct outcome of the pandemic was, hey, our innovation velocity has to increase because this has become a far more strategic technology today than it was five years ago,” Jeetu Patel, senior vice president of security and apps at Webex, told Recode.

  Meanwhile, Facebook realized early in the pandemic that people were using its Portal video chat service more for group events than one-on-one conversations, so it made that easier with link sharing and call scheduling.

  All of the platforms have enabled fun backgrounds and Snapchat-like augmented reality filters.

  In addition to many of the same features as its competitors, Zoom has been rolling out new potential revenue streams. After launching Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone last year, Zoom also announced more new products in October: OnZoom, a video events platform that will allow people to sell tickets, and Zoom Apps, which lets people navigate to other workplace apps like Dropbox and Slack within Zoom. Zoom sees these new products as common-sense additions to its core tool, which it says could still get better.

  But taken together, all of these moves could be a sign of weakness.

  “Anytime an enterprise tech company that’s a one-trick pony announces new product, it’s because the current product is maxed out,” said market researcher Thomas DelVecchio.

  What comes after a vaccine

  The end of the pandemic does not signify the end of video calls. It will certainly mean less video usage, but video will likely forevermore be a component of meetings, if not a dire necessity.

  After the pandemic, the vast majority of office employers plan to use on a hybrid work model, wherein some of their workforce works remotely at least some of the time. As large as it was this year — $7.9 billion — the video conferencing market is expected to grow next year to an estimated $9.7 billion with 90 percent of North American businesses likely to spend more on it, according to IDC.

  The video conferencing companies, in turn, are all looking forward to a time when meetings will happen naturally in person and remotely. They’ll also have to make it natural for those physically present to communicate effectively with their remote counterparts, without one feeling disadvantaged. Inevitably, video calls need to be more useful.

  “It needs to be more than a meeting,” said IDC’s Kurtzman. “It needs to add more value.”

  That will include using augmented reality to make meetings more engaging and viewing data together as a group more useful. It will also require setting up video calls to become even simpler and more seamless than they are now.

  “Video conferencing in seven years will seem unrecognizable from the video conferencing we have today,” Kurtzman said. “The features and ways of engaging many people would classify as science fiction today.”

  Companies are approaching the future from varying angles. Going forward, Microsoft is investing heavily in features that contribute to employees’ sense of wellbeing, as their research shows working during the pandemic has had deleterious effects on employees, including an increased number of meetings and longer hours. Cisco is soon launching a feature meant to guarantee that everyone in a meeting feels they can participate, by allotting each participant time to speak in which the others are muted. Facebook expects video to become an additive element to regular life.

  “I can see every wedding happening going forward having a Portal device in the front row,” Micah Collins, director of product management for Facebook’s Portal, said.

  And now that these legacy software companies are paying such close attention to the video conference space, it will be difficult for Zoom to keep up and continue to differentiate itself. Its founder has suggested that Zoom could be the center of a more human communications system.

  “Eric at one point said, ‘I want you to be able to reach through Zoom and shake someone’s hand or give each other a hug over Zoom,’” Bawa said. “We view ourselves as the conduit to providing human to human connection in any context in a very intimate and personal way.”

  If Zoom can pull it off, that could be the difference between a company on the rise and one crashing back to Earth.

• The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19) -

  

  “Shifting baselines syndrome” means we could quickly get used to climate chaos.

  On Thursday, 2,800 Americans died from Covid-19. That is more than died on September 11, 2001 in a horrific attack that sparked a national convulsion and two wars that are still ongoing.

  If an accident or attack had violently killed this many US citizens in January of this year, there would have been a reckoning, a demand that authorities bring the full might of the country to bear on finding and addressing the causes. It would have been experienced as an unbearable collective tragedy. The names of the dead would have been carved into a new national monument.

  But that’s not what happened. Instead, infections started slowly and grew. There was no line crossed, no sudden trauma that shook us awake, just a creeping death toll spread out over to which we have been incrementally adjusting for nine months.

  But now there’s a 9/11 happening every day, and there’s still no real national mobilization. We can’t even get everyone to wear masks. Millions of people traveled for the Thanksgiving holidays, despite expert warnings that the Covid surge is ongoing.

  Because the virus crept up on us, we adjusted to it, like we’re adjusting to climate change, like we adjust to everything. It’s called “shifting baselines syndrome” and it’s the theme of a piece I first published back in July. It is, unfortunately, at relevant as ever.

  ---

  For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will act.

  Maybe it will be an especially destructive hurricane, heat wave, or flood. Maybe it will be multiple disasters at once. But at some point, the severity of the problem will become self-evident, sweeping away any remaining doubt or hesitation and prompting a wave of action.

  From this perspective, the scary possibility is that the moment of reckoning will come too late. There’s a time lag in climate change — the effects being felt now trace back to gases emitted decades ago. By the time things get bad enough, many further devastating and irreversible changes will already be “baked in” by past emissions. We might not wake up in time.

  That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.

  No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.

  The youth climate movement continues agitating, some of the more progressive countries are roused to (inadequate) action, and eventually, all political parties are forced to at least acknowledge the problem — all outcomes that are foreseeable on our current trajectory — but the necessary global about-face never comes. We continue to take slow, inadequate steps to address the problem and suffer immeasurably as a result.

  NurPhoto via Getty Images

  David Wallace-Wells, author of the popular and terrifying climate change book The Uninhabitable Earth, discussed this possibility in a New York Magazine piece written during the apocalyptic fires late last year in Australia. One might have thought that fires consuming hundreds of millions of acres and killing more than a billion animals would be a wake-up call, but instead, Wallace-Wells writes, “a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.”

  Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.

  Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.

  Concepts developed in sociology and psychology can help us understand why it happens — and why it is such a danger in an age of accelerating, interlocking crises. Tackling climate change, pandemics, or any of a range of modern global problems means keeping our attention on what’s being lost, not just over our lifetimes, but over generations.

  Shifting baselines are a form of generational amnesia

  In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly published a one-page article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution titled “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome in fisheries.” It contained no original experiments, no numbers or equations, but it went on to be the most cited and widely discussed thing he ever wrote.

  Pauly had something particular in mind about the transition from pre-scientific (anecdotal) to scientific data, but the conceptual architecture of shifting baselines also proved to be incredibly fruitful in other contexts and went on to be “revolutionary for the field of ecology,” write Jeremy Jackson (an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Jennifer Jacquet (an environmental studies professor at New York University). The notion was later introduced to the public by filmmaker Randy Olsen in a 2002 LA Times piece and has since become a subject of much popular discussion.

  So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

  And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

  Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

  “An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”

  The same phenomenon is sometimes called “generational amnesia,” the tendency of each generation to disregard what has come before and benchmark its own experience of nature as normal.

  A 2009 study from researchers at the Imperial College London examined a series of case studies, from “hunters’ perceptions of change in prey species populations in two villages in central Gabon” to “perceptions of bird population trends of 50 participants in a rural village in Yorkshire, UK.” Sure enough, they found evidence of generational amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs because younger generations are not aware of past biological conditions.”

  It’s easy to see the same thing happening on a larger scale with climate change. Few people are aware, in a conscious way, of how many hot summer days were normal for their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Recent research shows that “extremely hot summers” are 200 times more likely than they were 50 years ago. Did you know that? Do you feel it?

  It’s not just intergenerationally that we forget, either. The Imperial College researchers also demonstrated the existence of another form of shifting baselines syndrome: personal amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs as individuals forget their own experience.”

  Just as generations forget about ecological loss, so do individuals

  It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.

  “There is a tremendous amount of research showing that we tend to adapt to circumstances if they are constant over time, even if they are gradually worsening,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He cites the London Blitz (during World War II, when bombs were falling on London for months on end) and the intifada (the Palestinian terror campaign in Israel), during which people slowly adjusted to unthinkable circumstances.

  “Fear tends to diminish over time when a risk remains constant,” he says, “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.”

  He notes that big events, or “teachable moments,” can momentarily shock us into willingness to make big changes, but “a teachable moment is only a moment,” he says. “Once the fear is gone, the willingness to take measures is also gone.”

  Even those big personal moments fade quickly. One of the most robust findings in modern psychology — made famous by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert — is that we have an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”

  We tend to dramatically overestimate the effect that large events, good or bad, will have on our happiness. We think the death of a family member will make us enduringly less happy, or winning the lottery will make us enduringly happier. In fact, what psychologists find again and again is that we quickly return to our personal happiness equilibrium. A soldier who loses a leg and a soldier who returns home safe to a new baby will generally, a year or two later, be roughly as happy as they were before those events. It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”

  Just as we adjust emotionally, we adjust cognitively. We forget what came before; we simply don’t think about it. For the most part, only our recent experience is salient in defining our baselines, our sense of normal.

  XKCD

  The process of forgetting, of resetting, is almost impossible to resist, even for those acutely aware of it. In 2013, author JB MacKinnon released a book called The Once and Future World, about the extinction crisis and the abundant natural world that Americans are barely aware is draining away.

  “Even though I spent several years writing a book about things disappearing from the natural world,” MacKinnon says, “I can’t hold it in my head. I have to go back and reread it in order to refresh my eyes so that when I go out into the natural world, I think, ‘there are things missing here’. Otherwise, I’m just gonna go, ‘What a beautiful day’.”

  “I mean, who remembers what the price of coffee was 10 years ago?” he asks.

  Humans view the world through the lens of recent experience

  UC-Davis environmental economist Frances Moore thought of a clever way to test this phenomenon of short-term salience in the context of weather.

  How many times must unusual temperatures be repeated before they cease to be experienced by individuals as unusual? How fast do unusual temperatures become unremarkable? To find out, Moore and colleagues turned to Twitter. In a study published last year, they analyzed Twitter’s massive US database to correlate unusual heat or cold events with chatter about the weather. In this way, they tried to track the “remarkability” of temperature anomalies.

  “Something crazy happens, and then the same crazy thing happens the next year, and people are able to realize, ‘Oh, it’s two crazy things’,” Moore says. “Then it starts happening again, and people start to think, ‘I guess this isn’t so notable anymore.” Accordingly, tweets about the weather decline.

  How quickly does the effect take hold? “The reference point for normal conditions appears to be based on weather experienced between 2 and 8 years ago,” the study concluded.

  “It’s a powerful phenomenon, this normalization or reference-dependent utility,” Moore says. “It’s not super-rational behavior.”

  The study’s conclusion about what this portends for climate change is unsettling: “This rapidly shifting normal baseline means warming noticed by the general public may not be clearly distinguishable from zero over the 21st century.”

  Let that sink in. Even though atmospheric temperatures are, on a geological time scale, changing at a headlong pace, on a human time scale, they are still changing too slowly to be perceptually or emotionally salient. Put more bluntly: The public may never notice that it’s getting warmer.

  Research based on social media in a single country has obvious limitations, and Moore is reticent to speculate about how long the window of salience might be for other kinds of weather, or in other places.

  But it stands to reason that something like the same window applies to other natural or even social phenomena. It may be just as likely that the public never notices the increasing intensity of storms or frequency of flooding or regularity of crop failures. However rapidly those phenomena might change, they rarely change fast enough to be dramatically different from conditions two to eight years ago.

  The window of experience that humans find emotionally and cognitively salient is simply too narrow to take in long-term changes in ecological systems. What was unthinkable to previous generations — say, regular nuisance flooding in southern Florida — is normal now. What seems unthinkable to us now — say, stay-at-home orders in large swathes of the US Southwest for several weeks a year due to dangerous heat — will be, by the time it rolls around, not that much worse than what came just before it.

  We adjust; we can’t help it. If we wait for ecological change to thrust itself into the consciousness of ordinary Americans, we may be waiting forever.

  Joe Raedle/Getty Images

  Shifting baselines apply to several other social problems

  Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.

  What is the unending debate over the “normalization” of Trump but a debate over shifting baselines? President Trump has degraded and discarded longstanding norms of presidential behavior with astonishing speed and recklessness, but it has proven incredibly difficult for the press and the public to assess his record based on pre-Trump baselines. This is why people are always asking, “What if Obama did this?” They are trying to ask, “Why have we shifted our moral and political baselines so quickly?”

  Similarly, the US is busy normalizing the grim reality that college graduates will enter a world of high debt, expensive housing, and parlous job prospects. The post-war expectation of a middle-class life with a family-supporting job and a reliable pension might as well be ancient history.

  Shifting baselines are evident in the steady erosion of unions, the militarization of police, and the infusion of US politics with dark money. They are even evident, as we’ll discuss in a moment, in our experience with Covid-19.

  For the generation of Americans coming of age today, Trump, gridlocked politics, and a rapidly warming planet have become normal. Can the incoming Biden administration convince them that they should expect, and demand, something better?

  How to fight shifting baselines and personal amnesia

  The human propensity to rapidly adapt is part of our evolved cognitive and emotional machinery. But our ability to heed and remember the past is also shaped by culture.

  “I looked at Native Hawaiian culture,” MacKinnon says. “They had individuals within communities who were assigned to have a social relationship with species that were never even given names in English.” North America’s indigenous cultures still carry an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge that can help reveal what’s been lost.

  That kind of historical consciousness — a day-to-day awareness of the obligations that come with being a good ancestor — has faded. And modern consumer capitalism might as well be designed to erase it, to lock everyone into an eternal present wherein satisfying the next material desire is the only horizon.

  One answer is for journalism and the arts to pull the lens back and try to recenter a richer historical perspective. One ambitious effort to do that is journalist John Sutter’s Baseline 2020 project. He and his team have picked four locations around the world that are particularly vulnerable to climate change — Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, and the Marshall Islands — and will visit them every five years until 2050, documenting the changes facing the people who live there. (It is modeled on director Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, which check in on the same group of Brits every seven years.)

  “Change is invisible in any one moment,” Sutter says. He notes that scientists often do studies that last for years or decades, but “that longitudinal approach just doesn’t happen in journalism.” Taking the long view is one way to make changing conditions salient and emotionally impactful.

  In a similar spirit, artist Jonathon Keats has designed a special camera to take a 1,000-year exposure of Lake Tahoe. He calls it a “sort of cognitive prosthesis, a mechanism for us to be able to see ourselves from that far-future perspective.” The Long Now Foundation, established by Stewart Brand in 1996, has been hosting seminars to spur long-term thinking for decades.

  “Culture will hang on to knowledge of things that are changing or gone longer,” MacKinnon says, “if those things are the kinds of things that they pay attention to.”

  It’s not just about documenting decline, either. There have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.

  There is no substitute for leadership and responsive governance

  It can not ultimately fall to ordinary people to hold baselines stable. On these matters, as on much else, they take their cues from their leaders. Studying and understanding the long arc of history, considering the experience of previous generations and the welfare of coming generations, making decisions with the long view — those are things leaders are supposed to do.

  The most reliable way to stop baselines from shifting is to encode the public’s values and aspirations into law and practice, through politics. They can’t be held steady through acts of collective will. They have to be hardwired into social infrastructure.

  Unfortunately, US politics has become almost completely unresponsive, which reinforces rather than ameliorates our slipping baselines. One crucial part of registering a crisis as a crisis is a sense of agency, and Americans increasingly feel that they have no ability to shape national policy.

  Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Moore. “That might be what’s going on with the coronavirus — people don’t feel like they have agency on a collective level, because the government is not doing anything, so their response is to say, ‘well, I gotta live my life’.”

  On top of that, it’s just tiring to feel anxious for so long. “The combination of adaptation and fatigue is absolutely deadly in terms of our ability to respond to the virus at this point,” says Loewenstein.

  “White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking” https://t.co/mqD6oB1reE pic.twitter.com/J4nTAepM1M

  — Mark Berman (@markberman) July 6, 2020

What if Americans simply accommodate themselves to thousands of coronavirus deaths a day? As writer Charlie Warzel noted in a recent column, it’s not that different from the numbness they now feel in the face of gun violence. “Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale,” he writes, “we get used to it.”

Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and climate change may make pandemics more common. It is not difficult to imagine Americans forgetting a time when mingling freely was taken for granted. When being in public did not mean constant low-level exposure anxiety. When there weren’t regular waves of infection and death.

“If we keep getting zoonotic disease pandemics, then we’ll just say, ‘well, here comes the winter one, catch you on Zoom until June’,” says MacKinnon. “Our baseline could shift to the point that we don’t remember there was a time when people went most of their lives without hearing the word pandemic.”

Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.

And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies.

From The Hindu: Sports

• ISL | Chhetri seals it in BFC’s favour - Cashes in on a penalty to help his side beat Chennaiyin FC

• Under-fire Zidane refuses to give up - Reports link Pochettino and Raul as his likely replacements

• Olympics to cost extra $2.4 billion: organisers - The costs could rise further, with Tokyo 2020 saying it will release an additional $250 million in “contingency” funds to help cover the expenses.

• Radhakrishnan is new National chief coach - “We are happy we will be able to maintain continuity of our planning since Radhakrishnan has been the deputy chief coach for seven years now,” said AFI president Adille Sumariwalla.

• Not practical to ban switch-hit: Taufel - Former ICC Elite Panel umpire Simon Taufel feels it will not be practical to outlaw the switch-hit shot, adding that it’s “impossible” for the on-fiel

From The Hindu: National News

• SC adjourns hearing of SNC Lavalin case to January 7 - Solicitor General says the case required a detailed hearing and will require some time.

• Another FIR lodged in U.P. under new unlawful conversion ordinance - Complainant in Mau accuses local man of abducting his daughter on the eve of her wedding

• Polls will change course of State politics: Thushar - ‘Alliance with BDJS has helped BJP a lot’

• Farm laws will destroy agriculture sector, says Haryana Congress chief - JJP delegation asks Haryana Home Minister to withdraw cases against farmers immediately.

• Voters should sanitise hands before, after polling - No sale of liquor for 48 hours from Tuesday, on counting day

From BBC: Europe

• Denmark set to end all new oil and gas exploration - The European Union’s largest oil producer plans to stop extracting fossil fuels by 2050.

• French Thalys train attacker ‘tried to kill me three times’ - American Spencer Stone tells a French court how he tackled the gunman on the Thalys train in 2015.

• Germany to wipe Nazi traces from phonetic alphabet - The Nazis removed Jewish names from the German phonetic alphabet - now a reform is coming.

• Brexit: Time running out as Brexit trade talks restart - The UK warns chances of a breakthrough are “receding”, as it negotiates with the EU over business rules.

• Coronavirus: Irish shutdown eases with hospitality reopening - Restaurants, cafes and some pubs in the Republic of Ireland are opening after six weeks of lockdown.

From Ars Technica

• Here’s what happens when a bee stings you directly in your eyeball - You think 2020 is pretty horrible, but it could always be worse. - link

• Google parts with top AI researcher after blocking paper, faces blowback - Timnit Gebru’s exit reignites debate over diversity and free speech at tech group. - link

• Rocket Report: Billionaire backs Scottish spaceport, Relativity bags a bundle - “Fatigue fracture surfaces were confirmed in the apertural area.” - link

• Win laptops, smartwatches, and more in the 2020 Ars Technica Charity Drive - Help yourself to prizes by helping us raise money for good causes. - link

• Android apps with millions of downloads are vulnerable to serious attacks - Flaw allows malicious apps to steal credentials, private messages, and much more. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A Chinese doctor cant find a job in a hospital in America, so he opens a clinic and puts a sign outside that reads “GET TREATMENT FOR $20 - IF NOT CURED GET BACK $100.” -

  An American lawyer thinks this is a great opportunity to earn $100 and goes to the clinic.

  Lawyer: “I have lost my sense of taste.”

  Chinese: “Nurse, bring medicine from box No. 14 and put 3 drops in patient’s mouth.”

  Lawyer: “Ugh. this is kerosene.”

  Chinese: “Congrats, your sense of taste is restored. Give me my $20.”

  The annoyed lawyer goes back after a few days to try to recover his money.

  Lawyer: “I have lost my memory. I can’t remember anything.”

  Chinese: “Nurse, bring medicine from box no. 14 and put 3 drops in his mouth.”

  Lawyer (annoyed): “This is kerosene. You gave this to me last time for restoring my taste.”

  Chinese: “Congrats. You got your memory back. Give me $20.”

  The fuming lawyer pays him, then comes back a week later determined to get back $100.

  Lawyer: “My eyesight has become very weak I cannot see at all.”

  Chinese: “Well, I don’t have any medicine for that, so take this $100.”

  Lawyer (staring at the note): “But this is $20, not $100!”

  Chinese: “Congrats, your eyesight is restored. Give me $20”

  submitted by /u/Ev0On
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• I asked my masseuse if it was normal to get an erection during my massage -

  He said it was perfectly normal. I said, “Ok, but could you at least stop bumping it into me?”

  submitted by /u/windmillninja
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• Old lady gets into a Merzedes-Benz taxi cab -

  As she hops in, the driver asks her where she’s going. She gives him an adress, as she’s just arrived to town to visit family.

  They keep going for a bit, when the old lady notices the very characteristic Mercedes-Benz ornament emblem mounted on the hood.

  “So what is that thing for?” she asks the driver.

  The driver sees this as a chance to prank the old woman for some laughs.

  -“That’s a sight that I had installed so I can aim my targets better” he answers.

  -“What do you mean by targets?” she asks

  -“Well, you see that cyclist over there cycling along the road? Well I hate those cyclists so I’m going to run over him!”

  As the woman gasps, he proceeds to accelerate and drive directly towards the unaware cyclist, but in the last moment he turns the wheel to dodge the cyclist. But there’s a loud sound that surprises the driver.

  “What was that sound??” he asks.

  “Well, you can say whatever you want about that fancy sight of yours, but if I hadn’t opened the car’s door, we wouldn’t have hit that goddamm cyclist!”

  submitted by /u/Basque_Pirate
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• Your mom is so slow -

  It took her nine months to make a joke

  submitted by /u/Anal_beadsoup
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• A woman goes into a pharmacy and asks for cyanide… -

  A woman goes into a pharmacy and asks for cyanide. The pharmacist is shocked and said “what do you need cyanide for?”

  “I plan to poison my husband”, she tells him. “I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no way I can give you cyanide for that” the pharmacist says angrily.

  The woman reaches into her purse and takes out a hidden camera photo of her own husband sleeping with the pharmacists wife.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had a prescription”

  submitted by /u/ImJokingNoImNot
  [link] [comments]