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<title>14 July, 2022</title>
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<title>Daily-Dose</title><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport"/><link href="styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><link href="../styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><style>*{overflow-x:hidden;}</style><link href="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.css" rel="stylesheet"/><script src="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.js"></script></head>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A President Asking for Civil War</strong> - The January 6th committee closes in on Trump, but it may be too late. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/a-president-asking-for-civil-war">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Where Will the Conservative Party Go After Boris Johnson?</strong> - The Tories must pick a new leader, but the former Prime Minister may have stacked the deck against his own party. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/where-will-the-conservative-party-go-after-boris-johnson">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Clarence Thomas</strong> - For decades, Thomas has had a deeply pessimistic view of the country, rooted in his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. After the Supreme Court’s recent opinions, his dystopia is becoming our reality. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-self-fulfilling-prophecies-of-clarence-thomas">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Last Abortion Clinic in North Dakota Gets Ready to Leave</strong> - The Red River Women’s Clinic has thirty days to close on one side of the border with Minnesota, before reopening on the other. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/the-last-abortion-clinic-in-north-dakota-gets-ready-to-leave">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>What Precedents Would Clarence Thomas Overturn Next?</strong> - The Justice was once an outlier for his “outre” legal views. Now, Jeannie Suk Gersen says, he is the heart of a conservative bloc that is only getting started. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/politics-and-more/what-precedents-would-clarence-thomas-overturn-next">link</a></p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>How the world changed its mind on Tracy Flick</strong> -
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<figure>
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<img alt="A brightly colored illustration shows Tracy Flick in blue button-up shirt and sweater vest sitting at a desk with hands folded; a glass bowl of votes and a plate of personalized cupcakes are next to her. Behind her, a yellow banner that says “Tracy” hangs against a green chalkboard and a pink wall. The banner has been torn in half." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oGQXrtGs1XMD8qUcnnxoTGrZ8og=/399x0:4399x3000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71114502/Reese_witherspoon_VOx2__1_.0.jpg"/>
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<figcaption>
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Tracy Flick never wins. | Michelle Rohn for Vox
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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The new Election sequel shows how far we’ve come in handling ambitious women — and how far we have to go.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qOZfg7">
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<em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em>.</em>
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SJxEoy">
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In 1999, as the black-hearted comedy <em>Election</em> slunk its way onto movie screens across America, the film critic MaryAnn Johanson made a prescient prediction. This was going to be one of those movies, <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/1999/04/election-review.html">Johanson wrote</a>, that would see a huge generation gap in the way audiences responded to it.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZAkPcI">
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<em>Election</em>, directed by Alexander Payne and based on the 1998 novel by Tom Perrotta, stars Matthew Broderick, the slacker Gen X hero of <em>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off</em>. Here, Broderick plays a high school teacher named Mr. McAllister, or Mr. M. He’s scheming to foil the plans of go-getter Tracy Flick, played by a young Reese Witherspoon with her chin thrust permanently, belligerently forward.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wd28kN">
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Tracy, who dots the <em>i</em> in her last name with a gold star, wants to be president of the student body, is qualified to take on the role, and moreover, is running unopposed. But Mr. M. finds her so annoying that he ends up ruining his own life in his quest to take her down. Adultery, voter fraud, and 200 personalized cupcakes ensue.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IGagic">
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While Mr. McAllister is the point-of-view character, <em>Election</em> doesn’t exactly take a side in his epic battle against Tracy Flick. Still, film critics at the time sided almost universally with the erstwhile Ferris and against good-girl Tracy. “One wonders if this Tracy might not really be a monster, a kind of Hitler in the crib,” <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Election-Gets-Results-Teen-black-comedy-hits-2933339.php">mused the SFGate</a>, speaking for the crowd.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Ti64he">
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Johanson wasn’t so sure that consensus would stand the test of time. “Tracy’s not actually a bad person,” <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/1999/04/election-review.html">Johanson reasoned</a>. “It’s only in McAllister’s head that she’s dangerous, and as a fellow misanthropic Xer, I see his point — Tracy is annoyingly eager, determined, and devoted to her school to the point of self-sacrifice.” Yet everything that made Tracy seem so annoying and even malicious to McAllister could, Johanson pointed out, be considered heroic — especially by the generation that was at the time just beginning to be called millennial.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zPcIaa">
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More than 20 years later, Johanson has been proven correct, up to a point. As Tracy makes her return to pop culture in the form of Perrotta’s new <em>Election</em> sequel, the novel <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, she’s being greeted with the form of pop culture mea culpas that we have become used to rolling out for most of the prominent women of the Y2K eras: <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-election-book-reese-witherspoon.html">think piece</a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta-review/629635/"> after</a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/books/review-tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta.html"> think piece</a> about how we were wrong about Tracy Flick way back when. She has become a sort of fictional amalgam of all those wronged women, Britney and Hillary and Monica rolled into one obstreperous package.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="03lIhw">
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“How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy?” asked New York Times film critic A.O. Scott <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/movies/tracy-flick-reese-witherspoon.html">in a 2019 reevaluation of the film</a>. Scott found himself appalled by his old instinct to read Tracy as a villain and Mr. M. as a monster. “How much does a woman — a teenage girl — have to suffer before she earns it?”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gu9Inw">
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Perrotta asks a similar question in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>. In this new sequel, Tracy is once again thwarted by those who would deny her the honors she deserves, and once again she suffers enormously in the process.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="o9RXwr">
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Contrary to the title, Tracy does, in the end, win the day. But her win is vexed, fraught, and shaded with ambiguities. It seems ripe for nearly as much misinterpretation as <em>Election</em> itself was.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cXycof">
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Tracy Flick is a Rorschach test for how we think about women, ambition, and the power dynamics of sex. To understand how Tracy transitioned from baby Hitler to symbol of wronged women everywhere, we’ll have to go all the way back to 1998. We’ll see what led audiences to read her as a villain then, what makes them think of her as a hero now — and what biases might still be hiding in the way we read Tracy Flick.
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</p>
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<h3 id="pDv0jh">
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“Tracy Flick is one of the most complex female characters to run riot through an American movie in memory”
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</h3>
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Am9AE_qaVSaJAM9wa3MEbpBigjQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759379/Election_poster.jpg"/> <cite>MTV Productions via <a class="ql-link" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126886/" target="_blank">IMDB</a></cite>
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<figcaption>
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The original poster for Alexander Payne’s 1999 <em>Election</em> shows a disconcerting close-up of Tracy Flick’s beaming smile, with Mr. M. scowling out at the camera from the inside of her mouth.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WhSrwH">
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There are two things about Perrotta’s <em>Election</em> that have largely been discarded or ignored in its cultural legacy that are crucial for understanding Tracy Flick.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="i7IYgr">
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The first is that the events of the novel take place in 1992, and are explicitly framed as an analogue to the 1992 presidential election and Bill Clinton’s affair with Gennifer Flowers. <em>Election</em>’s high school student body president race features a George H.W. Bush candidate, an establishment figure who should be a lock for the presidency but who isn’t exactly popular: Tracy. There’s an affable Bill Clinton figure, the popular jock Paul Metzler, whom Mr. M. manipulates into running against Tracy. And there’s a Ross Perot, a third-party candidate who runs on a platform of nihilism and ends up picking up massive amounts of support. That’s Paul’s sister Tammy, who runs against him as an act of revenge after he steals her girlfriend.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KBXne3">
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The big twist in <em>Election</em> is that Paul, the Bill Clinton, isn’t the one who has the dark secret. Tracy does.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="X87JO8">
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Tracy is a good girl with a squeaky clean reputation and unstoppable forward drive. She empathizes with a pundit’s description of George H.W. Bush as a man whose “fire-in-the-belly” is “all he has.” Her smoldering sexuality leaves Paul incapable of thinking straight around her. “She’s got this ass,” he confides to us.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gy3RBL">
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Tracy’s secret, the Gennifer Flowers peccadillo waiting in the wings to come out and destroy her, is that she had what she describes as “an affair” with her English teacher, Dave, a close friend of Mr. M.’s. (Confronted with the term “sexual harassment,” she says simply, “I don’t think it applies,” on the grounds that Dave never threatened her GPA.) And although Mr. M. never comes right out and says so, it’s clear that he decides to go after Tracy as a way of punishing her for this affair: for looking like a good girl and acting like someone else.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EiM1Sx">
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“Looking at her,” he complains, “you’d think she was just a sweet teenage girl who deserved every good thing that had ever happened to her.” In fact, he considers Tracy guilty: first of sleeping with Dave, then of dumping him and letting her mom tell the principal about their relationship, so that Dave lost both his job and his marriage. Tracy, in Mr. M.’s eyes, has displayed a failure of character.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="m8oiKI">
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Contemporary critics had no trouble picking up on the tension between Tracy’s good-girl image and her jailbait actions. The contrast was delicious, and part of what made Tracy such an instantly iconic character. “Tracy Flick,” <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/reviews/980419.19lasallt.html">ran the New York Times book review</a>, “is a self-conscious overachiever who defies labeling as a goody-two-shoes: she once had an affair with a teacher — ‘even if he did turn out to be as big a baby as any 16-year-old.’”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DhMVoi">
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The contrast was only heightened a year later, when Payne’s version of <em>Election</em> hit theaters. As played by Witherspoon, Tracy’s no longer a charismatic sexpot. Now she’s prim in her headbands and Peter Pan collars, and pointedly childlike. When we first meet her, she’s sitting in a chair and swinging her legs because she’s so short that her feet don’t quite touch the ground. When we see her seduction by her teacher — now renamed Dave Novotny — she’s perched on his couch, guzzling root beer through a straw, eyes giant.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lyOjiL">
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Still, the film treats Tracy’s perky precocity as something seductive in its own right, and an object of intense fascination for Mr. M. In Mr. M.’s head, Tracy’s lips are red and luscious as they hover over his ear and whisper about how excited she is to be working <em>very closely</em> with him. When he has sex with his wife, he sees Tracy’s head superimposed over hers, headband and all, and hears her say, “Fuck me, Mr. M.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="u8N0Pn">
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There’s a vast, dizzying divide between the prudishness of Tracy’s looks and the raunch shown both in her relationship with Dave and in Mr. M.’s fantasies. For most critics in 1999, that divide was key to the layers of her character.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WzqOW4">
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“Tracy Flick,” <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/high-school-high/">LA Weekly declared</a>, is “one of the most complex female characters to run riot through an American movie in memory. The character is so rich, so contradictory and so deeply, enduringly unsettling that it’s almost a shock — if she weren’t so obviously homegrown, Tracy Flick could be French. (In some scenes, she comes across like a slightly sturdier Lolita, though one as shanghaied by her own ambition as she is by men.)”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="feQfB9">
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The idea that Tracy carries as much responsibility for her relationship with her teacher as Clinton did for his adultery with Flowers, and that this relationship should be a source of shame for her, is embedded in the text. But it would also be contradicted by the second forgotten plot line of Perrotta’s <em>Election.</em>
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</p>
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<h3 id="mNMYaF">
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“It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was 15”
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</h3>
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zrk0ZlsEcwedzB6MxE4wuZmW7Kg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759446/election_still_1.jpeg"/> <cite>MTV Productions</cite>
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<figcaption>
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Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in <em>Election</em>.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aWCtuK">
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Mr. M’s trusty current events class doesn’t only discuss the 1992 election. It also discusses a horrific local news story. The football stars of a neighboring high school, we learn, have sexually assaulted a girl Mr. M. describes as “mentally retarded” with a broomstick. Their defense in court is that the assault was consensual.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hLsuGL">
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Mr. M.’s students overwhelmingly side with the boys. So does much of the rest of the town, which we see gossiping over the girl’s “major pair of hooters.” Mr. M., disgusted by the town’s response, prides himself on knowing better than the high schoolers when it comes to this case. But the rest of <em>Election</em> makes it clear that he doesn’t, really. While Mr. M. doesn’t want to admit it, the football player rape case and Dave’s seduction of Tracy are analogous: both sexual abuses of power. Tracy is a child, her teacher takes advantage of her, and Mr. M. blames Tracy for it.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mFpDra">
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Mr. M. is even prone to gossiping about the bodies of his teenage students, including Tracy’s, in the same way that the rest of the town gossips about the football players’ victim. “It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was 15,” says Mr. M. of Tracy and her much-discussed ass. “Spend enough time in a high school, and you forget what 15 <em>means</em>.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Oh0kPb">
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Perrotta won’t let the reader forget what 15 means, though. When we see Tracy’s rendezvous with Dave, it becomes painfully clear just how teenage she really is.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qcnKTd">
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“It’s a bad dream,” she tells us: “my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he’s reading aloud in class and wants us to think he’s moved by the passage.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9PAMjb">
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Tracy is very young, Dave is very middle-aged, and the whole situation is sad and gross. If Tracy thinks she’s consenting, the novel implies it’s only in the way the football players’ victim did: as someone powerless feeling obligated to do what someone stronger asks her to do.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WaupFM">
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There’s an ambiguity here that is fundamental to the way Perrotta approaches the world. Tracy’s relationship with her teacher is on the one hand a source of shame, a dark secret that threatens to negate all her hard work and render her unelectable. On the other hand, it’s also straightforwardly a case of sexual harassment.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9yLLY9">
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This sort of double-think speaks to a vexed confusion of the era, a sense that sexual assault can on the one hand be very bad and something to be condemned, but on the other hand really is pretty shameful to the victim if you think about it. The critical response to <em>Election</em> shows that the first half of that idea wasn’t anywhere near as compelling as the second, especially when you’re looking for reasons not to like someone.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DJSIaU">
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Tracy was already annoying: so self-centered, so ambitious. “Something in those flashing, sanctimonious eyes portends the worst,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/reviews/electionhowe.htm?movieslede=y">the Washington Post mused</a>. With critics already in an amenable frame of mind, it was easy to seize on the idea of her relationship with her teacher as one of many reasons audiences should consider her a villain. If her teacher preyed on her, well, didn’t she deserve it?
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</p>
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<h3 id="8h81wS">
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“I tried to turn it into a funny story, but no one ever laughed”
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</h3>
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w6mdnw8rkMpkj9PkGRYP_qhXUbk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759455/tracy_flick_cant_win_9781501144066_xlg.jpeg"/> <cite>Courtesy of Scribner</cite>
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<figcaption>
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<em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> by Tom Perrotta, a sequel to <em>Election</em>.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xQ5V45">
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Perrotta’s new <em>Election</em> sequel, <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, turns on the question of which interpretation of <em>Election</em> is correct. Is it the interpretation of 1999, or that of 2019? Was Tracy the hero of the story all along? Or was she the villain?
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1IVppM">
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Like <em>Election</em> before it, <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is framed as an explicit response to a major cultural event. While the former took on the 1992 election, the latter is Perrotta’s Me Too novel.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uHgxAr">
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As the book opens, Tracy Flick finds herself living in a world in which it’s now mainstream conventional wisdom that teenage girls who have relationships with their teachers are not the responsible parties. She finds the transition as jarring as many of the rest of us do.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="f5UKH4">
|
||
“The thing you had to understand,” she tells us, “is that I wasn’t a normal high school girl.” Tracy saw herself as exceptional: smarter and more ambitious than any of her peers, a mini adult who deserved to be treated as such. So even after she became an actual adult, it still made sense to her that when she was a teenager, her teacher had instigated a relationship with her. Wasn’t he only doing what she wanted and treating her as the adult she thought she was?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GJAdsf">
|
||
Then Me Too arrived, and with it, story after story of girls who, like Tracy, considered themselves to be exceptional and who, like Tracy, were abused by an adult who took advantage of that belief. “You can’t keep reading these stories, one after the other,” Tracy admits, “and keep clinging to the idea that your own case was unique.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ppJ1II">
|
||
To the adult Tracy, just as damaging as the memory of her relationship with Dave is the memory of Mr. M.’s betrayal. “For a while, in my twenties, I tried to turn it into a funny story, but no one ever laughed,” she muses. “I think it just made people wonder if there was something wrong with me, and I couldn’t help wondering that myself, because why else would a teacher hate me so much that he’d ruin his life just to stop me from getting something I desperately wanted and totally deserved?” Who, after all, could inspire such rage but an infant Hitler?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qxGIGn">
|
||
But that girl — who was so ferociously ambitious that she terrified her teacher — is gone in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>. Now chastened, Tracy has been stripped of much of her alpha dog swagger. Although she long planned to be the first female president, her dreams were derailed when her single mother developed MS while Tracy was in law school. Scholarship student Tracy dropped out to help, and eventually got a job as a substitute teacher to make ends meet. As the novel opens, Tracy’s mother is dead, and Tracy is now an assistant principal at a school not dissimilar to her old high school. Her great ambition is to take over as principal once the incumbent retires.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eFLhfc">
|
||
Tracy’s new position feels at once both redemptive and humiliating. For once, her status as an underdog isn’t up for debate: No one could feel the need to bring this version of Tracy Flick down a peg because she’s already been brought down so far. It’s a position designed to evoke the reader’s sympathies, not their rage.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nK9Lnc">
|
||
Still, in another sense the move feels as though it’s stolen Tracy’s <em>Election</em>-era win away from her once again. So what if she finally did manage to become student body president despite all Mr. M.’s worst efforts? She’s still seen her dreams dashed more thoroughly than Mr. M. could manage on his best day.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kxkMTI">
|
||
Tracy’s redemption does eventually arrive — but it comes in a way that is, within Perrotta’s low-stakes world, tonally pretty weird. I won’t spoil the details here, but I will say that the climax of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> sees Tracy performing a highly dramatic, highly dangerous act of self-sacrifice that ends with her whole community lauding her as a hero.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Rzo8do">
|
||
When Tracy tries to explain her actions, she does so with an elevated tone that once again sounds foreign to Perrotta’s grubby, venal little world. “I still can’t tell you why I did that,” she says, “except to say that that’s me, that’s who I am, that’s how I’ve tried to live my life. Going where I’m needed, doing what I can to make things better, trying to be of service.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yBB65o">
|
||
For the most part, the critics of 2022 have both taken Tracy at her word and suggested that they are a little disappointed with Perrotta that they feel compelled to do so.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xWfO9W">
|
||
“Her exoneration thrilled me; I imagine that many readers will feel the same. But the effort of recuperation wears on the book,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/tracy-flick-takes-on-the-world-again">wrote Katy Waldman in the New Yorker</a>. “The aftertaste of a voguish feminism, one that casts all women as misunderstood saviors, lingers. Perrotta’s step seems surest when his characters’ saintliness — or, better yet, their miscreance — doesn’t lie quite so close to the surface.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JNfqa8">
|
||
“You will not close this book commiserating with the likes of Mr. M. Nor will you wonder whether you missed the nuances,” <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta-review/629635/">declared the Atlantic</a>. “<em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is frankly didactic.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zibDR3">
|
||
It is worth considering, however, that Perrotta’s narrators are all highly unreliable. When, at the end of <em>Election</em>, Mr. M. congratulated himself for knowing that sexual violence was bad, there was plenty of room to doubt his version of his self-image. Should we be so sure now that Tracy is right about herself?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="r9MgAa">
|
||
There is plenty of evidence that the Tracy of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is a woman who “tries to be of service.” In this book, Tracy spends most of her page time attending to the minutiae of public school administration with a focus that borders on the maniacal. But in <em>Election</em>, part of Tracy’s charm is how little she cares about being of service, and how much she cares about her own furious and tremendous ambitions. As a teenager, the great object of Tracy’s fantasies is power: accumulating it, winning it, taking it for herself, and doing so unapologetically. There is something thrilling in reading it, watching it, in seeing this girl want so much so badly.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KJZiDx">
|
||
Perhaps Tracy’s assertion that “who I am” is someone who spends her time “doing what I can to make things better” is, in its way, as much of a piece of self-deception as Mr. M.’s laudatory self-image as the guy who knows you don’t mock the rape victim at the end of <em>Election</em>. After all, Perrotta’s books are peopled with characters who lie to themselves. And an ambitious woman has as much reason to lie as anyone else.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nL8J4r">
|
||
What made the critics of 1999 find Tracy Flick so villainous was not just her position as her teacher’s victim but her straightforward, cold-blooded ambition. It would suit Tracy’s purposes now to think of herself not as someone who wanted power for her own purposes, but as someone whose ambitions were always in the service of something bigger than herself.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fiFsLF">
|
||
Such a revisionist reading, like the reading of Tracy as a sexual harassment victim, makes her a character who’s much easier to sympathize with than the craven power-snatching teenager of <em>Election</em>. But we take Tracy at her word here at our own peril.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SVj1oh">
|
||
What Tracy Flick seems to understand instinctively in <em>Election</em> is that power will protect her. It will make it not matter that she is friendless, that no one likes her enough to write a genuine in-joke in her yearbook, that she can’t even get her cousin to ask her to the prom. It will make her a person who would not be targeted by a predator like Dave, who sees that she is lonely and weak and so considers her easy pickings. It will make her never again be the girl who is, as she discovers humiliatingly in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, exactly like every other precocious teenager whose teacher preyed on her.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="l2yc78">
|
||
The misreadings of <em>Election</em> of 1999 revealed a culture that was all too willing to despise a teenage girl, no matter how much she suffered, and pity a middle-aged white man, no matter how despicable his actions. Perhaps what the misreadings of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> reveal is a culture that is still unwilling to let girls long for power enough to protect themselves. It reveals a culture that will celebrate an ambitious woman, as long as her greatest ambition is to be a high school principal.
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>We all just fell for Amazon’s made-up holiday yet again</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="A pile of Amazon boxes wrapped in plastic wrap.." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NqOGWC8Mk6JkZ9yLmhtaEbpu1Is=/146x0:2813x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71114302/1229055019.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
We don’t have to shop because Amazon says. And yet. | Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Get something you didn’t need on Prime Day? You’re not alone.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I56oF7">
|
||
You might not think an Instant Pot would be at the top of your summer shopping list. The sweltering heat doesn’t exactly put people in the mood for a hearty stew. But <a href="https://www.vox.com/amazon">Amazon</a> has <a href="https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2017/06/05/startup-instant-pot-became-amazon-prime-day-star/">managed to help make it into a hot item to buy</a> among consumers in mid-July each year thanks to Prime Day, its now 48-hour deal extravaganza.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AM1opY">
|
||
As the saying goes, if you build it, they will come, which in Amazon’s case means poof! inventing a shopping holiday out of thin air.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="S51GjB">
|
||
Amazon Prime Day first launched in 2015, initially as a way to celebrate Amazon’s 20th birthday (to the extent companies can have birthdays, I guess). It was a way to reward members of its <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18511544/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-day-shipping">Prime program</a>, which started in 2005, and to bring consumers into its ecosystem of products and services. It was also a way to pump sales in what is normally an offseason for the company. <a href="https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/the-history-of-prime-day">According to Amazon</a>, consumers across nine countries bought over 34 million items on the first Prime Day, then just 24 hours. It surpassed the number of items sold on Black Friday the year prior, the e-commerce giant’s biggest Black Friday yet at the time.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<aside id="VKmR2P">
|
||
<div>
|
||
|
||
</div>
|
||
</aside>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uFlZyh">
|
||
Today, Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year. In 2021, people bought over 250 million items during it. For this year, the numbers aren’t out yet, and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-prime-day-isnt-quite-the-blockbuster-it-once-was-11656235800">it’s unclear how much of an impact inflation and changing consumer habits made</a>, but it is still a big deal. Historically, Amazon says, “Jump,” as in “Shop.” Consumers across America and the world ask, “How high?”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QlYeHR">
|
||
“People everywhere, but Americans in particular, love sales; they love deals,” said Sucharita Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “And if they’re told they’re going to find great deals, they’ll go and look.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lzZHDv">
|
||
Even if that means looking for a glorified crockpot during one of the hottest months of the year. In 2015, 24,000 Instant Pots were sold on Prime Day. By 2018, that number was 300,000. In 2021, Instant Pot was still <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/prime-day-top-products-sold-1076028/">among the biggest sellers</a> on Prime Day.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="puEPy8">
|
||
I recognize people make things that are not soups in Instant Pots, but still.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="pa49yJ">
|
||
Christmas in July, but for yourself
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="G8mDfu">
|
||
The idea of a holiday for buying yourself stuff is not unique to Amazon or something Amazon invented. Prime Day was inspired by Alibaba’s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/china-singles-day-2021-alibaba-jd-hit-record-139-billion-of-sales.html">Singles Day</a>, on November 11, in China. All sorts of holidays, real and invented by retailers, have become about buying. For some reason, we’ve collectively decided Presidents’ Day is a time for mattress sales. Even Juneteenth <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23150067/juneteenth-walmart-icecream-consumerism-merch">has become awkwardly commercialized</a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NgMKgb">
|
||
Greg Greeley spent 18 years at Amazon, including running Prime, and oversaw the early Prime Days. He explained to me that while Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for example, were always about gifting to other people, Prime Day had a distinct appeal. “I liked to describe it as our gift to Prime members so they could gift something to themselves.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ATa3Ih">
|
||
Prime Day occupies a space consumers don’t really have to fill but might just kind of want to. It falls between tentpole shopping moments like the holidays and the back-to-school season. It’s also a moment where it feels a bit more like it’s okay to buy just to buy, instead of for a specific purpose — and, maybe, to be a little selfish about it.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NDDWHC">
|
||
“Cultures have been inventing commercial holidays for a very long time,” said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at the advertising firm Publicis. “People are very motivated by price, they’re very motivated by the treasure hunt of a deal, and when clever marketers do a good job of creating this perception that there’s some special reason for a deal, that triggers some cognitive bias that we have.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hUAyKM">
|
||
As Hilary George-Parkin <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/15/20694723/psychology-sales-prime-day-fomo-scarcity">laid out for The Goods in 2019</a>, sales and deals make consumers feel like they’re getting something special even if they’re not, like they’re getting free money. People can be pushed to buy out of FOMO, and the belief they’ll lose something if they don’t buy now before inventory runs out or the deal ends.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="T7DZjz">
|
||
“These deals are structured in such a way that the products that are on deal won’t be there forever,” said Kelly Goldsmith, a behavioral scientist at Vanderbilt. “Scarcity marketing tactics, they’ve been a mainstay of the marketer’s toolkit for a very long time.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EQyfWS">
|
||
Some consumers head into Prime Day with a clear idea of what they want and hunt for discounts on items they already intend to buy; if not on that specific day, then eventually. Others, however, just buy stuff because they see it and it’s there.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="teWZhj">
|
||
Prime Day is neat for Amazon, medium for a lot of other parties
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AgrbVs">
|
||
Whatever deals consumers feel like they’re getting out of Prime Day, the real winner in this is probably Amazon. Even though, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-prime-day-isnt-quite-the-blockbuster-it-once-was-11656235800">as Sebastian Herrera notes in the Wall Street Journal</a>, Prime Day isn’t quite as big of a thing as it once was, it’s still very much a net positive for the company. It helps lift third-quarter sales and brings in billions of dollars. It is also a way to get people to join Prime (though much less so now than at the beginning) and get consumers familiar with and buying Amazon’s products and services.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I35dLv">
|
||
“In the old days, it was mainly a deal on stuff Amazon was selling, and Amazon could kind of curate it and say, ‘Hey, we’re having a super good deal on Alexa,’” Goldberg said. Now, he said, that’s diminished, and there’s almost too much for consumers to sort through when buying, whether it’s products from Amazon or not. “Today, there’s 10 million <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GW3L8JX7Q9FH8ALB">Lightning Deals</a> on Prime, and the vast majority of them are for crap nobody wants.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dtAG9B">
|
||
Prime Day can be a mixed bag for third-party sellers on the platform, Goldberg said. They generally don’t get much notice of the exact dates, making the whole thing logistically challenging, and sellers sometimes wind up discounting so deep to make sales that it hurts their margins. “The reason you would sell something at a loss on Prime Day is to meet a new customer that might buy more stuff from you over time,” he said. Increasingly, that’s not possible on Amazon, as people often just buy from the first listing that comes up instead of going back to a specific seller. “Sellers are increasingly learning that you can’t acquire customers on Amazon; you’re renting customers on Amazon.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="R7qFaS">
|
||
An Amazon spokesperson said Prime Day 2021 was its biggest ever for third-party sellers and that this year customers could shop more products from those sellers than last year. The spokesperson declined to say how much notice of Prime Day sellers get, or address speculation that the company might add another Prime Day at a different point in the year.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="x4KBa8">
|
||
While third-party sellers may not always have a ton of visibility, Amazon is watching buyers’ every move. “Every click you make on Amazon is likely something that somebody somewhere is studying,” Goldsmith said.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WnOjXl">
|
||
Prime Day encourages consumers to scoop up a bunch of stuff over the course of a couple of days in a way that <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/amazon-prime-day-fulfillment-center-working-conditions.html">is a stretch for Amazon’s warehouses</a> and, ultimately, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/tech/workers-amazon-prime-day/index.html">its workers</a> to deliver on. There is a reason <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage">Amazon is worried it will run out of potential employees at some point</a>, though Amazon said it is adequately staffed for the season.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MzSiUZ">
|
||
For shoppers, Prime Day can even be less than ideal — you’re not saving money if you load up on a bunch of stuff you don’t actually want.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="otlPz5">
|
||
Maybe try buying a mini bit less next year
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VoDG4b">
|
||
Prime Day 2022 was July 12 and 13, and if you got a good deal on some stuff you’ve been wanting, good for you! If you got a good deal on stuff you did not actually want and maybe now are having some regrets, hey, it happens to all of us. There are always <a href="https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/save-date-july-12-13-prime-day-returns-offering-amazons-lowest-0">returns</a>. Maybe you will really wind up liking that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Yibidys-Indoor-Plants-Outdoor-Multiple/dp/B0982NXNXZ?ref=dlx_deals_gd_dcl_img_115_58a91ab0_dt_sl15_6b">plant stand</a> you now have to buy a bunch of plants for and the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Women-Straw-Panama-Buckle-Fedora/dp/B0B1Q45K37?ref=dlx_deals_gd_dcl_img_4_be49ff47_dt_sl15_6b">fedora</a> you are starting to suspect you’ll be too embarrassed to actually wear in public.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BhBAu2">
|
||
“We have so much crap in our lives, do we really need more?” Kodali said. “A lot of this stuff is getting to a point of just wastefulness; it just ends up in landfills, contributing to our global warming problem.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6ukw5x">
|
||
As consumers, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23013102/american-consumers-expectations-anger-entitled">we’ve been trained to buy cheap stuff without thinking about the broader implications</a>. Amazon and Prime Day are part of the problem. We actually do not need a new holiday for buying stuff.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gaLA8S">
|
||
Still, the whole situation is hard to resist. It’s not just that Amazon pushes Prime Day on consumers — so does the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/money/early-amazon-prime-day-2022-deals-0710/">media</a> and the <a href="https://people.com/fashion/amazon-early-prime-fashion-deals-under-30/">entire internet</a>. News stories about the best Prime Day deals get clicks. I got an email from my bank reminding me Prime Day is coming. Other retailers, such as <a href="https://www.target.com/c/deal-days/-/N-xgolj">Target</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/select/shopping/walmart-deals-days-2022-ncna1296518">Walmart</a>, get in on these special deal events, too. A lot of parties are complicit in making the whole thing churn, including consumers themselves.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sHb96C">
|
||
I did not buy anything on Prime Day this year. It’s not because I am a virtuous consumer or anything, but mainly because I am lazy, and sifting through a bunch of stuff on Amazon’s website seems exhausting.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I3kAhN">
|
||
I have started thinking about an Instant Pot a little, which I am told can be an enjoyable thing to have and use, even in the summer months. I’m not even sure if I have room for one, but I sort of want it now. I suppose that’s the point.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OjPjwy">
|
||
“Nobody needs an Instant Pot, there’s nothing that you can make that you need to survive that you can’t make without an Instant Pot, so it’s not a necessity. But it’s an aspirational item,” Goldberg said. “When the $100 Instant Pot becomes $60, it opens the floodgates.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MJgVth">
|
||
Maybe that’s how the Instant Pot lands in my kitchen come Prime Day 2023.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aMNCG2">
|
||
<em>We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-squeeze"><em>The Big Squeeze</em></a><em>.</em>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NF25sR">
|
||
<a href="http://vox.com/big-squeeze-newsletter"><em>Sign up to get this column in your inbox</em></a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fEmYHz">
|
||
<em>Have ideas for a future column? Email </em><a href="mailto:emily.stewart@vox.com"><em>emily.stewart@vox.com</em></a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xajYdf">
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>Why adoption won’t fill the gaps of a Roe-less America</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="A person at a protest bows their head while carrying a sign that reads, “I am the pro-life generation.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tboJSlS8wlqm2N09KnU_2GSssCo=/220x0:3780x2670/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71114156/506527306.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
Abortion opponents participate in a rally preceding the March for Life in 2016. | Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
The “We Will Adopt Your Baby” signs ring so hollow. Here’s what’s missing.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kYQihP">
|
||
In the immediate wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning <em>Roe v. Wade</em>, social media filled with <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-will-adopt-baby-meme-goes-viral-debates-roe-reach-fever-pitch-rcna35818">images and memes</a> playing off a <a href="https://twitter.com/NoelleFitchett/status/1540805540946649089">viral tweet</a>: A clean-cut couple beams at the camera while standing outside the Supreme Court building and holding a sign reading “We will adopt your baby.” (Slate has <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/adopt-your-baby-meme-abortion-protest-roe.html">the full story</a> on the couple featured in that photo.)
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aES2h3">
|
||
In a post-<em>Roe</em> world, there is already a renewed focus on adoption as a supposed solution for unwanted pregnancies. Indeed, in the arguments before the Supreme Court last year, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/amy-coney-barrett-adoption-myths.html">Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested</a> that adoption is a foolproof substitution for abortion. Yet the rhetoric around adoption too rarely takes into consideration the person having the baby who will be adopted.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Dw1xWs">
|
||
Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter at Salon, has been covering adoption in America for over a decade. Her book <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-child-catchers-rescue-trafficking-and-the-new-gospel-of-adoption/9781586489427"><em>The Child Catchers</em></a> is one of the best ever written about the messy intersections of capitalism, Christianity, and adoption, digging deep into the ways the adoption industry wrings every dollar it can out of an incredibly fragile period in the lives of everyone it touches. (Disclosure: I am adopted.)
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DeR19W">
|
||
Joyce and I talked recently about adoption rhetoric at a time when American reproductive rights have been gutted. That rhetoric touches on so many other aspects of American life, most notably race and class.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ecqcEW">
|
||
“For decades now, there’s been a pro-choice rejoinder to anti-abortion activists: What are you going to do with all these extra kids you want to see born? Are you prepared to adopt all these kids?” Joyce said. “And the answer is: kind of? A lot of people will say, ‘That’s exactly what we want.’”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WJVGod">
|
||
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OudoWp">
|
||
<strong>Photos of couples holding signs saying “We will adopt your baby” have been propagating on Twitter in the past few weeks. As somebody who’s covered this world extensively, how do images like that intersect with your work?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fgaaT5">
|
||
It feels like conversations about adoption that for a very long time were happening in the margins of discussion about reproductive rights are very much more a mainstream discussion. What’s interesting is there have been a few other moments where there has been a similar, if time-bound, recognition of this issue.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6IW83X">
|
||
In my book, I wrote about what happened in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010. There was this immense rush to not just expedite adoptions that were in process but to open up expedited adoption procedures to any child who was in institutional care in the country, even though welfare experts and even some of the more responsible adoption agencies were saying, “When the country is in complete disarray is not the time to start rushing things.” As part of that, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Life_Children%27s_Refuge_case">Laura Silsby</a>, a Baptist missionary from Idaho, wrote this extremely blunt and kind of ghoulish plan that she was going to gather [Haitian] children off the street. Ultimately, they were going to be offered for international adoption. The boldness and bleakness of that grabbed people’s attention.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4bRmNb">
|
||
Also, in 2018, when the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17475232/children-separation-border-immigration-families-belong-together">family separation crisis</a> at the border began to get a lot of notice, there were people who suddenly paid a lot of attention to the fact that one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, Bethany Christian Services, had been contracted by the government to offer a form of foster care for these children. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/deported-parents-may-lose-kids-adoption-investigation-finds-n918261">People started asking</a>: What are they going to do with these children that they’re taking away from their parents? Are they going to be offering these children for adoption?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="C3fejY">
|
||
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning <em>Roe</em>, there’s this similarly blunt thing that happened. Two Supreme Court justices — Samuel Alito in his opinion and Amy Coney Barrett in her arguments last winter — made the argument that abortion is not needed because we’ve got adoption. <a href="https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1521332386184769541?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1521332386184769541%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mic.com%2Fimpact%2Froe-adoption-abortion-conservatives">Right-wing politicians</a> have said that adoption is the answer to unplanned pregnancies. And then you have people showing up with celebratory signs and big smiles that say “We will adopt your baby.” That makes it too hard to ignore for a lot of people who weren’t really well-versed in those dynamics.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div id="GtPZ1l">
|
||
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" dir="ltr" lang="en">
|
||
My favorite sign yesterday. <a href="https://t.co/6UsmNy8Q9r">pic.twitter.com/6UsmNy8Q9r</a>
|
||
</p>
|
||
— Noelle Fitchett (<span class="citation" data-cites="NoelleFitchett">@NoelleFitchett</span>) <a href="https://twitter.com/NoelleFitchett/status/1540805540946649089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2022</a>
|
||
</blockquote></div></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mTCf5p">
|
||
<strong>Your book primarily (but not exclusively) deals with international adoption, especially evangelical Christian families adopting children, sometimes lots of them, from overseas. How does domestic adoption fit into that picture?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5abH3Z">
|
||
The movement’s rhetoric as a whole is this idea that by adopting, you’re doing something more than just building a family. You are also solving the problem of abortion, because in their mind, you are providing the answer to unplanned pregnancy. Adoption is seen as a seamless solution.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TWhyiE">
|
||
Poverty is the common denominator here. One family is being broken apart for reasons that ultimately boil down to poverty in various complicated ways. Usually, much wealthier families are being created out of a piece of that first family.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lcw9Zo">
|
||
When I was doing my reporting for the book, I spoke to the director of an adoption agency in the Pacific Northwest that prided itself on being very open and trying to avoid a lot of the ethical problems that have plagued other adoption agencies. She told me that if you look at all different forms of adoption, the one thing they have in common is the birth mother is invisible. You’re erasing not just the birth mother but the entire family of origin. They’re sometimes seen as the source of a product, as crass as that sounds. It’s how a lot of adoptees have ended up feeling — like a product or a supply.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4sC16x">
|
||
And these ideas make those families of origin invisible by making them part of a broad caricature. If it’s domestic adoption, it’s got to be some messed-up family or substance-addicted family or abusive family. Or careless, feckless young parents who weren’t responsible. On the flipside, they’re made into these angels who have given the ultimate sacrifice. But they’re never looked at as individual people who, with different resources and support, might have made a different choice.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WoQvRg">
|
||
Internationally, you see a similar thing. The families of origin had been treated for a long time as a terrible situation from which children were rescued, or they were written about in some kind of third-world tragedy terms.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9RqRgY">
|
||
<strong>How do you think this intersects with race?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KZaOUh">
|
||
Sometimes in the rhetoric around international adoptions, there’s what a lot of people would characterize as “white saviorism”: These children were thrown away, and the adoptive parents or the church has come along to redeem them. A lot of times, those ideas will involve some fairly severe denigration of the country, the culture, or the family that the children came from.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sxRmok">
|
||
If you look at the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, there was an extreme version of that rhetoric, with people talking about Haiti as this doomed or even satanic country. There was a sense of saving these children from growing up in that country. And the leaders of Haiti pointed out at the time, “What are you saying about our country if you say the only chance our children have is to be taken out of it?”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ivhQck">
|
||
In the last 20 years, transracial adoptees in particular have talked about their experiences with this. Generational waves of adoptees of a certain age come from a particular country because that country was a hot spot adoption center at the time. So there is this older wave of Korean American adoptees [from the 1980s] who were pioneers in a lot of this research and advocacy. They talk about having many times grown up in an area where they were the only person of color. And Black or Latinx adoptees, whether they were adopted domestically or internationally, say similar things.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="74cGhv">
|
||
Even adoptees who had really happy situations and were close with their adoptive family will say that something that was missing was the understanding of what it would be like to grow up a person of color in a largely white community.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<figure class="e-image">
|
||
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ks8mfs80rPB_O2r2nHXxAHJ6riA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23786862/GettyImages_675653308a.jpg"/> <cite>Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images</cite>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
Anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights demonstrators wave their signs outside the US Supreme Court during the 1989 March for Life in Washington, DC.
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="e6wLcF">
|
||
<strong>The natural question is: Why aren’t the folks who were holding those signs not just adopting </strong><a href="https://www.acf.hhs.gov/media/press/2021/national-data-shows-number-children-foster-care-decreases-third-consecutive-year"><strong>kids in foster care</strong></a><strong>? Obviously, it’s not that simple, but I’m still asking myself that question.</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hAVQwU">
|
||
There are different dynamics at play. A lot of times people who want to adopt do want to adopt infants or young children. There is a perception that children who have been in the foster care system are damaged in some way. Sometimes, there are weird racial dynamics. There have been adoptive parents who have distinguished, racially, between Black kids in the foster care system in the US and Black kids who were available for adoption from countries in Africa. They would say, “My kid’s not Black. They’re Ethiopian.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eLdr21">
|
||
But the foster care system also has a ton of problems. The majority of kids who end up in the child welfare system in most places in this country are overwhelmingly there not because of child abuse but because of things that fall under the category of neglect. To people who haven’t paid that much attention to it, it’s easy to conclude that kids who are neglected aren’t being fed and aren’t safe and need to be taken away. But that’s often not what neglect ends up meaning.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fhwMWD">
|
||
Most of the time, it boils down to things that, again, are about poverty. There are huge racial disparities there, but also really significant classist elements. Poor white families also often end up on the wrong side of that scrutiny. The neglect that ends up separating so many kids from their families in poorer communities in this country is so subjective.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6nhE9j">
|
||
Kids end up in this system because they wore dirty clothes to school, or because a school nurse found lice, or because their parents were trying to get substance-abuse treatment. Most of these things just boil down, ultimately, to them being poor. If we were a country that provided better resources to deal with these things, it wouldn’t result in a system that starts its own catastrophic chain of events, both for families but also for the system as a whole when it starts taking in way more children than it can responsibly care for.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gVxDxE">
|
||
<strong>Obviously, lots of people are adopting because they can’t have children for whatever reason. But what do you see as overriding motivations about adoption within these religious communities, even in families that are only adopting two or three kids?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="w0nT3Q">
|
||
Everybody’s in an individual situation, and most people, the primary motivation is to either build or expand their family. That remains true.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1ilTEn">
|
||
When I was writing about the Christian adoption movement 10 years ago, there was this concerted effort to cast adoption not just as something individuals did for all the reasons that people do things, but to cast it into a religious mission, where they would be doing a number of things simultaneously. They would be solving the “orphan crisis,” which was this argument that there are hundreds of millions of children who are orphaned and in need of adoptive homes around the world. And the other argument was they could solve the abortion question. They could provide the homes that pro-choice advocates were constantly challenging and asking for when they would say things like, “Are you prepared to adopt all these extra kids?”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="E0gbLr">
|
||
As the movement really got into full swing in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a lot of religious leaders started writing books making a theological case for adoption as well. A lot of those books would point out what they saw as a parallel between the adoption of children into a family and the way Christians were adopted into God’s family when they accepted Christ. So they would say, if you adopt, you are capturing this divine pattern in your family. Some of the books made an argument that the ultimate purpose of adoption is fulfilling the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-great-commission-and-why-is-it-so-controversial-111138">Great Commission mandate</a> that you are <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2028%3A16-20&version=NIV">going and converting the nations of the world</a>, that you are evangelizing through adoption.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="35X6rW">
|
||
<strong>The physical toll a pregnancy takes on someone’s body is substantial, but as we talk about birth families, I want to think about the mental and psychological effects of going through a pregnancy and giving the child away, even if you are doing so willingly. What do those look like?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cEC03Y">
|
||
The reason I ended up writing about adoption in the first place is I was speaking to a lot of the women who had relinquished their children during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era">baby scoop era</a>, before [1973’s] <em>Roe v. Wade</em>. Unwed parenthood was so shameful that a lot of white women got sent away to these maternity homes, so they could go through pregnancy and deliver, then pretend nothing happened.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<figure class="e-image">
|
||
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Mw6kTovYlnHwy7cQX03W6uSGhnc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23767696/929339492.jpg"/> <cite>BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</cite>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
A French woman adopting a child from Tahiti meets the biological mother.
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XuS4YO">
|
||
I was speaking to these women decades later, and they were still so raw from that loss. It had come to define their life. Everyone I spoke to felt at least coerced, like they were not given a real chance to make a decision to parent. They said all kinds of things, like they would have PTSD reactions if they heard children crying, or that some of them never stopped thinking about where their child was and if they were okay.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wyx6BN">
|
||
Some of the mothers I spoke to who had this experience talked about this as a form of ambiguous loss. That’s a term they often use for families of someone who has gone missing. In some ways, that can be harder to deal with than if somebody has died because you are living constantly in this state of uncertainty.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qbP6fB">
|
||
<strong>Adoption is always going to exist. It’s always going to be part of how humanity handles children who need homes. But we’re also entering an era when there might be a lot more of it. What are some things we could do as a society to make adoption less traumatic for everybody involved?</strong>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="n4caXd">
|
||
It needs to be a truly informed choice, which is something we haven’t seen, outside of certain circumstances. But it’s never been the main experience of people relinquishing children for adoption.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9Pg1x7">
|
||
So many people have talked about forms of pressure they encountered. They might have to fill out these questionnaires that make them feel like there’s no way they are prepared or wealthy enough to raise a child, which is a pretty subtle form of coercion. But there’s more overt ways, like outright telling people there’s no way they could be a good parent and if they keep their child, they’re being selfish.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gcEkJl">
|
||
We would need to start asking: Has this person or their family been offered the material resources that they are most likely lacking to be able to keep their family intact? There’s a lot of talk, even among adoption advocates, that adoption should be the last resort after trying to reunite a family, or trying to keep a child within an extended family or within their community — or at least within their country, if it’s international.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wSoiSU">
|
||
In practice, it’s never worked out that way because those options cost the state money. If you’re really going to support families, in the way that a handful of Republican politicians say they are willing to consider doing now that they have outlawed abortion in many states, that is going to cost a huge amount of money. The adoption industry is a private, market-based solution to that problem that generates money for Western businesses and all of the middlemen that get involved.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uHU11B">
|
||
We haven’t ever really tried a system that’s non-coercive. But I also think you can’t talk about that prospect without the bedrock choice that people need to have: to decide whether to go through with a pregnancy. Most people involved in adoptions, most people who have relinquished custody, will tell you that whether or not to continue a pregnancy is a very different decision than whether to parent that child.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
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||
<ul>
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||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Reconsider GST recommendation for horse racing on merit: TAI</strong> - Appeals to the GoM by citing the adverse impact on horse racing in the country</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>England vs India second ODI | India wins toss, elects to field</strong> - India is 1-0 ahead in the three-match series.</p></li>
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||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Ahead Of My Time, Arabian Phoenix and Exclusive impress</strong> -</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>MRF 2W Rally of Coimbatore this weekend</strong> -</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>West Indies vs India T20I series | Kohli, Bumrah rested; Ashwin returns</strong> - K.L. Rahul and Kuldeep Yadav were picked in the 18-man squad subject to fitness.</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Vaccination prevents deaths, masking prevents infection: IIPH Director</strong> -</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Viswakarma community’s issues will be solved: Minister</strong> - 12 recommendations of Sankaran Commission will be implemented</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Kodagu rain: 14 families shifted to relief camp from ‘unsafe’ zone</strong> - Three more families still remain at Tora village in Virajpet taluk despite knowing the risks of staying there amidst torrential rain and the threat of landslides</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Saint Gobain to support 40 women students of IIITDM Kancheepuram</strong> - Saint-Gobain India has signed an eight-year agreement with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram, to provide scholarship to 40 girl students doing B.Tech.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Vice-President inaugurates blood transfusion centre</strong> -</p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Ukraine war: Russian rocket attack kills 20 in Vinnytsia</strong> - Ukrainian officials say three children were among those killed in the central city of Vinnytsia.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Wildfires rage as Europe battles heatwave</strong> - Around 3,500 firefighters in Portugal are battling blazes as temperatures continue to rise in Europe.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Italy’s PM Draghi on brink as crisis vote looms</strong> - His government nears collapse after a populist coalition party plans to pull out of a confidence vote.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Swedish court convicts Iranian ex-official over 1988 executions</strong> - Former prison official Hamid Nouri is found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison.</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Nazi Soldau: Ashes of 8,000 victims found in mass grave in Poland</strong> - A mass grave containing 17.5 tonnes of ashes is unearthed in Poland, close to a former Nazi camp.</p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>GM, EVgo, and Pilot will install 2,000 fast chargers at travel centers</strong> - This is on top of GM and EVgo installing 3,250 fast chargers by 2025. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866738">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Electric cars are doomed if fast charger reliability doesn’t get better</strong> - If every driver has a horror story about charging, adoption is going to stall. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866587">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>All the best Amazon Prime Day 2022 deals we can find [Day 2 Update]</strong> - We’ve sorted through Amazon’s annual garage sale to find the stuff that’s worth your time. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1863699">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Novavax’s COVID vaccine finally wins FDA authorization for use in unvaccinated</strong> - The two-dose, protein-subunit vaccine is intended for a primary series, not boosters. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866721">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Microsoft wins deal to serve ads on Netflix, edging out Comcast and Google</strong> - Microsoft will be Netflix’s exclusive “advertising technology and sales partner.” - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866697">link</a></p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>A new monk arrives at the monastery</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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<div class="md">
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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A new monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned the task of helping the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He notices, however, that they are copying copies, and not the original books.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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So, the new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out that if there was an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. The head monk says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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So, he goes down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours later, nobody has seen him. So, one of the monks goes downstairs to look for him. He hears sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old monk leaning over one of the original books crying. He asks what’s wrong.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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“You fuckers”, he says, with anger and sadness in his eyes, “the word was celebrate!”
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Unkizor"> /u/Unkizor </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vylsuv/a_new_monk_arrives_at_the_monastery/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vylsuv/a_new_monk_arrives_at_the_monastery/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>I got fired from a sperm bank…</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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<div class="md">
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Every time someone walked in I’d say “get a load of this guy”
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Jmards15"> /u/Jmards15 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vybzr7/i_got_fired_from_a_sperm_bank/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vybzr7/i_got_fired_from_a_sperm_bank/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>A man found a woman tied to the rail tracks and untied her.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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<div class="md">
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Then they had a lot of sex and he was on his way to the bar. He started boasting about all the different positions they had sex in.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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The bartender asks did you get any head.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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To which the man replies “I couldn’t find the head.”
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/curiousrelatively"> /u/curiousrelatively </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vy770y/a_man_found_a_woman_tied_to_the_rail_tracks_and/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vy770y/a_man_found_a_woman_tied_to_the_rail_tracks_and/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>My Boss calls me ‘the computer’</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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<div class="md">
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Nothing to do with my intelligence, I go to sleep if left unattended for 15 minutes.
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/RemarkableSeason3754"> /u/RemarkableSeason3754 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vyeeb3/my_boss_calls_me_the_computer/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vyeeb3/my_boss_calls_me_the_computer/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>my brother in law and I have always wanted to come up with our own joke nobody has told before. I want to see if you guys like it!</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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<div class="md">
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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So there’s this old farmer whose really into Egyptian culture and one day he passes away.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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It’s his redneck son’s job to bury him so he talks to his wife and says “honey I’m not sure what to do, do I bury or cremate my dad? I think I need a couple days to think about it”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Well a couple days go by and she goes outside and he’s giving oral sex to one of their geese and she says “what in the hell are you doing?!”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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And he says “well dad always wanted one of those surc-off-a-gooses”
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Heiser147"> /u/Heiser147 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vymtwt/my_brother_in_law_and_i_have_always_wanted_to/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/vymtwt/my_brother_in_law_and_i_have_always_wanted_to/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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</ul>
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