The Inimitable Tiff

FiveThirtyEight examined the results of a survey of over 10,000 global knowledge workers2 recruited by Future Forum, a research consortium run by Slack.3 The survey included over 5,000 respondents from the U.S., plus approximately 1,000 additional respondents each from Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

We wanted to see which groups, if any, want to return to full-time in-person work. Participants were asked a variety of questions, including how working remotely compares with office work, how satisfied they were with their workplace and where their sense of belonging stood at this point in the pandemic. We then looked at the workplace experiences of groups that experts have already identified as having been most affected by the switch from in-person to remote work: those who experience workplace inequality due to their race, gender, or both; and those who provide the majority of their family’s childcare or eldercare.

The group most enthusiastic to return to in-person work is white men — 30 percent want the office to be the only place where they work. Roughly half as many Black men — almost 16 percent — feel the same. White and Black women are in the middle, around 22 percent each.

That might be because in the U.S., office culture was originally created to accommodate the needs of white people, and specifically men, says Angelica Leigh, a professor of management and organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Leigh’s research shows that when dealing with the aftermath of massive social events that disproportionately affect people of color, such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, many employees of color supress their emotions in order to fit into the norms of the office. She and her colleague refer to that suppression as identity labor.

Uninhibited growth can lead to new problems for cities, as human development puts new demands on the environment.

Researchers and experts have said explosive urban development was a contributing factor for the intense flooding after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017. The city is located on some of the country’s least permeable soil, and construction of impervious surfaces, like roads in flood-prone areas, exacerbated the inability of the city to withstand worsening natural disasters because of climate change.

“You have the two water problems: too much water or not enough,” Saiz said, referring to both the risk of flooding in low-lying developed areas in states such as South Carolina, Florida and Texas, as well as the dangers of water shortages in the Southwest United States.

Water shortages in cities like Las Vegas are the result of outdated leasing agreements for water from the Colorado River.

Researchers at Harvard University estimated that there were nearly 20,000 extra coronavirus infections and 750 Covid-19 deaths associated with exposure to wildfire smoke between March and December 2020 in the American West. The paper was published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

Exposure to smoke, whether from air pollution or cigarette smoke, is believed to impair the function of white blood cells in the lungs, blunting the body’s immune response. The chemicals in particulate matter can also inflame cells lining the airways and lungs. In both cases, if the body is exposed to a virus in addition to air pollution, the immune response may be slowed and the person may develop a more severe illness than they would have otherwise, researchers say.

The findings build on the well-established connection between air pollution and respiratory-tract infections and conditions such as asthma. But the study is the first to show a statistical link between wildfire smoke and Covid-19 caseloads and deaths.

Under pressure, the industry has been experiencing a wave of closures and consolidations. Smaller nonprofit nursing homes are being closed or swallowed by for-profit entities, even as smaller for-profits are absorbed by large corporations. Private-equity firms have also become a major industry player. On the whole, nonprofit facilities provide a higher quality of care, and private-equity has a particularly troubling reputation.

Covid 19 turned nursing homes’ chronic operating problems into emergencies. From January 2020 to January 2021, nursing home occupancy fell nationwide more than 16 percent. In a survey released in June, 54 percent of nursing homes said they were operating at a loss and only a quarter of nursing homes and assisted living facilities expressed confidence they could survive another year.

But deforestation and climate change may soon lead to a permanent change in the region’s climate, scientists warn. The rainforest would be eroded past the point at which it can produce enough rainfall to sustain itself. More forest would die out, further reducing rainfall, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of self-destruction that, once begun, might not be possible to stop.

Before long, much of the world’s largest rainforest could disappear, receding into a vast savanna.

This would be a terrible loss in its own right, stripping the world of much of its biodiversity, and more broadly, a climate disaster without an equivalent in world history. The region would cease to absorb climate-warming carbon dioxide and, in the process, release up to six times the annual carbon output of every coal-burning plant on earth.

I first wrote about dieback, as this phenomenon is known, in 2019. That year, Thomas Lovejoy, a prominent environmental scientist, told me the scenario was “close. It’s really close.”

He added, “And it can happen in a very short period of time.”

“People tend to either love them or hate them, and cats are often underappreciated by the scientific community,” she writes. But, she says, in some ways the organization of the cat genome is much like the human genome, and cat genomics could help in the understanding of the vast amount of mammalian DNA that does not constitute genes, and is poorly understood.

Among the advances in veterinary medicine that have benefited humans, she pointed out that remdesivir, an important drug in combating Covid, was first successfully used against a cat disease caused by another coronavirus.

She is the director of the 99 Lives Cat Genome Sequencing Initiative and as part of that project, she and a group of colleagues, including Wes Warren at the University of Missouri and William Murphy at Texas A&M University, recently produced the most detailed genome of the cat to date, which surpasses the dog genome.

Neil Irwin:

Fed officials believe the strategy of keeping easy monetary policy in place even as the economy is well into its recovery will help bring the American job market back to full health quickly. The aim is also to establish credibility that its 2 percent inflation target is symmetric, meaning that it will not panic when prices temporarily overshoot that target.

Many of the people involved in market strategy are less than thrilled with this approach, and the consequences for would-be investors.

“Nominal yields are low because of how much the Fed is buying,” said Ms. Desai of Franklin Templeton. “It’s ludicrous given where we are” with growth and inflation.

At the same time, Americans have accumulated trillions in extra savings during the pandemic, money they are parking in all sorts of investments, which has been pushing asset prices upward and expected returns down. Arguably, the flip side of low expected returns on safe assets is stratospheric prices for real estate, meme stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Globally, demographic trends tied to the aging of the enormous baby boom generation are causing a surge in savings. Gertjan Vlieghe, a top official with the Bank of England, has shown that the pattern of retirement savings evident in Britain and across advanced nations points to continued low interest rates.

Zeynep Tufekci:

I’ll be first to say that the media can and should do a better job. But the administration’s job is to make sure the message they send is clear, timely, loud and unified, not just to get angry at factors beyond their control.

How else could this have played out? Ideally, with better data and earlier response. The C.D.C. should start tracking more breakthrough cases, and do much more systematic data collection, including cluster and contact-tracing, while the pandemic continues to rage. Yes, such infrastructure cannot be built overnight, but we have to start from where we are.

Sarah Smarsh:

Anger is a contagious energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt others. If allowed to implode, it will hurt you. I had to learn early how to transmute it for the sake of my own survival. I found that it can be the source of a powerful alchemy. If we are up to the task, it could help us create something good together.

That alchemy begins with awareness. Are we justified in our indignation? Do we have the facts? If we do not understand the problem, our feelings are untethered from reality. Untethered anger tends to be unproductive and selfish, delighting our egos rather than directing us toward necessary action.

So when you are ready — and if you are never ready, whether because you mourn a loved one’s death or your altered future, I won’t judge — let us hold our rage in our hands and look closely to see what it contains.

And

This archetypal bumpkin villain of post-Trump America has long received too much credit in a country where Trumpism thrives in affluent, white urban communities bursting with college degrees. In handling the pandemic, such misdirection of attention keeps us from what we should be doing: trying to reach the vast group of people who might choose vaccination if barriers to access and knowledge were removed.

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Farm Bank went on to weave a complicated, meta-business model: in 2017, the company began setting up deli franchises across Turkey. Franchisees paid Farm Bank about $30,000 (100,000 lira) to open shops that sold sausage, cheese, butter, honey, and other goods emblazoned with the Farm Bank logo — suggesting that the produce had come from the company’s livestock. It did not.

Meanwhile, Farm Bank players received 95% of their earnings in cash and 5% in vouchers that they could use to purchase items from the delis. The company would then pay deli owners a 20% profit on the items players bought with the vouchers. More than 100 Farm Bank delis popped up throughout Turkey.

It was in the midst of this apparent success that the app’s founder, 26-year-old Mehmet Aydın, approached freelance software programmer Cudi Cumhur Yurdakul, then 27, to work on developing Farm Bank. At the time, Yurdakul couldn’t have guessed where the job would take him —  across the Atlantic ocean several times, and ultimately to prison. “When I met Mehmet,” Yurdakul told Rest of World, “the only thing that I noticed was that he was a determined person.”

In March 2018, a year after Yurdakul joined the company, the Farm Bank house of cards collapsed. News broke that Aydın had fled the country with loads of cash from his investors. In less than two years of running the company, the company had collected around $250 million (1.14 billion lira) from Farm Bank users. Aydın made off with upwards of  $80.5 million (322 million lira) , which he took with him to South America. There, reports captured the elusive executive driving fast cars and living in luxury.

Linkrot and content drift at this scale across the New York Times is not a sign of neglect, but rather a reflection of the state of modern online citation. The rapid sharing of information through links enhances the field of journalism. That it is being compromised by the fundamental volatility of the Web points to the need for new practices, workflows, and technologies.

Retroactive options––or mitigation––are limited, but still important to consider. The Internet Archive hosts an impressive, though far from comprehensive, assortment of snapshots of websites. It’s best understood as a means of patching incidents of linkrot and content drift. Publications could work to improve the visibility of the Internet Archive and other services like it as a tool for readers, or even automatically replace broken links with ones to archives, as the Wikipedia community has done.

Still, more fundamental measures are necessary. Journalists have adopted some proactive solutions, such as screenshotting and storing static images of websites. But it doesn’t solve for the reader who comes across an inaccessible link.

Eighteen months after the kickoff party, the 19th can reasonably be called a success. It has raised $13 million, attracted 10,500 paying members, and hired more than 30 staffers.

Although it does not share audience numbers, it has landed scoopy interviews, including the first with Kamala D. Harris after Joe Biden named her as his running mate. Politico called the 19th the “the start-up scoring all the Biden admin. interviews,” noting that it has also interviewed prominent Republican women.

The outlet’s first virtual summit drew 180,000 viewers. And when it holds its second one this month, the speakers will include Michelle Obama, Demi Lovato, Billie Jean King and Nikole Hannah-Jones.

That success hasn’t happened by standing still. It’s required one adjustment after another.

The site has dropped some of what Ramshaw calls “the baggage of legacy news organizations” — including the media’s tendency to treat both sides of every controversy as respectable, even when one isn’t. Not long after President Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers provoked an insurrection at the Capitol in January, for example, the 19th changed its self-description from “nonpartisan” to “independent.”

“A lot of aging research is obsessed with returning people to a younger state or turning back the clock,” he said. “But here the conclusion is very different. Maybe a microbiome that’s healthy for a 20-year-old is not at all healthy for an 80-year-old. It seems that it’s good to have a changing microbiome when you’re old. It means that the bugs that are in your system are adjusting appropriately to an aging body.”

The researchers could not be certain whether changes in the gut microbiome helped to drive healthy aging or vice versa. But they did see signs that what happens in people’s guts may directly improve their health. They found, for example, that people whose microbiomes shifted toward a unique profile as they aged also had higher levels of health-promoting compounds in their blood, including compounds produced by gut microbes that fight chronic disease.

During the Trump years, the number of scientists and technical experts at the United States Geological Survey, an agency of the Interior Department and one of the nation’s premier climate-science research institutions, fell to 3,152 in 2020 from 3,434 in 2016, a loss of about 8 percent.

Two agencies within the Agriculture Department that produce climate research to help farmers lost 75 percent of their employees after the Trump administration relocated their offices in 2019 from Washington to Kansas City, Mo., according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.

And at the E.P.A., the number of environmental protection specialists dropped to 1,630 from 2,152, a 24 percent decline, according to a House science committee report, which called the losses “a blow to the heart” of the agency. The E.P.A. is operating under its Trump-era budget of about $9 billion, which pays for 14,172 employees. Mr. Biden has asked Congress to increase that to $11.2 billion.

At the same time, Mr. Biden has directed the E.P.A. to write ambitious new rules reining in climate-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plants and oil and gas wells, while also restoring Obama-era rules on toxic mercury pollution and wetlands protection.

The prosecution has already emerged as a critical test for how the Biden administration approaches the growing threat of homegrown anti-government groups. More than that, though, the case epitomizes the ideological divisions that have riven the country over the past several years. To some, the FBI’s infiltration of the innermost circle of armed anti-government groups is a model for how to successfully forestall dangerous acts of domestic terrorism. But for others, it’s an example of precisely the kind of outrageous government overreach that radicalizes people in the first place, and, increasingly, a flashpoint for deep state conspiracy theories.

The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.

You could say that this move away from the ironic and antiheroic modes is a repudiation of the bad fans. But you could also argue that it’s a concession to them — at least, to the idea that good storytelling means that author and character should be in sync.

When you watched “Arrested Development” in 2003, you might love watching the Bluths, but you were under no illusions that you were meant to see them the way they saw themselves. Whereas watching “Ted Lasso,” you believe that Ted Lasso is decent, and so do the supporting characters (even the ones who don’t like him), and so does “Ted Lasso.”

You can even see this arc in the careers of individual artists. Take Ryan Murphy, who went from dark-comic acid baths like the high school satire “Popular” and the mordant plastic-surgery drama “Nip/Tuck” to the idealistic “Hollywood” and the recently concluded “Pose,” a heart-on-its-sleeve celebration of the queer and transgender pioneers of the New York ballroom scene in the 1980s and 1990s. In between was “Glee,” which managed to be savage and sentimental at the same time.

Margaret Sullivan:

The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly nonpolitical testimony from four police officers who were attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.

This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explicit Republican obstructionism.”

This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.

Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”