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Celerity
Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
July 23, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/your-anti-racism-books-are-means-not-end/614281/
In today’s cultural moment—during which hundreds of mainstream institutions in the U.S. are acknowledging systemic racism—books and other content about race and discrimination have surged in popularity. These texts, such as How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi; So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo; and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, are meant to elevate general knowledge about Black people’s lived experiences, and the ways that racism is baked into American life. They have been widely circulated throughout university plenaries, in corporate seminars, and on public-library websites. Black-owned independent bookstores have been swamped with orders driven by overwhelming demand, and sales for titles on civil rights have tripled in some cases.
Social change via collective awareness—known as “consciousness raising”—isn’t a new strategy; it originated during the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and was popularized by the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. During the latter, consciousness raising was used as a way to mobilize women and draw them to feminism by pushing the notion that their experiences (in their interpersonal relationships, workplaces, and childhoods) were not individual, but rather a shared, gendered condition. Yet many radical feminists (especially Black ones) were critical of consciousness raising, wary that mainstream feminism was doing more navel-gazing than organizing to tackle social problems.
With consciousness raising today, a similar issue has emerged: the idea that broader knowledge of systemic racism will bring about meaningful social change for Black communities. The tactic can be a crucial step toward resolving forms of oppression, and the work of Black scholars, journalists, and writers has contributed greatly to how these issues are being reframed in the public discourse. But many of these authors would agree that raising awareness about racism is not a means in itself of correcting injustice. And while the crafters of anti-racist reading lists are mostly making an earnest effort to educate people, literature and dialogue cannot supplant restorative social policies and laws, organizational change, and structural redress.
When offered in lieu of actionable policies regarding equity, consciousness raising can actually undermine Black progress by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse. Executives at major corporations such as Amazon, for instance, have invited race scholars and writers to “help [them unpack]” such topics as the American justice system and how to be an anti-racist ally. Yet Black employees at many of these companies have pointed to the hypocrisy of in-house dialogues about race while practices like labor exploitation continue. In the form of hollow public statements and company-sponsored conversations, consciousness raising is often toothless.
snip
The False Promise of Anti-racism Books
Texts that seek to raise the collective American consciousness are rendered futile without concrete systemic changes.https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/your-anti-racism-books-are-means-not-end/614281/
In today’s cultural moment—during which hundreds of mainstream institutions in the U.S. are acknowledging systemic racism—books and other content about race and discrimination have surged in popularity. These texts, such as How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi; So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo; and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, are meant to elevate general knowledge about Black people’s lived experiences, and the ways that racism is baked into American life. They have been widely circulated throughout university plenaries, in corporate seminars, and on public-library websites. Black-owned independent bookstores have been swamped with orders driven by overwhelming demand, and sales for titles on civil rights have tripled in some cases.
Social change via collective awareness—known as “consciousness raising”—isn’t a new strategy; it originated during the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and was popularized by the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. During the latter, consciousness raising was used as a way to mobilize women and draw them to feminism by pushing the notion that their experiences (in their interpersonal relationships, workplaces, and childhoods) were not individual, but rather a shared, gendered condition. Yet many radical feminists (especially Black ones) were critical of consciousness raising, wary that mainstream feminism was doing more navel-gazing than organizing to tackle social problems.
With consciousness raising today, a similar issue has emerged: the idea that broader knowledge of systemic racism will bring about meaningful social change for Black communities. The tactic can be a crucial step toward resolving forms of oppression, and the work of Black scholars, journalists, and writers has contributed greatly to how these issues are being reframed in the public discourse. But many of these authors would agree that raising awareness about racism is not a means in itself of correcting injustice. And while the crafters of anti-racist reading lists are mostly making an earnest effort to educate people, literature and dialogue cannot supplant restorative social policies and laws, organizational change, and structural redress.
When offered in lieu of actionable policies regarding equity, consciousness raising can actually undermine Black progress by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse. Executives at major corporations such as Amazon, for instance, have invited race scholars and writers to “help [them unpack]” such topics as the American justice system and how to be an anti-racist ally. Yet Black employees at many of these companies have pointed to the hypocrisy of in-house dialogues about race while practices like labor exploitation continue. In the form of hollow public statements and company-sponsored conversations, consciousness raising is often toothless.
snip
July 22, 2020
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-finally-has-his-stormtroopers
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Trump had attempted a military coup and failed on every conceivable level. I also wrote that he had given up on the idea of “dominating the streets” of American cities because the military refused to be his cudgel against the people of the United States. I really should have known better. Once he and his regime of literal fascists realized the military as it is currently configured was not going to follow unconstitutional orders, they went with Plan B: Organize America’s very own Gestapo. For the last several days, heavily armed federal agents with no discernible identification have been roaming the streets of Portland, Oregon, randomly snatching people, throwing them into unmarked cars, and driving off.
https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/1285054555600777216
There is literally nothing about this that is legal. And that’s the point.
State Sponsored Terrorism
Even though the media got bored of them, the BLM protests over the murder of George Floyd have not stopped. They’ve morphed into a larger protest against both police brutality and displays of white supremacy in the form of Confederate statues but they’re still going strong. They are not, however, marked with the ongoing violence seen in the first few days of the protests and there has been relatively minor amounts of vandalism. This is essentially why the media got bored and left. No violence, no news. Left wing protests are so very, very boring. Mostly because the protesters don’t carry guns and threaten to murder elected officials. But non-violent confrontations do not serve Donald Trump’s Orwellian “LAW AND ORDER!!!” narrative. For that, you need protesters clashing with the police. You need tear gas flooding the streets. You need people running from lines of militarized law enforcement to show how strong and tough and macho the government is. If the protesters are no longer angry enough to throw things at the local police and the local police are no longer angry enough to antagonize the protesters, what’s a fascist regime to do? Send in the feds to instigate violence and literally terrorize the community, of course.
Via OPB.org:
As was pointed out on Twitter, this is some Pinochet type bullshit.
https://twitter.com/4everNeverTrump/status/1283956223486726144
Just to be super clear: Trump is having federal law enforcement drive around in unmarked, non-government vehicles, while wearing no identification, grabbing people without telling them why they are being detained, and whisking them away. They are also not coordinating with the local police.
Let’s look at the different reasons to do this:
1. It’s straight up terrorism. You don’t do this unless you’re looking to scare the shit out of people. Half the work of a police state is done when the populace is too terrified to resist. See: Gestapo and KGB.
2. Unaccountability. With no visible names or agencies and the officers being shipped in from all over the country, it becomes nearly impossible to identify who is doing what in the name of the federal government.
Don’t be surprised when Trump’s secret police force becomes a formalized group and adopts a face mask as part of their official uniform.
3. The anonymous nature of the kidnappings (let’s call them what they are) leave a massive opening for white nationalist militias to show up in their own military uniforms and unmarked cars and grab people. Don’t expect the Trump regime to care too much about this possibility.
4. Deniability. American law enforcement has a history, some of it quite recent, of targeting movement leaders. With a secret police force, they can disappear “troublemakers” and who do we go to for answers? No one. And, again, that’s the point. If you think that’s a stretch, consider the announcement that Trump’s secret police force will now be “collecting data” on protesters beforehand. It helps to know who to target while also sending a clear message: “We are watching you and you may be one of the people we grab.” (Please refer back to the section concerning terrorism)
5. Escalation. People are going to get angry about this. The longer it goes on, the angrier they’re going to get. That, more than anything else, is the bottom line to these kidnappings. Trump needs chaos and violence in the streets and since it’s not happening on its own, he’s going to create it.
Creating Red Meat For The Base Or Laying The Groundwork?...........
snip
Trump Finally Has His Stormtroopers
Trump needs chaos and violence in the streets and since it’s not happening on its own, he’s going to create it.https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-finally-has-his-stormtroopers
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Trump had attempted a military coup and failed on every conceivable level. I also wrote that he had given up on the idea of “dominating the streets” of American cities because the military refused to be his cudgel against the people of the United States. I really should have known better. Once he and his regime of literal fascists realized the military as it is currently configured was not going to follow unconstitutional orders, they went with Plan B: Organize America’s very own Gestapo. For the last several days, heavily armed federal agents with no discernible identification have been roaming the streets of Portland, Oregon, randomly snatching people, throwing them into unmarked cars, and driving off.
https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/1285054555600777216
There is literally nothing about this that is legal. And that’s the point.
State Sponsored Terrorism
Even though the media got bored of them, the BLM protests over the murder of George Floyd have not stopped. They’ve morphed into a larger protest against both police brutality and displays of white supremacy in the form of Confederate statues but they’re still going strong. They are not, however, marked with the ongoing violence seen in the first few days of the protests and there has been relatively minor amounts of vandalism. This is essentially why the media got bored and left. No violence, no news. Left wing protests are so very, very boring. Mostly because the protesters don’t carry guns and threaten to murder elected officials. But non-violent confrontations do not serve Donald Trump’s Orwellian “LAW AND ORDER!!!” narrative. For that, you need protesters clashing with the police. You need tear gas flooding the streets. You need people running from lines of militarized law enforcement to show how strong and tough and macho the government is. If the protesters are no longer angry enough to throw things at the local police and the local police are no longer angry enough to antagonize the protesters, what’s a fascist regime to do? Send in the feds to instigate violence and literally terrorize the community, of course.
Via OPB.org:
Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off. The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.
As was pointed out on Twitter, this is some Pinochet type bullshit.
https://twitter.com/4everNeverTrump/status/1283956223486726144
Just to be super clear: Trump is having federal law enforcement drive around in unmarked, non-government vehicles, while wearing no identification, grabbing people without telling them why they are being detained, and whisking them away. They are also not coordinating with the local police.
Let’s look at the different reasons to do this:
1. It’s straight up terrorism. You don’t do this unless you’re looking to scare the shit out of people. Half the work of a police state is done when the populace is too terrified to resist. See: Gestapo and KGB.
2. Unaccountability. With no visible names or agencies and the officers being shipped in from all over the country, it becomes nearly impossible to identify who is doing what in the name of the federal government.
Don’t be surprised when Trump’s secret police force becomes a formalized group and adopts a face mask as part of their official uniform.
3. The anonymous nature of the kidnappings (let’s call them what they are) leave a massive opening for white nationalist militias to show up in their own military uniforms and unmarked cars and grab people. Don’t expect the Trump regime to care too much about this possibility.
4. Deniability. American law enforcement has a history, some of it quite recent, of targeting movement leaders. With a secret police force, they can disappear “troublemakers” and who do we go to for answers? No one. And, again, that’s the point. If you think that’s a stretch, consider the announcement that Trump’s secret police force will now be “collecting data” on protesters beforehand. It helps to know who to target while also sending a clear message: “We are watching you and you may be one of the people we grab.” (Please refer back to the section concerning terrorism)
5. Escalation. People are going to get angry about this. The longer it goes on, the angrier they’re going to get. That, more than anything else, is the bottom line to these kidnappings. Trump needs chaos and violence in the streets and since it’s not happening on its own, he’s going to create it.
Creating Red Meat For The Base Or Laying The Groundwork?...........
snip
July 21, 2020
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-has-always-been-governing-on
While Democrats should rightfully be extremely anxious about the upcoming presidential election, the polling information coming in from swing states reveals an incredibly bleak forecast for Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s lead is now so comprehensive that even if you account for the polling inaccuracies in 2016, Biden still takes the electoral college with relative ease. This reality appears to be finally dawning on Donald Trump, who has apparently been so worried about his re-election prospects that he is begging Tucker Carlson to tell him what to do. A recent report in Vanity Fair outlines just how bad things are in Trumpland: Republicans that have spoken with Trump in recent days describe him as depressed and “down in the dumps.” “People around him think his heart’s not in it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Torn between the imperative to win suburban voters and his instincts to play to his base, Trump has complained to people that he’s in a political box with no obvious way out. According to the Republican, Trump called Tucker Carlson late last week and said, “what do I do? What do I do?”
While Carlson isn’t an idiot, it is hard to see how he would advise Trump to do anything other than double down on White Nationalism and racial fear mongering. After all, he urges Trump to do that nightly on his show, and has never asked Trump to take responsibility for his disastrous handling of the Coronavirus pandemic (according to Carlson, it isn’t that bad and Democrats have used the pandemic to “subvert democracy and install themselves as monarchs”). If this is where Trump is going for advice, things must really be that bad. The rest of the GOP appears to now be extremely realistic about Trump’s re-election prospects: Nervous Republicans worried about losing the Senate are now debating when to break from Trump. Trump campaign internal polls show Trump’s level of “strong support” dropping from 21 to 17 points since last week, a person briefed on the numbers said. A source close to Iowa Republican Joni Ernst’s campaign said Ernst advisers are upset that a solid seat is now in play. “Joni’s campaign is pissed. They should not be in a competitive race,” the source said. ("This is completely false," an Ernst campaign spokesperson said in a statement. "Folks are energized about re-electing Joni Ernst, President Trump and the rest of Republican ballot in Iowa this November." ) A Republican strategist close to Mitch McConnell told me that Republicans have Labor Day penciled in as the deadline for Trump to have turned things around. After that, he’s on his own.
The notion that Trump can turn things around in less than two months is becoming increasingly absurd given the trajectory of Coronavirus and the economic crisis. There are no signs that Trump is turning either around, and the success of his presidency is almost completely dependent on his ability to do just that. Mitch McConnell no doubt understands that Trump is completely incapable of making the changes necessary, so will now be recalculating how to limit the enormous damage to the GOP. Republicans attached to objective reality (ie, those not in the Trump administration) understand that this is now about saving the Senate so they can thwart Biden’s legislative agenda when he gets in. How realistic is this? According to multiple polls, not very. The race to control the Senate is still close, but the political landscape has changed so dramatically in the last few months that Republicans are now on course to lose that too. Reported the NYTimes: Mr. Biden himself told a group of journalists last week that he could see his party winning as many as 53 Senate seats this year. And on Friday, as the Senate candidates struggle to raise money, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its race ratings in 20 House seats — all in favor of the Democrats. And yes, you read that correctly: 20 House seats. This is in short, a complete catastrophe for the GOP. They have tied themselves to Trump’s presidency for the past four years, and are now apparently planning on severing themselves two months before the general election.
This clearly is not enough time, and no amount of race baiting, confederate flag waving, or fear mongering over the economy is going to do much to change things in the coming weeks. Voters now seem to be extremely cognizant of the fact that Trump and the GOP have failed to control the Coronavirus and failed to save the economy, and they are set to punish them at the polls in November. Many observers in 2016 predicted that Trump would be the end of the GOP. They thought he would crash and burn against Hillary Clinton, and take the GOP with him. Trump has spent four years mocking those who forecasted his demise, and Republicans have been more than happy to play along, protect him, and watch the country burn while he plays at being president. The reality is that those observers were not wrong about Trump and the GOP’s self immolation — they just did not take the deeply unfair electoral college into account that handed Trump the election despite losing the popular vote by almost three million people. Trump has been governing on borrowed time, delaying his inevitable demise by focusing almost entirely on short term political gimmicks. He does not think in terms of months or years, but how to survive the daily news cycle and keep the public focused on his Twitter account. Trump and the GOP have steadfastly ignored the warning signs and refused to think about the long term health of their party. It has taken 143,000 dead Americans for the country to wake up to this fact, but it now appears they have. Trump and the GOP are going to pay dearly for it in November, and should spend more time figuring out how to keep themselves out of jail than in political office.
Trump Has Always Been Governing On Borrowed Time, And Now That Time is Up
Things are so bad, Trump is apparently calling Tucker Carlson to beg for help, and the GOP planning on abandoning him before November.https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-has-always-been-governing-on
While Democrats should rightfully be extremely anxious about the upcoming presidential election, the polling information coming in from swing states reveals an incredibly bleak forecast for Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s lead is now so comprehensive that even if you account for the polling inaccuracies in 2016, Biden still takes the electoral college with relative ease. This reality appears to be finally dawning on Donald Trump, who has apparently been so worried about his re-election prospects that he is begging Tucker Carlson to tell him what to do. A recent report in Vanity Fair outlines just how bad things are in Trumpland: Republicans that have spoken with Trump in recent days describe him as depressed and “down in the dumps.” “People around him think his heart’s not in it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Torn between the imperative to win suburban voters and his instincts to play to his base, Trump has complained to people that he’s in a political box with no obvious way out. According to the Republican, Trump called Tucker Carlson late last week and said, “what do I do? What do I do?”
While Carlson isn’t an idiot, it is hard to see how he would advise Trump to do anything other than double down on White Nationalism and racial fear mongering. After all, he urges Trump to do that nightly on his show, and has never asked Trump to take responsibility for his disastrous handling of the Coronavirus pandemic (according to Carlson, it isn’t that bad and Democrats have used the pandemic to “subvert democracy and install themselves as monarchs”). If this is where Trump is going for advice, things must really be that bad. The rest of the GOP appears to now be extremely realistic about Trump’s re-election prospects: Nervous Republicans worried about losing the Senate are now debating when to break from Trump. Trump campaign internal polls show Trump’s level of “strong support” dropping from 21 to 17 points since last week, a person briefed on the numbers said. A source close to Iowa Republican Joni Ernst’s campaign said Ernst advisers are upset that a solid seat is now in play. “Joni’s campaign is pissed. They should not be in a competitive race,” the source said. ("This is completely false," an Ernst campaign spokesperson said in a statement. "Folks are energized about re-electing Joni Ernst, President Trump and the rest of Republican ballot in Iowa this November." ) A Republican strategist close to Mitch McConnell told me that Republicans have Labor Day penciled in as the deadline for Trump to have turned things around. After that, he’s on his own.
The notion that Trump can turn things around in less than two months is becoming increasingly absurd given the trajectory of Coronavirus and the economic crisis. There are no signs that Trump is turning either around, and the success of his presidency is almost completely dependent on his ability to do just that. Mitch McConnell no doubt understands that Trump is completely incapable of making the changes necessary, so will now be recalculating how to limit the enormous damage to the GOP. Republicans attached to objective reality (ie, those not in the Trump administration) understand that this is now about saving the Senate so they can thwart Biden’s legislative agenda when he gets in. How realistic is this? According to multiple polls, not very. The race to control the Senate is still close, but the political landscape has changed so dramatically in the last few months that Republicans are now on course to lose that too. Reported the NYTimes: Mr. Biden himself told a group of journalists last week that he could see his party winning as many as 53 Senate seats this year. And on Friday, as the Senate candidates struggle to raise money, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its race ratings in 20 House seats — all in favor of the Democrats. And yes, you read that correctly: 20 House seats. This is in short, a complete catastrophe for the GOP. They have tied themselves to Trump’s presidency for the past four years, and are now apparently planning on severing themselves two months before the general election.
This clearly is not enough time, and no amount of race baiting, confederate flag waving, or fear mongering over the economy is going to do much to change things in the coming weeks. Voters now seem to be extremely cognizant of the fact that Trump and the GOP have failed to control the Coronavirus and failed to save the economy, and they are set to punish them at the polls in November. Many observers in 2016 predicted that Trump would be the end of the GOP. They thought he would crash and burn against Hillary Clinton, and take the GOP with him. Trump has spent four years mocking those who forecasted his demise, and Republicans have been more than happy to play along, protect him, and watch the country burn while he plays at being president. The reality is that those observers were not wrong about Trump and the GOP’s self immolation — they just did not take the deeply unfair electoral college into account that handed Trump the election despite losing the popular vote by almost three million people. Trump has been governing on borrowed time, delaying his inevitable demise by focusing almost entirely on short term political gimmicks. He does not think in terms of months or years, but how to survive the daily news cycle and keep the public focused on his Twitter account. Trump and the GOP have steadfastly ignored the warning signs and refused to think about the long term health of their party. It has taken 143,000 dead Americans for the country to wake up to this fact, but it now appears they have. Trump and the GOP are going to pay dearly for it in November, and should spend more time figuring out how to keep themselves out of jail than in political office.
July 21, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/could-covid-19-immunity-really-disappear-months/614377/
They were the most depressing headlines I’d read all year. And that’s saying a lot. ”Immunity to COVID-19 Could Be Lost in Months,” The Guardian declared last week, drawing on a new study from the United Kingdom. Forbes grimly accelerated the timeline: “Study: Immunity to Coronavirus May Fade Away Within Weeks.” And the San Francisco Chronicle took things to a truly dark place: “With Coronavirus Antibodies Fading Fast, Vaccine Hopes Fade, Too.” Terrified, I read the study that launched a thousand headlines—and did not come away much less terrified. Researchers at King’s College London had tested more than 90 people with COVID-19 repeatedly from March to June. Several weeks after infection, their blood was swimming with antibodies, which are virus-fighting proteins. But two months later, many of these antibodies had disappeared.
The implications seemed dire. If our defenses against COVID-19 evaporate in weeks, people could contract the disease for a second time, as some widely-shared stories have suggested. In such a world, herd immunity would be out of the question. Even more depressing, it could mean that vaccines that work on the basis of antibody response would be useless after a few months. The study conjured for me a future in which the pandemic never went away. Their response: Please calm down—but don’t expect us to make you feel entirely relaxed. (I also reached out to several co-authors of the King’s College London paper, but did not hear back.) “I was definitely very worried when I saw the headlines,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “But then I looked at the data. And actually, looking at the data, I feel okay about it.”
Acquired immunity is cellular memory. When our bodies fight off an infection, we want our immune systems to remember how to defeat it again, like a person who, after solving a big jigsaw puzzle, recognizes and remembers how to set the pieces the next time. The whole point of vaccination is to teach the immune system those same puzzle-solving lessons without exposing it to the full virus. This is why the KCL study initially seemed so dreadful. It found that the number of certain active antibodies—called “neutralizing antibodies”—declined significantly between tests, especially in patients with mild or no symptoms. Antibody levels are one proxy for the immune system’s memory. If they plunge quickly, that might mean that our immune system can't remember how to solve COVID-19 for more than a few months at a time, dooming us to start from square one with each new exposure. No COVID-19 researchers are rooting for antibody levels to decline so quickly. Everyone I spoke with acknowledged that the study might reveal something important and concerning. But overall, the scientists converged on three reasons to hold out a bit of skepticism about the most apocalyptic headlines.
First, our immune system is a mysterious place, and the KCL study looked at only one part of it. When a new pathogen enters the body, our adaptive immune system calls up a team of B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells. To oversimplify a bit, the B cells’ antibodies intercept and bind to invading molecules, and the killer T cells seek and destroy infected cells. Evaluating an immune response without accounting for T cells is like inventorying a national air force but leaving out the bomber jets. And, in the case of COVID-19, those bomber jets could make the biggest difference. A growing collection of evidence suggests that T cells provide the strongest and longest-lasting immunity to COVID-19—but this study didn’t measure them at all. “To look at just one part of the immune response is woefully incomplete, especially if many COVID patients rely more on T cells,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research facility. He pointed me to a study from France’s Strasbourg University Hospital, which found that some people recovering from COVID-19 showed strong T-cell responses without detectable antibodies. “There is a chance that if a similar longitudinal study looked at T-cell response, the outcome would be far more optimistic,” he said.
snip
related
Immunity to COVID-19 is probably higher than tests have shown
https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-than-tests-have-shown
New research from Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital shows that many people with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 demonstrate so-called T-cell-mediated immunity to the new coronavirus, even if they have not tested positively for antibodies. According to the researchers, this means that public immunity is probably higher than antibody tests suggest. The article is freely available on the bioRxiv server and has been submitted for publication in a scientific journal. “T cells are a type of white blood cells that are specialised in recognising virus-infected cells, and are an essential part of the immune system,” says Marcus Buggert, assistant professor at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the paper’s main authors. “Advanced analyses have now enabled us to map in detail the T-cell response during and after a COVID-19 infection. Our results indicate that roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in.”
In the present study, the researchers performed immunological analyses of samples from over 200 people, many of whom had mild or no symptoms of COVID-19. The study included inpatients at Karolinska University Hospital and other patients and their exposed asymptomatic family members who returned to Stockholm after holidaying in the Alps in March. Healthy blood donors who gave blood during 2020 and 2019 (control group) were also included.
T-cell immunity in asymptomatic individuals
Consultant Soo Aleman and her colleagues at Karolinska University Hospital’s infection clinic have monitored and tested patients and their families since the disease period. “One interesting observation was that it wasn’t just individuals with verified COVID-19 who showed T-cell immunity but also many of their exposed asymptomatic family members,” says Soo Aleman. “Moreover, roughly 30 per cent of the blood donors who’d given blood in May 2020 had COVID-19-specific T cells, a figure that’s much higher than previous antibody tests have shown.” The T-cell response was consistent with measurements taken after vaccination with approved vaccines for other viruses. Patients with severe COVID-19 often developed a strong T-cell response and an antibody response; in those with milder symptoms it was not always possible to detect an antibody response, but despite this many still showed a marked T-cell response.
Very good news from a public health perspective
“Our results indicate that public immunity to COVID-19 is probably significantly higher than antibody tests have suggested,” says Professor Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and co-senior author. “If this is the case, it is of course very good news from a public health perspective.” T-cell analyses are more complicated to perform than antibody tests and at present are therefore only done in specialised laboratories, such as that at the Center for Infectious Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. “Larger and more longitudinal studies must now be done on both T cells and antibodies to understand how long-lasting the immunity is and how these different components of COVID-19 immunity are related,” says Marcus Buggert.
snip
How Long Does COVID-19 Immunity Last?
A new study from King’s College London inspired a raft of headlines suggesting that immunity might vanish in months. The truth is a lot more complicated—and, thankfully, less dire.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/could-covid-19-immunity-really-disappear-months/614377/
They were the most depressing headlines I’d read all year. And that’s saying a lot. ”Immunity to COVID-19 Could Be Lost in Months,” The Guardian declared last week, drawing on a new study from the United Kingdom. Forbes grimly accelerated the timeline: “Study: Immunity to Coronavirus May Fade Away Within Weeks.” And the San Francisco Chronicle took things to a truly dark place: “With Coronavirus Antibodies Fading Fast, Vaccine Hopes Fade, Too.” Terrified, I read the study that launched a thousand headlines—and did not come away much less terrified. Researchers at King’s College London had tested more than 90 people with COVID-19 repeatedly from March to June. Several weeks after infection, their blood was swimming with antibodies, which are virus-fighting proteins. But two months later, many of these antibodies had disappeared.
The implications seemed dire. If our defenses against COVID-19 evaporate in weeks, people could contract the disease for a second time, as some widely-shared stories have suggested. In such a world, herd immunity would be out of the question. Even more depressing, it could mean that vaccines that work on the basis of antibody response would be useless after a few months. The study conjured for me a future in which the pandemic never went away. Their response: Please calm down—but don’t expect us to make you feel entirely relaxed. (I also reached out to several co-authors of the King’s College London paper, but did not hear back.) “I was definitely very worried when I saw the headlines,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “But then I looked at the data. And actually, looking at the data, I feel okay about it.”
Acquired immunity is cellular memory. When our bodies fight off an infection, we want our immune systems to remember how to defeat it again, like a person who, after solving a big jigsaw puzzle, recognizes and remembers how to set the pieces the next time. The whole point of vaccination is to teach the immune system those same puzzle-solving lessons without exposing it to the full virus. This is why the KCL study initially seemed so dreadful. It found that the number of certain active antibodies—called “neutralizing antibodies”—declined significantly between tests, especially in patients with mild or no symptoms. Antibody levels are one proxy for the immune system’s memory. If they plunge quickly, that might mean that our immune system can't remember how to solve COVID-19 for more than a few months at a time, dooming us to start from square one with each new exposure. No COVID-19 researchers are rooting for antibody levels to decline so quickly. Everyone I spoke with acknowledged that the study might reveal something important and concerning. But overall, the scientists converged on three reasons to hold out a bit of skepticism about the most apocalyptic headlines.
First, our immune system is a mysterious place, and the KCL study looked at only one part of it. When a new pathogen enters the body, our adaptive immune system calls up a team of B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells. To oversimplify a bit, the B cells’ antibodies intercept and bind to invading molecules, and the killer T cells seek and destroy infected cells. Evaluating an immune response without accounting for T cells is like inventorying a national air force but leaving out the bomber jets. And, in the case of COVID-19, those bomber jets could make the biggest difference. A growing collection of evidence suggests that T cells provide the strongest and longest-lasting immunity to COVID-19—but this study didn’t measure them at all. “To look at just one part of the immune response is woefully incomplete, especially if many COVID patients rely more on T cells,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research facility. He pointed me to a study from France’s Strasbourg University Hospital, which found that some people recovering from COVID-19 showed strong T-cell responses without detectable antibodies. “There is a chance that if a similar longitudinal study looked at T-cell response, the outcome would be far more optimistic,” he said.
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related
Immunity to COVID-19 is probably higher than tests have shown
https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-than-tests-have-shown
New research from Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital shows that many people with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 demonstrate so-called T-cell-mediated immunity to the new coronavirus, even if they have not tested positively for antibodies. According to the researchers, this means that public immunity is probably higher than antibody tests suggest. The article is freely available on the bioRxiv server and has been submitted for publication in a scientific journal. “T cells are a type of white blood cells that are specialised in recognising virus-infected cells, and are an essential part of the immune system,” says Marcus Buggert, assistant professor at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the paper’s main authors. “Advanced analyses have now enabled us to map in detail the T-cell response during and after a COVID-19 infection. Our results indicate that roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in.”
In the present study, the researchers performed immunological analyses of samples from over 200 people, many of whom had mild or no symptoms of COVID-19. The study included inpatients at Karolinska University Hospital and other patients and their exposed asymptomatic family members who returned to Stockholm after holidaying in the Alps in March. Healthy blood donors who gave blood during 2020 and 2019 (control group) were also included.
T-cell immunity in asymptomatic individuals
Consultant Soo Aleman and her colleagues at Karolinska University Hospital’s infection clinic have monitored and tested patients and their families since the disease period. “One interesting observation was that it wasn’t just individuals with verified COVID-19 who showed T-cell immunity but also many of their exposed asymptomatic family members,” says Soo Aleman. “Moreover, roughly 30 per cent of the blood donors who’d given blood in May 2020 had COVID-19-specific T cells, a figure that’s much higher than previous antibody tests have shown.” The T-cell response was consistent with measurements taken after vaccination with approved vaccines for other viruses. Patients with severe COVID-19 often developed a strong T-cell response and an antibody response; in those with milder symptoms it was not always possible to detect an antibody response, but despite this many still showed a marked T-cell response.
Very good news from a public health perspective
“Our results indicate that public immunity to COVID-19 is probably significantly higher than antibody tests have suggested,” says Professor Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and co-senior author. “If this is the case, it is of course very good news from a public health perspective.” T-cell analyses are more complicated to perform than antibody tests and at present are therefore only done in specialised laboratories, such as that at the Center for Infectious Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. “Larger and more longitudinal studies must now be done on both T cells and antibodies to understand how long-lasting the immunity is and how these different components of COVID-19 immunity are related,” says Marcus Buggert.
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July 19, 2020
https://futurism.com/global-birth-rates-falling-precipitiously?ref=thefuturist
People around the globe are having way fewer babies. By the year 2100, that might turn into a pretty big problem for humanity — rather than the relief one might expect. If they aren’t already, dozens of countries’ populations will be going into decline in this century, according to a new study published in the Lancet this week. 23 countries are expected to feel this effect intensify, with their populations dropping to half of what they are now by the year 2100.
The global population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, according to the new projection, and then drop off to 8.8 billion towards the end of the century. “That’s a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline,” Christopher Murray, co-author and researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, told the BBC. “I think it’s incredibly hard to think this through and recognize how big a thing this is; it’s extraordinary, we’ll have to reorganize societies.”
The reality is that with more women receiving an education and entering the work force, combined with the wide availability of contraception, fertility rates are dropping, sometimes precipitously, around the world — a stark reversal of the baby boom following the Second World War. Countries including Spain, Portugal, and Thailand will have their populations more than halve by the end of the century — “jaw-dropping,” according to Murray.
But aren’t fewer humans better for a ravished world that’s rapidly being drained of its resources? The researchers suggest that there may be fewer babies being born, but any positive consequences for the environment would be offset by the challenges of a rapidly aging population. Much older populations “will create enormous social change,” Murray told the BBC. “Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?” “We need a soft landing,” he added.
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Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study
https://tinyurl.com/ybadb2q7
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Findings
The global TFR in the reference scenario was forecasted to be 1·66 (95% UI 1·33–2·08) in 2100. In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100. The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million [248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427]). Findings also suggest a shifting age structure in many parts of the world, with 2·37 billion (1·91–2·87) individuals older than 65 years and 1·70 billion (1·11–2·81) individuals younger than 20 years, forecasted globally in 2100. By 2050, 151 countries were forecasted to have a TFR lower than the replacement level (TFR <2·1), and 183 were forecasted to have a TFR lower than replacement by 2100.
23 countries in the reference scenario, including Japan, Thailand, and Spain, were forecasted to have population declines greater than 50% from 2017 to 2100; China's population was forecasted to decline by 48·0% (?6·1 to 68·4). China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098. Our alternative scenarios suggest that meeting the Sustainable Development Goals targets for education and contraceptive met need would result in a global population of 6·29 billion (4·82–8·73) in 2100 and a population of 6·88 billion (5·27–9·51) when assuming 99th percentile rates of change in these drivers.
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Researchers Say Earth Is Headed for "Jaw-Dropping" Population Decline
"It's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganize societies."https://futurism.com/global-birth-rates-falling-precipitiously?ref=thefuturist
People around the globe are having way fewer babies. By the year 2100, that might turn into a pretty big problem for humanity — rather than the relief one might expect. If they aren’t already, dozens of countries’ populations will be going into decline in this century, according to a new study published in the Lancet this week. 23 countries are expected to feel this effect intensify, with their populations dropping to half of what they are now by the year 2100.
The global population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, according to the new projection, and then drop off to 8.8 billion towards the end of the century. “That’s a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline,” Christopher Murray, co-author and researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, told the BBC. “I think it’s incredibly hard to think this through and recognize how big a thing this is; it’s extraordinary, we’ll have to reorganize societies.”
The reality is that with more women receiving an education and entering the work force, combined with the wide availability of contraception, fertility rates are dropping, sometimes precipitously, around the world — a stark reversal of the baby boom following the Second World War. Countries including Spain, Portugal, and Thailand will have their populations more than halve by the end of the century — “jaw-dropping,” according to Murray.
But aren’t fewer humans better for a ravished world that’s rapidly being drained of its resources? The researchers suggest that there may be fewer babies being born, but any positive consequences for the environment would be offset by the challenges of a rapidly aging population. Much older populations “will create enormous social change,” Murray told the BBC. “Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?” “We need a soft landing,” he added.
snip
Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study
https://tinyurl.com/ybadb2q7
snip
Findings
The global TFR in the reference scenario was forecasted to be 1·66 (95% UI 1·33–2·08) in 2100. In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100. The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million [248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427]). Findings also suggest a shifting age structure in many parts of the world, with 2·37 billion (1·91–2·87) individuals older than 65 years and 1·70 billion (1·11–2·81) individuals younger than 20 years, forecasted globally in 2100. By 2050, 151 countries were forecasted to have a TFR lower than the replacement level (TFR <2·1), and 183 were forecasted to have a TFR lower than replacement by 2100.
23 countries in the reference scenario, including Japan, Thailand, and Spain, were forecasted to have population declines greater than 50% from 2017 to 2100; China's population was forecasted to decline by 48·0% (?6·1 to 68·4). China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098. Our alternative scenarios suggest that meeting the Sustainable Development Goals targets for education and contraceptive met need would result in a global population of 6·29 billion (4·82–8·73) in 2100 and a population of 6·88 billion (5·27–9·51) when assuming 99th percentile rates of change in these drivers.
snip
July 19, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/shops-arent-for-shopping-anymore/563054/
In the year 2000 at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, Abercrombie and Fitch opened the first location of its new shop, Hollister, and set Midwestern high schoolers like myself California dreaming. Designed with a “Dude” or a “Betty” in mind, Hollister had a West Coast–meets–That ’70s Show vibe. There was a dimly lit “lounge” where you could sink into vintage velvet chairs with funky rope fringe and flip through the latest surfer or skateboard magazine. Or you could select the store soundtrack through a special touch screen, which offered a curated list of rad music. My favorite feature was a giant, wall-size screen that streamed a live feed of sunny Huntington Beach, California, into the mall on dreary Ohio afternoons. Even if I never purchased Hollister’s clothing, I always stopped in the store to watch surfers in real time and transport myself into a new lifestyle. Sometimes—a decade before Instagram selfies—my friends and I would sneak photos of ourselves in front of the screen, as if we were on the beach. Years later, I found myself working as a store designer for Abercrombie and Fitch. I once helped facilitate the municipal approval of upgrades to the cameras on the Huntington Beach pier for Hollister’s live-feed system, which now streamed California to suburbs all across the country. I knew then what I hadn’t as a teenager in Ohio: Retail stores have become a host for experiences first, and buying things second—if at all.
In retail spaces, consumer attention has shifted away from goods on racks and shelves, and toward smartphones and apps instead. In response, retailers face a growing need for elevated in-store experiences that seamlessly mesh with online platforms and web stores. The resulting retail model looks a lot less like previous notions of conspicuous consumption and a lot more like visual culture. Customers no longer kick the tires or shop till they drop. Instead they cultivate virtual feeds and inspiration boards. Thanks to smartphones, apps, and social-media platforms like Instagram, a broader public has developed a visual vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility. Retailers, particularly in fashion, have overhauled marketing and branding strategies to promote their individual labels among broader audiences. But they also face a new challenge: how to adapt retail design to sell pictures on social-media profiles as much as, or more than, they sell garments for real bodies. To bridge the gap between virtual and physical retail operations, behind-the-scenes organizational shifts have occurred. The professionals who actually select the merchandise for sale in retail stores once had stiff, corporate job titles like global procurement manager or internal buyer. They have since transformed into tech-savvy art directors and independent-minded brand ambassadors. These individuals focus on marketing more than goods, telling customers which brands and products are worthy of hashtags, geotags, and reposts. Likewise, the antiquated roles of store clerk and retail customer have also evolved: Shopworkers now have titles like brand specialist, and buyers have given way to “influencers” who remix shopping into a new kind of job.
Two categories of retailers have emerged from this shift. The first consists of existing companies that have overhauled their retail stores to incorporate physical and technological experiences. Nordstrom is one such example, with their Pop-In series by Olivia Kim, the company’s vice president of creative projects. The second includes web-based start-ups that are nimble with apps and social-media platforms, such as Glossier, a “people-powered beauty ecosystem” founded by Emily Weiss. Both types of retailers focus on building strong marketing narratives and immersive online experiences. Among those are “pop-up” stores, displays, or events—nomadic retail spaces that arrive and depart again within weeks or days. You may have experienced one of these pop-ups yourself, perhaps at a smaller scale while cutting through a department store to enter a mall. Comprised of only a few racks, the display is like a store within a store. Inside, a pulsing soundtrack might drown out the surrounding Muzak, while customized lighting illuminates the specialty mannequins and displays. At a larger scale, pop-ups can become huge undertakings. The Nike+ Run Club pop-up events allow you to test-run a 5K in their newest, knit shoes—while sipping pressed juice during a live DJ set before customizing your own pair on an iPad, next to an irresistibly Instagrammable neon-light Nike swoosh. In cases like this, retailers foreground experiences worthy of capturing on a smartphone, pressing customers to share them on social media. That sharing produces both immaterial value for the individual and brand exposure for the retailer.
But the best technological integrations into the retail environment are those that cannot be seen. To assist in the development of both physical and virtual retail spaces, retailers commission designers and architects. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a firm helmed by Rem Koolhaas and commonly referred to as OMA, did precisely this for their series of Prada epicenter stores nearly 20 years ago. In the Prada SoHo epicenter, OMA inserted plasma screens seamlessly into fitting-room mirrors so that customers trying on clothes were recorded from all angles for a visual playback. The glass containers of the fitting rooms were made from Priva-Lite, an electronically activated material that can be controlled by the customer to appear transparent or opaque, challenging notions of public and private space. OMA also programmed the store for various non-retail activities, like the hidden DJ booth in a large sloping ramp or stadium seating that captured the familiar feeling of the Spanish Steps in Rome. The whole affair was meant to connect the in-store retail experience to a global market in real and virtual time and space.
Now that the smartphone is over a decade old, retail has moved beyond OMA’s 2001 vision. More importantly, consumer priorities have changed drastically in regards to material purchases. Buying things has become less important than pursuing experiences. That poses a problem for retailers, who are in the business of selling consumer goods. Brands like Warby Parker, a web-based eyewear retailer with stores in major U.S. cities, have redefined retail partly by changing the purpose of stores. By keeping only samples on their sales floor, Warby Parker reduced their back-of-house stockroom square footage while simultaneously grooming customers to prefer an online retail experience. Customers can bring a prescription to the store and play with the various glasses on display, or they can upload a head shot and try on glasses virtually. Browsing in person and ordering online later is nothing new, but Warby Parker deliberately decoupled the retail experience from purchase completely. That turns the retail showroom into a place to experience the products’ style without guilt or pressure from salespeople.
The band Rapture plays at an event at the Rem Koolhaas–designed Prada Soho store in 2009. (Amy Sussman / Getty)
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Shops Aren't for Shopping Anymore - How the Smartphone Changed the Purpose of Retail Shops
Retail stores used to be places to buy things. Smartphones changed that, and retailers are struggling to invent new reasons, and methods, for shopping.https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/shops-arent-for-shopping-anymore/563054/
In the year 2000 at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, Abercrombie and Fitch opened the first location of its new shop, Hollister, and set Midwestern high schoolers like myself California dreaming. Designed with a “Dude” or a “Betty” in mind, Hollister had a West Coast–meets–That ’70s Show vibe. There was a dimly lit “lounge” where you could sink into vintage velvet chairs with funky rope fringe and flip through the latest surfer or skateboard magazine. Or you could select the store soundtrack through a special touch screen, which offered a curated list of rad music. My favorite feature was a giant, wall-size screen that streamed a live feed of sunny Huntington Beach, California, into the mall on dreary Ohio afternoons. Even if I never purchased Hollister’s clothing, I always stopped in the store to watch surfers in real time and transport myself into a new lifestyle. Sometimes—a decade before Instagram selfies—my friends and I would sneak photos of ourselves in front of the screen, as if we were on the beach. Years later, I found myself working as a store designer for Abercrombie and Fitch. I once helped facilitate the municipal approval of upgrades to the cameras on the Huntington Beach pier for Hollister’s live-feed system, which now streamed California to suburbs all across the country. I knew then what I hadn’t as a teenager in Ohio: Retail stores have become a host for experiences first, and buying things second—if at all.
In retail spaces, consumer attention has shifted away from goods on racks and shelves, and toward smartphones and apps instead. In response, retailers face a growing need for elevated in-store experiences that seamlessly mesh with online platforms and web stores. The resulting retail model looks a lot less like previous notions of conspicuous consumption and a lot more like visual culture. Customers no longer kick the tires or shop till they drop. Instead they cultivate virtual feeds and inspiration boards. Thanks to smartphones, apps, and social-media platforms like Instagram, a broader public has developed a visual vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility. Retailers, particularly in fashion, have overhauled marketing and branding strategies to promote their individual labels among broader audiences. But they also face a new challenge: how to adapt retail design to sell pictures on social-media profiles as much as, or more than, they sell garments for real bodies. To bridge the gap between virtual and physical retail operations, behind-the-scenes organizational shifts have occurred. The professionals who actually select the merchandise for sale in retail stores once had stiff, corporate job titles like global procurement manager or internal buyer. They have since transformed into tech-savvy art directors and independent-minded brand ambassadors. These individuals focus on marketing more than goods, telling customers which brands and products are worthy of hashtags, geotags, and reposts. Likewise, the antiquated roles of store clerk and retail customer have also evolved: Shopworkers now have titles like brand specialist, and buyers have given way to “influencers” who remix shopping into a new kind of job.
Two categories of retailers have emerged from this shift. The first consists of existing companies that have overhauled their retail stores to incorporate physical and technological experiences. Nordstrom is one such example, with their Pop-In series by Olivia Kim, the company’s vice president of creative projects. The second includes web-based start-ups that are nimble with apps and social-media platforms, such as Glossier, a “people-powered beauty ecosystem” founded by Emily Weiss. Both types of retailers focus on building strong marketing narratives and immersive online experiences. Among those are “pop-up” stores, displays, or events—nomadic retail spaces that arrive and depart again within weeks or days. You may have experienced one of these pop-ups yourself, perhaps at a smaller scale while cutting through a department store to enter a mall. Comprised of only a few racks, the display is like a store within a store. Inside, a pulsing soundtrack might drown out the surrounding Muzak, while customized lighting illuminates the specialty mannequins and displays. At a larger scale, pop-ups can become huge undertakings. The Nike+ Run Club pop-up events allow you to test-run a 5K in their newest, knit shoes—while sipping pressed juice during a live DJ set before customizing your own pair on an iPad, next to an irresistibly Instagrammable neon-light Nike swoosh. In cases like this, retailers foreground experiences worthy of capturing on a smartphone, pressing customers to share them on social media. That sharing produces both immaterial value for the individual and brand exposure for the retailer.
But the best technological integrations into the retail environment are those that cannot be seen. To assist in the development of both physical and virtual retail spaces, retailers commission designers and architects. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a firm helmed by Rem Koolhaas and commonly referred to as OMA, did precisely this for their series of Prada epicenter stores nearly 20 years ago. In the Prada SoHo epicenter, OMA inserted plasma screens seamlessly into fitting-room mirrors so that customers trying on clothes were recorded from all angles for a visual playback. The glass containers of the fitting rooms were made from Priva-Lite, an electronically activated material that can be controlled by the customer to appear transparent or opaque, challenging notions of public and private space. OMA also programmed the store for various non-retail activities, like the hidden DJ booth in a large sloping ramp or stadium seating that captured the familiar feeling of the Spanish Steps in Rome. The whole affair was meant to connect the in-store retail experience to a global market in real and virtual time and space.
Now that the smartphone is over a decade old, retail has moved beyond OMA’s 2001 vision. More importantly, consumer priorities have changed drastically in regards to material purchases. Buying things has become less important than pursuing experiences. That poses a problem for retailers, who are in the business of selling consumer goods. Brands like Warby Parker, a web-based eyewear retailer with stores in major U.S. cities, have redefined retail partly by changing the purpose of stores. By keeping only samples on their sales floor, Warby Parker reduced their back-of-house stockroom square footage while simultaneously grooming customers to prefer an online retail experience. Customers can bring a prescription to the store and play with the various glasses on display, or they can upload a head shot and try on glasses virtually. Browsing in person and ordering online later is nothing new, but Warby Parker deliberately decoupled the retail experience from purchase completely. That turns the retail showroom into a place to experience the products’ style without guilt or pressure from salespeople.
The band Rapture plays at an event at the Rem Koolhaas–designed Prada Soho store in 2009. (Amy Sussman / Getty)
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July 18, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/
Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world. Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture” is not through a social lens, but an economic one. Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—Everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him. The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed.
The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool. But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social-media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy, and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, the communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards?
This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful, a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother of three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless. In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.” The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same.
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How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture
Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/
Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world. Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture” is not through a social lens, but an economic one. Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—Everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him. The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed.
The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool. But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social-media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy, and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, the communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards?
This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful, a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother of three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless. In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.” The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same.
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July 18, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/joe-bidens-vice-president-powerful-history/614161/
If Joe Biden wins in November, his running mate could become the most consequential vice president in modern American history. The woman Biden picks could be seen as a potential president-in-waiting, a signal for the Democratic Party’s agenda in the years to come, and perhaps the most significant player trying to help Biden manage a country—and a federal government—in crisis. Under normal conditions, the presidency and its manifold obligations are already too much for one person to handle. As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden redefined the office by assuming a level of responsibility that his predecessors never had. If elected, Biden would likely follow a similar model, and potentially expand the authority of a constitutionally insignificant office beyond precedent. Those responsibilities will be even more weighty as the country combats the coronavirus pandemic; endures the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; and reckons with questions of race, policing, and discrimination reignited by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “Joe Biden’s vice president will most likely be the most powerful vice president in history because the trend is toward more powerful vice presidents, Joe Biden knows the value of having a vice president with lots of responsibility, and Joe Biden is going to inherit an epic disaster,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama senior adviser and co-host of Pod Save America, told me.
At the same time, with Biden planning to serve as a “transition candidate” for a new wave of younger and more racially diverse Democratic politicians, she’s also likely to face a degree of attention and scrutiny that few vice presidents ever have. The task for Biden come January would be to maintain a healthy partnership with his vice president—without worrying that she’ll outshine him. “History tells us that consequential presidents and vice presidents come out at times where they’re tested and tried, and I can’t imagine a period of time where the president and vice president are going to be tested more than in January 2021,” Michael Feldman, a senior adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, told me. “There’s just no chance that the person who he picks is not a consequential vice president or consequential historical figure. They just will be.” For most of American history, the vice presidency was an insignificant office famously described as a “bucket of warm piss” and as “useful as a cow’s fifth teat” (or “a fate worse than death,” according to the HBO comedy Veep). That changed in 1976, when Walter Mondale accepted Jimmy Carter’s VP offer and laid out a vision for how the vice president could play a more intimate and active role in White House politics. Mondale, who would be leaving a safe Senate seat and a position on a select committee conducting one of Congress’s first major oversight investigations of the intelligence community, made clear to Carter that he wanted real authority, and he didn’t want to be bound to a singular policy area.
“The one thing that was not always true was that the vice president had power—it was only to the extent that the president allowed it,” Mondale told me. “I was able to help a lot because Carter had not been in Washington … and I had quite a bit of experience there.” Carter agreed to Mondale’s terms. He integrated Mondale’s staff with his own, gave him an office in the West Wing, set up weekly lunches for the two to discuss the president’s agenda, included Mondale in the flow of national-security paperwork, and assigned him to be his chief troubleshooter to manage relationships on Capitol Hill, in state governments, and with labor unions. “Mondale didn’t want to be in charge of any specific program or department, because he thought that would be infringing on somebody else’s turf,” Richard Moe, Mondale’s chief of staff and a former Carter senior staffer, told me. “He wanted to be a general adviser and to take specific assignments when required.” To this day, vice presidents have kept their White House offices and weekly lunches (though Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s are no longer one-on-one), and successive administrations have expanded the Carter-Mondale model of power-sharing. Gore, for example, championed environmental reforms and the “information superhighway,” an effort to expand the internet’s reach. Dick Cheney wielded tremendous influence on national security and the War on Terror.
But Biden’s vice presidency was the biggest leap forward from the Carter-Mondale model yet. Unlike previous veeps, Biden sustained a high level of influence with the president throughout their two terms in office, Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar at St. Louis University, told me. As Goldstein has previously written, much of that prestige was derived from Biden’s public loyalty to Obama, which he accomplished “without surrendering his public identity and becoming lost in the president’s shadow.” “It was a natural role for Biden because it involved a lot of dealing with governors and mayors and legislators, and Biden likes that,” Goldstein told me. “He was good at it.” In addition to his weekly lunches with Obama, Biden’s schedule was packed with time with the president, in keeping with his request to be the “last man in the room.” On any given day, Biden would start the morning by joining Obama for the Presidential Daily Briefing in the Oval Office after making the crosstown drive from the Naval Observatory. He might have additional meetings in the Oval Office with Obama and a Cabinet secretary, or a Situation Room briefing with intelligence-agency heads. Depending on the day, he’d head out of town for an address, a tour, or a foreign visit, or stay in Washington for meetings with legislators. While previous vice presidents did wield authority over special projects, they weren’t in charge of the defining issues for an administration, such as Biden’s role in implementing the Recovery Act after the Great Recession and leading efforts to whip Republican support to pass the Affordable Care Act. Biden also received major foreign-policy assignments throughout both terms, including his role as a chief adviser and surrogate as the administration debated its Afghanistan policy in 2009.
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Joe Biden's Vice President Could Be the Most Powerful in History
He’d need to maintain a healthy partnership with his deputy—without worrying that she’ll outshine him.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/joe-bidens-vice-president-powerful-history/614161/
If Joe Biden wins in November, his running mate could become the most consequential vice president in modern American history. The woman Biden picks could be seen as a potential president-in-waiting, a signal for the Democratic Party’s agenda in the years to come, and perhaps the most significant player trying to help Biden manage a country—and a federal government—in crisis. Under normal conditions, the presidency and its manifold obligations are already too much for one person to handle. As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden redefined the office by assuming a level of responsibility that his predecessors never had. If elected, Biden would likely follow a similar model, and potentially expand the authority of a constitutionally insignificant office beyond precedent. Those responsibilities will be even more weighty as the country combats the coronavirus pandemic; endures the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; and reckons with questions of race, policing, and discrimination reignited by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “Joe Biden’s vice president will most likely be the most powerful vice president in history because the trend is toward more powerful vice presidents, Joe Biden knows the value of having a vice president with lots of responsibility, and Joe Biden is going to inherit an epic disaster,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama senior adviser and co-host of Pod Save America, told me.
At the same time, with Biden planning to serve as a “transition candidate” for a new wave of younger and more racially diverse Democratic politicians, she’s also likely to face a degree of attention and scrutiny that few vice presidents ever have. The task for Biden come January would be to maintain a healthy partnership with his vice president—without worrying that she’ll outshine him. “History tells us that consequential presidents and vice presidents come out at times where they’re tested and tried, and I can’t imagine a period of time where the president and vice president are going to be tested more than in January 2021,” Michael Feldman, a senior adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, told me. “There’s just no chance that the person who he picks is not a consequential vice president or consequential historical figure. They just will be.” For most of American history, the vice presidency was an insignificant office famously described as a “bucket of warm piss” and as “useful as a cow’s fifth teat” (or “a fate worse than death,” according to the HBO comedy Veep). That changed in 1976, when Walter Mondale accepted Jimmy Carter’s VP offer and laid out a vision for how the vice president could play a more intimate and active role in White House politics. Mondale, who would be leaving a safe Senate seat and a position on a select committee conducting one of Congress’s first major oversight investigations of the intelligence community, made clear to Carter that he wanted real authority, and he didn’t want to be bound to a singular policy area.
“The one thing that was not always true was that the vice president had power—it was only to the extent that the president allowed it,” Mondale told me. “I was able to help a lot because Carter had not been in Washington … and I had quite a bit of experience there.” Carter agreed to Mondale’s terms. He integrated Mondale’s staff with his own, gave him an office in the West Wing, set up weekly lunches for the two to discuss the president’s agenda, included Mondale in the flow of national-security paperwork, and assigned him to be his chief troubleshooter to manage relationships on Capitol Hill, in state governments, and with labor unions. “Mondale didn’t want to be in charge of any specific program or department, because he thought that would be infringing on somebody else’s turf,” Richard Moe, Mondale’s chief of staff and a former Carter senior staffer, told me. “He wanted to be a general adviser and to take specific assignments when required.” To this day, vice presidents have kept their White House offices and weekly lunches (though Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s are no longer one-on-one), and successive administrations have expanded the Carter-Mondale model of power-sharing. Gore, for example, championed environmental reforms and the “information superhighway,” an effort to expand the internet’s reach. Dick Cheney wielded tremendous influence on national security and the War on Terror.
But Biden’s vice presidency was the biggest leap forward from the Carter-Mondale model yet. Unlike previous veeps, Biden sustained a high level of influence with the president throughout their two terms in office, Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar at St. Louis University, told me. As Goldstein has previously written, much of that prestige was derived from Biden’s public loyalty to Obama, which he accomplished “without surrendering his public identity and becoming lost in the president’s shadow.” “It was a natural role for Biden because it involved a lot of dealing with governors and mayors and legislators, and Biden likes that,” Goldstein told me. “He was good at it.” In addition to his weekly lunches with Obama, Biden’s schedule was packed with time with the president, in keeping with his request to be the “last man in the room.” On any given day, Biden would start the morning by joining Obama for the Presidential Daily Briefing in the Oval Office after making the crosstown drive from the Naval Observatory. He might have additional meetings in the Oval Office with Obama and a Cabinet secretary, or a Situation Room briefing with intelligence-agency heads. Depending on the day, he’d head out of town for an address, a tour, or a foreign visit, or stay in Washington for meetings with legislators. While previous vice presidents did wield authority over special projects, they weren’t in charge of the defining issues for an administration, such as Biden’s role in implementing the Recovery Act after the Great Recession and leading efforts to whip Republican support to pass the Affordable Care Act. Biden also received major foreign-policy assignments throughout both terms, including his role as a chief adviser and surrogate as the administration debated its Afghanistan policy in 2009.
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