Big, bright, beautiful spiral, Messier 106 dominates this cosmic vista. The nearly two degree wide telescopic field of view looks toward the well-trained constellation Canes Venatici, near the handle of the Big Dipper. Also known as NGC 4258, M106 is about 80,000 light-years across and 23.5 million light-years away, the largest member of the Canes II galaxy group. For a far far away galaxy, the distance to M106 is well-known in part because it can be directly measured by tracking this galaxy's remarkable maser, or microwave laser emission. Very rare but naturally occurring, the maser emission is produced by water molecules in molecular clouds orbiting its active galactic nucleus. Another prominent spiral galaxy on the scene, viewed nearly edge-on, is NGC 4217 below and right of M106. The distance to NGC 4217 is much less well-known, estimated to be about 60 million light-years, but the bright spiky stars are in the foreground, well inside our own Milky Way galaxy. Even the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way was questioned 100 years ago in astronomy's Great Debate. via NASA https://ift.tt/2VSFy8D
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
Virginia Heffernan talks to CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem about what it really means—and what it takes— to safely re-open the country and heal from the coronavirus pandemic, the Waffle House Index, and how this crisis may affect our values.
Podcast production by Melissa Kaplan.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3d4O3D7
via IFTTT
Every Thursday night, the crew responds to a bonus question in chat form.
Dear How to Do It,
I am a woman who’s begun dating a man who it turns out is a virgin. He went to Catholic school his entire life. He’s focused on reading up on how to please a partner while he’s spent his time alone, and I’ve gotten the benefit of that, but he also didn’t know that you don’t need to be literally inside of a woman to get her pregnant when you ejaculate or otherwise get semen around her vagina. Are there any basic sex education materials freely available online? Is there somewhere that has the basics readily available? What does he need to know?
—Birds and Bees
Stoya: Scarleteen! It’s a website geared toward youth (i.e. those without a solid sexual education). They’ve been around for over 20 years, and are one of the places I learned the basics from.
Rich: You know, it can be a major pain in the ass and feel like a cancer on human interaction, but also: thank god for the internet. We’d be so screwed without this information readily accessible given the state of sex ed in the U.S. (and all over, really). Planned Parenthood also has a long list of sex ed resources.
Stoya: I’m glad places like Scarleteen and Planned Parenthood exist and can provide free, widely available sex ed.
Rich: Imagine if the majority of the population skydived without formal instruction. “Figure it out!” they call down after pushing you from the plane. It’s just wild to me.
Get the How to Do It Newsletter
Sex advice from Stoya and Rich, delivered weekly.
Stoya: Same. So at Sex Bingo last night, we had a whole talk about the need for emotionally safer sex. It’s so rarely talked about. (And by at Sex Bingo I mean virtually chatting from my desk.)
Rich: Yes! What’s your vision for ideal emotionally safe sex?
Stoya: Well, I’m not entirely sure what it is, only what it is not. It’s not steamrolling partners, or twisting their arms into doing things they’re unsure about. So I guess it’s a space made for boundaries. It’s being present with the other person and aware of how connected they are to the current moment. It’s checking in when we aren’t sure how the other is doing. It’s making space for aftercare talks, even after vanilla sex.
Rich: Yeah, I think it’s a general philosophy that sex is something that is shared and that the person/people you’re having it with is indeed human.
Stoya: Agreed. Scarleteen does address the emotional ramifications of sexual interaction.
Rich: Ah, that’s amazing. Just based on past columns and issues that we see coming up again and again, I can offer a few HTDI principles. You needn’t be worried about abnormality—virtually anything within the realm of consent is OK (this owes to Gayle Rubin’s idea of benign sexual variation). The orgasm is not the ultimate determinant of worthwhile sex—there’s plenty to enjoy with or without coming. STIs are something to be vigilant about, but in many cases, they’re villainized beyond their practical threat. Generally, something like herpes isn’t going to destroy your life. Communication is paramount. Because sex itself is paramount, I tend to venerate connected sex, but you know, I’d be a liar if I said no-strings hook-ups weren’t part of my (non-quarantine) menu.
Stoya: I think connection and no-strings can co-occur.
Rich: Yeah, it’s true.
Stoya: Comets, for one thing. “Comet” is the term in the non-monogamous community for people you have super great, intense moments with every few months to couple of years.
Rich: Ahhh that’s good, I haven’t heard it.
Stoya: I learned it from sex educator Vonka Romanov.
Rich: I love a random with whom I share a solitary moment, but there’s room for connection there too. Oh another big one: Don’t sweat the small stuff. If everyone’s happy, you don’t have a problem. If you both come in two minutes, great. If you’re both super vanilla, awesome. If you are both perfectly pleased with each other, don’t get self-conscious about all the nonmonogamy that’s afoot.
Stoya: Exactly. Vanilla is a wonderful flavor. Meanwhile, sperm are hardier than you might expect, and can cover some serious ground. Best practice is to wear a condom. And you shouldn’t ejaculate anywhere near the vaginal opening unless you’re trying to achieve pregnancy. (Unless you’re wearing a condom. Then it’s OK to ejaculate in the condom even if it’s in an orifice.)
Rich: It can be a challenge to strike the balance between being a generous lover and maintaining your own boundaries, so go slow and recognize that this can be a fun challenge to work on.
Stoya: 100% agreed.
More How to Do It
For as long as I have known her, my wife has been interested in “incest” role play. While it isn’t my cup of tea exactly, I have been willing and happy to support her in her exploration of this kind of fantasy and role-play. Recently, though, things have started to move in an uncomfortable direction for me. My wife is very close with her older brother, with whom we often speak very openly about sex and sexuality. A few nights ago, and after a few drinks, my wife got to talking fairly explicitly about some of the “family” role-playing that she and I are into, and her brother—who I thought would be kinda horrified—was not only entirely supportive, but vaguely expressed interest in exploring this kink with us. When we got home, I expected my wife to make it clear that her brother ever joining us in the bedroom was entirely off the table, but instead she seemed to think it was a really good idea. My wife and I have enjoyed group sex in the past, but I am just worried about how this could affect my relationship with my brother-in-law. Is there a way for me to make this happen, without it getting weird?
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Robbie Amell and Allegra Edwards, at a digital funeral, in Upload.
Amazon Studios
What if the next life were no better than this one? Not a heaven or a hell, or even a purgatorial waiting room, but a world that operates according to the same rules as the one that came before it, only tweaked enough that we don’t just accept them as the way things have to be. In the near future of Upload, whose first season begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Friday, death is not the end, at least for those with the resources to survive it. But the hereafter in Greg Daniels’ series isn’t spiritual, it’s digital, and everything, including entry and your continued existence, comes at a cost. It’s less like heaven than a cruise ship on an infinite voyage, one where everything is marked up because the dead aren’t in much of a position to comparison-shop.
Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) finds his way to Lakeview, as his particularly plush digital forever is called, after his self-driving car rear-ends a garbage truck. He’s only 27, an aspiring software designer on the verge of his first big sale, but his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) is so panicked by the thought of a life without him that she coaxes him to sign away his future as his gurney is being wheeled through a hospital. The ads for Lakeview make it seem like a country-club paradise, but the first hint that it might not be quite so simple comes via the upload process itself, which instantly vaporizes the still-living Nathan’s head, a calm female voice chirping “Upload complete” as what’s left of his lifeless corpse flops into a tray of ice.
In a sense, Nathan’s entry into Lakeview is a dream come true. While we still don’t know much about him after the 10 episodes of Upload’s first season are over, he comes across as a person who wasn’t born into privilege but always felt he was destined for it. The ex-girlfriends who show up at his funeral—live-streamed into Lakeview from the world of the living—are all model-pretty and rail-thin, as is Ingrid, who’s the daughter of a fabulously wealthy industrialist, to boot. Entering Lakeview puts him among some of the wealthiest people on Earth, including Koch-brother stand-in David Choke (William B. Davis, the actor best known for playing The X-Files’ Cigarette Smoking Man), who savors the taste of a virtual black rhino steak while bragging that scientists had to kill the last living specimen to get the taste right. Nathan is finally among the richest of the rich, but life in Lakeview isn’t one size-fits-all. The digital afterlife is laden with micropayments, whether it’s a thousand dollars for the swing of a virtual golf club or a dollar a minute to catch a cold, which apparently becomes desirable after a few decades of sustained algorithmic perfection.
It’s details like these that make Upload worth watching, and not its familiar, unengrossing plot and characters. It’s a running gag early on that the primary descriptor people use to describe Nathan is “hot,” and while that’s not inaccurate, it also speaks to how little else the character has to distinguish him. There’s more to Nora (Andy Allo), the tech-support worker who serves as Nathan’s in-afterlife “angel”—basically a call-center staffer who visits paradise during office hours and then goes back to her studio apartment. But the arc of the season requires viewers to become invested in the budding romance between Nathan and his on-the-clock caretaker, and it’s difficult to work up any enthusiasm for fanning the sparks.
Daniels’ show is more interested in the material than the philosophical, in the world as it is rather than what it shouldbe.
Where the show excels is in playing out its premise at length, and in depth. The digital afterlife is like a sitcom Minority Report, where artificial intelligences done up as hotel bellhops dog your steps offering you free gum and promotional chalupas rain from the sky. It’s heaven, but with spam. There’s no net neutrality in the next world, either, so unless you’re like Ingrid’s family, who brag of having “three generations of unlimited data,” you can get stuck in suspended animation when you go over your limit. The darkest and most resonant outgrowth of this idea comes when Nathan starts exploring the lower floors of the 10,000-story hotel that houses Lakeview’s residents, and enters the world of the “2 gigs”—budget customers whose monthly allocation is so small that they can burn through their data with a string of vigorous thoughts. If they want so much as a nice view from their window, which otherwise looks out on a featureless grey expanse, they have to sacrifice several precious megabytes. (Should the parallel to the real world not already be clear, the show sends Nora on a cross-country trip in “economy minus,” where passengers hang from the plane’s ceiling and the seats both in front of and behind Nora recline in her direction.) The best strategy, a 2 gig advises Nathan, is to sit still, try not to think, and hope someone on the other side comes through with the money to spring you from this eternal debtors’ prison.
There’s no way to avoid comparing Upload to The Good Place, which was created by Daniels’ Office and Parks and Recreation collaborator Michael Schur. But Daniels’ show is more interested in the material than the philosophical, in the world as it is rather than what it should be. There’s a glimpse, perhaps to be expanded upon in future seasons, of what an entirely digital world could be, a place in which physical limitations are no longer a barrier to true equality. But like the internet itself, the digital afterlife’s promise has been buried under a mound of micropayments, utopia eroded a dollar at a time.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Trump during a meeting with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
Slate is making its coronavirus coverage free for all readers. Subscribe to support our journalism. Start your free trial.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said that he would not extend federal social distancing guidelines to combat the coronavirus once they expire on Thursday. The end to the administration’s “Slow the Spread” campaign, which had been extended after an initial 15-day run that began in March, will leave states to decide how to proceed on their own. “They’ll be fading out because now the governors are doing it,” Trump said in a meeting with Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana on Wednesday. The guidelines were incorporated into new recommendations for responsibly reopening states that the White House issued earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence said, but critics have noted that these aren’t specific or binding.
The loss of a national social-distancing campaign comes as the U.S. is seeing daily rises in the death toll—more than 1,000 additional deaths have been confirmed every day since April 2—and as the country has recorded 61,288 deaths and more than 1 million cases of COVID-19.
The social distancing campaign is also ending amid insufficient testing. In order to lift restrictions safely, the U.S. will need millions of tests per week, according to separate reports released this week by the Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. While the U.S. has ramped up testing in recent weeks, Adm. Brett Giroir, the official leading the federal government’s testing response, said there is “absolutely no way” the country will have the minimum of 5 million tests per day that the Harvard study cites, despite Trump’s promises to the contrary. (The most tests the country has done in a single day were 314,182, on April 22, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
Yet Trump continues to share overly rosy predictions about the pandemic and the country’s ability to reopen safely. When asked why he expects COVID-19 to go away without a vaccine at a White House roundtable on Wednesday, Trump replied, “It’s going to be gone. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be eradicated.” That same day, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, lauded the administration’s response to the pandemic as a “great success story.” Kushner added that he hopes the country will be “really rocking again” by July.
The lack of a cohesive federal response, compounded by Trump’s mixed signals on reopening individual states, has led to what Politico has called an “inconsistent patchwork of state, local and business decision-making,” which may lead to a second wave of COVID-19 cases or exacerbate the current outbreak. So far, states’ plans to reopen have diverged largely along partisan lines. Some states with Republican governors, including Alaska, Georgia, and Tennessee, have already started loosening restrictions, while others with Democratic governors, including Louisiana, Michigan, and North Carolina, have extended their lockdowns for at least another week. California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to order the closure of all state parks and beaches starting Friday, CNN reported. Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas will allow businesses in the state to start reopening the same day.
Despite the administration’s unfounded optimism and the varying state-by-state responses, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on April 19 showed that 58 percent of registered voters are most concerned the country could move too quickly on lifting distancing restrictions, and a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll published on Wednesday showed that 65 percent of Americans think it’s too early to have people return to work.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Sikhya Entertainment/DAR Motion Pictures/National Film Development Corporation of India
In the aftermath of Irrfan Khan’s death, at 53, the uniquely international scope of the extraordinary Indian actor’s career has led to the quiet erasure of his best work. Many outlets, both in headlines and general obituary coverage, primarily highlighted his roles in the Western films Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi, somewhat understandably, because those Oscar-favorite movies both boosted his global profile significantly. But to reduce his significance to the relatively small roles he had in those movies minimizes why he mattered so much. He actually is probably most recognizable to the average American moviegoer from such big-budget films as The Amazing Spider-Man and Jurassic World, but he did his finest work in his home country, all the way up until his death. He was known in India not just a great actor, but as one of the finest actors ever in a national industry that’s had many to herald.
Irrfan—he dropped his surname professionally, because he didn’t want to be known for his lineage—achieved a rare international celebrity that so few Indian actors, or actors in general, ever reach. He had an unmatched global presence in everything from Bollywood dramas to American action films to Japanese TV shows. With rugged looks and a wily versatility, his talent shone through as both a leading man and a character actor. Following a 2001 breakout in The Warrior, he reached very different audiences around the world in very different ways. His death is an enormous loss. Even India’s usually Muslim-unfriendly prime minister heralded his work.
It may seem hard to imagine now, but not too long ago, a Bollywood crossover star of this standing didn’t really exist, despite multiple unsuccessful attempts from the largest, most prolific film industry in the world. Khan became one of the most recognized Indian actors in the world, and he performed a unique, memorable balancing act between Western cinematic worlds and his Indian roots. As he gradually rose to fame in India, developing from a struggling ’80s TV actor to a bona fide film star by the 2000s, directors abroad took note. In 2007 alone, he had roles in acclaimed films from three different countries: Anurag Basu’s Life in a … Metro, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, and Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart. Yet even when he became a familiar brown face on the red carpet, he never fully abandoned Bollywood for Hollywood, or vice versa. He would show up in an American blockbuster one moment and then carry a low-budget Indian indie affair right after. He let the breadth of his work speak for itself.
One look from Irrfan sticks in your mind and floatsthere.
And Irrfan’s Bollywood turns were his most stunning exhibit: Throughout his decadeslong career, he was in everything from blockbusters to indie gems to art house staples. Early on, he portrayed chilling gangsters in movies like Maqbool and Haasil, and often appeared in gritty crime movies and thrillers. But he could also be agile comic relief, like in Piku, or convincingly play a sensitive, lovestruck widower, like in The Lunchbox. His characters could be lonely, cruel, heroic, or vengeful. No matter how famous he became, he never stuck to one type.
The Irrfan performance I think about the most is his role as the titular character in Paan Singh Tomar, a historical biopic about a record-breaking athlete who led an armed insurrection against exploitative village landlords and crooked cops and went on to lead a life of banditry before being killed by police. Tomar’s journey from runner to vigilante is thrilling—Irrfan carries the pain and fury of India’s deprived rural underclasses in every grimace, every monologue roaring with rage, every moment both as a sportsman and dacoit carried proudly and rebelliously. It’s a complex portrait of a man whom most know very little about, and Irrfhan plays it boldly. Tomar is not your standard historical figure, forged and spurred as he is by a venal landowning and corrupt justice system. He, and Irrfhan’s performance, showcases a not-insignificant part of the Indian population—the poor who take up arms because the system fails them so miserably, leaving them to think there’s no other recourse.
On a completely different end of the character spectrum, I also often think of Billu, sometimes known as Billu Barber. Released a year after Slumdog Millionaire, it found Irrfan playing a more understated role: a barber in small village who happens to personally know a famous actor who has come to shoot a film in his area. Once his neighbors find this out, they try to get him to introduce them to the celebrity, although their suspicions soon rise when he is unable to do so. It’s an empathetic film about a microcosm of small-town Indian society and the effects of fame, and Irrfan’s barber is endearing—a humble working-class man who ends up ostracized because of a narrative that spirals beyond his control. Irrfan plays the role humbly, simply, charmingly. You feel and root for him throughout.
All of these films, and more besides, are well worth seeking out and enjoying if only for Irrfan’s presence. Even when he wasn’t the lead, he was the undeniable standout in his films. He could be hilarious, wise, or scary. One look from him sticks in your mind and floats there, a face you’d remember long after you’d seen a movie of his. Both native Indians and the diaspora look to him as nothing less than a titan, and that’s not just because of his international success.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Sojy39
via IFTTT
Elections staff load ballots into machine as recounting is underway at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office on November 11, 2018 in Lauderhill, Florida.
Joe Skipper/Getty Images
The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause opened the floodgates for lawmakers to draw egregious partisan gerrymanders without fear of federal lawsuits. By declaring that gerrymandering presents “a political question beyond the competence of the federal courts,” SCOTUS ensured that the 2020 redistricting process will be infected with extreme partisan bias in most states. That ruling was harmful enough on its own terms. On Wednesday, however, an influential federal judge suggested that Rucho’s rule should be expanded to prevent judges from intervening when lawmakers manipulate the outcome of elections through voting laws. If more courts adopt that theory, it will become harder than ever to challenge partisan prejudice in the administration of elections.
Wednesday’s decision in Jacobson v. Lee involves a Florida law that dictates that candidates who share a party with the current governor are listed first in every race on every ballot. Because Republicans have long held the Florida governorship, this law grants a huge benefit to GOP candidates. As U.S. District Judge Mark Walker explained when he blocked the measure in November, the first candidate listed on a ballot benefits from the “primacy effect”—voters’ tendency to favor the first choice at the top of a list. Political scientists calculate that, in Florida, the primacy effect gives Republican candidates a five percentage-point advantage over their competitors. This windfall is called the “donkey vote,” and it will give Donald Trump a significant advantage in the must-win state come November.
Walker found Florida’s system to be “a discriminatory burden” on citizens’ constitutional right to cast an equal vote in a “free and fair election.” The law, he concluded, “systematically advantages candidates of one party,” putting an illicit “thumb on the scale in favor of the party in power.” Walker ordered the state to adopt a neutral scheme for ballot placement, like alphabetical order or a random lottery (as some other states do).
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed on Wednesday in an opinion by Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee who was one of the most conservative judges in the country before Trump infused the judiciary with underqualifiedreactionaries. Pryor’s majority decision did not address the merits, instead holding that the plaintiffs—voters and Democratic organizations—lacked standing to bring the suit. No plaintiff, Pryor wrote, had proved “injury in fact,” or a concrete harm inflicted by the law. As a result, federal courts have no authority to address their claims. Under that holding, a different plaintiff could still contest the law—including, perhaps, a candidate whom it handicaps.
In a strange move, though, Pryor went much further in a separate opinion concurring with his own majority opinion. Rucho, he asserted, was about more than gerrymandering: It stood for the broad principle that federal courts cannot resolve a “complaint of partisan advantage” in election law. When a law benefits one party but does not directly burden a citizen’s ability to cast a ballot, Pryor wrote, it does not implicate any constitutional rights. Instead, it asks courts to determine a “standard of fairness,” presenting a question that is “political, not legal.” Moreover, courts lack the ability “to answer the determinative question: How much partisan advantage from ballot order is too much?” When courts have to decide “basic questions” of fairness and figure out “how much partisanship is too much” in election administration, they’ve entered the political thicket and must butt out.
Pryor’s concurrence telegraphs to the rest of the judiciary that judges skeptical of voting rights lawsuits should use Rucho to throw them out of court. (In an apparent dig at Walker, a frequent critic of Florida’s voter suppression laws, Pryor wrote that his principle “may seem counterintuitive to federal judges who are used to usurping the authority of state legislatures to regulate elections.”) It gives conservative judges a powerful weapon against such suits, allowing them to claim that voters are asking for political “fairness,” not constitutional equality, and therefore have no business in federal court.
As Marc Elias, the voting rights attorney who brought this case, noted in the Washington Post, this sweeping interpretation of Rucho could let lawmakers inject even more partisanship into each election. Legislatures could insist that candidates of one party are always listed first. They could concoct a formula that ensures candidates of the minority party are buried beneath third-party candidates. They could keep straight-ticket voting for one major party but not the other. None of these laws would impose a direct burden on a citizens’ ability to cast a ballot; they would merely affect the “fairness” of the election. According to Pryor, that’s not enough to justify a federal lawsuit.
Depending on Pryor’s understanding of what constitutes a “burden” on “individual voting rights,” states could go farther. A Republican-controlled legislature could allow more early voting days in GOP-heavy counties. It could place ballot drop boxes in predominantly Republican neighborhoods. It could require voter ID, then permit IDs more likely to be held by Republicans than Democrats (like a gun permit). A governor could even cancel a special election if she feared her preferred candidate might lose. All these cases would turn on the constitutionality of state efforts to benefit candidates from one party without denying the ballot to voters from the opposite party. And Pryor’s theory suggests that, under Rucho, federal courts could not decide them.
It’s notable that Pryor raised Rucho in a separate concurrence rather than his majority opinion. One judge, Jill Pryor (a Barack Obama appointee, no relation to her colleague) rebuked him in a partial dissent, insisting that Rucho’s “reasoning was specific to the gerrymandering context.” The other judge on the panel, Robert Luck (a Trump appointee) simply signed onto the majority. Pryor’s theory, then, has not yet gained support on his courts.
But Trump has appointed plenty of judges, including at least one on the 11th Circuit, who are clearly gunningfor voting rights. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has totally abdicatedits responsibility to protect the franchise. Whenever a new theory hostile to equal suffrage floats up from the lower courts, it’s a trial balloon that may well catch the justices’ attention. Rucho was a terrible decision by itself. But it will be so much worse if conservative judges use it to shield countless partisan election laws from judicial scrutiny.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
A new high-pressure ventilator developed by NASA engineers and tailored to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) patients today was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use under the FDA’s March 24 ventilator Emergency Use Authorization.
April 30, 2020
from NASA https://ift.tt/3aUN2vQ
via IFTTT
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
One place where law and morality are supposed to agree is that there should be no crime without a criminal mind, what is called mens rea in criminal law. But there have been a proliferation of crimes that do not require knowledge or intent, contributing to over-prosecution and over-incarceration. Conservative and libertarian lawmakers have claimed the moral high ground over progressives in advocating that people who do not intend and do not know they are breaking a law be excused for their criminal conduct. Is this correct or just a cover to make white-collar crimes harder to prosecute? Today we look at the battle over mens rea reform in the criminal justice system, the moral theory underlying the idea that being culpable for wrongdoing requires an objectionable state of mind, and why human beings care so much more about mindset than they do about conduct. Guest voices include Michael Chase, Benjamin Levin, Gideon Yaffe, State Sen. Todd Kaminsky, Sarah Lustbader.
In Slate Plus: Barry talks to Sarah Lustbader, senior contributor to the Appeal and senior legal counsel for the Justice Collaborative, about the comparative significance of mens rea versus moral luck in prosecution and why the deontology/consequentialism debate in criminal justice policy is so difficult.
For all back episodes from Seasons 1-3 of Hi-Phi Nation, visit www.hiphination.org
Kris Connor/Getty Images for the Weinstein Company
A former Senate staffer named Tara Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993, an accusation which gained further credibility on Monday when Business Insider reported that one of Reade’s former neighbors recalls Reade having told her about the alleged incident in detail in the mid-’90s.
Biden’s defense, so far, has involved keeping his distance from the story. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has said, through a spokeswoman, that he did not assault Reade, but he has yet to address the accusation himself in public. His campaign has meanwhile signaled its confidence in Biden’s good reputation to an extent that reads as arrogance.
On Tuesday, for example, the candidate made an online appearance with Hillary Clinton, who was reportedly involved in some of Bill Clinton’s efforts to discredit women who said (truthfully, in at least some cases) that they’d had extramarital affairs with him or suffered unwelcome advances. The subject became an issue during her presidential race—and while that was to some extent because it was raised in bad faith by Donald Trump, she is, regardless, not widely seen as a credible character witness for men accused of misbehavior. On Thursday, the Biden campaign announced that its vice presidential selection committee will include former Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, a longtime friend and political ally of Biden’s whose own history on the subject of sexual assault is, at the least, unsavory.
Most directly, it’s public record that a D.C. waitress named Carla Gaviglio accused Dodd and the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy of sexually assaulting her at the restaurant where she worked in 1985. According to Gaviglio, Kennedy and Dodd were both drunk in a private room when Kennedy threw her into a seated Dodd’s lap and rubbed his genitals against her until other staffers intervened.
It’s not the only account in which Dodd served as Kennedy’s lecherous wingman: The late actress Carrie Fisher, in a memoir, wrote that she went on a group date in 1985 with Dodd during which Kennedy asked her leeringly if she would be “having sex with Chris” and/or would “have sex with Chris in a hot tub,” behavior which she says Dodd observed with “an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face.” In 1990, a writer at the D.C. paper Roll Call described Kennedy and Dodd to GQ magazine as “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world.”
Dodd, moreover, was a leading Democratic recipient of donations by Harvey Weinstein, whom he referred to as his “good friend” in a 2011 New York Times interview. After he left the Senate in 2011, Dodd became the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. “I’ve known Harvey for 25, 30 years, and we’ve been friends,” Dodd told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “He was very helpful to me as a candidate for Congress and as a senator over the years.” Informal accounts of Weinstein’s frequent sexual misconduct were widely, widely circulated well before they were ultimately made public in New York Times and New Yorker exposés, and he is now in prison after having been convicted of third-degree rape and first-degree commission of a criminal sexual act (forced oral sex).
Defenses of Biden that have been made by his campaign and by Democratic surrogates have emphasized not just that he denies Reade’s allegations but that he embodies the decency of a person who could never be associated with such acts. That message is undermined by his decision to remind the public of his long association with Dodd, who at best was passively adjacent to, and at worst complicit in, the behavior of two notorious, powerful men during the era in which Biden—then, himself, one of the most prominent politicians in the country—is accused of assaulting Reade.
Slate is covering the election issues that matter to you. Support our work with a Slate Plus membership. You’ll also get a suite of great benefits.
Chris Dodd and Harvey Weinstein in Washington, D.C. in 2012.
Kris Connor/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company
A former Senate staffer named Tara Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993, an accusation which gained further credibility on Monday when Business Insider reported that one of Reade’s former neighbors recalls Reade having told her about the alleged incident in detail in the mid-’90s.
Biden’s defense, so far, has involved keeping his distance from the story. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has said, through a spokeswoman, that he did not assault Reade, but he has yet to address the accusation himself in public. His campaign has meanwhile signaled its confidence in Biden’s good reputation to an extent that reads as arrogance.
On Tuesday, for example, the candidate made an online appearance with Hillary Clinton, who was reportedly involved in some of Bill Clinton’s efforts to discredit women who said (truthfully, in at least some cases) that they’d had extramarital affairs with him or suffered unwelcome advances. The subject became an issue during her presidential race—and while that was to some extent because it was raised in bad faith by Donald Trump, she is, regardless, not widely seen as a credible character witness for men accused of misbehavior. On Thursday, the Biden campaign announced that its vice-presidential selection committee will include former Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, a longtime friend and political ally of Biden’s whose own history on the subject of sexual assault is, at the least, unsavory.
Most directly, it’s public record that a Washington D.C. waitress named Carla Gaviglio accused Dodd and the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy of sexually assaulting her at the restaurant where she worked in 1985. According to Gaviglio, Kennedy and Dodd were both drunk in a private room when Kennedy threw her into a seated Dodd’s lap and rubbed his genitals against her until other staffers intervened.
It’s not the only account in which Dodd served as Kennedy’s lecherous wingman: The late actress Carrie Fisher, in a memoir, wrote that she went on a group date in 1985 with Dodd during which Kennedy asked her leeringly if she would be “having sex with Chris” and/or would “have sex with Chris in a hot tub,” behavior which she says Dodd observed with “unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face.” In 1990, a writer at the D.C. paper Roll Call described Kennedy and Dodd to GQ magazine as “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world.”
Dodd, moreover, was a leading Democratic recipient of donations by Harvey Weinstein, who he referred to as his “good friend” in a 2011 New York Times interview. After he left the Senate in 2011, Dodd became the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. “I’ve known Harvey for 25, 30 years, and we’ve been friends,” Dodd told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “He was very helpful to me as a candidate for Congress and as a senator over the years.” Informal accounts of Weinstein’s frequent sexual misconduct were widely, widely circulated well before they were ultimately made public in New York Times and New Yorker exposés, and he is now in prison after having been convicted of third-degree rape and first-degree commission of a criminal sexual act (forced oral sex.).
Defenses of Biden that have been made by his campaign and by Democratic surrogates have emphasized not just that he denies Reade’s allegations but that he embodies the decency of a person who could never be associated with such acts. That message is undermined by his decision to remind the public of his long association with Dodd, who at best was passively adjacent to, and at worst complicit in, the behavior of two notorious, powerful men during the era in which Biden—then, himself, one of the most prominent politicians in the country—is accused of assaulting Reade.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Fans dressed as Star Wars characters pose during a May the Fourth festival in Singapore on May 4, 2017.
ROSLAN RAHMAN/Getty Images
I had a bad feeling about this when I first saw the tweets about Disney claiming “ownership” of #maythe4th. The lawyers I follow derided Disney’s attempt to secure a contract with anyone tweeting about the semi-official Star Wars holiday, and the Twitterati made mocking counteroffers to Disney.
But beneath the well-deserved ridicule is a question: What exactly was Disney trying to accomplish? The answer to that question turns out to be important, because it shows just how far back Disney, and the law of copyright that the company is built on, are stuck in the pre-internet past.
The now-infamous tweet appeared Monday, when Disney’s video streaming service Disney+ called on Star Wars fans to tweet their “favorite #StarWars memory” in advance of May 4. The follow-up came immediately:
Reaction was swift. At least one user tweeted that they had unsubscribed from Disney+ out of outrage. One clever remark read, “My favorite Star Wars memory would have to be the time Disney tried to lay legal claim to every tweet on Twitter that used a particular hashtag.” In response to the criticism, the company limited which #maythe4th tweets the supposed contract applied to, and it reiterated that those tweets “may appear in something special on May the 4th!”
Scorn for this tweet was predictable. For one thing, it looked like the next evolution of the shrink-wrap licenses, end-user license agreements, terms of service, privacy policies, and other tracts that everyone so commonly sees and ignores. Legal experts pointed out that Disney’s ability to stick Twitter users to a “contract of adhesion” with the company is limited at best, especially given its lack of rights over the #maythe4th hashtag.
Moreover, Disney laying claim to #maythe4th tweets struck a chord for many in the online community worried about ownership of words. Disney has a storied history of muting criticism and use of its films—one Twitter user remembered the time when Disney “blacklisted the LA Times from film reviews,” and another invoked when Disney “threatened to sue a grieving father who wanted to put Spiderman on his 3yr old son’s headstone.” And a claim to own #maythe4th is sadly plausible when Polo Ralph Lauren sues the U.S. Polo Association for using the word “Polo,” Kim Kardashian is maligned for appropriating the word “kimono,” and Queen Elizabeth dangles the word “royal” over Harry and Meghan.
The problem is, Disney almost certainly isn’t trying to “own” #maythe4th tweets. Absolutely, Disney has sent out its bounty hunters to take down everything from handmade baby Yoda dolls to school fundraisers. But it cannot stop all uses of the hashtag, on Twitter or elsewhere.
Instead, Disney must have intended its tweet-agreement to obtain permission to use fan tweets in “something special on May the 4th.” Since anyone who writes an original tweet has an automatic copyright in its text, Disney may have worried that said “something special” would infringe its fans’ copyrights. Several experts, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have suggested that this is probably what is going on, and the next day, the Copyright Alliance (of which Disney is a member) coincidentally tweeted a 2017 article about whether tweets are copyrighted.
So why did Disney find a contract necessary at all? Everyone uses tweets without worrying about permission: People retweet one another, journalists embed tweets in their stories, Jimmy Kimmel has celebrities read mean tweets on broadcast television, Jimmy Fallon calls on followers to #QuarantineAMovie—no Twitter contract in sight. Even though tweets are often protected by copyright, the usual expectation is that quoting tweets in these ways qualifies as “fair use,” an exception to copyright law that allows for using copyrighted material for purposes like news reporting, education, and parody.
Many explanations for Disney’s overlawyering are possible, but one seems especially pertinent because it goes to the heart of Disney as a company and copyright as a law: the role of entertainment franchises. A 1957 drawing of Disney’s corporate strategy shows a tangled spiderweb of properties—films, magazines, rollercoasters, toys. The threads of the franchise web are woven with contracts of exquisite complexity—Spider-Man rides are permitted west of the Mississippi but not east. It is no great leap from franchise contracts to Disney’s terms-of-use tweet: It’s a galaxy of finely engineered contracts for every piece of creative content. After being told about a Disney+ production including unauthorized, copyrighted tweets, some lawyer must have found the lack of contracts disturbing.
But that galaxy of contracts is of a long time ago. The frenetic pace of social media outstrips any possibility of contracts for all online content. That’s a good thing, as it enables people all over the world to be creative and to express themselves—indeed, #maythe4th was made popular not by Disney but by Facebook fan groups. But when grass-roots creativity clashes with corporate copyright, bad things happen. Disney’s contract tweet resulted in just online derision, but another case, involving a tweet about a Tom Brady photo, led to a federal court creating massive uncertainty about the common practice of tweet embedding.
In the 1950s, when movie studios were few and most Americans consumed content from a television or movie screen, franchise contracts and copyright law perhaps were elegant weapons for what some might call a more civilized age. Today, when retweets and remixes abound and content creators are a diverse mix of Instagram influencers, YouTube vloggers, Twitch streamers, and more, copyright law and the contracts it demands seem to have about the accuracy of a stormtrooper’s blaster. Making sure that the online environment encourages the diversity of modern creativity requires updating copyright law to fit this digital age, and a good first step would be to escape the mentality that every tweet requires a contract.
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
On this week’s episode: Dan, Jamilah, and Elizabeth revisit last week’s quarantine pod discussion and talk to Dr. Saskia Popescu about the risks of being in contact with another family during stay-at-home orders. Plus, LEGO Masters contestant Boone Langston joins to talk about awesome builds, the show and how kids can up their LEGO game. It’s our Everyone Is Fighting Now segment this week, and it’s for all ages. To listen to Everyone Is Fighting Now, zoom ahead to about 51:00. Or if you are listening to the Plus episode, go to 45:13.
Elizabeth recommends being on top of your Mother’s Day plans. If you need an idea, this questionnaire is a great, free project to do with your young ones.
Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today’s show, and give us ideas for what we should talk about in future episodes.
Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2KPLKrn
via IFTTT
NASA has selected three U.S. companies to design and develop human landing systems (HLS) for the agency’s Artemis program, one of which will land the first woman and next man on the surface of the Moon by 2024.
April 30, 2020
from NASA https://ift.tt/3cWkwvg
via IFTTT
Keith's note: All I have to do is look at my mug and I can transport myself back to Everest and Devon Island. Do any of you have something that you kept that takes you back to your space mission, expedition, or once-in-a-lifetime experience?
Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player:
Episode Notes
So, sure—Billy Joel’s first Top 40 hit, way back in 1974, was “Piano Man,” and the nickname stuck. But for a guy who became famous sitting behind 88 keys, few of his biggest hits are really piano songs. In fact, on all three of his No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, keyboards are not the primary instrument.
The truth is, Joel isn’t the Piano Man, he’s the pastiche man. He has openly admitted to borrowing genre tropes, vocal styles, and even specific song hooks from his Baby Boom-era heroes, from Ray Charles to the Beatles to the Supremes. He’s been a jazzy crooner, a saloon balladeer, an anthem rocker, even a pseudo-punk. And on his most hit-packed album, he literally tried on a different song mode on every single—and was rewarded for it. This month, Hit Parade breaks down the uncanny success of pop magpie Billy Joel, the guy who would try anything for a hit: the next phase, new wave, dance craze, any ways.
Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2zKLpnK
via IFTTT
At last week’s coronavirus task force briefing, President Trump floated the possibility of injecting bleach as a cure for the coronavirus. Soon after, the Centers for Disease Control warned on Twitter that disinfectants can cause health problems, and should be used only according to their instructions. The apparent clash raised the question: What if the president threatens to fire officials who refuse to echo his dangerous speculations?
The Trump administration has been using the president’s power over personnel (the power to hire and fire federal workers) to prevent government officials from sharing facts about the coronavirus that are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred message. Its actions underscore the dangers of increasing presidential control over an administrative state that could otherwise be guided by expertise and facts: Autocratic presidents can use the personnel power to suppress facts and mislead the American people. Notwithstanding that threat, the Supreme Court appears poised to give the president more power over personnel, not less—and prevent Congress from protecting federal officials in the future.
It’s not hard to see how the president’s use of the personnel power runs the risk of confusing and harming Americans. On Tuesday evening, the Washington Post reported that CDC Director Robert Redfield had warned that a subsequent wave of the virus “next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” That warning is inconsistent with the president’s preferred message that things are getting better. Thus, at Wednesday’s coronavirus task force briefing, Donald Trump trotted out the CDC director to cast doubt on the story. (The Director maintained that while the quote was accurate, “the headline [of the story] was inappropriate.” The headline stated that the “CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating,” rather than “more difficult.”) The White House press secretary subsequently suggested Redfield was merely talking about the need for flu shots.
Also on Wednesday, the official who led the federal agency involved in developing a vaccine, Dr. Rick Bright, claimed that his superiors had removed him from his post after he questioned the viability of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. A recent study by Veterans Affairs hospitals found more deaths among coronavirus patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine than those who were treated with other care. But the president had previously described the drug as a “game-changer” and expressed hope that the drug would be used more broadly.
These examples illustrate some of the troubling consequences of the President’s power over personnel—or at least this President’s power over personnel. Presidents can exercise the power to hire and fire federal officials in ways that both obscure facts and endanger lives – such as by minimizing the looming specter of another, major coronavirus outbreak in the coming fall or winter or by touting bleach as a cure for the virus. Presidents can put their employees to the choice of staying on message or losing their jobs.
What if Congress wanted to do something about that—and tried to protect expert health officials from a President who is allergic to the facts?
More than 75 years ago, the Supreme Court allowed Congress to insulate federal officials from presidential removal. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Court said that Congress could prevent presidents from removing Federal Trade Commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” These restrictions are sometimes called “for cause” removal restrictions because they prohibit Presidents from removing an official for mere policy disagreements. (Indeed, no head of any agency has ever been removed for cause.) In Humphrey’s Executor, the Court reasoned that being “independent of executive authority” was necessary for officials “to exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts,” rather than being subject to political whim.
But Congress might not be able to rely on that decision for much longer. Conservative judges, including one of President Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, have started to question the wisdom and correctness of Humphrey’s Executor. They have maintained that the Constitution requires the President to exercise unfettered discretion over the power to fire high-level executive officers. When Justice Kavanaugh was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he claimed that agencies led by officers protected by for-cause removal were an anomaly – and questioned whether Humphrey’s Executor was correctly decided.
They have maintained that Article II of the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, and that the executive power includes the ability to fire the heads of administrative agencies. (My colleague Julian Mortenson has debunkedthis interpretation of Article II in a series of papers.)
This term, the full Supreme Court may very well agree with Justice Kavanaugh’s aggressive interpretation of Article II. The Court is poised to decide a case about the constitutionality of the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the course of urging the Court to find the bureau unconstitutional (the bureau is led by a single director who is removable for cause), the Trump administration is asking the Court to either overturn Humphrey’s Executor or to limit the decision to its facts. Either route would ensure that presidents, including this one, have the authority to remove, for any reason, the heads of any agencies that are exactly the same as the FTC.
That would mean that Congress could not insulate agencies or departments – including a new office of global pandemics – headed by single individuals from presidential removal. A decision along those lines could also limit Congress’s ability to protect existing offices and office heads from presidential control.
Critics of the administrative state like to say that increasing presidential control over agencies would be good for the health of our democracy and the rule of law. But as the coronavirus has made clear, there are costs to increasing presidential control as well: What if the president can simply fire every official who says that injecting bleach could kill you?
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Astrobee: The crew performed the activities needed to charge 8 of the Astrobee batteries. A new buzz comes to the International Space Station (ISS): Astrobee. Three free-flying, cube-shaped robots. The robots are designed to help scientists and engineers develop and test technologies for use in microgravity to assist astronauts with routine chores and give ground …
April 30, 2020 at 12:00AM
from NASA https://ift.tt/2WctkGz
via IFTTT
NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30-31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemi
April 30, 2020
from NASA https://ift.tt/2YkB2RC
via IFTTT
Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Bob Carey/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images and Pluto TV.
The newest entry into the digital streaming wars, Quibi, couldn’t have debuted at a worse time. Already one of the more inane entertainment ideas in recent memory, Quibi’s supposed selling-point is that it features a ton of A-listers starring in original programming, with the catch that every episode clocks in at under 10 minutes—“Quick Bites.”
Entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s $1.75 billion venture went live April 6. Less than a month later, an estimated one-fifth of the American workforce is currently unemployed and largely confined to their homes, hiding from a deadly pandemic that’s far from finished with us. In theory, social-distancing consumers, especially those in a generation raised on the rapid fire likes of YouTube, Snapchat, and Vine, should be primed for A Very Quibi Quarantine. Instead, the service saw about 300,000 downloads in its first day, with about 1.7 million subscribers by the end of the week—numbers that might sound impressive at first, until one realizes Disney Plus raked in 10 million subscriptions in its initial 24 hours.
Companies like Disney, Netflix, and HBO will likely only further consolidate their holds on the market, forcing newer ventures like Quibi to continue trying to differentiate themselves in the digital streaming ecosystem. But meanwhile, a number of bare-bones, largely free services have long been available on most platforms. What’s more, these companies don’t require the exorbitant funding, production costs, and subscription models of their competitors. Instead, their catalogs invest in inexpensive, seemingly exhaustive familiarity. The future of digital streaming isn’t the House of Mouse continuing to swallow blockbuster franchise intellectual property or HBO churning out big-budget prestige series. It’s the app promising us Jerry Springer brawls, Golden Girls reruns, UFO schlock-documentaries, and Jersey Shore debauchery: Pluto TV.
Pluto TV is a free streaming outlet featuring dozens of channels airing largely syndicated shows pretty much 24/7, along with a bevy of middling on-demand films and TV series. Other channels are dedicated to individual IP, like Mystery Science Theater 3000, Cold Case Files, the James Bond franchise, and Dog the Bounty Hunter. (There are also a couple history and nature documentary channels for those of you with more discerning cultural palettes.) The trade-off is semiregular commercial breaks, usually no lengthier than anything you might experience on something like Hulu. It’s old-school basic cable brought into the digital era, and its business model will become the standard alternative to premium streaming access.
Free streaming platforms like Pluto TV remind us that digital entertainment, like everything else in this world, is a medium predicated on class. You may have long since given up purchasing physical media, figuring it a dead or, at least, dying industry, but lots of people still use these “basic,” cheaper streaming and rental businesses. Redbox still has 41,000 rental kiosks across North America as of last year, accounting for more than half the remaining DVD and Blu-Ray rental markets and generating $244 million in revenue on top of its relatively new streaming services. Crackle, TubiTV, and Popcornflix are all free (or dirt cheap), Pluto TV-adjacent streaming services for television and movies. Vudu offers both free livestreaming and on-demand rental options, was purchased by Walmart for $100 million in 2010 and reportedly amassed 100 million downloads in the ensuing decade. Earlier this month, Fandango, itself owned by NBCUniversal, acquired the company for a currently undisclosed amount. Last year, Viacom acquired Pluto TV for $340 million at a time when the company boasted about 20 million monthly users. While nowhere near the numbers of premium services like Disney Plus and Netflix (itself now pushing 170 million subscribers) Amazon Prime, they are a solid and relatively stable source of revenue generation for entertainment corporations, and remain free for consumers.
Compare that with the rising costs of each premium subscription option. Digital streaming services’ original appeal lay in the notion of viewers getting the chance to pick-and-choose their content providers, trimming the fat from TV cable providers’ years of bloated, overpriced subscription packages. Now, thanks to an ironic combination of atomization (i.e. CBS All Access, Peacock) and amalgamation (Amazon, Netflix, etc.), we are facing that same financial strain for our media entertainment all over again. Like the ubiquitous Fox and ABC affiliates of the ’90s, Pluto TV is ostensibly just … there. The most bare bones kind of television, ready for viewing, with no credit card or digital cable box or antenna required.
Pluto TV also takes away the anxiety of choice plaguing most of its competitors. Too often have I succumbed to the Death Scroll, that interminable amount of time spent deciding what, exactly, to watch—a process made exponentially more stressful by the number of people seated around the screen. On the one hand, the appeal of a decision-less downtime might sound unnerving, lazy, or even slightly soul-crushing (that’s probably because it, in actuality, is all the above). But that doesn’t change the simple fact that, at any given time, I can turn on Pluto TV to a random channel and be, at the very least, mildly entertained for an indefinite period of time. Over the course of two months’ worth of social distancing, I have now, somewhat ashamedly, seen almost every episode currently airing on the COPS rerun channel.
Hell, even the commercials featured on the channels are entertaining in a weird, nostalgic way. Ads peddling portable oxygen concentrators, discount auto insurance, and wholesale shopping websites feel ripped straight from basic cable commercial breaks of the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s an annoyance, but at least it’s a familiar one. With an excess of time to kill and uncertain income for the conceivable future, watching Pluto TV for free becomes, if somewhat perversely, an act of mental and financial self-care.
The history of American pop culture is its history of mass market consumerism and assembly-line entertainment, its ability to syndicate itself into oblivion. It’s also what will propel it forward, for better or worst. Subscriptions to HBO Max and algorithms based on your recent Tiger King binge aren’t the future of American home entertainment. A comically grim character on an HBO primetime prestige show once ruefully remarked that, “time is a flat circle.” The same can be said for television. TV is a flat circle, and everything that airs will soon air again. The future of digital streaming isn’t app gimmickry and award-garnering celebrities—it’s modern mass consumption culture at its simplest form, the countless syndicated basic cable offerings and trash television that is cheap to produce, cheaper to air, and like all great works of art, able to withstand the passage of time.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Deagreez/iStock/Getty Images Plus and DaddyBit/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Slate is now asking those who read the most to support our journalism more directly by subscribing to Slate Plus.Learn more.
Dear Prudence,
My husband has an extremely obnoxious habit that I have spoken to him about several times over the past five years. He will pick at his toenails while watching TV and then leave the remnants on the couch where he’s been sitting. I will periodically find large chunks of toenail clippings randomly on our couch, coffee table, and floor. It’s not often, but every few months I will find these lovely gifts. I have explained to him that it is disturbing and gross (and embarrassing if someone were to come over). I have politely requested that he do this in the bathroom. My requests have gone unnoticed and been ignored. I feel disrespected and grossed out. I have begun to passive-aggressively handle this by picking up the clippings whenever I find them and putting them in his coffee cup in the mornings. I know this is wrong, but I find some relief in making him discover his own toenail clippings in his coffee. What else can I do? How can I help him understand that this is neither acceptable nor fair to me?
—End of My Rope
This question showed up in my inbox well over a month ago, and I haven’t been able to answer it. I just keep turning this scenario over and over. The fact that the odds are now fairly good that you two are quarantined or sheltering in place together—well, let’s just say that you, dear letter writer, have been on my mind a lot. There’s part of me that thinks, “Look, almost every human being has at least one private habit that’s sort of disgusting and sort of comforting all in one, and shame isn’t a very useful tactic when it comes to changing behavior.” And then there’s part of me that thinks, “My God, how hard is it to clip your toenails over a trash can, after being reminded every couple of months for the past five years? What kind of careless Howard Hughes nonsense is this?”
The tools of the advice columnist are, generally, time, distance, and perspective. But I don’t have any surefire techniques for getting someone to pay attention after you’ve tried reminding them, explaining your feelings, reasoning with them, and pleading with them for half a decade. In your position, I might very well find myself tempted to do the exact same thing and feel simultaneously defeated and a certain thrill of vindictive pleasure. Is your husband an ordinarily reasonable, well-meaning person? If so, I’d try to see if I could use this escalation as an attempt to snatch up some sort of victory: “I need to admit defeat here. This has been so frustrating, and so unmanageable, that I’ve found myself putting your old toenail clippings in your coffee cup in an attempt to get your attention, because everything else I’ve done to that effect has failed miserably for the past five years. You know that it grosses me out; you know that I end up cleaning up after you, which I resent; and you know enough not to do it at work or in public—only in places where I’ll take care of it for you. I don’t feel proud or happy about my actions, but I don’t have any better ideas, so I’m asking for your help. I’m clearly missing something. What are you getting out of this? What’s going on inside of your head when you pull off your toenails and leave them on the table? Do you find yourself spacing out and forgetting what you’re doing? What do you think would be necessary to get this to change? I’m absolutely out of ideas. What do you suggest?”
That’s not to say he’s likely to immediately chirp: “I never thought of it like that. What a great idea! If I start doing [thing], I know this will never happen again.” Expect a few uncomfortable silences and some initial defensiveness, but hold out until he’s willing to offer up a solution or two of his own. You’ve done the heavy lifting for the past five years. I think it’s fair to ask him to take the lead now. Good luck. I’m rooting for you.
Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend has a habit of rubbing his index finger between his toes and then smelling his fingers “to make sure they don’t smell.” He will also do this with his balls. I realize it’s relatively normal for people to want to make sure they don’t smell. However, he’ll do it repeatedly, five to 10 times! Then, without washing his hands—because according to him, “If it doesn’t smell, that means it’s clean”—he will then go and touch household items! Granted, it’s usually after he’s showered recently (minutes to several hours), but it still grosses me out. How do I help him realize how gross it is?
—Scratch and Sniff
Please don’t feel like you need to spend the next five years having this conversation with him over and over again. The problem here is the magical thinking he’s built up around “cleanliness,” which cannot be determined by smell. What you can argue is that it’s a private grooming act, like blowing your nose or excavating your ear canal, that ought to be done by oneself, in the bathroom, immediately followed by hand-washing. You can show him one of the many hand-washing guides that are floating around these days and point out that touching one’s genitals necessitates a thorough scrubbing. You can also emphasize the public health element if you think it’ll strengthen your argument. Once again, good luck.
How to Get Advice From Prudie
• Send questions for publication toprudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
• Join the live chat every Monday at noon.Submit your questions and comments herebefore or during the live discussion.
• Call the voicemail of the Dear Prudence podcast at 401-371-DEAR (3327) to hear your question answered on a future episode of the show.
Dear Prudence,
I’m a tenure track humanities professor. Like many, I’ve been seriously affected by the social distancing and shelter-in-place ordinances lately. It started when our institution announced we’d be switching everything online (I’d never taught online prior to this, though I’m fairly tech-savvy) and I had one week to get prepared. I worked 80 hours that first week. Ever since, I’ve been working 12-hour days, every day, to make sure classes are running adequately. I respond to emails from my countless anxious students within 24 hours (usually more like six hours). I’m exhausted. I feel more like a therapist than an instructor nowadays. I’m seeing my own therapist, but appointments are biweekly, and I feel like I need them daily. I’ve made myself available to my students as much as possible, and I feel guilty that I still have a job and remain safe (so far), while they’re struggling with unemployment, sick family members, and mental health issues.
I’ve tried establishing boundaries by limiting “email hours” and cutting back on check-in emails, but I still feel like I’m running on fumes. I give up on my boundaries so easily when another sob story comes through my inbox. Since I’m not tenured yet, I’m terrified of students complaining (which could lead to a denial of tenure when I’m up for review). How am I supposed to last another eight weeks of overtime when I can barely manage my own needs anymore?
—Not a Psychologist
You’re in a tremendously difficult situation, and I wish I had better advice for you than suggestions on how to perform triage. But I do see a few ways for you to let up on yourself, if only slightly: A six- to 24-hour window for responding to all student emails is too much. Give yourself 24 to 48 hours. That’s still timely and within industry standard (according to an admittedly brief straw poll I just administered to the several professors of my acquaintance). I’d also encourage you to stop thinking of yourself as giving up on your boundaries whenever you hear a sob story from a student. There are a lot of very real sob stories out there right now. Millions of people have been massively devastated in terms of employment, housing, health, and financial security, and now is not the time to grow skeptical of more than one student suffering multiple catastrophes at once.
I’m sure plenty of your fellow tenure track colleagues are suffering from the same constraints. You might collectively approach your dean or head of department and raise the possibility of skipping or disregarding student evaluations this semester or even pausing the tenure clock. And while I don’t suggest you stop responding to students in moments of distress, make sure you direct them toward people equipped to serve their mental health needs, both on and off campus. You are a teacher and a compassionate person capable of lending a sympathetic ear, but you cannot continue to serve as an unofficial social worker or therapist out of a sense of guilt. It’s not fair to you or your students. I hope summer vacation comes swiftly and brings a real sense of relief with it.
Help! My Mom Used to Hate My Grocery Store Job. Now She’s Calling Me a Hero.
Danny M. Lavery is joined by Justine D’Souza on this week’s episode of the Dear Prudence podcast.
Sheltering in place during this pandemic has me seriously thinking about divorcing my wife. We have a 3-year-old together. I always knew we had some issues, but I used to be more distracted by day-to-day life and didn’t dwell on them. My wife regularly insults me in front of our son, constantly monitors me and tells me if she thinks I’m doing a bad job at something (missed a spot mowing the lawn, etc.), and then demands that I do nice things for her to demonstrate my love. When she’s upset, I have to solve whatever problem is causing her to be upset. We have been to therapy a few times, but she either tells the therapist that everything’s fine or that I’m the one who needs to improve his behavior. I do not want a divorce, for the sake of my son. I also don’t want to give up on my wife, whom I fell in love with for a reason. I suspect her constant negativity stems from some unhappiness or inability to deal with the world, and what I really want is for her to see a therapist. For years, I’ve suggested it, she’s agreed, and then she has refused to go. Where do I go from here? It is a struggle to get through each day because I’m with her 24/7. I can’t remember the last time she went 45 minutes without being negative toward me. Do I really want a divorce, or is this just the pandemic talking?
—Constant Negativity
Your wife’s constant criticism isn’t a natural response to increased stress brought on by a pandemic. It’s the habit of years. It has nothing to do with the pandemic. You’re simply noticing it more often now because there are fewer distractions available to you. You say you don’t want to divorce her, primarily because of your son. I understand that impulse, but your options are not merely to stay with your wife, thereby helping your son, or to leave your wife, thereby hurting your son. It may hurt your son to grow up watching one of his parents constantly belittling, criticizing, and insulting the other. Moreover, your dignity and emotional well-being matter not just insofar as they enable you to be a better parent to your son but because you’re a human being in your own right who deserves to be treated with respect, full stop. You may have your own private unhappiness or moments of stress, but you don’t deal with such things by lashing out at your wife or others. Her cruelty toward you is not an instinctive response to her own pain but a choice she makes every day.
I understand your temptation to fixate on individual therapy because you want to believe that your wife doesn’t really want to hurt and demean you—that if only she could be persuaded to look inward, she’d discover some internal unhappiness that caused this unkind, unloving behavior, and she’d be able to stop. But you’ve spent years encouraging her to see a therapist, to no avail. I don’t think continuing to suggest therapy to your wife is going to be your solution. But it might help you to see an individual therapist of your own as you try to sort through what kind of treatment you believe you can rightly ask of or expect from a partner. I think divorce may very well end up being the best option for you—and for your son. But I don’t think it means you’d be giving up on your wife. She’ll still have the ability and opportunity to change her own behavior, whenever she decides it’s worth it.
Dear Prudence Uncensored
“Hell is full, and the devils are walking the earth.” Danny Lavery and Nicole Cliffe discuss a letter in this week’s Dear Prudence Uncensored—only for Slate Plus members.
Dear Prudence,
For a while now, my sex drive has been all over the place, and my husband’s has been at an all-time high. I don’t really want sex so much as I want to cuddle. But whenever I deny wanting sex, either I’m met with pouting until I give in, or we argue. Most recently, he elbowed our dog by accident in bed while trying to reach for me and my attention went to making sure the dog was OK. My husband then rolled over in a huff, and I felt like I was the bad guy. What do I do? I don’t want to feel like I have no choice, but I don’t want him feeling left out either.
—Mismatched Libidos
It’s one thing for your husband to feel frustrated, hurt, or rejected when he wants to have sex and you don’t, and quite another to react to each individual incident by pouting until he gets his way or picking a fight. That’s a shortsighted response that prioritizes his immediate success over shared long-term trust and intimacy. You have every right to say that you don’t want a sex life that’s founded in huffiness, pouting, guilt, and begrudging going-along-to-get-along, and your husband has a right to ask for what he wants and to talk honestly about his feelings. But this does not include badgering you into rote, “well-this-is-better-than-getting-into-a-fight-I-guess” sex.
This may be a question best addressed with a couples counselor, since I imagine frustrations may be running high for both of you. The goal here isn’t just to find a magically “fair” number of times you two can have sex each week—it’s to negotiate mutually agreeable terms of intimacy, desire, avowal, and closeness. It’s to find ways to discuss frustration, fears, anxieties, and disappointment with each other—without lashing out, pouting, or trying to guilt the other into giving in. The problem of mismatched libidos is real, and it can be a challenge for any couple to address. But it can’t be met by goading and guilting the partner with the lower libido into feeling cornered and hopeless.
Dear Prudence,
I’ve always had a rocky relationship with my dad and stepmom, but over the past year things had improved. Before the pandemic, they had planned a camping trip to my state in May, and I was to join them for a few days. But the national parks are now closed, and local residents have asked tourists to stay away over fears that our small, rural hospitals will be completely overwhelmed. I’ve suggested that they postpone their trip, but they reply that people who are afraid of the coronavirus are “pussies” and they’ll be coming whether or not the parks are open. I know I should be more pointed with them about how reckless this is, but I’m afraid that my dad will turn his anger on me and our relationship will sour once again. How can I be direct and protect myself at the same time?
—Vacation Conundrum
I hope this doesn’t come across as overly pessimistic, but what you’d hoped was an improvement in your relationship with your father might have merely been a lull in hostilities. If you’re afraid your relationship will sour again simply because you decline to go camping in a park that’s been closed for reasons of public health and safety, then I think very little has changed, at least on your father’s end. That’s not to say you were wrong to hope things were getting better or that you should blame yourself for having been optimistic! But I hope it will make dealing with your father’s likely outburst a little bit easier for you if you’re able to acknowledge that this is consistent with his previous behavior. If your primary goals are to be direct and to protect yourself from an unnecessarily prolonged fight, all you have to do is tell him that you won’t be able to join them, that you’re following regional instructions for social distancing, and that you hope they’ll do the same. You don’t have to argue with them or defend yourself against accusations of being a “pussy”—or defend yourself at all. Just tell them what you’re doing and what information led to your decision, encourage them to rethink their plans, and then consider your intervention finished. Enjoy, if nothing else, the peace and quiet that comes with refusing to engage with someone else’s temper tantrum.
Classic Prudie
For the past three years I’ve worked for a small business with only one other employee. My boss, the business owner, has serious mental health issues and has made the job extremely challenging at times. She has picked on me occasionally in the past but has currently turned her focus to my co-worker. We work in a private office suite and no one has access to it but the three of us. Our boss has her own bathroom off her office, and the other employee and I share a separate bathroom. While I was on vacation last month, our boss twice came into the employee bathroom and pooped in the shower (which no one uses). My co-worker discovered it after noticing a strange smell and finally opening the shower. My co-worker was so mortified and afraid of our boss she didn’t say anything. The poop stayed until the cleaning lady came later in the week. The following week, it happened again. This time my co-worker mentioned the strange smell to our boss, who told her she was imagining it. My co-worker was then too scared to say anything else. Since my co-worker started working at the office, my boss had been behaving more bizarrely. She has started leaving her own bathroom door open whenever she uses it—we can hear it, and see her if we walk by. This is shocking bullying. But I don’t want to quit because I am making way more in this position than I will get elsewhere, and I have flexible hours. Is all this a sign of dangerous mental illness? Should I flee? My co-worker has already put in notice.
Slate Plus members get extra questions, Prudie Uncensored with Nicole Cliffe, and full-length podcast episodes every week.
Keith's note: All I have to do is look at my mug and I can transport myself back to Everest and Devon Island. Do any of you have something that you kept that takes you back to your space mission, expedition, or once-in-a-lifetime experience?
