Does Ceres have underground pockets of water? Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, was thought to be composed of rock and ice. At the same time, Ceres was known to have unusual bright spots on its surface. These bright spots were clearly imaged during Dawn's exciting approach in 2015. Analyses of Dawn images and spectra indicated that the bright spots arise from the residue of highly-reflective salt water that used to exist on Ceres' surface but evaporated. Recent analysis indicates that some of this water may have originated from deep inside Ceres, indicating Ceres to be a kindred spirit with several Solar System moons, also thought to harbor deep water pockets. The featured video shows in false-color pink the bright evaporated brine named Cerealia Facula in Occator Crater. In 2018, the mission-successful but fuel-depleted Dawn spacecraft was placed in a distant parking orbit, keeping it away from the Ceres' surface for at least 20 years to avoid interfering with any life that might there exist. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Dm7Ula
President Donald Trump during a news conference at the White House on Monday.Win McNamee/Getty Images
One of Donald Trump’s biggest frauds is that he’s a strong leader. He says he’s tough on China, tough on borders, and tough on looters and anarchists. But when toughness really counts, he’s craven. He sucks up to Vladimir Putin, writes love letters to Kim Jong-un, begs Xi Jinping for help in getting reelected, and causes thousands of deaths by refusing to face a catastrophic virus. On Monday, Joe Biden launched a frontal assault on Trump’s cowardice. And Trump, in a press conference afterward, validated Biden’s indictment.
Trump thinks the recent wave of violence in certain cities—some of it related to protests against shootings by police—can help him change the subject from COVID to law and order. Biden, speaking in Pittsburgh, directly addressed that issue. “If Donald Trump wants to ask the question, ‘Who will keep you safer as president?’, let’s answer that question,” said Biden. “When I was vice president, violent crime fell 15 percent … The murder rate is up 26 percent across the nation this year under Donald Trump.”
Biden argued that in street clashes between left- and right-wing extremists, real political courage consists of standing up to the miscreants on your own side. Trump hasn’t just failed that test, Biden said; he’s ducked it. “He’s got no problem with right-wing militia, white supremacists, and vigilantes with assault weapons, often better armed than the police,” said Biden. Trump’s “failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.”
Biden coupled this attack with a scathing assessment of Trump’s appeasement of Russia. “The Kremlin has put bounties on the heads of American soldiers,” said Biden. But “instead of telling Vladimir Putin … that there’d be a heavy price to pay if they dare touch an American soldier, this president doesn’t even bring up the subject in his multiple phone calls with Putin.” Biden also pointed to reports that “Russian forces just attacked American troops in Syria, injuring our service members. Did you hear the president say a single word? Did he lift one finger? Never before has an American president played such a subservient role to a Russian leader. It’s not only dangerous. It’s humiliating.”
Above all, Biden lambasted Trump for shrinking from hisduties.
Trump has surrendered to the novel coronavirus as well, Biden noted. The former vice president likened the disease to a wartime adversary, noting that it had killed more Americans than “every war since Korea combined.” He observed that COVID’s death toll dwarfs the current threat from street violence. “More cops have died from COVID this year than have been killed on patrol,” said Biden. While hyping manageable threats, Trump ignores the big one.
Above all, Biden lambasted Trump for shrinking from his duties. Images of urban violence in Trump’s ads, Biden noted, “are images of Donald Trump’s America today. He keeps telling you if only he was president, it wouldn’t happen. … He is president.” This flight from responsibility—running away from bad news in Syria and Afghanistan, blaming violence on mayors, abandoning governors to deal with COVID on their own—defines Trump’s failure as a leader. He is, in Biden’s words, “a bystander in his own presidency.”
Against this cowardice, Biden promised to govern the country with backbone. He rebuked left-wing vandals who abuse the protest movement. “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting,” Biden declared. “It’s lawlessness … And those who do it should be prosecuted.” He mocked Trump’s simultaneous caricatures of him as an establishment dinosaur and a communist stooge. “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” he joked.
But Biden also argued that to lead with strength, a president must do more than bluster. He must listen and heal. The reason Trump can’t extinguish racial unrest, said Biden, is that “he refuses to even acknowledge that there’s a racial justice problem.” And the reason Trump can’t get aid to people whose livelihoods have been wrecked by COVID is that he can’t “pull together the leaders in Congress.” Biden contrasted Trump’s insecurity and rigidity with his own record of bringing people together: police; nonwhite communities; and lawmakers, mayors, and governors from opposing parties.
At a press conference hours after Biden spoke, Trump vindicated Biden’s criticisms of him. The president disowned responsibility for the violence in cities, calling them “Democrat-run.” When a reporter asked Trump why he wasn’t meeting with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot in the back seven times by police last week, the president said it wasn’t safe, because the family wanted its attorney to join the conversation by phone. “I thought it would be better not to do anything where there are lawyers involved,” he pleaded.
Another reporter asked Trump why he hadn’t said anything about his fans who drove trucks through Portland on Saturday, firing paintballs and pepper spray at adversaries and bystanders. “That was a peaceful protest,” Trump said of the truck caravan, and “paint is not bullets.” When a third reporter asked about Kyle Rittenhouse, the white vigilante who shot two people to death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Trump defended the shooter. “He was trying to get away from them,” said Trump. “They very violently attacked him.” If Rittenhouse hadn’t shot them, Trump argued, “he probably would have been killed.”
Trump is a coward. He hides from COVID. He refuses to confront Putin about the alleged bounties. He refuses to criticize assailants and killers who support him. He won’t even talk to a Black family about a loved one shot by police. He’s afraid of the family’s lawyer. Lots of people are cowards, but you can’t give them this kind of responsibility. When the president is a coward, people die.
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Miami-Dade’s first day of classes did not go well.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The first day of school in Miami-Dade County, Florida, was brought to you by the numbers 4, 0, and 4.
On Monday morning, 275,000 students and 19,200 teachers settled in for the start of remote learning for the semester, only to encounter widespread crashes on the school system’s education platform. Many students couldn’t join virtual classrooms; teachers were locked out of attendance portals and grading systems. All morning, parents and students sent tweets like these:
School still happened—but lots of teachers had to scramble to relocate the morning’s lessons to Zoom. In a news conference, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho attributed the debacle to “a slowdown of access related to an external connectivity to the internet between our data center and the internet provider.” So … too many students logging on at once? Not so, said Carvalho, who attributed the failure to a third-party switch provided by Cisco that connects Miami-Dade’s system to the internet, and that it was probably not a capacity issue. “We know what the problem is, but we do not have as of yet … a solution,” he said. School officials and IT personnel were still looking into how to resolve the issues as of Monday evening. Unless the problem gets resolved overnight, students in Miami-Dade should once again expect to again rely on Zoom on Tuesday.
Teachers had been raising concerns about Miami-Dade’s remote learning plan in the weeks leading up to the first day of classes. In July, the district finalized plans to spend $15 million of funds from the CARES Act on a no-bid contract for My School Online, a platform that’s supposed to allow teachers to virtually administer lessons. When the pandemic forced Miami-Dade to shut down schools at the tail end of the last academic year, the district gave teachers the choice over which online platforms to use for at-home learning. That quickly became too unwieldly for students to navigate between all of them, so school officials decided to invest in a single platform for the fall. While Florida is requiring most schools to offer in-person instruction, it carved out an exception for Miami-Dade because of the severity of the pandemic in the county, which has 156,910 cases. The district plans to reassess the possibility of reopening facilities on Sept. 30, so the earliest Miami-Dade students could return to school buildings is Oct. 5.
Until then, it’s remote learning. But teachers reportedly didn’t have much time to get acquainted with My School Online. The district didn’t integrate its data with the platform until August 17. It then set up a weeklong orientation period starting on August 24 to allow instructors to learn how to use the tools, which didn’t go smoothly: The system crashed on the first day of orientation and teachers continued to have problems accessing the platform and uploading learning materials. Teachers also criticized the training for focusing more on pedagogy than hands-on practice with the new online tools.
While Miami-Dade Schools’ start to the school year back seems to have been worse than most, the district is far from the only one to experience tech glitches as classes come back into session. Students in neighboring Broward County’s public schools were also met with slow connection speeds, crashing dashboards, and log-in issues on their first day of school last week due to capacity limits. Similar tech snafus have been reported in districts in Maryland, North Carolina, Indiana, and California.
Education officials have spent the last few months agonizing over how to weigh the risks of holding in-person classes during the coronavirus pandemic against the degradation in quality of education that tends to come with remote learning. Teachers have struggled to keep students engaged, interact with them on a personal level, and issue grades fairly. In addition, increased reliance on virtual teaching tools threatens to exacerbate pre-existing educational disparities that result from unequal access to internet and digital devices. But you can’t even begin to fret over those problems—or get in a lesson or two—if you can’t even get the tech to work.
A student studies in an open-air seating area on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 18, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
Colleges across America have logged more than 26,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since March, according to the New York Times, which is pulling together university-specific data in absence of a more formal database. The Times notes that this number is likely on the low side—“with no national tracking system, colleges are making their own rules for how to tally cases”—and that most of these cases have been reported since late July.
With no national strategy to fight the coronavirus, colleges have been left to make their own rules on if and how to reopen, and what steps to take once an outbreak occurs. And the outbreaks, they are certainly occurring. Which means colleges are also needing to figure something else out: Where to place the blame. The answer is often, as experts predicted, on the students. Here’s why there have been outbreaks on college campuses, according to school administrators:
Students going to bars. The campus with the most coronavirus cases as of Monday is the University of Alabama at Birmingham (972 cases) and sibling school, with a separate campus, University of Alabama (568 cases). “We remain satisfied that the precautions implemented prior to the resumption of classes—including masking, distancing, and a blend of in-person and remote instruction—are appropriate and effective,” Ricky Friend, the Dean of the College of Community Health Sciences at UA, said in a statement published August 28th concerning the three-school system of UAB, University of Alabama (in Tuscaloosa), and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In-person classes are still in session, but school officials at UA specifically, which has logged 568 cases, did ask the mayor of Tuscaloosa to close bars, which he did for a two-week period, starting August 24th.
Students holding parties. After an outbreak of more than a hundred positive cases at SUNY Oneonta in upstate New York, five students “have been suspended for holding parties against the college policy,” said SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras in a statement sent out by Gov. Cuomo’s press office. “Three organizations, campus organizations, have been suspended and we’re going to be tough not because we want to ruin their fun, but this is a different time and this goes to what other campuses have been doing.” The campus is going virtual for two weeks, the statement also notes, and Cuomo is deploying a “SWAT team” which includes 71 contact tracers.
Students ‘gathering’ off campus: Leadership at the University of Notre Dame, where there have now been nearly 600 cases, explained in a statement that “the vast majority of the positive cases” discovered the week of August 9th “can be traced to a SINGLE off-campus gathering” where “individuals…were both outside and inside, together for some time, not wearing masks, in a crowded space, and drinking.” Notre Dame later suspended in-person classes for a two week period, and announced that they would begin regularly testing students. At Georgia College, where 7 percent of the student body is infected, in-person classes are ongoing, reports Inside Higher Ed, but officials said in a statement to the news outlet that “we continue to remind our students that COVID-19 can spread rapidly at off-campus social gatherings where social distancing and other mitigation measures are not maintained.”
Students ‘gathering’ ON campus: “Last night, a large group of first-year students selfishly jeopardized the very thing that so many of you claim to want from Syracuse University—that is, a chance at a residential college experience,” said J. Michael Haynie, Syracuse University’s Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation in an August 20th statement titled “Last Night’s Selfish and Reckless Behavior.” Pictures and video of the gathering spread on social media. The university has not experienced a major outbreak (yet).
Students not wearing masks and breaking social distance rules: The University of Miami is doling out warnings, fines, and suspensions for students who break safety rules, reports the Miami Herald. Ryan Holmes, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students told the Herald that depending on how extreme the case was, students could be suspended for breaking coronavirus rules. He didn’t specify how much the fines were but in Miami, you can be fined $50 by the city for a first offense of going maskless. The school has found 183 positive cases since August 17th.
There are too many people on campus. Following outbreaks, an announcement from Kevin M. Guskiewicz, University of North Carolina Chancellor, and Robert A. Blouin, Executive Vice Chancellor, explained that the school was making “important changes to de-densify our campus.” (Namely, undergrad classes would go online for the entire semester, and students would be allowed to cancel their dorm room leases without penalty.) The reasoning Guskiewicz and Blouin use here is notable because it acknowledges the reality that students, many of them teenagers away from home for the first time, with limited support to combat loneliness and, due to COVID, boredom, will end up prioritizing the wrong thing. And it helps underscore the reality that the virus thrives when lots of people live in close quarters. Which brings me to the last, best thing to blame…
We are simply in a pandemic: After logging 263 positive tests in one week, East Carolina University switched to an online semester. Before the uptick, Interim Chancellor Ron Mitchelson had scolded some students for being “unmasked, and irresponsible.” But in an August 23rd statement, his messaging shifted to acknowledge the larger reality this semester exists within. He said in a video statement to the community: “the decision to pivot in large part was the disease, right, it’s a horrible pandemic that we face. We couldn’t stand by any longer.”
And there it is: An actual change in infrastructure that takes into account the fact that we are living in a pandemic. It’s probably the only chance colleges have to get out of this mess.
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Dear Prudence is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here’s an edited transcript of this week’s chat.
Danny Lavery: Hello, everyone! Glad to be back. Let’s get started.
Q. My wife revealed my trauma: My wife and I have been friends with two families since we’ve been together. We vacation together, our kids are “play cousins,” and we enjoy each other’s company. They’ve known my wife longer than me. Recently, it came out that my wife had mentioned to one friend, who then told their partner and the other couple, that I experienced sexual abuse as a child. I feel completely humiliated. I have never disclosed this to anyone other than my wife. While I’m sure she wasn’t gossiping about me, I still resent her having shared this. I am embarrassed that they’ve known something so intimate about me. I feel shut down whenever I interact with these friends now. I don’t know how to proceed.
A: Your wife should not have disclosed your childhood sexual abuse to anyone, regardless of her intentions. I’m glad you didn’t think she was gossiping or speaking flippantly about it, but it’s your call to decide when, where, and how you want to share this information with other people, no matter how well your kids get along, no matter how long you’ve known them, or any other factor. I hope your wife has already apologized sincerely. If she hasn’t, she needs to. Impress upon her that this has materially damaged your relationship with these people, that you had no intention of discussing your childhood abuse with them, and now that you’ve realized they’ve known about it for some time (without your knowing about that knowledge!), the trust and intimacy you once shared with them has been displaced. Your wife should also commit to never sharing this information on your behalf again. Once she’s able to do that, then you can discuss what your future relationships with these other families might look like. Maybe you need distance for a while, maybe you’d like her to apologize to them for sharing information that wasn’t hers to disclose, maybe both.
You may also want to see a couples counselor together, both to work through this violation and to establish a sense of trust with someone who’s professionally obligated to maintain confidentiality. To that end, you might also consider seeing a therapist of your own. But you certainly don’t have to—I don’t want to suggest that your first response to having your wife violate your privacy ought to be “talk to somebody else about your abuse.” I recommend therapy often (and see a therapist regularly myself), but it’s not the only way to deal with trauma or work through relationship issues, and having experienced CSA in the past doesn’t create a special obligation to disclose or discuss it with others. I hope you’ll consider it as an option that may very well provide you with some relief, but whatever decision you make is entirely yours.
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Q. Voter fraud: My father is in a nursing home and is often very confused. Recently I told my mother that she could not fill out his absentee ballot for him because it is against the law. At first she was upset, wanting to know when it had become illegal. I told her it had always been illegal and that it is considered voter fraud. With the current brouhaha over mail-in ballots, I didn’t want her to get in trouble. Today she told me that she had sent the mail-in ballot to the nursing home but had changed her mind and was going to get it back and “rip it up with my own two hands so you don’t call the police on me.” I was very hurt by this and told her so. She happens to be voting for a different candidate than I am, but I would have given her the same information even if she was voting for my candidates. Until a few years ago, my father took care of all the “adult” work, and my mother at age 88 has now been thrown in water above her head with no idea how to cope. I thought it was the right thing to do to give her the information I did. Was I wrong, or should I have just let her commit voter fraud and hope she didn’t get caught, rationalizing that the one vote would not have made a difference?
A: Depending on your state, and whether your father has moments where he’s able to clearly communicate his wishes, he may have the right to fill out an absentee ballot with additional assistance. You and your mother might want to speak to the nursing home administration and inquire whether they’re able to assist. You can learn a bit more about voting accessibility options here, although of course my thoughts here are neither exhaustive nor an adequate substitute for legal advice. And that doesn’t mean your mother, or anyone else, can simply take his absentee ballot and decide whom they think he’d vote for—or worse, whom they’d want him to vote for—before mailing it in on his behalf. To that end, it’s perfectly fine that you told your mother not to do it. The fact that she got a little snitty and said “I’ll tear it up myself so you don’t call 911” is annoying, but take the win where you can get it. It’s good that she’s not going to fill out his ballot! Now, as for her being generally “in over her head” at 88, that seems like the more pressing issue. I don’t know if you fear for her ability to care for herself, but if you’re worried about her health or safety or ability to stay on top of her bills, I suggest you focus on finding resources to help her cope. Good luck!
Q. Closing out jailed son’s social media: My 24-year-old son was arrested this weekend to be extradited out of state and, best-case scenario, won’t be out for eight months to a year. He gave me his phone and said to shut everything down. After that interaction, I won’t be able to see or talk to him for 10 to 14 days. In getting his apps ready to close, I found he’s been lying about his age (saying he’s 18) and using an entirely made-up identity to talk to young (but still of age) women. I feel those women deserve more than being ghosted, but I don’t know what to tell them—“Sorry, my son lied to you and now he’s in jail”? And if I do, how detailed should I be?
A: I understand that you want to support your son while he’s incarcerated, but you’ll take on too much responsibility if you try to make it your job to address his relationships with the women he’s lied to. I don’t know if his arrest is in any way connected to this, but if so, I hope you’ll consult a lawyer of your own before doing anything with your son’s accounts, to make sure that you’re staying on the right side of the law and protecting yourself. You can support your son without acquiescing to this request. I think the best thing to do is to tell him the next time you speak that you’re not able to close down his accounts because that would either involve continuing the lies he’s told these women, or having to conduct awkward personal conversations that he needs to either have or avoid on his own. There’s nothing here that can’t wait 10 or 14 days; it doesn’t sound like he’s ever met any of these women or that he’s made them extravagant promises. Even if they are hurt and bewildered by his sudden disappearance, ghosting is hardly uncommon on dating apps, especially when a relationship’s still in a just-texting phase. I agree that these women deserve better, but your son chose not to treat them better, and all the sympathy and explanations in the world from his mother won’t make up for his bad behavior. While your son’s obviously going through a difficult time facing out-of-state charges, he’s also 24 years old, and it’s his responsibility to deal with whatever consequences arise from his decision to lie to women, whether online or elsewhere.
Q. Husband’s friend that he hates: My husband has a co-worker he constantly complains about to me. He says that the entire office can’t stand her, she’s a snitch, etc. However, I just saw messages on his phone with her that are paragraphs long and how he hopes they get to work the same days together. How much should I be worried?
A: I don’t want to choose a “concern level” you should set your flag to, but you should certainly talk to your husband about it—starting, of course, with an honest disclosure about just how you came to see those messages on his phone, why you felt compelled to read through them, and whether you two generally have a difficult time trusting each other, and probably an apology, if you two aren’t normally in the habit of reading each other’s text messages. Then listen to what he has to say, and be honest with yourself about how persuasive you find his explanation. Maybe he has a crush on her, maybe they’re having an affair, maybe he has an unattractive habit of complaining about her to others while flattering her directly in order to stay on her good side (or maybe both). Whatever the case may be, you can both apologize for having violated his privacy and ask for clarification about a jarring inconsistency.
Q. Cleaning neighbors’ yard: We’re friendly with a neighbor who’s been gone for a long period because of COVID. Leaves have piled up in her yard, and we’d like to clean them up. Usually we ignore them and she cleans them up when she returns, but she’s been gone longer than normal and the fire danger is very high. Is it OK to clear her yard of leaves? We don’t have any contact info for her, nor do our other neighbors, or we’d ask her first. She has another house out of state and is only here a few months out of the year.
A: This seems straightforwardly fine! Late August is a particularly risky time for fires, you’re not planning on cutting down a tree or altering some permanent fixture of her backyard, you’re normally friendly with her but don’t presently have any way of getting in touch, and it doesn’t seem likely she’d want to save dead leaves. Go ahead and clear the leaves. When she gets back, you can ask if she’d like to leave a forwarding number on future trips (or suggest she hire a landscaping crew every few months), but I really don’t think you have to wait to ask her permission this time.
Q. Can’t stay at home: I have been back to working in the office for about two months after my state’s initial stay-at-home order was lifted. My wife seems to have gotten too accustomed to having me at home every day because she is constantly asking and begging me to stay and work from home for a day. This has happened almost on a daily basis lately. While I enjoyed working from home and wish I could go back to it again, and my office has a semi-relaxed work-from-home policy, it’s not that simple. I’m in a junior position, and my boss would much rather I’d be in the office full time (it’s not an option for me to work from home for one or two days a week). I know she’s stressed out because she has to get our oldest child ready for school in the mornings and take care of our needy 2-year-old, but I feel like she’s being unreasonable. Is she, or should I be more accommodating somehow? I’ve even tried coming home on my lunch break occasionally—something that isn’t easy, given the commute—and she continues to want me to stay home. Is there a solution here that I’m not considering?
A: I don’t think either of you is being unreasonable, although I do agree that your wife’s current approach (asking you every day if you can work from home) to a perfectly understandable problem (feeling overwhelmed on a daily basis by two small children as a stay-at-home parent) needs to change. I’m not quite sure whether the “semi-relaxed” work-from-home policy applies to everyone in your office or if it’s tied to seniority. If once a week isn’t possible, I wonder if you could ask your boss about the possibility of working from home one Friday a month; while that won’t solve the bulk of your child care problem, it can’t hurt, especially since you enjoy it yourself.
But whatever answer your boss gives, you have grounds to reorient this conversation with your wife. Tell her you’ve noticed she asks you almost every day to work from home, that it’s just not possible for you to do so right now, and then ask her what kind of help she needs right now to make her own workdays manageable. Can you help get your oldest child ready for school before you leave for work in the mornings? If not every day, can you commit to two mornings a week, or make lunches the night before? Are there chores or errands related to child care that aren’t immediately time-sensitive that you can take over on the weekends so she has more time to decompress? I don’t imagine you can provide much more than brief moral support if you come home during a lunch break for 15 minutes when factoring in your commute, so look for other opportunities to relieve some of the child care burden where you can. Good luck!
Q. Do I owe my friend who helped me out once? I met my friend “Jonathan” 20 years ago in high school. We became friends on Facebook but didn’t really communicate until 12 years after high school, when he messaged me about a trip to the city he lived in I posted about on Facebook. We had lunch my first day there. Then a week later, when I found myself in a bind in a city where I knew no one else, I called him for help. He really came through for me with generosity and hospitality, and I will never forget it. The problem is that in the years since he has continued calling me for favors. More than once he has called me and asked me to wire him a couple hundred dollars, which I did if I had it. Once he called me to pick him up at the airport about two hours from where I live and take him to his hotel. It was a weeknight, and when his flight was delayed he still expected me to show up at 11:30 p.m. on a work night. But what has really bothered me is that he has asked me to provide a fake reference in a job search more than once over the years. The first time, I was younger and it was actually kind of fun. Now it feels irresponsible, especially now that everything we do is virtually public. This potential employer could find me and call me out on social media or worse, contact my current employer and fill them in. I’ve already made the mistake of saying I would do this again. Do I confront him and tell him I am not comfortable doing this again? Do I just pretend like I never got the call for a reference? Or do I just follow through on this favor and refuse if it comes up again? I feel like I might never escape this feeling that I owe him, that unless I do something equally generous, we will never be “even.”
A: Unless Jonathan bought you a house with a suitcase full of cash, no mortgage, free and clear and in your name, I’m at a loss to think of what he could have done for you when you were alone in a new city that means eight years later you’re still honor-bound to say yes to any and every favor he asks of you, without question. Yes, you should stop providing him with fake work references, and you can let him know you wish you hadn’t done it in the first place because the risks are too high for both of you. Don’t wait around for a prospective employer to call you—firstly because I think you’ll feel stressed out and anxious waiting for such a call, but also because it would be a waste of his time and yours if he lists you as a reference in the future and you already know you’re not going to do it anymore. If he asks you for a ride from an airport two hours away at midnight, or any other favor you can’t comfortably perform, tell him no. It’s great to do favors for a friend when you can, but this isn’t Sila Tsarevich and Ivashka with the White Smock and you’re not under a life debt because Jonathan helped you out in a crisis.
Q. Re: Cleaning neighbors’ yard: Given she lives out of state for part of every year, she likely has her mail forwarded to her there. Try sending her a note to the address that you have for her in your own neighborhood, and it will probably be forwarded to her out-of-state address.
A: That’s a good suggestion! I agree: If she has multiple homes, it seems likely that she has at least some way of checking mail at both addresses when she’s out of town. I still think the letter writer should rake up the leaves and then send the note letting her know and asking what her wishes are in the future, rather than asking permission and then waiting around, but it’s a good option.
Q. Re: Can’t stay at home: It might be worth asking if your boss will let you shift hours slightly, maybe 9–6 instead of 8–5. Then you could be more hands-on in the a.m., getting your daughter ready and getting the day off to a better start. Just a thought!
A: That might be an option and worth at least raising with the boss. I can’t imagine the OP is the only employee having to deal with pandemic-related child care issues, and I hope management is willing to be flexible where possible.
Q. A family friend is threatening to tell my parents I’m a stripper: I had been struggling to make a living at my job for a few years now and decided to apply as a bartender at a local strip club. After a few days of working there, the manager said he was low on girls for the night and asked if I would like to dance for the night. I was a little hesitant at first but decided it was just one night. I ended up loving it and made around $800 in a few hours! We talked, and I became a dancer overnight. This was about a year ago. The other night while doing a set, one of my parents’ friends comes up to the stage and asks for a VIP dance. The entire time he was telling me how he wants a cut of my earnings to stay quiet and not tell my parents what I am doing! I either have to come clean to my parents (who are VERY religious and would disown me), quit my job and get further in debt, or start paying this guy half of my nightly earnings. Read what Prudie had to say.
A woman is arrested outside of the Kenosha County Courthouse on Saturday in Kenosha, Wisconsin.Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Since footage came out last week of a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shooting Jacob Blake in the back seven times while his children were in the car, protesters have taken to the streets in the lakeside city. Tensions flared as armed so-called militia members joined the scene. They say they’re trying to protect life and property in Kenosha, but on Tuesday, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot three protesters, killing two of them. For Monday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Gina Barton, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, about what’s really going on in Kenosha and how things got to this point. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ray Suarez: What has it been like in Kenoshasince the footage of Jacob Blake’s shooting came out?
Gina Barton: The response was almost immediate. People in Kenosha started taking to the streets. During the day, things have been pretty calm. Families are out there. Younger people are out there—all different races, ages—but then when the sun goes down, you start getting different groups of people who seem to be interested in causing conflict and chaos.
These so-called militia members seem to be a big part of that conflict and chaos. How did they get involved?
A former Kenosha alderman is one of the leaders of a militia-type group that is called the Kenosha Guard. The Kenosha Guard on Tuesday put out an event on Facebook saying people need to come out and defend life and property. They had 3,000 people say they were interested. I don’t think nearly that many came, but that was on Facebook and it also got picked up by Infowars.
The sheriff, David Beth, has said that armed militia groups on the street are“not helping.” But law enforcement in Kenosha, at least early on, didn’t seem to be making an effort to move them on or get them out of town either.
The armed so-called citizen militias have reached out to both the police chief and the sheriff and asked them to deputize them. Sheriff David Beth, in one of my favorite quotes from him all week, said his reaction to that was, “Oh, hell no.” The Kenosha city police chief, though, is the one who hasn’t commented. I emailed and asked, “Did you cooperate with them?” because they sent him a personal message. He won’t answer that question. And from everything that transpired on Tuesday, it sure seemed like no one was telling them to go home.
There’s a lot more that we’re going to end up finding out about Kyle Rittenhouse. He’s been arrested. He’s been charged with intentional homicide. And since that moment, the rumor mill has been on overdrive about this kid. What he did in Kenosha after his mother brought him from Antioch, Illinois, how he moved around the city with an assault-style rifle slung on his shoulder, was not stopped by police. Is the dust settling? Is there a clear picture emerging not only of the events of Aug. 25, butofwho this kid is and what his motivations were?
As far as I can tell, it’s unconfirmed whether his mother brought him to Kenosha or how he got there. But he says through his attorney that he was there to try and protect some of the local property of a man who owns a car dealership and a couple of auto shops. You can also see him in videos saying that his job is to protect people and he’s also there to provide first aid. However, I talked in-depth to two people who were out there on Tuesday night and saw these events unfold. And they said that Tuesday night was different because there were so many more white guys with guns out there than there had been the previous evenings. And when they saw Rittenhouse, he gave them an uneasy feeling because he looked so young and didn’t seem like he was necessarily handling that weapon correctly.
There were a lot of storieson social media early on about a kind of chumminess between Rittenhouse and police. They gave him water. They talked to him. They let him pass, even though he was armed. Has any of that been able to be nailed down?
A lot of those examples that you just mentioned have been confirmed. David Beth, the sheriff in Kenosha, said we would give water or Gatorade to anyone who asked us, so he’s not denying that law enforcement was giving water to these men with guns. Earlier on Tuesday night, there were civilians taking sniper-style stances on the roofs of buildings. They were clearly out past curfew with guns. We do know that the Kenosha Guard here and Kyle Rittenhouse idolized police and considered themselves sort of supplemental law enforcement officers who were there to help the police.
HowwasKyle Rittenhouse able to pass through a line of law enforcement and go home after allegedly having shot three people with plenty of witnesses around?
I talked to a street medic the other day. And she was trying to walk through that very same area to get to her car that evening and was not allowed to pass. She is Native American and Japanese. And she said the exact place where Kyle Rittenhouse, a white man with a large gun, walked, she had tried to go and was turned away. So I do think that at least some in law enforcement saw these men as their allies or at least as not a threat. After the shootings on Tuesday, the following day, the Kenosha police chief came out and essentially said if people would have obeyed the curfew, this shooting wouldn’t have happened.
It sounded as if he was blaming the two men who died for their own deaths and blaming the man who is in danger of losing his arm for the fact that he was shot with an AR-15. So, the ACLU has called for the Kenosha police chief to resign. And it really has fed into the idea that he, in fact, was sympathizing with the white armed civilians, self-styled militiamen.
There’s a degree to which the tumult on the streets of Kenosha is sort of taking our gaze away from Jacob Blake himself. What’s going on there? He’s been in the hospital since he was shot. He’s said to be paralyzed from the waist down. It’s been reported he’s handcuffed to his bed. Why? Is he a suspect? Has he been charged with a crime?
My experience from covering police for the past 20 years is that if they have somebody who is injured while they’re being arrested, then it is pretty much standard operating procedure to handcuff them to the bed. I have even heard stories of pregnant women being forced to go into labor and give birth while being shackled to a bed. There was a lot of outcry about this, and on Saturday, Gov. Tony Evers intervened and I’m told Jacob Blake is now no longer handcuffed to his hospital bed.
Wisconsin has an unusual law. It was one of the first in the country, passed after a previous killing by the Kenosha police. When people are killed by police in Wisconsin, an outside agency reviews the case, but Jacob Blake was not killed. Is there going to be an outside investigation triggered in a case like this one?
I think it’s really interesting that our law, which was in fact the first in the nation, was passed largely due to the efforts of a man named Michael Bell, whose son was fatally shot in the head by Kenosha police all the way back in 2004. Michael Bell’s son, whose name was also Michael Bell, was shot point-blank in the head in front of his mother and sister in their driveway. The Kenosha Police Internal Affairs did their own investigation and within 48 hours cleared those officers of any wrongdoing. So that is when Bell’s father said, This is ridiculous. How can anybody be expected to do a thorough investigation of their own department? That law is only, as you stated, for fatal shootings. In other events where somebody is wounded or there’s a serious use of police deadly force if it isn’t fatal, the department involved can ask an outside agency to come in. So in this case, the Wisconsin Department of Justice is leading the investigation. And the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department was in charge of the scene of Jacob Blake’s shooting that night. So I do think that that is one thing that Kenosha police did right in these circumstances is as soon as that shooting happened, they decided we’re not investigating ourselves. And they called in the sheriff’s department and the state Justice Department.
Kenosha is a city that’s,according to the Census Bureau, about 77 percent white, about 10 percentBlack. It’s not one of these places that has a very large minority presence that’s created the kind of tensions that you see in nearby cities in Illinois and in Wisconsin itself.
That’s absolutely true. And I think one thing that people need to know about the shooting of Jacob Blake, and people need to know about what’s going on with policing in Kenosha, is that since 2004, the police have not had a great relationship with basically anyone in Kenosha. Michael Bell, who was shot in the head and killed in 2004, was white. And our review of fatal police shootings in Kenosha since then shows that the majority of the people that police have fatally shot are white also. We know of one Black man who’s been fatally shot in Kenosha since 2003. But it seems to me that the police in Kenosha don’t have a great relationship with people of any race.
Is it too early to tell where we are in the lifecycle of this story? Are things calming down?
What some of us are concerned about is that President Trump has said he is planning to come to Kenosha this week on Tuesday. And I think if he actually does choose to make that visit, that could incite things again. And we could see this cycle continuing and repeating itself.
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Attorney General Bill Barr speaks at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on August 4, 2020.Hicholas Kamm/Getty Images
Last week, the Department of Justice sent widely publicized letters to the governors of four states—Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—seeking information about nursing homes and coronavirus infections. The DOJ justified the request as part of an evaluation whether to open a formal investigation under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). This does not appear to be an ordinary independent investigation, though. In fact, there’s every reason to believe the DOJ letters are partisan attacks on opponents of the president.
The backdrop for all this is the COVID-19’s devastating effect on life in nursing homes. The coronavirus pandemic has hit nursing homes hard and highlighted the inhumanity of our system of shunting away elderly and disabled people in isolated congregate institutions. The New York Times estimates that at least 68,000 people have died due to COVID in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities—41 percent of the total number of deaths attributable to the virus in this country.
The devastation underscores a truth we have known for years: Institutions separated from the mainstream of society—nursing homes, long-term care facilities, psychiatric hospitals, or jails and prisons—cause intense harm to the people who are confined there. They rigidly control the lives of their residents—limiting such mundane daily liberties as the choice of when to turn out the light at night or with whom to eat dinner. They often limit opportunities for employment, education, and personal development. And they frequently harm the physical and mental health of those who must live there—with the tragic consequences we are seeing today.
Government investigations of the poor conditions at congregate institutions—and efforts to promote community-based alternatives so that individuals would not be forced to live in those facilities—would be very welcome. The coronavirus pandemic makes the need for such action especially acute.
That is not, however, what the DOJ’s actions were about. Instead, the department is acting in a transparently political manner. Throughout the pandemic, DOJ has failed to take key steps to use CRIPA to protect residents of congregate facilities. Last week’s letters, aimed at governors who have vocally criticized President Trump’s response to the pandemic, and timed amidst the Republican National Convention, will do nothing meaningful to protect those residents.
Nursing homes are a key location for the spread of COVID-19, but DOJ’s authority under CRIPA extends to only a tiny slice of those facilities. The statute applies only to institutions that are operated by state or local governments. But the overwhelming majority of people in nursing homes are in privately operated facilities. In New York, for example, only 28 out of the state’s more than 600 nursing homes are public. And it’s far from a coincidence that all four governors who received these letters are Democrats. The state with the worst per capita coronavirus death rate in nursing homes, according to federal data, is Massachusetts—but its Republican governor received no similar letter. Same for Mississippi, Maryland, and Arizona—all are in the top 10 in death rate, all have Republican governors, yet none received a DOJ letter. New York and Michigan rank 11th and 12th on this metric.
According to the Times data, Florida has experienced more nursing home deaths (both absolutely and as a percentage of total COVID deaths) than has Michigan, yet DOJ actually singled Florida out for praise in the press release it issued last week. The only reasonable explanation for the disparate treatment is that the Trump Administration perceives Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as an enemy and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as a friend.
Compared to its narrow authority over nursing homes, DOJ has the power under CRIPA to address conditions in all jails and prisons. And jails and prisons are still the sites of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks. In one of the most serious outbreaks, Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio has reported more than 2,400 cases, affecting nearly its entire population. UCLA’s COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project has tallied over 1,000 virus-attributed deaths of jail and prison inmates and staff. But DOJ hasn’t lifted a finger to enforce the law there. To be sure, there’s been no CRIPA letter to Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to address the crisis in his state’s prisons.
We have spent our legal careers advocating for the rights of individuals who have been forced—by legal dictate or by the lack of other options—to live in congregate facilities. Much of our advocacy has involved efforts to reduce our nation’s reliance on large institutions by promoting robust community-based alternatives to confinement. As a political appointee at the Department of Justice during the Obama Administration, one of us led the government’s CRIPA enforcement and used that authority to promote deinstitutionalization. As career civil servants at the Department of Justice during the 1990s, both of us worked on CRIPA cases involving a range of settings, including jails, prisons, and mental health and developmental disability facilities. We welcome efforts to move people from congregate facilities, and to improve conditions where decarceration is pending or impossible. But the department’s action is transparently political and plainly not undertaken in good faith.
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In a departure from its usual strategy of spending 20 minutes focused on a single obscure or complex topic, Last Week Tonight’s main segment on Sunday actually focused on … events that took place last week. “It’s one of the rare times we’re actually living up to our title, unlike what should probably be called 28 Minutes on the Corn Tax or Whatever the Fuck with John Oliver,” said the host. It’s a testament to how very bad the past week was that Oliver barely touched on the devastating hurricanes or the wildfires blazing across California or the pandemic, instead focusing primarily on the Republican National Convention and the events in Kenosha.
“Lying in front of flags” was, in Oliver’s view, the main theme of this year’s RNC, to the point where he was surprised that a speaker “didn’t at one point claim Trump invented parakeets or that he stoped the murder hornets by sucking them straight out of the air.” Of the most unique falsehoods in a “blizzard of lies,” Oliver pointed to Larry Kudlow’s choice to speak about the pandemic in the past tense, as if we’re past all that unpleasantness now, and the lengths to which RNC speakers went in assuring white viewers that racism was also a relic of the past.
This is the same week that Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer in front of his children and 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was allowed by police to walk away after, as Oliver put it, “driving to a city he didn’t live in, to protect property didn’t own” and shooting two Kenosha protestors. “If you’re looking for a better visual illustration of the differences between being black and white in America, I don’t think you’re gonna find one,” Oliver said. “Except, maybe, seeing exactly who sits down and who stands up when ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ comes on at a wedding.”
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The movie of the year was released last week. And, no, I’m not talking about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet; I’m talking about the briskly edited, 34-second video of a masked Tom Cruise, being driven in a black van through the streets of London in order to attend a theatrical screening of Nolan’s long-delayed time-trip blockbuster. This movie has it all: National Lampoon’s European Vacation–caliber moving shots of London landmarks; a shot where Cruise stands in front of a giant Tenet poster and proudly declares, “Back to the movies”; several shots of Cruise lurched forward in his theater seat transfixed by Nolan’s film; a shot where Cruise stands up at the end of the film and states, “Great to be back in a movie theater, everybody”; and, well, that’s it. (The mask Cruise is wearing appears to be an N95 valve mask, which, notoriously, protects only the wearer from infection.) It is as craven a work of cinematic propaganda as you are likely to see, but, for that reason, it is maybe the great film of the pandemic so far.
While nations have gone in and out of lockdown, schools have opened and closed and opened and closed, and families have separated from one another for months at a time, the global film industry has itchily sought our fastest possible return to the cineplex. Cruise—whose video is captioned, “Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved it.”—did not emerge from self-isolation to tell us that going to the movies again is safe. He emerged to tell us that going to the movies again is good. (It’s worth noting that Cruise was accompanied by Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie, who is aiming to restart production of the Cruise-starring franchise’s latest installment next month.) This tension—between the relative safety of the theatrical experience and the cultural sanctity of the theatrical experience—has defined the film industry’s response to the pandemic this summer. The cost in lives and the cost in money have both been rhetorically laundered through the magic and romance of cinema. And it’s no accident that, at the center of this fracas, is the director of Tenet himself.
He hasn’t been in charge of a bungled federal response, nor is he wantonly spreading false information to the public, but Nolan has become a second-tier villain of the pandemic. Although he’s been relatively quiet as Tenet’s release date has been adjusted and adjusted and adjusted again, when he has spoken, it’s been in the same rhapsodic register as Cruise. In a video for Chinese moviegoers who’ll be seeing the film this week, for instance, he said, “I like nothing more than escaping to another world through the power of movies. And Tenet is our attempt to make as big a film as possible, with as immersive action as possible for the big screen.” It’s in line with long-standing Hollywood tradition to frame an epic adventure film like Tenet as a means of imaginative escape for people across the globe whose lives have been upended by a rampaging virus and the economic and social collapses it’s brought in its wake. While two and a half hours in the immersive environment of an Imax theater might provide needed escapism for viewers mired in the culture of the coronavirus, it provides no escape from the virus itself. It’s telling that Nolan foregrounds cinema’s ability to help us forget the world around us rather than, say, critically engage or rethink it. It’s no use taking a fantastic voyage to Christopher Nolan’s alternate universe if our bodies are still sitting around in this one, snorting up all the aerosol droplets the theater’s A/C vents are helpfully distributing around the room. The “power of the movies,” if it’s mobilized in this way to herd viewers into spaces as demonstrably unsafe as movie theaters is a dangerous one. What if the “power of movies” could allow us to escape to another world from the safety of our own homes?
As the release date shifted from July to August to September, Warner Bros. has been pushing the narrative that Tenet would be released when it was safe for us to see Tenet. Deadline reported that Warner Bros. would be opening Tenet stateside only in those cities where “it’s seen that it’s safe to reopen.” It was also reported this week that COVID-19 hospitalizations where I live in St. Louis are approaching a record high. And yet, as early as Monday night, when sneak previews begin across the U.S., I’ll be able to go to the Galleria 6 or the Hi-Pointe or the AMC Esquire 7 and watch Tenet in an air-conditioned room full of people. It’s not safe. But here comes Tenet.
This isn’t just about the specific bad luck of being a would-be blockbuster in America’s pandemic summer. For Nolan, at least, it’s as much about long-simmering dread over the loss and degradation of cinema by digital technology. There are few filmmakers as evangelical in their opposition to the digital—to digital cinematography, digital projection, digital effects, and, heaven forbid, digital streaming—as Christopher Nolan. Nolan avows the not-uncommon belief that these innovations represent a death of cinema, that digital tools not only cheapen the product and the experience but threaten the very medium of film itself. He has something of a point here. Seeing a film with 70 mm clarity and laser-aligned sound genuinely is a thrilling experience—and it’s one that, to judge from Tenet’s $53 million opening weekend, much of the world is raring to get back to. There’s an indescribable magic to seeing a classic film projected from an original print on an enormous screen, surrounded by hundreds of other enchanted spectators. And, while the rise of digital streaming has the feel of a democratic delivery system, it’s as capable of letting great films disappear as it is rendering them accessible to broader audiences. It’s also one of several culprits making the more boutique pleasures of old-fashioned projection and exhibition harder to come by.
Nolan is, however, uncommon in his orthodoxy about the bleak future this divide portends. Tenet, as he says in that video, was made “for the big screen.” For Nolan, his films are inseparable from the specificity of their medium format and exhibition context. To say Tenet is made for the big screen is, of course, a common kind of directorial cliché, but, for Nolan and many others, it also carries a very literal, material charge. This film, outside its ideal exhibition context, projected on large format film in a darkened theater, is fundamentally something else. For Tenet to lose its run in theaters, for it to go direct to streaming, for this work of filmic art to immediately be subordinated to the digital economy would be an untenably compromised situation for this fundamentalist filmmaker.
Nolan’s aesthetic fundamentalism is not the primary reason for Tenet’s hasty return to theaters—it probably doesn’t mean very much to Warner Bros. at all, and most theater chains don’t even have the technical capacity to project Nolan’s films the way he’d wish—but it provides an artistic alibi for what is, at bottom, a matter of finances. Indeed, Nolan himself articulated the structure of this alibi in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed warning against the tyranny of the digital. “The public will lay down their money to those studios, theaters and filmmakers,” he wrote, “who value the theatrical experience and create a new distinction from home entertainment that will enthrall—just as movies fought back with widescreen and multitrack sound when television first nipped at its heels.”
The financial concerns that buttress and contextualize Nolan’s cinematic advocacy are real. For every executive whose payday is theoretically preserved by the opening of this film, there are thousands of below-the-line craftspeople and theater workers whose jobs remain safe. But the lesson of this crisis so far is that losses are inevitable in the short term, and that the only way to avoid greater losses in the medium term is to fundamentally reconceive what the world looks like. The U.S. has lagged behind its peers in part because of a widespread cultural refusal to change in this way, to “lose” a way of being—even temporarily—in service of saving the lives and livelihoods of those around us. (The theater industry has argued that if they’re not able to reopen soon, the damage could be irreversible, but it would be worse if movie theaters become known as superspreading hot spots.) The Tenet fiasco, shot through with romantic nostalgia for a particular type of cinematic experience that was at some risk of disappearance even before COVID-19, is a catastrophic fable of coronavirus denialism, particularly in the U.S. Long partial to ponderous tales of masked heroes—whether they be batmen or WWII-era wingmen—Nolan and Warner Bros. find themselves, at least philosophically, in league with the anti-maskers and anti-lockdown protesters. When the lights go down in the theater, the outside world melts away—this is cinema’s most notorious special effect. And it’s an effect that plenty of lawmakers and business owners and frustrated citizens have been trying to reproduce when they’ve rushed reopenings and prematurely lifted lockdown orders and defiantly posed for maskless photo-ops. If we go back to work, if we go back to school, if we go back to the movies, the pandemic melts away. But when the lights go up, we know that’s not true. Tenet, despite its radical reimagining of past and future, will one day come to symbolize the stubborn, pointless insistence that the world continue on exactly as it had been before.
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"ANNOUNCEMENT: These difficult times can be especially trying for those with children at home or other dependent/caregiver responsibilities. As we head into the fall, and more schools opt to conduct classes virtually, I am pleased to announce that the agency is able to continue offering excused leave through March 2021. Supervisors should approve all requests, to the extent possible, and work with employees to ensure all available leave options and schedule flexibilities are considered."
In the largest-ever study of glacial lakes, researchers using 30 years of NASA satellite data have found that the volume of these lakes worldwide has increased by about 50% since 1990 as glaciers melt and retreat due to climate change.
August 31, 2020
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Got a Very Serious Book to sell about the dangers of radical right-wing overreach? In book publishing, this is the summer of the Sith Lord design palette. Just in the past two months, three high-profile new books—Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses (on the conservative movement since the 1970s), Robert Draper’s To Start a War (on the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq), and Julian Zelizer’s Burning Down the House (on Newt Gingrich)—have all hewed close to this same look. It’s characterized by an imposing black background with a combination of red-and-white, boldface, sans-serif font. (As if in an accidental homage to “Separated at Birth,” the Andersen-edited Spy magazine feature, New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix recently featured the Draper and Zelizer books nestled right near each other in the highbrow-brilliant quadrant.)
And next week, Michael Cohen’s Disloyal, a tell-all about his years working for Donald Trump, will go out to stores with a fittingly downmarket version of the same look.
Skyhorse Publishing
This isn’t an entirely new trend. I’m working on the next season of Slate’s Slow Burn, about the leadup to the Iraq War, and in the course of my research for the podcast, my desk started to pile up with books whose dust jackets similarly featured Darth Vader’s favorite colorway. I begin to think of this loose template as “the Angler cover,” after Pulitzer winner Barton Gellman’s 2008 biography of Dick Cheney, which became a best-seller. There was the Draper book, and 2007’s Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency, by Pulitzer winner Charlie Savage, and Joby Warrick’s Pulitzer-winning Black Flags: The Rise of Isis. I started to notice Angler-style covers everywhere. On Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s No. 1 New York Times bestseller, about Steve Bannon. On Fascism: A Warning, by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, which also topped the bestseller list.
Of the look, a book designer told me that the colors are simply grabby (“there are only so many colors we have … and these are just the most serious colors we have in the crayon box”), and this sort of refined but bold design telegraphs ambition. Editors, the designer says, always believe a “big book has to look like a big book.” Several of the Sith Lord books share the same publisher, Penguin Press, which publishes a lot of serious nonfiction, and the cleanest, simplest execution of the look seems to come from that house. The designer also suggested to me that the Patient Zero for this oft-imitated design style was Penguin’s 2004 Pulitzer winner Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll, which seemed to establish a visual language for the ambitious work of journalism about the world that 9/11 made. (Coll’s 2018 book Directorate S comes wrapped in another, slightly more fanciful riff on the look.)
It makes a certain kind of intuitive sense that the Sith Lord palette would have taken off in the years of the Bush administration’s War on Terror and returned in earnest when Trump was elected. The colors are the American flag in mourning, the more tranquil blue blotted out by black. The whole look is one of warning, of red-alert. The red, white, and black color scheme is echoed, in a less spare and streamlined look, in some of the Resistance-aimed, less journalistically rigorous barnburners of the past few years, like Cliff Sims’ Team of Vipers or Michael Wolff’s Siege.
Meanwhile, on balance, big politicalbooks of the Obama years—even the ones about the financialcrisis—tend to come in jauntier packaging. Red beats out black, blue shows up, and white gets to be the background rather than the font color. (One exception is Jonathan Chait’s book Audacity, which has a very Angler-y vibe—but while it was about Obama, it was published at the dawn of the Trump years, which seems to have cast a shadow. Still, there’s a trace of Democratic blue.) This may, of course, simply reveal the worldview of the publishers and journalists and the readers to whom the books are marketed.
One of the more interesting twists on the Angler cover is Clinton Cash, the right-wing book that author Peter Schweizer (along with his longtime collaborator Steve Bannon) deliberately and explicitly intended to be the kind of investigation that wouldn’t just ping around the Fox News-sphere but would also infiltrate the pages of the mainstream media. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cover choice, in the visual vernacular of ambitious journalism, was deliberately selected to help that mission along.
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The book designer I spoke to told me it’s relatively common practice in an initial brainstorming meeting to look to a recently successful book on a similar subject area and try to do a new riff on it. For what it’s worth, Draper, Gellman, and Andersen all told me that their covers weren’t designed as any kind of deliberate homage to another author’s book or reference to a certain color scheme. (“No one was ferociously advocating the red/black motif,” Draper said, suggesting that instead it might have been—as Paul Wolfowitz famously said of weapons of mass destruction as a reason for going to war—the one thing “everyone could agree on.”)
I asked Andersen if there’s anything annoying about having a book that looks so much like others on the market. “No, no! It’s the Zeitgeist,” he replied. “And to tell the truth, in the age where people buy books online, that sense of ‘Oh look, the book on the shelf here looks like that other one,’ … I think people are less aware.”
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This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture.Read more here.
I’m a single gay man and have been for most of the 15 or so years of my post-closet life. I’m also a chronic gay dating app user. More than chronic, in fact; I’m almost never not online. Or at least that was the case until the coronavirus pandemic brought the possibility of “meeting up” to a sudden halt.
Like many other gay men, I’ve deleted Grindr more times than I can count, only to reinstall it again a few days, if not hours, later. But when COVID-19 hit in mid-March, I deleted the app and didn’t reinstall it until sometime in mid-May. It was the longest I had ever been disconnected from a grid of other gay men since I started using dating apps almost a decade ago.
In retrospect, my decision to disconnect brought me peace: I was no longer struggling to balance multiple sexually charged conversations and endless requests for “more pics” with my daily routine, and I was no longer perpetually trying to slot hookups or dates into my already crammed schedule. But even though I had cut myself off from the all-consuming “pic?-looking?-hookup-post-hookup-‘I’m too busy this week but maybe next?’ ” cycle, I wasn’t totally off in the wilderness. I maintained my contact to the outside gay world through other avenues, like Reddit—and by extension Twitter and Instagram.
As public health experts and politicians began voicing cautious optimism about things potentially returning back to something like normal in the near future, a wave of optimistic memes and GIFs flooded my screen, visualizing the nonstop orgy gay men were, at least allegedly, prepping themselves for. And when I reinstalled the app, the very same wave of optimism washed over me, too. I returned to my menagerie of local and international contacts—“How are you? How’s quarantine treating you? Ugh, I’m so horny too!—and I even started e-meeting new people through FaceTime for virtual coffee dates and for cocktail hour.
A crisis is also an opportunity to do something differently, to correct a past error or improve something that wasn’t working before. I determined I was going to use physical distancing strategically to my advantage. I wasn’t going to rush to hook up with someone right away, and I wasn’t going to spoil my interest immediately by exchanging pictures. No, no. Not this time. This time I was going to use technology to date like how I did before technology completely altered dating.
How naïve: It took less than a month for me to slide back into my rutted cycle, only this time without the benefit of physical relief, since I was still respecting physical distancing protocols and all.
Why did I go back to Grindr? Did I honestly expect things to be different? After all, in my capacity as an academic researcher, I had published a scholarly paper that likened gay dating apps to gamified microporn. I should have known better than to think I could prevail over a set of algorithms designed to hook me into a cycle of endless dissatisfaction.
Throughout the COVID crisis period, an idea I had only briefly touched upon in my paper continuously ran through my mind—an idea that only gained emotional traction as I came to realize I had fallen effortlessly back into old habits I so dearly wanted to break.
GMSNAs [gay male social networking applications] have to make you feel optimistic even if you also feel more pessimistic every time you log on, in many ways characterizing what Lauren Berlant has termed cruel optimism: “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”
It’s an uncanny feeling when your own words unexpectedly offer insight into your own experiences. And upon reflection, there was something about Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism that resonated with me more deeply when I returned to Grindr after my absence.
Debuting in the midst of the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement, Cruel Optimism was a lyrical dissection of how our attachment to the narrative of the “American Dream” was not only toxic but spiritually, psychologically, and even economically malignant and deleterious. Berlant’s book contributed to a cycle of thought within queer theory that took aim at the way optimism acts as a pillar that bolsters late capitalism, despite delivering diminished returns to the very people whose optimism about that system sustains it.
For Berlant, optimism becomes harmful when the thing you find yourself attached to convinces you that without that thing you won’t be able to achieve anything, or at least anything that presumably requires that thing you’re attached to. Within Berlant’s study of our devotion to an economic system that no longer delivers on its promise of a better life is a profound yet simple question about the nature of human desire: Why can’t we let go? Why can’t we let go of the things that, deep down, we know harm us?
The overlaps between Berlant’s critique of consumer capitalism and Grindr are numerous. After all, Grindr is a for-profit business whose model relies on an active, if not ever-expanding, user base. And as I reflect on my attachment to Grindr, I’m reminded of the old adage, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
And so I ask: Why can’t I let go of Grindr? Why do I remain optimistic about apps like it when the return on my time and emotional investments is diminished with each reinstall and reopening of the app? Why do I struggle to imagine a gay life, let alone a better gay life, without Grindr? Why do I cling to an app that has been viewed by many in the community as an obstacle to self and collective flourishing?
“When we talk about an object of desire,” writes Berlant, “we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.” What, then, does Grindr, my object of desire, promise me? Or, more accurately, what promises do I make myself believe Grindr promises me? What cluster of promises do I embed in the app that I then want it to make possible for me?
Connectivity? Happiness? Satiation? Salvation? Marriage? A boyfriend? An open relationship? Temporarily relief from my carnal cravings? Distraction? Titillation? Heteronormativity? Homonormativity? Queer emancipation? A friend? An adventure? A hand to hold while I walk down the street? A body to cling to as I fall asleep?
Despite living in this moment where the very idea of connection can feel toxic, I still want to meet someone to call my own. But why didn’t I manage to achieve this before COVID-19 put up all these additional barriers for me to circumvent—both physical and mental? And if I really wanted to meet one other person to call my own, then why did I so easily slide back into my comfortable routine of disjointed chats and pic exchanges? Moreover, how do you even date in the midst of a pandemic or ethically satisfy your carnal needs? Am I even legally allowed to touch a stranger anymore?
The optimism I felt earlier has faded. And as I sit alone in isolation, my thumb tapping on profile pictures, sending selfies, typing out “Hellos” and “How are yas,” I’m reminded of Christina’s confessional sendoff in Vicky Christina Barcelona: “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.”
How I envy her.
Meeting people through apps like Grindr has been a mixed bag of eerily easy and frustratingly difficult, but I always clung to some vague feeling that Grindr was going to eventually reward me with that which I want. But as I see my blank gaze reflecting off my phone’s screen while I meander through Grindr’s interface, I can’t help but hear a soft echo growing inside my head: You don’t know what promises you want me to make possible for you.
Do I even know who I am anymore? Do you?
For more of Slate’s LGBTQ coverage, listen to the Outward podcast.
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