Society

If the World Health Organization was hoping that its report earlier this year into the origins of COVID-19 would be the last word on the matter, it is going to be sorely disappointed. A group of 18 immunologists, biologists and other scientists have written to Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to make it clear that they reject WHO’s conclusion that it is ‘extremely unlikely’ that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, entered the human population through a laboratory accident. The report, published on February 28, pretty well rejected the theory that SARS-CoV-2 could have originated as a virus held, even invented, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it escaped.

Someday, we’ll count them like fallen soldiers: the online platforms that began by promising to be different, an escape from the grind of endless internet flame wars, and ended up like all the others, captured by memeified outrage. The trajectory is always the same. Tumblr, originally a home for cheeky fanblogs with titles like ‘fuckyeahsharks!’, was overtaken in a few short years by the ‘Your Fave Is Problematic’ brand of outrage archaeology. Facebook started as a place to collect your photos, share updates about your lunch and platonically ‘poke’ your friends, only to devolve into a wasteland abandoned by virtually everyone except a bunch of angry boomers battling over whether or not Hillary Clinton does, in fact, eat babies. Twitter...

Former first lady Michelle Obama told late night host Stephen Colbert this week that she suffers from 'low-grade depression' and anxiety. If you rolled your eyes at that self-diagnosis, you're not alone. Mrs Obama has joined the hordes of celebrities who have publicly spoken about dealing with anxiety disorder, including Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Cardi B, Adele and Jennifer Lawrence. Apparently this is supposed to make these mega-rich, ultra privileged individuals more relatable to the average human. I mean, who doesn't get a bit nervous before embarking on a worldwide singing tour or giving a 'thank you' speech after receiving an Oscar?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it,’ said Joe Biden. ‘It still matters.’ Sorry, Mr President, I disagree. After more months than I care to count of rigorously strapping a face covering across my mouth and nose, I’ve decided to shed the mask. Now, after nine maskless days, I can say that I have never felt so sensible, so liberated and so, well, attractive. In fact, I cannot recommend it enough. I first shed the mask by accident after getting slightly drunk one evening. Who cares, I thought, as I hurled myself on to the subway.

Your business may have closed, your kids still aren’t in school, nana hasn’t had a hug in 18 months, and your uncle drank himself to death from the crippling isolation — but the real tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the luckless fats are feeling stigmatized again. Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times detailed the tearful struggle of being grotesquely obese in the age of COVID-19. ‘Chrystal Bougon cried after the needle went into her arm. Not because her first dose of the Moderna vaccine hurt. But because, finally, being fat actually paid off,’ the article begins. ‘Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight.

Take me out to the ballgame, just not if I have to wear a mask. Major League Baseball is finally allowing a limited number of fans back into ballparks this year, but their nonsensical COVID-19 restrictions sap almost all the joy out of the experience. I recently attended my first game in almost two years at Nationals Park in Washington DC. (Before angry readers tell me I should be boycotting the MLB because of their decision to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia's new election security laws, I'll have you know that I did not purchase the tickets). It was far from a celebration of the (far too slow) reopening of America.

On a normal day, the Colonial Pipeline carries up to three million barrels of oil 5,500 miles from the Southern United States to New York, providing 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel needs. On Friday, the oil stopped flowing. The pipeline was shut down after the operating company was hit by a cyberattack. Two days later and the pipeline is still sitting idle, and companies are scrambling to try and secure supplies of oil, diesel, jet fuel and gasoline. The cyberattack raises international suspicions. Was it China? Russia? Those countries specialize in such actions. The NSA however has been briefing that the culprit was an unusual cybercrime outfit known as DarkSide. DarkSide’s business is ransomware.

The Seychelles has become a place to watch. Known as the world’s most vaccinated nation, ahead of even Israel, a third wave of COVID is hitting the archipelago despite the fact that over 60 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated — and nearly 70 percent have received at least one shot. In April the Seychelles was hopeful it was soon to reach herd immunity. But now 456 new cases reported over three days (the population is approximately 98,000) has cooled optimism there — especially since a third of the new cases were fully vaccinated (the remainder had received only one shot or were unvaccinated). It’s perhaps too soon to draw conclusions, but it doesn’t look like good news for those hoping widespread vaccination will bring about herd immunity.

The Facebook Oversight Board has reached a decision on Donald Trump…kind of. The tech company’s ‘Supreme Court’ is upholding the move to restrict Trump’s ‘access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account’. But the board deemed it ‘not appropriate’ to indefinitely suspend Trump from Facebook’s platforms, describing that penalty as ‘indeterminate and standardless’. The FOB wants Facebook to ‘determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform’ in the next six months. In other words — they punted.

Several years ago I applied for a teaching position in an American university. In response I received a lot of forms to fill out, including one that required me to identify my ‘ethnicity or race’. I hate to tell this to those of my liberal friends who relish historical analogies from 1930s Europe, but when I noted how black Americans were classified in the form —‘You are defined as Black even if only one of your parents was an African American’—the Nuremberg Race Laws came to mind. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see, even with a summer tan, a very white man. So I assumed it would be a waste of time to fill in the part about race on the form the university had sent me.

The birds are singing, the temperature is rising and I am frantically searching for a seamstress to hem three to four inches off a formal dress designed for a woman of normal height. You know what that means: it’s wedding season. This wedding season holds the uncertain distinction of being either the second under COVID or the first post-COVID, depending on your geography and luck. The pandemic was a tragedy for many couples who had planned their big day last year. According to the wedding website the Knot, less than half of couples who intended to get married in 2020 followed through with both their ceremony and reception.

It’s a day that ends in -y, which means there is some execrably stupid dust-up involving Tucker Carlson. Have you heard about Justin 'Definitely Not A Psychopath' Baragona? He possesses 52,000 tweets, 'spends most of his waking hours consuming cable news' and has one of the internet’s creepier fake smiles. He’s also tweeted about Tucker Carlson 29 times just this month. Wow, he sounds well-adjusted! Justin was the perfect kind of addict to spearhead the newest Tucker outrage spasm. https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1386837979453399049   Wait, that’s it? Tucker doesn’t like kids wearing the Face Diaper of the Beast? Who cares? But in the hyperreality of Twitter, Carlson’s throwaway venom was treated like a criminal offense. https://twitter.

A specter is haunting the very-online paleocon right — the specter of toxic traditionalism. We saw it late in March, when Groyper leader, traditional Catholic and all-round scumbag Nick Fuentes defended Rep. Matt Gaetz’s alleged affair with an underage girl as ‘very traditional’. There are plenty of reasons to object to sex between a 38 year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, but it was commonplace in the Middle Ages. To a troll like Fuentes, that automatically makes it #based. We also see it in the parish wars that are forcing Catholics to choose between milquetoast rainbow-flag-wavers like Fr James Martin and some iteration of a stock character Catholic meme lords call ‘Fr Chad Young trad’.

Left-wing magazine Slate took the stunning and brave step Saturday of publishing an article outlining the case for no longer wearing masks outside. 'As we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable,' the author reasoned. Mask enthusiasts melted down in response, insisting that Slate's article was 'irresponsible', 'going to get people killed' and 'misleading'. Others celebrated the article as 'a good sign of progress'. A Harvard infectious disease specialist asserted, 'I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit.

Statistics released by Pew Research illustrate the extent to which the religious faith of President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, is a source of profound division between Democrats and Republicans. To quote Pew: 'Nearly nine in 10 Democrats (88 percent) says that Joe Biden is at least "somewhat" religious; just 36 percent of Republicans agree.' On the face of it, the Democrats are right. This is a man who attends Mass every Sunday, and whose faith has helped him through the unthinkable tragedy of losing his young first wife and one-year-old daughter when their car was hit by a tractor in 1972. Biden's surviving son, Beau, was injured but survived; he died from a brain tumor, aged 46, in 2015.

If you’re the sort of person who buys and reads books about human behavior, then it is likely you have recently encountered an exciting, counterintuitive new psychological idea that seems as if it could help solve a pressing societal problem like educational inequality, race relations, or misogyny. Maybe you came across it in a TED Talk. Or, if not there, in an op-ed or blog post or book. It is, after all, a golden age for popular behavioral science.