Society

In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo approved a much needed state budget. Buried in this 400-page document was a provision to legalize commercial surrogacy. Passed without the opportunity for legislative hearings or public debates, the law came into effect in February 2021. Critics claim that Cuomo is unleashing an exploitative multi-billion-dollar industry that preys on the vulnerabilities of women. While surrogates are usually from poorer backgrounds and, in many states, are more likely to be of color and in particular black, the implanted eggs are selected from mainly white women up to the age of 25, usually highly educated and screened for any hereditary illness.

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.

The widespread implementation of some kind of digital vaccine passport or ‘vaxport’ appears to be a foregone conclusion in the United States — but not if I can help it. I’m going hard against it while there’s still time. You should too. It’s a very simple question: do I trust the government, Big Tech and corporations not to abuse this power? The answer is NO. Absolutely not. And why should I? Why would anyone? I could have just stopped at ‘do I trust the government, Big Tech and corporations?’ Opposing vaccine passports seems like something that should unite people across the entire political spectrum. Over the past decade we’ve had all of these institutions sell our data, spy on us and lie to us.

What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets. So Amazon doesn’t ban books. It just makes them much harder to buy and read. If a private company chooses to do that, who are you to complain?

The ethical case against domestic use of ‘vaccine passports’ was made with some passion in Britain before Boris Johnson’s change of heart. Matt Hancock repeatedly assured people that Britain is 'not a papers-carrying country'. Vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi said vaccine passports would be 'discriminatory'. Michael Gove promised that there were 'no plans' to introduce them. In a Westminster Hall debate, MPs from all parties lined up to say that out of principle, the minority who chose not to take the vaccine should suffer no penalty. Brits have not been told the reason for the U-turn. In theory, the UK government is taking soundings. In practice, those involved in Michael Gove’s review have been told that the decision has already been made by the PM: so they’re happening.

There’s an Old Testament story that ought to be better known (who does God’s PR these days?). King David is in his palace, and a servant announces that he has a caller. It’s Nathan the prophet. Good old Nathan — committed to maximizing the life-chances of the poor, a real old-school man of the people, and often a bit spiky with it — a man to keep onside. Yes, yes, send him in. Nathan launches into a story about a humble farmer who has been conned by some smooth-talking landlord and has now lost his land and his last remaining lamb to this greedy sod. The king’s a bit disappointed that Nathan has brought such a tiny issue to his attention — he was hoping for a big juicy cause he could champion, so as to remind the people of his compassionate-conservative credentials.

Pfizer and BioNTech have released some extraordinary findings from a Phase 3 trial involving 46,307 participants, between seven days and six months after a second dose was administered. The vaccine was found to have a 91.3 percent efficacy rate. These findings line up with the real world data coming out of Israel, which has used the Pfizer vaccine to inoculate its population, and reported several weeks ago that it proved 94 percent effective in preventing symptomatic illness. But on top of the overall efficacy rate came even better news: Pfizer is reporting that the ‘vaccine was 100 percent effective in preventing severe disease’ as defined by the Centers for Disease Control.

My first memory of my Aunt Mary involves a rattlesnake and a meat cleaver. I was maybe seven years old when my cousins and I found the rattlesnake near a stack of cardboard boxes in her garage. It was barely 9 a.m. and we ran inside to find her already in full makeup and a silk housecoat, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She grabbed the cleaver and walked up to the recoiling viper — as entranced by her severe face and big red hair as we were — and chopped its head off with a nimble clank. ‘Wait till it stops wigglin’, then go toss it over yonder,’ she said through a cloud of smoke, and motioned toward an embankment at the end of the driveway. My last memory is from a little over a decade later.

In rural upstate New York, where I grew up, pot-smoking was disproportionately a sport of farmers’ kids. That’s because inequitable ownership of land meant that some people could grow weed more discreetly than others. Among those with acres to till, private oases of marijuana were easily created by their offspring out of sight — especially, I recall, in between tall rows of feed corn. And with easier access to the drug, the sons and daughters of farmers also seemed to smoke more of it than the kids who were forced to rely on retail. This brings us to a paradox that, while not exactly one of Zeno’s, amounted to my earliest intuition of a chicken-and-egg problem.

Nothing duller for those of us not in therapy than listening to people who are in therapy talking about it, something they seem to like to do incessantly, at every opportunity. For this reason, my heart sank during the Oprah interview — which I’d been looking forward to tremendously — when early into his appearance, Prince Harry made an unsmiling reference to the ‘many years’ he had spent ‘doing the work — and doing my own learning’. Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, not long later he was telling the ludicrously softball interviewer of his family, his father, particularly: ‘they only know what they know. I’ve tried to educate them, through the process that I’ve been educated.’ Difficult to imagine how much the Windsors must have enjoyed that.

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.