Kat Rosenfield

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

During World War Two, ordinary citizens were encouraged to plant victory gardens, collect scrap metal and carpool to save fuel, always with the understanding that these measures would somehow contribute to victory. The propaganda of the time was heavy on the same ‘do your part’ messaging that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, giving meaning to people's sacrifices by characterizing their efforts as a patriotic duty and a moral imperative — and by strongly implying that those who balked at those sacrifices were on the side of the bad guy. One of the most famous posters from the era shows a snappily-dressed man behind the wheel of a car, with a ghostly, familiar figure sporting a toothbrush mustache in the passenger seat.

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...

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are widely available in the US, the CDC have released a handy chart to illustrate the relative risks of certain activities to vaccinated vs unvaccinated people. The color-coded chart, titled ‘Choosing Safer Activities’ and published this week, seems to be meant to persuade more people to get jabbed: the vaccinated figure is given a green light to do all sorts of things, including seeing friends, going to the movies and dining indoors, while the unvaccinated person gets a red or yellow danger alert for all but the smallest outdoor gatherings. However, the vaccinated figure is also pictured wearing a mask, which seems to suggest a startling lack of confidence in the vaccines' efficacy.

In some ways, the downfall of Jared Porter is a prototypical #MeToo story. A man in a position of relative influence made unwanted overtures to a female colleague via text message, in a milieu where rebuffing him was potentially injurious to her career. He was overly persistent, unforgivably lewd, and seemingly impervious to her discomfort, and while he apologized after being told directly that his conduct was inappropriate, it was too little, too late. The woman, a reporter, was thoroughly and understandably demoralized by the experience — and once the man’s conduct became public knowledge, he was thoroughly and understandably defenestrated from his high-profile position as a Major League Baseball general manager.