Monday 13th May 2024

The Problem With America’s Protest Feedback Loop

The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.


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Photos of the Week: Grim Reaper, Wicker Man, Met Gala

The ruins of a mountain monastery in Turkey, tornado damage in Oklahoma, a dress rehearsal for the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, devastating floods in southern Brazil, a drone expo in South Korea, ongoing Russian drone attacks in Ukraine, camel rides in a Chinese desert, fireflies on a forest trail in Taiwan, and much more A performer floats above supporters, attached to a cluster of helium balloons, above the Marques do Pombal square in Lisbon, on May 6, 2024, to celebrate the champions of the Portuguese football league. #


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Against Sunscreen Absolutism

Australia is a country of abundant sunshine, but the skin of most Australians is better adapted to gloomy England than the beaches of Brisbane. The country’s predominantly white population has by far the world’s highest rate of skin cancer, and for years the public-health establishment has warned residents about the dangers of ultraviolet light. A 1980s ad campaign advised Australians to “Slip, Slop, Slap”—if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.


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The Female-Midlife-Crisis Novel

Back when the word weird (or, in the spelling of the day, wyrd ) was first commonly used in English, it was not an adjective but a noun, and it functioned as a synonym for fate. A person wasn’t weird; instead a person had a weird, which was theirs alone, determined by forces beyond control and understanding. Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth helped transform the word, linking its supernatural connotations with an aesthetic quality. Those three crones know the future—they seem to know everything, standing astride the temporal and the miraculous as they do. In them, the old and the new weirds meet: They are creatures in touch with the workings of fate, but they are also inexplicable, creepy, queer, spooky, deviant from the norm.I have been thinking about this word and its overtones since reading All Fours, the second novel by the idiosyncratic interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, probably best known for her work as a filmmaker. As I made my way through the book, I kept remarking to myself, and writing in the margins, “This is so weird.” That’s not a bad thing, in my personal lexicon, though in this instance I was registering a persistent feeling of bafflement. July’s middle-aged protagonist—a “semi-famous” artist known for her early multi-genre success (who, like July, has worked across film, writing, and performance)—consistently acted on instincts I didn’t understand and made choices I couldn’t imagine anyone making. As a narrator, she was not just unreliable but unpredictable, unsettling, shimmeringly strange.


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Many Indians Don’t Trust Their Elections Anymore

On March 21, a little less than a month before India’s national elections, the main opposition party, Congress, held a press conference to announce that its campaign was paralyzed. The government had earlier frozen the party’s bank accounts in connection with an alleged tax violation from the 1990s. Now the party was struggling to support its parliamentary candidates, and its ground organization had sputtered to a halt.Later that evening, fewer than 10 miles away, cops and paramilitaries surrounded the official bungalow of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi province and a member of another opposition party, seeking his arrest on corruption charges. His supporters began a spontaneous protest, and amid the frenzy, Kejriwal became the first sitting chief minister to be arrested in India’s history.


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Israel’s PR-War Pandemonium

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)


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The Best Hope for Electric Cars Could Be the GOP Districts Where They’re Made

Dozens of used electric-vehicle batteries were stacked like cordwood on pallets in a warehouse-style building about 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada, when I visited the site last week.The batteries were bound for an assembly line that would begin the chemical process of recycling up to 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they contain. Eventually, after treatment in two more buildings on the site, the metals will become a high-value, fine black powder called cathode active material that is shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to Toyota and Panasonic for the manufacture of new EV batteries.


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The Future of Electric Cars Hinges on a Dongle

Take a road trip in an electric car, and you’ll quickly realize that gas stations are incredible. Nothing in the world of EVs is as fast and easy as checking highway signs for the nearest Shell or BP, filling up your tank in just a few minutes, and getting on with your day. It’s not just that chargers are still hard to find. They can be dreadfully slow, adding as little as 25 miles of battery life every hour. Plenty of faster ones exist, yes, but there is no guarantee that they will work. A long-distance drive in an EV still requires a lot of planning and a lot of luck.But if you drive a Tesla, the experience is better. The company’s Superchargers are speedy—adding up to 200 miles of charge in just 15 minutes—and simple to use. Set up an account with Tesla and charging initiates automatically after plugging in. There’s no fumbling with screens or swiping a credit card. Superchargers consistently clock in as the most reliable EV chargers in the U.S.


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Prom Dresses Are Just Dresses Now

For high schoolers across America, prom season means heady nights of corsages, limousines, broken curfews, and gaudy, bedazzled gowns—except, maybe not that last part anymore. The words prom dress once conjured images of shimmering taffeta and poofy princess skirts and other cringeworthy fashion choices only teens would make. You can still buy those types of dresses, but these days, high-school dance floors are more refined, filled with slinky satin, garden-party florals, and corseted bodices—designs that women in their 20s, 30s, and beyond might wear.Over the past decade or so, the style divisions among age groups have become far more fluid. Social media has flattened the landscape of influence, so people of all ages are being fed similar content. Retail, meanwhile, has moved away from age-specific brands toward fast-fashion sites and online stores with wide appeal. The assimilation is especially clear in prom style. Teens will wear just about any fancy adult look to the dance, whether it be a relatively casual dress you might see at an Easter brunch, or a jumpsuit fit for the red carpet. This has spurred an existential crisis in teen fashion: What even is a prom dress anymore?


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What Happened to Stormy Daniels Is Not Salacious

It was something sadder, uglier, and—for many people who have lived in some way in the shadow of sexual violence—more familiar.One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. For months, we’d all been reading news stories about Daniels’s reported sexual encounter with then-President Donald Trump, along with Trump’s efforts to pay her off in order to cover it up before the 2016 election—and now, finally, we were going to hear from the woman herself. The story itself seemed funny, an absurd dispatch from a faraway, brightly colored world of celebrity gossip.


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