The theory goes that Donald Trump, once he has gotten another month of pathetic narcissistic whining out of his system, will in January permanently move to Mar-a-Lago to spend time with—well, not with his family, but at least with an ever-present rotation of paying admirers. It'll be his own little theme park—a one-figure wax museum with himself as the feature attraction.
If this sounds like hell on Earth to you, rest assured that Trump's wealthy Palm Beach neighbors share your opinion. They don't like the idea of living next to Nazi Disneyland and are once again demanding that the city force Trump to keep his past promises (ha) that the property will not be used as a residence. The Washington Post reports that Mar-a-Lago's neighbors delivered a new letter to the city reminding them of such, which may once again put the city on the spot when it comes to enforcing their agreements with Trump or once again caving in.
This is all in dispute because of the arrangements Donald Trump set up when he turned the mansion into a private rich-person club. At the time, Trump assured the city of a great many things, including that the compound would not be used as full-time residence by him or by anyone else. Trump went on to of course break every one of the past agreements whenever he had a desire to do so, because that is literally how he does "real estate" deals: He lies, daring the other party to spend the enormous amounts of cash required to enforce their contract.
One of the latest Mar-a-Lago breaches was the installation of a private helipad, which Trump claimed was now a Secret Service necessity but which his team promised would for sure be removed again when the Secret Service didn't need it. Photographs soon after its construction proved that Trump's family was using it for their own purposes, and the odds that Trump will agree to not do that when he is no longer in office are approximately zero. Get used to helicopters, Mar-a-Lago neighbors.
And, in fact, Trump has already been claiming that Mar-a-Lago is his permanent residence. He did so when he voted in these last elections, asserting in his voter registration forms that he lived at the Mar-a-Lago address, not the White House, in order to vote absentee in the state. This is the sort of fraud that (not white) Americans can face heavy prison time for attempting, but if you are a rich and powerful ultraturd, nobody bats an eye.
Now Palm Beach is in a familiar position: fight Trump in court, for years, at great expense, or simply allow him to break the agreement forbidding him from using the property both as for-profit club and private home and admit once again they got played. It's almost certain that they will. The possibly most appropriate compromise, in which Trump agrees to turn the property back into a private residence and end its use as a business, will never happen because Trump very, very, very much needs every dime he can squeeze out of his devotees. He has very big loans coming due soon, and few ways of making anything close to the amount of money needed to avoid bankruptcy.
Especially if bank fraud charges make him an even more toxic figure in the non-crooked segments of the finance world.
So this will be fun to watch, in a glad-we're-not-them way. Will Trump's wealthy neighbors succeed in getting the worst person in America to not move in next to them? Will Trump really decamp to Mar-a-Lago at all, when Trump Tower offers so much more privacy and freer access to Russian organized cri—I mean, to the other Trump Tower residents?
Will Trump instead decide that he has a new, irresistible desire to live in some nation that has no extradition agreements with the United States?
I'm still betting on the last one; the man has now gotten used to being able to break laws with reckless abandon while relying on a staff of government officials to shield him from the results. He's not going to be able to stop, which means he's going to have to go shopping for a city and nation that lets its oligarchs violate laws with even less oversight than Palm Beach, Florida, and the United States can be bothered to provide. Somewhere in the Middle East, probably. No helipad rules at all in some of those places.
Georgia Democrats are in a door-knocking, lit-dropping frenzy. Many of them are focused on turning out voters in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of suburban Atlanta—the voters who helped flip the state to Joe Biden in November, and who are widely considered the key group for Democrats to reach. But not Ben Davidson. Ben Davidson is hitting the apartments.
The 34-year-old sales manager, one of the leaders of a local progressive group called Georgians for Registration and Increased Turnout, or GRIT, has spent virtually all his free hours since Election Day inside the diverse and mostly low-income apartment complexes dotting the southeast edge of Cobb County, a big suburb northwest of Atlanta. At each door, Davidson asks residents about COVID-19—whether they’ve still got a job, plenty of food, enough money for rent. He asks whether they’d like to get another $1,200 check from the government. They typically respond with something along the lines of “Hell yeah,” Davidson told me. So he tells them to vote for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on January 5. “If we want COVID relief, we have to get these guys in office,” he says to the residents.
Progressives such as Davidson have a theory for Democratic success that goes something like this: If candidates campaign on a populist economic agenda that appeals to all working-class Americans, they’ll see a boom in turnout. So far, that theory has not borne fruit, at least not on any mass scale. But the Georgia runoffs, which will determine Senate control, could be different. Democrats have something specific and concrete to offer voters that they didn’t have in elections past: When they win back the chamber, everyone gets a check. If groups like Davidson’s can boost turnout, they’ll have validated progressives’ theory—and demonstrated that Democrats can win suburban voters even without Donald Trump on the ballot.
Ben Davidson canvassing a Georgia neighborhood (Lynsey Weatherspoon)
The runoffs will likely be close, if the vote tallies from November are any indication. But Democrats face two major obstacles to victory: Trump, a singular catalyst for left-wing turnout, will be on the sidelines in this election, and the Democratic Senate candidates underperformedBiden in Georgia. One theory for this underperformance is that a lot of well-off, college-educated suburbanites who voted Biden for president backed Republicans down the rest of the ballot.
For Democrats to win both Senate races, they need to remobilize the voters who went to the polls in November, and get some new ones too. One option is to frame the runoffs as equal in consequence to the presidential election: A Republican Senate can be expected to block basically everything on the Biden agenda. Another option is to argue that the financial activities of the Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, make them untrustworthy and out of touch with Georgia voters.
But progressives want the party to focus on the possibilities for pandemic relief under a Democratic Senate. Through the CARES Act passed in the spring, Republicans and Democrats unanimously approved $1,200 stimulus checks for qualifying Americans and $600-a-week enhanced unemployment benefits, which expired in July. Americans have struggled to pay their bills and waited in lines outside food banks for months as Congress has made slow progress on a new relief package. Stimulus checks are a sticking point: Most Republicans (and some Democrats) are opposed to direct payments, and it’s still unclear whether the package under negotiation will include them. Perdue and Loeffler initially opposed direct payments to Americans in early spring. While both might ultimately support the new package if it comes for a vote, neither has made clear where they currently stand on direct assistance, and a new round of stimulus checks could be less generous than the first. Democrats hope to pass more COVID-19 relief once Biden is inaugurated next month.
“The more that Democrats are able to paint Republicans as plutocrats who don’t care about working-class and middle-class families,” the more successful they’ll be, Waleed Shahid, the communications director for the progressive group Justice Democrats, told me.
This message could find traction in an unexpected place: America’s rapidly changing suburbs. It’s how GRIT, which was formed by a group of local activists after Election Day to focus on voter registration, is targeting new and low-propensity voters. “We follow the Stacey Abrams playbook here,” Davidson told me, referencing the former Georgia state lawmaker’s efforts to mobilize and expand the Democratic base. He and other GRIT members have knocked on thousands of doors in the apartment buildings along Highway 285, generally considered the borderline between the state capital and its suburbs. These apartments are zoned as part of the latter region, but residents here are not the upper-middle-class Ward and June Cleaver of suburban myth. Instead, the buildings contain high concentrations of young people, people of color, and lower-income workers—many of them unregistered to vote. Many residents are employed in the service industry, many are immigrants, and many move around a lot, which means they’re hard to target using traditional canvassing methods.
These Georgians are the new suburbanites—people who, a decade ago, would have typically lived in a major city, but who have moved to the inner-ring suburbs, where housing can be more affordable, Ernest McGowen, a political-science professor at the University of Richmond, told me. Suburbs around the country are becoming more diverse, in part thanks to residents such as these, and the regions’ evolution couldn’t come at a more politically advantageous time for Democrats.
At least some of the anti-Trump voters whom Democrats have come to rely on may soon return to the Republican Party. In a swing state such as Georgia, where victory happens at the margins, this dynamic should be worrisome for Democrats. But organizers can help compensate for a deficit if they turn out voters like those living in the apartments. They are “Democrats’ bread and butter,” Davidson told me. GRIT’s policy to win them over: “Knock every damn door.”
The Georgians whom Davidson and his teammates meet inside these developments are eager for another round of cash assistance, he said. They perk up, too, when they hear about Daniel Blackman, a candidate for the Georgia Public Service Commission—and the only other Democrat who will be on the ballot in January—who’s campaigned on lowering utility rates. These ideas appeal to working people because if you’re earning only a couple thousand dollars a month, even small changes in monthly payments can make a monumental difference.
Ossoff and Warnock are deploying the same message, hammering COVID-19 relief in their tweets, ads, and television appearances. “Get on a plane to Washington and vote for $1,200 stimulus checks for your constituents who are hurting right now, Senator,” Ossoff said in a recent interview on MSNBC.
Progressives have been urging Democrats to talk like this. For multiple election cycles now, leftists have insisted that a working-class revolution could be imminent, if only Democratic candidates would embrace a message of economic populism. But this approach didn’t even work for their standard-bearer: Bernie Sanders twice ran for president on a platform of raising wages and workers’ rights, arguing that he would awaken a legion of brand-new voters and send them to the polls. But those voters never showed up, and, as you may have noticed, Sanders is not currently the president-elect. Progressive House candidates campaigning similarly in swing states were mostly unsuccessful in 2018 and 2020. This message may not work as well as progressives hope.
And despite Biden’s win, Republicans still have it easier than Democrats in Georgia. For the runoff elections, Loeffler and Perdue simply need to reprise their November turnout, which was higher than Democrats’. “Fundamentally, this is still a state that wants to be a little bit Republican,” the GOP strategist Liam Donovan told me.
But the give-people-money approach is widely popular across the country and across party lines. In Georgia, 63 percent of probable runoff voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who commits to passing an additional $1,200 relief check, according to a recent survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress.
In the Atlanta suburbs, Davidson and his GRIT teammates signed up some 200 new Democratic voters before registration closed on December 7. They’re holding multiple events every week at complexes all along the highway. Roughly one-third of the Georgians Davidson meets haven’t heard about the elections before, he estimates, but he’ll keep making the case. He needs them to show up on January 5, these suburbanites who are often excluded from voter outreach, and left out of the national conversation. Without them, Democrats may not be able to win.
Holiday party season is around the corner, but the concept of an office gathering carries some uneasy weight in hard economic times. | Getty Images
Due to the coronavirus, American work culture is changing. Office holiday parties should too.
I’ve become nostalgic about last year’s office holiday party, as one does in 2020. It was lightly snowing that night, and I was on the deck of some Manhattan rooftop, surrounded by clear plastic igloos that have become hot commodities in pandemic times. Donald Trump was being impeached by the House of Representatives, and my colleagues from Vox Media’s New York office were singing off-key karaoke downstairs — and I sometimes wish I had joined them.
For better or worse, the coronavirus has changed the nature of office work, and for many white-collar employees like me, it has been months since they’ve last shared a physical workspace with colleagues. Holiday party season has rolled around again, but the concept of an office gathering carries some uneasy weight, especially for cash-strapped businesses that have had to lay off workers. The unprecedented nature of the pandemic has prompted companies to rethink the social obligations tied up in the office holiday party — who these events are for, what purpose they serve in American work culture, and whether it’s even necessary to pivot to virtual.
According to an American survey of almost 200 human resources representatives, just 23 percent of companies are planning a year-end celebration. And of those celebrations, nearly three-quarters will be held online. This is a staggering decline from last year’s survey, also released by the executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in which 76 percent of respondents announced plans to host a holiday party.
In separate polling conducted by Vox and Data for Progress, 26 percent of the 1,136 respondents said they were planning to host a holiday party with attendees outside of their immediate household. Meanwhile, only 10 percent said their workplace was hosting some sort of year-end event — with 70 percent of those planning to attend. Nearly half of respondents said they aren’t currently working.
From a human resources perspective, holiday parties are not just an important aspect of employee appreciation, but a means to foster a friendly work environment by bringing together workers from across the company. This year, bringing people together — safely, at least — doesn’t feel so together. Some companies are keeping it simple by focusing on virtual entertainment, while others are diverting extra budget money to charity. What was once a festive occasion for company bonding or, in some cases, financial stunting has little value in a world where workplace interactions have transitioned online.
For years, Silicon Valley has developed a reputation for hosting ostentatious parties, with some spending millions of dollars on expensive employee gifts, free booze, and winter decor. Wall Street, too, has started splurging again on luxury venues and holiday-themed frivolities since the 2008 financial crisis, when corporate spending dipped. (Wall Street’s holiday party spending is still down, though, compared to pre-Great Recession levels.) And this year, even some finance and law firms are scaling back and settling on cheaper remote alternatives, Business Insider reported. For example, Morgan Stanley is hosting a virtual benefit show to raise money for children’s hospitals, while PayPal’s global event is a 29-hour online “party” employees can tune in to.
But these year-end corporate events naturally vary by size and grandeur depending on a company’s finances. Many Americans are employed by smaller businesses, in which intimate holiday gatherings are a crucial part of building camaraderie despite the potential for awkwardness to emerge from a night of casual drinking. These companies don’t usually outsource their holiday planning process, relying instead on workers to coordinate the event schedule.
Alex Long, a program associate at the Wilson Center, a DC-based think tank, traditionally plays host for the center’s various end-of-year events, from its Halloween bake-off to its Christmas party. This year’s party was hosted over Zoom and Long improvised as Santa Claus, taking questions from employees’ kids. “To be honest, it was really cute,” Long told me over Twitter. “I think while the virtual holiday party is hard to pull off without it feeling stale or forced, having something or someone for people to laugh at rather than forcing any conversation felt sweet to be able to provide.”
Even though the Zoom party was only an hour long, Long felt there was an added layer of responsibility to keep the audience entertained. “We run a relatively small operation, about 100 to 150 employees, so the familiarity with each other helps take some of that pressure off,” he added. Without the ability to mingle in person, however, the entertainment factor becomes much more crucial.
For Finn Partners, a marketing and communications firm, employees could choose to participate in one of three virtual party options: trivia, a murder mystery game, or a sip-and-sketch art class. The firm’s New York office usually throws a traditional holiday bash with food, drinks, and a DJ, but this year’s change was a pleasant surprise, according to one employee. They were able to select food items for delivery, and for the murder mystery game, the company hired eight actors to play out scenes while employees were tasked with determining the killer.
Yet there is a subset of workers who believe the coronavirus should spell the end of the office holiday party. This might sound Grinchian, but some argue that employees can be better appreciated through holiday benefits or time off, not through raffles or corporate merchandise. The Harvard Business Review published a story in 2014 that urged companies to rethink the purpose of holiday parties. It cited studies that suggest these corporate-funded events aren’t accomplishing much at all: People don’t mingle with strangers, and there’s added risk of bad behavior, especially when alcohol is offered.
“I would so much rather get off work an hour early, but instead we’re going to be staring at frozen screens with BYOB drinks pretending it isn’t grim,” said Zelda, an employee at a tech startup based in New York. “You’re expected to go party hard and then still roll online and finish up work.” Zelda attributed the “work hard, party hard” mentality to startup culture. And while attendance isn’t mandatory, Zelda felt pressure to attend since she began the job remotely and hasn’t socialized with many colleagues.
Over-the-top celebrations and perks are meant to delight employees, but some are reassessing the ethics of financing such elaborate festivities. Honda Wang, a former employee of a popular coffee roaster company from Philadelphia, told me that corporate employees were, as a whole, treated better than baristas — which was reflected not just in the scale of their holiday parties but also in wages and benefits.
“Baristas also got holiday parties, but as the company grew, the budget didn’t grow with it, so it became more austere as time went on,” said Wang, who graduated from barista into a corporate role. “This is a separate issue, but I believe the money generated [from the team I was on] could have easily gone back into paying baristas a $15 minimum wage.”
“Baristas also got holiday parties, but as the company grew, the budget didn’t grow with it, so it became more austere as time went on”
Wang admitted he enjoyed the perks of working in corporate, beyond the office parties: The company paid for expensive dinners, and managers actively encouraged his team to splurge on clients. Over time, though, he became uneasy at how poorly the baristas were treated as the business expanded. It was “a microcosm of income inequality all within a single coffee company,” Wang concluded.
Wang’s anecdote is reflective of a pervasive labor problem, in which companies favor and court certain types of workers over others. Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths, for example, rely on contract workers to fulfill certain temporary roles. But these white-collar contract workers aren’t able to revel in the many corporate perks dished out by the likes of Google and Facebook.
As KQED reported last April, these contractors don’t work directly for tech companies, and usually earn less than their employee counterparts. Experts, academics, and labor advocates who spoke with the radio station estimated more than 100,000 contractors are working in tech, filling in for both white- and blue-collar roles. Last December, The Verge’s Casey Newton reported that Pinterest slashed contractor pay during the holidays. The company traditionally pays its culinary and maintenance workers during the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. That perk was only extended to full-time employees in 2019 as the company sought to cut costs.
Sure, company budgets are opaque and complex, and the fact that contractors and less skilled employees are poorly treated is more complicated than an indictment of corporate party culture; celebrating workers is not the only outsize cost companies may have on their balance sheet. It does, however, reveal disparities in employee treatment and highlights how a certain type of worker is often prioritized — to the point of excess — over others.
The coronavirus has pulled back the curtain on America’s staggering inequalities: The pandemic is disproportionately affecting low-wage workers in the hospitality, travel, and meatpacking industries, compared to the college-educated professional class. Employees are saying they’d rather receive hazard pay or bonuses for their work than cursory gestures of year-end appreciation. Online, people are urging companies to devote their party budget to local food pantries or charitable causes. The British property firm Landmark Investments, for example, has launched a campaign called Xmas Party Heroes, urging big corporations to pledge their party budgets for charity.
In a year of adapting to the “new normal,” maybe companies should consider shirking tradition when it comes to appreciating employees and building collegial camaraderie. American work culture is evolving, and as the new year approaches, managers and workers should forge an environment that collectively benefits all employees, not just a select few.
of course. blatant interference and hiding bodies to help the GOP and its blatant malfeasance
From the start of the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been committed to the idea of mushroom management — he’s kept Florida citizens in the dark and fed them bullshit. In April, Florida began hiding the list of deaths from county medical examiners, which had always been public before that point. In May, DeSantis fired data scientist Rebekah Jones after she refused to stop posting data that was both accurate and public. Jones created her own dashboard in June, in hopes of giving Florida residents a more accurate view of what was going on. However, since then the state has been making it harder to get basic information on topics like hospitalization rates, and persecuting Jones—ending with a raid on her home in which weapons were pointed at her children. In the wake of that raid, a Republican official resigned his position, saying he no longer wished to serve Florida’s current government in any capacity.
But even if Jones’ computers were carried away in this politically motivated raid, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel couldn’t help but notice another … oddity in Florida’s COVID-19 data. This particular strangeness was a sudden and unexplained gap in reporting of deaths related to COVID-19, one that began just days before the election.
The gap was actually noticed first by University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. On his personal website, Salemi posted the data, but drew no immediate conclusion, saying that he needed “to understand this process more.”
But what the Sun-Sentinel shows is that Florida announced that it was making a change in how it was handling “backlogged deaths” on Oct. 24, just 10 days before the election. These are deaths that had been recorded on previous dates, but not yet reported on the state’s official site. According to the state, it wanted to make sure that deaths logged to COVID-19 really were directly attributable to the disease, and couldn’t be assigned to some other cause. Florida officials didn’t resume reporting these deaths until Nov. 17, and when they did numbers were surprisingly down, even though case counts and hospitalizations were up. In addition, it seems that there was a very abrupt change that came a few days before these announcements.
So what were Florida voters seeing when they looked at COVID-19 deaths in the days leading up to the election? That things were great. On Oct. 7, there had been 119 deaths reported in a day. But after Oct. 20, the number of deaths reported in a day never reached double-digits until well after the election.
Here’s another astounding coincidence that was picked up by WTSP back in November: Starting on Oct. 22, just as the reported deaths from COVID-19 made this unexplained drop, DeSantis went dark on COVID-19 statements. Even though case counts were rising in the state all through this period, and COVID-19 was dominating the conversation in other states, DeSantis didn’t make a statement about the state of the pandemic. For two weeks, DeSantis had no briefings or news conferences about the pandemic, despite multiple requests for an update from both local officials and news organizations.
It seems that DeSantis contrived to make sure that when people went to the polls across his state, COVID-19 wasn’t on their minds. And if it was, they could be expected to be comforted by how the state was seeing a plummeting death toll even as the numbers were soaring across the nation. In short—Florida voters were sent a false message that the pandemic was under control in their state, and that the “open everything” policies advocated by DeSantis and Donald Trump had been successful.
TikTok routes the personal data of job applicants through servers in China, and only discloses this to candidates in certain countries, Business Insider has discovered. From a report: US job candidates, notably, are not told their data will be routed through China. Some of the personal information TikTok says it collects about applicants is potentially highly sensitive, with the firm's own policies stating that it collects medical data; sex and race data; marital status; geolocation data, among many other categories. The revelation is an embarrassment for TikTok, which has spent much of 2020 maintaining that it is separate to its Chinese owner ByteDance, and fending off unproven insinuations by President Trump that it funnels user data to China. After being approached by Business Insider, TikTok said it would no longer store job applicant data in China.
The City of Detroit wants attorney Sidney Powell to pay—literally—for her reality-adjacent dog and pony legal challenge to Michigan's election results.
The city has prepared a motion to fine Powell and her team over her so-called "Kraken" lawsuit for "frivolously undermining 'People's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.'" The motion also seeks disciplinary action that could include banning the lawyers from practicing law in the Eastern District of Michigan—which might be just fine by Powell's team since they thought they were in Minnesota anyway.
"It's time for this nonsense to end," Detroit's lawyer David Fink told the Law & Crime site in an interview. "The lawyers filing these frivolous cases that undermine democracy must pay a price.”
The city is seeking what are known as Rule 11 sanctions, which can be sought against an opposing counsel for frivolously filing claims with improper aims and virtually zero chance of succeeding due to lack of evidence or a legitimate grievance.
That would seem appropriate here, particularly for Powell's suits since they have been flatly dismissed in several states by federal judges who often include scathing rebukes of Powell's intent. That was certainly true in Michigan. In fact, forget trying to defend claims made by Team Kraken and Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a court of law. They have indeed been so outlandish that they were indefensible even in the friendly setting of Fox News studios.
Detroit's motion has not been filed yet, according to Law & Crime. Once it is, the "Kraken" team will have 21 days to fix the problem and/or withdraw the litigation.
Detroit’s attorneys had hinted at taking this type of action in a filing in November. It certainly wouldn't be surprising to see other jurisdictions employ it if Trump's litigation efforts continue, which seems entirely possible.
When Powell was asked about the sanctions effort, she signaled confidence that she was really on the right track now: “We are clearly over the target.”
Ridiculous, but glad to see people are finally moving on from these idiots
One of the drawbacks to being a miserably craven, scruples-free, power-hungry bully is that people tend to only want to be around you for a handful of reasons. These people—one could call them hangers-on, or sycophants, or minions—will put up with you because you either have real power or they perceive that you have power. The difference in results is miniscule. People like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and virtually everyone in the Trump White House, fit this personality description. Whether those folks listen to a Mike Pompeo because they are afraid of him or because they too are miserably craven and believe Pompeo to be the best route towards their own selfish goals doesn’t change the equation.
On Tuesday, Pompeo and his wife were set to host an ill-advised hundreds of persons holiday party—indoors. According to The Washington Post, of the “more than 900 guests invited,” only a few dozen people RSVP’d to the event “and even fewer showed up.” Normally these kinds of fancy events pull in a few hundred people, but Pompeo had two things going against him: there’s a goddamn out of control pandemic going on in the United States that has claimed over 300,000 American lives; and Mike Pompeo, like the rest of the Trump White House, is no longer a perennial dictator.
But there’s a cherry on top of this cake.
It turns out that even while most people were losing their RSVPs in their bathroom wastepaper basket, Pompeo himself was getting ready to cancel his appearance at this frivolous and dangerous event. Why? Let’s hear from a White House spokesperson: “Secretary Pompeo has been identified as having come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID. For reasons of privacy we can’t identify that individual. The Secretary has been tested and is negative. In accordance with CDC guidelines, he will be in quarantine. He is being closely monitored by the Department’s medical team.”
This comes just a few days after it was announced that Trump legal team stu-perstar Jenna Ellis had tested positive for COVID-19 after attending one of the holiday parties held by the White House on Friday. To be clear, the event was still attended by a few dozen people and while it isn’t clear who those people were, there is a very good chance many of them were State Department employees and possibly their families under pressure from their bosses. The exact number is not known, but a considerable number of people were likely obligated to work the event—champagne and table settings don’t pour and set themselves.
Pompeo’s ugly displays of vanity continue to be a danger to the public at large. This was not Pompeo’s first attempt to force people to make bad health decisions in the name of a holiday party. Last Tuesday, Pompeo’s State Department hosted a 200-person party. It’s important to remember that these are the last big luxury fancy parties that people like Mike Pompeo get to bill to the American taxpayer before these people crawl into whatever lobbying firm or other private interest they plan on taking a paycheck from once they leave office.
Free college is also a way to secure a democratic future. good.
President Trump spent the last few months of the presidential campaign appealing to — and sometimes even pleading with — suburban voters. At a rally in Pennsylvania in October, Trump called out suburban women specifically, saying that “they should like me more than anybody here tonight because I ended the regulation that destroyed your neighborhood,” referring to his administration’s moveto end a government program aimed at reducing segregation in suburban areas. “I ended the regulation that brought crime to the suburbs,” said Trump. “[A]nd you’re going to live the American dream.”
It was plain to see that Trump wasn’t talking to all suburbanites, though. He appeared to have a specific vision of the suburbs in mind: Something like the modern day equivalent of the white, well-to-do characters from 1950s sitcoms who had big, well-manicured lawns and white picket fences, agreed with their neighbors about most things — from which presidential candidate to support to what makes a good tuna casserole — and were, in the past, the targets of racial dog-whistles like Trump’s.
Only this strategy didn’t work. Because this version of suburbia is increasingly hard to find.
Suburban and exurban counties turned away from Trump and toward Democrat Joe Biden in states across the country, including in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. In part, this may be because the suburbs are simply far more diverse than they used to be. But suburbs have also become increasingly well-educated — and that may actually better explain why so many suburbs and exurbs are turning blue than just increased diversity on its own.
According to Ashley Jardina, a political science professor at Duke University who studies white identity politics, it’s not that racial diversity isn’t a factor. Among white people, at least, educational attainment is often a proxy for how open they are to growing racial diversity, with more highly educated white people likely to think increased racial diversity is a good thing. “Education is so important because it’s intertwined with racial attitudes among white people,” Jardina said.
No matter how you slice it, it’s clear that communities that were pretty much uniformly white only a few decades ago are now far more racially diverse, with Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans making up larger shares of suburban and exurban populations than ever before. According to our analysis of data from a “diversity index” developed by USA Today that calculates the chance that any two people chosen at random from a given area are of different races or ethnicities, most suburbs have grown at least somewhat more diverse over the past 10 years. That’s particularly true in some of the states — like Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — that were pivotal for Biden this year.26
On the surface, those demographic shifts may seem like good news for Democrats, since nonwhite voters are much more likely to identify as Democratic than white voters. But when we dug into how these diversifying parts of the country have actually voted, we didn’t find a uniform shift toward Democrats.27 Some suburbs that grew more racially diverse over the past decade saw a smaller swing toward Biden than others — or even moved slightly further into Trump’s column. And other suburbs that didn’t diversify much at all still became much bluer in 2020.
Rather, it was education — and particularly how much more educated a place has gotten over the past 10 years28 — that was more closely related to increased support for Biden (especially once accounting for how educated a county was in 2010). Growing racial diversity in an area was still important, since the suburban counties that saw the biggest swing toward Trump were the ones that remained less racially diverse and less educated. But the political swing among diversifying counties was much less uniform than it was in counties that became more educated.
Take Henry County, Georgia, a mostly exurban part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Voters there narrowly backed Hillary Clinton by 4 points in 2016, but they supported Biden by a whopping 20 points this past November — a 16-point Democratic swing. What happened? Henry County was already pretty diverse, but it became even more so in the past decade. Once majority non-Hispanic white, the share of its Black population is now nearly equal to its white share. Meanwhile, the share of the population with a college degree grew slightly faster than was typical across other suburban and exurban counties. This made Henry one of the many increasingly diverse and educated counties in the Atlanta area that shifted to the left from 2016 to 2020, helping Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1992.
And it’s suburbs like Henry that produced some of the swiftest and most dramatic political shifts of the 2020 election, according to William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. The patterns we observed in Henry County can be seen in suburbs across the Sun Belt. Shifting suburban populations in states like Texas and Arizona have made presidential elections there much more competitive in a relatively short period of time, while according to Frey, demographic change has been happening in suburban areas in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin too, but at a slower pace.
What about places that become either more diverse or more educated, but not both? Suburban and exurban counties that grew more diverse but did not become more educated still swung toward Biden in 2020, but by a much smaller margin. It’s especially striking when you compare these places to areas that became much more educated but not more diverse, as those places actually had moved more toward Biden, on average.
Consider Volusia County, Florida, a suburban-exurban county northeast of Orlando in central Florida. Volusia became marginally more Republican this year, as Trump won it by 14 points after winning it by 13 points in 2016. This, despite the fact that Volusia has become more diverse over the past decade, primarily through an increase in its Hispanic population (although the county is still roughly 70 percent non-Hispanic white). However, the share of Volusia’s population with a four-year college degree hasn’t increased as much as in other suburban and exurban places.
It’s also possible that because the population was less educated as a whole, the white residents were more likely to respond to the county’s growing diversity by becoming more conservative — canceling out some of the effects of having a growing nonwhite, Democratic-leaning share of the community. In her own research, Jardina has found similar dynamics at play, although she hasn’t focused on the suburbs specifically. In general, though, Jardina said, “[W]hites who have a higher level of racial identity and live in places where there’s been a much greater change in the foreign-born population are much more likely to vote conservatively.”
That may help explain why suburban and exurban areas like Volusia County that became notably more diverse but not more educated didn’t move as much to the left as places that became more educated but not more diverse. Take Ottawa County, Michigan, which sits along the coast of Lake Michigan as part of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area. The county remains pretty Republican, but Trump only carried it by 21 points this year after winning it by 30 points four years ago — a 9-point swing toward the Democrats. And although the racial and ethnic makeup of Ottawa’s population hasn’t changed much since 2010, the share that holds a bachelor’s degree has shot up from 29 percent to 34 percent, which might explain the county’s swing. Overall, the Democratic gains there were part of a larger swing in the traditionally Republican Grand Rapids region that helped Biden carry Michigan.
So what do these trends mean for Democrats — and Republicans — going forward? Jardina stressed to us that in the short term, demography is not destiny. Democrats might struggle to reproduce Biden’s strong performance in the suburbs, particularly if their Republican opponents don’t rely as heavily on racialized appeals and transparently racist tropes as Trump. “The big question mark for me is what happens in these suburban areas in two years or four years if [Republican candidates] adopt a similar strategy to Trump but with more competence and decorum,” Jardina said. “I’ll put it this way — I don’t think Republicans have lost their opportunity to stay competitive in the suburbs.”
On the other hand, both Frey and Jardina said it’s possible that the demographic realignment of the suburbs could end up creating a more lasting political shift — one in which the suburbs and exurbs look and vote a lot more like urban areas, and a lot less like more rural places. Frey predicted, though, that the big political shifts we saw this year in places like the Sun Belt might persist — or even accelerate — simply because they map better onto the speed and breadth of the demographic changes in those areas. But a lot will depend on Democrats’ ability to mobilize the diverse groups that now are looking more and more like typical suburban voters.
“The future of the Democratic Party is clearly with these younger, more diverse, more educated populations,” Frey said. “But they have to figure out how to keep them energized and voting.”
SolarWinds has removed a list of high-profile clients from its website in the wake of a massive breach, "suggesting the company may be trying to obscure its clients in an effort to protect them from bad publicity," reports The Verge. From the report: The list of vulnerable companies is much smaller than SolarWinds' overall client list, so simply appearing on the list doesn't mean a company has been affected. SolarWinds claims that only 33,000 companies use the Orion product, compared to its total client base of 330,000. Out of that 33,000, the company estimates that fewer than 18,000 were directly impacted by a malicious update, and the list of directly targeted companies is likely even smaller. Still, there is much about the attack that remains unknown, and it is possible that additional compromises have yet to be discovered.
SolarWinds' overall client list includes a broad range of sensitive organizations. Before its removal, the page boasted a broad range of clients, including more than 425 of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 as well as the top 10 telecom operators in the United States. In an article on Monday, The New York Times cited a number of organizations as vulnerable that are not cited on the public client page, including Boeing and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other organizations have been cagey about their own exposure, even within the federal government. Several news outlets have reported that the breach affected the Department of Homeland Security, but the department has not made any official statement regarding its exposure.
Intel became the latest tech company to report diversity statistics Tuesday, sharing a mixed bag of annual numbers that included small gains in some areas, relatively flat numbers of Black employees and a decline in female representation in the U.S. Axios reports: Women made up a bit more than a quarter of Intel's employee headcount, seeing a tiny drop in the U.S. compared to last year and a similarly minuscule increase over the same period for Intel's total global workforce. The percentage of underrepresented minorities in the U.S. workforce ticked up by a fraction of a percentage point, coming in at just over 16%. African American representation was flat at 4.9%.
"It may be slower than we would like but at least the conversation is on the table," Intel's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer Dawn Jones told Axios. Intel's inability to significantly boost the diversity of its workforce is far from unique in the industry. Intel wants to set up an industry-wide effort that would work to help standardize ways of measuring different diversity statistics from one company to another.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged career employees at the Education Department on Tuesday to “be the resistance” when the Biden administration comes into power next month, according to a recording of her remarks obtained by POLITICO.
During a department-wide virtual meeting to discuss the shift to the new administration, DeVos acknowledged that most of the agency’s thousands of career employees “will be here through the coming transition and beyond.”
“Let me leave you with this plea: Resist,” DeVos said. “Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what’s right for students. In everything you do, please put students first — always.”
An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the remarks. The department also would not saywhether DeVos plans to stay in office until Jan. 20.
DeVos' words: The secretary told Education Department employees on Tuesday that her goal “in everything we accomplished was to do what’s right for students,” adding that “four years later it’s still my focus and it’s still my hope for all of you.” She touted her overhaul of Title IX rules governing sexual assault and misconduct in schools and colleges as one of her major accomplishments.
The secretary's remarks come after nearly four years of frequently sparring with the career employees of her department. She tangled with the agency’s union over reorganizations and workplace policies, such as teleworking rules, and blamed bureaucrats at the agency for making it difficult to get things done.
“This building has caused more problems than it solved,” DeVos said of the Education Department during an interview with Reason magazine this fall.
Political appointees at the Education Department also sought to investigate and punish career employees who they suspected of leaking information to the press. Across the government, Trump administration officials frequently derided the “Deep State” and accused career employees of trying to continually subvert the president’s agenda.
DeVos’ use of the word “resistance,” in reading from what appeared to be prepared remarks, mimics liberal opposition to President Donald Trump.
The transition: Department officials announced during the all-hands staff meeting that they have lined up career officials to take over in an interim capacity in roles that will be vacated by an exodus of political appointees in the coming weeks.
The Trump administration plans to tap Phil Rosenfelt for the role of acting secretary of Education, according to a list obtained by POLITICO.
Rosenfelt is the department's deputy general counsel and a longtime career employee. He played the same role during the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration in 2017, serving as acting secretary of Education from late January of 2017 when Secretary John B. King Jr. left office until early February of that year, when DeVos was sworn in.
Background: Rosenfelt in 2019 was at the center of a controversy over the Trump administration’s efforts to replace the acting inspector general at the Education Department.
Trump appointed Rosenfelt to replace Sandra Bruce, the No. 2 official in the inspector general’s office, who had been serving as the acting inspector general. But the White House backtracked on the decision several days later amid backlash from Democrats, who opened inquiries into the matter.
Top Democrats accused the Trump administration of attempting to influence Bruce’s investigation of DeVos' decision to reinstate a controversial accreditor of for-profit colleges. Education Department officials deny those charges.
One of Donald Trump’s “elite strike force” legal super team members, Jenna Ellis, once held the title of deputy district attorney at the Weld County District Attorney’s Office. When asked by the The Wall Street Journal about being terminated from that position after only six months, Ellis said she was fired because “she refused to bring a case to trial that she believed was an unethical prosecution.” At the time, Weld County “declined to comment.”
About that: The Colorado Sun has obtained some recordsfrom Ellis’ short stint at Weld County’s DA office. Guess what? They seem to contradict the magical story of persecution Ellis was feeding the WSJ. In fact, Ellis was let go because she “made mistakes on cases the employer believes she should not have made.” But most damning is what the nature of the mistakes were.
According to the Sun, the documents they received point to a mishandling of the process surrounding the Victim Rights Act. This is the law that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta broke when he handed out a grotesque sweetheart deal to sexual predator and serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein back in 2008.
The documents, which you can see here, are from an appeal Ellis made to receive unemployment benefits. This paragraph sticks out:
There are federal laws and state statutes that regulate aspects of the process throughout each case. The employer noted some cases were being processed that did not adhere to the Victim Rights Act as it applies to the cases. There is the appearance in case documentation the claimant did not follow proper protocol for some of the cases she handled. The employer began tracking the claimant’s handling of cases and kept notes on issues the employer believed were not in compliance with accepted protocols and practices. The claimant did the best she could with her education and training to meet the expectations of the employer.
In Ellis’ defense, she won her appeal here and received unemployment benefits as the overseeing officer found: “There were some deficiencies in her education and experience that account for some of the errors she committed while learning on the job under high-volume conditions.”
If Ellis had just said that she was fired but received unemployment because her firing was deemed not to be her fault, there really would be nothing to write about. In fact, the unsigned statement sent to the Sun says: “This is a nonstory from a decade ago trying to damage her reputation simply because she works for President Trump.” However, Ellis very clearly told the WSJ that “she refused to bring a case to trial that she believed was an unethical prosecution.” Those are two very different things.
It begs the question: Why? Why say that? There are a couple of reasons this might be: The first is that, like most of the right-wing charlatans we’ve seen over the years, Ellis wants to boost her bonafides by creating a narrative more in line with the whiny reverse racism and Christian persecution right-wingers believe about themselves. Another reason is that while Ellis may have very legitimately made “mistakes” that were not intentionally nefarious, they may be more embarrassing or more problematic the more detail were to come out. It’s hard to say.
Ellis has a documented history of being something of a monster, albeit a lot less loud than her compatriots. Based on her history and the company she keeps, everything is usually under on the table.
Academics from an Israeli university have published new research today detailing a technique to convert a RAM card into an impromptu wireless emitter and transmit sensitive data from inside a non-networked air-gapped computer that has no Wi-Fi card. From a report: Named AIR-FI, the technique is the work of Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. Over the last half-decade, Guri has led tens of research projects that investigated stealing data through unconventional methods from air-gapped systems. [...] At the core of the AIR-FI technique is the fact that any electronic component generates electromagnetic waves as electric current passes through. Since Wi-Fi signals are radio waves and radio is basically electromagnetic waves, Guri argues that malicious code planted on an air-gapped system by attackers could manipulate the electrical current inside the RAM card in order to generate electromagnetic waves with the frequency consistent with the normal Wi-Fi signal spectrum (2,400 GHz). In his research paper, titled "AIR-FI: Generating Covert WiFi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers," Guri shows that perfectly timed read-write operations to a computer's RAM card can make the card's memory bus emit electromagnetic waves consistent with a weak Wi-Fi signal. This signal can then be picked up by anything with a Wi-Fi antenna in the proximity of an air-gapped system, such as smartphones, laptops, IoT devices, smartwatches, and more. Guri says he tested the technique with different air-gapped computer rigs where the Wi-Fi card was removed and was able to leak data at speeds of up to 100 b/s to devices up to several meters away.
A medical staff member studies a patient’s MRI in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, on December 10. | Go Nakamura/Getty Images
Long Covid “is a phenomenon that is really quite real and quite extensive,” Anthony Fauci said earlier this month.
When Heather-Elizabeth Brown spiked a fever in April in Detroit, the only reason she was able to get a coronavirus test was because she was volunteering as a police chaplain and was therefore considered an essential worker. Her results came back negative, and she was relieved. But then, she says, “I just got sicker and sicker.”
After being turned away from overcrowded ERs twice, Brown was eventually admitted on her third try. She finally tested positive, and by that point, she was severely ill. She was put on a ventilator and spent the next 31 days in a medically induced coma.
Before Covid-19, Brown was a healthy, active Black woman in her 30s. “But when I came off the ventilator, they had to coach me how to breathe.” The smallest pleasures — like eating a sliver of ice after her feeding tube was removed — became something to treasure.
Six months later, Brown is still very ill. She has been hospitalized for blood clots and has lingering heart problems, nerve pain, and extreme fatigue. “Even making breakfast is now out of the question,” she says. Most troublingly, she’s still experiencing severe brain fog, which makes it hard for her to return to work.
Brown is just one of many previously healthy people whose life has been derailed after a Covid-19 infection. While early research on Covid-19 focused on its respiratory symptoms, we now know its impacts — both direct and indirect — can be much more extensive and relentless.
Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Critical care nurses and respiratory therapists in Minneapolis, Minnesota, flip a Covid-19 patient upright.
On December 3, the National Institutes of Health held a two-day seminar on what has come to be called long Covid, or long-haul Covid — cases of lingering symptoms that can last for weeks or months after an initial infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently created a list of some of the persistent symptoms patients are experiencing, which include chest pain, brain fog, fatigue, and hair loss — with patients reporting many others as well.
Because these patients don’t all have the same symptoms, they will need different kinds of post-Covid care. And the NIH made clear that there are still many more questions than answers — including whose symptoms might linger for months, and how to treat them.
Almost a year into the pandemic, there have not yet been thorough, large-scale studies to determine the true prevalence of long Covid. But preliminary research suggests that somewhere between 10 percent and 88 percent of Covid-19 patients will experience at least one symptom for many weeks or months. Some of these can be life-altering; one study found that 50 percent of non-ICU patients reported a significant change to their cognitive functioning.
Doctors at the seminar said they were surprised by the scope of long Covid and its potential socioeconomic impacts. “This is a phenomenon that is really quite real and quite extensive,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who spoke at the event.
Even if the prevalence ends up being on the lower end of the 10 to 88 percent range, the sheer volume of people getting sick means there are already millions of Americans who have, and will soon have, long Covid. Despite the staggering numbers, “we’re a hidden group of people,” Brown says. This can make getting treatment from skeptical physicians challenging. Long-Covid patient Anthony Campbell, for example, had a doctor refuse to sign a work disability form unless he was treated for anxiety rather than for his persistent symptoms.
Interviews with dozens of patients like Brown and Campbell provide a closer look at long Covid’s devastating impact — and the clues the latest research offers into what might be causing all these symptoms, including erectile dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, hallucinations, and dementia-like effects that can severely impact daily life.
Menstrual changes and erectile dysfunction
One of the most surprising new findings about long Covid’s effects is that both women and men have reported sexual and reproductive system symptoms following a Covid-19 infection.
The Patient-Led Research Group, a team of researchers who are also Covid-19 patients, conducted a survey of 640 long-Covid patients and recorded more than 200 total symptoms, including testicular pain, urinary problems, and menstrual changes.
“A lot of people with long Covid notice that their symptoms get worse just before their period happens,” when estrogen levels are lowest, says Louise Newson, a general practitioner and menopause specialist. She says an additional sign hormones may be involved are long-Covid symptoms like “brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, joint pain — these are also symptoms of menopause.”
Newson has 842 patient responses so far to a pilot survey, and she says the results “confirm my thoughts that long Covid is likely to be related to low hormone levels (estrogen and testosterone), which so far have been neglected with research.” Estrogen plays a key role in women’s health, and having abnormally low levels can lead to infertility, osteoporosis, lack of sex drive, and depression.
Newson says that anecdotally, patients with long Covid from her menopause clinic have improved with the right dose and type of hormone replacement therapy. “They all had low oestradiol and low testosterone results before treatment,” she says.
Long Covid can also significantly impact male reproductive systems and testosterone levels. “Absolutely, reproductive systems have been overlooked during the pandemic,” says Geoff Hackett, a professor of sexual medicine at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. He explains that during acute illness, the testes can be attacked by the virus directly.
“The testes are one of the highest sites of ACE2 expression,” writes the British Society of Sexual Medicine (BSSM) in its position paper on Covid-19. (This ACE2 enzyme is the primary way SARS-CoV-2 enters cells.) The BSSM adds that SARS-CoV-2 also damages cells on the inner surface of blood vessels called endothelial cells, a condition which is “frequently present in men with erectile dysfunction and testosterone deficiency.”
Several recent studies have pointed to testosterone, which in men is produced in the testes, as playing an important role in coronavirus patients: A study in Germany found that the majority of men admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 had low testosterone levels and high inflammatory markers. (This study was unable to determine if these low testosterone levels predated their coronavirus infection.)
A similar study in Italy found low testosterone levels predicted worse outcomes in hospitalized patients. A third study, in Wuhan, China, also found low testosterone levels in coronavirus patients, which they said required “more attention to gonadal function evaluation among patients recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially the reproductive-aged men.”
Hypogonadism, when sex organs don’t produce sufficient hormones, affects both the production of testosterone and sperm. Another recent paper, published in The Lancet, found the production of sperm was impaired in Covid-19 patients, which they said might be explained by an immune response in the testes. In some patients, they also found auto-immune orchitis, or inflammation of the testis with specific anti-sperm antibodies. “There does seem to be some evidence for relative infertility afterward,” Hackett says, though he cautions it’s too early to say if it would be permanent.
In general, “attacking the cells of the testes will have an adverse effect on erections,” Hackett says. Even beyond a direct effect, endothelial disorder and inflammation may affect the arteries in the penis, making erections more difficult. “Erectile dysfunction is going to be highly prevalent, particularly if you look at the groups at high risk of Covid-19,” Hackett says. “Seventy-five percent of diabetics have erectile dysfunction anyway.” Based on anecdotal evidence, the next Patient-Led Research Group survey will include questions on shrinkage, erectile dysfunction, and testicular pain.
Erectile function is a sign of overall health, and urologist Ryan Berglund of the Cleveland Clinic recently made a statement that for young and healthy people who develop this problem after having Covid-19, “this can be a sign of something more serious going on.”
The BSSM is concerned that these reproductive effects may have lasting implications, warning that low testosterone levels in men “are associated with increased mortality,” and that those “who may have survived the current pandemic ... may be at considerable risk from second and third wave infection, or future viral pandemics.”
Recognizing these impacts may help doctors find effective treatments; Hackett says a common erectile dysfunction treatment, Tadalafil, improves all markers of endothelial disease. “If it didn’t give men an erection, it would be treated as a serious cardiovascular drug,” he says. He notes that mountain climbers often take Tadalafil before big climbs to avoid altitude sickness, as it lowers pulmonary artery pressure and improves the endothelium of arteries — effects that might significantly help Covid-19 patients.
But Hackett says even as the UK National Health System rolls out long-Covid clinics, he’s been disappointed to see these symptoms overlooked. “Their strategies include things like eating healthy, hydrating, and mindfulness,” he says. “How is this going to go down with seriously ill people? All they’re offering is platitudes.”
Wang Ying/Xinhua via Getty Images
Medical workers transport a patient in New York City on December 8.
Pulmonary problems
Long-Covid symptoms can be very diverse and are often not limited to one part of the body, making them hard to understand. One of the reasons long-Covid patients are struggling to do high-quality research through their illnesses, says Hannah Davis, a long-Covid patient and a member of the Patient-Led Research Group who helped design the survey, “is that we need answers.”
She’s tired of being told that no one knows how to help treat her symptoms, or how many others might be experiencing something similar. “We’re going to get answers faster than anyone else because we’re living this experience,” Davis says. One recent study of 201 long-Covid patients in the UK found that even in a young, low-risk population, 66 percent had impairments to one or more organs four months after their initial symptoms.
Being sick enough to be ventilated, like Brown was, often comes with its own complications; one study found that 81 percent of ventilated patients develop delirium, and one in five patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome — a common lung condition in ICU patients — experience long-term cognitive impairment. But even coronavirus patients with milder symptoms or no initial symptoms at all can develop long Covid.
Long-term lung problems are perhaps the most straightforward long-Covid symptom, as the virus can directly inflame the lung tissue, filling air sacs with fluid and making them less elastic and harder to expand as you breathe. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, it was known that previous coronavirus epidemics had caused lung scarring in some patients. One 15-year study of 71 SARS patients from a 2003 outbreak found a third had reduced lung capacity; a third of MERS survivors in a 2017 study also had long-term lung damage.
New research suggests that around half of asymptomatic Covid-19 infections can also cause damage to the lungs.
In early November, a study published in The Lancet on 41 autopsies of Covid-19 patients offered a possible reason: It found that the virus caused major structural changes in the lungs, including extensive blood clotting, scarring of respiratory tissue, and the fusion of many smaller cells into larger cells. (Based on the fact that these were autopsies, these were all severe cases, limiting the implications that can be drawn.)
The authors suggest that, unlike other types of pneumonia, these structural changes may stem “from the persistence of infected and dysfunctional cells in the lungs” — which may help explain why some of these symptoms linger. Though we still don’t know the exact mechanics, continuing lung symptoms are perhaps the most common of them.
It’s still unclear how long these symptoms might last; some long-Covid patients have reported improvements in their breathing, although much slower than they would have liked. One study of mildly ill patients in China found that 70 percent had abnormal lung scans three months after their initial illness.
Blood clotting and other cardiovascular issues
Early in the pandemic, doctors noticed that many Covid-19 patients were having serious blood clotting problems, with reports of clogging dialysis machines and clots in the arms and legs called deep vein thromboses. But some patients, like Brown — who went back to the hospital with blood clots three months after her initial symptoms — are also experiencing clots weeks or months later.
Large blood clots can cause tissue damage, requiring amputations. Smaller clots can restrict blood flow in the lungs, impairing normal oxygen exchange. If clots travel to the brain or heart, they can also cause strokes or heart attacks, as 23-year-old Riley Behrens recently suffered after a coronavirus infection. “Before this, I was a healthy young athlete with no major medical conditions,” she tweeted after a Covid-related stroke. “Now, I’m being told I will likely never return to contact sports because of lasting lung and brain damage. The risk for a second stroke will always be there.”
It’s hard to know how common clotting problems are in Covid-19 patients, but reports of conditions linked to clotting have certainly increased: A study published in Annals of Vascular Surgery recently found a twofold increase during the pandemic in major amputations, which are sometimes required after a clot is found. And multiple researchers have reporteda spike in the number of stroke patients, including young people like Behrens who would not normally be at high risk for strokes, as well as in patients who didn’t know they’d had the coronavirus but later tested positive for antibodies.
A study published in Scienceinmid-November may have identified one of the reasons for this abnormal clotting: In half of 172 hospitalized coronavirus patients, the scientists found autoantibodies — proteins that are supposed to defend against invaders that instead start to attack the body’s own cells. When these autoantibodies were injected into lab mice, the animals developed blood clots. The researchers suggest that these proteins could be sparking a dangerous loop between clotting and hyperinflammation. A December preprint also found a significant percentage of Covid-19 patients developed autoantibodies, and the more severe their symptoms, the more autoantibodies they had.
But Covid-19’s cardiovascular impacts don’t end with coagulation. Half of 1,216 Covid-19 patients in one study also had heart abnormalities, and one in seven had severe cardiac issues.
“People can present without any lung symptoms, and have just heart or brain involvement,” says Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. These can include cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle that makes it harder for your heart to pump; myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle; and pericarditis, inflammation of the pericardium, the two thin layers of tissue that surround the heart and help it function. One study on 54 college athletes who’d had mild Covid-19 cases found that a third had pericarditis, even though about the same number had been asymptomatic.
Many long-Covid patients are also experiencing persistent heart concerns months after their initial illness. Kate Meredith of Beverly, Massachusetts, for example, first got sick in March. Now, she has tachycardia, or an abnormally elevated heart rate. “If I get up to do the dishes, it jumps to 140 [beats per minute],” she says.
Leticia Soares and Israel Slick, of Ontario, both also got Covid-19 in April. They each independently reported heart palpitations and tachycardia to the same doctor, who speculated Slick’s condition might be related to his Covid-19 infection, while Soares, who is Latina, was told to seek counseling. (Many Black and brown long-Covid patients say they’ve experienced gaslighting and medical racism when they try to seek treatment.)
Cardiovascular symptoms may arise from the coronavirus directly impacting the endothelium. These cells control vascular functions, including enzymes that direct blood clotting. The endothelium is also important for proper immune function, and its imbalance could help explain the cytokine storms seen in many patients with severe Covid-19 cases. “There’s no shortage of ways by which this virus can hurt the heart,” Topol concludes.
Go Nakamura/Getty Images
Dr. Joseph Varon, center, and other medical staff members talk to a patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, on December 6.
Immune system
Damaged endothelial cells can also stimulate mast cells, a type of blood cell that’s part of the immune system. Their job is to defend against foreign bodies by releasing chemicals like histamines. Activated mast cells were recently found in autopsies of Covid-19 patients and are linked to clots and pulmonary edemas.
Some long-Covid patients are reporting symptoms and inflammation similar to mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), a chronic, multisystem condition that causes allergic responses, GI problems, and neurological issues.
Frances Simpson, a psychology lecturer at Coventry University in the UK, says she and her 5- and 9-year old were infected with Covid-19 in March and have had long-Covid symptoms since, including new allergic reactions. “When you read about possible mast cell activation syndrome,” she says, “we can tick all of the symptoms off between us” — things like headaches, rashes, and extreme fatigue. Moreover, some of the drugs that have been shown to help with severe Covid-19 cases, like famotidine and aspirin, inhibit mast cell activation.
Immunology is very complicated, but it also appears that T cells, an important component of the immune system, may also play a role in long Covid, as they do in other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.
The CDC is now calling a particular set of inflammatory symptoms in multiple organs after an initial infection multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults, or MIS-A — after a similar post-viral condition that was first reported in children, called MIS-C. Both children’s and adults’ symptoms in these cases overlap with MCAS, with problems like chest tightness, abdominal pain, rash, and inflammation, strengthening the argument that mast cells may be involved.
Nervous system
New research is also homing in on the many, sometimes severe, neurological symptoms that long-Covid patients have reported. One peer-reviewed paper found that a surprising 40 percent of patients with Covid-19 showed some kind of neurologic manifestation, and more than 30 percent had impaired cognition. These symptoms — including brain fog, extreme fatigue, difficulty with short-term memory, intense headaches, and tingling or numbness — are common in long-Covid patients.
Some long-Covid patients develop dysautonomia, a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that can be triggered by viral infections. The autonomic nervous system controls involuntary functions in our bodies such as heart rate and digestion. When it is damaged by an infection, these functions can go out of whack.
Davis, for example, has been diagnosed with a form of dysautonomia called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), where blood vessels don’t respond to chemical signals efficiently. When she stands, blood pools in her lower extremities, making her feel faint and exacerbating her brain fog. The nervous system continues to release hormones to tighten her non-responding blood vessels, increasing her heart rate and making her shake.
There’s also increasing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can actually cross the blood-brain barrier, a layer of specialized cells that protect the brain, and harm the nervous system directly. In April, researchers found that a 40-year-old woman in Los Angeles with headaches, seizures, and hallucinations had RNA from the coronavirus in her cerebrospinal fluid.
One study recently found an explanation for how that may have occurred: The virus can directly enter and damage cells in the brain’s choroid plexus, which has cells with ACE2 receptors. “This can lead to leakage across this important barrier, that normally prevents entry of pathogens into the cerebrospinal fluid and the brain,” says study co-author Madeline Lancaster, a biologist and the group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
The brain is normally protected from your blood, so it’s a big problem to have that barrier penetrated. During viral infections, many immune cells are activated and circulating through the body. Lancaster explains that even if the virus itself doesn’t get past the barrier, having “those inflammatory cytokines leak into the brain, where they really do not belong, can have serious repercussions.” One example is encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain itself, as found in this study of 12 Covid-19 patients in the UK.
Lancaster says viruses may penetrate the blood-brain barrier more often than previously thought. “The Covid crisis has shined a light on overlooked post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS),” she says. “There’s a lot of indication that inflammation of the brain can lead to those symptoms. There’s a huge overlap between those conditions and long Covid.”
But though post-viral symptoms may linger for months or even years, it can be hard for doctors to find clues in neurological tests. While encephalitis can be seen on MRIs, damage to the cerebrospinal fluid might not be visible. (Doctors can, however, look for elevated biomarkers like cytokines.) “Unfortunately, that’s one of the reasons a lot of patients with CFS have been told it’s all in their heads. We’ve let those patients down,” says Lancaster.
Neuro-inflammation can cause emotional and behavioral changes. Sammie, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy, says she and her daughter were both infected in the UK with Covid-19 in March. Since then, her 15-year-old daughter has had headaches, dysautonomia, fatigue, and extreme anxiety and emotional outbursts. “She’s not a crier. She’s normally very stoic,” Sammie says, but over the last few months, “she’s had irrational outbursts, just sobbing her heart out.”
One study of 62,354 patients recently published in The Lancet Psychiatryjournal found that one in five were diagnosed with a mental health disorder within three months of testing positive for the coronavirus. “But what’s the chicken and what’s the egg?” Lancaster asks. “It could be that there are people with leakier brains to start with, who when they get Covid-19 are more likely to have viral entry into their brain.”
Neuro-inflammation might also help explain some of the weirder long-Covid symptoms reported by parents of children who have had Covid-19, like something called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, an alteration of visual perception where objects or body part sizes are perceived incorrectly. Simpson says her son’s vision regularly goes blurry, and he describes people’s heads “going small.”
Gretchen Drown of Portland, Maine, also says that her 15-year old son, who got Covid-19 in March, describes “things looking weird,” and that during these episodes, his pupils get strangely dilated. Drown’s son also now has headaches and extreme fatigue, which worsen after he overexerts himself, making it hard to keep up with school.
Damaging the blood-brain barrier also hurts its ability to make cerebrospinal fluid, which is important for providing nutrients to the brain and removing its normal waste. Lancaster calls the cerebrospinal fluid the plumbing system of the brain. “Imagine your house with all your toilets clogged — a similar thing can happen in the brain,” she says.
Much of this fluid cycling normally occurs during sleep, so Lancaster suggests that Alice in Wonderland syndrome — and possibly other common neurological symptoms in long Covid, like extreme fatigue and insomnia — might be related to the virus compromising the body’s ability to generate and manage this fluid.
Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images via Getty Images
A young boy receives a free Covid-19 test along with the rest of his family in Perrysburg, Ohio.
Children and long Covid
As the pandemic began, it appeared most children had mild cases of Covid-19. But while clinicians have not been tracking long Covid in children, it’s clear from the many parents Vox interviewed that children of any age can and do experience persistent symptoms that can completely alter their ability to function.
That no one seems to be paying attention to pediatric long-Covid cases is a source of extreme frustration. Multiple parents reported that during their efforts to get their children care, medical providers accused them of Munchausen syndrome, a psychological disorder where someone pretends to be ill.
Sammie says when a nurse suggested it to her, “I literally think if I hadn’t had a mask on, my jaw would have fallen off. I felt so broken — it makes me feel emotional talking about it now.” Since then, she’s complained to the clinic and actually gotten a letter of apology. But her experience demonstrates the hurdles parents face in getting their children the care they need. “I think there are a lot more children who are ill, and who no one is connecting the dots for,” Sammie says.
While it’s hard to quantify something no one is tracking, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests about 11 percent of US Covid-19 cases are children, with over 1,460,905 children contracting the virus as of December 3. It’s easier to count more acute Covid-19 consequences, like MIS-C: In one study of kids under 18 with MIS-C, 14.8 percent exhibited new neurological symptoms like headaches, muscle weakness, and reduced reflexes. The youngest child with persistent symptoms Vox found was 18 months; the oldest was 15.
While some of the symptoms parents have reported in children are similar to adult long-Covid cases — headaches, extreme fatigue, difficulty concentrating or forming new memories, anxiety, depression, tachycardia, dysautonomia, lingering or recurrent fevers — others differ. Some parents in the long-Covid kids online group Sammie formed, for example, have been reporting frequent nosebleeds.
Some of the parents, like Simpson, are themselves suffering from long Covid. “In many families who have kids with long Covid, there’s a mother or father who has it as well. People should be tripping over themselves to research if this is genetic,” she says.
But in the meantime, for parents like Sammie, Simpson, Meredith, and Drown, there are few resources to help their children recover. Though it hasn’t been easy, Sammie hasn’t given up trying to get her daughter into more specialized care. “If I don’t advocate for my child, who the hell is going to do it?” she asks.
Parents worry about how their children’s lives might be impacted by the long-term effects of this disease. For adult patients, too, the repercussions are potentially huge.
One doctor, whose family asked that her name be withheld for privacy reasons, first got sick this spring. She eventually despaired of finding treatment for her long-Covid symptoms. She recently drove to New York — because she wanted to be near the best researchers she knew of — before ending her life. She donated her body to science.
For those who survive, like Brown, the questions are pervasive. “How will this affect me when I want to have a baby?” Brown asks. “What is next? We have no idea. No one can tell me anything specific.” She’s frustrated that friends her age still assume that if they get infected, they’ll recover.
“You might be okay, but you might not,” Brown says. She says she’s angry about how the pandemic has been measured in deaths rather than in lives disrupted. “The disparities are shocking. And more will be lost if we don’t make adjustments.”
Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.
An anonymous reader shares a report: On an earnings call two months ago, SolarWinds Chief Executive Kevin Thompson touted how far the company had gone during his 11 years at the helm. There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call. "We don't think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth of coverage we have," he said. "We manage everyone's network gear." Now that dominance has become a liability -- an example of how the workhorse software that helps glue organizations together can turn toxic when it is subverted by sophisticated hackers. On Monday, SolarWinds confirmed that Orion -- its flagship network management software -- had served as the unwitting conduit for a sprawling international cyberespionage operation. The hackers inserted malicious code into Orion software updates pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers.
[...] Cybersecurity experts across government and private industry are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage, which some are already calling one of the most consequential breaches in recent memory. [...] Experts are reviewing their notes to find old examples of substandard security at the company. Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds' update server by using the password "solarwinds123" "This could have been done by any attacker, easily," Kumar said. Others -- including Kyle Hanslovan, the cofounder of Maryland-based cybersecurity company Huntress -- noticed that, even days after SolarWinds realized their software had been compromised, the malicious updates were still available for download.
It'll be some good experience for him and hopefully some good results for the country.
During his campaign, former mayor Pete Buttigieg had some big plans for the nation’s infrastructure. That included a $1 trillion plan to “revitalize the nation’s transport networks” through a partnership with state and local governments. Now it seems that Buttigieg might be in a position to turn some of those plans into reality, as sources have indicated that the South Bend native is President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to be secretary of transportation.
There had been rumors that Buttigieg had received offers of other roles but turned them down. However, heading up the Department of Transportation seems like a good slot for Buttigieg, who has proven himself as an effective surrogate for Biden and a powerful communicator both before and after the election. Under Elaine Chao, the Department of Transportation has achieved … it’s hard to pin down anything. The department’s plans for the last two years appear to have no ambition higher than catching up on some of the thousands of backlogged repair requests. But then, since every “Infrastructure Week” in the Trump White House has signaled disaster, maybe Chao has thought it best to keep a low profile.
But if Joe Biden follows through on his own plan, Buttigieg will have plenty of things to do.
For everyone harping about the need for Biden to create “a team of rivals” should now feel like Biden is off to a good start; with Kamala Harris as VP, and Buttigieg at Transportation, Biden has done exactly that. And he may not be done.
One of the first things that any incoming secretary of transportation will be facing is the more than 100 environmental and safety regulations that Trump eliminated. Among them is one seriously big one—the use of climate change models and predictions in planning for infrastructure projects. By ignoring this one, the DOT has been citing projects in locations that could literally be underwater soon after they are built.
Biden’s plan calls for creating “millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure—from roads and bridges to green spaces and water systems to electricity grids and universal broadband.” Overall, Biden’s plan includes a whole series of options that are designed to make the country both greener and more secure while providing long-term employment.
The plan also calls for proving every city with a population over 100,000 with “high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation.” Which is a great idea. Buttigieg might even have a good place for this to start—the population of South Bend, Indiana, is 101,000.
The Republican civil war in Georgia intensified Tuesday after Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue lambasted Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office for not having provided them with publicly available voter registration data. Raffensperger was not having it.
“It’s been one week since the voter registration deadline passed and the Secretary of State has failed to compile and release a final list of newly registered voters,” Loeffler said Monday in a statement on behalf of herself and Perdue. “This is totally unacceptable.” The failure might threaten the integrity of the runoff elections, she warned. Raffensperger’s response reflected his rage at being targeted by his fellow Republicans for the crime of having run a reasonably fair election.
“Though I’ve told the Republican Party to stop focusing on me and instead direct their energies to winning the Senate runoffs, clearly they haven’t listened,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “As embarrassing as it is for Sens. Perdue and Loeffler not to know that the data they want is already publicly available from the Secretary of State, it’s even worse that they’re not aware their own campaigns already have the data they’re looking for. Early voting has already started but it’s not too late for them to call their offices and get their campaigns in order.”
Ouch.
Raffensperger’s statement further quoted a National Republican Senatorial Committee representative as saying: “They have those lists.”
Donald Trump gave Raffensperger more reason for explosive fury Tuesday morning with this retweet:
It does not look like Georgia Republicans are getting ready to make nice with each other. What a shame.
Joe Biden plans to name Pete Buttigieg as his Secretary of Transportation, according to multiple reports.
Axios reports: “Joe Biden plans to name Mayor Pete Buttigieg as his transportation secretary as early as today, tapping a formal rival to help rebuild America’s infrastructure, according to three people familiar with the matter.”
CNN reports: “Buttigieg would be the first Senate-confirmed LGBTQ Cabinet secretary should his nomination make it through the chamber. The choice vaults a candidate Biden spoke glowingly of after the Democratic primary into a top job in the incoming administration and could earn Buttigieg what many Democrats believe is needed experience should he run for president again.”
New young Republican-elect of North Carolina Madison Cawthorn took time away from anonymously managing his racist website, to bring his pretty boy brand of racism to Georgia. More importantly, North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn went down to Georgia to tell Georgians that Raphael Warnock—born and raised in Georgia—is a “radical’s radical,” and a carpetbagger.
Yup. The 25-year-old, whose prefrontal cortex will just have finished developing by the end of this year, seems not to be bothered by feelings of guilt or remorse over his straight-up lying. Appearing on Fox News on Tuesday, Cawthorn explained that “the number one reason I’m coming down here, is because if we cede control of our Senate, and really all of Washington, D.C., to the Democrats, it’s not going to represent the values of my home, Western North Carolina, and certainly not the values of Georgia and the values of most of the people of the United States of America.”
I don’t know, like seven million more people voted for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. You don’t have to be smart to understand how seven million is more than not seven million. But Cawthorn wasn’t done telling Georgians what their values are.
Cawthorn decided to up his lying, seamlessly mind you, by explaining that “I mean you see this Warnock fella, coming down here and disguising himself as some moderate pastor from the South, who doesn’t believe in these radical ideas.” I mean, this Warnock fella has been the senior pastor of the historic Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, a congregation Martin Luther King Jr. once led, for like 15 years. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, and went to college at HBCU Morehouse in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s been in Georgia more than twice as long as Cawthorn has been alive. Heck, Cawthorn spent a fifth of his short life at Patrick Henry College in Virginia!
But, as Cawthorn will continue to explain, Warnock is not simply “disguised,” he’s like the second coming of Vladimir Lenin. “He’s a radical’s radical. He wants to defund our police. He says he’s a pastor, yet he’s all about abortion. This is somebody that does not represent what real Americans believe.”
“Real” Americans.
The only response I can muster here is this one from online.
Why is a former Chick-fil-A worker from NC trying to pretend he knows what people in GA want or need?
Daniel Miessler, a widely respected infosec professional in San Francisco, writes about design and user experience choices Google has made across its services in recent years: I've been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google's GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other properties -- not to mention their multiple social media network attempts, like Google+ and Wave. Back then it was super annoying, but kind of ok. They're a hardcore engineering group, and their backend services are without equal. But lately it's just becoming too much.
1. Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
2. What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?
3. What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?
4. Google just rolled out Google Analytics 4 -- I think -- and the internet is full of people asking the same question I am. "Is this a real rollout?"
[...] My questions are simple:
1. How the hell is this possible? I get it 10 years ago. But then they came out with the new design language. Materialize, or whatever it was. Cool story, and cool visuals. But it's not about the graphics, it's about the experience.
2. How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
3. How can you run Gmail on an interface that's tangibly worse than anything else out there?
4. How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?
I've heard people say that Google has become the new Microsoft, or the new Oracle, but damn -- at least Microsoft is innovating. At least Oracle has a sailing team, or whatever else they do. I'm being emotional at this point.
Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces. Focus on the experience. Focus on simplicity. And use navigation language that's similar across your various properties, so that I'll know what to do whether I'm managing my Apps account, or my domains, or my Analytics. You guys are awesome at so many things. Make the commitment to fix how we interact with them.
Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984. | Clay Enos/DC Comics
Wonder Woman 1984, for better and worse, feels like three Wonder Woman movies wrapped into one.
Wonder Woman challenges much of what is supposed to make this blockbuster movie era of superheroes cool. She doesn’t have Batman’s dark vengeance, Iron Man’s sardonic edge, or Thor’s party boy vibe, nor does she possess Captain America’s charming self-awareness.
Instead, Amazonian princess Diana Prince (née Diana of Themyscira) is a goddess who saves humanity. Diana talks about the beauty of the world and learning all of its languages, relishes her sacred duty to protect the innocent and fight for those who cannot fight themselves, and dreams of making the world better with one good deed at a time.
Unlike most of those Good Guys, Diana is from a matriarchal land of female warriors. She’s too good for the world of men, Diana’s mother Hippolyta tells her in the first movie. The Queen of the Amazon’s assessment isn’t really about Diana’s superhero abilities and literal godliness. It’s a warning: Diana believes fully in love, truth, compassion, empathy, kindness, and mercy, but this other world is one mired in cynicism and corruption.
The first Wonder Woman stood apart from other DC Entertainment movies in the clarity of Diana’s super-sized morality crisis.
Director Patty Jenkins carefully laid the foundation of the character in the 2017 film, showing how Diana’s hopeful and idealistic worldview leads to fantastic moments, like saving a village that American forces gave up on long ago. But these lofty ideals also have the capability of stranding Diana in hesitation. When she finds out that humans are just capable of evil on their own and that the world of men are undeserving of her goodness, she questions if they’re even worth saving.
With Diana, the tension is not that her life is in danger. She’s always as fast, as strong, and as durable as her enemies. Rather, it’s whether or not the goddess finds it within herself to sacrifice for people who would likely never do the same for her.
The best moments of Jenkins’s ambitious and hefty sequel, WW1984, engages with Wonder Woman’s very human problem. Diana is a goddess — in appearance, morality, strength, invulnerability — living among mortals, but she is otherwise alone.
But superhero movies, even those with the emotional promise of Wonder Woman, are unfortunately never fully about the emotional fragility our characters can’t punch their way through. Superhero movies are supposed to be big, expensive, loud, and fun. And WW1984 is stuffed to its cinematic seams, sometimes to its detriment.
WW1984 is three movies rolled into one: It’s at once a romance about lost love; a tale about the jealousy in our friendships; and a sad, broken man desperate to take over the world. And it’s only the first two of these that truly take us somewhere wonderful.
Wonder Woman feels more flawed and human in WW1984 — that’s a good thing
Clay Enos/DC Comics
Wonder Woman leg-pressing a tank in Wonder Woman 1984.
Since the first film from 2017, it is impossible for me to see anyone else but Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Gal Gadot as anyone else but Wonder Woman. She obviously looks the way we think superheroes are supposed to look — tall and beautiful. But Gadot’s magic is in the small stuff. It’s the small wink that assures you she’s got this or that vague suggestion of a smile as she careens into a tank. Her Wonder Woman lives where joy meets strength.
WW1984 mostly — aside from an opening sequence — swerves away from Gadot’s strengths and asks her to give a chillier take on the character. As its title suggests, we meet Gadot’s Diana in the rambunctious ’80s where she’s a beautiful loner who lives in DC’s Watergate building.
To be clear, she’s not a loner because she lives in the Watergate, but rather because she’s watched the love of her life die in WWI while she maintains near-immortality. Judging from the camera’s lingering shots on old photos of Steve (Chris Pine) in the many nooks around her apartment, Diana still nurses a broken heart.
On a shelf, there’s one picture of Diana and an aged Etta Candy, Steve’s assistant from the first movie. I immediately imagined the stories and laughs they had together, yet the film overlooks the underlying sadness of that: how emotionally exhausting it would be for Diana to know that she’d outlive all of her friends. That has to be equally as devastating as losing her first love.
The one new friend she does make is the dorky Barbara Minerva (played by a devilish Kristen Wiig), a new coworker in the gemology department at the museum where Diana works. How Barbara’s last name does not set off alarm bells in Diana’s head is hard to fathom, considering Diana’s first-hand experience with gods and goddesses. Then again, maybe that’s my fault for expecting logic in a movie about an Amazonian demigod living in Washington, DC.
Barbara, all social awkwardness, can’t seem to decide whether she’s jealous of or attracted to — in a platonic way, of course— Diana’s natural grace. Wiig, who’s made a career out of honing cringe, taps into that well to find Barbara. But she imbues Barbara with just enough friend-envy (frenvy?) that there’s just the slightest bit of relatable menace in the glances she steals and her talk about how easy Diana’s life must be.
The two bond over a weird stone that they soon find out grants wishes. It’s a “poor unfortunate souls” type of situation: One longs to be admired, and the other wants a boyfriend. And does the stone help them? Yes, indeed. And Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) — a television con man loser who sure seems like a certain sitting president’s DCEU analog — has his eyes on the stone and the two as well.
My wish for WW1984 would be much more editing
Clay Enos/DC Comics
Gal Gadot and Chris Pine in Wonder Woman 1984.
All of this stone magic results in everybody getting what they want: Diana gets a second chance with Steve; Barbara becomes hot (relatable) and strong (also relatable), and Maxwell Lord becomes less of a loser. But it also results in a lot of movie and not enough script to hold everything together.
For all the globe-trotting Diana does in the film, there’s unfortunately barely any time for her beloved Themyscira, and not enough from her Amazon moms Hippolyta and Antiope. Yet what the movie lacks in Amazonian extravaganza, it makes up for in its romantic reunion between Diana and Steve. Pine, as he did in 2017, brings out the emotional vulnerability of Diana and the movie. He clasps her hand and tells her, “I wish we had more time.” If there is a man worth risking the world for, it is Steve — but he would never allow you to do that. The two share a heavenly romantic moment, and something I’ve thought about long after the movie ended while I got nostalgic over a WWI boyfriend I never had.
At the same time as she’s reuniting with Steve, Barbara starts to pull away from Diana. Barbara becomes stronger, faster, more confident to the point where her behavior shocks Diana. It’s a thrilling glimpse into Diana’s ego. Is she threatened because Barbara’s behavior is rank or is she threatened because, for the first time in forever, she finally has an equal? The answer, just based on how much we’ve seen of Diana’s competitiveness on Themyscira, is more uneasy than it seems.
The frustrating part of WW1984 is that these two solid storylines are saddled with a third. Looming in the background is the maniacal Maxwell Lord who wants to rule the world and wield unrivaled influence. While Pascal is doing great work, lacing American cheesiness into every fiber of his character, I found myself wondering when we’d get back to Diana and Steve, or questioning whether Barbara and Diana would ever be friends again, or asking myself what Diana loves more: being a goddess or being in love?
I’m confident Jenkins could’ve excised Lord, perhaps saved his role for a third installment, smashed together what was left, and created an even better Wonder Woman movie than the first one. Lord’s presence and his motives dull the interesting stuff about Wonder Woman, plunging us into rote superhero territory.
Large adult sad boys who want to take over the world and launch it into an apocalypse is something we’ve seen before (see: Loki in Avengers, Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Luther and Doomsday in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Steppenwolf in Justice League). This formulaic story is something fit for the other guys. The more time spent on it, the less time WW1984 spends being wondrous.
The rampant spread of the coronavirus has raised America’s baseline levels of anxiety and depression. | Getty Images
Survey data shows the mental health strain of the pandemic.
Case numbers, positivity rates, deaths, and hospitalizations have become the go-to metrics for tracking the severity of the coronavirus pandemic. But one symptom of the pandemic, impacting both those who’ve had the virus and those who haven’t, has proven more difficult to quantify: deteriorating mental health. Perhaps because of this challenge, it has been largely absent from the messaging and response of public officials.
A close look at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey data shows that one measure of mental health is far more intimately tied to the state of the pandemic than previously imagined. In fact, their trajectories align almost exactly.
It is well documentedthat the coronavirus pandemic has taken a serious toll on emotional wellbeing. Rates of depression and anxiety in June were three to four times higher than at the corresponding point in 2019, according to the CDC, and deteriorating mental health outcomes have been similarly observed in nations across the world, among them the UK, India, and China. Rates of suicidal ideation, substance abuse, and alcohol consumption are steadily on the rise.
But the connection is even stronger than you might think in the US: As the number of new cases of the virus fluctuates week to week, our mental health moves in lockstep.
Data available from the Mental Health Household Pulse Survey, run by the CDC, offers a week-by-week estimate of the fraction of Americans who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression between April 23 and July 21 of this year. Comparing this data to the weekly US coronavirus cases over the same time interval reveals an unmistakable trend: the incidence of depressive or anxious symptoms among Americans almost exactly mirrors the trajectory of the US coronavirus curve.
With an r2 value (a standard metric of correlation strength) of 0.92 between new Covid-19 cases and the incidence of anxious or depressive symptoms, the correlation between them is very, very strong.
It is always possible that any correlation could be coincidental rather than causal, or that the link could be more complicated than it seems. Indeed, June and July marked a period of increasing viral spread; one might speculate that, as the pandemic stretched on, public mental health could have correspondingly worsened simply as a function of time or some other factor.
Yet, data from the second phase of the Household Pulse Survey, from August through October, showed mental health continued to consistently follow fluctuations in the Covid-19 curve. After the scary viral spike in July, the number of weekly cases declined from roughly 450,000 per week at the end of July to roughly 250,000 by the end of August. And along with this period of slower viral spread, mental health outcomes markedly improved as well, reinforcing the relationship between the two.
Then again, as cases increased during September and October, mental health outcomes correspondingly worsened.
We don’t know yet exactly why reports of mental health issues trace much of the coronavirus curve — whether it is cause and effect, the result of other variables, or some unlikely causal relationship in the other direction. For example, as people become more depressed and anxious, perhaps they seek social interaction more carelessly, generating infection spikes. And the points where the two curves somewhat diverge (e.g. June and late October) show that there are certainly other factors at play.
What is clear is that the rampant spread of the virus is having a major effect on mental health. Overall, the pandemic has raised America’s baseline levels of anxiety and depression: Even at its lowest point this summer (early May), the rate of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression hovered around 34 percent, roughly three times higher than the average of 11 percent reported in a parallel study between January and June in 2019.
Fluctuations above this already-high baseline could plausibly be caused, at least in part, by the severity of the pandemic at a given point in time. For example, elevated rates of viral spread directly increase the likelihood that we or someone we know will become exposed and undergo a mentally straining period of quarantining waiting for symptoms — or self-isolation while battling the new illness itself. The state of the pandemic also often determines things like freedom of mobility through lockdown measures or their absence.
Historically, imposed quarantine has been shown to dramatically affect mental health. Moreover, the perceived trajectory of the pandemic has significant repercussions for the economy and unemployment, bothof which have been shown to directly impact mental health.
Covid-19 messaging and policies have fixated on the standard numbers of cases and deaths. But these numbers alone miss out on the very real, very strong connection between the pandemic and our mental health, which is impacting far more people than have been infected with the virus. And it is not only a question of decreased quality of life. Anxiety and depression have been shown to be major drains on the economy as well.
Looking at these charts, it is clear that our mental health traces the coronavirus curve. And just as rising case numbers have had a crushing impact on our psychological health, whatever has led to periods of decreased viral spread (e.g. masks, distancing, and other smart policies) seems to have improved our mental health. Policymakers should take this finding to heart and respond to the pandemic with the emotional wellbeing of the public in mind.
Hearteningly, Biden recently appointed a nurse with mental health expertise to his Covid Advisory Board. Come January, in addition to enacting policies to curb viral spread, the administration should directly address mental health – for example, by continuing to seek out experts in psychiatry and mental health, expanding access to Telemental health services, and addressing the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on mental health among marginalized groups such as Black and Latino populations.
For the sake of our own sanity, let’s continue to take this virus seriously.
Isaac Sebenius is a graduate student in the advanced computer science program at the University of Cambridge, where he researches mental illness by combining machine learning with biological data.
Hungary’s parliament, under Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling nationalist Fidesz party, on Tuesday passed laws banning adoption by gay couples and passed a constitutional amendment defining family as a married man-woman couple.
Reuters reports: “The legislation … says only married couples can adopt children and single people can only adopt with special permission from the family affairs minister. Hungary does not allow gay marriage. Parliament also amended the constitution, with a dozen new rules including a new definition for family as the union of a father who is a man and a mother who is a woman, redefining the clause to exclude alternative family types. Although there are exceptions when single people or family members can adopt children, ‘the main rule is that only married couples can adopt a child, that is, a man and a woman who are married,’ Justice Minister Judit Varga wrote in the law.”
The new laws also “effectively rule out legal changes to a person’s gender,” Bloomberg adds.
Avid Donald Trump backer Jerry Falwell Jr. was booted from his position as head of Liberty University this summer after the board of the white conservative evangelical "university" finally had enough of him. It came amid longstanding allegations that Falwell had been using the university's finances as a slush fund for his own family, friends, and business ventures and, just as a by-the-way, amid accusations that the Falwells were f--king their former poolboy-turned-weird-business-partner.
Oh, and it also came after Falwell had long made an international mockery of the educational institution by turning it into a fascist propaganda center for Donald Trump, whose lawyer may or may not have been in possession of photos confirming the poolboy's story, but the devoted evangelical leaders of the university never had any particular problems with that. The money-funneling and the scandals were the problem, not Falwell hitching the university to the world's current best approximation of the Antichrist.
The bit about Liberty University turning into a fascist propaganda center? Not an exaggeration. The supposed "think tank" is a nest for Trump conspiracy promoters and Trump-devoted hacks, both promoting Trump-polishing ads during the election and, now that the election is over, promoting new segments repeating Team Trump's election conspiracy claims and urging conservative legislators to overturn the election and reinstall Trump as Dear Leader.
The "think tank" he created was the Falkirk Center, named for Falwell and cofounder Charlie Kirk, the glibly fascist and unfathomably dimwitted propagandist behind "Students for Trump.” It has acted almost exclusively as pro-Trump misinformation network featuring some of the weirdest and most dishonest of his allies, ranging from Sebastian Gorka to Jenna Ellis. But honestly, you can imagine the rest from just knowing that Kirk and Falwell were the brains behind the operation.
Not that anyone cares anymore, but all of this would appear to be a rather blatant violation of the university's tax-exempt nonprofit status. It is not allowed to meddle in partisan political campaigns, much less run a partisan political campaign from university offices, but Politico's scan of the think tank's products makes a good case that Falwell and Kirk's pet project was partisan and political as central focus. It's hard to make a nonpartisan case that the November presidential election should be nullified and Dear Leader proclaimed Dearest Leader, after all. If United States laws actually applied to any of these people (tip: they don't) the university would be in very hot water right now. It would be lawyerin' up time.
That said, and despite the departure of kingpin Falwell, it doesn't look like the supposedly non-crooked Liberty University board is eager to close down Falwell's pro-Trump group. If this sounds odd to you, remember that this is the group that defended Falwell's myriad scandals and business ventures for a very long time after it first became clear that they were sketchy, and is generally packed with the sort of people who struggle to suss out the difference between Donald Trump and Jesus. The institution is likely to remain a vehicle for the indoctrination of politically active conservatives with the religious component stapled on to serve the approximate role of school mascot for its indefinite and ever-humiliating future.
There's one particular tidbit of the Politico story worth highlighting, however: The appearance of disgraced evangelical charlatan Ralph Reed, who is not described as "disgraced" despite his role in the Jack Abramoff scandal, in which Reed's "Christian Coalition" was revealed to have been used as the vehicle by which Reed made himself in excess of $5 million in laundered lobbyist money. Reed's status as supposed evangelical leader was decimated by the revelation that he was using his evangelical nonprofit to protect gambling interests as an illegal lobbyist, after which he sulked off and ...
... quickly reestablished himself in the conservative evangelical money networks because the whole thing is crooked from top to bottom, and it's not like being caught dead to rights being Evil As Crap is going to put anyone out of favor with their equally scheming peers for very long. Just wait—Jerry Falwell Jr. will "redeem" himself about five drunken benders and three more sex scandals from now, or whenever his current funds run out and he is in danger of losing the lifestyle he has become accustomed to.
The sophisticated cyber campaign that breached email accounts across the federal government created a deepening crisis Monday as signs multiplied about the scope of the foreign intruders’ reach.
"This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official said, after the National Security Council held its second meeting in three days about the attacks, which security experts have linked to Russian intelligence. “That's the view from inside government — that we're dealing with something of a scale that I don't think we've had to deal with before."
The breaches are also focusing new pressure on the executive branch’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which had already taken heat from President Donald Trump for refusing to support his election conspiracy theories. CISA, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has been without a permanent leader since Trump fired its widely respected director, Chris Krebs, in mid-November. And some government officials have already questioned whether it has the staffing and other resources to help the rest of the executive branch respond to such a sprawling attack.
DHS itself appears to have been one of the agencies the intruders breached, officials said Monday.
Agencies throughout the government scrambled Monday to assess the full scope of the breaches, as did executives in industries including energy and health care. The NSC activated an Obama-era emergency plan and convened a virtual meeting of its Cyber Response Group on Monday to formulate a plan for assessing the damage.
The intruders may have gained access to the email accounts as far back as June, POLITICO and other publications reported Sunday. Such an extended duration raises a huge red flag about the attacks' impact on the government, said Sue Gordon, a former top deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“It is massively disruptive once you have long-term penetration by a nation-state," Gordon said in an interview.
Monday's NSC meeting yielded some progress. "We have a full understanding of who's compromised so far," said the official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitive discussions. But the person acknowledged that this was "obviously subject to change as agencies continue to hunt through their systems."
The new Cyber Response Group will activate a subsidiary body, known as a Unified Coordination Group, to streamline crisis collaboration between affected agencies. The NSC will also hold two daily communications meetings to ensure that all agencies are speaking with one voice.
"We're declaring this a significant cyber event," the official said, referring to a term in the presidential directive governing the response process.
As part of an increased "[operational] tempo," the official said, the FBI, CISA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "will lead a large-scale, U.S. government-wide response and recovery effort."
Agencies spent Monday trying to determine whether they had been breached in the cyber campaign, which officials said gave hackers access to emails at agencies including DHS, the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department’s telecommunications policy body.
The breaches are not believed to have exposed the nation's most sensitive secrets, according to the U.S. official. "We haven't seen any evidence that any classified systems have been compromised." On the other hand, the official added, "We don't know what has been taken."
The Trump administration suspects that the campaign is the work of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, according to a second U.S. official, who also requested anonymity to speak freely. The SVR unit dubbed “Cozy Bear” was one of the teams that hacked the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 cycle.
CISA is playing a central role in the response to the attacks, the existence of which first became publicly known Sunday. As the investigation got underway, CISA’s efforts yielded perhaps inevitable criticism from within the government about its speed in deploying incident response teams to help other agencies identifyand contain any intrusions.
There is “massive frustration with CISA on a sluggish response to agency breaches,” said the first U.S. official.
Cybersecurity professionals have consistently warned that CISA — a two-year-old agency tasked with defending civilian federal networks from hackers, assisting agencies in recovering from breaches, and helping to defendcritical infrastructure such as power plants and election systems — lacks enough personnel and resources to effectively fight massive digital fires inside the government. Only a small portion of the agency’s roughly 2,200 employees are tasked with that work.
“They are overwhelmed,” the U.S. official said.
CISA rejected the criticism.
“That’s inaccurate,”spokesperson Sara Sendek said, adding that the agency is confident that it has enough personnel to handle a potential surge in agencies reporting breaches. “CISA has been providing support and assistance to all of our federal partners who have requested it. There has been no delay in responding to any request.”
But a CISA employee, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to reporters, acknowledged that the scope of the crisis could overtake the agency.
“We’re doing OK right now,” this person said, but “that seems likely to change. … Many agencies don’t know how on fire they are yet.”
The U.S. official said that CISA’s incident responders, who swoop into agencies to help them understand and mitigate breaches, were “too few.”
CISA’s incident response teams, including private contractors, are not as large as many people might assume, according to the CISA employee. “NSA we aren’t,” this person said, referring to the spy agency’s massive workforce.
Exactly how much the leadership void at CISA has affected its response remains unclear.
Krebs tweeted Sunday that he had “the utmost confidence” in his former employees, who “know how to do this.”
But some lawmakers are still worried.
“The firing of the extremely capable director of CISA in the middle of this moment of vulnerability, it undermines national security,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who co-chaired a congressionally chartered commission that recommended sweeping changes to the government’s cyber activities.
The attacks appear to have originated with a compromise of an IT vendor whose products are widely used across the federal government, raising new fears about the systemic risk posed by the government’s supply chain.
Investigators believe that the hackers added malicious code to software updates for an IT product used across the federal government, used that code to pry open doors into agency networks and then used a sophisticated technique to access federal workers’ emails.
Although the investigations remain in the very early stages, the breaches appear to have begun between March and June, when the hackers compromised the software company SolarWinds, which sells IT management products to hundreds of government and private-sector clients, including federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies.
By infecting the software updates that SolarWinds distributed to users of its Orion IT monitoring system, the hackers gained a foothold in those users’ networks. From there, they appear to have broken into victims’ Microsoft email servers by forging the authentication tokens that tell the system who should be granted access.
Late Sunday night, CISA issued a rare emergency directive ordering agencies to immediately disconnect all SolarWinds products from their networks.
SolarWinds believes that fewer than 18,000 of the 33,000 organizations that were eligible to receive Orion software updates during the relevant time period actually received the infected code, the company said Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company added that it planned to distribute a fix “on or prior to” Tuesday.
Orion products accounted for roughly 45 percent of SolarWinds’ total revenue during the first three quarters of 2020, the company said.
The manner in which the hackers breached government agencies by compromising a vendor in their supply chain is reminiscent of a global malware outbreak in 2017, known as NotPetya, the largest and most destructive digital attack in history. That incident began when Russian hackers infected the software updates of the Ukrainian tax software maker M.E.Doc. Security researchers believe that the Russians only intended to spy on certain Ukrainian targets, but the NotPetya malware quickly spread around the world, causing as much as $10 billion in damage for victims that included the shipping giant Maersk and the pharmaceutical titan Merck.
Security professionals do not expect a repeat of NotPetya this time. Everything about the recent breaches indicates an espionage operation rather than a destructive rampage, they said, and intelligence collection requires individual attention that even Moscow cannot apply to all of the hundreds of potentially compromised SolarWinds clients.
“No adversary has enough human resources to effectively exploit every potential victim,” tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder of the security firm CrowdStrike. “They pretty much HAVE to focus on those they care most about.”
Even so, companies in critical infrastructure sectors have begun assessing their systems to see if they, too, were affected. Executives in the electric power sector held a “situational awareness call” on Monday, and the Department of Health and Human Services held a conference call Monday afternoon with health care organizations to explain the SolarWinds vulnerability, according to an invitation seen by POLITICO.
Even after SolarWinds clients close that door, they will still need to check their systems for signs that the hackers got inside.
“These organizations are still going to have an uphill battle getting this actor out of their networks,” said John Hultquist, senior director of intelligence analysis at FireEye. “It won’t be easy.”
The first U.S. official agreed. "We are in very, very early days," they said, "and there's a sense that ... the news is going to get worse."
Daniel Lippman and Martin Matishak contributed to this report.
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