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What Happened: July 23, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: Suicides spike among kids; Vaccinations surge; Weekend reads

by
The Scroll
July 23, 2021

The Big Story

Suicides rates among Californians under 18 increased by 24% in 2020, according to research presented by Jeanne Noble, director of COVID response at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Noble, who co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month on “The Pandemic’s Toll on Teen Mental Health,” claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has misrepresented the data on adolescents and COVID by exaggerating the risks teens face while minimizing the mental health consequences of social isolation caused by extended lockdowns. In an interview published today in Just News, Noble says that California’s “lessons are national.” She points to CDC data showing that among 5- to 11-year-olds mental health visits to emergency departments went up by 24% over the first nine months of 2020 compared with the same period from the previous year—among 12- to 17-year-olds, there was a 31% jump over the same period. Girls appear to be particularly hard hit. Suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls that led to emergency room visits were up by 51% in February and March 2021 compared with the same months in 2019. Overall, Americans under 18 were 20 times as likely to die of suicide in 2020 than from COVID. Noble attributes the disproportionately adverse mental health effects suffered by young people during the pandemic to “prolonged social lockdown.”

Read it here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/kids-suicide-and-mental-health-hospitalizations-spiked-amid-covid

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads


The Rest

More Americans are getting vaccinated in states that have seen a recent uptick in COVID cases. The Economist reports that Kansas, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and Nevada all now have daily vaccination rates above the national average. (Florida, Missouri, and Texas together account for 40% of all new infections.) There’s no way to say for sure why vaccinations are going up in these places but it’s likely due to multiple reasons. People are scared of being infected by the new, more transmissible delta variant of COVID that’s responsible for 80% of new cases. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey suggests that Americans who had been previously opposed to getting vaccinated may be swayed by the prospect of facing restrictions, including possible vaccine mandates. And finally, a public messaging effort by high-profile Republicans like Fox News host Sean Hannity and Congressman Steve Scalise urging their followers to take the virus seriously and get vaccinated.
Read it here: https://wvmetronews.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-triggers-increased-emphasis-on-vaccinations/

New details on the Democratic primary in New York City’s mayoral race show that Eric Adams—a Black ex-cop and liberal Democrat of the old school—won with a broad coalition of working-class and middle-class New Yorkers, and a decisive lead among lower income Black and Latino voters. That support won him four out of five New York City boroughs, excluding only Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough and global financial capital. Maya Wiley, a civil rights activist who worked as counsel to New York’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio, was the most progressive among the leading candidates in the race, widely praised by the New York media and endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her support of policies like ending entrance exams for public schools (Wiley’s own child attended private school) and defunding the police. “Wiley did well in gentrifying areas and among young Black voters, but there are more older Black voters than young voters,” Jerry Skurnik, a Democratic political consultant, told Bloomberg news. “Wiley’s strength, ironically, was with the White gentrifiers.”
Read it here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s9p_sn1bcGwJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-mayoral-analysis/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il

The Cleveland Indians, as they’ve been known since 1915, are no more—welcome the Cleveland Guardians. The major league baseball team has faced backlash for years over its name and logo and announced its rebranding Friday in a video posted to Twitter narrated by Tom Hanks. The name change has been expected since 2018 when the ballclub dropped its Chief Wahoo logo featuring a grinning, red-faced caricature of an Indian chief.

Intense droughts in California have driven up cases of water banditry as thieves steal from fire hydrants, water lines, and directly from farmers’ supplies. An estimated 12 billion gallons of water have been stolen throughout the state since 2013, according to a local official. But that has gone up recently. “Water stealing has never been more severe,” the head of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) told CNN recently. Much of the theft is driven by illegal marijuana growing operations, according to California law enforcement officials. The state MET team reports that it has removed more than 400 miles of pipes illegally channeling water from streams to man-made dams.

If approved, the new Defense budget would require women to register for the draft for the first time. The $740 billion defense authorization bill unveiled Thursday by Senate Armed Services officials includes a new provision requiring women to register for the Selective Service System, as men are already legally obligated to do from age 18 to 25. The U.S. has not instituted a draft since Vietnam and there is no current plan to do so, nor is it likely to come back barring a national security emergency, given the resistance to the idea among military senior brass who are partial to the professional military.

Netflix is still the giant in the streaming services content business that is steadily taking over the spot at the top of the entertainment pyramid once held by Hollywood film studios, but HBO is gaining ground. After Netflix underperformed in its quarterly earnings report this week, falling short of revenue growth goals and losing 430,000 subscribers from the end of March through the end of June, HBO gained 2.4 million new subscribers over the same three months.

An 80-foot-long ancient warship was discovered by a team of Egyptian and French divers from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology exploring the waters in the Egyptian bay of Abū Qīr. The vessel is dated to the second century BCE and exhibits both Greek and Egyptian shipbuilding techniques. It was found in the sunken city of Thônis-Heracle.

To escape restrictions imposed by U.S. regulators, a group of “crypto nomads” has set up business overseas, relocating billions of dollars in business, mostly in Asia. The nomads offer the kind of high-risk trading in cryptocurrency futures and derivatives that is supposed to be prohibited for U.S. investors, who nevertheless seem to have no problem getting around the restrictions by trading through companies outside the country.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/us/politics/crypto-billionaires.html


The Back Pages

—A new breed of Germans in the aftermath of Nazism swears to atone for their nation’s past by purging the last traces of fascism so it can never again be allowed to take power. A noble impulse, but where does it lead? In more than one deformed offshoot of the anti-Nazi German purification project, it leads to the most hideous evil. In his book Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman recounts how the ultra-left-wing terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group (also known as the Red Army Faction) interpreted their mission to purge Germany’s Nazi past as a mandate to help hijack a plane with a Palestinian terrorist group and single out the Jews onboard for death.

They weren’t the only ones. In a chilling account in this week’s New Yorker, Rachel Aviv tells the story of Helmut Kentler, whose goal “was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”

A noble goal, so far as it goes, that led to this:

Beginning in the late ‘60s, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a “complete success.”

—In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf tells the story of how “The California Dream Is Dying.” A California native, Friedersdorf sees his state losing its dynamism and slipping toward a semifeudal oligarchy and he’s worried.

If California fails to offer young people and newcomers the opportunity to improve their lot, the consequences will be catastrophic—and not only for California. The end of the California Dream would deal a devastating blow to the proposition that such a widely diverse polity can thrive. Indeed, blue America’s model faces its most consequential stress test in one of its safest states, where a spectacular run of almost unbroken prosperity could be killed by a miserly approach to opportunity.

Read it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/california-dream-dying/619509/


—The novelist Walter Kirn trucks no bullshit.

Every morning, there it is, waiting for me on my phone. The bullshit. It resembles, in its use of phrases such as “knowledgeable sources” and “experts differ,” what I used to think of as the news, but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. It consists of its decomposed remains in a news-shaped coffin. It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class

Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.