| America’s Ebola Panic |
[06 Oct 2015|12:00pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/10/ebola_panic_anniversary_predictions_of_a_u_s_epidemic_didn_t_come_true.html It’s been a year since peak “Fearbola” in the United States—the out-of-proportion panic at the possibility of Ebola cases in this country. At that time, the outbreak was increasing dramatically in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. Thomas Eric Duncan was being treated for his Ebola infection in Dallas, under the care of nurses Amber Vinson and Nina Pham, and he died Oct. 8, 2014. Both nurses later developed the disease themselves, and Vinson traveled to the Akron, Ohio, area during her incubation period. In mid-October, New York City physician Craig Spencer was diagnosed with the virus; shortly thereafter, Kaci Hickox, a nurse working for Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone, was forced into quarantine after flying into Newark airport.
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| How American Apparel Lost America’s Youth |
[06 Oct 2015|03:51pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/10/how_american_apparel_lost_america_s_youth.html On Sunday night, after a weekend of Joaquin’s wind and rain, I stocked up on fall tights from American Apparel’s online store. I woke up Monday morning to news that the once-hip purveyor of cotton T-shirts and sparkly spandex had filed for bankruptcy. The company was bruised by the megalomania and sexual misconduct of its founder, Dov Charney, but it was finally done in by a simple fact: Nobody is buying its clothes anymore. Nobody except, evidently, me.
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| The Elegant Bigotry of Michel Houellebecq |
[06 Oct 2015|04:01pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/submission_by_michel_houellebecq_reviewed.html Michel Houellebecq’s new novel Submission, which describes an Islamicized France of the near future, has been described variously as “melancholic” (Adam Gopnik), “melancholy” (Adam Shatz), and “extraordinarily sad” (Sylvain Bourmeau). It is a “tragedy” (Mark Lilla), one that ends on a “bone-chilling” note (also Lilla)—the total capitulation of a decadent academic French elite to a pious and paternalistic Islamic regime. Melancholy is in the eye of the beholder. To people for whom the idea of “Europe,” or more specifically “France,” looms large—with its spirited republican politics, its sectarian Christian warfare, its zesty laïcité, its Zola and Huysmans, its Drumont and Rimbaud and Corbière and Paulhan and Bloy—Submission may indeed be a pre-emptive bit of cultural mourning.
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| Cybersecurity: The Lame Game |
[06 Oct 2015|06:41pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/the_u_k_cyber_security_challenge_games_reviewed.html It can’t be easy to design computer games for the very paranoid. At various points while trying out the U.K. Cyber Security Challenge games, which were designed to identify and train cybersecurity professionals, I managed to convince myself that the whole point of the game was to see whether I was stupid enough to download whatever files I was being instructed to download, that the designers were intentionally providing incorrect passwords to those files to see whether I could find another way to access them, and that the games were nothing but an elaborate ruse to undermine my personal device and network security. It’s not easy for the very paranoid to play computer games either, apparently.
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| A Biden Presidency Would Be Grim News for Feminism |
[06 Oct 2015|10:26pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/10/a_biden_presidency_would_be_grim_news_for_feminism.html It looks increasingly likely that Joe Biden is going to run for president. Why else would he, as Politico reported, personally tell Maureen Dowd, scourge of the Clintons, that his son’s dying wish was for him to enter the race? Hillary Clinton’s support has been tanking among Democratic women, her most important constituency: In a September Washington Post–ABC News Poll, only 42 percent of the female Democratic electorate backed her—1 point less, amazingly, than the number of Democratic men who support her. Maybe Biden could pick up some of these defectors. If he actually won, though, it would be a grim thing for feminism, and not just because he’s a man.
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