List of Fictional COVID-19 Drugs Banned by the FDA

Related: List of Fictional Drugs Banned by the FDA, More Fictional Drugs Banned by the FDA

Agoravix

PROFILE: Designed in the mid 2010s to be an effective weapon against any contagious pandemic. Agoravix used breakthrough vaccine technology to deliver mRNA encoding extremely sensitive glutamate receptors designed to be highly expressed in specific regions of the amygdala. The increased activation of neuronal fear circuitry reliably triggered a severe but temporary agoraphobia, leading to recipients barely leaving their houses for around a month.

BANNED BECAUSE: The FDA reasoned at the time that the social and economic costs of people not leaving their house could not be justified, even for a severe pandemic.

Purchasil

PROFILE: Developed by the same company that made Agoravix. Following the initial rejection of Agoravix, scientists set about designing an adjunct that could be delivered simultaneously that would stimulate economic activity. Purchasil contained mRNA encoding modified dopamine receptors that would increase the rewarding effects of shopping. The goal was to generate a combination vaccine that would lead to recipients remaining at home but spending large amounts of money online shopping.

BANNED BECAUSE: The rewarding effects of shopping were found not to be related to amount of money spent as hoped, but rather the volume of products acquired. This led to recipients desperately purchasing large amounts of bulky cheap items such as toilet paper. This was deemed insufficient to cause any significant economic growth, and approval was denied.

Helixium

PROFILE: Device designed to be deployed to the general population to reduce transmission of Covid-19. The device consisted of a small canister of pressurised helium/oxygen worn around the neck, with an attached nasal delivery tube. By significantly lightening the mixture of gasses being breathed in, any exhaled droplets of virus are carried harmlessly over the heads of nearby people as opposed to into their faces, reducing risk of transmission.

Highly effective but saw limited usage as the device was immediately politicised. Although the pro-Helixium side was able to make sound and objectively correct arguments about one’s moral duty to endure minor inconvenience in order to protect others, these arguments were always made in squeaky voices and were thus easy to refute by calling the proponents sheeple in a commanding baritone.

BANNED BECAUSE: A well controlled independent trial demonstrated that Helixium was less effective than a cloth mask worn over the nose and mouth. In a complete departure from tradition the FDA reasoned that it was immoral to charge people for a product when a cheaper and more effective version was available, and revoked approval. (...)

BAI-0001

PROFILE:

With the development of machine learning algorithms applied to bioinformatics, the AI/biotech start up BioAI abandoned all other projects and set out to develop a vaccine at unprecedented speed.

They trained their model on all available datasets related to immunity, viral sequences and formulation of existing vaccines. They input the parameters they wanted (highly stable, minimal mortality, simple delivery and highly likely to trigger an immune response) and the model output an RNA sequence and described the formulation of a protein and lipid based capsule that would allow delivery by inhalation.

The vaccine, termed BAI-0001, was produced and trialled in young healthy volunteers. It was found to cause flu-like symptoms in some participants, but no serious illnesses and 100% immunity.

With a press release describing their results BioAI saw their stock price soar as they were touted as a revolution in medical research. They sought a fast tracked emergency use authorisation from the FDA.

BANNED BECAUSE: A junior biologist at BioAI noticed that the RNA sequence and delivery capsule of the vaccine was indistinguishable from COVID-19 itself. Further investigation revealed that they had indeed just synthetically recreated the virus. The submission to the FDA was sheepishly withdrawn.

by u/venusisupsidedown, Reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex | Read more:

[ed. See also: I should have loved biology.]

Adrian Tomine, Killing and Dying, 2015
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What My Dad Gave His Shop

The first time I looked at my father’s Yelp reviews, I choked up. They were not all positive, and of course I read the worst ones first. My dad, Frank, runs a high-fidelity audio-video store in San Francisco and also repairs the brands he sells. One reviewer gave him one star, noting that his turntables had sat in the shop for five weeks, untouched. It brought me back to all the school nights when we stayed at the store until 9 p.m. so he could finish a job that was overdue. Another guy complained that when he called, my dad picked up blurting, “What do you want? I’m vvvvvveeeerrrryyyy busy.” I remember hearing him do that once when I was a kid. He was on hold with the bank or a supplier, and the second line kept ringing. I was aghast. “Well, I hope you are sooooooooo busy that people do not EVER go to your store,” this reviewer wrote.

But the haters were in the minority. His clients included George Moscone (“very down-to-earth,” my dad said) and Walt’s daughter Diane Disney Miller (“short like Minnie Mouse and kind to everyone”). “Frank is the man!!” one customer wrote. “He is the only one I believed I could trust with a delicate and expensive job—and boy was I right.” “Will try to find good value for someone who isn’t a cognoscenti about audio,” another said. “Been going to him for 30 years. Never would go anywhere else.” A “neighborhood gem.”

And then there was a review from someone who hadn’t bought a thing from my dad. He’d locked himself out of his car and wrote to thank my dad for letting him use the store’s phone. Would an employee at Walmart do that? Could they? Big-box stores are designed such that the workers rarely see the outside. They aren’t part of “the ballet of the good city sidewalk” that Jane Jacobs wrote about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the mid-century Greenwich Village that she immortalized, grocers held keys and packages for neighbors, and candy-store clerks kept an eye on kids. Even the drinkers who gathered under the gooey orange lights outside the White Horse Tavern kept the street safe by keeping it occupied. When I first read the book 15 years ago, I told my dad to pick up a copy, which he diligently did, from the bookshop up the street. It was the first book he’d read since he started at the store, in 1975. (...)

For 45 years, that store, Harmony Audio Video, has been my dad’s life: the reason he left home early every day, the reason he was chronically late to pick me up from school, the reason he didn’t take a single vacation for 25 years. Growing up, the store was my life too: From the time my mom’s breast cancer metastasized when I was in second grade (she died when I was 10), I hung out in the back after school until 7 or 8, before we drove 40 minutes home on coastal Highway 1 to slightly more affordable El Granada. Keeping me with him at work meant he didn’t have to pay for child care. In exchange, he basically ceded the store’s second phone line to me for conversations with classmates and friends. If he was with a client and I had a question, I had to write it on a note card—one of the hundreds of blank neon mailers on which he listed monthly specials.

The store put me through private school in San Francisco (with an assist from financial aid). And it got me a summer job pipetting chemicals into test tubes in high school (a scientist at a blood lab was one of his customers). I’m not going to say the store was a community linchpin—nobody needs really nice speakers or crystal-clear flatscreen TVs—but it was a node through which different strata interacted: doctors, tech VPs, working-class Italians from North Beach like my dad, who were into fast cars and fancy speakers, as well as the musicians and video guys he employed and for whom he set up profit-sharing plans. (...)

More than 400,000 small businesses have closed since the start of the pandemic and many thousands more are at risk, according to the Brookings Institution–affiliated Hamilton Project. Mom-and-pop stores across the country are liquidating, breaking their leases, putting up handwritten goodbyes. “We are sad and sorry that it is time to say zai jian (until we meet again),” read a sign at San Francisco’s dim sum institution Ton Kiang. “Over the years, you shared your weddings and anniversaries with us, celebrated and had us host your life passages and family gatherings … We will always treasure these moments and value your friendship.”

How many of these businesses will eventually be replaced, and what will be lost if they aren’t? It’s easy to compare prices. It’s harder to put a value on the cranky independence of small-business owners, or their collective importance to community spirit and even the American idea. “What astonishes me in the United States is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings as the innumerable multitude of small ones,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835.

by Francesca Mari, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Carlos Chavarría

The Rise of the Roommate

In late March, when New York City went into lockdown, I had to make a choice: either I shelter in place with my roommate (who is at higher risk of illness from the virus) and my two cats in our shared Brooklyn apartment, or I relocate to my partner’s one-bedroom space, some fifteen minutes’ walk east, not to return for the indefinite duration of the pandemic. Neither option was ideal. Our apartment had a slightly more centralized location, marginally more space, a dishwasher, and on-site laundry; it also had all of my stuff and the aforementioned cats (to whom my partner is severely, and frustratingly, allergic). On the other hand, my partner’s apartment had, well, my partner. Intimate companionship. The promise of emotional support amid an unprecedented episode of collective crisis. The assurance of human touch amid mounting paranoia over contact and spread. In the simplest possible terms: I could choose home, or I could choose hugs.

I went with the former.

More than half a year later, I don’t regret my decision, though I struggled to explain my almost comically depressing “date night” Instagram photos to colleagues and friends, my partner’s surgical mask providing a pop of blue from some ten feet behind my shoulder. After all, I’m a member of the demographic sweep of city dwellers for whom home ownership has become a fable. The desperate calculus of suboptimal housing prospects is practically our rite. Like many of my peers, I’ve grown resigned to the reality that where I live—and, often, with whom—is subject to the whims of things beyond my control: boomers, feline immunotherapy advancements, and the market’s appraisal of my skill set in a given fiscal quarter. In 2019, I was one of the last of my journalist friends to experience the dreaded but inevitable media-company layoff—along with all of my coworkers. The growing scarcity of jobs in my field coexists with a generational landscape of underemployment and wage stagnation, of less in savings and more in debt.

For those of us born without the superpower of (other people’s) wealth, you might say that this very instability is our own inheritance. What it usually means is getting a roommate.

In the public imagination, the nuclear family still looms large as the de facto template for “home.” But the numbers tell a different story. In 2016, there were roughly 582,000 noncensus family households across Canada—homes of two or more people outside of parent-child or partnered relationships. South of the border, more than one-third of US adults lived in a shared household as of 2017. That figure marks a relatively slight increase over the estimated 28.8 percent of shared households in 1995, a time that boasted two beloved roommate-centric prime-time sitcoms, Living Single and Friends.

What’s different today is the length of time that shared housing factors into the lives of young(ish) adults. In the US, the 2008 recession propelled an adult-roommate boom that never ended—a trend prevalent in cities, where young (and youngish) adults flock for jobs. In Canada, urban co-living startups, like Roost and SoulRooms, echo the broader turn toward “adult dorm” housing setups seen in cities from Dublin to New York.

None of this should come as a surprise. Millennials like me comprise the largest living generation in North America, yet we are grossly underrepresented in the ranks of homeowners in the US and Canada alike. In both countries, a rising proportion of this demographic is delaying marriage or forgoing it completely. It follows, then, that more adults than ever are navigating their path-defining mid-twenties to late thirties untethered to the commitments—and securities—that shaped adulthood for previous generations.

To some extent, apartment sharing retains connotations of youthful impermanence. From this perspective, living with roommates is a blip on the postgraduate journey toward “real life,” wherein “real” is shorthand for stable housing and long-term domestic partnership. But, for many members of my generation, whose adulthoods have been shaped by precarity, “real life” is determined less by accruing legally sanctioned anchors, like property and kin, and more by a series of forced adaptations. Burnt-out and saddled with debt, we’ve neither the energy nor the ability to tether ourselves to home and hearth. Though our circumstances are far from ideal, they’re also poised to change the face of the household as we know it—in the long term and, perhaps surprisingly, for the better.

It may be tempting to see the increase in adult roommates as some harbinger of “The Decline of X,” with the implicitly righteous variable standing for “the family,” “home ownership,” “economic stability,” “the middle class,” “a culture of commitment,” or any host of factors to which we’ve arbitrarily ascribed moral value. Such conclusions wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Certainly, the prevalence of nonfamilial cohabitation reflects shifts in cultural expectations around marriage and child rearing that, in turn, partly stem from the economic realities of twenty-first century capitalism. It’s also fair to say that roommates are a by-product of the economic and geographic transience that confronts both young and not-so-young adults today.

But, while the rise of the roommate may be further evidence of our unlucky, market-driven fate, some of its potential outcomes also offer hope—a way back toward an experience of community that we lost with the nuclear-family model. Nonfamily cohabitation calls for a kind of learned care that’s honed through negotiating interpersonal boundaries without the presumption of common values. And shared space, by definition, shifts the individual’s relationship to place from “mine” to “ours.” 

by Kelli María Korducki, The Walrus | Read more:

Image: Hudson Christie

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

The Godmother of Soul (Oxford American)

She traveled the world and left it scorched with her fearlessness and musical originality, inspired fierce devotion from an audience who thrilled to her enormous gifts and her personal excesses, and shook the celestial rafters with the force of her artistic character. ... she wielded her guitar like a weapon and distorted the sound: a guitar technique that was completely original at the time and would be copied by legions of rock guitarists in the decades after. Her voice was like a freight train in its power and a poem in its expressiveness. A woman playing guitar, singing spiritual songs in nightclubs that harbored all manner of vice, was unprecedented. Gospel singers just didn’t “cross over” to secular music. You were one or the other. She did it anyway, and Black churchgoers, the devoted core of her original audience, were shocked by her nightclub appearances, and shunned her. More than a decade later, mixing secular and spiritual music was still so unacceptable that the great Sam Cooke recorded his first pop song under an alias, in order not to alienate his gospel fan base. (...)

She “played guitar like a man,” people told her, as a compliment. Dozens of musicians and performers credit her as a major influence, from Chuck Berry to Elvis to Keith Richards to my dad, who must have felt as if a spell had been cast on him as he sat glued to his family’s battery-powered radio and heard her voice pierce the gloaming over the cotton fields. The Black churchgoers eventually forgave her and found their way back into her audience. In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to honor her, and then in 2017, forty-four years after her death, she was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

[ed. See also: some amazing solos.]

Octo-pie

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The Long Odds Facing Trump’s Attempts to Get State Legislatures to Override Election Results

On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump is set to hold a meeting at the White House with the Republican leaders of Michigan’s Senate and House of Representatives. It’s unclear what the president plans to discuss, but multiple press reports suggest Trump, in a desperate bid to cling to power, has pinned his hopes on persuading GOP-controlled legislatures in battleground states that voted for Joe Biden to intervene and throw the election to him. That aspiration cropped up in the Trump campaign’s courtroom maneuverings this week. Legal papers filed with a federal court in central Pennsylvania (the campaign filed a draft version, apparently in error), showed that the campaign had contemplated — but ultimately decided against — asking the judge to order “the Pennsylvania General Assembly to choose Pennsylvania’s electors.”

Five states fit the description of battleground states with GOP-run legislatures that voted for Biden: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. It would be difficult to convince lawmakers to overturn the will of voters in even one state. For Trump to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, he would need to pull that trick off in three states.
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That’s a very tall order. There are steep political hurdles, starting with the fact that the two Michigan lawmakers visiting the White House on Friday have previously made statements rejecting legislative intervention. But even if those lawmakers waver or succumb to Trump’s arguments, as many Republicans have, there are legal impediments, and they’re almost certainly insurmountable.

Unlike the fevered cries of election fraud — which many lawyers in the Trump camp have undercut by acknowledging in court that they have no evidence of fraud — the Trump side’s legislature theory has some basis in fact. Article II of the U.S. Constitution holds that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors” to vote for president as a member of the Electoral College. In the early days of the republic, some legislatures chose electors directly or vested that power in other state officials. Today, every state allocates presidential electors by popular vote (and all but Maine and Nebraska apportion them in winner-take-all fashion).

As far as the Constitution is concerned, there’s nothing to stop a state legislature from reclaiming that power for itself, at least prospectively. Separately, a federal law, the Electoral Count Act of 1887, provides that whenever a state “has failed to make a choice” in a presidential election, electors can be chosen “in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.”

But even so, there’s a more immediate obstacle: state law. In the five states where Trump’s team hopes GOP-run statehouses will hand him a second term, the popular vote is enshrined in the state constitution, the state’s election code or both.

Consider Michigan, which Biden carried by nearly 158,000 votes. The state’s election code specifies that the presidential electors “who shall be considered elected are those whose names have been certified to the secretary of state by that political party receiving the greatest number of votes” for president — the winner, that is, of the popular vote. The Michigan Constitution grants qualified citizens “the right, once registered, to vote a secret ballot in all elections,” including “in the election for president and vice-president of the United States.”

The two Michigan Republicans expected to meet with Trump on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield, have expressed concerns about irregularities and potential fraud in the Michigan election, a pet subject of the president and his allies. The Trump campaign and its supporters, however, have failed to substantiate their claims, despite papering state and federal courts with affidavits from GOP election observers and others who purport to have witnessed suspicious behavior or wrongdoing by election workers in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold with a sizable Black population. Last Friday, one Michigan judge called affidavits submitted by Republican observers “rife with speculation and guess-work about sinister motives” of poll workers. On Thursday, the Trump campaign withdrew a federal lawsuit it had filed in the state, claiming — falsely, according to Michigan election officials — that the county election board for the Detroit area had declined to certify the county’s election result.

Yet — up till now, at least — both Shirkey and Chatfield have rejected the proposition that state legislators might intervene to supplant the will of Michigan voters. “That’s not going to happen,” Shirkey told Bridge Michigan on Tuesday. He noted that state law left up to the electorate who would receive the state’s 16 electoral votes. Chatfield made a similar point in a statement on Nov. 6, a few days after the election, though he gave it a Trump-y spin, calling for every “legal vote” to be counted, a phrase Trump and his allies have adopted to imply that there exist large numbers of illegal votes. “The candidate who wins the most of those votes will win Michigan’s electoral votes, just like it always has been,” Chatfield said. “Nothing about that process will change in 2020.” Their counterparts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona have made similar statements.

Even if Trump were to change the Michigan lawmakers’ minds on Friday, the Legislature can’t amend state law by fiat. A constitutional amendment has to be itself ratified by popular vote, and if it’s introduced in the Legislature, it first has to pass both houses by supermajority margins. The GOP possesses only a bare legislative majority in either house. Amendments to the election code, meanwhile, are subject to veto by the governor. In Michigan, that’s Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, a committed Trump antagonist who would inevitably veto any legislative attempt at the wholesale disenfranchisement of her constituents. Without supermajorities, Republican legislators alone are impotent to override her veto.

Trump faces a similar dynamic in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both of which have Democratic governors and legislatures controlled by the GOP (but not by enough to overcome a veto by the governor). Only Arizona and Georgia have Republican-dominated statehouses and Republican governors. Legislatures there have shown no particular inclination to intervene on Trump’s behalf. Even if they went along with Trump’s plan, the president would still be 11 electoral votes shy of the 270 he needs to prevail over Biden.

by Ian MacDougall, ProPublica |  Read more:

Image:Adam J. Dewey/NurPhoto via Getty Images

[ed. Who needs elections, anyway? See also: Michigan lawmakers pledge to 'follow the law' on picking electors after meeting with Trump (Yahoo News).]

Holger Kurt Jäger — Modus Operandi (oil on linen, 2019)

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“Emily in Paris” and The Rise of Ambient TV

By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia. At that point, Emily had already gone jogging, and the multicolored wheels of her Apple-esque step-counter appeared on my television screen. The circles filled; Emily had pleased the robots monitoring her health. During her next run, a small square popped up: a visualization of Emily’s Instagram account, to which she posted a photo of Paris, accruing onscreen likes. Later, Emily talked, via video call, with her old marketing-agency boss back in Chicago, whom she had replaced on the Paris sojourn when the boss found herself pregnant. My television displayed a closeup of Emily’s phone showing the boss’s face, inset with an image of Emily’s face—three layers of screens at once.

Emily is a millennial naïf, played by Lily Collins, who is meant to bring American-capitalist wisdom to a French agency that caters to luxury brands. The showrunner is Darren Star, the creator of “Sex and the City,” but if Carrie’s column lent that show a narrative structure and momentum—everything is copy—“Emily in Paris” begins and ends in an avalanche of desiccated digital-marketing language that seems to have subsumed Emily’s soul. She cares about nothing more than “social,” impressions, R.O.I. Many episodes climax in the successful taking of a photo for Instagram. In the course of the season, fulfilling a prophecy cast by Collins’s dramatic eyebrows and wide eyes, our heroine becomes an Instagram influencer in her own right, those onscreen follower numbers jumping to ten, twenty thousand (not nearly enough to make her the kind of celebrity the show portrays, as viewers pointed out). Emily’s job is to get more likes for brands; her life is to get more likes for herself. Everything is content.

But all of that barely matters. The purpose of “Emily in Paris” is to provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone, refreshing your own feeds—on which you’ll find “Emily in Paris” memes, including a whole genre of TikTok remakes. It’s O.K. to look at your phone all the time, the show seems to say, because Emily does it, too. The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing; when you glance back up at the television, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways, lovely but meaningless. If you want more drama, you can open Twitter, to augment the experience. Or just leave the show on while cleaning the inevitable domestic messes of quarantine. Eventually, sensing that you’ve played two episodes straight without pausing or skipping, Netflix will ask if you’re still really watching. Shamed, I clicked the Yes button, and Emily continued being in Paris.

In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic. Nothing bad ever happens to our heroine for long. The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching. Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.

“Emily in Paris” was just renewed for a second season; its formula of thin fictional storytelling wrapped in exotic backdrops was an instant success that seems destined to be reiterated many times over, in other locales, with other Emilies. But Netflix’s back catalogue of ambient options is made up of reality shows: “Dream Home Makeover” is ambient interior decorating; “Taco Chronicles,” ambient foodie travel; “Get Organized with the Home Edit,” ambient cleaning; “Street Food,” ambient cooking; “MeatEater,” ambient outdoorsmanship. What these shows all have in common is their placidity—there’s little in the way of conflict or tension—and their reliance on B-roll, the footage that filmmakers intersperse with their main shots to smooth transitions between cuts. There often seems to be more B-roll than A, however. Viewers can select from footage of beef getting sliced, shelves being filled, or walks through foreign cities.

Like earlier eras of TV, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, soap operas, first on the radio and then on television, broadcast long-running daytime dramas in which the logic of subplots didn’t matter as much as consistency—the fact that they were produced quickly and cheaply and broadcast at the same time every day. The name came from the soap brands that bought ads on the shows, to reach the audience of women at home, but it also evoked the banality of domestic labor that the programs distracted from, providing welcome background noise.

The advent of streaming, and cord-cutting, allowed viewers a more intentional relationship to TV, at least in theory. When Netflix and other platforms began dumping entire seasons of shows at once, binging became a byword for paying deep attention, as viewers gave themselves over to intricate drama or quirky comedy. But now we’re learning to stream as if we never abandoned cable in the first place, especially during quarantine, when nothing’s stopping you from leaving the TV on all day long. As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Netflix

Jean Degottex (1918-1988), Sans titre, 1959
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Google Pay: Now a Full-Fledged Financial Service

Google today announced a major relaunch of Google Pay—which formerly was a relatively simple tap-to-pay app but will now be a complete financial service competing with the likes of Venmo, Mint, Apple Pay, and even some banks. The new Pay is available as an Early Access app in the Google Play store as of this afternoon, alongside the original and much less ambitious Google Pay—which is now tagged as "old version."

In addition to the simple tap-to-pay features offered in the previous app, users of the new Google Pay can directly link bank accounts and credit cards to the app. This allows for AI-driven insights into spending and saving, replacing much of the functionality of your own bank's online banking app with Google Pay, and more.

We can already hear readers screaming about the privacy implications of allowing Google directly into your banking, credit card, and payment histories—and we don't really blame you. Google clearly heard those cries coming as well and seems to be doing what it can to allay those concerns.

During the mandatory privacy preference section of the Google Pay setup process, the app assures you that personal info gathered in Pay will never be sold to a third party. It also pledges that your Pay transactions are not shared with any other Google services—so, for example, purchasing a pair of shoes with Google Pay shouldn't result in a sudden onslaught of Nike and Adidas ads while watching YouTube videos later.

If allowed, Google Pay can use your transaction history to more effectively select what cash-back and similar offers to present you with in the Explore and Discover areas of the app. The setting is optional, and it's opt-in—you have to actually grant Google permission before it will use your data to serve offers inside the app. In addition to the simple "yes you may" and "oh heck no" options, there's a more cautious "try it for three months"—if selected, Google will offer you targeted offers for now but prompt you to review your decision after you've had a few months to stew about it.

Finally, you have the option to "help friends find and pay you"—which, for our older readers, is largely similar to the old days of publicly listed or private telephone numbers. If you turn this setting on, entering your phone number will pop up your name and face, populated from your Google profile—and users who already have you as Google contacts (e.g., in their phone's address book) can find you directly in Pay that way as well. If you disable it, you can still accept payments—but your friends will need to be extra careful not to bobble your number when entering it since they won't get a confirmation that you're you.

App overview

The new Google Pay offers three major feature groupings, organized into view icons at the bottom of the app:

• Explore (...)
• Pay (...)
• Insights (...)

by Jim Salter, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Google

[ed. See also: Google Pay's massive relaunch makes it an all-encompassing money app (Verge).]

'Integrity Still Matters'

Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.

It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.

But after Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by around 13,000 votes, Raffensperger has emerged as one of the few Republican officials across the US who has aggressively disputed Trump’s baseless claims that fraud tainted the election result in the state. Trump, who endorsed Raffensperger in 2018, is now directing his ire at the secretary of state, and Georgia’s two Republican senators, both locked in separate runoff contests against Democrats, have called on Raffensperger to resign.

Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.

“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”

He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.

“Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”

“Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”

Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.

“We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.

He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls.

“It’s really those little things that turned out to be big things. It’s not the machines, and it’s not the process.”

by Sam Levine, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Brynn Anderson/AP

Dirk Bouts, Hell (detail), 1450 Palace of fine arts, Lille, France

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We Are Built to Forget

We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.

*

The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table.

Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.

I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.

*

People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are often unable to forget the causative trauma. What if we could simply erase that moment, expunge it as if it never happened? Researchers are working to develop drugs that will mimic the cannabinoids produced in the brain, pharmaceuticals that will find their way to those waiting receptors and lock in—click—a perfect fit. Release from memory. Oblivion. Bliss.

Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?

*

There are not many stories to tell:

My parents divorced when I was ten.

My father, unsurprisingly, was absent before and after.

Unsurprisingly, I loved him.

I got pregnant when I was sixteen. It was 1965.

I was expelled from school.

My mother kicked me out.

My father and his new wife took me in.

My baby was given away.

Later, I argued with my father’s wife.

She kicked me out, a permanent exile from my silent father.

I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen. Now I am sixty-five. All of this was a long time ago.

There. I have named everything you need to know. I have told these stories in other places, for other reasons, and am reluctant to say them again. I was on a basketball team. I am simply looking for that lost fragment.

I still can smell the peach. My grandmother’s voice, silent for thirty years. What was she saying to me? Did she say, Don’t be afraid? Did she say, Hush, everyone who loves you is sleeping? Did she say, Remember these hands cutting this ripe peach for you. This moment is important. (...)

*

We need to forget. Imagine remembering every fractional moment of every morning, as you showered, fed your children or made your coffee, pulled the door closed and turned the key. Like bad narrative writing, every moment would be equally important, the golden juice dripping through fingers as significant as walking out of my high school in shame one cold winter day. What meaning could we make if every second asked for our full attention?

We must forget in order to make room for remembering. We now have a metaphor for this process: delete. Here is oblivion. But here, too, is our hunger to know the full story. Our forgetting is the saboteur of that hope. I was on a basketball team with friends and classmates for three years. If we practiced or played games for one hundred twenty minutes five days of the week, for ten weeks of the season, where are those eighteen thousand minutes?

Maybe we are lucky if we produce a lot of cannabinoids. Wash the brain with forgetting. But what happens if we delete what lies near the center of our story? I remember, one day, running to the girls’ room to throw up again after lunch in the cafeteria. I remember moving past the school nurse, hunching over my five-month belly. Somehow later I was at her desk, and somehow I had in my hand a green expulsion card. I have it still, so I know this is memory, not fiction. I remember taking my mittens and jacket from my locker, walking down the long quiet hall, linoleum and echo, and past the big window in the office. The secretaries stared at me. I don’t remember any of their names. I remember the long walk home, and I remember terror. I remember a giving in, an understanding that this, finally, here, was the beginning of something too big and too sad. (...)

*

Artists Doug Goodwin and Rebecca Baron wanted to see—to really see—what is lost when analog film is translated to digital form. A moment-to-moment translation of an average 35 mm film would require four hundred DVDs. What happens when all that information is reduced to a single DVD? A lot of information is left out.

Goodwin and Baron studied motion in their “Lossless” series, manipulating the compression of information and exposing the residual effects of that process. Lots of frames had to go. Most had to go. How do we see an uninterrupted flow of movement, then, if most of the image is missing? Using John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Goodwin and Baron translated the analog film to digital form and then retrieved what was lost in the process. The result is a strange, beautiful run of smeared and melting images of men and horses tearing across a desert. We can make out the men, the horses, the churning legs and upraised cowboy arms brandishing guns. But the images fracture, hesitate, jolt, and smear again. What are we seeing? Memory. Most of the original images are allowed to be forgotten. That leaves a lot of emptied frames, blanks waiting to be written. Then, Goodwin says, “these frames look backward and forward in time to paint the resolved image … We toss out the keyframes and let the file try to connect the intermediate frames.”

What I see is whole sections of story tossed out, forgotten, and the ghosts of the forgotten, lingering. What was lost becomes visible, and it is beautiful.

by Meredith Hall, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)

Murphy's Law

Trump’s absurd insistence that he “WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” is easy enough to ignore. What is harder to ignore is what his appointee who runs the General Services Administration (GSA) is doing. By statute, the GSA’s administrator has responsibility for ascertaining “the apparent successful candidates for the office of President and Vice President.” This crucial ascertainment sets the government’s support for the transition effort in motion. When Congress enacted the transition law and later amended it seven times, it does not appear to have contemplated the risk that a partisan loyalist appointed by a corrupt president would refuse to fulfill this duty when the outcome of the election was clear. Enter GSA Administrator Emily Murphy.

Murphy is refusing to ascertain the apparent winner of the 2020 election as the president who appointed her disputes the clear outcome. She has not been especially transparent about her rationale. A spokesperson for her agency unhelpfully said, “an ascertainment has not yet been made” and “[the] Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.” Murphy, it seems, is putting her loyalty to Trump over her duty to the American people.

Much is at stake. The Congressional Research Service has written that “[t]he smooth and orderly transfer of power generally is a notable feature of presidential transitions, and a testament to the legitimacy and durability of the electoral and democratic processes.” Murphy’s misconduct is dangerous.

Her ascertainment is the legally necessary precursor to the government’s assistance to the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team. It releases $6.3 million dollars to the team, which is funded by public and private money; a loan of expanded federal office space and equipment; access to government agencies that will begin sharing information and records about ongoing activities, plans and vulnerabilities; national security briefings for the president; and other support. The New York Times reports that “transition officials said her inaction was preventing Mr. Biden’s teams from moving into government offices, including secure facilities where they can discuss classified information.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently confirmed that it is not providing national security briefings to the president-elect. The Defense Department has also reportedly indicated that it will not meet with the Biden-Harris transition team until Murphy formally affirms the apparent winner.

Murphy’s refusal comes as great news to hostile foreign powers. Experts have cautioned that authoritarian governments see a benefit in having public confidence in democracy undermined. But one of Trump’s own former national security experts, Fiona Hill, has warned: “The biggest risk to this election is not the Russians, it’s us.” Four former Secretaries of Homeland Security, Republican and Democratic (Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Jeh Johnson), have now called on Murphy to issue the ascertainment of an apparent winner of the election, counseling: “At this period of heightened risk for our nation, we do not have a single day to spare to begin the transition. For the good of the nation, we must start now.” (...)

Murphy has a sordid history in the Trump administration. As I recounted in my July 2 piece for the Review, she cancelled a long-planned relocation of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Circumstances suggest she may have been satisfying a desire on the part of President Trump to avoid opening real estate near his Washington, D.C., hotel that a competing hotel could acquire. Trump leases the government’s Old Post Office building from Murphy’s agency for his hotel, which sits less than a block from the J. Edgar Hoover building that houses FBI headquarters.

Murphy has declined to discuss a meeting with President Trump at the White House shortly before the cancellation. She refused to answer questions about it posed by the GSA’s inspector general, who noted that her testimony in an April 2018 hearing before Congress may have “left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”

by Walter M. Shaub Jr., NYRB | Read more:
Image: White House

[ed. What started as an embarrassing temper tantrum has now devolved into just plain truculence and stupidity. The whole country is swirling around Trump's toilet. See also: History Suggests Delay In Trump-Biden Transition Could Mean Danger (NPR).]

Trump Administration, in Late Push, Moves to Sell Oil Rights in Arctic Refuge

In a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, the Trump administration on Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies. (...)

The Arctic refuge is one of the last vast expanses of wilderness in the United States, 19 million acres that for the most part are untouched by people, home instead to wandering herds of caribou, polar bears and migrating waterfowl. It has long been prized, and protected, by environmentalists, but President Trump has boasted that opening part of it to oil development was among the most significant of his efforts to expand domestic fossil fuel production.

The Federal Register on Monday posted a “call for nominations” from the Bureau of Land Management, to be officially published Tuesday, relating to lease sales in about 1.5 million acres of the refuge along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. A call for nominations is essentially a request to oil companies to specify which tracts of land they would be interested in exploring and potentially drilling for oil and gas.

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said it welcomed the move. In a statement, the organization said that development in the refuge was “long overdue and will create good-paying jobs and provide a new revenue stream for the state — which is why a majority of Alaskans support it.”

The administration’s announcement establishes a tight timeline for lease sales, with the earliest they could occur being on or about Jan. 17. The call for nominations will allow for comments until Dec. 17, after which the bureau, part of the Interior Department, could issue a final notice of sales to occur as soon as 30 days later.

Normally the bureau would take time to review the comments and determine which tracts to sell before issuing the final notice of sale, a process that can take several months. In this case, however, the bureau could decide to make the entire coastal plain available and issue the notice immediately.

by Henry Fountain, NYT |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Miller for The New York Times

[ed. Any reasonable court should throw this out just on process alone.  oh, wait... See also:
Trump pushes extensive rollbacks of environmental protections on his way out of the White House (ADN).]

Social Media Managers Are Not Okay

Until recently, Christina Garnett worked at a global agency managing social media accounts for Fortune 500 companies, running a team that moderated and responded to people’s online questions. During the first months of the pandemic, she would wake up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., anxiously checking her phone and email to see if there was yet another crisis that required a quick response: Did the stock market crash? Did the president tweet about a specific brand? Was there a potential Covid-19 vaccine?

The 37-year-old social strategist often felt depressed and misunderstood by upper management, who didn’t fully understand how much time, effort, and stress social media work entails — and how toxic it can be for those who perform it every day, for hours and hours. “They don’t know what it’s like to live in that Twitter feed… to live in the comments section and to be able to see a populace that is agitated, that feels hopeless, that feels angry, that feels powerless,” she says. “It has turned to a point where we are either crying into the void or we’re yelling at it.”

In the relentless news cycle of 2020, social media managers are first responders. At a time when many are feeling social media’s impact on mental health and the burnout of working through a pandemic, they are under immense pressure to stay online, always be on call, respond quickly, and not make mistakes. In some cases they are on the verge of psychological collapse. Yet the importance of their work is still often invisible and undermined.

When Garnett shared her concerns about how 2020 is affecting social media managers in a blog post, messages started pouring in from dozens of peers who told her they were also struggling.

She had first tried to minimize her feelings. She told herself others had it worse than her, that she wasn’t working 24-hour shifts at a hospital and lives were not at stake in her job. But eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore. In June, she quit her job at the agency and now works as a strategist for a tech company. (...)

Social media managers are making important — and very public — decisions all the time. They need to respond to news and conversations quickly to be effective. The public voice and image of companies, media outlets, public figures, and institutions are in their hands at a very delicate time. Yet their job is still often seen as something anyone could do, or left to those who are just getting started in their careers.

“It’s like putting an intern to be your press secretary,” says Alan Rosenblatt, a social media consultant for political campaigns who teaches digital and social media strategy at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

by Marta Martinez, OneZerop | Read more:
Image: Lia Liao

[ed. Ok social media managers, just curious, what guidelines are you using to decide how to best do your job? That might be one source of stress.]

David Milne (Australian, b. 1946), Something which the past has hidden, 2019.
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Pardon Me?

Report: Trump has repeatedly asked if he can "preemptively" pardon himself (and family members)

At present, Donald Trump is embroiled in an absurd attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election because he’s physically incapable of admitting defeat and maybe also because he sees it as a possible way to collect a nice chunk of change from the easy marks that are his supporters. Eventually, though, his efforts will fail; Joe Biden will move into the White House on January 20, 2021, and Trump will revert to being just another civilian, albeit one with so much debt and bitterness that national security experts fear the possibly that he might reveal state secrets for money. Also: he’ll no longer be able to use the staff of the Justice Department as his personal legal team to fend off prosecutors, which is a very worrisome thing for a guy who’s potentially committed numerous crimes; we know this because, according to the New York Times, he’s concerned “not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well.” And that obviously brings us to the question of whether or not he might actually try to pardon himself. And the answer to that question is: it definitely sounds like he might!

CNN reports that Trump has been asking aides since 2017 if he can self-pardon, which is just an amazing thing to behold given that he had just been inaugurated and apparently his first order of business as president was to be like, “Soooo....I was talking with some people and they were asking me, ‘Hey, Don, you’re president. You know these things, these pardons, are you allowed to do them on yourself?’ And I thought, That’s a great question. I had never thought of that but it’s a beautiful question.” According to one former White House official, Trump has also asked about pardons for his family, which makes sense given that they work together at the Trump Organization and possibly engaged in various forms of tax fraud together, among other things. Perhaps most incredibly, Trump reportedly “even asked if he could issue pardons preemptively for things people could be charged with in the future,” said the former official. Y’know, like a get-out-of-jail-free card for life just in case you decide to commit a crime at any point in the future.

Not surprisingly, because Trump has the mind of a child, the former official said that “Once he learned about it, he was obsessed with the power of pardons. I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favor.” So taken was Trump by the idea of the ability to wave a wand and get rid of any legal consequences for a criminal conviction that senior officials would apparently bring it up out of nowhere if they needed to get him to shut up about something else:

One former official said Trump was so fascinated by his pardon powers that senior-level officials would sometimes bring up their research on the matter just to get Trump off another subject they wanted to steer away from.

“He asked stuff [about pardons] all the time—asking this stuff of everybody,” one person said, meaning there’s a nonzero chance Trump would bring up pardons with, like, the Secret Service, the East Wing housekeeper, and whoever was forced to dress up as the Easter Bunny after Sean Spicer was put out to pasture.

Regarding whether or not Trump would actually pardon himself, former aides who say he wouldn’t do it believe so only because “doing so would imply he’s guilty of something.” (“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” he tweeted in June 2018.) But others think it’s basically a given. “Of course he will,” the former White House official told CNN. And while he presumably wants to, it’s not actually clear Trump can, although apparently there is an insane scenario in which he could fake sick and temporarily make Mike Pence president just so he could do the honors:

Trump’s legal team and administration officials have downplayed the prospect [of a self-pardon]. There’s no precedent for doing so and the constitutionality of such a pardon is untested constitutionally, with legal experts split on whether it would be legitimate. The Justice Department looked at the question in the Nixon era and concluded it wasn’t within the president’s power to pardon himself. “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself,” the Office of Legal Counsel wrote in August 1974.

The OLC memo laid out alternate possibilities of which Trump could avail himself: he could temporarily declare himself unable to perform his presidential duties, allowing the vice president to act as president, including by issuing him a pardon, and then the president could resume his duties as president, or resign.

Even if Trump can pardon himself or have Pence do it for him, a self-pardon would only protect him from federal crimes and not a number of ongoing investigations and civil suits currently underway, including two led by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are pursuing possible criminal charges related to the Trump Organization.

by Bess Levin, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: via