The Future Was Supposed to Be Better Than This

By DAVID SAX

The New York Times,  Nov. 25, 2020

At the end of September, the Centers for Disease Control posted a list of recommendations for how Americans can safely celebrate Thanksgiving this year. Eat all the pie you want (but only with your immediate family). Attend parades and big games (but only on TV). Shop till you drop (from the couch). Skip the flight back home (Zoom with your relatives instead). Give thanks (while maintaining social distance).

As a Canadian, I experienced this virtual version of Thanksgiving in October, preceded by the Jewish High Holy Days a few weeks before that. Normally, on the night before Yom Kippur, I would dress in a suit and walk to a nearby synagogue, to hear my brother in law sing the Kol Nidre prayer. But rising case numbers here in Toronto made that unwise, so my wife and I sat on the couch and streamed the Higher Holidays program put on by the college Judaism organization Hillel, and Reboot, a creative nonprofit I’m affiliated with.

The program featured an array of voices representing a cross section of the Jewish experience, from Iraqi cantors and L.G.B.T.Q. rabbis, to a short film about Black Lives Matter. It was beautiful, meaningful and just one of hundreds of online services we could have tuned into that night. The promised future of Judaism!

Except I couldn’t bring myself back to spend another moment in front of a screen the next morning. My neighbor told me about a service in a nearby park, so we walked over and sat six feet apart. The congregation was far more traditional than what I am used to, and I could barely follow along with the Hebrew, but as the sun shone down, and we sang Avinu Malkeinu, a 1,500-year-old prayer for forgiveness, the feeling of those collective voices behind their masks sent a shiver down my spine. Here, for the first time since March, I was experiencing something that was real, visceral and unable to be digitized. It wasn’t futuristic. In fact, it was about as timeless a moment as it gets.

It feels like we heard for years that when it came to work, school, God or groceries, the virtual future — the moment when we’d use screens and technology for everything in life — was around the corner. Then one day in March, that future appeared at our doorstep uninvited.

As experts try to forecast what the world will look like once the virus is behind us, it’s now common to hear that we are just at the start of this “new normal.” Offices and downtowns will be abandoned as many of us permanently work from home. Education will be delivered from a screen. Gyms will flounder, while Peloton flourishes. Ghost kitchens and delivery apps will take the place of shuttered restaurants. The physical, analog world that existed before the pandemic is but a fading relic.

The problem with these predictions is that they are the same ones that have been used to sell us software and devices for the past several decades, with the same promises of efficiency. They almost always typically fall short when they meet the real world.

Seven years ago, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claimed that retail stores would soon go out of business, as e-commerce ate their lunch. But while Amazon and other online retailers grew rapidly during this time, and their growth exploded during the initial peak of the pandemic lockdown, e-commerce in the U.S. still only accounts for around 16 percent of retail sales. Malls, shopping streets, bookstores and others icons of physical retail, though battered and fighting for survival, are still open and in many cases doing brisk business. Shopping remains a deeply human action that can serve as education, entertainment and community building all at once.

That same thing can be true with work. “Office centricity is over,” proclaimed Tobias Lütke, the chief executive of the e-commerce software firm Shopify, in May, declaring that the firm had no intention of returning to its beautiful and brand-new offices, just blocks from where I live in Toronto. But many of us have found that remote work is anything but dreamy. We cannot concentrate, we feel unmotivated, we have children quite literally crawling all over us. We deeply miss having somewhere to go, a reason to shower and dress up, and most importantly, a collective sense of purpose forged with the people we work with side by side.

Perhaps nowhere has seen the promised Eden of technological futurism run into the hard ground of earthly reality more harshly than in education. In 2018, Vivek Wadhwa, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation in Silicon Valley, predicted that “the future of education is virtual,” powered by AI enabled VR headsets. Instead, the online learning most students, teachers and parents experienced this spring, and are unfortunately continuing this fall, is best characterized as a vast disappointment. Technical failures abound at every turn, work is left untouched and many feel abandoned. In a recent survey of educators from 59 countries, over half said that the experiment in e-learning had resulted in students learning less than they would if they were in school.

I saw this with my own kids, who started kindergarten and second grade in mid-September, in-person at our local public school. Each day in lockdown was a long battle with a poorly designed software interface, punctuated by vocal battles over assignments. “I miss school,” my daughter said one night in April. I reminded her that she was attending school, just online. “No, Dad, real school!” she replied, breaking into tears, “Online’s just the work, without any of the fun!”

Now, she and her brother put on their masks and run laughing into the schoolyard to meet their friends each morning, while their brave, brilliant teachers prepare them for another day in the world. It turns out that school is more than just facts transferred from textbook or website to learners. It is an immersive environment that facilitates learning through a purposefully designed physical space and carefully crafted relationships that equals something far greater than the sum of its parts. Something that cannot be fully conveyed through a flat piece of glass.

While the digital tools we have clung to these past months are not going away, it is a false assumption that this state of emergency is a sign of the future. Learning, playing, socializing and spending all our time on the same screen, in the same pair of sweatpants, in the same house, day after day after day, isn’t the desirable utopian future we had hoped for. It’s a prison of digital luxury.

The pandemic has caused us to see the value of the real world; in the mundane joy of a drab office, the miracle of a creaky public school classroom. It’s given us a new appreciation for the singular experience of sitting around a holiday table — talking politics with relatives that we both love and cannot stand, eating way too much turkey and pie and experiencing the emotional and physical fullness that feast induces. Reality is still where the action is, and though we are forced to stick to the virtual for our safety, as soon as the pandemic ends most of us will come running back to the world beyond our screens.

David Sax is the author of “The Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.”

The Holidays Must Look Different

Holidays must look different this year. Lives are at stake. This year’s holiday season will be hard. But shared sacrifice will keep coronavirus outbreaks from spreading further.

• THE NEW YORK TIMES, Oct. 29, 2020

Credit...

Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Getty Images

In some ways, the coronavirus is still a mystery. Scientists can’t say for certain why it’s deadly or debilitating in some people but has virtually no effect in others. They don’t know exactly how long immunity lasts or whether (or when) a vaccine will stop its spread and bring this wretched chapter to a close.

But they do know this: The virus spreads most rampantly between people who gather indoors, in close quarters, to talk or laugh or sing, without wearing masks. Experts say the wave of outbreaks now sweeping the nation has been caused by precisely these types of gatherings.

As gut-wrenching as this may be, one of the most obvious ways to mitigate further viral spread will be for as many people as possible to stay home this holiday season. Even before the recent spike in cases, scientists knew that holidays were risky business. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekend were all followed by measurable spikes in case counts. The fall and winter holidays are likely to be much worse, because they tend to involve more travel and indoor gatherings.

In normal times, some 50 million Americans usually travel at least 50 miles for Thanksgiving dinner, according to AAA and as noted in The Atlantic. This year, especially, the need to draw loved ones close feels urgent, and the idea of sacrificing one more sacred tradition in a year when we have already sacrificed so much feels deeply unfair. But skipping or severely curtailing in-person holiday celebrations now is as much a civic duty and an act of solidarity as wearing a mask in public or standing at least six feet apart.

The coronavirus is surging again, not just in a few hot spots but across the US, with an average of 59,000 new cases per day — as high as that number has been since August. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have labeled indoor gatherings with far-flung relatives as “higher risk” and is advising people to keep these get-togethers as small as possible and to hold them outdoors if they can. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease control expert, has said that, for safety’s sake, he won’t be seeing his own children this Thanksgiving.

It’s tempting to view the coming holiday season as a well-earned respite from a year filled with hardships. But, as others have argued, those hardships are precisely the point. Children have all but lost a year of schooling, small business owners have seen their livelihoods destroyed, people everywhere have watched loved ones die alone, in nursing homes and hospital wards where restrictions related to Covid-19 prohibited visitors. Failed leadership and failed policy have exacerbated all of these tragedies. Individual or family sacrifices, made for the greater good, have helped.

Taking unnecessary risks now would be an affront to all those sacrifices. What will have been the point of closing schools, hobbling industries or swapping so many human interactions for so many virtual ones? So much of it will have been for naught if a surge of holiday travel gives way to a tsunami of outbreaks and, ultimately, more death.

It’s true that not all gatherings are the same and that individual families can minimize their risks by taking precautions — by keeping gatherings small, by holding them outdoors and by testing and quarantining before and after travel. But those things are all much easier to do for families of means, who are more likely to have spacious, easily ventilated kitchens, space to gather outside, easy access to diagnostic testing and the ability to quarantine.

What’s more, low risk is not the same as no risk, and when it comes to the coronavirus, all risk is ultimately shared. The danger is not individual — it’s collective. The decisions you make are not only about whether you might infect your own grandmother, they’re about whether your family gathering will seed an outbreak that could ultimately infect someone else’s grandmother. The more people gather from far and wide, around densely packed tables, to eat and talk and occasionally shout, the more the coronavirus will spread. That’s an indisputable truth that no amount of wishful thinking or careful planning can undo.

The Walk

 

Little Amal, a young refugee, embarks on a remarkable journey – an epic voyage that will take her across Turkey, across Europe. To find her mother. To get back to school. To start a new life. Will the world let her? Can she achieve what now seems more impossible than ever?

In 2021, from the Syria-Turkey border all the way to the UK, The Walk will bring together celebrated artists, major cultural institutions, community groups and humanitarian organizations to create one of the most innovative and adventurous public artworks ever attempted.

At the heart of The Walk is ‘Little Amal’, a 3.5-metre-tall puppet of a young refugee girl, created by the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company. Representing all displaced children, many separated from their families, Little Amal will travel over 8,000km embodying the urgent message “Don’t forget about us”.

At this time of unprecedented global change, The Walk is an extraordinary artistic response: a cultural odyssey transcending borders, politics and language to tell a new story of shared humanity – and to ensure the world doesn’t forget the millions of displaced children, each with their own story, who are more vulnerable than ever during the global pandemic.

Ammonite, a film by Francis Lee

My favourite film at the SEFF, an unmissable work of art, by the director of God's Own Country.

Miss Liberty doubts

 

Pop Singer Is Still Missing Amid Chechnya’s ‘Gay Purge’

Human rights activists are demanding answers on the three-year anniversary of the disappearance of Zelimkhan Bakaev, a high-profile pop singer from the Russian region of Chechnya.

In April 2017, the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleged that Chechen officials were arresting and violently torturing men they believed to be gay in what was described as a “gay purge”.

“There is little doubt he was targeted because of his sexual orientation,” the group said. Chechen singer Zelimkhan Bakaev was last seen on August 8 in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and Human Rights Watch said his family had been unable to get answers from authorities about what happened to him.

Chechen authorities have repeatedly denied the violent campaign against the country’s LGBT community, but last month a 30-year-old Russian man became the first to publicly identify himself as a victim.

Maxim Lapunov said he was living and working in the Chechen capital of Grozny when he was jailed and tortured by police in March.

Human Rights Watch’s Tanya Lokshina said at the time Lapunov was “incredibly brave and courageous” and other victims hadn’t come forward because of the risk of violent retribution from their families.

The Russian LGBT Network said last month the persecution of the region’s gay people was continuing despite global outcry.“Russian authorities at different levels made numerous statements about the fact that not a single victim filed an official complaint and that made it easy for officials to dismiss the [reports] as rumours,” she said.

They said since March this year more than 150 people had contacted them for assistance, 79 had fled Chechnya and 53 people had found safety outside of Russia.

Reports have emerged claiming that pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev has become the latest victim of Chechnya’s anti-gay purge. The singer, aged 25, reportedly went missing in August 2017, and hasn't been heard from since by his family and friends. After fears began to grow for his safety, LGBT human rights groups previously thought that Bakaev had been detained. However, sources now believe the Russian singer was brutally tortured to death by authorities shortly after his arrival into the country because of his sexuality.

Chechnya's Islamic, anti-gay leader has denied involvement in the disappearance of Russian pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev. 

The singer was feared to be a victim of Chechnya's anti-gay purge after he went missing in August 2017 while visiting the country for his sister's wedding.

While Chechen officials kept quiet about the disappearance, Ramzan Kadyrov has now claimed that the singer was 'dealt with' by family members.  

In a speech to an audience of uniformed security men that aired on state television channel Grozny TV, President Kadyrov denied involvement and claimed the singer's parents were blaming him for the disappearance.

Youth turnout swells, despite obstacles

The coronavirus pandemic and new requirements in Republican-led states have created voting obstacles for college students this year. Yet youth participation in the American election appears to be on the rise.

By DAN LEVIN

The New York Times International Edition, 31 October 2020

With many American campus quads resembling ghost towns and childhood bedrooms serving as lecture halls, politically active college students have moved their get-out-the-vote efforts online, hosting debate watch parties on Zoom, recruiting poll workers over Instagram and encouraging students to post their voting plans on Snapchat.

Young voters, traditionally a difficult group for politicians to get to the polls, are showing rare levels of enthusiasm in this election, even as college students have faced new obstacles to casting their ballots — some stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, and others from elected officials seeking to impede college voting.

At Bard College in New York State, students sued to bring a polling station to campus. Residential advisers at the University of Pittsburgh used Zoom to register new voters. And at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students have signed up as poll workers to help their fellow Badgers navigate some of the nation’s toughest voter identification laws.

“We’ve had to exhaust every possible option to continue energizing voters,” said Roderick Hart, a junior at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

“In the past, we had massive rallies and all these people walking around with clipboards registering kids to vote,” Mr. Hart, 20, said. “But now, social media is really our only way of connecting everybody at once, considering we’re not on campus.”

Despite the difficulties, efforts to mobilize the youth vote, along with greater accessibility through early-voting hours and mail-in ballot options, appear to be paying off, with potentially significant implications for races nationwide.

More than five million voters under 30 have already cast ballots for the Tuesday election, including nearly three million in 14 key states that could decide the presidency and control of the Senate, according to data compiled by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. That is more than double the number of ballots cast by young voters at a similar point in the 2016 presidential election, mirroring an increase in early voting among all demographics because of coronavirus concerns. The early-voting numbers for young people are particularly notable in states such as Texas, where, by a week ago, nearly two-thirds as many had cast early votes as the total number of young voters four years ago, according to Tufts researchers.

A national poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School found that 63 percent of youth voters surveyed said they would “definitely be voting,” suggesting turnout similar to 2008, when enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s candidacy led to higher levels of youth voting than in any election since 1984.

Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, college students emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms, when their turnout rate of 40.3 percent, according to the Tufts Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, was more than double the rate four years earlier.

Faced with those surging numbers among a voting group that leans heavily Democratic, Republican lawmakers in numerous states, including several battlegrounds, have taken actions that they said were intended to prevent voter fraud — including enacting restrictive ID rules and byzantine voter registration requirements — that have also made it more difficult for college students to cast ballots.

Elected officials have also moved to diminish the electoral power of campuses through redistricting, as well as by limiting early voting sites, purging voter rolls or refusing to permit polling stations on campus. And the logistics of the pandemic could alter where young people cast their ballots, potentially affecting races where candidates, typically Democrats, count on support from students living in their districts — but many of those students are now at home.

“Every aspect of students’ ability to vote is under attack,” said Maxim Thorne, managing director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on protecting voting rights for young people. “You have to fight these battles on every front, whether you’re in a state as blue as New York or as red as Georgia.”

In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest, a Republican-backed law took effect last fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to obtain an in-state driver’s license and auto registration, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually. The law passed after years of calls by state Republicans to clamp down on voting access for college students.

“They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” the state’s Republican House speaker said in 2011 when discussing plans to tighten up voting requirements.

Republicans in North Carolina enacted voter ID requirements in 2018 that recognized student identification cards as valid but proved so cumbersome that large state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, and a federal judge blocked the law in December, but confusion lingers.

“The thing that’s hard is, everybody’s like, ‘ No I can’t vote today because I don’t have my ID with me,’ and you have to explain they don’t need that,” said Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonpartisan group in North Carolina.

In Wisconsin, Republicans have imposed some of the toughest restrictions, including a requirement that IDs used for voting expire within two years, which invalidates most student IDs issued by four-year schools. The University of Wisconsin, which has around 40,000 students in Madison, created a second form of ID that complies with the voter law. When the pandemic shuttered campus last spring, the school developed a digital version of the voter ID, and students can now print them out at campus polling sites.

Not all colleges are so enthusiastic about ensuring students can vote. In September, the University of Georgia canceled plans for in-person voting on campus, citing concerns about social distancing and insufficient space during the pandemic.

After an uproar from student voting groups and local officials — who noted that the school had chosen to allow up to 23,000 fans to attend home football games — the university reversed course and agreed to house voting booths in the basketball arena.

At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., students and the school sued in September to get a polling site on campus; the closest place to vote was at a church located down a dirt road in the nearby town of Red Hook.

A New York State Supreme Court judge originally denied their petition, citing a Republican member of the Dutchess County Board of Elections who said it was too close to the election to change polling locations. Yet the very next day, the board moved two other polling sites in Red Hook.

On Friday, the judge reversed her decision and ordered the polling site to be moved to Bard’s main student center.

“For the first time on this campus,” said Sadia Saba, 21, a senior who was a plaintiff in the case, “students feel like their voices are being heard in the political process.”