That Was the Week that Was

I'm Megan McArdle, and this was my week

Apr 19, 2021

I don’t know about you, but my weeks often have themes to them. Looking back over the editions of this newsletter, we had covid-19 week, cancel culture week, and cogntive-gap week. And now we come to the theme of my last week, which was …

Well, actually I’m reminded of the time, almost 11 years ago, when we were interviewing a day-of coordinator for our wedding.

(Sounds precious, I know, but it was the best $1200 we spent on that wedding. The DJ was an hour and a half late, and I didn’t even know until after the wedding. If you’re thinking about getting married, fire the videographer and enjoy the day itself.)

Anyway, as soon as we sat down, the coordinator asked us what the theme was for our wedding.

My heart went staccato. We were supposed to have a theme?

A year before, I would have been derisive. A theme? Really? But now the day was drawing close, and in the anxious way that brides have, I immediately decided that we had made a terrible mistake, and now the wedding would be ruined. Everyone has a theme except us! We will be laughed out of Washington!

I imagined our guests sitting at dinner parties some twenty years hence, regaling listeners who alternated between being amused and appalled.

They divorced, of course. We knew they were doomed as soon as we walked into the wedding. Slow shake of the head, pitying smile. No theme.

My then-fiance looked at me, clasped my hand tightly, and looked at the wedding coordinator.

“The theme of our wedding,” he said firmly, “is ‘Wedding’.”

Reader, I married him. 11 years this coming June.

Anyway, dear readers, the theme of last week was “week”. Stuff happened, and I wrote about it. Weeks sometimes go that way, you know.

First, I covered the union drive at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, AL. When I pitched that column, and started writing it, there was still excitement in the air circulating around the left half of the pundit spectrum. After decades of watching the union share of private sector employment shrink, it seemed like unions might actually be beginning to crack two previously impregnable fortresses: Amazon, and the Deep South.

(I pause to note that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns my newspaper. Adjust your opinions of this section accordingly.)

By the time it actually ran, of course, the union had lost rather spectacularly; the NLRB called the election with a thousand votes still out because the ballots were running approximately 2-to-1 against the union, so the number of “No” votes had already crossed 50% of all ballots cast.

As Rich Yeselson pointed out, this was such a disaster that it was probably objectively foolhardy for the union to go forward with the election, rather than withdrawing their petition and waiting for a more propitious time. Yes, I understand the union had a reason for gambling: Amazon’s turnover makes organizing their facilities very tough, because you spend a lot of time persuading people who leave, and then you have to start over. But losing this badly was a public relations disaster that will haunt other organizing campaigns for years to come.

Yet as I explained in my column, the union almost couldn’t help itself, because Amazon was just such an enticing target:

Amazon’s dominance suggests it ought to have some pricing power. It has hundreds of thousands of new workers who could be brought into the union fold. Its warehouse facilities are even bigger than a Walmart Supercenter, so they’re more efficient to organize; they’re also significantly more productive than traditional retail. Yet since the company’s whole business model now depends on being close to every consumer to facilitate quick delivery, it can’t just move operations to a friendlier state, much less Vietnam.

I also explained, however, why it’s going to be extremely difficult to actually hit that target. You can read that explanation at the Post.

The other part of my week was occupied by the same thing that has occupied at least part of every week since January 2020: the pandemic. Specifically, the government’s decision to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over reports that a small number of women had experienced a rare and life-threatening kind of clotting in the weeks after being vaccinated. This was, I said, a big mistake:

So far we know that six women who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine experienced a rare form of blood clot, and one died. But more than 7 million people have received this vaccine, which means that if the vaccine is causing this problem, it appears to be a less than one-in-a-million side effect. Extrapolating that out: If everyone in America received this vaccine and it caused clots at the same rate, there would be around 330 such cases, and perhaps some fatalities. By comparison, almost 500 Americans died of covid-19 Monday.

I’ve gotten some pushback on this column from people who pointed out, correctly, that there were no easy answers here: if the government didn’t pause, and it turned out there were lots of previously undetected cases of these kinds of clots, that could shake confidence in the vaccines even more than announcing a pause did. And look, that’s true—if it were easy, we wouldn’t be arguing about it.

That said, I am ever-mindful of the business school professor who once told my class “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re probably spending too much time sitting in airports.”

The FDA always has to choose between two kinds of errors, between being too lax, and letting things through that don’t work well, or cause harm; or being too restrictive, and failing to save lives they could have. However, the FDA only ever commits one kind of error: on the side of caution. That almost certainly means that Americans are spending too much time in metaphorical airports—or all-too-real graves. And that caution is most likely to go awry during a fast-moving global pandemic where we don’t have a lot of good guideposts.

So I’d far rather the government had adopted a “watchful waiting” policy, or better yet, this fantastic idea proposed by Alex Pareene:

I'm no public health expert, but from what I've seen the clotting issue needs study. But since it only affected women, the right move would've been for the FDA to declare J+J the "Dudes Only" vaccine and then print t-shirts that say "It Takes a Real Man to Handle This Johnson"

As the kidz say on Twitter, this, but unironically.

Elsewhere at my employer

If you’re in my region of the mid-Atlantic, you know the dread Brood X of 17-year cicadas are coming any day now. (We’ve ordered anticipatory window screens.) This is something we may have to think about more often, because biologist Chris Simon says climate change may be turning 17-year cicadas into 13-year cicadas:

The reasons for early emergences are not fully understood, but we expect climate change plays a role. As we prepare for the rest of Brood X to crawl out from their earthly dwellings this year, we may see further evidence of what scientists have been piecing together for years: These bugs are changing dramatically as humans take a toll on the environment.

Alyssa Rosenberg asks where the mass, popular adult dramas are that can take the place of Game of Thrones in popular culture:

Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe has conquered the world through careful cultivation of the maximally profitable PG-13 rating. In pursuit of profit, Marvel has largely surrendered the ability to explore grown-up questions about sex and romance and prioritized a certain political neutrality. Characters barely date; their family lives, when they exist, are meant to signal personality traits, not drive exploration. All political conflicts are personalized; who are superheroes to be limited by deeper systems, after all?

And on the news side, Bruce Alpert writes about the screenings and treatments that got delayed by the pandemic.

Brian R. Rah, chair of the Cardiology Department at Montana’s Billings Clinic, was confused in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Why the sudden drop in heart attack patients at the clinic? And why did some who did come arrive hours after first feeling chest pains?
Two patients, both of whom suffered greater heart damage by delaying care, provided what came to be typical answers. One said he was afraid of contracting covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, by going to the hospital. The other patient went to the emergency room in the morning, left after finding it too crowded, then returned that night when he thought there would be fewer patients — and a lower risk of catching covid-19.

Researchers will be studying this period for years, looking for clues as to how much good early interventions do. In the meantime, if you’ve been putting off healthcare, go to the doctor, okay?

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Substackery

Matt Yglesias on the myth of turnout:

…after Obama’s two successful election campaigns, his main communications and message operatives sold out to go do corporate work. The veterans of his organizing operations, by contrast, had fewer marketable skills and generally more left-wing convictions, so they stuck around in politics and took over the Democratic Party — telling everyone that investing in organizing and turnout rather than in rigorous message-testing is the way to win.
More broadly, ideologues on both sides like to overrate the idea that you can manipulate the composition of the electorate because it implies there are no electoral benefits to moderation.

Freddie DeBoer suggests proponents of social justice politics “can do great damage. But they cannot win”

You might ask why I’ve gone with this trivial example. Why not talk about something more serious? But this is the issue: under this political ethos all things become trivial. The insistence that all things have political valence, no matter how ridiculous; that every last aspect of your life is a potential site of political struggle; and that these struggles are of vast importance even though they have no material impact on the world - these things combine to make social justice politics totalizing and yet unserious, inescapable and thus mundane, unremarkable. Paradoxically the intense emotionalism of this school of politics, the insistence that feeling a particular way amounts to doing something, must inevitably leave its proponents unable to make basic distinctions of priority and practice, unwilling to distinguish between what makes them feel intensely and what could make the largest impact in real-world terms.

I loved Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, which seemed to me to distill those beautiful, liquid, in-between moments that one experiences while traveling alone into a kind of crystalline essence that was painfully beautiful—and painfully real, because so many of the characters are played by ordinary people who aren’t actors, but actually live out of vans, just like the people they play.

But Noah Millman didn’t like it as much as he expected, and tries to figure out why:

Even before the turn in the film’s plot that transforms our understanding of Fern’s situation, I was aware that there was something different about Fern. That something different, I thought, was that she was played by Frances McDormand, and not by someone who actually lives out of a van. McDormand is a phenomenal actress, capable of incredibly subtle performance, and that’s precisely what she delivers in this film. But next to the artlessness of the non-actors, I couldn’t shake the awareness that it was a performance. All her subtleties felt like forms of distancing, ways in which she was separating herself from people who were simply more direct, even when they reveal things long kept hidden.

Wonderful advice from Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille.
The fight over a Mies van der Rohe house must be read to be believed.
Mies insisted on building on the Fox River’s floodplain, the better to enjoy the local woods. He refused thermally efficient double-glazing. Only after protest was Farnsworth allowed a wardrobe; Mies said it was a weekend house and the necessary single dress could be hung out of sight behind the bathroom door. He was adamant that his own furniture designs were used rather than his client’s preferences. Moreover, his architectural training had not included Mechanical & Electrical Services, so he knew nothing of plumbing, heating, air-conditioning, drainage or power supply. Water seepage from above complemented the rising damp caused by the turbulent, intrusive Fox below. The house was an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. Ugly stains soon appeared. When Farnsworth complained about the exiguous fireplace, Mies said: ‘Get smaller logs.’
A drone died to get this video.
The Muppets Have a Secret Weapon.
I loathe recipe blogs, not because they preface recipes with little stories—I do that on my own, mostly dormant one—but because the blogs are deliberately set up to make you scroll …. and scroll … and scroll to figure out where the recipe even is.

There is, of course, a reason for that, and in short, don’t blame the recipe bloggers.
You would think a top-ranked law school would have better lawyers.
I can’t deal with this revelation.
Why the West lost India’s culture wars:
The Oxbridge-educated milieu of Nehru, and the gin-drinking inclinations of Jinnah were in the subcontinent, but not truly of it. The English-speaking intelligentsia of India, which produces novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, is the face of elite India most prominent to the rest of the world, but this is not the only India. And it is no longer the dominant India.
Instead of affirmative action, Texas state schools guaranteed admission to the top 10% of every high school. Whatever the other merits of this plan, it doesn’t seem to have enhanced equity:
Our analysis reveals an increase in the likelihood that high schools in non-suburban areas sent students to the flagship campuses, but ultimately little to no equity-producing effects of the Top 10% Plan over this 18-year period. In fact, the representation of traditional, always-sending, feeder high schools on the flagship campuses continued to dwarf the population of students from other high schools.