THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

How Culture Got Stupid: ‘Despite the strange takeover of culture by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go.’ Kat Rosenfield joins The Free Press. (Kat Rosenfield, July 13, 2024, Free Press)

Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.

In the early 2010s, Tumblr gave birth to an accusatory and highly influential blog titled Your Fave Is Problematic, which studiously cataloged the offenses that artists, authors, and celebrities had committed against social justice. A hallmark of YFIP was its utter collapse of the distinction between art and artist: one representative post from 2013, about YA author John Green, lists allegedly offensive comments made by Green next to quotes uttered by his fictional characters, as though they were one and the same.

Years later, in 2021, the author of YFIP revealed herself in the pages of The New York Times, admitting she was an angsty teenager when she started the blog, and had canceled people to feel better about herself. But by then, the notion that cultural criticism should be first and foremost an exercise in taking offense had taken gangrenous root—not just on social media but in the legacy press, propagated by a new generation of young, hungry, underpaid opinion writers who survived by making you hate-click.

The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

All art was political, and always had been;

Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;

And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”

It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television.

Cancel Culture being so reactionary it couldn’t help but provoke the counter-reaction. And since the counters so outnumbered the correct it wasn’t much of a fight.

IT’LL BE LONG BIRD FLU ONCE THAT’S TRENDY:

Looking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design (SARA TALPOS, 07.25.2024, UnDark)

Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The best data, they say, suggest that most people recover from the disorder and that long Covid rates will decline as people develop immunity. (A July study by the VA St. Louis team also found that rates of long Covid declined over the course of the pandemic.)

The work produced by Al-Aly and his colleagues, which relies on electronic health records of U.S. veterans, is also a key point of contention. In interviews, several experts questioned the VA St. Louis’ methods. At the request of Undark, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch reviewed the group’s first long Covid study and raised a range of concerns. Many of them related to the handling of negative controls, a statistical technique that, when deployed properly, can help researchers detect problems in the analysis of their dataset. Some of the negative controls “are simply misused in the paper,” Lipsitch wrote in an email to Undark.

Additionally, some experts suggested that the VA St. Louis studies are not truly measuring long Covid. “They’re not studying post-viral illness, in my opinion, in these VA studies,” said Anders Hviid, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Department of Epidemiology Research at the Statens Serum Institut. Post-viral syndromes, said Hviid, are relatively rare and are usually characterized by fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Al-Aly’s research, meanwhile, looks at what Hviid described as a gamut of outcomes: dementia, thromboembolisms, psychiatric diseases, kidney diseases — “everything under the sun,” he said.

At best, the studies are detecting health problems known to occur when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said Hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias in the study design, and are picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all. “It’s a disappointment that not more U.S. scientists have spoken up about this,” said Hviid.

Heck, they still pretend fibromyalgia is a thing.

MAGA IS ANTI-AMERICAN:

JD Vance dismisses the American idea (Jeff Jacoby, July 23, 2024, Pundicity)

[M]uch of what makes the United States so extraordinary is that for more than two centuries it has also been the homeland of millions of people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — with no lengthy family or property ties in America. At the heart of Americanness is not blood or soil but the embrace of fundamental principles and beliefs. Vance is wrong. America’s greatness is rooted precisely in the ideas that he regards as secondary. His wife’s American identity does not inhere in the burial plot of the family she married into. It is bound up, rather, in the worldview her parents adopted when they left their native India and put down roots in America.

This was a point that Ronald Reagan made frequently, including in his very last speech as president.

On Jan. 19, 1989, in a final ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Reagan said he wanted to make “an observation about a country which I love.” That observation, simply stated yet profound, isolated a key truth about the United States. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan said, quoting a letter from a correspondent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

How does a person become an American? By taking on American principles, above all those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that we are created equal and endowed from birth with the rights to life and liberty. At the heart of “American exceptionalism” is the recognition that full-fledged membership in our nation — unlike in France, Germany, Turkey, or Japan — is not a matter of birth, blood, ancestry, or soil. America is the embodiment of certain ideas, and to be fully American one need only pledge allegiance to those principles.

The Republican Party used to celebrate American exceptionalism. But Trump explicitly rejects the concept, so it stands to reason that his running mate, having jettisoned so many of his principles to refashion himself as the MAGA heir apparent, would turn his back on this one too.

IT IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

The placebo effect unlocked: How the brain tricks itself into pain relief (Bronwyn Thompson, July 25, 2024, New Atlas)

The findings do more than just solve a puzzle for neuroscientists and put to bed any thought that the placebo effect was ‘all in your head’ (even though, quite literally, it is).