An ordinary day in New York City, as captured in The Hottest August. | Grasshopper Films

The Hottest August director Brett Story wanted to “look at climate change by looking away from it.”

One of the best documentaries of the year is also, on its surface, one of the simplest. To make The Hottest August, director Brett Story spent the month of August 2017 talking to New Yorkers about their hopes for the future as well as their anxieties. Story and her crew visited many well-traveled spots — Midtown Manhattan, people’s front stoops in brownstone Brooklyn — as well as some out-of-the-way places like Rockaway Beach, where residents worried about an eroding shoreline even before Hurricane Sandy devastated the area in 2012.

The movie was named for the expectation that the month would be the hottest August on record in the northern hemisphere — and while, in the end, it turned out to be slightly cooler than August 2016, the trendline has continued upward.

So what emerged from Story’s interviews was a portrait of ordinary people living in the shadow of looming climate change and the threats it poses to their ways of life. (The film’s official description is “A film about climate change, disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety.”) The Hottest August is a funny and fascinating film, but with an air of the uncanny hanging over everything.

As in her outstanding 2016 documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Story’s interviews with her Hottest August subjects are shot with a stationary camera, often using their surroundings to help frame and provide subtle context for their answers; small interstitial moments give the film a sense of otherworldliness. Earth is our home, the place where we live, but with its cinematic vocabulary, The Hottest August presents a sense of strangeness, of being small beings living on a big planet whirling through an even bigger universe.

Story, who is Canadian and holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Toronto, met me in Brooklyn to discuss how she made the movie, how she imbued it with a feeling of sci-fi peculiarity, and how she navigates her own feelings of “futureless-ness.”

Alissa Wilkinson

The Hottest August is a documentary with a topic on its mind — how the looming possibility of devastating effects of climate change weighs on ordinary people right now. But it alludes to that topic rather than being direct. The meaning accumulates with your interviews, rather than being stated up front. How do you approach making a movie that will ultimately be allusive?

Brett Story

I feel like we’re living in a time when climate change news has accelerated and intensified. It’s not like we weren’t talking about environmental issues 15 years ago. But there’s something about now in which it feels so overwhelming and so intense. Now, there’s a kind of undeniability about planetary crisis.

I was thinking about how that was for me, personally, making it really hard to think in future terms — just, like, planning. I would think, “Oh, should I have a house one day?” Or, “Will I change careers?” And every time I had a thought that it felt slightly absurd. On a personal level, there’s a sense for me of a kind of futureless-ness.

We live in a socio-political time in which there are endless sources of bad news, and scary news, and Trump’s presidency, and violence at the border, and neo-Nazis marching around.

So I became quite preoccupied, trying to think about a way to connect these personal feelings of futureless-ness with an interest in how it was affecting how we live socially.

Grasshopper Films

But at the same time, I had to admit to myself that I don’t watch climate change films, and ask myself why. I don’t even read that much material about climate change, these long articles. It’s not that I’m uninterested, and it’s not because I don’t think it matters — totally the opposite. But I’m not sure what I have to learn from these pieces, because I’m already on board. I know. I know, and I think lots of us know, both that climate change is real and that it’s really bad and really scary.

So the film emerged out of an interest in subverting what constitutes a climate change film and thinking about what it is we have to learn at this moment that would be useful. For me, what I have to learn that might be useful is the causes of our paralysis, and the consequences of living in a future-less world. The social consequences of that. Is it connected? Is there a kind of nihilism that pervades? What are we doing with this dread and this anxiety? How’s it translating? How’s it being captured by political forces and ideas of who’s deserving and who’s undeserving of resources?

So the very origins of the project came out of a desire to look at climate change by looking away from it.

As soon as we started filming, I knew I was not going to utter the words “climate change.” I was going to ask people questions that would allow them to dictate what the conversation would be.

Some have said, and I agree, that people are going to look back at this time — at all of our cultural artifacts, all the books that get written, and the phones that get made — and be able to see climate change in all of them, even if they’re not obviously interested in that topic.

Alissa Wilkinson

New York is a particularly interesting place to investigate this because it has experienced some really recent, big weather events that caused measurable damage to the city that some people are still living with, like Hurricane Sandy in 2012. There are still people who don’t have their homes back.

Brett Story

I wanted to make a film where I was living. I wanted to have the confidence of knowing a place and knowing how to discover what I don’t know about it.

So it wasn’t even so much that it had to be New York. Any city holds lots of contradictions, but it needed to be a city that really exemplifies the contradictions. The economic contradictions — the absurd levels of wealth, absurd levels of poverty. The density of all these strangers living side by side.

And I really love making films in which I don’t follow characters but I have encounters with strangers. The Hottest August gave me a pretext to do a little bit more than what we’re all already doing with most of our day, which is encountering people and learning a little bit about life through those small encounters.

So it had to be a film that takes place in a dense place — a dense, full, vibrant, contradictory space. And yeah, I think it’s fitting that New York is a power capital of the world. It’s surrounded by water. That water is rising. It’s had its few climate catastrophes. But for me, it was also just about doing a deep study of a place where I could roam around with a sense of what I already know and what I have yet to find out about a place I call home.

I wanted the film to settle in a space [that tapped into] the deeply ordinary, and also allow it to feel strange for people. And the imagery needed to help us do that. As soon as we see images that we’ve seen before, we become really passive viewers. So the trick was finding images that we hadn’t seen before, but could also convey nothing more than ordinary life in different places. There’s a kind of delight in, you know, different blocks that look so radically different from each other, and yet they get called the same city.

Grasshopper Films

Alissa Wilkinson

There’s one scene, in the Brooklyn Navy Yards I think, that really did look kind of otherworldly, even if it’s just this one space.

Brett Story

It looks like a Soviet spaceship.

Alissa Wilkinson

Exactly. It’s a Tarkovsky.

Brett Story

The film is made up of genuinely spontaneous encounters. All we could do was pick locations. So all we could think about was, where do we go so that we’ll meet people once we’re there?

Alissa Wilkinson

Were you asking people where you should go next? Were you wandering around with a tripod?

Brett Story

Yeah, we were carrying a tripod. Some of the process of choosing just had to do with aesthetic inclinations. But I also wanted to offer some order to the disorder, to offer the audience a way through wide-ranging ideas. If I’m going to offer people a film that asks them to make associations between lots of different things and it doesn’t have a plot or any drama or a story, then I should at least give it some sort of aesthetic sensibility. It’s like basic architecture for the film.

I think of The Hottest August as a film that’s arranged through a series of detours. The conversations themselves are all sort of off-point, even when you start to realize that there are a set of questions that I’m asking everybody.

I’m genuinely approaching people and saying, “Hey we’re making a film about how people are doing this summer and what you’re thinking about.” Which is so loose! And then trusting my own skills as an interviewer, to hear what people are saying and to follow them there.

Then I take those conversational detours and try and choreograph them in the edit room so that they point to something.

If we’re shooting an interview in a sandcastle on Rockaway Beach, at a sandcastle-building contest, and an umbrella rolls away, we don’t know what that means. It might not mean anything. But it’s an opportunity to just delight in this strangeness and absurdity. The fact that someone walks by at the exact same moment and his bathing suit matches, can be part of the coincidences and delights that also remind us how strange we are, as human beings occupying this planet and making things on it and living our little lives on it. So a lot of the visual details are just purely about that, rather than pointing directly to themes or issues.

Alissa Wilkinson

New York is such a good city for a movie like this — everyone is very opinionated and willing to share their opinions with you.

Brett Story

That’s the thing: It’s a city in which, for whatever reasons, people are incredibly generous. I’ve felt that on a personal level; when I moved here for the first time for a brief stint, in 2008, I didn’t have a single friend. At a certain point I was like, “I don’t even need friends. I’m having such interesting conversations with all the people that I just meet in the course of my day.” I think people are really generous with themselves. Especially if they feel respected, and especially if you’re asking genuine questions and genuinely listening. People know when they’re being listened to.

Grasshopper Films

Alissa Wilkinson

Did you learn anything surprising through doing all of these interviews, talking to all of these people?

Brett Story

I think that I expected people to feel and talk about their anxieties and their worries a lot. Maybe not necessarily name environmental catastrophe as the cause of those anxieties, but still to point to those worries and anxieties. What I didn’t expect was that, yes, that happened, but people expressed so much more optimism than I expected.

Someone would say, “I’m getting kicked out of my house next week,” or, “I can’t get a job, I have to walk dogs,” or, “I’m worried about Social Security in the future,” but then they’d almost immediately also find a way to say everything was going to be fine. Like, “My luck’s going to turn. I’m going to make some better decisions moving forward. I’m going to get on top of this. I’m going to be my own personal entrepreneur. And then I won’t get evicted next week.”

I found this quite devastating. And I found it surprising and really interesting.

We have to live in this world. We have to get up every morning in it. There’s a luxury to letting ourselves be overwhelmed with the pessimism and the dread, but the mind has capacity to play all kinds of beautiful tricks.

That became really interesting to me, something that I wanted to bring out as a theme.

Alissa Wilkinson

Isn’t that part of the problem, too? We know this … thing … is coming. But it’s hard to convince a lot of people, and even ourselves, that we need to do anything about it. It’s like, “Well, it will happen and we’ll figure something out” — like, we’ll all move to the moon or whatever and it’ll be fine.

Brett Story

That’s true.

Alissa Wilkinson

I also wonder how much of this is part of Americans’ relentless optimism about the future. I wonder if you made this film in France, if you’d have a different film.

Brett Story

I think that’s true. I wonder what that’s about. Because I don’t think it’s just like, optimism is American. I think that versions of pessimism are also American, but I do feel like people have to be optimistic because … I have something to say about this. I feel like when we admit that life is pretty bad, there’s a way in which, in America — and I’ll include Canada in this too — the narrative of personal success versus personal failure is so dominant that as soon as you admit that things are shitty, you’re also kind of admitting that you’re a personal failure. Because that’s the narrative we’re sold.

And that’s devastating, too. I mean, I don’t want to feel like my life is shitty, because it’s all my fault, because I fucked up too much, or because I failed on too many fronts. That “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative — the one that says you can be anything you want, and then if you’re not, it’s all your fault — that makes optimism the better choice. Because otherwise what are you going to do with that humiliation and that shame?

That’s a big part of what I was interested in while making this film: thinking about the paralysis we feel, the powerlessness we feel, the reasons we can’t seem to do anything while our planet is collapsing.

We have an increasing loss of the sense of being in a society in which we can make social demands. So everything gets individualized. Change is only possible through individual action. And, I admit, I just don’t believe my personal action is going to have a huge effect — if I don’t use some straws tomorrow, I don’t think that’s going to cut carbon emissions. And I think that’s true of a lot of people.

So, does that make me the bad guy when it comes to climate change? No. I think when we lose a sense of belonging to a collective and having collective power over our circumstances, we can default to a kind of hopelessness or paralysis when it comes to things as big as environmental disruption.

Alissa Wilkinson

As well as magical thinking, that it’s just going to work out.

Brett Story

That it’s just going to work out, yeah. I mean, it has to work out, because there’s no other way. We can’t come up with another possible scenario.

Alissa Wilkinson

Plus, we get the idea that it’s always worked out in the past. Which is not true. Humankind is still here, but civilizations have disappeared.

Brett Story

Magical thinking is such a good phrase. It’s what I’m always interested in my films. What stories, what forms of magical thinking become so natural to us that we can’t think past them? I’m not saying that other people think crazy things — I include myself in this. What becomes received wisdom, so that we get trapped and can’t think outside of it?

And how could something like cinema — which can make us feel, and think, and hear slightly differently, or set us off kilter — how can that reacquaint us with our own forms of reality and dislodge some of that actual thinking?

Maybe that’s investing too much [power] in cinema. But that is what makes art complex and, for me, what makes it political. I think it’s more effective at [making us feel or think differently] than sending messages. Art can rejigger our relationship to the world such that we can start to examine why we even think stuff.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think this is why The Hottest August has the feeling of science fiction, in a way, even though it doesn’t present itself as a science fiction film. Sci-fi is always trying to dislodge us from the contexts in which we make our assumptions. It unsettles us, makes us feel a little strange so that we see the world differently.

Grasshopper Films

Brett Story

That was a really fun thing to play with creatively. That’s what we talked about while making it: This isn’t a science fiction movie and there’s no science fiction narrative, but can we introduce some sci-fi elements into it?

So, [the film’s editor] Nels [Bangerter] and I had a lot of fun with it. The first time he showed me the edit where we zoom in on the moon, and then the moon starts to spin around? I was like, “Nels, what are you doing? This is so weird!” And he’s like, “Just try it.” And now it’s my favorite part. Or that moment where the umbrella blows away — that is actually just totally ordinary. But it’s a moment where you can be like, “Oh, yeah, the world is a weird and wild place. And we’re on a planet, and there’s other planets, and there’s animals, and they’re looking at us, and they’re judging us.”

I think ordinary life is science fiction, if we can see it in those terms.

The Hottest August opens in select theaters on November 15 and will continue to screen in the weeks following; check the film’s website for details.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Rep. Max Rose (D-NY) for the 116th Congress stands outside the Longworth House Office building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Rose is introducing a new bill to ban corporate PACs along with Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA). | Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

More Democrats are ditching corporate PACs. A new bill would make that mandatory.

Two moderate House Democrats are introducing a bill aiming to root out corporate influence where it currently thrives: Washington, DC.

On Friday, Reps. Max Rose (NY) and Josh Harder (CA) will introduce the “Ban Corporate PACs Act,” which would ban for-profit corporations from being allowed to sponsor, operate, or fund PACs. Vox was given an exclusive first look at the legislation.

The bill’s co-authors see it as a necessary addition to the HR 1 — also known as the “For the People Act” — the vast anti-corruption bill that was House Democrats’ first priority after taking back the majority in 2018. HR 1 passed the House way back in early March, but it has gone nowhere as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vehemently opposes it.

“We always said HR 1 was just the beginning,” Rose told Vox in an interview. Rose called corporate PACs “legalized bribery” that “should not have a place in this town.”

His co-author, Harder, agreed. Nodding to the 2020 election, the members of Congress noted that while nearly all Democratic candidates running for president have taken a no-corporate PAC pledge, and multiple Democrats running for House and Senate have done the same thing — the idea should be mandatory.

The two members want this bill to be part of the House’s end-of-year agenda, but if it is passed in the House, it likely won’t go anywhere in the Republican controlled Senate. Still, anti-corruption reforms are incredibly popular with the American public across party lines.

“I think the impression a lot of folks have around the country is that Washington is a town controlled by corporate interests — there’s a lot of truth to that,” Harder told Vox.

Banning corporate PACs is becoming increasingly popular among Democrats

Rose and Harder’s bill calls for an outright ban of corporate PACs, which saw a resurgence after the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

That decision made it clear the Supreme Court viewed money and outside spending in elections as free speech. And it paved the way for outside groups to spend unlimited sums of money on elections.

That’s ushered in a new political era in the United States, one where each election tops the amount of spending in the last. The 2016 election is the most expensive to date, costing over $6.5 billion (including Senate, House, and presidential campaigns). And the 2018 midterms were the most expensive midterms thus far, weighing in at over $5.7 billion for just Senate and House races.

Forswearing corporate PACs has become somewhat of a trend in the Democratic Party. At the beginning of the race, all Democratic candidates pledged they would not take corporate PAC money. A smaller group said they would not take Super PAC money, but some have been more open about their reliance on Super PACs, including newly minted presidential candidate Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts.

It’s not just at the presidential level; in 2018, close to 200 candidates for US House pledged to not take corporate PAC money. Watchdog outlet OpenSecrets noted most of those Democrats not only followed through on their promise of not accepting money from corporate PACs, but also that many times that decision didn’t disadvantage their fundraising because individual donors were so willing to give in the 2018 cycle.

For many of the freshman Democrats, like Harder and Rose, who campaigned on a no corporate PAC pledge, the culture of Washington was a bit of a shock. As House Democrats were rolling out HR 1 this spring, some freshman told Vox they were being approached by more senior members and pressured to ditch their promise.

“Mostly from members who have been here a long time … a few of whom have been very dismissive and said, ‘You’re going to have to get rid of that,’” Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) told Vox this spring.

Harder, who beat Republican incumbent Jeff Denham in California’s 10th Congressional District, remembered going to what he thought was going to be a policy discussion shortly after arriving in DC as a new member of Congress.

“All it is is a whole row of lobbyists really eager to have conversations, and that’s basically been every day since,” Harder told Vox. “The peeks into it I’ve seen are really frustrating. It’s not just this is a corrupting influence, this is also a huge impediment to the things we want to get passed.”

And of course, Republicans have no such qualms about accepting corporate PAC money, which drives the arguments of some older Democrats who say their party needs to take it to stay competitive. Republicans in the Senate have also been an impediment to Democrats’ attempts at reform. McConnell has refused to take up HR 1 and similar bills, arguing it infringes on constitutionally protected free speech.

Rose, a freshman member of Congress representing Staten Island with a penchant for being blunt, sees it differently.

“Mitch McConnell has never met a corporate PAC, federal lobbyist, dark money outfit that he doesn’t immediately fall in love with,” Rose said. “He is not a supporter of the swamp, Mitch McConnell is the swamp.”

Anti-corruption bills are politically popular

If there’s one thing Democratic and Republican voters can agree on, it’s that Washington is corrupt and dysfunctional.

The belief there’s too much money in Washington goes across party lines. A 2015 New York Times/CBS poll found 84 percent of Americans thought money had too much influence in politics, and 66 percent believed wealthier Americans had more political influence.

Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp” and pledges not to run on outside money that wasn’t his own were hugely popular in 2016. Come 2018, House Democrats crushed Republicans in a wave election as they hammered a message about cleaning up a “culture of corruption” that had run rampant in the Trump White House.

And although McConnell and Republicans oppose Democrats’ HR 1, the sweeping bill was politically popular, including with Independent voters. A January poll by End Citizens United poll found 75 percent of 2018 voters in battleground House districts said cracking down on Washington corruption was their top priority, followed by 71 percent who wanted to protect Social Security and Medicare, and 70 percent who listed growing the economy and jobs.

Furthermore, 82 percent of all voters and 84 percent of independents said they support a bill of reforms.

Since HR 1 could not be passed, Rose and Harder are hoping this smaller provision will be politically harder for the Republican-controlled Senate to ignore.

“This bill is a response to a feeling out in the country about who has power in Washington and who should have power in Washington,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, communications director for End Citizens United.

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Taylor Swift meets fans at Tianhe Sports Center on November 11, 2019 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province of China. | Photo by Xia Wening/VCG via Getty Images

Taylor Swift says Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta won’t let her perform her old hits on TV.

Taylor Swift’s ongoing feud with music executives Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta has entered a new and extremely dramatic phase. On Thursday night, Swift published an emotional plea on her social media accounts, claiming that Braun and Borchetta were blocking her from performing her old hits at the upcoming American Music Awards and in a previously unannounced Netflix documentary — and now Swift’s fans are doxxing Borchetta and Braun in retaliation.

Swift’s public feud with Braun and Borchetta began this summer when Borchetta, the founder of Swift’s old record label Big Machine Records, sold the label, and with it, Swift’s old master recordings to Scott Braun. The sale gave Braun ownership over all the records Swift made prior to 2019’s Lover, and meant that any time someone wanted to license one of Swift’s old hits, they would have to go through Braun.

For Swift, the sale was unacceptable. Braun was Kanye West’s manager when Kanye released his infamous “Famous” video, which features a nude likeness of Swift in bed with Kanye. Swift has said that she considers Braun to bear personal responsibility for the whole affair, which was, she wrote this summer, “a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked.” Swift said she tried to purchase the rights to her master recordings herself, but neither Braun nor Borchetta were willing to make a deal she found acceptable.

So to get around them, Swift announced in August that she planned to re-record all of her old albums starting in November 2020, the point at which her old contract allows her to do so. The plan was that she would own the masters for all of her new recordings herself, and anyone who wanted to license them could go through her rather than Braun.

But now, Swift says that Braun and Borchetta are refusing to allow her to perform her old hits anywhere. “Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun have now said that I’m not allowed to perform my old songs on television because they claim that that would be re-recording my music before I’m allowed to next year,” she wrote. And that ban would block her from performing her old hits both at November’s American Music Award, where Swift will be honored as Artist of the Decade, and in a forthcoming Netflix documentary.

Per Swift, Borchetta will only drop this claim if Swift agrees both to cancel her plans to re-record her old albums and to stop talking publicly about him and Braun. “Basically, be a good little girl and shut up. Or you’ll be punished,” Swift summarizes. “This is WRONG.”

If Swift’s summary is correct, Braun and Borchetta are attempting to gain some leverage against her after she thoroughly trounced them in the court of public opinion this summer. But Swift has enormous leverage of her own, in the form of her army of dedicated Swifties, and she is willing to use it. “This is where I’m asking for your help,” she writes in her post. “Please let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel about this.”

The Big Machine Label Group refuted Swift’s claims in a statement issued Friday morning. “At no point did we say Taylor could not perform on the AMAs or block her Netflix special. In fact, we do not have the right to keep her from performing live anywhere,” reads the post. It goes on to argue that Swift “has admitted to contractually owing millions of dollars and multiple assets to our company” — the assets presumably being her old masters — and that “despite our persistent efforts to find a private and mutually satisfactory solution, Taylor made a unilateral decision last night to enlist her fanbase in a calculated manner that greatly affects the safety of our employees and their families.”

Big Machine is being a bit weaselly with its language about the ban (they don’t have to be unable to legally block Swift from performing live to make it difficult for her to perform live), but it isn’t wrong to note that the safety of its employees may be at risk. As Vox’s sister site The Verge has reported, some of Swift’s fans responded to her post by doxxing both Braun and Borchetta, publishing their private contact information, including phone numbers and physical addresses, to Twitter.

Swift hasn’t responded to the doxxings, and it’s not a move she explicitly directed her fans to make. But it’s relatively common during Twitter wars for figures with a lot of followers to point their fans in the direction of a hapless target, and then sit back and watch the fallout. That move was a favorite tactic of infamous online of all people Milo Yiannopoulos, of all people, before Twitter finally banned him. Weaponizing his followers worked for him because it allowed him to direct increasingly vicious and hateful harassment at his targets while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean. Swift knows how unpleasant that can be, because she experienced online attacks herself at Kim Kardashian’s hands two years ago.

The great Taylor Swift-Scooter Braun war is getting messier and messier, and it’s starting to look as though everyone involved is willing to play dirty.

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Former US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on November 15, 2019. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Even Fox News thought Trump’s tweets strayed dangerously close to witness intimidation.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch delivered a powerful opening statement during her testimony before House impeachment investigators on Friday. She detailed her decades of service as a diplomat, and expressed concern that her sudden ouster due to a Trumpworld smear campaign this past spring could have a chilling effect on those who are sincerely committed to rooting out corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere.

“I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” she said, alluding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The policy process is visibly unravelling … the State Department is being hollowed out.”

Shortly after Yovanovitch concluded her opening statement, President Donald Trump responded to it by attacking her, going so far as to blame her for decades of civil unrest in Somalia. (Yovanovitch began her posting in Mogadishu in 1986, when she was about 28 years old.)

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” Trump tweeted. “Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

In a second tweet, Trump touted his own “very strong and powerful foreign policy” before taking a shot at former President Barack Obama. But the irony is that just hours earlier, at a rally in Louisiana, Trump mocked and ridiculed William Taylor — the State Department official who testified before impeachment investigators on Wednesday and is currently serving as the acting ambassador to Ukraine.

And with regard to Trump’s claim that Ukrainian President Zelensky “spoke unfavorably about [Yovanovitch] in my second phone call with him,” a call summary released by the White House indicates that Trump brought her up and criticized her as “bad news,” and that Zelensky mostly just went along with what he was saying.

“She’s going to go through some things,” Trump said during that call, in a comment that Yovanovitch said during her testimony that she regarded as a “threat.”

“I wondered what that meant. It concerned me,” she said.

Shortly after Trump posted his tweets, the Democrat leading the impeachment inquiry, Rep. Adam Schiff, asked Yovanovitch to respond to them.

“Well, I don’t think I have such powers — not in Mogadishu, Somalia, not in other places,” she began. “I actually think that where I served over the years, I and others have demonstrably made things better for the US as well as for the countries that I’ve served in.”

Schiff went on to characterize Trump’s tweets as a form of witness intimidation.

“I want to let you know, ambassador, that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,” he said.

Even Fox News’s Bret Baier thought Trump’s tweets were ill-advised. After Yovanovitch’s hearing adjourned for a break, Baier said that “this whole hearing turned on a dime when the president tweeted about her [in] real time and during the questioning Adam Schiff stopped the Democratic questioning to read the president’s tweet to her and get her response.”

“Now that enabled Schiff to then characterize that tweet as intimidating the witness or tampering the witness, which is a crime — adding essentially an article of impeachment in real time as this hearing is going on,” Baier continued. “That changed this entire dynamic of this first part of this hearing, and Republicans now are going to have to take the rest of this hearing to probably clean that up.”

During another Fox News segment, former independent counsel Ken Staff said Trump’s tweet showed “extraordinarily poor judgment” and “was quite injurious.” But one of the Republicans partaking in the impeachment inquiry, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), defended the president, saying he “has been frustrated with this relentless attack on him by the Democrats that started even before he was president. I think the American people can relate to the frustration.”

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage

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Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on November 15, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” she said.

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, is on Capitol Hill Friday to testify in the second day of public impeachment hearings. But she used her opening testimony in large part to offer a stinging indictment of leadership at the State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump.

Yovanovitch was the US ambassador to Ukraine between August 2016 and May of this year. A widely respected career diplomat and the highest-ranked female ambassador at the State Department, Yovanovitch was the target of Rudy Giuliani-led attacks falsely accusing her of, among other things, working to thwart Trump’s Ukraine policy and being close to the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. That smear campaign, backed with no public evidence, ultimately led to her unceremonious dismissal months before her time was up.

“I still find it difficult to comprehend that foreign and private interests were able to undermine US interests in this way,” she said. “These events should concern everyone in this room,” she added, noting, “If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States.”

Her strongest comments, though, came when she turned her attention to the “degradation of the Foreign Service” during this administration, highlighted by the fact that Pompeo didn’t protect Yovanovitch from the attacks.

“As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” Yovanovitch said. “The State Department is being hollowed out from within at a competitive and complex time on the world stage. This is not a time to undercut our diplomats.”

One of the country’s most respected ambassadors, then, just said that the State Department is flailing with Pompeo and Trump in charge. It’s about as damning a statement as one could imagine — and it came during one of the most dramatic periods of the Trump presidency.

You can read Yovanovitch’s full opening statement here.

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Digital rights group Fight for the Future conduced live facial recognition surveillance in Washington, DC, to track down members of Congress. | Fight for the Future

Almost 14,000 people’s faces were non-consensually scanned in Washington. Sound creepy? That’s the point.

Dressed in hazmat-like jumpsuits, wearing smartphones strapped to their heads, the activists who descended upon Congress on Thursday were a strange sight.

They were there to scan faces: members of Congress, journalists, and whoever else happened to cross their path in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. They also headed to K Street in hopes of finding Amazon lobbyists to scan.

Using Rekognition, Amazon’s commercially available facial recognition software, the activists scanned nearly 14,000 faces, which they cross-checked with a database that enables the people to be identified. They livestreamed the whole process.

The activists were not trying to be creepy for creepiness’s sake. Their goal was to show lawmakers that facial recognition software — which can identify an individual by analyzing their facial features in images, videos, or real time — is an invasive form of surveillance. Over the past few years, the tech has become embedded in high-stakes contexts like law enforcement and immigration; the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Transportation Security Administration all use it.

The activists have one demand: the technology should be banned.

“This should probably be illegal but until Congress takes action to ban facial recognition surveillance, it’s terrifyingly easy for anyone — a government agent, a corporation, or just a creepy stalker — to conduct biometric monitoring and violate basic rights at a massive scale,” said Evan Greer, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, the nonprofit advocacy group that organized Thursday’s action.

The Rekognition system correctly identified one lawmaker, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California. It also incorrectly indicated that it had identified several journalists, lobbyists, and even a celebrity — the singer Roy Orbison, who died in 1988 — thereby highlighting one of the main problems with facial recognition: Sometimes, the tech gets it wrong.

If you’re in DC, you can go to ScanCongress.com to see if your face was scanned, too.

Although the activists’ suits were emblazoned with a notice — “Facial recognition in progress” — the group did not ask people if they consent to be scanned. The software on their smartphones just automatically scanned whoever they passed as they walked around.

That sounds unethical, right? The activists agree — and that’s their point: Currently, there’s no law preventing people from scanning your face without your consent anytime you step out in public, and there should be.

“Our message for Congress is simple: make what we did today illegal,” Fight for the Future, which has been advocating for digital rights since its founding in 2011, said after the action.

“Because we’re decent human beings, all this data we’re collecting will be deleted after 2 weeks,” the group promised. “But there’s no law about that. Right now, sensitive facial recognition data can be stored forever.”

The action was part of Fight for the Future’s BanFacialRecognition.com campaign, which has been endorsed by grassroots civil rights organizations like Greenpeace and the Council on American Islamic Relations.

”People should be able to go about their daily lives without worrying that government agencies are keeping tabs on their every movement,” said Carol Rose, executive director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a statement on Thursday’s action. “For too long, face surveillance technology has gone unregulated, posing a serious threat to our basic civil rights and civil liberties.”

The case for banning facial recognition tech

Facial recognition software has encountered a growing backlash over the past few months. Behemoth companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have become mired in controversy over it. San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville have all issued local bans.

Meanwhile, some of the Democratic presidential candidates have articulated how they’d handle the tech if they’re elected. In August, Sen. Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for a total ban on the use of facial recognition software for policing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, and former housing secretary Julián Castro have noted that they’d regulate the technology; they did not promise to ban it.

Some argue that outlawing facial recognition tech is throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Advocates say the software can help with worthy aims, like finding missing children and elderly adults or catching criminals and terrorists. Microsoft President Brad Smith has said it would be “cruel” to altogether stop selling the software to government agencies. This camp wants to see the tech regulated, not banned.

Yet there’s good reason to think regulation won’t be enough. The danger of this tech is not well understood by the general public, and the market for it is so lucrative that there are strong financial incentives to keep pushing it into more areas of our lives in the absence of a ban. AI is also developing so fast that regulators would likely have to play whack-a-mole as they struggle to keep up with evolving forms of facial recognition.

Then there’s the well-documented fact that human bias can creep into AI. Often, this manifests as a problem with the training data that goes into AIs: If designers mostly feed the systems examples of white male faces, and don’t think to diversify their data, the systems won’t learn to properly recognize women and people of color. And indeed, we’ve found that facial recognition systems often misidentify those groups, which could lead to them being disproportionately held for questioning when law enforcement agencies put the tech to use.

In 2015, Google’s image recognition system labeled African Americans as “gorillas.” Three years later, Rekognition wrongly matched 28 members of Congress to criminal mug shots. Another study found that three facial recognition systems — IBM, Microsoft, and China’s Megvii — were more likely to misidentify the gender of dark-skinned people (especially women) than of light-skinned people.

Even if all the technical issues were to be fixed and facial recognition tech completely de-biased, would that stop the software from harming our society when it’s deployed in the real world? Not necessarily, as a recent report from the AI Now Institute explains.

Say the tech gets just as good at identifying black people as it is at identifying white people. That may not actually be a positive change. Given that the black community is already overpoliced in the US, making black faces more legible to this tech and then giving the tech to police could just exacerbate discrimination. As Zoé Samudzi wrote at the Daily Beast, “It is not social progress to make black people equally visible to software that will inevitably be further weaponized against us.”

Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, a law professor and a philosophy professor, respectively, argued last year that facial recognition tech is inherently damaging to our social fabric. “The mere existence of facial recognition systems, which are often invisible, harms civil liberties, because people will act differently if they suspect they’re being surveilled,” they wrote. The worry is that there’ll be a chilling effect on freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

The authors also note that our faces are something we can’t change (at least not without surgery), that they’re central to our identity, and that they’re all too easily captured from a distance (unlike fingerprints or iris scans). If we don’t ban facial recognition before it becomes more entrenched, they argue, “people won’t know what it’s like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited.”

Luke Stark, a digital media scholar who works for Microsoft Research Montreal, made another argument for a ban in a recent article titled “Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI.”

Comparing software to a radioactive element may seem over the top, but Stark insists the analogy is apt. Plutonium is the biologically toxic element used to make atomic bombs, and just as its toxicity comes from its chemical structure, the danger of facial recognition is ineradicably, structurally embedded within it, because it attaches numerical values to the human face. He explains:

Facial recognition technologies and other systems for visually classifying human bodies through data are inevitably and always means by which “race,” as a constructed category, is defined and made visible. Reducing humans into sets of legible, manipulable signs has been a hallmark of racializing scientific and administrative techniques going back several hundred years.

The mere fact of numerically classifying and schematizing human facial features is dangerous, he says, because it enables governments and companies to divide us into different races. It’s a short leap from having that capability to “finding numerical reasons for construing some groups as subordinate, and then reifying that subordination by wielding the ‘charisma of numbers’ to claim subordination is a ‘natural’ fact.”

In other words, racial categorization too often feeds racial discrimination. This is not a far-off hypothetical but a current reality: China is already using facial recognition to track Uighur Muslims based on their appearance, in a system the New York Times has dubbed “automated racism.” That system makes it easier for China to round up Uighurs and detain them in internment camps.

A ban is an extreme measure, yes. But a tool that enables a government to immediately identify us any time we cross the street is so inherently dangerous that treating it with extreme caution makes sense.

Instead of starting from the assumption that facial recognition is permissible — which is the de facto reality we’ve unwittingly gotten used to as tech companies marketed the software to us unencumbered by legislation — we’d do better to start from the assumption that it’s banned, then carve out rare exceptions for specific cases when it might be warranted.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

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President Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office and walks toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Don’t fall for it.

President Donald Trump just released a readout of his congenial April phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

You should give it a read — but just know that it’s meant to distract you. That’s because this first phone call was never the problem.

Trump spoke with Zelensky on April 21 to applaud the Ukrainian leader on winning his nation’s presidential election. “I congratulate you on a job well done,” Trump said, according to the White House readout of the call, “and congratulations on a fantastic election.” (The readout states on the first page that it is not a verbatim transcript, but rather a reconstruction based on the notes of White House officials who listened in on the call.)

“Thank you so very much,” Zelensky responded, “and I appreciate the congratulations.”

The rest of the call reads in a similar fashion, though it contains no mention of many issues like corruption that the White House previously said they had discussed.

The White House released the readout right as Friday’s impeachment hearing was getting started. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, used part of his opening statement to stage a dramatic reading of the call summary. The reason, he noted, was to show that Trump held a normal call with the Ukrainian leader.

But the appropriateness of the April call was never in doubt. Many who testified in the impeachment inquiry have said that that conversation was just fine. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the director for European affairs on the National Security Council, told investigators it was “positive.”

Rather, it’s the call on July 25 between Trump and Zelensky that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

During that conversation, Zelensky mentioned buying “more Javelins [missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.” Trump immediately responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Trump then went on to discuss his hope that Ukraine would open an investigation into Democratic candidate and former vice president Joe BIden and Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden — Joe’s son — sat.

Trump continues to say the July call was “perfect,” but it’s clear that it was anything but. That’s why the president and his allies are now promoting the unremarkable April call to distract from the July conversation and make it seem like Trump never did anything wrong.

Don’t fall for it. It’s the July call that matters, not the April one.

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Christina Animashaun/Vox

People are more likely to evacuate if they can find safe passage for their pets, too.

Welcome to Laboratories of Democracy, a series for Vox’s The Highlight, where we examine local policies and their impacts.

---

The policy: Pet evacuation plans for natural disasters

Where: Nationally

Since: 2006

The problem: It all started with Snowball. In the days after Hurricane Katrina inundated much of the Gulf Coast and burst through the New Orleans levies, the Associated Press reported that a boy had his small white dog Snowball taken from him by a police officer before he could get on a bus to be evacuated to Houston. “The boy cried out — ‘Snowball!’ Snowball!’ — then vomited in distress,” the AP reported.

The story was just one tragedy among thousands during and after Katrina, but it caused a large amount of anguish among pet owners across the country. Reports of thousands of abandoned pets and the many people who refused to leave their homes unless they could take their animals with them sparked a change in evacuation policy and a recognition of the strength of the human-animal bond. As for Snowball, there is some dispute as to whether the dog was ever found. Soon after the initial story was published, a federal government official told USA Today that Snowball had been reunited with its family.

In the massive Katrina evacuation, both out of New Orleans to avoid the floodwaters and then out of the state entirely, “a lot of people had top-down directives to not allow people to take dogs and cats with them, and bringing cats and dogs to sheltering spaces was not thought of. That caused a lot of distress and there was a huge outcry,” Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies evacuation decision-making, said.

The impact of Katrina on animals and their companions was enormous. According to a survey by the Fritz Institute, nearly half of those who chose to stay behind during Katrina said they didn’t want to leave their pets. One Mississippi veterinary official told the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association that about a quarter of the deaths in one county hit hard by the storm came from people staying with their pets rather than evacuating.

While there’s no exact count of the number of pets left behind, estimates range from 200,000 to 600,000 from the over 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast region. Pets continue to be a priority during evacuations — during the recent fires in Northern California, many pets were left behind as people fled the oncoming flames, leading to a large grassroots effort to reunite people and their animals.

The effects on people who lost their pets but survived are dramatic as well. One study of African American single mothers who had been affected by Katrina found: “Pet loss significantly predicted postdisaster distress, above and beyond demographic variables, pre- and postdisaster perceived social support, predisaster distress, hurricane-related stressors, and human bereavement.”

That people refused to leave rather than abandon their pets or were traumatized by losing them should not be a surprise. While this would not be news to nearly any pet owner, many people view companion animals as essentially members of their families.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, David Grimm, the author of Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, said many people saw pets as family members. “People saw animals dying, they see members of people’s families that are dying,” he told Vox.

As anyone who’s ever worked at a general interest news site or a local news station could tell you, people all over the country are intensely interested in pets and deeply, deeply affected by stories of them in danger or separated from people, especially children. “You would see video footage of dogs wading through toxic waters, cats clinging to rooftops, it focused attention not just on the plight of people but the plight of pets,” Grimm told Vox.

The next year, the bitterly divided second Congress of the second Bush administration managed to pass the PETS Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush about a year after Katrina. The law was an amendment to the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, which is the legal framework for much of the government’s role is disaster relief and assistance to local agencies. The PETS Act instructs local government to include pets in their disaster planning. The rubber hits the road largely at the local level, when states mandate that counties and other smaller agencies come up with plans to accommodate pets during disasters.

“There’s language in this that makes sure that FEMA can provide mass care shelter and assistance to states,” DeYoung said. “What that means is that states can request extra support from FEMA because they’re setting up a co-located shelter where they can request funds to offset planning and accommodating.”

How it worked: More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, several of the states most frequently impacted by disasters requiring evacuations have come up with strategies to help pets and their people.

In North Carolina, for instance, this has meant setting up shelters that allow people and pets to stay together during evacuations for hurricanes, including, according to the Virginian-Pilot, a shelter in Elizabeth City that was set up in a trailer full of “folded animal crates, food bowls, leashes, pooper scoopers and massive rolls of plastic sheeting” during Hurricane Florence last year.

The Virginian-Pilot reported that “emergency officials deployed dozens of the portable pet shelters” and were able to provide housing for “hundreds of animals.”

When Hurricane Matthew hammered the Southeast in 2016, it was well after the PETS Act was in force and national and local attention was firmly focused on the need to incorporate animals into disaster planning. More than 100 pet owners affected by the storm filled out a questionnaire designed by DeYoung and her co-author Ashley Farmer in March 2017: Just over 70 percent evacuated and nearly all of those who had left before or during the storm did so with at least one pet.

But that did not mean they necessarily knew where to go with them. Some reported having to drive farther to find a pet-friendly hotel or having to stay with non-pet-owning relatives. And just because pet-friendly shelters were in operation, that did not mean pet owners necessarily knew about them. While many people looked online for information about where they could bring their pets, the two researchers wrote that some people reported “social media” had informed them there were no shelters they could bring animals to.

But by putting it to locals, there can sometimes be confusion about how mandates from the state and federal government are carried out. The plans sometimes “do not dedicate extensive planning for sheltering and accommodations for pets in emergencies” and can be “unclear why or how the plans at the state level are being delegated to county planners,” DeYoung and two co-authors found in a 2016 paper published in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The PETS Act “doesn’t lay out the roadmap” for appropriate services for people and their pets, and states and local agencies are “still trying to figure out what it looks like,” Diane Robinson, the program manager for disaster services at the Humane Society, said, “which is still today a challenge for communities to have disaster plans in place that really meet the demand.” More than 30 states “have laws or emergency operation plans that provide for the evacuation, rescue, and recovery of animals in the event of a disaster,” according to the Michigan State University Animal Legal and Historical Center.

And some people still choose to leave some of their pets behind, DeYoung and Farmer found in their 2019 paper. “‘Outside cats,’ for instance, were left to fend for themselves as they were not used to being inside,” and of the people interviewed, “89 percent of respondents with dogs indicated that they took all pets with them, while 55 percent of respondents with cats took all pets with them.”

Robinson pointed to programs and policies in some of the states most frequently hit by disasters, including North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California. “The federal government can only do so much; disaster is a local problem that needs a local solution.” When Harvey inundated the Houston area in 2017, one large shelter quickly changed its policies to allow pets inside, NPR reported.

One thing the PETS Act does not do is mandate that hotels and motels accept pets during a mandatory evacuation. According to the fact-checking and debunking website Snopes, false information about this supposed mandate starting popping up during 2017’s hurricane season as Harvey and Irene bore down on the Gulf Coast and East Coast respectively. The rumor was so prevalent that FEMA addressed it on its own webpage, telling pet owners, “Hotels and motels participating in FEMA’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance Program do not fall under the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act,” and that they should instead “call the hotel before you go and ask if pets are permitted.”

This common misconception pops up online frequently during disasters and has to be debunked just as often. “Hotels are not required to accept pets in a mandatory evacuation,” DeYoung said. “Some businesses out of good PR or having human compassion,” will, but that’s hardly a national-level policy.

“We want to see that the owners and their animals are able to be housed closely so that human-animal bond remains,” Robinson said. “It’s very healing for them and comforting for them to spend that time [together], to have that one piece of normalcy in their life where they’re providing care for that animal and not just sitting and waiting.”

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York.

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The Simpson family (and Mr. Burns) are now on Disney+. | 20th Century Fox

But what’s concerning about how the classic series’ new streaming home is treating the show?

In Watch This, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff tells you what she’s watching on TV — and why you should watch it, too. Read the archives here. This week: The Simpsons. You may have heard of it. The first 30 seasons are now streaming on Disney+.

In the mid 2000s, Slate press critic Jack Shafer tried to figure out a method by which to pinpoint the moment when millennials and Gen-Xers had taken over the reins of the national media from the baby boomers. The answer he came up with was brilliant: Once younger generations were in charge, we would start sprinkling articles with perfectly cromulent Simpsons references.

I don’t know if Shafer was exactly right — because the structure of what we think of as “the media” changed so much that it’s more likely this article will end up with a headline like “Why you need to start watching The Simpsons right now” than “Me not recommend The Simpsons? That’s unpossible!” — but I appreciate the spirit of what he was going for. The Simpsons is like oxygen if you were born after 1980 or so. It’s always been there. It will always be there.

That’s true even though the series’s best days are long behind it. I still mostly enjoy The Simpsons when I tune in for the odd episode, but those first 10-ish seasons form what is probably the greatest TV show ever constructed, and definitely the funniest. I could — and do — watch them over and over and over again, and now that they’re streaming on Disney+, I probably will continue to do so. (Yes, they were available for years on a platform called “Simpsons World,” via FX, but paying for a platform mostly to watch The Simpsons on it always felt a bit extravagant to me.)

And yet: Disney+ has some kinks to work out if it wants to win my full-throated Simpsons support.

The Disney+ episodes of The Simpsons are still great. But you’re missing the embiggened picture (literally).

The major problem confronting Simpsons fans who decide to stream on Disney+ is that the service isn’t showing the older episodes in their original aspect ratio. Most seasons of the show were formatted for boxy, standard-definition TVs, in an aspect ratio of 4:3 (meaning four units of width to three units of height). But on our modern widescreen TVs, which display images at a 16:9 ratio (16 units of width to nine units of height), 4:3 programs are displayed with black bars on either side of the picture, because it isn’t large enough to fill the entire screen. (For more on aspect ratios, consult this Vox explainer from the halcyon days of 2014.)

Many viewers feel like they’re not getting “the full picture” if they see those black bars, so most networks that rebroadcast old 4:3 programs in 16:9 zoom in on the center of the image. This process ends up cutting off visual information at the top and bottom of the screen. Sometimes, that’s not a problem, even if it is an inherently truncated image. But in the case of a show with so many sight gags like The Simpsons, the tops and bottoms of an image can be where some of the best stuff lives.

Observe:

Simpsons World allowed viewers to watch episodes in either the 4:3 aspect ratio or the 16:9 aspect ratio, so Simpsons purists (like myself) could get the full effect. So Disney+ should bring back the 4:3 episodes as soon as possible, lest I write more strongly worded articles to that effect. (“Dear Mr. Iger: There are too many Simpsons episodes in the wrong aspect ratio. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot!”)

(Simpsons World also allowed users to check out the DVD commentary tracks for the episodes, as well as special themed collections. My life is not necessarily hinging on whether these come back as it is with the 4:3 episodes, but, like, how hard could it be to throw them up there on Disney+, too?)

Look: Watching The Simpsons in 16:9 is still pretty darn amazing. These episodes are as funny as they were when they first aired in the 1990s, and some of the greatest television ever made lurks in the archives. (For my money, season four is the show’s best, but the fact that you can make credible arguments for basically any season from two through eight is proof of how good this show is.) The Simpsons possesses heart, wit, and genius in equal measure, and if you want to be my friend, then you need to understand why my wife and I so frequently say, “The door blew shut!” to each other.

In all likelihood, you’ve heard of The Simpsons before this article, and if you have, get thee to a Disney+ account. If you’ve heard of it but never seen it, well, come on already! And if this is somehow the first time The Simpsons has ever crossed your field of vision, you have so much delight, so much entertainment, and so many brightly yellow people ahead of you. If these ideas are intriguing to you, please subscribe to my newsletter.

The Simpsons is streaming on Disney+, though the most recent season is available on Hulu. New episodes still air Sundays on Fox at 8 pm Eastern, which is a whole thing, huh?

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Italy’s parliament recently passed a law that requires parents to prove their children have the required shots before entering school, or else face a €500 (about $600 USD) non-compliance fine. | Plush Studios/Getty

Countries like Germany and Australia are tired of measles outbreaks — so they’re moving to fine anti-vaccine parents.

There’s a school of thought that refusing vaccines on behalf of your children amounts to child abuse, and that parents should be punished for their decision. We know vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective at preventing the spread of disease, and failing to immunize children can put them (and vulnerable people around them) at tremendous risk of illness or even death when outbreaks get rolling.

Now it seems Germany, Australia, and a number of other countries are fed up enough with vaccine-refusing parents that they’re experimenting with punitive measures. We haven’t quite reached the level of child abuse charges, but moms and dads in these countries may face fines if they fail to give their kids the recommended shots. In Australia, the directors of schools that let in the unvaccinated kids would be fined too.

This marks a pretty aggressive shift in how we manage vaccine refusers and the costly, deadly outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough they help spark.

Here’s a quick roundup of the global crackdown on vaccine-refusing parents:

• In Germany on Thursday, lawmakers passed a law stating that parents need to prove they’ve vaccinated their kids against measles — or risk fines up to up to €2,500 (about $2,750 USD). Unvaccinated children also risk losing their places in school.
• Italy’s parliament passed a law that makes 10 childhood vaccinations mandatory for kids up to age 16, and requires parents to prove their children are immunized before entering school or else face a €500 (about $560 USD) noncompliance fine. And kids who aren’t vaccinated are being told not to come to school.
• In France, the health ministry made 11 vaccines — up from the current three (diphtheria, tetanus, and polio) — mandatory for children, though there’s no talk of a fine there yet.
• Further afield, New South Wales, Australia, passed “no jab, no play” legislation in September 2017: the law bans unvaccinated kids from preschool and day care and fine the directors of schools that admit un-immunized children $5,500 Australian dollars ($4,400 USD). The law in New South Wales is modeled on similarly stringent laws in other Australian states, and across the country, parents with children who aren’t immunized aren’t eligible for child care benefits.
• In the US, New York — where a large measles outbreak raged on for nearly a year — the government threatened parents who don’t vaccinate their children with a fine of up to $1,000.

These fines come amid a growing problem with measles globally. Over the past two years, measles cases have been edging up in countries around the world, with a 300 percent rise in cases over the same period in 2018, according to the World Health Organization.

Many countries where measles had been declared eliminated have recently lost that status, including Britain, Greece, Brazil, France, and Germany. With more than 1,200 measles cases this year — the largest number for any year since 1992 — the US also nearly lost its measles elimination status.

Before we consider punishing American parents, we might try this

Here, vaccine skeptics have also been persuading more parents in a number of states to refuse shots for their children. So is the US ready for a similar crackdown?

Punishing parents for doing things that could harm their kids is not without precedent in the US. For example, there are laws in various states requiring parents to use car seats or seat belts for their children or else pay a fine or be docked driver’s license points. Same goes for firearm storage laws.

But before we start fining anti-vaxxers, there are some much more basic steps the US could take that would improve vaccination rates. And they involve simply making it harder for parents to opt out of routine shots on behalf of their kids.

Vaccines fall under the public health jurisdiction of the states. And there’s currently a lot of variation across the US when it comes to immunization requirements.

Even though all 50 states have legislation requiring vaccines for students entering school, 45 states allow exemptions for people with religious beliefs against immunizations, and 15 states currently grant philosophical exemptions for those opposed to vaccines because of personal or moral beliefs. (The exceptions are Mississippi, California, and West Virginia, and more recently, New York, and Maine which now have the strictest vaccine laws in the nation, allowing only medical exemptions.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the parts of the country that make it easier for people to opt out of their shots tend to have higher rates of … people opting out of vaccines. So a lax regulatory environment can create space for more parents to refuse vaccines.

That’s why some states have been moving to crack down on this trend — most notably California — and they’re already seeing success in terms of boosting vaccine coverage rates.

In 2015, another measles outbreak prompted California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, to sign a bill, SB277, that abolished all nonmedical exemptions. And the California experience is instructive for other states that might want to close some of their loopholes.

According to the state health department, the number of kindergarten students in the 2017-2018 school year with all their required vaccines was 95.1 percent — a 4.7 percentage point increase over 2014-2015 and the second-highest reported vaccine rate since health authorities started tracking. A recent analysis, published in JAMA, put the opt-out rate at 4.8 percent by 2017.

Hidden within that increase is some conflicting data, said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. Since the law was enacted, medical exemptions have also increased, suggesting there may be an unintended effect of the crackdown on nonmedical exemptions.

That’s because something else was going on in California, and it offset that increase in medical exemptions: In parallel with abolishing nonmedical exemptions through SB277, California launched the “Conditional Entrant Intervention Project,” in 2015. The idea was that public health professionals would work with local health departments to identify schools granting high rates of conditional entrants, and work with them to bring them down.

Between 2014 and 2015, Omer and his colleagues found a sharp 23 percent decline in the conditional admission rate. So even with the rise in medical exemptions, the overall vaccine exemption rate still went down thanks to the decline in conditional vaccine entry to schools.

Omer told Vox, “I’m not discounting eliminating nonmedical exemptions. It’s a reasonable option. But it may not resolve all issues.” That’s why California is now cracking down on bogus medical exemptions, too.

That means simply outlawing nonmedical exemptions may not be a panacea in states that have a high percentage of parents using their social capital to spread anti-vaccine views. And as we saw in California, a ban on nonmedical exemptions could even backfire if other vaccine loopholes are left open.

But should look for ways that make it more inconvenient to opt out — by doing things like introducing exemptions with regular renewals. Fewer than a dozen states require annual — or more frequent — recertification for medical exemptions. So for example, if a child in a K-12 school gets an exemption in kindergarten, it will follow them through to college. She’ll never be asked to renew that exemption. Or, by cracking down on the conditional entry to school.

And they should move fast. The percentage of people seeking nonmedical exemptions — while still small — has also been creeping upward, from 1.1 percent in 2009-2010 to 2.2 percent by 2017-2018. Outbreaks in recent years have also been getting larger, Omer said. “That’s the canary in the coal mine for me.”

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2vtepw2