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One Good Thing: Lucy Dacus’s latest album is a different kind of ghost story

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There’s a common trajectory that can frequently be observed in American popular music: A promising first album will brim with potential but maybe isn’t quite all there yet. A near-great second album will burst with ideas and can make it seem like the artist can do anything. A masterful, even perfect third album pulls together everything that worked in the first two albums to make something amazing.
I always think of this trajectory in terms of Bruce Springsteen. His first three albums — January 1973’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPy82OO6vRg&list=PLgaFNC_I_ZknSHzbilIia07ucfu8FJaeh">Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.</a>; November 1973’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWLMaZ7H3B0&list=PLgaFNC_I_Zkm1W3n85zslCNxn5X8JQkUI">The Wild, the Innocent, & the E-Street Shuffle</a>; and 1975’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2X0Gf9jfz8&list=PLgaFNC_I_ZklS14ekQlw_bOqM63aBY3RI">Born to Run</a> — follow this career trajectory almost exactly.
There are plenty of artists who follow this trajectory other than Springsteen, but allow me to stick with the Boss for a second, because another Springsteen superfan is 26-year-old <a href="https://lucydacus.com/">singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus</a>. And Dacus’s third album, <a href="https://lucydacus.ffm.to/homevideo.owe">Home Video</a>, released this summer, is a straight-up masterpiece.
(I suspect Dacus will be flattered by the comparison. She released a terrific cover of Springsteen’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1JYXY15k6E">“Dancing in the Dark”</a> in 2019, and she told Rolling Stone in <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lucy-dacus-boygenius-woodstock-808369/">an interview that year</a> that “Bruce’s birthday should be a national holiday.”)
The similarities between Home Video and Born to Run aren’t readily apparent upon first listen. While Springsteen’s album is a blast of desperate rock, Dacus’s album builds lush musical arrangements full of shimmering percussion and ethereal backing vocals. It’s the kind of slightly stripped-down singer-songwriter arrangement that typified her first album, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5NLJAfqmeU&list=PL-iTX2QYt6_kl792zS9-0t77U98odWQUR">2016’s No Burden</a>. Born to Run, meanwhile, is brash, bold, and noisy, Springsteen’s street rat strivers straining to be heard over an enormous wall of sound.
Dacus isn’t averse to rocking out, either. No Burden contains plenty of tunes that turn up the volume a bit, and her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WDZdT04ls4&list=PLZqsyBiYZFQ3ipLPwlbvTNkO9QQBdcdlD">2018 second album, Historian</a>, is louder still, tipping all the way over into heavier rock several times. That trend continues. Several songs on Home Video favor the sound of a shaggy bar band having the time of their life. The opening track, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGaVVOyiVag">“Hot and Heavy,”</a> offers a guitar-heavy tour of the white evangelical Southern milieu the album takes place in, while the single <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qmaB3qwPAs">“Brando”</a> is a terrific pissed-off breakup song just begging for either a hard rock or dance-pop cover.
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But for much of its running time, Home Video skews ever so slightly more toward the quietude of Dacus’s debut album. Dacus has grown as a songwriter since 2016, and her songs create a tension where the people at the center of her stories are confronting horrifying things at a volume barely above a whisper. The album centerpiece <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S19BYUvnKjk">“Thumbs”</a> features the singer’s hushed accounting of a night when she accompanied a friend (or possibly lover) who was about to see her abusive father for the first time in years.
“Thumbs” is immediately followed with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5YlfCvPtfE">“Going Going Gone,”</a> which amounts to a campfire sing-along about an innocent and nervous ex-boyfriend who grows out of that innocence and turns into a drunk who grabs women’s asses. And yet the song never leaves behind the feel of something you might sing around the fire in the middle of the woods. It’s gentle, even as its subject matter underscores a certain tragedy.
The voices on “Going Going Gone” include indie-rock enigma Mitski, whom Dacus opened for on Mitski’s most recent tour. The chorus also features Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, whom Dacus records with as the trio boygenius. All three have made cameo appearances on one another’s most recent solo album, starting with <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/9/1/21404841/phoebe-bridgers-punisher-review-chinese-satellite">Bridgers’s Punisher</a> in 2020, continuing with <a href="https://www.vox.com/22408663/little-oblivions-julien-baker-review-one-good-thing">Baker’s Little Oblivions</a> this spring, and now concluding with “Going Going Gone” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcctkQrwR0s">“Please Stay”</a> on Home Video. Dacus’s musical net is cast incredibly wide.
So why the Springsteen comparisons, beyond Dacus’s fandom for the rock star? For as ultimately different as Home Video and Born to Run sound, the two albums fall into similarly almost-autobiographical territory.
Springsteen’s stories of New Jersey working-class tough guys endlessly posturing in hopes no one will figure out what they’re overcompensating for had the feel of someone remembering their adolescence with just enough distance to make sense of it. (Springsteen was 25 when Born to Run came out.)
Meanwhile, Dacus draws from both her life and the lives of other people she knew growing up in heavily evangelical Virginia. She wrote many of the songs on the album after reading her childhood journals, and as such, her songs remember the pains of growing up queer in a place that didn’t always let people explore that side of themselves. (Dacus described herself as “gay,” “queer,” and “bisexual or pansexual” in the same sentence in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/t-magazine/lucy-dacus-home-video.html">a New York Times interview</a>, and then said she thinks “Gender is a joke.”)
“Hot and Heavy” sets up the album as a kind of memory play — Dacus is back somewhere and suffused with painful memories of growing up. Where “Hot and Heavy” explicitly roots that in memories of a person Dacus misses, it also creates an expectation for the album to follow: You’re listening to the sonic equivalent of driving through your hometown after years away, memories pouring in with every building you pass.
Born to Run ends with the epic, mournful <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR_0nbEzVdY">“Jungleland,”</a> in which Springsteen’s strivers realize they might never escape. Home Video concludes with maybe the best song Dacus has yet written, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GVnrnqoZ7o">“Triple Dog Dare,”</a> which (in my read of the album) circles back to the person she missed so badly in “Hot and Heavy.”
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“Triple Dog Dare” is <a href="https://music.apple.com/nz/album/home-video/1559506368">directly autobiographical</a>, drawing from a connection Dacus had with another girl as a teen that she didn’t realize was romantic attraction until the girl’s mother, seeing what was budding between the two, drove the teens apart. In real life, the friendship withered; in the song, Dacus and her friend run away on a boat, off to be together forever. Escape is possible, but only through storytelling and art. Home Video, like Born to Run before it, is haunted not by ghosts but by older versions of ourselves who made different choices from us, some for good and some for ill.
Our hardest memories never resolve into something we might have liked better, no matter how much we try. You’re always going to be haunted by the choices you didn’t make, the people who fell away from your life, and the places you ultimately had to leave. Home Video brims with the feeling of things that were lost and things that simply never were. It’s brilliant and beautiful and just about perfect.
Home Video is available on all music streaming platforms and for sale as a CD or digital download. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the <a href="https://www.vox.com/one-good-thing">One Good Thing</a> archives.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22649452/lucy-dacus-home-video-review">https://www.vox.com/culture/22649452/lucy-dacus-home-video-review</a>

vox One Good Thing: Lucy Dacus’s latest album is a different kind of ghost story

There’s a common trajectory that can frequently be observed in American popular music: A promising first album will brim with potential but maybe isn’t quite all there yet. A near-great second album will burst with ideas and can make it seem like th…

Meet the most hilariously weird model on TikTok

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Sometimes I get really depressed about all the ways TikTok is flattening culture, how it bombards its users with one completely random trend or subculture that becomes a nationwide talking point for roughly three days and never matters again.
It’s depressing to me because the joy of TikTok is supposed to be about getting lost in the thick of it, and yet so many of us find ourselves in the same places, even as we assume that the videos we see are somehow a reflection of our own hyper-individual tastes. It’s depressing because if you spend enough time on TikTok, you’ll start to notice how many of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/7/13/22570476/youtube-voice-tiktok-influencer-sound">creators start to adopt each other’s cadences</a> and editing conventions, and how an entire platform of weird and totally dissimilar content can end up labeled as “TikTok humor.”
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But every once in a while, I’ll stumble across a TikTok user who’s so funny and so captivating that it makes me completely forget all of that. One of those people is <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@captincroook?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">Alex Consani,</a> a model and funny person about town whom I started following because I needed to know where she <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@captincroook/video/6970153302763900165?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">bought a certain dress</a>, and after watching more of her videos I realized I needed to know everything about her life.
Like all the best people on TikTok, though, she leaves the details a mystery and instead shows herself in absurdist situations (the <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@captincroook/video/6995252005933534469?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">outside of the Pasadena Scientology building</a> in a pretend MTV Cribs episode in which she tells people they can buy the Hunger Games book series there, for instance), while <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@captincroook/video/6971989855320509702?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1">contorting her face</a> in a way that is, inarguably, art.
Alex Consani’s internet life existed long before TikTok, however. She’d gone <a href="https://www.facebook.com/slaymodels/posts/1454392964590750">viral back in 2016</a> at the age of 12, after a feature in Cosmopolitan Germany about her life as a trans model. Which, yes, makes her just 18 now, a number I was shocked to learn considering how she’s managed to build such a unique brand of humor and more than 600,000 followers.
From the Bay Area — though she’s headed to college in New York City this fall — Alex chatted with me over the phone about her TikTok fame that, like many creators, exploded after the pandemic. The interview has been edited and condensed.
What came first, modeling or being professionally funny?
I started modeling in about 2015. My mom saw this really scary, dingy Facebook ad for some modeling agency, and she was like, “Oh, Alex, would you want to do this?” And I was like, “Wait, that would be fun.” It was actually a really good experience and it helped me a lot in my career. It was an agency based in LA, so it was a lot of traveling down to LA, basically learning the ropes of the industry.
How’d you start on social media?
I’ve always had a Play-Doh face. I’m very expressive. When Instagram was at its peak after Vine died, I used to try and be one of those, like, finsta Instagram creators [a.k.a more alternative, edgy Instagram influencers who shitpost freely rather than curating a polished aesthetic]. I took pride in the stuff that I post because I always thought it was so funny. So when TikTok came up and we were in quarantine, I saw that as an opportunity for me to post that to a broader audience. And obviously, I never expected anything to come from it, but it ended up happening. I don’t know if my modeling agency likes what I post sometimes. It can be a little crazy.
What was your first introduction to the internet?
I grew up on YouTube, obviously. I remember watching a lot of makeup tutorials from the 2000s and 2010s. Also just seeing movies and TV shows like Hannah Montana where they were like, texting and using social media apps and stuff.
What was it like when you started to blow up on TikTok?
I’ve changed a lot since I’ve started doing social media. I’m following my own sense of humor, instead of getting inspiration from other creators or other things like that. Having that unique sense of humor is really what TikTok specifically lives for. I still don’t really feel like I’m funny. But once I found my ability to be comfortable on the internet, and just post whatever I want in the moment, was when I started looking at myself as a funny person.
You have a popular shop on Depop; is that where you find most of your clothes?
I like Depop, but a lot of the time I can’t find the things I want at the right price because I’m very frugal with my money where I can be. I really like supporting thrift stores, and a lot of my friends do clothing resale, so I’ll just go buy from them. [My style is] like, Kesha mixed with early 2000s Rihanna.
What does your For You page look like?
Oh, god. I feel like my For You page is very mixed. It’s like, strange audios. I don’t really get much of anything other than just random compilation videos of random things. I love watching hair tutorials.
How do you deal with all the brands that reach out to you about sponsorships?
I want to make sure that my content isn’t brand-focused because I like the personalized aspects of other creators, and I’m at my most funny and my most positive when I’m posting things I genuinely want to post. So I am getting those brand sponsorship offers, but it’s really hard to choose what to take on. When it comes to, like, bigger deals, I’ll definitely hit up my modeling agent to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Honestly I haven’t made any money yet, believe it or not. I’m not in <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mqq4/how-much-does-tiktok-creator-fund-pay">the Creator Fund</a>, I just like to do [social media] for fun. I feel like there are other, more profitable, more “Alex” businesses.
Where do you want to take your social media following?
Modeling and being a content creator, they’re very short-lived careers. I’ve always had a goal of starting a business, and that’s kind of why I tried to move to Depop for a little bit, just to see how I could do in the business world. That’s something that I could genuinely see myself doing and genuinely see myself loving, a fashion related business. I’ve worked in the fashion industry for long enough that it might be something that I get tired of quickly, so I don’t really know, honestly.
This column first published in The Goods newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/newsletters">Sign up here</a> so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22654214/alex-consani-tiktok-model">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22654214/alex-consani-tiktok-model</a>

vox Meet the most hilariously weird model on TikTok

Sometimes I get really depressed about all the ways TikTok is flattening culture, how it bombards its users with one completely random trend or subculture that becomes a nationwide talking point for roughly three days and never matters again. It’s d…

In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand

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Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/beautiful-world-where-are-you-9781250818034/9780374602604">Beautiful World, Where Are You</a>, it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is going to be struggling with on the page is herself. Or rather, the phenomenon of herself.
<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/3/20807728/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends">Sally Rooney</a> has become that rarest of creatures among literary novelists: a brand name. There are other literary novelists who have bestselling books and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/4/22/21229912/hulu-normal-people-review-tv-sally-rooney">hit TV show adaptations</a> of their work, but only Sally Rooney has <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/sally-rooney-bucket-hat">a hypebeast bucket hat</a> and <a href="https://lithub.com/faber-is-opening-a-sally-rooney-pop-up-shop-but-what-does-a-sally-rooney-pop-up-shop-look-like/">a pop-up shop</a>. Early galleys of Beautiful World, Where Are You <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/20/advanced-copies-sally-rooney-unpublished-book-sold-beautiful-world">sold for hundreds of dollars online</a>, and even the promotional tote bag her publisher put together can fetch about $80 on the resale market.
Since her first book came out in 2017, Rooney has gone from much-admired young writer to Instagram status symbol to metaphor for everything that is ailing white middle-class millennials. And she’s done it all, apparently, without much caring for the experience.
“I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things — having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself,” says Alice, the celebrity novelist who is one of the four central characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You. “When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.”
Alice’s discontent with her life and her work is one of the chief animating forces of the novel. Like Rooney’s previous books — 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2019’s Normal People — Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. At its core, it is obsessed with <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/3/20807728/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends">the same set of questions that have always preoccupied Rooney</a>: As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?
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Rating: 4 out of 5
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The love stories provide the plot skeleton, and Rooney sketches them out with her characteristically sharp eye for the ever-shifting power dynamics of relationships and impressively intimate sex scenes. (Rooney’s tool kit also comes, it must be said, with a tendency to occasionally have characters break up over a misunderstanding so stupid that you kind of just say, “Okay, Sally, we’ll let it go because it’s you.”)
Alice is the principal character in our first dyad. Like Rooney, Alice recently published two novels that were met with a level of acclaim she finds baffling. She has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and now she is convalescing in an enormous borrowed house in a tiny Irish town. There, she strikes up a relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker she meets on Tinder who tells her flatly that he never plans to read her novels. They embark on a relationship animated simultaneously by Felix’s apparent disdain for Alice and her own fawning admiration for him, and by their shared understanding that this apparent dynamic is fundamentally false, and masks something murkier occurring between them under the surface.
Our other couple is firmly rooted in Dublin. There, Alice’s best friend Eileen works a poorly paid job at a literary magazine, grieves her recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, and lives in a flatshare with a married couple. She’s nearing 30, and she’s beginning to fear that she’ll never really grow up.
Eileen’s strongest support system is with her childhood friend Simon: 35, handsome, wealthy, and saintly. Eileen and Simon are plainly in love with each other from page one, but their five-year age gap makes the power dynamics of their Emma-Knightley-esque friendship so fraught that they can only approach the possibility of a relationship on tiptoe, pretending they don’t realize what they’re doing.
Rooney gives us these two love stories in highly distant third-person prose. The narrator’s eye is like a camera’s lens, showing us only her characters’ physical movements, their dialogue, the emotions their facial expressions might seem to suggest. We have no access to what’s going on inside their heads, no way of knowing when they are lying to themselves or to each other, outside of minute tells: Alice tucking her hair behind one ear when she runs into Felix; Eileen coming straight home to microwave refrigerated leftovers covered in cling film.
The only time we begin to get a glimpse of their interior monologues comes in the chapters that bridge the book’s two romances: long, discursive emails between Eileen and Alice. There, they comfortably transition back and forth between gossiping about their love lives and careers to heady intellectual debates about why civilizations collapse, whether it matters to the vast majority of humanity if they do, and whether beauty matters when so much of the rest of the world is miserable. Eileen thinks humanity lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, “when plastics became the most widespread material in existence;” Alice thinks it happened after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Beautiful World, Where Are You gets much of its tension from the disconnect between the spare prose of the third-person sections and the rambling soliloquies of the emails between Eileen and Alice. As they remind each other in their emails over and over again, they both know that the world is in a state of crisis. The environment is collapsing, reactionary right-wing political movements are on the upswing, and most of the world’s population lives in grinding poverty to subsidize the unconscionable wealth of the rest of the world. And yet, in their day-to-day lives, they both seem to find themselves most often concerned with their romantic travails, their careers, their families and friendships, and the art that moves them and brings them pleasure. The contradiction strikes them as by turns insufferably immoral and beautifully human.
This same contradiction is also the animating force behind Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Sally Rooney’s novels are in many ways 19th-century bourgeois marriage novels with more sex and texting, and she and her characters seem to be constantly torn between taking a visceral delight in the pleasures of the form — the sheer emotional power of hoping that Mr. Knightley and Emma will at last finally admit their love for one another — and horrified by their lack of ethical and political power.
Rooney’s earlier novels kept this debate mostly subtextual. It was the visceral, erotic tug between her characters that pulled the reader in, that lit up her sparse prose and turned her books into sensations. Beautiful World, in contrast, is unlikely to be quite such a hit with readers, however successful it is on its own terms. It takes place very determinedly outside of the realm of the body. The love stories exist, but the ethical problem of art is what this novel is capital-A About.
“The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” Alice proclaims in one email to Eileen. “Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it down tightly underneath the glittering surface of the text.”
“I agree it seems vulgar, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse,” Eileen responds. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.”
Within the framework of this debate, turning a novelist like Sally Rooney into a merch-hawking celeb does feel as though it’s in such poor taste as to be almost violent. It detaches Rooney the human being and Rooney the artist from Rooney the brand name, whose primary value is its ability to make money for Rooney’s publisher. Books, in this world, are only barely morally defensible as it is, given their limited ability to fix society’s ills. Thinking about them as tools by which to mine wealth and social capital from the celebrity ecosystem — turning novelists into brand names — would be willfully dehumanizing.
But Rooney does offer us a possible solution to the terrible moral problem of the novel. Toward the end of Beautiful World, we take a trip to a wedding, that traditional climax of a marriage novel. At last, the camera lens through which we’ve been seeing the world breaks, and we slip seamlessly into our characters’ minds and bodies, the sensual details that occupy them most, in a long lyrical, ecstatic burst of prose.
Here, finally, is the end of alienation. Here, finally, is what it means to live life in a body, as a human being, not as a dry, mechanical observer or as a bodiless brain in cyberspace. That is what novels can offer us, even bourgeois realist novels, and especially Rooney’s earlier novels. And that, she seems to argue, is what matters most of all.
It is also what makes Beautiful World, for me, even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends, although I think it’s unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser on the level the other two novels were. There is something tender about the way Rooney turns again and again to the novel, almost against her will, as though, Mr. Darcy-like, she has struggled in vain to deny her true feelings. Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art — and, by extension, to the ways in which human beings relate to one another.
“And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?” Eileen posits at one point. “Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.”
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love. It’s much sweeter and smarter than all the merch would lead you to believe.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22654386/sally-rooney-beautiful-world-where-are-you-review">https://www.vox.com/culture/22654386/sally-rooney-beautiful-world-where-are-you-review</a>

vox In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand

Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is going to be struggling with on the page is herself. Or rather, the phenomenon of herself. Sally Rooney ha…

America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TYALAxMhbAKwdKUMMKAi6LQmR8M=/0x161:3000x1732/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823651/GettyImages_1214134265_copy.jpg" /></div>
More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish.
Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine threshold that mitigates the worst Covid-19 outcomes but doesn’t prevent all infections? Or is it something else entirely?
At the root of this confusion is a big question the US, including policymakers, experts, and the general public, has never been able to answer: How many Covid-19 deaths are too many?
The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America’s anti-pandemic efforts from the start. At first, the goal of restrictions was to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/3/10/21171481/coronavirus-us-cases-quarantine-cancellation">“flatten the curve”</a>: to keep the number of cases low enough that hospitals could treat those that did arise. But that consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus — leaving the country with patchwork restrictions and no clear idea of what it meant to “beat” Covid-19, let alone a strategy to achieve a victory.
The vaccines were supposed to be a way out. But between <a href="https://www.vox.com/22602039/breakthrough-cases-covid-19-delta-variant-masks-vaccines">breakthrough infections</a>, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22632695/long-covid-19-vaccines-delta-variant-pandemic">risks of long Covid</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22630979/covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-delta-variant">new variants</a>, it’s becoming clear the vaccines didn’t get rid of the need to answer the underlying question of what the Covid-19 endgame is.
America is now stuck between those two extremes: The country wants to reduce the risk of Covid-19, but it also wants to limit the remnants of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions on day-to-day life.
“We’re not trying to go for zero Covid,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “The question becomes: When do, in most communities, people feel comfortable going about their daily business and not worrying, excessively, about doing things that are important and meaningful to them?”
Will Americans accept the deaths of tens of thousands of people, as they do with the flu, if it means life returning to normal? Can the public tolerate an even higher death toll — akin to the drug overdose crisis, which <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm">killed an estimated 94,000 people in 2020</a> — if that’s what it takes to truly end social distancing and other precautions?
Does it make a difference if the vast majority of deaths are among those who are willingly unvaccinated, who, in effect, accepted a greater risk from the coronavirus? Are further reductions in deaths worth postponing a return to “normal” — or changing what “normal” means — if continued precautions are mild, like prolonged masking or widespread testing?
There are no easy answers here. Even among the experts I’ve spoken to over the past few weeks, there’s wide disagreement on how much risk is tolerable, when milder precautions like masking are warranted, and at what point harsher measures, like lockdowns and school closures, are needed. There’s not even agreement on what the endgame is; some say that, from a policy standpoint, the goal should be to keep caseloads manageable for hospitals, while others call for doing much more to drive down Covid-19.
One big problem identified by experts: “I don’t think we’re having those conversations enough,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Instead of the public and officials openly discussing how much risk is acceptable, the public dialogue often feels like two extremes — the very risk-averse and those downplaying any risk of the coronavirus whatsoever — talking past each other.
But the path to an endgame should begin with a frank discussion about just how much risk is tolerable as the coronavirus goes from pandemic to endemic.
If there is one point of agreement among most experts, it’s that Covid-19 is here to stay. “Until very recently, I was hopeful that there was a possibility of getting to a point where we had no more Covid,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. Now she believes that “it is infeasible, in the short term, to aim for an eradication goal.”
Particularly with the rise of the delta variant, a consensus has formed that the coronavirus likely can’t be eliminated. Like the flu, a rapidly shapeshifting coronavirus will continue to stick around in some version for years to come, with new variants leading to new spikes in infections. Especially as it becomes unlikely that 100 percent of the population will get vaccinated, and as it becomes clear that the vaccines <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22630979/covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-delta-variant">provide great but not perfect protection</a>, the virus is probably always going to be with us in some form, both in America and abroad.
That doesn’t mean the US has to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the coming years. While the vaccines have struggled at least somewhat in preventing any kind of infection (including asymptomatic infection), they have <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22630979/covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-delta-variant">held up</a> in preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death — reducing the risk of each by roughly 90 percent, compared to no vaccine. Research has also found <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w29092">stricter restrictions reduce Covid-19 spread and death</a>, and that <a href="https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf">masks work</a>.
But it’s also become clear most Americans aren’t willing to tolerate drastic deviations from the pre-pandemic normal — lockdowns, staying at home, and broadly avoiding interactions with other people — for long. While social distancing staved off the virus in the pre-vaccine pandemic days, it also wrought economic, educational, and social devastation around the world. It’s the intervention that, above all, most people want to avoid going forward.
“That’s the goal, in my mind: to eliminate or reduce social distancing,” Jha said.
What policymakers can aim for is not a total end to Covid-19 but a balancing act. On one side of that scale is containing Covid-19 with restrictions and precautions. On the other is resuming normal, pre-pandemic life. Vaccines have changed the balance by giving us the ability to contain Covid-19’s worst outcomes — hospitalization and death — with less weight on the side of restrictions. But vaccines alone can’t drive hospitalizations and deaths to zero if all the weight on the restriction side is removed.
That suggests a choice: Either Americans accept some level of Covid-19 risk, including hospitalization and death, or they accept some level of restrictions and precautions in the long term.
Depending on how that choice is made, the US could be looking at very different futures. Americans could decide some milder precautions, like masking, are fine. Or they could conclude that even masking is too much to ask, even if that means a greater death toll. It hinges on how much weight on the restrictions side remains acceptable for the bulk of the population — how high the threshold is for embracing continued deviations from what day-to-day life was like before.
Regardless, experts say the balance, as the coronavirus becomes endemic, will require accepting some level of Covid-19 risk — both to individuals and to society. America already does that with the flu: In some years, a flu season <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html">kills as many as 60,000 people in the US</a>, most of whom are elderly and/or people with preexisting health conditions, but also some kids and previously healthy individuals. As a cause of death, the flu can surpass <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm">gun violence or car crashes</a>, but it’s a tolerated cost to continuing life as normal.
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<aside><q>America is now stuck between two extremes: The country wants to reduce the risk of Covid-19, but it also wants to limit the remnants of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions on day-to-day life</q></aside>
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“You want to get Covid to a place where it’s more comparable in terms of disease burden and in terms of economic impact to the flu,” Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me.
With about half the country vaccinated, the Covid-19 death rate is still much higher than that of the flu — the <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~EuropeanUnion">more than 120,000 deaths over the past six months</a> is still more than double the number of people even the worst flu seasons have recently killed. But as more people get vaccinated and others develop natural immunity after an infection, the death rate will likely come down.
A glimpse of what this could look like in the future came from a study in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The study was at first <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/health/cdc-vaccinated-delta.html">widely</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/30/provincetown-covid-outbreak-vaccinated/">reported</a> as evidence that the virus can still spread among the vaccinated because the outbreak happened in a highly vaccinated population, and three-fourths of those who were infected had gotten their shots.
But experts now argue for another interpretation of the study: It’s what a post-pandemic world could look like. Yes, the coronavirus still circulated among vaccinated people. But in an outbreak that eventually infected more than 1,000, only seven hospitalizations and zero deaths have been recorded. If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced around 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”
That doesn’t mean the vaccine is perfect. A 90 percent reduction in death, relative to the unvaccinated, is not 100 percent. But it is a much lower risk. If this holds up despite future variants and potentially waning vaccine efficacy, it’s great news.
But that isn’t how the Provincetown study has been widely interpreted, especially after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited it to reinstitute masking recommendations for the vaccinated in public indoor spaces in <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view">areas with substantial or high caseloads</a>.
And the national Covid-19 disease burden may never resemble Provincetown’s anyway, since the city resides in the <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-onedose-percent-pop12">second most vaccinated state</a>. In that context, Americans may have to come to accept even higher levels of sickness and death if the goal is to return to normal and vaccination rates don’t go up quickly enough.
That leaves the country with a blunt question: How many deaths are Americans willing to tolerate?
The problem is there’s no agreement, including among experts, on Covid-19 risk. Some have accepted merely reducing the coronavirus’s strain on hospitals as the major policy goal. There’s next to no confidence that anything like “Covid zero” can be achieved now, but other experts still prefer harsher restrictions if it means preventing more deaths. And many people fall in between.
It’s this debate, between “flatten the curve” and “Covid zero,” that’s long divided the US’s Covid-19 response. Red states hewed at least for a while to “flatten the curve,” moving to lift Covid-related restrictions and reopen their economies as soon as hospitals stabilized. Blue states never truly pushed for “Covid zero,” but they were generally much less willing to tolerate high levels of cases and deaths — and, as a result, shut down more quickly in response to even hints of major surges. (Although there were some outliers on both sides.)
Even with the vaccines, this division, among both policymakers and the public they serve, has kept America in limbo.
Part of the divide is on a philosophical question about the role of government. But it’s about individuals’ decisions, too: Are they willing to forgo social activities, government mandate or not, to reduce deaths? Are they willing to keep wearing masks? Submit to continued testing in all sorts of settings?
Are 30,000 to 40,000 deaths a year too many? That’s generally what the country sees with gun violence and car crashes — and American policymakers, at least, haven’t been driven to major actions on these fronts.
Are as many as 60,000 deaths a year too many? That’s what Americans have tolerated for the flu.
Are 90,000 deaths a year too many? That’s the death toll of the ongoing drug overdose crisis — and while policymakers have taken some steps to combat that, experts argue the actions so far <a href="https://www.vox.com/22589160/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdose-deaths-2020-life-expectancy">have fallen short</a>, and the issue doesn’t draw that much national attention.
Is the current death toll — of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html">more than 1,500 a day</a>, or equivalent to more than 500,000 deaths a year — too much? Many people would say, of course, it is. But in the middle of a delta variant surge, Americans may be revealing their preferences as restaurant reservations <a href="https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry">are now around the pre-pandemic normal</a> — a sign the country is moving on. “The loudest voices on social media and in public are way more cautious than the average American,” Jha said.
Part of the calculus may be influenced by who is getting infected and dying. Once everyone (including children) is eligible for the vaccines, is a high death toll among those who remain unvaccinated simply part of the risk they decided to take by not getting the shot?
This is not something most experts I spoke to are comfortable saying, but it’s a sentiment I’ve repeatedly heard from vaccinated people and even some who are unvaccinated — a very dire version of “actions have consequences.”
Another consideration is whether some Covid-related precautions become permanent. Social distancing in any of its forms doesn’t seem like a candidate. But what about masking in indoor spaces? More frequent testing? Vastly improving indoor ventilation? Doing more things outdoors? Depending on whether Americans embrace these other interventions, the level of Covid-19 risk people have to tolerate may end up being lower — but what “normal” looks like would also be redefined to some degree.
Other countries are talking about these trade-offs more explicitly. Australian leaders, for example, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-delta-covid-lockdown/2021/08/24/6bb6131c-03b8-11ec-b3c4-c462b1edcfc8_story.html">have said</a> that they will shift from a long-heralded “Covid zero” strategy once vaccination rates hit certain thresholds — even though this means continued cases and deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated. In the US, the end goal has never been so clear.
Experts argue that these kinds of questions need to be out in the open, so Americans and their leaders can openly discuss them and decide on a plan forward.
Those conversations “were important to have in the beginning,” Murray said. “But they’re even more important now, as we move into this control phase rather than a phase where elimination or eradication [of Covid-19] seems possible.”
The country may just continue muddling along. Vaccination rates and natural immunity will slowly increase. Deaths and hospitalizations will similarly decline. Eventually, the virus will hit a level that most Americans find tolerable (if that hasn’t happened already). Politicians and the media will talk less about the coronavirus. And, perhaps before we know it, the pandemic will be a thing of the past in the US.
That’s what was happening in June — before the delta surge. But over the past 18 months, we’ve seen that, with no agreement on the endgame, it’s often impossible to say if the end is really near.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22651046/covid-19-delta-vaccines-social-distancing-masking-lockdowns">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22651046/covid-19-delta-vaccines-social-distancing-masking-lockdowns</a>

vox America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate

More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish. Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine…

America Plans On Doing Massive Cuts On Military Spending, A Sign Of The US Empire’s Decline

armageddon America Plans On Doing Massive Cuts On Military Spending, A Sign Of The US Empire’s Decline

By Theodore Shoebat The US projects major declines in military spending, a sign of the empire’s gradual decline: [embedded content] source https://shoebat.com/2021/09/06/america-plans-on-doing-massive-cuts-on-military-spending-a-sign-of-the-us-empir…

Qatar May Struggle To Deliver The New-Look Taliban It Hyped

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Qatar May Struggle To Deliver The New-Look Taliban It Hyped" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-09/93mdal1o_bloomberg-taliban_625x300_07_September_21.jpg" title="Qatar May Struggle To Deliver The New-Look Taliban It Hyped" /></div>
Qatar's reveled in hosting talks with the Taliban and has gained the trust of its leaders. (File)
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As the Taliban closed in on Kabul and tens of thousands of people overwhelmed its airport, it was the small Gulf state of Qatar that first opened its doors to evacuees, fast establishing itself as the West's main line of communication to an organization best known for harboring Osama bin Laden.
The US and UK have since moved their Afghanistan embassies to Doha, its critical role lauded by <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-secretary-of-state-antony-blinken-arrives-in-doha-for-talks-on-afghan-crisis-with-qatar-2531887" target="_self">US Secretary of State Antony Blinken</a> and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin -- both visiting this week. Yet a relationship painstakingly nurtured over the past decade could quickly become a liability for Qatar if it fails to deliver the world the new-look Taliban it's tried to nurture; one that's more hospitable to women and less hospitable to terrorists on the run.
Qatar's ties to the Taliban and other Islamist groups have long been a source of tension with its neighbors and concern for its Western allies. Caught out by the almost immediate collapse of the US-backed government as the last American troops left, Western powers had few other means of contacting the Taliban's political representatives.
Qatar's reveled in hosting talks with the Taliban, complete with big backdrops and dramatic lighting, and has gained the trust of its political leaders. Some 500 to 600 Taliban members with their families have lived in cosmopolitan Doha, according to a Gulf-based diplomat. They include Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the head of the political wing, who has held talks among the skyscrapers, in five-star hotels where Qatar's modesty rules aren't strictly observed.
That gave the Taliban a platform to recast itself as more moderate and ready for government via the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television channel. And it gave Qatar, which has deftly fostered relations with Iran and Islamist groups while serving as a regional headquarters for US military operations, an opportunity to raise its own stature with its most important strategic ally.
At a press conference in Doha Tuesday, Blinken heaped praise on Qatar for its help in Afghanistan. "For years, at our request, you've facilitated diplomacy between the Taliban and the Afghan government to try to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution," he said.
It's not clear, however, how Qatar will bridge the gap between the image-conscious leaders it's hosted and the Taliban's military wing, which is closer to Pakistan, the longtime political broker next door, and sees less need to accommodate.
There's no meeting of minds as there is with Pakistan, Western diplomats say. The Qataris have even found Baradar, who is at odds with the Pakistanis, difficult to deal with, according to the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. And Pakistan's not the only interested party. Landlocked Afghanistan is surrounded by powerful neighbors such as Iran and China, with a more direct interest in its fate than distant Qatar.
"Qatar is an important conduit between the Taliban and the rest of the world, but does not wield anything like the kind of deep influence on the group that Pakistan does," said Jane Kinninmont, Middle East analyst at the European Leadership Network.
"Qatar's relationship with the Taliban has focused heavily on mediation and international relations. It therefore influences a particular subsection of the Taliban - those that want to engage with the outside world and have pragmatic relationships that will enable them to access aid and trade."
A Liability
Western governments have said any engagement with the Afghan regime will be conditional on it allowing safe passage out of Kabul and the flow of humanitarian aid, not becoming a haven for terrorist organizations, respecting human rights and forming an inclusive government.
There's no evidence, however, that Qatar can influence the Taliban's approach to the education of women and girls, though the Qatari ruling family has identified that as a priority.
And while Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani has said his country was working with the Taliban and Turkey to restart operations at Kabul airport, it has yet to persuade the Taliban to accept foreign security staff at the airport, a key sticking point.
The Qatari government did not respond to a request for comment on its relations with the Taliban.
Aware of its own limitations, Qatar has focused less on trying to induce change in the Taliban's attitude and more on using its deep pockets to buy influence in a region of strategic interest to major powers, said another person familiar with the matter, requesting anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
The world's top exporter of liquefied natural gas and one of the world's richest nations, Qatar has financial leverage as well as lobbying clout in Washington that Pakistan lacks. That's become more critical to the Taliban as Western governments and international organizations shy away from supporting a regime that's yet to prove it's different to the international pariah of the 1990s.
If Afghanistan does, again, become a haven for terrorists, Qatar's ties could quickly become a problem.
Saudi Arabia was castigated for recognizing the Taliban regime of the 1990s, which hosted al-Qaeda before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. Today, the Gulf's hereditary rulers largely view any Islamic political movement as a threat to national security and to their own primacy and watch Qatar's high-stakes foreign policy with concern.
"Qatar could easily be embarrassed and may want to distance itself from the Taliban or at least from some of its leaders," Kinninmont said. "Some Taliban members are now using language that appeals internationally but it's unclear if this newfound presentability is much more than a re-branding."
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/qatar-may-struggle-to-deliver-the-new-look-taliban-it-hyped-2532966">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/qatar-may-struggle-to-deliver-the-new-look-taliban-it-hyped-2532966</a>

news world Qatar May Struggle To Deliver The New-Look Taliban It Hyped

Qatar's reveled in hosting talks with the Taliban and has gained the trust of its leaders. (File) As the Taliban closed in on Kabul and tens of thousands of people overwhelmed its airport, it was the small Gulf state of Qatar that first opened its d…