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September 2020

[Report]

The Big Tech Extortion Racket

How Google, Amazon, and Facebook control our lives

By ,
[Memoir]

A Litany for Survival

Giving birth as a black woman in America

By ,
[Letter from Washington]

Elder Abuse

Nursing homes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line

By ,
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum amount the U.S. government spent funding anti–Hugo Chávez rock songs while he led Venezuela : $22,970

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of 2019 among years with the highest worldwide spending on nuclear weapons : 1

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the United States spent more than the second-highest spender : 70

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of National Guard members on active duty in the United States on June 1, 2020 : 66,700

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

On active duty abroad on the same day : 28,300

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of cities in which the Department of Homeland Security has used aerial surveillance at protests this year : 15

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum hours of surveillance footage that it has logged : 270

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of police departments in the twenty largest U.S. cities whose use-of-force policies meet UN human-rights standards

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Total value of surplus military equipment distributed to U.S. police departments under the Trump Administration : $964,962,803

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of bayonets : $19,761

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of “extreme cold-weather parkas” distributed to the LAPD : $27,161

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of police killings since 2010 in which restrained victims told officers they couldn’t breathe : 32

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of those incidents that resulted in criminal charges against the officers : 5

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of those cases in which charges were not eventually dropped : 2

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of time on duty that U.S. police officers devote to violent crime : 4

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

To noncriminal complaints : 35

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of leading U.S. state health officials who have resigned, retired, or been fired during the COVID-19 pandemic : 34

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of coronavirus-related academic studies that have been retracted since the outbreak : 22

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated months of education progress, on average, expected to be lost by K-12 students who began remote learning this year : 7

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. rural school districts that did not require any instruction after schools closed : 53

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of city-dwelling Americans who have considered moving somewhere less dense since the pandemic began : 39

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who have moved because of the coronavirus : 1/10

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since February in the number of American Jews who have applied to emigrate to Israel : 64

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a Canadian sees the United States as “unfriendly” or “an enemy” : 1 in 5

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount that the United States will lose this year in tourism revenue : $550,000,000,000

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That the United States will lose even if all Americans’ tourist dollars are spent domestically : $52,000,000,000

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That China will gain if its tourist dollars are spent domestically : $238,000,000,000

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount per traveler by which Japan plans on subsidizing domestic vacations as part of economic recovery efforts : $187

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount that a tourist to Iceland can pay to skip a government-mandated COVID-19 quarantine protocol : $65

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of U.S. climate-change infrastructure projects that have been delayed or canceled because of COVID-19 : 13

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Europeans aged 16 to 29 who think authoritarian states are better equipped to handle climate change than democracies : 1/2

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of people living in democracies who believe their governments are not democratic : 2/5

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of transgender Americans who don’t have the identification required to vote : 42

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of registered Democrats who believe that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud : 21

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of registered Republicans : 69

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of times per day that Donald Trump tweeted in 2017 : 7

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

In 2020 : 32

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who want Trump to tweet more frequently : 3

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of May 29–June 4 among weeks that researchers determined to be the “saddest” on Twitter : 1

September 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of seafarers who have been stranded offshore since pandemic lockdown measures began : 200,000

September 2020

Readings

[Essay]

Disappearing Ink

By ,
[Closure]

The Long Goodbye

By ,
[Memoir]

Reborn to Run

By ,
[Escalation]

Apple Watch

[Denomination]

Call Me by Your Pain

[Instructions]

Vanishing Cream

[Personal Growth]

Empathy, My Dear Watson

[Lecture]

Intellectual Property

By ,
[How-To]

Extra Extra

[Expert Opinion]

System of a Clown

[Fiction]

After Midnight

By , Translated by
[Poem]

Walking Tour of an Imaginary Homeland

By ,
[Accusations]

When Life Gives You Lemon

All This Life in Us

All This Life in Us, a painting by Dominic Chambers, whose work is on view this month at Anna Zorina Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Anna Zorina Gallery, New York City

“Clair de Lune”

“Clair de Lune,” a photograph by Paul Cupido, whose work is on view this month at Photo Basel, in Berlin.
© The artist. Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York City

“Antonín Kalina, Czechoslovakia, 1988” and “Zofia Baniecka, Poland, 1986”

“Antonín Kalina, Czechoslovakia, 1988” and “Zofia Baniecka, Poland, 1986,” photographs by Gay Block, from Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, which was reissued last month by Radius Books.
© The artist. Courtesy Radius Books

[untitled]

A photograph from the series Land/s by Gohar Dashti, whose work was on view in July at Intersect Aspen, in Aspen, Colorado.
© The artist. Courtesy Robert Klein Gallery, Boston

Appendix 137_120

Appendix 137_120 (detail), an archival inkjet print from the series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow by Walid Raad, whose work was on view last month at Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City
[Letters]

Letters

[Editor’s Desk]

Fighting Words

By ,
[Easy Chair]

Which Side Are You On?

By ,
[Report]

The Big Tech Extortion Racket

How Google, Amazon, and Facebook control our lives

By ,
[From the Archive]

Who Is the Tyrant?

By ,
[Annotation]

The Haunted House

What privacy looks like on Google Street View

By ,
[Memoir]

A Litany for Survival

Giving birth as a black woman in America

By ,
[Letter from Washington]

Elder Abuse

Nursing homes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line

By ,
[Poetry]

Three Poems

By ,
[Letter from Tor House]

Bright Power, Dark Peace

Robinson Jeffers and the hope of human extinction

By ,
[Essay]

Nonconforming

Against the erosion of academic freedom by identity politics

By ,
[Story]

The Work of Art

By ,
[Reviews]

New Books

By ,
[Reviews]

Cage of Gold

The corrupt business of deportation

By ,
[Reviews]

Coetzee’s Radical Masterpiece

On the Jesus trilogy

By ,
[Puzzle]

Same Difference

By ,
[Findings]

Findings

By ,
[Findings]

Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans.

[Findings]

The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right.

[Findings]

The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance.

[Findings]

Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.

[Findings]

Men can rate the facial attractiveness of women without paying attention, but women cannot do the same for men; gay men find the faces of purportedly fertile women and men more attractive; adolescents and adults both rate the faces of children younger than 4.6 years old as more appealing than those of older children; and body odors associated with fear quicken the visual processing of others’ facial expressions of fear.

[Findings]

Beak covering and nape-feather ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cockatoos.

[Findings]

Repetitive negative thinking was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in female adolescents may prevent suicide.

[Findings]

Psychopaths recommend harsher punishments for homicides, whether accidental or motivated by profit, but exhibit relatively low concern about killing in general.

[Findings]

Online murder-for-hire advertisements seek to convey professionalism yet tend not to provide references up front.

[Findings]

Convalescent plasma helps Syrian hamsters fight SARS-CoV-2.

[Findings]

Plastic surgeons suggested that Botox could reduce the expression of negative emotions by masked faces.

[Findings]

The presence of a professional sports team increases a city’s seasonal flu deaths.

[Findings]

A psycholinguistic analysis of posts on Twitter and Weibo during COVID-19 lockdowns found that residents of Lombardy grew increasingly focused on leisure and residents of Wuhan grew increasingly focused on religion.

[Findings]

Recent toilet-­paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

[Findings]

Gerontologists cautioned that it would be difficult to predict individual Holocaust survivors’ trauma or resilience in response to the pandemic, which was expected to strengthen the market for laboratory mouse-suffocation chambers.

[Findings]

Researchers proposed replacing the paradigm of extinction with that of evanescence.

[Findings]

Climate change was expected to drive American lobsters to seek deeper waters, beavers to colonize new parts of Canada, and wolf spiders in the high Arctic to produce a second annual brood.

[Findings]

Humboldt penguins who nest in the open have more pollutant metabolites in their blood than do penguins who nest in guano-rich burrows.

[Findings]

The tiger snakes of Perth have heavy metals in their livers.

[Findings]

Satellite imagery captured ecosystem damage from fog loss, and aerial photography confirmed the existence of Roman military camps revealed by the 2018 Welsh drought.

[Findings]

A young woman in a Vilnius plague pit was found to have been coinfected with yaws.

[Findings]

A man buried at Newgrange passage tomb was found to be the product of first-degree incest, indicating that he was a member of the elite.

[Findings]

Scientists trained subjects to exercise control over a single neuron, linked the hippocampus to regret, and concluded that humans smell in stereo.

[Findings]

Straight Slovakians assume that a woman in high heels will inspire more intense mate-guarding.

[Findings]

Women who receive continuous rather than interrupted sutures for perineal repair after vaginal delivery report higher sexual levels of arousal and orgasmic function.

[Findings]

Pinkness predicts aggression in flamingos.

[Findings]

Chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.

[Findings]

Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold, moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the Levant around 4000 bc, and postwar atmospheric nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and rainfall in the Shetland Islands.

[Findings]

A period of global coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification of japonica rice.

[Findings]

Ostrich-­shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-­shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

[Findings]

Interviews with reptile poachers in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Caspian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure, Maynard’s longnose sand snake, the Persian spider gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured for use by snake charmers.

[Findings]

Herpetologists inventoried the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge.

[Findings]

Half of Algeria’s marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.

[Findings]

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-­­metal chelator.

[Findings]

The mating calls of male Panama cross-­banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

[Findings]

Arson dogs’ noses remain better than lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants.

[Findings]

CBD improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs.

[Findings]

Finnish scientists identified the genomic region associated with fearfulness in Great Danes.

[Findings]

The decreasing transpiration of plants, a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, was partly to blame for recent heat waves in northern latitudes.

[Findings]

Peatlands, which now store roughly as much carbon as Earth’s forests or its atmosphere, can hold more carbon if exposed to low-­intensity fires.

[Findings]

Inland waters are emitting previously unaccounted-for levels of carbon dioxide, and freshwater insects are flourishing even as terrestrial insects are dying off.

[Findings]

Ocean acidity can now be predicted five years ahead of time.

[Findings]

Green snow is spreading across Antarctica.

[Findings]

The deepest octopus observed to date was photographed in the Java Trench.

[Findings]

Terrestrial bacteria can grow on extraterrestrial nutrients; the black hole nearest Earth was discovered in the constellation Telescopium; and X-­ray experiments conducted at the European Synchrotron indicated that moisture is destroying The Scream.

[Findings]

A fungal parasite that afflicts the reproductive organs of millipedes was named in honor of Twitter.

[Findings]

In Maine, a loon stabbed a bald eagle through the heart.

[Findings]

Six new coronaviruses were discovered in bats.

[Findings]

Falling levels of tourist trash during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of COVID-­19-­infected blood, which at least one monkey then tried to eat.

[Findings]

Vampire bats who are strangers will groom one another before sharing blood via regurgitation.

[Findings]

Skin swabs are three times as accurate as fecal samples at predicting a person’s age.

[Findings]

Young burglars are driven first by thrills, then by skills.

[Findings]

Half of the flights taken by British men aged twenty to forty-five are for stag parties.

[Findings]

Drivers of fancy cars yield to pedestrians less often than drivers of humble cars, and still less if the pedestrians are non-white men.

[Findings]

Los Angeles scientists found that the city’s road network could be more efficiently designed by P. polycephalum, a slime mold.

[Findings]

Stinging water was blamed on jellyfish mucus.

[Findings]

Engineers reported success in deploying “ultra-­gentle” robotic “linguine fingers” to grab deep-sea jellyfish.

[Findings]

Children, unlike adults, are resilient against the Pinocchio Illusion when their fingers are pulled upward in sync with a tone ascending from 700 to 1200 Hz.

[Findings]

Fingertip injuries can indicate child abuse.

[Findings]

Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes that spares the anterior hypothalamus was linked to the emergence of acquired pedophilia.

[Findings]

Five primate electrophysiologists agreed that, upon 50 Hz stimulation of the central lateral thalamus, anesthetized Wisconsin monkeys become wakeful.

[Findings]

The high contrast provided by humans’ white scleras enhances our awareness of one another’s gazes.

[Findings]

It remained unknown whether Shanidar Z received a Neanderthal flower burial.

[Findings]

An extinction-­risk model was found to work well for bumblebees.

[Findings]

An interdisciplinary team suggested that climate-­driven societal collapse may stabilize once humans start accepting years with many disasters as the new normal.

[Findings]

The formation of pre–Silk Road Eurasian empires was driven partly by the spread of northern Chinese broomcorn millet; nano­diamonds and meltglass at Abu Hureyra point to a cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas; the collapse of Harappan society coincided with the loss of the Ghaggar River’s perenniality and the onset of the Meghalayan Stage; the breakdown of Easter Island society and the cessation of megalithic statue-building postdated European contact; and epigraphic evidence suggested a descent into total war during the Terminal Classic era of Mayan civilization.

[Findings]

A 46,000-year-old bird recovered from the Siberian permafrost was determined to be a female horned lark.

[Findings]

The tail of an unidentified herbivorous dinosaur in Alberta was found to contain a type of histiocytic tumor that primarily affects young children.

[Findings]

The exoplanet NGTS-10b was found to have a year lasting eighteen Earth hours and to be at risk of falling into its star.

[Findings]

Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma around the cluster’s central black hole. “People were skeptical because of the size of the outburst,” said one of the scientists. “We don’t know why it’s so big.”

[Findings]

A spineless hedgehog in Fishcross regrew its spines and was released into the wild, and officials blamed the deaths of British black bees at Wisbech Castle on “morons.” 

[Findings]

A soggy Suffolk owl found in a ditch was diagnosed as too fat to fly.

[Findings]

Mount Vesuvius turned a Herculaneum man’s brain to glass, according to archaeologists, who also revived the voice of a priest from the reign of Ramesses XI and determined that a mummy in the Ulster Museum had been stabbed in the back.

[Findings]

Crystallized mud-wasp nests were used to revise the age of Aboriginal rock art, and a sheep hunters’ encampment was discovered in Nachcharini Cave.

[Findings]

India’s Supreme Court approved the importation of Namibian cheetahs.

[Findings]

Researchers who wear orange catch more anoles, and Australia began culling thousands of camels with helicopter snipers.

[Findings]

Sheep compensate well for lameness.

[Findings]

Southern white rhinos are threatened by inbreeding.

[Findings]

Veterinarians developed an ultrasound schedule for pregnant dolphins, and marine biologists discovered four new species of walking sharks and found that gray seals clap at each other to communicate underwater.

[Findings]

Cetaceans are least likely among mammals to dream profoundly.

[Findings]

African penguins were found to be the first non-primates whose speech exhibits both the Menzerath–­Altmann Law and Zipf’s Law of Brevity.

[Findings]

The asteroid strike at Yarrabubba may have ended Snowball Earth.

[Findings]

Ocean currents are speeding up.

[Findings]

Scientists looked forward to studying the flow of Antarctic bottom water from the Weddell Sea into the Scotia Sea.

[Findings]

Climate change will not encourage sugar maples to move northward, but it will drive Americans from the coasts toward Las Vegas.

[Findings]

Rising climate skepticism among Republicans in recent decades was attributed to backlash against Democratic elites.

[Findings]

Automation of the labor force may lead humans to overcome their differences, and researchers seeking to use personal voice-assistance to detect dementia among their users were awarded a $12 million grant.

[Findings]

Sugar ants will mine dried urine from sand.

[Findings]

The axolotl’s unusually large genome may be useful for something.

[Findings]

The world’s oldest bamboo fossil turned out to be a conifer.

[Findings]

Rumors seem more truthful when sourced to a friend of a friend.

[Findings]

Adolescent Dutch boys who instrumentalize sex are highly likely to nonconsensually forward sexts they receive from strangers.

[Findings]

A review of 250,000 pieces of erotica published between 2000 and 2016 found no significant increase in “transgressive” content, Saudi Arabians do not linger on porn websites, and neuroscientists reported that forceful, prosaic self-squeezing of the penile shaft more closely evokes the neurological signature of erotic touch than does gentle, prosaic self-squeezing of the glans.

[Findings]

Heterosexual women and men rated the erogeneity and appropriateness of having digital avatars of themselves touched by virtual men or women.

[Findings]

Straight women who can see and those who are blind care equally about dating good-looking men, though blind women place more importance on their partners having pleasant voices and odors.

[Findings]

Taiwanese men increase their odds of getting married in a given year by 3.92 percent for every 10 percent increase in the value of their real estate.

[Findings]

Red-haired or freckled women in high-UV latitudes have lower mortality risks, light-skinned sex workers in Mexico command higher rates, Brazilian men who self-identify as black are slightly happier with their penis size than those who self-identify as white, and a survey of forty countries found Colombian women to be more than five times as happy with their breast size as Japanese women.

[Findings]

Japanese macaques were recolonizing the abandoned zone around Fukushima.

[Findings]

Mantled howler monkeys howl for longer in the resource-rich interiors of forests than in areas impacted by human activity.

[Findings]

Baboons’ clear articulation of proto-vowels led scientists to conclude that speech could have begun developing twenty million years earlier than was previously thought.

Microfiche Illustration by Nick Misani

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