How are masks still political?
A national mask mandate is probably coming — and just a year too late.
Sree’s newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). The image above shows how we used to take celebrity photos at real events and how we take them now. Gloria Steinem headlined this year’s Lunch for the Girls, an annual fundraiser that my Digimentors team produced virtually this week for Girls Inc of Omaha. In 1995, she headlined an event for the South Asian Journalists Association and Sakhi for South Asian Women my friend Hemalee Patel @hemaleejp and I organized. The last 25 years have been kinder to Ms. Steinem!
Scroll down for Read Something; Watch Something; a weekly tech tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob), and much more.
TUNE IN: Sunday #NYTReadalong w/ Ruth Ben-Ghiat, history professor and author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present” (8:30 am ET Sunday, watch live or later).
After 250 episodes in 250 days, my global show has moved from daily episodes to 1-2 times a week. Next: Monday 9 pm ET with our friends at Indiaspora, co-hosted by the amazing Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan (watch live or later). The best way to know when I’m on the air and see all my archived shows, is to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
My Digimentors team is working with companies and nonprofits around the world to create virtual events. We’ve worked on events for 50 people and 100,000 people (the event with Girls Inc of Omaha with Gloria Steinem is just one of dozens we have done). See our new brochure. Don’t cancel or postpone your conference - contact us! sree@sree.net
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before — supporters of the president and other anti-mask crusaders are misrepresenting something for their own purposes.
This time it’s a study out of Denmark with some lukewarm conclusions on whether masks slow the spread of Covid19. The study’s authors, of course, insist that their conclusions — conclusions that have been widely challenged by other scientists working on the virus — actually show that masks are effective. “We think you should wear a face mask at least to protect yourself, but you should also use it to protect others,” lead author Henning Bundgaard told The Washington Post. “We consider that the conclusion is we should wear face masks.”
More important are the criticisms of the study, the main one being that the methodology used makes it difficult-to-impossible to come to any meaningful conclusion at all.
If you have an uncle posting Parler screenshots on his Facebook feed every hour, you already know what comes next — conservatives have been using the study to continue their absurd fight against mask rules and mask-wearing more broadly. These are the same people who parrot the “it only has a 1% mortality rate” line as if 2,000 of the 200,000 people who tested positive in one day this week dying is no big deal.
Look at this map, and read the latest on the pandemic, at The New York Times.
At what point does this become real for everyone? That’s the question I keep coming back to. I’ve done 250+ episodes of my Daily Covid19 Show, dozens of episodes of my WBAI call-in show, my NYT Readalong, She’s on Call, and countless other outside shows and events over the last 9 months. We’ve had the people on the front lines of this thing tell us, over and over again, about the minimum viable things we can do to limit the spread. All of the evidence — even from faulty or otherwise poorly-conducted studies — shows that masks are the best measure we have right now to limit the spread of the virus.
Anyway, here’s how Taiwan is handling the pandemic. The country hasn’t had a local case — not one — for months.
A national mask mandate is very likely coming (assuming Trump’s coup attempt fails), and I hope that the crows of a tiny minority of people seemingly bent on using their friends, families, and communities as the testing grounds for nature’s wrath fall on deaf ears.
- Sree
Read Something
For the last couple of centuries, America has chronically-undervalued women on basically every front. We appear to be continuing this sad tradition apace. Sobering reading, this report from the Commonwealth Fund.
Tech Tips from @NewYorkBob: Listen Up! Wireless Earbuds Are Now Affordable
Each week, veteran tech journalist Robert S. Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him on @newyorkbob.
As 2020 stumbles to a close that can’t come soon enough, many of us find ourselves mired in endless videoconferences and conference calls. Heaven help the person who strays from a videoconference only to return to a screenful of frowns and shaking heads—or worse.
Surviving the age of Zoom requires a certain level of comfort and a good set of wireless earbuds can help. They can shut out the sounds of your loving, but noisy family while allowing you to move around and hear every word of the videoconference or conference phone call. They can also allow you to look more professional in video calls since there are no wires dangling or a headset clapped atop your head.
Wireless earbuds are nothing new, but many, like Apple’s AirPods and AirPods Pro ($159 to $249), are downright expensive. The good news is that many wireless earbuds unveiled in 2020 are technically sophisticated, yet inexpensive. (Yes: Good news in 2020!)
For example, the $40 PistonBuds True Wireless Headphones from San Diego-based 1MORE USA Inc. have four “environmental noise canceling” microphones that listen for and eliminate stray noises while a software algorithm amplifies your voice for the sake of those on the other end of the call, according to 1MORE.
A set of 7mm driver provides enough bass and clarity in your ear for voice calls and music while basic functions like taking and ending calls and playing and pausing music can be handled by tapping the earbuds, said 1MORE.
The company said the PistonBuds offer up to 3.5 hours of use per charge while the battery in the included charging case stores enough power for 20 hours of earbud use before it needs to be charged itself.
There’s one downside of lightweight wireless earbuds, however: It’s easy to forget they’re still in your ears. So don’t forget to unplug—gently.
Listen to Something
The big media news this week is Buzzfeed’s acquisition of HuffPost. The ink is barely dry on the deal, and Peter Kafka already got Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti on his Recode Media podcast to talk about it. This interview goes well beyond the purchase and gets into the digital news industry as a whole, and quite a bit more. One for the media junkies out there.
Watch Something
250,000 (and climbing) deaths later, I still have to link to videos like this pleading with people to simply… care a little bit.
Odds & Ends
🗞 Sunday #NYTReadalong w/ Ruth Ben-Ghiat, history professor and author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”
The Readalong is followed, on Sundays at 11 am-noon ET, by a new medical show I’m co-executive producing with surgeons Sujana Chandrasekhar, M.D. (@DrSujanaENT), and Marina Kurian, M.D. (@MarinaKurian), called She’s On Call (watch live or later).
After 250 episodes in 250 days, my global show has moved from daily episodes to 1-2 times a week. Next: Monday 9 pm ET with our friends at Indiaspora, co-hosted by the amazing Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan (watch live or later).
The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
🎧 Every Saturday, I host a call-in show on WBAI 99.5FM (@wbai) - "Coping with Covid19" - focused on being helpful, hopeful, and focusing on the pandemic's effects on society’s most vulnerable. Listen live Saturdays from 12-2pm EST, or later. And, of course, call in or tweet questions for us using the #wbaisree hashtag! Listen to this week’s episode here!
📺 A reminder to watch my Global Covid19 Show. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn something every time. We’ve had 250+ shows and 450+ guests - and 1m+ viewers. Check out the archive and please subscribe to my YouTube channel. And/or sign up for my WhatsApp alerts list (it’s not your typical WhatsApp group, just a text when I’m live!). We are in partnership with Scroll.in, one of India’s best news and culture websites.
Recent highlights:
Sapphire, whose novel became Oscar-winning “Precious” (she’s newly on Twitter!)
Dr. Keiji Fukuda of HKU, former pandemics expert at WHO & CDC
👀 Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let us know! Let’s collaborate!