2.8.21 | Vax Americana

edition thirty-three

Ben Parks

Feb 08, 2021

Good Monday morning. Do what you can to give yourself the benefit of the doubt today. Our agenda this week:

Conversation Starters
The Dialogue (Social Justice)
Future of Higher Education
Best of the Rest

Conversation Starters

START YOUR WEEK HERE: An all-time “ad” for Zillow

I’M SENSING A THEME: PANDEMIC FATIGUE

This piece captures better than anything I’ve read our current feeling of hope mixed with anxiety, impatience, fear, sadness, and anger. I wish we talked more about our shared collective trauma from this pandemic.

Recently, there has been such emphasis on the new: a new year, new vaccines, a new administration getting in and sorting out the pandemic. But amid all this I’ve found myself suddenly struggling with impatience and the reality that, yeah, this isn’t ending soon. Now there is just...more waiting, more time lost.

Pandemic Fatigue Grows As People Wait For The Vaccine (Buzzfeed)

Related: It's Not Just You. A Lot Of Us Are Hitting A Pandemic Wall Right Now. (HuffPost)
Mental health crisis for America’s moms: The Primal Scream (NYT)
The diminishing returns of productivity culture (Culture Study)

THIS IS REAL: REVENGE BEDTIME PROCRASTINATION

You know that thing where you stubbornly stay up late for no reason because you feel like you didn't get any time to yourself? Here's how to stop. ‘Revenge Bedtime Procrastination’ Is Real, According to Psychologists (Glamour)
Related: An interview with the man who identified very early the “attention economy” and the ways that the internet has rewired our brains. Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age (NYT)

MISSING “SOCIAL SERENDIPITY”

I thought frequently of other people I had missed without fully realizing it. Pretty good friends with whom I had mostly done things that were no longer possible, such as trying new restaurants together. Co-workers I didn’t know well but chatted with in the communal kitchen. Workers at the local coffee or sandwich shops who could no longer dawdle to chat. The depth and intensity of these relationships varied greatly, but these people were all, in some capacity, my friends, and there was also no substitute for them during the pandemic. Tools like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for maintaining closer relationships, couldn’t re-create the ease of social serendipity, or bring back the activities that bound us together. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health. But that does present an opportunity. In the coming months, as we begin to add people back into our lives, we’ll now know what it’s like to be without them.

The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships (Atlantic)

Related: A Pandemic Is Hard Enough. For Some, Being Single Has Made It Harder. (NYT)

*WHISPERS*... GOOD NEWS?

The news about the vaccines continues to be excellent — and the public discussion of it continues to be more negative than the facts warrant. Here’s the key fact: All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 deaths. They have also drastically reduced hospitalizations. Good Vaccine News (NYT)

David Carroll @profcarroll

You know what seems to be fixing anti-democratic misinformation better than fact-checking or media literacy? Lawsuits.

2020 ELECTION MAP: NEIGHBORHOOD BY NEIGHBORHOOD

Highly recommended: Fascinating and fun to explore down to the street level. An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election Results: Trump vs. Biden (NYT)

OUR RADICALIZED REPUBLIC

Recommend this deep dive into how the US has become so deeply divided, including quotes from UMD Prof. Lilliana Mason: Our Radicalized Republic (538)
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election (Time)
Recommended on my home state of Iowa: Hawkeye Elegy: A collision of pandemic, disaster, and polarization in the heartland (Fortune)

Share Parks and Wreck

The inauguration, from sunrise to sunset, captured in one striking picture (National Geo)

The Dialogue (Social Justice)

UPCOMING EVENTS

Second Annual Black History Month Read-a-Thon

Tuesday, February 16 from 11am-2pm: Black History Month Read-a-Thon from UMD Libraries' and MICA. The theme is "Black Joy" and we look forward to celebrating historical moments of joy across the African diaspora. Register to attend and/or sign up at: go.umd.edu/bhmreads. (h/t Leigh Amadi Dunewood)

Black Friday Webinar Series from School of Public Policy

Tuesday, February 9 from 12pm-1pm: First Amendment Rights and Race in America
Friday, February 26 from 12pm-1pm: The Intersections of Public Policy and Black History in America (h/t Paul Brown)

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Recommended: WaPo is curating a selection of recently published stories and columns that represent Black excellence and triumph. Black History Month 2021 (WaPo)
Movies About Black Joy and Where to Watch Them (PopSugar)
Do We Ask Too Much of Black Heroes? (NYT)
Black women aren’t saving America for you. They’re protecting themselves. (HuffPost)
Just 5 percent of vaccinations have gone to Black Americans, despite equity efforts (Politico)

WHITE SUPREMACY

Tressie McMillan Cottom: Breaking Up With White Supremacy Was Always The End Game
If you follow all the prescriptions of checking your privilege, unpacking your invisible knapsack, centering the marginalized, excavating your deeply held white supremacist notions and not becoming a Karen, you will absolutely positively have to break up with actual white people.
White supremacists are using gaming sites as tools of hatred (Fast Company)
“White Supremacy Is Not Just for White People”: Trumpism, the Proud Boys, and the Extremist Allure for People of Color (Vanity Fair)

AMPLIFYING VOICES

Tipping Is a Legacy of Slavery (NYT)
Going to bed hungry (WaPo)
Who Owns Stocks? Explaining the Rise in Inequality During the Pandemic (NYT)

Scott Bayer #THEBOOKCHAT co-founder @Lyricalswordz

On the final day of the semester I asked students to find or create memes that encapsulated our time together. A thread of some of my favorite. Shout out to Rayan for this gem 👇👇

Future of Higher Education

There’s no going back to the old “normal” in higher ed when the pandemic is over. A new paper from Deloitte, The Hybrid Campus, makes the case for a blended residential experience. The paper lays out three big shifts that need to happen for universities to become hybrid campuses.

A rethinking of the academic portfolio to identify academic programs and courses that can be delivered in a hybrid format as well as a new academic calendar that provides students more flexibility than the traditional semester schedule.
Redefining the student experience for lifetime learning that adds e-advising, virtual communities, and online wellbeing and career services that complement the in-person campus.
A reshaping of campus work, the workforce, and workplace that challenges the orthodoxy that all staff must be on campus to effectively support the needs of the campus community.

HOT TOPICS

Close to home: Remote learning is making it harder for marginalized students at UMD to stay afloat (DBK)
FAFSA: Black and Latino students are getting audited by the Education Department (WaPo)
The Heavy Cost of an Empty Campus (Chronicle)
No 'Social Justice' in the Classroom: Statehouses Renew Scrutiny of Speech at Public Colleges (Chronicle)

CASE STUDIES

Interesting look at how IU actually figured out how to implement wide scale testing and tracing efforts at $700 per student, which is far less than whatever colleges would lose on dropped tuition: The Colleges That Took the Pandemic Seriously (Atlantic)
UC-Davis is providing free testing, masks and quarantine housing to tens of thousands of people in the surrounding community: A California university tries to shield an entire city from coronavirus (NYT)

TEACHING AND LEARNING

mytherapistsays