vox--2020-05-04--The closure of meatpacking plants will lead to the overcrowding of animals. The implications are hor

The closure of meatpacking plants will lead to the overcrowding of animals. The implications are horrible.

Across the country , meatpacking plants are shutting down over coronavirus outbreaks among staff .
Since the start of April , huge meat firms like Tyson Foods , Smithfield Foods , JBS USA Holdings , and Cargill have closed at least a dozen pork , beef , and chicken processing plants , per the Wall Street Journal .
At least 3,400 people in meatpacking facilities have tested positive , and at least 17 have died , the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting estimates .
And because of the intense concentration of the meatpacking industry , these facilities account for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meatpacking capacity .
As much as 40 percent of America ’ s pork-packing capacity is currently idle , by one estimate .
This won ’ t necessarily lead to meat shortages , as Nicole Narea explains ( though it might cause spot shortages at your local grocery store ) .
But it has severe consequences for the animals left on farms across the country .
Pork and poultry production ( and to a lesser extent beef production ) is done on a “ just-in-time ” basis , explains Jayson Lusk , an agricultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the assumption that they ’ ll be able to send off mature hogs to slaughter so that hogs still being grown have room to live ; there isn ’ t much excess capacity if the mature hogs have to stick around due to meatpacking bottlenecks .
“ If the finished pigs , who weigh about 280 lbs , are unable to head to the packing plant , there is no room in the barn to receive the new batch of pigs from the nursery , ” Lusk explains in a recent blog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t vacated , there is no room for the piglets .
All the while , new piglets are being born with nowhere to go.
” That means that the number of “ excess hogs ” on pig farms is growing rapidly .
“ We have a national pork processing capacity of about 500,000 head per day , ” Lusk writes .
“ Latest data suggests that because of plant closures and slowdowns , we are processing about 40 % fewer pigs , which means an extra 500,000*0.4 = 200,000 pigs that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Single .
Day .
Do that for 5 days , and that ’ s 1 million ‘ excess ’ pigs left on the farm.
“ This holds at both small and large farms ; these problems are faced by producers at all levels .
So farms across the country are facing a massive dilemma : What do we do when there are millions of additional animals we don ’ t have space , labor , or food to care for ?
There are several options available , but they boil down to three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into existing barns , which risks overcrowding in facilities that already don ’ t offer a lot of room per animal • Putting animals onto outdoor fields , where they can not be protected effectively from predators and disease “ You ’ re having to choose between amazingly bad options for protecting their welfare , or making the incredibly difficult choice to euthanize them all because there are fates worse than death , ” says Candace Croney , a professor of animal sciences at Purdue and an expert on animal welfare on farms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extreme step of euthanasia ( a term some might argue is a misnomer since their killing isn ’ t strictly for the animals ’ benefit in this case ) .
Allen Harim , a poultry processor , has announced it will euthanize 2 million chickens in Delaware and Maryland .
JBS ’ s pork plant in Worthington , Minnesota , has reopened — to euthanize pigs from local hog farms , not to process them for sale .
A representative for the Minnesota Pork Producers Association told the Star-Tribune he expects 60,000 to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week in Minnesota alone .
This kind of effort isn ’ t unprecedented .
In 2015 , an avian influenza outbreak led to the US Department of Agriculture assisting in the euthanizing of 31.5 million birds in Iowa .
But the animal welfare costs of the Covid-19 outbreak are relatively underpublicized , and severe .
The costs on human farmers forced to euthanize animals are severe as well .
“ It takes a significant emotional and psychological toll on the people who have to do it , ” Croney says .
“ They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at all possible .
It ’ s devastating to make these kinds of decisions and they have some lasting psychological repercussions.
” Because animal agriculture in the US is a highly competitive industry , the life cycles of the livestock and poultry being raised and slaughtered are tightly regulated for maximum efficiency .
A pig typically goes through a 292- to 311-day ( about 9 1/2 to 10 1/2 months ) life cycle from a female pig ’ s impregnation through to slaughter for market , the National Pork Board explains .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the animals : gestation facilities for pregnant pigs ; farrowing facilities for mothers ( sows ) and their newborns ; nurseries for piglets after they ’ ve been weaned ; and finishing barns for pigs as they grow up to market size .
Each of those facilities is usually filled to maximum capacity , for efficiency ’ s sake .
That makes a bottleneck like closed processing plants immensely challenging for farmers .
If they can ’ t offload mature pigs to meatpacking plants ( which usually slaughter and dismember the finished @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to place pigs coming up from nurseries .
If they leave pigs in their nurseries , then the youngest piglets just weaned off their mothers have nowhere to go .
If those piglets go nowhere , then pregnant pigs have nowhere to go once they give birth .
A blockage at one point in the process causes problems throughout the whole process .
Poultry faces a similar problem , though given that meat chickens ’ lifespans are typically only 6 to 8 weeks , farmers have a bit more flexibility and fewer built-in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flexible since you can add additional cattle to the pasture , but they face overcrowding concerns as well .
What farms do about overcrowding So , what can farms do if they ’ re faced with excess animals ?
Croney notes that they can try to slow the growth of animals , perhaps by reducing food given to them or altering the temperature of barns ( which has an effect on the eventual size of livestock ) .
But this comes with immense costs .
“ You can curtail growth by curtailing how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you have animals that are hungry and crowded , which sets them up for competition around food , which can lead to injury and death , ” she notes .
Pork and especially chicken plants already don ’ t offer much space to their animals .
A 2011 survey found that pigs got on average 7.2 square feet each ; the National Chicken Council reports that standard industry practice is to give about 0.8 square feet for each chicken , or barely more than a standard sheet of paper .
Overcrowding due to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ space .
Farmers can theoretically place excess animals outdoors but this might be an even worse option .
“ In order to let them have access outdoors , much less to house them outdoors , you have to have a certain level of setup and protections for them , ” Croney explains .
“ The types of fencing , shade , water access , protection from predators and inclement weather — you ’ d have to have that set up and reworked .
If you have a farm with a couple thousand animals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do .
You certainly don ’ t have labor to spare to help you do that , and those systems require much more intensive oversight and management.
” “ You ’ re having to choose between amazingly bad options for protecting their welfare , or making the incredibly difficult choice to euthanize them all because there are fates worse than death ” For chickens , there are particular concerns apart from overcrowding or outdoor dangers that come into play when mature chickens are no longer being slaughtered .
“ Broiler chickens , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to egg-laying hens , have been bred to be so large that if they ’ re allowed to live longer than planned , “ they suffer from animal welfare problems because they could be too large relative to their ability of legs to withstand the weight , ” Lusk explains .
“ You don ’ t have near that problem with pigs or cows .
The animal welfare problem with pigs is the backing-up issue , and the animal welfare problem with chickens is them getting too big.
” Given these difficulties , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why some farms are already opting for euthanasia .
But that comes with its own difficulties .
Processing plants are supposed to render animals “ insensible ” and unable to feel pain before slaughtering them , and to use calming practices that make slaughter as minimally stressful as possible .
“ As sad as even that death is , the process is typically smooth and the animals shouldn ’ t be able to anticipate what is happening , ” Croney says .
“ With mass euthanasia and limited personnel , that orderly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is difficult , sometimes impossible to achieve , which is why no one ever wants to be in that position.
” Croney notes euthanasia can take many forms , from gassing to bolt guns to straight-up gunshots ; the latter creates obvious noise problems and is difficult to scale .
“ Especially if people are using physical methods with captive bolt or gunshot , people are becoming stressed themselves and having to hurry , ” Croney says .
“ That may mean that things are not done as accurately or humanely.
” Then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Without processing plants that can dismember animals , ship out usable meat , and dispose of the rest , it ’ s not obvious what farmers can do with the animals they euthanize .
JBS , a massive pork processor , is sending hogs sent to it for euthanasia by hog farmers to landfills ( basically mass graves ) or external meat rendering plants .
As processors like JBS shut down facilities , though , more and more of these tasks may be taken up by the farms themselves , not meatpackers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as more of an open question , with options like burial on the farm itself presenting themselves .
“ The entire situation is tragic , ” Croney concludes , and not just for animals .
“ Whatever our stances on meat-eating , this is a time to be a little sensitive .
There are people who are incredibly depressed , who are struggling , who really do care about their animals , and this is incredibly hard for them .
The human toll this takes is not often talked about.
” Every day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Across the country, meatpacking plants are shutting down over coronavirus outbreaks among staff. Since the start of April, huge meat firms like Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings, and Cargill have closed at least a dozen pork, beef, and chicken processing plants, per the Wall Street Journal. At least 3,400 people in meatpacking facilities have tested positive, and at least 17 have died, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting estimates.
And because of the intense concentration of the meatpacking industry, these facilities account for a massive share of America’s overall meatpacking capacity. As much as 40 percent of America’s pork-packing capacity is currently idle, by one estimate.
This won’t necessarily lead to meat shortages, as Nicole Narea explains (though it might cause spot shortages at your local grocery store). But it has severe consequences for the animals left on farms across the country.
Pork and poultry production (and to a lesser extent beef production) is done on a “just-in-time” basis, explains Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue. Farms typically operate on the assumption that they’ll be able to send off mature hogs to slaughter so that hogs still being grown have room to live; there isn’t much excess capacity if the mature hogs have to stick around due to meatpacking bottlenecks.
“If the finished pigs, who weigh about 280 lbs, are unable to head to the packing plant, there is no room in the barn to receive the new batch of pigs from the nursery,” Lusk explains in a recent blog post. “If the nursery isn’t vacated, there is no room for the piglets. All the while, new piglets are being born with nowhere to go.”
That means that the number of “excess hogs” on pig farms is growing rapidly. “We have a national pork processing capacity of about 500,000 head per day,” Lusk writes. “Latest data suggests that because of plant closures and slowdowns, we are processing about 40% fewer pigs, which means an extra 500,000*0.4 = 200,000 pigs that are left on the farm. Every. Single. Day. Do that for 5 days, and that’s 1 million ‘excess’ pigs left on the farm.“ This holds at both small and large farms; these problems are faced by producers at all levels.
So farms across the country are facing a massive dilemma: What do we do when there are millions of additional animals we don’t have space, labor, or food to care for? There are several options available, but they boil down to three big strategies:
Packing more animals into existing barns, which risks overcrowding in facilities that already don’t offer a lot of room per animal Putting animals onto outdoor fields, where they cannot be protected effectively from predators and disease Euthanizing animals en masse
“You’re having to choose between amazingly bad options for protecting their welfare, or making the incredibly difficult choice to euthanize them all because there are fates worse than death,” says Candace Croney, a professor of animal sciences at Purdue and an expert on animal welfare on farms.
Some farms are already taking the extreme step of euthanasia (a term some might argue is a misnomer since their killing isn’t strictly for the animals’ benefit in this case). Allen Harim, a poultry processor, has announced it will euthanize 2 million chickens in Delaware and Maryland. JBS’s pork plant in Worthington, Minnesota, has reopened — to euthanize pigs from local hog farms, not to process them for sale. A representative for the Minnesota Pork Producers Association told the Star-Tribune he expects 60,000 to 80,000 hogs will be put down this week in Minnesota alone.
This kind of effort isn’t unprecedented. In 2015, an avian influenza outbreak led to the US Department of Agriculture assisting in the euthanizing of 31.5 million birds in Iowa. But the animal welfare costs of the Covid-19 outbreak are relatively underpublicized, and severe. The costs on human farmers forced to euthanize animals are severe as well. “It takes a significant emotional and psychological toll on the people who have to do it,” Croney says. “They’ll try to avoid it if at all possible. It’s devastating to make these kinds of decisions and they have some lasting psychological repercussions.”
How overcrowding happens
Because animal agriculture in the US is a highly competitive industry, the life cycles of the livestock and poultry being raised and slaughtered are tightly regulated for maximum efficiency. A pig typically goes through a 292- to 311-day (about 9 1/2 to 10 1/2 months) life cycle from a female pig’s impregnation through to slaughter for market, the National Pork Board explains.
That process involves four separate types of enclosures for the animals: gestation facilities for pregnant pigs; farrowing facilities for mothers (sows) and their newborns; nurseries for piglets after they’ve been weaned; and finishing barns for pigs as they grow up to market size.
Each of those facilities is usually filled to maximum capacity, for efficiency’s sake. That makes a bottleneck like closed processing plants immensely challenging for farmers. If they can’t offload mature pigs to meatpacking plants (which usually slaughter and dismember the finished pigs), then they have nowhere to place pigs coming up from nurseries. If they leave pigs in their nurseries, then the youngest piglets just weaned off their mothers have nowhere to go. If those piglets go nowhere, then pregnant pigs have nowhere to go once they give birth. A blockage at one point in the process causes problems throughout the whole process.
Poultry faces a similar problem, though given that meat chickens’ lifespans are typically only 6 to 8 weeks, farmers have a bit more flexibility and fewer built-in time costs. Pasture-raised cattle are more flexible since you can add additional cattle to the pasture, but they face overcrowding concerns as well.
What farms do about overcrowding
So, what can farms do if they’re faced with excess animals? Croney notes that they can try to slow the growth of animals, perhaps by reducing food given to them. But this comes with immense costs. “You can curtail growth by curtailing how much you feed them, but then you have animals that are hungry and crowded, which sets them up for competition around food, which can lead to injury and death,” she notes.
Pork and especially chicken plants already don’t offer much space to their animals. A 2011 survey found that pigs got on average 7.2 square feet each; the National Chicken Council reports that standard industry practice is to give about 0.8 square feet for each chicken, or barely more than a standard sheet of paper. Overcrowding due to Covid-19 could entail offering them even less space.
Farmers can theoretically place excess animals outdoors but this might be an even worse option. “In order to let them have access outdoors, much less to house them outdoors, you have to have a certain level of setup and protections for them,” Croney explains. “The types of fencing, shade, water access, protection from predators and inclement weather — you’d have to have that set up and reworked. If you have a farm with a couple thousand animals, that would be incredibly difficult to do. You certainly don’t have labor to spare to help you do that, and those systems require much more intensive oversight and management.”
“You’re having to choose between amazingly bad options for protecting their welfare, or making the incredibly difficult choice to euthanize them all because there are fates worse than death”
For chickens, there are particular concerns apart from overcrowding or outdoor dangers that come into play when mature chickens are no longer being slaughtered. “Broiler chickens,” or chickens bred for meat as opposed to egg-laying hens, have been bred to be so large that if they’re allowed to live longer than planned, “they suffer from animal welfare problems because they could be too large relative to their ability of legs to withstand the weight,” Lusk explains. “You don’t have near that problem with pigs or cows. The animal welfare problem with pigs is the backing-up issue, and the animal welfare problem with chickens is them getting too big.”
Given these difficulties, it’s not hard to see why some farms are already opting for euthanasia. But that comes with its own difficulties. Processing plants are supposed to render animals “insensible” and unable to feel pain before slaughtering them, and to use calming practices that make slaughter as minimally stressful as possible. “As sad as even that death is, the process is typically smooth and the animals shouldn’t be able to anticipate what is happening,” Croney says. “With mass euthanasia and limited personnel, that orderly, one-by-one, careful, generally consistent process is difficult, sometimes impossible to achieve, which is why no one ever wants to be in that position.”
Croney notes euthanasia can take many forms, from gassing to bolt guns to straight-up gunshots; the latter creates obvious noise problems and is difficult to scale. “Especially if people are using physical methods with captive bolt or gunshot, people are becoming stressed themselves and having to hurry,” Croney says. “That may mean that things are not done as accurately or humanely.”
Then there’s the problem of disposal. Without processing plants that can dismember animals, ship out usable meat, and dispose of the rest, it’s not obvious what farmers can do with the animals they euthanize. JBS, a massive pork processor, is sending hogs sent to it for euthanasia by hog farmers to landfills (basically mass graves) or external meat rendering plants. As processors like JBS shut down facilities, though, more and more of these tasks may be taken up by the farms themselves, not meatpackers and meat processors. That leaves disposal as more of an open question, with options like burial on the farm itself presenting themselves.
“The entire situation is tragic,” Croney concludes, and not just for animals. “Whatever our stances on meat-eating, this is a time to be a little sensitive. There are people who are incredibly depressed, who are struggling, who really do care about their animals, and this is incredibly hard for them. The human toll this takes is not often talked about.”


vox--2020-05-04--Supreme Court hears 2 cases about when religious employers can ignore civil rights laws

Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel , are difficult cases .
They concern whether two Catholic school teachers qualify as “ ministers , ” and are therefore beyond the reach of workplace civil rights laws .
In Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC ( 2012 ) , the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment enshrines a “ ministerial exemption ” to anti-discrimination laws .
As Chief Justice John Roberts explained for the Court in Hosanna-Tabor , the Constitution ’ s “ Establishment Clause prevents the Government from appointing ministers , and the Free Exercise Clause @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of religious groups to select their own.
” This prohibition on laws regulating how religious groups choose their own ministers is so broad that it even permits such groups to engage in invidious discrimination .
A church may fire a minister , for example , because that minister is black , or because they are gay , or because they ’ ve become pregnant , even though federal law prohibits race and pregnancy discrimination , and many states have laws barring anti-LGBTQ discrimination .
But it ’ s also far from clear who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which is where Biel and Morrissey-Berru come in .
Though there are some religious leaders — priests , rabbis , imams , and the like — who rather obviously qualify as ministers , what about someone with significant religious duties who spends most of their time engaged in secular work ?
What about someone who may spend a few hours a week providing religious instruction , but who has no formal training in theology and no formal status as an ordained minister ?
Both Biel and Morrissey-Berru involve Catholic school teachers who claim @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reasons .
Kristen Biel was diagnosed with breast cancer and has since died .
Her estate claims that her teaching contract was not renewed because of her cancer diagnosis , in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act .
The school claims she was removed because she “ was not strict ” enough in her classroom discipline .
Agnes Morrissey-Berru , meanwhile , says her contract was not renewed due to age discrimination .
The school claims a mix of reasons for removing her , including financial concerns and concerns that her teaching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the real reason these women ’ s contracts were not renewed is not before the Supreme Court .
The Court will confront whether Biel and Morrissey-Berru count as ministers — and therefore are beyond the reach of laws banning disability and age discrimination .
And the question of whether either woman qualifies as a “ minister ” turns out to be devilishly hard to answer under the Supreme Court ’ s sole precedent dealing with the ministerial exception .
And , in case it is not yet clear , the stakes in these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is classified as a “ minister , ” they effectively lose their rights to be free from discrimination in the workplace .
If the Court permits large swaths of workers to be classified as “ ministers , ” it could open the floodgates to widespread discrimination .
The purpose of the ministerial exemption is to prevent the government from , in the words of Hosanna-Tabor , “ depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.
” Hosanna-Tabor , moreover , was a unanimous decision , so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and conservative judges that some form of ministerial exemption to civil rights laws is mandated by the Constitution .
But Hosanna-Tabor also does not offer clear guidance on who qualifies as a minister , in no small part because it was a fairly easy case .
Like Biel and Morrissey-Berru , Hosanna-Tabor involved a teacher at a religious school .
In determining that this teacher did qualify as a minister , the Supreme Court laid out several factors that courts could consider when determining if a particular employee fits within the ministerial exception @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out as a minister , and did the employee do the same ?
Did the employee have significant religious training ?
Did their job duties involve “ important religious functions ” ?
All these factors pointed in one direction in Hosanna-Tabor .
The plaintiff in that case was a teacher at a Lutheran school that gave her the title “ Minister of Religion , Commissioned.
” She ’ d completed “ eight college-level courses in subjects including biblical interpretation , church doctrine , and the ministry of the Lutheran teacher , ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lutheran faculty .
She taught some religious subjects .
She led her students in prayer , and she occasionally led chapel services .
She ’ d also claimed a tax benefit for workers who earn their income “ in the exercise of the ministry.
” Given these lopsided facts , the Supreme Court had little difficulty concluding that the Hosanna-Tabor plaintiff was a minister .
Biel and Morrissey-Berru , by contrast , involve much more marginal claims that two religious school teachers qualify as ministers .
Both women received bachelor ’ s degrees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take “ catechist courses ” provided by Los Angeles ’ s Catholic archdiocese .
And both women were classified by their schools as “ lay employees.
” Meanwhile , both women did provide some religious instruction to their students — though , at least in Biel ’ s case , her religious teaching duties appear to have been fairly minimal .
According to the lawyers for her estate , Biel taught religion “ for approximately thirty minutes a day , four days a week , ” and she did so from a workbook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Biel and Morrissey-Berru , in other words , is whether the ministerial exemption applies when some but not all of the factors identified in Hosanna-Tabor also apply to the alleged ministers at the heart of those cases .
The opposing sides propose wildly different tests for determining who qualifies as a minister The Catholic schools hoping to classify Biel and Morrissey-Berru as ministers , unsurprisingly , propose an expansive test for who fits within the ministerial exception : ” When an employee of a religious organization performs important religious functions , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough under Hosanna-Tabor for the ministerial exception to apply.
” And what qualifies as an “ important religious function ” ?
To answer this question , the schools look to Justice Samuel Alito ’ s concurring opinion in Hosanna-Tabor , which suggests that employees “ who serve in positions of leadership , those who perform important functions in worship services and in the performance of religious ceremonies and rituals , and those who are entrusted with teaching and conveying the tenets of the faith to the next generation ” all qualify as ministers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religious subjects , even for just a couple of hours a week , that is enough to qualify the teacher as a minister .
A teacher may even qualify as a minister if they are required to lead their students in prayer , as these prayers could qualify as “ important functions in worship services and in the performance of religious ceremonies and rituals.
” Lawyers for the two teachers , meanwhile , suggest a less expansive test .
For one thing , they ask the Supreme Court to place much more emphasis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ministerial status ” such as whether an employer explicitly designated a particular employee as a minister , and whether the employee had formal religious training .
Among other things , this reliance on formal criteria offers a fair warning to employees who are subject to the ministerial exception .
As the lawyers for the two teachers write , “ an employee should not discover on the day of her dismissal that her employer is entitled to fire her for becoming pregnant or sick—or just becoming older.
” Yet these lawyers also acknowledge that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is insufficient .
They concede that “ in our pluralistic society , some churches have unorthodox hierarchies , and others may not use familiar titles or nomenclature.
” Accordingly , they recognize that courts must pay some attention to the “ religious functions ” performed by a particular employee to determine if that employee is a minister .
One thing that becomes painfully clear , after reading both briefs , is that coming up with a satisfying way to sort out which employees should qualify as ministers is hard .
As the plaintiffs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relies too heavily on formal criteria like whether a particular employee was ordained as a minister is not compatible with faiths that have “ unorthodox hierarchies.
” Employers , moreover , could find it fairly easy to game such a test .
If courts place a heavy emphasis on which employees are formally designated as ministers , that gives religious employers a strong incentive to designate every employee as a minister — in order to immunize itself from lawsuits alleging employment discrimination .
The schools ’ proposed test , meanwhile , is even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religious denominations and conservative law firms have already published guides advising religious employers on how to game such a test .
Consider a manual published by the Southern Baptist Convention and the Alliance Defending Freedom .
That manual , titled Protecting Your Ministry From Sexual Orientation Gender Identity Lawsuits , suggested that even employees such as a receptionist could be reclassified as “ ministers ” by a sufficiently creative employer : So the Supreme Court faces an unenviable task in Biel and Morrissey-Berru .
It needs to offer lower courts some guidance on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ secular and religious duties qualifies as a minister , and how much leeway religious employers should have to designate vast swaths of their workforce as ministers .
And the stakes here are high , since any employee classified as a minister loses their legal protections against invidious discrimination .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, are difficult cases, which the Court will hear in a rare teleconferenced oral argument next Monday. They concern whether two Catholic school teachers qualify as “ministers,” and are therefore beyond the reach of workplace civil rights laws.
In Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (2012), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment enshrines a “ministerial exemption” to anti-discrimination laws. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained for the Court in Hosanna-Tabor, the Constitution’s “Establishment Clause prevents the Government from appointing ministers, and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.”
This prohibition on laws regulating how religious groups choose their own ministers is so broad that it even permits such groups to engage in invidious discrimination. A church may fire a minister, for example, because that minister is black, or because they are gay, or because they’ve become pregnant, even though federal law prohibits race and pregnancy discrimination, and many states have laws barring anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
But it’s also far from clear who qualifies as a “minister,” which is where Biel and Morrissey-Berru come in. Though there are some religious leaders — priests, rabbis, imams, and the like — who rather obviously qualify as ministers, what about someone with significant religious duties who spends most of their time engaged in secular work? What about someone who may spend a few hours a week providing religious instruction, but who has no formal training in theology and no formal status as an ordained minister?
Both Biel and Morrissey-Berru involve Catholic school teachers who claim that they lost their jobs for illegitimate reasons. Kristen Biel was diagnosed with breast cancer and has since died. Her estate claims that her teaching contract was not renewed because of her cancer diagnosis, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The school claims she was removed because she “was not strict” enough in her classroom discipline.
Agnes Morrissey-Berru, meanwhile, says her contract was not renewed due to age discrimination. The school claims a mix of reasons for removing her, including financial concerns and concerns that her teaching had insufficient “academic rigor.”
But the real reason these women’s contracts were not renewed is not before the Supreme Court. The Court will confront whether Biel and Morrissey-Berru count as ministers — and therefore are beyond the reach of laws banning disability and age discrimination. And the question of whether either woman qualifies as a “minister” turns out to be devilishly hard to answer under the Supreme Court’s sole precedent dealing with the ministerial exception.
And, in case it is not yet clear, the stakes in these cases are profound. If an employee is classified as a “minister,” they effectively lose their rights to be free from discrimination in the workplace. If the Court permits large swaths of workers to be classified as “ministers,” it could open the floodgates to widespread discrimination.
The ministerial exception, briefly explained
The purpose of the ministerial exemption is to prevent the government from, in the words of Hosanna-Tabor, “depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” Hosanna-Tabor, moreover, was a unanimous decision, so there is widespread consensus among both liberal and conservative judges that some form of ministerial exemption to civil rights laws is mandated by the Constitution.
But Hosanna-Tabor also does not offer clear guidance on who qualifies as a minister, in no small part because it was a fairly easy case.
Like Biel and Morrissey-Berru, Hosanna-Tabor involved a teacher at a religious school. In determining that this teacher did qualify as a minister, the Supreme Court laid out several factors that courts could consider when determining if a particular employee fits within the ministerial exception. Did the employer hold the employee out as a minister, and did the employee do the same? Did the employee have significant religious training? Did their job duties involve “important religious functions”?
All these factors pointed in one direction in Hosanna-Tabor. The plaintiff in that case was a teacher at a Lutheran school that gave her the title “Minister of Religion, Commissioned.” She’d completed “eight college-level courses in subjects including biblical interpretation, church doctrine, and the ministry of the Lutheran teacher,” and had to pass an examination administered by Lutheran faculty. She taught some religious subjects. She led her students in prayer, and she occasionally led chapel services. She’d also claimed a tax benefit for workers who earn their income “in the exercise of the ministry.”
Given these lopsided facts, the Supreme Court had little difficulty concluding that the Hosanna-Tabor plaintiff was a minister.
Biel and Morrissey-Berru, by contrast, involve much more marginal claims that two religious school teachers qualify as ministers. Both women received bachelor’s degrees in secular subjects, although Morrissey-Berru did take “catechist courses” provided by Los Angeles’s Catholic archdiocese. And both women were classified by their schools as “lay employees.”
Meanwhile, both women did provide some religious instruction to their students — though, at least in Biel’s case, her religious teaching duties appear to have been fairly minimal. According to the lawyers for her estate, Biel taught religion “for approximately thirty minutes a day, four days a week,” and she did so from a workbook mandated by her school.
The question in Biel and Morrissey-Berru, in other words, is whether the ministerial exemption applies when some but not all of the factors identified in Hosanna-Tabor also apply to the alleged ministers at the heart of those cases.
The opposing sides propose wildly different tests for determining who qualifies as a minister
The Catholic schools hoping to classify Biel and Morrissey-Berru as ministers, unsurprisingly, propose an expansive test for who fits within the ministerial exception: ”When an employee of a religious organization performs important religious functions,” the schools argue, “that is enough under Hosanna-Tabor for the ministerial exception to apply.”
And what qualifies as an “important religious function”? To answer this question, the schools look to Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion in Hosanna-Tabor, which suggests that employees “who serve in positions of leadership, those who perform important functions in worship services and in the performance of religious ceremonies and rituals, and those who are entrusted with teaching and conveying the tenets of the faith to the next generation” all qualify as ministers.
Thus, if a schoolteacher teaches religious subjects, even for just a couple of hours a week, that is enough to qualify the teacher as a minister. A teacher may even qualify as a minister if they are required to lead their students in prayer, as these prayers could qualify as “important functions in worship services and in the performance of religious ceremonies and rituals.”
Lawyers for the two teachers, meanwhile, suggest a less expansive test. For one thing, they ask the Supreme Court to place much more emphasis on “formalistic, objective indicia of ministerial status” such as whether an employer explicitly designated a particular employee as a minister, and whether the employee had formal religious training. Among other things, this reliance on formal criteria offers a fair warning to employees who are subject to the ministerial exception.
As the lawyers for the two teachers write, “an employee should not discover on the day of her dismissal that her employer is entitled to fire her for becoming pregnant or sick—or just becoming older.”
Yet these lawyers also acknowledge that a test relying solely on formal criteria is insufficient. They concede that “in our pluralistic society, some churches have unorthodox hierarchies, and others may not use familiar titles or nomenclature.” Accordingly, they recognize that courts must pay some attention to the “religious functions” performed by a particular employee to determine if that employee is a minister.
One thing that becomes painfully clear, after reading both briefs, is that coming up with a satisfying way to sort out which employees should qualify as ministers is hard. As the plaintiffs’ lawyers acknowledge, a test that relies too heavily on formal criteria like whether a particular employee was ordained as a minister is not compatible with faiths that have “unorthodox hierarchies.”
Employers, moreover, could find it fairly easy to game such a test. If courts place a heavy emphasis on which employees are formally designated as ministers, that gives religious employers a strong incentive to designate every employee as a minister — in order to immunize itself from lawsuits alleging employment discrimination.
The schools’ proposed test, meanwhile, is even easier to game. Indeed, some religious denominations and conservative law firms have already published guides advising religious employers on how to game such a test.
Consider a manual published by the Southern Baptist Convention and the Alliance Defending Freedom. That manual, titled Protecting Your Ministry From Sexual Orientation Gender Identity Lawsuits, suggested that even employees such as a receptionist could be reclassified as “ministers” by a sufficiently creative employer:
When feasible, a religious organization should assign its employees duties that involve ministerial teaching, or other spiritual qualifications — duties that directly further the religious mission. For example, if a church receptionist answers the phone, the job description might detail how the receptionist is required to answer basic questions about the church’s faith, provide religious resources, or pray with callers. Consider requiring all employees to participate in devotional or prayer time, or to even lead these on occasion.
So the Supreme Court faces an unenviable task in Biel and Morrissey-Berru. It needs to offer lower courts some guidance on when an employee with a mix of secular and religious duties qualifies as a minister, and how much leeway religious employers should have to designate vast swaths of their workforce as ministers.
And the stakes here are high, since any employee classified as a minister loses their legal protections against invidious discrimination.


Contact tracing, explained

To safely begin reopening the economy , America will need to rely on so-called disease detectives to track the novel coronavirus and contain new emerging outbreaks before they grow out of control .
This work , known as “ contact tracing , ” is critical for state plans to relax social distancing without inviting a sudden resurgence of Covid-19 cases .
All the various plans to ease social distancing restrictions rely on this work .
To prevent another spike in cases , public health workers will perform the difficult and sometimes tedious process of interviewing people diagnosed with Covid-19 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in close physical contact with , and then informing those people of their potential exposure and advising them to self-isolate and get tested .
“ The rapidity with which this work has to be done is really unprecedented , ” Jeff Dunchin , who leads the epidemiology division in King County , Washington , the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States , told me .
“ If you miss a few cases , those little sparks can set off a forest fire.
” People in this field — officially known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — were previously focused on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases .
Tracing Covid-19 presents new challenges .
One person infected with the virus can spread it to a half dozen others and symptoms often don ’ t present themselves for days after a person is already contagious .
New technology could assist public health workers with their jobs .
Apple and Google are reengineering smartphones ’ Bluetooth functions so they could silently and anonymously track the people each of us comes into close contact with .
But those sci-fi public health ventures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and convincing people to use them .
That leaves old-fashioned disease detecting as one of the best tools available to track Covid-19 once people start going back to work and out in public places .
But the fear is the US won ’ t have enough people to do this on the necessary scale .
Researchers say the country is going to need tens of thousands more workers — and billions of dollars — to handle the contract tracing workload expected for the coronavirus .
The DISs I spoke with said they haven @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but they ’ ve been working in a lockdown situation , with most people ’ s contacts limited to whomever they live with .
Once more people start going back to school and work , the job will become much harder .
“ It ’ s going to be very challenging , ” Dunchin said .
“ We ’ re not absolutely sure that we ’ re gon na be able to do it.
” John Owens Jr. has been a DIS in Rochester , New York , for 20 years .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
His phone rings twice in five minutes when we talk .
“ My phone never stops ringing.
” Before the coronavirus showed up , his team was tracking HIV , syphilis , gonorrhea , and chlamydia .
One person on the contact tracing squad would receive maybe three or four people every day .
They would go interview a person who tested positive for these diseases and find out who their recent sexual partners had been .
The DIS would then get contact information for those people and notify them of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of contacts — and there could be anywhere from one or two to 30 — it could take mere hours or nearly a week to complete that process .
“ Being able to gain rapport with people quickly , that is the single most important thing , ” Owens said .
“ if you are good at that , you will be good at this.
” But Owens and his team had never tracked a disease quite like Covid-19 before ; the only remotely comparable experience was a past measles outbreak .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calls : 40 cases or so every day for his team of eight to 10 workers , depending on the day .
A respiratory virus like SARS-Cov-2 is also much harder to track than a sexually transmitted disease .
The DIS team has to ask patients about everybody they ’ ve been in close proximity to since two days before they first felt symptoms from the coronavirus .
“ You can ’ t ever really know how you got it or when you got it , ” Owens said .
“ It is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much easier to figure it out with STDs or HIV.
” On the other hand , the contact tracing workers I spoke with said people are usually more forthcoming when talking about Covid-19 than they are when discussing their recent sexual history .
“ People are dealing with the anxiety of ‘ Who have I infected ?
, ’ ” Bryana Fryczynski , a DIS with the Michigan state health department , told me .
“ People are having to deal with those emotions while being isolated .
We take that burden away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that conversation , we have the information we need and they can rest easily.
” Both Owens and Fryczynski said their work had been made simpler by the lockdowns in place all over the country ; people don ’ t have many contacts except their immediate family members or roommates .
They expect that to change — the number of contacts to increase , the work of tracing the disease to become more difficult — as the stay-at-home restrictions ease .
Michigan is in a political fight right now over rolling back some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the time , and there are no typical days with this job .
Owens remembered in the early days of the pandemic , people were getting exposed at churches ; others had gotten the virus in cafeterias and bowling alleys .
It ’ s asking a lot of people , to try to remember anybody they ’ ve been physically within six feet of for a period of 15 minutes or more .
And it ’ s going to be more difficult as people start going to offices or restaurants again .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ places start to slowly reopen , ” Fryczynski said .
“ For now , people are like , ‘ It ’ s the people in my household.
’ ” Phone apps could help with contact tracing — but they have shortcomings There has been a hope that , as people start venturing back out into the world , our smartphones can help automate some of the work contact tracing teams are asked to do .
In April , Apple and Google rolled out a plan for adapting Bluetooth functionality to keep track of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaffary explained : The contact-tracing tool Apple and Google want to create would have your smartphone log when you ’ ve come into close contact with other people .
If one of those people later reports Covid-19 symptoms to a public health authority , your phone would receive an alert about the diagnosis .
It works a bit like exchanging contact information with everyone you meet , except everything is designed to be anonymous and automatic .
Once it ’ s equipped with this new contact-tracing software , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keys with nearby devices via Bluetooth .
The phone maintains a list of keys collected from people you have come in contact that with stays on your device , not a server , unless you test positive for coronavirus and report your diagnosis .
If that happens , your phone will then upload those keys to a server that will send alerts to the owners of recently collected keys .
The alert will not reveal who ’ s infected — in this example , that ’ s you — but it will share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proximity to you should do next .
This naturally raises a lot of privacy concerns for Americans .
While policy experts have suggested ways to build public trust in these apps , a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found about 60 percent of Americans either would not or could not allow their phone to silently and anonymously surveil them , even in the name of public health .
Smartphone users were roughly split down the middle , 50-50 .
Another 1 in 6 Americans don ’ t have a smartphone with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Apple and Google envisioned .
North Dakota went ahead and set up its own contact tracing app , asking people to download it to help with the effort to track Covid-19 .
But only 3 percent of the state , about 25,000 people , had done so as of April 29 , according to the New York Times .
For context , Oxford researchers have estimated governments would need more like 60 percent of their citizens to participate for these apps to be effective .
To be fair , this is not only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countries have failed to achieve the necessary buy-in from their citizens , too , as Shirin Gaffary wrote for Recode .
Just 20 percent of Singapore ’ s population has downloaded its tracing app ; Norway has done a little better , reaching 30 percent in the first week , but the government must still double that to reach the necessary market saturation .
Without a sudden uptick in people willing to use a smartphone app to aid contact tracing in the US , the traditional work of disease intervention specialists is going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But experts don ’ t think the US has nearly enough people trained to do that work right now .
We need a lot more people to do this contract tracing work Before the pandemic exploded , state and local health departments had about 2,000 workers doing contact tracing .
The varying estimates for how many people are needed to trace Covid-19 are all exponentially larger than that .
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated the US needs 100,000 people performing this work for state and local agencies .
Former @ @ @ @ @ @ @ necessary number of workers could be as high as 300,000 .
Money is going to be the problem .
The Johns Hopkins researchers thought it would take $ 3.6 billion to hire and train enough people to expand the DIS ranks , a figure endorsed by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials .
But state budgets are squeezed and while people could in theory volunteer for these jobs , there is also record unemployment right now .
It makes a lot of sense to put out-of-work people , or people training @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on these assignments — and to pay them .
But state governments would need financial help from Congress to do it .
The most recent stimulus bill put aside $ 11 billion for state and local health programs , but that was supposed to cover testing and other activities as well as contact tracing .
More money will be needed , especially if the people like Frieden are right and we need more like 300,000 people to perform this job to keep the coronavirus contained .
In the meantime , states and cities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the tracing capacity .
California has put librarians and attorneys to work interviewing people and calling contacts .
New York Gov .
Andrew Cuomo announced he was partnering with former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg ’ s philanthropic group , as well as Johns Hopkins University , to train people to do contact tracing .
Maryland signed a contract with NORC-University of Chicago to quadruple its contact tracing capabilities , enough to track as many as 1,000 new cases per day .
( Right now , the state is seeing a little less than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recent days . )
And it still might not be enough to prevent future waves and the need to reinstitute stricter social distancing rules .
Public health experts keep cautioning lockdowns may need to be reinstated if there is a rapid rise in cases and hospitalizations that risks overwhelming local health care systems .
“ I tend to be somewhat on the pessimistic side about contact tracing as a general control strategy .
What we are pretty sure about is that contact tracing works well when you have relatively few cases , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when you have even fewer cases that are unknown , ” Marc Lipsitch , a Harvard University epidemiologist , told reporters on a recent call .
“ Neither of those is true right now in most parts of the United States.
” Nevertheless , the more people who can do the work , the more it can help .
Owens told me Rochester has “ so many volunteers ” who want to come and help .
In Michigan , Fryczynski said state health department workers are being assigned to assist the cities and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Covid-19 cases .
“ Right now , it ’ s an all hands on deck situation.
” Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

To safely begin reopening the economy, America will need to rely on so-called disease detectives to track the novel coronavirus and contain new emerging outbreaks before they grow out of control.
This work, known as “contact tracing,” is critical for state plans to relax social distancing without inviting a sudden resurgence of Covid-19 cases. All the various plans to ease social distancing restrictions rely on this work.
To prevent another spike in cases, public health workers will perform the difficult and sometimes tedious process of interviewing people diagnosed with Covid-19, finding out whom they have recently been in close physical contact with, and then informing those people of their potential exposure and advising them to self-isolate and get tested.
“The rapidity with which this work has to be done is really unprecedented,” Jeff Duchin, who leads the epidemiology division in King County, Washington, the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, told me. “If you miss a few cases, those little sparks can set off a forest fire.”
People in this field — officially known as disease intervention specialists — were previously focused on HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Tracing Covid-19 presents new challenges. One person infected with the virus can spread it to half a dozen others and symptoms often don’t present themselves for days after a person is already contagious.
New technology could assist public health workers with their jobs. Apple and Google are reengineering smartphones’ Bluetooth functions so they could silently and anonymously track the people each of us comes into close contact with. But those sci-fi public health ventures have problems, both in safeguarding privacy and convincing people to use them.
That leaves old-fashioned disease detecting as one of the best tools available to track Covid-19 once people start going back to work and out in public places. But the fear is the US won’t have enough people to do this on the necessary scale. Researchers say the country is going to need tens of thousands more workers — and billions of dollars — to handle the contact tracing workload expected for the coronavirus.
The disease intervention specialists I spoke with said they haven’t been overwhelmed to date — but they’ve been working in a lockdown situation, with most people’s contacts limited to whomever they live with. Once more people start going back to school and work, the job will become much harder.
“It’s going to be very challenging,” Duchin said. “We’re not absolutely sure that we’re gonna be able to do it.”
How public health “detectives” track diseases like Covid-19
John Owens Jr. has been a disease intervention specialist in Rochester, New York, for 20 years. He now supervises the contact tracing team there. His phone rings twice in five minutes when we talk. “My phone never stops ringing.”
Before the coronavirus showed up, his team was tracking HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. One person on the contact tracing squad would receive maybe three or four people every day. They would go interview a person who tested positive for these diseases and find out who their recent sexual partners had been. The disease intervention specialist would then get contact information for those people and notify them of their potential exposure. Depending on the number of contacts — and there could be anywhere from one or two to 30 — it could take mere hours or nearly a week to complete that process.
“Being able to gain rapport with people quickly, that is the single most important thing,” Owens said. “if you are good at that, you will be good at this.”
But Owens and his team had never tracked a disease quite like Covid-19 before; the only remotely comparable experience was a past measles outbreak. They’re dealing with a lot of calls: 40 cases or so every day for his team of eight to 10 workers, depending on the day.
A respiratory virus like SARS-Cov-2 is also much harder to track than a sexually transmitted infection. The disease intervention team has to ask patients about everybody they’ve been in close proximity to since two days before they first felt symptoms from the coronavirus.
“You can’t ever really know how you got it or when you got it,” Owens said. “It is much more challenging. It’s much easier to figure it out with STDs or HIV.”
On the other hand, the contact tracing workers I spoke with said people are usually more forthcoming when talking about Covid-19 than they are when discussing their recent sexual history.
“People are dealing with the anxiety of ‘Who have I infected?,’” Bryana Fryczynski, a disease intervention specialist with the Michigan state health department, told me. “People are having to deal with those emotions while being isolated. We take that burden away. They know at the end of that conversation, we have the information we need and they can rest easily.”
Both Owens and Fryczynski said their work had been made simpler by the lockdowns in place all over the country; people don’t have many contacts except their immediate family members or roommates.
They expect that to change — the number of contacts to increase, the work of tracing the disease to become more difficult — as the stay-at-home restrictions ease. Michigan is in a political fight right now over rolling back some social distancing rules. Things are changing all the time, and there are no typical days with this job.
Owens remembered in the early days of the pandemic, people were getting exposed at churches; others had gotten the virus in cafeterias and bowling alleys. It’s asking a lot of people, to try to remember anybody they’ve been physically within 6 feet of for a period of 15 minutes or more. And it’s going to be more difficult as people start going to offices or restaurants again.
“I think things will change as places start to slowly reopen,” Fryczynski said. “For now, people are like, ‘It’s the people in my household.’”
Phone apps could help with contact tracing — but they have shortcomings
There has been a hope that, as people start venturing back out into the world, our smartphones can help automate some of the work contact tracing teams are asked to do. In April, Apple and Google rolled out a plan for adapting Bluetooth functionality to keep track of our contacts, as Recode’s Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaffary explained:
The contact-tracing tool Apple and Google want to create would have your smartphone log when you’ve come into close contact with other people. If one of those people later reports Covid-19 symptoms to a public health authority, your phone would receive an alert about the diagnosis. It works a bit like exchanging contact information with everyone you meet, except everything is designed to be anonymous and automatic. Once it’s equipped with this new contact-tracing software, your smartphone will periodically exchange anonymized tracing keys with nearby devices via Bluetooth. The phone maintains a list of keys collected from people you have come in contact that with stays on your device, not a server, unless you test positive for coronavirus and report your diagnosis. If that happens, your phone will then upload those keys to a server that will send alerts to the owners of recently collected keys. The alert will not reveal who’s infected — in this example, that’s you — but it will share information for what people who were in proximity to you should do next.
This naturally raises a lot of privacy concerns for Americans. While policy experts have suggested ways to build public trust in these apps, a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found about 60 percent of Americans either would not or could not allow their phone to silently and anonymously surveil them, even in the name of public health. Smartphone users were roughly split down the middle, 50-50. Another 1 in 6 Americans don’t have a smartphone with the capability to run the kind of app Apple and Google envisioned.
North Dakota went ahead and set up its own contact tracing app, asking people to download it to help with the effort to track Covid-19. But only 3 percent of the state, about 25,000 people, had done so as of April 29, according to the New York Times.
For context, Oxford researchers have estimated governments would need more like 60 percent of their citizens to participate for these apps to be effective.
To be fair, this is not only a problem for the US. Other countries have failed to achieve the necessary buy-in from their citizens, too, as Gaffary wrote for Recode. Just 20 percent of Singapore’s population has downloaded its tracing app; Norway has done a little better, reaching 30 percent in the first week, but the government must still double that to reach the necessary market saturation.
Without a sudden uptick in people willing to use a smartphone app to aid contact tracing in the US, the traditional work of disease intervention specialists is going to be critical to the Covid-19 response.
But experts don’t think the US has nearly enough people trained to do that work right now.
We need a lot more people to do this contact tracing work
Before the pandemic exploded, state and local health departments had about 2,000 workers doing contact tracing. The varying estimates for how many people are needed to trace Covid-19 are all exponentially larger than that.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated the US needs 100,000 people performing this work for state and local agencies. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden told Politico the necessary number of workers could be as high as 300,000.
Money is going to be the problem. The Johns Hopkins researchers thought it would take $3.6 billion to hire and train enough people to expand the disease intervention ranks, a figure endorsed by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. But state budgets are squeezed, and while people could in theory volunteer for these jobs, there is also record unemployment right now. It makes a lot of sense to put out-of-work people, or people training to work in the medical fields, on these assignments — and to pay them. But state governments would need financial help from Congress to do it.
The most recent stimulus bill put aside $11 billion for state and local health programs, but that was supposed to cover testing and other activities as well as contact tracing. More money will be needed, especially if the people like Frieden are right and we need more like 300,000 people to perform this job to keep the coronavirus contained.
In the meantime, states and cities are doing what they can to expand the tracing capacity. California has put librarians and attorneys to work interviewing people and calling contacts. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he was partnering with former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic group, as well as Johns Hopkins University, to train people to do contact tracing. Maryland signed a contract with NORC-University of Chicago to quadruple its contact tracing capabilities, enough to track as many as 1,000 new cases per day. (Right now, the state is seeing a little less than that, between 600 and 900 in recent days.)
And it still might not be enough to prevent future waves and the need to reinstitute stricter social distancing rules. Public health experts keep cautioning lockdowns may need to be reinstated if there is a rapid rise in cases and hospitalizations that risks overwhelming local health care systems.
“I tend to be somewhat on the pessimistic side about contact tracing as a general control strategy. What we are pretty sure about is that contact tracing works well when you have relatively few cases, you have the resources to do it and when you have even fewer cases that are unknown,” Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University epidemiologist, told reporters on a recent call. “Neither of those is true right now in most parts of the United States.”
Nevertheless, the more people who can do the work, the more it can help. Owens told me Rochester has “so many volunteers” who want to come and help. In Michigan, Fryczynski said state health department workers are being assigned to assist the cities and counties that are facing an overwhelming load of Covid-19 cases.
“Right now, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.”
Eliza Barclay contributed to this report.


vox--2020-05-04--Paranoia about cheating is making online education terrible for everyone

When student Marium Raza learned that her online biochemistry exam at the University of Washington would have a digital proctor , she wanted to do her research .
The system , provided by a service called Proctorio , would rely on artificial intelligence and a webcam to monitor her while she worked .
In other words , as tests must happen remotely in the Covid-19 crisis , Raza ’ s school is one of many using a mixture of robots and video feeds to make sure students don ’ t cheat .
“ We don ’ t have any transparency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be used or who is going to see it , ” Raza told Recode .
“ The status quo should not be visualizing each student as someone who is trying to cheat in any way possible.
” Raza wasn ’ t the only one in her class who felt concerned about new levels of surveillance .
Another student in the class , who did not want to be named , said that in addition to privacy worries , they were concerned that they didn ’ t even have enough RAM to run @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tool ’ s facial detection algorithm seemed to struggle to recognize them , so they needed to sit in the full light of the window to better expose the contours of their face , in their view an indication that the system might be biased .
When a practice run with the software ultimately failed , Raza said students took the exam online without Proctorio ’ s monitoring .
Given the remote instruction required by the Covid-19 crisis , the University of Washington had signed a six-month contract with Proctorio only a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Washington spokesperson Victor Balta told Recode the software has not yet been widely used by professors .
Still , these students ’ experiences are another sign that , amid the pandemic , the hurried move to re-create in-person classes online has been far from smooth , especially when it comes to testing .
As professors have tried to balance a desire to keep students learning , some institutions have gone to great lengths to catch students cheating during the quick adjustment to remote instruction .
Many of these tactics are short-term solutions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move to online education — a transition that started long before the pandemic hit — requires increased digital surveillance of students to replicate old testing norms .
That , or schools will have to come up with different ways to measure learning .
Student surveillance is on the rise as tests move online In recent weeks , teachers of all education levels have been trying to figure out how to grade their students .
College professors , in particular , have moved large classes online , sometimes to reach a hundred or more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world .
Some professors say they ’ ve lowered their expectations for their students ’ work , and many have switched to pass-fail grades or adjusted their exam processes .
The switch to online learning has also left many universities leaning more heavily on existing learning management platforms , such as Blackboard and Canvas , where they can post assignments , online discussions , and resources .
Instructors have turned to video conferencing to host classes and lectures .
Meanwhile , some students and even some instructors simply don ’ t have the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make online courses work .
Still , as more aspects of education have moved online , some professors have remained committed to one classroom staple : the timed , closed-book exam .
But unable to have a teacher ’ s assistant strolling around a classroom to make sure students aren ’ t cheating , instructors are turning to remote proctoring services like Proctorio as well as competitors Examity , Honorlock , and ProctorU .
Some of these tools include a human component .
Examity , the subject of a recent Verge investigation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ webcam while they take exams and look for signs of cheating .
These human proctors might also ask that students show ID or put away their phones .
Some students are quick to brag about ways to trick these proctors in these scenarios .
( More on that in a second . )
But there are varying levels of automation , as well .
For instance , Examity also uses AI to verify students ’ identities , analyze their keystrokes , and , of course , ensure they ’ re not cheating .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ detection , which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens .
The company founder and CEO Mike Olsen , apparently bullish about the service ’ s automated nature , told Recode in an email that the company has fewer than 100 employees and doesn ’ t need “ humans in call centers.
” Though they ’ ve seen a surge during the pandemic , none of these companies is particularly new .
Whereas Examity and Proctorio were founded in 2013 , ProctorU has been around since 2008 .
Before the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ services to both online and traditional universities .
And with the huge growth of online education — the industry is expected to grow from being a $ 4 billion market in 2019 to a nearly $ 21 billion market in 2023 — they have been successful .
After raising $ 90 million last year , Examity reported that its exam monitoring services were used by more than 500 colleges and employers .
Demand has surged in recent weeks for obvious reasons .
Proctorio ’ s Olsen told Recode that in the last month @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exams — a 900 percent increase from the same period last year — and he anticipates many more as finals season approaches .
Some students seem to hate these services , and social media is chock-full of their grievances , from criticisms of the software to objections that the tool is just plain annoying .
And some , such as Raza , have turned to their campus newspapers to express their privacy objections .
Earlier this year , students at Florida State University started an online petition to protest their school ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have signed it so far .
The University of California Berkeley has already banned online exam proctoring , with some students saying they may not have the high-speed internet connection or living situation to make remote exams happen effectively and equitably .
New testing practices mean students are finding new ways to cheat These services are not perfect , and it ’ s easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services .
Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods , so they ’ re constantly coming up with countermeasures .
On its website , Proctorio even has a job listing for a “ professional cheater ” to test its system .
The contract position pays between $ 10,000 and $ 20,000 a year .
But the potential for deception doesn ’ t stop with remote proctoring .
“ With the rapid shift to online , we can ’ t watch students as they do their work in the same way that we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Phillip Dawson , a researcher who studies cheating at Australia ’ s Deakin University .
“ We ’ ll see different kinds of cheating.
” On the extreme end , Dawson suggests someone could be paid to take an entire course on behalf of another student and the professor would never know .
A version of this is already happening .
After stay-at-home orders left China locked down in the pandemic , some students paid firms to finish their semesters online for them , according to Quartz .
Students have long used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and this trend might evolve in the future .
As Dawson explains , new technology allows students to automatically paraphrase other people ’ s work .
This might make it harder for an instructor to spot plagiarism .
Spinbot , for example , is a simple service that “ spins ” or rewrites chunks of text .
Students could also plug a paragraph of English text into Google Translate , translate it into another language , and then translate it back into English to get a version that looks different from the original @ @ @ @ @ @ @ AI-based writing tool to help them finish texts , such as the Talk to Transformer tool , which is built on a language model from the research laboratory Open AI .
All these cheating innovations likely mean more demand for even better software to catch these students .
These programs include services , like LockDown Browser , that prevent students from using other applications during an exam or class , as well as anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin .
“ We will never be able to stop cheating in online learning , just like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stop cheating in offline learning , ” Dawson admits , explaining that schools might just be investing in a sort of education “ security theater.
” This could be a chance to change how higher education works Probably unfortunately , many students ’ and teachers ’ first introduction to online learning has been rushed and insufficiently prepared .
Some students , already burdened by the anxiety and fears of living through a pandemic , suffer from the digital divide .
Teachers , many untrained in online learning , are struggling to manage classes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ responsibilities and families .
But experts say that what ’ s happening now probably doesn ’ t represent the future of online education .
“ Our new normal might not be that everything ’ s online , ” says Ryan Baker , a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania .
“ But it might be that a third of things are online , and that might feel like a normal thing after a year.
” Marium Raza , the University of Washington student , said any form of webcam-based monitoring makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would prefer that schools have a bit more trust in students .
“ Students should be able to consent to using or not using a software without having it impact their educational experience , ” Raza argues .
“ But more than that , I think the whole process should be democratized a little bit , and students should be involved in the decision-making.
” The shift to online learning is inevitably changing views not just on cheating but also on what it really means to test students ’ knowledge .
Some professors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learning , arguing that assessments online don ’ t necessarily need to be traditional exams .
Even before the pandemic , some professors were arguing that “ attempting to replicate in-person teaching online ” with online proctoring doesn ’ t actually work .
As Douglas Harrison , a vice president and dean at the University of Maryland ’ s global campus , recently argued , the pandemic should push instructors toward assignments that might make cheating less likely and make assignments more meaningful , perhaps through case studies or scenario-based learning .
Baker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which can use algorithms to adapt lessons to individual students , as well as other computer-based learning tools .
For instance , he ’ s now adjusting one of his fall courses , which might be online , to make use of a mathematics platform called Assistments , which allows students to receive automatic feedback on their answers and gives teachers analytics about what kinds of mistakes students are making .
Ultimately , he says the current period will allow us to learn what kind of education works online and what doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are better to do live , and there are experiences that are better to do online , ” says Baker .
“ I ’ ve never been a fan of the 700-person lecture.
” Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network .
All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

When student Marium Raza learned that her online biochemistry exam at the University of Washington would have a digital proctor, she wanted to do her research. The system, provided by a service called Proctorio, would rely on artificial intelligence and a webcam to monitor her while she worked. In other words, as tests must happen remotely in the Covid-19 crisis, Raza’s school is one of many using a mixture of robots and video feeds to make sure students don’t cheat.
“We don’t have any transparency about how our recorded video is going to be used or who is going to see it,” Raza told Recode. “The status quo should not be visualizing each student as someone who is trying to cheat in any way possible.”
Raza wasn’t the only one in her class who felt concerned about new levels of surveillance. Another student in the class, who did not want to be named, said that in addition to privacy worries, they were concerned that they didn’t even have enough RAM to run the Proctorio software. Worse, the tool’s facial detection algorithm seemed to struggle to recognize them, so they needed to sit in the full light of the window to better expose the contours of their face, in their view an indication that the system might be biased.
When a practice run with the software ultimately failed, Raza said students took the exam online without Proctorio’s monitoring. Given the remote instruction required by the Covid-19 crisis, the University of Washington had signed a six-month contract with Proctorio only a few weeks before this biochemistry exam. University of Washington spokesperson Victor Balta told Recode the software has not yet been widely used by professors.
Still, these students’ experiences are another sign that, amid the pandemic, the hurried move to re-create in-person classes online has been far from smooth, especially when it comes to testing. As professors have tried to balance a desire to keep students learning, some institutions have gone to great lengths to catch students cheating during the quick adjustment to remote instruction.
Many of these tactics are short-term solutions, but they demonstrate that the bumpy move to online education — a transition that started long before the pandemic hit — requires increased digital surveillance of students to replicate old testing norms. That, or schools will have to come up with different ways to measure learning.
Student surveillance is on the rise as tests move online
In recent weeks, teachers of all education levels have been trying to figure out how to grade their students. College professors, in particular, have moved large classes online, sometimes to reach a hundred or more students across the country or even the world. Some professors say they’ve lowered their expectations for their students’ work, and many have switched to pass-fail grades or adjusted their exam processes.
The switch to online learning has also left many universities leaning more heavily on existing learning management platforms, such as Blackboard and Canvas, where they can post assignments, online discussions, and resources. Instructors have turned to video conferencing to host classes and lectures. Meanwhile, some students and even some instructors simply don’t have the appropriate devices or the internet connection to make online courses work.
Still, as more aspects of education have moved online, some professors have remained committed to one classroom staple: the timed, closed-book exam. But unable to have a teacher’s assistant strolling around a classroom to make sure students aren’t cheating, instructors are turning to remote proctoring services like Proctorio as well as competitors Examity, Honorlock, and ProctorU.
Some of these tools include a human component. Examity, the subject of a recent Verge investigation, has remote proctors who watch students via webcam while they take exams and look for signs of cheating. These human proctors might also ask that students show ID or put away their phones. Some students are quick to brag about ways to trick these proctors in these scenarios. (More on that in a second.)
But there are varying levels of automation, as well. For instance, Examity also uses AI to verify students’ identities, analyze their keystrokes, and, of course, ensure they’re not cheating. Proctorio uses artificial intelligence to conduct gaze detection, which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens. The company founder and CEO Mike Olsen, apparently bullish about the service’s automated nature, told Recode in an email that the company has fewer than 100 employees and doesn’t need “humans in call centers.”
Though they’ve seen a surge during the pandemic, none of these companies is particularly new. Whereas Examity and Proctorio were founded in 2013, ProctorU has been around since 2008. Before the novel coronavirus, these companies marketed their services to both online and traditional universities. And with the huge growth of online education — the industry is expected to grow from being a $4 billion market in 2019 to a nearly $21 billion market in 2023 — they have been successful. After raising $90 million last year, Examity reported that its exam monitoring services were used by more than 500 colleges and employers.
Demand has surged in recent weeks for obvious reasons. Proctorio’s Olsen told Recode that in the last month, the company has administered 2.5 million exams — a 900 percent increase from the same period last year — and he anticipates many more as finals season approaches.
Some students seem to hate these services, and social media is chock-full of their grievances, from criticisms of the software to objections that the tool is just plain annoying. And some, such as Raza, have turned to their campus newspapers to express their privacy objections. Earlier this year, students at Florida State University started an online petition to protest their school’s use of Honorlock, and over 5,500 have signed it so far. The University of California Berkeley has already banned online exam proctoring, with some students saying they may not have the high-speed internet connection or living situation to make remote exams happen effectively and equitably.
New testing practices mean students are finding new ways to cheat
These services are not perfect, and it’s easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services. Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop. It’s also easy for these remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods, so they’re constantly coming up with countermeasures. On its website, Proctorio even has a job listing for a “professional cheater” to test its system. The contract position pays between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.
But the potential for deception doesn’t stop with remote proctoring.
“With the rapid shift to online, we can’t watch students as they do their work in the same way that we might have in the past,” said Phillip Dawson, a researcher who studies cheating at Australia’s Deakin University. “We’ll see different kinds of cheating.”
On the extreme end, Dawson suggests someone could be paid to take an entire course on behalf of another student and the professor would never know. A version of this is already happening. After stay-at-home orders left China locked down in the pandemic, some students paid firms to finish their semesters online for them, according to Quartz.
Students have long used the internet to buy essays online, and this trend might evolve in the future. As Dawson explains, new technology allows students to automatically paraphrase other people’s work. This might make it harder for an instructor to spot plagiarism. Spinbot, for example, is a simple service that “spins” or rewrites chunks of text. Students could also plug a paragraph of English text into Google Translate, translate it into another language, and then translate it back into English to get a version that looks different from the original. Students might even try using an AI-based writing tool to help them finish texts, such as the Talk to Transformer tool, which is built on a language model from the research laboratory Open AI.
All these cheating innovations likely mean more demand for even better software to catch these students. These programs include services, like LockDown Browser, that prevent students from using other applications during an exam or class, as well as anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin.
“We will never be able to stop cheating in online learning, just like we’ve never been able to stop cheating in offline learning,” Dawson admits, explaining that schools might just be investing in a sort of education “security theater.”
This could be a chance to change how higher education works
Probably unfortunately, many students’ and teachers’ first introduction to online learning has been rushed and insufficiently prepared. Some students, already burdened by the anxiety and fears of living through a pandemic, suffer from the digital divide. Teachers, many untrained in online learning, are struggling to manage classes at home while they juggle their own responsibilities and families. But experts say that what’s happening now probably doesn’t represent the future of online education.
“Our new normal might not be that everything’s online,” says Ryan Baker, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “But it might be that a third of things are online, and that might feel like a normal thing after a year.”
Marium Raza, the University of Washington student, said any form of webcam-based monitoring makes her uncomfortable. Moving forward, she would prefer that schools have a bit more trust in students.
“Students should be able to consent to using or not using a software without having it impact their educational experience,” Raza argues. “But more than that, I think the whole process should be democratized a little bit, and students should be involved in the decision-making.”
The shift to online learning is inevitably changing views not just on cheating but also on what it really means to test students’ knowledge. Some professors are looking for other ways to measure learning, arguing that assessments online don’t necessarily need to be traditional exams.
Even before the pandemic, some professors were arguing that “attempting to replicate in-person teaching online” with online proctoring doesn’t actually work. As Douglas Harrison, a vice president and dean at the University of Maryland’s global campus, recently argued, the pandemic should push instructors toward assignments that might make cheating less likely and make assignments more meaningful, perhaps through case studies or scenario-based learning.
Baker is an advocate of adaptive learning, which can use algorithms to adapt lessons to individual students, as well as other computer-based learning tools. For instance, he’s now adjusting one of his fall courses, which might be online, to make use of a mathematics platform called Assistments, which allows students to receive automatic feedback on their answers and gives teachers analytics about what kinds of mistakes students are making.
Ultimately, he says the current period will allow us to learn what kind of education works online and what doesn’t.
“There are experiences that are better to do live, and there are experiences that are better to do online,” says Baker. “I’ve never been a fan of the 700-person lecture.”
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.


vox--2020-05-04--Colson Whitehead wins the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2019 novel Nickel Boys .
The win comes just three years after Whitehead won the Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad , making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to have won the Pulitzer for fiction twice .
The last time Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize , in April 2017 , the award served as the crown jewel in a months-long coronation .
The Underground Railroad , in which an enslaved woman makes a magical-realism-inflected journey out of the antebellum south , was easily 2016 ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 2016 , it became the inaugural book in the then-latest edition of Oprah ’ s Book Club .
Shortly thereafter , Barry Jenkins signed on to direct the TV adaptation .
In November , it won the National Book Award .
But this year ’ s prizewinner , Nickel Boys , is a quieter and less showy book than The Underground Railroad .
And it ’ s not the consensus pick of 2019 in quite the same way its predecessor was .
Like The Underground Railroad , Nickel Boys is about a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it deals with a hellish Florida reform school — historically called the Dozier School for Boys , here renamed Nickel Academy — at which boys who ’ d been convicted of petty crimes were systematically tortured : starved , beaten , raped , and shot .
Nearly 100 boys between the ages of 6 and 18 died at the Dozier School for Boys between 1900 and 1973 .
Boys of all races attended the school , but it was strictly segregated , and everything was worse for the black kids .
In Nickel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of two black students at Nickel Academy .
One of them is deeply principled and believes Nickel to be a violation of the moral laws of the universe .
The other is a survivor who will do what it takes to get out of Nickel alive .
In spite of themselves , they become best friends .
Part of what made The Underground Railroad so compelling was its elements of surrealism .
In that novel , the Underground Railroad is a literal train , and as the protagonist travels out of the South @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time .
But Nickel Boys contains no similar genre breaks ; it ’ s a straightforward realist novel with a clean three-act structure , and although there is a twist , it ’ s the kind of twist that ’ s well within the realm of normal for this sort of literary fiction .
And although Nickel Boys was well-reviewed , it didn ’ t become inescapable in the way The Underground Railroad did .
It won the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the National Book Award .
Nor was it an Oprah pick .
Whitehead ’ s second Pulitzer , then , is less a coronation of Nickel Boys and more a coronation of Whitehead himself .
In becoming a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner , Whitehead is breathing rarified air known only to Faulkner , Updike , and Booth Tarkington ( not all Pulitzer choices stand the test of time ) .
He ’ s become a veritable literary statesman .
The world is waiting to see what he ’ ll do next .
Every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2019 novel Nickel Boys. The win comes just three years after Whitehead won the Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to have won the Pulitzer for fiction twice.
The last time Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize, in April 2017, the award served as the crown jewel in a months-long coronation. The Underground Railroad, in which an enslaved woman makes a magical-realism-inflected journey out of the antebellum south, was easily 2016’s book of the year. In September of 2016, it became the inaugural book in the then-latest edition of Oprah’s Book Club. Shortly thereafter, Barry Jenkins signed on to direct the TV adaptation. In November, it won the National Book Award.
But this year’s prizewinner, Nickel Boys, is a quieter and less showy book than The Underground Railroad. And it’s not the consensus pick of 2019 in quite the same way its predecessor was.
Like The Underground Railroad, Nickel Boys is about a real-life atrocity. In this case, it deals with a hellish Florida reform school — historically called the Dozier School for Boys, here renamed Nickel Academy — at which boys who’d been convicted of petty crimes were systematically tortured: starved, beaten, raped, and shot. Nearly 100 boys between the ages of 6 and 18 died at the Dozier School for Boys between 1900 and 1973.
Boys of all races attended the school, but it was strictly segregated, and everything was worse for the black kids. In Nickel Boys, Whitehead delves into the story of two black students at Nickel Academy. One of them is deeply principled and believes Nickel to be a violation of the moral laws of the universe. The other is a survivor who will do what it takes to get out of Nickel alive. In spite of themselves, they become best friends.
Part of what made The Underground Railroad so compelling was its elements of surrealism. In that novel, the Underground Railroad is a literal train, and as the protagonist travels out of the South, she also seems to travel through time. But Nickel Boys contains no similar genre breaks; it’s a straightforward realist novel with a clean three-act structure, and although there is a twist, it’s the kind of twist that’s well within the realm of normal for this sort of literary fiction.
And although Nickel Boys was well-reviewed, it didn’t become inescapable in the way The Underground Railroad did. It won the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, but it wasn’t a finalist for the National Book Award. Nor was it an Oprah pick.
Whitehead’s second Pulitzer, then, is less a coronation of Nickel Boys and more a coronation of Whitehead himself. In becoming a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Whitehead is breathing rarified air known only to Faulkner, Updike, and Booth Tarkington (not all Pulitzer choices stand the test of time). He’s become a veritable literary statesman. The world is waiting to see what he’ll do next.