vox--2020-09-03--Disney’s live-action Mulan is streaming on Disney+ after months of pandemic delays

The new film is now available as a premium add-on for $ 29.99 .
Disney ’ s live-action Mulan is finally here , and the company is releasing the movie in a wildly different fashion than anyone could have predicted : as a premium offering on its Disney+ streaming service .
Originally slated to come out on March 27 , the film ’ s planned theatrical debut was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic as lockdowns closed movie theaters all over the world .
Disney first delayed Mulan ’ s launch until July 24 , then August 21 , before taking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But then , in early August , Disney executives announced that the movie would begin streaming on Disney+ on Friday , September 4 , and that it would come with a fee attached : Subscribers who want to see it would have to pay an additional $ 29.99 to watch Mulan as a “ premium ” offering .
This is a big deal for Disney , which initially delayed the movie to ensure it could maximize the film ’ s profits with a theatrical release .
But with US theaters still in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Disney ’ s updated rollout plans for Mulan will inevitably serve as a kind of trial balloon that will indicate whether at-home audiences are willing to pay $ 29.99 for three months of “ premier access ” to a movie they won ’ t even own .
( Mulan will become available to all Disney+ subscribers for no additional fee on December 4 . )
Disney CEO Bob Chapek has said that the company ’ s decision was driven by the pandemic and doesn ’ t represent a shift in Disney ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s easy to imagine that if Mulan is very successful on Disney+ , execs will begin to ponder more permanent changes .
And in the meantime , fans can watch Mulan get down to business — albeit with a more serious approach than she did in the 1998 animated original — from the comfort of their couches .

Disney’s live-action Mulan is finally here, and the company is releasing the movie in a wildly different fashion than anyone could have predicted: as a premium offering on its Disney+ streaming service.
Originally slated to come out on March 27, the film’s planned theatrical debut was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic as lockdowns closed movie theaters all over the world. Disney first delayed Mulan’s launch until July 24, then August 21, before taking it off the release calendar entirely.
But then, in early August, Disney executives announced that the movie would begin streaming on Disney+ on Friday, September 4, and that it would come with a fee attached: Subscribers who want to see it would have to pay an additional $29.99 to watch Mulan as a “premium” offering.
This is a big deal for Disney, which initially delayed the movie to ensure it could maximize the film’s profits with a theatrical release. But with US theaters still in a state of limbo heading into the fall, Disney’s updated rollout plans for Mulan will inevitably serve as a kind of trial balloon that will indicate whether at-home audiences are willing to pay $29.99 for three months of “premier access” to a movie they won’t even own. (Mulan will become available to all Disney+ subscribers for no additional fee on December 4.)
Disney CEO Bob Chapek has said that the company’s decision was driven by the pandemic and doesn’t represent a shift in Disney’s business model. But it’s easy to imagine that if Mulan is very successful on Disney+, execs will begin to ponder more permanent changes.
And in the meantime, fans can watch Mulan get down to business — albeit with a more serious approach than she did in the 1998 animated original — from the comfort of their couches.


vox--2020-09-03--Disney’s new Mulan: Pack up, go home, you’re through

“ Let ’ s get down to business !
” orders the commander of the conscripted army in 1998 ’ s Mulan , as he ’ s trying to whip his ragtag officers into shape .
The line kicks off the excellent montage song “ I ’ ll Make a Man Out of You , ” a number steeped in irony , because it ’ s the one thing that the commander can ’ t do to Mulan — a girl who ’ s disguised herself as a boy and run away from home to join the imperial forces .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cheeky irony , doesn ’ t make it into Disney ’ s new live-action adaptation of the animated hit Mulan .
Though it may be the most highly anticipated of all Disney ’ s recent remakes , spiritually , there ’ s little connective tissue between the 2020 version and its predecessor .
But then , there ’ s also little connective tissue within the new film .
Instead , for all its screenplay ’ s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding , Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else .
Mulan ’ s few bright spots can ’ t save it from clunky writing To a degree , every one of Disney ’ s recent string of live-action adaptations of its animated classics has had to justify itself — its reason for existing .
The many films Disney has tried to put new spins on have ranged from beloved ’ 90s films whose remakes failed to serve much purpose , like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King , to older films , like Dumbo and The Jungle Book , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contemporary lenses to their initially problematic tellings .
Mulan seems to fall outside of these two extremes .
The 1998 animated film won high critical praise and legions of devoted fans .
The plot of this version of Mulan is fairly simple : Mulan has been struggling to behave as a proper young lady when she learns her aging father has been drafted into the emperor ’ s army .
Disguising herself as a man , Mulan joins the regiment in her father ’ s place .
There , she learns to fight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the guys .
After her gender is inadvertently revealed and she faces disgrace , she chooses to fight as a girl , ultimately saving the emperor , winning honor , and becoming a hero .
It ’ s all straightforward , but the presence of lots of fun side characters , a few strong musical numbers , and thrilling battle sequences , all gorgeously animated , make the original Mulan a standout in the Disney canon .
There ’ s plenty of potential for expansion and development in its narrative about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rose to fame as a great warrior after risking her honor and her life to join the army in an era where no women were allowed .
Hua Mulan is the stuff of legend , and like all legends , her character can stand the tests of revision and recalibration .
The film also has some awkward cultural stereotyping to undo ; and as a story where the hero unquestionably defends the Chinese empire , the new film could also have done more to critique the geopolitics of the 1998 film through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ populism .
But the new Mulan doesn ’ t seem concerned with deeper characterization , deeper world-building , or even a deeper plot .
Sure , it ’ s stylish , colorful , and decently acted , with entertaining action sequences — overall , though , the movie is a rote , flat , paint-by-numbers version of the story you already know .
There is some new stuff added to Disney ’ s 2020 take on Mulan .
In particular , where the first film ’ s villain was an invading , genocidal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are both new characters , Böri Khan ( Jason Scott Lee ) and the fighting female sorcerer Xianniang ( Li Gong ) , who each have their own reasons for standing against the emperor .
Their backstories and individual motives could have made for a rich and complicated story arc , but instead , like every other potentially interesting thing in Mulan , they ’ re barely given more than a few lines of exposition — never enough depth or screen time to be made interesting .
At primary fault here is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four cisgender white people for the script , and I spent the entire film being mad at all of them .
The script is clunky , humorless , and full of jarringly awkward exposition .
Characters we love , in particular Eddie Murphy ’ s comical dragon Mushu , have been excised .
Others who ’ ve been imported from the 1998 version get introduced without clear definitions , as though the writers hope the audience will simply insert pre-established characterizations from that other film into this one .
That would be fine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ direct sequel , but it ’ s incredibly frustrating to see in a standalone film more than 20 years removed from the animated feature .
Again and again , plot ideas are introduced but never delved into .
Mulan apparently has extraordinary qi ( the energy that powers all living things according to many Chinese spiritual practices ) , but we don ’ t know why hers is so much stronger than most people ’ s , or why she ’ s so inherently ashamed of it , since powerful qi is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Chinese culture .
A couple of nonsensical third-act plot points are tossed in for convenience and then hand-waved away .
At a few points , narration attempts to wedge in whole emotional arcs that would have been nice to have seen unfold onscreen .
This voiceover thing happens most distressingly at the film ’ s emotional climax , which was so muddy , I wound up having to stop and rewind to see if I ’ d missed some major dramatic shift that led up to it .
I hadn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t there .
The lack of emotional development especially shortchanges the movie ’ s main plot thread — Mulan battling , and ultimately coming to terms with , her gender .
The new Mulan , I ’ m sorry to say , offers a much more binary reading of gender than its predecessor , which was frequently unsubtle in the way it coded Mulan ’ s refusal to accept her assigned gender , offering multiple readings of the character .
In the original film ( as in the folklore ) , Mulan was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until she was inadvertently unmasked ; in the new film , she isn ’ t fully able to pass .
It ’ s implied that her love interest , the new character Honghui ( Yoson An ) , knows her gender long before she decides to reveal herself .
And that ’ s a key difference that the live-action film doesn ’ t come close to pulling off — making Mulan ’ s gender reveal make sense and feel satisfying .
To be clear , Mulan doesn ’ t need to work as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity to be successful .
The original Mulan is a great film , whether you read it as a trans man coming to embrace his identity or as a cisgender girl finding empowerment to be herself .
But in this film , regardless of how you read Mulan ’ s gender , the story fails to present this giant conflict in a way that feels compelling .
Mulan ’ s guilt over hiding her cis identity is what drives her big emotional shift — only we don ’ t really see or feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a couple of repeated references to her failure to embody “ truth.
” What we see onscreen far more often than Mulan feeling guilty for deceiving everyone is Mulan being preoccupied with successfully passing as a man , a classic trans mentality that invites us to empathize with her as a potentially trans character .
And because we see Mulan leaning so strongly toward presenting as transmasculine , the film ’ s conflation of “ true ” identity with the gender you ’ re assigned at birth , and Mulan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feels a little like ... transbaiting .
If queerbaiting in the modern sense involves intentionally including overt queer subtext in a work in order to capitalize on a queer audience , only to later textually reject the possibility of queer relationships , then this version of Mulan feels a lot like that for trans identity , a tantalizing tease to trans viewers that ultimately reinforces a gender binary — like it wants to have its gender reveal party cake and eat it too .
I ’ m reluctant to place too much blame @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Niki Caro , for this , especially when her most famous film , Whale Rider , deftly explores a girl ’ s emotional growth in very similar circumstances to Mulan , without ever shortchanging her female empowerment .
I ’ m even less reluctant to blame Mulan ’ s actress Liu Yifei , who does her best to imbue personality into a lifeless and humorless script .
But the script problems seem to dictate how flat the movie feels as a whole , and neither director nor star succeeded in rejuvenating the words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still nice seeing Mulan as a live-action story ; it ’ s a relief that the original film ’ s stereotypical jokes , language , and characterizations have been excised , and there ’ s enough entertainment happening onscreen that most viewers will feel like they ’ ve , you know , watched a movie .
As you ’ d expect from a Disney film , the art direction and scenic design are especially well done .
Caro ’ s direction is strong at various points throughout the film , particularly during the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ despite some awkward editing .
The cast boasts a litany of Asian all-stars , from martial arts legends Donnie Yen ( Mulan ’ s commander ) and Jet Li ( the emperor ) to Li Gong ’ s fascinating antihero .
But the film doesn ’ t really do anything with them .
The original film , with all its moving parts , still managed to nudge multiple characters along paths that felt like growth .
Without more attention paid to character development , in this film , character decisions largely just seem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s not like the film gives us anything else interesting in exchange for all the things it ’ s left out .
The new Mulan is about 20 minutes longer than the original film , yet I honestly couldn ’ t tell you what the new film spent most of its time on , given how fully it dropped so much of the original film .
There ’ s none of the animated movie ’ s well-drawn characterization , comic relief , or fun singing and dancing , which was often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ horrors of war .
In live action , Mulan is just bland , dry storytelling , perfunctory and joyless .
Like many viewers , I ’ d wanted great things from this film .
Indeed , many hoped Mulan would be the crown jewel of Disney ’ s recent remake project .
This film falls far short of that — and that ’ s not even considering its controversially high $ 30 streaming ticket price .
Most viewers will be watching the new Mulan on Disney+ alongside the 1998 version .
With the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is just too easy : Accept no substitutes .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

“Let’s get down to business!” orders the commander of the conscripted army in 1998’s Mulan, as he’s trying to whip his ragtag officers into shape. The line kicks off the excellent montage song “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” a number steeped in irony, because it’s the one thing that the commander can’t do to Mulan — a girl who’s disguised herself as a boy and run away from home to join the imperial forces.
That song, and all of its cheeky irony, doesn’t make it into Disney’s new live-action adaptation of the animated hit Mulan. Though it may be the most highly anticipated of all Disney’s recent remakes, spiritually, there’s little connective tissue between the 2020 version and its predecessor.
But then, there’s also little connective tissue within the new film. Instead, for all its screenplay’s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding, Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory. It gets down to business — and little else.
Rating: 2 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
Mulan’s few bright spots can’t save it from clunky writing
To a degree, every one of Disney’s recent string of live-action adaptations of its animated classics has had to justify itself — its reason for existing. The many films Disney has tried to put new spins on have ranged from beloved ’90s films whose remakes failed to serve much purpose, like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, to older films, like Dumbo and The Jungle Book, which unquestionably benefited from applying more progressive contemporary lenses to their initially problematic tellings.
Mulan seems to fall outside of these two extremes. The 1998 animated film won high critical praise and legions of devoted fans. The plot of this version of Mulan is fairly simple: Mulan has been struggling to behave as a proper young lady when she learns her aging father has been drafted into the emperor’s army.
Disguising herself as a man, Mulan joins the regiment in her father’s place. There, she learns to fight, builds character, and makes friends with the guys. After her gender is inadvertently revealed and she faces disgrace, she chooses to fight as a girl, ultimately saving the emperor, winning honor, and becoming a hero. It’s all straightforward, but the presence of lots of fun side characters, a few strong musical numbers, and thrilling battle sequences, all gorgeously animated, make the original Mulan a standout in the Disney canon.
There’s plenty of potential for expansion and development in its narrative about the Chinese folk hero Hua Mulan, who rose to fame as a great warrior after risking her honor and her life to join the army in an era where no women were allowed. Hua Mulan is the stuff of legend, and like all legends, her character can stand the tests of revision and recalibration. The film also has some awkward cultural stereotyping to undo; and as a story where the hero unquestionably defends the Chinese empire, the new film could also have done more to critique the geopolitics of the 1998 film through the lens of this era of protests and populism.
But the new Mulan doesn’t seem concerned with deeper characterization, deeper world-building, or even a deeper plot. Sure, it’s stylish, colorful, and decently acted, with entertaining action sequences — overall, though, the movie is a rote, flat, paint-by-numbers version of the story you already know.
There is some new stuff added to Disney’s 2020 take on Mulan. In particular, where the first film’s villain was an invading, genocidal child-killer, Mulan’s primary antagonists are both new characters, Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and the fighting female sorcerer Xianniang (Li Gong), who each have their own reasons for standing against the emperor. Their backstories and individual motives could have made for a rich and complicated story arc, but instead, like every other potentially interesting thing in Mulan, they’re barely given more than a few lines of exposition — never enough depth or screen time to be made interesting.
At primary fault here is a weak and non-cohesive screenplay. Mulan credits four cisgender white people for the script, and I spent the entire film being mad at all of them. The script is clunky, humorless, and full of jarringly awkward exposition. Characters we love, in particular Eddie Murphy’s comical dragon Mushu, have been excised. Others who’ve been imported from the 1998 version get introduced without clear definitions, as though the writers hope the audience will simply insert pre-established characterizations from that other film into this one. That would be fine if this were a Mulan fanfic or direct sequel, but it’s incredibly frustrating to see in a standalone film more than 20 years removed from the animated feature.
Again and again, plot ideas are introduced but never delved into. Mulan apparently has extraordinary qi (the energy that powers all living things according to many Chinese spiritual practices), but we don’t know why hers is so much stronger than most people’s, or why she’s so inherently ashamed of it, since powerful qi is a highly desirable (and non-gendered) attribute in Chinese culture. A couple of nonsensical third-act plot points are tossed in for convenience and then hand-waved away.
At a few points, narration attempts to wedge in whole emotional arcs that would have been nice to have seen unfold onscreen. This voiceover thing happens most distressingly at the film’s emotional climax, which was so muddy, I wound up having to stop and rewind to see if I’d missed some major dramatic shift that led up to it. I hadn’t missed it — it just wasn’t there.
The weak writing makes Mulan’s gender issues a lot messier
The lack of emotional development especially shortchanges the movie’s main plot thread — Mulan battling, and ultimately coming to terms with, her gender. The new Mulan, I’m sorry to say, offers a much more binary reading of gender than its predecessor, which was frequently unsubtle in the way it coded Mulan’s refusal to accept her assigned gender, offering multiple readings of the character.
In the original film (as in the folklore), Mulan was able to pass successfully as a man until she was inadvertently unmasked; in the new film, she isn’t fully able to pass. It’s implied that her love interest, the new character Honghui (Yoson An), knows her gender long before she decides to reveal herself. And that’s a key difference that the live-action film doesn’t come close to pulling off — making Mulan’s gender reveal make sense and feel satisfying.
To be clear, Mulan doesn’t need to work as a narrative story of trans or nonbinary identity to be successful. The original Mulan is a great film, whether you read it as a trans man coming to embrace his identity or as a cisgender girl finding empowerment to be herself.
But in this film, regardless of how you read Mulan’s gender, the story fails to present this giant conflict in a way that feels compelling. Mulan’s guilt over hiding her cis identity is what drives her big emotional shift — only we don’t really see or feel Mulan’s internal conflict, apart from a couple of repeated references to her failure to embody “truth.” What we see onscreen far more often than Mulan feeling guilty for deceiving everyone is Mulan being preoccupied with successfully passing as a man, a classic trans mentality that invites us to empathize with her as a potentially trans character.
And because we see Mulan leaning so strongly toward presenting as transmasculine, the film’s conflation of “true” identity with the gender you’re assigned at birth, and Mulan’s ultimately abrupt embrace of her womanhood, feels a little like ... transbaiting. If queerbaiting in the modern sense involves intentionally including overt queer subtext in a work in order to capitalize on a queer audience, only to later textually reject the possibility of queer relationships, then this version of Mulan feels a lot like that for trans identity, a tantalizing tease to trans viewers that ultimately reinforces a gender binary — like it wants to have its gender reveal party cake and eat it too.
I’m reluctant to place too much blame on the film’s director, Niki Caro, for this, especially when her most famous film, Whale Rider, deftly explores a girl’s emotional growth in very similar circumstances to Mulan, without ever shortchanging her female empowerment. I’m even less reluctant to blame Mulan’s actress Liu Yifei, who does her best to imbue personality into a lifeless and humorless script. But the script problems seem to dictate how flat the movie feels as a whole, and neither director nor star succeeded in rejuvenating the words on the page.
It’s still nice seeing Mulan as a live-action story; it’s a relief that the original film’s stereotypical jokes, language, and characterizations have been excised, and there’s enough entertainment happening onscreen that most viewers will feel like they’ve, you know, watched a movie. As you’d expect from a Disney film, the art direction and scenic design are especially well done. Caro’s direction is strong at various points throughout the film, particularly during the action sequences, which are often clever despite some awkward editing. The cast boasts a litany of Asian all-stars, from martial arts legends Donnie Yen (Mulan’s commander) and Jet Li (the emperor) to Li Gong’s fascinating antihero.
But the film doesn’t really do anything with them. The original film, with all its moving parts, still managed to nudge multiple characters along paths that felt like growth. Without more attention paid to character development, in this film, character decisions largely just seem to happen out of nowhere. And it’s not like the film gives us anything else interesting in exchange for all the things it’s left out.
The new Mulan is about 20 minutes longer than the original film, yet I honestly couldn’t tell you what the new film spent most of its time on, given how fully it dropped so much of the original film. There’s none of the animated movie’s well-drawn characterization, comic relief, or fun singing and dancing, which was often juxtaposed against its sobering commentary on the horrors of war. In live action, Mulan is just bland, dry storytelling, perfunctory and joyless.
Like many viewers, I’d wanted great things from this film. Indeed, many hoped Mulan would be the crown jewel of Disney’s recent remake project. This film falls far short of that — and that’s not even considering its controversially high $30 streaming ticket price. Most viewers will be watching the new Mulan on Disney+ alongside the 1998 version. With the original Mulan right there, this kicker is just too easy: Accept no substitutes.


vox--2020-09-03--Tenet is here. It’s fine.

Tenet is here. It’s fine.

Let ’ s start with the good stuff .
Tenet — surely the most widely anticipated film of 2020 , for several overlapping reasons — is a slick and stylish thriller bearing Christopher Nolan ’ s unmistakeable thumbprints .
John David Washington , Robert Pattinson , and Elizabeth Debicki are very good in it .
The movie is often exciting , and it has a couple good fights and car chases of a kind we haven ’ t quite seen before .
It is always surprising , and it ’ s innovative in a way massive-budget blockbuster films rarely get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was very hard to make , and thus it is very impressive .
Whatever else it is , you can ’ t say it ’ s not ambitious .
But it ’ s that “ whatever else it is ” part that I keep tripping over .
I ’ m not the only critic who ’ s noted the impossibility of really describing this movie , even to your friends in private .
It ’ s seems spoiler-proof by design ; the entire plot was posted ( accurately ) on Wikipedia within days @ @ @ @ @ @ @ screenings , but I can ’ t say that reading it will really tell you a lot about the movie , or its secrets and twists .
That ’ s not a problem , however .
Tenet is not really a film that is ” about ” its plot .
The story is more of an excuse to turn the form of the movie into a mind game , a brain tease , like one of those jangly puzzle things you can pick up at a museum gift shop to fiddle with when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you think you ’ ve figured it out , another bit of it pops loose , and you have to start all over again .
To what end , I am not sure .
I have uniformly loved , or at least admired , every film Christopher Nolan has ever made .
He is perhaps the only household-name director in Hollywood who can turn out impeccable , ambitious , original films that meet the standards of many cinephiles while also luring huge general-interest audiences .
It ’ s a tricky feat to pull @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it for decades now .
Still , there ’ s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven ’ t felt in his previous work .
The stakes , presumably , couldn ’ t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie , I don ’ t understand why I was meant to care .
As an intellectual exercise , Tenet is very interesting , if not entirely successful .
As a movie , I ’ m not so sure .
Tenet is both highly ambitious and a little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elephant in the room .
Normally I would ’ ve tried to see a film like Tenet at least one more time before reviewing it , to try to pick apart some of its trickier mechanisms and determine whether they click into place or fall apart under scrutiny .
But I won ’ t be doing that with Tenet , because I can ’ t .
I live in New York , where movie theaters remain closed .
So to see the movie , I had to rent a car and drive out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in which a tiny handful of people wearing masks sat in a massive and very clean theater , with no concessions and far more than 6 feet between us .
It was a privilege afforded me because of my job , and one that most people won ’ t have .
Even if I could buy a ticket to see Tenet again this weekend , closer to home , I ’ d still be wary , given epidemiologists ’ cautions , of voluntarily spending hours in an enclosed room with people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eat or drink .
But since I can ’ t buy a ticket where I live , that choice has been made for me .
I can not make that choice for you , and I won ’ t .
I can say that if you ’ re planning to wait , for whatever reason , until you can see Tenet at home , that ’ s perfectly fine .
I saw it on an IMAX screen , but unlike with Nolan ’ s 2017 masterpiece Dunkirk , I don ’ t really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much to the Tenet experience .
In Dunkirk , the IMAX footage cranked up the movie ’ s emotional heft , portraying the magnitude of the challenge the soldiers faced .
Shot by frequent Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema , Tenet is often very nice to look at , but there ’ s no real reason to see it huge .
( Be warned : It is also very loud . )
The thing about movie reviews , however , is that they aren ’ t only ( or even primarily ) written @ @ @ @ @ @ @ records for the future , to show how a movie was received in its historical context .
And I don ’ t know what ’ s going to happen in the future , when people may sit down to watch the movie in a theater or at home , totally detached from the context of a global pandemic .
So imagine along with me — and with a measure of thematic appropriateness — that the rest of this review is for the future , when I hope with all my might that we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contemplating whether we ’ re risking our lives to go sit in a dark room and be entertained for a couple hours .
As I ’ ve said , I couldn ’ t spoil Tenet even if I wanted to .
But I can briefly set it up : The story involves an agent whom the credits call “ the Protagonist ” ( John David Washington ) .
The Protagonist is sent on a truly brain-bending mission , for reasons he does not understand .
Along the way he encounters an unhappy woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cruel , fabulously wealthy oligarch ( Kenneth Branagh , doing a Russian accent ) who also seems to be dealing with some shadowy and devious figures .
The Protagonist partners up with Neil ( Robert Pattinson , excellent as always ) , who seems to know more about what ’ s happening than he lets on .
Also , there is some kind of group called Tenet pulling the strings behind the scenes , and someone , somewhere , has hatched a plot to destroy humanity .
The Protagonist and Neil hop around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off things , shoot guns , drink martinis in fancy places — Tenet ’ s nods to the spy genre are undeniable .
And , of course , things get messy , physically and metaphysically .
The apocalyptic plot point was where my disappointment started .
Whenever a blockbuster declares “ and all of humanity will be destroyed !
” to establish its stakes , I assume it ’ s a crutch to get us to care about the characters .
But we can only be asked to care about the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living through our own hair-raising serial apocalypses ) before it loses its punch .
Somehow , I expected something more ... surprising ?
... from a filmmaker of Nolan ’ s caliber .
Some of the other things I found frustrating , I hesitate to reveal , because the discovery of them can be enjoyable .
Tenet moves so fast that it ’ s only afterward you ’ ll start thinking , Wait , what ?
Possibly all the pieces hold together ; possibly I was just bewildered by watching a movie on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ watching movies on my laptop .
But the internal logic of Tenet doesn ’ t quite work .
So-called “ plot holes ” are never a reason to dismiss a movie out of hand .
Our pleasure in watching any film depends , first and foremost , on suspending our disbelief and allowing a filmmaker to play in a grand sandbox of their own devising while we watch .
Sometimes things don ’ t hold together perfectly — a problem that time travel movies have dealt with for decades ( which is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the new Bill and Ted movie ) — but we like them anyhow because of how they make us feel and think .
Perhaps my biggest issue with Tenet , then , is that while it forced me to think , it didn ’ t reward my efforts to figure out what was happening .
In movies that are puzzle boxes , mysteries , or elaborate tricks — for instance , Nolan ’ s 2006 thriller The Prestige — the audience experiences a satisfying moment where the thing they ’ ve been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mystery isn ’ t solved , but suddenly the pieces slot together and you see the magnificent creation the director was crafting the whole time , in plain sight , while you were looking at other things .
I never experienced that moment with Tenet , and what ’ s more , I think the movie tried to inspire that moment and failed .
Similarly , it also fails to give us enough reason to care about its characters , though it seems to try .
You can feel the great movie Tenet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ striving and falling short feel worse by comparison .
Still , it ’ s not a failure of a movie .
Nolan is almost singular among well-known contemporary filmmakers in his pursuit of a few matters , and the most gratifying part of Tenet is seeing two of his obsessions rear their heads once again .
The first is the way that time itself — a thing we ’ re accustomed to thinking of as a fixed fact of life , ticking forward steadily — is actually much more slippery , much more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s played with this idea off and on throughout his films , but the best example is probably Dunkirk , in which three timelines unfold at the same time but at different rates , mimicking the experiences of the characters for whom time is rushing by or dragging , depending on where they sit and what they anticipate or dread .
I don ’ t know if Nolan ’ s fixation on time is why he became a filmmaker or if it ’ s the other way around , but his job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ linked .
One of the joys of cinema is that when we watch a movie , we are watching time pass .
The director can speed it up or slow it down through editing and other technical tricks , and we can have the illusion that we ’ ve lived through a full day when it ’ s been only a couple of hours ( as with Sam Mendes ’ s 1917 , for instance ) .
Normally we can only perceive time , not control it , but a filmmaker gets to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of time , if only for a while .
Time is also linked to our memories , and memory is a way to relive lost time — something Nolan has explored from very early on in his career , such as with 2000 ’ s Memento , as well as in other films like 2010 ’ s Inception .
What and who we remember is , in a sense , the summation of who we are .
Tenet poses a question : Can your identity be linked to something that can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s an intriguing possibility , even if it doesn ’ t quite feel like Tenet does much with it .
And this finally brings me to the grander , more interesting project of Nolan ’ s , which seems to be the exploration of how ostensibly sterile systems and concepts like math and science intersect with the intangible and metaphysical aspects of being a human .
Memory , yes .
But also things like love ( see 2014 ’ s Interstellar ) and , in Tenet ’ s case , faith .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it ’ s no shocker that faith comes up ; the question of predestination lurks around the corners of the film .
But the larger question , raised by Pattinson ’ s character as Tenet concludes , is whether “ faith ” might just be faith in the mechanics of the world .
That Nolan makes more than a few nods in Tenet to the Sator Square — an ancient palindrome some scholars believe was meant to be a covert sign of pagan or Christian faith , or perhaps an incantation — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meant to be more than just a snappy way to finish a film .
He is continuing his probe into the heart of being human , of being alive in a universe we barely understand , and he ’ s using cinema to do it .
But exploring interesting ideas isn ’ t enough to make for a good movie — and that ’ s why Tenet still doesn ’ t work for me .
It ’ s the first Nolan movie in a long while that I ’ ve left feeling disappointed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stuff buried beneath its antiseptic , perhaps overly showy technique , once you get past the clankier bits , that is worth exploring .
Tenet masquerades as a puzzle box , but it reads more like another key that Nolan has stuck into the door that conceals the secret of life .
Tenet opens in select US theaters on September 3 .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

Let’s start with the good stuff. Tenet — surely the most widely anticipated film of 2020, for several overlapping reasons — is a slick and stylish thriller bearing Christopher Nolan’s unmistakeable thumbprints. John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki are very good in it. The movie is often exciting, and it has a couple good fights and car chases of a kind we haven’t quite seen before. It is always surprising, and it’s innovative in a way massive-budget blockbuster films rarely get to be. Tenet looks like it was very hard to make, and thus it is very impressive. Whatever else it is, you can’t say it’s not ambitious.
But it’s that “whatever else it is” part that I keep tripping over. I’m not the only critic who’s noted the impossibility of really describing this movie, even to your friends in private. It’s seems spoiler-proof by design; the entire plot was posted (accurately) on Wikipedia within days of the film’s first international screenings, but I can’t say that reading it will really tell you a lot about the movie, or its secrets and twists.
Rating: 3 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
That’s not a problem, however. Tenet is not really a film that is ”about” its plot. The story is more of an excuse to turn the form of the movie into a mind game, a brain tease, like one of those jangly puzzle things you can pick up at a museum gift shop to fiddle with when you’re bored. Every time you think you’ve figured it out, another bit of it pops loose, and you have to start all over again.
To what end, I am not sure. I have uniformly loved, or at least admired, every film Christopher Nolan has ever made. He is perhaps the only household-name director in Hollywood who can turn out impeccable, ambitious, original films that meet the standards of many cinephiles while also luring huge general-interest audiences. It’s a tricky feat to pull off, but he’s done it for decades now.
Still, there’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.
Tenet is both highly ambitious and a little unimaginative
Here I have to mention the elephant in the room. Normally I would’ve tried to see a film like Tenet at least one more time before reviewing it, to try to pick apart some of its trickier mechanisms and determine whether they click into place or fall apart under scrutiny. But I won’t be doing that with Tenet, because I can’t.
I live in New York, where movie theaters remain closed. So to see the movie, I had to rent a car and drive out of state to attend a private screening, in which a tiny handful of people wearing masks sat in a massive and very clean theater, with no concessions and far more than 6 feet between us. It was a privilege afforded me because of my job, and one that most people won’t have. Even if I could buy a ticket to see Tenet again this weekend, closer to home, I’d still be wary, given epidemiologists’ cautions, of voluntarily spending hours in an enclosed room with people who might choose to remove their masks to eat or drink.
But since I can’t buy a ticket where I live, that choice has been made for me. I cannot make that choice for you, and I won’t. I can say that if you’re planning to wait, for whatever reason, until you can see Tenet at home, that’s perfectly fine. I saw it on an IMAX screen, but unlike with Nolan’s 2017 masterpiece Dunkirk, I don’t really feel that the shifted aspect ratio added much to the Tenet experience. In Dunkirk, the IMAX footage cranked up the movie’s emotional heft, portraying the magnitude of the challenge the soldiers faced. Shot by frequent Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema, Tenet is often very nice to look at, but there’s no real reason to see it huge. (Be warned: It is also very loud.)
The thing about movie reviews, however, is that they aren’t only (or even primarily) written for the present; they’re records for the future, to show how a movie was received in its historical context. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, when people may sit down to watch the movie in a theater or at home, totally detached from the context of a global pandemic. So imagine along with me — and with a measure of thematic appropriateness — that the rest of this review is for the future, when I hope with all my might that we as a society won’t be contemplating whether we’re risking our lives to go sit in a dark room and be entertained for a couple hours.
As I’ve said, I couldn’t spoil Tenet even if I wanted to. But I can briefly set it up: The story involves an agent whom the credits call “the Protagonist” (John David Washington). The Protagonist is sent on a truly brain-bending mission, for reasons he does not understand. Along the way he encounters an unhappy woman (Elizabeth Debicki) married to a cruel, fabulously wealthy oligarch (Kenneth Branagh, doing a Russian accent) who also seems to be dealing with some shadowy and devious figures. The Protagonist partners up with Neil (Robert Pattinson, excellent as always), who seems to know more about what’s happening than he lets on. Also, there is some kind of group called Tenet pulling the strings behind the scenes, and someone, somewhere, has hatched a plot to destroy humanity. The Protagonist and Neil hop around the world, climb things, jump off things, shoot guns, drink martinis in fancy places — Tenet’s nods to the spy genre are undeniable. And, of course, things get messy, physically and metaphysically.
The apocalyptic plot point was where my disappointment started. Whenever a blockbuster declares “and all of humanity will be destroyed!” to establish its stakes, I assume it’s a crutch to get us to care about the characters. But we can only be asked to care about the end of the world so many times (while living through our own hair-raising serial apocalypses) before it loses its punch. Somehow, I expected something more ... surprising? ... from a filmmaker of Nolan’s caliber.
Some of the other things I found frustrating, I hesitate to reveal, because the discovery of them can be enjoyable. Tenet moves so fast that it’s only afterward you’ll start thinking, Wait, what? Possibly all the pieces hold together; possibly I was just bewildered by watching a movie on a huge screen after six months of watching movies on my laptop. But the internal logic of Tenet doesn’t quite work.
So-called “plot holes” are never a reason to dismiss a movie out of hand. Our pleasure in watching any film depends, first and foremost, on suspending our disbelief and allowing a filmmaker to play in a grand sandbox of their own devising while we watch. Sometimes things don’t hold together perfectly — a problem that time travel movies have dealt with for decades (which is a running joke, by the way, in the new Bill and Ted movie) — but we like them anyhow because of how they make us feel and think.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Tenet, then, is that while it forced me to think, it didn’t reward my efforts to figure out what was happening. In movies that are puzzle boxes, mysteries, or elaborate tricks — for instance, Nolan’s 2006 thriller The Prestige — the audience experiences a satisfying moment where the thing they’ve been watching clicks into place. Maybe the mystery isn’t solved, but suddenly the pieces slot together and you see the magnificent creation the director was crafting the whole time, in plain sight, while you were looking at other things.
I never experienced that moment with Tenet, and what’s more, I think the movie tried to inspire that moment and failed. Similarly, it also fails to give us enough reason to care about its characters, though it seems to try. You can feel the great movie Tenet could have been, which makes the striving and falling short feel worse by comparison.
Tenet continues Christopher Nolan’s explorations of his grandest themes
Still, it’s not a failure of a movie. Nolan is almost singular among well-known contemporary filmmakers in his pursuit of a few matters, and the most gratifying part of Tenet is seeing two of his obsessions rear their heads once again.
The first is the way that time itself — a thing we’re accustomed to thinking of as a fixed fact of life, ticking forward steadily — is actually much more slippery, much more tied to our lived humanity. He’s played with this idea off and on throughout his films, but the best example is probably Dunkirk, in which three timelines unfold at the same time but at different rates, mimicking the experiences of the characters for whom time is rushing by or dragging, depending on where they sit and what they anticipate or dread.
I don’t know if Nolan’s fixation on time is why he became a filmmaker or if it’s the other way around, but his job and his fascination with time are certainly linked. One of the joys of cinema is that when we watch a movie, we are watching time pass. The director can speed it up or slow it down through editing and other technical tricks, and we can have the illusion that we’ve lived through a full day when it’s been only a couple of hours (as with Sam Mendes’s 1917, for instance). Normally we can only perceive time, not control it, but a filmmaker gets to reverse that rule and be in charge of time, if only for a while.
Time is also linked to our memories, and memory is a way to relive lost time — something Nolan has explored from very early on in his career, such as with 2000’s Memento, as well as in other films like 2010’s Inception. What and who we remember is, in a sense, the summation of who we are. Tenet poses a question: Can your identity be linked to something that can’t reside in your memory yet? It’s an intriguing possibility, even if it doesn’t quite feel like Tenet does much with it.
And this finally brings me to the grander, more interesting project of Nolan’s, which seems to be the exploration of how ostensibly sterile systems and concepts like math and science intersect with the intangible and metaphysical aspects of being a human. Memory, yes. But also things like love (see 2014’s Interstellar) and, in Tenet’s case, faith. In a story about time and fate, it’s no shocker that faith comes up; the question of predestination lurks around the corners of the film. But the larger question, raised by Pattinson’s character as Tenet concludes, is whether “faith” might just be faith in the mechanics of the world.
That Nolan makes more than a few nods in Tenet to the Sator square — an ancient palindrome some scholars believe was meant to be a covert sign of pagan or Christian faith, or perhaps an incantation — leads me to believe this line is meant to be more than just a snappy way to finish a film. He is continuing his probe into the heart of being human, of being alive in a universe we barely understand, and he’s using cinema to do it.
But exploring interesting ideas isn’t enough to make for a good movie — and that’s why Tenet still doesn’t work for me. It’s the first Nolan movie in a long while that I’ve left feeling disappointed. And yet there is enough good stuff buried beneath its antiseptic, perhaps overly showy technique, once you get past the clankier bits, that is worth exploring. Tenet masquerades as a puzzle box, but it reads more like another key that Nolan has stuck into the door that conceals the secret of life.
Tenet opens in select US theaters on September 3.
ntribute today from as little as $3.


vox--2020-09-03--How chronic stress and Covid-19 might be linked

2020 has been remarkably stressful — from the fear of nuclear war to a presidential impeachment to a pandemic that has killed more than 186,000 Americans as of September 3 .
And let ’ s not forget the record unemployment , the school closures , the police killing of George Floyd and other people of color , the months of protests against police brutality and systemic racism , and accelerating climate change .
Many Americans are understandably feeling anxious about this cascade of events — on top of any stressors they may have already been dealing with .
“ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a lot , ’ ” says Linda Goler Blount , president and CEO of the Black Women ’ s Health Imperative .
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of 5,412 people in late June found that 31 percent were experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression , about three times the number of respondents who said the same in the first two quarters of 2019 .
Another 26 percent reported symptoms of a trauma- or stressor-related disorder .
Eleven percent of people said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asking if stress — especially chronic stress — might be another preexisting condition that makes Covid-19 infections worse .
Our bodies have evolved to respond in the moment to stressful situations , both physical and emotional .
This is often called the “ fight-or-flight ” response , and it helps us react quickly to danger .
But when this becomes a long-term response , these involuntary reactions can be harmful .
There isn ’ t a single agreed-upon definition of what “ chronic ” means , though some researchers think stress that persists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Generally , “ People thinking about something consistently over time qualifies as a chronic stressor , ” says Paula Braveman , director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California San Francisco .
Other researchers say an important feature of chronic stress is its instability , of not knowing whether or when the stressor will end .
( The pandemic seems to fit the bill . )
Still others define it as the body ’ s inability to return to base level amounts of important hormones , often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” for stress hormones such as cortisol .
Cortisol is an important part of the stress response , and new research suggests cortisol levels appear to impact the severity of Covid-19 .
There ’ s still a lot we don ’ t understand about the relationship between the two , but clinical trials of a Covid-19 treatment using dexamethasone — a drug that reduces the body ’ s natural cortisol production , as well as inflammation — has been found to help critically ill patients .
“ High levels of cortisol are associated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and drugs that block the hormone seem to improve outcomes , ” says Kavita Vedhara , a University of Nottingham professor of health psychology who is conducting an ongoing study on Covid-19 and stress .
Vedhara says that while further research is needed , she wouldn ’ t be surprised if chronic stress was found to be a risk factor for a severe case of Covid-19 .
“ It fits with what we know about psychological stress generally , and in particular the evidence on stress and other viral infections , ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could hold clues for preventing or reducing the severity of infections , as well as responding to the inequities that put some racial and minorities groups at greater risk .
Can chronic stress make us more susceptible to infection — and more severe infection ?
Fifty years of research on stress suggests it has a profound effect on the body , influencing everything from memory to the way the body stores fat .
It ’ s even been found to cause structural changes in the brain .
In general , “ Chronic stress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kathryn Freeman Anderson , a sociology professor at the University of Houston .
Over time , stress keeps the body locked into a heightened response , resulting in damage somewhat similar to an engine idling for too long .
Prolonged stress also weakens the immune system .
In 1991 , scientists studying the relationship between psychological stress and immune response intentionally exposed 394 healthy participants to one of five respiratory viruses , including a coronavirus .
The subjects were then quarantined and monitored .
Even after controlling for factors like age , sex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ antibody status , the researchers found that a person ’ s underlying stress levels were associated with an increased risk of getting sick .
Since then , dozens of studies have shown that chronic stress increases the risk of not only catching the common cold but also developing conditions such as asthma and Alzheimer ’ s disease , among others .
Chronic stress can also make vaccines less effective .
One study compared the vaccine responses of 32 caregivers of a spouse with dementia — a role associated with chronic stress — against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After vaccinating both groups against influenza , the researchers found that the caregivers ’ stress was associated with a lowered antibody response , meaning less protection against the flu .
Conversely , in 2018 , Vedhara designed an experiment for 138 older adults to see whether a positive mood could have a protective effect .
For two weeks before and four weeks after their annual flu shot , participants self-reported how they felt using a diary .
Vedhara found that psychological influences , including stress and mood , influenced participants ’ antibody response @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by observing specific emotional states . )
Vedhara found that if participants felt unstressed and upbeat , particularly on the day they were vaccinated , the vaccine worked better .
The effect on antibody production was about as large as the effect of statins on cardiovascular events .
“ These are very tangible , very profound effects , ” Vedhara says .
Similar results have also been seen in young people : A 2018 study of 83 undergraduates found that people with a positive affect — feelings of happiness and positivity — had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Affects , or observable emotions , are impacted by stress , both for better and worse .
During the early stages of Covid-19 , Vedhara found that Black , Asian , and other ethnic minorities in the UK reported feeling more stressed than white people , even after accounting for age , gender , and working situation One study found that people who had a negative affect in response to daily stressors over the course of a week — meaning they don ’ t recover well from daily stress — had poorer physical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study of 8,542 participants found that a positive affect not only helped reduce the damaging effects of stress but was also associated with lower mortality rates .
Further research is needed into what actually causes these differences .
It may be for both behavioral and neurobiological reasons ; when stressed , people might behave in ways that hurt the immune system , such as by drinking alcohol or not getting enough sleep .
But stress also influences the concentration of many hormones , including cortisol , that impact the production of antibodies .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ activates a network that includes the pituitary and adrenal glands .
These glands release cortisol and other hormones that keep the body on high alert .
But cortisol also turns out to have a surprising place in the immune system : Most immune cells also have a receptor for it .
“ This means there ’ s a direct mechanism by which cortisol can regulate immune cells and our immune system , ” Vedhara says .
When people have chronically high levels of cortisol from being stressed , they end up with lots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cytokines have also been noted in severe cases of Covid-19 , as have lower levels of lymphocytes , the white blood cells that help fight infections .
Scientists are looking for other direct relationships between chronic stress and Covid-19 .
Besides cortisol , other important hormones , including one called Ang-II , are impacted by stress ; Elevated levels of Ang-II have already been associated with severe Covid-19 cases .
Stress is distributed unequally — and for many , it ’ s exacerbated by systemic racism Although most of us have experienced more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like so much else , tends to affect some individuals , like people of color , more than others .
In April , during the early stages of Covid-19 , Vedhara found that Black , Asian , and other ethnic minorities in the UK reported feeling more stressed than white people , even after accounting for age , gender , and working situation .
These same communities also reported disproportionate deaths from Covid-19 .
According to CDC data , Blacks , Native Americans , and Latinos all have age-adjusted hospitalization rates around 4.7 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people .
A Black person with Covid-19 is almost four times more likely than a white person to die from it .
Goler Blount says it ’ s frustrating that the data is often reported without context .
“ It ’ s not because they ’ re Black , it ’ s because of the experience of being Black , ” Goler Blount says .
“ Discrimination doesn ’ t stay in the realm of mental health , ” says Anderson .
“ We can actually measure the physical impact on the body.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ researcher Arline Geronimus studied what the experience of racism does to the body and found that “ racial inequalities not explained by poverty existed across a range of biological systems.
” She called the health consequences of the large and small stresses caused by racism “ weathering ” — and this kind of erosion is more than a metaphor .
Multiple studies show that an experience of discrimination increases cortisol levels , and the effects accumulate over a lifetime .
Chronic stress can start damaging health and affecting gene expression even before birth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stress with shorter telomeres , a protective casing at the end of DNA strands that is diminished each time a cell divides .
Shortened telomeres have been linked to increased disease and shorter lifespan .
Though telomeres can be repaired by an enzyme called telomerase , stress and cortisol exposure reduces the body ’ s supply of the enzyme .
One study found that the higher a mother ’ s prenatal anxiety , the shorter her baby ’ s telomeres were , raising questions about whether stress risks can be inherited .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effect chronic stress has on people of color .
Another line of research has shown that if young people experience systemic discrimination , it can trigger higher levels of cytokines , magnifying the impact of future stress on their health .
A study by the Yale School of Public Health found that by middle age , women who had frequent experiences with discrimination had significantly higher levels of visceral fat , putting them at higher risk for serious conditions such as heart disease and diabetes ( two risk factors for severe Covid-19 ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the levels of hormones involved with blood pressure and contribute to hypertension , another risk factor for Covid-19 .
It ’ s not just the experience of discrimination , but also the fear and anticipation of racism that cause harm .
“ The vigilance , the concern itself is a strain on the body , ” says Brenda Major , a professor and social psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara .
She says the recent videos and other coverage of police killings and protests against police brutality are themselves a source @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like you being shot and killed can itself heighten concern , fear , and vigilance , ” says Major .
UCSF ’ s Braveman says chronic stress is also structural , tied to “ how we track people into unhealthy places and expose them to unhealthy conditions over their lifetimes.
” She says the US culture perpetuates racism — and its stress — even when there is not a particular individual intending to discriminate .
We don ’ t have to look far for examples of how communities of color are disproportionately exposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fine particulate matter that can cause respiratory illnesses , as well as a higher risk of natural disasters —environments that are often sources of stress themselves , as well as an indirect stress when friends and family become ill. “ This is literally the environmental impact on us , and it ’ s how our bodies are responding , ” says Goler Blount .
How to leverage what we know about stress to decrease it — and Covid-19 risk To better understand how stress — both recent and long-term — might be impacting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ researchers are conducting experiments .
Following up on her April survey of almost 4,000 people in the UK and New Zealand , Vedhara is now asking participants to send in a small hair sample .
She ’ ll use this to measure cortisol , investigating how self-reported mental health over the course of the pandemic results in measurable physical changes .
She ’ ll also look to see whether cortisol levels are associated with being infected with Covid-19 — and the severity of illness .
Already , other research suggests that cortisol is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a recent study of 535 people published in The Lancet those with confirmed cases of Covid-19 had much higher levels of cortisol than those who did not .
After taking measurements within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital , the scientists found that a doubling of cortisol concentration was associated with a 42 percent increase in mortality .
More research is needed , but in the meantime , Vedhara notes that while the known risk factors for severe Covid-19 cases — age , ethnicity , and preexisting conditions — are largely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways to improve mental health .
We don ’ t know yet how much reducing stress might help protect against severe Covid-19 , but there may be measures that can be used now to reduce anxiety overall .
Understanding the source of stress can be helpful in figuring out how to manage it .
“ The first step is to understand what is giving rise to those negative feelings , ” Vedhara says .
Some stress is emotion-focused — like the ongoing uncertainty of when the pandemic will end — and can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instance , when patients with colorectal cancer meditated at the beginning of chemotherapy treatments , it improved their cortisol response .
But changing personal behavior can not combat structural sources of stress .
( Meditation is certainly not a cure for the stress of systemic discrimination . )
“ One of the most striking features of [ self-reported stress in April ] , ” Vedhara says , is that it was strongly related to “ how much people were worried about contracting Covid-19.
” A recent study suggests the high numbers of Black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Covid-19 might actually be an underestimate .
Goler Blount says a Black Women ’ s Health Imperative analysis found that in the next three years , every Black person in the US will lose someone they know to Covid-19 or its long-term consequences .
Vedhara suggests this demonstrates a need for more effective public health interventions , rather than psychological ones .
As the pandemic continues to take thousands of American lives each day — and as other economic , safety , and logistical stresses mount — Goler Blount says stress is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are connected .
We are here , all in the middle of this , grieving.
” Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist .
Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @ loisparshley .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

2020 has been remarkably stressful — from the fear of nuclear war to a presidential impeachment to a pandemic that has killed more than 186,000 Americans as of September 3. And let’s not forget the record unemployment, the school closures, the police killing of George Floyd and other people of color, the months of protests against police brutality and systemic racism, and accelerating climate change.
Many Americans are understandably feeling anxious about this cascade of events — on top of any stressors they may have already been dealing with. “The technical term is, ‘It’s a lot,’” says Linda Goler Blount, president and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of 5,412 people in late June found that 31 percent were experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression, about three times the number of respondents who said the same in the first two quarters of 2019. Another 26 percent reported symptoms of a trauma- or stressor-related disorder. Eleven percent of people said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 30 days.
Now some researchers are asking if stress — especially chronic stress — might be another preexisting condition that makes Covid-19 infections worse.
Our bodies have evolved to respond in the moment to stressful situations, both physical and emotional. This is often called the “fight-or-flight” response, and it helps us react quickly to danger. But when this becomes a long-term response, these involuntary reactions can be harmful.
There isn’t a single agreed-upon definition of what “chronic” means, though some researchers think stress that persists for weeks or months likely qualifies. Generally, “People thinking about something consistently over time qualifies as a chronic stressor,” says Paula Braveman, director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California San Francisco.
Other researchers say an important feature of chronic stress is its instability, of not knowing whether or when the stressor will end. (The pandemic seems to fit the bill.) Still others define it as the body’s inability to return to base level amounts of important hormones, often developing a new, elevated “normal” for stress hormones such as cortisol.
Cortisol is an important part of the stress response, and new research suggests cortisol levels appear to impact the severity of Covid-19. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about the relationship between the two, but clinical trials of a Covid-19 treatment using dexamethasone — a drug that reduces the body’s natural cortisol production, as well as inflammation — has been found to help critically ill patients.
“High levels of cortisol are associated with poor [Covid-19] outcomes, and drugs that block the hormone seem to improve outcomes,” says Kavita Vedhara, a University of Nottingham professor of health psychology who is conducting an ongoing study on Covid-19 and stress. Vedhara says while further research is needed, she wouldn’t be surprised if chronic stress was found to be a risk factor for a severe case of Covid-19. “It fits with what we know about psychological stress generally, and in particular the evidence on stress and other viral infections,” she added.
Understanding how stress impacts Covid-19 could hold clues for preventing or reducing the severity of infections, as well as responding to the inequities that put some racial and minorities groups at greater risk.
Can chronic stress make us more susceptible to infection — and more severe infection?
Fifty years of research on stress suggests it has a profound effect on the body, influencing everything from memory to the way the body stores fat. It’s even been found to cause structural changes in the brain.
In general, “Chronic stress wears the body down,” says Kathryn Freeman Anderson, a sociology professor at the University of Houston. Over time, stress keeps the body locked into a heightened response, resulting in damage somewhat similar to an engine idling for too long.
Prolonged stress also weakens the immune system. In 1991, scientists studying the relationship between psychological stress and immune response intentionally exposed 394 healthy participants to one of five respiratory viruses, including a coronavirus. The subjects were then quarantined and monitored. Even after controlling for factors like age, sex, education, weight, and prior antibody status, the researchers found that a person’s underlying stress levels were associated with an increased risk of getting sick. Since then, dozens of studies have shown that chronic stress increases the risk of not only catching the common cold but also developing conditions such as asthma and Alzheimer’s disease, among others.
Chronic stress can also make vaccines less effective. One study compared the vaccine responses of 32 caregivers of a spouse with dementia — a role associated with chronic stress — against 32 subjects in a control group. After vaccinating both groups against influenza, the researchers found that the caregivers’ stress was associated with a lowered antibody response, meaning less protection against the flu.
Conversely, in 2018, Vedhara designed an experiment for 138 older adults to see whether a positive mood could have a protective effect. For two weeks before and four weeks after their annual flu shot, participants self-reported how they felt using a diary. Vedhara found that psychological influences, including stress and mood, influenced participants’ antibody response. (Stress responses are often measured by observing specific emotional states.)
Vedhara found that if participants felt unstressed and upbeat, particularly on the day they were vaccinated, the vaccine worked better. The effect on antibody production was about as large as the effect of statins on cardiovascular events. “These are very tangible, very profound effects,” Vedhara says.
Similar results have also been seen in young people: A 2018 study of 83 undergraduates found that people with a positive affect — feelings of happiness and positivity — had better antibody responses to a vaccination. Affects, or observable emotions, are impacted by stress, both for better and worse.
During the early stages of Covid-19, Vedhara found that Black, Asian, and other ethnic minorities in the UK reported feeling more stressed than white people, even after accounting for age, gender, and working situation
One study found that people who had a negative affect in response to daily stressors over the course of a week — meaning they don’t recover well from daily stress — had poorer physical health in the long term. Another study of 8,542 participants found that a positive affect not only helped reduce the damaging effects of stress but was also associated with lower mortality rates. Further research is needed into what actually causes these differences. It may be for both behavioral and neurobiological reasons; when stressed, people might behave in ways that hurt the immune system, such as by drinking alcohol or not getting enough sleep.
But stress also influences the concentration of many hormones, including cortisol, that impact the production of antibodies. During the fight-or-flight response, the brain activates a network that includes the pituitary and adrenal glands. These glands release cortisol and other hormones that keep the body on high alert. But cortisol also turns out to have a surprising place in the immune system: Most immune cells also have a receptor for it. “This means there’s a direct mechanism by which cortisol can regulate immune cells and our immune system,” Vedhara says.
When people have chronically high levels of cortisol from being stressed, they end up with lots of inflammatory cytokines. High levels of cytokines have also been noted in severe cases of Covid-19, as have lower levels of lymphocytes, the white blood cells that help fight infections.
Scientists are looking for other direct relationships between chronic stress and Covid-19. Besides cortisol, other important hormones, including one called Ang-II, are impacted by stress; elevated levels of Ang-II have already been associated with severe Covid-19 cases.
Stress is distributed unequally — and for many, it’s exacerbated by systemic racism
Although most of us have experienced more stress this year, chronic stress, like so much else, tends to affect some individuals, like people of color, more than others.
In April, during the early stages of Covid-19, Vedhara found that Black, Asian, and other ethnic minorities in the UK reported feeling more stressed than white people, even after accounting for age, gender, and working situation. These same communities also reported disproportionate deaths from Covid-19.
According to CDC data, Black, Native American, and Latino people all have age-adjusted hospitalization rates around 4.7 times higher than the rate of white people. A Black person with Covid-19 is almost four times more likely than a white person to die from it.
Goler Blount says it’s frustrating that the data is often reported without context. “It’s not because they’re Black, it’s because of the experience of being Black,” Goler Blount says.
Related Police brutality is a public health crisis
“Discrimination doesn’t stay in the realm of mental health,” says Anderson. “We can actually measure the physical impact on the body.” In the 1990s, public health researcher Arline Geronimus studied what the experience of racism does to the body and found that “racial inequalities not explained by poverty existed across a range of biological systems.” She called the health consequences of the large and small stresses caused by racism “weathering” — and this kind of erosion is more than a metaphor.
Multiple studies show that an experience of discrimination increases cortisol levels, and the effects accumulate over a lifetime.
Chronic stress can start damaging health and affecting gene expression even before birth. A number of studies have linked stress with shorter telomeres, a protective casing at the end of DNA strands that is diminished each time a cell divides. Shortened telomeres have been linked to increased disease and shorter lifespan.
Though telomeres can be repaired by an enzyme called telomerase, stress and cortisol exposure reduces the body’s supply of the enzyme. One study found that the higher a mother’s prenatal anxiety, the shorter her baby’s telomeres were, raising questions about whether stress risks can be inherited. If true, this might amplify the disproportionate effect chronic stress has on people of color.
Another line of research has shown that if young people experience systemic discrimination, it can trigger higher levels of cytokines, magnifying the impact of future stress on their health. A study by the Yale School of Public Health found that by middle age, women who had frequent experiences with discrimination had significantly higher levels of visceral fat, putting them at higher risk for serious conditions such as heart disease and diabetes (two risk factors for severe Covid-19). In older adults, stress changes the levels of hormones involved with blood pressure and contribute to hypertension, another risk factor for Covid-19.
It’s not just the experience of discrimination, but also the fear and anticipation of racism that cause harm. “The vigilance, the concern itself is a strain on the body,” says Brenda Major, a professor and social psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara. She says the recent videos and other coverage of police killings and protests against police brutality are themselves a source of stress. “Reading about people like you being shot and killed can itself heighten concern, fear, and vigilance,” says Major.
UCSF’s Braveman says chronic stress is also structural, tied to “how we track people into unhealthy places and expose them to unhealthy conditions over their lifetimes.” She says the US culture perpetuates racism — and its stress — even when there is not a particular individual intending to discriminate.
We don’t have to look far for examples of how communities of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollutants like cancer-causing chemicals and fine particulate matter that can cause respiratory illnesses, as well as a higher risk of natural disasters —environments that are often sources of stress themselves, as well as an indirect stress when friends and family become ill. “This is literally the environmental impact on us, and it’s how our bodies are responding,” says Goler Blount.
How to leverage what we know about stress to decrease it — and Covid-19 risk
To better understand how stress — both recent and long-term — might be impacting individuals’ risk for Covid-19, many researchers are conducting experiments.
Following up on her April survey of almost 4,000 people in the UK and New Zealand, Vedhara is now asking participants to send in a small hair sample. She’ll use this to measure cortisol, investigating how self-reported mental health over the course of the pandemic results in measurable physical changes. She’ll also look to see whether cortisol levels are associated with being infected with Covid-19 — and the severity of illness.
Already, other research suggests that cortisol is tied to worse Covid-19 outcomes. In a recent study of 535 people published in The Lancet, those with confirmed cases of Covid-19 had much higher levels of cortisol than those who did not. After taking measurements within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital, the scientists found a doubling of cortisol concentration was associated with a 42 percent increase in mortality.
More research is needed, but in the meantime, Vedhara notes while the known risk factors for severe Covid-19 cases — age, ethnicity, and preexisting conditions — are largely out of our control, there are ways to improve mental health. We don’t know yet how much reducing stress might help protect against severe Covid-19, but there may be measures that can be used now to reduce anxiety overall.
Understanding the source of stress can be helpful in figuring out how to manage it. “The first step is to understand what is giving rise to those negative feelings,” Vedhara says. Some stress is emotion-focused — like the ongoing uncertainty of when the pandemic will end — and can be reduced through skills like mindfulness. For instance, when patients with colorectal cancer meditated at the beginning of chemotherapy treatments, it improved their cortisol response.
But changing personal behavior cannot combat structural sources of stress. (Meditation is certainly not a cure for the stress of systemic discrimination.)
“One of the most striking features of [self-reported stress in April],” Vedhara says, is that it was strongly related to “how much people were worried about contracting Covid-19.”
A recent study suggests the high numbers of Black, Latinx, and Asian people dying from Covid-19 might actually be an underestimate. Goler Blount says a Black Women’s Health Imperative analysis found that in the next three years, every Black person in the US will lose someone they know to Covid-19 or its long-term consequences. Vedhara suggests this demonstrates a need for more effective public health interventions, rather than psychological ones.
As the pandemic continues to take thousands of American lives each day — and as other economic, safety, and logistical stresses mount — Goler Blount says stress is only accumulating. “All these things are connected. We are here, all in the middle of this, grieving.”
Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.
ntribute today from as little as $3.


vox--2020-09-03--Facebook won’t stop Facebook from spreading lies about the election

This fall ’ s election promises to be chaotic , nerve-wracking , and potentially calamitous .
Lies will be flying everywhere , and Facebook will distribute many of them .
And in response , Facebook plans to do … not that much .
You may be confused about this if you saw recent headlines about Facebook ’ s election actions , like the ones that came out this morning : “ Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November , ” said the New York Times .
Earlier this week , Axios announced that Mark Zuckerberg is spending $ 300 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states fix their “ election infrastructure.
” It ’ s not that these things aren ’ t true .
It ’ s just that they won ’ t do anything to stop the misinformation and lies that are going to put the election at risk to begin with .
And that ’ s because Facebook — like the other big social media platforms — is built in a way that lets bad actors spread lies easily , and makes it almost impossible to rein them in .
The bug is the feature .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s news : Facebook says that it will ban new political ads in the week before the election .
Facebook has been weighing this pre-election ad ban for nearly a year ( which is why I asked Facebook ad boss Carolyn Everson about it at our Code Media conference last November ) .
Why announce it just now ?
Facebook isn ’ t saying .
In any case , you can ’ t understand the ban unless you understand what the ban doesn ’ t do : • The ad ban doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ads or ramping up the distribution of those ads .
• The ad ban also doesn ’ t prevent politicians from lying in those ads because Facebook has already said it won ’ t do that .
• And Facebook isn ’ t doing anything about limiting the ability of politicians to target tiny groups of voters with ads built just for them — a key reform critics , including former Facebook security boss Alex Stamos , have been calling for .
So : Donald Trump and his campaign , for instance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ads toward key voters , and flood their News Feeds with them all the way through the election .
They just can ’ t run new versions of those ads , starting October 27 .
Facebook also says it will take other steps to prevent people from being suckered by some of the lies they see on Facebook .
The company says it will take down posts that claim you ’ ll get Covid-19 if you vote in person ; and it will direct users to official election results if any “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victory before votes are counted .
Again , all fine things to do .
But none of them counter the main problem about Facebook : It is built specifically to get its 2 billion users to share whatever they want , with anyone they want , instantly and without friction .
And now that bad actors — everyone from spammers to Russian hackers to Trump and his enablers — have figured out how to use that system , they are doing so .
This morning , for instance , Trump doubled down on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ balloting , then to show up for in-person voting and see if they can vote again .
Whether Trump is trying to actually get his voters to vote twice , which is illegal , or is simply trying to muck up the voting process and cast more doubt on the results doesn ’ t matter : It ’ s certainly an attempt to undermine the election .
And here it is , on Facebook : By the way , that link , attached to Trump ’ s mischief post by a diligent Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the president is trying to undermine the election .
It just sends you to a well-intentioned page that provides links to local voting resources .
Twitter , of course , is Trump ’ s favorite place to lie directly to the public , and the same post is there , too .
But Trump ’ s campaign and his surrogates love Facebook — both as a place to run ads and , crucially , as a place to run lies for free .
The technical term for the latter is “ organic marketing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spread your untruths , you get Facebook and its users to do it for free .
As the Times ’ s Kevin Roose notes* , over and over again , right-wing publishers like Ben Shapiro ’ s The Daily Wire thrive on Facebook : And Facebook can ’ t do anything about this because Facebook is built to do this .
Not specifically this , of course — it ’ s built to let you say anything to anyone about anything .
Facebook will occasionally crack down on the most egregious abuse .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with 2 billion users , so it will perpetually be in a whack-a-mole scenario .
And you have much better odds of getting noxious stuff onto Facebook than Facebook does at keeping it off the site or taking it down quickly .
See , for instance , the successful effort to rally armed vigilantes to Kenosha , Wisconsin , last week .
Any attempts to fundamentally change that — changing the user-generated engine that fuels the site or the attention-based advertising structure that rewards users who make the most provocative stuff — would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not happening , you can ’ t count on Facebook to change the way people will use and abuse it this fall .
* Facebook is sensitive enough to these charges to have created a full rebuttal to Roose , which argues that conservative media isn ’ t quite as popular as he suggests .
That said , Facebook often points to the success of right-wing media on its service when conservatives claim they are being censored on Facebook .
Confusing !
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

This fall’s election promises to be chaotic, nerve-wracking, and potentially calamitous. Lies will be flying everywhere, and Facebook will distribute many of them.
And in response, Facebook plans to do … not that much.
You may be confused about this if you saw recent headlines about Facebook’s election actions, like the ones that came out this morning: “Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November,” said the New York Times. Earlier this week, Axios announced that Mark Zuckerberg is spending $300 million of his own money to help states fix their “election infrastructure.”
It’s not that these things aren’t true. It’s just that they won’t do anything to stop the misinformation and lies that are going to put the election at risk to begin with. And that’s because Facebook — like the other big social media platforms — is built in a way that lets bad actors spread lies easily, and makes it almost impossible to rein them in. The bug is the feature.
Let’s quickly talk about today’s news: Facebook says that it will ban new political ads in the week before the election. Facebook has been weighing this pre-election ad ban for nearly a year (which is why I asked Facebook ad boss Carolyn Everson about it at our Code Media conference last November). Why announce it just now? Facebook isn’t saying.
In any case, you can’t understand the ban unless you understand what the ban doesn’t do:
The ad ban doesn’t prevent campaigns from running existing ads or ramping up the distribution of those ads.
The ad ban also doesn’t prevent politicians from lying in those ads because Facebook has already said it won’t do that.
And Facebook isn’t doing anything about limiting the ability of politicians to target tiny groups of voters with ads built just for them — a key reform critics, including former Facebook security boss Alex Stamos, have been calling for.
So: Donald Trump and his campaign, for instance, can lie in Facebook ads, funnel the ads toward key voters, and flood their News Feeds with them all the way through the election. They just can’t run new versions of those ads, starting October 27.
Facebook also says it will take other steps to prevent people from being suckered by some of the lies they see on Facebook. The company says it will take down posts that claim you’ll get Covid-19 if you vote in person; and it will direct users to official election results if any “candidate or campaign” tries to declare victory before votes are counted.
Again, all fine things to do. But none of them counter the main problem about Facebook: It is built specifically to get its 2 billion users to share whatever they want, with anyone they want, instantly and without friction. And now that bad actors — everyone from spammers to Russian hackers to Trump and his enablers — have figured out how to use that system, they are doing so.
This morning, for instance, Trump doubled down on his calls for voters to try mail-in balloting, then to show up for in-person voting and see if they can vote again. Whether Trump is trying to actually get his voters to vote twice, which is illegal, or is simply trying to muck up the voting process and cast more doubt on the results doesn’t matter: It’s certainly an attempt to undermine the election.
And here it is, on Facebook:
By the way, that link, attached to Trump’s mischief post by a diligent Facebook employee doesn’t tell you that the president is trying to undermine the election. It just sends you to a well-intentioned page that provides links to local voting resources.
Twitter, of course, is Trump’s favorite place to lie directly to the public, and the same post is there, too.
But Trump’s campaign and his surrogates love Facebook — both as a place to run ads and, crucially, as a place to run lies for free. The technical term for the latter is “organic marketing”: Instead of paying Facebook to spread your untruths, you get Facebook and its users to do it for free.
As the Times’s Kevin Roose notes*, over and over again, right-wing publishers like Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire thrive on Facebook:
Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition. The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.
And Facebook can’t do anything about this because Facebook is built to do this. Not specifically this, of course — it’s built to let you say anything to anyone about anything.
Facebook will occasionally crack down on the most egregious abuse. But it’s a global platform with 2 billion users, so it will perpetually be in a whack-a-mole scenario. And you have much better odds of getting noxious stuff onto Facebook than Facebook does at keeping it off the site or taking it down quickly. See, for instance, the successful effort to rally armed vigilantes to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week.
Any attempts to fundamentally change that — changing the user-generated engine that fuels the site or the attention-based advertising structure that rewards users who make the most provocative stuff — would change Facebook. And since that’s not happening, you can’t count on Facebook to change the way people will use and abuse it this fall.
Facebook can’t save us from Facebook.
* Facebook is sensitive enough to these charges to have created a full rebuttal to Roose, which argues that conservative media isn’t quite as popular as he suggests. That said, Facebook often points to the success of right-wing media on its service when conservatives claim they are being censored on Facebook. Confusing!