🌊 This… Is NPR Drama

Notes from the… polycule?

The New York Times ran a Monday feature on a polyamorous relationship between not three, not four, not five, but 20 different people. The term for the Massachusetts-based group is a “polycule,” which merges polyamory and molecule. You could say some of the polycule members are unique. One described the differences between her husband — with whom she’s no longer monogamous — and herself: “My husband and I are very, very different, which is our strength. He’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd.” Well, it’s now evident that the “it’s complicated” relationship status on Facebook serves a purpose.

In today's edition:

–Max, Max, Jen, and Alex

KEY STORY

Ticketmaster Monopoly?

The US Justice Department (DoJ) is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster-owner Live Nation, the Wall Street Journal reported

• In 2010, Ticketmaster, an online ticket sales company, and Live Nation, an event marketer and venue owner, merged. The combined company now controls 70%+ of the US’ live events ticketing market

• Critics have since accused Live Nation of being a monopoly and using its power to raise ticket prices and lower its service quality. Those accusations grew after Ticketmaster’s botched release of Eras Tour tickets

• Per the WSJ, the DoJ is now preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit

Dig Deeper

• During a Congressional hearing in early 2023, Ticketmaster’s president defended the company, saying that it faces significant competition and does not set ticket prices

• In response to the latest news, a Ticketmaster executive said in a statement, “Ticketmaster has more competition today than it has ever had, and…it has nothing close to monopoly power”

KEY STORY

Russia Advancing in East

Russian troops are making significant territorial gains across eastern Ukraine

• In recent months, Ukrainian and US officials have increasingly warned that the lack of US assistance has given Russia a decisive battlefield advantage

• On Saturday, Ukraine’s top general wrote, “The situation on the eastern front has deteriorated significantly in recent days.” He added that Russian forces are “actively attacking” many areas

• In recent days, Russia has claimed, and Ukraine has partially confirmed, that its forces have seized several towns in Ukraine’s east and are threatening others

Dig Deeper

• Last week, the US’ top general in Europe warned that Russia is currently firing five artillery shells for Ukraine’s every one. He predicted that within weeks, that disparity would grow to 10:1

• US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Monday that the House will consider aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and other countries this week. However, he said he would introduce the aid as separate pieces of legislation per country/region, defying a Democrat-led effort to pass one comprehensive $95B aid package

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KEY STORY

NPR Suspends Critic

National Public Radio (NPR) suspended a senior editor a week after he published an article accusing the outlet of a liberal slant

• Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR, published a letter on April 9 in The Free Press in which he said, “Open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR.” He claimed that among its newsroom, there were 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans, and that NPR’s CEO called diversity its “North Star”

• On Friday, NPR suspended Berliner for five days, claiming he violated NPR’s policies by not receiving approval to publish with an outside outlet

Dig Deeper

• Berliner’s letter fed into long-standing beliefs among some conservative circles that NPR has drifted to the left, leading some politicians, including Donald Trump, to call for NPR to be defunded

• NPR’s editor-in-chief defended the outlet, writing in an email to staff, “We believe that inclusion…is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world”

• Berliner was told he would be fired if he violated NPR’s policies again

KEY STORY

SCOTUS Trans Ruling

The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) allowed Idaho to begin broadly enforcing a ban on gender transition-related treatments for minors

• In 2023, Idaho passed a law making it a felony for doctors to provide minors with transition-related treatments. In May, the families of two trans individuals sued; in December, a judge blocked enforcement of the law pending further legal action

• On Monday, SCOTUS allowed Idaho to begin enforcing that law for everybody except the two individuals who brought the suit

• 23+ states have limited transition-related procedures for minors

Dig Deeper

• SCOTUS reversed what is known as a “universal injunction,” wherein a single judge blocks enforcement of a law for everybody, not just those who brought the lawsuit

• In three separate opinions backed by different factions of SCOTUS, the justices expressed differing views on universal injunctions, with several conservative members suggesting that lower courts overstep their powers by using them. The opinions did not discuss the constitutionality of bans on transition-related treatments

RUNDOWN
Some Quick Stories for the Office

🇺🇸 The IMF predicted the US economy will grow 2.7% this year, .6 percentage points higher than its previous estimate

🇦🇫 Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared April “Confederate Heritage Month,” preserving a 31-year state tradition

🇰🇷 A US House committee accused the Chinese Communist Party of subsidizing the export of fentanyl precursors. It also said that by refusing to prosecute fentanyl-related crimes, China has allowed “CCP-tied Chinese organized criminal groups become the world’s premier money launderers”

🇮🇷 The US House sent two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate

💊 Copenhagen’s stock exchange went up in flames on Tuesday. The building, built in 1625, was among Copenhagen’s oldest and most historic buildings. At the time of the fire, it was undergoing renovations

COMMUNITY

We founded RocaNews because we wanted news companies to give us just the facts – not tell us what to think. That inspires us to do the “Roca Votes” story each week, in which we summarize a controversial topic and see how Roca Nation feels about it.

This week’s topic asks: Should podcast hosts push back? If so, when? 

Keep the debate going and reply to this email to let us know what you think!

POPCORN
Some Quick Stories for Happy Hour

🙌 A killer deal: The current owners of the white Ford Bronco involved in the 1994 OJ Simpson police chase plan to sell the vehicle for at least $1.5M

🕵🏻‍♂️ It’s all gravy, baby: Toronto police investigated a suspicious package delivered to the Ontario legislature and later identified it as powdered gravy

🏀 Slam dunk career: Six-time NBA All-Star forward and former #1 pick Blake Griffin, 35, announced his retirement from professional basketball on Instagram

🎃 I Come From a Pumpkin Down Under: An Australian man turned the country’s largest pumpkin — weighing 900 lbs — into a canoe and paddled it down the Tumut River

☄️ Pain in the asteroid: NASA confirmed that space debris from the International Space Station crashed through a Florida home’s roof last month

ROCA WRAP
The Numbers Guy: Part 1 of 2

Bad English made Martin Kulldorff’s career.

When Kulldorff was eight, his father – a prominent Swedish statistician – got a job lecturing at Texas A&M University and relocated the family from Sweden to Texas.

Kulldorff hardly knew a word of English, “but math was easy,” he told Roca. “So maybe that's why I started to love math: Because that was the language I spoke, and it was the same language in Sweden and the US.”

As Kulldorff pursued his passion for math, he realized that it was more interesting “to do something practical with it.” 

So he turned to biostatistics and epidemiology – in his words, “[using] a lot of math to analyze health data.” He pursued that passion first in Sweden then back in the US, receiving a PhD from Cornell in 1989.

Kulldorff’s research landed him a professorship at Harvard Medical School and roles with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and CDC.

In the years before the pandemic, he worked on two main topics: “The early detection of infectious disease outbreaks, how to monitor them once they have emerged,” and “monitoring the safety of vaccines and drugs after they have been approved.”

It was February 2020 when Kulldorff realized what the world was headed for with Covid.

“We had the outbreaks in Northern Italy and Iran,” he told Roca. “And as an infectious disease epidemiologist, it was obvious that this was going to hit the whole world. There's no way to stop it.”

“It was spreading a lot before it was noticed. And if it does that, you can't really stop it,” he explained.

To predict where the pandemic was headed, Kulldorff turned to the numbers – specifically infection data from Wuhan.

“I could see that the people who died in Wuhan were mostly older people,” he said. “Obviously, everybody was infected, all age groups. But since it was only the older people who died, I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and it was clear that there was more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality rates from the old and the young.”

Kulldorff initially agreed that efforts should be made to “flatten the curve,” to avoid flooding emergency rooms. By early April, though, he opposed the pro-lockdown consensus.

Kulldorff drew a clear conclusion from the data: Young people were at low risk from Covid; the elderly and immunocompromised – which he is – were at high risk.

He believed that lockdowns could cause negative health and social effects for a wide swath of the population that was at low risk for the virus. And, he believed, it was inevitable that everyone would contract the virus eventually.

Kulldorff published articles on his anti-lockdown views in Swedish media, but English-language outlets repeatedly declined his submissions.

He didn’t publish in the mainstream American media until he translated an article to Spanish and published it in CNN Español.

By the summer, Kulldorff had connected with several other prominent anti-lockdown scientists In August 2020, then-President Trump invited the group to the White House.

“We were supposed to only meet for like five, 10 minutes,” Kulldorff recalled. “But he was very interested. I think the meeting lasted for an hour and a half.”

After that meeting, that group of scientists – including one from Oxford and another from Stanford – decided to co-author an open letter that would articulate an alternative path to lockdowns.

In fall 2020, they convened in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and published the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns and “focused protection” of high-risk groups.

The letter immediately gained traction, including a signature from a Nobel laureate.

That, in turn, sparked alarm in the US government. Days after the letter’s release, NIH Director Francis Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci, “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists…seems to be getting a lot of attention.”

“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

Part 2 will continue tomorrow.

***

Dr. Kulldorff was the first-ever guest on Roca’s new podcast, We the 66 podcast. The episode is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Reply to this email to let us know what you think!

EDITOR’S NOTE
Final Thoughts

Happy Hump Day Roca! We’ll keep it short today and hope that you learned something new in today’s newsletter.

— Max, Max, Alex and Jen