分类：全球热读榜

New York Times / Charlie Warzel
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/opinion/sunday/twitter-protest-politics.html

In February, I declared, somewhat winkingly, that Twitter is real life. My argument was not that what happens on that social media website is broadly representative of popular opinion but that what happens on Twitter is a good barometer of enthusiasm around movement-building and fandoms. And that elites tend to undervalue or dismiss what happens on the platform, suggesting that those loud voices making them uncomfortable aren’t accurate indicators of lived experiences.

Since, I’ve received a steady stream of gloating emails about how wrong I was. After all, I cited Senator Bernie Sanders’s online movement for the Democratic presidential nomination, powered in large part by Twitter, as a primary example of this insurgent force and referred to the candidate as “arguably now the Democratic front-runner.” Not two weeks later, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, effectively cementing him as the Democratic Party’s nominee. If Twitter was actually real life, surely it would be Mr. Sanders doing virtual town halls from his basement campaign headquarters, not Mr. Biden.

The power of online movements has been at the front of my mind the past two weeks as Americans have gathered by the tens of thousands to protest police and state violence against black people. Millions, too, have followed along on their screens, amplifying protest messages, sharing donation links and expressing solidarity. Online platforms, especially Twitter, “have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia,” my Times colleague Jenna Wortham wrote last week of the images of police violence against peaceful protesters.

Those images appear, at last, to be having a sweeping effect on our public consciousness of racial inequality and injustice, especially in regard to police violence. “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones,” Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, wrote last week.

For black activists and their allies, the only thing new about this experience is its widespread public recognition. This movement’s rallying cry — Black Lives Matter — was coined as a hashtag in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon Martin’s murder, and scholars have been studying the internet’s central role in amplifying protest movements and racial inequality since before that.

“Social media participation becomes a key site from which to contest mainstream media silences and the long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations,” Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa wrote in 2015 in a hashtag ethnography of the Ferguson protests.

They cite early hashtag movements like #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown as “entry points into larger and more complex worlds” that helped illustrate that “‘#Ferguson is everywhere’ — not only in the sense of a broad public sphere but also in the sense of the underlying social and political relationships that haunt the nation as a whole.”

But as the activism dominated social media, it did not necessarily have large-scale public support. A 2017 Harvard-Harris poll suggested 57 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. And yet, these conversations didn’t disappear off the internet when they left front pages. They were there all along, in plain view for those who sought them out. They continued, despite portrayals to discredit the movement as a violent fringe and specious claims that “systemic racism is a myth” perpetuated by the media and so-called social justice warriors.

But what begins online and is castigated as an unrepresentative view gradually builds consensus, in this case, tracking to our current moment. When, at last, it reaches critical mass it is treated as conventional wisdom by those who once dismissed it. According to a new Times analysis, “in the last two weeks, American voters’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased almost as much as it had in the preceding two years.” As my Opinion colleague Aisha Harris wrote on Tuesday, “all of a sudden, everybody seems to care about black lives.”

The undergirding movement and struggle has been there the whole time. It was an articulation of a better future, even when it fell on unlistening ears. It was real life.

There’s a similar argument to be made for the insurgent-left politics of Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Throughout the primaries, centrist Democrats argued that the senator’s ideas were overindexed on places like Twitter but considered on the fringe and unpalatable to most Americans. But since Senator Sanders dropped out of the race in April, his policies have resonated beyond his base. Now staring down a pandemic, mass unemployment and a potential depression, centrists have mused publicly about a health care system like Medicare for All that doesn’t tie insurance to employers.

Similarly, the Sanders campaign’s racial justice reforms and intersectional economic programs now appear more acceptable to a political establishment that dismissed the proposals as unrealistic and radical. Twitter’s left-leaning politics weren’t (slightly) ahead of the times — they were merely disregarded as implausible or not representative. Or as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The New Yorker declared just before he left the race, “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.”

They didn’t randomly *sound* extreme to voters who knew long before COVID that the country was in crisis.

His ideas were *sold* as extreme by the pundit class & corporate Dems— something they should take responsibility for now. https://t.co/3RMpw0WrL8

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) June 8, 2020

This cycle is beginning to play out again during the George Floyd protests, where protesters have adopted a new rallying cry: Defund the Police. The demand has been met with scorn by the president and conservatives, and anxiety by centrist and establishment Democrats. The Biden campaign has rejected it as a bridge too far. Journalists and news outlets have qualified it — suggesting it’s merely an aggressive statement of support for reprioritizing police funding.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser says that when people say they want to defund the police, she believes most mean they want reform and good policing. https://t.co/wGdaPxKqOC pic.twitter.com/tBbWUI5PWf

— CNN (@CNN) June 9, 2020

Of course, for tens of thousands marching in the streets waving #DefundThePolice signs, the phrase is not a dog whistle; it’s a bullhorn. It is, like Medicare for All, a call for a complete reimagining of what they see as a corrupt, broken system. The argument is, quite literally, to defund the police and build a healthier public safety system from scratch while investing that money in other adjacent community-support resources.

The slogan — just like Black Lives Matter — is blunt. Its intentions are clear: Imagine a world without the police state. But do a Twitter search for the words “defund the police Twitter real life” and you’ll see the dismissal in real time, suggesting that an overhaul of militarized policing is a fantasy held by a small number of extremely online leftists.

on the whole, the media will prefer “experts” and “organizers” who say “when we say abolish or defund we don’t ACTUALLY mean that haha calm down” because it a) gradual reform reflects the politics of most media ppl and b) they don’t actually believe change is possible.

— kang👎 (@jaycaspiankang) June 8, 2020

An argument about Twitter — or any part of the internet — as “real life” is frequently an argument about what voices “matter” in our national conversation. Not just which arguments are in the bounds of acceptable public discourse, but also which ideas are considered as legitimate for mass adoption. It is a conversation about the politics of the possible. That conversation has many gatekeepers — politicians, the press, institutions of all kinds. And frequently they lack creativity.

“Many times our politics and our political imagination is limited by our politicians. … I think people who could do more to try to imagine a different political world often times are obsessed with the filibuster,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said last week on a podcast about reimagining the police state. “I’m not saying the filibuster isn’t important. … But I’m saying that there’s one group of people who have to be concerned about that but there’s another group of people who also should think long term. What do we want? What are the guiding lights?”

Right now, in the midst of a series of cascading, intersecting crises (racial and economic inequality, climate change, mass unemployment, a pandemic), what’s possible feels like more of an open question than in recent memory. But that possibility, while life-affirming for many, is deeply threatening to some: the rich, and the white and powerful, to name a few. And those who feel threatened will try to demean the ideas. They’ll be met with eye rolls as the out-of-step activism of the hyperpolitical Twitter fringes or the ramblings of the woke, coddled campus kids. Implicit here is that Twitter and the campus are siloed spaces away from reality.

Which is what makes the events of the past two weeks of mass protests so powerful. The marching in the streets, the waving of signs and defiant chanting as well as the choking tear gas and the grotesque shows of police force — they are positively, indisputably, physically real. And it is further proof that the online spaces that helped to galvanize these movements have always been rooted in reality. It’s just one that many refused to open their eyes to.

MANY PEOPLE COMPLAIN about having a terrible memory. Shopping lists, friends’ birthdays, statistics for an exam—they just don’t seem to stick in the brain. But memory isn’t as set in stone as you might imagine. With the right technique, you may well be able to remember almost anything at all.

Source：WIRED

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-trick-your-brain-to-remember-almost-anything/

J.K. Rowling is under fire again after she doubles down on her anti-transgender views. Rowling is most known for her Harry Potter series, which of course was turned into the popular film series starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. While her Harry Potter characters are beloved by fans around the world, Rowling has received a lot of hate these past few years due to changing Harry Potter canon and for her views on the LGBTQA+ community.

Rowling has been called out for being a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) and for her Anti-Trans comments in the past, but the most recent drama started at the beginning of June. After sharing the article “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate”, Rowling commented, “People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”. Despite receiving backlash on the internet, Rowling defended her tweet by reiterating that she supports the trans community but has also been contacted by women she said are, “justifiably terrified by the trans activists.” Now Rowling is in hot water again for similar reasons.

In her latest response on Twitter, Rowling clarified why she liked a tweet comparing hormone prescriptions to anti-depressants. One Twitter user called out Rowling for supporting the claim that anti-depressants and hormone prescriptions were, “Pure laziness for those who would rather medicate than put in the time and effort to heal people’s minds.” Rowling reiterated her support of trans-women while also explaining again that she has taken medication for her mental health. Her long Twitter thread，explains why she believes hormones and surgery may not be the best option for people struggling with mental health. 

Throughout her thread, Rowling sites a handful of articles and studies to claim that using hormones for gender transition can lead to serious side-effects, which she believes many trans-activists ignore. Rowling also explains in her thread that she believes hormone therapy is “a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people,” reiterating her stance that hormones can cause problems with “fertility and/or full sexual function.” This most recent development, along with her previous comments saying, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction” has caused many Harry Potter fans to turn against the once-beloved writer. 

Many Harry Potter stars have apologized and condemned Rowling’s comments, with Radcliffe, Watson, Grint, and Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne all standing with the trans community. The more Rowling speaks out on this subject, the more it seems to tarnish her reputation as more fans and organizations turn against her. Warner Bros. has issued a statement in the past on Rowling’s views, but with her most recent comments, the fate of Fantastic Beasts 3 is unclear, especially since Redmayne has condemned her beliefs and because the first two films have already received their fair share of controversy.

Source：Screen Rant

https://screenrant.com/jk-rowling-transphobic-hormones-conversion-therapy-criticism-response/

In 430–429 B.C.E., a mysterious epidemic ravaged Athens, plunging the city into chaos.Art work by Michiel Sweerts
“Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now,” Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, declared in his funeral oration, a celebrated speech in the winter of 431–430 B.C.E. He wasn’t wrong. We continue to admire Athens’s architectural splendor, stage its tragedies and comedies, and marvel, especially, at much that its democracy (the world’s first) wrought: participatory government, equal treatment before the law in private disputes, a distaste for class consciousness, juries made up of citizens, and tolerance about others’ personal lives.

But soon after Pericles gave that prideful speech, the original democracy got sick. In 430–429 B.C.E., Athens was devastated by a mysterious epidemic, which reared its head again a few years later. Tens of thousands of people died, perhaps as many as one-third of Athenians. Society was ravaged, and the military, which was in the early stages of a brutal twenty-seven-year war against Sparta, was debilitated for many years. The catastrophe contributed to Athens’s shattering defeat, in 404 B.C.E., by the loutish Spartans, who tore down the city’s walls and imposed a short-lived but murderous oligarchy. Among those who died from this plague were Pericles and two of his sons.

Millennia later, the plague reminds us that the legacy of the eternal “wonder” of Athens contains within it a cautionary tale: the failure of democratic society to cope with a lethal epidemic. The model of how democracy began is also a study in how it can founder and fall.

Most of what we know about the plague comes from the brilliant Athenian historian Thucydides, widely viewed by classicists as the single best source on Athens in the age of Pericles. He would not be surprised to find his book being read today, during the coronavirus lockdown. “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public,” he wrote, with zero modesty, “but was done to last forever.”

Thucydides was a worldly Athenian general, whose “History of the Peloponnesian War” is a cold-eyed account of the ruinous conflict between democratic Athens and militaristic Sparta. The book, although unfinished, established him as the founder of the systematic study of international relations. It was translated into English in 1628 by Thomas Hobbes, and has since been cited by heads of state from Woodrow Wilson to Xi Jinping.

In a book packed with battle, conquest, and massacre, Thucydides’ account of the plague is especially horrifying. A seasoned, hard-bitten warrior, he was, for once, at a loss: “Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the suffering of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.” Thucydides himself got the plague but survived, as he coolly notes in passing.

Nobody knows what the plague was, although classically minded epidemiologists still debate its cause. It might have been smallpox, a fungal poisoning called ergotism, or something worse. In 1985, a New England Journal of Medicine article argued that it was a combination of influenza and staphylococcus, dubbed “the Thucydides syndrome.” A 1994 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology rejected that diagnosis, proposing, instead, typhus, anthrax, or perhaps “a potentially explosive respiratory agent.”

Whatever it was, it was a horror. As Thucydides recorded with clinical detail, people suddenly felt their heads begin to burn, their eyes redden, their tongues and mouths bleed. Next came coughing, stomach pain, diarrhea, and “vomiting of every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession.” The skin turned reddish with pustules and ulcers, while the stricken plunged into the city’s water tanks trying to slake an unquenchable thirst—possibly contaminating the water supply. Most died after about a week. The city was blanketed with corpses.

Athenians were already packed into the city as a wartime measure, and frightened people fleeing the countryside crowded it even further, creating conditions we now know are ripe for contagion. Athenian doctors bore the brunt: “Terrible . . . was the sight of people dying like sheep through having caught the disease as a result of nursing others.” Neither medicine nor quackery helped. Nor did consulting the oracles or praying in the temples, futile pieties which Thucydides dismissively noted were soon discarded.

Pericles’ stirring funeral oration is among the most famous passages of Thucydides. The statesman praised Athens for its freedom and democratic deliberations, while defending its increasingly oppressive empire. (Athens was only a democracy for adult, male citizens of Athenian descent, not for women or slaves, or for foreigners living under imperial rule.) This message has been remembered: during the First World War, London buses carried posters with passages from the speech; in 2012, a memorial in central London to the R.A.F. Bomber Command was engraved with a quote from it.

But Thucydides’ chronicle of what happened just after Pericles’ funeral oration is unsparing—and should be as enduring as the speech itself. “The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law,” Thucydides wrote. Orderly Athenians, no longer expecting to live long enough to face punishment for crimes, plunged into “a state of unprecedented lawlessness.” They could not even bother to lay their dead to rest respectably. Instead, survivors looked for already burning funeral pyres, adding friends and relatives to the blaze. And with the spectre of mortality looming at all times, they lived only for “the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence.”

Many Athenians blamed the calamity on their Spartan enemies, spreading dark rumors of poisoned reservoirs. Yet Thucydides swiftly dismissed such speculation. After all, Athens was a naval power, an imperial capital, and a trading city whose fleets ranged across the ancient world; the contagion, he wrote, probably spread from Ethiopia to Libya to Persia before finally reaching Greece, where Athens—a global port for commercial ships—was its first stop.

And, once it arrived, its damage knew no bounds, doing terrible harm to democracy itself. In Plato’s “Republic,” written several decades after the plague, Socrates warned that democracy would decay into tyranny; Thucydides recorded it sliding into discord, folly, and demagoguery. Only someone of Pericles’ intelligence and integrity, Thucydides wrote, “could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check.” His death left Athenian democracy in the hands of self-serving scoundrels such as Alcibiades, who later promoted an oligarchic coup, and bellicose demagogues such as Cleon, whom Thucydides scorned as “remarkable among the Athenians for the violence of his character.”

For anyone hopeful that democracy is the best system for coping with the current coronavirus pandemic, the Athenian disaster stands as a chilling admonition. As Plato knew, political regimes are as fragile as any other human structure, and all fall in time. The plague devastated Athens for many years—Thucydides reckoned it took fifteen years to recover—but his account suggests that the damage to democracy lasted far longer. The stakes of our own vulnerability are no different.

This is a sobering history, but, reading Thucydides’ account of the plague while under lockdown, I sometimes found the frosty old historian oddly heartening. He was too scrupulous to blame the epidemic on the Spartans—an ancient reproach to those today who try to pin blame on foreign rivals. Politicians in search of scapegoats would be wise to recall Pericles, who said, before the plague, “What I fear is not the enemy’s strength, but our own mistakes.”

Thucydides maintained a rationalist’s sensibility even in wartime and plague. Unlike some Athenian dramatists, he saw neither metaphorical significance nor divine retribution in the epidemic. The plague was just a plague. Surviving the disease, he carefully “set down the symptoms, knowledge of which will enable it to be recognized, if it should ever break out again.” His ancient empirical analysis of catastrophe offers a jot of hope, if not wonder: for as long as there have been plagues, there have been people, scared but tenacious, using reason to try to learn from them.

Source：The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-plague-a-cautionary-tale-of-democracys-fragility

In a Twitter video that has over 1.1 million views, a police officer starts crying while telling viewers that she was made to wait for her McDonald’s meal after ordering ahead.

A Twitter user who posted the video wrote, “Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop [sad face emoji, angry face emoji] Come on America. We are better than this.”

The police officer, identified by the Twitter user as “Stacey,” films herself describing her experience waiting a long time for her McMuffin meal.  In the video “Stacey” notes that she has paid ahead of time “so people don’t pay for my stuff because I just always like to pay for it myself.” She appears to be referencing the common practice of police officers being given free food and drinks at restaurants.

When “Stacey” is finally given her coffee without her meal, she tells the employee who hands it to her, “Don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it. Right now I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made.”

Multiple influencers told WIRED that their videos had been copied from other platforms and reposted to Zynn without permission.

LATE LAST MONTH, a mysterious new video app called Zynn began appearing at the top of app store charts, beating out household names like Instagram and YouTube. Zynn is a near identical copy of TikTok, and both apps are the product of Chinese tech giants. The biggest difference is that Zynn, in an effort to attract new users, is currently paying people in the United States and Canada small sums to watch videos and invite their friends to join. The tactic has seemed to work: Zynn has already been downloaded over 3 million times, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower, and ranked number one this week on Apple’s list of the most popular free apps.

As of Tuesday, however, Zynn is no longer available for download from the Google Play Store, and a link that previously went to the app’s listing is now dead. It’s unclear why the app was removed, and Google did not immediately comment. A spokesperson for Apple said it was looking into Zynn, but did not have any additional information as of publication. Twitter and Instagram accounts claiming to represent Zynn posted a statement Tuesday afternoon acknowledging the app had been removed, and said the company was “in communications with Google and working to fix this ASAP.”

Meanwhile, Zynn is filled with videos that appear to be stolen from creators on other social media platforms, including TikTok celebrities with massive followings like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae. Many of the clips are aggregated by accounts centered around a single theme, like “pranks.” Other videos appear on lookalike profiles impersonating individual creators. Four influencers who spoke to WIRED said videos they originally published to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube were uploaded to Zynn without their consent, under accounts they didn’t open.

“I didn’t create this,” Max Mazurek, a Polish dancer and model with almost 190,000 TikTok followers said after WIRED showed him a Zynn profile using his name. The account has nearly 25,000 followers and featured many of the videos Mazurek had previously uploaded to TikTok and other platforms. “It’s not my account. I can’t download this app in Poland,” he said.

The launch of a new social media platform often sets off a rush to grab famous or valuable usernames, and it’s not uncommon for scammers to impersonate celebrities on social media. Reposting other people’s content without credit has also long been an issue online. What’s strange about the Zynn accounts, however, is how many of the copied videos have timestamps that date back months before the app went public.

Zynn officially launched in the Apple App Store on May 7, and was first installed by Google Play users on May 5, according to Sensor Tower. Many of the impersonator accounts reviewed by WIRED, including the one under Mazurek’s name, uploaded their first posts on February 19. The significance of that date isn’t clear, and Zynn did not respond to a request for comment sent to an email address listed on its website. Its Community Guidelines state that it respects intellectual property rights, and forbids users from posting “anything that you do not own or do not have permission from the owner to share.”

“I feel that it’s honestly sad that they are stealing creators’ content and impersonating people,” said Chloe, a TikTok influencer with almost 18,000 followers. Until WIRED brought it to her attention, Chloe says she was unaware that a Zynn profile had been created using the same handle she uses on Instagram and TikTok, @ebonychlo. The account also began posting videos taken from her official social media profiles on February 19, months before Zynn became available for download.

Tiffany Hunt, a makeup artist with over two million followers across TikTok and Instagram, said she also had no idea someone was impersonating her on Zynn. “Never heard of this app, certainly never posted to it,” she said. A Zynn profile with a name similar to the one Hunt uses across social media, @illumin_arty, began posting videos taken from her legitimate accounts on the same date as the others: February 19.

Zynn is brimming with similar profiles that appear to exclusively post content taken from elsewhere on the internet, particularly TikTok. Many videos feature watermarks or other visual elements indicating they were lifted from other platforms. While digital creators do often repost videos across different sites, that possibility seems unlikely in cases where the videos are time-stamped from before Zynn’s launch.

Since its launch, an avalanche of suspicious accounts capitalizing on the app’s reward system have also appeared on Zynn. In addition to earning points by watching videos, which the app says can then be redeemed for cash or gift cards, users can also earn money when their friends enter their referral code at sign-up. Critics have called this system a pyramid scheme; at the very least, it seems to encourage scammy behavior. An account impersonating TikToker Addison Rae, for example, uploaded a video on May 25. “Hey y’all it’s Addison!!” the caption reads. “Decided to join Zynn to earn some quick cash. Use my code DJMA8VS to receive a special offer of $20!!!” The comments are filled with hundreds of similar offers, promising instant money or follow backs. “Let’s get rich together,” dozens of different accounts exclaim.

In an additional twist, Zynn appears to have been created to compete with TikTok by a rival of its parent company, ByteDance. Zynn’s listed developer, Owlii, is reportedly owned by Kuaishou, a billion-dollar Chinese company. Kuaishou is the second most popular video platform in China after Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic version of TikTok. The companies are two of China’s most powerful tech giants, and have a longstanding rivalry. Both apps have hundreds of millions of users each, with Douyin being more popular in cities and Kuaishou in rural areas. Now, they’re fighting for the upper hand in the West.

Kuaishou and ByteDance compete closely in China, but the latter is currently doing far better abroad. While an international version of Kuaishou’s app is used in some countries like Brazil, ByteDance has succeeded in making TikTok popular around the world. The app has now been downloaded over two billion times, and has become a major cultural force in the United States, on par with American platforms like Instagram and YouTube. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

Kuaishou did not respond to two requests for comment, but a spokesperson told the tech news site The Information last month that Zynn was tailor-made “for the North American market.” So far, the app has earned millions of downloads. But it’s not clear Zynn’s fast rise means lasting success—especially if people realize they can find much of its content elsewhere.

The answer hinges on a peculiarity of the Japanese language.

In the Old Testament, God wrought ten plagues upon humanity. In modern times, we have our hands full with just one: covid-19. Or so we thought, until it was reported, in the May 2nd edition of the Times, that a new pestilence is afoot. “Murder hornets” with “mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins,” we were told, were descending upon North America from their native habitat of Asia. Within twenty-four hours, the hashtag #murderhornets was trending on Twitter, fuelled by all the excitement befitting what sounds like a newly discovered species of homicidal Pokémon. Sensing a rare non-virus viral story, major media outlets ranging from the Washington Post to Fox News pounced. They began amplifying the insect threat with their own details, many of them simply rephrased from the original piece; by the middle of last week, Jimmy Fallon was interviewing a “murder hornet” in costume on “The Tonight Show.” (“Look, we’re just regular old bees who happen to make things fall asleep forever.”)

This is a familiar story of how trending topics drive the modern news cycle, but it’s also a testament to the power of a catchy label. Murder hornet is the nickname bestowed upon Vespa mandarinia, the already formidable-sounding Asian giant hornet, which is native to large swaths of East Asia. The Japanese call it ōsuzumebachi: literally, giant sparrow-hornet. They aren’t actually sparrow-size; the biggest specimens come in at just under two inches long. But that is cold comfort when one hears their menacing, resonant buzz approaching, which is something that occurs with disconcerting regularity if you spend time outdoors during the summer months in Japan.

The monsoons and humidity that can make Japan difficult to bear during the summer also make it a haven for insects and other creepy-crawlies. Some of them grow to truly enormous proportions. To the sparrow-hornet you can add startlingly large cockroaches, enormous orb-weaver spiders, and centipedes that can reach six inches in length. So, too, palm-size rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles. Unlike the dreaded hornet and its ilk, these gentle giants are beloved traditional playthings. The males use their horns to wrestle each other away from sources of food and from potential mates. Collected by children and squared off in sumo-style matches, these giant armored beetles provided the cultural template for the virtual battles that Japanese video-game designers would perfect in the eighties and nineties.

I know these things both because I love bugs enough to have flirted with majoring in entomology during my university studies, and because I have lived in Tokyo for close to twenty years. Even in the city, one has occasional run-ins with giant hornets during the summer months. Here, they are rightfully feared even without nicknames, and incidents involving them regularly make headlines. Like all wasps and other hornets, and unlike honeybees, giant hornets have smooth stingers that allow them to attack repeatedly. The Asian giant hornet’s barb packs an especially potent poison, and, every year, dozens of Japanese lose their lives as a result of anaphylactic shock. Asian giant hornets tend to nest in hidden places, such as the hollows of trees or ground burrows. Removing, or even simply approaching, these hives is dangerous work. Their stingers easily penetrate standard beekeeping suits, necessitating thick protective gear and specialized equipment such as vacuums to suck the creatures out of the air as they mass to protect their homes.

For all their ferocity, however, I had never once heard them referred to as “murder hornets” in Japanese. The first time I saw the name was, as for many Americans, when I read it in the Times that weekend. The phrase immediately piqued my interest. The closest analogue I knew, satsujin bachi, is simply “killer hornet,” Japan’s matter-of-fact equivalent of the English-language “killer bee.” Even that usage was largely relegated to tabloid news and variety shows. I had never heard a hornet called a “murderer”—how could it be? A murder requires premeditation. We don’t speak of bears or tigers murdering people. Why, suddenly, hornets?

I had a guess. Linguistically, the common Japanese word satsujin—written with the characters “kill” and “person”—does not clearly distinguish between a person being “murdered” or “killed.” This ambiguity means that if one looks up satsujin in a Japanese-English dictionary, they will be presented with a list of options that includes the words “murder,” “manslaughter,” and “killer.” It is up to the translator to select the proper word based on context. I strongly suspected that this linguistic subtlety had been lost in translation. For, as terrifying as the giant hornet may be, I have never heard anyone in Japan portray it as possessing homicidal intent. Curious, I approached Junichi Takahashi, a Japanese entomologist, who was quoted in the Times’ original report. When I explained my mission, it seemed that Professor Takahashi didn’t want to stir the hornet’s nest with another interview, but he did aver that “giant, killer, and murder are general names used by the media.”

Not everyone is happy about the dramatic nicknaming of the creatures. “They are not ‘murder hornets.’ They are just hornets,” the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist Chris Looney told the Washington Post. “It’s kind of a sensational term,” agreed the Texas A&M entomologist Molly Keck in an interview with a San Antonio television station. The linking of the foreign-born insects with a scary word, in this case “murder,” skirts dangerously close to uncomfortable territory: those of a certain age will recall the “Africanized killer bee” scare of the seventies, with all of its race-baiting overtones, and, more recently, the Trump Administration’s strenuous efforts to relabel the coronavirus as a specifically “Chinese” virus.

The phrase “murder hornets” leapt into the lexicon mere weeks ago, but its rapid percolation throughout the mediasphere evokes the way new dangers spread so fluidly through a globalized modern world. The ōsuzumebachi hornets have troubled the residents of Japan since time immemorial. That these tiny terrors have suddenly appeared on the American side of the Pacific is only the latest curveball from Mother Nature, and another reminder that the borders we surround ourselves with, whether lines drawn on a map or nicknames given to things that frighten us, are meaningless to natural threats like insects or viruses.

US President Donald Trump, with Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow (L), holds a press conference on the economy, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 5, 2020. 

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the May jobs report, the latest snapshot of the US labor market. The report contains reason for optimism in the face of the crippling pandemic and reveals how much more support is needed to ensure a return to full employment.

Devil in the details

The big headline was what would be in any other circumstance a massive surge in employment: the monthly employer survey showed 2.51 million more employees on payrolls than there were in April when economic effects of COVID-19 were largest.

This gain came as a shock given that economists had projected a drop of more than 7 million jobs in the month. The gloomy predictions were based primarily on recent initial unemployment claims data. And the estimates seemed logical since the number of Americans receiving unemployment insurance (including those covered by Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which extends benefits to more Americans than the traditional unemployment insurance program) continued to rise in May.

But survey-based approach of the BLS showed what is, on the face of it, a much brighter picture. There are, however, some caveats. In the report, the BLS emphasized that responses to its surveys appeared to be making things look a bit better than they otherwise would. BLS economists estimated that the 13.3% unemployment rate was about 3 percentage points lower than it would be if not for irregularities in survey response patterns.