S3 Podcast

In the past two years since authorities (and the public) learned about a decade-long college admissions bribery scheme, we’ve watched high-profile participants like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman plead guilty, receive sentences, and serve time for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering. But one conspirator has stayed notably under the radar: William “Rick” Singer, the mastermind behind the scandal investigated in Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues

Singer — portrayed in the documentary by Stranger Things' Matthew Modine, reenacting his wiretapped conversations with clients — made $25 million helping wealthy and powerful parents get their kids into elite colleges. In May 2019, Singer pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering, racketeering, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice, and admitted to working with over 750 families. In order to get students into schools like Yale University and the University of Southern California, Singer paid proctors to alter his clients’ SAT scores, hired exam preparation experts to take the tests on his clients’ behalf, and worked with several coaches to falsely identify clients as recruited athletes. To cover his tracks, he laundered money through a “nonprofit” called the Key Worldwide Foundation

Eleven coaches and directors were charged with accepting bribes of up to $1.3 million to submit candidates’ names as sports recruits. Over 20 parents have been sentenced for their involvement in the operation. Singer, however, hasn’t yet been sentenced. It’s unclear when he’ll go to prison, but his lawyer told USA Today that it will likely be sometime this year or next. He currently faces a maximum sentence of 65 years, with three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $1.25 million.

with three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $1.25 million.

Today, Singer mostly avoids the public eye, although he’s been spotted around Newport Beach, CA a couple times. Ironically, as he awaits sentencing, Singer has decided to focus on his own educational pursuits. According to his lawyer, Donald Heller, he enrolled in Arizona’s Grand Canyon University in November 2019, in an attempt “to change his life for the future.” During his time as a student, he was granted permission to travel between his home in California and Arizona, where he took psychology courses. Bob Romantic, a spokesperson for the school, told USA Today that Singer was no longer a GCU student as of July 2020.

In June 2015, a white supremacist opened fire inside the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black congregants, including the minister. The massacre sparked a crescendo of anti-racist protest, including often successful demands for the removal of statues of Confederate Generals from public spaces throughout the South.

Two years later, a coalition of white nationalists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally aimed at protesting and reversing the local City Council’s decision to remove from the city’s center of a hundred year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Also gathered in Charlottesville were civil rights activists who sought to support the city’s resolve in removing the statue, and to press for further reforms aimed at dismantling institutional white supremacy. The event turned violent after the white nationalists attacked the racial justice advocates with tiki torches, pepper spray and lighter fluid. Fights erupted, injuring at least 30 people. The weekend of protest ended when one of the white nationalists deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counter-protesters, injuring 19 and killing one. Refusing to condemn either the goals or the actions of the white nationalists, President Trump commented that there were “very bad people … and very fine people on both sides.”

Trump was correct about that. In this encounter between white nationalists and civil rights activists, there were undoubtedly good individuals and bad individuals on both sides. How, then, can we judge which movement was the “good” one and which the “bad?”

The answer can be found in the sociological study of social movements. Over decades of focused research, the field has demonstrated that evaluating the moral compass of individual participants does little to advance our understanding of the morality or the actions of a large movement. Only by assessing the goals, tactics and outcomes of movements as collective phenomena can we begin to discern the distinction between “good” and “bad” movements.

As with most disasters, when the history of the COVID pandemic is written, there will be a fair amount of finger-pointing involved.

Much more could have been done to mitigate the coronavirus impact in the United States, but in reality, there are very few countries that totally escaped this scourge. Scientific research has provided a lot of new knowledge by which to manage the pandemic—and of course, the development of vaccines in record time is welcome news. But even with vaccines, success in controlling this virus continues to depend in large measure on human behavior. Science cannot take on these big challenges solely through medical fixes; rather it needs social and behavioral science to have a seat at the table as well. History is also a useful guide for understanding the present.

Anthropology is a broad field that has long focused on issues having to do with social organization, cultural meaning and human behavior. And as a professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, in addition to my role at the New York Academy of Sciences, I have seen how classic fieldwork methods of ethnography—based on close observation of patterns and structures of social meaning—have revealed important insights into why modernity has accommodated enormous variation of thought and behavior. Join the conversation @scarsleftbhind

Another 15 regions in the country will also be placed under the same measures from midnight on Friday.

These measures will not be as strict as the previous lockdown, Prime Minister Jean Castex said, with people allowed to exercise outdoors.

France has recorded 35,000 new cases within the past 24 hours.

Mr Castex said a "third wave" of infections in the country was looking increasingly likely.

The situation in Paris is particularly worrying with 1,200 people in intensive care there, more than at the peak of the second wave in November, Health Minister Olivier Veran said.

Under the new measures, non essential businesses will be forced to close but schools will remain open. People will be allowed to exercise outdoors within 10km (6 miles) of their home and are not allowed to travel to other parts of the country unless they have a valid reason. Those in the affected areas will have to fill out a form to explain why they have left their homes.

France's nationwide curfew will remain in place however it will begin an hour later at 19:00 (18:00 GMT).

Fears of a third wave come as the French government faces criticism for its slow vaccine rollout.

From Friday, France will resume vaccinating using the AstraZeneca jab following the EMA's announcement that it was fit for use. Mr Castex said he would be getting the vaccine straight away to prove that it was okay.

France had suspended the jab after several reports of blood clots in people who had the vaccine. A survey conducted just as the suspension was announced found that only 20% of the French have confidence in AstraZeneca. Join the conversation on Instagram @scarsleftbhind

New research by the National Institutes of Health found that unbalanced progesterone signals may cause some pregnant women to experience preterm labor or prolonged labor. The study in mice -- published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- provides novel insights for developing treatments.

During pregnancy, the hormone progesterone helps to prevent the uterus from contracting and going into labor prematurely. This occurs through molecular signaling involving progesterone receptor types A and B, referred to as PGR-A and PGR-B. In this first-of-its-kind study, the scientists showed how unbalanced PGR-A and PGR-B signaling can affect pregnancy duration.

"We used genetically engineered mouse models to alter the ratio of PGR-A and PGR-B in the muscle compartment of the uterus, called the myometrium," said senior author Francesco DeMayo, Ph.D., head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Reproductive and Developmental Biology Laboratory. "Our team found that PGR-A promotes muscle contraction and PGR-B prevents such contraction, and we identified the biological pathways influenced by both forms."Join The Conversation on Instagram @scarsleftbhind

Activists say the "Mississippi Fairness Act" is the first law targeting transgender people to pass in 2021.

The bill argues that boys and girls have "inherently different athletic capabilities". It is expected to face legal challenges.

It comes as a swath of Republican states push back against pro-LGBT measures from the Biden administration.

What does the law say?

The law requires public high schools and institutions of higher education to "designate its athletic teams or sports according to biological sex".

Coming into effect in July, it also calls for protecting schools that maintain separate sports teams from complaint or investigation.

Supporters of the bill had argued that transgender women have an unfair advantage over those born female, because they have "categorically different strength, speed and endurance".

It cites an article written by a trio of women's sports stars - including tennis champion Martina Navratilova - that said it would be "a denial of science" to ignore that those born male can "beat the best girls and women in head-to-head competition".

Trans athletes face 'huge' equality fight

Ms Navratilova has since established a group that she says will seek a "science-based, ethical approach" to "establish a middle ground that both protects girls' and women's sport and accommodates transgender athletes". She has also proposed a special provision for elite sports.

MPs from across the political spectrum called during a Westminster debate for the practice to be made illegal.

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch said the government was "committed" to "ending" it, and took the issue "very seriously".

But equality campaigners and some MPs said targeted action was needed.

"Conversion therapy" refers to any form of treatment or psychotherapy which aims to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

The practice is already outlawed in Switzerland and parts of Australia, Canada and the US.

Medicaid, the publicly funded insurance program for low-income and disabled individuals covers 43.1 percent of all births in the U.S. Unfortunately, vital pregnancy-related coverage ends just 60 days after giving birth for most people on Medicaid. Black and Latinx women, as well as other birthing people of color, make up a disproportionate share of Medicaid enrollees. Research has shown that closing gaps in coverage could improve lactation and human milk feeding support, assist with family transitions and the physical and emotional recovery of birthing people.

Lack of insurance and transitions between plans disrupts trusted relationships between patients and providers who work together to address conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic conditions before a person becomes pregnant or during early prenatal care. Extending Medicaid coverage to 12 months would likely prevent many of the roughly 12 percent of pregnancy-related deaths occurring after six weeks postpartum.

Despite the coverage gains made under the Affordable Care Act, women of color are still more likely to be uninsured, even during the perinatal period. Coverage gaps also create harmful barriers to seeking care and receiving help for complications after giving birth, including access to mental health services for the one in 10 birthing people who will experience postpartum depression, not to mention the stress of taking on the out-of-pocket costs associated with not having insurance or being underinsured. Additionally, the Affordable Care Act provides necessary coverage for community-based lactation support and human milk feeding resources—breastfeeding, chest-feeding and the provision of expressed human milk. Human milk feedings have been shown to improve health outcomes across the life course for birthing people and their infants, increase bonding between the dyad, and reduce health care costs.

Medicaid expansion is an ethical imperative and moral duty of federal and state governments to protect the health and welfare of the most vulnerable populations in our society. Comprehensive insurance coverage must become the standard ethic of care and a moral priority in efforts to reduce the impact of maternal mortality and morbidity and improve health and wellness during the postpartum period. With no federal mandate, the 12 states that have continued to deny access to insurance through Medicaid expansion will likely forgo extending postpartum Medicaid. It is shameful that this is our reality during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

One additional consideration is the missed opportunities of the pandemic—namely, shelter-in-place regulations that could have served as a pilot program to extend postpartum Medicaid and pay workers to stay home. By focusing on workers who are hardest hit by COVID-19, we could have accomplished complementary goals given these workers are the same people who are likely eligible for expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage. A recent report from TimesUp makes the case for a worker-centered recovery. Findings showed that 52 percent of Latina women and 44 percent of Black women anticipated losing paid work as a result of unpaid caregiving responsibilities, compared to 30 percent of men.

In addition, one in four birthing people have to return to work within 10–14 days after giving birth. The lack of paid family leave, coupled with the potential loss of health care coverage, further perpetuates health inequities and disparities. One state, California, expanded Medi-Cal (the state version of Medicaid) by the Provisional Postpartum Care Extension (PPCE) in 2019. The PPCE includes extended Medi-Cal coverage, across the first year of the postpartum period, for birthing individuals diagnosed with a perinatal mental health condition during pregnancy or up to 90 days after birth. We believe these policies should be the standard of coverage for all pregnant-capable people, regardless of insurance payor and mental health diagnoses.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It is an often-used quote, and for good reason. Juliet tragically underestimated the impact of the Montague surname. She was not the first, nor the last, to underestimate the power of the names we give.

In psychiatry, handbooks determine which names (or classifications) we give to the difficulties that people face. We use them so that when we say ADHD, schizophrenia or depression, people have a more or less consistent idea of what we mean. Moreover, it enables us to study groups of people with the same classification and learn about treatments and prognostics.

However, a severe and often overlooked side effect of this practice is that these names implicitly suggest causality. The classificatory terms we use all refer to disorders that cause symptoms, and therefore suggest that we understand the causes of the problems. Which we do not. At the very least, the term disorder suggests a common causal structure, which goes against all our current knowledge on causal heterogeneity in psychiatry. Moreover, these classifications are applied to individuals and therefore suggest that causes lie mainly with the affected individual.

The most common psychiatric handbooks (DSM-5 and ICD-11) are clear on the status of their classifications: they are purely descriptive and are not based on underlying causes. Still, in practice, we say things like “he is inattentive at school because he has ADHD.” It is a circular statement: a child is inattentive because of his inattentiveness. When we say that someone has an attention deficit, we are inclined to look for the cause of the problem. But when we say someone has an attention deficit disorder, we might wrongly assume we have already found the cause. Or, in a milder version, assume the cause to be located somewhere in the (brain of the) individual.

On the surface, this may seem like a silly, innocent mistake. However, social scientists have shown time and again that this systematically places the problem with the individual and diverts our focus away from the context (e.g. family/school/work) where traits lead to problems.

One clear example is the relative age effect in ADHD. The youngest students in class get diagnosed with ADHD more often and receive more ADHD medication than their older classmates. It is the mirror image of the well-known relative age effect in professional sports, where relative maturity in young athletes is mistaken for talent. It seems that in ADHD diagnostics, relative immaturity can be mistaken for ADHD; a consequence of these children being unfairly and unfavorably compared to their older classmates.

There is no good time for a pandemic, but COVID-19 hit the United States as a public health crisis was well under way.

The novel coronavirus has exacerbated already rising death rates among Americans in the prime of their lives, a new report concludes. Especially hard-hit are racial minorities and people of all races with low incomes and a high school education or less.

The report, released March 2 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, provides the most comprehensive look at premature deaths in the United States to date. A picture is emerging of how the interplay of known and often preventable risk factors, including rising rates of opioid overdoses and obesity, is contributing to declining U.S. life expectancy (SN: 12/21/17).

Since the 1990s, drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides and obesity-related conditions have resulted in the deaths of nearly 6.7 million U.S. adults ages 25 to 64, a 12-member committee finds. Mortality rates from those causes tended to accelerate in the 2010s. Aftershocks of the sharp economic recession in 2008 may have contributed to that development, the report suggests.

“This is a public health crisis that isn’t getting better, and in some ways is getting worse,” Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the committee, said during a March 2 webinar to discuss the report.

The report shows that declining life expectancy among racial minorities and working-class white people before the pandemic “set the stage for the challenges we saw during COVID-19,” says epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health. Galea assisted in the peer review of the committee’s analysis.

People with underlying health conditions — often the very conditions driving the trend of premature deaths — have been especially vulnerable during the pandemic. For instance, studies have found that obesity creates a substantial risk for hospitalization and death following a coronavirus infection (SN: 4/22/20). And federal data cited in the report reinforce that the virus has not affected all groups equally. From January 1, 2020, to January 9, 2021, 4.3 percent of all deaths among working-age white residents involved COVID-19. That figure reached 10 percent for Black residents, 21.4 percent for Hispanics, 14.2 percent for Native American groups, 13 percent for Asians and 16.1 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.

Though COVID-19 is currently a leading cause of death, what prompted the new report was the fact that U.S. life expectancy had dropped for three years in row starting in 2015. Harris’ team analyzed data on mortality of working-age people in the United States from 1990 through 2017, as well as reviewing research on social trends related to disease and death.

Cardiometabolic diseases, including diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, high blood pressure caused by heart disease, narrowed heart arteries and stroke, led to more than 4.8 million premature deaths, a trend that accelerated after 2010. While the mortality rate from these causes for Black people varied over the study period, at times dipping, it consistently remained twice that of white and Hispanic people, the report found.

Researchers screened 789 players who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infections for signs of myocarditis or pericarditis — inflammation of the heart or its surrounding sac. Only five of those athletes (0.6 percent) had evidence of the inflammatory heart conditions and were restricted from play for at least three months to give their hearts time to heal, researchers report March 4 in JAMA Cardiology. Those results contrast with findings from previous studies of college athletes, which suggested that as many as 15 percent of young athletes may have developed the potentially deadly heart conditions after a coronavirus infection

The long-anticipated CDC guidance on schools was released on February 12. This is the latest event in what has been, up to this point, among the most politically charged and scientifically contested aspects of the COVID-19 response. In its guidance, the agency calls for K–12 schools in particular to reopen as soon as possible, noting that with safety precautions in place such as physical distancing, contact tracing and mask-wearing, many have been able to open safely, and stay open. The report also cites evidence, also referenced in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association authored by CDC staff, that school attendance in this age range is not a primary driver of community transmission, and that declining infection rates are possible while keeping schools open.

However, the levels of community transmission used as benchmarks have drawn criticism, not least because they seem to not reflect the latest evidence on what is achievable with safeguards, and by implication suggest almost all schools in the U.S. should remain in remote or hybrid forms for the immediate future, in spite of the evidence.

Much has been written arguing for and against urgent reopening, and this latest round of debates reflect a year’s worth of very public debates. Leaving aside these discussions, we think it is worth pausing and reflecting on the failures these very debates have brought into bold relief. Simply put, the arguments about school openings during COVID-19 reflect, to our mind, an ongoing failure of science and society, in which academics and policy makers share responsibility.

First, on the science. As the CDC guidance makes abundantly clear, evidence to date points to COVID posing a low risk to children, with the risk of spread among young children also low, if well-managed, in the school setting. It is important to remember that the level of safety we adjudge as “safe” is a relative thing, and unknowns remain about the long-term effects of COVID; however, we know that among children ages 5–14, the COVID-19 mortality rate has been reported at around one per million. To put this in perspective, by contrast, transport accidents account for 15 times that mortality rate. Children in that age range are almost 10 times more likely to die by suicide, than die from COVID-19 (see Figure).

One can reasonably surmise that it has been far more dangerous throughout the past year for children to get to school than it has been for them to be in school.