Dental Dams for Palestine

It’s still happening! I regret to inform that the college students are still somehow at it. But their protests are getting progressively further from the plot. Take, for example, this University of Chicago supplies list, which seems to think dental dams and plan B are needed in order to *checks notes* help the Gazans?

UChicago encampment requests Plan B, HIV tests and dental dams, per a post on the organizers’ Instagram pic.twitter.com/EEbzLqraMX

— Gabby Deutch (@GSDeutch) May 2, 2024

Or the very strange pro-North Korea takes at Princeton. Or take the odd nativist signs spotted at George Washington’s campus, which read “students will leave when Israelis leave” (somehow I doubt it!) and “students will go back home when Israelis go back to Europe, US, etc. (their real homes).”

Or the seemingly right-wing effort to fund a massive kegger ($500,000 raised) for the flag-defending frat bros at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the wave of frat-bros-defending-the-flag coverage from across the country.

But it’s not all dental dams and Zyn pouches (bless the Gen Zs). Student journalists have played an important role in the coverage, restoring some faith that the kids do in fact know what they’re doing: “A student-run radio station broadcast live as police cleared a building taken by protesters on the Columbia University campus, while other student journalists were confined to dorms and threatened with arrests,” reports The Associated Press. On Dartmouth’s campus, several student journalists were arrested during the course of their coverage.

And on other campuses, some police departments have shown not a hungriness to enter, but rather restraint: “Penn asked the Philadelphia Police Department [PPD] to immediately help disband the College Green encampment—and the PPD declined to do so until Penn proves that the situation is more dangerous,” reports Daily Penn‘s news editor, Ben Binday.

Meanwhile in actual Gaza: A ceasefire agreement is still elusive, as neither Gaza nor Israel have had sufficient demands satisfied. But news broke that another hostage held by Hamas was found dead, 49-year-old Dror Or, making him the 38th hostage killed.

Turkey has stopped trading with Israel in an attempt to exert pressure on Israel to stop its military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Colombia is now severing diplomatic relations, too. A United Nations report was just released saying it would take 80 years to rebuild the homes destroyed over the course of Israel’s offensive. With some 370,000 homes damaged and 79,000 destroyed, and a building pace of around 1,000 per year (based on previous rates of building in the area), the amount of time needed to get the area back to a reasonable condition is quite stunning.

Scenes from New York: Why have three-bedroom apartments all but disappeared in NYC?

• “Thousands of immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program could obtain federal health coverage later this year under a new Biden administration rule,” reports The New York Times.
• A second Boeing whistleblower was just found dead. He was formerly a “quality auditor at a key Boeing supplier who raised concerns about improperly drilled holes in the fuselage of 737 Max jets,” per NPR.
• Time for a finance-bro makeover? (PLEASE.)
• Competition among obesity drugs!
• “A study of a San Francisco nonprofit’s $100 million effort to reduce chronic homelessness by half in five years shows the effort fell significantly short of its goal. … The Tipping Point effort guided 595 chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing. It also moved an additional 373 people, already living in supportive housing but ready for more independence, into market-rate housing through a voucher program,” reports Philanthropy. 
• Read Nate Silver on “politics as self-interest” and “politics as personal identity” and how, actually, “politics as a battle of ideas” is a stunningly small category comparatively.
• Precisely:

One quality I wouldn’t personally want in a lawyer is *shaken and unable to focus after witnessing the state deploy force* https://t.co/wm14RzWteu

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) May 2, 2024

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