Vox Sentences: Meet America's new Ebola czar

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1. We've got an Ebola czar

Newly appointed Ebola czar Ron Klain with Kevin Spacey, who portrayed him in the HBO film "Recount." (Michael Loccisano/FilmMagic)

• Ron Klain, who was chief-of-staff to the vice president for both Joe Biden and Al Gore, is America's new Ebola czar, reporting to National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco.

• Ezra Klein argues it's an excellent choice that "shows a healthy respect for how hard the bureaucratic job of coordinating the Ebola response really is."

• Diseases that have killed more Americans this year than Ebola and for which the Executive Branch lacks equivalent czars: heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's, diabetes …

• Point being — Klain will probably do a good job, but there are way more serious threats to Americans' lives, such as auto accidents, that could probably use more attention.

• Actual czars weren't good at controlling disease outbreaks.

• Senegal is now Ebola-free, and Nigeria is close.

• "A Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital employee who handled the fluids of a now-deceased Ebola patient is currently on a cruise boat under federal monitoring."

• There's strong evidence that a travel ban against West Africa won't help stop the spread of Ebola.

• Americans are surprisingly knowledgable about how Ebola works.

2. Frozen benefits

A technician opens a vessel containing women's frozen egg cells on April 6, 2011 in Amsterdam. (Lex van Lieshout/AFP/Getty Images)

• The latest benefit for workers at Apple and Facebook: egg-freezing.

• Nitasha Tiku argues this is "a lavish amenity designed to keep workers in the office and fixated on the job."

• Shane Ferro dissents: "in reality this is a move that removes a major financial barrier to women being able to control their reproductive timelines, at a time in their careers when even the most well-off might not have an extra $20,000 laying around."

• Are Apple and Facebook's moves a step toward making egg-freezing broadly accepted as more than a luxury for the uber-rich, per Megan Garber? Or will it take government action to make the jump, per Amanda Hess?

• Emma Rosenblum points out that career concerns aren't the only, or even the main, reason women freeze their eggs.

• Sarah Elizabeth Richards notes that the failure rate for pregnancy attempts from frozen eggs is quite high: "Fertility doctors have worried that women would put their faith in an unproven technology, postpone having babies until their natural fertility was gone and end up devastated if the eggs didn’t work."

• And the procedure is still relatively rare; only about 2,000 births have occurred through frozen eggs.

3. Two weeks until voting time

The latest Senate forecasts from six leading forecasters. For more information, see here.

• The midterm election that people are losing interest in is drawing closer! Here are the nine Senate races to keep an eye on.

• Here's what the election models say: it sure looks like Republicans are going to take the Senate.

• Even if polls move toward Democrats in the late going, John Sides cautions that just means polls are starting to reflect the fundamentals, such as presidential approval and the state of the economy, which favor Republicans.

• Lawyers are giving less this election cycle, hurting Democrats.

• ISIS victim James Foley is being used in Republican attack ads, and his family wants it to stop.

• This ad out of Nebraska (screenshot above) is not exactly subtle in its racial dogwhistling.

• We don't have a lot of evidence that political ads work at all, even if they're not as gross as the above examples.

• Union voters are backing the Republican candidate for governor in Rhode Island — with good reason.

4. Misc.

• Nigeria reached a deal with Boko Haram for the release of girls kidnapped in April; for more background, see here.

• Obama is under pressure to send ground troops to fight ISIS as air strikes fail to end the group's assault on the Syrian city of Kobane.

• US government programs kept 38.7 million people out of poverty last year.

• It sure looks like it's official UK government policy to let people crossing the Mediterranean to the EU drown, out of fear that rescuing them would encourage more migration.

• Would Kobe Bryant make a good union president?

• Despite lots of attempts, science still can't prove that there's no such thing as free will.

• The Fed works by changing how people think about the economy — and it can do that without the public understanding how the Fed works at all.

• The political science of brawls in legislative chambers.

• Russia appears to be in the middle of a punishing crackdown on McDonald's.

• Almost 90,000 people shared a meme stating that this is the first year in 666 years that Halloween falls on Friday the 13th, which is wrong in at least three different ways.

5. Verbatim

• "It will be made illegal to sell products that make alcohol appear pleasant."

• "The good people of Alaska want to talk about the issues, not some esoteric inside-the-Beltway process story about whether their representative in Congress murdered somebody."

• "Charlier found a tumor measuring nearly 1 square inch in [Rene] Descartes' right sinus."

• "At Buddy’s, a used 32-gigabyte, early model iPad costs $1,439.28, paid over 72 weeks."

• "Taxes should be significantly higher than typical estimates and most transfers should flow across national borders."

• "Knowing what I know, I would try anything and everything to refuse to go there to be treated."

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