Vox Sentences: FDA to gay and bi men — you can give blood if you stop having sex

Note: There won't be Vox Sentences installments on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We'll be back Friday.

1. Blood inequality

(Shutterstock)

• The Food and Drug Administration is relaxing a decades-long ban on blood donations from gay and bi men.

  [Sarah Kliff and Julia Belluz]

• The current policy, meant to protect against HIV transmission, bars any man who's had sex with a man since 1977 from donating blood.

• But the FDA is still requiring men to abstain from sex with other men for at least a year before donating.

  [Gizmodo / Sarah Zhang]

• That effectively bars men in monogamous same-sex relationships from donating.

• We have good blood tests for HIV, which LGBT health advocates argue make any deferral or ban unnecessary.

  [GMHC]

• Tim Murphy on the deferral period: "It's discriminatory and it's supporting a longtime, ugly belief that gay men are in some sense contaminated."

  [NY Mag / Tim Murphy]

• Japan and the UK also have one-year deferrals; Canada has a five-year deferral; and France, Germany, and Denmark have lifetime bans for men who've had sex with men.

  [NBC News / Mike Darling]

• When Australia dropped its ban, donations grew substantially and HIV infections did not.

  [See et al, 2010]

• Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen: do what Italy does and bar people from donating blood based on their actual sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation

  [CBS News / Dennis Thompson]

2. Turbo-growth

The economy. Or something. Just go with it. (Shutterstock)

• The US economy grew at an annual rate of 5 percent from July through September this year.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• That's the best quarterly GDP growth figure in 11 years.

  [Bloomberg / Michelle Jamrisko]

• And the subsequent drop in oil prices can be expected to provide a further boost going forward.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• This will provide ammo to those on the Fed arguing it should increase interest rates to prevent inflation from getting too high.

  [Bloomberg View / Mohamed El-Erian]

• But inflation is still far below target, so tightening might be premature.

  [NYT / Paul Krugman]

• "The punchline seems awfully clear: solid, accelerating growth with no obvious price pressures."

  [Jared Bernstein]

• Even if we add 331,000 jobs every month — as we did in November — employment won't be back to pre-recession levels until mid-2016.

  [Hamilton Project]

3. Interview back on

(Columbia Pictures)

• The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX and a few other theaters will be showing The Interview on Christmas.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The move follows a petition campaign by the Drafthouse and other independent theaters, who viewed Sony's initial decision to pull the movie as caving to demands for censorship.

  [The Verge / Bryan Bishop]

• Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said the studio considered releasing the movie on-demand but couldn't find a vendor. But Sony owns its own video-on-demand provider, Crackle.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• A hacker collective known as Lizard Squad may have been involved in the cyberattack on Sony that prompted the initial decision to shelve the film.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• It's worth remembering that the publicly cited evidence for North Korean involvement in the hacks is circumstantial — but the US government may be keeping the most convincing evidence classified.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

4. Misc.

• Women from households earning under $7,500 a year are six times as likely to be victims of sexual assault as women from households earning $75,000 or more.

  [NYT / Callie Marie Rennison]

• If college skeptics are so convinced there's a higher ed bubble, why not bet that tuition rates are going to fall?

  [Washington Post / Dan Drezner]

• For decades, British undercover cops would use dead children's names and identities as covers.

  [London Review of Books / Andrew O'Hagan]

• Lauren Hillenbrand has been confined to her home with chronic fatigue syndrome for years. Here's how she researches and writes non-fiction anyway.

  [NYT Mag / Wil Hylton]

• Coca-Cola is opening a factory in Gaza.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

• Spending Hanukkah with Jews for Jesus.

  [The Atlantic / Emma Green]

5. Verbatim

• "Children higher in IQ learned the truth about Santa at a younger age."

  [New Republic / Alice Robb]

• "The young man told us that he began to dismember people at the age of 14."

  [Vice / Juan Camilo Maldonado]

• "The Oscar-winning director John Ford, known for his John Wayne Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers, made a movie for the US military called Sex Hygiene, which may be the most watched sex-ed movie ever."

  [Collectors Weekly / Lisa Hix]

• "The only problem with the square screen isn't that you can't see more content on it, it's that you can't fit a big enough line of coke on it before you start trading stocks."

  [The Verge / Dieter Bohn]

• "What happened in that phone booth? Here’s a theory: Canada happened in that phone booth."

  [Grantland / Brian Phillips]

• "Participating in an outrage mob gives us a chance to inflict pain on a stranger in a socially acceptable manner."

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Smith]

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