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]

Will you join us?

Our biggest supporters are our readers — and we’re so grateful to everyone who has made a contribution during our September campaign. We’re less than 1,000 contributions away from reaching our goal for the month, which in turn will allow us to say yes more often when our incredible journalists come to us with questions they want to answer and projects they want to pursue. Will you make a contribution before the month ends and support our policy coverage through 2024 and beyond?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via