Note: There won't be Vox Sentences installments on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We'll be back Friday.
1. Blood inequality
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The Food and Drug Administration is relaxing a decades-long ban on blood donations from gay and bi men.
[Sarah Kliff and Julia Belluz]
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The current policy, meant to protect against HIV transmission, bars any man who's had sex with a man since 1977 from donating blood.
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But the FDA is still requiring men to abstain from sex with other men for at least a year before donating.
[Gizmodo / Sarah Zhang]
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That effectively bars men in monogamous same-sex relationships from donating.
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We have good blood tests for HIV, which LGBT health advocates argue make any deferral or ban unnecessary.
[GMHC]
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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]
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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]
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When Australia dropped its ban, donations grew substantially and HIV infections did not.
[See et al, 2010]
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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)
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The US economy grew at an annual rate of 5 percent from July through September this year.
[Vox / Matt Yglesias]
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That's the best quarterly GDP growth figure in 11 years.
[Bloomberg / Michelle Jamrisko]
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And the subsequent drop in oil prices can be expected to provide a further boost going forward.
[Vox / Brad Plumer]
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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]
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But inflation is still far below target, so tightening might be premature.
[NYT / Paul Krugman]
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"The punchline seems awfully clear: solid, accelerating growth with no obvious price pressures."
[Jared Bernstein]
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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)
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The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX and a few other theaters will be showing The Interview on Christmas.
[Vox / Matt Yglesias]
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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]
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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]
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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]
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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.
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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]
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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]
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For decades, British undercover cops would use dead children's names and identities as covers.
[London Review of Books / Andrew O'Hagan]
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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]
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Coca-Cola is opening a factory in Gaza.
[Washington Post / Adam Taylor]
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Spending Hanukkah with Jews for Jesus.
[The Atlantic / Emma Green]
5. Verbatim
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"Children higher in IQ learned the truth about Santa at a younger age."
[New Republic / Alice Robb]
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"The young man told us that he began to dismember people at the age of 14."
[Vice / Juan Camilo Maldonado]
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"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]
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"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]
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"What happened in that phone booth? Here’s a theory: Canada happened in that phone booth."
[Grantland / Brian Phillips]
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"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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In This Stream
Vox Sentences
- Vox Sentences: On Iran, a resolute House
- Vox Sentences: FDA to gay and bi men — you can give blood if you stop having sex
- Vox Sentences: The great North Korean internet outage of 2014
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