This is part of The Associated Press’ ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform.
CLAIM: COVID-19 vaccines make people produce a spike protein that is a toxin and can spread to other parts of the body and damage organs.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. COVID-19 vaccines instruct the body to produce spike proteins that teach the immune system to combat the spikes on the coronavirus, and experts say these proteins are not toxic.
I tried this with measured expectations. Admittedly because of preconceived assumptions, I figured it was another formulaic celebrity bio of the usual recipe. A surface skimming with one part intimacy, two parts fun and frolic, a few dashes of zaniness, and maybe some outrageousness thrown in. Just to keep us all watching.
Val is not this. It is not formulaic. It is much more. Its real.
Certainly, one reason I was caught off guard is because I haven’t followed the news of Val Kilmer. I had no idea, or just forgot, that he battled through a very tough throat cancer a few years ago. Whether you are aware of this, or not, if you know little else, or if you have not seen this film, I am here to recommend it.
I always found Val Kilmer an interesting actor, and a person. It sounds trite to use an ordinary word, but, to go much further in describing him, is to risk painting a portrait that could distract from his profile simply as a human being. And this is entirely the point.
Val is a human being that lived, and lives, a life in a way that isn’t particularly profound. At least as compared to world changing politicians, global humanitarians, or medical pioneers. He’s an actor. Actors (at least in costume) entertain us. We follow them. We have fun with them, turn them on, turn them off, and then move on to other things in our life.
Val has been fortunate. He was born with a matinee idol smile, grew up in privilege, and found a career he loved. He has also been slammed to the canvas with cancer. For this, as with anyone who has struggled against major health adversity and then comes out standing with their fist in the air, he deserves a look.
In full disclosure, I’m a pushover for deep thinking introspects. I know it can be a self defeating navel gaze, but in some cases, it is unavoidable, and truly the best way ahead if you haven’t come to terms with things that need resolution as you, and we age further. There really is no other way.
Here is a film that has this presentation. It is, of course, sad. It is also elevating and inspiring in an offbeat spiritual way. Which is part of who Val is anyway. It is also very touching. Disarmingly so. If you stay with it, and let yourself connect with the voice of his son who narrates most of Val’s words against the visuals of his family, and his loves, you might even bond a little as you listen and take it all in. Either way, it doesn’t take long to see what this film is about. It really is about Val. It is deeply personal. It is deeply honest. There really is no other way.>MB
Useful background and a reality check on the…”reality” of the situation.
The thing about actual history and scholarly text such as this one is they try and paint a picture of current events as accurately juxtaposed to past events. This is what gives perspective. And perspective is what makes true independent decision making happen.
The infernal noise of loudmouths, grandstanders, endless galleries of biased voices, along with all the other assorted hucksters, serves only to hijack our own common sense and deductive reasoning capabilities. There are people who can’t resist trying to “persuade” anyone who listens.
It’s not easy culling out basic data, information, and facts from all the noise around us. But that’s no excuse to embrace a POV just because they’re easily accessed online, and “sound” convincing. If that’s all we do, then we’re surrendering our own powers to others because we don’t want to do the work on our own. That is far worse for all of us. >MB
From 9/11 to COVID-19: A Brief History of FDA Emergency Use Authorization
Cross-posted from COVID-19 and The Law, where it originally appeared on January 14, 2021.
By Jonathan Iwry
The ongoing fight against COVID-19 has thrown a spotlight on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its power to grant emergency use authorizations (EUAs). EUA authority permits FDA to authorize formally unapproved products for temporary use as emergency countermeasures against threats to public health and safety.
Under § 564 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), use of FDA’s EUA authority requires a determination that an emergency exists by secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as a declaration by the HHS Secretary that emergency circumstances exist warranting the issuance of EUAs. Each issuance of an EUA requires that FDA conclude that:
it is reasonable to believe that a given product “may be effective” as an emergency countermeasure,
the known and potential benefits of authorization outweigh the known and potential risks, and
no formally approved alternatives are available at the time.
Annie Kapnick’s post on COVID-19 and FDA’s EUA authority provides a helpful overview of FDA’s emergency powers and their use in response to the pandemic. A brief look at the history of FDA’s emergency powers, including key events leading up to their enactment — Thalidomide, swine flu, AIDS, and 9/11 — offers perspective on the situation facing FDA today and its implications for the future. The history of EUA illustrates how its use today against COVID-19 involves fundamental questions about the role of public officials, scientific expertise, and administrative norms in times of crisis.
The pre-history of EUA
The first event to foreshadow the major themes surrounding FDA’s EUA power was the Thalidomide tragedy of the mid-20th century. In the 1950s, a new drug called Thalidomide was put into circulation in West Germany and other countries as a treatment for morning sickness. The next decade would reveal that the drug resulted in severe birth defects, with known cases numbering in the tens of thousands. The drug’s introduction to market is remembered as one of the worst public health disasters in recent times. It underscored the importance of strict standards of clinical review in approving new food and drug products, and remains a key reference point for FDA regulators, emphasizing the importance of the agency’s extensive and thorough formal approval process.
Fast forward to 1976, when reports of cases involving a new strain of influenza A (the same family of flu viruses that caused the flu pandemic of 1918) prompted fears of a possible “swine flu” pandemic. President Gerald Ford pushed for a first-ever national vaccination program — shortly before starting his reelection campaign. After millions had been vaccinated, the public was alarmed by reports that the vaccine might be causing Guillain-Barré syndrome. And ultimately, a pandemic never materialized.
In their post-mortem study, Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg described the swine flu episode as a policymaking disaster; yet they also expressed concern that the American public and policymakers would wrongly oversimplify the event in their memory as a case of government overreaction and overstepping, and that they would thus over-learn the dangers of responding too swiftly to fears of a pandemic. (Some would argue that this concern did not bear out, as nothing was learned at all.)
Next, the AIDS crisis gave rise to an early precursor to EUA authority. In the late 1980s, public health experts suggested that an investigational drug called DDI might prove useful for AIDS patients unable to tolerate other medications. Many objected that DDI lacked formal approval and was not guaranteed to be safe and effective; others countered that the risks of breaking protocol by issuing a drug lacking formal approval paled in comparison to the number of lives that could be saved. Impatient with FDA regulators’ conservative approach, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, proposed a new “parallel track” system to administer DDI to eligible patients while continuing to study the drug. Other measures for circumventing FDA’s formal approval process already existed at the time, but this proposal attracted the attention of President George H.W. Bush, whose support encouraged FDA to adopt the process and administer DDI to those in need.
The enactment and early years of EUA
Ultimately, it was the War on Terror that would give rise to emergency use authorization. After the events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent anthrax mail attacks, Congress enacted the Project Bioshield Act of 2004. The act called for billions of dollars in appropriations for purchasing vaccines in preparation for a bioterror attack, and for stockpiling of emergency countermeasures. To be able to act rapidly in an emergency, Congress allowed FDA to authorize formally unapproved products for emergency use against a threat to public health and safety (subject to a declaration of emergency by HHS). The record indicates that Congress was focused on the threat of bioterror specifically, not on preparing for a naturally-occurring pandemic.
FDA’s newfound EUA authority would be used relatively sparingly for the first 16 years following its enactment. During that time, its most extensive use was in combating the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009 by authorizing medical equipment and existing influenza drugs. Health policy experts would look back on the use of EUA against H1N1 as an overall success. It would also be used (pursuant to an amendment allowing for preemptive EUAs) to authorize occasional countermeasures in anticipation of MERS, Ebola, Zika, and other epidemics, none of which ultimately materialized in the United States.
EUAs against COVID-19
Then came COVID-19. In February 2020, HHS Secretary Alex Azar declared the pandemic a national health emergency warranting emergency use of in vitro diagnostics, followed by subsequent declarations in March warranting emergency use of other countermeasures. Since then, FDA has issued nearly 400 EUAs for personal protective equipment, medical equipment, in vitro diagnostic products, drug products, and, most notably, vaccines (compared to 22 EUAs issued in response to H1N1 in 2009). An EUA had never been granted for a brand-new vaccine before; the only vaccine ever to have received an EUA prior to the current pandemic was AVA, an anthrax vaccine that had already been formally approved for other purposes when it was granted an EUA in 2005. This, combined with the stakes of administering a vaccine to people who are otherwise healthy, led FDA to commit itself to heightened standards of review, or “EUA plus,” in evaluating a COVID-19 vaccine for emergency authorization. Two vaccines have been authorized thus far: one by Pfizer-BioNTech on December 11, 2020, and another by Moderna on December 18, 2020.
FDA’s exercise of discretion in issuing EUAs has not been without controversy, and the politicization of the pandemic by President Donald Trump has added a political dimension to FDA’s decision making as an administrative agency run by a presidential appointee. Many have criticized the White House for encroaching on FDA’s independence and failing to uphold basic standards of respect for scientific evidence and decision-making autonomy by technical experts. Trump notoriously pressured FDA officials into authorizing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, anti-malarial drugs that many believed might pose substantial risks for COVID-19 patients. The EUA came only days after Trump publicly endorsed the drugs; FDA revoked it months later. Public health experts were similarly concerned by FDA’s decision to authorize SARS-CoV-2 convalescent plasma on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Even FDA’s decision to grant its first vaccine authorization to Pfizer-BioNTech was somewhat controversial: White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows allegedly contacted FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn the day the vaccine would be authorized, demanding his resignation if it was not authorized by end of day.
Yet even when making decisions free of overt political interference, FDA has confronted difficult decisions in exercising its discretion to grant EUAs. In the spring of 2020, for instance, FDA decided to address widespread testing shortages by issuing “umbrella” EUAs for entire categories of diagnostic and antibody tests (as well as masks and other protective equipment) ex ante — allowing those tests to come to market before reviewing them on a case-by-case basis. In doing so, FDA essentially made a value judgment that the risk of allowing unreliable tests to come to market — and thus the risk of contributing to inaccurate data about the pandemic — was outweighed by the value of having more testing data at all.
Historical reflections
Looking back through the history of EUA, two key themes emerge. The first concerns the influence of the President on FDA decision making: sometimes in ways that seem motivated by the public interest, other times by political or personal interest. As the swine flu affair of 1976 demonstrates, President Trump is not the first president to have pressed for a speedy vaccination effort while running for reelection. As long as health regulators are answerable to political officials, there will always be some possibility of political influence. This reflects a deep and fundamental tension between respecting technical expertise and ensuring that technical experts are held accountable to elected officials (and, ultimately, to the public will).
Second, this history points up an inherent ethical dilemma between protecting individuals and benefiting the collective in times of crisis — between cautious restraint and urgent pragmatism. How should FDA weigh the costs to individuals posed by unapproved and potentially harmful products against the benefit to society in addressing a public health emergency quickly? What degree of risk are health regulators justified in imposing on individuals for the sake of a promising but uncertain solution to a pandemic? Even when a drug or vaccine might seem to carry a low risk of serious side effects, the decision to authorize that product takes a stance on this dilemma, rather than finding a way around it. There will always be some tension between those who are willing to depart from ordinary protocol to save lives quickly (as in the case of the AIDS crisis) and those whose primary goal is to avoid authorizing the next Thalidomide.
Beyond COVID-19
Lawmakers and policymakers place great value in precedent, whether written or historical. There is almost no precedent to guide FDA’s use of this relatively new power, let alone during the greatest public health crisis the agency has ever faced. On the contrary, the history of EUAs points up essential dilemmas that aren’t going away, and that will have to be grappled with in emergencies to come.
These questions are not unique to FDA. Much has been written generally about the role of agency norms and institutional dynamics in the administrative state. Others have discussed the myriad violations of norms of democratic governance by the Trump administration (arguably the defining legacy of the Trump years). These issues cannot be resolved by looking to the law; they will inevitably require hard judgments about how to balance deference to scientific expertise with public accountability, how to integrate empirical analysis and value judgments, and how to weigh our competing values in times of crisis.
FDA’s emergency powers underscore the impact these questions have on the public welfare — and demonstrate that the way we answer them can literally be a matter of life and death.
At some point in every relationship we all need a shoulder to cry on and an open ear to listen to us. While you may think venting to your friends is helpful, it can also be hurtful. Unless you’re going through a major issue in your relationship where you seek the counsel of a therapist, rarely can any good come from others sticking their noses into it. Here are the 10 reasons why it’s better to keep your mouth shut about your partner.
1. THE LAW OF ATTRACTION.
The law of attraction basically states that you receive the same kind of energy you put out into the universe. If you believe this, when you speak negatively about your partner and your relationship, you’ll be encouraging more of it. Whether you believe in this theory or not, when people constantly rant and rave about their partner, they’re usually in worse moods because they continue focusing on only the things that aren’t perfect.
2. YOUR FRIENDS WON’T EVER FORGET.
Friends are like elephants – they’ll remember that one incredibly hurtful insult your boyfriend hurled at you mid-fight that you shared with them pretty much forever. They’ll never forget when you told them about the one or two times he was incredibly selfish or acted like a total D. When you share too much information ,you’ll inevitably taint their perception of him. They may smile and nod when you talk about him after that fight, but might secretly be hoping for you to end the relationship and move on.
3. YOUR MAN WILL FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AROUND YOUR FRIENDS.
Your guy will know when you gossip about him to your friends. Not only will your friends’ opinions start becoming unfavorable when you share every disagreement, but your man won’t want to be around them. Guys are inherently more private than women and he probably won’t want to sit through happy hour feeling the glare from your pals that they know that one time for an hour last year you suggested taking a break or embarrassed that they know that he had trouble getting it up on your last weekend getaway.
4. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE BESIDES YOU TWO.
You can describe, vent and discuss your relationship until you’re blue in the face. You can get advice from your mom, your friends or even your mailman, but everyone’s advice will be colored by their own experiences and insecurities. No one really knows what it’s like to be inside of a relationship other than the two people who are actually in it. Instead of looking to outside sources, you should learn to trust your gut. It’s usually spot on. You just have to learn to pay attention to it.
5. DISCRETION IS A VIRTUE.
Regardless of how close you are with other people, sometimes your relationship is none of their damn business. Not everyone is as tight-lipped as we may like to believe, and there are some details both good and bad that should remain inside of the relationship.
6. ENDLESS DISCUSSION CAN CREATE MORE PROBLEMS.
Ever heard of self-fulfilling prophecies? For example, if you become obsessed with a single complex issue in your relationship that requires joint effort and commitment to address and resolve together, but you instead decide to treat your partner with mistrust and judgement, like they’ve done something wrong, they will feel that and may actually start looking for someone else outside of your relationship to make them feel good about themselves. Not an excuse, just a realistic example.
7. IT MAKES YOU SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF.
When you incessantly discuss your relationship, you’re bound to nitpick. That’s a slippery slope because you inevitably augment the little things in your relationship that if you hadn’t examined ad nauseam, you probably would have been happy letting go, therefore creating more problems.
8. THE ONLY PERSON YOU SHOULD BE TALKING TO IS HIM.
If you have real issues in your relationship, you have to talk to your partner. As much as we’d like to believe that our partners must also realize there’s an issue or a problem, they don’t. Sometimes simply making them aware of your gripes is the easiest way to fix it. If they’re aware, no one will be able to fix it besides the two of you (or possibly a licensed therapist). Other conversations are literally a waste of your energy.
9. YOU NEED TIME TO THINK.
If all you’re doing is yapping, you aren’t necessarily processing a situation. If you need to make a major decision like working on your relationship or splitting or even something like whether you two are ready to move-in together, you need to silence your mouth so you can listen to your inner voice to figure out your true feelings about how you should proceed.
10. THE ONLY OPINION YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IS YOURS.
You may make a choice that you’re happy with for the rest of your life, or the decision you make might be one that you regret in six months. Regardless, that means the decision was yours. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you based a major life decision on people who aren’t living your life. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we should grow from them. If you’re only listening to others you will never be able to mature into the person you’re meant to be.
When I was in my early twenties, I discovered The Atlantic magazine. Soon, I decided it was one of the best all around magazines available for general reading about news events, culture, art and a grab bag of other editorial focused articles.
Today, deciding if The Atlantic skews one way or the other for the sake of building a pro or con case to reading it, is as much a waste of time as assessing any other magazine or periodical. Where humans are involved, skews follow. What matters here, and everywhere else, is the quality of writers, research sources, and the presence and verification of facts, where applicable. The Atlantic deserves a read for intelligently thought out perspective, and novel coverage like the article that follows below… >MB
Full article pasted in for those who can not access the link. Courtesy of The Atlantic magazine.
The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable
Why targets of deliberate deception often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived
By Brooke Harrington AUGUST 1, 2021
Something very strange has been happening in Missouri: A hospital in the state, Ozarks Healthcare, had to create a “private setting” for patients afraid of being seen getting vaccinated against COVID-19. In a video produced by the hospital, the physician Priscilla Frase says, “Several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘Please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine.’” Although they want to protect themselves from the coronavirus and its variants, these patients are desperate to ensure that their vaccine-skeptical friends and family never find out what they have done.
Missouri is suffering one of the worst COVID-19 surges in the country. Some hospitals are rapidly running out of ICU beds. To Americans who rushed to get vaccinated at the earliest opportunity, some Missourians’ desire for secrecy is difficult to understand. It’s also difficult to square with the common narrative that vaccine refusal, at least in conservative areas of the country, is driven by a lack of respect or empathy from liberals along the coasts. “Proponents of the vaccine are unwilling or unable to understand the thinking of vaccine skeptics—or even admit that skeptics may be thinking at all,” lamented a recent article in the conservative National Review. Writers across the political spectrum have urged deference and sympathy toward holdouts’ concerns about vaccine side effects and the botched CDC messaging about masking and airborne transmission early in the pandemic. But these takes can’t explain why holdouts who receive respect, empathy, and information directly from reliable sources remain unmoved—or why some people are afraid to tell their loved ones about being vaccinated.
What is going on here? Sociology suggests that pundits and policy makers have been looking at vaccine refusal all wrong: It’s not an individual problem, but a social one. That’s why individual information outreach and individual incentives—such as Ohio’s Vax-a-Million program, intended to increase vaccine uptake with cash prizes and college scholarships—haven’t worked. Pandemics, by definition, are collective problems. They propagate and kill because people live in communities. As a result, addressing pandemics requires understanding interpersonal dynamics—not just what promotes trust among people, but which behaviors convey status or lead to ostracism.
Shifting from an individual to a relational perspective helps us understand why people are seeking vaccination in disguise. They want to save face within the very specific set of social ties that sociologists call “reference groups”—the neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and friendship networks that help people obtain the income, information, companionship, mutual aid, and other resources they need to live. The price of access to those resources is conformity to group norms. That’s why nobody strives for the good opinion of everyone; most people primarily seek the approval of people in their own reference groups.
In Missouri and other red states, vaccine refusal on partisan grounds has become a defining marker of community affiliation. Acceptance within some circles is contingent on refusal to cooperate with the Biden administration’s public-health campaign. Getting vaccinated is a betrayal of that group norm, and those who get the shot can legitimately fear losing their job or incurring the wrath of their families and other reference groups.
Sociology solves mysteries like these by zeroing in on problematic relationships, not the decisions that individuals make in isolation. Many of the people refusing safe, effective vaccination amid a deadly pandemic are enmeshed in a very distinctive type of relationship that sociologists have been studying for more than 70 years: the con job. Con artists gain social or financial advantage by convincing their marks to believe highly dubious claims—and to block out all information to the contrary.
COVID-19-related cons have become big business, not just for right-wing media outlets that have gained viewers while purveying vaccine disinformation but also for small-time social-media grifters and enterprising professionals. The New York Times recently profiled Joseph Mercola, a Florida osteopath whom the paper described as “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation.” Four years ago, the Federal Trade Commission forced Mercola to pay nearly $3 million in settlements for false advertising claims about indoor tanning beds that he had sold. In February of this year, Mercola told his millions of followers on Facebook that the vaccine would “alter your genetic coding,” and promoted his line of vitamin supplements as an alternative to ward off COVID-19.
To outsiders, the social dynamics of the con appear peculiar and irrational. Those caught up in it can seem self-destructive and, frankly, clueless. But to sociologists, including me, who study fraud, such behaviors obey a predictable logic.
The seminal text in the field—Erving Goffman’s 1952 essay “On Cooling the Mark Out”—observes that all targets of con artists eventually come to understand that they have been defrauded, yet they almost never complain or report the crime to authorities. Why? Because, Goffman argues, admitting that one has been conned is so deeply shameful that marks experience it as a kind of social death. The victim, he writes,
has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miserably lacking in them. This is a process of self-destruction of the self.
Goffman notes that other life events, such as being fired or dumped, can evoke similar feelings of humiliation. But people targeted by con jobs can save their pride by denying the con as long as possible—or claiming they were in on it the whole time. This saves face and cheats social death, but allows the con to continue unchecked, entrapping others. In doing so, marks prioritize their self-image over the common good.
This behavior—which Goffman doesn’t shrink from calling a “moral failure”—is embodied in figures such as the Louisiana man who attained national fame recently with a defiant rant from his ICU bed, refusing to get vaccinated even after a life-threatening bout with COVID-19. After being hospitalized with the disease, or losing loved ones to it, some former vaccine refusers own up to their misjudgment. But not all do.
Framing vaccine refusal in terms of sociological theory isn’t just an intellectual exercise. On the contrary, it can help public-health experts and government officials figure out how to react when marks collide with the reality that COVID-19 is serious, the vaccines work, and not getting vaccinated is dangerous. Goffman points out that con artists employ specialists to “cool” marks down when the deception is finally revealed. A cooler, he writes, “has the job of handling persons caught out on a limb—persons whose expectations and self-conceptions have been built up and then shattered.” Coolers prevent blowback from angry marks—encouraging them to blame themselves, not the con artist. They help marks rebuild their social identity, retain their self-respect, and preserve their affiliations with their reference groups.
In this light, the recent volte-face of many prominent conservatives toward enthusiastic endorsement of vaccination is great news for everyone who wants to see an end to the pandemic. Representative Steve Scalise, a high-ranking House Republican from Louisiana, recently got vaccinated on camera. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a press secretary in the Trump White House now running for governor of Arkansas, published an op-ed disclosing that she and her family had gotten vaccinated. On Tuesday, Senator Roy Blunt used the Republican leadership’s weekly press conference to urge his constituents in Missouri to get vaccinated—presumably without resorting to disguises.
Some commentators have mocked these efforts—particularly those of Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kay Ivey of Alabama. DeSantis recently declared, “Vaccines are saving lives.” “It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” Ivey recently said, adding, “These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain.” Both had previously taken vocal stands against certain pandemic-mitigation measures; in May, for example, each signed legislation banning organizations in their states from requiring proof of vaccination for employees and customers.
But those who see only hypocrisy and bad faith in these moves misunderstand the social dynamics of the con. Cooling out the marks—which is what all these right-wing efforts to push vaccination represent—works only when the marks perceive the coolers as members in good standing of the same reference groups. Having expressed doubts about COVID-19 vaccination or other pandemic mitigation likely makes Ivey and DeSantis more effective in persuading other conservatives: Their previous positions signify authenticity and in-group loyalty, making them more trustworthy, not less. High-status leaders such as Scalise, Ivey, Blunt, and DeSantis can expand the range of acceptable behavior for other group members through the example of their own actions.
This is reason for optimism: The conservative coolers are finally on the case, and only they have a chance of transforming partisan vaccine refusers into vaccine adopters. Whether these efforts will improve vaccination rates in red states remains to be seen, but it should come as a relief to those weary of being nice to vaccine holdouts. Blue-staters’ approval probably never mattered in the first place.
Brooke Harrington is a sociology professor at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Pop Finance and Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent. Her site is brookeharrington.com.
