The Buzz 01.24.18

WHO’S IN TOWN?

Cover that cough! It’s cold and flu season, which means bad bugs are circulating and people are at a higher risk for developing infections. It’s also time for the Midwinter Conference of Immunologists, who are in town this week to share their latest research into what makes the immune system work – and what causes it to struggle or even fail. The keynote speaker is Kristen Hogquist of the University of Minnesota, a renowned virologist at the school’s Institute for Molecular Virology whose lab specializes in how T-cells are developed in the thymus – the “t” in “T-cell” – a lymphoid organ located just below the breast bone.

Sat-Tue Jan. 26-29. Asilomar Conference Grounds, 800 Asilomar Ave., Pacific Grove. $200/students; $375/others. midwconfimmunol.org.

FREE SPEECH

On Jan. 18, a four-minute video of Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips and Covington Catholic High School students went viral. It shows Phillips and junior Nick Sandmann just inches apart, face-to-face at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. While Phillips chants a song and beats on a drum, Sandmann, wearing a red MAGA hat, smirks silently; in the background, classmates mock Phillips’ chanting. In the days since, a nearly two-hour video surfaced, showing a still-incomplete but fuller picture – for example, a simultaneous protest by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites who had derisive remarks for all. The longer video doesn’t cut the tension, but it does force viewers to shed simplistic left vs. right framing. As contributing editor Ian Bogost puts it in The Atlantic: “Video can capture narratives that people take as truths, offering evidence that feels incontrovertible. But the fact that those visceral certainties can so easily be called into question offers a good reason to trust video less, rather than more.”

GOOD WEEK / BAD WEEK

GOOD:

The final numbers are in, and as the “OMG!” goal line puts it: OMG! In 2018, Monterey County Gives! raised $5.45 million (exceeding both the goal of $4 million, and the “OMG! goal” of $4.5 million) for 169 nonprofits working in Monterey County, active in areas from vaccinations to theater education to alleviating hunger. MCGives!, a partnership of the Monterey County Weekly, Community Foundation for Monterey Countyand Monterey Peninsula Foundation, leveraged $1.5 million in match money against the gifts of 4,710 individual donors, setting a new record in 2018. “These numbers reflect a remarkable philanthropic spirit, and recognition that the work these groups do is vital to our community and affects all of us,” says Community Foundation President/CEO Dan Baldwin. “This level of participation in MCGives! is a tremendous compliment to Monterey County.”

BAD:

Things are looking grim for monarch butterflies. The Xerces Society, which keeps track of how many of the butterflies migrate to the Western states each year, announced Jan. 17 the number in California dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. The 2018 Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count found only 28,429 butterflies in the state, an 85-percent fall from 2017 and a 99-percent decline from the 1980s. “To picture what this means for monarchs, imagine the population of Los Angeles had shrunk to that of the town of Monterey,” monarch conservation expert Emma Pelton said in a press release. Some researchers have guessed 30,000 is the “quasi-extinction threshold.” But Xerces Society is not giving up: It issued a “Call to Action,” encouraging the protection of overwintering sites, restoring of breeding and migratory habitat, protecting monarchs from pesticides and more research.