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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, July 29th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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Here's a question a lot of people are trying to answer: Is the United States currently in a recession?
Emily Stewart: That is a very good question. And I think the answer is nobody quite knows the answer. The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which we have just seen.
That's Emily Stewart, who covers economics for "Vox." The latest GDP numbers out this week do show the economy shrinking. But many economists look at a bigger picture and don't think we can call it a recession yet. That includes Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
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Janet Yellen: Job creation is continuing, household finances remain strong, consumers are spending, and businesses are growing.
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And Stewart says all this talk about the factors we use to define a recession misses an important and squishy data point.
Stewart: To a certain extent, it doesn't really matter technically whether or not we are in recession, because it really matters how people feel.
And people do not feel good.
Stewart: The economy feels like something's really bad going on. It just feels icky.
Stewart argues that the current mix of inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the fallout from the pandemic are creating what she calls a "bad vibes economy."
Stewart: People are just channeling a lot of different feelings about everything into the economy. And you turn on the TV and you watch the news and what you see on the news sucks. And then you go to a restaurant and all of a sudden, the bill is way more than you thought. And so, it all kind of, I think, comes together.
Economists actually do measure whether people think everything's terrible. One indicator is the Consumer Confidence Index and it's dropped a lot lately. "Barron's" explains how people's worries about a recession can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. If anxiety turns into action and people cut back on spending, that could turn a kinda-sorta-maybe recession into the real thing.
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Monkeypox is now a declared emergency in San Francisco and New York State. Public health officials around the world are trying to understand how to stop it. "NPR" has exclusive new reporting on possible origins, which may go back half a decade to Nigeria. That's when a doctor observed an early outbreak and tried to raise red flags.
The story goes back to 2017, when Dr. Dimie Ogoina treated an 11-year-old boy with blisters. The doctor thought it was monkeypox and he was right. He knew that kids sometimes got it from playing outside with animals. But what happened next didn't follow the usual script. He started to see cases in older patients, a lot of men in their 20s and 30s. "NPR's" global health reporter Michaeleen Doucleff explains the new pattern this doctor was seeing.
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Michaeleen Doucleff: Ogoina started to investigate these patients more and found that many of them had high-risk sexual behaviors, multiple partners, sex with prostitutes.
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That was a pretty huge revelation. And it connects with the current outbreak, which is largely among men who have sex with men. We should be clear, monkeypox is not technically an STD. It can spread through various kinds of close contact, not just sex.
Doucleff says, this doctor tried to warn international health officials about what he was seeing. And they just didn't listen.
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Michaeleen Doucleff: He calls it a lost opportunity. You know, the scientific community didn't pay attention to his data and his warnings. And in general, the effort to stop the outbreak in Nigeria this whole time has paled in comparison to the effort to stop monkeypox in Europe and in North America. For example, when the disease hit the West this year, there has been this rapid effort to vaccinate people, but the same hasn't been true in West Africa.
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There are now tens of thousands of monkeypox cases around the world. This doctor argues that it might have been prevented if the world had paid attention to what was happening in Nigeria sooner.
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In the months leading up to the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo earlier this year, the gunman was on social media message boards planning his attack. The man who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 published hateful writing online. And this past Independence Day, the man accused of shooting into a crowd of people at a July 4th parade, there was a common theme in his online activity, he was obsessed with the idea of mass murder.
Ben Collins covers online extremism for "NBC News." And he says it's just not a coincidence that all these shooters were radicalized online. Ben says the internet is regularly mass-producing hate. And at its worst, it's mass-producing mass murderers. Young, White men are getting a dangerous message in these online spaces.
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Ben Collins: "White men are being persecuted, they're being replaced, that women are out to get them, that feminism has neutered White men." It is a combination of all of these horrific internet subcultures that have popped up over the last few years. When you combine them all into one thing, this is doomer-ism, this is nihilism. This is the idea that can't be fixed, and violence is the only answer. And the only way to get one over on them is to blow yourself up.
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Some of these spaces are obscure and hard to find. But people often stumble onto this content using the products of well-known companies like Facebook and Reddit. When someone clicks on one extremist post, the algorithm might start showing more inflammatory content.
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Ben Collins: And when that happens, you get regular people pushed from Facebook to Telegram, Telegram to 4chan. And that's how you have now 65-year-old-retirees hanging out on 4chan or 8chan and waiting for Q drops and then going to the Capital on January 6th.
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It's really hard to shut these spaces down. Ben says we need to start by at least recognizing just how big and how serious the problem is.
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Ben Collins: I don't know how to fix that without people realizing it's a problem. There are people politically who are like trying to take advantage of this or at least allude to the less violent versions of these people are online as part of their base. And that has to stop. And it's almost exclusively on the right. If we have that as part of our political subculture, we are in such deep trouble, I do not know how to get out of it.
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If you want to hear my full interview with Ben Collins, check out this weekend's episode of "In Conversation." You can find it by searching "Apple News In Conversation" in the News app, or in the Podcasts app.
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We're getting into a new phase of pandemic supply-chain weirdness. It's not about shortages anymore, remember the toilet paper scare of 2020? It's now actually the opposite. Stores stocked up on a bunch of stuff that they thought we'd want. But they were wrong. And now they can't sell it all.
There are so many examples of this. Air fryers, Peloton bikes, patio heaters… these were all things that, at some point in the pandemic, got super-hyped. Demand was up so stores stocked up on them. But now that the hype has died down, retailers are stuck with a bunch of air fryers that no one wants.
You probably understand that a store's worst nightmare is empty shelves. But a store's second worst nightmare is overstocked shelves and warehouses. If that stuff doesn't sell, companies miss out on profits. And on top of that, they're paying for space to store the unsold things. "NPR" spoke with Mark Mathews at the National Retail Federation.
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Mark Mathews: Inventory ordering is an imperfect science at best. If you think about it, you're ordering goods three, six, even nine months in advance. Retailers base their forecasting on historical behavior, but there is no template for what consumer behavior looks like coming out of a pandemic.
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"Inventory" is one of those boring words that it has serious impact. That GDP drop we talked about earlier on the show? A key reason for the slowdown is companies cutting back spending because they already had too much stuff in inventory.
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Walmart now says that it's marking down prices on some things to clear out the shelves. And when the biggest retailer makes a move like that, other stores often follow. Unsold inventory is bad for the industry. But it might lead to some pretty good deals for you.
You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, along with coverage of the deadly flooding in Kentucky. I'll talk with you again on Monday.
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