I Fail To Explain Gamestop and Philly's Vaccine Rollout Has Hit a Hiccup
A lot happening in this issue.
Featuring Barstool (regrettably), Kronk, and Web Therapy.
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Special Note Part II (Whoops!)
Two weeks ago, I sent out an issue of the Good Links with a link to an organization called Philly Fighting COVID’s vaccine sign up page. At the time, it was the only Philadelphia County vaccine sign up page. Since then, the organization Philly Fighting COVID has seen one of the more comically disastrous business downfalls in recent history. I would like to apologize for peddling their sign up page, but in my defense it was supposed to have been vetted by the City of Philadelphia and, as I said, “It just feels like the ethical thing to do to send this out to the small but mighty listserv I have access to!”
The City of Philadelphia has abruptly severed ties with Philly Fighting COVID. It turns out it was being run by a 22-year-old (read: child) with no medical experience who’s been mismanaging his company. Please skip down to “This Week’s Theme” for the full scope of ridiculousness.
P.S. Here’s the City of Philadelphia’s official vaccine sign up page.
Talkin’ About Some Generation (Millennial Authors, Starting Off Light)
I liked this profile of debut novelist Lauren Oyler, whose cultural criticism has famously skewered a number of popular pieces of culture: the movie Lady Bird, Irish author Sally Rooney’s wildly popular novels, and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. It’s a great peek into one of the millennial generation’s (potentially, we have some time) best critics:
Last year, her pan of Jia Tolentino’s widely beloved essay collection Trick Mirror got so much traffic that it crashed The London Review of Books’ website. “She doesn’t abide by these rules of who in any particular moment is deemed untouchable. She just doesn’t care,” says writer Jessa Crispin, who edited Oyler at Bookslut.
And why not? She says it hasn’t cost her any friends — or assignments. “I’m not afraid of being disliked by people that I already dislike,” she shrugs. “People being mad at me is not the same as people not hiring me to do more writing.”
P.S. All those reviews are linked in the profile, and I highly recommend them as well.
An Item Whose Seriousness I Can’t Gauge (It’s GameStop, Baby!)
I’ve watched four full seasons of Billions and one episode of that awful HBO show Industry and I still have no goddamn clue how the stock market works. From what I can gather, GameStop (beloved arbiter of video games and Pokemon cards) was about to go bankrupt (?) and then two weeks ago some trolls on a subreddit for day traders (people who are poor who do stocks, too???) said “let’s buy up all the GameStop stock to mess up the thing that hedge funds do when companies go bankrupt!” Because apparently hedge funds DO something when companies are about to go bankrupt? The TL;DR (I guess) is that a bunch of normies on Reddit bankrupted (broke? sent under? ruined the life of?) a hedge fund by buying up GameStop stock and now the entire financial world is in freefall (or something). As of this newsletter writing, the millennial stock-trading app Robin Hood has taken GameStop stock (and AMC stock, anticipating a similar issue) off their app and the Redditors are very mad about that. In response, AOC and Ted Cruz have teamed up (!!!) to condemn Robin Hood and request an investigation into what they’re doing! Or it LOOKED like they were teaming up and then AOC tweeted telling Ted Cruz to, essentially, “resign, b*tch.”
Here is an actual explainer from Vox. And I hate to admit this, but it seems like the thing that kicked this into high gear (sent more people buying GameStop stock) was when Elon Musk tweeted “GAMESTONK!!” with a link to the r/WallStreetBets subreddit.
It’s also basically the only thing that anyone has been tweeting about for the past 48 hours! In case you’re not on that website!
The only thing I remember about GameStop.
P.S. For all I know, this is how the stock market works.
P.P.S. Or this is.
P.P.P.S. I am so sorry, but Elon Musk is gonna get mentioned again in this newsletter. Might start writing it as El*n M*sk.
This Week’s Theme: The Rapid Implosion of 9-Month Old Start Up Philly Fighting COVID
Starting from the beginning, Philly Fighting COVID began as a start up back in March-ish 2020 that used a 3-D printer to help with a PPE shortage. It was founded by a 22-year-old Drexel University graduate student named Andrei Doroshin. After the PPE shortage became less of a crisis, the organization moved into being a hub for COVID testing. They administered a number of COVID tests over the past several months, and then submitted a proposal to be one of the City of Philadelphia’s major vaccine distributors. They were the first partner selected, and the first distributor to get their website up and running, making them the epicenter of media attention. Doroshin managed to really stir the pot when he completely abandoned any commitments Philly Fighting COVID had for implementing COVID-19 Testing, leaving community organizations in the lurch on MLK weekend. It seems that this, in combination with the organization’s meteoric rise, led to further media scrutiny that revealed Doroshin and his organization to be less fit for the job than they seemed. The City of Philadelphia’s official line for abruptly severing ties with Philly Fighting COVID is that the organization did not reveal that they had established a for-profit arm or that they had the capability to sell users’ data. But it seems like there’s way more to it than that. More information is still coming out about the situation, and I suspect more info will come out specifically about the city’s involvement. In the meantime, here are the highlights from the news coverage that we do have, where I specifically highlight all the instances in which the 22-year-old CEO of the company made a fool of himself.
This Philly Mag article does most of the work explaining what the heck went on with Philly Fighting COVID, including debunking parts of Doroshin’s embezzled resume (if you want a full debunk, there’s an unsubstantiated Reddit thread I can DM you) claiming that he “began a career as a director of photography” and then left said career to start a non-profit focused on air pollution. Aside from the fact that that line would be considered unfuckinghinged on a person of any age’s resume, what I find so funny about this is that he’s literally 22. He also supposedly went to college (which, btw, I think Drexel has shifted into being Philly’s most-hated university)! In what world does a 22-year-old have the functional time to do any of that? For fuck’s sake, the only thing you should automatically believe on a 22-year-old’s resume is that they’re allowed into bars. Other highlights include:
Andrei Doroshin’s father, Serge Doroshin, owns the film company Andrei claimed to have worked for. Love those rich daddy vibes.
Andrei Doroshin’s quote to the Today Show that his company “took the entire model and threw it out the window” when it came to running a vaccine clinic.
The “Head of Systems” of Philly Fighting COVID (and obvious friend of Doroshin’s) claiming that he “played important roles at Johnson & Johnson” when he graduated from college last year and appears to have just done a co-op there.
But the fun ramps up in this WHYY article, which Philly Mag briefly references, but doesn’t quite cover. It turns out Doroshin stole vaccine from his own clinic. He packed it up in a bag, took it home, and then posted on SnapChat about it. Has anything ever been so distinctly, so deliciously 22-year-old-rich-kid-stupid? Some other notes:
Apparently pre-med students and nursing students, as well as unqualified staffers were injecting the vaccine without direct supervision, a violation of PA law.
Originally Doroshin said that the claims that he stole vaccines were “baseless” and this article has since been updated to him fully admitting he stole them. Amazing.
Overall, this story sucks. Doroshin set up a system that both didn’t work right (people with appointments were turned away) and de-prioritized the people who most need to be vaccinated — according to this article, people specifically in their 80s and 90s were turned away from the clinic, even though clearly there was enough extra vaccine for Doroshin to steal. Meanwhile, the Philly Fighting COVID instagram for the past few weeks has been filled with what looks to be healthy young people getting vaccinated, for no rhyme or reason. Just lucky enough to be picked off the unorganized PFC list. Plus, now the city has twice the work to do ensuring the people who PFC was taking care of get their second vaccine doses. Anecdotal reports seem to suggest that’s going fine, but I haven’t seen any articles about it.
And finally the piece de resistance, in my humble opinion, is this newer WHYY article, which attempts to answer the question of why a 22-year-old with a company was given so much public trust. It tells a whole story you should read, but for me? The highlights are:
“This is a wholly Elon Musk, shooting-for-the-heavens type of thing,” Doroshin said. “We’re gonna have a preemptive strike on vaccines and basically beat everybody in Philadelphia to it.”
And then also (I don’t really understand the ethics behind this insurance plan of his, but it’s about the salacious way he presented it):
“This is the juicy slide,” said Doroshin, clicking through to a screen on the financing plan. “How are we gonna get paid?” He walked the staff through the plan to get the vaccines for free from the federal government and bill insurance companies $24 a dose. “I just told you how many vaccines we want to do — you can do the math in your head,” he said.
And it turns out he’s the clinic boss from hell:
Interviews with dozens of people who worked for and with Philly Fighting COVID within the last nine months paint a story of a precocious organization run by a hot-headed Drexel graduate student with little oversight. Former PFC staffers said Doroshin fostered a toxic work environment replete with public outbursts, impulsive firings, and a cliquish culture of gossip and impropriety on testing sites, where he often encouraged staff to skirt best health practices in the name of efficiency.
And the actual details of mess re: vaccine distribution:
That first trial run at the Convention Center was meant to inoculate home health workers, with an eye to making a dent in the city’s starkly disparate vaccine rates for Black Philadelphians. But PFC lost all of its racial and ethnic data for the patients, according to a Jan. 14 letter from Farley to Council President Darrell Clarke’s office that was obtained by WHYY.
A glitch in the Amazon cloud, Farley said in the letter, meant there was no racial or ethnic breakdown of who Philly Fighting COVID had vaccinated that weekend.
Flamholz, the former PFC nurse, said she was often one of the only people with any clinical experience at the start-up’s Fishtown testing site, while designated supervisors were absent, distracted or, at times, asleep.
And one more “oh my god can you BE more 22?” item:
She and numerous others also reported chasing after their paychecks, and hounding PFC execs for billable hours. Doroshin, meanwhile, appeared to use his personal Venmo account to make official PFC payments, interspersed with crude sex jokes. The organization submitted illegitimate invoices for its city-funded testing, Philadelphia Magazine reported.
I’ve lifted the most ridiculous parts of these articles to highlight, but again: this story sucks. I wish a city with one of the robust medical communities in the country (see: Penn, Jefferson) had a much better initial vaccine rollout AND that it didn’t have to include learning exactly how stupid it would be to entrust part of it to a 22-year-old white guy with a rich dad and an aspiration to be like Elon Musk.
The current “ending” to this story is that Philly City Council, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and the Pennsylvania Attorney General are all looking into Philly Fighting COVID’s practices. In the meantime, you can sign up for the vaccine on the city’s website at the top of this newsletter!
That was a whirlwind. Here’s some sheep to relax you.
P.S. This is my favorite meme about this (so far).
Politics (Staying Philly For This One)
Maybe you don’t know his name, but you’ve at least seen his face or heard of his ominously ubiquitous company Barstool Sports. Dave Portnoy is the most annoying (and annoyingly popular) guy in media (and sports and sport betting and pizza tasting). I’m sure the list goes on, but I don’t really care to learn all the items. I bring him up not because I want to, exactly, but because he quasi-moved to Philadelphia last year in order to launch Barstool Sports partnership with sports gambling company Penn National, which required him to be in the Penn National-headquartered state of Pennsylvania. As such, Dave Portnoy has infected my Philly-based media diet. He quickly claimed Philadelphia was the perfect place for this partnership, and then tried all the pizza in the area for his truly inane YouTube show “One Bite Pizza Reviews” where he takes one bite of a pizza and manages to suck 7 minutes of life away from you. He’s been bopping around town for so long that Philly Mag finally did a profile on him, asking the big question: why does Dave Portnoy think Philly is the “perfect place” to launch his gambling venture? Because the thing is: Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports are huge promoters of racism and misogyny. They like rape jokes and endorse violent language against women. In 2015, Dave Portnoy said that “protesters against police brutality who blocked a Boston highway…should be killed.” Another gem from Portnoy involved saying that football player and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick looks like “an ISIS guy.” He visited T**** in the White House, all smiles and shit. He’s a bad guy. So it’s not so flattering for him to declare Philly the “perfect place” for him and his company. The article does a great job of juxtaposing Portnoy’s toxic persona and legacy with the City of Philadelphia’s own sketchy history and its newer, more progressive reputation. Leaving everyone with the right advice:
So memo to everyone hailing Portnoy as a hero on the streets of Old City: Remember what you’re also supporting when you log on to Barstool for guy-takes-Wiffle-Ball-to-the-nuts videos or to lay a few bucks on the Birds. And lest you kid yourself about whether Portnoy, chastened by justified criticism or raised stakes in a new arena, can evolve, remember when people thought Trump could become presidential once he was actually the president.
P.S. Dave Portnoy has also randomly decided to come out in full force in support of the Redditors trying to tank GameStop (if you remember this from earlier in the newsletter), joining the ranks of AOC and Ted Cruz (who Retweeted Barstool).
A Celebrity Thinger (Team Kronk)
I don’t really remember liking the movie “The Emperor’s New Groove” that much, but this Vulture oral history of the movie is one of the most fun oral histories I’ve ever read. Just an absolute roller coaster of a tale about a serious Disney movie called “Kingdom of the Sun” getting totally scrapped in order to make a bizarre buddy comedy that turned into the beloved “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
Disney movies are usually worked on for, like, four years. Reportedly, this one had to come together in one year:
Randy Fullmer (producer): We had a year, literally, to put that whole thing together. There’s a deadline because we got a McDonald’s Happy Meal that has to come on a certain date, and there are big fines to pay if you don’t do that.
So, there are details about that whole process, but also details about the great Earth Kitt (who voiced the incomparable villainess Yzma) and Patrick Warburton’s (voice of KRONK!) careers doing movies together in South Africa in the ‘80s:
[Patrick] Warburton: Eartha and I had actually worked together before that. We did some horrible movies in South Africa back in 1985 [Dragonard and Master of Dragonard Hill]. Oliver Reed was the villain. Eartha Kitt ran the bordello. I’m the one white slave. Now, I was 22 years old. I rowed crew in college, so I was still in pretty damn good shape. And it’s one of these exploitation-type films. So once they got me up on the blocks, of course, the women have their husbands there, and they’re twirling their parasols, like, “Darling, I want that one.” To reiterate, these are the worst movies ever made. My wish is that nobody would ever see them ever again — because as bad as these movies are, I truly was the worst thing in them. Oliver Reed, who sometimes would start with a little bit of whiskey at 10 in the morning, is really the only watchable thing in them. He was relegated to doing crappy movies like ours because they couldn’t insure a major production with him at the time. Finally, he garnered some trust and they hired him on Gladiator… and he died, making Gladiator, drunk in a bar on the island of Malta. I think he was arm wrestling a rugby team [On the night of his death, Oliver Reed was indeed goaded into a drinking match against a group of not rugby players, but Royal Navy sailors. (For what it’s worth, he won the arm-wrestling match.).] I might have one of these details wrong. It cost them millions of dollars in post.
And did you know that Sting did the music for this movie? So there’s a lot of Sting talk. Plus this absolutely hysterical roast of stand-up comics, featuring Emperor voice actor David Spade.
Hahn: This is a terrible thing to tell you and you don’t necessarily need to print this, but David Spade would always do better if we had lights there and a camera crew — even if it wasn’t a real camera crew. The recording stage is kind of dark and dim. It’s like a music recording stage. He’s there with the microphone. He just didn’t have any energy. Then we would turn on some shooting lights and have a video camera, so he had somebody to perform to. I think when you’re a stand-up comic and you’re looking for a reaction, you benefit from having those lights and knowing you’re on. Eddie Murphy was the same way.
I pulled out a lot here, but the whole thing is long and great. There was also a documentary made by Sting’s wife about the making that never got released because Disney never wants it to see the light of day? I mean, really, just click click click on that link!
Okay, emperor of healthy boundaries!
Would You Rather?
Would you rather shut up about Tom Brady forever or get paid a million bucks to post on Snapchat?
A Recommendation (Ahead Of Its Time!)
This week I’m recommending Showtime series Web Therapy (streaming on Amazon Prime with some truly deranged IMDb TV ads), which aired from 2011-2015. It stars Lisa Kudrow as a woman with a failed financial career who invents a new therapy “modality” where she offers people talk therapy through video chat for three minutes. But the true conceit of the show is that every character is without a single moral. Lisa Kudrow’s character is married miserably to a lawyer player by Victor Garber, who is Kinsey 6 gay, but they’re never gonna get divorced because of the money and optics. They play the kinds of Republicans whose existence feels, in my opinion, to fully foreshadow the past four years of disaster. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it? That’s just how it feels to me.
Every episode is absolutely hysterical (in my opinion), and the guest star list is absolutely stacked: Meryl Streep, Alan Cumming, Lily Tomlin, Selma Blair, Megan Mullally, Steve Carell weirdly looking his hottest, Conan O’Brien. But more than that, it has aged beautifully, cuing right into the hell we live in now where everyone does in fact have to go therapy over the internet. Not to mention Lisa Kudrow is one of the great comic actresses our time.
It turns out this show hasn’t been gifed enough because it’s too old, but this is still a fun one.
P.S. Sticking with the Philly theme this week, Lisa Kudrow’s character is supposed to live in Philadelphia and it’s the most accurate portrayal of Wharton grads I’ve ever seen in my damn life.
Donation Corner! (For You to Ignore or Engage With As You Please!)
Here are your donation opportunities for the month:
Puentes De Salud - a 501(c)(3) organization that promotes the health and wellness of Philadelphia’s rapidly growing Latinx immigrant population through high-quality health care, innovative educational programs, and community building.
Racial Justice Philly - a fledgling organization fighting for racial justice, which I am specifically suggesting this week because they’re doing fundraising for another “groceries for philly” event, which brings groceries to Philly communities in food deserts.
A GoFundMe for a mom who needs housing in order to be reunited with her children. Sourced from the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund. About $3,500 left to her $10,000 goal.
P.S. If you have an organization/mutual aid fund/individual in mind that you think would be good to highlight, feel free to email me directly with information about it!
P.P.S. Why three places each week?
The first donation opportunity will always be a a 501(c)3 organization that I have done some due diligence around to try and ensure they’re a real non-profit organization that 1) does good work and 2) is tax-deductible!
The second donation opportunity will be a mutual aid fund (s/o to the politics good link!), which FYI is probably not tax-deductible.
And the final donation opportunity will be an individual in need of funds who has a GoFundMe or a cashapp (or however the kids are accepting funds these days) where you can donate. Also likely not tax-deductible. Note: I’m going to do my best to share GoFundMes that have not yet reached their goals!
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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