, a series of stories checking in on how things are going now for the people and products that were riding high during the last administration.
The Trump years were flush times for Yaniv Graif: In the lead-up to the 2016 election, the now 37-year-old, who lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, started manufacturing what he believed to be the world’s first and still, according to him, bestselling toilet paper printed with Donald Trump’s face on it. The product had a good run for the next four years, but it being 2021, Graif agreed to speak to Slate to address the obvious: Now that the Trump administration is over, are sales in the crapper? According to him, no, but he’s always innovating and on that note, he asked me to mention the Trump toilet paper NFT he recently created. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The most-read stories of 2020, month by month
After hearing from New Hampshire Fish and Game that there was a lack of activity being recorded on a tracking collar worn by Mink the bear beginning about a week ago, Hanover Deputy Fire Chief Michael Hinsley found the bear’s remains on a gravel bar in the Mascoma River near Old Pine Tree Cemetery Road in Lebanon, N.H., Tuesday, August 25, 2020. After the remains were taken to the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme to be examined, Hinsley returned with a metal detector to search for possible bullet fragments and found none. (Valley News - James M. Patterson) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com
News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)
“As fewer users read, watch, and listen to us out of anxious necessity, we will need to make our journalism that much more essential to their lives.”
There will be a vaccination dividend.
When treasury-sucking events or stalemates end, they unleash energy and activity that was thwarted or diverted during the crisis, creating an explosion of all that pent-up creativity, innovation, and economic activity. It happened at the end of the Cold War and was called the Peace Dividend.
In 2021, we can expect a Vaccination Dividend as the world finally gets the Covid-19 crisis under control. How much of the burst of creativity and investment including in journalism will come in 2021 and how much in 2022 will depend on a lot of factors: how soon the vaccines can be distributed, how effective they prove to be, how many people get vaccinated, and how much the world with a new U.S. administration dedicated to global leader