Graduation! May 29, 2020 Harvard’s commencement Thursday was the best ever. The logistics were the least of it — but still: Not too cold or too hot, no umbrella to worry about (if I don’t bring one, it will rain) . . . no $600 hotel room or insanely impossible traffic . . . and seats so good you could see and hear as if you were three feet from the stage. You could show up in a t-shirt and not feel under-dressed. There was much to like about the morning program (Yo-Yo Ma!), but if you don’t have time to watch it all, scroll down to Marty Baron’s commencement address. Or just watch it here on YouTube. The former editor of the Miami Herald, and then the Boston Globe (played by Liev Schrieber in the movie), and now the Washington Post (“Democracy Dies In Darkness”), this quiet, unnervingly modest but steely strong man made anyone who cares about truth and decency proud. It is a must watch / must share. (And if you want something lighter, here’s how Conan O’Brien closed out the afternoon program.) Have a great weekend.
Camp May 28, 2020May 27, 2020 Summer Camps Should Reopen argues this piece in The Atlantic. I agree. No they shouldn’t, argue Drs. Kass and Baren in the New York Times. Well, okay, but I wish these distinguished doctors had cited numbers. Specifically, the number of camp age children admitted to hospitals for COVID (almost none) and the number who have died (even fewer) … and compared those numbers, by way of context, with the hospitalizations and deaths we endure each year from other illnesses and camp-related accidents. And then argued why parents shouldn’t be allowed to make this decision for themselves. Don’t the numbers make a difference? Few parents (I hope) would take a one-in-a-thousand chance of losing their child. But how many would deprive a child of summer camp — or school — if the chance were one in a million? One of you, who supports keeping camps and schools closed, responded, when I asked whether parents should be allowed to decide that for themselves: “Do we allow parents to decide whether to put their kids in a seat belt? Sometimes the role of government is to protect people and the public.” True. But when seat belts became mandatory on January 1, 1968, more than 50,000 Americans were dying in vehicular accidents each year — the equivalent of 80,000 with today’s larger population — compared with just 9 children being hospitalized with COVID in the week ending May 20th (not dying — hospitalized). Also: wearing a seat belt imposes a minor cost and inconvenience. Being deprived of camp — or school — takes a larger toll. So I’d leave it up to the parents; but I think camps and schools should reopen, staffed by the kinds of young and healthy counselors and teachers and cafeteria workers who — blessedly — are at extremely low risk of serious harm, and who wish to accept that risk. Meanwhile, lest we forget why we face these agonizing trade-offs in the first place: Per Politifact and elsewhere . . . Trump drastically cut CDC staff in China . . . removed our primary embedded liaison with the Chinese CDC . . . disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic office . . . threw out the Obama-Biden pandemic playbook . . . defunded the global early warning network for new viruses . . . repeatedly praised the Chinese government . . . and ignored more than a dozen urgent warnings — including Joe Biden’s on January 27. Or to put it more vividly, as Alfred Hitchcock might have, don’t miss this four minute movie. Download and share!
Smash! May 27, 2020May 27, 2020 This benefit concert sold out in 16 minutes. One night only. Never again seen by anyone in the four years since. Until now. Yours, free. Flynn’s lies to the FBI were material — just look at all the people who thought so. From Flynn himself, and his defense attorneys, all the way up to, among others, the President of the United States. That suddenly the Attorney General would move to drop the case screams contempt for the rule of law. But that won’t bother Glenn’s brother . . . Glenn: “I forwarded last week’s Vivaldi clip to my brother, who found that his computer blocked it. Why? ‘I think I have it figured out,’ he reported. ‘Andrew Tobias, I discover, is a hate-filled elitist never Trumper. My computer, unbeknownst to me, apparently has a filter in place to block out such fools. Computers have their imperfections, and no matter the potential quality of this particular email, my computer reads Andrew Tobias in the URL and engages the filter.‘ It’s very sad to me that a 76-year-old Ph.D. in psychology who still has an active patient-counseling practice revels in his own brand of Trump-inspired ignorance. His and my older sister, now deceased, was more liberal. My brother’s adopted daughter thinks Trump is an ass. To my brother’s astounding admission that his computer filters out everything not resembling Fox News, I responded: ‘He who willfully filters out facts lives his life in willful ignorance.’ Willful–ignorance. Noun. (uncountable) (idiomatic, law) A decision in bad faith to avoid becoming informed about something so as to avoid having to make undesirable decisions that such information might prompt.” Finally, on the remote chance you have not already seen it: NYTParody
“Deep” May 26, 2020May 26, 2020 Here’s the last eleven minutes. The lead-up (one presumes; I haven’t had time yet to watch) is a long discussion of how after 10,000 human generations of struggling and suffering and inventing and inspiring — reaching demigod-like heights where we can watch a movie while eating dinner flying across an ocean — our little species is poised for misery and extinction, leaving the universe devoid of intelligent life until someplace, somehow, the same amazing process repeats a million or a billion years from now and, like as not, in a speck of time, they blow it all over again. Or maybe not.
Republican Voices May 25, 2020May 24, 2020 Lifelong conservative George Will left the Republican Party in horror over Trump’s first years in office. Here he offers his choice for V.P.: Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo. And he’s not the only Republican voice speaking out for Democrats this November. Take John McCain’s senior campaign strategist Steve Schmidt. Like your fellow readers Carl and Tom, Schmidt hoped McCain would beat Obama. “That makes his current thoughts even richer,” writes a friend. Five minutes. And I’m sure you’ve seen these three Republican-created Lincoln Project ads. Lew: “I play golf with a bunch of Republicans. Afterward, we always talk politics. They have no facts but great conviction. They believe that the Democrats are going to take away what they have worked so hard to earn — and waste it. They don’t care about anything else. But things are beginning to change. One, a former FBI agent, has become a rabid Trump hater. He attacks my golfing friends with great vigor. It’s actually unpleasant but fascinating. Another, the wife of a Trumper, openly stopped supporting her husband on this issue.” And speaking of golf! Robert: “I heard Ted Cruz on TV a while back saying that, being from Houston, he knows energy companies and their boards. And implying that Hunter Biden’s election to Burisma’s board was corrupt. He said he didn’t know of anyone on an energy company board without experience in the energy field. Well, I worked for a Fortune 500 semiconductor company for many years and know that one of its goals was board diversity, not only in gender, race, etc. but also in background. Many if not most of our board members were from outside the electronics field. So I wondered if this were also true for energy companies. I did a quick search on Exxon-Mobil (XOM board of directors). It appears to me that exactly none of their board members, except the CEO, comes from the energy field. Ted Cruz = Fake News.” Ted Cruz is awful. You know who else? Lindsey Graham — in 80 seconds. Or in this graphic (I know it’s a little mean, but after watching those 80 seconds it’s hard not to think a little meanness is warranted): As I said at the start of this long weekend: let us remember today all those who gave their lives for our democracy . . . for a free press . . . for an independent judiciary . . . for the separation of powers . . . for the rule of law . . . for decency and dignity and honor . . . and do all we can to assure they did not die in vain.
Every So Often There’s A Column You Just Have To Read May 23, 2020 This is one of those: Billions are going to zillionaires under the guise of pandemic relief. Eager for Carl and Tom to tell me why they’re okay with this.
Have A Great Long Weekend May 22, 2020May 21, 2020 How to build a Tesla Model S — in five minutes. (Thanks, Glenn!) Mike Martin: “The United States had CDC scientists inside China. The global pandemic emerged just months after Trump removed the expertise the world counted on to prevent it.” From the Los Angeles Times: . . . Trump has scored a dubious achievement: Alone among recent presidents, he has drawn criticism from all his living predecessors, Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. His brawl with Obama has been brewing for years. Long before Trump launched his 2016 campaign, he claimed falsely that the first African American president wasn’t born in the United States. Candidate Trump said Obama was “perhaps the worst president” in history. He blamed Obama for a long list of purported sins, from the 2015 deal that successfully rolled back Iran’s nuclear program to allegedly being responsible for Trump’s own failure to deploy widespread testing for the coronavirus. The surprise is how rarely Obama responded. But now, it appears, his gloves are coming off. After Trump alleged Monday that his predecessor had committed crimes but refused to tell reporters what they were, Obama issued an instant and acid response: “When even [Trump] can’t explain his own conspiracy theory, you know the White House has fallen on tough times.” Meanwhile . . . want to spend 4 minutes seeing what he’s been cooking up on the South Side of Chicago? I checked the market yesterday and noticed that — barely an hour into the trading day — PRKR had dropped 10%, from 50 cents to 45 cents. This kind of thing doesn’t flap me much; the obscure stocks I tend to favor bounce around. But out of curiosity I did go to check the volume: it had fallen on 7,356 shares. About $3,500 worth. I tell you this by way of saying . . . “ignore the noise.” If Apple were to drop 10% in an hour, there would be a reason. (Apple had in fact dropped half a percent, on $2.5 billion worth of trades.) But if one of our little special situations plunges, the “reason” is likely, “Beth needed cash for a new refrigerator.” Richard Bingler: “You are SO right about After Life! Thanks for recommending it.” Here’s what they’re apparently doing in China. (If nothing else, the kids are adorable.) https://andrewtobias.com/wp-content/uploads/chinese-school-kids.mp4 Have a great weekend. Remember all those who died fighting for democracy. May they not have died in vain.
Two Things To Keep Strongly In Mind May 21, 2020May 20, 2020 But first . . . Even FOX News gets it: Trump is unfit. Two minutes. Joe Biden — take action. Republicans decry discrimination (no, really!) — against Big Oil. FOX News again: reporting a hopeful breakthrough on testing, out of Israel. Three breaths, wait a minute, and presto: your result. So much good stuff to watch, but let me add Ricky Gervais’s After Life to your queue. Each episode under 30 minutes (and just 12 in all). Really wonderful. And now . . . Jim: “I agree with reopening the economy while safeguarding the vulnerable. One thing I haven’t seen, though, is an explanation of how we’re supposed to be able to do it.” → Such a good question. If it were up to me (thankfully, it is not), I would push most of that down to the individual level. For example, if you’re elderly or diabetic and live with school-age children from whom you can’t stay properly distanced, I’d leave it to you to decide whether to (a) keep them locked up until they’ve been vaccinated; or (b) find a way to live with your sister, out of harm’s way; or (c) move the children to live with their healthy 35-year-old aunt . . . i.e., figure something out until there’s a vaccine or a cure. To make this easier, I’d look to the government to offer support . . . e.g., provide living quarters for vulnerable people to stay safe. But for the millions of schoolchildren who live only with healthy young-ish parents? And who can be taught by healthy young-ish teachers and served meals by healthy cafeteria staff, etc.? THOSE are the kids and teachers and staff I’d see getting back to normal ASAP. Two things to keep strongly in mind as we continue to grapple with the least bad ways to move forward: 1. People under 25, with the rarest of exceptions, do not die from COVID-19. As you can see, back when there were “only” 68,998 confirmed COVID deaths in America, just 88 were among people under 25. Each truly a tragedy — but not more so than each of the 14,962 non-COVID deaths among the same age group. 2. The same is nearly as true of healthy people under 55. Of the 5,075 who died of COVID-19, a great many were not healthy (which is why we should urge, and assist, anyone in ill health to take extra precautions). Whatever their health pre-COVID, we grieve for every one of them — but no more than we grieve for each of the 100,769 in the same age cohort who died of non-COVID tragedies. (In Italy, of 29,692 total COVID-19 deaths, just 332 have been among people under 50.) It is not crazy to allow young-ish healthy people to go about their lives — wearing masks, washing hands, socially distancing, and getting tested, as appropriate — while we find smart, compassionate ways to protect the vulnerable. The third thing to keep strongly in mind is that tens of thousands of fine American lives could have been spared if Trump had not eviscerated the CDC “forward” team in China, had not gutted Obama’s pandemic preparedness systems, and had not negligently ignored more than a dozen urgent warnings. Including Joe Biden’s warning January 27 in USA Today. Does needlessly losing tens of thousands of American lives rise to the level of a “high crime or misdemeanor” even if, in the eyes of the Republican Senate, collusion with Russia and multiple obstruction-of-justice felonies do not?
The World’s Stupidest Version Of A Discussion May 20, 2020May 19, 2020 But first: Vivaldi — and so much more. Three minutes. Thanks, Mel! Randy Rainbow’s latest: Distraction. John Yodsnukis: “What if instead of using the census to determine how many representatives each state gets, we use the number of VOTERS in each election? If you don’t vote, you’re not represented.” → Ha! (I replied.) Constitutional amendments are HARD! “Yes. But put on your idealism hat and tell me why it’s a bad idea. Wouldn’t it increase voter turnout?” → I like it! States would compete to get the highest turnout. But Republicans would kill it for that reason. Voter suppression is a core Republican principle — never more than this year. Take voting by mail, for example — the method Trump himself most recently used. Republicans are doing all they can to limit it. . . . President Donald Trump said that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” The GOP speaker of the House in Georgia said an all-mail election would be “extremely devastating to Republicans.” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said universal mail voting would be “the end of our republic as we know it.” . . . So I don’t see Republicans voting for any Constitutional Amendment that would encourage voting. And now . . . It’s every bit as awful for someone to die in a crash as paying tribute to coronavirus workers, but the former will get zero notice; the latter, quickly become known throughout the entire world. It’s only natural to focus on the unusual. (Did you see the video I led with yesterday about a trip to the store?) Yet it can cause us to make bad decisions. With that in mind, I offer this email from a large DNC donor to one of the country’s best, most prominent columnists: I’m writing this as a longtime admirer. The pieces [you’ve written on the pandemic] are good, as yours always are. My concern is that the focus on the outlier cases of young people getting sick has diverted attention from what seems to be the bigger story — which is a failure to protect people in vulnerable populations. Your point in our Twitter exchange was that while they are outlier stories, “they respond to a sense of invulnerability that many young people feel. That sense of invulnerability strikes me as imprudent both for them and for the people around them.” My fear is that not talking honestly about which groups are at risk will really hurt people. We have implemented a set of policies that could not possibly be more unequal in their outcomes. As with most tragedies, the highest prices will be paid by the people who can least afford to pay them. Child abuse is soaring as kids are locked at home with parents consuming 55% more alcohol according to sales data, and the most at-risk kids aren’t being seen by adults outside their homes. Suspected child abuse filings by mandated reporters have plunged due to school closings and the acuity of kids showing up in ERs with abuse cases has soared — because more moderate cases aren’t making it to the hospital. According to a Pew poll, low-income parents are more than twice as worried as high-income parents about the impact of school closings on their kids’ futures. So you do a piece on a 27-year old NYC physician who had COVID and recovered. Obviously, we’re happy for him, and the story itself is great. But it’s one case, and there really don’t appear to be many others of similar acuity in NYC, the hardest hit area. We have not seen excess mortality among doctors and nurses. This is from a few weeks ago but the ratios haven’t changed as far as I know: There are 42,000 nurses in New York State repped by their union. At the time, six had died from COVID — 0.014%. New York State at that time had had 16,162 deaths overall, out of 19,450,000 people — 0.083%, In other words, non-nurses died at more than 5x the rate of nurses. The NY antibody studies have found healthcare professionals to have lower infection rates than the general population. Isn’t that important context? My concern is that the focus on outliers, while deeply human, has created a warped sense of who’s at risk, who needs protection — and, as important, who’s at very little risk and is more likely to be a victim of the social and economic impact of lockdowns. Given that only about 5.9% of the US population is over 75, versus 21% under age 15, these are not idle questions. I would also submit to you that while a large percentage of vulnerable seniors have steps they can take — or be helped to take — to socially distance, vulnerable children have very few self-help options for dealing with abusive or neglectful home situations. I just can’t help spending all day every day wondering how it’s possible there isn’t a smarter way to handle something with such a dramatic skew in terms of who’s vulnerable. For instance, a lot of pieces — and Cuomo speeches — were devoted to lecturing millennials about needing to stop playing sports in Central Park because of the pandemic. As more information has come in, we’ve learned that outdoor transmission is exceedingly rare. Might those viral-ready speeches scolding millenials have been better devoted to questioning the wisdom of discharging COVID patients back into nursing homes? One of the reasons I so badly wanted to connect with you was that this issue has become so partisan, I’m concerned that most people who share my values (our values, really, based on my read of your past work) are allowing their justifiable horror over Trump’s corrupt sociopathy — and incompetence in UNDER-reacting to the pandemic, ignoring more than a dozen urgent briefings, etc. — to blind them to the costs of an OVER-reaction. Take the saturation-level coverage of the Kawasaki-like illnesses. I’m concerned that fear mongering from Cuomo and de Blasio has so poisoned the discussion that parents will be terrified to send their kids to camp or to school. My hope is that someone with a large megaphone will really dive into the data. With the rarest of exceptions, kids don’t die of COVID or this related Kawasaki-like syndrome. It’s horrible and tragic when they do; it’s horrible and tragic when a child dies in ANY way. But we really hurt millions of kids — and put them at different kinds of risks — if we lock them inside as a result. Especially the most vulnerable kids, who will pay the highest price in terms of crime, violence, substance abuse, and failures to launch successful adult lives. I’ve been so frustrated by what a culture war issue this has become: the left insisting on indefinite school closings in the absence of evidence, the right essentially insisting that wearing a mask is a failure of masculinity. It’s just the world’s stupidest version of a discussion. My basic view is that each intervention should be considered independently in terms of costs and benefits. Things with minimal social cost, like mask-wearing, should be implemented even with minimal evidence of efficacy. But school closings? A policy with absolutely enormous social costs paid by the most vulnerable people in America, and one that has little evidence for its centrality in fighting COVID. I just keep thinking back to all of Jonathan Kozol’s books, and about the impact of these policies on those kids. It just haunts me. If there’s any chance there’s a better way, we need to start fighting for it right now. I know you care as deeply about these issues as I do, and I am so grateful that you’ve devoted your career to covering these stories that are so often forgotten. And thank you for at least giving me a chance to argue with you a little.
The Earth Will Be Fine Without Us May 19, 2020May 18, 2020 But first . . . Alan: “Having to take the family to the store to shop, remember this.” Three jaw-dropping minutes. Jules: “The Trump Administration Is Reversing Nearly 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List.” Imagine what he would do in the next 4 years.” And then watch one of the countless videos inspired by Haroon Rashid’s poem, like this one. We Fell Asleep In One World and Woke Up In Another Suddenly Disney is out of magic, Paris is no longer romantic, New York doesn’t stand up anymore, the Chinese wall is no longer a fortress, and Mecca is empty. Hugs & kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends becomes an act of love. Suddenly you realise that power, beauty & money are worthless, and can’t get you the oxygen you’re fighting for. The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in cages. I think it’s sending us a message: “You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine. When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters.”