My high-school friend Cindy painted large, wall-sized paintings of dark-skinned figures amid lush, brilliantly colored tropical plants, birds, and snakes—their bodies intertwined with one another or wrapped around trees, their faces angular and distorted, Picasso-like: heads perched on necks at improbable angles, oversized noses, eyes near the ears. One might call her style “Faux Caribbean Surrealism,” reminiscent of Bony Ramirez, but ugly.

I hated her paintings, but never told her, of course. I felt offended by them, hurt by them—which didn’t make sense to me, but hurt is what I felt. It seemed to me that she was fascinated, mesmerized, delighted by the grotesque, the dissymmetry, the hideousness of her subjects. It felt like she was trying to force the ugliness at you with the enormous, in-your-face canvases, the screaming colors, the boldly outlined shapes, the macabre freakishness of it all.

A few years ago Cindy died. Her brother organized a last-minute Zoom call for a few of her friends, in place of a funeral. He mumbled about having to roll her over in bed, stomach to back, back to stomach, and over again; the bedsores, the relentless pain; the lost ability to speak. He didn’t say more. I never got to say goodbye.

There are stories to tell about Cindy and me—we roamed the night streets together. Once she pulled me off a neighbor kid’s fat, drunk, father, whom I was beating the crap out of in the dark, on the ground beside the open driver’s door of his obscenely long Cadillac, while his wife sat screaming in the passenger seat. Cindy and I were each lost in our own way in those last years of high school.

Cindy made a decent living selling her paintings. But I would only have to think of them to be overcome with anger, offense, and confusion. I have never understood my strong feelings about Cindy’s art.

Until today.

Last night, in the wee hours when I should have been sleeping, I was suddenly, for no conscious reason, grabbed by an impulse to look up “freak show.”

Oh.

Cindy’s paintings were nothing more than a freak show. That’s why I hated them. Cindy’s paintings were an exhibition of people—dark-skinned people—(Cindy was a rich suburban white girl)—who she depicted as non-people, as human curiosities, presented as macabre, ugly, for audiences to stare at in fascination and revulsion.

There’s a history of this kind of artist’s gaze, this kind of gawking. The Smithsonian describes 19th- and early-20th-century “human zoos,” or ethnological exhibitions, where people—especially indigenous and colonized people—were presented to white audiences as “exotic specimens,” as non-human “things,” to be looked at for their strangeness because they were “other,” primitive, grotesque.

Today, in the light of day, I understand why I’ve hated Cindy’s paintings, why they seemed not merely ugly, but *morally* ugly.

The offense wasn’t that I dislike distorted faces. I don’t mind Picasso, or Bony Ramirez. No, the offense was: Why are you, Cindy, looking at people this way? Why is their supposed strangeness—their supposed exotic, macabre, ugliness—why is this the thing you want me to stare at? Do you not realize how hurtful your gaze is?

Poor Cindy. Now she’s gone. I can only imagine how cut off from humanity she must have felt at the end of her life, how alone.

I wish I had figured this out before she died. I would have told her that her paintings sucked. I would have straightened her ass out.

She would have listened to me, because she always did.

Random thoughts, the day after:

Hegseth’s wife (his third? Didn’t his mother say that he keeps cheating on one wife to marry a new one? Or wait - maybe this is his girlfriend? Hard to keep track. He does use a lot of hair gel, though) .Anyway... Hegseth’s plus-one whoever she is has *humongous* boobs. That is the main thing about her. Also, isn’t Hegseth sort of gay? He pays so much attention to his hair and makeup. He’s not very manosphere fake-masculine at all, judging by his own stupid standard of masculinity (ugga ugga me kill everybody me drink blood ugga). Soldiers must laugh at him.

Weijia Jiang what a disappointment you are. Shame on you Weijia Jiang. And here I thought you were a fighter, a proud, feisty, brave journalist, speaking truth to power and pursuing righteousness and justice. You were great in 2017, sitting in that briefing room, asking the hard questions and not backing down in the face of a bully. You were hated, *hated,* by Trump then. You are loved by him now. Do you have children, Weijia? What do you tell your children about that vulgar, cruel man? How do you explain why you suck up to him?

Trump looked awful last night. Why does he salute during the National Anthem? One instance might be dismissed as his typical ignorance or his typical gauche vulgarity. But he keeps doing this. So it’s a deliberate, calculated F U - he wants to show his contempt and disrespect. For our military and its traditions. And for American tradition itself: for our manners, our propriety, for humility, for the basic decencies by which a civilized people distinguish honor from swagger.

Trump looked awful sitting up there on the dais. He was extremely orange last night, more saturated than I’ve ever seen him. Thick with paint: R255 / Pyrrole Orange layered over Schmincke Mussini Cadmium Orange. And he looked - how to describe it - shaggy. Unkempt. Craggy. His hair and his face. He looked heavy, bloated, angular, angry, sagging brow, sagging, snarling mouth. His expression seeming carved in to his features, unmoveable. He seemed dazed, discombobulated, a mess. A very large, bloated, vermillion mess.

Melania is ugly. Boy has she aged. She has an unsightly lump below each corner of her mouth where they injected too much Juvederm in an attempt to fill in the deep downward trenches she’s gotten from chronic grimacing in disgust. She does not look elegant up close like she does from a distance, where all you can see is the hat and clothes. Up close you see her face. She looks angry and mean, and harsh - like a vinegar-blooded, scourge-faced harridan. With mouth lumps and bad skin under caked-on makeup.

The whole cabinet was there. No American president’s entire cabinet has ever attended this dinner - it’s not about them. Evidently gross spectacle was planned, as is always the case with this attention-starved TV infomercial huckster. The plan seems to have been to hijack what has been a celebration of journalism and our American reverence for our free press, and free speech, and the first amendment of our constitution and to turn the night, instead, into a celebration of Trump, and a demeaning and humiliation of the 1,000 journalists in the room (hey what’s the matter you can’t take a joke? You like insulting and mocking people with your jokes, right? Well guess what, this time the joke is on you journalists haha). That seems to have been the plan.

Was the shooting another staged event? It didn’t seem so to me. Melania looked genuinely shocked, and high-tailed it outta there so fast she literally vanished instantly. Trump sat there like a giant blob - I mean he was seriously heavy last night he must weigh 500 lbs - looking, as I said, dazed and confused. I would have thought he’d be drugged on his favored drug Adderall, or Don Jr’s favored meth, just to keep him awake enough to deliver the mean speech he had planned (what’s her name - Caroline Levitate - who is suddenly a neon platinum blonde - had said about the planned speech “shots will be fired hahaha”). But it seems that instead of uppers, they gave him downers, some sedative instead. They should have given him a diuretic.

Anyway, it didn’t look staged to me, despite Trump not reacting, despite the convenient drama and spectacle of guys with long guns on the stage and agents running everywhere, blah blah, and despite the instantaneous lying about the location of the shooter (he was nowhere near the ballroom, but was in fact on the floor above), and the motive of the shooter (no statement yet about who he had wanted to shoot), and the condition of the shooter (Kaitlin Collins on CNN reported definitively the shooter was dead, neutralized by brave security personnel), and the lying about the shooter firing the shot that pierced the vest of a security guy. But staged or not, this will be seized upon - SEIZED UPON to use Trump-like capitalization - so they can promote the “necessity” of Trump’s $400 million dollar taxpayer funded gold ballroom; and to paint Trump as President Uber Victim.

And most of all to DISTRACT FROM AN IMPOSSIBLE WAR HE CAN ONLY END BY:

1. GOING UP AGAINST PUTIN, or

2. MAKING A DEAL THAT IS WORSE THAN BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S THAT TRUMP TORE UP BECAUSE TRUMP IS A F-ING IDIOT.

And that, my friends, is why they call it “BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE.”

Oh, and Epstein. I mean EPSTEIN.

So this is the story and investigative report on CECOT that 60 Minutes had scheduled to air on Sunday, and that had been massively advertised and promoted for weeks, where they would show the public the horror of what the American government is doing.

But just before it aired, the new head of CBS (a woman named Bari Weiss, a total Trump toadie, who just took over CBS last month, and who is making her way through the network chopping heads and turning CBS into state-run TV just like Russia’s, basically rebranding CBS as Trump TV) this woman, just three hours before the segment was about to air, pulled it. Infuriating the large team of journalists who have been working on this for a year, giving some bullsh*t explanation about it not being ready blah blah...

Canada’s Global TV News aired it, however. 😂 Because don’t f*ck with Canada.

And when I heard about that, I immediately downloaded it of course. So did other people. So here it is.

The backlash against this has been ferocious. Americans overwhelmingly do NOT approve of what Trump is doing, they do not approve of the censorship, the suppression of investigative reporting, the takeover of the media, the attempt to silence the American free press. Like so much of what Trump and Republicans are doing to consolidate power, this shameful 60 Minutes episode lays bare what this administration is actually up to - and it is not what their supporters voted for. And as their real goals become impossible to ignore, anger is spreading well beyond political activists—into the lives of ordinary Americans who have wanted nothing to do with politics. Until even they will reach the point where doing nothing is no longer an option.

“To them, only pro-Trump speech is protected. If you oppose Trump - you "hate America" or you're a "terrorist".

“What they're trying to do is simple: suppress turnout this weekend. Don't let them win.”

This has been bugging me.

That White Evangelical God is too soft.

That’s the problem with White Evangelicals. Their God is too easily manipulated. He's like Nymphadora Tonks, the shape-shifting Metamorphmagus in Harry Potter. He can be whatever you want him to be.

He is NOTHING like the Jewish God, who is mean, and I mean — MEAN. The Jewish God is the OG FAFO God. You disobey this guy and he kills your first born, sends plagues, he even sends frogs for chrissakes.

He’s not like the Catholic God, either. Ask any kid at Catholic school - you do one wrong thing and their God casts you into eternal fire where you scream in torment forever and ever. (Revelation 6–20)

He’s definitely not like Allah who burns your skin off, pours boiling water on your face, and drowns you in floods. (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:39)

This White Evangelical God? You can disobey him. You can do whatever you want. Whatever it is, this God gives you a pass. No. Matter. What.

And there you have it - this, in a nutshell, is the very heart of the White Evangelical religion. And this is the problem.

Because with this God, you can be "born again" -- over and over and over -- no matter what you’ve done. I mean, you can get away with anything - any-f*ing-thing - with this God. This God loves sinners. No matter how bad a sinner you are, this God gives you instant mercy, with zero accountability. You can be a murderer! A serial rapist! A pedophile! No problem! No matter what heinous cruelty or greedy corruption - you are still a good Evangelical. We're talking stuff people would be f*ing crucified for by other Gods. But this God? Noooo problemo. This God shrugs and forgives. He gives get-out-of-hell-free cards for all. He gives spiritual immunity for repeat offenders. It's like forgiveness costs nothing, which, for White Evangelicals, it doesn’t.

So this is my theory on what the problem is with White Evangelicals. And so it's no wonder that these people are morally unhinged, running wild, out of control, getting away with murder, literally. It's no wonder, when you consider that there is no structure, there are no consequences to their bad actions, there are no lines they’re afraid to cross.

Because their father figure is too soft! He offers no discipline, no backbone. Their God is not strict—he’s indulgent. So instead of raising God-fearing disciples—he's creating sociopaths, fanatics, racists, and frauds.

This is Trump's base. White Evangelicals are Trump’s base. And America's problem.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A note on why I say "White" Evangelicals:

It's because though White Evangelicals and Black Evangelicals share the same faith, they are totally different in their churches and their cultures, and have radically different worldviews.

White Evangelicals have Mega-churches, Christian radio, Fox News, and “family values.”

Black Evangelicals have gospel music, civil rights, social justice preaching, and local organizing.

White Evangelicals speak of personal sin, sexual purity, and traditional marriage.

Black Evangelicals speak of communal sin, systemic injustice, dignity, and liberation.

White Evangelicals approach to Scripture is about literalism and individual morality.

Black Evangelicals approach is about liberation, justice, and survival in the face of oppression.

A White Evangelical rally features prayer, American flags, anti-abortion signs, and calls to “take back the country.”

A Black Evangelical rally features gospel choirs, voter registration drives, sermons on police violence, poverty, and justice.

White Evangelical origins are from their Southern Baptist roots, Puritanism, and Great Awakenings.

Black Evangelicals origins are through survival: from slavery, to Jim Crow, and to the Civil Rights movement.

White Evangelical church structure is often male-led, and hierarchical.

Black Evangelical church structure is historically grassroots, sometimes female-led, and often more egalitarian in response to community needs.

Top issues for White Evangelicals: abortion, religious freedom, opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-immigration policies.

Top issues for Black Evangelicals: racial justice, healthcare, poverty, voting rights, and criminal justice reform.

White Evangelicals are overwhelmingly Republican (~75–80%)

Black Evangelicals are overwhelmingly Democrat (~80–90%)

For White Evangelicals God's forgiveness is a moral escape hatch, reinforced by a position of privilege: they are white, often suburban, politically dominant, and so less likely to be held accountable. The result is: “I’m forgiven, therefore I’m good”—even while supporting cruelty, inequality, or corruption.

Black Evangelical theology, in contrast, is shaped by generations of being judged, punished, and excluded—by white Christians, no less. Black Evangelicals can’t afford the luxury of “sin now, grace later.” They've never had that cushion. So grace is not cheap. And forgiveness requires action—repentance, change, repair. In the Black church there's often a deeper sense of moral obligation, too, because doing wrong doesn’t just reflect on you—it affects your community, your people, your survival. The Black Evangelical church is not just a place of worship—it’s a place of accountability, social responsibility, respectability, and resistance.

Did you sleep last night? I hope you got a good sleep, and woke up feeling rested and able to count your blessings. Don’t let yourself get exhausted - it’s not good for thinking straight or staying cheerful and kind.

Yesterday was hard for me. So many wild, over-the-top Executive Orders (“Decrees” made by our “king”):

• He rescinded 78 Biden executive actions on racial equity, gender discrimination, climate change, pandemic preparedness, ethics requirements for politicians, migration, the lowering of prescription drug costs, sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians, and offshore drilling

• He rescinded Biden’s order that had repealed Trump’s earlier ban on transgender personnel serving openly in the U.S. military.

• He ordered that the United States now officially recognizes only two sexes (male and female), and ordered that agencies issue government documents showing people’s sex at conception.

• He ordered the prohibition of the use of gender identity or preferred pronouns

• He ordered that no Federal funds are to expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.

• He imposed a freeze on regulatory laws

• He ended birthright citizenship in the United States, a right enshrined in the Constitution. Trump’s order means that the U.S. government will no longer recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States to immigrants who lack legal status, and bars birthright citizenship for children born to people on temporary work, student, or tourist visas.

• He declared a “national emergency” on the U.S.-Mexico border

• He declared that the southern border “qualifies as an invasion.” (you can see where this is going…)

• He designated cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

• He directed the military to “seal the borders” and provide troops, detention space, aircraft and other transportation, for border security.

• He brought back the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires people to await their asylum hearings in Mexico.

• He ordered the attorney general to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use,” including crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

• He ordered all federal workers to return to their offices to work in-person, full time, and agency heads to to terminate all remote work arrangements.

• He ordered the elimination of all government diversity programs and the termination of all federal offices and any positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and environmental justice.

• He signed a letter to the United Nations withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

• He ordered orders the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to look for misconduct occurring in the last four years within the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the intelligence community.

• He delayed the ban on TikTok

• He commuted the sentences of 14 January 6 defendants, and pardoned 1,500 people convicted of crimes in the insurrection

• He declared a national emergency in order to expand natural resources production

• He halted restrictions on the exporting of liquefied natural gas.

• He halted offshore wind lease sales.

• He withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization.

• He revoked the security clearances of his former national security adviser, John Bolton, and all intelligence officials who signed on to a letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation.

• He granted security clearances to an undisclosed list of personnel

• He began the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and changed Mount Denali’s name back to Mount McKinley again

• He has (temporarily) gotten around the illegality of forming an unofficial government “department” for Elon Musk to head up renaming the United States Digital Service to Musk’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

The Trump administration said the idea for this Day One Onslaught was “Shock and Awe,” designed to put liberals in our place, humble us, show who’s boss.

Don’t be shocked or awed. Certainly don’t be shocked, since every single item on this list is a thing Trump promised to do.

And don’t think any of this is guaranteed to happen. Everything - and I mean every single thing on this list - is subject to complex and lengthy court battles.

And don’t be under any illusions that these guys can work with each other. Their strategies alone can’t work because they’re full of internal contradictions. Because these guys have competing interests - they're all against each other. The fascists want to use the oligarchs to get to fascism, the oligarchs want to use the fascists to get more money. It’s the Greedy For Money versus the Greedy For Power. The Ideologues versus The Gold Diggers. The Republican party has become a den of thieves and they know that. They know what they each had to do to get there, what they had to compromise, what they had to give up. They know this about each other. They know their party members are morally bankrupt, that lying has become the official language of the party. So of course they do not work together well, if at all, when there is no trust, and likely betrayal, and they know that they could be thrown under the bus at any moment. It's a high risk, vertiginous atmosphere at the world's most influential, dizzying heights of power. And they're all in it for themselves. Not for America, not for Americans.

But don’t be discouraged! I grew up in the Civil Rights movement, so I always look to black leaders - from those days, and from today, too - for how to keep on keeping on, how to keep pushing forward, in the face of the harshest setbacks. Every fight has setbacks. There were so many setbacks for racial justice in the 50s and 60s. It was not a sure battle, like it might seem now, looking back. No one then could see if or where it might end, no one knew if change would ever come. You never know this when you’re in the thick of it, you don't know if what you’re doing matters, or makes any difference at all.

But you just keep going. Eyes on the prize, one foot in front of the other. I like to think of it as "plodding." I’ve always pictured big brown clodhopper shoes going plomp plomp plomp, plodding along through mud, sleet, fierce headwinds, plodding forward.

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward." (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

"There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time." (Malcolm X)

"You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right." (Rosa Parks)

"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble." (John Lewis)

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

“Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, I'm gonna keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin', Marching up to freedom land."

But what does that mean in this case, plodding along putting one foot in front of the other? Doing what, exactly? People who study dictatorships say pushing back makes you feel better, more empowered, less exhausted, more hopeful. So how do you push back, what do you do?

Well... you could support other people who are doing good things. You could donate money or time. Or you could do community work, in schools, or libraries, or by supporting local politicians. You could use whatever skills you have - knit something! Or make a knitting dissidents group like the pink hat brigade. If you like to paint, paint and inspire people with your art. You could choreograph a dance, write a children’s book, create a bumper sticker or t-shirt, build houses for homeless people, start a facebook group, do zoom chats just to check in and support friends, you could organize a march or non-violent civil disobedience action in the style of MLK. You could post your thoughts on bluesky to motivate others, or stuff envelopes for an organization you like.

It’s the doing something to push back that matters. It helps you, it helps the people you do it with, and it moves the world forward, bending the moral arc of the universe in the right direction, towards justice.

We’re in this together,

Liza

A lady came out of the school, walked over to us and whispered to the teacher, then took my hand and led me to the principal’s office. It was hard to walk covered with hitchhikers. I was surprised to find my little sister in the office, sitting on a bench.

Mrs. Boyarsky was there too. She had come to drive us home in her car. We didn’t know why and were too scared to ask.

Mrs. Boyarsky was our scary next door neighbor. She had a loud voice, a Hungarian accent, and mile-high orange hair. We had heard that Hungarians all have fire-colored hair like this, because Hungarians have fiery tempers. Mrs. Boyarsky also had creepy blue numbers tattooed on her wrist that she got at a concentration camp called Aushwitz. Lots of kids’ parents in our neighborhood had blue numbers. We heard stories about the concentration camps, and Dr. Josef Mengele the Angel of Death with his medical experiments, and Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Höss. These names were familiar to us, they were the boogeymen in our childhood nightmares.

My father had disdain for Mr. Boyarsky who was an accountant, a lowly profession according to my father. But my father absolutely hated Mrs. Boyarsky. Just the mention of her would make him red-faced mad. We never knew why he hated Mrs. Boyarsky, but we never wondered about it, because so much of life went unexplained. Maybe she scared him because she was very Jewish, and in those years my parents were busy convincing themselves that they were cultured New England WASPS. Whatever the reason, my parents weren’t on speaking terms with the Boyarskys, even though the Boyarsky girls were the same ages as my little sister and me and the four of us played together every day after school.

Mrs. Boyarsky pulled into her driveway, walked us into their house, and up the stairs to Andrea and Karen’s bedrooms. This was all so strange. We didn’t know why we had been brought there with no explanation. We had never been inside the Boyarsky house, even though our two houses were so close to each other we could see into Karen’s bedroom from my parents' bedroom window.

These bedrooms were so different from ours! They were pink! Fluffy pink rugs, ruffled curtains tied with ribbons, stuffed animals, dolls with long blonde hair, big pink mirrors…all things that my father hated and was loudly against on moral grounds, things that were expressly forbidden in our house.

The Boyarsky house smelled, too. It smelled like my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia - my father’s mother, whose house always smelled like food. I had a feeling my father would hate this smell.

It was dinner time. Strange and creepy. Who would have known that Andrea and Karen lived like this! Dinner was formal and quiet, nothing like our house which was loud to put it mildly, even in those days when there were still only three of us kids since my two youngest sisters hadn’t been born yet. One time my Uncle Herb was visiting for dinner and shocked us all by suddenly slamming his hand on the table, rattling the plates and dishes, yelling about the "decibel level," and storming out of the kitchen in a fury. Dinner at our house always had something going on.

But this dinner at the Boyarsky’s was nothing like that. We were in the dining room, first of all, not in the kitchen like at our house. And the table was covered with a white tablecloth and all kinds of things, like it was a holiday. My sister and I sat stiffly next to each other in awkward silence, in tall chairs, feeling very small.

Mr. and Mrs. Boyarsky were upset that we didn’t know it was Friday night and “Erev Shabbat” - the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. We had no idea.

In our house we celebrated only two Jewish holidays: Passover, when we had a seder where relatives came and there were lots of kids and noise and fun; and Hanukkah when we got loads of presents for eight days, we played games like rolling hazelenuts on the floor like marbles, we gambled with M&Ms using little roulette wheels and dreidels, and we sang rounds and harmonies with my father. Best of all, my father gave us a history lesson in the form of mesmerizing and dramatic stories of Ancient Judea, Judah Maccabee and his five brave sons, Hannah and her seven sons, and the brave fighters who battled against Syrian and Greek oppression, and fought for the freedom to observe Jewish faith, laws, and traditions, and to remain in their native land.

But we knew nothing about “Shabbat” and had never seen the Friday night ritual.

We watched as Mrs. Boyarsky put a white scarf on her head, covered her eyes, and lit two candles while singing in Hebrew. Then Mr. Boyarsky lifted a metal cup like the one our father used at our Passover seders, and Mrs. Boyarsky, Andrea, and Karen all held up their cups, so we lifted ours too. Mr. Boyarsky sang the same blessing our father sang at Passover. We all took a sip of wine. Grape juice.

Mrs. Boyarsky pointed to bowls filled with water beside our silverware, telling us to dip our hands. Everybody dipped their hands in the water, and Mrs. Boyarsky passed around a little towel, singing in Hebrew again.

Then she pulled off a piece of a big, shiny, braided bread (we knew this was “Challah” and had it sometimes in our house), sang again in Hebrew and everybody (but us) sang quietly with her. She passed the bread around the table and we each pulled off a piece.

The food was strange. My sister and I didn’t say a thing. After dessert, Mr. Boyarsky held up a piece of bread and sang another blessing.

Then Mrs. Boyarsky walked us to our house next door, said good night, and left us standing outside on the doorstep.

We opened the door and went in.

We could hear my mother crying in her bedroom upstairs.

My father was pale greenish and scary looking.

He told us that our little brother Jefferson was dead.

He said this is the last time we will speak of this.

You will never speak his name again. Do you understand? Jefferson will be erased from all memory. You never had a brother. Jefferson never existed. Do you understand?

We didn’t understand.

The next day, and for a week after, strangers came to our house dressed in black. They sat in our living room, the sunken room two steps down from our front hall, the one room in our house that we weren’t allowed to go in, that no one ever went in, ever. They told us this is called “sitting shiva.” For a week a stream of visitors came to our house and our living room was full of strange people wiping their eyes, talking in low voices and looking mean. My mother looked frightened and lost, like a ghost. It was all scary and confusing.

Then my sister and I were stuffed into a smelly green car. I was sure I'd throw up all over the shiny red vinyl seat. Car rides always made me vomit, and I felt queasy already.

We had to stay with our four boy cousins in Boston. They were loud, agressive, and scary. Then we were driven to Philadelphia to stay with other cousins. They were quiet, serious, and unfriendly. Then we went to stay with our grandparents in Atlantic City. I loved my grandparents and I loved Atlantic City, the beach, and the boardwalk.

After what felt like a long time we were finally driven back home, and sent to school as if nothing had happened.

Except that we never saw my mother anymore because she locked herself in her bedroom all day, only coming out to cook dinner behind a closed kitchen door. She’d call us up to eat and disappear again before we could see her.

My father got home later and later, eating his dinner alone.

Something had happened. Something sinister had happened, and it had come between my parents. There was some unspeakable secret they were hiding from us, and from the world, and it followed them everywhere, hovering in the space between them, almost visible. My parents didn’t speak to each other.

A few years later, my mom had another baby, a girl, making us three sisters. Then she had one more, and we were four daughters.

The years passed and our dinner table beame noisy and chaotic again. As if four girls weren’t enough, my sisters always had a few friends over, all of the girls crammed on top of each other on the bench that surrounded our kitchen table. Dinner was loud - it was a competition to see who could get my father’s attention by telling the funniest story of the day, or the dumbest thing some teacher had said, or the most colorful or preposterous character we’d met. Dinner was raucous, a lot of laughing - the neighbor kids loved eating over. My mother rarely sat down, standing nearby to replenish big serving bowls of food and cartons of milk as needed.

On the surface things felt normal again. We acted like things had returned to normal. Like the Unspeakable Thing had never happened. But my family was never the same again. The rift between my parents was as wide as the Atlantic Ocean and it never healed, it pulled us under, it drowned us under the oppressive weight of unspoken sadness, long after we’d forgotten where the sadness came from or what life had been like before it.

I loved acting as a child (I still do), and acted in as many plays as I could find. For many years, even into adulthood, I had a trick I’d use to make myself cry on stage. I felt guilty about using my secret trick, like I had an unfair advantage. My trick was to think of my brother, repeating the forbidden name “Jefferson” silently to myself. This would always make me cry.

I had been very close to my baby brother. I taught him to say his first words, and I held his little hands and taught him to take his first steps.

I’ve never stopped missing him.

In seventh grade I had a friend named Jeffrey who was really funny. Jeffrey and I would skip school and walk the train tracks, one foot in front of the other, balancing along the rails. He told me about his dad leaving, and I told him about my brother dying. But mostly we spent our days together telling jokes and laughing. Everything seemed funny.

We’d hear a train coming from a long ways away, and we’d wait and watch as it blew by us, pulling its long line of boxcars, rumbling along and blowing its whistle.

Sometimes, when the train was moving slowly enough, we’d grab hold of the ladders on the side, climb up, and hang on for a ride.

One day the train came to a standstill, and we said let’s hop the train! We ran along looking for open doors and found one we were able to slide open so we climbed up inside. It was dark in there and seemed stacked with boxes, but we found plenty of room to sit. This was fun!

Soon the train started to move again, first creeping slowly, then faster, and faster, until we were roaring along. What a noise! The low thrum, thrum of the engine; the clanging and clanking of axles and couplings banging against each other; the hypnotic rolling rhythm of the wheels along the rails; the squealing and screaming of brakes as the train passed around a curve and we had to brace ourselves to avoid sliding across the floor. And the blast of the horn, that melancholy whistle that - until they built the beltway through our woods - I would hear every night as the train passed outside my bedroom window. The sad, haunting whistle that would hang in the air long after the train had gone by.

After a while we pulled into a large yard with multiple train tracks criss-crossing every which way, and short and long trains parked everywhere. We hadn’t thought about getting home. We peered outside around the corner of the door. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so we sat back down to think about what we’d do next.

We had no idea where we were. Later we’d say “somewhere in the midwest” but we weren’t sure where that was.

We were sitting there thinking when suddenly there was a loud clamoring and cussing and a man appeared in the door! Uh oh. We were in trouble now. He must not have been able to see us, hiding in the shadows in the back. He sat down in the middle of the floor, leaning back against the stack of boxes and stretching out his legs in front of him. HE WAS WEARING A COWBOY HAT! I could barely make him out in the dark, but that big hat made a silhouette against the light at the door. I was dumbstruck.

When I was a kid, there was one television show I never missed, and that was Gunsmoke. It was my favorite show. Later on I watched The Rifleman, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger. They were all good, but Gunsmoke was my favorite. I loved cowboys.

But we definitely did not have any cowboys in Maryland, and here was a real live cowboy sitting right in front of us, right here in this train! I had goosebumps. I was astonished. I couldn’t see Jeffrey in the dark, but I knew he was astonished, too.

The cowboy didn’t seem to know we were there, which might be a problem. Because he probably had two six-shooters in his holster.

What to do. I decided to make small mouse-like noises rubbing my shoe on the floor. The cowboy didn’t move. I tried again. The cowboy still didn’t move. Maybe he was sleeping? I rubbed my shoe a little harder this time, adding a couple thumps, and the cowboy jumped up and moved to the door. Suddenly we were staring into a flashlight.

“Who’re yew?” the cowboy barked in a throaty whisper, not very friendly at all.

“We’re going home,” I said in a tiny voice.

There was a long silence. The cowboy just stood there, not moving.

“What’re y’doin’ here?” he said.

He talked like a cowboy! No one I had ever known, except Marshall Matt Dillon, sounded like this.

“We’re… going home,” I said again, in explanation.

The cowboy shined the flashlight on me, then on Jeffrey, then he shined it slowly around the car, then on me again, then on Jeffrey, then on a dark corner at the far side of the car, which he then walked over to, turned off his flashlight, and we heard him sitting down on the floor.

“Jes keep quiet then,” he said. And he didn’t say anything more.

I was afraid to breathe, staring into the dark with my eyes wide open. I waved my hand up and down and sideways in the air where I thought Jeffrey would be and finally hit his leg. I moved over and whispered “Jeffrey.”

Jeffrey put his mouth right against my ear and whispered so quietly all I could hear was two tongue sounds that sounded like “Don’t talk!”

I was certainly not about to talk.

We sat stone still and silent like two statues in the dark, and the train rattled along.

As the afternoon waned the sun dipped lower in the sky, casting a column of golden light and sunbeams through the crack in the door, bathing the dusty wooden floorboards in a warm glow.

Suddenly the cowboy coughed loudly, scaring the bejeezus out of me. I felt Jeffrey nearly jump off the floor.

“Yew folks comin' from 'round Cumberlan' way, ain'tcha? Mebbe some’eres round them parts, reckon?”

If I could have sat any stiffer or stiller, I would have. This was a question the cowboy had asked in his raspy voice, I knew that much. But I couldn’t understand a word he’d said.

I was relieved to hear Jeffrey answer him. “No sir. We’re not from Cumberland.”

"Y'all know them McLennan young'uns? They're m'sister's young'uns.”

“No sir,” Jeffrey said.

The cowboy got up then and walked over to the door, sliding it open a bit to watch the countryside roll past. The train was slowing down.

Now we could see the whole length of him, from his hat down to his… yes indeed! Those were real cowboy boots.

The cowboy said, "Well, reckon this's where I git off. I'm fixin' to drop in on m'sister.”

The train was still moving but he leaned way out, one hand hanging onto the door.

Then he turned to us and said, as if taking up in the middle of a conversation,

“Yep! I reckon that’s the long and short of it, kids.

“Jes' keep this in mind:

“Don’t never gamble.

“Nuthin’ good’ll ever come of it, even if you think it will. Gamblin’s a treacherous friend.”

Then he tipped his hat at us and said,

“Well, y'all take care now!”

And with that, he turned and jumped down into the thicket beside the tracks.

We ran to the door to see him, but he had disappeared into the woods.

We watched for a while, hoping to see him again, and then slid the door almost closed and returned to our spots on the floor.

Some time later, as dusk was falling, the rhythmic chugging of the train began to subside and the train came to rest at the spot where our adventure had begun. We climbed out of the car and in the waning light said goodbye and headed home, armed with a story about having to stay late after school. We’d gotten away with that one before. Our families didn't notice us much, so we got away with a lot.

At our age, we already understood that you might stumble into all kinds of odd run-ins with grownups. But the rendezvous with our cowboy topped the list as the strangest by far. He appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared just as quickly, almost like a ghost, or as if we'd imagined him. We wondered if maybe he had some kind of magic.

And who would believe us if we told them? We made a pact to never tell anyone, to keep our train trip and our cowboy a secret forever.

I never knew Jeffrey’s last name. My family moved to Japan, and when we returned to the States Jeffrey was gone and I had other worries so soon forgot about him. A picture of Jeffrey stays in my mind, though. He’s up ahead of me stepping along the rail, his arms outstretched for balance, the train tracks unrolling endlessly before him, vanishing into the faraway distance.

Mrs. Harper had greyish blackish hair, in a bun. She had glasses, and her face was wrinkly. She seemed suspicious.

Her house smelled weird. Not bad, exactly, just weird. Very suspicious.

My mother left and after a glass of milk, I had to make pee-pee. Mrs. Harper walked me down a dark hall, to the bathroom in the back.

She closed the door and I stood there, staring in amazement. This was some bathroom! There was a fluffy green thing covering the toilet seat. Like the shag rug at Aunt Pearl’s house. It was color of canned peas - that kind of green. And a matching green thing on the top of the toilet, too! And even more down on the floor! Not just one, lots of fluffy green rugs on top of each other, next to the toilet and the bathtub. This was amazing. And a green shower curtain that was soft like a dress! Nothing like my mother’s plastic shower curtain.

And then - I saw the towels. Amazing towels! So many of them! Towels hanging on top of each other - little ones, big ones, all different sizes of pea green towels. I stroked them, so soft!

I had to make pee-pee, so I pulled down my shorts and lifted up the fluffy toilet lid and I have to say at this point I was so amazed a little pee almost came out because THE TOILET SEAT YOU SIT ON WAS SOFT AND SQUISHY! And green!

I climbed up and I have to say sitting up there on that squishy seat I had the most amazing peeing experience of my whole life.

I now had a great vantage point to consider everything in the room. An amazing, magic fluffy green fairyland! Candy would appear somewhere for sure, maybe in a bowl.

I turned to look behind me and didn’t see any candy bowls. I did see a silver thing - oh, this was a razor. I knew this was a razor because my father had one just like it. I knew it was sharp but I’d never been allowed to actually touch one. I thought I probably shouldn’t touch this razor either, but I did want to see if it could cut things. I decided to test the razor on one of the towels hanging behind me, and yes, it sure was sharp alright. I sliced a nice, neat 4” cut through the bottom of one of the biggest towels. That razor went right through it! Very sharp.

Well, that was enough fun. I jumped off the squishy seat, flushed the fluffy toilet, closed the fluffy lid, but then had to climb back up again to reach the sink to wash my hands. Green soap! I dried my hands on the fluffy towels, and on my way out noticed that the walls were shiny pea green tiles. I could not wait to tell my mother and father about Mrs. Harper’s bathroom.

But I got in trouble.

The next day my father walked me back over to Mrs. Harper’s. This was much more serious than if my mother had walked me over. Mrs. Harper’s face looked dark and suspicious as she told my father about the sliced towel, and there was some talk about money, and some things about me having problems.

How I am able to remember the content of that adult conversation of seventy years ago I cannot say, but the substance of it was clear and has stayed with me to this day: the only explanation for me to have sliced Mrs. Harper’s towel was that I was “disturbed.”

Maybe I am disturbed, but that’s not why I sliced Mrs. Harper’s towel. I just did what any curious scientist would do, using empirical research to discover observable, measurable evidence in order to form conclusions, theories, or principles. I was simply using a fundamental aspect of the scientific method, where hypotheses are tested against real-world data and observations.

And this is how I’ve conducted the rest of my life in the seventy plus years since.

I remember that cold silence, broken only by the humid huffing of the horse. I remember us pushing through thigh-high snow to find a tree. I remember afterwards, when the smooth blanket of white had become littered with a mess of torn black branches, shredded bark, mangled green scales, and the tree's guts we’d hacked out to make our notch cuts. I remember our boot prints and hoof prints leaving an icy, muddy, trampled path behind us as our horse dragged out the trimmed logs, bound in heavy chains. Like evidence left behind at a crime scene.

Yesterday we fed the geese on the pond. The sun’s glare was so brilliant we were blinded by the glare and could barely see the geese floating towards us through the shimmering haze. Our food pellets were hitting the water like a shower of rocket fire. It was cold and windy with gusts so strong we had to hang onto the fence to keep from being blown backwards. Wild windy water, the geese drifting calmly along the surface.

Our masks were in our pockets. We didn’t need them, with nobody around and such a windy day. We are “Novids” - that’s what they're calling us now. We’re among the few left who still haven’t gotten sick. The night before I’d had one of those dystopian-movie dreams where we’re surrounded by zombies, sick with fever, coughing up sputum, shuffling along with arms hanging, head cocked to the side, drooling. And us in our little house, yellow sun, blue sky, green gardens, birds and animals in our trees and flowers, like a children’s playhouse world in crayon colors.

As I write this, we’re getting ready to head out for a run. This morning I was up at 5:30 for my daily Pilates, weights, rebounder, and bike workout. Sometimes, on rainy days, we’ll go up and down the stairs. We ache most of the time, never sure if we’re doing too much or too little for our ageing joints and tendons. The rule seems to be: The more we move, the better we feel, but the more we freeze up and ache when we’re still. The less we move, the worse we feel, and the weaker we get, and also the more we ache when we move, and also, also the more we ache when we stay still. In other words, aching appears to be unavoidable. I guess it's what ageing is like.

A few days ago I finished “Our Oriental Heritage” which is Volume I of the 11-volume The Story of Civilization by Will Durant. It was magnificent. He (and his wife Ariel, who wrote with him) wrote this volume in 1935 , so it’s been a bit like reading a history within a history. I think I would have enjoyed knowing this couple. Their writing is deeply researched, thoughtful, wise, respectful of and delighted with the world’s varied peoples and cultures, and they approach these rich histories with a noticeable lack of confusion regarding race, class, religion, sexuality, or morality - in pleasant contrast to so much of what one hears today. I’ve learned so much already! These 1,681 pages covered Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea, Persia, India, China, and Japan. Now I’m on to Volume II, “The Life of Greece.”

We’re missing the U.S. Open Swing Dance Championships this year, after 15 years of flying to Los Angeles every year to spend Thanksgiving with our second family - our dance family. It was always hard to leave our children and grandchildren for the holiday, but everyone at the Open was in the same boat. In those years the Open was the apex of the dance year, the big, culminating event, where reputations were made and lost, where you’d be together all day and night with your friends from every corner of the globe, where you were surrounded by west coast enthusiasts who were just as obsessed with the dance as yourself. The Open was the event not to be missed for anyone who loved west coast swing. I wrote breathlessly about the Open during those years. But we haven’t been back since 2019. Things may have changed since then between the pandemic, the difficulties of travel, and with the growth and vitality of the European community.

But despite our brilliant Fall here at home, where the air is filled with falling orange and yellow leaves, it does feels odd to be here instead of at the Burbank Marriott.

But here we are, at home, and still managing the risk of covid. We're health conscious, and it’s important to us to be able to continue to enjoy our active, healthy life.

And we do not want to infect, disable, or kill, others.

Strong words, but true words.

Because as I write this 2,000-6,000 people are still dying each week of this disease (that number represents known covid deaths plus "excess deaths" which are deaths that exceed the number predicted by hospitals and insurance actuaries that would include all known and predictable causes like flu and other viruses and diseases, and so are therefore attributed to covid). I do not include these numbers to be alarmist, but to shed light on the difficult truth of the challenge. Covid is still here, still being passed around, still making people sick.

My husband and I don’t want to contribute to transmission. We don’t want to help the virus to find hosts so it can turn itself into new variants. It's likely that a really bad variant will emerge in the near future, because why wouldn't it? With 60% of all covid infections being completely without symptoms (this is covid’s sneakiest, most effective trick!) one could be covid-positive and never know it, meanwhile spreading the virus to others as effectively as someone with symptoms. And one would still run the risk of suffering long covid and neurological/coronary/organ issues oneself, problems that would remain for the rest of one’s life - because once you’re infected, the virus never leaves, like with chickenpox and shingles.

So, what do we personally do to avoid catching covid?

~~ We wear N95/N99 respirators any time we leave the house, period. We have many different types, disposable and non-disposable.

~~ We avoid indoor spaces unless we have to be inside, and then for as short a time as possible. Covid is airborne, has been shown to hang in the air for hours, some studies say for days. We try not to be in indoor spaces if we can manage it.

~~ We avoid crowds. Outdoors, and especially indoors. Crowds as in - dances. You'd have to do some extreme mental gymnastics to convince yourself that a dance in an enclosed space is not risky for yourself and for everyone you're spreading covid to. We have still not attended a dance since January 2020. Which, for us, feels more like a moral decision than anything else.

~~ We use nasal sprays in risky situations. There are many good nasal sprays, with good science to support their use.

~~ We have excellent air purifiers in every room of our house, and I've built corsi boxes to use, too, if necessary. (I've also built corsi boxes for local schools, libraries, random offices, etc - they can be made cool looking with patterned duct tape, colored lights, computer fans, glue gun stuff, easy and fun to make). Whenever we can we open windows, sometimes we'll set up fans to create cross breezes. In other words, we always keep our space ventilated so that we’re breathing clean, fresh air.

And meanwhile, we stay hopeful, and we wait. There are excellent mucosal, pan-variant vaccines in trials all around the world, some Phase II and even Phase III trials with promising results, some already available in other countries. “Mucosal” (versus the humoral vaxxes that we've all gotten so far) are absorbed into the mucosa of the nose (they’re nasal sprays), throat, mouth, and the rest of the upper respiratory tract. Mucosal vaxxes use a different method of battling the virus than the method used in the shots currently available, and the mucosal method is a much faster and more effective method at stopping replication of the virus. Covid does its damage by travelling throughout your body, destroying the epithelial tissue (the tissue that covers the surfaces of organs and lines body cavities) and the mucosa (the tissue that lines the mucous membranes of organs and body cavities) of every organ and structure it touches. In contrast, the “humoral” type vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, and AstraZeneca) introduce an antigen into your circulating bodily fluids (your bloodstream) triggering your immune system to send antibodies into that circulating stream to fight the virus there.

Not to say that humoral vaccines are ineffective - far from it. They're good at preventing severe illness - Pfizer and Moderna shots have kept millions of people from dying. Those million dead in the US alone would probably still be with us had the vaccine been available, or if people had not been tricked into refusing it.

There are also new monoclonal antibodies in development (Vilobelimab (Gohibic), for instance), and antivirals such as Molnupiravir and Remdesivir already in use, and more.

And just like with AIDS, there are many drugs in development for people who have already been infected and thus are faced with a virus hiding in a reservoir somewhere in their body. Covid is indeed like AIDS in many ways, including the response to it by the public, and by public health officials, the medical establishment, the business world, and government. Most people reading this are not old enough to have lived through the beginning of the AIDS crisis, but I was there, and the resemblances are uncanny.

Last month the CDC finally - reluctantly - three years too late - but finally at long last - is acknowledging that covid is airborne, and it now recommends a minimum of five air changes per hour in every indoor setting. There is a huge literature available at this point on ventilation science and the viability of covid in different conditions/over time/humidities. Six air changes per hour is what ventilation scientists recommend, but the CDC's five is a step in the right direction. The CDC is handcuffed by the HICPAC and the AHA who supposedly “advise” the CDC on covid policy but whose interests are not actually protecting the health of the American public, but rather, protecting hospitals and the healthcare industry from liability.

Covid is the most studied of any virus in history, so there are vast libraries of covid research available at this point. I'm always happy to provide links to databases of papers, studies, articles on most any aspect of the virus, the disease, and the pandemic. Just ask.

As far as the dance world: I gave up hoping for behavioral or attitude changes in my fellow dancers. Included in covid research, there's been much written about the psychological, sociological, cultural, and political aspects of the pandemic. You read it and realize it's all things you knew but didn't want to admit to yourself. Basically: we are good at deceiving ourselves, at telling ourselves and each other stories that we make up to fit with how we want to perceive the world.

And we are at our core selfish creatures, in the same way that all animals are selfish; and knowing this about ourselves, we’ve devised laws, norms, and social pressures to try to make us behave in unselfish ways. The differences in those laws, norms, and social pressures define our varied human cultures.

The dance community, like every other human group, has our own laws, norms, and social pressures that define the morals and values of our own particular culture. West Coast Swing culture is different from Lindy, Ballroom, Square Dance, Ballet, or any other dance culture because our morals and values are uniquely our own.

Anyone who’s followed my writing knows that I’ve been very outspoken, and very disappointed in our community’s behavior since the start of the pandemic. I could have indulged myself in disappointment in the west coast swing world as my chosen culture for 30+ years of my life. But after reflection I realized that I was blaming the dance community for a story I had concocted in my own head, a story that made the dance community into something I needed it to be: a selfless culture of caring, high-minded people who put kindness and morality first above everything else, and who considered caring about the welfare of other people as high a moral value as personal artistic expression. That's how I saw the community because that’s how I needed to see the community, in my attempt at fulfilling my own personal needs and yearnings. I saw it as I needed it to be. What I saw was only my projection, my fantasy - it was not a realistic picture of the dance community as it truly is.

The dance community is great, in so very many ways. It provides unmatched fun - days, nights, and years of laughter and playing. It’s a means of artistic expression. And it fulfills a critical social need for so many people: the need to feel connected, the antidote to loneliness.

But one doesn't look to the dance community for moral rectitude or selflessness.

It would be easy to lapse into hopelessness and cynicism about the world today. There’s so much that seems disappointing: people’s behavior in every regard, the loss of civility, the loss of a shared morality, the loss of respect for norms, institutions, and freedoms that we, in America at least, took for granted, the loss of the idea of truth.

Finding hope is an important ambition these days, with the world on fire. But to me it seems that as much as there is to worry about, that alongside the fire and turmoil - maybe brought to life because of the fire and turmoil - it’s as if more and more people, ordinary people and extraordinary people, are emerging from every walk of life to do good, to do for others in little ways or big ways. I read of people all around the world creating solutions and programs and organizations and advocacy groups; people bringing people together, sharing information, using whatever skills they have to help others, to help the weak and the sick, and the elderly and the poor; I see people donating their time, giving food and service, doing grunt work for a cause, fighting righteous wars, speaking out at great risk to themselves, standing up against formidable forces. Everywhere I see angels emerging into view from every part of society and from every corner of the world. That's what it looks like to me. It’s as if the forces of evil have roused a sleeping giant of goodness.

Why do we like Novavax? Like many people, we've already had several doses (three? four? five? It's hard to recall) of Pfizer's vaccine. But we've closely followed the development and ongoing challenges of Novavax from the beginning—they're located right here in Maryland. We're also keeping an eye on the broader landscape of COVID vaccine development, eagerly awaiting the nasal “mucosal” vaccine that might signify the beginning of the pandemic's end. (I discussed mucosal vaccines and more in a passionate Facebook rant in September).

The primary distinction between Pfizer/Moderna and Novavax is in their mechanisms. The mRNA vaxxes teach your own cells to make copies of that spikey thing you see in the pictures of the virus. Novavax doesn’t operate that way. Novavax uses what’s called a "protein subunit," a tiny piece of that spikey thing, in purified form. This method is similar to the technology used to make the DPT shots administered to babies (which contain components of tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough), as well as the vaxxes for hepatitis, shingles, and pneumonia. In other words, Novavax’s method uses a longstanding and well-understood approach.

To make the Novavax vaccine, parts of the spike protein are extracted and then reassembled ("nanoparticles" that are pieced together like “nano legos”) to closely mimic the real virus, leading one’s immune system to perceive the new creation as the actual COVID-19 virus itself.

So they’d managed to outwit the immune system’s locked gates and set the fake-covid at the “door.” Now came the harder trick — making it work.

The biggest challenge was that protein-based type of vaxxes like this are made using only small pieces of the protein (in this case pieces of the spikey thing) and because they’re so small, they don't work very well to alert the immune system to mount a defense.

To overcome this challenge, something else is added to the vaccine mixture - this something is called an "adjuvant.” In this case the adjuvant they’re using is a chemical that comes from the soapbark tree (picture below - it’s an evergreen tree found in Chile and used for centuries by Andeans as a medicine for various ailments. It’s also used around the world as an ingredient in sodas (to make them foamy), and in beer, cocktails, baked goods, personal care products, and as an adjuvant in many well known modern pharmaceuticals).

In Novavax this adjuvant is called “Matrix-M,” and its effects are profound. The addition of Matrix-M triggers parts of your immune system that are more robust and enduring than the reaction of antibodies alone (as with the mRNA vaccines). This results in early activation of what are called your “innate immune cells” (these are the immune cells that you’re born with, before ever encountering foreign pathogens) right there at the injection site in your arm, as well as in the draining lymph nodes nearby. Within 24 hours of receiving a Novavax shot, neither the spike fragments nor the Matrix-M adjuvant can be detected at the injection site, suggesting that your immune cells have already transported the vaccine mixture to your lymph nodes and from there into your body’s lymphatic system.

This rapid immune response may be the reason people report less arm soreness post-injection (we experienced none) compared to mRNA vaccines.

Comprehensive immune system activation like this suggests that Novavax - though not the same - may resemble the behavior of the much anticipated nasal mucosal vaccine that I mentioned above.

I wrote about nasal mucosal vaccines and the immune system last year:

Another challenge in making Novavax was that whether the mixture works or not depends on which parts of the spike are used. The original Novavax provided substantial protection against the original covid variant. But then along came Delta. And then Omicron.

And then along came all those evil recombinant Omicron mutant "babies" (recombinant means that different variants are “mating” promiscuously with each other and giving birth to axe-murderer “babies” that have the worst traits of both of their parents). The worry was that the original Novavax formula wouldn't work against all the new variants.

But... it did! Studies in 2022, at the six month mark after one Novavax shot, showed that the original Novavax formula was providing excellent protection against mortality, severe disease necessitating hospitalization, and…against any form of infection at all.

I'll repeat that: Novavax was conferring complete protection against any infection at all. Period full stop. This means it was preventing both contracting covid - and unwittingly transmitting covid to others. And remember that covid is a virus notorious for infecting half its victims symptomlessly. Dr. Fauci said just last week that a full 60% of infections may be asymptomatic. Novavax was preventing people who didn’t realize that they were infected from spreading the virus to those around them. This is a big deal.

At the time of these Novavax studies, the variants in circulation were BA.1 and BA.5. In the studies conducted in the USA and Mexico, the level of protection after one shot was was 73%. In the UK 83%.

Here's Novavax presenting to the FDA and CDC in June 2022.

As of this writing the current recommendation is to wait one month after receiving your first Novavax shot to get the second, then wait six months before getting the third shot, and another six months after that for the fourth.

Protection spikes dramatically after the third and fourth doses, reaching a 95% efficacy rate. This is remarkable, especially compared to mRNA vaccines, which at best offer 30% protection—primarily against severe disease or death—and last only one to three months. That last bit is what people seem to forget - that the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) only last three months at best, and then, except for some negligible residual immune system “memory,” you’re basically back to being unprotected and vulnerable to infection or reinfection once again.

Note that animal studies indicate that Novavax-induced antibody levels at baseline (meaning after the very first shot) outpace those of other vaccines across all variants.

My purpose is not to downplay the miracle of the mRNA vaxxes. Pfizer and Moderna shots have kept millions of people from dying. Those million dead in the US alone would probably still be with us had the vaccine been available, or if people had not been tricked into refusing it. It is much better to take the mRNAs and get at least some protection, even briefly, against this dangerous, disabling, shape-shifting, creepy, weird-ass virus. Do you want to go around forever blowing your diseased breath on every person you meet? We don't.

But back to Novavax—it's evolved. The new 2023-24 Novavax formula has been enhanced to tackle the latest variant “soup.” (I wrote about “the soup” last June).

Novavax has been doing trials with people who, like us, started with the mRNAs and then switched to Novavax. So far it looks like two Pfizers or Modernas, followed by a Novavax, is the same as if you’ve had two Novavaxes. Mixing Pfizers or Modernas with Novavax or AstraZeneca is called "heterologous boosting" and it has been previously shown to increase both the breadth of the immune response, and the length of time (its “durability”) that protection lasts.

Novavax shots give next to no side effects (we’ve had three shots so far, and zero side effects, we couldn’t even feel where we’d gotten the shot, no symptoms at all the next day.

So we’re all about Novavax. Like I said, we’ve had three, about to get our fourth.

But as I said in the Facebook rant linked to above, pharmacies are likely to know less about Novavax than readers of this essay. Some might not even recognize the name, let alone know it's available to order. We’re assuming there are the usual corporate competition reasons for this, but that’s not our concern.

It's crucial to call ahead before assuming that your local pharmacy stocks Novavax. Some national chains offer it, but we’ve found smaller private pharmacies reliable as well. We get ours from one such pharmacy who even administers our shots car-side, eliminating the irony of contracting COVID while being vaccinated against it.

https://www.novavax.com/science-technology/recombinant-protein-based-nanoparticle-vaccine-technology

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.22282414v1.full

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.22282414v1.full

https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(2200548-5/fulltext

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X23008873

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40033-2

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21645515.2023.2189885

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2202542

Masks are not like the screens on your window that keep out mosquitoes too big to fit through the holes. Masks are not like spaghetti colanders or flour sieves.

Masks filter in a different way than by blocking particles that are too big. In fact, masks filter out *small* particles even better than they filter big particles, which seems weird at first.

Take the example of covid particles, for instance, so tiny - as small as 70-90nm! - the size of the mitochondria inside the cells of your body! That’s pretty small. (Covid particles are not coming at you this small, though. They don’t travel through the air as “naked” pieces of virus. They leave someone’s lungs aerosolized, like little flying “bubble boys,” encased in “Respiratory Aerosol Particle” bubbles (RAPs) made of mucous, salts, and water. These aerosolized particles are more like 2 microns - larger than the "naked" virus particles themselves).

But still - so small! And yet, N95 masks are able to filter out 95% of those covid particles in your incoming air stream.

How do they do this?

They do it by being made of special materials (why those pretty cloth masks don't work) that use four different filtering methods:

1. "Interception" - where an uncoordinated particle gets too close to a mask fibre... and gets stuck on it.

2. "Gravitational Sedimentation" - where a heavy particle falls down onto a mask fibre... and gets stuck on it.

3."Brownian Diffusion" - where an over-caffeinated particle is bouncing and jumping around like a crazy person (instead of behaving and keeping within the incoming air stream like everybody else) and bounces right at a mask fibre... and gets stuck on it.

4. "Inertial impaction" - where a lazy particle is too sloppy and sluggish to navigate the twisty turny up-and-down corridors and channels between the mask fibres and bumps into a mask fibre... and gets stuck on it.

5. "Electrostatic attraction" - where a balloon-that-you-rubbed-against-your-hair-to-make-it-stick-to-the-wall particle rubs against a static electricity mask fibre… and gets stuck on it.

From a particle’s point of view, the best size to be is 0.3μm (that’s 0.0003 millimeters) because that’s the size that makes it through the mask fibres best. Smaller particles get stuck, bigger particles get stuck, but not those 0.3μm guys. The reason is too weedy for here, but what’s good to know is that when tests are done to certify which masks are good, they use particles that are this size, 0.3μm, to measure worst case scenarios. A legit N95 has been certified to keep out 95% of 0.3μm particles.

But here’s the thing about masks. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a good N95 if you’re breathing in air from the sides, top, and bottom of your mask. Covid particles are not getting stuck on mask fibres if they’re not even going through the mask. Air is just like water - it will take the easiest, most direct route to get from one place to another. So when you take a breath, that incoming air stream won’t enter your nose through the mask because why go through the mask when the faster route is right around the mask?

In other words, for your mask to do what you’re wearing it for, you need a tight seal. Which fits your particular face shape.

Oh, and one last thing: Wearing two masks is not better than wearing one. Masks are made to be breathable, and are in fact tested for breathability (another cool but complicated subject not worth going into now). If you double mask, you’ve made it impossible to breathe without pulling in air from around the edges of your masks. In other words, you’ve compromised the filtration efficiency of the mask. Two masks are uncomfortable, too.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00506-7

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452199X20301481

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81935-9

Then I tried a book everyone said was so funny: Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman. It wasn't funny.

Next I read The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. First I loved it. His writing is so rich, it's like double chocolate cheese cake, every sentence so full of description, meanings, world history, cultural references, poetry, comedy, tragedy, too much. Totally queasy with sugar overload by the time you reach the period at the end. I don’t think I liked it.

Then Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. At first I just loved it. A gentle priest living a life of quiet kindness. But then très misérable characters started to appear, with misérable stories of mistreatment, sadness, abuse, and cruelties. When the forlorn, destitute, suffering girl was about to sell the only two things of value she had left - her beautiful front teeth - to buy food for her daughter - enough was enough for me. Seriously, Victor Hugo? You can't make your point without pulling a poor girl's teeth out? Yuk to the stupid mawkish book, yuk to the stupid syrupy musical.

Because All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favorite books (read it so many times I can't count anymore) I tried another by its author, Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades. It's good, but not riveting, quiet, and profound in the same way as All Quiet. My grandfather fought in WWI and sang songs and told stories and jokes about the war, so I've always felt a sense of connection and nostalgia for that time period, and for that awful war. It was a hideous war. Not sure what’s missing, but Three Comrades doesn’t capture the full power of that era.

I then discovered Alexander McCall Smith, and his 44 Scotland Street series. I love this series. It's hilarious, full of colorful characters drawn with wit, charm, and light-hearted but cutting social commentary. The series is a love letter to Edinburgh, Scotland and its people. I chain-smoked all sixteen books, and hope he'll write more.

Alexander McCall Smith also wrote a more popular series about Botswana, called The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I've tried and tried, but this series has too much sadness for me. Rape, abuse, exploitation, treachery... it's too much. I'm half way through the first book (an international bestseller) but don't think I'll push myself to finish. What's the point?

Next, One of Ours by Willa Cather, one of my favorite authors. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a favorite of mine. This novel is also great until it throws a curveball - turning into a novel about the war. I didn't know this beforehand, thinking I was reading another one like the O Pioneers triad, about farmers, rolling fields, and working with the land. She's an astounding writer, and One of Ours, like everything she writes, reaches right into your soul. But it's so sad, I wish it hadn’t reached into mine.

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I'm a meditator (started in 2019) so I felt I had to read this. I'm guessing every American who meditates has probably read this. It's by the guy who brought meditation into hospitals and heart/stroke clinics, after he discovered that meditation is as healthy and restorative for your heart as sleeping, only moreso. I found this book irritating. It's the author's style, his tone of voice. He feels gentle, but heavily, suffocatingly gentle, like a weighted blanket. I think he would make me scream if I met him in person, which would not be good for my heart.

A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. What a ride! I loved this. But be forewarned - the protagonist is one sneaky, evil dude. Exactly the opposite of Jon Kabat-Zin. A real page-turner, mesmerizing, colorful, chilling writing.

Did Darwin Write The Origin Backwards? by my cousin Elliott Sober. What can I say - it's philosophy, it's science, it's brilliant thinking, it's profound, it's true, my cousin is brilliant, this is as good as it gets. I love everything about everything in this collection of essays.

Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life by George Catlin, an American painter, author, and traveler who painted portraits of the Plains Indians in the Old West of the 1830s. This book is about breathing through your nose instead of your mouth.

A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. I love George Orwell. There's not a thing he's written that I haven't loved. He's a favorite author.

The Party of The First Part: The Curious World of Legalese by Adam Freedman. If you like words and language, you'll love this. It's very funny.

The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. I love words and language, and wish I'd studied linguistics. This is great book on language, and Pinker is a great writer. I don't think I would like Steven Pinker in person - he seems arrogant and superior. But, I don’t know, maybe he should be arrogant and superior. He's certainly superior to me. His writing and his thinking are really good. He’s witty, and seems to be able to create endless clever, funny, perfect metaphors. Which makes me hate him even more.

Next, A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen by Jonathan Clements. I really like this author. I lived in Japan when I was a teenager and have loved the country and its culture and people ever since, but only recently have I begun learning about Japanese history. I hadn't realized how backward and intransigent Japan was until the Meiji Restoration in 1869. My husband and I are fans of 1950s, 60s, and 70s Japanese movies so we see a lot of weird traditional Japanese culture. Weird is an understatement. How much of what we see in movies is close to reality we don't know, but Japanese culture does have a seriously creepy, weird side to it. Anyway… this book is not creepy or weird, it’s an easy, colorful entry to Japanese history.

Zen and Japanese Culture by Daisetz T. Suzuki. I'm going through this slowwwwwly. It's languid, dense, tedious, and maybe profound.

Next I read Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Annie Jacobsen. This was meh. I love spy novels, but this wasn't that. This was public knowledge kinds of stuff (it's non-fiction, which the author says up front, to warn people like me that it's not John le Carré). It was exactly what that long title says it is, and rather dry.

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova. This is a book about poker. Konnikova is a psychologist who decides to learn from one of the best poker players in the world, and within a year wins the PCA National event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure No-Limit Hold'em Championship. I knew zero about poker before reading this, and I hate gambling and casinos, so this was all foreign to me. I learned from this book that poker is totally about psychology, and it's about people who are obsessed with summoning their best, sharpest, clearest thinking. Poker requires knowing human nature, knowing what makes people tick. It's a game about understanding the role of luck and how people behave and make decisions when luck plays a role. In other words, poker is about game theory. Very cool book.

Then I read Konnikova's next book: The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It...Every Time. I love con artists and scams. But this book wasn't as good as her poker book. She describes a lot of colorful scam artists, impersonators, people who you almost can't believe would have the guts to pull off the stuff they do. Also some cool stuff about how to spot deception, and "tells." (Watch the hands! Who knew?).

And now I am in the middle of - and lovvvving - a book by another of my favorite writers, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by the most wonderful Ed Yong, who also writes for The Atlantic and has written some important, beautiful, and true pieces about the pandemic, the virus itself, the disease, and long covid. Ed Yong is a wonderful human being, and this book is a WONDERFUL beautiful book about the natural world.

I think that's all… but it feels like I am forgetting some.

Last night we saw that Warnock had won, Walker had lost, and we went to bed happy.

But this morning I woke up crying in my sleep, so sad about - something. It took me a while to realize what.

Overnight, my thoughts must have rearranged themselves, and it had become clear to me that I have mixed, and strongly felt, emotions, about this race, and about Herschel Walker in particular.

It was his concession speech that did me in. Because instead of laughing at it, and him, like I'd expected to, I found myself deeply moved by the graciousness, humility, and decency of his short message. He's a football player, so he understands sportsmanship, of course he does. He knows what it is to win - and - to lose. He knows what it is to make a concession speech.

This man is no angel. He's not a person I'd want my children to ever, ever, be like, in any way. He's violent, he's a bully, he lies, he's uneducated, his thinking is unclear and illogical, and he was willing to do and say things to get for himself whatever it was he was trying to get in this race.

But I found myself feeling sorry for him, and ashamed of myself for participating in the brutal mockery that was made of this man.

And - I found myself angry. That this man seems to have been chosen - in the most cynical of ways - in the most racist of ways - by the Republican party, not for anything he could have provided to help the people of Georgia, but solely because it was thought that his race and celebrity status would get them a win. Herschel Walker was used. In the crassest, ugliest of ways. How humiliating. Clearly he wasn't vetted. Because no vetting was needed, was it? The only requirements were that he be Black, a celebrity, and willing to do what he was told. This man, this unqualified, violent, indecent man, is who they chose? With so many qualified Georgians to choose from? With so many qualified *Black* Georgians to choose from?

Shame on them.

I'm glad Reverend Warnock won, of course I am. He's a gift to Georgia, and to our country. That the race was so close is upsetting, but I think I understand how it happened.

But in the end, now that it's over, what I'm left with, is the sadness of it. The feeling that I've been witness to meanness, and the sadness that comes from this.

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American leaders and pundits have been trying to call an end to the pandemic since its beginning, only to be faced with new surges or variants. This mindset not only compromises the nation’s ability to manage COVID, but also leaves it vulnerable to other outbreaks. Future pandemics aren’t hypothetical; they’re inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events. As rising temperatures force animals to relocate, species that have never coexisted will meet, allowing the viruses within them to find new hosts—humans included. Dealing with all of this again is a matter of when, not if.

In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. That diagnosis remains unchanged; if anything, I was too optimistic. America was ranked as the world’s most prepared country in 2019—and, bafflingly, again in 2021—but accounts for 16 percent of global COVID deaths despite having just 4 percent of the global population. It spends more on medical care than any other wealthy country, but its hospitals were nonetheless overwhelmed. It helped create vaccines in record time, but is 67th in the world in full vaccinations. (This trend cannot solely be attributed to political division; even the most heavily vaccinated blue state—Rhode Island—still lags behind 21 nations.) America experienced the largest life-expectancy decline of any wealthy country in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. If it had fared as well as just the average peer nation, 1.1 million people who died last year—a third of all American deaths—would still be alive.

America’s superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the country’s many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.

In furiously racing to rebuild on this same foundation, America sets itself up to collapse once more. Experience is reputedly the best teacher, and yet the U.S. repeated mistakes from the early pandemic when faced with the Delta and Omicron variants. It got early global access to vaccines, and nonetheless lost almost half a million people after all adults became eligible for the shots. It has struggled to control monkeypox—a slower-spreading virus for which there is already a vaccine. Its right-wing legislators have passed laws and rulings that curtail the possibility of important public-health measures like quarantines and vaccine mandates. It has made none of the broad changes that would protect its population against future pathogens, such as better ventilation or universal paid sick leave. Its choices virtually guarantee that everything that’s happened in the past three years will happen again.

The U.S. will continue to struggle against infectious diseases in part because some of its most deeply held values are antithetical to the task of besting a virus. Since its founding, the country has prized a strain of rugged individualism that prioritizes individual freedom and valorizes self-reliance. According to this ethos, people are responsible for their own well-being, physical and moral strength are equated, social vulnerability results from personal weakness rather than policy failure, and handouts or advice from the government are unwelcome. Such ideals are disastrous when handling a pandemic, for two major reasons.

First, diseases spread. Each person’s choices inextricably affect their community, and the threat to the collective always exceeds that to the individual. The original Omicron variant, for example, posed slightly less risk to each infected person than the variants that preceded it, but spread so quickly that it inundated hospitals, greatly magnifying COVID’s societal costs. To handle such threats, collective action is necessary. Governments need policies, such as vaccine requirements or, yes, mask mandates, that protect the health of entire populations, while individuals have to consider their contribution to everyone else’s risk alongside their own personal stakes. And yet, since the spring of 2021, pundits have mocked people who continue to think this way for being irrational and overcautious, and government officials have consistently framed COVID as a matter of personal responsibility.

Second, a person’s circumstances always constrain their choices. Low-income and minority groups find it harder to avoid infections or isolate when sick because they’re more likely to live in crowded homes and hold hourly-wage jobs without paid leave or the option to work remotely. Places such as prisons and nursing homes, whose residents have little autonomy, became hot spots for the worst outbreaks. Treating a pandemic as an individualist free-for-all ignores how difficult it is for many Americans to protect themselves. It also leaves people with vulnerabilities that last across successive pathogens: The groups that suffered most during the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 were the same ones that took the brunt of COVID, a decade later.

America’s individualist bent has also shaped its entire health-care system, which ties health to wealth and employment. That system is organized around treating sick people at great and wasteful expense, instead of preventing communities from falling sick in the first place. The latter is the remit of public health rather than medicine, and has long been underfunded and undervalued. Even the CDC—the nation’s top public-health agency—changed its guidelines in February to prioritize hospitalizations over cases, implicitly tolerating infections as long as hospitals are stable. But such a strategy practically ensures that emergency rooms will be overwhelmed by a fast-spreading virus; that, consequently, health-care workers will quit; and that waves of chronically ill long-haulers who are disabled by their infections will seek care and receive nothing. All of that has happened and will happen again. America’s pandemic individualism means that it’s your job to protect yourself from infection; if you get sick, your treatment may be unaffordable, and if you don’t get better, you will struggle to find help, or even anyone who believes you.

In the late 19th century, many scholars realized that epidemics were social problems, whose spread and toll are influenced by poverty, inequality, overcrowding, hazardous working conditions, poor sanitation, and political negligence. But after the advent of germ theory, this social model was displaced by a biomedical and militaristic one, in which diseases were simple battles between hosts and pathogens, playing out within individual bodies. This paradigm conveniently allowed people to ignore the social context of disease. Instead of tackling intractable social problems, scientists focused on fighting microscopic enemies with drugs, vaccines, and other products of scientific research—an approach that sat easily with America’s abiding fixation on technology as a panacea.

The allure of biomedical panaceas is still strong. For more than a year, the Biden administration and its advisers have reassured Americans that, with vaccines and antivirals, “we have the tools” to control the pandemic. These tools are indeed effective, but their efficacy is limited if people can’t access them or don’t want to, and if the government doesn’t create policies that shift that dynamic. A profoundly unequal society was always going to struggle with access: People with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and no health insurance struggled to make or attend vaccine appointments, even after shots were widely available. A profoundly mistrustful society was always going to struggle with hesitancy, made worse by political polarization and rampantly spreading misinformation. The result is that just 72 percent of Americans have completed their initial course of shots and just half have gotten the first of the boosters necessary to protect against current variants. At the same time, almost all other protections have been stripped away, and COVID funding is evaporating. And yet the White House’s recent pandemic-preparedness strategy still focuses heavily on biomedical magic bullets, paying scant attention to the social conditions that could turn those bullets into duds.

Technological solutions also tend to rise into society’s penthouses, while epidemics seep into its cracks. Cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, and education, who then move on, leaving the communities most affected by diseases to continue shouldering their burden. This dynamic explains why the same health inequities linger across the decades even as pathogens come and go, and why the U.S. has now normalized an appalling level of COVID death and disability. Such suffering is concentrated among elderly, immunocompromised, working-class, and minority communities—groups that are underrepresented among political decision makers and the media, who get to declare the pandemic over. Even when inequities are highlighted, knowledge seems to suppress action: In one study, white Americans felt less empathy for vulnerable communities and were less supportive of safety precautions after learning about COVID’s racial disparities. This attitude is self-destructive and limits the advantage that even the most privileged Americans enjoy. Measures that would flatten social inequities, such as universal health care and better ventilation, would benefit everyone—and their absence harms everyone, too. In 2021, young white Americans died at lower rates than Black and Indigenous Americans, but still at three times the rate of their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

By failing to address its social weaknesses, the U.S. accumulates more of them. An estimated 9 million Americans have lost close loved ones to COVID; about 10 percent will likely experience prolonged grief, which the country’s meager mental-health services will struggle to address. Because of brain fog, fatigue, and other debilitating symptoms, long COVID is keeping the equivalent of 2 million to 4 million Americans out of work; between lost earnings and increased medical costs, it could cost the economy $2.6 trillion a year. The exodus of health-care workers, especially experienced veterans, has left hospitals with a shortfall of staff and know-how. Levels of trust—one of the most important predictors of a country’s success at controlling COVID—have fallen, making pandemic interventions harder to deploy, while creating fertile ground in which misinformation can germinate. This is the cost of accepting the unacceptable: an even weaker foundation that the next disease will assail.

In the spring of 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would last for years, and that the U.S. would need long-term strategies to control it. But America’s leaders consistently acted as if they were fighting a skirmish rather than a siege, lifting protective measures too early, and then reenacting them too slowly. They have skirted the responsibility of articulating what it would actually look like for the pandemic to be over, which has meant that whenever citizens managed to flatten the curve, the time they bought was wasted. Endemicity was equated with inaction rather than active management. This attitude removed any incentive or will to make the sort of long-term changes that would curtail the current disaster and prevent future ones. And so America has little chance of effectively countering the inevitable pandemics of the future; it cannot even focus on the one that’s ongoing.

If change happens, it will likely occur slowly and from the ground up. In the vein of ACT UP—the extraordinarily successful activist group that changed the world’s approach to AIDS—grassroots organizations of long-haulers, grievers, immunocompromised people, and others disproportionately harmed by the pandemic have formed, creating the kind of vocal constituency that public health has long lacked.

More pandemics will happen, and the U.S. has spectacularly failed to contain the current one. But it cannot afford the luxury of nihilism. It still has time to address its bedrocks of individualism and inequality, to create a health system that effectively prevents sickness instead of merely struggling to treat it, and to enact policies that rightfully prioritize the needs of disabled and vulnerable communities. Such changes seem unrealistic given the relentless disappointments of the past three years, but substantial social progress always seems unfeasible until it is actually achieved. Normal led to this. It is not too late to fashion a better normal.

I didn’t write this. I don’t write this well.

This was written by Ed Yong, for The Atlantic, with his trademark clarity, humility, and compassion.

I include it because this is precisely what I would have said, if I’d been able to express myself this well.

To my surprise, I really liked it. It took my mind away from the worries of the world, and scratched an itch I didn’t know I had: I was enjoying watching bad guys get the shit beat out of them. I loved this, in fact. Smashing with clubs, slashing with swords, bashing in heads. I couldn’t keep from squealing, jumping up off the couch, pumping my fist in the air, yelling GET HIM! TAKE THAT YOU &^%*#!

This was me, the movie snob, the fan of indie dramas and moody art house films. Me, who scrunched way down low in the seat, almost on the floor, with three coats over my head to block the sound, at the movie theater with my family for Lord of The Rings.

I liked it so much that the next night we chose a “movies like this” recommendation. Same bald guy, exact same cast, but different hats and costumes this time. I loved it again.

Now I know: That bald guy is the very famous and beloved Gordon Liu, and that cast of actors, costumes, and sets, are part of an astonishing, short lived, magical moment in time, in which thousands of Kung Fu movies were produced by the sprawling Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong, between the years of 1967 and 1984.

These movies (and others produced by other studios without money for good production values or cast) are called “Classic Kung Fu,” and for the next year this became our obsession. Our favorite directors are Gordon Liu’s brother, Lau Kar Leung, and a famously, flamboyantly gay director named Chang Cheh (I mention his gayness because it matters in what these movies are) who directed more kung fu movies than any other director during those years.

For a full year we watched one of these movies every night, until we had seen them all. They’re in Mandarin (not Cantonese, like you might think since they were made in Hong Kong - there’s a reason for this) and our ear became so accustomed to the sound of Mandarin we felt like we were absorbing the language through osmosis, like a language immersion course. We love the sound of Mandarin, the music of it.

The more we watched, the more questions we had. What were those hats? Why do they drink from bowls, not cups? Why do they eat big hunks of greasy chicken straight at the camera, smacking and chomping with their mouths open, dropping food and drool down their chins and shirts? Why do they show such graciousness and respect for their enemies? What in Chinese culture gave them their extraordinary patience, that long view? What is Chinese Opera? Are they extremely sexist or extremely not sexist or both? Because they treat women fighters with as much fear and respect as they give their men fighters, and their concubines and prostitutes are revered. What are the Ming and the Qing Dynasties? What history do these movies cover? Who are the bad guys? Why are there no tributes or recognition of the Kung Fu movie stars we’re watching? They’re certainly faster and stronger than any Olympic gymnast we’ve ever seen. So how is it that nobody knows their names? Why aren’t they famous?

All my adult life I’ve been embarrassed at my ignorance of China. Chinese history, Chinese culture, Chinese geography - I’ve felt ashamed that I know nothing about a country of this size, a country with 6,000 years of history, and the oldest written language in the world. I’ve always meant to educate myself but hadn’t.

And then along came Kung Fu. And my entry into China via the make-believe world of the Hong Kong movie industry and Peking Opera acrobats.

Last year I read a few beginner books:

My favorite was “The Water Kingdom,” which tells Chinese history through the role of water. Water in politics, in technology, in poetry, painting, philosophy, religion, humor, water in relationships, in martial arts, in war, power, ethics, and morality. Water is everything in China. It’s a great book.

“Science and Civilization in China” was a tome of seven volumes, and concentrates on inventions and technology throughout Chinese history. It’s dry, but I like dry reading, full of facts. I didn’t know that China had invented, well, most everything. Many centuries before similar inventions would emerge in the West.

So now I’m no longer totally ignorant, I’m just ignorant. The more I learn, the more I know how much I don’t know. Chinese history, alone, would take more than one lifetime to cover.

As for Kung Fu - I am smitten.

By the way, I don’t mean Bruce Lee. I’m not a fan of Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee has a story worth telling - he was huge in Asia, worshipped and beloved, and big in the West, too, later on. But I don’t like Bruce Lee’s style, or his movies.

I don’t mean Jackie Chan, either, although Jackie’s an amazing, loveable, athlete. Jackie made some great movies in the late 70s (Shaolin Wooden Men, Drunken Master, Fearless Hyena, Big Brawl;) and a few with his buddies Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, both equally brilliant (and hilarious) athletes. (These three, the “Three Brothers” they’re called, were raised together at the China Drama Academy, the Peking Opera school where they lived and studied as children.)

And I don’t mean the superbly crappy Kung Fu movies churned out by the bazillions in those years, shot with such lousy cameras they’re almost too dark to make out, with ugly “choreography,” inept “fighters,” and stories so stupid you wonder if they’re parodies of themselves.

The Kung Fu movies I mean are those made by the Shaw Brothers, and directed by the two directors I mention above. The casts of these movies were all acrobats drawn from the Peking Opera schools (and a few from ballet who were trained to fight at the studios), and the choreography of the fight scenes was, with typical Chinese rigor, rehearsed to absolute perfection, blindingly clean, precision timing, perfectly straight lines, exactness of beauty and movement. For us, as dancers, the fight scenes are so intricate, so difficult and complex, we shake our heads in disbelief.

Here are Gordon Liu (the “bald guy” from our very first Kung Fu movie) and Johnny Wang, two of our favorites. The director and choreographer is Gordon’s brother Lau Kar Leung.

In this scene there are only two fighters - just imagine the choreography for teams of 30 or more of these guys, all fighting simultaneously with each other, weaving in and out and back flipping over and through each other, sliding and jumping across the stage.

Kung Fu fight scenes are nothing like fight scenes of today. Not only the stars, but the full cast were trained acrobats and martial artists, who actually knew how to fight, never used stunt doubles, and didn’t stop moving until the end of the scene. We’ve timed some long fight scenes at twelve minutes! That means twelve minutes of blinding speed, strength, power, and continual movement. Twelve minutes of memorized, perfected choreography. It boggles the mind.

You can see in this clip that it’s not tricks of the camera that makes it exciting. The camera just rests on the fighters, allowing you to sit back and watch them move, without editing or interruption.

In contrast, you can’t find a movie today where the camera is not so close you’re only able to catch a fist flying across the frame for a split second, or a momentary glimpse of a grimace; where everything is cut and pasted to suggest a fight without ever letting you actually see it happening.

Kung Fu movies have spoiled us. We can’t watch modern action flicks anymore without being frustrated.

Lately we’ve been watching Jason Stratham movies. They’re okay. Jason actually does know how to fight, so the camera at least lets you watch him throw punches. He doesn’t get hurt in his movies. I like that. Jackie always gets beat up first before getting realllllly angry and then watch out. Jason is usually rescuing a little girl, and every scene is him bashing the shit out of four or five bad guys, until at last he saves the girl, and is fishing on a boat with his old police officer friend who reprimands him for not taking better care of his health and blowing up too many buildings again.