How To Accelerate Herd Immunity

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Two docs, Zeynep Tufekci and Michael Mina, suggest:

“While we know that the single dose can protect against disease, we don’t yet know how long this immune protection will last, and at what level. However, there is no rule that says that vaccines must be boosted within weeks of each other. For measles, the booster dose is given years after the first dose. If the booster dose could be given six months or a year after the first dose, while maintaining high efficacy before the second dose, that would allow twice as many people to get vaccinated between now and later next year, accelerating herd immunity — greatly helping end the crisis phase of the pandemic in the United States.”

A One Act Play

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The setting: Jeff Bezos’s and MacKenzie Scott’s Medina, WA kitchen. After working together to make Kraft macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, they serve themselves, grab two cans of Mountain Dew, and sit down at their formica dinner table. It’s one of their last dinners together as a married couple. A few days following this meal, they decide to pull the plug on their marriage. 

Jeff: Mac and cheese with dogs never gets old. [laughs uncontrollably] 

MacKenzie: No, it doesn’t. [inner voice. . . but your laugh has sure started to] 

Jeff: What did you do today?

MacKenzie: I spent most of it journaling. Which helped me realize I don’t want to help you turn Amazon into the world’s retail store anymore. I think $182 billion is enough money. I want to make the world a better place through writing and giving my share of our money away.

[All the while, Jeff texts Lauren Sanchez under the table.]

MacKenzie: [Softly, sadly, and with a deep sense of resignation.] Did you hear me?

Jeff: Yes, you said you want to help me make Amazon into the world’s retail store. 

[MacKenzie stares at Jeff in silence]

Jeff: [Head in his lap.] Can you pass the applesauce? 

 

My Person Of The Year

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A New York Times primer for anyone who doesn’t know MacKenzie Scott, the eighteenth wealthiest person in the world.

“Ms. Scott, who was formerly married to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, has pledged to give away most of her wealth. Her shares in Amazon were valued at about $38 billion last year but would have gained value during the coronavirus pandemic.”

Scott isn’t letting the pandemic stop her from making true on her pledge. Quite the opposite. Last week she revealed she was “the one behind the donations to dozens of colleges and universities, part of nearly $4.2 billion she had given to 384 organizations in the last four months.”

As impressive as the amount Scott’s given away is is how her team did it.

“The money came after weeks or months of hush-hush conversations in which Ms. Scott’s representatives reached out to college presidents to interview them about their missions, several of the presidents said on Wednesday. When they learned who was behind the effort, it was a surprise to them, too. But it could not have come at a better time — when the pandemic was hitting their student bodies hard, they said.

‘I was stunned,’ Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas, said of learning that Ms. Scott was giving $50 million, the biggest gift the university had ever received. She thought she had misheard and the caller had to repeat the number: ‘five-zero.'”

Scott is the antithesis of most ultra wealthy philanthropists who almost always give to their alma maters, most of which are already flush with nine or ten figure endowments.

“Ms. Scott’s latest gifts bring her charity to almost $6 billion this year, an extraordinary amount. In another unorthodox touch, she announced them in a Medium post on Tuesday. ‘This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,’ she wrote. ‘Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty.'”

Experts on philanthropy were surprised to see Scott associate herself with institutions that were “much more humble and, indeed, needy.”

“To these institutions, a $20 million donation was the equivalent of several times that to a Harvard or Yale, and could have a disproportionate impact.

‘One of the things that’s so incredible about this massive grouping of gifts is that she does not have a personal connection to most, if any, of these universities,’ said Kestrel Linder, chief executive of GiveCampus, a fund-raising platform that works with colleges and universities.

Ms. Scott made gifts to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, as well as community and technical colleges and schools serving Native Americans, women, urban and rural students.”

Dare to be different. And hella generous.

Seattle Leans A Little Left

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Moderate Democrats are splitting with more radical leftists on Seattle’s plans to give misdemeanor suspects a pass for crimes committed to meet a basic need.

Jason Rantz, right wing radio host tells a precautionary story. Seattle CM called police she defunded to report crime she is effectively legalizing.

I guess I’m a moderate Democrat since I find the proposed legislation problematic for the reasons Rantz explains. However, since we already imprison a larger proportion of citizens than any other country, we know Rantz’s solution of locking up more people will do nothing to reduce crime or improve Seattleites’ quality of life. Because criminals aren’t rational. They don’t plan on being caught, and therefore, don’t ponder the odds of going to prison.

We also now know we can’t afford our prison population if we want balanced state budgets. I wish I could direct a larger proportion of my city, county, and state sales taxes to mental health and substance abuse treatment.

That still leaves the question of what to do with all the criminals of sound mind who commit property crimes and other misdemeanors. On that, I’ll defer to experts to propose smarter, more viable alternatives to prison.

Wednesday Required Reading

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1. What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels? I need to see a lot more of Wiseman’s work, but the little bit I have seen makes me think that question is not at all hyperbolic.

“The fact that Wiseman’s half-century-long project is a series of cinéma-vérité documentaries about American institutions, their titles often reading like generic brand labels — ‘High School,’ ‘Hospital,’ ‘The Store,’ ‘Public Housing,’ ‘State Legislature’ — makes its achievement all the more remarkable but also easier to overlook. Beginning with ‘Titicut Follies’ (1967), a portrait of a Massachusetts asylum for the criminally insane that remains shocking to this day, Wiseman has directed nearly a picture a year, spending weeks, sometimes months, embedded in a strictly demarcated space — a welfare office in Lower Manhattan, a sleepy fishing village in Maine, the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University, the flagship Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas, the New York Public Library, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Tampa, Fla., a Miami zoo — then editing the upward of a hundred hours of footage he brings home into an idiosyncratic record of what he witnessed. Taken as a whole, the films present an unrivaled survey of how systems operate in our country, with care paid to every line of the organizational chart. They also represent the work of an artist of extraordinary vision. The films are long, strange and uncompromising. They can be darkly comic, uncomfortably voyeuristic, as surreal as any David Lynch dream sequence. There are no voice-overs, explanatory intertitles or interviews with talking heads, and depending on the sequence and our own sensibility, we may picture the ever-silent Wiseman as a deeply empathetic listener or an icy Martian anthropologist.”

2. Why Are Great Athletes More Likely To Be Younger Siblings?

“The roots of the little sibling effect may lie in the way younger siblings strive to match their older siblings on the field. This was the case with Michael Jordan, the youngest of the three Jordan boys and the fourth of the five Jordan children. When the siblings were growing up, Larry — who was born 11 months before Michael — was considered a better basketball player and regularly bested Michael in one-on-one games.

‘I don’t think, from a competitive standpoint, I would be here without the confrontations with my brother,’ Michael recalled in the ESPN documentary’ The Last Dance.’ ‘When you come to blows with someone you absolutely love, that’s igniting every fire within you. And I always felt like I was fighting Larry for my father’s attention. …

‘I want that approval. I want that type of confidence. So my determination got even greater to be as good, if not better than, my brother.'”

Alas, did not apply in my family. Oldest Brother routinely whipped my ass on golf courses and tennis courts alike. And Older Brother was a much better swimmer and water polo player.*

3. Amanda Seyfried Finally Stakes Her Claim. How to be wonderfully grounded, against the odds. Buy a farm.

4. Why Andy Mukherjee is losing hope in India. Given it’s impact on the planet, anyone who is not East-Indian owes to themselves to learn a lot more about India. This is an excellent start.

*that’s why this athletic accomplishment was so gratifying

“I Often Look Down On Myself”

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Despite all the distancing, I’ve had many more meaningful interactions with my students this semester than I anticipated. Interactions that have left me feeling sublimely aligned with my life purpose.

I regularly challenge students to focus more on learning processes than outcomes. More specifically, I advise them not to focus on grades too intensely.  I’m not naive as to why so many of them do exactly that—scholarship requirements, good driving discounts, graduate school applications, and parents’ expectations for starters.

And yet, deep down they know their intense focus on grades often compromises their learning. Many still can’t help themselves.

“Why, do you place so much importance on your grades?” I gently probed with one of my first year writers last week during a one-on-one conference. I don’t remember what she said, but I’ll never forget her follow up e-mail.

“You asked me when we last met why I focus so much on my grades. I gave you the first answer to come to mind. I have put a lot of thought into it. I often look down on myself. I have a hard time telling myself, that I’m smart or interesting or pretty. I have a hard time accepting it when others say it’s true. Grades are the way, I can look at myself and say, ‘here in front of you is proof that you are smart, or at least smart enough, and that you can succeed.’ That’s all. Thank you for everything professor.”

I’m the one who should be thanking her for the single most honest, heartfelt explanation for grade anxiety I’ve ever heard.

Obama’s Disappointing Return

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“Moderate mush” appears to be the essence of Lili Loofbourow’s argument in her Slate piece titled “Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows”.

“But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of ‘snappy’ leftist political slogans like ‘defund the police’ reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t ‘alienate’ people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a ‘reasonable person’—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive.”

Loofbourow doesn’t like his music either.

“Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right. It explains, I think, why there’s something so mystifyingly generic about his self-presentation when you take him out of the right-wing fever swamp. His music selections could be a Starbucks album, they’re so mainstream. Asked what someone should read to understand this bizarre, unprecedented moment in contemporary America, he recommends the fresh unplumbed perspectives of de Tocqueville and Thoreau. In other words: Obama sat the last four years out and it shows. He might be appearing on ‘Snapchat political shows,’ but his ability to adapt to new media forms does not extend to his political thinking. He isn’t bringing new tools or interpretations to the table and he seems to be overlooking the extent to which older tools do not work.“

Okay, let’s concede LL’s point, the historical moment has passed Obama by. But why then, does she end this way?

“Obama stayed away during the Trump years. Maybe he deemed it tactically wise. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he wanted to work on his foundation. But we could have used him during these four awful years.”

Loofbourow earns lots of points for critiquing a political icon, but I’m also deducting a few for a lack of internal consistency.

My Plan To Jump The ‘Rona Vaccine Line

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What’s the most effective and humane way to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine given the limited supply? Apparently, the plan is to prioritize the “most vulnerable”. Therefore, beginning immediately, I am going to begin talking about my feelings in a much more genuine and authentic manner than ever before.

The Golden State?

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There has been a steady stream of stories of entrepreneurs bailing on California. Here’s one example of a 30-year old YouTube multimillionaire high tailing it to Henderson, Nevada. This week some guy named Elon Musk made news for relocating to Texas. Vegas; Austin; Bend, Oregon are the new Los Angeles. 

My family moved from Ohio to Southern California in 1973. Once my swimmer-platform diving daredevil brother experienced the beach scene, he never left. Today, his posse is filled with successful entrepreneurs, so I asked him if this outward migration was legit. He confirmed it is. 

“One of my coffee buddies is looking at AZ or Nevada. Tough when they have a network or friends and family. One of the issues that most of these guys face is having investments in CA that are hard to move. Even if they move, they still have to pay CA taxes. In conversations, it’s not the amount of taxes that they pay, but the way they are used. The waste and lack of financial control that public servants use, is consistently frustrating.”

An exact echo of the video story.

So where does this end? Is the Golden State done? A year from now, will it be the Silver State? A decade from now, the Bronze State? 

My guess is this is a lull. What makes California such a special place to live? Near constant sunshine, the Pacific coastline, the Redwoods, the Sierra Nevadas, being able to visit my childhood home, UCLA basketball. Those things remain (relatively) unaffected by high taxes and a declining quality of life.

What’s another major issue that often makes California an exasperating place to live? Population density and it’s ripple effects—clogged freeways, jammed parking lots, exorbitant housing prices, long lines at Space Mountain. 

With each business departure, the Golden State is a touch less crowded. Meaning there’s slightly less traffic, slightly less demand for housing, slightly more tee times available. Of course, there’s even less tax revenue too. Which could lead to one of two things, either Sacramento figures out how to use the revenue that’s left a lot more efficiently or they raise taxes on The Leftovers. 

One thing I know for sure. After 48 years, my brother is starting to get comfortable in California. He’s a kite surfing, paddle boarding machine with sand in his house and a year round tan that’s really annoying. He’s not going anywhere.

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