Ben Werdmuller is an FT subscriber:
There’s a lot to be said for reading on paper. One of my more recent indulgences has been a daily subscription to The Financial Times, which on weekdays is a sober paper that reports the news fairly objectively. On weekends it’s a different beast: in particular it includes a magazine pull-out called How to Spend It that is apparently aimed at the worst people on earth and is generally indistinguishable from satire.
Of course HTSI — which is now the actual name of the weekend supplement — is tongue-in-cheek. They’re Brits. My favorite part are interviews with old-money Zoomer scions. “Q: What do you do these days? A: My wellness company Zubeeyqyo which makes fantastic goat milk-based facial creams has recently expanded to Asia. Thanks so much to my dear friends for their support.” Brilliant.
The Forever Plague and its enemies
Halloween is nigh. This year, our eldest decided to dress up as a plague doctor, and looking through costume options reminded me of one of the worst pieces of doomscrolling churnalism that proliferated after covid. It is titled Get Ready for the Forever Plague, by one Andrew Nikiforuk, “an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more”. Of course, back in March 2020 he was just “an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades”. So it goes.
Such is the nature of echo chambers that he continues to write, putting out articles like this month’s As COVID Surges, the High Price of Viral Denial. At first glance they are meticulously sourced, a hyperlink to a peer-review journal underlining each claim:
COVID can even whittle away your intelligence. A recent New England Journal of Medicine study looked at the memory, planning and spatial reasoning of nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID. Almost all had significant deficits “in memory and executive task performance” regardless of the variant.
Alas, the linked NEJM article says no such thing. In fact:
Participants with resolved persistent symptoms after Covid-19 had objectively measured cognitive function similar to that in participants with shorter-duration symptoms, although short-duration Covid-19 was still associated with small cognitive deficits after recovery. Longer-term persistence of cognitive deficits and any clinical implications remain uncertain.
And as for the “regardless of the variant” claim:
The largest deficits in global cognitive scores were observed in the group of participants with SARS-CoV-2 infection during periods in which the original virus or the alpha variant was predominant as compared with those infected with later variants.
Crucially, the control group was people with no documented covid infection; we have no idea how covid-19 compares to other coronavirus infections, other viral infections in general, and even any illness requiring hospitalization. Staying in the ICU takes a toll regardless of what put you there, and last I checked covid has been putting fewer and fewer people in the hospital, let alone the intensive care unit.
This is a common theme for most covid-19-related research. Here, again, is Nikiforuk’s latest article:
No COVID infection is completely benign because each infection plays a role in deregulating the immune system. Even a mild infection, as one recent study noted, can increase “autoantibodies associated with rheumatic autoimmune diseases and diabetes in most individuals, regardless of vaccination status prior to infection.”
Two things here. One, autoantibodies associated with a disease do not imply a disease: I myself have had high titer for antibodies associated with Sjogren’s syndrome for more than a decade without ever having symptoms of the disease (how I found out about those antibodies is a story for another day). Two, note that the study compared autoantibody levels of three groups of people: those with long covid and persistent neurologic and fatigue symptoms (“neuro-PASC”), covid convalescents, and healthy controls with no known exposure. Ideally it would have included people with non-covid “neuro-PASC” and/or convalescents of other, non-covid viral infections. But at the very least it should have mentioned prior similar research in other viral diseases and put the findings in context of other viruses and hypothesis for autoimmunity. Presented like this, SARS-CoV-2 is a celestial bugaboo unchained from other parts of reality — no wonder that the lab leak hypothesis is so tempting!
Because there are two things that could be happening here. Either a humanity-ending event occurred somewhere near the end of 2021 and we are living a somewhat prolonged but inevitable decline in which so many people will have symptoms of long covid that civilization as we know it will end (queue “the Forever Plague”). Or maybe, just maybe, we experienced a once-in-a generation spread of a new virus — new to us but something humanity has had to deal with throughout its existence — at a time when we have the means to analyze its genome, our genome, its proteins, Kudos to the Nature group of journals for their SEO. our proteins, the cells it infects, our cells responding to the infection, the microbiome, the food, the water, the air, the animals and yes, even art. And all that without the context of other viruses and other pandemics.
The family looking forward to one last weekend at the beach, but no:
Swimming was banned at beaches in Ocean City and on Assateague Island on Sunday after used hypodermic needles and other medical waste washed ashore, authorities said.
Maryland officials closed Assateague State Park to swimming, wading, surfing or any other activities in the ocean. The Assateague Island National Seashore, which is in both Maryland and Virginia, prohibited swimming along “ALL” ocean-facing beaches, according to alerts sent Sunday. The island is 37 miles long.
Most news is noise; local news is an exception.
Here are a few unrelated articles that crossed my inbox this morning:
It’s been exactly 3 years since Norm Macdonald died from acute myeloid leukemia, which was itself a know. complication of treatment he received for multiple myeloma.
But none of that is important. Anwyay, here’s Norms last stand-up performance on Letterman.
A few links, to be filed in the “What a time to be alive” folder:
Journalists are reaching their nadir, even at FT. At best, they are misguided newly minted English majors who haven’t yet learned statistics and are easily fooled by randomness. But it shouldn’t take more than a year on the job to realize that most journalistic efforts are attempts to create a story out of pure noise, and at that point you either quit your job and start doing actual journalism, or you call yourself what you are: a professional troll.
CNN writes about Surgeon General’s advisory on parental health:
The advisory describes how mothers and fathers now work many more hours than in 1985 but also spend many more hours every week on primary child care — and that doesn’t count their total time spent with children. “Demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time,” the advisory says. The strain is even greater on parents caring for aging parents or other loved ones.
Can confirm. The advisory itself is a quick read, well worth checking out.
The FBI arrested a DC council member yesterday for taking bribes. The same council member who made the news in 2018 for saying that “the Rothschilds controled the climate”. Here is a good heuristic: if someone sees corruption, manipulation and conspiracies everywhere, odds are that they are themselves corrupt, manipulative and conspiratorial. Pure projection.
Janan Ganesh published another banger of a column this week, Beware the professional ghetto. He quotes Taleb, and rightfully so, and puts out this fascinating bit of trivia:
Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.
Fachidiocracy, anyone?