Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Silent-Reading Party (The Stranger)

Image: uncredited

[ed. I don't know whether to feel heartened or depressed. Strange times.]

Bruce

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Sylviane Girard
via:

St. Vincent

The Ultimate Guide to Instant Noodles

As a semi-professional noodle slurper and collector, I’ve eaten hundreds of noodles in my life, but I have a particular soft spot for one type, specifically: the instant kind. You know, those hard squiggly bricks of dried, fried noodles with accompanying seasoning packets that have long been the foundation of the American collegiate diet. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been showing off my impressive collection of instant noodles to my friends on FaceTime like a YouTube beauty guru flaunting their makeup stash.

I love instant noodles for many reasons: They have a nearly indefinite shelf life; they are an easy breakfast, snack, or — with the right bolstering — a full meal; and, they come in a panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, and colorful packaging styles. But while there is nothing wrong with eating instant noodles according to the instructions, it’s their versatility that’s made me a devoted fan. Here’s how to mash-up, deconstruct, and upgrade the dorm room staple.

1. Load up on protein

Yes, many instant noodles come with their own packets of dehydrated vegetable or meat flavoring, but they rarely provide much real taste and add zero in the way of texture. Supplementing your own additional proteins will do a lot to make your instant noodles more satisfying and nutrition-rich. Try simple items like ground meat, sausage, tofu, and leftover fried chicken — or my personal favorite ramen topping, pork char siu. Meat shortage got ya down? Just crack an egg. You can stir it right in to create an egg-drop soup effect, or poach the egg gently in the soup broth to enjoy breaking the creamy yolk.Chicken-flavored ramen with garlicky sautéed kale, roasted chicken legs, and carrots.

2. Go big with toppings

Going nuts with the add-ons at ramen restaurants can mean spending $30 on a bowl of noodles (toppings normally cost between $1 and $3 each.) But at home, you can have as many toppings as the inventory of your fridge’s produce drawer allows: scallions, corn, mushrooms, kale, you name it. Not sure about what to do with all those weird greens in your CSA farm box? Add them to your instant noodles! Fact: There is no such thing as a lousy topping for instant noodles.

3. Deconstruct everything

Each element of the instant noodle package is a multi-purpose cooking superstar. The seasoning packets add a pop to stir-fried vegetables. Broken into bits, the uncooked noodles are an excellent crunchy topping for a salad or even another non-instant pasta dish. Do yourself a favor and add some ramen seasoning to mac and cheese, or how about using those instant noodles to make buns for an at-home ramen burger?

4. Switch up the liquid

To deepen the character of the soup, try cooking the noodles in vegetable or chicken broth instead of plain water. There are plenty of wilder recipes out there, including this one I’m skeptical of that uses milk, but homemade stock is a safe jumping off point.

5. Mash-up different styles

Mixing different instant noodle styles and seasoning packets is a culinary art form in itself, and can have big payoff. Jjapaguri (also called ram-don), the famous dish from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, is actually just a hybrid of two different kinds of instant noodles — Neoguri and Jjappaghetti — and has become one of Korea’s national dishes. The magic comes from the mixing of Neguri’s spicy seafood powder with Jjappaghetti’s savory black bean powder, which ignites a lethal umami bomb. But jjapaguri is just the start. Try mixing Neoguri and curry noodles to create an exuberant, spicy curry broth. Combining super spicy noodles with something cheesy is also 100 percent never a bad idea.

The Ones to Know

Here, then, are some of the best instant noodles to stock up on, categorized by whether or not they’re “brothy” (the noodle soup kind) or “saucy” (brothless noodles with a separate sauce).

BROTHY

MyKuali Penang White Curry Noodle

If you love Penang curry, try adding this noodle to your cart. These wildly popular Malaysian instant noodles are considered some of the best in the world on this heavily opinionated ranking. Three whole flavor pouches — one of them is a paste — make for a deep, coconut-y taste and hearty portion size that you rarely get from instant noodles. Add toppings like fried tofu or prawns.

Neoguri, Spicy Seafood Udon Noodles

Neoguri, a Korean word for raccoon dog (neither a raccoon nor a dog; discuss), has been my top choice for ramen since I started slurping noodles at the age of three. This beloved Korean instant noodle is known for two things: thick udon-like noodles and a spicy seafood broth with actual dried seafood. It’s fantastic with any fishy topping or add-ins.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup

Shin Ramyun might be the very first Korean instant noodle brand, as well as one of the easiest to find internationally: I still remember the exciting moment when I found Shin Ramyun in a random gas station in Alabama. It’s known for its spicy broth, and doubles as an excellent noodle for Korean ramen beginners. Top this with a slice of American cheese to tone down the spice and pump up the greatness.

Prima Taste Laksa Coconut Curry Lamian Noodles

This Singaporean instant noodle inspired by traditional laksa has a paste sachet that can and should be used for stir-frying vegetables, too. The noodles are rounder and less wavy than others, and the white powder adds the signature creaminess.

Mama Noodles

Thai cooking doesn’t shy away from acid, and neither do these Thai instant noodles, with just the right balance of acidic and salty flavors. The wavy noodles and the powdery seasonings make a great snack — though it may not be hearty enough to be a standalone meal. Beef it up with a hard-boiled egg and other vegetable toppings, like scallions.

Sapporo Ichiban Tokyo Chicken Momosan Ramen
Think Japanese shoyu ramen, in instant form: salty, slightly smokey, and clean tasting. It’s great with plain old white-meat chicken breast — which is hard to say about anything, really.

Paldo Gomtang Oriental Style Noodles with Beef Soup Base
Not all Korean instant noodles are spicy! This mild, creamy Korean noodle soup is inspired by gomtang, or beef bone broth. It has an intense beefiness and is excellent with hearty greens like cabbage or scallions. Add some ground beef to make it more filling.

SAUCY

Nongshim, Jjapaghetti (Noodle Pasta with jjajang Sauce)
“On Sundays, I’m the chef for Jjapaghetti” has been a Korean catchphrase for more than a decade. A combination of two dishes — jajangmyun (black bean noodles) and spaghetti— this saucy Korean instant noodle is also what spurred the ram-don trend after its crucial role in Parasite. The accompanying savory black bean sauce is all it really needs, though I highly recommend a luxe drizzle of truffle oil, too.

Indomie Mi Goreng Instant Stir Fry Noodles
If you haven’t tried this Indonesian instant noodle, stop what you’re doing and fix that immediately. The package comes with a liquid seasoning mix of savory onion-flavored oil, sweet-spicy chili sauce, and sweet soy sauce, creating a salty-and-sweet coating for the wavy noodles. Any optional toppings like grilled steak or boiled eggs are just gravy.

by James Park, Eater |  Read more:

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Pacific Voyages

After shutting down Buck’s Restaurant my wife Margaret and I got down to the serious business of home defense from our redoubt in the Santa Cruz Mountains by making a half dozen stuffed dummies out of our old clothes from the 70s (‘look out, you vicious hoards, we have hippies on guard!’) and lashed them to the parapets of the hastily erected stockade, armed them with wooden muskets, posted the “Danger—rabid dogs with stainless steel teeth” signs (much to the pups amusement as they lolled about drooling and snoring on the couches) and battened down for the eventual zombie apocalypse

We then inventoried our 21 bags of flour and wondered whose job it was to pick up the yeast. In reality we are off the grid as we have been for 43 years. I realized I have been predicting the apocalypse for decades and thank god I’m finally right. Please send me likes.

And so, I launch Pacific Voyages which is a series of vignettes about mostly obscure islands of the Pacific which populate this ocean most abundantly.

So just sit back and take a break from the end of the world and travel with me to the ends of the world.

The Pacific, with its amazing history, is now going to be my main focus until the cows come home and if they do the dummies, vigilant at the ramparts, will probably shoot them anyway.

I’ll tell you about a French island named Clipperton. A place you have never heard of relatively near California.

And of course I will cover Pitcairn, where the Mutiny on the Bounty folks went and where their descents (at last count 58 of them) still live. They are among the least fun folks I have encountered. Certainly it’s one of most remote places to live. Half the population of the men alternate spending time in Australian prisons for pedophilia and then they switch with the other half because they need at least 10 men to launch the boat to the supply ships.

And I will discuss Ball’s Pyramid. This is an extremely narrow 1,844’ tall rock. It is only here that the third largest bugs in the world live in obscurity.

So trust me when I say I will take to places you will most likely never go. In any case this is a vacation from the cares of the world with not a wiff of virus. Just watch out for malaria, beriberi, blackwater fever, typhus, cannibals, murderous mosquitos, sharks, sea urchins, saltwater crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, political shenanigans, white bread with Spam and wildly overpriced pina coladas.

Behold, the world of mostly boring places awaits.

by Jamis MacNiven, Pacific Voyages |  Read more:

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[ed. For example: Gravina Island (Alaska).]

Trump Administration Moves to Ease Rules for Hunting Bears and Wolves on Federal Lands in Alaska

Two federal agencies this week took steps to increase hunting and trapping on several national preserves in Alaska and in the popular Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

The moves drew alarm from conservation groups who said the new rules will support extreme measures to kill predators and their young in national preserves in Alaska. They said a proposed rule change would allow brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for the first time.

Alaska leaders praised the changes, and hunting groups and a tribal consortium said the new rules will support sport and subsistence hunters in the national preserves.

The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in separate statements that their actions are designed to align federal and state law.

In the broadest action, the park service announced a final rule that will roll back 2015 prohibitions, adopted under President Barack Obama, affecting hunting and trapping in national preserves in Alaska.

The agency manages 10 preserves in the state, including at Denali National Park and Preserve, where the preserve lies west of the park.

Park lands would not be affected by the new rule, the agency said. The new rule should be published in the Federal Register at the end of the month, said Peter Christian, a spokesman with the agency in Alaska.

He said the new rules are designed to allow hunters to take:

• Black bears, including cubs and sows with cubs, with artificial light at den sites.

• Black and brown bears over bait.

• Wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the denning season.

• Swimming caribou.

• Caribou from traveling motorboats.

“These harvest practices would be allowed in national preserves where authorized by the state of Alaska,” Christian said.

In a statement, Defenders of Wildlife called the plans part of an “onslaught” against wildlife by the Trump administration. They allege that the state wants to increase game populations by driving down carnivore numbers, and they say the federal changes are meant to support that effort.

“The Trump administration has shockingly reached a new low in its treatment of wildlife," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife. “Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane.”

by Alex DeMarban, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Bob Hallinen /ADN archive
[ed. Unbelievable.]

Nonessential Work

I have always been a dutiful reader. For most of my adult life, the question of what I want to read has never seemed as the urgent as the question of what I am supposed to read. Which means that, even now, I’m still basically the college freshman I once was, diligently crossing titles off the mental checklist that only ever grows longer. As with many compulsions, the reasons for this sense of obligation are mysterious to me. But I suppose I must at some point have believed that literature was a deeply important human experience, one that I could help foster by becoming an English professor. If I sound unsure, it’s because I have struggled lately to believe in the mission to which I have devoted myself.

I wish I could blame COVID-19 for my loss of faith, but I know it dates back further. Tasked with acting inspired, moved, transported by literature in front of roomfuls of students on a weekly basis, I have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to summon the requisite emotions. In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether literature really is worthy of devotion or whether I have just been conning myself and—with mixed results—my students. When, several weeks ago, all nonessential workers were asked to stay home, I felt a pang of self-recognition.

And yet, ironically, since the classes I was teaching at the time continued, I was also in a position where I had to urge my students to keep reading. I had to ask them to find a relatively quiet place in their crowded apartments and sit at their computers discussing what they had read. Why was I insisting on this? What purpose did it serve? One student told me he still had to go to the construction site where he worked, but everyone was trying to stay six feet apart. Another informed me that both her parents were sick, and she had been instructed to remain in her bedroom indefinitely. I expressed sympathy and then turned the conversation back to the text. “Stay safe, everyone!” I announced at the end of our Zoom session, “and don’t forget to read through chapter four.”

Since my whole family is now home all the time, I need to sequester myself in my son’s bedroom to get any work done. Through the door, I can hear him doing his math in the living room, arguing with my wife, food being eaten, dishes being done, news on the radio announcing fatality rates. I’m teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for my American Novel class, which I’m excited about because A) it’s a book that’s never before failed to revive my sense of the world as worthy of awe and wonder and B) I’ve taught it already and I know I can get through it quickly and return to all the other things I need to do.

I read:

One evening that summer we came into the kitchen and Sylvie was sitting in the moonlight, waiting for us. The table was already set, and we could smell that bacon had already been fried. Sylvie went to the stove and began cracking eggs on the edge of the frying pan and dropping them shoosh into the fat. I knew what the silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses.

It’s a perfect passage for people trapped inside their apartments staring out their windows. Yet I am unmoved. I’m alarmed to discover my old underlinings practically gouged into the page. I remember spending an evening with the lights turned off to see what it was like. I look at my notes and find the following: “Idle chatter closes us off from the world. Robinson’s trying to capture the condition of silence, but she needs to put words on it. So the meaning of some of these moments resides in the silence after we finish the sentence.” I sit in silence after I finish the sentence, waiting for the epiphany to arrive. It doesn’t. The sentence is just syllables strung together. Have I lost my capacity to feel literature?

Then I do what I’ve always done as a dutiful reader—move on to the next book on the syllabus. In this case, it’s Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum. I’ve never read it before, so I have to pay much closer attention than I did to Housekeeping. I feel guilty devoting several hours a day to reading, but in a kind of fight-or-flight reaction to all the pressures around me, my attention rivets itself to the text. I don’t find it extraordinary. But I do begin to feel the effects that reading literature carefully can have on me. My mind composes itself; the oxygen seems to reach deeper into my body; the world relaxes its grip.

Erdrich’s novel is about a drum made by a Native American man broken by his wife’s desertion and his daughter’s death. It’s about lives going off track and then sometimes righting themselves. It’s about how the labor of crafting well-made objects can be therapeutic, but also what happens when those objects are taken from the communities they are meant to serve. The cast of characters is large and initially confusing, but on my fourth day of reading I start to see how their storylines are going to converge. While I find the slow process of tracking the various characters’ journeys toward resolution almost hypnotically satisfying I also begin looking forward to the final page, to that moment of culmination that well-designed novels are sometimes able to produce when everything feels connected, when the end recalls the beginning, and when I briefly seem to experience the whole thing all at once. Ideally, after I’m finished, I’ll get that strange post-reading high, that feeling of being both outside and inside my own life, like my quotidian experiences have assumed a novelistic shape, like I’m revisiting this particular afternoon from the afterlife, free of all the worry and dread that prevented me from appreciating it the first time around.

But I don’t quite make it. (...)

At first I am annoyed. The narrator’s voice suddenly sounds trite, too eager for uplift. But then it occurs to me there might be another reason I’m resisting her experience. Contemplating a sacred object thought to heal and redeem those who come into contact with it, she admits she cannot say, “I believe, I am convinced.” Is it possible I identify too much with her? The source of the drum’s power, Erdrich suggests, is precisely the conviction of those who “come together around it”—a conviction inspired by the drum but also responsible for its transformative influence. Might there be an answer here to my own dilemma? If I had conviction, in other words, would literature magically regain its power?

by Timothy Aubry, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Ojibwa drum ca. 1875, Detroit Institute of Arts
[ed. As mentioned earlier, A Gentleman in Moscow is a great book for these tough times.]

Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement

There is a script to life that most of us have internalized, whether consciously or not. It’s in many of the most beloved fictional stories, and—from the outside, at least—it looks like the lives of successful people tend to follow it as well. It is often called the hero’s journey, or the monomyth.

The 19th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor was the first to identify the hero’s journey in literature. As he showed, many great adventure stories throughout history follow the basic formula. This is true from the Bible’s story of King David to Star Wars today. You can think of it as having three parts. The first is the call to adventure, where the hero-to-be is stimulated to act in some bold way, usually to meet a daunting task—say, fighting Goliath, or the Empire. The second is the ordeal, in which the hero is brutally tested and has to beat long odds—such as vanquishing a giant in battle or blowing up the Death Star. The third is victory, where the hero wins against these odds and returns home, triumphant.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that successful people tend to see their own lives through the lens of this myth. “He is no hero who never met the dragon,” Jung wrote. “Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.” Jung sounds like an egg-headed Tony Robbins there: Want to be a winner in your career? Then live your own hero’s journey—set your goals, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, win, and return victorious! The End.

It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.

Of course, some people enjoy retirement, but since I have been writing about happiness later in life, many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored. In search of—well, they’re not quite sure what—some have made bad choices, tanking their marriages (leading to what social scientists call “gray divorce,” which doubled in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015) or making stupid business decisions they don’t think they would have made when they were still employed. One person told me, “Since I quit working, I feel like a stranger to myself.”

The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.

by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Jan Buchczik
[ed. See also: 4 Rules for Identifying Your Life’s Work; and Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think (The Atlantic).]

Memory in a Time of Quarantine

Our memories make us who we are, subconsciously driving our behaviors and dictating how we view the world. One of the most interesting things about memory is its imperfection. Rather than serving as a precise record of past events, our memories are more like concocted reflections, filtered and distilled from pure reality into a personal brew that is formulated by our own unique physiologies and emotional backgrounds. The wholly unique universe we each create—separate from but still tethered to the actual universe—is the product of electrical signals zapping through the lump of fatty flesh inside our skulls. Biology gives birth to something that exists outside the boundaries of biology.

The neural machinery involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of memories is coming to light in labs across the world, but science has not yet solved this particular puzzle. In this issue, you’ll read about talented researchers who use modern tools such as optogenetics and genome editing to probe the biology underlying memory. In lab animals, these scientists can force the recall of memories at the flick of a molecular switch, implant false memories, and erode a real memory to the point of vanishing. Through these studies and others, perhaps science will one day robustly characterize memory’s biological nuts and bolts. But will we ever truly understand, and perhaps directly manipulate, the personal reality created by each individual’s brain?

What scares me most at this juncture in world history is how the COVID-19 pandemic will live in the memories of those affected by it. The patchiness of the current global predicament will dictate our individual familiarity with the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. Some will remain largely unscathed by illness, many will feel the economic pinch of societal lockdowns, many will also lose friends or loved ones to the virus, others will succumb to it themselves. No one will emerge unchanged.

Memories living within the survivors will mirror the array of individual experiences. For many, traumatic memories of the pandemic—whether that be illness from the virus or any of the hardships that come along with social isolation and the global economic downturn—will become uninvited guests, intruding on the daily business of living. On the opposite end of the spectrum, with any luck, many young people living through this reality will recall this period of their lives with a hazy bemusement. “Remember when we were kids, and we got to stay home from school with Mom and Dad for months on end?” Again, the mountain of memories that will accrue in this complicated time will not faithfully record the events now unfurling. Rather, they will form smudged reproductions of the difficulties we are all grappling with. Those memories, and the behaviors they drive, will linger, perhaps for generations.

The scientific enterprise is currently front and center. Millions around the world are counting on researchers and clinicians to pull us from the darkness of this pandemic, as dozens of drugs and vaccines make their way through development and organizations around the globe work to distribute accurate tests that can track the spread of the disease. And this is only the first battle. In the months and years to come, those of us who survive this episode will again call on healthcare providers and scientists to rescue us from the mental and physical aftereffects of the pandemic. For the foreseeable future, the world will need science and medicine more than ever before in recent history. And we will need humanity in equal measure.

by Bob Grant, The Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Andrzej Krause

Michael Ramirez
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Labor of Love

If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that people will watch any old dating show under quarantine, no matter how staggeringly dumb it is. So with that in mind, Fox’s Labor of Love will probably end up as the biggest hit of the summer.

Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.

In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.

Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)

It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.

The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Fox

[ed. Hard to believe the concept of "entertainment" has sunk this low.]

Georges Braque, The Aquarium
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via:

When All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Starts Looking Like a Dance

Everyone is hoping for a definitive solution to coronavirus. A vaccine, or a good antiviral, or a test + trace regimen so well-coordinated that it stops the virus in its tracks.

Suppose that after X years, we realize there is no definitive solution. We are faced with the choice of continuing restrictions forever, or lifting the restrictions, letting lots of people die, and getting herd immunity the hard way. What then?

If we lift the restrictions, the same number of people will die as if we had never instituted any restrictions at all, and also we will have wasted X years. We will have gone X years with millions of people poor and unemployed, millions of others locked in their houses and unable to have fun – and it won’t have saved a single life.

If there’s a 50% chance of a definitive solution in one year, is it worth staying locked down until then? What about a 25% chance in five years? 10% chance in ten years? If there is never a definitive solution, are we willing to stay locked down forever?

Also: if a lockdown lasts a long time, what’s the average R0 during that phase? One possibility is that it’s less than 1, in which case the virus will “die out” locally (although it probably won’t go extinct smallpox-style – too much opportunity for other countries to reinfect us). Another possibility is that it’s more than 1, in which case lockdown isn’t working and we get continued exponential growth ending in lots of deaths and eventual herd immunity.

Is there a possibility where R0 is exactly 1? Seems unlikely – one is a pretty specific number. On the other hand, it’s been weirdly close to one in the US, and worldwide, for the past month or two. You could imagine an unfortunate control system, where every time the case count goes down, people stop worrying and go out and have fun, and every time the case count goes up, people freak out and stay indoors, and overall the new case count always hovers at the same rate. I’ve never heard of this happening, but this is a novel situation.

If that were true, right now we’re on track to gain herd immunity in 30 years. This would be another worst-of-all-worlds scenario where we have all the negatives of a long lockdown, but everyone gets infected anyway.

Sing, O Muse, Of Arbit-Rage

There’s a morbid joke about the news, which goes something like:

10,000 Africans in a famine =
1,000 Chinese in an earthquake =
100 Europeans in a plane crash =
10 Americans in a terrorist attack =
1 pretty white girl getting kidnapped

(if you want to go a different direction, you can add “= 0.1 black people murdered by cops”)

Coronavirus has killed about 100,000 Americans so far. How bad is that compared to other things?

Well, on the one hand, it’s about 15% as many Americans as die from heart attacks each year. If 15% more people died from heart attacks in the US next year, that would suck, but most people wouldn’t care that much. If some scientist has a plan to make heart attacks 15% less deadly, then sure, fund the scientist, but you probably wouldn’t want to shut down the entire US economy to fund them. It would just be a marginally good thing.

On the other hand, it’s also about the same number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War plus the Korean War plus 9/11 plus every school shooting ever. How much effort would you exert to prevent the Vietnam War plus the Korean War plus 9/11 plus every school shooting ever? Probably quite a lot!

Maybe part of this is that heart attack victims are generally (though not always!) older than 9/11 victims, so the cost in DALYs is lower. But the bigger problem is that there’s no arbitrage in the market for lives. Some normal good, like Toyota Camrys, sells for about the same price everywhere. There might be minor variations based on how far you go from a Toyota factory or something, but overall you wouldn’t expect the same Camry to sell for ten times as much in one city as another. Someone would arbitrage – buy the Toyotas in the cheap city and sell them in the expensive one! But the same reasoning fails when it applies to lives. Life has no single value denominated in dollars, attention, or outrage. So when we search for metaphors to tell us how bad 100,000 deaths from coronavirus are, our conclusion depends entirely on what metaphor we use. “It’s like 15% of heart attacks” sounds not-so-bad, and “it starts with the Vietnam War and gets worse from there” sounds awful, even though they’re the same number. There’s no way to fix this without somehow making all our intuitions collide against each other and equalize, which sounds really hard.

Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal.

On the other hand, the US spent about $5 trillion on the Iraq and Afghan wars. Even optimistically assuming this helped prevent some terrorism, it’s a no-brainer to say we should have accepted the cost in terrorist attacks and spent it on stricter COVID lockdowns instead.

Is spending resources on the coronavirus lockdown a good idea? A good idea compared to what? Compared to using resources efficiently, goodness no, not at all. Compared to putting the resources in a giant pile and setting them on fire, yes, definitely. Compared to usual practice? Usual practice basically involves alternating betwen the two previous options inconsistently; the answer depends on how long we spend in each category. At this point, we are too incompetent for questions about our preferences to even make sense.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Pebble

A proposed mine in Alaska will endanger brown bears – and much more (The Guardian)

Image: Acacia Johnson

No, We’re Not All in This Together

Quarantine fatigue is bringing an end to our lockdown, whether we’re ready or not.

All 50 states now are reopening, no matter what’s going on with the virus. This anxiousness to get back to regular life and work, which you can feel bursting on the suddenly crowded streets of Seattle, may have been baked into the timeline centuries ago, when the word “quarantine” was coined by the Italians.

It’s a mashup of “quaranta giorni,” or “forty days.” Wednesday marks Day 58 we’ve been cooped up since the March 23 shutdown order. No wonder we got restless.

The good news is that, in King County, which had the first confirmed death in the nation in February, the virus has been driven down to near-suppression levels. On Sunday, the county reported just 31 new cases of the virus. That’s the lowest daily case figure since March 7, back when there was also far less testing being done.

Keeping the virus down now as we reopen would require testing, tracing and isolating the new cases. It’s a level of control and follow-through that probably isn’t in our DNA. But 31 cases is getting low enough that isolating the virus becomes at least theoretically possible.

The flip side can be seen only 140 miles away, in Yakima. It’s a real-time rebuke to the coronavirus cliché that “we’re all in this together.”

Yakima County, one-ninth the size of King, had 82 new cases Sunday. Two days prior, it reported 122 new cases. It now has a case rate of more than 1,000 per 100,000 residents, the highest of any county on the West Coast and three times the rate of King.

In the last few days, nearly half of all the new cases reported in the state were in Yakima.

The Yakima outbreak was clustered at first in nursing homes, like here, but is now running through agriculture and fruit-packing plants. The health officer there said the spread there versus relative containment elsewhere is because two-thirds of the jobs in Yakima are considered both “essential” (such as the food industry) and hands-on (can’t be done remotely).

“We’re a little bit of a model of what it looks like when you have a lot of the population going off to the workplace,” Dr. Teresa Everson told The Seattle Times. “We never got to low mobility.”

Sixty-four percent of the infected people are Hispanic or Latino. Some of the Latino neighborhoods have case rates up to 2,300 per 100,000 — five times the U.S. average, and nine times the state rate.

Due to all this, the farmworkers, many of them seasonal migrants, made a reasonable request that they not be clustered together into big bunk-bed farm dormitories at night. But the state decided to allow the bunking of workers in groups of 15 (even as the rest of us technically have been advised not to gather in a group of any size, even while outside).

The state’s rule “not only defies science, they defy basic human rights,” said the Latino Civic Alliance of Yakima.

Despite that, on Monday the workers were being told by some to quit complaining and man up to the virus.

“Return to work,” read a sign, in Spanish, on a car roaming past lines of protesting migrant workers, as reported by the Yakima Herald-Republic. “Your fear is the virus that is attacking our civil rights. Free yourself!”

Yeah, you there, the poorest, most marginalized people in the state. You be the tip of the spear.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Ray/Yakima Herald-Republic

The Sickness in Our Food Supply

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.) The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.

On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry. Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying. This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.

When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.

Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.

The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.

Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.

Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal. Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.

Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.

by Michael Pollan, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Ellie Foreman-Peck

Amber Mark

Louis, Louis

Over at The Cut, New York magazine’s ode to the stylish and sexy set, there are stories of couples considering open relationships and pro tips on “How to Whiten Your Teeth at Home” (and your skin, your apartment, yourself. . .). But the other day, I found a somewhat startling headline there. The famed fashion brand Louis Vuitton, fervently adored by those who like to showcase their status on various airport concourses, had manufactured and donated 2,500 face masks to workers at New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The masks given to the MTA, where nearly a hundred workers have lost their lives during the pandemic, another article pointedly clarified, are plain, not adorned with the company’s valuable logo.

I imagined this odious scene in my head. How had the masks been sent over to the MTA? Was there a ceremony, featuring a small gaggle of exhausted workers, an over-eager Vuitton public-relations manager, some MTA boss awoken from his work-at-home slumber? Or were they just mailed over in a large box with Louis Vuitton as the return address? I wondered why the masks were not adorned with the brand name—surely the expert artisans of repurposed Vuitton factories could put a little logo on them? I imagined the rehearsed response that would fall from the nude matte lips of a working-from-the-Hamptons publicity doyenne: “Well, the pandemic is so tragic,” she’d intone nasally, “we didn’t want people to think that we are using it as a publicity thing, or to push a secondary market for masks.”

Except that Louis Vuitton is using this moment (as are Chanel and Armani and Kate Spade and Ralph Lauren, for that matter) to do just that; they flash with a flourish the company’s caring heart. The logo on the masks would make them valuable beyond their functionality, maybe even make them (gasp) fashionable, and we all know that fashion of that high-end, snobby sort does not belong on the faces of poor MTA workers. Sharing some small bit of its billions in profits is kindly and socially responsible; giving away its logo to working stiffs is cheapening its brand.

The Vuitton caper represents the conundrum that luxury fashion brands face in this time of tragedy. Chanel, which has also allegedly repurposed its factories to make masks and protective gowns, survived World War II with a tarnished reputation. Its survival was ensured largely because Coco Chanel, the company’s namesake, became an eager agent for the Nazis. Even as she peddled her suits and gowns during the War, Chanel cozied up to a top officer in German military intelligence, happily moving into the Ritz Hotel and passing information she gleaned from her uppity and ever style-conscious French friends on to the Germans.

Louis Vuitton’s mask-donation publicity stunt is not equal to colluding with the Nazis, but it is a hypocritical effort to create the pretense of a “company conscience” where none exists. Bernard Arnault, a lover of diamonds who heads up LVMH (the company that owns Louis Vuitton) is the richest man in France. His company is valued at $166 billion; he recently gobbled up Tiffany for $16 billion. But Arnault, the mask stunt tries to say, also has a heart of gold, a desire to tend to the needs of the MTA. This caring story is the one Vuitton wants to tell.

The truth happens to be different. Vuitton’s bid for good publicity underscores just how hard it is going to be for luxury fashion brands to contort themselves into the tight moral constraints that are likely to dominate consumption in the post-Covid-19 world. Gone are the days when impossibly thin New York women could put on a Chanel suit that cost a small mountain of credit card debt and lay rightful claim to the snobbery that came with it. Similarly lost will be admiration for the branded tchotchkes that heiresses and style mavens flashed with some deliberation every chance they got.

There is research to show just how terrified the fashion industry is of all this—and of one other more important and crucial consequence of the pandemic. A report published by McKinsey & Company mentions something called “a quarantine of consumption,” where consumers already driven away from luxury brands and toward those that promise sustainability and fair labor practices will now turn away altogether and for always. Boasting about a $6,000 pair of Louboutins may have brought awe and envy to the suburban mother in the “before” times. In the after-times it just reveals a craven let-them-eat-cake sort of callousness.

Trend forecasters agree. “The virus, I think, can be seen as a representation of our conscience . . . it brings to light what is so terribly wrong with society and every day that becomes more clear,” said Li Edelkoort. “It teaches us to slow down and change our ways.” This change of ways bodes ill for all the discretionary spending that brand-boasting Americans and more crucially the jet-setting Chinese have promoted in the post-2008 recovery. With “discretionary” spending drawn into the realm of ethical consumption, a fashion brand must now signal not only style but virtue.

And so it happens that Louis Vuitton, never before concerned with anything New York’s MTA workers need or do, has to make masks for them. The hope is that websites like The Cut, which seems to have branding conundrums of its own in the post-Covid moment (like the blackly comic juxtaposition of Covid casualty numbers next to the thirteen best eye creams), will run articles on it along with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and perhaps Vanity Fair. The handing out of masks, the repurposing of factories, all the luxe brands hope, will make fashion look good, where good (revolutionarily for fashion) means actually virtuous rather than simply beautiful. If there is any embarrassment to be felt about the multi-billion-dollar LVMH handing out a few thousand masks through Louis Vuitton, it has been ignored.

by Rafia Zakaria, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: The Baffler