If you need a wake-up call, here it is: My husband was on a large conference call of American med school deans last night. One asked about legal coverage for pulling people off ventilators to give to others more likely to survive. I.e., not being charged with murder. Here we are.
My mom just said to me, "We're all going to get it now, so why not just give up and go back to normal?" So this is what I explained, in case this explanation helps you:
1/n
I'm not asking you to stop your life. I'm asking you to mask-up, avoid the vulnerable, be careful. If you're infected, isolate. SLOW THE SPREAD. Our front-line medical providers need us to do this to save lives, including people with non-covid crises. Thank you. 9/n
The National Association of Manufacturers is the largest manufacturing association in the United States, representing small and large manufacturers in every industrial sector and in all 50 states. It's suggesting Pence invoke the 25th Amendment.
The National Association of Manufacturers: "Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy."
via
@shopfloornam
So the reason not to say "screw it, let's just unmask and go back to normal" right now is to try to....flatten the curve. I know that's an expression from way back when, but it applies. We need to slow down infections to keep hospitals from collapsing. 6/n
If hospital systems collapse -- and this is already happening in some ERs/ICUs -- then people with survivable medical crises like heart attacks and car accidents are going to die when they didn't need to die. We don't want that scene! 7/n
Added to the challenge is that you really DO have to take infected hospital staff out of rotation, even if the staff are not really feeling very ill, because people in the hospital with, say, bad cancers/pregnancy, need to be protected from infection. They are very vulnerable.4/n
My kid just told me that at his house (dorm) at Univ Chicago, they randomly assign themselves teams to root for in the Super Bowl because most of them have no idea who the teams are.
So, weird as it sounds, we have to try to slow the spread if we can, knowing Omicron is crazy infectious. Slowing the spread will slow how many unvaccinated and vaxed-but-vulnerable people end up in the hospitals. Slow the spread. 8/n
All this means that hospitals are at the breaking point. Staff are being pulled out. Patients are surging in because a small percentage of a lot of infected people is still a lot of people. This is bad. 5/n
I spent a while last night on the phone with someone who is pretty well known and being cancelled in a way that will destroy his life. I hadn't heard of him before he reached out to me with a note that made me worry he was suicidal. 1/n
But because Omicron is SO infectious, there is going to be a huge surge in terms of absolute numbers of people who need hospitals. We are already seeing that. 3/n
So I tweeted something in which I had the position of JK Rowling wrong, and for that I apologize. I was fooled by something that looked like it was quoting her but wasn't, and I feel stupid for making that mistake. Her position is stated clearly here
Yes, Covid will now find almost everyone, and almost everyone vaccinated will be okay. Only a small percentage of us will need hospitals. (More unvaccinated than vaccinated will need hopsitals, but still only a small percentage of all of us.) 2/n
Bad-ass and beautiful!
"We hacked printers all across Russia and printed this PDF explaining that Putin/Kremlin/Russian media is lying and then we instructed how to install tor and get around their censorship to access real media."
What are you supposed to do when a hundred students show up to protest someone you're pretty sure isn't you? (A blog about my visit to
@WellesleyFP
last week)
Everyone deserves due process. Title IX at many universities has been broken a very long time. I had a horrific experience in the early 2000s when a colleague was falsely accused. Have seen much ridiculousness since. This is NOT a partisan issue. Justice matters for everybody.
And I said to myself, as I pictured myself throwing another beached starfish into the sea, walking along a shore filled with beached starfish as far as the eye can see, "Well, maybe I saved that one." /fin
Apparently last night there was "counterprogramming" for students who found my reappearance at
@WellesleyFP
traumatic. Candles, coloring books, and chill music were offered. Had I known in advance, I would have sent them a couple of pans of brownies, to help out.
I feel like someone should remind the Republican party that, when you have to break up with someone with narcissistic personality disorder, they will try to destroy you on the way out.
Ed Wilson was not just a scientific great, he was a moral great. Here are a few pages from "Galileo's Middle Finger," excerpting the conversation I had with him about being attacked.
The National Association of Manufacturers: "Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy."
via
@shopfloornam
My mother: "Do what they do in Poland -- have 3 cloves of garlic for breakfast. It doesn't do a damn thing for the virus but it keeps people away from you."
I find the messaging of AOC's dress bizarre. She participates in what is basically an obscene display of wealth but tries to be cute about it? Reminds me of a snobby bourgeois Harvard professor who visited my grad program and kept yelling at the waiter while espousing Marxism.
Do not erase intersex people
Do not erase feminine gay men
Do not erase butch lesbians
Do not erase trans people
Do not erase gender nonbinary people
Do not erase bigendered people
Stop insisting sex is simply dimorphic in humans because these realities make you uncomfortable.
Every single fellow progressive academic I have referred to
@TheFIREorg
for help, FIRE has helped. For free. Effectively. No other organization helps on free speech as fast, as effectively, or as blindly towards political orientation.
Within just the last year, FIRE used the First Amendment to successfully vindicate the rights of college students in Iowa to advocate for marijuana legalization, and in Illinois to pass out flyers attacking capitalism. /6
Me: So,
@petersagal
says I have to stop running until my runner's toe heals itself.
The mate: Didn't I tell you the same thing?
Me: Yeah, but you're just a doctor, and he's Peter Sagal.
Why do people think you must EITHER believe sex is real OR honor transgender people and their rights? I believe sex is real. (That's why surgery on sexed parts can hurt.) I also believe in honoring people's gender identities and expressions. (I support consented surgeries.)
I asked him to tell me his story. I know the importance of getting people who are traumatized to turn their chaos into a narrative as it helps with healing. (Thanks, Art Frank, "The Wounded Storyteller," and
@JonathanMAdler
for that insight.) 2/n
I'm going to admit I've been so buried in a bond analysis I completely missed the attempts to burn
@sapinker
at the stake. I thought when I joined academia, I would be free of the church, free of the requirement to adhere to the dogma of those with power. I was wrong.
I told him, "Don't listen to that voice that says, 'If I kill myself, THEN they will be sorry.'" Because they won't be, and you'll be dead. And he said he had thought about just that. (We all have.) 5/n
"Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances"
"'The scariest one I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,' he said."
Just got rejected for another thing I applied for. Lodging this not for sympathy -- just so folks know something I learned from E.O. Wilson -- it never does get easier. Good work is worth doing even when you keep getting rejected.
I remember one time I asked a colleague to walk me back to my hotel at a conference and he expressed skepticism that the city we were in was unsafe. So, as we walked I narrated for him how I saw the walk back, as a woman. Pointed out the creepy stuff. The dark alleys. The stares.
@S_h_e_e_n_a_
I got them from a photojournalist friend. He explains: "I was taking photos and video during recovery efforts in NJ following Hurricane Sandy (2012). A shuttered Catholic high school gym was serving as a meal station for first responders. These were hanging on the wall."
Just your daily reminder, if you find yourself wanting to be angry at the unvaccinated who are getting really sick, that there are many forces of disinformation and misinformation that are extremely persuasive. Try to understand that, and try to maintain compassion.
This article made my skin crawl. We aren't going to end up with good doctors by letting undergrad pre-meds pass organic chem because universities want to protect their US News rankings. Gah!
So I bought a friend a large
@DoorDash
gift card b/c her family is dealing with a hospitalization that is complex and exhausting, and they took my money but didn't give her the card. I've been DM'ing with
@DoorDash_Help
and they've now disappeared. Do me a favor and "like" this.
I don't acquiesce, but I do get frustrated, exhausted, depressed, and lonely standing up sometimes. So this award means a *lot* to me. Thank you,
@HdxAcademy
and see you all tonight!
Institutional pressure and potential career damage will intimidate most people into acquiescence. But not
@AliceDreger
, which is why we are awarding her the first-ever HxA Open Mind Award for Courage.
At the end he said a deep thank you. I said, "Dude, one of us is going to bed tonight NOT actively being destroyed AND with the great feeling of having helped someone. That would be me. So thank you." 8/n
Then I told him the survival strategies. I told him his world will become and MUST become much smaller, for example. I told him how to draw on the person he was - the strong one - to take care of himself. That he DESERVED that care. And to read the Tao (Mitchell's esp.
#9
). 4/n
Then I pushed him with questions designed to make him cry (to crack), but we both ended up weeping, as often happens for me in these conversations. To hear someone who is realizing their identity is being destroyed -- it is brutal. 3/n
This is what I want to reiterate:
Sex is not gender.
Do not judge people by the color, shape, or history of their skin.
Please judge them by their acts, but:
Try to see elements of yourself in others before declaring anyone an enemy.
Be kind.
Have compassion.
Please.
"The fucking librarians came for me with pitchforks and torches, man!" I said. I told him I thought I would NEVER laugh about that, but now I laugh about that. I suggested he get a new career as an archivist and let me in, cause no one else will. 7/n
It's interesting that now that I'm older, and men look at me differently, I feel safer. Sleeping in hotels feels a lot easier to me. No wonder so much social progress happens through the actions of women who hit middle age.
So I'm going to throw this out there and then go on a twitter vacation for obvious reasons. I don't see how using "their" as the default pronoun for everyone (singular) respects everyone. It seems as troubling to me as when we were supposed to use "his" for "everyone."
Then he asked me how long it had been since my experience and I burst out laughing and told him I'm constantly being cancelled. I told him about the archivists and we were laugh-crying together. 6/n
Well, you guys, my kid graduated from high school today. This is the high school where, in his freshman year, I live-tweeted his abstinence sex ed class and everything went crazy. Today he's an investigative reporter with me
@eastlansinginfo
. In Sept. he starts physics
@UChicago
.
I get why people don't want horrid stereotypes in the books read to children. But I always thought part of my job as a parent was to navigate that and actually talk about it with my kid as he grew up - the stereotypes of mothers, and of children, for example.
Cop: Do you know why I stopped you?
Me: I was speeding..
Cop: That's refreshingly honest.
Me: Well, it's my first ticket, and I've definitely deserved many more.
Cop: You're kind of odd.
Me: Yeah, I have a problem with honesty. I over-use it.
I can't believe how disoriented I feel by the idea that we're about to have a president who is going to acknowledge the 400,000 who have died. The absence of national grieving has been eerie and emotionally confusing.
Still grateful to Arnold Lobel, author of "Frog and Toad," who taught me to start every to-do list with "Make list." Because when you're done making the list, you immediately get to cross the first thing out. And you feel productive.
People think because I criticize progressives I'm not one. I wish they'd get the most important work we can do is questioning and critiquing the people we generally agree with. Loyalty is intellectual death.
I am so very pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of The Journal of Controversial Ideas, on whose editorial board I have the honor to sit.