2023
I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.
How to help friends and employees living with long Covid cnn.com
We had our bathrooms remodeled in 2017, and I have finally figured out how to work the light switches in my bathroom.
I was a gifted child.
Why Did Men Stop Wearing Hats? gentlemansgazette.com
The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for Covid-19.
An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving Covid patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.
— Patricia Mazzei, nytimes.com
Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.
In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.
Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.
It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?
Funny, insightful, and moving.
By Paul Murray. nymag.com
Margaret Atwood: “The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you. Compendiums of this and that are very useful for bathroom reading: small reading packages within a larger book. You wouldn’t want to read War and Peace in there. You’d never come out. They’d probably call the police and get the door broken down.” wikipedia.org
“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”
— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com