Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of May 17, 2021
Hello! First newsletter after finishing the PhD and it feels…. weird? Like I have no idea what to do with my life? Anyway, in the Bay for another month or so, so if anyone has recs for the bucket list, please send them this way!
Good journalism/Cool shit
The J&J Rescue Mission Starts With a Choice
On the J&J vaccine:
As vaccine supply starts to exceed demand in the U.S., researchers and health workers across the country are steeling themselves for what could be a rough rescue mission. A vaccine that’s thought of as “shitty,” experts told me, has little chance at being seen as truly equitable, and some of them worry that J&J’s product has already been snared in that trap.
“I think it’s going to be hard to dig our way out,” Abraar Karan, an internal-medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told me.
The key couple of passages:
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is not, experts repeatedly told me, a “worse” vaccine. Among the three options available to Americans—Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and J&J—“the best vaccine you can get is the one you can get in your arm as soon as possible,” Chrissie Juliano, the executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, told me.
But J&J’s vaccine is undeniably different, and its portability and convenience have prompted health departments to shuttle it into distinct populations, such as incarcerated individuals and people experiencing homelessness. In practice, this may be contributing to some unintended stratifications. David Lazer, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, told me his team has collected data showing that Black people are almost twice as likely to have received the J&J vaccine than white people, a disparity that doesn’t seem to be accounted for by preferences alone.
The hustle to allocate J&J immediately raised questions about whether America’s “problematic” vaccine was being earmarked for communities who are already distanced from medical resources and disproportionately pummeled by the virus, says Rachel Hardeman, a health-equity expert at the University of Minnesota. That stigma rapidly began to reinforce itself. In early March, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan rejected a batch of J&J doses, saying that he wished to provide his residents with only “the best” vaccines. One physician told me that she’d received calls from reporters asking her to comment on J&J “being the poor person’s vaccine.” “There’s this undercurrent of tension,” Taison Bell, a critical-care physician at the University of Virginia Health System, told me. Many of the populations described as good J&J candidates “feel, rightfully so, that they receive second-rate care.”
This challenge, even if it has more to do with public perception than the vaccine’s intrinsic quality, can’t be dismissed: If people believe the vaccine is inferior, “that’s just as important as reality when people try to make healthy decisions for themselves,” Bell said.
And what the future of choice might look like:
An infrastructure of choice is now supporting the vaccine rollout among people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, where close to 70,000 people are without stable housing. Heidi Behforouz, the medical director of Housing for Health, told me that her team has delivered doses to more than 3,500 people living in shelters or on the streets in the past three months. Most received the Moderna vaccine. The shot is cumbersome to trek into encampments, but with the help of specialized coolers and a vigilant follow-up protocol, “our second-dose return rate is about 93 percent,” she said. (The national average, meanwhile, is about 92 percent.) The team added J&J to its repertoire in early April, just days before the pause, and plans on offering both brands to all of its patients. [The Atlantic]
Rebekah Jones, the COVID Whistleblower Who Wasn’t
I suppose there’s a first time for everything, but this National Review (!) article was extremely good. (And I only know this lady as the person who kept bullying Emily Oster [leave Emily alone!]) [National Review]
Sports hot takes
Loved this story on Shaq. Some great quotes:
After Brown’s clinic in Wildflecken, the LSU coach felt a tap on the shoulder. Turning around, his eyes grew wide and … OK, now this is where legend turns to lore. In the original telling of this story, published by the Associated Press in 1988, a 13-year-old Shaquille O’Neal stood about 6 feet 4. By the time Sports Illustrated published its version of the story in 1991, that same 13-year-old Shaquille was up to 6 feet 6. When it was written multiple times during his rookie season with the Orlando Magic in 1993, young Shaq was reported to be 6 feet 8. When Shaq himself retold the story on “The Players Tribune” podcast in 2020, he was suddenly up to 6 feet 9…
Stammering and nervous, young Shaquille asked Brown for some tips on strengthening his legs and improving his jumping ability. He complained he couldn’t dunk yet. Looking him up and down, Brown asked, “What rank are you, soldier?”
Shaquille, ducking his head, replied, “Coach, I’m 13 years old.”
“I was in a hallway sometime before tip-off when I saw this monster walking toward me,” says former UTSA assistant Gary Marriott, “and I said out loud, ‘Who in the f— is that!?’ Burmeister comes over and tells me this is Shaquille O’Neal. He says, ‘Look at this kid! We gotta get him!'”
And finally, just imagining him leading the line for our national soccer team:
He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in April 1989: “I don’t mind all the attention because I could be in Germany playing soccer and nobody would know anything about me.” [The Athletic]
The Night the Bugs Came for Joba Chamberlain
This would’ve been better as an oral history, but it’s still pretty great. [The Ringer]
Lucas Giolito Changed His Delivery, And Pitchers Around MLB Are Following His Lead
And a second baseball article! This one about pitching delivery. [FiveThirtyEight]
Health, politics, and academia
The 'Handmaiden of Trump': How Elise Stefanik Went From Moderate to MAGA
I think this is really interesting on a transformation of someone (relatively) moderate to a hardline Trumper (h/t Anirudh). [Time]
Survivors Stuck in Limbo as PG&E Fire Victim Trust Pays Out $50 Million in Fees
Absolutely insane.
A KQED investigation found that while they waited, a special Fire Victim Trust in charge of compensating survivors racked up $51 million in overhead costs last year. During that same period, the Trust disbursed just $7 million to fire victims – less than 0.1% of the $13.5 billion promised – according to an analysis of federal bankruptcy court filings, court transcripts and correspondence between staff of the Fire Victim Trust and the victims themselves.
During its first year of operation, the Trust spent nearly 90% of its funds on overhead, while fire victims waited for help, KQED found. [KQED]
On new pre-K research (with much bigger sample sizes):
Let’s start with the negative results: The Boston students who won the lottery did not do noticeably better on standardized tests in elementary school, middle school or high school, according to the three researchers, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Parag Pathak and Christopher Walters. These findings are consistent with the mixed evidence on Head Start.
But test scores are mostly a means, not an end. More important than the scores are concrete measures of a student’s well-being. And by those measures, the students who won the lottery fared substantially better than those who lost it.
The winners were less likely to be suspended in high school and less likely to be sentenced to juvenile incarceration. Nearly 70 percent of lottery winners graduated from high school, compared with 64 percent of lottery losers, which is a substantial difference for two otherwise similar groups. The winners were also more likely to take the S.A.T., to enroll in college and — though the evidence is incomplete, because of the students’ age — to graduate from college…
How could pre-K have these positive effects without lifting test scores? It seems to improve children’s social and emotional skills and help them mature more than it helps in a narrow academic sense, the researchers told me.
The findings are a reminder of how complex a process schooling is. We can’t simply give up on test scores. Measurement and accountability are vital parts of education, just as they are with most human endeavors. Without them, society ends up tolerating a lot of mediocrity and failure. But measurement often needs to be nuanced to be accurate. [New York Times]
With Hugs and Haircuts, U.S. Epidemiologists Start Returning (Carefully!) to Everyday Life
My main takeaway: epidemiologists continue to be extremely extremely risk adverse. [New York Times]
Is Brett Kavanaugh Out for Revenge?
I think this article doesn’t really tell me much, but I’ve certainly had the same thoughts about Kavanaugh perhaps being not that conservative, but also because of his confirmation, having no reason to ever shift left. [The Atlantic]
Music
St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique
This is a quietly brutal beatdown of a review. I love it.
Such themes and their associated aesthetics—gray-day vibes, harmonic in-betweenness, psycho-thriller strings—can create a powerful sense of intrigue. But they can also leave listeners cold. Over the years, St. Vincent’s serrated instrumentals and spooky imagery have hinted at untamable urges, yet her robotic rhythms and melodies could seem overly eager to tame them. At least, that’s how I’ve often felt. One surprise of the recent interview-related backlash was in realizing how many other people felt mystified by the acclaim she’s received over the years. An ugly strain of resentment—the kind you typically see people nursing toward more in-your-face celebrities—even seemed to be floating around. “Killing an interview,” one popular tweet reads, “is the most interesting thing St. Vincent has ever done.”
Daddy’s Home, upon first listen, seems like it might impress her critics…Yet with repeated listens to Daddy’s Home, a familiar hollowness sets in. The album imitates stoner kookiness but never gets extreme enough to feel all that trippy. Prog-rock sounds dress up four-minute fables rather than fueling wilder exploration. Lyrically, St. Vincent strings together bits of poetry that, with a few exceptions—the seething “Down,” the wistful “... At the Holiday Party,” the show tune “My Baby Wants a Baby”—end up amounting to emotional beige. As for her father’s story, she doesn’t push into reckoning, revelation, or vulnerability. The greatest insight she offers comes at the end of the title track, when she sings, “We’re all born innocent / But some good saints get screwed,” and, “All good puritans / They’ll pray about reform.” Those lines mix vividness and vagueness, like many of St. Vincent’s lyrics have, but the wider context means that the mystery created is not exactly a productive one.
Maintaining a sense of personal privacy remains a wise thing for artists to do. But in terms of art and songwriting, declining to go deeper or broader—or more specific or more vulnerable—does not make St. Vincent a fascinating resister to a culture of exhibitionism and sloganeering. It simply makes her album a frustrating listen. “I wanna be loved!” she cries on the opening track, but some deep-seated musical and lyrical caginess gets in the way of connection…In a rare moment of risk taking, St. Vincent confesses to finding her own work facile in comparison: “Me, I never cried / To tell the truth, I lied.” Lied about what? She doesn’t need to say, but she also can’t banish—even from herself—the suspicion that mystery is cheaper than meaning. [The Atlantic]
Et cetera
Quintin Jones Is Not Innocent. But He Doesn’t Deserve to Die.
I enjoyed this essay in the Times, which echoes some of my thoughts as well (and is a good way of thinking about the death penalty). [New York Times]