3 = 1 + 1 + 1
How I found dry land after a year in a lifeboat
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re still basking in this Kirkus starred review for Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth: “An iconoclastic, romping, bull’s-eye volley at an enduring sacred cow—popular history at its most engaging and insightful.” Here’s the pre-order link so you don’t miss out, and if you want to do me a favor, please click here to send a tweet promoting the book.
This week we’re getting the jab. Robin Whetstone offers what for her is a normal day (reader, it is not) in “A Typical Saga,” and Jack Hughes cuts right to the chase with “The World Wants ‘The West Wing.’”
And as always we remember who we lost and offer recommendations on what to do (make TikTok pasta), read (Scott Galloway’s “Two by Two”), watch (It’s a Sin on HBO Max), and listen to (“Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast).
But first, have I ever told you about 3 = 1 + 1 + 1?
That’s a storytelling device that someone at work uses for presentations. Instead of leading someone through the evidence to a conclusion (1 + 1 + 1 = 3), he reverses things and starts with the big reveal, and then explains how he got there. So let me start with the news that Sonia and I got our first jabs this week. This should not have happened — we’re not old enough or at risk enough to qualify — and at first it almost didn’t. But we ended up with one foot each on land and one foot still in the lifeboat. It’s kind of a story.
Last March, we all experienced what some smart people call “collective displacement” as we digitally migrated out of the office and online. Partly this accelerated transitions already underway. I’m much more comfortable buying clothes online now. Heck, we redecorated our living room without ever going to a furniture store, but we haven’t had anyone over because of the plague. Once my friends and I get vaccinated, we’re going to hang out, shake hands, hug and generally get reacclimatized to breathing the same indoor air without worrying about dying, but I’m not going back to IKEA ever again.
This is where we are now, adrift on lifeboats that took us off Plague Island and are waiting to deliver us safely to land. This is our Dunkirk. The government was good at supporting the creating of the vaccines but suboptimal at distribution thanks to the friction generated by the interplay of federal, state, and local governments that could heat Alaska in the wintertime. On one side of the equation is a blur of government agencies, health systems, pharmacy chains, H-E-B and the Los Angeles Dodgers trying to set up vaccination stations. On our side of this wildly unbalanced equation is just you in your lifeboat. We are all more or less on our own, trying to get to safety. If this is Dunkirk, it was the French who organized it this time.
But we’re not completely alone. Last weekend Sonia got an email from one of her friends. Apparently the deep freeze in Texas left UT-Austin with some extra vaccines, and they needed somewhere to stick them. To arms! It was thanks to this friend that we got the link, and it was due solely to Sonia’s kind and patient instruction that I was able to navigate the impressively complicated website to secure an appointment at the Gregory Gym Monday at 10:40 in the morning. There was nothing asking me for my status. All I was told to bring was this QR code and a driver’s license.
I sent the link right away to friends and spent the rest of the weekend trying to imagine life without the plague. Sonia and I could go to that new restaurant down the street and actually sit inside. And that’s pretty much all I came up with. It was hard to imagine not being afraid. I struggled to accept the possibility of sitting across a table from Sonia inside a restaurant. Now, when I walk past the restaurants and see the naked-faced patrons inside, it looks like a horror movie.
One friend I sent it to agonized over getting vaccinated before his friend, a teacher, did so. He hemmed and hawed about it with his wife before his teacher friend sent him the same link. “I took this as a sign and signed up,” he said. “And I thought about hanging out with friends and planning a vacation.”
It seemed too good to be true, which it turned out to be. Apparently they did not require a password to make it easier for the senior citizens who actually qualified to sign up, and one person sent the link to a friend who sent it to a friend and so on. UT Health noticed that more people were signing up than they had sent invitations to, and word broke on Twitter that appointments made by those who didn’t get invited would be canceled.
And that meant I had to reach out to all my previously happy friends and ruin their weekends.
“Rats,” said one, who had started planning a trip for her 40th birthday party as soon as she got the appointment.
“Oh Lord,” said another. “Glad to see the vaccine rollout is going so well”
“That’s incompetence on a grand scale,” offered another.
“I mean I get why we need to do 1A & 1B first, but when you screw up like this — how do you fill the slots?” asked my friend with the teacher friend. “How are people who thought they had vaccine slots going to feel?”
The friend who had started planning her birthday trip looked into it further. “Now a friend with UT Health is saying it might be more trouble than it’s worth to cancel the appointments, so assume you have the appointment until you get a cancellation email,” she wrote.
Sonia’s appointment was cancelled via email on Sunday, the night before our appointments. Her spirits sank, but not her lifeboat. Would I step onto dry land without her? I proposed waiting until we could get jabbed together. It wouldn’t seem fair or right to me, I told her. What her response lacked in modulation it made up for in conviction that I should follow her two-step process: shut up, and get vaccinated.
This is how I ended up standing in that line on the UT Campus on Monday morning with thousands of others, many of whom obviously had qualified by dint of their age, and a ton of us who apparently had all gotten that same rogue link. The length of the line illustrated the magnitude of the SNAFU, which made the news while I was still in line.
Reports came in via text. One friend got turned away. Another got a jab. My appointment was at 10:40. I got in line at 10, dressed so badly for the cold that I pressed my hands flat against my thighs inside my pockets so my fingers wouldn’t go numb. The line moved 20 feet in 38 minutes, which is when I got my rejection email from the University of Texas. By that time I was so cold my hands hurt. To tell the truth, I was as grateful to be walking to a warm car as I was for the 21 hours I could hope.
The friend who got vaccinated felt bad for me, but her husband, a cancer survivor, had already gotten vaccinated. I was happy they could be safe on land together. I didn’t mind my lifeboat with Sonia. We’d made it this far, and I figured a couple more months wouldn’t kill me. Admittedly, that’s usually just a metaphor and not an expression of the non-zero chance of dying from the plague, but I’m not above taking comfort in the unearned connotations of a metaphoric construction.
That was Monday.
On Tuesday morning — Texas Independence Day, by the way — the friend who had been planning her birthday trip texted me a link to a vaccine center in Gatesville, a small town 99 miles away best known for having a working drive-in movie theater and the state’s death row for women.
“If you’re up for a drive,” she texted. She had discovered what others have. The polarization of the plague suppressed demand in rural parts of the state, leaving them begging for arms to jab. The signup sheet asked no questions, requiring me to tell them no lies. An appointment for Friday was quickly secured for me and Sonia.
That Tuesday was when Governor Greg Abbott flew to Lubbock to, some say, change the discussion from the infrastructure failures born of the winter storm to the plague. That he considered the latter preferable marks a change. Last May, he lifted restrictions on capacity for restaurants, bars and other businesses, causing a huge spike in the plague. A month later, he shut things down again and admitted he’d made a mistake.
"If I could go back and redo anything, it probably would have been to slow down the opening of bars, now seeing in the aftermath of how quickly the coronavirus spread in the bar setting," he said in June 2020.
If this sounds to you like he was making sense and had finally gotten his act together, you probably are not a Texas Republican primary voter. Abbott was vilified for imposing restrictions on liberty-loving Texans. Abbott’s acquiescence to scientific guidance was political sacrilege. So after a traumatic week in which millions of Texas went without heat, power, and water, the first infrastructure to get repaired was the Governor’s political base.
“It is now time to open Texas 100%,” Abbott said in Lubbock. “People and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate. …. all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100%.” (Of note, tours of the Governor’s Mansion are still on hold.)
Yee. See also: haw.
The next day, Wednesday, the Texas Department of State Health Services finally included teachers, school support staff, Head Start personnel, and child care workers on the vaccine priority list. And in case the space-time continuum seems less linear these days, let me lay this out chronologically: The Governor opened bars before he put teachers on the vaccination list, which was good because I needed a drink, but first I needed a shot.
The trip on Friday to get vaccinated was uneventful, except for the whole getting vaccinated so we don’t die from the plague part. There were forms to fill out, explanations to listen to, but no one asked me for proof I was eligible. They didn’t even ask to look at my driver’s license. They just wanted arms. Maddie, who injected me with the vaccine, said they had been doing 500 a day in this town of 15,000 or so. Now that’s up to 900. If you can explain why a town best known for lethal injections would prove more effective at vaccinating me than a world-class university, you’re smarter than I am.
But smart is not what I was after. In three weeks or so, we’ll go back. Our journey will be complete. I can see shore from here. Sonia and I can continue on from there, leaving the plague behind. We found a workaround, to be sure, but in this system a workaround can be the only way to make things add up.
A Typical Saga
by Robin Whetstone
I wonder if normal things ever happen to Robin Whetstone. If they do, I hope normalcy visits her rarely, because one of the things I love most about her writing is that, knowing her as I do, I never once doubt that she is making anything. A friend once told me the secret of how journalists make fun of people — Write down what they say and put it in the paper. That’s how Robin entertains her readers. She writes down what happens to her and lets me publish it.
The World Wants "The West Wing"
by Jack Hughes
We’re going to need stories to help us process what the Trump presidency meant to our country, which is as good an argument as any for a West Wing reboot. Jack Hughescounts the coincidences and draws the parallels in his latest contribution for The Experiment.
Who we’ve lost
This Orthodox Christian priest
This Vikings fan
This nurse
The Ritz
How we’re getting through this
Signing this petition
Making TikTok pasta
Repurposing airline food
Combatting Zoom fatigue
Stealing beer aging in sunken ships
Escaping North Korea on a handcart
Learning what makes content sharable
Doing downward-facing dog with a downward-facing dog
What we’re reading
Esquire: “'They're Walking a Fucking Tightrope and It's Perfect': How Ted Lasso Made Nice Comedy Funny” - THEY ARE CURRENTLY FILMING SEASON 2!!
It works, and it takes the viewer by surprise after a decade of the comedy of coldness. “I think we've been trained to be really cynical,” says Jon Herman, screenwriter of Straight Outta Compton and fellow surprise Lasso fan. “What was funny was people being shitty to each other, humiliating each other.” Cruelerbecame equated with funnier, meaner with more authentic; think The League and The Hangover. “It felt like people didn’t want to have any hope.”
Scott Galloway: “Two by Two” - Do you know how well something has to be written to get be pumped about investing in Goldman Sachs?!?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how tech is battling for our attention. Screens have infested our lives and we’ve become re-attached to an Orwellian umbilical cord. From fitness to dating to news to travel to investing to cooking, every slice of our day is a battleground among tech players for our monetize-able attention. Two factors drive strategy in this battle: the value of the attention that firms command, and the means to monetize that attention.
Susannah Jacob: “The Secret Life of the White House” (h/t) Jack Hughes - Surprising stuff in here that challenged my assumptions, but not the kicker, which is below:
“It’s like night and day,” the residence worker told me, describing the difference between the two families’ concern over social distancing. “The Bidens came in and the first thing they did was make a loop of the State Floor and greet the staff,” the worker said, pausing, and then beginning to cry. “We were all very flattered. Usually we meet them in the first days or first weeks, but never in the first minutes.” The Bidens went down the line, greeting the staff, some of whom spoke brief, deferential words of welcome and said that they were glad they were there. To one of the well-wishers, Biden was heard to respond, “We’re glad we’re here, too.”
Kirkus: Forget the Alamo - You can pre-order the book here!
An iconoclastic, romping, bull’s-eye volley at an enduring sacred cow—popular history at its most engaging and insightful.
Richard Nuwer: “People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up—or Keep Talking—Science Confirms” - This right here is a bone-shaking insight.
That people fail so completely in judging when a conversation partner wishes to wrap things up “is an astounding and important finding,” says Thalia Wheatley, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College, who was not involved in the research. Conversations are otherwise “such an elegant expression of mutual coordination,” she says. “And yet it all falls apart at the end because we just can’t figure out when to stop.” This puzzle is probably one reason why people like to have talks over coffee, drinks or a meal, Wheatley adds, because “the empty cup or check gives us an out—a critical conversation-ending crutch.”
Ross Ramsey: “Abbott’s Icebreaker” - Get it? Icebreaker?
The day before the governor was in Lubbock to say everything’s great and he’s getting rid of his precautionary restrictions, the head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was telling people like him to hold off. She noted that while caseloads were flattening out, variants of the coronavirus could bring another wave of the pandemic.
Michael Szollosy: “Robots were dreamt up 100 years ago – why haven’t our fears about them changed since?” - Amazing. Robots were invented as a way to express our cultural anxiety a century ago.
The European Union Legal Affairs committee in 2017, for example, adopted a legal framework on robotics that started with the Three Laws found in Asimov’s stories, and cites R.U.R. and Frankenstein. This is a testament to the power of those stories, but it is no way to start a serious conversation about how we can deal legally and ethically with robots as they exist in our world today.
Tunku Varadarajan: “The American Dream Is Alive on Mars: Growing up in India, Vandi Verma admired Spock on ‘Star Trek’ and wanted to be an engineer. Now she drives the NASA rover exploring the red planet.” - Verma is the world’s most-experienced rover driver!
“One of the most important things we’re doing with this rover,” Ms. Verma says, “is collecting samples of Mars’ core.” The rover’s robotic arm will drill the surface and collect samples the size of a piece of chalk. These will be stored, and eventually brought to Earth. “That’ll be the first time we actually bring back samples from Mars,” she says. “The technologies that would be used to study them aren’t even invented, because the samples will come back in the early 2030s. That’s what’s amazing about this mission.”
What I’m watching
Stardust, a David Bowie biopic, was awful, but Marc Maron was good.
11.22.63, Hulu’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about James Franco traveling back in time to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John Kennedy was, in fact, about Franco preventing Oswald from killing Kennedy. Other than that…
It’s a Sin is set in the teeth of the AIDS crisis in the late ‘80s, and yes, you’ll attach to characters just in time for it to hurt when you find out they died. You’ll get a phone call and hear that he’s gone, which is how I found out about my Uncle Buddy. So this HBO+ limited series is going to make you cry, but this is not all about the struggle for recognition, or the pain of rejection by society and parents, or the shame that comes with accepting one’s place in a community reviled by society. It’s a Sin is also about the joy of living a coherent life with people who love you just as you are.
What I’m listening to
The You’re Wrong About episode about bystander apathy is sterling work.
Jane Weaver is a British psychedelic singer who, at the age of 48, made a solid pop album called Flock. Check out this song, “The Revolution of Super Visions.”
Pitchfork called Wild Pink’s latest album “indie rock at its most familiar and instantly gratifying.” This music is so unchallenging it almost comes pre-chewed, but damn if my foot doesn’t start tapping.
St. Vincent has a new album coming out in May about her father’s recent stretch in prison called Daddy’s Home. Here’s the first single, “Pay Your Way in Pain.”
London’s Greentea Peng calls herself a neo-soul, psychedelic r&b singer. Her latest, “Nah It Aint The Same,” is a whole mood.
Japanese Breakfast’s “Be Sweet” sounds like a Walker Lukens track. This is about the best compliment I can bestow on a pop song. Pitchfork liked it, too.
We may be contending with grief and illness on a mass scale, but Japanese Breakfast gives us a way to resist sorrow.
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
