Last March, scientists announced that Mr. Castillejo, then identified only as the “London Patient,” had been cured of H.I.V. after receiving a bone-marrow transplant for his lymphoma. The donor carried a mutation that impeded the ability of H.I.V. to enter cells, so the transplant essentially replaced Mr. Castillejo’s immune system with one resistant to the virus. The approach, though effective in his case, was intended to cure his cancer and is not a practical option for the widespread curing of H.I.V. because of the risks involved.
March 9, 2020
"This is a unique position to be in, a unique and very humbling position. I want to be an ambassador of hope."
Said Adam Castillejo, quoted in "The ‘London Patient,’ Cured of H.I.V., Reveals His Identity" (DNYUZ).
"It’s been a spiritual exercise in letting go. You paid for season ticket on the subway, now you realize..."
"... subway travel is the surest way of getting the disease. You have a subscription to the gym, the gym is closed. So is the cinema. Your tickets for concerts and football games are useless. Your children can’t go to school. Or university. Even mass is canceled.... Two weeks ago, when the first restrictions came in — banning all kinds of gatherings and closing pubs, though not actually restricting our movement — we were sure they’d overdone it. A cafe owner in downtown Milan told me angrily that one of the best weeks of the year had been blown: carnival, Fashion Week. Hoteliers complained of 90 percent cancellations. Then we saw the number of infections shoot up.... But inevitably the virus is bringing a new awareness that we all share the same physical space, Milan, Italy. We really live here, and we sink or swim together... I sense a new spirit of unity. The fallout for the economy will be huge. But paradoxically the government is very likely to be strengthened.... One suspects that when, God willing, the emergency is over, there will be those who will not want to relinquish this newfound power and the sense of identity and responsibility it brings."
From "This Is Life Under Lockdown in Italy/Your tickets for concerts and football games are useless. Your children can’t go to school. Even mass is canceled" by Tim Parks (NYT).
From "This Is Life Under Lockdown in Italy/Your tickets for concerts and football games are useless. Your children can’t go to school. Even mass is canceled" by Tim Parks (NYT).
"The coronavirus is putting remote work to a gigantic test, and at a totally unprecedented scale."
"Throughout China, Italy, Japan and South Korea, workers have been on lockdown. Last week, the same happened in Seattle. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all told employees there to remain home.... In fact, remote work isn't always possible. Fewer than half could do so at least some of the time, according to one Gallup survey. Hourly workers don't get paid if they don't work, and those in retail, manufacturing, or health care usually must be physically present to work.... 'I don't believe people are as productive at home'...."
From "Laundry Between Emails: Working From Home Goes Viral In The Time Of Coronavirus" (NPR).
From "Laundry Between Emails: Working From Home Goes Viral In The Time Of Coronavirus" (NPR).
"A comprehensive new study from two law students at Yale shows that routinely granting argument time to the solicitor general is a recent and curious phenomenon."
"The study asks the provocative question of whether giving the solicitor general this preferred position makes any sense. 'What we’re asking for is really for the court just to apply the same standard to all amici, whether they’re from the solicitor general’s office or not,' said Darcy Covert, who conducted the study with A.J. Wang. 'In cases where the connection to the federal government is particularly tenuous and the motivation for the solicitor general entering the case may be ideological, in those cases he certainly shouldn’t be getting oral arguments.'... Starting in 1988, though, the office’s success rate started to rise, reaching almost 100 percent. From the beginning of the term that started in 2010 through the end of the one that began in 2017, the court granted just eight of 26 motions for argument time from amici other than the solicitor general, the study found. During that same time, the court granted 252 of 253 such motions from the solicitor general."
From "The Supreme Court Has a Special ‘Friend’: The Justice Department/A new study questions the court’s practice of automatically granting argument time to the solicitor general as a 'friend of the court'" by Adam Liptak (NYT).
ADDED: The occasion for paying attention to this topic seems to be the Solicitor General's argument in an abortion case last week. The NYT article begins with a statement about that case — there were 70 amici who submitted briefs in that case but only the Solicitor General got to make an oral argument to the Justices (who may delegate reading these non-party briefs to their law clerks). Later, the article notes that the federal interest in this case about the constitutionality of a state law is "not obvious." The SG only offered to provide "the federal perspective":
It seems to me that it's much better to routinely grant the SG's request than to base the decision on which side the SG supports.
From "The Supreme Court Has a Special ‘Friend’: The Justice Department/A new study questions the court’s practice of automatically granting argument time to the solicitor general as a 'friend of the court'" by Adam Liptak (NYT).
ADDED: The occasion for paying attention to this topic seems to be the Solicitor General's argument in an abortion case last week. The NYT article begins with a statement about that case — there were 70 amici who submitted briefs in that case but only the Solicitor General got to make an oral argument to the Justices (who may delegate reading these non-party briefs to their law clerks). Later, the article notes that the federal interest in this case about the constitutionality of a state law is "not obvious." The SG only offered to provide "the federal perspective":
The motion noted that the solicitor general’s office had taken part in arguments at the last big abortion case, during the Obama administration in 2016, but it neglected to say that it had supported abortion rights in that case. In last week’s argument, Jeffrey B. Wall, a deputy solicitor general, argued in favor of a state law restricting abortions. If he was offering “the federal perspective,” that perspective had shifted with a change in administrations.And, I suspect, the NYT perspective on routinely granting the SG oral argument time has also shifted.
It seems to me that it's much better to routinely grant the SG's request than to base the decision on which side the SG supports.
Death comes for Max von Sydow.
The great Swedish actor was 90. From the NYT obituary:
Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, in southern Sweden.... He was said to have adopted the name Max from the star performer in a flea circus he saw while serving in the Swedish Quartermaster Corps....Did he really name himself after a flea?! From a 2012 interview (in The Guardian):
For all his connection to the land of his birth and of Bergman, Sweden became distant to Mr. von Sydow.... "I have nowhere really to call home... I feel I have lost my Swedish roots. It’s funny because I’ve been working in so many places that now I feel at home in many locations. But Sweden is the only place I feel less and less at home."
Is it true he named himself after a flea? "Ha ha ha!" booms Von Sydow, his laugh filling the room. "Yes! Ha ha ha! During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'"Ah, so it was not an actual flea "in a flea circus he saw," as the New York Times put it. He himself was in a show playing a character that happened to be a flea.
A flea circus is a show on a tiny stage that has real fleas performing (or tiny imitation fleas):
The first records of flea performances were from watchmakers who were demonstrating their metalworking skills. In 1578, Mark Scaliot produced a lock and chain that were attached to a flea. The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto advertised an “extraordinary exhibition of industrious fleas” on Regent Street, London. Some flea circuses persisted in very small venues in the United States as late as the 1960s....Here's Charlie Chaplin with his flea circus in one of my all-time favorite movies — "Limelight" (which I'll put up as a meditation on death alongside "The Seventh Seal," so please make that your double feature):
"Trump is going to try dampening black voter enthusiasm for Biden by contrasting the two men’s criminal justice records."
"The framing will be simple: Trump signed a bipartisan criminal-legal reform bill, the First Step Act, and has been generous with his pardon powers toward unjustly imprisoned black people, like Alice Marie Johnson.... ...Trump’s status as a self-styled reformer is laughable, [but] Biden’s record is grotesque. Most of its lowlights occurred in the 'tough on crime' 1980s and 1990s... [when] he viciously characterized people who commit crimes as sociopathic 'predators' who are beyond rehabilitation. He cast then-President Bush’s escalation of the War on Drugs as lacking 'enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.' He authored the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act [that]... expanded the death penalty, eliminated education funding for imprisoned students, created harsher sentencing guidelines for a wide range of crimes, and increased funding for local police departments and corrections departments.... Perhaps more than any other official of the era, he embodied the Democratic impulse to outflank Republicans from the right by locking more people in jails and prisons. He helped catalyze the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. He said he was 'not at all' ashamed of his involvement as recently as 2016...."
From "On Criminal Justice, Biden Has No Moral Standing Over Trump" by Zak Cheney-Rice (New York Magazine).
... the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country... — I don't think I'd ever seen the word "carceral" before — "the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country." But it's a word that the OED traces back to the 1500s. It means what you can easily see it means — relating to prisons. Nabokov used it in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1960), describing the opening of a prison door: "... suddenly the key scraped in the lock and the door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." That is, opening the prison door sounded exactly like opening a prison door.
ADDED: This magazine essay is larded with assurances that Trump is awful on criminal justice too, so it's only that Biden will have trouble gaining an advantage here. Biden can't get "moral standing over Trump," but why doesn't Trump have moral standing over Biden?
From "On Criminal Justice, Biden Has No Moral Standing Over Trump" by Zak Cheney-Rice (New York Magazine).
... the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country... — I don't think I'd ever seen the word "carceral" before — "the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country." But it's a word that the OED traces back to the 1500s. It means what you can easily see it means — relating to prisons. Nabokov used it in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1960), describing the opening of a prison door: "... suddenly the key scraped in the lock and the door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." That is, opening the prison door sounded exactly like opening a prison door.
ADDED: This magazine essay is larded with assurances that Trump is awful on criminal justice too, so it's only that Biden will have trouble gaining an advantage here. Biden can't get "moral standing over Trump," but why doesn't Trump have moral standing over Biden?
March 8, 2020
"Several Madison alders are sponsoring the resolution creating the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Murals and Crossings Art Pilot Program, which would install LGBTQ+ inclusive rainbow flag markings..."
"... at pedestrian crossings on the Capital City Trail and near the Capitol Square.... 'It would be a reminder to residents who see it that the LGBTQ community is an important part of the fabric of Madison, especially given that we have a lesbian mayor and many other queer people in positions of power'" (Capital Times).
Why should the street be painted to remind us of who's in a position of power? I would not paint anything political on the street. Let the street be a street. It doesn't need to talk to us, especially not to nudge us about what we should believe or value.
Why should the street be painted to remind us of who's in a position of power? I would not paint anything political on the street. Let the street be a street. It doesn't need to talk to us, especially not to nudge us about what we should believe or value.
Sunrise — 7:12 a.m.
The actual sunrise time today was 7:22. The 2 other sunrise photos — 1, 2 — I've put up this morning — much oranger, less pink — were done at 7:27. Here's a longer view of the sky at 7:12:
Today's was one of the best sunrises I've seen in my 6 months of sunrise. It was excellent through a 20-minute period during which it changed a lot. If there's a good level of cloud cover — this was, I think, about 34% — then be there 15 minutes before the actual sunrise time or you'll miss the prettiest part. Today's sunrise was special because there was enough cloud cover to make the sun itself photographable after it came into view. That's how I got those pictures 5 minutes after the actual sunrise time. It was the longest window of opportunity I've seen so far.
I also discovered a new trick for photographing the sunrise on an iPhone. To keep the sun from blowing out the picture, touch the sun on the screen and it will reset the lighting.
"A few months before he died, in 2018, [Philip] Roth told me in an interview that he never intended his book as a political allegory. But by then, with the Trump administration in full swing..."
"... he agreed that the parallels between the world he invented and what was happening in contemporary America were hard to ignore: a demagogic president who openly expresses admiration for a foreign dictator; a surge of right-wing nationalism and isolationism; polarization; false narratives; xenophobia and the demonization of others."
From "‘The Plot Against America’ Imagines the Rise of an Intolerant Demagogue/David Simon has translated Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate history novel into an HBO mini-series, Simon’s first literary adaptation" by Charles McGrath (NYT).
From McGrath's 2018 interview with Roth:
From "‘The Plot Against America’ Imagines the Rise of an Intolerant Demagogue/David Simon has translated Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate history novel into an HBO mini-series, Simon’s first literary adaptation" by Charles McGrath (NYT).
From McGrath's 2018 interview with Roth:
ROTH: However prescient “The Plot Against America” might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. Lindbergh, historically, was the courageous young pilot who in 1927, for the first time, flew nonstop across the Atlantic, from Long Island to Paris. He did it in 33.5 hours in a single-seat, single-engine monoplane, thus making him a kind of 20th-century Leif Ericson, an aeronautical Magellan, one of the earliest beacons of the age of aviation. Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.
"The people from Hopewell Township who crashed on our road sued Cessna for—as I understood the complaint—not making a cockpit of sufficient structure to withstand the forces that injured them."
"I was subpoenaed to testify. There would be a deposition in my office in East Pyne Hall, on the Princeton campus. My office was not a boardroom. It sorely lacked space for me, two lawyers, and a court stenographer. We were crowded in there for upward of an hour, and I learned early on that I was meant to testify but not to tell a story. I was bubbling mad. How could anyone even imagine suing Cessna for Cessna’s role in the crash? As the court stenographer tapped along, I tried to say as much, but was quieted by the lawyers as my words were inserted edgewise. This seemed to be a story to tell, to investigate, to amplify, to enrich with detail about flight rules, liability law, aircraft design, women priests, women rabbis, and varying portraits of one subject by sixteen writers, but beyond this brief outline the disparate parts of 'The Airplane That Crashed in the Woods' seemed as resistant to the weaving and telling as they had been with an audience of two lawyers and a court stenographer."
From "Tabula Rasa/Volume One" by John McPhee (in The New Yorker). This is a collection of "saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project, the purpose of which is never to end" — modeled on Mark Twain's "old-man project," his autobiography.
I chose the snippet above because it says something apt about the difference between how writers and lawyers process the raw material of life. But I'm interested in the overarching concept of the "old-man project" (and I, an old woman, am fine with the way old man McPhee didn't bother to include old women in the concept).
From a 2013 New Yorker article about Twain's book:
From "Tabula Rasa/Volume One" by John McPhee (in The New Yorker). This is a collection of "saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project, the purpose of which is never to end" — modeled on Mark Twain's "old-man project," his autobiography.
I chose the snippet above because it says something apt about the difference between how writers and lawyers process the raw material of life. But I'm interested in the overarching concept of the "old-man project" (and I, an old woman, am fine with the way old man McPhee didn't bother to include old women in the concept).
From a 2013 New Yorker article about Twain's book:
Its forbidding size and freewheeling structure have puzzled and infuriated generations of researchers who have descended into the archives, hoping to find a finished memoir and instead discovering ten file feet of musings, interspersed with letters and newspaper clippings. Twain insisted that his sprawling memoir not be published until a century after his death, in 1910, so that he could speak freely about everyone and everything. But he couldn’t resist publishing excerpts in the North American Review before he died. And, in the decades since, more has trickled out as editors have waded through Twain’s papers to uncover pieces that they considered worth publishing.McPhee's idea of the "old-man project" is that it's a way to stay alive, so it's not just long and sprawling. It's impossible to finish. That's the idea. I get it. It's like blogging.
Amy slips... and it seems she's revealing that she's Biden's VP choice.
{ WATCH }— Mikenzie Frost (@MikenzieFrost) March 7, 2020
A slip this morning by Sen. Amy Klobuchar during a campaign event for Joe Biden in Grand Rapids.
“I could not think of a better way to end my candidacy, as hard as it was to do with our beloved staff and everyone else, than to join the tick—“ pic.twitter.com/KZvzqNzkUJ
So funny... and kind of charming. I hope she is Biden's choice. I think they'll be cute together. What better way than a gaffe to reveal your connection to the gaffe-master?
Via "Klobuchar 'ticket' slip-up at Biden event in Michigan sparks speculation she'll be his VP pick" (Fox News).
AND: Let's see how Joe is doing:
This is Joe Biden at his St. Louis rally earlier today. He spoke for less than 10 minutes, and these are just SOME of the verbal errors he made. This is NOT a stutter. This is serious. @progressvoice @KyleKulinski @OrganizingPower @CANCEL_SAM @shaunking #WhereIsJoe pic.twitter.com/5zsWddwqNi— The Path Forward YT (@PathForwardYT) March 7, 2020
IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd tells the perfect joke: "Biden picked her because her hair smelled like honey mustard."
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed a bill and, when asked about it, couldn't explain why and admitted "You caught me."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
We're told that "Evers' staff" have complained about the way the legislature presents him with too many bills at once — Evers is a Democrat and the GOP holds the majority in both houses of the legislature. I guess that makes it harder to veto anything, but Evers vetoed 2 things, and you'd think he'd be able to explain why.
What is a paddle wheel raffle anyway? Surprisingly, it has to do with meat — meat and charities:
So you can see why the reporter wanted to push for Evers to explain his "thought process." Did Evers not understand what he was doing? Maybe he had no "thought process" at all or his thought process would show that he didn't understand the Wisconsin meat raffle tradition.
Anyway, I remember writing about the Wisconsin meat raffle. It was back in 2017, and I only noticed it because I saw a sign in a tavern window.
Isn't it odd that businesses were openly doing something that was a felony under state law? It's easy to imagine their thought process: Because it was done openly and traditionally around the state, people thought that whatever the law was on the books, it wasn't real. Then the state justice department began enforcing, and that motivated the legislature to change the law. But Evers vetoed the bill, perhaps not understanding that it would just preserve the tradition that had gone on even though it was — on the books — a crime.
ADDED: Writing this post, I was thinking of Tony Evers as elderly and perhaps in the kind of mental decline that we're worrying about with Joe Biden. But he's only 68. He was born in 1951, and so was I. I have a difficult time thinking of 68 as a time of mental deficiency. But maybe I have a difficult time because I really am in decline. It's like deciding to go ahead and drive when you've had a few drinks — by the way, that too is a Wisconsin tradition — you're judging whether you're impaired while you're — if you are — impaired.
Evers signed more than 60 bills on Tuesday and vetoed two related to games, including one that would have allowed any business with a Class B gambling license to hold raffles using a paddle wheel.Why did he have the answer on Tuesday but not on Thursday? I can think of a few reasons: 1. The Tuesday message was a written statement, and on Thursday, he was tasked to find the answer in his own head, 2. The Tuesday message did not represent his "thought process," which is what the reporter on Thursday asked him about, and he didn't remember or didn't want to talk about his actual "thought process," 3. Evers is not truly in charge, not making his own decisions, because why would you say "We'll get you the information on that" — we — when asked about your own thought processes?
Evers told lawmakers in a veto message Tuesday that the bill could threaten revenue the state receives from casinos owned by the state's tribal nations in exchange for exclusive gaming rights. When a reporter asked him Thursday why he vetoed the legislation, Evers said he would follow up with an answer.
"Could you take us through your thought process on that?" Michael Leischner, a reporter for talk radio station WSAU, asked at a news conference in Wausau following a bill signing ceremony. "We'll get you the information on that," Evers responded. "I signed over 100 bills two days ago and vetoed a handful of other ones — but you caught me."
We're told that "Evers' staff" have complained about the way the legislature presents him with too many bills at once — Evers is a Democrat and the GOP holds the majority in both houses of the legislature. I guess that makes it harder to veto anything, but Evers vetoed 2 things, and you'd think he'd be able to explain why.
What is a paddle wheel raffle anyway? Surprisingly, it has to do with meat — meat and charities:
In Wisconsin there is a long-standing tradition of using meat raffles to raise money for charity.... “It’s kind of a very Wisconsin sort of a thing,” said state Sen. Andre Jacque (R – De Pere)....Jacque criticized Evers for claiming — in his veto message — that the bill "could threaten the exclusive rights of Tribal Nations to conduct Class III gaming in Wisconsin." Jacque said, "In talking to tribal representatives, tribal leaders, there was no opposition because this doesn’t compete with casino gambling."
Jacque says paddlewheel raffles, which are often used for meat raffle events, are illegal even under a Class B raffle license which many non-profits use. He says recently the Department of Justice has started enforcing the rule, sending letters to various charities warning they could be prosecuted for up to a Class I felony of fostering illegal gambling -- punishable by up to a $10,000 fine.
“When people find out they’re stunned,” said Jacque. “And I think especially stunned the Department of Justice doesn’t have higher priorities right now than to crack down on our charitable groups that hold meat raffles. So this is something where, you know, Wisconsin is unfortunately discouraging something that we actually advertise through our tourism sites, our community calendars and everything else... So [the veto is] disappointing.”
So you can see why the reporter wanted to push for Evers to explain his "thought process." Did Evers not understand what he was doing? Maybe he had no "thought process" at all or his thought process would show that he didn't understand the Wisconsin meat raffle tradition.
Anyway, I remember writing about the Wisconsin meat raffle. It was back in 2017, and I only noticed it because I saw a sign in a tavern window.
Isn't it odd that businesses were openly doing something that was a felony under state law? It's easy to imagine their thought process: Because it was done openly and traditionally around the state, people thought that whatever the law was on the books, it wasn't real. Then the state justice department began enforcing, and that motivated the legislature to change the law. But Evers vetoed the bill, perhaps not understanding that it would just preserve the tradition that had gone on even though it was — on the books — a crime.
ADDED: Writing this post, I was thinking of Tony Evers as elderly and perhaps in the kind of mental decline that we're worrying about with Joe Biden. But he's only 68. He was born in 1951, and so was I. I have a difficult time thinking of 68 as a time of mental deficiency. But maybe I have a difficult time because I really am in decline. It's like deciding to go ahead and drive when you've had a few drinks — by the way, that too is a Wisconsin tradition — you're judging whether you're impaired while you're — if you are — impaired.
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