This by Jonathan Liew is beautiful:
Certainly this final felt like a turning point of sorts: a pause in hostilities, perhaps even a burying of the hatchet. “My heart is filled with joy and I’m the happiest man alive,” Djokovic said after the match, paying tribute to the crowd. He had just lost a devastating final. His tilt at immortality had come crashing down at the last. And yet it was hard to shake the suspicion that on some level, he finally had what he had always wanted.
where have you gone, Hamburger University?
I just spent a few days in Chicagoland, visiting dear old friends and my very dear son. I got a deal from Expedia and stayed at the Hyatt Lodge in Oak Brook, which used to be a hotel owned by McDonald’s as part of the Hamburger University campus. But Hamburger University is no more. (At least, not in Oak Brook.)
If you walk around the site you see immaculately-tended grounds:
And the buildings are well-kept also:
Very mid-century modern. But as you look closer you see that the buildings are totally empty:
Rather disconcerting. The property has been purchased, and its billionaire owner appears to have undisclosed plans for it. But nothing is happening at the moment, and around the edges things are starting to look a little shabby.
I think it would be an ideal location for The School for Scale. Just saying.
Eventually, all discussions about sterilizing immunity become nerdy quibbles over semantics. Clearly, not every infection is clinically meaningful, or even logistically detectable, given the limits of our technology — nor do they need to be, if there’s no sickness or transmission. (A koan for pandemic times: If a microbe silently and inconsequentially copies itself in a tissue, and the body doesn’t notice, did it actually infect?) There is, for every pathogen, a threshold at which an infection becomes problematic; all the immune system has to do is suppress its rise below this line to keep someone safe.
But that might be exactly the point. Say that sterilizing immunity is impossible, that our immune systems cannot, in fact, be trained to achieve perfection. Then it’s neither a surprise nor a shortcoming that COVID-19 vaccines, or other vaccines, don’t manage it: An inoculation that guards marvelously well against disease — offering as much protection as it can — can still end an outbreak. Life would certainly be easier if vaccines offered invincible armor, with pathogens simply ricocheting off. But they don’t, and assuming or expecting them to manage that can be dangerous. The dubiousness of sterilizing immunity is a reminder that just about any immune response can be overwhelmed, if exposures are heavy and frequent enough, Grad told me. The best we can all hope for is functional immunity, more like a flame retardant than a firewall, that still keeps bad burns at bay.
One thing I don’t understand (and I’ve read a good deal of legal commentary on this issue) about United States v. Texas: The suit says that the Defendant is “the State of Texas” and that “The State of Texas includes all of its officers, employees, and agents, including private parties who would bring suit under S.B. 8,” but what does “private parties who would bring suit” mean? As far as I can tell the United States is suing unspecified people for some envisioned future action. How is that possible, unless the government has a Precog Division I don’t know about? How is is possible for any of us who live in Texas to know whether we are among the Defendants in the suit?