My Favorite Person? Place? Thing?

3/6/2017

With Randy Cohen: PersonPlaceThing.org

The invitation was an honor – to be interviewed by Randy Cohen on his radio/podcast show, PersonPlaceThing.

Everybody knows Cohen, the original Ethicist in the New York Times magazine, who set such a high bar of being informed, quirky and timely. Now he produces his own show, asking people to discuss their favorite person, place and thing.

His invitation included a podcast of his interview with Judy Collins.
On the same list as Judy Blue Eyes? Count me in.

Cohen’s show took place at the beautiful library in Port Washington, L.I., in front of friends, neighbors and family, facilitated by the ever-personable Jessica Ley.

For my choices, I could have gone stone serious but I decided to omit family, religion and politics. Better to go with the first answers that popped into my head – stuff that sustains me, at this stage in my life, outside my deepest ties.

Cohen did a great job editing nearly an hour of banter into a tight 25 minutes but I do have a footnote to each category:

Person: The tense original first chapter to which I refer is about a confrontation between Confederate soldiers and two teen-age brothers on a road leading to Gettysburg. The famous editor was flat-out wrong to cut it. The author was right. That scene, now restored, sets up the entire novel.

Place: I love my adopted home town but I also love my home borough of Queens. Living half an hour east is about as far as I can stand. That helps explain my choice.

Thing: Cohen’s subtle editing cut out the fact that he is far more accomplished than I am with my chosen implement. I have immense respect for his weekend jaunts.

Nuff said. I’ll be proud if anybody wants to listen and respond in Comments.
* * *
The link to the show:

http://personplacething.org/episode-161-george-vecsey/

The show will also be broadcast in New York on Tuesday at 1:30 PM on WNYE, 91.5 FM, and more broadly Friday night at 10:30 PM across WAMC Northeast Public Radio. You can also download it free at iTunes.

Altenir Silva

3/7/2017 05:35:51 am

Dear George,
Loved it. I didn’t know you were a bike-man. Great! I liked about Ella Fitzgerald’s story. Great chat.
Best - Altenir

George Vecsey

3/7/2017 12:49:34 pm

Dear Altenir: Thanks for listening to the interview. I don't know how Ella came to be on the audio -- but I am now conditioned to listen for her. We've been there 30-40 times in the past five-six years. It is so familiar. Now they seem to have the occasional Indian film, also. No idea how this very cool place comes to exist. But it does. Best, GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

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