When friends in Jerusalem and the Upper West Side send the same link, it makes sense to read it -- and pass it on. Roger Angell, 98, has some thoughts on election day and citizenship.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/get-up-and-go What could be more American than an essay on voting by a hallowed member of the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame? Enjoy....and vote. http://www.joedarrow.com/sports-figures/ (The art was a bonus. I found it on line, and consider my posting it here as an endorsement for any artist who can put these three dudes in the same work.)
steve
11/5/2018 04:01:29 pm
George,
George Vecsey
11/5/2018 06:10:04 pm
Steve, thanks for the alert. I just inserted it. Must have knocked it out when I was inserting the link for the artwork. Appreciate your letting me know. Best, GV
bruce
11/5/2018 05:39:36 pm
george,
George Vecsey
11/5/2018 06:13:14 pm
Bruce, it was Paul Zimmerman, old colleague from the 60s, a cult figure to NFL fans. Big dude, played football and rugby. His father was a long-time official with the ILGWU, lefty from the 30s, met him when I was a news reporter. Paul was ill a long time. RIP. GV
bruce
11/5/2018 07:13:30 pm
george,
Brian Savin
11/5/2018 07:59:36 pm
George,
bruce
11/5/2018 08:07:03 pm
brian,
Steve
11/5/2018 08:08:28 pm
Finally read it, George. Thanks so much for posting. He's still an amazing writer. And 100% right!
Brian SAvin
11/5/2018 08:10:56 pm
I don't believe George knows anything close to as much as you claim. But I do believe you are trying to intimidate him.
bruce
11/5/2018 08:20:02 pm
brian,
Brian Savin
11/5/2018 08:27:13 pm
No, Troll, you are getting desperate. George is an extremely bright fellow who has meant much to me for decades. And you are the pretender.. You have no history. If George weren't politically important you wouldn't be involved. You don't know him. You never have. You are paid to troll this sight and other sites as well. F-bomb off, asshole.
George Vecsey
11/5/2018 08:34:42 pm
Brian, you've been a loyal reader for a long time. Your notes when I wrote the NYT sports column were reassuring.
Brian Savin
11/5/2018 08:42:01 pm
I think Ive made my point. Now call off the Troll. Thanks.
Randolph
11/6/2018 08:23:28 am
George Vecsey
11/6/2018 08:32:23 am
Randy, thanks for the note. Just a guess that your parents would have remembered FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt visiting Appalachia during the Depression and putting programs in motion. (She pushed her husband, as the great Ken Burns documentary makes clear.) Loretta Lynn told me that her daddy "thought FDR hung the moon." Later she was a Bush-ite. When I was living in Kentucky, I retraced a visit by Bobby Kennedy in 67 or 68....through eastern KY. One family had three portraits on their walls -- I used it in a chapter in my book on Appalachia, "One Sunset a Week." The portraits were: Jesus, Bobby and Elvis. Well, at least WVA rejected that criminal Blankenship in the primary. GV
bruce
11/6/2018 08:53:01 am
george,
Randolph
11/6/2018 12:35:22 pm
George, 11/6/2018 01:06:41 pm
George:
George Vecsey
11/6/2018 01:16:08 pm
Peter, I would never have associated The Babe with Lincecum but then again I am not an artist. Artists make those kind of connections -- is Darrow saying that Ruth and Lincecum were both one-offs?
bruce
11/6/2018 05:26:29 pm
george,
George Vecsey
11/6/2018 01:10:32 pm
Randy, I drove the Blue Ridge once, it was beautiful. Pulled off a few times, That stonework is gorgeous. 11/9/2018 09:55:31 am
I loved everything of Roger Angell's that I read. He always had an interesting and informative take on things. 11/9/2018 10:36:17 am
I was ten years old when FDR died. I heard the news while in the school yard playing softball and told my mother when I got home. I did not understand why my mother cried.
George Vecsey
11/10/2018 12:17:01 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/opinion/irving-berlin-god-bless-america.html
George Vecsey
11/10/2018 12:23:04 pm
Alan, Giamatti was a tough guy..had firm opinions. He also had Fay Vincent, who had been out in the world, as his cohort. They would not have had that drug mess that followed. Donald Fehr could not have gotten away with stonewalling as long as he did -- which results in an entire generation in Hall of Fame Limbo, waiting for people to forget. Giamatti hated legalized gambling -- lotteries, etc.Thought it was government endorsed degeneracy. It would have been, shall we say, different. GV 11/9/2018 10:21:47 am
On a three week driving trip through VA, SC, NC and GA, we spent four days in Ashville, NC. In addition to enjoying all the country music, we spent a day driving the Skyline Drive. 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 |