I’m reading a lot more continental philosophy lately than I ever have before (I know — I know. I know!) and been having an interesting thought about epidemiology and the practice of science that I want to share — mostly because I’m genuinely not sure what I think yet, and on top of that, I don’t really know enough yet to begin to determine what I think. The basic idea is this: epidemiology as it is taught and learned is basically a deconstructive project. This is distinct from how epidemiology functions in the social and political spheres. I will try to illustrate with an example that I am actually capable of handling — Derrida is like Beetlejuice, I’m afraid to invoke him directly too many times for fear he’ll jump-scare materialize behind me in a striped suit.

The best part of science education is the venerable institution of journal club. In my opinion, we don’t do journal clubs nearly enough, which is to say, we don’t do nearly enough close-reading of scientific texts. My original home discipline is biology; journal clubs in biology are a lot of fun. Journal clubs in epidemiology are much more rare (not surprisingly — very boring managerial discipline lurching hard into Vox-style smug irrelevance post-2020) but when they’re good, they can be really good, for a really specific reason.

The way I usually like to think about things in my field is: “data are compatible with multiple states of reality.” Developing the intuition necessary to imagine what these states of reality might be and how they might have converged to produce the data collected and analyzed in a given article is the real work of journal club — epidemiologic critique as tacit acknowledgment that there is no interpretation of a given piece of data analysis that closes the interpretive act for good, or brings the process of interpretation to a definitive end. Iterative and open-ended critique of a given journal article is supposed to excavate, like dusty buried artifacts, not only the investigator decisions (implicit or explicit) and values structuring the analysis, but also the stuff lurking out there in the “real world” that may explain a given set of findings better than the authors’ interpretation or cut against the interpretation supplied. (From the Wikipedia page on deconstruction: “Derrida refers to the — in his view, mistaken — belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. Rather… a concept must be understood in the context of its opposite.”)

There’s a lot to deconstruction and I am simply not pretending I know. I don’t know shit. Just want to be very clear about that, because a lot of what follows is over my head and maybe sounding even more addled than the rest of this post. But considering deconstruction in the technical sense, we have to consider also what the binary opposition at stake in journal club is. To my mind, it’s something like “real/not real” or “true/not true,” pertaining to the findings or overall declarative statement about what a particular paper “shows.” This opposition can never be definitively resolved or synthesized, and in fact the two sides of the binary are sort of mutually haunted by their opposites, as illustrated by the sheer number of epidemiologic findings that seem to be both true and not true simultaneously — for example, are coffee or wine supposed to be good or bad for you? What’s the consensus this week?

One of the purposes of this newsletter is to work through some theoretical materials to excavate whatever in them might be useful to developing a more sophisticated structural account of the failures of the COVID pandemic and response in the United States. To this end, I finally started reading Tony Smith's Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, a favorite recommendation of Nate's.

I don't think anybody is on the edge of their seat waiting for it at this point, but J*stin's and my planned book about COVID is not happening anymore. One of the rocks we dashed ourselves on is: what is the appropriate level of analysis of the general social structure as concerns COVID and the COVID response? He wanted to focus much more on a retelling of the Merchants of Doubt story, adapted to the pandemic, chronicling the corruption of various governments and scientific advisory bodies, the distortions of the scientific process and its outputs imposed by well-funded private interests, and how these things, combined with a lack of organizing among scientists and the susceptibility of the scientific community to reasonable-sounding bad ideas (like those advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration), ultimately undermined the pandemic response.

I, on the other hand and controversially (?), wanted to focus on the structural overdetermination of the failures of the pandemic response. By which I mean: by digging into the history of public health, its roots in the industrial revolution and its inseparability from the "abstract social logic of capital," its individualizing and managerial ethos, and how the structures and imperatives of capitalism shape knowledge production as well as the politics of social coordination and emergency response, I wanted to show how little there was (by way of some kind of robust, democratic organization of science at the societal level) to undermine. I wanted to show how the pandemic response was rotted from the inside out rather than subverted by a handful of malevolent actors -- in my view, this more than anything else explains how the Republican and Democratic presidents of two different administrations overseeing the pandemic response converged on essentially the same set of policy actions, just glossed with different rhetorics (but not that different, at the end of the day), although both stories are obviously true and complementary at different levels of analysis and different levels of social organization.

In any case, an interesting and not altogether encouraging thought struck me reading through Chapter 3 of Smith's book. This chapter is devoted to placing liberal egalitarianism and Marxian theory in some kind of dialogue or juxtaposition with each other to illuminate the mutual misunderstandings in each approach's view of the other. As Smith writes (p. 64):

Good evening, sickos. I am preparing to record an episode of Death Panel duck-hunting Sandro's new-ish book, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time. It's a doozy, not in the sense of being packed with ideas but in the sense of being one of the worst books I have ever read in my life. It fails on every level as a book (at the level of idea, the level of argument, the level of prose). Big ups to the University of Chicago press for binding a bunch of this man's toilet paper scribbles (blog posts) into a book and selling it to rubes and bitter bitches like me. Anyway, I wrote some rambling notes on the first parts of the book as a way to get back into it and jog my memory for recording. These are just notes, please don't hate me because they're sketchy and full of block quotes. I'm trying to synthesize the common threads that make this so shitty and so of a piece with what passes for thinking about the pandemic in my cursed field... but this is not that. Proceed with the knowledge that this is raw process!

Big thoughts

• He managed to write an entire book about “liberalism” and “public health” without once advancing a serious definition (let alone a serious thought) about either

• … Because UChicago Press paid him to print out and bind some of his ice cream brain blog posts. I guess this is the level of COVID analysis that publishers (the public??) are looking for. 

• The unifying theme is how hackneyed and fucking irritating he is while saying absolutely nothing at all. 

• He loves to talk about “marginalizing forces” and “disparities” and “structural determinants” but doesn’t ever complicate the narrative – that liberalism itself is one of these marginalizing forces and structural determinants. (I’ve skipped several grade levels over Sandro here)

• He doesn’t even aspire to internal consistency. 

  • “Narratives” – are they good or bad?

• Overidentifies public health with “Enlightenment science” which is just wrong. The techniques of public health were not developed in the enlightenment. Public health itself developed during the industrial revolution. Was this a time of flourishing liberalism? No. This was a time when the contradictions and weaknesses of liberalism were exposed. 

• Does liberalism transcend time and place? According to Sandro, both yes and no. (Because he’s too fucking dense to be bothered sorting it out.) He takes pains to let us know that racial justice and other forms of social justice are important to liberalism – which is decidedly not true of many, many episodes in the history of liberalism. The liberalism of the Enlightenment is not the same thing in any way as the liberalism of today. But public health is failing because we’ve forgotten our “liberal roots” and Enlightenment values (reason?? Whose reason and who decides?). 

• It’s crazy this book got published because the basic thesis of it is so fucking confused. 

• He wants the nice parts of liberalism but none of the nasty parts. He doesn’t even know there are nasty parts. He’s allowed to do this because he’s a Spreadsheets Doctor, nobody expects him to know anything.

• Phenomenology of reading this book: despair. This is what passes for serious scholarly discourse in my field. It makes me want to KMS. 

I'm currently preparing to record an episode of Death Panel about my most important niche interest: counting deaths in pregnancy and postpartum. This is in the news recently due to a new study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (hereafter AJOG) entitled "Maternal mortality in the United States: are high and rising rates due to changes in obstetrical factors, maternal medical conditions, or maternal mortality surveillance?" This study made the news because it purports to show, contrary to the popular narrative, that the rising rates of perinatal death we've been hearing so much about are not real increases, but rather artifacts of inaccurate perinatal death surveillance. It has been known since at least 2018 that the current method used to count these deaths is inaccurate and likely inflates death counts. The CDC pushed back on the study in a characteristically confusing way, taking issue with the alternative methodology the study's authors used to count perinatal deaths (known to result in substantial undercounting), even as it acknowledged that its own current method of counting results in overcounting.

So what's going on here? Indulge me as I pull back the veil on the social construction and social life of mortality data before getting into some more general (and more interesting) theoretical considerations. It all starts with the system of death reporting in the US. Death reporting is done at the state level; local officials or health authorities typically fill out death certificates then transmit those death certificates to the state vital statistics office, which then forwards them along to the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which tabulates mortality data from the whole country.

Accurately reporting pregnancy-related and pregnancy-associated deaths (more on the difference between these two presently) has been a huge challenge for the United States, even though it ain't rocket science to count deaths in pregnancy. The UK, for example, has a prospective obstetric surveillance system (called UKOSS for, straightforwardly enough, the UK Obstetric Surveillance System) that works very well. Not so in the US, which had problems harmonizing state-level mortality rates due to state-level differences in death reporting practices, especially around pregnancy. It was known through the 1980s and 1990s, furthermore, that the NVSS was severely undercounting pregnancy-related deaths. To remedy this problem, a so-called "pregnancy checkbox" was added to the 2003 Revised Standard Death Certificate. The purpose of the checkbox was to indicate whether the decedent was pregnant at the time of death or within 42 days of death (42 days post-delivery is the arbitrary cutoff we use to bracket the "postpartum period," although very good arguments can be made -- using so-called "late" pregnancy-associated deaths -- that this restriction leads to undercounting).

States didn't all adopt the revised death certificate at the same time, however. The US was unable to report a national maternal mortality rate (embarrassing, tbh) between 2003 and 2017 due to staggered adoption of the new death certificate across states. It is well-known that the checkbox estimates overcount perinatal deaths (this was highly publicized in Texas in 2018). Despite these issues, every state is now using the death certificate with the checkbox, so NVSS is once again able to tabulate national perinatal mortality rates. The results have been grim. NVSS documents a near-doubling of the already-high perinatal mortality rate from 17.4 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2018 to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, with these overall rates masking emergency-level rates among Black and Indigenous women -- for example, 70 deaths per 100,000 live births among Black women that same year. For comparison, national perinatal mortality rates in the UK (not even one of the countries with the lowest rates) are on the order of 7-8 deaths per 100,000 live births annually. (COVID was definitely related to this increase, with 2021 appearing to be a high-water mark; provisional data seem to indicate these rates coming down, ever so slightly, in 2022.)

Hey everyone. I really am sorry. I am doing a really shitty job keeping up with this newsletter, and it hasn't really been because I'm busy, but more because I'm struggling to have thoughts that feel interesting. It has been a year of a lot of inner turmoil (and growth!), I guess I am busy, but busy with non-remunerable life stuff that doesn't scan as real to anyone in our capitalist hellscape. (Sidebar: I saw a pastel-colored pop psych infographic about "internalized capitalism" and its symptoms today.)

Maybe internalized capitalism isn't as silly as it sounds... maybe it's just alienation, in the psychological sense or the phenomenological sense (the feeling of being alienated) rather than the strictly Marxist sense of the products of my labor being alien-able from me. The container for all my tedious crises and upsets, the big nesting doll that holds them all, is my journey through and out of academia, which is to say my journey of identity dissolution, formation, and dissolution again. This is why I don't have any good ideas right now. Since I am no longer an academic, I'm no longer subjectified as an ideas-haver. There's no nice sticky matrix of connective tissue holding me in relation to other people who are thinking, or writing. I've only been spiraling one way, inward, away from people and the kind of intellectual exchange that keeps the little flame burning. I feel like I have a gray heap of cold, spent embers right where my diaphragm is.

I was so fucking good, as an academic. I was also killing myself in a million ways, and the killing myself was what made me so good. I was bright, original, overflowing with great ideas, and diligent enough to execute a fair number of them. What happened to me? I got disenchanted. I was always pretty disenchanted with the system of academia. I got disenchanted with the work itself, the only kind of work I have ever really loved and wanted to do. It was starting to happen pre-2020. You allow yourself to question what one psychometric scale or Census-derived social inequality index is really measuring, or what regression models really are, and heretical thoughts start creeping in. What really did me in, though, was obviously COVID, the spectacle of all of it, how eager I was to be a dog in everyone else's fight (I think this was a good quality for some very worthwhile COVID fights, but is a trait I would like to get better at recognizing in myself so I can counter it as far as day to day operations of living are concerned).

One of the minor tragedies of this journey for me is that COVID intensified the heretical thoughts, and for a time, it seemed like -- for the first time ever -- somebody was listening. Original thinking of any kind in epidemiology is flatly unwelcome; we are to memorize the Healthy People 20XX objectives, complete the modules, perform the rote statistical operations, compose the awkward papers, try to get some money, and repeat. Suddenly, everyone's eyes were on my field, and it turned out I had a valuable perspective to share that people wanted to hear. For a moment. This is where the Marxist sense of alienation comes in. I'm a big dumbass, tweeting all my good thoughts, because good thoughts are free and should be shared. Or so I thought. Good thoughts are also alienable, and time and time again, it has been demonstrated to me that my ideas are desirable and productive -- and even more so when they aren't attached to me but rather free-floating, Vogelfrei, appropriable by anyone with some institutional credentials to just plug-and-play in their templates for doing equity-focused research or whatever the fuck.

Before 2020, nobody knew what epidemiologists did -- I can track the normalization of COVID-19 by the number of people who, upon meeting me, ask if that's like, some kind of skin doctor or something. The beginning of the pandemic was a weird, sudden intrusion of everyone in the world into my cozy little academic space. A similar thing happened last year around this time in a very different corner of my life. The reality show I had religiously followed since its 2013 debut suddenly became national, even international, news following the spectacle of a cheating scandal among the cast members. The Scandoval, while pretty run of the mill drama for Vanderpump Rules, took over the actual news cycle for awhile and catapulted the cast members into realms of fame they weren't ready for. Tom Sandoval, the titular cheater, became (as a days-old New York Times magazine cover story put it) the most hated man in America. Rachel Leviss, his affair partner, was skinned alive in the media, by her fellow cast members, and in every possible public venue and wisely checked herself into a trauma treatment facility in Arizona. And Ariana Madix, who Tom Sandoval cheated on, has been rather puzzlingly lionized and showered with lucrative career opportunities, doing sponcon for real brands now (like Glad and Lay's and Uber Eats) and playing Roxy Hart on Broadway.

Just to get things out of the way, I am Team Rachel to the core. Yes, she did a bad thing. But it's a bad thing that has to be understood in its proper context. It really is Tom Sandoval's MO to scoop women up right out of deeply abusive relationships and kind of love bomb them (Rachel had been engaged to a very volatile cast member, an alcoholic DJ named James, for a long time). In fact, this is what he (Tom) did with Ariana, the woman he would later cheat on: it was a major plot point for several early seasons that Tom Sandoval cheated on his previous girlfriend Kristen with Ariana; he and Ariana both, as a united front, spent years (literally years, on national television) calling Kristen crazy and dragging her name through the mud. This is just scratching the surface of the reality TV drama in the background here, but these swirling questions of guilt, responsibility, and atonement are what make Ariana's utterly imperious attitude towards everyone so hard to take. Everyone who has ever been on Vanderpump Rules is guilty of the exact same behavior (and worse -- remember when Jax tried to dump Laura-Leigh moments after her Narcotics Anonymous meeting?). What has made the show work for all these years -- some years better than others -- is that there are no lines in the sand, no untransgressable boundaries, and really no consequences for any of these folks' incredibly fucked up and harmful behavior towards each other. (Keep it coming, I do not care about these people or their lives except insofar as they want to debase themselves for my entertainment!)

It might seem like kind of a curveball to bring in 19th century Russian literature at this point -- but hear me out. I've been working my way through The Brothers Karamazov for the last few months. I suppose it's my One Big Book for this winter (I always have exactly one every year). I've read it before but it was a long time ago; now, as a grownup, I'm really struck by how hilarious and real it is, and how funny and idiosyncratic Dostoevsky's sensibility is. He has an incredibly sympathetic knack for seeing the absolute transcendence at the heart of even the most degraded and ridiculous human drama. I think he would have absolutely loved Vanderpump Rules. I also think he would have loved really miserable airport travel -- the more delays and the bigger the crowds, the better -- for the same reason. The depths of human wretchedness and the heights of human transcendence are one and the same. A phrase that recurs throughout the book is "for all and on behalf of all," from the Russian Orthodox liturgy, meaning that we are all guilty of all the world's sins, in front of God and everyone. What this really means is that we are all really connected, we are all responsible for each other. This idea recurs again and again, in the words and actions of different characters, from the monk Father Zosima to his disciple, young Alexei Karamazov, to the group of schoolboys that look up to Alexei, to Grushenka, the "fallen woman" common to Dostoevsky's works, to Dmitri Karamazov, accused of patricide.

I have been trying and struggling to write an essay about Emergent Strategy and what rubs me the wrong way about it. Writing this just now has clarified one thing. We are all connected, we do all share in each other's guilt and responsibility. In Emergent Strategy, this idea hinges on a worn-out appropriation of the concept of a fractal. Because fractal objects are self-similar at different scales, the author argues, this is also how reality actually is, and small actions are the same as big actions -- e.g., being in an annoying workbook polycule and intentionally trying to form "Liberated Relationships" is exactly the same thing as political work and urgent struggles for justice on the macro scale because "micro is macro."

Let's see... can I write about the second chapter of this book in a fun and engaging way?

Nobody wants to look at the hole COVID blew in our collective psyche anymore. Boo hoo for me. You could analogize it to Walter Benjamin's angel of history; I would analogize it more to trying to outswim the sinking Titanic (like COVID itself, another smashing success for capitalist society).

Here's a general summary of the first chapter of this book, at least up to the part that I find really interesting (there's more, a four-part typology of different types of ideologies, that I will cover later).

• Subjectivity refers to acting as a subject in a given context; it is not the same thing as personality.

• Ideology interpellates human beings as subjects. This is Althusser again, who describes ideology as a "quadruple system" of 1. interpellating individuals as subjects; 2. subjecting them to the big-S Subject (like God, or the king, that kind of thing); 3. facilitating mutual recognition between Subject and subject, subject and subject, subject and self; and 4. "the absolute guarantee that everything is really so" (Therborn's words). Althusser's system can be summarized, tersely, as interpellation-recognition and subjection-guarantee.

• Keeping Althusser's concept of interpellation-recognition (following from above), Therborn modifies the description from Althusser's original subjection-guarantee to subjection-qualification. Subjection to some kind of ideological discourse process in turn qualifies the subject for various kinds of roles.

Happy New Year, everybody. I'm looking forward to getting back into some heavy theory posting and navel gazing in 2024. To ease us all back in, I'm sharing the short essay I wrote about the Netflix series Goop Lab back in February 2020. It's interesting to revisit my perspective on this after... the events that transpired in the rest of 2020 and subsequently. Hope you enjoy!

What condition my condition is in (02/10/2020)

A few weekends ago, I gave into peer pressure and morbid curiosity and queued up Goop Lab: the Netflix series by Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “lifestyle and e-commerce” company. I knew very little about Goop, except that they sell really expensive stuff, that they were sanctioned for making unsubstantiated medical claims about their infamous jade vaginal eggs, and that the promotional image for the show was hilarious. The show consists of six short episodes, each featuring a wellness trend, treatment, or subject. Every episode is hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop “chief content officer” Elise Loehnen, who has the screen presence of a stunned hostage. And in each episode, a trim, young collection of fresh-faced Goop staffers try out the featured treatment, exercise, or experience. If that doesn’t already seem like a potential HR nightmare, the show adopts a “monster of the week” format where the monster in each episode is the personal trauma or health struggle of someone that Gwyneth and Elise directly employ.

Just a quick introductory note -- this is an essay that is no longer going to appear in the publication it was scheduled to. Everything is fine, but since it's now sort of Vogelfrei (winking emoji) I'm just posting it here for all of your enjoyment. The idea is for this to be one essay of a series of length n summarizing a Marxist theoretical intervention that isn't explicitly related to the pandemic, and trying to use it to "think with" the concept of social murder we are developing. I hope you like it.

Thanks to the catastrophic experience of the COVID pandemic, Friedrich Engels’s obscure concept of “social murder” has enjoyed a small renaissance in some corners of the academic literature and discourse since 2020.  Ironically, as COVID has made the concept of social murder – which my colleague Nate Holdren describes as the “depoliticized mass killing of working people” and which Engels described as the death produced by placing working people in the position where they can neither survive the conditions of work, nor survive on the wages paid, nor survive without wages altogether – more popular, its inner mechanisms have become more and more depoliticized, mystified, and naturalized. Currently, provisional weekly death counts associated with COVID-19 – if you know where to find them – suggest lower levels of death relative to previous years. We are still, however, almost totally in the dark about transmission of the virus, and therefore of the general level of risk, following dismantling of testing infrastructure and associated reporting systems. 

The highly unequal distribution of COVID mortality drew a bright, highlighter-yellow line under other health inequalities in the United States, and further suggests some kind of structural explanation rather than the individualist-lifestyle attitudes many of us hold about health. But leftists and leftist formations in the US have largely not investigated this from a structural perspective, nor made any concerted attempt to develop a coherent analysis of the biggest mass death event in living memory. A recent book by Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital while not intended to address or make sense of either social murder generally or COVID specifically, is promising in terms of developing an actionable critical analysis of public health, the pandemic, and the catastrophically failed pandemic response. Specifically, Mau’s concept of economic power can help us make sense of several episodes in the pandemic in ways that mainstream explanations, focused on the cultural and ideological correlates of individuals, simply can’t. 

Recently on Death Panel we did a loose episode on AI in healthcare, inspired by the class action lawsuit against UnitedHealth over the use of its algorithmic tool "nH Predict" to deny coverage for post-acute care. What follows are my notes for that episode -- so if you listen to it, some of the points will be familiar. These really are just scratchy notes, not organized or edited at all, but perhaps interesting as I/we continue to develop critiques of so-called "artificial intelligence."

Distinct strands:

1. The Life and Death Committee

2. Overdose risk scoring/prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs)

3. UnitedHealth scandal and lawsuit

4. Other developments in health care

5. "The Gospel," the IDF's AI-enabled target-production system

What unites all of these?

I've been listening to too much Ram Dass, because every time I think about sitting down to actually finish writing this, I immediately think "yeah, but who am I?" And then I don't do it. Everybody thinks they're somebody doing something. What the hell does it matter?

My birthday just happened, late in October. (I am now 35, apparently my "karmic year.") This makes me a Scorpio; according to the system of astrological correspondences in the tarot, my birth card is Death. Death can signify literal, biological death, as it seems to in the opening sequence of Cléo from 5 to 7.

As I have been working on a draft of something else, I have been thinking a lot about the explanations available to us for sense- and meaning-making around the pandemic. I have also been preoccupied with the uses of different kinds of explanation, and the difference between explanation and analysis (or in Jungian parlance -- apparently -- explaining vs. explaining away). Most of the explanations and narratives coming from the right about COVID are obviously bogus, and I won't spend time on them here. The explanations coming from the center, the great American ideological mainstream, are also obviously bogus; interesting in the social function they are supposed to serve, to exculpate and even celebrate the Biden administration, but little else.

What I'm most interested is leftist accounts of why the COVID response was such a disaster. These can be explanations, intended to make meaning by fitting the events of COVID into some narrative structure, or analyses, intended to illuminate the what and why of the pandemic and see what can be excavated in practical terms to inform organizing strategy. For our purposes (as... a left), I think the analytic approach is the right one. I have spent too much of my own life on dissipative tactical campaigns that are completely misinformed and misguided as to the nature of the problem. For example, I was once directed to canvass every house, without a plan, in a given municipality to get signatures in support of Medicare for All to take to the mayor of the municipality to try to get a resolution in support of Medicare for All passed. Needless to say, this is bad strategy and I did not comply.

The stakes are similar with COVID. Insofar as the left overall even seems interested in learning what can be learned from the most cataclysmic event in recent memory, the thinking seems to always redound to vagueness and hand-waving about "capitalism," or if the speaker wants to show their sophistication, "racial capitalism," "interconnectedness," "organizing." (Something I've just realized, we use "redound" on the podcast all the time but we're using it in a very archaic sense). One explanation that is superficially convincing and not altogether wrong -- and one that I myself have devoted substantial time to developing -- is that what happened with COVID is essentially a replay of the events covered in the book Merchants of Doubt. For anyone who isn't familiar, this is about how scientists allied with industry groups to distort the process of knowledge production in order to create false debate and the illusion of uncertainty on matters of public import, principally the dangers of tobacco smoking and climate change.

This was, undoubtedly, part of it. A very interesting part at that, specifically for what analysis of something like the Great Barrington Declaration can teach us about science under capitalism, how knowledge is made and disseminated. As a global explanation for the disaster of the pandemic response, though, I'm not sure it's comprehensive enough.

Greetings! Happy Halloween! And apologies for the long interval between newsletters. Further apologies that this one isn't a very heavy hitter. The reason for all of it is that I was out of town for a week recently -- ever since the pandemic started, traveling is even more vexing and exhausting than it was before, and I'm fighting for my fucking life here trying to get back on some kind of track. So it goes. I went to Austin, TX, because I used to live there and haven't been back since pre-pandemic.

It's wild. Austin is a really interesting place. Here's what I noticed on this trip:

• The volume and color contrast on everything are just sort of turned up. More people, more stuff, more kinetic energy...

• More franchises. Austin is blessed with an incredible "food scene," and many, many, many of the restaurants that were new and just opening up when I lived there have mushroomed into gigantic franchise operations. We went to a Ramen Tatsu-Ya at South Congress and Slaughter (this is very far south and remote from the original location in north Austin), one of several franchises. There are a couple of Easy Tigers too. Just a few things I noticed.

• Ugly box condos everywhere. Even more of them. Austin is, if not the ugly apartment complex capital of the world, a close second or third to Dallas or Houston. Previously quiet and "undeveloped" areas are now covered with big, hideous condo developments.

• Everyone and everything I care about/am involved in has spun out to farther and farther reaches of the city -- the center is too molten, nobody can afford to even get close to it anymore. So that when I was there I was renting in Travis Heights and on the east side, but now most people are far south or far north. (North/South is the most important Austin axis, because the city has not invested at all in adapting infrastructure to the feverishly growing population, and traffic on the two major north-south arteries, Mopac and I-35, gets even more unmanageable and disruptive every year).

• In spite of this and all the other horrible, intractable problems with the city that I haven't even mentioned... it's still fucking great. The vibes are still good. The food is still amazing. Time moves differently. The "porch culture" is still welcoming and fun. (The downside: it's VERY easy to be an alcoholic, to drink constantly... everyone's always socializing, the weather's always beautiful. Catch me in the morning.)

• There are a lot more burners at Barking Springs. (Barton Springs is a huge pool, fed by a spring and unchlorinated, ice cold all the time, a very classic Austin institution... Barking Springs is the portion of the pool that isn't "included" in Barton Springs, separated by just some concrete and a fence, so called because you can do everything you're not allowed to do at Barton Springs -- drink, smoke, sit in an innertube with your dogs and your burner husband all day long, whatever).

• Everyone, and I mean everyone, in Austin is a VVITCH these days. But only a brave minority (of which I am proudly a part) are witchy enough to go out and about in a city full of incredibly hot people with unshaven, unsightly stubbly legs.

The sociology stuff is all well and good. I'm no urban studies person. What's important to me is I stayed with my best friend from when I lived there, a woman I haven't spoken much to since I moved. A classic millenial tale, our lives simply knocked us spinning in different directions for awhile. Hard to describe the special feeling of being "back" in an older episode of life, but as a different person -- that's kind of what these long friendships are, at the end of the day, I guess. This friend is blessed with a big, echt-Austin constellation of girlfriends, one of whom was staying at the house with us a mere 12 hours or so after breaking through on DMT. Time moves differently, more leisurely, in Austin ("where adults go to retire," as my dad, an erstwhile but longtime Austin resident, puts it), and she and I had a lot of 1:1 time to talk ("integrate" as they say) and our conversations kept coming back to the same idea. The real thing, the important thing, is connection. Is it ever anything else?

Remember Co-Star? The algorithmic astrology app? (My Co-Star horoscope today: "You don't need to catalog everything you think." Well, you're not the boss of me.) A typical headline from late 2019, from Vogue: "Meet the astrology app that's intriguing millenials everywhere." From the article,

The app’s proprietary AI technology takes data from the publicly accessible Jet Propulsion Laboratory to map out the position of the planets. The team, which consists of 10 people, has writers who translate the astrological data into thoughtful daily horoscopes and push notifications.

Public data, proprietary algorithm. It's a common enough scenario, and an interesting one. What does it really mean to encode the esoteric knowledge of astrology practice -- in this case, the knowledge of the relative positions of planets -- in a mathematical algorithm that a tech company owns?

This is basically the question addressed in the first half of The Eye of the Master, a "social history of artificial intelligence" by Matteo Pasquinelli. (I got a galley copy of this book from a Verso pal I met at the conference in September, but Google informs me it actually came out yesterday!) It's definitely "a choice" to begin a social history of AI from the industrial revolution in England, and to start with a close reading of Marx's writings on machinery in the Grundrisse and Capital. I think it's a choice that makes sense. As Pasquinelli argues, pace Marx and Charles Babbage, science isn't the inventor of technology -- labor, or rather the division of labor, is. This did not make sense to me for the first few chapters of the book, to be quite honest, but I think it's a valuable insight and I'm going to try to explain why.

Today is a bit of a failure to launch for me so I'm using this newsletter to construct a short playlist out of things that aren't available on streaming (to my knowledge). I really feel that music has a seasonal dimension. Springsteen for example: Darkness on the Edge of Town is a summer record, The River is for the dead of winter. Don't ask me to explain this. This morning was the first day that really felt autumnal; misty, a little rainy, cool, the leaves starting to go yellow and red.

The Bob Seger System - Lucifer

Bob Seger is our dad rock. Springsteen is for the east coast, Neil Young for the west, but Bob Seger is from Detroit. Pittsburgh isn't the Midwest, but Detroit is probably spiritually the most similar city. (Some autumn trivia, Pittsburgh and Detroit are the only cities in the USA where the night before Halloween is routinely called "devil's night.") If you only know Bob Seger from the Chevy commercials (WHOOOAA-OHH, LIKE A ROCK!) then you should be aware that Bob Seger fucking slaps. His earlier output with the Bob Seger System is particularly good -- a little more punk, a little more heavy psych, a little less classic rock.

I finished my first pass through Göran Therborn's The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) recently (this is a Nate recommendation, thank you Nate!) and what follows are some brief notes about the introduction to the (very short) book.

First, a few notes about the project and how Therborn posits it to the reader:

The main concern of this essay is the operation of ideology in the organization, maintenance, and transformation of power in society.

Ideology is not, Therborn argues, either consciousness or symbolic language; rather, partially extending Althusser's argument in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Therborn identifies ideological work (done by a text, a speech, etc.) as work that "operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity." This follows closely to one sense of the analysis of ideology in Marx (it is "the medium through which men make their history as conscious actors") and completely breaks with another (ideology as "false consciousness," false belief).

This is the last part of my notes from Socialism Conference, based on my reading of a chapter in a volume that Nate contributed to (Nate! What's the citation? I will add it!) Apologies for the slow pace lately, just got a lot of plates in the air!

The polemic of "social murder" is important -- we are supposed to understand the fact of this ongoing death baked in to the function of capitalism as natural, certainly as apolitical. Theorizing social murder as a tendency inherent to capitalist economic and social relations -- as I've said many times before, this is a good theoretical foundation for public health, which really lacks one. (Public health explainer edition of this newsletter coming soon.)

This theory of social murder has two facets, per Nate: 1) "All versions of capitalism will tend to generate depoliticized killing of working class people" and 2) a theory of the capitalist state. This helps understand how capitalism generates both harm and social conflict (which may, as has been the case during COVID, take the form of a moral economy struggle). Thinking about moral economies around COVID and social murder; there was a lot of outrage over the conduct of Tyson plant managers during the early weeks of the pandemic. This outrage was channeled into some legal cases, not into general social unrest; for many and certainly for Tyson it's good enough to go back to the "normal" state of affairs for the company, which is absolutely brutal -- Tyson has been cited multiple times since 2020 for on-site employee deaths, hazardous chemical discharges, and more.

Usually, when I wake up, I involve myself in a grueling morning routine for something like two hours. This routine includes caring for my neurotic cats, cleaning up any mess from the night before, making coffee and ideally also food, and, most importantly, yoga. I've done yoga off and on for more than ten years, and over the last few years of the pandemic I developed a home hatha practice that I really like. Still, in my eagerness to spend some more time out of the house recently, I've gone back to a few in-person yoga classes at studios. I do like to do this. The sociality, the particularly yoga-studio smell of incense and feet, and being forced to do poses and sequences that I myself didn't select are all very good for me. Studio yoga, though, has seemed to change since I was last in it.

Now, this could be a product simply of secular trends in my life. I'm older and have more money than I did before. When I first started, I did yoga at donation-based studios where I was taught by average-looking middle aged people, many of them in recovery, who wanted to share the benefits of yoga asana and spiritual practice with others. I'm sure there were lots of studios full of tight-assed ponytailed blonde women in expensive gear somewhere, but that wasn't my world.

Fast forward to 2023. After an emotional period of personal turmoil, returning to in-person yoga classes that are full of crystals and tarot cards and affirmations felt good. It feels good to hear things like that I should "follow my dreams" and "stand in my power" and "take up space" or "live my truth" or whatever. (This is a genuine howl of supplication, though: please stop making me listen to coffee shop ho-hey music in yoga classes. It's undignified.) Anyhow, I didn't think much of this until one day, I was in the shower listening to Brown Acid Trippin’ on NTS Radio (as I am wont to do) and was pleasantly surprised to hear a deep cut I actually recognized, “Good for the Gander” by Hot Chocolate. The refrain: “What’s good for the gander / gotta be good for the goose.” Being in the shower, the crucible of deep and innovative thinking in today’s relentless world, my mind wandered a bit; I dwelled on the question, in particular, of when, under what conditions, is what’s good for the gander also good for the goose? How do we understand the relationship between a part (the goose) and the whole (the gander)? 

As an American, particularly an American scientist, everything I have learned and internalized, consciously and unconsciously, has instilled an reductionist, individualist mindset in me -- these are the tracks my thoughts run on. The geese are all distinct individuals, the gander then being nothing more than the simple aggregate of some number of individual geese. Is what’s good for the gander good for the individual goose? It depends on what the “what” is, and how representative the gander is, leading us to down a silly path (dare I say... a goose chase) that forks off into goose participatory democracy, goose demcent, goose Borda. How can an individual goose “make their voice heard,” what is the consensus rule for deciding who wins and who loses?

Not a super fun or funny or engaging post, but what follows is the second part (of three) of my notes for Socialism conference. The ideas of moral economy and moral economy struggles I have found super generative in thinking about COVID. Maybe you will too!  A few more things are coming this week, including (I hope) the last part of these notes, some more fun stuff, and a (fun! Of course! Always fun!) explainer about public health and what it actually is.  

To start, from a chapter Nate wrote called “The Reproduction of Moral Economies in Capitalism: Reading Thompson Structurally”:

The Marxist historian and polemicist EP Thompson is often remembered today for having offered an analysis of what he termed the ‘moral economy’ in a series of writings from 1963 to 1971. For Thompson, a moral economy was a food market in which each commodity is bought and sold at a ‘fair price’ instead of a ‘free price’ determined purely by the market. In this way, the ‘moral economy’ subordinates profit-making to the need to avoid hunger and ultimately starvation. Thompson’s offered his analysis of the ‘moral economy’ in the context of a broader examination of popular riots in eighteenth-century England. He referred to these riots as a ‘pattern of social protest’ consisting of specific ‘forms of [collective] action’ which‘ depended upon a particular set of social relations’. ‘Moral economy’ was his term for that‘ particular set of social relations’, and in his view it offered ordinary people ideological resources for transgressing prevailing social norms and engaging in acts of collective resistance. For Thompson, a ‘moral economy’ existed, and it facilitated collective action, when it was generally believed that food prices should be regulated to ensure subsistence, when legal authorities were widely believed to enforce this norm, and when certain food vendors violated the expectations the norm generated by pricing bread and other food too high. Under these conditions, the popular classes could step in to punish seller for departing from general norms relating to bread pricing, thus enforcing the ‘moral economy’ as the background normative condition for food markets. 

I just read through Nate's posts and laughed so hard, holy shit. Then I got insecure and freaked out because my first post on here was so serious and unpleasurable. While I'm not a people pleaser, it's still important that you all know that I'm actually SUPER CHILL AND FUNNY, ACTUALLY.

I kid. I have no idea what I'm actually like and this isn't the place to speculate. I do have a bit of a special place in my heart for the brisk rap of a ruler on a desk top of it all, though. I like to be taught in a manner that is unflinching, arbitrarily exacting, and emotionally withholding, which maybe means that I am some kind of people pleaser after all, albeit in a very fussy way.

The coolest thing about rigor, or structure, or constraint or whatever you want to call it is that learning how to work with it also teaches you how to transcend it in a really emotionally satisfying way. If I were a filmmaker, I'd make a grueling experimental opus about Jacob Bernoulli or how the Annunaki were extraterrestrials or something like that. But since I'm (mercifully) an epidemiologist, this kind of level-up takes me instead into the realm of epistemology in the abstract. How do we know what we know, how valid or reliable are our ways of knowing -- certainly compared to each other, but also as faithful representations of some kind of absolute reality? It's a fucking mess in there, but it's also pretty fun -- the history of humans trying to know stuff like a junk shop with the most amazing and demented and cruel and outlandish and kind and avaricious and essentially human bullshit all cluttered together. Some fucking 11th century wizard obsessively boiling his own piss is, however indirectly, responsible for our entire way of life. You can thank him for your scented candles and moisture-wicking polymers.

That's funny even though the subject matter of actual human experience is often... not. We are really stressed out monkeys, trapped in a reality that we are fundamentally limited in our ability to comprehend and have no choice but to deal with. We can't know ultimate reality, we are in a profound state of ignorance, and we let our thinking minds delude us about all sorts of things, most specifically that they are us. So far, so good. The mind is infinite, but even mystical experiences are still experiences... right? Are our minds imprisoned in the squishy physical architecture of our brains? Whether we're photons of divine light, parcels of the Godhead, or simply selfish monkeys who think we're doing something, can the mind transcend its physical limitations? Fucking woo woo enough for you yet? I told you this shit was funny. (Just kidding, I jacked in to Source earlier -- by which I mean I banged 400 mg of Benadryl and thumb wrestled with the Hat Man -- and it told me with solemn seriousness to tell you to subscribe to my fucking newsletter.)

What follows is a lightly edited (for clarity, readability, etc.) version of notes I prepared in advance of the session that Nate and I both participated in at this year’s Socialism Conference called How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and COVID-19. This was the second in a five-session track on health, disability, and capital organized by the Death Panel podcast, of which I am a cohost and which you should subscribe to.

I have broken the original notes document up into three shorter posts for ease of reading. Posts two and three will be linked here as soon as I post them!

Propositions on social murder broadly – what is it and how do we understand it?

• Engels's definition, from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):