How to deal with the next pandemic given the inevitable conspiracy theories that undermine constructive responses?
Slate, Molly Oldmstead, 26 Aug 26: Public Health Advocates Are So Desperate for Help Against Conspiracies They’ve Turned to the Place You’d Least Expect
How about… A.I.?
Historically, pandemics have happened multiple times a century, and many scholars believe that they’ll become more frequent due to climate change and deforestation. In the six years since COVID arrived in the U.S., the public health community has drawn no significant new conclusions about how to beat back conspiracy theories during a pandemic.
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Admittedly, looking to A.I. for rescue is usually an eye-roll-worthy impulse. And coming from the field of disinformation in particular, A.I. is a Pandora’s box of yet-to-be-imagined evils. Generative A.I. certainly has the potential to worsen pandemic conspiracy theories by equipping them with highly convincing fabricated evidence.
A.I. is better than social media, at least. Many ideas and examples.
But none of those improvements will stop conspiracy theories. Nor will media literacy programs, stronger education about viruses, centralized hubs for medical information, “prebunking” campaigns, or community engagement programs—all good ideas from experts that still cannot meet the sheer force of our paranoia. The conspiracy theories, they all agree, will still happen. The distrust is too bad, the hucksters too loud.
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This all leaves us with the pathetic situation of working off a pandemic strategy developed before the current social media age, hoping the American public will experience a radical change in attitude, and turning for comfort to the whims of artificial intelligence.
“We’re just trying stuff and seeing if it sticks,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, when discussing the conspiracy theories. “But we’ve barely scraped the surface in terms of understanding.”
I saw a Facebook post by one of those psychologists who said that decades ago there were always tabloid magazines at the supermarket with headlines like “Elvis Marries Bigfoot” and the like. People would buy those tabloids. And that the people who would buy those tabloids have now found each other on the Internet and have become MAGA.
The amplification of ignorance and the suspicions of base human nature may defeat all other human aspirations.
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Can some truths be only told through myths?
Perhaps. Maybe essentially. Humans do not live by facts alone; in fact they critically depend on stories and religion to bind tribes into trustworthy groups.
Review of a new Sean Tan graphic novel. Let’s see what the reviews says about that claim.
NY Times, John Hendrix, today: 20 Years Later, the Long-Awaited Companion to a Classic Graphic Novel
Subtitle: As Shaun Tan reminds us with his stand-alone follow-up to “The Arrival,” some truths are so enormous, so beautiful, they can be told only through myth.
I have “The Arrival” and several other Sean Tan artbooks.
G.K. Chesterton wrote that fairy tales “make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” It is a simple truth, but easy to forget: The great myths give us eyes to see our own lives anew, by gilding the familiar with the fantastic.
It has been 20 years since Shaun Tan published his astonishing wordless graphic novel “The Arrival.” Equal parts atmospheric immigration allegory and surreal ride on a chiaroscuro carousel, the book instantly became a classic. Dauntless and strange, it shimmered like a new kind of myth — one whose primary language was not textual but visual.
And,
When a modern mind reads the word “myth,” it might be tempted to substitute the word “falsehood.” Sadly, this is part of our hangover from the Enlightenment. It seems natural to us to assume that the best way to understand a rose is by putting it under a microscope — rather than by writing (or reading) a sonnet. But as Tan reminds us with his new opus, “Hometown,” some truths are so enormous, so beautiful, so elusive they can be told only through myth.
OK, fine. But look: this is exactly an example of how people try, or resent the try, to reduce everything to one particular kind of understanding. There are different realms of the world, and different scales, each understood in its own way; they are all true, without negating each other. Reality is multi-dimensional, metaphorically.
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Another think piece. It’s a known pattern: populations become inured to what’s happening in their government, until it’s too late. For years Germans thought Hitler was harmless eccentric.
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 21 Aug 2026: Can we restore lawful government?, subtitled “A more blatantly corrupt and cruel administration than any we’ve seen before—but it’s not too late to stop it.”
It was almost a relief to read that the Trump Administration admitted in court documents that it cancelled clean energy research grants “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Grants were cancelled only if the researchers were from states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Of course, this action was an outrage that no previous president of either political party would have committed. Things like this have undoubtedly happened before, but nothing of this scale. It was a relief to read about it because, while it was obvious that the Trump administration is corrupt in this partisan way, the administration had previously lied about its motivations. Now the abuse of power is in the open.
And this:
Trump does things like this because he can. He likes to punish perceived enemies, even though that does not actually serve his interests. Trump has no respect for, or even understanding of, scientific research. He either believes that clean energy research, and the climate change issues it addresses, are fraudulent—or he just doesn’t care about the welfare of the country or humanity in the future. Trump has all the instincts of a narcissistic dictator.
And it’s fascinating how his fans don’t recognize this. The article goes on. Worth reading.
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OK, here’s Mahler 7. I’m posting this video because it’s another good example of a video of an orchestral performance, with lots of close-ups of the musicians, and the conductor, Claudio Abbado.
I still think it’s an odd duck of a Mahler symphony. But Mahler was trying to do something different every time. (As Beethoven did.) They’re all interesting.
I always wonder, watching orchestral performances like this: are the performances having fun? Do they enjoy this music? Maybe some music and not so much other music, which is a chore?
Actually, I remember listening to this symphony on a scratchy car radio as I drove one Friday night from LA out to Apple Valley, back around 1980, in my family’s used 1964 Buick Skylark, across desert roads, in the dark. The radio signal from LA eventually faded away.
