Thursday Reads

 Thanks to all the sexual harassment allegations against him, Rep. Madison Cawthorn's eight-month marriage went into the ditch.

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Donald Trump--remember him?--endears himself to the whacko anti-vax crowd by promoting COVID vaccinations.

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Life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped dramatically in the past year.  It dropped 1.8 years to around age 77, thanks to COVID-19.

I am pretty sure the man I cared so deeply about and who died in late October died of it despite being vaccinated.  He got moved to Idaho in February following his brother's death, and Idaho is a complete shithole with only about 46 percent of adults there being fully vaccinated.  It has the lowest vaccination rate in the country.

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Obituary:  Noted writer and commentator Joan Didion, 87, died from complications of Parkinson's disease. She was active for many decades, and her commentary was always worth reading.  I liked her essays for the New York Review of Books.  She had also written screenplays (Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays).  

Snip:

Joan Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. She was a fifth-generation Californian descended from settlers who left the ill-fated Donner party in 1846 and took the safer route. Her father was a finance officer with the Army, her mother a homemaker, and during World War II the family moved from one posting to the next before returning to Sacramento after the war.

As a teenager, Ms. Didion typed out chapters from Hemingway novels to see how they worked. She was deeply influenced by Hemingway’s handling of dialogue and silence. Joseph Conrad was another formative influence.

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