• Published on

    To the Wonder

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    Directed by Terrence Malick.
    113m; 2.39:1. 

    Synopsis: A Parisian woman (Olga Kurylenko) moves to Oklahoma, struggling to find happiness while married to her husband (Ben Affleck). A local priest (Javier Bardem) struggles with his faith.     Trailer.

    In the heady days when auteur theory was first burgeoning forth, courtesy of Andrew Sarris, Truffaut, and others, it was taken as a point of pride and skill when a director could assert his authorial voice in his films such that you could instantly identify who its maker was. This concept still holds largely true, and I for one believe there's no better definition for a great director. Howard Hawks said it best when Peter Bogdonavich once asked him what great direction was: "when you can tell who the devil made it."

    When you put on any film by Scorsese, Fellini, Welles, Mann, Antonioni- it doesn't take more than a few minutes to tell who the director is. The confident and dexterous clarity of voice these greats and others possess is, in my mind, the indicator of a great director by the same measure in wchich we evaluate great authors and composers.

    Not everyone loves Malick, but everyone will agree that his films are instantly identifiable. His latest is by far his most divisive, but I think it's one of his best. To The Wonder follows a woman's (Kurylenko) relationship with her husband (Affleck) and a priest's (Javier Bardem) relationship to God. Both are searching for- what? happiness, self-realization, peace. Deep, inner satisfaction. 

    The film assumes your understanding of the basic plot and chooses to go deeper, dispensing with story and exploring instead the textures of this search. The approach feels both broadly sketched and startlingly intimate (especially in its use of voiceover) at the same time. Definitely the most abstract so far of Malick's already fairly abstract work, the content of To The Wonder is told mostly through its elliptically sequenced images. On first watch it's an exhausting experience, as most of these films are– here replicating the restless turmoil of frustrated love, the ever-moving camera demanding our complete attention. Ask yourself if Olga's narrated ruminations are directed at her husband, or perhaps in fact at God. 

    Affleck told audiences at Telluride that the film     "makes Tree of Life look like Transformers," and indeed, it's a challenging film- but only if you're expecting a normal movie. I say let the images wash over you. The joy of the camera, swinging through the trees in Paris, making tangible the energy of early love; the mystery of the last two shots, which when paired together evoke a loss, but also the calmness of having been found; whispered nothings on the soundtrack, ruminations of lonely people, as they walk around in the corners of the widescreen frame. Don't try to decode everything- let the ideas and sensations work their way into you, right-brain style, of their own accord. Things will click together on your drive home, or a day later.

    Suffice it to say that if you're feeling adventurous, and are someone who finds yourself ruminating often on  whether or not love is connected to self-realization, or the existence of God, the frustration of not knowing people who are close to you, or breaking free from doubt... you'll find this film of interest. Certainly there is no more rapturously beautiful film to come out this year- wherever Malick turns his artful gaze, our perspective is transformed by his. Sight & Sound critic Nick Pinkerton writes on the subject better than I can:

    "Malick is one of few filmmakers who could, in the space of a few images, go from Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy to a fast-food drive-through in Oklahoma without implying a pejorative judgement about either, dismissing the Old World for the New or vice versa. At one point, Bardem’s priest preaches about the necessary will behind a husband’s conjugal love – “He does not find [his wife] lovely, he makes her lovely” – and Malick similarly does not film things because they are beautiful; they become beautiful because he films them."

    Malick, a former Oxford Philosophy professor (he translated Heidegger's Essence of Reasons into English), invests his films with a wisdom of observation that makes the act of watching his films feel valuable- but never in a preachy way, as most of the meat of the picture is not explicit, but implicit in imagery and music.

    Pinkerton's full Sight & Sound review is one of the best pieces on the film; also insightful is Roger Ebert's famous writeup- this was the last film Ebert reviewed before dying. Both men offer similar appraisals on the film while coming from very different places, and address some of the concerns brought up by other viewers. Not a film everyone will take to, but one I can't get enough of.

    Further reading:
    The Playlist. Venice Review: Terrence Malick’s ‘To The Wonder’ Is A Raw & Heartfelt Film Of Loss And Longing
    The Los Angeles Times. Marveling at meditative ‘To the Wonder’
    Salon. Terrence Malick's rapturous, religious love story
    Time. Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder: Rapturous, Forbidding, Wondrous
  • Published on

    Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups

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    "[B]ecause I stumbled down the road like a drunk... that doesn't mean it's the wrong one."
    ​
    Directed by Terrence Malick. With Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, et al. 
    118m; 2.39:1.
    Synopsis: A well-heeled Hollywood screenwriter searches for direction after realizing achieving his ambitions isn't the answer to happiness. Theatrical Trailer.

    The ultimate extension of cinema lies beyond narrative. Film is a great medium for telling stories, but it can do much more. Actors performing well-written lines is the province of theatre. Cinema has the ability, with its preponderance of image and sound, to be far more potent. It has no need to reduce experiences to words, no burden to simplify life into discrete units. From day one it held the promise of something bigger, deeper, larger. 

    The earliest films reveled in the power not of the word, of course, but of the image. Take a look at Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, the legendary 1929 film from which it's been said the origins of all stylistic innovations in cinema can be found, but which more importantly captures the vitality of life experience without the need for a plot. You don't need story. You have life, and isn't life, after all, what happens in between?

    Let Knight of Cups wash over you. Don't try to figure it all out. It's bigger than that, designed to reach you on a level beyond the intellectual. The cavalcade of stunning, entirely natural light-lit images gradually cohere into something whole: a successful Hollywood screenwriter (Bale) slowly realizing that the status of material success, long his aim, has not answered his search for fulfillment. We set goals, convinced achieving them will bring the fulfillment we dream of. What do you do when you get there and discover they don't? There's something more. It was always nearby. 

    That delicate something is what this film is about. 

    Bale wanders through L.A., as we do through life, contemplative and observant. The camera matches his ruminative inquisitiveness, careening around people and drifting through rooms and highways, seeing beauty everywhere, photographing light as a character, as though there was a silent, benevolent presence in our lives, always just around the corner, waiting. Bale's journey toward substance and purpose, and the pearls of wisdom he gains from each of his relationships, profoundly move to me, not least because the film uncannily mirrors journeys of my own in L.A. 

    Also particularly gratifying to me are how Malick, in previous films largely a purveyor of beauty in the natural world, shoots L.A. with just as much verve and celebration, as though its concrete expanses were no less ravishing than the quiet hills surrounding. It's all about our perspective. His L.A. is no den of purgatory, but as ever a place where beauty is visible by those with eyes to see it, where a thoughtful calm can read the signposts all around, guides toward a higher plane of being. What other filmmaker would cut from le Jardin de Luxembourg to a drive-in burger stand in Bartlesville, Oklahoma with no apparent judgment? Who would see the same beautiful light in both places? You can understand why I like this guy.

    As well, the same generosity of perspective is applied to his characters. It isn't only Blanchett's doctor or Portman's affluent wife who are the arbiters of wisdom in this picture, though they might have the more apparent intellectual capacity. Look at Teresa Palmer's stripper, whose grasp of the ephemerality of substance in Hollywood is grounded and acute ("real life is so hard to find"), or Imogen Poots' aspiring starlet, who has no status or material accomplishment to her name, yet in a sentence recapitulates Bale's entire philosophical struggle. The film may take place in Hollywood, but it is not of it.

    Most complaints about late-period Malick involve critics wishing the films were more comprehensible, more digestible, plot-driven… basically, more ordinary. I say revel in the differences. It's too unlike other films to be judged by their standards. You've never seen photography this dazzling, a camera this sensitive, this untethered, interior monologue this private. It's a film about the issues we all think about, but rarely speak aloud.

    That's that! Thanks for reading!
    ----

    The New Yorker. Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups” Challenges Hollywood to Do Better: Richard Brody eloquently expounds on Knight of Cups, something of a lone wolf in the face of the generally dismissive reviews it received. 
    Taste of Cinema. 8 Reasons Why “Knight of Cups” Is Terrence Malick’s Best Film So Far ​
    ​RogerEbert.com. Knight of Cups (Four stars).
    San Francisco Chronicle. ‘Knight of Cups’ transcends mere plot and character
    The Village Voice. Malick Goes L.A. in the Sumptuous ‘Knight of Cups’
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    Successful Method for Keeping COVID-19 Patients Alive Discovered in Seattle

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    UPDATE: Video with more info, medication protocol, source info and contact here.

    Stumping for my friend here, who's on to something in a big way, but who is meeting resistance from other medical entities who wish to claim the discovery for themselves. Press: Contact Dr. Bowers or myself for more.

    While the world scrambles to find a cure, a Seattle internist working for Dr. James Bowers, MD, has discovered a 3-drug combination which successfully keeps COVID-19-positive patients alive. Working with a group of twenty-plus infected elderly residents at a North Seattle nursing home, Bowers and crew were shocked and delighted to find that in every case, administration of this cocktail prevents patients from dying or advancing to severe illness. 

    The cocktail, based on studies previously conducted during the SARS and MERS epidemics, works by preventing the coronavirus’ fatal ability to damage the lungs by stopping the onset of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). While not a cure for the virus in strict terms, Bowers’ cocktail effectively and conclusively prevents COVID-19 from being lethal. As he explains, “This combination represents a different way of treating COVID-19 by changing the way our body reacts to the virus by preventing it from OVER-reacting to it.” The repercussions of transforming the coronavirus into a non-fatal health issue are, of course, seismic.

    Particularly noteworthy is that all of Bowers’ patients are among COVID-19’s most vulnerable targets– weak and elderly individuals, many of whom already have preexisting illnesses and compromised immune systems. In addition to a 100% success rate of suppressing ARDS with these patients, the medication has also shown no severe side effects. Bowers and co. were thrilled to see the drug combination even work with an infected patient in her early nineties, no doubt saving her life. Indeed, the only patient in the group exhibiting failing health is also the only one to refuse Bowers’ treatment, tragically– if inadvertently– further confirming the cocktail’s efficacy.

    “Viruses have been around longer than humans and have learned to adapt,” says Dr. Bowers, a former chief of staff at Northwest Hospital. “We are dealing with an especially efficient virus in COVID-19. This drug combination is just a start into coming up with more effective therapies, but right now it is the only thing we have to fight COVID-19.” 

    Dr. Bowers is calling on pharmaceutical companies to work quickly with medical providers to address the crisis. “The goal is to get hospitals in the Seattle area to use this protocol in the hope that local foundations such as the Gates Foundation will help spread the word and support this effort.” 

    The shortest, fastest time a vaccine has taken to get from testing to public access was for the Ebola virus, and that took six years. The discoveries and proven success of Dr. Bowers and his team represent the first major breakthrough in the fight to stop COVID-19.
  • Published on

    Clarification: Not Quite What I Said

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    Really quick, but very important–

    The difference between popularity and fame, as I define those words, is that popularity has more to do with being known directly, from primary interactions with the person in question. Fame is when you read about whoever it is in a Newsweek editorial. That isn't primary experience, but secondary or, more often, tertiary; and in those scenarios the truth can get hazy real fast. 

    I like being popular. I don't like being famous. Because that's when people start twisting your words, and the others who don't know you start believing them. I was just alerted this morning by a rider who knows me that my recent interview on KIRO is being taken out of context and being used as weaponized fodder against Seattle's homeless population and transit at large. 

    That wasn't the idea, people.

    When I stated, as linked in the audio and transcript of the full interview below, that 80 percent of my riders are non-destination passengers, I was careful to emphasize that I was referring explicitly to my anecdotal experience alone, and only during the time of the coronavirus outbreak that followed Jay Inslee's stay-at-home order. I couldn't have been more clear. Did I say this was a bad thing? Ah, the way assumptions tell more about the assumer than the speaker themselves... I also took time to make explicit that I had no pejorative intention, and that, as anyone familiar with me knows, I take great and humble pleasure in serving and being accepted by the homeless community. If you have taken even a passing interest in my work, none of this is news to you.

    You can guess which parts the right-wing organizations left out. You can guess how much time they spent with my full interview, with my book or blog. I'm purposely not linking to them because I'm not going to further popularize views that advocate for suppression, prejudice, hate, and racism. 

    The idea I was attempting to articulate in the interview was that the question of transit during a virus outbreak is a complex one. That's it, period point blank. Do I have answers? Of course not, and I chuckle at anyone who claims to during this time, except perhaps virologists and other medical experts. This is not the time for political backbiting and armchair quarterbacking. I'm not qualified to have an opinion on the decisions currently being made, and wish only to add to the discussion, not supplant it. I definitely wasn't saying we should deny service to those in need, nor did I imply that anyone doesn't deserve a ride. Guys, it's me here. I'm Nathan. Doesn't all that go without saying? 

    I assume goodness in people, and as I've stated before, it's gotten me in hot water from time to time. I assume listeners would take a moment for the full interview, because I optimistically imagine they're interested in hearing what I have to say in full, rather than cherry-picking quotes they can distort toward their own nefarious ends. I assume good intentions.

    Please assume the same of me.

    Full interview with Dave Ross here, including transcript.
    Context helps; here's another recent interview on similar subject matter: NPR: KUOW: The Friendly Bus Driver in Socially Distant Times (scroll down for my 11-minute segment)
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    Back Door Man

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    Every bus driver has experienced this.

    There are many reasons people disregard the needs of others. Some are cultural, and some personal, ingrained by role models or lack thereof. Certain folks don't consider others because they are young, and the last part of the brain to develop is also the portion concerned with empathy. It's a survival mechanism; as a child you need to prioritize yourself to survive.

    Other folks are older but just don't have the brain development. Hard drug use is quite literally brain damage, and if you start using before the age of 25 (the age the brain fully matures), your brain will stop growing.* If you manage to kick your habit before 25, your brain is able to complete development, even if the process is delayed; but if you keep using past 25, your brain will never complete its maturation. For the rest of your life, you'll be wandering around in an adult body but stuck with the emotional capability of a teenager, and you'll wonder why existence seems so much easier for other people. Oh, Life. It can be so forgiving... except when it isn't.

    Still other people are self-absorbed for less dramatic reasons. They didn't have parenting that encouraged caring or empathy. Maybe they were spoiled. Or they have cultural standards that look dismissive from the outside– differing concepts of personal space or noise, for example. Perhaps they are experiencing crises situations which require focus on themselves; the survival mechanism again.

    These are the things a bus driver thinks when a passenger is about to get off the back door, but doesn't, because they're talking to their friends and thereby holding up the entire bus. Or when they're scrambling, slowly, to gather their paraphernalia to disembark but are so sluggish you're convinced– convinced– they're taking up everyone's time out of spite.

    These judgments are too easy. I tend to find myself thinking instead about brain science. With the endless amount of reasons brains can be underdeveloped or unstable, I find this rather more likely than malicious spite or ignorance. Considering the rampant drug use and untreated mental illness here in Seattle, it's more plausible to me that these folks really are operating at the limit of their abilities, which I state not as judgment but as a paraphrase for what I myself try for: the best you can do.

    For me, recognizing that people differ in ability isn't pejorative but humanizing. No need to hold folks to your standards, or any high standards. They have abilities in other areas, and as J.M. Barrie once wrote, they're all fighting their own battles. We have no idea. So be kinder than necessary.

    Which is what I attempted with this gent, a stocky fellow holding up the bus now, one foot edging out the back doorway at Prefontaine as he continued chatting with the gaggle of guys seated within. Shaved head, massive headphones with one speaker propped awry, the better to hear his friends; a forty-something brutalist figure with an itch to burn, the sort of restless fury to burn you expect in a younger man.

    If you just close the door on them, they get angry. If you yell at them, they get angry; and as my colleague Abdi once wisely told me, "If you act tough, they will act tough. And they've got nothing to lose." You do. Which is why getting pissed off never works.

    Sometimes you can just sit there, remaining silent, and the passengers will enthusiastically do the work for you, New York-style. But tonight I felt like trying the J.M. Barrie approach.

    "I'm a start closing that back door now," I said.
    Nothing.
    "Alright big guy, I don't wanna shut the door on ya..."
    Still nothing. We'd been there long enough for another passenger– guy in a red jumpsuit– to get off and then wander back and slink on again through the same rear doors.
    Me, friendly: "Once again, I'm thinkin' about closing those back doors..."

    At which point Mr. Brutalist stepped out, but also during which one of his buddies growled, "Bus driver, you're starting to piss me off!!"

    Which is when Mr. Red Jumpsuit leaned toward the speaker and yelled, "HEY THIS BUS DRIVER COOL!! HE LIKE MY GIRLFRIEND!!!"

    I don't know what the sentence meant, but I knew it was intended as praise, and I could see that it worked. Either I was similar to this man's girlfriend, or I liked her, whoever she was, and that esteemed me highly enough in his eyes for him to defend my character. What it meant was that everything was fine, and Respect, the all-singing, all-dancing high currency of the street, had restored whatever ripples had been brewing.

    What it meant was contained in my grin of gratitude, and the facial expression of one of the boys in the back: a dead ringer for A$AP Rocky except darker-skinned and friendlier, who looked at me from his position on the back bench, his arm around a girlfriend of his own.

    He returned my grin with a bigger one, a smiling laugh that was on my side, accepting the humor of the situation, my attitude, accepting the notion of accepting, a casual recognition of the delicate balance of things, the art of it all... How we live now, and have to exist in modern life:

    Keeping things on an even keel.

    ---

    ​*More on the brain: here's what I wrote in a 2015 post about similar concerns. Selected sources below.

    "The brain doesn't biochemically mature until a person's mid-twenties. Hard drug use before this age inhibits the development of the neurochemicals needed for the proper formation of multiple brain components, but most crucially for the prefrontal cortex. It's quite literally a case of arrested development. If an individual stops using by around age 24, there's still time for mirror neurons to develop. But kicking a habit is one of the hardest things to accomplish in life, and not everyone can do it that quickly. Addiction is a treatable condition; curtailed brain development isn't. The prefrontal cortex doesn't continue developing after the mid-twenties, and if its growth was prematurely stopped in the years prior, well. There is no undo button in life.

    The prefrontal cortex is the locus for what psychologists call "executive function": the ability to differentiate conflicting thoughts (good/bad, better/best), extrapolate future consequences of current activities, identify goals, predict outcomes, learn rules at a concrete level, and control behavior to anticipate and avoid socially unacceptable outcomes. The supramarginal gyrus (say that five times fast), also called Brodmann area 40, is strictly speaking located in the parietal lobe but is more generally situated at the junction between the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. Area 40 identifies actions and gestures of other people.

    I mentioned mirror neurons above. Mirror neurons fire when a person acts and also when a person sees an action being performed by another person. In other words, you feel better when the person in front of you smiles, or you care when someone else is sick even though you aren't. The right half of the supramarginal gyrus identifies our emotional state and that of others as distinguishable. It allows us to consider and imagine another's emotional state. Empathy, basically. It overcomes and autocorrects the brain's innate egocentricism (a Darwinian survival mechanism most pronounced in children or in adults without a developed supramarginal gyrus).

    Now, imagine not having any of that. This is why children are used as soldiers in certain parts of the world. It's a lot easier for them to kill people. It's also why robots are scarier, and why this man, with the faroff gaze and cloudy film in his eyes, is unsettling. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,' Allen Ginsberg wrote in 1955, and could as well have been referring to all the possible future Raphaels and Marie Curies who, having finally kicked their habit, live out their lives with the emotional maturity of teenagers."

    Light reading on brain and drug science     here and here. Or, if you like, heavy reading here, here, and here.
  • Published on

    In Praise of Lockdowns

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    UPDATE: Mr. Inslee has gone forward with exactly the kind of mandate I urge below! Of course I want to believe it was all because of my blog, but, you know, I'm told the world is bigger than that...!! Happy staying at home!

    I like people. I really do. As a child I liked animals, like all children, but when I eventually discovered people I knew I could never go back. The wildly imperfect, endlessly incomprehensible human beast, all of them searching in the dark for their version of love, of quality, each of us echoes of each other, something familiar in the glint of every person's eye.

    It is in that light that I offer these words on our Governor's office. I'm not interested in calling people out, judging them for transgressions real or imagined, or pretending to have the answers. Other folks do all that enough– too much, I'd say. I feel closer to myself when I simply appreciate others; observing and reflecting, trying to learn something about this mysterious life we've been thrown into.

    I recognize and respect the impetus behind the Inslee office's current resistance to a shelter-in-place order. As he has stated, he'd like to avoid the economic impact if alternate methods prove such a drastic choice unnecessary.

    I recognize this perspective, but I do not agree with it.

    COVID-19, like every uncontained virus that has ever existed, infects populations at an exponential rate. One person is infected, who then infects another; those two each infect multiple others and so on. You understand. It's how you get from 444 cases in Hubei Province on January 23rd to 4,903 a week following (1/30)… to a remarkable 22,112 seven days after that (2/6). The same can be observed in Italy, where by now we all know that due to a blasé government response, cases skyrocketed from 888 to 4,936 in 7 days (2/29 to 3/6). Closer to home, it's also how New York registered 4,812 cases in the last 24 hours (a number which will have increased by the time you read it).

    With this obvious truth easily understood, it baffles me that Washington, the American epicenter of the virus, has been among the most sluggish of U.S. states to react. To spend a week doing not much more than reminding the public to wash their hands is, at this point, morally irresponsible. Cities less compromised than ours have taken greater safety precautions. Why? Because we are at a crisis state where lives are being damaged and lost. We have arrived at, and are now beyond, the point where being overly cautious is something that might be criticized in hindsight. If Inslee is worried about that, he needn't be. The situation is severe enough that unprecedented measures are not only appropriate but expected.

    The Governor’s office’s hesitancy in taking action might be understandable from an insular view. He urges people to self-quarantine without requiring it. Fine. But there's reality to consider, and the current reality is that people are not doing that. We saw the photos of hordes flocking to Alki over the weekend, and I witnessed firsthand the crowds flooding the Green Lake trails. There was no social distancing taking place– not there, nor in my vast workplace of the street. Not enough. In light of there being a global pandemic underway, our city of which is a major nexus point of infection, these circumstances being legal is irresponsible and unsafe. Now is not the time for half-measures.

    More concretely, many people (such as yours truly) don't have the option to self-isolate. Numerous businesses are not complying with Inslee's request, for obvious financial reasons, and I don't believe they will unless legally compelled to do so. Their employees might like to stay home, but currently don’t have the luxury. Not everyone in Seattle works in tech. Some of us bake pizza. Some of us pour concrete. Might keeping these employees alive be more important than making a profit? Can we pause? Can we take a second, while science figures this thing out, and perhaps realize this could be the perfect time to experiment with a mode of society besides the current and deeply flawed model?     If this doesn’t make us push the reset button, what will?

    I appreciate Inslee’s optimism in hoping people and businesses would comply with his request. It’s the sort of move I would make as a politician, which is why I’m not one– my glowing trust in the goodness of people has gotten me in enough trouble throughout life already, even if that trouble is vastly outweighed by delightful experiences. But this is one of those moments: we tried, we saw, and we saw what was needed next. The public’s steadfast refusal to self-quarantine forces myself and thousands of other employees around the city to continue to go to work and expose ourselves. 

    At this point it's absurd to assume I don't have the virus. I've been driving visibly sick passengers and others around for two weeks, and have also likely been passing the virus along to others, such as the elderly woman I assisted up the ramp this evening. I wish I could obey the self-quarantine suggestion, but my place of work will not allow it, and continues to require my presence amongst the people. My late-night, non-destination passengers are legion in number, and they don't have access to the resources others have. Subsequently, they have different standards for sanitation, levels of awareness and concern… and of course, no one's testing them.

    Once they get the virus, everyone gets the virus.

    Wildfire won't even cover it. We'll need a new vocabulary for how fast it'll spread, because wildfire is what's already happening now.

    I feel disappointed in the state government's response, which is far too easy to interpret as a lack of concern for its citizens during this pandemic, despite vigorous statements to the contrary. I worry that the current refusal to issue the order will in hindsight be recognized as a catastrophic error, not just because it will severely tarnish Inslee’s otherwise admirable political legacy, but more crucially because it came at the devastating cost of real people's lives and lasting damage to their families. People got infected today because of this, who might not have. People died today.

    I’m not in a position to meaningfully critique a job about which I know basically nothing. I will not subject Mr. Inslee to the sort of arrogant armchair quarterbacking so many professions have to endure. But I will note my research and observations of the effect his decision is having. Inslee is an ordinary man under extraordinary circumstances, and we can't expect perfect foresight in times like these. He doesn’t have great decisions to choose from. He has only bad decisions at his disposal. He’ll get yelled by some quarter or another at no matter what he does. The question is, what’s the best bad decision that can be made right now? That involves the least least loss of life?

    I like people. I really do. I like Mr. Inslee, and I like the guys in the back of my bus.

    I want to see all of us thrive.

    ---

    Sources and further reading~

    USA Today. "We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America." By Yaneer Bar-Yam, MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics.
    The Guardian. "China's coronavirus lockdown strategy: brutal but effective."
    WSJ. "Lockdown of Recovering Italian Town Shows Effectiveness of Early Action."
    The Atlantic. "You Should Already Be in Lockdown: 'Six feet away' just doesn’t cut it."
    Al Jazeera. "To get through coronavirus lockdown, we need basic income."
    Live Science. "How effective are travel bans for curbing coronavirus spread?"
    The Washington Post. "Limit Travel to Fight Coronavirus? The Pros and Cons."

    [Image copyright Q13 Fox: crowds at Alki this past Sunday.]