The forgotten female action stars of the 1910s

 Even before women won the right to vote, a slew of films from the early-20th century featured heroines who chased danger and adventure.

A city editor orders an armed female reporter to chase down a con man and “get the story.” A railroad telegrapher seeks vigilante-style justice against two robbers who attacked her. An adventure-seeking heiress outruns a giant boulder Indiana Jones-style … decades before Harrison Ford was ever born.

In the current movie landscape, female action heroes tend to be so few and far between that their mere existence seems like an accomplishment (think: Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, Rey in Star Wars, or the four stars of the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot). But more than a century ago, before women had even won the right to vote in many countries, actresses headed up some of the U.S’s most popular and successful action movies—even if they performed stunts in skirts that ended only a few inches above their ankles.

The actress Ruth Roland in an advertisement for the serial Hands Up in 1918 (WIKIMEDIA)

During the early years of cinema in the 1900s and 1910s, men starred in action films such as westerns, but women dominated the so-called “serial” or “chapter” film genre. These were movies in which the same character appeared over several installments released on a regular basis, with plots that were either ongoing or episodic. The story lines typically featured female leads getting into danger, getting out of danger, brandishing guns, giving chase in cars, and battling villains. The film scholar Ben Singer estimates that between 1912 and 1920, about 60 action serials with female protagonists were released, totaling around 800 episodes.

What’s most striking about the category, Singer says, is its “extraordinary emphasis on female heroism.” Protagonists exhibited traditionally “masculine” qualities like “physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority, and the freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere.” Then, by the early 1920s, those films and their stars, the so-called “serial queens,” disappeared.

What happened? The answer may have to do with the early film industry’s short-lived tolerance of greater female involvement at all levels of the filmmaking process—a phenomenon that helps explain why today, even after women have shattered so many cultural barriers, action movies still continue to be dominated by male stars.

To understand what happened in the 1910s, it’s necessary to put the emergence of the serial film into context. During this period, two film formats jostled for dominance: what we’d now call “shorts” and “features.” But short films weren’t labeled as “short” at the time—they were simply the industry standard, and were usually described by their length (in number of reels). Features, meanwhile, were the newcomers, with higher production values, more ambitious plots, and greater production costs. Serials were something of a bridge between the two formats. Each episode in a serial was the length of a 15- or 20-minute short film, but over several weeks, a serial could tell a more complicated story.  

Serials focused on women action heroes from the start, possibly thanks to the format’s tie-ins with magazines and newspapers, which aimed to draw female readers because they were attractive to advertisers. In 1912, Thomas Edison’s film company teamed up with Ladies’ World magazine to put one of the earliest instances of a serial film, What Happened to Mary?, into print. This example of cross-promotion would continue as other “chapter films” were serialized in newspapers. The Chicago Tribune printed the story of The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) while the film episodes played in theaters. (Incidentally, Kathlyn was the first film serial to have a narrative thread that continued from week to week instead of relying on the same leading character to provide cohesiveness.)

The focus on heroines seems also to correlate with the film industry’s fascination with the “New Woman.” “She wore less restrictive clothes,” the film curator Eileen Bowser notes, “she was active, she went everywhere she wanted, and she was capable of resolving mysteries.” 

The proliferation of women in all areas of the film industry during the 1910s—not just as actors, but as screenwriters, theater managers, gossip columnists, film producers, and directors—reflected the increasing number of women in the American workplace, and also the efforts of the vocal and energetic women’s suffrage movement. It’s important to note however, that the abundance of serial-queen films in the 1910s wasn’t caused by women producers or directors pushing for them; the female stars of these movies often provided ideas and sometimes directed, but for the most part, serial films were written and directed by men.

In 1914, a breakout year for the category, the actress Mary Fuller played a daring reporter in The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies. The same year, Grace Cunard appeared in Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery, which was billed as the “Most Sensational Series of Pictures Ever Produced … AEROPLANES—LION—TIGERS—CANNIBALS—SHIPWRECKS …” Also in 1914, Pearl White, perhaps the best-remembered serial queen of all, made headlines as the fearless heiress Pauline Marvin in The Perils of Pauline, and Helen Holmes began her stint as the brave railroad telegrapher in The Hazards of Helen, which went on to become the longest-running serial, with 119 episodes over six years.

A clip from a 1916 episode of The Hazards of Helen exemplifies the heroism on display in “serial-queen” films. In it, Holmes, the railway telegrapher, battles vagrants, who’ve caused her to lose her job, atop a moving train. She spies them from a distance, makes her way across beams suspended above the tracks, jumps onto the moving train, grapples hand-to-hand with one of her antagonists and falls into the water with him. In the end, she gets her job back.

Perils of Pauline, which established White as one of the era’s most popular stars, features a different kind of bravery: one in which the lead character pursues her explorations to the point where she has to be rescued—usually by her beau, Harry. Over the course of the series, White (in the title role) is set adrift in a hot-air balloon and kidnapped on horseback by bandits. In an episode titled The Goddess of the Far West, Pauline charges down a steep hill to avoid being crushed by a massive boulder hurtling behind her, like Indiana Jones would do in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark nearly 70 years later.

Harry lassoes her out of the way in the nick of time. But make no mistake, it’s Pauline, not Harry, who carries the show. Although she’s bound and gagged and subjected to every sort of danger, her agility, resourcefulness, and strength are constantly on display as she runs, jumps, tumbles, fights off villains, or burrows her way out of a cave. The challenges she faces are the result of her own desire to push the boundaries, and she returns in each episode, unharmed and eager for her next adventure.

Though these serial queens are rarely remembered today, in their time, actresses such as Grace Cunard, Gene Gauntier, Ruth Roland, and Kathlyn Williams all boasted their own devoted followings. White’s enthusiastic audience of all ages and genders voted her as one of their top three favorite actresses from 1916 to 1918 in a Motion Picture magazine survey. Her fandom was also global: She was particularly beloved in France where she was seen as the incarnation of the “athletic, good-natured young American girl,” and she inspired spin-offs as far away as India, where the actress known as “Fearless Nadia” channeled “Fearless, Peerless Pearl” in her movies for the producer Homi Wadia.

Unfortunately, the celebrity of White and her cohorts would be short-lived. Serials like The Romance of Elaine and A Daughter of Uncle Sam adapted to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 by introducing plotlines featuring German saboteurs and spies as villains, with women starring in patriotic roles. But by 1919, after the war had ended and women had won the vote, serials and their female stars faded from popularity. The action heroine didn’t really make the transition to features. Or if she did, then as now, it was only in sporadic titles.

World War I also sparked a seismic transformation in the American film industry. Previously, the United States had been just one of several nations that produced and exported films. While the war crippled its European competitors, the U.S. film industry, now firmly based in Hollywood, succeeded in flooding foreign markets with its product. Movie-making became a big American business, and expensive-to-make features were Hollywood’s calling card.

Serial films were, like short films, demoted to a cheaper, less prestigious B-genre. The once-plentiful mom-and-pop production companies couldn’t compete with new studios that could finance and distribute large slates of lavish features, and serial queens, along with a legion of female directors and producers, also found themselves out of work. By the late 1920s, the movie business, which had once been relatively welcoming to women at all levels of the filmmaking process, now relegated them to only a few behind-the-camera roles, such as screenwriter or costume designer. Those who directed, like Dorothy Arzner in the late 1920s to the early 1940s, were in the minority, and no women headed major studios.

As movies became big business, filmmaking became more of a boy’s club, and women were pushed to the sidelines, with their disempowerment behind the camera reflected by female characters’ shift away from action roles. This persists to some extent today, even though, as movies like last year’s Mad Max and Melissa McCarthy’s Spy or the Hunger Games franchise show us, there’s certainly an audience out there for female-driven action movies.

So why do the 2010s lag behind the 1910s in terms of a robust body of films with female action leads? No doubt, industry experts could pull out a formula filled with box-office returns to explain and justify this. But perhaps looking to the past provides an equally compelling, if less intuitive, answer—that when women flourish in all aspects of the filmmaking process as they did during the early days of the business, when the current massive gender imbalance in the industry is corrected across the board, the conditions will be ripe for female action heroes to once again take over the big screen.

(Source: The Atlantic)

A women-only Bengaluru start-up is making straws from fallen coconut leaves

 A Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2018 is making eco-friendly straws named ‘Kokos Leafy Straws’, using dried coconut leaves, a report in The Logical Indian stated.

Evlogia Eco Care Private, founded by Manigandan Kumarappan, makes these eco-friendly straws of fallen coconut leaves.

Fallen coconut leaves are usually the residue left at many farms. The start-up collects discarded coconut leaves from the farms, which makes straws after the leaves go through a rigorous cleaning process.

These straws are sturdy and remain intact in liquid for a long duration. The midribs that hold the leaves are used to make brooms.

Employment of women

The startup employs 15 women, all hailing from nearby areas and economically poor background. The entire manufacturing process, from leaf collection to the final product, is taken care of by these women.

The products are exported to countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany and UAE.

The company makes 10,000 straws per day.

(Source: India Times)

40 journalists killed in India, 198 serious attacks in last five years, finds study

 In the 40 attacks where journalists died, 21 were confirmed to be related to their journalistic work.

Free press – the fourth pillar of democracy – sounds powerful. However, in the last few years, it has become more and more dangerous to be a journalist in India. A report called ‘Getting Away with Murder’ by journalists Geeta Seshu and Urvashi Sarkar on attacks on journalists in the last five years has some grim findings. The research was funded by Thakur Foundation, which works in areas including public health, right to information, and civil liberties. 

At least 198 serious attacks were recorded on reporters between 2014 to 2019, and of these, 36 happened in 2019 alone. Six of these are fairly recent, having happened during the protests over the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In 40 of these, journalists were killed – 21 of them were confirmed to be related to their journalistic work. The researchers chose 63 cases in all to follow up on – where scribes were found to have been attacked for their investigative work – and found a near-zero conviction rate. “Of the 63 cases studied, FIRs were lodged in only 25 cases. In 18 of these, the case hasn’t progressed beyond registering of the FIR. Chargesheets were filed in three cases but the process stalled thereafter. In only four cases, a trial has commenced.”

“Journalists covering conflict or news events were specifically targeted by irate mobs, supporters of religious sects, political parties, student groups, lawyers, police and security forces,” the report said. “Perpetrators of the killings and attacks included government agencies, security forces, political party members, religious sects, student groups, criminal gangs and local mafias.”

Clampdown on free speech

Self-censorship seems to have become more the norm than exception, the report says. It found that the media persons taking on corruption, excesses and powerful persons such as mining and sand mafias, were most vulnerable. For instance, The Wire’s story on the growth of the business firm run by Jay Shah, Home Minister Amit Shah’s son, was met with multi-crore legal notices, and defamation cases.

“But the ultimate censorship is the killings, that have claimed as victims both prominent senior journalists and editors in state capitals, to locally influential journalists as well as the foot-soldiers –stringers and freelancers- in small districts and towns across India,” the report says. Majority of the journalists who were found to have been killed or attacked were self-published, wrote on social media, or published in regional media.

“At least seven cases pertain to journalists pursuing investigative work on illegal activities, including reports on sand mining, illicit liquor trade, land grab, water mafia etc.,” the report said.

The report also highlights attacks on women journalists – they were found to be the targets of “relentless online harassment” as well, apart from “brutal” offline targeting in the field. Examples: Gauri Lankesh’s murder in a residential area in Bengaluru in 2017, a petrol bomb attack carried out at the home of Shillong Times editor Patrician Mukhim, journalists Sandhya Ravishankar and M Suchitra attacked in Chennai while covering illegal mining, to name a few.

Journalists were found to be particularly vulnerable in conflict zones, such as Kashmir, and Bastar in Chhattisgarh – not just from being caught in the crossfire, but also from law enforcement officials. In 2017, at least 14 journalists were arrested by Chhattisgarh government on various charges. And this report highlights the challenges such as information lockdown and intimidation being faced by journalists in Kashmir.

Further, there seems to be no official record or data when it comes to attacks on journalists. The study’s sources were a Rajya Sabha response, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) data, Press Council of India (PCI), news reports, and so on.

Low convictions, flawed justice system

The report looks at various case studies including the murders of Gauri Lankesh Patrike editor Gauri Lankesh, Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari, among others.

In the first case of Gauri Lankesh, a staunch critic of the right wing and fundamentalist groups, who was shot in 2017, a 9,325-page chargesheet naming 18 accused was filed in November 2018. The trial is yet to begin, over two years later. The case of Shujaat Bukhari, who was killed along with his two bodyguards, in 2018, remains unsolved. While Kashmir police said that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba was behind it, the outfit denied this through statements published in papers. As of June 2019, one suspect was killed in a shootout. The proceedings are at a standstill following the lockdown in Kashmir after abrogation of Article 370.

The report also mentions the death of Ramchandra Chhatrapati, who worked with Poora Sach. It took 17 years to obtain a conviction against Gurmeet Ram Rahim, the self-styled godman who is already serving a 20-year life term in relation to two rape cases. Chhatrapati had reported on the sexual exploitation of young women in Gurmeet’s ashram. He was shot on October 24, 2002, and succumbed to his injuries.

These instances show how slowly such cases move forward, and especially when the media coverage dies down. In fact, out of the 21 deaths that the report found between 2014-19, only in the case of Tarun Acharya did a conviction come. Further, despite testimonies by colleagues and family members, the reasons behind the killings were often attributed to things like property dispute, past enmities, family or marital disputes.

For instance, in the case of Rajdeo Ranjan, the bureau chief of Hindustan, killed in 2016 allegedly by supporters of former RJD MP Mohammad Shahabuddin, it was after much persistence of his wife Asha that the CBI took up the case. Initially, the trial was proceeding at a good pace, and 10 witnesses deposed before the court too. However, in October this year, she found that the CBI counsel was no longer attending court, and missing all the dates as it had been decided that the CBI case hearings were to be dealt with by the special crime branch of the states. Three years since her husband’s death, she said then that she felt like she was back to where she had started.  

Some journalists also expressed reluctance or unwillingness to report attacks on them to the police. “Journalists have had police raid their homes, smash their cameras and even fire tear-gas shells into their homes. In July 2018, Fahad Shah, editor of The Kashmirwalla, took to Twitter to say that a teargas shell was fired into his home, two weeks after his parents’ car was broken. Shah did not file a formal complaint. “Whom do I complain to? I know who did it but what’s the point. Later, I got an ‘informal’ message via someone that it should not have been done and that the action was regretted,” he said to a researcher […],” the study says.

In many cases where journalists did opt for legal proceedings, they were not supported by their employers.

Recommendations

Researchers make several recommendations such as reaching out to journalists, their families and colleagues without delay, providing medical and financial assistance, and psychological assistance to families of the deceased as well as to journalists who have faced attack.

It is also recommended for the government to take a proactive stand when journalists are attacked, appointing a high level official to look into the investigation and ensure that there is no pressure on law enforcement.

Apart from quasi-legal bodies like PCI (Press Council of India) and NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) taking suo-motu cognisance of such cases, they should also make their inquiries and findings public, and monitor investigations. Employers are suggested to support their journalists.

Networks, human rights activists, lawyers, and medical practitioners can also contribute by providing timely assistance. The report also recommends to build up a network of journalists’ organisations and groups to set up helplines, provide safety, and monitor cases and justice delivery till their conclusion. 

(Source: TNM)

The mutated virus is a ticking time bomb

 There is much we don’t know about the new COVID-19 variant—but everything we know so far suggests a huge danger.

A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries. Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a Colorado man with no history of travel, an additional case was found in California.

There are still many unknowns, but much concern has focused on whether this new variant would throw off vaccine efficacy or cause more severe disease—with some degree of relief after an initial study indicated that it did not do either. And while we need more data to feel truly reassured, many scientists believe that this variant will not decrease vaccine efficacy much, if at all. Health officials have started emphasizing the lack of evidence for more severe disease.

All good and no cause for alarm, right? Wrong.

A more transmissible variant of COVID-19 is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.

Increased transmissibility can wreak havoc in a very, very short time—especially when we already have uncontrolled spread in much of the United States. The short-term implications of all this are significant, and worthy of attention, even as we await more clarity from data. In fact, we should act quickly especially as we await more clarity—lack of data and the threat of even faster exponential growth argue for more urgency of action. If and when more reassuring data come in, relaxing restrictions will be easier than undoing the damage done by not having reacted in time.

To understand the difference between exponential and linear risks, consider an example put forth by Adam Kucharski, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who focuses on mathematical analyses of infectious-disease outbreaks. Kucharski compares a 50 percent increase in virus lethality to a 50 percent increase in virus transmissibility. Take a virus reproduction rate of about 1.1 and an infection fatality risk of 0.8 percent and imagine 10,000 active infections—a plausible scenario for many European cities, as Kucharski notes. As things stand, with those numbers, we’d expect 129 deaths in a month. If the fatality rate increased by 50 percent, that would lead to 193 deaths. In contrast, a 50 percent increase in transmissibility would lead to a whopping 978 deaths in just one month—assuming, in both scenarios, a six-day infection-generation time.

JOHN MOORE / GETTY

Transmissibility increases can quickly—very quickly—expand the baseline: Each new infected person potentially infects many more people. Severity increases affect only the infected person. That infection is certainly tragic, and this new variant’s lack of increase in severity or lethality thankfully means that the variant is not a bigger threat to the individual who may get infected. It is, however, a bigger threat to society because it can dramatically change the number of infected people. To put it another way, a small percentage of a very big number can easily be much, much bigger than a big percentage of a small number.

I dismissed the news initially because viruses mutate all the time and there have been too many baseless “mutant-ninja virus” doomsaying headlines this year. The exaggerated, clickbaity alarmism makes it harder to discern real threats from sensationalism. Given the constant reality of mutation, genomic variants should be considered innocent until proved guilty. Even an increase in the proportion of cases attributable to a particular variant is not definitive proof of an evolutionary advantage.

However, as data on the new variant roll in, there is cause for real concern. Trevor Bedford, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a board member for the Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic, points out that infections from the new variant are increasing very rapidly among the population in the U.K. Bedford also notes that this new variant seems to have a higher secondary-attack rate—meaning the number of people subsequently infected by a known case—compared with “regular” COVID-19.  Finally, the new variant seems to result in higher viral loads (though this is harder to be sure about as viral loads can be affected by sampling bias and timing). As Kucharski told me, all of this does not rule out other explanations. This increased transmission could be due to chance or founder effects—meaning one variant just happened to get somewhere before the other variants and then got “lucky”; it was early, rather than more transmissible. It could be due to changed behavior among people—quarantine fatigue, less masking—leading to more rapid spread. However, given the current evidence, along with the specifics of the mutation, it’s getting harder to assume that those other explanations are more likely than the simple proposition that this is truly a more transmissible variant.

So how much more transmissible? We aren’t completely sure yet, but the initial estimates from the data suggest that this variant could be about 50 to 70 percent more transmissible than regular COVID-19. To make matters thornier, we aren’t yet exactly sure why it’s more transmissible, though reasonable theories are already being tested. This variant, now called B.1.1.7, has “an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein,” which is how the virus gains entry into our cells. The new variant may be better at eluding our immune response and replicating, or be able to better bind to locations in our body more conducive to infecting others, but that is all speculative for the moment.

This uncertainty in understanding the variant’s exact mechanisms means that we don’t know if our existing tools—masks, distancing, and disinfecting—are as effective as they were compared with an identical scenario with the regular variant. To be clear: The variant is still a respiratory virus, so the basic tools will not change, and they will all continue to work. In fact, they have become more important, but we may need to be stricter—less time indoors, better masks, better ventilation, more disinfection of high-touch surfaces—to get the same bang for our protective buck. It may be a small difference, or not. We don’t know. We won’t know for a while.

Given that this new variant is already here in America, are we too late? No, but we are on our back foot. The United States does not have extensive genomic surveillance, or a rapid turnaround with what surveillance it has, so in some ways, we are flying without a map. We have some indications that the variant is—so far—probably relatively rare in the United States.

This could, of course, change extremely quickly, before we can even detect that change, but that highlights the importance of early action. In addition to the threat of exponential growth, we must remember that this pathogen is quite overdispersed—meaning some people seem to cause many infections, while many do not transmit it at all (though these ratios may change as well). Early on, there was a lot of hand-wringing about why some European cities were very badly hit while others were spared—spared only until later, it often turned out—despite similar policies. The answer could be just a bit of bad luck and a few weeks of delay: For exponential processes, small initial differences can mean gargantuan differences in the long run, and we are not helpless.

We can and should deploy whatever weapons we have in our arsenal, as soon as possible. If public-health officials can accelerate our ability to detect the new variant, they must. “You could imagine case-based interventions specifically targeting the early variant-transmission chains,” Bedford told me. “I wouldn’t expect to contain them, but I could imagine buying a week or two.”

A week or two may not seem like a lot, but combined with other aggressive public-health measures, we may actually gain a few additional weeks. Maybe all of that could delay this new variant’s widespread establishment until February or even March.

This moment is somewhat similar to America’s initial COVID-19 surge and shutdown in March. We need to once again talk about the importance of flattening the curve. We need to again preserve hospital capacity, so our fatality rate doesn’t increase. But this time around, we can be a lot more hopeful: We need to flatten the curve because delaying potential infections just a few weeks or a month can make a tremendous difference when highly effective vaccines are being rolled out.

We are in a race against time, and the virus appears to be gaining an unfortunate ability to sprint just as we get closer to the finish line. Although the initial rollout of the vaccines has been slow, it is expected to increase rapidly. The U.S. may have 50 million to 100 million people vaccinated as early as March. That is a huge difference, one that could save many lives, especially since we also have perhaps that many people with some degree of postinfection immunity.

Here’s how to think about it: Vaccinated people are a lot less likely to get sick in the first place. One hundred million vaccinated people will mean 100 million people with much less (or hardly any) risk for any symptomatic COVID-19, especially severe disease. That’s an enormous gain.

But that’s not all. Vaccines benefit not just the vaccinated, but potentially everyone else, too. Fewer people symptomatically sick with a contagious virus means fewer sick people infecting even more people. Every indication we have suggests that vaccinated people will also transmit less—how much less is still being studied, but the difference may well be substantive. The mRNA vaccines (both already approved in the United States) cut down symptomatic disease by about 95 percent. We already know that people who never develop symptomatic disease are a lot less likely to transmit COVID-19. (Note the difference between people who are truly asymptomatic and people who are just about to get sick—presymptomatic—but are highly infectious.) In a preliminary study, the Moderna vaccine was found to even prevent two-thirds of asymptomatic infections. 

Vaccinated people are thus not only much, much less likely to get any disease; they appear much less likely to get even a silent, asymptomatic infection. Although we need more data to be sure, all of this strongly suggests that vaccinated people will also transmit less. The fewer people there are to efficiently transmit a pathogen, the harder it is for that pathogen to spread.

Now that we have effective vaccines, flattening the curve into the future also means obliterating the curve. Dylan Morris, a postdoc at UCLA who studies virus transmission and quantitative biology of infectious disease, and a co-author of a preprint paper studying the impact of timing on nonpharmaceutical interventions—such as reducing mobility and contacts, wearing masks, distancing, and avoiding indoor gatherings—told me that “delaying cases has always been valuable, but right now it is especially valuable. Buying even a bit of time to ramp up vaccination could avert a great deal of mortality and morbidity.” Every COVID-19 death is tragic, but with the existence of several effective vaccines, every death is now technically preventable too.

Even without a vaccine, Morris said, knocking down the virus through temporary suppression can be valuable even though the virus will grow again, precisely because of these exponential effects. The same percentage growth amounts to a much smaller number of infected people when the baseline number is much smaller. Bringing the baseline level of contagion down also allows for safer experimentation: What happens if we relax X a bit? What restrictions work best? Which ones are most sustainable? If cases are growing from a very large base number, however, that means the state of the world is changing very quickly, so small mistakes are magnified. As Morris said, “You can’t finesse the steep part of an exponential.” He noted that throughout the pandemic, we bemoaned the absence of silver bullets while underestimating the value of crude hammers. But now we are in a different situation: We do have a silver bullet—vaccines—just as we have this new threat thrown at us. How we react in the next few weeks will matter immensely.

Imagine it this way: There is a tsunami heading our way, and we are ferrying people to a high point. Everyone we transport up to the top is safe, but even better, they can also help other people get to safety (the exponential desirable effect of the vaccine). The reverse is also true, however: Everyone we leave behind also pulls down more people (the exponential unwanted effect of increased transmissibility). And the whole process is very sensitive to when we start; it’s much easier in the beginning but gets nearly impossible as the wave grows higher and gets closer. With this variant, at least in the United States, we are likely at the beginning, or near the beginning.

All this means that the speed of the vaccine rollout is of enormous importance. There are already worrisome indicators of slow rollout. Vaccination of a broad population, not vaccines in and of themselves, saves lives, and epidemics are fought with logistics and infrastructure. We should put every bit of energy, funding, and relentlessness into vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the United States was reportedly planning to hold back half the vaccine it has in freezers as a hedge against supply-chain issues, and some states may be slowed down by murky prioritization plans. Scott Gottlieb—the former FDA chief and a current board member of Pfizer—has argued that the U.S. should also go ahead with vaccinating as many people as possible right now and trust that the supply chain will be there for the booster. Researchers in Canada—where some provinces decided to vaccinate now as much as possible without holding half in reserve, and will administer the booster with future supplies—estimate that this type of front-loading can help “avert between 34 and 42 per cent more symptomatic coronavirus infections, compared with a strategy of keeping half the shipments in reserve.” (Note that this strategy, which is different from the one the United Kingdom just announced it will adopt in prioritizing the first dose, does not even necessarily involve explicitly changing booster timing protocols in order to maximize vaccination now; it just means not waiting to get shots into arms when the vaccines are currently available.) These were already important conversations to have, but given the threat posed by this new variant, they are even more urgent.

Maybe—just maybe—this variant will turn out to be a false alarm, not nearly as transmissible as we feared. We will know soon enough. Our precautions will still be net positives. But if it is indeed much more transmissible, we may face a true tragedy: exponential growth with massive numbers of illnesses and deaths just as highly effective vaccines are being made available. We’ve had a year to learn—about the importance of early action, of acting decisively even in the face of uncertainty, of not confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. A year to learn to aim not for perfection in knowledge but for maximal impact even while considering the trade-offs. And most important, a year to learn to not wait when faced with threats with exponential dynamics but to act as early and as decisively as we can—and to adjust and tamper later, if warranted.

“Exponentials are so cruel that nobody wants to look them in the eye,” Morris told me. This is true, but averting our eyes doesn’t avert the outcomes. Each one of us is now counting on every person who serves the public—mayors, city-council members, health officials, nurses, FDA regulators, members of Congress, journalists—to speak up now, and to speak up loudly. We must insist on swift and aggressive action, along with more resources, in order to get this right. It is not too late. Many lives depend on what we do next.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Painted ladies

 The painted lady larvae came in a small, clear plastic cup with a half inch of growth medium on the bottom. Tiny holes in the lid for air. The day they arrived, each was no longer nor thicker than an individual, mascara-plumped eyelash. There were six living larvae in the cup. You could find them if you looked, squirming across the medium or edging up the sides, but you had to look.

I never thought much about eyelashes until I started shopping for them. Now they’re the first thing I notice on a woman. My daughter is a dancer. She’s only nine, but her dance school requires she wear false lashes for all performances. I’ve always been afraid of glue-on lashes. The ripping off part scares me the most. I’m afraid the adhesive will take with it something that matters. Instead, I found a company that makes magnetic lashes. A thick coat of eyeliner, and they stay right on. They are endless, the things I discover so my girl can do what she loves.

*

We’d tried to grow painted lady butterflies at home before, but we traveled too much that summer. They are easy to care for during their larval stage, but once they build their chrysalides, you have to keep a careful watch. After they have hardened—but not so long after that you disturb the unseen process happening inside—you must transfer the chrysalides to the netted cage that will be the emerged butterfly’s home. You must set inside the cage a bowl of sugar water filled with little wads of sweet-water-soaked paper towels, also at just the right time, remembering to change the water and towel wads every other day. Stay near. You must be present at the moment when the butterflies emerge. We missed the good parts last time. We had to take the net cage to my parents’ house. The painted ladies emerged there, without fanfare, living most of their brief, final days while we were away.

*

The magnetic lashes were advertised in several lengths and degrees of thickness, each named after a city: Nashville, Dallas, Portland, Chicago. Portland was the least conspicuous, then Seattle. The Chicago lashes were more densely packed. The Los Angeles style was longer and crosshatched in a way that made you want to look at them closely. They resembled Madonna’s $10,000 mink lashes, but without diamonds at the base. We bought Seattle. When they arrived and we’d gotten them applied I asked, “What would Dallas have looked like on you!?” I couldn’t even begin to imagine Vegas on my child’s eyes.

*

I thought it would be a positive learning experience to watch something tiny and plain as those larvae grow into creatures as beautiful, as magical, as butterflies.

*

I used to think most people with great lashes just used really good mascara. That’s how naive I can be sometimes. Once I started shopping for false lashes, I couldn’t help noticing the lash bars all over town. There is an entire industry for eyelashes. I became obsessed. For about a month, most of what I talked about was the enhancement of lashes. If I saw a woman with lovely lashes, I would compliment her. “Thank you,” said a grocery store cashier. “I just got them done. It took forever! I had no idea it would take so long. I had to keep my eye open while a woman applied each individual lash. Can you imagine!?” I couldn’t imagine. I wanted to ask more, but her line was growing noticeably long.

*

I thought this summer, since we were home all the time, growing something beautiful and alive would be fun.

*

The revelation that so many people were enhancing their eyes was disruptive. It changed the way I saw the things I’d been seeing before. Eyeshadow I could understand. I’d long participated in the act of shadowing my eyes. I’d resisted eyeliner until I went to ladies’ night at the local mall with my Aunt Mary—when she was still alive and healthy—about six years ago. We went on a lark one Friday night, when I was new to Fort Collins and had pretty much nothing to do but hang out with her. Sephora was offering free makeovers, and when the aesthetician finished one side of my face with eyeliner and the other side without, just to prove her point, both Mary and I had to admit that the application of liquid liner should become part of my regular makeup routine. My eyes look better and brighter with liner, there’s no doubt about that. But I cry too much to wear mascara. 

Allergies and, you know, all this dust in the air. I mean, come on. There is so much to cry about. Aunt Mary is dead, for one thing. I can name many others. We’re on track, again, to suffer the hottest, most brutal summer on record. There are hardly any Gunnison sage grouse left. No more Indo-Chinese tigers. Someone is counting—now, as ever, someone has to keep counting—but it’s hard to keep track of all our unexpected human dead. All our dead. I’m just saying, I can’t imagine why someone would lie down with their eyes open and let a stranger glue individual artificial lashes alongside each God-given lash surrounding their eye. Is that where we’re putting our energy these days?

Once I started looking, though, I saw it everywhere, this lashwork. And, I thought, it almost always made people look beautiful.

*

At first, the painted lady larvae looked like little lashes. But, after about five days, they plumped up and started to look like what I expected from a caterpillar. Crenelated fuzzy worms on legs. Cute even. Mission driven. “Grow, little guys,” we said. “Grow!”

They were messy, though. Filling their cup with a sort of web-like silk and what the literature calls frass. They molted and left behind black balls that looked like caterpillar poop, or maybe tiny caterpillar heads, as they ate uneven holes into the growth medium, which was the color and texture, my daughter pointed out, of puke.

*

When the shutdowns started in Colorado and around the U.S. and people were wondering about haircuts—some people even protesting with semiautomatic assault rifles and stringing their governor’s effigy up in a noose, demanding haircuts, the hairdressers’ health be damned—I wanted to know about the people who needed their eyelash extensions filled in. Why wasn’t I hearing more about the nation’s eyelash situation? How many husbands and boyfriends and unwitting souls like me were just now discovering what it really meant to look into a woman’s eyes?

*

I woke up one morning and, overnight, most of the larvae had hung their chrysalides from the fabric that stretched across the top of the cup just for this. They were the dusty gray-green of old eucalyptus leaves, with a threading of gold along one seam. Why the gold, I’ve always wondered. The chrysalides were gorgeous, I am not the first to say, like living jewels.

Two weren’t at the top, though. Their little packages of pupae were lying in the growth medium on the floor of the cup. 

According to the literature, they could get wet, infected, or worse. This butterfly-growing activity quickly stopped being as fun, as easy as I had hoped.

*

I should back up a little. When I was obsessing over artificial lashes, one of my questions was whether or not their proliferation was a possible sign of the coming end of the world.

I would like to say that I’m not usually prone to such ideation, but I’m not here to tell you lies. My point where the lashes were concerned was that I had, in my hasty research, noticed that there have been several phases in history when lash extensions have been popular, when women were rewarded for enhancing themselves in this particular way. “I never wore them when I was young,” my friend Brenda told me. “They were very fashionable at my high school in 1967, then the hippie thing took precedence.” I took this as further confirmation that periods of the popularity of falsies coincide with moments just before our culture experiences some fundamental—some might say catastrophic—change.

*

We would have to watch the net cage all the time to catch the moment of emergence. For at least a day before I turned around to see a butterfly, a careful look at the chrysalis revealed the intensifying orange and black and white of those self-fabricating wings. There are so many things in our world that seem to disappear for a while. Only some of them come back again. How do they do it, turn in just a matter of days from caterpillar to nothing to something that will fly? Any moment now, I kept thinking. But some moments last longer than others.

*

Researchers suggest that false lashes first came into popularity in the entertainment industry when D. W. Griffith demanded that his female stars wear them for one of his films. Griffith’s rationale was roughly the same one my daughter’s dance school laid out. Eyes with false lashes look better under the bright production lights. Also, maybe Griffith was tapping into an ancient belief that thick lashes make a woman look more virginal and pure. Children often have thick lashes, and one standard of beauty is a woman who in body and actions resembles a child. But this is just conjecture, and certainly those Vegas lashes I mentioned earlier aren’t designed to make a girl look chaste.

The film that brought falsies to Hollywood wasn’t Griffith’s most famous. His most famous film was The Birth of a Nation, a movie that seeks to justify, to glorify the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The lily-white beauty whose purity is at the supposed center of the nation’s natal drama was played by the same star, Lillian Gish, who wore the fake lashes in Griffith’s subsequent film. She remains an icon of beauty for many, with her big beckoning eyes.

*

I woke up early this morning and got a bit of writing done. It was a good day, and I was feeling pretty happy. “Come look at your butterflies!” I yelled down to my daughter, when I went to check on the chrysalises in the net cage. Finally, one had emerged. It was hanging upside down, drying its wings. Opening and closing them like, yes, fluttering lashes. So beautiful, I thought, sighing. Happy, completely, for the first time in a while.

“What’s that?” she asked. Pointing to the bottom of the cage.

Did you know that the meconium inside a chrysalis resembles human blood? Red liquid made up of all a butterfly discards after assembling its body. Red splotches were all over the floor of the cage. “Why is there all that blood!?” she asked. Even if it wasn’t blood, it looked like blood. And that was not the worst of it.

My daughter’s eyes are beautiful, do I need to tell you that? She wasn’t crying, but she also wasn’t not crying. Do you know what I mean? Her eyes were filled with the sort of sadness we carry inside, almost spilling over our lids, when we’ve seen suffering of which we know we’re the source.

Her lashes were black and long and wet with what she will never unsee.

On the floor of the cage was a butterfly, the first to have emerged. It had been there too long for us to help it, if we ever could have helped it. Its drying wing had adhered to the fabric on the bottom of the cage. This is the part I don’t want to write. To release it from the cage, I would have to rip its wing. The butterfly was still alive, of course. But it couldn’t survive. The other emerged butterfly was flittering over it with its working wings, crawling on the just-built, floor-stuck body as if it were a rock. A breathing, dying rock.

I only wanted to give my girl something she could love. As if, for beauty, this world doesn’t suffer enough.

(Source: The Paris Review)