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Guest post by Vilde Lunnan Djuve and Carl Henrik Knutsen
In March 2020, COVID-19 generated a major emergency in countries across the world with public fear of the virus, lockdowns, and economies going into a tailspin. Yet, observers and citizens in many countries were worried about one additional thing, namely that their leaders would use the ongoing crisis as a window of opportunity for concentrating power in their own hands and thereby (further) undermine democracy. This was the case in Hungary, for example, where Viktor Orban’s government was granted the power to rule by decree. Such fears are not unfounded: History suggests that whenever leaders declare states of emergency in response to a (perceived or real) crisis, democratic decline becomes much more likely.
The COVID-19 crisis, in many ways, was unprecedented in its global scope and wide-ranging ramifications. Yet, even more conventional crises such as a “regular” economic recession with increased unemployment and reduced incomes, could have notable political consequences. From previous research, we also know that crises are related to various tumultuous political events such as civil war, coups d’état, and revolutions.
But very often regimes are changed not by some outside force such as military officers conducting coups or by revolutionaries in the streets. Instead, global data from the last two centuries show that the incumbent regime elites, including the sitting leaders themselves, are very often involved as key actors in processes of regime change. Does economic crisis increase the chances also of such incumbent-guided transitions?
In our new study, we investigate the relationship between economic crisis and regime changes driven by regime incumbents. We find that the relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-driven transitions (when treating them as one category) is very clear and at least as strong as the relationship between crisis and coups d’état. In other words, the risk of regime change driven by sitting presidents or other top leaders increases just about as much as the risk of coups, in the wake of economic crisis.
Why do we find such a robust relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-guided transitions? We propose two complementary explanations:
First, we argue that economic crises can work as windows of opportunity for incumbent leaders who are eager to expand their grip on power, make sure that they stay in power in the future, and diminish the role of the opposition. The idea is that, like during a pandemic (albeit typically on a smaller scale), citizens are more willing to accept extreme measures from their incumbents when crises loom. This gives leaders leeway to blame common enemies, ensure support where they otherwise cannot find it, and pursue regime change in a direction they inherently prefer.
Indeed, we find in our study that there is a strong and systematic relationship between economic crises and non-democratizing regime transitions driven by the regime incumbent. For examples of this unfolding in the real world, we can look to the self-coup of President Fujimori in Perú in April 1992, which took place after a long slouch in growth and the ascension of the armed group Sendero Luminoso.
In a more hopeful vein for supporters of democracy, we also have reason to believe that crises can trigger incumbent-guided liberalization. Both previous scholarship and real-world examples suggest that crises may force concessions from cornered autocrats because they ultimately would prefer gradual democratization to full-fledged revolution or armed insurgency. Since we know that crises make both coups and revolutions, perceptive autocrats should anticipate the heightened threat levels and thereby be more motivated to, e.g., hold general elections to diffuse tensions.
For a classic example of crisis driving popular discontent, rising insurgency, and mediated democratization guided by the incumbent, we can look to Zambia when the rule of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) ended in 1991. Kenneth Kaunda and UNIP had ruled Zambia for 27 years, whereof 18 under a formalized one-party state. Yet, in 1991, multi-party elections were held, followed by a relatively peaceful transfer of power to the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Here, the economic crisis built up substantial pressure on the regime by way of widespread protest and increasing opposition alliance building. Under such conditions, the regime ultimately opted to reform a less favorable regime type than the status quo, presumably because this outcome was preferable to them compared to forced regime change by outside actors.
We thus know that crisis can help push the needle in some instances. However, we do not find in our analyses that there exists a robust, systematic relationship between crisis and incumbent-guided democratization, more specifically. It might be that many cornered dictators, during times of crises, preempt the need for concessions by consolidating power instead of liberalizing. Or, they make policy concessions to the opposition that fall short of democratization, but still ease tensions, such as increasing pensions payments.
Overall, then, we find that crises rarely pressure incumbents to democratize. Rather, crises enable regime leaders to alter their regimes either without affecting their democracy score, or by lowering it. In the midst of a global halt in democratic progress, there is thus particularly good reason to pay close attention to the actions of incumbents in weak democracies during times of crises.
Vilde Lunnan Djuve is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Carl Henrik Knutsen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo and a Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
By Leo Lam and Taylor Nichols.
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the operation of our society. To cope with a novel virus to which humans had no immunity, public health authorities took a multitude of actions such as lockdowns, mandates on non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks, and later on vaccines in specific circumstances to protect the population. Naturally, whenever mandatory actions are enforced, ethical questions regarding liberty and the question of choice arise and the answers are not always clear.
One way to help guide us through such an ethical dilemma is to perform a risk and benefit analysis on the individuals and the community affected by these actions. This is also not a simple task as some risks/benefits may be superficially qualitative and as such, quantitative comparisons must be formulated carefully to avoid bias and therefore skewing the outcome of the analysis. Ethical positions must be informed by scientifically justifiable facts, not cherry-picked values that support preconceived notions.
In another word, the risk profiles for the risk and benefit must be closely matched for the analysis to be fair, defensible, and scientifically justifiable. Without this consideration, merely comparing numbers may create an illusion that sways the argument one way or the other, while the actions that optimally benefit society and individuals languish in the noise.
Vaccine mandates, especially those that apply to college campuses, have been a point of contention among experts and general society because the risk and benefit analysis is not as clear cut for the college-aged population as, for example, those who are over 65. The college-aged group does not get as sick when infected, and the death rate is lower. Yet regardless of age, some risks do exist and such risks must be carefully balanced against the perceived lowering benefit as we progress down the age groups.
To perform a robust analysis for this younger age group, details matter when it comes to examining the risk profiles. On the benefit side for this age group in decreasing severity, vaccines reduce the number of deaths, reduce the number of cases of severe diseases that require resource-intensive hospitalizations, reduce the overall number of cases, and lower the chance of Long COVID even for mild cases. Each one of these benefits reflects different levels of resource consumption for treatments and individual suffering with long-term and short-term implications. It is also clear that there are public health benefits that affect other age groups when this group is vaccinated. On the negative side, receiving the vaccines comes with risks such as Severe Adverse Events (SAEs), reactogenicity, and myocarditis, especially for the males in the group. Each one of these risks also requires the consumption of resources to treat and represent varying levels of personal suffering.
For example, using the number of cases to quantify the risk of SAEs seems straightforward, but the severity of such SAEs would determine which benefits should be compared. The SAEs reported in the Pfizer vaccine trial were “moderate persistent tachycardia, moderate transient elevated hepatic enzymes, and mild elevated hepatic enzymes” all of which were reported to be transient, self-resolved events that did not require hospitalization in the trial. It would be, therefore, inappropriate to compare this low level of severity to death or even to hospitalized cases of COVID given the differential in treatment resources and suffering. While still imperfect, it would be more reasonable to compare it to the number of COVID cases prevented. There is a spectrum of severity in COVID cases, some resources are still needed to treat on average, and with Long COVID being a non-insignificant possible outcome, the risk profile of a COVID case is still higher than the reported SAEs. Here, the precautionary principle applies, and erring on underestimating the benefits is not unreasonable to prevent harm.
Our paper that examines the ethics of college vaccine mandates uses the same process to identify the correct comparison pairs for SAEs, reactogenicity, and the chance of myocarditis. It can be demonstrated that the resources saved via vaccine mandates far exceed the resources needed to treat the risks and that the population in that age group benefits from vaccination far more than the risk they are exposed to from vaccination when risk profiles on both sides are carefully balanced. Attending college is also a privilege, not a right. We concluded that the vaccine mandates carry more benefits than risks on both an individual level and on a societal scale on quantifiable grounds. And thus, college mandates are ethical.
Paper title: The ethics of college vaccine mandates, using reasonable comparisons
Authors: Leo Lam, Taylor Nichols
Affiliations: University of Washington, University of San Francisco
Competing interests: None
Social media accounts of post authors: @SeattleiteLeo @tnicholsmd
The post College vaccine mandates benefitted students and society appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."
The post “There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed appeared first on Public Books.
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On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
For Lit Hub in 2021, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón considers her gender in “Preparing the Body for a Reopened World.”
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
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Running is a sport of contradiction. Finishing a marathon is at once extraordinary and unremarkable: Running 26.2 miles is an exceptional achievement, but it’s also one that 1.1 million people complete every year.
In running, themes of life and death coexist. On one hand, it’s a celebration of what the human body can do and achieve. Some events, like cancer charity runs, are associated with the will to survive. But at the other end, in the sport’s most extreme races like the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in California’s Death Valley, participants teeter on the edge of mortality. The truth is, the marathon was born out of, quite literally, death.*
* The first marathoner, an Athenian man delivering news of a Greek victory after a battle, collapsed and died after finishing his journey.
Other contrasts abound. Sociological analyses of running culture also show how it can be egalitarian and unequal at once: Theoretically, running has no barrier to entry, and all you really need is a good pair of sneakers, but the socioeconomic and racial disparities in the world of competitive running are hard to ignore. The median household income of the Runner’s World print audience in 2022 was $120,050 (well above the 2021 national median of $70,784), implying that running is somehow associated with wealth. (A study on the meaning of running in American society looks at how running perpetuates ideals of capitalism and consumerism.) On the other hand, the simple act of jogging by yourself, in your own neighborhood, can be deadly for those less privileged; the most high-profile running stories in recent years haven’t been about heroes, but victims.
All of which is to say, running can be a complex subject, and essays and features about running fascinate me, especially after I became a runner myself.
The appeal of running isn’t always obvious to outsiders. Until I became a runner, I had been mystified why people would subject themselves to such a tedious kind of suffering. Masochists, I thought, whenever a group of runners passed by me in college.
But now the joke’s on me. I’m that guy running with a varicolored Dri-FIT running tank, six-inch lined running shorts, a Garmin feature-packed to conquer K2. My face is smeared with sunscreen, enough to trap dirt and insects that land on my face.
My transformation from an unbeliever to that friend who guilt-trips you to cheer for me on a Sunday morning happened two-plus years ago, thanks to — what else? — the pandemic. One fateful day in March 2020, after indoor gyms shut down, I decided to run across the Queensboro Bridge in Queens, New York. Back then, I didn’t have a smartphone, so I put my iPad mini in my polyester drawstring bag and ran across the bridge, listening to What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. What started that day as a lockdown pastime evolved into something more, and thanks to Murakami, I’ve since added marathon entry fees as a line item in my annual expenses.
I’d like to think that all runners have experienced that moment when they cross over from “someone who runs” to a “runner.” The more you run, the more you experience moments of endorphin-induced glee. But one day you achieve escape velocity — and feel the euphoria of the “runner’s high.”
As the pieces below will show, runner’s high is not the only reason — nor is it the most meaningful one — writers run. If you’re Murakami, the reason can be as mundane as to stay fit after committing to a sedentary job. For other writers, it’s more complicated. The stories in this reading list highlight six writers’ insights on the act and art of running.
Longtime fans of the Murakami Cinematic Universe will find familiar elements here: baseball, jazz, understated prose, and non sequiturs. For a time, before Murakami became a novelist, he was the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo. In this piece, he describes how — and exactly when — he decided to write and how his early habits and commitments allowed him to do so prolifically for decades.
Running a jazz club required constant physical labor, but when Murakami started to spend more time at his desk, he started gaining weight. “This couldn’t be good for me,” he writes in a deadpan statement. “If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.” Being metabolically challenged helped Murakami develop his work ethic.
Murakami drops writing advice while making parallel points about running. But the way he does it is frustratingly tantalizing — he’s not the one to share his tips openly à la Robert McKee. Murakami suggests that writing, like running, relies less on quick decision-making skills than patience and long contemplation: “Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life.”
Murakami calls himself a no-talent — a colossal understatement — but readers who have encountered unreliable narrators in his novels know better: We shouldn’t be so naïve as to take his words at face value.
Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.
Murakami doesn’t debunk the myth of an artistic genius but shows that with a sustainable routine, the genius can be prolific. If you’re reading for concrete advice on writing and a neat analogy comparing running to writing, you won’t find it here. Rather, we get something better: a portrait of the artist as a young runner.
Don’t let the title fool you. Rachel Richardson has no unconditional praise for Thoreau; she politely defies him. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau spoke to an audience of men as he opined on nature. To him, women were symbols — “for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters,” writes Richardson — rather than his target readers.
To read Thoreau’s essay in 2023 is to be startled by his problematic view of women and puritanical sense of “capital-N” Nature. He would not approve of the urban environment that Richardson describes while she runs: “I was born in a California he didn’t imagine, in a hospital in a town laid out with lawns and gardens.” Her piece is a bracing tonic against the writer’s anachronistic thoughts.
Richardson, like many other runners like me, was not always a runner: “How or why anyone would do this for pleasure was beyond my ability to fathom,” she thought when growing up. But in her 20s, she discovered running as a refreshingly guilt-free activity to do in a world that made her anxious. (People who started running during the pandemic, like me, might agree. Unlike going to the gym or participating in a team sport, which were risky at the time, running was easier to navigate and do on our own.)
Richardson writes that she never knows what her running route will be. But that uncertainty brings relief. Freedom. Inspiration. Running rewards runners with a sense of uncomplicated happiness and goodwill, which Richardson details in this delightful passage:
When I run, I smile and people smile back. Kids wave at me and cyclists nod as they zoom by. Other runners raise a hand of hello or, my favorite, flash a big grin. Sometimes we’re wearing the same race shirt—me too!, I point. Sometimes they’re in a zone I can’t penetrate, with their earbuds and podcast or playlist keeping them company. I still smile, even when they don’t look up. Hey, we’re out here, doing this beautiful thing.
When the endorphins start kicking in, around mile three, I love everybody, even the sourest-faced walker or most oblivious group of teenagers taking up the whole trail and dropping Doritos on the ground. Nice dog!, I shout when I see a dog happily panting at her runner’s side, or You’ve got this! to the struggling jogger stumbling to the end of his route. … I am an unrepentant dork when I run.
I have beef with running memoirs that try to overburden the sport with dramatic insights. Not because insights can’t be found in running, but because execution without sentimentality is no easy feat. Thompson’s essay — which deals with, among many things, family relationships, parental abuse and influence, sexuality, ambition, and mortality — is a clear-eyed piece that demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a dexterous editor and writer.
I’ve read this piece many times, and like a good novel, I’m drawn to different themes every time. In my most recent read, two ideas resonated: defining one’s identity separate from one’s parents’ and identifying with one’s masculinity without being poisoned by it. It’s an all-consuming narrative that spans four generations of men in Thompson’s family.
As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.
I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn’t identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You’ve had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.
Whereas Murakami’s piece, detached from romanticism, was not a very effective sales pitch for running, Joyce Carol Oates’ ode to running may intrigue any writer who could use more literary imagination; she writes about running as a consciousness-expanding activity, allowing her to envision what she writes as a film or dream: “I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”
This piece was written more than 20 years ago. Oates, one of America’s most renowned storytellers, has published more than 70 books in her literary career. For her, running certainly seems to work.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind’s eye, the pages I’ve just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
Though I can’t claim the same level of inspiration, something similar happened when I first started running. During my daily runs, I experienced breakthroughs where I felt stuck: A connective sentence or a word I’d been looking for would pop into my head. On some days, this happened so often that I needed to stop every few minutes to record it on my phone, which disrupted my run. Eventually, I learned to run with a waterproof pocket notebook in my left hand and a retractable pen in my right.
The May 2020 timing of this piece on Jim Fixx, the “father of recreational running,” was wonderfully apt for pandemic-inspired runners. It was as if Chris Ballard, a seasoned sports writer, was inducting new runners into the history of the sport.
Ballard observed that more people started running during the pandemic, believing it “would in some way do them good, or make them feel better about themselves or the world, if even for a moment.” But the belief that running is good for your body and soul wasn’t always accepted wisdom but once an argument, even a radical and contrarian one.
It may sound glib to say that “running saved my life.” But for Fixx, it really did. And, in a tragic irony, it also killed him. Fixx was one of the central figures of the running boom of the ’70s and whose book, The Complete Book of Running, became “the most lucrative nonfiction title ever published by Random House,” writes Ballard. It was a hit, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. As Ballard writes, “a fad had become a craze,” and for the first time in a year, 100,000 Americans finished a marathon. The book was noteworthy not just because it was an encyclopedia of running; it heralded a certain kind of running memoir, one in which an author details their salvation by running.
Ballard writes both a pocket history guide on how running became a major sport in America and a personal history of the man who made it possible. Although this story has been told many times, Ballard’s reporting is enriched by Fixx’s journals, to which his family offered access for the first time.
After his death, the sports world changed profoundly. Running was no longer a craze, or a miracle cure. But neither did it die. Instead, it evolved. In 1977, 25,000 Americans finished marathons; By ’94, more than 300,000 did. In ’94, Oprah ran, and completed, her only marathon, spurring a boom among those who felt the feat previously unreachable. By the turn of the century, how you ran mattered as much as whether you did. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run spurred thousands to tromp through the woods barefoot. Ultramarathons gained in popularity. Rock ’n’ roll marathon and fun run entered the lexicon. By 2011, women accounted for close to 60% of the finishers in half-marathons.
It’s not exactly a light read, so let me leave you with an irresistible detail: Fixx’s father was born a Fix but added a second x to his name. Why? He thought, “a person’s name ought to be a proper noun, not a verb.”
I couldn’t think of a better piece to wrap up this reading list than a meta-essay about writing on running by Kathryn Schulz who is, after all, a master of meta-writing. (Her piece about Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series is a good example.)
What do runners think about when they run? In the first part of this two-part story, Schulz looks to scientific research and lays out the uninspiring results. She writes: “Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it.” But she continues:
Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”
Then, Schulz points out, with a knowing wit, the shortcomings of contemporary writing on running. Writing about running without schmaltz — like Murakami — is no easy feat, which makes it hard for people to find books that “address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms.” You could also argue that Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, despite being enjoyable, reads like gonzo journalism. And some running memoirs that read like redemption memoirs, such as Robin Harvie’s The Lure of Long Distances, follow the same formula.
Later, Schulz champions Poverty Creek Journal, a book by literary-critic-cum-runner Thomas Gardner, as “the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.” After reading this piece, I read this strangely profound book — it’s a mix of literary criticism, running logs, and thoughts that range from complaints to grief.
When Schulz says running logs are “terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative,” she doesn’t intend it as a criticism. Running is, admittedly, an incredibly understimulating sport to watch, so much so that I suspect even the most avid runners probably don’t sit down to watch the Boston Marathon from beginning to the end.
And here’s a pitfall of sports writing: There’s often too great a desire to imbue a grand meaning to the sport. “Life is a marathon,” goes the cliché. But the thing is, life is like a marathon. So writing about running becomes a balancing act, one in which — without sufficient craft and self-awareness — can be a challenge. But here, Schulz (and Gardner) masterfully explore the essence of running, in all its glory and tedium. A sport of contradiction indeed.
Sheon Han is a writer and programmer based in Palo Alto, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read his work at sheon.tk.
We think of being in the hospital as enduring isolation in a clinical setting, cut off from normal life. But what if being hospitalized meant something different? What if you could be receive hospital-quality care in your own home? Helen Ouyang profiles a movement of health care providers who, propelled by a range of factors, not least among them the COVID-19 pandemic, are working to redefine what hospitalization in America might look like:
Other countries, including Australia, Canada and several in Europe, had already been experimenting with this practice, some of them extensively. In Australia, which has been running home-hospitals for decades, these services provided in Victoria alone are the equivalent of what a 500-bed facility could offer in one year. Overall, the patients treated in this way do just as well, if not better, in their homes.
The obstacles impeding Leff and other hospital-at-home advocates in the United States were bound up with America’s labyrinthine health care system and particular medical culture. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), which is the largest payer of hospitalizations, has required that nurses must be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, effectively keeping patients within the hospital walls. This matches how American society has come to regard hospitalization, too — nurses at the bedside, doctors making their rounds, in elaborate facilities pulsating with machines.
But Americans didn’t always convalesce in hospitals. Before the 20th century, treatment at home was the norm. “Only the most crowded and filthy dwellings were inferior to the hospital’s impersonal ward,” the historian Charles E. Rosenberg writes in his 1987 book “The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System.” “Ordinarily, home atmosphere and the nursing of family members provided the ideal conditions for restoring health.” As Rosenberg puts it, “Much of household medicine was, in fact, identical with hospital treatment.” As health care became more specialized and high-tech, however, diagnosis and treatment gradually moved into hospitals, and they evolved into institutions of science and technology.
By Nathan Petrovic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that inequalities are still a worldwide problem concerning healthcare, especially regarding the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. As more affluent countries bought massive stocks of vaccines, lower and middle income (LMICs) countries struggled to gather enough vaccines. To counteract this predicament, Albertsen and Germani et al. have proposed that, past a certain threshold of orders of vaccines, states should be taxed by a percentage depending on the number of orders in relationship with said threshold. The rate of taxation would itself grow as the richer countries order more while being above said threshold.
A taxation system makes sense for several reasons. First, it allows for sustained production because such a system won’t serve as a disincentive for vaccine manufacturers. Second, it allows a fair distribution of essential goods that otherwise may not afford these products. Third, it allows to create a disincentive against hoarding vaccines.
I argue that establishing such a threshold requires careful consideration around what kind of pathogen we are dealing with. Because this tax will also place a heavier burden on healthcare budgets in high income countries, such a threshold must be established democratically as well as scientifically. Some have proposed to establish the threshold according to an accurate estimation of the rate of immunity needed to protect the rest of the population (what is commonly referred as “herd immunity”). This poses issues because this rate can change and evolve across time which can be problematic because taxes can only function when the rate is stable, and an idea of a taxation system that would have to follow unpredictable mutations of a virus. If we set the threshold according to a proportion of the more vulnerable population in a given country, we are faced with the problem that the pathogenicity and lethality of a virus can evolve unpredictably (as we have seen with omicron), and the number of people at risk for any given set of mutations can also evolve. Thus, it could only be applied if we are certain that mutations won’t change these parameters.
The ”VaxTax” also poses a problem pertaining to how healthcare resources are allocated worldwide. Its strength (and weakness) is that it allows for a system that doesn’t disincentivize current vaccine manufacturers. This means that current vaccine production would keep going without having a shortage due to disincentivized manufacturers. But this in turn plays into the current functioning of resource allocation for healthcare, which is the global market, and which is also responsible for the same inequalities the tax is meant to resolve.
There is also a point to be made that a “VaxTax” would disincentivize richer countries to mandate vaccines, even if they would be efficient to improve vaccine uptake. In this situation, the tax will force more expenses because mandates typically apply to the whole population of a given country. This will either lead to the rejection of the mandates if the tax is enforced, or to excessive expenses if both are imposed, which may in turn foster resentment against the taxation system, leading to its rejection.
Another issue is that this system of taxation, if applied, should not only be utilized for vaccines. Vaccines have the advantage of not needing a steady and permanent supply to protect, unlike treatments because they typically don’t prevent diseases. The funds from the tax could be used to increase the production and research capacities of low and middle-income countries. Numerous pathologies such as neglected tropical diseases have been affecting millions of people for decades with little attention focusing on them.
Finally, depending on the situation, the “VaxTax” could lead to counterproductive consequences. The myriad of possibilities of a “VaxTax” is situated between two opposite scenarios. In the first scenario, high income countries don’t hoard vaccines and don’t bring supplementary funds the “VaxTax”. This extreme would only happen if the “VaxTax” was sufficient in dissuading high income countries from hoarding vaccines. In this scenario, LMICs would still face the problem of funding because they would not be able to access as much as they need. But the second, opposite scenario where high-income countries still hoard vaccines, the funding may be sufficient, but the availability of the vaccines would be lacking, making a suboptimal outcome for LMICs for a reason that is not the same as the one in the first scenario. This leaves us in an uncomfortable situation where we may need to find an optimal point of taxation where we can maximize funding, availability as well as efficiency of immunization.
When trying to come up with solutions against growing inequalities between higher and lower income countries, we need to make sure that the solutions provided do bring enough performant solutions so that we reach our objectives. This solution has the advantage of being compatible with current economical organization of production and distribution. It is also a step in the right direction to suppose that more coercive systems in an international context could be implemented. Nonetheless, the “VaxTax” would be suboptimal to solve these distribution issues. If we want equal access to healthcare, we need to find better solutions that may involve more profound economical and societal changes rather than playing the market game.
Author: Nathan Petrovic
Affiliation: Master’s student at the University of Geneva.
Competing interests: None declared
The post Reassessing the “VaxTax” appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
By Ezio Di Nucci.
At no (other) time during the COVID-19 pandemic were excess deaths as high as they are this January 2023 in Denmark. That’s right, more people are dying now than at any other time since the beginning of the pandemic (the last time excess death numbers were comparable was, in fact, the winter 2017/2018). There are actually two different headlines here:
Two separate questions come to mind, one strictly epidemiological (EPI); the other broadly normative (NORM):
EPI: why are more people dying now than at any other time during the pandemic, especially in a rich welfare state with one of the highest vaccine uptakes worldwide (as in, not China)?
NORM: why, if more people are dying now than ever before (during COVID-19), is nobody calling for lockdowns or even masks (if you do a deep-dive in covid-twitter – don’t – you’ll find that, at most, folks are calling for boosters for under-50s, not exactly armed guards outside every apartment building).
The EPI question is boring and predictable: influenza is back with a vengeance because it missed last season, while at the same time COVID-19 is still around. And there’s RS too; plus ,maybe some of those missing cancer diagnosis from two years ago;[1] so let’s leave EPI to the pros and move on to the softball.
Here are some possible answers to NORM:
This second option is also in line with the latter headline, namely the fact that we had similar excess mortality in the winter of 2017/18, but nobody suggested lockdowns back then.
This line of argument has the advantage of emphasizing that the current peak in Denmark (and probably the rest of Europe — I too have stopped obsessively refreshing ourworldindata pages[2]) must be distinguished from what is happening in China after their own liberitutti, because of the lack of availability of effective vaccines in the latter case. Against option #3, on the other hand, speaks the fact that current excess deaths aren’t fed by young anti-vaxxers but by the same 80-somethings that were overdying during previous peaks.
Imagine, for example, that the true answer to EPI had nothing to do with the pandemic: as in, not just that current excess deaths weren’t (only) COVID-19 deaths, but that current excess deaths were wholly unrelated to the pandemic and our reaction to it altogether. Even then, though, there would still be the question of why, assuming that somehow COVID-19 makes justifying restrictions easier than some other cause of excess mortality. At least in principle, then, now that we have become “so good” at lockdowns, tracking, masks, and vaccines, we should consider restrictive measures for any excess mortality, at least of the infectious kind anyway.
As always, we are just philosophers, we are not here to adjudicate between those different options, it’s good enough if we notice an anomaly and point out that it calls for further reflection – if not, god forbid, action.
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[1] And, obviously, inflation is literally killing people too, you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that. The more complex economics question is how much current high inflation levels are causally related to covid (rather than, say, Putin). I use the following rule of thumb: take your inflation number, split it in two equal halves, one is Putin, the other the ECB (or FED etc); and the ECB is (also) covid, but not just that (remember Draghi). Also, Putin might be mad but he aint stupid, he waited for the ECB to bring about unsustainable levels of inflation, then double-downed.
[2] If you haven’t moved on yet yourself, you might be interested in hearing that, on 8 February, we have invited Anders Tegnell, who ran the unique Swedish response to COVID-19, to discuss pandemic ethics with us in Copenhagen.
Author: Ezio Di Nucci
Affiliation: University of Copenhagen
Competing interests: None declared
The post Dying like (never) before appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
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