Vol 3. - Vaccines Redux, Testing, and Golf's New Content Lord
Thanks to everyone for the kind feedback on this little experiment. It's been a nice distraction to put this together every weekend.
With the holidays approaching, I'm putting together a list of expanded media recommendations for a future issue. Hit me with the best books, movies, albums or other content you've consumed during this crazy year!
Vaccines
Well, a lot of vaccine news this past week! As we go hurtling over the cliff towards winter with no coordinated national response and a looming powder keg of imminent holiday travel, news about the various vaccines that definitely can't help us for at least 3-6 months is starting to trickle out. Pfizer announced this past Monday, and it looks like Moderna will have something official to announce this week.
Unlike the H1N1 vaccine that was derived from the same process that produces the influenza vaccine (based on inactive virus), both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine candidates are based on a relatively new technique called mRNA. Moderna, in particular, was founded explicitly to explore mRNA-based therapies, and has endured an interesting decade trying to prove the technology works.
A COVID vaccine based on mRNA would the first time the FDA has approved any vacine using the technique. A brief overview of how it works in picture form (from a lovely profile of the founders of BioNTech, the german biotech firm partnering with Pfizer on the first of hopefully many promising COVID vaccines):
Testing - #InRomerITrust
Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer was an early proponent of mass testing as a way for us to balance managing the spread of COVID while engaging in limited amounts of economic and social activity. He made a very public wager that by this point in time, the US would be testing 20m people per day for COVID that he admittedly lost.
His rationale was rooted in the thinking that a pervasive policy of "test and isolate" would enable suitable containment of infected individuals while enabling economic and social activity. He laid out his thinking in an email to the Stanford diaspora's most recent embarrassing association Scott Atlas that he graciously republished to his personal blog.
I bring all this up because despite the existence of promising vaccines, mass population protection from COVID is at least a year away, at best. The US government has only purchased enough of the Pfizer vaccine to vaccinate 12.5m people in CY 2020 and has only pre-purchased enough to vaccinate an additional 50m.
If we want any sense of normalcy in 2021, our cities and states will need to develop robust infrastructure and policies to encourage the gradual return of social and economic activity as well as isolation for those who test positive.
I am hopeful that in the new year America will take a more serious approach to both funding and enforcing efforts for testing and isolation, but for now, private companies are forced to blaze their own trail:
The Golden State Warriors are investing up to $30m in newly approved and very accurate 'rapid PCR' testing in an effort to bring fans back for the upcoming NBA season (that starts just before Christmas)
Ticketmaster is exploring integrations with "health passports" where individuals can sync or upload either COVID vaccinations or negative test results 24-72 hours before an event as a prerequisite for receiving a digital ticket to enter an in-person event
United Airlines, among others, is also trialing the digital health passport approach with pre-departure tests required before some flights from Newark to the UK
Now, don't get wrong. I think it is bananas that a production-limited highly-accurate rapid COVID test can be acquired by private companies for their own use case instead of by governments optimizing for maximal societal benefit ()like providing our teachers and first responders with safe, reliable and fast test results). To me, this is the exact reason why government exists - to requisition as many of these tests that can be made to get crucial parts of our society back online with confidence faster than money and influence would otherwise dictate.
Short of that, however, I'll take whatever innovation and norm development we can muster to get the lowest common denominator amongst us comfortable with the idea that "health passports" are a key ingredient toward getting us back to normal sooner rather than later.
Golf's New Content Lord
Ok, ok. Lotta pandemic and vaccine talk lately. Doom and gloom. Downer stuff.
Let me attempt to make
(checks notes)
professional golf
a topic worth your time?
The Masters wrapped up today, and while Dustin Johnson won the tournament in record-setting fashion, the biggest story in golf is the mad scientist trying to break the game: Bryson DeChambeau.
DeChambeau is a 27-year old, 6 ft 1, 240-pound disciple of math and physics who is the first (and so far only) player on the PGA tour to have all his clubs be the same length in order to maintain a consistent swing no matter the angle of the club-head - wut?
(the angle of the club determines the height and, with swing speed, relative distance, the ball will travel)
He is inspired by a book written in 1969 by a Boeing engineer entitled The Golfing Machine, which dissects the physics behind the ideal golf swing. A 2003 Sports Illustrated article described its commercial failure "largely because it looks and reads like a physics textbook, which in a sense it is."
Except, 50 years later, someone has internalized and maximized its teachings to impressive effect.
Even if you know nothing and care nothing about golf as a sport, you owe it to yourself to pour a drink, sit back and read this instant classic profile of DeChambeau written before the Masters kicked off this week:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bryson DeChambeau
Without spoiling this masterpiece:
DeChambeau, who won the U.S. Open in September and starts the Masters on Thursday as the outright betting favorite, remade his body and his game in less than a year, adding 20 pounds of muscle and more than 40 yards of distance to his drive. In the process, he went from a good, young golfer to a potentially dominant force. He augmented this stunning development by speaking in a way that is indistinguishable from Elon Musk’s appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Sensitivity to air. How I’m perceiving reality,” DeChambeau told Golf Magazine_during the U.S. Open, when asked how he felt on the first tee. “It’s very difficult to explain, but essentially I can feel like I do something, but it can come off totally different depending on what reality actually is.” In another interview this year, he proclaimed to GQ: “I mean, my goal is to live to 130 or 140. I really think that’s possible now with today’s technology.” Justin Thomas, another elite golfer and trendy Masters pick, asked, fairly, “What in the hell are you even talking about dude.”
And then this:
The writer Martin Amis once said that when he read John Updike, he sighed because he immediately knew he’d have to read everything Updike ever wrote. I had a similar feeling the first time I saw this video: I, too, sighed because I realized I would never again skip over anything DeChambeau does for the rest of his life. If DeChambeau wanted to dig out of his anti-cool hole, well, the solution is to just keep digging, and he’s done that here. This is anti-cool: a guy disembarking alone on a private jet, a Kings of Leon song that was not cool upon its release more than a decade ago, an orange Bentley, a smirk, and an almost unbelievable tag line: “The journey to 215 MPH begins.”
…For the non-golfer, this is a reference to ball speed. DeChambeau is obsessed with working at the range and remarking upon his ball speed. He has the fastest speedon the tour at 199 miles per hour. The road to the remaining 16 miles per hour begins, apparently, with an orange Bentley and light alt-rock. Imagine if James Harden, another talented player criticized for his style of play, pivoted in the middle of said criticism to becoming a content lord, leaned into a complete lack of self-awareness, and produced that video.
Golf is a game that constantly tugs between power and finesse. DeChambeau, through a combination of body transformation and physics, is on track to be the most dominant ball striker since Tiger Woods and the institutional culture of golf is very nervous.
If that article is too much for you, this tweetstorm is much heavier on the appreciation for the technical and athletic prowess Bryson displays (yet sadly neglects the Content Lordship he is deserved):
(I swear to god this is also worth your time, if for no other reason it gives you a recent random golf factoid in your short-term memory other than TIGER WOODS).
That’s it for this week. Thanks for paying attention!
Woody