#TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "On six of seven days beginning April 21, India set new global records for daily COVID-19 infections, repeatedly surpassing the 300,000 tally previously set by the U.S. It's total confirmed cases -- more than 18 million -- is second only to that of the U.S."
"India's health system is on the brink of collapse." "India's health care spending is a mere 3.5% of GDP, far lower than in countries ranging from the world's wealthiest like France (11.3%),and the U.K. (10%), to other emerging economies like Brazil (9.5%), and South Africa (8.3%)." "Only 9% of Indians have at least one vaccine dose..."
#Rani Ayyab, "Narendra Modi has left Indians...," TIME, May 10/May 17, 2021. - "In rural India, where more than 66% of Indians live, many are skeptical of the vaccine, with misinformation circulating on social media and messaging services."
#Rachel Syme, "Feeling Better Now?" The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "One report estimated that the entire wellness industry is worth $4.5 trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4% year-over-year." "The desire for alternative forms of healing is nothing new. Given the bureaucracy of modern medicine, and many of the wellness trends that dominated the pastel, high-gloss Instragram campaigns of the past decade -- turmeric lathes, sage burning -- were shaped directly from practices that indigenous, and non-Western cultures, have passed down for centuries."
"What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the fount of all improvement." "Now the project is individual enhancement: poreless skin, pliant limbs, a micro-floral garden blooming inside your wild and precious gut."
#Hannah Fry, "What Really Counts," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "The N.H.S. is a much loved, much mocked, and much neglected British institution, with all kinds of quirks and inefficiencies. At the same time it was notoriously difficult to get a doctor's appointment within a reasonable period; ailing people were often told they'd have to wait weeks for the next available opening."
"We might be interested in whether our children are getting a good education, but it's very hard to pin down exactly what we mean by 'good.' Instead, we tend to ask a related and easier question: How well do students perform when examined on some corpus of fact? And so we get the much lamented 'teach to the test' syndrome." "Even the tiniest fluctuations, invisible to science, can magnify overtime to yield a world of difference. Nature is built on unavoidable randomness, limiting what a data-driven view of reality can offer." "Even the best-performing algorithm over all could predict only twenty-three per cent of the variance in the children's grade-point average." "If complex models offer only incremental improvement to simple ones, we're back to the familiar question of what to count, and how to count it."
ADDENDUMS:
*Vera Bergegruen, "American Quandary," TIME, April 26/May 3, 2021. "At least two dozen Republican candidates who embrace the conspiracy ran for congressional seats in 2020. "Over the course of the pandemic, the President retweeted QAnon-linked accounts more than 200 times, according to a tally kept by Media Matters for America, a liberal nonprofit group."
*Alex Ross, "New Stages," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Working musicians are reeling. Most American orchestral players have had to accept considerable pay cuts, and freelancers are in a desperate state, some of them being forced to give up on music entirely."
*Evan Osnos, "Unpacking the Court," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "After decades of careful centrism, Biden has proved to be more radical on policy than many Americans predicted. Yet, when it comes to the institutions of American democracy, his instinct is for restoration, not revolution."
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