India's Medical Woes; the Wellness Industry; and the British N.H.S.

 #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."

Refugees, Wellness Industry, Kid's Lunches, and Heirs' Property

J. Weston Phippen, "Hold the Line," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
"The 1980 Refugee Act allows people who have been prosecuted based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership in a particular social group to remain in the United States as long as they can prove they have a well-founded fear of returning to their home countries." "To this day, 83 percent of Chinese asylum seekers win their cases. But just 16 percent of Central Americans convince judges to let them stay. For Mexicans, it's 11 percent.

Since January, border agents have turned back more than 11,000 asylum seekers to wait on their cases in Mexico, according to Reuters."

Maddie Oatman "Doctor Woo," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
"As the global wellness industry tops $4.2 trillion, [Dr. Jen Gunter] is on a mission to arm women with science-based advice in hopes of stanching the spread of health misinformation." "As she sees it, the wellness industry is using pseudoscience against women to take their money and the anti-abortion restrictions that conflict with scientific evidence." "According to Chris Bobel, a professor of women's and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, women are viewed as dirty and impure from the day they first get their periods. 'We begin with very early messages about how your body is a problem to be solved,' Bobel says, 'and that sets up a constant quest to fix it.' "

Tom Philpott, "Failure to Lunch," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
Altogether, " kids rely on school meals for nearly half their daily calories, and 40 percent of their      vegetable intake, making the program 'a safety net for low-income children,' a 2016 study from Baylor University researchers found." "It turns out that serving healthier food did not result in significantly higher costs for cafeterias or mean more food going into the garbage. The reforms did, however, result in healthier lunches -- more whole grains, greens and beans, as well as fewer 'empty calories' (added sugar and solid fats, and less sodium.)"

Lizzir Presser, "The Dispossessed." The New Yorker, July 2, 2019.
"Heirs property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land -- 3.5 million acres,worth more than twenty-eight billion dollars." "Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmlands. This problem is a major contributor to America's racist wealth gap; the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families."

"In 1876, near the end of Reconstruction, only about five per cent of Black (sic) families in the Deep South owned land." Ray Orinbash, the director of the Institute for Urban research, at Morgan State University has said: 'There is this idea that most  blacks were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.' "

"In 1992, the N.A.A.C.P. accused officials of intentionally inflating taxes to push out black families on Daufuskin, a South Carolina sea island that has become one of the hottest real-estate buys."