july 1874

When a new disease emerges, health organizations turn to a seemingly simple number to gauge whether the outbreak will spread. It’s called the basic reproduction number—R0, pronounced R-nought—and though useful for decision-makers, it’s a nightmare for public communication. In brief, R0 is the average number of people who will catch the disease from a single infected person, in a population that’s never seen that disease before. If R0 is 3, then on average, every case will create 3 new cases. But even though it seems incredibly straightforward, it’s hard to calculate and tricky to interpret.

R0 is important because if it’s greater than 1, the infection will probably keep spreading, and if it’s less than 1, the outbreak will likely peter out. So it offers vital information to organizations and nations as they consider how to respond to an outbreak—such as the one the world is currently experiencing.

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, announced the title of his forthcoming memoir last night: The Room Where It Happened, a reference to the Oval Office, the scene of some of the misdeeds he is likely to attribute to the president. (I had hoped for something jauntier, perhaps ’Stached in the Cabinet.) Accompanying that announcement was a story in The New York Times teasing readers with revelations. The most significant is that Trump allegedly conditioned his release of Ukrainian military aid not only on that country’s announcement of an investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden, but also on its release of evidence of the Biden family’s involvement in Robert Mueller’s probe. In fact, there is no such evidence, and the only people who believe that there is such evidence are wing-nut conspiracy theorists and, it seems, the president of the United States.

In June of 2018, Demi Lovato did something pop stars aren’t supposed to do: tell the difficult truth. The former Disney actor had struggled in the public eye with drug addiction, but she’d also built a narrative of overcoming that addiction, with lyrics and a documentary attesting to six years of sobriety. Then she changed the story. “We've been down this road before,” she sang on a new song, “Sober.” “I’m so sorry, I'm not sober anymore.” A month later, she was hospitalized for a near-fatal overdose.

Lovato has kept a low profile since that hospitalization, but she is back now, with a more complex message than ever before. At the Grammys on Sunday, she gave her first performance in a year and a half, and expectations might have been for a triumphant—or at least hopeful—spectacle. Lovato did deliver that, in a way. But she also did something more powerful. In the face of wrenching realities—scandalous accusations of corruption and sexual assault leveled by the former CEO of the Grammys, plus the breaking news of Kobe Bryant’s death—the awards show had wrapped itself in bland affirmations. Music is “the most healing thing in the world,” Alicia Keys said at the top of the night. But Lovato, in hugely moving style, ditched motivational pablum. She debuted a song that said that singing, in fact, would not fix everything.

What happened to us? The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country, Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings. It is a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars.

Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. What happened to us? The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad. The question may surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and bloodletting of today have always been the norm.

“Left but not woke” is the Bernie Sanders brand. If anybody failed to recognize it before, nobody can miss it now. Last week, the mega-podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Sanders. The Sanders campaign tweeted a video of the Rogan endorsement from Sanders’s own account. That tweet then triggered an avalanche of disapproval from other voices in the Democratic coalition.

Rogan is not an ally to the cultural causes that have come to predominate on the contemporary left. He even mocks many of those causes, while also dancing around conspiratorial thinking of the left and right fringes: 9/11 denialism, Obama birtherism, and speculation about dark deeds concerning Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.