It is time for some discipline around here
What you can expect from this newsletter until another whim strikes me
My brother called me from Nouakchott yesterday. We had a long talk. Mauritania’s been doing an outstanding job with the coronavirus, by the way. They took this seriously way before any country in Europe did. When I flew in, on February 11, they were already wearing masks, taking everyone’s temperature on arrival, asking detailed questions of every incoming passenger about where they’d traveled before, and behaving like a country that sees a lethal global pandemic on the horizon. When I flew back to France, on February 24, exactly none of that happened. By early March, Mauritania had test kits, and they were able to test anyone with symptoms and give them the results of their tests within six hours.
I was amused by the story of the Italian tourists who thought they could evade Mauritania’s strict quarantine on Europeans—which they imposed just after I left—by slipping out of the hotel to which they’d been confined and wandering off into the desert. I could have told them—ain’t gonna work, fellas. Mauritanians know everything that happens in their desert. The téléphone arabe would have lit up instantly with the news that a bunch of Europeans in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and designer desert gear were out there yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. “Ma siamo completamente bloccati nella sabbia, Bruno, quindi che cazzo vuoi che faccia?” Besides, there’s only one road from Nouakchott into that desert, and it’s paved with no-nonsense police checkpoints.
They were, of course, promptly apprehended and deported.
Anyway, Mauritania took the coronavirus dead seriously, right from the start. Their strategy for keeping it out of the country is actually very similar to their strategy for keeping jihadis out of the country, and both are a success. So now you’re much more at risk of being killed by a terrorist or the coronavirus in France, and when I speak to my father, I say things like, “Thank God they’re in Mauritania, where they’re safe.”
In the further annals of, “How quickly the worm turns,” 35 Italian tourists in Ethiopia, having overstayed their visas, have petitioned for asylum because their country of origin is not safe—giving rise to mirth among Ethiopians, of course, who have some experience of Italians overstaying their welcome. They’ve taken to referring to them as the “undocumented migrants from Europe.”
But that’s not what we talked about. We talked about this newsletter. This is what he told me, and I think he’s probably right.
“Cut it in half. You’re just going on and on. Leo gets bored,” he said.
“Leo’s eleven.”
“Yeah, but he gets bored.”
“I am not going to start writing at a tenth-grade level because—”
“Eighth grade.”
“I am not—”
“Listen. It’s too long. It’s just not what I want from a newsletter. When Peter Zeihan’s newsletter shows up, I’m totally happy to see it. I know I’ll be distracted for exactly eight minutes. I want a newsletter to be eight minutes. It should be the same format, same length, same time of day—every morning, I wake up and it’s there. Twelve minutes at most. You could triple your success if you made it shorter. I will not read a 4,000-word newsletter—”
“But—”
“Claire. This is my literary judgment. The point of a newsletter is that between taking care of the kids and telecommuting, people don’t have time to make sense of all that information out there. They need someone to summarize it and give them the right perspective. It shouldn’t take more time to read a newsletter than the original research paper. That’s why it’s a newsletter, not a newspaper.”
He had a point.
“Here’s what you have to do.” He was on a roll. “You need five sections. Just five. Every day. The same ones.”
“Like what?”
“First, you need the daily denunciation. You gotta make people angry. People thrive on being angry. In most cases, you denounce Trump, but you’ve got to vary it—throw meat to the wolves. It shouldn’t be a long denunciation, but that’s how you have to start.”
“A daily denunciation. Okay.” I started taking notes.
“Then, second section, that should be the unusual question of the day. This is where you do your analysis. A paragraph. Like, ‘Why do people hoard toilet paper in a pandemic?’ …. No, I’m serious. That’s a fascinating question. Everything about it is fascinating. I want to understand this—sociologically, economically, psychoanalytically—”
“That will take more than a paragraph—”
“Well, okay, a long paragraph. But no more than that. Seriously, what’s up with Westerners and their toilet paper? Why do they love it so much? Why does it give them such a feeling of security to have a lot of it? Do you think it’s because using toilet paper gives them a socially-acceptable outlet for their desire manually to stimulate their anuses?”
“Mischa, I can’t—”
“I’m serious.”
“And stop going off on tangents. You’ve got to be disciplined.”
“Right.”
“Oh, and you need a chart of the day. People love charts. But here you need one, just one, personal anecdote of the day—or, I know! A recipe. People go bonkers for recipes. ‘Here’s a an easy recipe you can make in lockdown that your whole family will love. You can make it with just a turnip after the food supply chain breaks down.’ Or advice about exercising at home. Tell them, ‘So, this is the lockdown workout I just did.’
“Personal anecdote. Recipe,” I wrote in my notes.
“Then you should focus on one county. This is how it should work: It should be in terms of people’s experiences. Like, ‘Lately, I’ve been really into following Balazs Csekö, who really makes the experience of living in Hungary as it descends into a vicious personal dictatorship come alive for me.’ Don’t do it in the voice-of-God style, just focus on one person. Or one essay. Like that New York Review of Books article about Bolsinaro , did you read that?
“No—”
“It was excellent. It really made me understand Bolsinarismo. You should link to things like that. Or to a really great Twitter feed people don’t know about.”
“Okay.”
“And then you finish by sharing letters from your correspondents. And your reply to them. People really like interaction. And the chart of the day.”
“No photo of the day?”
“No, that’s stupid.”
“Why? I like photos.”
“No, just a chart. A chart.”
“Okay.”
“And then you ask for money. At the end. The only limit is your pride.”
“Got it.”
“Then you turn it over to the audience. Always end with a question.”
“Good idea.”
“Never more than 1200 words.”
“Okay,” I said glumly.
“Never.”
So, from now on, that’s going to be the format. Every day. We’ll get started tomorrow. I’d start today, but explaining it already took me to 1,141 words.
I thought your letters were fascinating, by the way. Though to my surprise, you did get a bad review. Yesterday, I got my very first letter from a reader who told me he was cancelling his subscription, indignantly, because he thought you were “terribly depressing and frankly, unrelentingly negative.”
He suggested you might be spiritually deficient.
If getting a bad review gets you down, you may find this chart useful. I know I certainly do. It’s is the Berlinski Cash-Praise Equation:
That sets me straight every time I’m tempted to get in a huff. I never get exercised by anything that doesn’t fall in the far lower-left quadrant, and neither should you.
The following isn’t technically part of the newsletter. Its an annex. (That way I don’t go over my word count.)
I found these articles really interesting, and I thought you might, too.
If you’re trying to decide at what point the cure becomes worse than the problem, start with this reading list. (But if you’d rather I just to summarize it because you’ve got the kids and the telecommute? Stay home.)
Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu
Does Social Distancing Matter? Efficiency of prompt quarantine measures on a susceptible-infected-removed model in networks
Is There a Case for Quarantine? Perspectives from SARS to Ebola
Costs and benefits of controlling quarantine diseases: a bio‐economic modeling approach
Impact of quarantine on the 2003 SARS outbreak: A retrospective modeling study
Model of epidemic control based on quarantine and message delivery
Rapid decay in the relative efficiency of quarantine to halt epidemics in networks
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Response Strategies: Lessons Learned From Quarantine
Effects of quarantine in six endemic models for infectious diseases
SARS incubation and quarantine times: when is an exposed individual known to be disease free?
Mathematical Models of Influenza: The Role of Cross-Immunity, Quarantine and Age-Structure
Investigating the role of quarantine and screening efficiency in dengue epidemics
A cost-based comparison of quarantine strategies for new emerging diseases
Factors Influencing Compliance with Quarantine in Toronto During the 2003 SARS Outbreak
When Is Quarantine a Useful Control Strategy for Emerging Infectious Diseases
Public health and ethical considerations in planning for quarantine.
Factors that make an infectious disease outbreak controllable.
Tracking Epidemics With Google Flu Trends Data and a State-Space SEIR Model
Willingness-to-pay for a statistical life in the times of a pandemic
Spatial Dynamics of Pandemic Influenza in a Massive Artificial Society
Economic Activity and the Spread of Viral Diseases: Evidence from High Frequency Data
"Seriously, what’s up with Westerners and their toilet paper? Why do they love it so much?"
Well, it's more comfortable than stones. Even though stones are reusable. If someone is willing to recover them.
"“Never more than 1200 words.”
"“Okay,” I said glumly."
Hah. Just like a girl. [Good thing I'm on the other side of the world.]
Eric Hines
Yes, I had been thinking of posting "brevity is the soul of wit." I was starting to wonder if you had lost your wits with novel-length emails every other day. We get it. I think we get it.