Unsolicited advice
I keep trying to convince my brother to get vaccinated. He’s 55 years old. He’s a corrections officer. He's now lost four coworkers to COVID-19. But he doesn't want the vaccine because, as he puts it, he doesn't know what's in it. He’s heard about what happened with the Johnson & Johnson one. He doesn’t trust it. I can’t say I blame him, though I also can’t say I understand.
I could try assailing him with facts. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are around 95 percent effective in preventing symptomatic infection after the second dose. They’re also both effective in preventing transmission: they reduce the incidence of asymptomatic infection, and, when infection does happen, they reduce viral loads.
I could email him a bunch mythbusting articles about the vaccine, or send him numbers from the CDC about how rare adverse reactions are. As for side effects, yeah, I was throwing up all day yesterday, two days after my second Moderna shot, but that sure beats being sick for two weeks (or longer) (or much longer). It beats ending up in the hospital. It also beats giving COVID to someone you love, or someone somebody loves, and being the reason that that person dies.
But no one likes a guilt trip. And no one likes being told what to do. As Philip Galanes writes in one of his gems,
Unsolicited opinions are the worst. They are usually about the red-hot needs of opinion spouters, not their recipients. And frequently they are infantilizing: “You are incompetent to walk this green earth until I tell you how.”
Which is not how I feel about my brother. He’s not incompetent, and he isn’t dumb.
Today the New York Times released a chat bot designed to show you how to talk to people who are hesitant to get the vaccine. Factual assaults, not surprisingly, are not recommended. What is recommended is listening, at least at first. Then the bot devolves into an extremely granular and impossible to memorize 16-part guide to encouraging a person to get vaccinated that I still haven’t finished reading. My brother and I don’t have those kinds of conversations. We call each other when there’s something wrong. We ask each other how we’re doing. There are a lot of silences and one-word answers. One of us always ends up saying something our mother used to say to us: “I don’t know what to tell you.” Then the other one sighs and says yeah and then one of us has to go.
I want to tell my brother to get vaccinated because I love him. Because getting vaccinated means he'll protect those around him, not just himself. That vaccines are scary but the diseases they prevent are much scarier. Maybe I’ll send him this video of Dolly Parton getting vaccinated and see if that does the trick.
In other news
Matt’s first story as a writer for Insider.com went up today. It’s about Mark Zuckerberg, the Giving Pledge, and perversities of the U.S. tax system:
By placing the money they've earmarked for charity into a variety of financial vehicles, Zuckerberg and other billionaires can warehouse the bulk of their wealth for years, use it to benefit their own interests, pass control of the vehicles to their children, and in some cases never have to give a dime to charity, all while enjoying a huge tax deduction.
The full text is paywalled, though you can get around that by subscribing for $1 and canceling later.
Read, read, read
I am late to the party in reading Lucia Berlin’s posthumous bestseller, A Manual for Cleaning Women, which I thought I’d never finish because I hate reading 432-page books, but once you get into this one the pages fly by. All the stories here are autobiographical. Berlin was an alcoholic most of her life and the intensity of that experience—and the brilliance of her observational abilities, her empathy, her ability to see herself for who she was—comes through with diamond clarity in every rhythmic, voice-livened line.
The most obvious comparison that I can make is Jesus’ Son. Many of Berlin’s stories are set in medical offices, and they’re as richly bleak as Denis Johnson’s hospitals are bleak. If you’ve already read and liked either or both, and you’ve already read The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, too, then check out Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter. Set among the dingy pool halls and various jails and prisons around Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco at midcentury, the writing isn't as stylish here but the back-then grit and desperation are a match. It’s one hell of a ride.
If it’s not so much the history and style of Berlin’s Manual as the absolute and utter hell of alcoholism that you want to read more of, read James Kelman’s 2005 masterpiece How Late it Was, How Late. A Glasgow drunk wakes up blind after a blow to the head. Things do not go up from there.
Complaint department
It’s not fair to unload on someone after telling them that they should read How Late it Was, How Late, so instead I’m going straight to the picture. This morning at 10:45 a.m. the sandboxes in both playgrounds in Kalorama Park got refilled with six tons of locally mined quartz. Touch some newly ground-up sand sometime. It’s amazing.
And finally, a note to my dear niece, whose birthday it was this week. You are amazing. I hope it feels like your birthday all week long.