May 5, 2020

Read this evening a couple of essays in the new New Yorker and the two poems. One of the essays discussed how our health care system was unprepared for the novel coronavirus. It compared our system's response to the response in Japan to a fire that suddenly shut down a major factory. In a matter of days, other factories had been refitted to pick up the slack. It's easy to make those comparisons. But Japan is a lot smaller. I wonder what it feels like to live in a country the size of Tennessee?

The other was a review of the new biography of Frank Ramsey. I liked the poems.

I spent most of the day at AR's. I picked up lunch from Randy's--an Italian (no mayo, thank you very much) for me, and a chicken Philly for AR. I spent most of the afternoon writing a blog post about a P&S article on property rights in medieval Egypt. It's not until you start trying to put an article in plain English that you notice where it's unclear. I tinkered quite a bit with the post. It still feels constructed rather than written.

I heard about for the first time a historic site in Louisiana called Poverty Point. It's a US national park and a UNESCO world heritage site. How had I never heard of it before?

In the afternoon I lay flat on AR's deck and looked up at the trees and blue sky.

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