Testing basketball players first saved countless lives

The debate over whether sports ball players are overpaid, especially compared to first responders, long predates the outbreak of coronavirus. But the current pandemic has helped highlight which professionals we literally can’t live without.

So maybe it wasn’t the best PR move when, while COVID testing kits were still in extremely short supply (as opposed to just in regular short supply), entire NBA teams managed to get themselves tested. The revelation that the young, fit, and talented were able to secure tests at a time when ordinary people suffering symptoms of the disease — and even medical workers — had trouble doing the same should not have surprised anyone familiar with how this country works, but nevertheless managed to spark widespread outrage.

Personally, I’m fine with it. Of course it’s unseemly, and highlights the glaring need to increase access to affordable healthcare and decrease stark inequalities across the country. But in this case I’m convinced testing the rich and privileged early helped save lives. And as long as the President keeps threatening to reopen the economy by Easter, we’ll need to find as many sick celebrities as possible.

It appears Don Draper felt left out of Doppelganger Week celebrations

Last week, YLS hosted a screening of Prosecutor, a documentary about Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief (what else?) prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. This post is not about the substance of that movie. Suffice to say that the documentary did not inspire me to go hear Ocampo speak live when he subsequently turned up in person on Monday.

Instead, I’m hear to tell you of a discovery I made in the course of the film. As you may have surmised from the title of this post, it included a cameo by Don Draper’s long-lost (perhaps slightly-nebbier) brother — and I’m not talking about Jon Hamm [start watching at 1:13 – bonus cameo by Tom Hanks at 1:36]:

My book club has some seriously good timing

I don’t often use this space to write about the books I read IRL.

When I do, it’s typically because of some fun coincidence. Once, my experiences in Nepal helped me appreciate a passage about an erotic Indian temple (How much Sutra is too much? — this is a Hebrew pun). Twice, two passages in a single book reminded me of a memorable phrase in one of my favorite TV shows (This obscenely tasteless post goes out to all you Arrested Development fans ).

But those ones were easy. To truly appreciate the coincidence described in the present post, you’ll have to take yourself back a month and a half or so. I had been inexplicably granted a week off school leading up to Thanksgiving, and was resolved to use that time really productively.

That didn’t happen.

I spent the week with my brother in Queens, and aside from one brief excursion (Book of Mormon!), kept mostly to the inside of his house. At one point while he was out the door on his way to class, I asked if he had any recommendations for something to do nearby. He suggested the cheap, local movie theater that was showing Argo, which had been in theaters for about a month, and which he strongly recommended.

All I knew about Argo was that Ben Affleck had recently visited Jon Stewart to promote it (an event that seemed to me quite recent because — as recently noted — I fall chronically behind on my TV-watching while school is in session), and I confused the movie with Cloud Atlas, because Tom Hanks had visited Stephen Colbert to push that at around the same time.

I never made it to the theater, but I did manage to do my brother’s suggestion one better. At exactly that time, I was in the middle of a novel by Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, which won the Hugo in 1968. As I read, it occurred to me that the book would make a great movie, so when I finally finished it, I checked out the Wikipedia page to see if that had ever happened. It turned out I was not the first person to get that idea:

In 1979 it was announced that Lord of Light would be made into a 50 million dollar film. It was planned that the sets for the movie would be made permanent and become the core of a science fiction theme park to be built in Aurora, Colorado. Famed comic-book artist Jack Kirby was even contracted to produce artwork for set design. However, due to legal problems the project was never completed.

[Editor’s note: You can see Kirby’s design for Science Fiction Land by scrolling back up.]

But as I read on, things started to get a little weird: