Monday
“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.
My first thought was: is this better or worse than the time that guy who’d been exposed to Ebola took the subway to go bowling in Brooklyn? The answer to which of course is that post-Covid, it’s worse; we know exactly how these things go, how they start small, with a news in brief buried 20 pages deep in the paper, moving glacially up the news list every few days until a lonely death in a Siberian laboratory leads, step by incremental step, to the zombie apocalypse.
Meanwhile, the word “plague” remains outlandishly unrelaxing, despite the best efforts of the New York Times to contextualise it. Elucidating the various different types of plague that can kill you – pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic – I have to say my money would’ve been on bubonic as the worst, what with the Black Death and all. Apparently, however, the most virulent form of plague is the one in question, pneumonic, spread by a cough or a sneeze and causing “a severe rapid-onset lung infection” that can kill within a few days. Advice from my medic friend in New York: “Get antibiotics for everyone.” Alternatively, invest in a sense of proportion.
Tuesday
I did not have “let’s have more firing squads” on my bingo card of talking points this week, but that is the serious discussion under way in the US after the horrific, botched execution of Christa Pike, the convicted murderer on death row who regained consciousness and started talking on Tuesday, after the state of Tennessee failed to kill her.
This was the second botched execution by the state this year, and one of the apparently 7% of all executions in the US since 1972 that have not been effective, among the most common reasons cited being expired drugs and untrained executioners, but also malfunctioning electric chairs that set fire to their occupants.
As a result, the single method of executing a prisoner in the US that has resulted in no failed attempts whatsoever is the firing squad, a phrase that raises images, incomprehensible in a supposedly modern world, of a semicircle of shooters, none bearing sole responsibility, firing in the direction of the condemned’s head. For the first time in the US military since 1945, one such execution is due to happen at Fort Hood, Texas, in December, which this week Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, promised to livestream in defiance of anything resembling normal human behaviour.
Wednesday
There’s likely a joke about the failure of the Tory party to lie down and accept its fate after so many lethal injections, but I can’t quite bring it home. Instead, at party conference this week in Birmingham, we saw a chipper-seeming Kemi Badenoch step out on stage to perform her pantomime version of common sense, smartly referring to the Reform party as “that” – as in “we are not uniting with that”. The Tory leader does an extremely good job of appearing to be a plain-spoken and regular human in contrast to Reform on the one hand and what might delicately be called the unusual makeup of the Greens on the other.
It’s worth remembering what Badenoch looks like when the mask slips. If Boris Johnson’s real face was the rictus of an underbriefed, overconfident man white-knuckling his way through government while chuckling to himself like a toy in a horror movie, Badenoch strikes me as someone who is stuck on the gimlet-eyed setting of victory at all costs. Meanwhile, footage of Young Conservatives partying at conference never gets old, offering a strong rival for most embarrassing moment to the 30,000-word policy document the Tory leader – hide your face – has self-christened “Kemistry”. Someone tell her you can’t coin your own nicknames.
Thursday
Anne Carson has won the Nobel prize for literature and, forgive me, but very occasionally when life gives you the opportunity to be insufferable, you can’t not take it, and so in response to this news I would like to say that when I went hiking with the Nobel prize winner Anne Carson in Iceland last year, the thought struck me …
There was no thought; I just wanted to get it on the table about the hike – OK, it was a short walk up a rocky incline – it was with the Nobel prize winner Anne Carson, who I have loved forever and have known since we met in Michigan many years ago. She is brilliant and funny and wise, and I could cite so many lines from her poetry but one of my favourites is this, from the poem Lines in her 2005 collection Decreation: “To my mother / love / of my life, I describe what I had for brunch.” I feel the same way about this line that Madonna used to say she felt about Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, which is that if you don’t feel it vibrate through your system, I can’t ever really be your friend. (I’m aware most people would be fine with that.)
Friday
Sublime to ridiculous, Carson to Elon Musk, who is the subject of Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary that launched this week and I can’t wait to see. Prepublicity has focused on the contributions to the film of Justine Wilson, Musk’s ex-wife, who along with MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) is part of the tech titans’ first wives club via which one can measure the journey taken by very rich men from marriage to regular women to women with no apparent interior lives. “He was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking,” said Wilson, who also told Gibney her ex-husband once said to her: “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” No amount of money in the world, am I right?
