Monday
“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” a medic friend texted me after reports emerged that a 28-year-old Russian woman had died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Given the famously limited transparency of the Russian state, the brief report seemed to carry an ominous subtext: a laboratory-created disease, cultivated for reasons nobody could explain and supposedly carrying a 100% mortality rate, had escaped into the population—just eight hours by plane from London. In short, we were all doomed.
My immediate question was whether this was more or less alarming than the time a man exposed to Ebola took the New York subway to go bowling in Brooklyn. After Covid, the answer feels obvious: it is worse. We know how these stories unfold—beginning with a small item buried deep in a newspaper, inching up the news agenda over several days, until one death in a Siberian laboratory becomes the first step towards the zombie apocalypse.
The word “plague” itself remains spectacularly difficult to find reassuring, despite the New York Times’ efforts to add context. The paper explained that plague comes in pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic forms. I would have assumed bubonic was the worst, thanks to the Black Death, but apparently pneumonic plague is the most dangerous of the three. It spreads through coughs and sneezes, causes “a severe rapid-onset lung infection” and can kill within days. My medic friend’s advice from New York was simple: “Get antibiotics for everyone.” The alternative, perhaps, is acquiring a sense of proportion.
Tuesday
“More firing squads” was not on my bingo card of talking points this week. Yet that is the serious debate now taking place in the US after the horrific, botched execution of Christa Pike, a death-row prisoner convicted of murder who regained consciousness and began speaking on Tuesday after Tennessee failed to kill her.
It was the state’s second failed execution this year and one of an estimated 7% of US executions since 1972 that have not gone to plan. Commonly cited causes include expired drugs, inadequately trained executioners and malfunctioning electric chairs that have set prisoners on fire.
That leaves the firing squad as the only execution method in the US with no recorded failed attempt. The phrase summons an image that seems impossible in a supposedly modern society: a semicircle of shooters, each spared sole responsibility, taking aim at the condemned prisoner. In December, Fort Hood in Texas is due to host the first such execution by the US military since 1945. This week, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to livestream it—an announcement that defies anything resembling ordinary human behaviour.
Wednesday
There is probably a joke to be made about the Tory party refusing to accept its fate after so many lethal injections, but I cannot quite land it. Instead, this week’s Conservative conference in Birmingham brought us a buoyant-looking Kemi Badenoch performing her pantomime version of common sense. She referred to Reform as “that”—as in, “we are not uniting with that.” The Tory leader is remarkably effective at presenting herself as an ordinary, plain-speaking person when set against Reform on one side and, more delicately, the Greens’ unusual political makeup on the other.
It is worth recalling what appears when Badenoch’s mask slips. Boris Johnson’s true face, to me, was the rictus grin of an underbriefed, overconfident man clinging to power while chuckling like a toy in a horror film. Badenoch seems permanently fixed on the hard-eyed setting of victory at any price. Meanwhile, footage of Young Conservatives partying at conference remains difficult to beat as the week’s most embarrassing spectacle—although the Tory leader’s 30,000-word policy document, which she has named “Kemistry”, is a formidable competitor. Someone should tell her that people cannot invent their own nicknames.
Thursday
Anne Carson has won the Nobel prize for literature and, forgive me, but every so often life offers an opportunity to be insufferable that is simply too good to refuse. So, in response to the news, I would like to mention that when I went hiking with Nobel prize winner Anne Carson in Iceland last year, I had a thought …
I had no thought; I merely wanted to establish that the hike—actually, a short walk up a rocky incline—was with Nobel prize winner Anne Carson, whom I have loved forever and known since we met in Michigan many years ago. She is brilliant, funny and wise. I could quote countless lines from her poetry, but one favourite comes from “Lines”, in her 2005 collection Decreation: “To my mother / love / of my life, I describe what I had for brunch.” I feel about that line the way Madonna once said she felt about a Frida Kahlo self-portrait: if it does not vibrate through your entire system, I cannot really be your friend. I realise most people would be perfectly comfortable with that.
Friday
From the sublime to the ridiculous—from Carson to Elon Musk, the subject of Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary released this week, which I cannot wait to watch. Much of the pre-publicity has centred on Justine Wilson, Musk’s former wife. Alongside MacKenzie Scott, formerly Bezos, she belongs to the tech titans’ first-wives club—a group through which one can chart the journey of extraordinarily wealthy men from marrying ordinary women to marrying women they appear to regard as having no inner lives. “He was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking,” Wilson told Gibney. She also recalled Musk saying: “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” No amount of money in the world, am I right?
