Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she not only covered, but broke the news of his arrest. It was a scoop that ignited the Internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli: the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million. Shkreli, convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison.
“I fell down the rabbit hole,” Smythe tells me, sitting in her bright basement apartment in Harlem, speaking publicly about her romance with Shkreli for the first time. The relationship has made her completely rethink her earlier work covering the courts, and as she looks back on all of the little decisions she made that caused this giant break in her life, she says she has no regrets: “I’m happy here. I feel like I have purpose.”
“The pandemic is a prisoner’s dilemma game played out repeatedly,” Dr. Bauch said. In lectures, he invokes a comparison between Ayn Rand, who made a virtue of selfishness, and the “Star Trek” character Spock, who said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Now the vaccine adds one more protective layer. The perceived benefits and costs of vaccination are often expressed as concerns about safety and side effects. If you are on the fence about vaccination, you might decide — noticing lower infection rates as vaccination campaigns gain speed — that it no longer seems so critical to get the jab.
Anyone who came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century will recall the constant flow of animated cartoons that made up most of children’s programming on TV. In a culture of supposedly short memories, they were an art form that reached right back across time. On the radio, “oldies” were a separate genre within pop music, but on the kids’ shows there was a steady stream of cartoons from half a century’s creation, reality intruding mostly with commercials for pre-sweetened breakfast cereals. Everything ran together: bending, bug-eyed dogs and cats playing bad swing jazz on living clarinets from the thirties, spinach cans popping open and tattooed muscles popping up from the nineteen-forties, and Japanese animation of the sixties so limited that it hardly moved.
The odds are we never should have been born.
Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be
exact. Only one among the 250 million
The best way to bear
that flaming pud
signalling the latter stages of our feast
The Vikings thought the wind was a god, that the eyes
were holes. A window meant a wind-eye, for the god to see with,