Pandemic Over? Not Quite, But Pfizer's Pill Is Great News
In this newsletter: The Pfizer pill, a Covid news podcast, and an inanity.
Part I: The Pfizer Pill
The end of the pandemic? Not quite, but Pfizer's new Covid pill is good news. I wrote about it this morning, and about what it means for the Merck pill we got excited about early last month.
In other Pfizer news, Pfizer's CEO told me why he thinks global vaccine distribution has been so overwhelmingly skewed in favored wealthy countries.
Part II: A Covid Roundup Podcast
It was a busy week for pandemic news: the CDC signed off on vaccines for kids, the White House set a deadline for the vaccine mandate, and Pfizer cemented its spot as the leading vaccine maker. I talked through it all yesterday on a Barron's podcast, which you can listen to for free here.
Part III: The Friz
One thing that people say happens sometimes, if you're a journalist on Twitter, is that an editor sees a thread you've done and messages you to ask if you'll write it up for them. That absolutely did not happen after I tweeted at extraordinary length about the 1995 educational picture book "The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane," but that won't stop me from going on about it here at even greater length. One only has so many ideas; you've got to suck the all juice you can from the ones you do get, even if they're a bit putrid.
The idea in this particular Twitter thread, which I tweeted at 9:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, which is far too early for that sort of thing, was that Ms. Frizzle is a mad demigod dedicated to the psychological torment of Arnold. This novel analysis of the Magic School Bus series is based on a reading of "The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane," the seventh Magic School Bus book, which features a frightening encounter with a semi-anthropomorphic weather radio.
As readers of any of the books in the Magic School Bus series (and I'm referring here to the original picture books, and not the various television programs or TV tie-in books or chapter books, of which there are many) will recall, the apparent dynamic between Arnold and Ms. Frizzle is that of an anxious, largely nonverbal child being gently pushed to take controlled risks by an eccentric teacher. My contention was that "The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane" reveals the true nature of Ms. Frizzle's dealings with Arnold, and her dark purpose.
Arnold spends this adventure terrified not of the titular hurricane, but rather of a cursed weather radio, which speaks directly and only to him. When the radio first speaks to Arnold, asking him if he has brought his raincoat, Arnold begs for release from this new horror. "Tell me this isn't happening," he thinks, grasping the side of the basket of the hot air balloon into which the school bus has transformed.
Like a biblical prophet, Arnold at first refuses to believe he has been chosen by the weather radio, thinking that he is "pretending [he] can't hear." For this refusal, Arnold, like Jonah, is punished with a storm. A hurricane smashes the hot air balloon, threatening the lives of the entire class. Just as Jonah allowed himself to be cast into the sea to save the ship's crew, Arnold hurls himself from the hot air balloon's basket at the urging of the weather radio, which tells him to "hurry up and jump" as he stands, eyes closed, on the basket's rim.
"We'll be seeing stormy seas today, Arnold," the weather radio jokes sadistically, as Arnold clings to a life ring in the middle of the ocean, his death all but a certainty. Two pages later, Arnold is rescued by a fishing boat, rather than a whale. And yet, in the frame in which the fishermen pull Arnold from the water, we see a dolphin watching from nearby, commenting insanely: "The wind is only 40 mph here." Was this dolphin Arnold's own Great Fish? Arnold doesn't tell us, but we see that he has undergone the same transformation that Jonah experienced inside of his whale, and Arnold accepts his mission. He brings his weather radio to shore, spreading news of the approaching hurricane. The people heed the word of the weather radio, evacuate, and are saved.
So is Arnold a prophet? What is speaking to him through the weather radio, and why has he been chosen?
In the Magic School Bus stories, it is Ms. Frizzle who is the ultimate source of all magic. Yes, it's the school bus that the title of the books tells us is magical. But the bus is just a bus until Ms. Frizzle turns a "strange little dial on the dashboard," imbuing it with her magical essence.
Of course, in a world where school buses can travel through time, it's likely that other supernatural beings exist, and that Ms. Frizzle is one among many gods and godlike beings. It seems unlikely that Ms. Frizzle is herself the godhead of the Walkerville cosmos, if only because godheads generally don't spend their time teaching science classes to elementary school students, but she certainly wields immense supernatural powers.
Still, in the text of the stories, we see no evidence of other supernatural beings working their magic upon the class. One could speculate, I suppose, about Liz the lizard, but there's no evidence in the text that she is anything but Ms. Frizzle's familiar. It's reasonable to assume, then, that it is Ms. Frizzle who has magicked the weather radio into speaking directly to Arnold.
So why has Ms. Frizzle done this? Why has she animated a weather radio and used it to send messages to a student she surely knows, in her infinite wisdom, to be particularly fragile? Surely not to save the people of the fishing village. They have their own weather radios, and in fact seem to already be evacuating when Arnold arrives.
This brings us to the essential question underlying the entire series: What kind of god is Ms. Frizzle, exactly? Who is this creature who brings a crowd of children on a bus ride into the ocean's depths, and through the earth's core, and back into the mists of prehistoric time? A god of wisdom, or a god of chaos? A seraph, or a demon?
The episode with the talking weather radio gives us our answer. Ms. Frizzle caused a weather radio to speak to Arnold to freak him out and make him think he's going crazy because she's a psychopath who wants to make him suffer.
The end.
Part IV: Words of Advice
A newspaper born from ashes of a failed partnership between neoconservatives and Yiddish socialists is being resurrected, this time by the former editor of an Orthodox-leaning formerly-Yiddish conservative Jewish paper. What does that tell us about American Judaism today? Not sure, not my beat anymore.
My advice is not to read this, because if you do you're going to be on Zillow for the rest of the night, looking at houses ANYWHERE BUT HERE, my god why does anyone even live in this place.
If you've gotten this far, my apologies. Here's another nice Misfits cover.