This article outlines the insanity of the college admissions game in the US. As a sports doc, I’ve had a front row seat to this madness for more than a decade. However, it isn’t limited to niche sports. There is a societal illness at work. (1/n) theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… First, there exists an echo chamber that reinforces the notion that admission to the Ivy League is somehow both a necessary and sufficient condition for success. This is complete nonsense, and sacrificing your / your children’s happiness on this altar will guarantee misery. (2/n)

I once wrote a paper on the sociology of HIV. I included an interview with a woman asked why she had unprotected sex. Her response startled me: when she asked her partner to use protection, he broke a bottle over her head. This is important to the psychology of our time. (1/9) As usual, people struggle to keep two thoughts in their heads at once. 1) Large public gatherings will worsen the pandemic, AND, 2) structural racism has worsened pandemic outcomes for minority populations, and the powerful have done nothing to mitigate this. (2/9)

The real crisis isn’t the coronavirus. It’s the erosion of empathy that has been cooking in modern society for decades. This week, we admitted a young person with COVID19, now on a ventilator. Days later, we admitted his mother, who is headed the same direction. In the parking lot, the father / husband, standing watch. He’s waiting for his phone to ring, to get some good news. Instead, he hears me. She’s too short of breath to speak more than a couple of words. He doesn’t yet realize he may never see them again.

Let me explain to you how this is going to go down. The virus is widespread in the community right now. The country will re-open without adequate contact tracing or testing. The pandemic will smolder for a short time, and then explode. Sadly, it won’t be just the conspiracy theorists who get it. It won’t just be the self-dealing, incompetent politicians. It won’t be the billionaires desperate to get people back to work. It will be regular folks. Poor people with a structural lack of access to resources.