Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 7)

This past summer for me was a summer of pizza. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy pizza before, but someone else always did the cooking. Whether at a restaurant or at a friend’s pizza party, I never did much of the work myself. The pandemic changed all that, sending me down a rabbit hole of how to make better pizza at home. In my latest article at Inside Hook, I cover the options from basic pizza pans to dedicated backyard ovens that reach more than 900° F. It was a very fun piece to write, and if you’ve been curious about making pizza I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

I wrote this a couple months ago, and if I were writing it today there are a couple things I would change. First, the the article implies that you need a baking steel to accompany the pans from Lloyd. I’ve been using both together, but this isn’t necessary; you can make good pizza with just the pans and your home oven. Second, I’d add a recommendation for these personal-sized 7-inch pans. The 10 x 14-inch pans mentioned in the article are great, but they make a big a pie. These smaller pans are perfect for when you’re cooking solo.

If you’re on the fence about upping your home pizza game, here are a few recent pies for inspiration.

As we come up on the final days of the election, I have a couple pieces out on how I’m voting. If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning, you know that I’m a long-time libertarian. This year, however, I’ll be casting my first vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. From my latest in Arc Digital, “A Pox on One of Their Houses“:

This decision has less to do with the Democrats or the Libertarians than it does with the Republicans. The Democrats nominated a moderate centrist with a 50-year career in public service. The Libertarians nominated an obscure psychology lecturer at Clemson. In a normal year, I would vote for the Libertarian.

But this is not a normal year.

In 2020, I cannot in good conscience proclaim, “A pox on both their houses!” and vote third party. One of the major parties has become far more deserving of pox than the other, and not just because of the literal plague it seems intent upon spreading. The GOP has hitched its wagon to an aspiring if not yet actual authoritarian, and as a lover of freedom and liberal democracy, the desire to see him thoroughly defeated has taken precedence over other competing values.

Here in Oregon, I’ve also written on Measure 108, which will drastically raise taxes on cigarettes and impose substantial new taxes on vaping. Every major paper in Portland endorsed the measure, but the Oregonian gave me space to make an argument against it:

If there were a measure on the Oregon ballot to raise taxes on products that help people quit smoking, such as nicotine patches and gums, there would be no doubt that this would be bad for public health. Oregon’s Measure 108, which would impose substantial new taxes on vaping products, is misguided for precisely the same reason. By raising the cost of the most effective smoking cessation devices ever invented, it will unintentionally perpetuate cigarette smoking.

Lastly, on the fun side of things, I have a piece up at Inside Hook on why I love chocolate bitters:

It wasn’t that long ago that even tracking down orange bitters was an ordeal. Now you can probably find them at your local Whole Foods alongside untold other varieties of bitters, tinctures and shrubs to dash into your cocktails. This plenitude is one of the welcome developments of the cocktail renaissance, but it can be hard to know where to begin. Celery? Habanero? Rhubarb? They all have their uses, but if I could add just one bottle of bitters to the holy trinity, it would be chocolate.

One year ago today, I hit publish on my most recent book, The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette. It was a risky time to release it. Although the book is not about vaping per se — the topic isn’t covered until the penultimate chapter — one of its main arguments is that e-cigarettes, snus, and other less harmful products have the potential to replace the lethal cigarette. The news that summer was dominated by a different take: that a mysterious epidemic of vaping-related lung diseases was killing people throughout the United States. While it’s always good to release a book with a relevant news hook, this was one that appeared to cast the entire project into doubt.

By September, as I was putting the finishing touches on the print manuscript, it seemed clear that the danger was arising from black market cannabis cartridges, not nicotine e-cigarettes. I ended up including this addendum to the chapter on vaping:

As this book goes to press in September of 2019, the United States is gripped by panic over vaping. Mysterious lung illnesses have appeared, teen use rose for another year, and the FDA announced its intent to ban flavored e-cigarettes nationwide. Emerging evidence suggests that the illnesses are mostly linked to cannabis products, though the causes are not yet known with certainty. In the long-run, I suspect that these incidents will reveal more about drug policy than they do about e-cigarettes, although it is a reminder that we do not yet know everything we need to know about vaping. Regardless, the damage has been done. Anti-smoking groups and politicians took advantage of the crisis to push bans through, with the likely effects of driving some vapers back to smoking, creating a black market, exacerbating misperceptions of e-cigarettes, and advantaging products owned by tobacco companies. In the midst of all this, one encouraging fact has been almost completely ignored: Preliminary figures show the youth smoking rate falling to another record low, down from 8.1% to 5.8% in just one year.

Looking back a year later, this paragraph has, for better or worse, held up. If you were looking for reliable information on the lung injuries in the fall of 2019, you were better served by the online cannabis magazine Leafly than by the Centers for Disease Control. Journalist David Downs had correctly identified black market additives to cannabis products as the source of contamination by August of that year. It took months for the CDC to catch up, and even today the agency continues to sow confusion by misleadingly casting blame on nicotine vaping.

As predicted, the result of this was a wave of new restrictions on vaping products, particularly bans on flavored e-cigarettes. Research from the NBER later concluded that misinformation from the CDC, along with associated press reports, did damage by failing to warn consumers away from contaminated cannabis products and by creating long-lasting misperceptions about the relative risks of vaping. Federal regulations taking effect this month are advantaging Big Tobacco over small producers, a topic I covered in-depth recently for Arc Digital. On the positive side, the FDA did partially back away from its plan to ban all flavored e-cigarettes, youth vaping rates declined in 2020, and the youth smoking rate continues falling to record lows.

Unlike my first and forthcoming third books, both produced under contract with a traditional publisher, The Rediscovery of Tobacco is self-published. This was also a risky decision since there was no advance, no sales team, and no PR push beyond my own emails to potentially interested readers. As a contrarian book in a fairly niche area of public policy, it was never going to be the next Harry Potter. So, was it worth it?

From a purely financial perspective, I didn’t expect it to provide a good return for the amount of time spent producing it. Given how long it takes to write a book like this, I’d have been better off working minimum wage. That said, spending long stretches of time in coffee shops reading and writing about topics I care about is how I spend a lot of my free time anyway, so I might as well have gotten a book out of it. The research was also subsidized by freelance pieces I was able to sell along the way: certain chapters draw heavily on articles I published in The Atlantic, Slate, and Reason. Lastly, writing a good book is gratifying, so the rewards aren’t purely financial.

The book has not sold quite as well as I’d hoped it might, but my fear was that it would not sell at all, so I’m happy to say that it’s doing reasonably well. It has sold in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Japan, throughout Europe, and likely some other countries. It led to multiple radio and podcast appearances, a live event at the Cato Institute, some articles reconsidering the extent of smoking bans, and positive reviews at Reason, Spiked, and a variety of trade publications. While sales of many books taper off soon after publication, this one has continued to sell through the summer, with July coming in as the second-best month for sales so far. Feedback from academics who study tobacco harm reduction has been overwhelmingly positive.

In the process of producing the book I learned a ton about self-publishing, from the ease of using Vellum (very worthwhile) to the exorbitant cost of acquiring your own ISBN (perhaps not so much). Amazon as a company gets a lot of bad press, but as an independent author I have to say it’s amazingly empowering. Through their Kindle Direct Publishing platform I can get an e-book or high-quality print-on-demand paperback to readers all over the world with zero inventory or shipping costs on my end. And while I miss the advance that comes with a traditional publishing contract, at the margin I make about three times as much per unit selling through Kindle Direct than I do selling through a publisher. Unlike many books that never generate enough royalties to pay out their advances, every time someone buys The Rediscovery of Tobacco, they’re putting money directly into my pocket. Whatever else you want to say about Amazon, their self-publishing platform is a marvel of communication, and my book probably wouldn’t exist without it.

(That said, I do have some significant complaints about the Kindle publishing interface, including one inexcusable problem that forced me to cancel some of my digital pre-orders. I won’t bore you with those details here. The hardcovers are sold through IngramSpark, which I also recommend for self-publishing. The quality is great and they have international reach for retail bookstores. My return is lower on hardcovers except when selling them in person, but hardcovers are nice and I like having them available for those who prefer them.)

With more than a billion smokers in the world and the ongoing battles over harm reduction and prohibition showing no signs of letting up, The Rediscovery of Tobacco is going to be relevant for years to come. If nothing else, I’m glad that when people look back on this era of of moral panic and bad policy, I’ll have written one of the few books to get things mostly right.

If I’ve learned one thing as an author, it’s to take every opportunity to promote your book, so I’ll end with a pitch: you should read it now! If you want to understand the history of tobacco, how the modern anti-smoking movement lost its way, and how innovation and harm reduction can combat a deadly product that kills more than seven million people every year, this is the book for you. Buy it from any of the following retailers. Or if you’ve purchased and read it already, thank you, and any assistance spreading the word through reviews or social media would be greatly appreciated.

Purchase The Rediscovery of Tobacco from: Amazon | Kindle | Bookshop | Apple | Powell’s | Barnes & Noble

I have a couple new pieces out, one long and one short, both related to smoke. First, the long one. For Arc Digital, I wrote an in-depth feature on the future of tobacco. It covers a lot of ground, drawing on visits to Philip Morris’s research headquarters in Switzerland and the Snus and Matchsticks Museum in Stockholm. It also looks at FDA regulation in the United States, the fate of e-cigarettes, and the cultural dysfunction in professional tobacco control. An excerpt:

The future of tobacco is very much up for grabs. It’s a struggle over not just what kinds of tobacco and nicotine products people consume, but also who is allowed to produce and sell them. As the age of the cigarette comes to an end, corporations that spent the previous century merchandizing that deadly product are politically and financially well-positioned to seize the market for safer alternatives. Ironically, laws and regulations supported by anti-smoking groups have paved the way toward a future that may once again belong to Big Tobacco.

The shorter piece is about the wildfire smoke that’s currently blanketing Portland. We’ve had some of the most hazardous air in the world for the past week, so residents are being urged to avoid being outside as much as possible. But there’s one group that an archaic state law has put in harm’s way:

Parts of Oregon this week achieved the distinction of having the worst air quality in the world. Due to the wildfires, the air quality index rating for Portland exceeded 500, which is literally off the charts. (Anything over 150 is considered “unhealthy” and anything over 300 is “hazardous.”) The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration has urged employers to shut down outdoor work activity when possible. Despite this, there’s still one group of workers needlessly spending their days outdoors: the station attendants who pump drivers’ gasoline because of Oregon’s ban on self-service fueling.

I didn’t intend to cover the protests in Portland, but as they consumed national attention, friends convinced me to write about them as a local observer. The resulting piece for Arc Digital ended up as one of my most popular and controversial recent articles. It explores what’s going on at the protests, why they offer a lot for a libertarian to love, and how our first reality TV president is using Portland as a prop for his re-election campaign. Read it here:

For a city under siege, things are surprisingly tranquil. The latest figures from the police bureau suggest that most crime is actually down. Yet the proud weirdness of our mid-sized city has long invited outside observers to read into it what they want to. Not long after I moved here in 2008, Portlandia cemented our role as national hipster punchline, a place where chickens have names, where you can put a bird on something and call it art, where young people go to retire. Now it’s where young people go to light fires, at least in the right-wing imagination. Both depictions are highly fictionalized, but even in bleak 2020, Portlandia remains the truer approximation.

Though it received less attention, my other piece for Arc Digital is my favorite thing I’ve written this year. It’s about a visit to a tiny tobacco farm on a remote island in Denmark where a woman named Janni Bidstrup keeps the tradition of Danish cigarmaking alive:

The morning starts a little later here in Ærøskøbing, a historic trading outpost of fewer than a thousand people that’s so picturesque, so abundantly hygge, that even Danes describe it as a “fairytale town.” I have it to myself as I wander the cobblestone streets waiting for breakfast. Colorful houses exude Scandinavian charm in the bright morning sun, and many of them leave homemade foods and crafts out for sale to passersby: packages of biscotti, knit socks, jars of marmalade made from foraged apriplums. Although the marmalade is tempting, I’ve traveled here for a different kind of produce. Ærø is the unexpected home to one of the world’s rarest cigars, the tobacco planted, harvested, cured, and rolled by hand in a labor of love by one of the last cigarmakers in Denmark.

I also have the cover story for the latest issue of Reason magazine, now free to read online. A lot has been written about bars and restaurants closing due to the pandemic. I focus instead on how some are finding innovative ways to survive and how the virus will change the hospitality industry for years to come:

When we think of things going back to “normal,” we really mean back to what we may eventually regard as a golden age of restaurant culture. The flourishing of the last decade or so was enabled by travel, immigration, international trade, intricately connected local suppliers, traditional food media, internet communities, and smartphones capable of taking professional quality photographs. Most of all, it was enabled by increasing prosperity and an openness to new experiences.

Prosperity and openness are both threatened now, the former by the economic crash and the latter by the fear that social gatherings will transmit an invisible and potentially deadly virus. The dream is that an effective vaccine will be developed in record time and we can hit a reset button on this year; the restaurant and bar economy, emerging from its deep sleep, will come back to life and pick up right where it left off. The reality is likely to be far more difficult.

I was also happy to contribute to this Esquire collection of home recipes from people laid off from work in bars and restaurants. It’s part of a larger package covering the business. My own suggestion for making drinks at home is the Honeysuckle, a lesser-known relative of the Daiquiri:

Springtime in Portland arrived about a week into our shutdown, and aside from my daily bike ride, I’ve been experiencing it mostly from my window. With everything in bloom, I associate honey cocktails with the season. Honey syrup is easy to make and brings an extra dimension of flavor that you don’t get with standard simple syrup. It’s also extremely versatile in basic three-ingredient cocktails, by combining it with citrus and a base spirit. The most well-known of these is the Bee’s Knees, which mixes gin, honey, and lemon, but it can work with just about any bottle you have on hand. Substitute bourbon for gin and you have a Gold Rush; rum, lime or lemon, and honey makes a Honeysuckle.

Lastly, for Inside Hook, I revisited the topic of my first book, how to make cocktails with beer, with three contemporary ways of using it in cocktails:

Does beer belong in a cocktail? Purists may recoil at the idea, thinking it sounds like a way to ruin a perfectly good beer, or perhaps recalling cheap “beergaritas” and other haphazard concoctions aimed more at maximizing alcohol content than at the harmonious commingling of ingredients. If that sounds like you, I’d urge you to reconsider. Beer is a surprisingly versatile addition to your mixology arsenal, and the secret ingredient for your next favorite summer cocktail may already be lurking in your refrigerator.

I have a new op/ed for the Oregonian up this week on the unexpected success of the Black Lives Matter protests shifting public opinion and the failure of anti-“big government” conservatives to contend with police brutality:

Despite some progress on the right, Republicans still lag far behind other groups in support for Black Lives Matter, the Pew survey notes. This is a conspicuous failing for a party that styles itself in opposition to “big government.” The videos of police brutality that have flooded social media document big government in action. No-knock warrants of the type that led to the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, part of a drug war that, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, costs the United States nearly $50 billion every year, are big government in action. The predatory policing of Ferguson, where the police department treated black residents as a source of revenue rather than as equal citizens, is big government in action. The left-leaning politics of Black Lives Matter is no excuse for conservatives to avert their eyes from these flagrant abuses.

From the June print issue of Reason, now online, I review the new Dr. Oz-endorsed book Quit Vaping, which doubles as a look at how the media skews perceptions of e-cigarettes:

One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but in this case the text lives up to expectations. The opening section, “Lies and Facts,” offers a preponderance of the former. Initially I attempted to keep track of misleading statements and critical omissions by marking them with Post-its. By page 30, such a thicket had accumulated that I gave up. Adequately critiquing Lamm’s selective reading of the scientific literature would be like trying to perform a live fact-check of a Trump campaign rally; the torrent of error is too much for any one person to handle. This section is a greatest hits collection of anti-vaping stories, recounting every possible danger and dismissing every possible benefit. In that sense, it provides a useful look at how coverage of the topic has become increasingly fear-based.

I also have a couple of recent lifestyle pieces for Inside Hook. First up, the case for making your own tortillas at home:

Baking sourdough bread has become the de rigueur culinary endeavor for food lovers stuck at home during the coronavirus shutdown. Perhaps you’re tempted to join in on the activity, but there are a few obstacles. The spike in demand has made flour a scarce commodity. More importantly, making sourdough looks hard.

 If, like me, you’d like to take on a slightly less daunting but nonetheless immensely satisfying cooking project, I suggest switching grains from wheat to corn, and making your own tortillas.

And next, an article about Irish Coffee, both how to make it the classic way and how to change things up:

As a coffee purist, I generally don’t like adding anything to my coffee — not even booze, despite my career in cocktails. My routine is typically several cups of black coffee throughout the day, spirits and cocktails at night, and never the twain shall meet. But I can’t deny that coffee cocktails do have their place, and as coronavirus shutdowns and social distancing have thrown schedules into disarray, I’ve been enjoying them more often.

Lastly, I’m continuing to send out my semi-weekly Substack newsletter. It’s free to subscribe and features my own writing, links to topical stories, and tips for making social distancing more bearable (i.e. cocktail recipes). Subscribe here.

Those are the topics of my two most recent articles. First, the coffee. I spoke with Peter Giuliano of the Specialty Coffee Association about making better coffee at home:

“In our research we’ve been quantifying how much different interventions affect the quality of the beverage,” he says. “What’s really clear is that the biggest impact is the coffee itself. There’s nothing that you can do that will have as big an effect as the quality of the coffee in the first place.”

Then at Slate, I look into the current state of the science on smoking, vaping, and COVID-19:

Are smokers and vapers more likely to die of COVID-19? To judge by news coverage of the topic, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The New York Times, Wired, CNN, Bloomberg, and numerous other publications have run stories warning that smokers and vapers are at higher risk. Anti-tobacco groups are using the pandemic as an opportunity to push for new restrictions on nicotine, ranging from bans on vapor products to the complete prohibition of cigarettes. At least one senator, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, is citing the disease as justification for a national ban on flavored e-cigarettes, while House Democrats are urging the FDA to temporarily ban e-cigarettes entirely. Amid all this alarm, one complication has received relatively little notice: Emerging evidence on the risk factors for COVID-19 is ambiguous with regard to smoking and virtually nonexistent for its relationship to vaping.

Lastly, I moved my newsletter over to Substack. If you’d like to subscribe, click on over here.

The past month has been extremely disruptive to my normal work, but one positive outcome is that I’ve had much more time for writing. I’ve also joined the trend, a few years late, of writers starting newsletters. The Liquidity Preference newsletter is going out 1-2 times a week with links to my work, discussion of COVID-19 and its economics fall out, and tips for making social distancing a little more tolerable. You can subscribe here or check out the archives for a taste of what to expect.

For the Neoliberal Project’s Exponents magazine, I took a look at the decades long campaign to stigmatize smokers via the dubious science of thirdhand smoke:

Now that we are all compelled to practice social distancing, we know too well what it’s like to live in a world where the air itself is suspect, where valued social spaces have been closed off to us, and where every brief encounter with another person requires undertaking a wary risk assessment. Despite the real effects of stigma experienced by smokers, it would be too much to suggest that they live in that world all the time. This is to the credit of ordinary people whose common sense leads them to ignore alarmist claims about thirdhand smoke; it’s certainly not for lack of trying on the part of anti-smoking activists or the journalists who uncritically amplify their fear-mongering.

The weblog is Truth on the Market is hosting a symposium on “The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” They invited me to contribute a post on how FDA regulations are preventing small distilleries from producing hand sanitizer:

In general, the redirection of craft distilleries to producing hand sanitizer is an example of private businesses responding to market signals and the evident challenges of the health crisis to produce much-needed goods; in some cases, sanitizer represents one of their only sources of revenue during the shutdown, providing a lifeline for small businesses. The Distilled Spirits Council currently lists nearly 600 distilleries making sanitizer in the United States.

There is one significant obstacle that has hindered the production of sanitizer, however: an FDA requirement that distilleries obtain extra ingredients to denature their alcohol.

I’ve also begun writing for the website Inside Hook. My first article advises what to make with some of the dusty bottles that may be taking up space in your liquor cabinet: Galliano, Drambuie, Jagermeister, and more. My second piece details my experiments making infinity bottles, including my 50+ ingredient Infinite Negroni:

As I write this, I’m sipping on a rum that’s not quite like any other I’ve had before. It’s funky and tropical on the nose, with notes of banana bread and fermented fruit. The palate is slightly sweet with vanilla, but also hot and high-proof, and hints of cinnamon and spice linger on the finish. If you’d like to try it, I’m afraid you’re out of luck: this rum exists only in my apartment, and it will taste different the next time I sample it, too.

The rum was poured from my favorite of my “infinity bottles.” The infinity bottle is a trend that has taken hold among spirits nerds as a way of creating a unique blend at home. The idea is pretty simple: You take an empty bottle and start creating your own personal blend of a chosen spirit, typically a whiskey. Then you keep adding to it over time. If you have an infinity bottle of bourbons, for example, you might drink some of it one night and then top it off with something new, creating a blend that continually evolves in the bottle.

Lastly, I’ve finally made The Rediscovery of Tobacco available on Apple books, so if you prefer reading on an Apple device, you’re out of excuses for not ordering it! I’ve also made the introduction available for free online.

“You’re overreacting. Look at how many people die from the flu every year,” my mom said. This was a couple weeks ago, and we were on the phone discussing my plans to visit home. My parents live in Houston, I live in Portland, Oregon, and my annual work trip to SXSW in Austin presented an all too rare opportunity to visit Texas. I was expressing my doubts that the trip was going to happen. There was this new coronavirus, and it sounded serious.

My mom, like many at the time and some even now, thought the media might be blowing the whole thing out of proportion. She mentioned my own writing, which has often focused on debunking media-driven health panics. Could this be more of the same? At first, it seemed unthinkable to cancel an event as massive as SXSW. Then it began to feel inevitable. Today, the idea that they could have done anything less feels recklessly irresponsible.

The events I’d been planning for months were called off, but I still had plane tickets and an expensive, non-refundable hotel room. I still had parents who wanted me to visit. I still had a hunger for breakfast tacos and Texas barbecue. But I also had vague yet evocative memories of a book I’d read eight years ago, a book in which ordinary people pick up extraordinary diseases, with often fatal consequences for themselves, their loved ones, and the doctors and nurses who care for them. Transporting my body and its invisible passengers into my parents’ house, where any sneeze, cough, or lick from an affectionate terrier could spread contagion, didn’t feel worth the risk. And so, as my flight departed to Austin, I stayed home revisiting David Quammen’s prescient book, Spillover.

David Quammen is among a handful of authors whose books I’ll order as soon as they’re announced, regardless of whether I have any previous interest in the subject matter. (Perceptions of man-eating predators? I will – hopefully – never be devoured by a bear, but Monster of God was an engaging read nonetheless.) His 2012 book, Spillover, is devoted entirely to infections that make the leap from other animals into humans. In technical parlance, “zoonosis.” The list of previous zoonoses is long: AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, rabies, Nipah encephalitis, Lyme disease, too many more to mention. Some, like flu, have become an ever-fluctuating part of our familiar viral landscape. Others, like SARS, flare up, run their course with terrifying intensity, and burn out. Our lives move on. But Quammen’s book wasn’t intended as a curious catalogue of past events. It was a warning. Zoonosis, he cautioned, “is a word of the future, destined for use in the twenty-first century.” Eight years later, that future has arrived.

Is this new coronavirus the “Next Big One” that epidemiologists have been fearing? If not, it’s certainly big enough, and it’s exposing how unprepared we are for it. Though Spillover is too dense to cover fully, here are three points that stood out while re-reading it during the current pandemic.

“Everything comes from somewhere”

One of the things I appreciate about Quammen’s books is that he situates his topics in evolutionary and ecological contexts. “Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions it’s every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests and zebras, or what owls do to mice.” We are not separate from nature. We are not even fully human; each of us is an ecological niche unto ourselves, home to uncountable microbes. So is every other creature. Through the long, relentless pressure of evolution, most of these relationships become manageable, sometimes even beneficial. Occasionally these microbes find themselves outside of the reservoir hosts to which they’ve become adapted. And then? A dead end, typically. But also opportunity. Nearly 8 billion opportunities in the case of humans, an efflorescence of new environments packed densely into cities and connected by global travel. And while most of us in wealthier countries rarely come into contact with live animals other than our pets, we interact with them indirectly through farming, trade, and encroachment into wild habitats. “Shake a tree,” as Quammen writes, “and things fall out.”

From a microbe’s eye view, we humans are high-risk, high-reward. They may infect our bodies and ravage us so thoroughly that they are unable to spread, their path blocked by human response strategies or their own excessive virulence. That’s the Ebola story, so far: a handful outbreaks, extremely high fatality rates, but ultimately, containment. In other conditions, the microbe may take hold and find itself capable of transmitting from host to host indefinitely, keeping the humans it infects alive long enough to spread it to others. That’s HIV, a virus that jumped from the blood of other primates to a person. The circumstances are contingent; it might have happened lots of times, eventually fizzling out. It only had to break through once. (In actuality, it probably succeeded multiple times.)

You don’t have to slaughter a chimp or eat a bat for zoonosis to happen. Disease could spring from racehorses (Hendra), pigs and chickens (swine and avian flu), domesticated goats (Q Fever), cattle (“mad cow”), parrots (psittacosis), ticks (Lyme disease), or Old Yeller (rabies). Reasonable steps can be taken to prevent spillover, and the present epidemic will likely result in some reflection on how to do so, but there’s no way to stop it entirely. The next disease is out there, uncharted. The question is how to prepare for it.

SARS should have prepared us

Eight years after first reading Spillover, there were a few specific cases described within it that lingered in my memory. The Australian horse trainer who came down with Hendra. The Dutch tourist who picked up Marburg during a ten-minute venture into a Ugandan cave. And most relevant to the current epidemic, the “superspreaders” who inadvertently transmitted SARS far beyond its initial entry into the human population.

A surprising number of these cases can be traced to a single hotel in Hong Kong, where a professor from Guangzhou arrived for a wedding. He’d been ill two weeks before, then felt well enough to travel. At the hotel, he felt sick again. He stayed on the ninth floor. So did a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother from Toronto, who overlapped with him for one night. So did a young woman from Singapore. Within a few weeks, the professor had died. The grandmother died, too, after flying the virus back to Canada, where it killed thirty-one. The young woman returned to Singapore. She survived, but her mother, father, uncle, and pastor did not. A woman infected by the grandmother brought SARS to the Philippines; a man infected by the young woman took it to Germany. In the end, SARS infected 8,098 people and took the lives of 774.

This web of infections, vaguely remembered, is what was on my mind as I contemplated my forthcoming trip to Texas. The United States had restricted travel from China, but the new coronavirus was already here. Never mind the Chinese; I fit the profile of a superspreader. I’d just been to New York, cramming onto subways, squeezing into airplanes, massing at the rails of the Staten Island Ferry as we passed the Statue of Liberty. Then back to Portland, where I went to bars and restaurants, played soccer. And then? To Austin, where I would interact with thousands of other travelers who had non-refundable tickets? And on to the home of my parents, who are in their sixties? No, thank you. Better to stay in Oregon reading popular science books.

Another thing about SARS: It was also caused by a coronavirus, SARS-CoV, namesake for the virus you’re currently worried about, SARS-CoV-2. As frightening as the original SARS outbreak was, its spread was limited. Perhaps that’s part of why some people are downplaying risks now. We’ve had outbreaks like this before, and they weren’t that bad in the scheme of things. That’s the wrong way to think about it. A better question to ask is, “Under what conditions could SARS have been much, much worse?”

The fortunate thing about SARS is that the infected typically endured recognizable symptoms before they became highly contagious. That made it possible to contain it. “This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode – not just lucky but salvational,” writes Quammen. For some other viruses, such as the flu, infectiousness can precede symptoms; that’s part of why they spread so easily. So, what’s scarier than SARS? SARS that spreads like the flu.

That’s not exactly what we’re facing now, but there are similarities. Toward the end of Spillover, Quammen recounts an interview with epidemiologist Donald S. Burke, who had given a lecture back in 1997 on the groups of viruses most likely to lead to the next pandemic. Coronaviruses stood out as a probable candidate even then, given their propensities toward infecting animals and rapidly evolving. The genomes of coronaviruses are encoded in error-prone RNA. That means they mutate often; they adapt, they evolve, the replicate in huge numbers. We were warned about this before SARS. SARS proved that the danger was real. Less than two decades after the initial SARS outbreak, the danger is here.

What we do now matters

I’m not writing this post to sound fatalistic. Yes, zoonoses are to some degree inevitable (though we can alter practices to prevent them). Yes, a bad one has arrived. But there’s a reason there are nearly eight billion of us: We are smart and we can change our behavior in light of new information. Toward the end of his book, Quammen considers how much that matters. “[Individual] effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd.”

Here in the United States, we’ve squandered our early opportunities to prevent the spread of this new coronavirus. Due to a lack of testing, we’re not even sure how many people have been infected. What happens next depends on a multitude of factors: how deadly the virus turns out to be, how many people get it (especially in vulnerable populations), and whether our hospital systems are able to deliver care without being overwhelmed by new patients. Under the rosiest estimates, deaths will be in the hundreds or thousands. If things don’t go well? Hundreds of thousands. If this goes very badly? More than a million.

The worst-case scenarios are not inevitable. But they are plausible. They are realistic. You should take them seriously. Even now, I feel like many people I talk to or interact with online are still complacent about how rapidly things can change. Here are the two points I think cannot be emphasized enough:

First, this is not something that only happens over there, or to other people. It’s not just the flu. You need to be thinking of this as something that could very well take the life of someone you care about.

Second, think about what you, as an individual, can do to prevent the worst-case scenarios from happening. Don’t be a superspreader. Try not to be a mediumspreader, either. Cancel your trip, cancel your events, cancel your parties. Work from home, if you can. Practice social distancing. How extreme? Honestly, I can’t tell you, but do think about it. If you’re reading this on your phone while waiting in line to get into a crowded bar, you’re doing it wrong.

What’s next?

What’s next, when the worst of this is over? I don’t mean next for this virus, or even for diseases generally. I mean what other disasters have we been warned about that many of us blithely ignore? That’s another thing I think about reading Spillover now. There’s climate change, obviously, which could spiral out in all sorts of terrible ways. Living in the Pacific Northwest, something more specific comes to mind: the other Next Big One, the earthquake and tsunami that will likely be triggered by the next great shift in the Cascadia subduction zone.

When Americans think of destructive earthquakes, we generally think of the San Andreas Faultline because it’s the most active. Due to all that activity, the cities along it are prepared. Little earthquakes and big earthquakes happen with too much frequency to ignore. The Cascadia subduction zone is different. Until fairly recently, scientists didn’t even recognize it as seismically active. That stillness belied a more frightening truth: The pressure is building up. Rather than releasing it gradually and actively, like the San Andreas, the CSZ releases it all at once in massively destructive megaquakes.

Based on current estimates, these megaquakes occur about every 243 years. The last one has been dated precisely to January of 1700. That’s… 320 years ago. You get the picture. I won’t go into detail here, but you can read grim predictions of what’s coming. Outside magazine devoted a feature to it in 2011. The New Yorker in 2015. Vice in 2016. The narrative structures differ but the basic story is always the same. The megaquake is coming and it’s going to be very, very bad.

Like many people living in the region, I read these stories when they were published. And like many of us, I haven’t done enough to prepare. There’s a suggestive parallel to COVID-19. Places with recent experience of respiratory disease outbreaks, particularly in Asia, knew to take it seriously and had plans in place for dealing with it. It’s similar to how cities that experience minor earthquakes are more prepared for the big ones. In the case of the Cascadia subduction zone, we are not the places prepared for coronavirus like Taiwan or Hong Kong or Taiwan. We’re Italy or the US. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and are currently lamenting the hardship of missing events or scrambling to find toilet paper because of the current epidemic, start thinking about what you can do now to be ready for the next disaster. We can’t say nobody warned us.

As someone who’s naturally contrarian, and who is friends with or follows a lot of other contrarians, it’s interesting to follow how people are evaluating the risks of coronavirus. One potential split noted in this Tyler Cowen column is between “base-raters” and “growthers.” Another is partisanship: right-leaning people seem to be more dismissive of the risk, perhaps taking their cue directly or indirectly from Trump himself. (The response is far from uniform; see Michael Brendan Dougherty at NRO, for example.)

Much of my own writing has focused on debunking health panics: on secondhand smoke, on vaping. You might expect I’d take a similar position on this, too, and conclude that fears of coronavirus are overblown. But facing the decision of whether or not to travel this week — I planned to work at SXSW in Austin and visit family in Houston — I’ve been reading about it obsessively, and I’m persuaded right now that the case for taking preventive measures is strong. I’ve cancelled my own trip in part because of the virus. Though I’m not an authority, I’ve talked with a lot of other people who are unsure how to plan and I thought it worth writing out my reasoning. Some reasons I’m in the “growther” camp who’s worried that the US is not yet taking this epidemic seriously enough:

1) Potential spread of the virus is exponential. From data published by Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data, the case doubling time is currently 5 days in some contexts, excluding China which has taken extreme measures to restrict its spread. (The page at Our World in Data is one of the best resources I’ve found for understanding the virus.)

2) Rates of testing have been extremely low in the US and there is evidence of community spread. Oregon, where I live, can test only 40 people per day. Over the weekend, the amount of known cases doubled twice. The absolute number of known cases is still low, but one has to wonder how many additional cases are out there.

3) The fact that many cases exhibit mild symptoms increases the chances that people may unknowingly spread the disease. Viruses with higher, faster fatality rates can seem scarier, but a virus that doesn’t kill its hosts quickly with debilitating symptoms has potential to spread more widely, doing more damage in the long-run. Relatively mild symptoms plus a long period of shedding may combine to make this virus difficult to contain.

4) Dismissive comparisons to the flu are unconvincing. First, the flu is quite bad to begin with! Second, even some optimistic case fatality rates for COVID-19 are about 10 times that of the flu. Unlike the flu, we do not have a vaccine for COVID-19. Also unlike the flu, it’s uncertain whether it will be seasonal. Absolute mortality is lower than the flu now, but given the factors above, there are plausible scenarios where it will grow alarmingly quickly. (See, again, Our World in Data.)

5) As a relatively young and healthy person, I’m not particularly worried about my own risks. I am worried about transmission to others. Observed fatality rates increase dramatically with age and certain medical conditions. Potential mortality among older populations is one of the most compelling reasons to take steps now to prevent the spread; see conditions at the Life Care nursing center in Washington or in Italian hospitals.

6) In addition to the direct risks of coronavirus, there will be second order effects if the medical system is overwhelmed. Patients suffering from other illnesses or accidents will be unable to get the care they need. If medical staff are also exposed to the virus, these patients then face even more risk, and challenges to the medical system will be compounded by shortages of doctors, nurses, and other staff. One thread on Twitter memorably describes this as “The Pinch.”

7) Perhaps, like the president, you believe that fear of the coronavirus is the product of the “Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party.” Perhaps you distrust the media. Do you also distrust markets? Stocks have fallen and the 10-year bond yield fell to a record low. It’s not always possible to read the message of the markets, but right now it seems pretty clear: investors expect coronavirus to have large, lasting detrimental economic effects, and they are flocking to the safest assets.

8) Given all of the above, there’s a compelling case for mitigation. The below image, also from Our World in Data, is an abstract visualization of the benefits of slowing the spread of the virus, a.k.a “flattening the curve.” This prevents the hospital system from being overwhelmed and buys time to develop treatments and hopefully an effective vaccine.

9) I see a lot of discussion about what the “real” case fatality rate of this virus is, as if that is an independent fact about the virus rather than a figure at least partially determined by the resources available to treat the sick. The rate is contextual and preventing the hospital system from being overwhelmed is one strategy for keeping it low.

10) We’re still learning what methods are effective for mitigating the spread of the virus, but improved sanitation and social distancing are smart approaches at minimum. Forgoing unnecessary travel strikes me as an obvious response, and it’s one reason I’m not going to Texas this week as I’d planned. Avoiding and cancelling mass gatherings, as costly as it is the short-run, is also the responsible decision right now. (See Yascha Mounk, “Cancel Everything.”)

11) I haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate this into the rest of my daily life. I expect a lot of people who can will start working from home. I have that option with writing, but all of my other work is public-facing to some degree. Even for my writing, events sell books. My other work is related directly or indirectly to hospitality: I tended bar last night. I have several small events planned or in the works. I still play soccer on weekends, though I suspect that may not last. How much of that is going to seem foolish from the perspective of a few weeks or months from now? I’m not sure. I’m arguing against interest by advocating for social distancing — my non-writing work is premised almost exclusively on encouraging the opposite of that — and I expect the next few months will be challenging. But at least I have writing! Many of my friends own or work in bars and restaurants full-time, and this is going to be very hard on them.

12) It’s possible that I’m overreacting. But as Yascha Mounk concluded in his own thread about this on Twitter, “If we all do the right thing, corona might yet pass without mass casualties. Like Y2K, it’ll become a punchline. (Let’s hope it will!) But consider two points: • Y2K passed without a hitch in part because we invested vast resources into preventing problems. • It’s rational to invest in avoiding the tail-end risk of a catastrophic outcome even if it pretty—or very!—likely that it’ll never come to pass.”