Stewart, like Younes, has also promoted lab leak nonsense, all too often a rite of passage for fashionably antivax adjacent commentators.

This feels like a glitch in the Matrix. A cake I've never heard of does indeed seem to be a Christmas tradition. Supposedly popular until the 80s, but made seasonally by supermarkets even today. Is there a New Year Casablanca Pie I don't know about?

And Ella is a lovely name.

The first thing that came to mind when reading it was Keith Roberts's chilling alternate history novelette 'Weihnachtsabend'.
ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/r...
That this story is set in a dark fascist dystopia is hardly reassuring.

Maybe they wrote it on a Fri night after 0.7 dm³ of Malbec? Perhaps they were going to give the concn one way, changed their mind, and forgot to delete the first statement, leaving a redundant, confusing sentence (omitting the '³' in the other units isn't a good sign either). I assume they want 15g.

You would think that a course that purports to teach students about a 'controversial' sbject would attempt to establish what the expert scientific consensus actually is, but no.

... Proximal Origin, Bloom's call to investigate origin, the Pekar 2021 index case timing paper (somewhat misrepresented) & original Gao 2022 preprint. It's as if most of the work on the market origin never happened.

The 'Case study' Kerrissey & Tofel are teaching is more of the same. Starts with false balance and goes downhill from there, recycling usual lab leak narratives. Most refs are to news stories etc. Few directly relevant scientific publications are cited, just ...

Tofel appears to have left ProPublica the year before that infamous piece was published, but has touched on similar themes elsewhere. His positive Substack review of contrarian screed 'In Covid's Wake' claims that scientific leaders including Fauci & Collins 'seem to have suppressed debate', etc.

Hi Philipp, any chance of making it available in epub format, e.g. via the Kobo store?

Witch (1993). Enigmatically released with the artist name '©' in 1993, this proto trip hop release was the work of poet, musician and model Leslie Winer. It stands up very well today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHKs...

He's probably just working up to appointing Andrew Wakefield...

A pretty safe bet - the garbled name Malhotra spouts in the video sounds like 'Professor Angleesh'.

With Sunny 16 etc. I could usually guess meter reading within a stop or so, fine for colour negative film if you err on side of overexposure, where there's more latitude (2 stops over usually OK, 2 stops under probably bad).

Had an Amazon card telling me my package was in a 'safe place', apparently a recycling bin (not the usual definition of 'safe'). There are at least a dozen recycling bins nearby (they wouldn't know which is mine). Looked in them, found nothing. I hadn't ordered anything from Amazon.

Sadly, his piece has now broken containment and leaked from the Telegraph's self-selecting ignorance bubble into Yahoo News, where anyone can be exposed to it. It seems like They do want you to read it after all.

I suppose this only makes 'sense' when you have an HHS secretary who, absurdly, takes 'no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS', and boosts Peter Duesberg's long discredited ideas in his vitriolic and nonsensical attack book, 'The Real Anthony Fauci'.

I hear the Conspiracy got to the AACR meeting last month too. Not even an E-poster. Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?

Image caption alt text: The larvae are believed to be transmitted when the mature brain worm induces an infected individual to insert their tongue into the auditory canal of a potential host.