On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of moral injury.
Pandemic
COVID-19 Series: Rob Wallace
The Secret Ingredient with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, Raj Patel author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott welcome back Rob Wallace an evolutionary biologist for his take on the link between global outbreaks of infectious disease and global agriculture. Rob Wallace is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science
Homeschooling
Most Texas students are finishing the 2019-2020 school year online — at least as much as possible. That was the inspiration for this Typewriter Rodeo poem.
Social Media & Homeschooling in a Pandemic
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take audience questions about how much is too much when it comes to social media, and how to get anything done when trying to homeschool your children and work your normal job, during a live virtual Views and Brews.
Poem For Doctors, Nurses, and Hospital Staff Everywhere
We always knew the roles of doctors and nurses were important. But, in the midst of a pandemic, they are being revealed even more as true heroes. That was the inspiration for this poem.
Texas Standard: April 16, 2020
As many jobs lost in the past month as all those created since the great recession, now Texas hospitals struggling to make ends meet, we’ll have the latest. Other stories were tracking: the oil and gas industry asking for more state regulation? More on an historic hearing aimed at trying to stop a downward spiral. Also, one place where business is good? Check in with some factories on the Texas Mexico border. And the Texas governor set to talk about plans aimed at getting back to business. A top pandemic expert at Texas A&M has a warning. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:
Abstraction and Base Rate Neglect
One thing that happens during a pandemic is that a lot of numbers, percentages, charts, and graphs get tossed around on a daily, even hourly basis. However, all those numbers and graphics are really difficult for us to process.
On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about abstraction and base rate neglect.
The Texas Polio Epidemic
The silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic, if there is one, seems to be that it spares children. The polio epidemic that raged off and on in the United States for about 40 years did the opposite. Indeed, it seemed to focus on children. Whereas there is hope that COVID-19, like the flu, will weaken in warmer weather, polio was most aggressive in the summer months. As such, Texas was perhaps the hardest hit state of all.
Dr. Heather Green Wooten, a medical historian, and author of the award-winning book, The Polio Years in Texas: Battling a Terrifying Unknown, told me the story of how Texas responded to the polio epidemic that terrified the state every summer for years.
Dr. Wooten told me that when San Angelo had a breakout of polio in 1949 – the hardest-hit town per capita that year in the U.S. – it was horrifying in scope for the city of 50,000. Sixty children in San Angelo came down with polio in one summer. Many died. Movie theaters and swimming pools and public gatherings were shut down. Travelers passing through would roll up their windows so as not to breathe the potentially contaminated air. They wouldn’t even fill up a low tire at the gas station for fear of taking the virus with them. Some residents refused to talk on the phone with anyone, believing that perhaps, somehow, polio could travel through the phone lines.
This kind of fear gripped Texas every summer for years. Parents would not let their children swim or go to summer camp or do anything in groups in an effort to keep them safe. Houses were kept spotless and were scrubbed top to bottom to kill all the germs. In fact, Wooten told me, “When mothers lost a child to polio, they suffered added anguish because they felt they would be judged as bad mothers and poor housekeepers. They would explain to reporters that ‘they had always kept a very clean house and didn’t understand how this could have happened.’”
There was a public service song by Red River Dave, frequently played on the radio in those days. It stressed cleanliness. Here’s a sample:
Take care that all the food you eat and kitchen ware is clean/
Kill the rats and kill the mice and make the roaches go/
That’s the way to really whip that mean old polio
The response to polio was largely a grassroots one, with the common man (and children) largely funding the research, the treatments, the hospitals and rehab centers. The March of Dimes, launched by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was enormously successful in this regard. It mobilized school children and civic groups of all kinds – Rotary International, Kiwanis, The Masons – to collect dimes, quarters and dollars from anyone and everyone. Theaters would play a short film like “The Crippler” before every movie, and then turn on the lights and collect donations from the crowd. It was incredibly effective. The March of Dimes also introduced us to the concept of the poster child, one of the most persuasive fundraising strategies of all time. Collection receptacles, in the form of little iron lungs, were placed at cash registers everywhere.
Wooten said that the small donations coming from almost every American gave each person a stake in beating polio. I like that one year the March of Dimes national campaign was launched from the community of Dime Box, Texas, about 70 miles east of Austin. How’s that for creative marketing!
When World War II broke out, the March of Dimes feared that donations would dry up. However, FDR made beating polio part of the war effort. He said on a radio address: “The fight against [polio] is a fight to the finish, and the terms are unconditional surrender.”
Big money entered the fight as well. Texas’ great oilmen gave millions to build hospitals, treatment facilities and fund research. Two of the greatest contributors were oil magnate Hugh Roy Cullen and politician Jesse Jones, both historically among Texas’ most generous philanthropists.
Great institutions in Texas like the Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children and the Gonzalez Warm Springs Rehab Hospital for Crippled Children were among the best in the country, as was the Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston. A fascinating side note is that these hospitals were also among the first institutions to be fully integrated, accepting all children on equal terms, regardless of race, religion or creed. Wooten noted that the children took to integration beautifully and became each other’s best therapy. Doctors found that putting them together helped them function as a team against the disease, cheering each other on against a common enemy.
You know the rest of the story: Dr. Jonas Salk, funded by the March of Dimes, discovered the first vaccine for the virus in the early 1950s, and rather than getting a patent and becoming an instant billionaire, he made a gift of his vaccine to all humanity.
Texas Standard: March 23, 2020
Dallas County becomes the first in Texas with orders to shelter in place. Reporters statewide join us with the latest on fight against the Coronavirus. Plus as Texas braces for economic fallout, how to plan in a time of uncertainty. Also the new school order across Texas, a return to college in a season of lockdown leaves some students adrift. And the connection between COVID-19 and a rise in domestic violence, how shelters are filling and in need of help. Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:
Closet Recordings: William Stafford
As we all try to adapt to life during this pandemic, poet and novelist Carrie Fountain will add perspective and guidance through poetry.
In the first of our special episodes of This is Just To Say titled, Closet Recordings, Fountain reads William Stafford‘s poem “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid.”
Texas Standard: March 13, 2020
This is not a test. As Texas responds to a pandemic, health officials struggle to find ways to deal with a lag in Coronavirus testing, we’ll have the latest. Plus in major cities across the Lone Star State, city streets, schools and universities and office buildings getting empty. Events from rodeos to concerts and games all cancelled or in the process of. So what comes next? Our conversation with the top official of the most populous county in Texas, judge Lina Hidalgo…Plus the politics of quarantine and much more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: March 12, 2020
Fighting fear in the Alamo city, site of a federally mandated quarantine. We’ll have a conversation with Mayor Ron Nirenberg for more information. Also, the latest on spring break extensions, school shutdowns and sports cancellations in Texas and further afield amid Coronavirus concerns. And a Supreme Court win for the Trump administration’s remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers. But some aren’t even getting to wait in Mexico for their hearings as they’re boarded onto planes and told to seek asylum first in Guatemala. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard: