At the very beginning of the war, many thinkers, myself included, expressed reservations about entering Afghanistan, also known as “The Graveyard of Empires,” because many of us did not believe that a young culture like America had the wisdom to take on a task that would take at least a century to do properly. But we went anyway. Twenty years on, we have played out our initial hand of cards in the first round of a global poker game. We lost. The question is, “What did we learn from it?”

There are eighty years left in the timeline of what we began. We could repeat the mistake of the past. We could start the cycle of death over again, as has been done many times before; not just by us, but by everyone else that’s tried. Or we could find a better way. War didn’t work. It almost never does. Enduring legacies require finding that long path to peace and tranquility. Not an easy thing to do. But not something we haven’t done. //

Today, the conflict isn’t colonial, it’s cultural. Both inside our nation and beyond our borders, the battle between tolerance and fanaticism rages. We’ve learned a hard lesson that money and might don’t work to solve it.

That’s the lesson for America from Afghanistan.

The Chosen' is pioneering an innovative delivery method with potentially groundbreaking implications for content creators, particularly faith-based ones.

“The Chosen” is both an app and a television series. It is both the largest ever crowdfunded entertainment project, and a Christian program about the life of Jesus. It’s also flying under Hollywood’s radar. That’s quite alright by creator Dallas Jenkins, who says his team’s outsider status allows the show “to be really nimble.” //

The one-app-one-show structure is critical part of “The Chosen’s” innovation, alleviating the option paralysis so often induced by browsing big streamers. “If you want to watch this show, you don’t have to sort through a bunch of other shows on another streaming service, you can literally just get our show. And that’s what I think could be the future,” Jenkins said.

“Some people have said, ‘Oh, I can’t wait till you get picked up by a big studio, and we said, ‘We wouldn’t have developed a brand new technology and gone this whole route if we wanted to get picked up by a big studio,” Jenkins insists. “We’re not doing this to be sold, we’re doing this to create a whole new alternative for people.”

Here's a preview of this winter season's on-screen stories that aren’t simply remakes or sequels.

How effective is immunity after Covid recovery relative to vaccination? An Israeli study by Gazit et al. found that the vaccinated have a 27 times higher risk of symptomatic infection than the Covid recovered. At the same time, the vaccinated were nine times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid. In contrast, a CDC study by Bozio et al. claims that the Covid recovered are five times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than the vaccinated. Both studies cannot be right.

I have worked on vaccine epidemiology since I joined the Harvard faculty almost two decades ago as a biostatistician. I have never before seen such a large discrepancy between studies that are supposed to answer the same question. In this article, I carefully dissect both studies, describe how the analyses differ, and explain why the Israeli study is more reliable. //

The CDC study did not create a cohort of people to follow over time. Instead, they identified people hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms, and then they evaluated how many of them tested positive versus negative for Covid. Among the vaccinated, 5% tested positive, while it was 9% among the Covid recovered. What does this mean?

Though the authors do not mention it, they adopt a de facto case-control design. While not as strong as a cohort study, this is a well-established epidemiological design. //

In the CDC study on Covid immunity, the cases are those patients hospitalized for Covid disease, having both Covid-like symptoms and a positive test. That is appropriate. The controls should constitute a representative sample from the population from which the Covid patients came. Unfortunately, that is not the case since Covid-negative people with Covid-like symptoms, such as pneumonia, tend to be older and frailer with comorbidities. They are also more likely to be vaccinated. //

The problem is that the CDC study answers neither the direct question of whether vaccination or Covid recovery is better at decreasing the risk of subsequent Covid disease, nor whether the vaccine rollout successfully reached the frail. Instead, it asks which of these two has the greater effect size. It answers whether vaccination or Covid recovery is more related to Covid hospitalization or if it is more related to other respiratory type hospitalizations. //

Covariate adjustments will typically change the point estimates somewhat, but it is unusual to see a change as large as the one from 1.77 to 5.49 that was observed in the CDC study. How can this be explained? It must be because some covariates are very different between the cases and controls. There are at least two of them. While 78% of the vaccinated are older than 65, 55% of the Covid recovered are younger than 65. Even more concerning is the fact that 96% of the vaccinated were hospitalized during the summer months of June to August, while 69% of the Covid recovered were hospitalized in the winter and spring months from January to May. Such unbalanced covariates are usually best adjusted for using matching as in the Israeli study. //

Concerning the Covid recovered, there are two key public health issues. 1. Would the Covid recovered benefit from also being vaccinated? 2. Should there be vaccine passports and mandates that require them to be vaccinated in order to work and participate in society?

The CDC study did not address the first question, while the Israeli study showed a small but not statistically significant benefit in reducing symptomatic Covid disease. Future studies will hopefully shed more light on this issue.

Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated. Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated. In fact, it is discriminatory.

Many of the Covid recovered were exposed to the virus as essential workers during the height of the pandemic before vaccines were available. They kept the rest of society afloat, processing food, delivering goods, unloading ships, picking up garbage, policing the streets, maintaining the electricity network, putting out fires, and caring for the old and sick, to name a few.

They are now being fired and excluded despite having stronger immunity than the vaccinated work-from-home administrators that are firing them.

Beijing's intentions are increasingly concerning to the U.S. as tensions rise over the South China Sea, Taiwan and military supremacy in the region.

The images captured by Colorado-based satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies show the outlines of a U.S. aircraft carrier and at least one destroyer sitting on a railway track. //

The images captured by Colorado-based satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies dated Sunday show the outlines of a U.S. aircraft carrier and at least one destroyer sitting on a railway track.

Maxar identified the location as Ruoqiang, a Taklamakan Desert county in the northwestern Xinjiang region.

The independent U.S. Naval Institute said on its website that the mock-ups of U.S. ships were part of a new target range developed by the People's Liberation Army.

Nuclear is still one of the most controversial sources of energy on the planet, but it does have some key upsides, especially in the global push to tackle emissions.
The European Union stands completely divided on the issue of nuclear power as Scotland hosts the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.
China is betting big on a nuclear future, aiming to bring over 150 new reactors online over the next 15 years. //

Other studies show that nuclear energy may not be the answer to climate change mitigation at all. A paper published in the journal Energy Policy August of this year argues that installed nuclear power capacity is simply too small now -- and still shrinking -- and will be too hard to scale up to have any kind of viable post-energy transition future, thanks to “technical obstacles and limited resources.” //

Beijing plans to bring 150 new nuclear reactors online over the next 15 years, which amounts to more nuclear capacity that the entire world has constructed in the last 35 years. “The effort could cost as much as $440 billion; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power,” writes Bloomberg.

This is an especially important development for China, given the size of the nation’s carbon footprint -- the biggest in the world. It’s also a development that only China could accomplish. “It would be the kind of wholesale energy transformation that Western democracies — with budget constraints, political will and public opinion to consider — can only dream of,” Bloomberg characterizes the plan. In fact, China may just be the only country in the world that can come up with the significant resources necessary to scale up nuclear so much so fast that it will put an end to the opinion that a nuclear renaissance will be “too little, too late.”

As the movies of Hollywood’s golden age assumed viewers would be intrigued enough by the plot to overlook the era’s shortcomings in special effects, “Old Henry” assumes the plot is compelling enough that extensive special effects aren’t needed. If anything, they would detract from this simple story of a protagonist who appears to be a simple man. //

“Old Henry” may not be an epic or a big box office moneymaker (it only aired at 30 theaters before moving to streaming platforms), but it isn’t intended to be. And because it doesn’t try to do too much, what it does is refreshingly good.