Bones, Genomes and Improbable Lives · Morning Gist
Sunday, October 254 stories · 13 min
Bones, Genomes and Improbable Lives
Today's pieces are about mortality and contingency: an ossuary, an Ice Age woman's DNA, decisions made without enough facts, and a poem about how unlikely we are.
Picked from 46 new articles across 14 sources · arrow keys for other days
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Playwright Kristin Idaszak goes back to Czechia's Sedlec Ossuary with a heart rhythm disorder and finds that facing death feels different from thinking about it. story 1 ↓
DNA from a woman in France's Isturitz Cave traces a migration about 32,000 years ago that crossed more than 1,500 km from Europe's east to its west. story 2 ↓
Former White House pandemic official Raj Panjabi gives three questions for judging health advice when official guidance suddenly changes. story 3 ↓
Maria Popova's poem, read by Nick Cave, goes from mitochondria to a grieving orca to call consciousness "gigantic and unnecessary." story 4 ↓
1/4Longreads· Kristin Idaszak· Oct 22
A playwright with a failing heart goes back to Czechia's bone church
Playwright Kristin Idaszak returns to a Czech chapel decorated with human bones after a dangerous heart condition. She finds bright lights and tour crowds, but also a way to stop hoarding her life.
Why it matters · The essay uses one strange building to pull together medieval theology, the ethics of visiting sites of death, and what it means to live with mortality instead of just thinking about it.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · What an ossuary is
An ossuary holds bones dug up from crowded graves. Medieval European churches built them so the dead could be stored safely until the bodily resurrection. Some later arranged the bones into decoration meant as a reminder of death.
2 · Sedlec, Kutná Hora
Kutná Hora is a silver-mining town about an hour east of Prague. Its Sedlec Ossuary holds the bones of tens of thousands of people, arranged into pyramids, a coat of arms and a famous chandelier.
3 · Euripides' Alcestis
In this Greek tragedy, Queen Alcestis agrees to die so her husband the king can live. The hero Heracles wrestles Death and brings her back, but she stays silent for the rest of the play.
2/4Nautilus· Jake Currie· Oct 23
Ice Age genome from French cave shows east-to-west migration across Europe
Researchers sequenced genomes of Ice Age hunter-gatherers called Gravettians. A woman from a cave in southwestern France had ancestry from central and eastern Europe, evidence that people moved across the continent about 32,000 years ago.
Why it matters · Archaeologists once thought these Ice Age groups were genetically cut off from each other. This finding suggests people moved and had children together across distances of more than 1,500 kilometers.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · Cultures versus populations
Archaeologists name prehistoric "cultures" from shared styles of tools and art. A shared culture doesn't mean shared ancestry, because ideas can spread between groups that never mix. Ancient DNA lets researchers test which groups were actually related.
2 · Who the Gravettians were
The Gravettians were Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe, roughly 33,000 to 22,000 years ago. They are known for tanged arrowheads and for Venus figurines carved from mammoth ivory. Their culture reached across the continent.
3 · Reading ancestry from DNA
3/4Big Think· Raj Panjabi· Oct 23
A former White House pandemic official on how to act without certainty
Raj Panjabi, who led Biden's White House pandemic-preparedness team, argues that not knowing COVID's origin pushed them to plan for every cause of a pandemic. When federal support was cut later, he says, states and independent experts took over.
Why it matters · The excerpt gives a practical way to act when key facts stay unknown, and three questions anyone can use when authorities they trusted start contradicting the evidence.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 30 sec
1 · The COVID origins dispute
Two main explanations exist for how COVID-19 began: a natural spillover from animals, possibly at a Wuhan market, or an accident at a Wuhan virology lab. Intelligence agencies and scientists still disagree, and the question may never be settled.
2 · Who sets US vaccine schedules
The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends which vaccines Americans should get and when. In 2025 Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, fired its members and appointed replacements, many of them critics of vaccines.
3 · The author
4/4The Marginalian (Maria Popova)· Maria Popova· Oct 23
Maria Popova's poem on life as a bet nobody would have taken
Maria Popova, writer of The Marginalian, has published a short poem. It argues that life, minds and love exist against long odds, and that the improbable is worth treasuring because nothing required it.
Why it matters · It turns a sound scientific idea, that we came from contingency and not necessity, into a way of seeing ordinary things, and it rewards a slow reading.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 26 sec
1 · Who Maria Popova is
Popova has written The Marginalian, called Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years, for seventeen years. It mixes science, literature and philosophy. She runs it alone, free and without ads, paid for by reader donations.
2 · Contingency in evolution
Many biologists stress that evolution follows no fixed script. Single chance events, like one cell swallowing another and so producing mitochondria, shaped everything that came after. Replay history and the result could look very different.
3 · Earlier collaboration
This is the second time the singer Nick Cave has read a Popova poem over an animation by the Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson. The first was "But We Had Music."
Latin for "remember you must die": an object or image meant to remind people of their mortality.
Watercolor of the coat of arms made of bones in the Sedlec Ossuary, which greets visitors on arrival.
Kristin Idaszak first visited the Sedlec Ossuary in her early twenties. It is a Catholic chapel in Kutná Hora, an hour east of Prague, decorated with the bones of roughly forty thousand people. An 1 is a place for storing exhumed bones. Sedlec's include a chandelier said to contain every bone in the human body. She loved the gloom and the strangeness, and came away a little humbled: her plays would not outlast these nameless plague victims. Her interest in death, she admits, was purely intellectual.
When death became real
In 2020 she developed 2, a dangerous, abnormally fast heart rhythm that can lead to cardiac arrest. Climbing stairs could set off an episode. She stopped leaving her apartment except for work, and the cornflower-blue living room full of travel souvenirs became, she writes, "the real ossuary." She compares herself to 3, the queen in Euripides' play who dies in her husband's place and is described as "both alive and dead." Eventually she decided that since the danger lived in her own chest, hiding wouldn't save her. She set off on a sabbatical that ended with leading students through Czechia.
Bones as art, death as attraction
Idaszak explains that ossuaries spread in 13th-century Europe because there were more dead than graves, and the bodies had to be kept for the resurrection. Bone art grew under the lavish Catholic Baroque and became fashionable with the 19th-century Romantics. So did "4," visiting sites tied to death and atrocity. She thinks it can be a real act of witness, as at Auschwitz or Hiroshima, but she also sees "the Disneyfication of death," and recalls a Savannah ghost tour that turned the city's history of slavery into entertainment.
The second visit
Sedlec let her down. It was brightly lit, crowded with tour groups photographing in defiance of the rules, and screens showed restorers cleaning bones. She learned the famous decorations were made in the 1860s by a carpenter, František Rint. The plague-haunted monk may never have existed.
At first she felt superior to the crowd. Then she asked herself whether she really believed none of them had grieved or nearly died. Her own brush with death hadn't made her wiser. It had made her hoard her life until it "moldered away, unspent." She draws on the historian 5: ossuaries present death as a transition rather than an end. She calls the visit "an ordinary day," not a purifying rite. Back home, she wished she had bought one of the kitschy skull mugs.
Kristin Idaszak, a playwright and essayist, has visited the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, twice. The first time she was a young graduate who was fascinated by death as an idea. The second time she was someone who knew it might come for her at any moment. Her Longreads essay "Charnel Heart" sets those two visits side by side. Along the way it takes in the history of bone chapels and the ethics of what is now called 1. Her point is that being close to death doesn't give you special access to its meaning.
The first visit
A friend's postcard started it. It showed the chapel's chandelier of bones, which supposedly contains every bone in the human body, with towers of skulls on either side. Four months later Idaszak was there. The story she heard ran like this. An abbot had scattered soil said to come from Golgotha, the hill where Jesus was crucified, over the abbey cemetery. Burial there was believed to speed the way to heaven, so the graveyard overflowed. An underground chapel was built to hold the remains, and after a plague a half-blind monk dug up the victims and decorated it with their bones.
The chapel holds roughly forty thousand bodies' worth of bones, "probably more." She remembers the dim light and the sense that each bone "radiated a life force." She loved it. Still, she admits her interest in death was entirely intellectual. She read Euripides, Dante, Camus and Nietzsche, and she understood mortality "like climate change or menopause," as a concept. What she took away was a small humbling: her plays would not last, but the bones of these nameless plague victims had. Then she got on with her twenties.
Illness
In the summer of 2020 she developed 2, a fast, abnormal rhythm starting in the heart's lower chambers that can turn into cardiac arrest. She lost count of the episodes, which were painful and terrifying. Climbing the stairs to her third-floor walk-up could set one off. She stopped going anywhere except work, then became afraid of grocery stores, yoga, and hot days. She spent her days in a cornflower-blue living room full of souvenirs from her travels: a Japanese fan, a penguin pitcher from her honeymoon in Tierra del Fuego, Antarctic travel posters. "That room was the real 3," she writes.
She uses 4 to describe how this felt. In Euripides' play the queen goes to the underworld in place of her husband, and a servant reports she is "both alive and dead." Idaszak felt the same. Her body had survived, but her curious, adventurous self was in Hades. Eventually she reasoned that since the danger was inside her own chest, staying home would not protect her: "I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world." She rented out her home and took a sabbatical to travel and write, ending with a study-abroad trip she was leading in Czechia.
Why bone chapels exist
The essay pauses here for some history, drawing on Paul Koudounaris's The Empire of Death. Ossuaries spread through Europe in the 13th century to solve a practical theological problem. There were more bodies than graves, and the dead had to be kept safe for the resurrection. After the Black Death, medieval art dwelt on rotting corpses, and Idaszak asks whether it was any wonder the corpses eventually became the art material itself. By the 17th century there were dozens of bone chapels. They grew out of the 5, the Catholic Church's response to Protestantism, which favored lavish Baroque art and an emphasis on bodily suffering. In the 19th century the Romantics and their Gothic tastes made them fashionable again.
That period also saw the rise of "dark tourism," visiting places linked to death and disaster. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term in 1996, in connection with tourism around John F. Kennedy's assassination, but Idaszak traces the practice back to the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, who travel to the site of Thomas Becket's murder. Grand Tour travelers went to the Paris catacombs, which hold some six million people's bones, and to Pompeii in search of the Sublime.
She weighs both sides. The case for dark tourism is that it resists forgetting. She went to Auschwitz and Hiroshima to bear witness. The case against is commodification: "The exit through the gift shop." She is hard on herself here too. She remembers the okonomiyaki restaurant she went to after the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, but not how she could have been hungry. She also describes a ghost tour in Savannah, Georgia, that turned the city's history of slavery into entertainment for people carrying to-go cocktails. Her term for the overall effect is "the Disneyfication of death." She also notes that the latest boom began before COVID, so the pandemic can't be credited with giving people a new reverence for mortality.
Évora, then Sedlec again
Weeks before Prague, she visited the Capela dos Ossos in Évora, Portugal, a more ornate 17th-century chapel. Its entrance reads: "We bones that are here await yours." She found the inscription comforting, but the visit changed nothing.
The change at Sedlec was gradual, and it began because 20 students who had never been abroad needed her to lead them. Then the chapel itself let her down. It was brightly lit, and monitors played footage of restorers cleaning bones. The foundation has been sinking since the 14th century. The architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel redesigned the building in the Baroque period. The bone art itself, chandelier included, was made by a carpenter, František Rint, in the 1860s. "Was the monk even real?" Busload after busload of visitors ignored the lone attendant's "no photos."
She felt superior to the crowd at first. Then, walking among the gravestones outside, she turned the question on herself. Did she really think none of those tourists had lost anyone or come close to dying? Her own closeness to death had not given her wisdom. It had made her guard her life "like a dragon hoarding a treasure pile," so that it "moldered away, unspent." The bones, she decided, had more life in them than she had.
She leans on the historian 6, who wrote that death was once "tame" and has become "wild." For medieval Christians, death was a long sleep before the resurrection. Modern society has moved dying into hospitals, out of sight. Ossuaries put it back in view, as a transition rather than an end. The return trip was "not some purifying rite. It was an ordinary day." Back home she wished she had bought one of the kitschy skull souvenirs she had sneered at.
What stays open
The essay doesn't resolve its tension about tourism. Idaszak condemns the gawking and then admits she can't claim to be above it. It ends with Alcestis, who stays silent after she is rescued. Idaszak wonders whether part of her stayed below, or whether she simply has nothing left to say. Her last image is an old photo of herself under the chandelier, looking "half-happy, half-haunted."
Remember
Sedlec's famous bone decorations come from the 1860s, made by the carpenter František Rint, not from a medieval monk.
Ossuaries began as a practical fix: there were too many dead and too few graves before the resurrection.
Idaszak argues that coming close to death made her hoard her life, not understand death better.
Every genome mixes DNA inherited from different source populations. Researchers compare an ancient genome with reference groups and estimate how much comes from each. The length of the inherited DNA segments shows roughly when the mixing happened.
The article's lead image, apparently showing Isturitz Cave, where the woman's genome was recovered.
A study in Science Advances finds that Ice Age Europeans were less cut off from each other than archaeologists thought. The evidence comes from a woman buried in Isturitz Cave in southwestern France, near the Spanish border.
A shared culture, two separate peoples
The 1 were hunter-gatherers who lived across Europe from about 33,000 to 22,000 years ago. Archaeologists recognize them by their 2 (points with a narrow stem for attaching to a shaft) and their 3, small female statuettes carved from mammoth ivory. These styles appear across the whole continent.
Earlier ancient-DNA studies showed that the people split into two genetic groups, one in western Europe and one in central and eastern Europe. That pointed to a culture that spread as ideas passed between populations that rarely mixed.
What the new genomes show
4, scientists who study DNA from ancient remains, sequenced genomes from several Gravettians who lived between 30,000 and 22,000 years ago in different parts of Europe. The Isturitz woman gave the oldest complete genome yet found in the region.
Most of her ancestry matches western European lineages, but part comes from central and eastern Europe. The team used 5 to date when that ancestry arrived. Such models usually rely on the fact that DNA from a migrant ancestor gets cut into shorter pieces with each generation. The team estimates a pulse of 6 from east to west about 32,500 to 31,500 years ago. Gene flow means ancestry passed between populations when people from different groups have children together.
"Eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed," said study author Pere Gelabert of the University of Vienna.
Genetic data from a second Gravettian, from Ormesson in northern France, shows the same pattern. The researchers suggest Isturitz may have been a hub where groups from different regions met and had children together.
What it does and doesn't show
The result shows that people crossed the line between the two genetic groups at least once, early in the period. It doesn't show regular travel. The two-group picture probably holds overall, just with less isolation. The hub idea rests on only two individuals.
The article leaves out important numbers, including how many genomes were sequenced and what share of the woman's ancestry is eastern. It also raises a question it doesn't answer. If eastern people reached the far southwest early in the period, migration may have spread part of the Gravettian culture, not just borrowed ideas.
A new study in Science Advances complicates a neat picture of Ice Age Europe. Researchers sequenced genomes from several Gravettian individuals. The 1 were hunter-gatherers whose culture spread across Europe between roughly 33,000 and 22,000 years ago. One of the genomes comes from a woman buried in Isturitz Cave in southwestern France, near the Spanish border. Most of her ancestry is western European, but some came from central and eastern Europe. The team dates that eastern contribution to a pulse of 2 (ancestry passed between populations when people from different groups have children together) about 32,500 to 31,500 years ago.
The puzzle: one culture, two peoples
Archaeologists define the Gravettian by the objects it left behind. Its makers produced 3, with a narrow stem for attaching to a shaft, and carved the 4, small female statuettes often made of mammoth ivory. These styles turn up from the Atlantic coast to the Russian plain.
Earlier ancient-DNA work found that the people themselves split into two genetic groups. One lived in western Europe and the other in central and eastern Europe. That raised an awkward question. If the two groups were genetically separate, how did they end up with the same toolkit and art? Ideas can travel without people moving, passed from band to band through trade or imitation. The ancestry data seemed to support that kind of cultural spread with populations that rarely mixed.
The problem is hard to settle from artifacts alone. A similar arrowhead in France and in Moravia (in today's Czech Republic) could mean shared ancestors, borrowed technique, or coincidence. Genomes can answer the narrower question of whether people from the two regions had children together.
What the team did
The paleogeneticists (scientists who study DNA from ancient remains) extracted DNA from Gravettian individuals who lived between 30,000 and 22,000 years ago in several parts of Europe, then sequenced their genomes. The Isturitz woman gave the oldest complete genome yet recovered from the region, according to the article.
The article doesn't describe the methods. Studies like this usually work as follows. Researchers compare the ancient genome with reference genomes that stand in for possible source populations, here western and central/eastern Gravettians, and estimate what share of the ancestry fits each source. To date a mixing event, they use the fact that DNA from a migrant ancestor arrives as long, unbroken stretches. Each generation of reproduction cuts those stretches into shorter pieces. Measuring how fragmented the eastern segments are gives an approximate number of generations since the mixing began. The authors call their approach "5" and arrived at the 32,500 to 31,500 year window. That is near the start of the Gravettian period, within a few thousand years of the woman's own lifetime.
What they found
The Isturitz woman's genome is mostly western European, with an added component from central and eastern Europe. "Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed," said study author Pere Gelabert of the University of Vienna. "Gene flow across such large distances adds a new dimension to our understanding of how Gravettian populations were connected."
A second individual points the same way. Genetic data from a Gravettian who lived at Ormesson, in northern France, shows a matching signal, the team says. From this, the researchers suggest Isturitz may have been a hub of Gravettian activity, a place where groups from different regions met and had children together.
How far to take it
The finding is real but limited. The eastern ancestry turns up as one pulse at a particular time, so the evidence fits at least one episode of contact. It does not show steady traffic between east and west. The two-group picture probably still holds in broad terms. The new result shows the boundary between the groups was crossed.
The "hub" idea goes further than the evidence. Two individuals with similar ancestry don't establish a meeting place, and Ormesson is far from Isturitz. The article doesn't say how many genomes were sequenced in total, what share of the woman's ancestry is eastern, or how large the dating uncertainty is apart from the stated range. Those numbers would show whether this was a large migration or a small one.
The result also reopens the question of how the Gravettian style spread. If eastern people reached the far southwest early in the period, migration may have carried part of the culture, not just borrowed ideas. Confirming that needs more genomes, especially from the period's earliest sites, and links between the genetic findings and the archaeology at each site.
Remember
A culture spreading across a region doesn't mean its people mixed, and ancient DNA can test which happened.
The eastern ancestry arrived in one pulse about 32,000 years ago, not through steady contact.
The claim that Isturitz was a meeting hub rests on only two individuals.
Raj Panjabi is a physician who led the Biden White House's pandemic-preparedness team. This piece is an excerpt from his book "Safer". The first Trump administration also disbanded a White House biodefense unit, in 2018.
Image: Big Think
Nobody knows for certain how COVID-19 began: 1 from animals or a lab accident. Raj Panjabi, a physician who led the Biden White House's pandemic-preparedness team, argues in this excerpt from his book Safer that this uncertainty was useful. Because his team couldn't rule out any cause, it had to plan for all of them.
Preparing for every cause
From fall 2022 into 2023, the team worked with more than 16 federal agencies on a pandemic prevention plan. It covered natural outbreaks, lab accidents and deliberate biological attacks. The idea was to choose measures that work whatever the source:
2 (sequencing pathogens' genetic material) in wastewater and at airports;
a CDC forecasting center, the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), which Panjabi calls a "pandemic radar";
hundreds of millions of dollars toward an 3 flu vaccine ready within 100 days of a new threat;
more than $3.2 billion for epidemiologists and contact tracers in all 50 states.
Two bipartisan 2022 laws, including the 4, created a permanent White House pandemic office and a State Department global health bureau. Abroad, the team negotiated a pandemic treaty through the World Health Organization. It also proposed a G7-backed line of credit (the 5 is a group of large democracies) so poor countries could order vaccines on "day zero" of an emergency.
When the government reversed course
In Trump's second term, Panjabi writes, the White House disbanded his team and proposed record cuts to public health funding. The CDC reduced the vaccines it recommends for children. Panjabi blames a movement spreading misinformation, not new science. His answer to this is to move control elsewhere: to state alliances, to a bipartisan biodefense commission drafting laws, and to independent expert groups.
Those groups gave the public three questions for when guidance suddenly changes:
Is it backed by a broad, consistent body of evidence? The CDC's vaccine advisory committee, 6, reversed measles guidance in 2025 during active outbreaks, with no new evidence.
Has it been independently reviewed? Its vote to end the hepatitis B dose at birth had no new peer-reviewed support. The American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed the dose.
Who benefits, and are conflicts disclosed? In January 2026 ACIP cut recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, amid concerns about political pressure.
The gaps
The excerpt lists what was done but gives no evidence of results. It also contains a tension it doesn't address. Panjabi praises laws as protection that lasts through changes of administration, yet his own office, created by statute, was still taken apart. The three questions also only shift trust from one authority to others.
Raj Panjabi, a physician who led the Biden White House's pandemic-preparedness team, opens this excerpt from his book Safer with an admission: there is still no consensus on how COVID-19 started. His argument is that this gap in knowledge did not have to stall the planning. If you can't tell whether the next pandemic will come from nature, a lab or an enemy, you can prepare for all three. The rest of the excerpt applies the same idea, acting without waiting for certainty, to a harder case: when the government agencies people trust start giving advice that conflicts with the evidence.
Planning for every cause at once
From fall 2022 into 2023, Panjabi's team worked with more than 16 federal agencies on the White House's pandemic prevention plan. These included the Departments of Defense and State, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the intelligence agencies. The plan covered three ways a pandemic could start: 1 (a virus jumping from animals to people), laboratory accidents, and deliberate biological attacks. Panjabi says these have different pathways but put planners in the same position: "We may not know what's coming, when it will arrive, or what form it will take."
So the team favored measures that pay off whatever the cause turns out to be. Planners elsewhere call this robust decision-making: rather than betting on the most likely scenario, you pick actions that hold up across many. A sensor that picks up a new pathogen in sewage works the same way whether the virus came from a bat or a lab freezer. The investments Panjabi lists follow this pattern:
Detection:2 (sequencing pathogens' genetic material) in wastewater plants and airports.
Forecasting: a new CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), which he calls a "pandemic radar" for predicting how outbreaks will spread.
Making it last
The second idea is to put preparedness into law so it doesn't depend on who is president. Panjabi's team worked with Congress on two bipartisan 2022 laws: the 4 and the Global Health Security and International Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Act. They created a permanent White House office for pandemic policy (negotiated with Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Republican Senator Richard Burr), a permanent U.S. global health security coordinator, and a new State Department bureau for global health security. They also authorized billions in funding, including for the new Pandemic Fund at the World Bank.
Internationally, the team negotiated the Pandemic Agreement, a treaty made through the World Health Organization. It also backed the U.N. Biological Weapons Convention and the International Health Regulations, the binding rules on how countries report outbreaks. One proposal relied on markets. Biden would ask the leaders of the 5, the group of seven large industrial democracies, to set up a line of credit. Low-income countries could then place orders with drugmakers on "day zero" of a pandemic. During COVID, rich countries bought up the early supply, so the aim was to bring more buyers and more orders to manufacturers.
The threats kept arriving. An outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu strain killed millions of farm birds, spread to dairy cows and caused human deaths. Mpox continued in parts of Africa. Ebola and Marburg, a related virus, broke out in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
Then the floor dropped
In Trump's second term, Panjabi writes, the White House disbanded his team, as it had done with a similar unit during Trump's first term. It also proposed the steepest cuts to science and public health funding in modern U.S. history. The CDC cut the number of vaccines routinely recommended for children, including those for influenza and hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is a chronic liver infection that can cause liver cancer. Panjabi attributes these changes not to new science but to "leaders of a movement that promoted false claims and misinformation."
He argues that the common reactions, disengaging, despairing, or waiting for things to return to normal, all fail because "uncertainty rarely resolves on its own." He says the response was to move control elsewhere. The nonpartisan Governors Public Health Alliance worked to strengthen protections at state level. The 6, where Panjabi is a commissioner, published a National Blueprint of recommendations it wants Congress to write into law.
Three questions for when guidance changes
Groups such as the Vaccine Integrity Project, the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist and the Common Health Coalition offered the public a short test. Panjabi illustrates each question with a decision by 7, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices:
Is it backed by a broad, consistent body of evidence? ACIP reversed measles vaccine guidance in 2025 while outbreaks were active in dozens of states. Decades of large studies show that the 8 vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) and MMRV (which adds varicella, or chickenpox) are safe and effective, and no new evidence had appeared.
Has it been independently reviewed? ACIP's vote to end universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth did not rest on new peer-reviewed work. The research still shows newborn infections are often silent but can lead to lifelong disease. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) publicly reaffirmed the birth dose.
What the excerpt leaves open
This is a memoir from someone who took part, and it lists what was done rather than what it achieved. It gives no evidence on whether the wastewater surveillance or the forecasting center changed any outcome. There is also a tension in the argument. Panjabi says protections in law "endure regardless of who occupies the executive branch," yet his own team, inside an office created by statute, was dismantled anyway. The excerpt doesn't explain how that happened or what it says about relying on law.
The three questions are sensible, but they put work on ordinary people. To judge whether evidence is "broad and consistent," you have to trust someone's summary of it. In practice the test moves trust from one authority, the CDC, to others such as the AAP. Panjabi presents that move as the solution. A reader might see it as the same problem in a new place.
Remember
When the cause of a threat is unknown, choose defenses that work across every plausible cause.
Panjabi says laws protect preparedness better than executive action, though his statute-created office was still dismantled.
Three checks for changed guidance: consistent evidence, independent review, and disclosed conflicts of interest.
Cover image for the poem, which is presented as a video read by Nick Cave over Daniel Bruson's animation.
Maria Popova, who has written the essay blog 1 alone for seventeen years, has published a short poem called "The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet." The musician Nick Cave reads it over an animation by the Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson. The post is just the poem and a brief introduction, so this summary is brief too.
The idea
Popova starts from a distinction. We bet on our lives using "countless calculations of probability," she writes, but the possible "always includes but exceeds the probable." Planning for the likely leaves us open to surprise from the real.
She then applies this to existence itself. We are "children of improbability." What we treasure exists "not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary." This echoes an established idea in biology called 2: life's history turned on one-off accidents and would not necessarily happen the same way twice.
How the poem works
The poem talks to "you," a sensible bettor, and lists everything that bettor would have missed. Earth is "the battered rock / orbiting a star / from the discount bin / of the universe," and the Sun really is an ordinary kind of star. From it came "3 and music," "mountains and minds." The pairings set biology beside culture as if both grew from the same soil. Mitochondria, the energy-producing parts of our cells, probably began when one ancient cell swallowed another.
Then come images of scale:
a hummingbird wing whirring "a hundred times faster / than your eye can blink"
the eye, which took "five hundred million years / from 4 to telescope"
a 5 growing "two hundred times more slowly" than the 6 drift
These are poetic figures, not cited measurements.
The turn
At the centre is "the marbled orca / carrying her dead calf / down the entire edge / of the continent." The orca brings in consciousness, and grief that is not only human. In the poem, consciousness "windows / this tenement / of breath and bone / with wonder." It ends "gigantic and unnecessary, / like music, / like love."
"Unnecessary" is the word that ties the poem together. Popova argues that what we value most is what nothing required. Being unneeded is the sign of the odds it beat.
Worth noting
This is a lyric, not a testable argument. Some philosophers would say consciousness evolved because it was useful, which is a challenge to "unnecessary" that the poem leaves alone. The text also says little about the animation, so reading alone misses part of the piece.
Maria Popova has published a short poem, "The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet," on 1. That is the long-running blog of essays on science, literature and philosophy she has written alone for seventeen years. The poem comes with a reading by the musician Nick Cave and an animation by the Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson. They first worked together on an earlier poem, "But We Had Music." The whole piece is the poem plus a brief prose introduction. There is no long essay here, so this write-up stays short too.
The argument in the introduction
Popova opens with a claim about how people decide things. We place life's bets, she writes, by "countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious." Again and again those calculations fall short of what actually happens. Her distinction is that the possible "always includes but exceeds the probable." If you plan only for the likely, you will keep being surprised by the real.
Then she widens the frame. We are "children of improbability." What we treasure exists "not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary," but because the universe took a gamble against huge odds. This lines up with an established idea in evolutionary biology called 2. It holds that life's history depended on one-off accidents, so replaying it would not reliably give you the same outcome.
How the poem builds the case
The poem talks to "you," the sensible bettor, and lists what that bettor would have missed. It starts with Earth: "the battered rock / orbiting a star / from the discount bin / of the universe." The image works because the Sun really is an ordinary star, one of a very common type. Nothing about where we are promised anything.
From that unpromising start the rock blooms "3 and music," "mountains and minds." The pairings are deliberate. Each one sets a physical or biological fact beside a cultural or mental one, as if both grew from the same soil. Mitochondria, the energy-producing parts inside our cells, are a well-known case of contingency: most biologists think they began when one ancient cell engulfed another and both survived.
Popova then gives a run of images, most of them built on scale:
A hummingbird's wing, which she says whirs "a hundred times faster / than your eye can blink."
The eye itself, which took "five hundred million years / from 4 to telescope." Trilobites, the extinct sea creatures, have some of the oldest well-preserved eyes in the fossil record. Telescopes are that same organ extended by tools.
An orange 5 on a black boulder, growing, she writes, "two hundred times more slowly / than the 6 beneath / are drifting apart." Plates move a few centimetres a year, so the line makes something nearly motionless look busy by comparison.
The figures belong to the poem. Popova doesn't cite sources, so read them as poetic scale, not measurements.
The turn to consciousness
The emotional centre is an image of "the marbled orca / carrying her dead calf / down the entire edge / of the continent." Popova doesn't name the animal. Readers may recall the widely reported 2018 case of a Pacific Northwest orca who carried her dead calf for more than two weeks. Either way, the poem uses the orca as a bridge. She is "carrying the weight / of consciousness." Grief, in other words, is not something only humans do.
From there the poem turns to consciousness itself. It "windows / this tenement / of breath and bone / with wonder." Then comes the closing claim. Consciousness "hovers over everything, / gigantic and unnecessary, / like music, / like love."
"Unnecessary" is the key word, and it closes the circle with the introduction. Popova's case is that what we value most is exactly what nothing required. It wasn't the probable outcome, and it does no obvious job that demands it. Being unnecessary is not a flaw in these things. It is a sign of the long odds they beat.
What to make of it
The piece is a lyric, not an argument you can test. As a statement of a mood grounded in science, it holds up. The image of the discount-bin star, the time scale from trilobite to telescope, and the pairing of mitochondria with music all point to the same real idea: our existence was contingent.
Some philosophers would push back on "unnecessary." They argue consciousness evolved because it was useful, so it isn't idle at all. The poem doesn't take up that debate. It also says almost nothing about the video, beyond thanking Cave and Bruson, so a reader of the text alone misses whatever the animation adds. The post closes with Popova's usual note: she has no staff, and readers' donations keep the site running.
Remember
Popova separates the probable from the possible: plans built on likelihood keep missing what actually happens.
The poem pairs biology with culture, "mitochondria and music," to suggest both come from the same improbable soil.
Calling consciousness "unnecessary" is meant as praise: what we treasure most is what nothing required.
Countermeasures: hundreds of millions of dollars to speed up work on 3 vaccines, the technology behind the main COVID vaccines. The aim was a pandemic influenza vaccine within 100 days of a threat appearing.
People: more than $3.2 billion to hire epidemiologists, data specialists and contact tracers for state and local health departments in all 50 states.
Who benefits, and are conflicts disclosed? In January 2026, ACIP cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. Panjabi says the votes raised concerns about political pressure. He contrasts this with the AAP and the Vaccine Integrity Project, which publish conflict-of-interest disclosures.
