On January 29, Farhad Manjoo wrote a column called "Beware the Pandemic Panic" telling us that the fear of COVID might be worse than the virus

By March, Manjoo had concluded that the novel coronavirus is what you get when you ignore science.

in May, Manjoo thought that the virus and the failed government response had smashed his optimism about the future.

but by late November Manjoo now declares that he will be traveling for a risky Thanksgiving, shame him if you must. It felt, in the end, more like a "gut call" ruled by "emotion" instead of empirical data.

I will refuse his injunction to "shame me if you must." Someone that publicly declares that he will defy the CDC recommendation after the rollercoaster journey he has been on in public since January

is clearly subject to incentives that are beyond public disapproval.

for those who are asking, this is just the Links web browser on a garden-variety Linux terminal. I often use it to read op-eds when I am too lazy to fiddle with an adblocker and want to read simple text on the web

if you don't like Links, there is also Lynx (the latest Manjoo op-ed pictured)

I honestly think this is a very ugly and complicated topic (Thanksgiving, not choice of text browser) but sadly its unsurprising that its being discussed here in the way it is.

Manjoo began as a COVID skeptic, then suddenly pivoted to COVID hawk. And then...to whatever he is saying these days. But, if you look at his NYT archive, the shift he makes is actually quite bigger than that.

In Manjoo's first piece about COVID and his about-face, he grounds his opinions in the need to respect science and, whether discussing January COVID hawks or March COVID skeptics, warns against the lure of emotions and irrationality.

By November, Manjoo's journey had come full circle. He abandoned his Jedi-like January meditations on the dangers of emotion ("fear leads to anger" as Yoda would say) to admit to

feeling deep anguish over the prospect of life passing him by in isolation. "we could skip Thanksgiving this year, but how many future Thanksgiving will we all have together?"

though he certainly did his homework about the size of his bubble and consulted the relevant recommendations from the CDC, Manjoo nonetheless obeyed his "gut call" to take his Thanksgiving trip.

when I read his latest column, I admit that my first reaction was not that analytical either. It was to bash the keyboard like an angry monkey

But when I took a step back, reflecting on Manjoo's strange public corona journey since January, I began to instead laugh like a maniac.

I laughed about how bizarre, perverse, and insane all of this was, and that at the end of the day that it had publicly broken Manjoo's own sense of steely rationalism

At the end of the day, it all came down to the passions. Science, shmience.

To some extent there's a Manjoo in all of us. The confusion, the anguish, the reversals, the clash between ambiguous and contradictory science and equally unreliable emotional drives, etc

that being said, what seems missing from this little adventure is some rudimentary recognition that he has been on it, and where it has taken him https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1329879084395094022

as a friend said, we don't live in a post-truth era. We live in a post-trust era. There is a difference. The former is about fact and fiction, the latter is about the credibility of those who determine it. I hope this has illustrated the difference.