Science Friday - Science News, Nobel Roundup, Book Club. Oct 9, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

What Is The Status Of President Trump’s COVID-19 Case? Late last week, President Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.  This Tuesday, he left the hospital and returned to the White House. And many questions still remain. Reporter Umair Irfan discusses the status of President Trump’s health, the experimental treatments he received and who else in the White House and in Congress may have been infected.  Talking About Black Holes And CRISPR With 2020 Nobel Prize Winners This week, a few researchers around the world received that legendary early-morning wake up call from Sweden, bearing word of the 2020 Nobel Prizes. This week, the prize in Medicine or Physiology went jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice “for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus.” In Chemistry, Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley won the prize for their work on the technique known as CRISPR. In 2017, Doudna described the technique on Science Friday. In Physics, the award was split among different types of black hole research. One half went to mathematician Richard Penrose, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” He described his work with physicist Stephen Hawking in a 2015 Science Friday interview. The other half of the physics prize was split between Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of one such supermassive black hole—”a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” Doomscrolling? Here’s Non-COVID Science News You Might Have Missed   Among all the COVID-19 news of the past week, other stories have gotten less attention than they deserve—including a discussion of climate issues at the presidential debate a week ago. The 12 minutes the candidates spent on climate change and the policy surrounding it marks the first substantive discussion of climate at a presidential debate in years. Science journalist Annalee Newitz joins Ira to unpack the climate discussion, and other science news—including a gruesome ancient punishment, and research into the savviness of crows.   The Science Friday Book Club: Technology, Magic, And Afrofuturism  The Science Friday Book Club continues this week, this time reading another short story from the speculative fiction collection New Suns. African-American author Andrea Hairston’s story ‘Dumb House,’ is about a woman named Cinnamon who finds herself pestered by a pair of traveling salesmen, who hope to persuade her to upgrade her house into something smarter. This week, we talk about ‘Dumb House,’ plus its place in Afrofuturism—culture and storytelling that imagines futures with African-descended people and culture at the forefront.  SciFri producer Christie Taylor, Journal of Science Fiction managing editor Aisha Matthews, and speculative fiction author K. Tempest Bradford discuss trust and community in ‘Dumb House,’ the relationship between technology and magic, and other elements that contribute to the story’s Afrofuturist theme. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. A bit later in the hour, the Sci-Fi Book Club returns with a book about Afro-Futurism. But first, last week, President Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This Tuesday, he left the hospital, returned to the White House. There are still many questions about the status of his health, the experimental treatments he received, and who else in the hospital? White House and in Congress may have been infected. Umair Irfan is here to fill us in on the latest updates. He's a staff writer at Vox and based out of Washington, D.C. Welcome back. Thanks, Ira. Okay, let's see if we can parse a lot of this stuff. Throughout the week, there have been mixed messages about Trump's health status. Do we know how severe his case might be? Do we know what his actual condition is? Well, we got an update on Thursday evening from White House physician Sean Conley, and he reported that the president's vitals his heart rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and breathing rate were all normal, and that there was no indication that the illness was progressing nor any side effects of the drugs. But he also said that this Saturday would mark 10 days since Trump's initial diagnosis, and this sort of confirms the timeline that had been a little bit vague, which indicates that the president likely was diagnosed on October 1.

and according to the CDC guidelines, you know, the isolation precautions can start being relaxed 10 days after the onset of symptoms. So the latest update does clarify some of these things, but there's still a lot that's up in the air. For example, we still don't know the date of his last negative test, correct? Yes, the White House has been a little bit hesitant to release that information. Similarly, when Sean Conley was questioned about the president's lung scans and any, you know, anomalies that were there, he cited patient privacy law. And that's kind of concerning because we know for a fact that, you know, past COVID patients have seen lesions in their lungs develop as a result of this infection, even patients who've had a mild

course of the illness. So that remains a possibility. And also there are people that have had long-term complications even after they've supposedly gotten better from this illness. So the president may not be out of the woods yet. There may still be some issues with breathing or even potentially blood clotting. So he's currently back in the White House, claims he's feeling fine, ready to hold large rallies. do we know what kind of guidelines then he is following, for example, about quarantining?

Well, we know that White House staff have been encouraged to, you know, wear personal protective equipment, things like face masks, but that's not been historically enforced very well at the White House, and that's part of the reason they were in the situation to begin with. And the president said that he wants to return to in-person rallies. And, you know, the White House position said that he can return to public events. and so very likely that a lot of these restrictions that may have been in place this past week will start being relaxed. Let's talk about the experimental treatment he received,

especially a drug produced by the company, Regeneron. What type of treatment is this? Well, this drug is a combination of two different monoclonal antibodies, and that's why it's called an antibody cocktail. Basically, these are the proteins that the immune system generates to attack the virus and prevent it from, causing an infection. And what this company did was they used an engineered version that was produced from genetically engineered animals, as well as one that was produced from a human that

had recovered from COVID-19. And the idea is the mix of these two separate antibodies would create a situation where it would be very hard for the virus to slip by them. And this is a drug that's still under testing. This is still in phase one, two, and three clinical trials. There were some good results that were posted by the company late in September. But right now, to my knowledge, there's no published data and there hasn't really been any clinical trials that have run to full completion nor any peer-reviewed papers on this. And so we really have the company's word to go on about its effectiveness. And now the president's word, because he's been promoting this drug pretty aggressively now. And he's called it a cure, right? I mean, this is a treatment. This has not been

classified as a cure. That's right. You know, the president received this very early on in his course of treatment and, you know, he still had to be hospitalized and still had to have these pretty severe medical intervention. So it may have helped him recover a little bit faster, but the fact is that, you know, this still meant that the disease was quite dangerous to him. He's had a test showing that he's had antibodies to the virus. What do these antibodies tell us? At this point, probably not all that much. I mean, he received a very high dose of this regeneron treatment, the highest dose that's available. And so some physicians looking at those results have said that, you know, it's very likely that the antibody test that he had this week was likely residual antibodies from that initial dose of the

medication and not antibodies that would produce by his own body. That can take up to two weeks to produce. And Regeneron is asking for emergency approval by the FDA. What are the implications of this? What does emergency approval mean? Right. Emergency approval means that, you know, more doctors will have access to this drug and they can use their own discretion to administer it to pay. Previously, this was, even though it was an experimental drug, it was available under a compassionate use guidelines, which means that it's only available on a case-by-case basis, and there's a lot more back and forth. But with emergency use, the standard is that it has a likely benefit, whereas full FDA approval means that the drug has a demonstrated benefit. So this is a slightly lower bar than what we would get with typical approval. But again, this is also still an acknowledgement that this is a stopgap that we don't fully know the full benefits and potentially the harmful effect of this drug as well. There's still a risk here. And of course, Trump is saying that he wants this treatment for everyone, but this is a really costly drug, is it not? Yeah, this is an intravenous drug. You know, it can cost thousands of dollars for a course of treatment. And this is a highly specialized

drug. It's produced using genetic engineering. And it's also harvested from people who've recovered from the illness. So it's, yeah, very complicated to manufacture. And it's also something that's going to be kind of difficult to scale up. And yes, it's also very expensive. And the president has been given sort of a cocktail of different treatments. I think it's been described as throwing in the kitchen sink approach. And no one has ever been given this combination of drugs. Do we have any idea what all of these do in the body together or how they might interact? Not really. And that's kind of the concern here. You know, doctors often express concern about, you know, this VIP syndrome where if you have a very high-profile patient,

they try to give them everything that they have in their disposal. But really, it may make more sense to have just one targeted approach where you either try to tamp down the immune systems over reactions or boost the immune system if it's having a hard time fighting off the infection. So, for example, like in addition to this regenerating antibody cocktail, the president also received dexamethosone. This is in corticosteroid, and it has the effect of actually tamping down on the immune system. Now, this is one of the few drugs that actually has a demonstrated benefit on mortality. This is, according to studies, it can actually save the lives of patients who've had COVID-19, but only in severely ill patients, patients who've needed oxygen support or who have needed to be intubated.

And that's because it can tamp down on some of these conditions of the immune system overreacting, like the cytokine storm, which you may have heard about. And that's where that benefit comes in. And then there was an antiviral drug that the president also received called remdesivir. And this is a drug that also has had some indication that it can be effective. There was just a clinical trial that was published this week that showed that for patients who received the drug, they were released from the hospital within 10 days, whereas the patients received the placebo were recovered within 15 days. And so it had a benefit in reducing the course of the illness.

All these things taken together, it makes it harder to tease out which drug was doing the heavy lifting here. And we don't still know how they all interact, as you noted. Yeah. So we don't know which one has been most effective for the president. Yeah. And that's important to figure out because it's not likely that anybody else will be able to get all of these drugs at the same time. Very likely doctors will have to make careful decisions about what individual drugs they prescribe to patients, and sometimes, you know, that requires figuring out what these drugs actually do. Well, we now know that there have been dozens of people around the president in the White House and the staff and the Pentagon who have tested positive. We're told there is frequent testing

at the White House. Do we know what type of testing the White House has been using? Well, the White House said that it's been using a system from Abbott Labs. This is a genetic test called ID Now. And this was a rapid testing system that was released over the summer, but this is a test that also had some issues with accuracy. That was generally the tradeoff that because it's a faster test, there is a little bit of a reduction in some of the accuracy of the results. But White House staff have had access to these tests at their own discretion over the summer, but then in August, that's when the White House implemented a policy of randomized mandatory testing. So it was pretty late in the game where the White House enforced a testing regime, but to this point, we still don't know how regular that was. how systematically staffers were being tested. And we don't know how often the president himself was being tested. And that's part of the reason why we've had such a hard time keeping track of his illness. We don't know when he was last negative and when he was first positive. So there has been reliance on testing, but not on wearing masks.

Right. And, you know, the White House hasn't enforced mask mandates. And we saw that, you know, in some of the recent events that were held at the White House where very few people were wearing masks or even keeping distant from each other. And so that's created a situation where, you know, the risk is much higher. individually, many of these measures have a marginal benefit, but taken together, wearing masks, maintaining social distance, staying in well-ventilated places outdoors. Together, that provides a robust barrier against infection.

But on the other hand, if you do none of those things, if you are very close to people not wearing masks in close proximity indoors for long periods of time, as the White House has been doing, that can dramatically boost the risk. With all the people who have been testing positive, the White House staff, Congress, as I say, the Pentagon. Is the White House now considered a hotspot? Yes. You know, in Washington, D.C., transmission of COVID-19 has been fairly low, and now this is one

of the epicenters in the city. And city officials are now concerned that the White House isn't handling this quite properly. City officials reached out to the White House this week saying that they want them to start implementing a contact tracing regimen where they try to figure out where all these White House officials were and who they've come into contact with. And it's kind of surprising that they haven't implemented this already, that the White House has been kind of dragging its feet on figuring out who else may have been exposed. And we keep finding out more and more people connected to this one White House event, the nomination ceremony

for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, have been exposed to this. And so we may still yet learn that more people were connected to this cluster. One of the most visible Trump confidants is Governor Chris Christie, who also tested positive and admitted himself to the hospital in New Jersey last Saturday, so it's been about a week. He's still in the hospital after six days. Do we know anything about his status? It's been pretty quiet. Yeah, it's been pretty quiet about him and a number of other officials that have also been exposed and tested positive. The same story is true for just about everybody else connected to this cluster that we don't quite know who has been infected how severely and what their current status is. And Trump's physician has cleared him, though,

to start attending rallies this weekend. The president's physician has said that the president's would be clear to start attending public events starting Saturday. Wow, so we'll see what happens this weekend. Thanks, Umer. You bet. Uffan, a staff writer at Vox and based out of Washington, D.C. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, the Nobel Prizes were announced this week. We'll take a look at the winners in physics, medicine, and chemistry.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Yeah, I know there's a lot going on this week. we can forgive you if you haven't been paying close attention to the Nobel Prizes. This week, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.

In chemistry, Emmanuel Charpontier of the Max Planck Institute, and Jennifer Dowdna of the University of California at Berkeley, won the prize for their work on the technique known as CRISPR. Back in 2017, Dr. Dowdena summarized the technique for us on Science Friday. You can think about it almost like a pair of scissors for DNA in the cell. And the great thing about this tool is that it's programmable. So scientists can directly tell the scissors where to go in the cell, which piece of DNA to cut, and can do that relatively inexpensively and quickly. So it's become a very widespread technology for altering the DNA and virtually all.

types of cells. But it's not initially what the Nobel winners were going for. It's a great story of how curiosity-driven research aimed in one direction ended up uncovering something that could be employed in a completely different way. I think that, you know, the way that bacteria can program proteins to cut viral DNA and protect themselves from viral infection was the original work that we were doing, and this was a project of international collaboration with Emmanuel Sharpen Thier in her laboratory. But that uncovered the mechanism that we realized could be employed in a very different way, namely for gene editing. It's a technique that quickly took the molecular and cellular biology research world by storm. There's sort of a very important

timing aspect to technologies. And I would say that's true for gene editing. It was a tool that was, very much the scientific community was ready for. We needed a way to make. We needed a way to manipulate DNA and cells, given all of the DNA sequencing that's going on now and, you know, whole genomes being sequenced and more and more information about the content of genomes. And what was missing was a way to rewrite them, a way to manipulate that information. And when that tool became available, as you pointed out, it was very quickly adopted globally. Congratulations to Immanuel Charpentier and Jennifer Dowdna. In physics, the award was split.

one half went to mathematician Richard Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. We talked about it on Science Friday back in 2015 about the work he and the late Stephen Hawking did. On black holes, matter pulled so tightly into itself by gravity that it forms what physicists call a singularity. The thing we were trying to do was to show that these singularities, first of all in the black hole and secondly in the Big Bang, which people knew about already, but only in very, very special circumstances when the situation was exactly symmetrical and the material involved didn't have any pressure and so on. It's very, very special. And people didn't necessarily believe that those singularities would be general

things which could occur under completely general circumstances. So, I started to think about these things in terms of what you call topological argument. That means you don't solve equations, you use quite general arguments to show that, in this case, a singularity had to exist somewhere. The situation that we now call a black hole in those days, they didn't even have a word for it, but where the matter collapses down past a point of no return. Well, this point of no return was a thing I called a trapped surface, that it doesn't depend on any symmetry or anything like that.

It's just a point of no return that you can characterize. And when it gets to that level, you can use these sort of topological arguments to show that somewhere in the future of that collapse, there must be a singularity. What does it matter to me as an average citizen if there are singularities out there in the other? Well, it's not so much the singular is because you can't get at them, you see.

At least the ones in the black holes, It's more that the black hole is a stable thing. It doesn't collapse down and then swish out again. You could imagine that if the matter collapsed in an irregular way, it might swirl around in some complicated way and then come switching out again. But what these arguments show is that doesn't happen. It collapses and keeps on collapsing in the same way that the symmetrical situation did, and it becomes singular.

Now, the singularity is not accessible to us in the black hole. The Big Bang is another question, because, of course, That singularity is in a sense the origin of all the things we know about. Black holes, and then all of a sudden after your papers, your papers are published, a few books were written, black holes really caught people's imaginations. Were you surprised by the amount of public interest in your work? It took quite a long time. I was surprised, well, it actually wasn't a great deal of interest to begin with.

I mean, it took, I mean, I used to go to these meetings, the Texas meetings on relativistic astrophysics. was there at the first one, that was when people were just beginning to realize that you had situations which might be something like a black hole. And it took a long time. I remember going to several of these meetings every two years or so, and each time there was a bit more interest and a bit more interest. And it took quite a while before people really swung around and the general community believed that these objects were really likely to be there. Why are people so fascinated by the site? Well, they're pretty wild things, aren't they?

And they're also, I mean, now we know they're absolutely huge ones. There are, you know, 10,000 million times the mass of the sun. There's some absolutely whopping ones. Our galaxy has one which is about four million times as massive as the sun. But there are now known ones which are far, far bigger than that. New Nobel-list Richard Penrose. The other half of the physics prize was, split between Reinhard Gensel and Andrea Gez for the discovery of one of those much bigger black holes,

a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy. We'll be talking more about that in the weeks ahead. But for now, congratulations, everybody. Among all the COVID chaos of the past week, I want to catch up on some other important stories that have gotten less attention than they deserve. This week, the vice presidential debate included some discussion of climate change. And at the presidential debate just a week ago, the night was filled with interruptions and lies and messy back and forths. But a highlight of the event, if one can be found, centered around the topic of climate change. Climate change has not been brought up in these debates in over a decade. Annalie Newitz is here to fill us in on the climate part of the debate,

and other science headlines. Annalese, a science journalist and author, based out of San Francisco. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me back. I remember that four years ago, there was not one question about the climate, right? That's right. And so in a debate that was mostly characterized by yelling, it was quite extraordinary to have that one phase of the debate devoted to talking about climate change

that was actually a relatively clear exchange between the president. president and former vice president. Well, it was actually very quiet because the president, the only time in the debate, never interrupted Joe Biden once in those 12 minutes. It's true. And Biden got a chance to talk a lot about his plans for what he would do if he became president, including developing green jobs, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, and a whole host of other issues, including simply acknowledging that climate change is caused by people and that people have a role to play in mitigating it. A little bit of it, I think the president said. Yeah, the president admitted that a tiny amount of climate change might perhaps be caused by people.

But his solutions to climate change were, as always, to fix the economy, to loosen regulations on things like emissions from cars. And it was never really clear how he squared the circle on that, how that was sort of fixing climate change. But Biden had a very, very different vision. And I think was especially good when he was talking about things like setting up charging stations for electric vehicles and really laying the groundwork for a new green infrastructure. And the interesting thing about that is he actually had a point by point plan that he had come out with. That's right. The Biden plan, which he was very careful to say was not the same thing as the Green New Deal, although it does, of course, contain a lot of elements of the Green New Deal. it clearly takes its inspiration from there.

Let's move on to another topic. We're hearing about clinical trials these days because of the COVID-19 vaccine and criticism of the FDA about this. Tell me more about that. So Science Magazine just did an investigative report where they spent many months filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the FDA to find out how the agency has been regulating people who violate its guidelines for conducting clinical trials and doing a lot of other kinds of medical research, which the agency oversees. And what this investigative report discovered was that

over the past three years, roughly, or four, since Trump has been elected, that the agency has kind of declined in its efforts to prevent people from violating its rules. And so what the investigators found was that, for example, during the Obama administration, almost 150 warnings were issued to clinicians and researchers about their research practices. And a number of those people were, in fact, sanctioned formally. Some were barred from conducting any clinical research. But during the Trump administration, there have been less than 10 disqualifications. And it's been a really big change for an agency whose entire job is in some ways to oversee how clinical trials are done. And a lot of the violations we see have to do with how patients in clinical trials were treated, how accurate the trials were.

And of course, all this stuff is very interesting right now because we're looking at these vaccine trials. So how does this lack oversight from the FDA affect the outcomes of these trials? development of treatments, as you just pointed out? The effect that this has is that we can't be sure as the public that this agency is really doing its due diligence. It's investigating individuals who violated their rules, who have, say, not informed their subjects during trials about all of the different things that they're going to be going through. They haven't been reporting negative results in trials. And so this could mean that when a vaccine comes to market, we can't have as much confidence that the FDA has really investigated it and has investigated all of the different

actors involved in doing these trials. Because a lot of the time, pharmaceutical companies will outsource these trials to organizations or researchers who specialize in running these trials. And so if one of these organizations keeps violating the rules and the FDA doesn't ever sanction them for it, even though the FDA knows they're violating the rules, it raises a lot of questions about how the agency is doing its work. I'm Ira Flito, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One other story or two to talk about, a very Annalise story, and I say that because the type of archaeology story that only you could dig up.

I had to get a dad joke in there. That's archaeologists found evidence of people punished by having their noses cut off. Is that right? That's right. So the old saying about cutting off your nose actually has its basis in real history. So archaeologists and anthropologists have known for a while that in England and other places that people were punished for various crimes by having their noses cut off. And we see this written into law in England in the Anglo-Saxon period, you know, about a thousand years ago. And a group of archaeologists recently discovered actual evidence of this on a skull of a woman who lived in the 800s in England.

And she was young. She was probably around 18. And it's likely that she was probably a slave based on what we know from the laws about who. who gets their nose cut off. And she was probably accused of adultery because we also have evidence that this was part of the law, that women especially were singled out

for having their noses cut off for this kind of crime. And it's really interesting that they were able to find the skull. It had actually been kind of buried in a vault for about 50 years. And they found the vault. They found this box with the skull

that had never been cleaned and discovered that there were these markings, very distinctive markings on the face that made it, obvious that a sharp instrument had been used to cut off the person's nose and upper lip. And so what this tells us is that the practice of punishing slaves and women with this particularly brutal act goes back further than the written record, because we do have it in the written record about 100 years later. So take it as an example of how law enforcement

has been treating prisoners cruelly and brutally for a very long time. And this woman's life was finally revealed. And so now we know the harm that was done to her. Very sad story. Let's go to a more uplifting story. The last story you have looks at crow consciousness. We know that crows are pretty smart, don't we? We already knew that they were very smart because crows have been very popular with animal behavior researchers because they're very good at solving multi-stage puzzles. They're easy to teach about puzzles, and they solve them at this level that's almost like a human child. And so this is a further example of how smart they are because crows, it turns out, know what they don't know, which is something that makes you very smart. And the way that researchers figured this out was they gave crows a test where they had to push a button when they saw a little.

light go off. But each time they did the test, the researchers changed the rules. So they'd say, to teach the crow, okay, hit the blue button if you see the light. Okay, now hit the red button if you see the light. And as the crows were having to change their frame of reference, they were also doing brain scans on the birds. So they could see that the birds weren't just randomly picking a button to push. They weren't just sort of like, I don't, I don't understand the rules have changed. I don't care. They were actually using neurons in their brains associated with cognition. So they were re-evaluating the task, figuring out what they had to do, and then poking the button to show that they'd seen the light. So they call this knowing what you don't know because it shows that they were

able to, with each successive test, they were having to think about the test again. They weren't just acting mechanically. They were re-evaluating the situation. How do you measure the inside of a crow's brain? You use brain scanning techniques, just like the ones that we use on humans. I thought maybe you'd use a crow bar. Okay. Yeah, it's all for the birds, isn't it? Delightful again, Annalee, and informative. Annale Newitz is a science journalist, an author based out of San Francisco. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me.

We're going to take a break. And when we come back, the SciFri Book Club returns. Yes, with a story about smart houses and a woman who really doesn't want one. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Would you trade your privacy for convenience? It's a central question to consider as our world is increasingly online, increasingly smart. Depending on the devices you have, you know that AI is watching everything, from what temperature your home is set to, to what you watch on TV. And it's a question at the heart of the next story in this week's book club as we continue our discussion of the anthology News Suns.

Original speculative fiction by people of color. SciFri Book Club Captain Christy Taylor, has more. If you've ever grappled with whether to add more tech to your life or felt pressured to upgrade before you felt ready, Andrea Harrison's short story Dumbhouse is for you. This story follows cinnamon, whose so-called Dumb House is plenty for her, but nevertheless, she's constantly pestered by traveling salesmen who want her to upgrade to the latest in self-contained tech abodes. Dumbhouse was this week's book club assignment from the collection New Sons, which was edited by Nisi Shawl, and it's a story that covers a lot of ground,

from the ways technology can be used to spy on us, to how it can be part of spiritual practice, to this movement in art and culture called Afrofuturism, which we'll talk about in a second. Joining me again is Aisha Matthews, managing editor of the Journal of Science Fiction and Director of Literary Programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference.

Welcome back, Aisha. Hi, Christy. Good to be back. Yeah, it's good to have you back. So we're talking this week about the story, Dumb House. It has a lot going on. We meet Cinnamon, who is this woman who just wants to be left alone, as she encounters two traveling salesmen who are trying to convince her to upgrade her house from a dumb house to a smart, technology-driven, your toilet analyzes your poop kind of house.

She says no a lot, and at the end of the day, the salesmen leave, but we like them now. Do you feel like I miss anything really important in getting to that summary? So when I first read this, it felt a little bit abstracted, kind of like, you know, it started in the middle of the story. because this is kind of an epilogue to Will Do Magic for Small Change, which is her 2016 book. It gives us a lot more kind of depth and nuance to how age and technology have changed things from this kind of techno-spiritual world that she lived in in our current time. But I also found it interesting in thinking of its relation to Kelsey's story.

It feels kind of like a different type of ghost story. Like, you know, there are the ghosts of her ancestors. but then there's also the ghosts who fly below the radar of technological surveillance. And so while last time we very much had the spirits themselves being carried around, I thought it was interesting to look at what it means to be a ghost in a world where visibility kind of signifies presence. Yeah, and I really liked also. So Andrea Harrison, she's also a playwright, and you can see a lot of that in this story.

Like we have everyone's in costume. There are all these props and special effects, you know, and it reads very much like a one-act play for me in a lot of ways, too. Definitely. That said, I don't want to go too much farther without introducing our third accomplice in this conversation. Kay Tempest Bradford is a speculative fiction writer. Some of her work includes steampunk about ancient Egypt. She is also a lead teacher in the writing the other workshop series, which is a resource for writers who wish to write about groups they themselves do not belong to. Hey, there, Tempest.

Hey, nice to be here. Tempice, as you were reading Dumbhouse, what were you most thinking about as you unpack the world of this story? I was keying into a lot of the conversation that was sort of being had about technology and the needs of technology and how cinnamon was like, nope, I don't need this stuff because I was taught how to live in a world where I didn't need technology to do all these things for me. That really felt important because, yeah, there's a lot of conversations being had about that, especially. now, like this year around like, what do we do if this does become an apocalypse situation? Because I think that our science fiction of fantasy has primed us for this to like think about what skills we might need to have, what things we might need to know if all this technology just goes away. I just moved into a new place. And one of the things that I finally did when I moved

to this new place is I got some smart plugs. And somebody was like, this is a slippery slope. You're all the way down the slippery slope. And I was like, no, it's only lights. So I like that this story was really digging into what it means to be a person who is just saying no, no, no to this. But then, like, it switches. It becomes a story about these characters and what these characters mean to each other. And I really love that. Last week, Aisha, we talked a little bit about ethnic futurisms, about how futurisms are about giving us futures that are not whitewashed, that are not all white people living in this sort of clean, neat technological future. We didn't really talk about Afrofuturism, but I would love for you to sort of unpack that for us. So how would you define

Afrofuturism and where it comes from and what it's doing? In my work and my understanding of Afrofuturism, you know, most people in the last few years have looked up the definition and seen Mark Derry's 1991 conversation. Afrofuturism used to be a lot more African-American-centric, at least in some of its early iterations. So I think in the larger growth of the Afro-Futurist movement, it's become much more Afrodiasporic, which you do see a lot of in Harrison's work in particular, the African deities, you know, the juju, what they call the hoodoo voodoo, all of these cultural artifacts that come from these African cultures. And so what I believe she calls juju tech is that kind of techno-spiritual blend, which is one of my favorite things about Afrofuturism, the idea that we are seeing a culture which has historically been deemed primitive, that is organ,

organically integrated with advanced technology. And in this story in particular, there were a few hints of the ways that black culture in the early 21st century kind of carries forward. So in the beginning of the story, she talks about how everyone essentially talks black now, that English of the 21st century is heavily inflected by black culture. She discovers they're actually trying to sell her own technology back to her. So there are these clear kind of colonial vibes of the things that have been appropriated and taken. But at the same time, she is still creating this culturally inflected technology.

I think that the internet has brought together a lot more people from a lot of different, like, you know, branches of the African diaspora to start having conversations with each other so that now there can be more recognition of what people from different parts of the diaspora and different parts of Africa have been doing with, you know, speculative fiction that we can. can put under the umbrella of Afrofuturism. For a long time, there are people who were thinking of it in a very literal way. And they were like, well, it's futurism, though, because Afrofuturism, right? But, like, Black Panther's Afrofuturism takes place in the quote now. And it can apply to things that happen, you know, all throughout history. Like, there are just ways of looking at history and lenses through which you can write it in the speculative realm that take on a very distinct flavor when a person who is of the African diaspora writes it.

And it's the same with other groups of marginalized people that fall under the BIOC umbrella as well. It's not even just about like, here's a black people telling black stories about black stuff, right? It's a way of looking at the future and the now that's inflected by our technology, which is futuristic to us and the way of looking at the past and what we could do with the past. And this is, again, why I really love New Sons, because it brings in all these different voices. from under this umbrella. Yeah, and this isn't really a story about,

it wasn't necessarily a story about how technology is bad. Like, it was not as simple as that. Her life, you know, rests on technology to a certain extent. She just wants to have agency over how it shows up in her life. There's one quote, co-ops are a threat. Dumb houses are a nuisance, a gateway drug. And so it really highlighted in the conversation they have about that, the idea that it is a threat specifically,

because you can grow your own food. You have your own means of social communication. It was a very kind of corporate town idea that they're trying to buy up every individual so that everyone will be entirely owned by the system. And I think we see that in a lot of ways today and a lot of dystopias go there. I found that idea really interesting

that the past is a gateway drug. Holding on to the past is somehow a gateway drug to revolution. Yeah, definitely. I also, I think about it in terms of even stuff that's going on right now where there are certain entities that are always trying to control things where you're like, why are you trying to control that? In some places, it's illegal for you to collect rainwater. It's water that falls out of the sky. Why would that be illegal? But it's like tied into all these systems of they need to control like who gets the water and when and how. And if you get your own rainwater, that disrupts that system. And it's like if they can allow somebody to live in a way that is not sanctioned, that does not benefit the corporation that is a threat to them.

I remember I saw that story about the rainwater. It was on Twitter. And one of those threads where somebody was like, what was the thing that radicalized you? And that was one of the stories that somebody told about how they found out their town had a prohibition against collecting rainwater. And another person who was like, my mother used to keep a garden. and then suddenly keeping your own garden was outlawed and they poured bleach all over the garden that she'd made in the community yard.

I know like a lot of dystopias go that way, but like the only reason why it comes up in dystopia is because it's something that's happening right now. You mentioned the co-op. The co-ops are a nuisance, quote, Aisha. And I don't know that we see that much of cinnamon's sort of larger landscape of where she's living,

but it's implied that she's part of a community. Like it's implied that she is working with other people to meet needs collectively in some way. And there's a sense, too, that what is frowned upon in this sort of corporate dystopia is that community is also sort of part of the rebellion against surveillance. Definitely. I think the term that would be used in disability studies

would be interdependence. So interdependence is in that regard seen, in the same way some people see welfare as we have to take care of others as opposed to none of us get anywhere entirely alone. All of us are in some way relying on others, and it's a matter of how much we embrace that. And I thought it was interesting even thinking about the juju tech she has and her sparkly dragon bodysuit and these LED masks that she has. And it's clear that she's selling them to someone as part of her living.

She was also at some point an engineer. and... Yeah, like she was in tech herself. Exactly. And so she's still, in the very real sense that all of us must be, she still has to eat at the end of the day. Ayesha, last week when we were talking about

even just sort of the concept of an anthology, like New Sons, and some of the stories that are told when we actually give storytelling platforms to racialized writers is the embodiment, the process of inhabiting a body and how that is realizing

differently by people who are racialized in their society. Was there anything for you that came up in this story that felt like that was part of that conversation? So definitely, I mean, there's the disguise element with her friends. They have like a whole, you know, Halloween-style face covering and modified voices, which is a whole lot. So I think cinnamon, you know, in, we'll do magic for small change. You know, she ultimately ends up being in a kind of three-way relationship with these two friends, one of whom is white, and she never imagines that anyone like that would love her. So in this future, where she's reunited with these people she used to love and kind of still does love, there's a real sense of her coming back into her embodiment in the context of her past life that I thought was

interesting because it was truly, you know, it's both a polyamorous and an interracial relationship. Yeah. And another aspect of that is how the theater of it does play into this. Because when they first come to her porch, she sort of recognizes them as people who are playing a role. And the fact that they were all like in this theater troupe together. And then there's a point in which they like recite a line from this play that they had done together as part of a ritualistic magical thing that's happening. And, you know, when I knew it was going to be important when Cinnamon first thinks, you know, these people are playing raw, I was like, this is about to be important. The way that that manifested through the story, you know, and how like they literally embody like one type of person

and then suddenly these two people embody whole other types of people and how that all plays into what's going on with the techno-spiritual aspects of the story and how it like rolls into what happens at the climax. It's all like so interconnected and all like just again very specific to who the two people who come to her door and body when they first come to that door and when they leave that door are two so different things. And it just all rolls into that whole theatrical, you know, ritualistic spiritual stuff that Andrea is like playing with with this story. Just a reminder that this is Science Friday. I'm Christy Taylor.

If we talk about science fiction or speculative fiction as a way to rehearse possible worlds, is there a takeaway or is there like a lesson learned or is there something that we're practicing that this story gives us? There are so many things that this story is doing all at once that, yeah, it's hard to like have a takeaway. I do feel like I want to to make everybody read this story and have a conversation with me about what are our needs going to be if everything really does fall apart going back to what I said in the beginning

and being like, look, like, we need to, are we going to be able to build a house on some land with a greenhouse and be able to grow some stuff and we can sell it to the co-op? Because if not, we need to get together these skills. That I think is a conversation that I would really love to have with people because I feel like that's one of the sort of tangible takeaways that is something that you can like discuss and discuss how you could apply to your life. Because I don't know if we can all necessarily apply the techno spiritual stuff to our lives, even though like I personally am like, I need to get on this.

What I loved about this story is the refusal to be assimilated and erased. And I think while the story sends a good message at the end that, you know, like she says, Tywo points out that, you know, It is good to have people tugging at your heartstrings. It is good to have people that care about you and to not be withdrawn from the world. But she is willing to stand her ground and fight to preserve the culture that has been passed down through the generations. And so I think something good to take away from it is kind of forcing us to challenge our ideas of how much participation is mandatory. If anything these stories can do, it is encouraging us to think about why are we so invested in everyone doing it our way. Why is it that when progress happens, everyone needs to get the new

iPhone, not just you. So I think it's important and powerful to be reminded that the past does have value and that while holding on to the past can certainly hold us back, there are things worth saving. And unfortunately, we are out of time. Eisha Matthews is managing editor of the Journal of Science Fiction and Director of Literary Programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference. K-Tempas Bradford is a speculative fiction writer and a lead teacher for the writing of the other workshop series. Thank you both so much for your time today. Thanks, Christy. Thank you. One last thing, we are giving away 10 free copies of New Sons this week, courtesy of the awesome folks at Powell's books. Go to our website for an entry form, plus an excerpt

from Dumbhouse, a chance to sign up for our newsletter, and much more. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. And like Christy says, for more information on participating in the Cifference, Fry Book Club, check out our website, sciencefriday.com slash bookclub. We've got all kinds of ways for you to get involved. Plus, this week on the Science Friday Voxpop app, book club readers, what are you thinking about as you read Dumbhouse and other stories in New Sons? Do you have a favorite story yet? Tell us your reactions. That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis.

Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.