What's in a name? When Omicron isn't Omicron

Tracking and Communicating About Variants

Say the words “Alpha”, “Delta”, or “Omicron” today and virtually the whole world knows what you are talking about: a variant of the virus that causes COVID-19.

This universal awareness is the result of a phenomenally successful choice by the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide Greek letter names to the major variants of the virus that have evolved over the course of the pandemic (WHO variants page). Providing these names avoided a choice between the inaccessible and confusing Pango nomenclature (e.g. “B.1.1.7”, "B.1.351", "B.1.617.2"), and inaccurate and stigmatizing place names (“e.g. “UK variant,” “South African variant,” “Indian variant,”).

Between mid-2020 and the end of 2021, 10 major variants had been named.

No new major variants have been named since Omicron was named in November 2021.

However, this lack of new names is not because no new major variants have emerged. Rather, they’re all lumped into “Omicron” now. And this mistake can be traced back to the initial naming of Omicron.

Cutting Without a Cause: The Less Than Compelling Case for Routine Infant Circumcision

You may have heard something about circumcision in the news lately. This is because there have been active ballot initiatives to ban routine male circumcision, first in San Francisco and then Santa Monica (though it has since been dropped there due to association with charges of antisemitism). I looked into the arguments surrounding the issue, and I’ve come to the conclusion that routine circumcision should not be allowed to continue.

Note: Due to the nature of the topic, some of the links in this post include explicit images of male anatomy, though no images are embedded in the post itself.

Rethinking Choice: Human Personhood and the Abortion Debate

Update: It has come to my attention that the timeline I'm describing has an error by a week or two. I don't have time to fix it, but the underlying idea is sound.

One of the most politically important questions of our day is defining the bounds of a human life, and who has control over it. This is in large part because it is so divisive, a treacherous landscape governed mainly by religious and political motivations, rather than by empirical truths, and serves as a distraction from the truly critical issues facing our country. It is therefore imperative that we formulate and proactively support a definition of human life that accounts for both fetal development and the fact that the mother and fetus are a single, integrated system.