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The Success of Top-Down Simplicity

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In the early weeks of Covid-19 vaccinations, the shining examples of success were all places with politically conservative leaders. Globally, the countries with the largest share of vaccinated people were Britain, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. In the U.S., the states that got off to the fastest starts were Alaska and West Virginia.

This pattern made me wonder whether many progressive-led governments were spending so much effort designing fair-seeming processes that they were failing at the most basic goal of a mass vaccination program: getting shots into arms. That error has held down vaccination rates across much of continental Europe. And it appeared to be an early problem in California and New York.

But it has not turned out to be much of an issue in the U.S. Instead, the states with the highest vaccination rates are now mostly Democratic-leaning, and the states with the lowest rates are deeply conservative.

Russ Bynum of The Associated Press wrote this week.

the chaos of the Trump administration’s virus response to the Biden administration’s. Democrats’ belief in the power of government certainly doesn’t ensure they will manage it competently, but it may improve the odds.

In the most successful state programs, one theme is what you might call centralized simplicity. In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont gave priority to older residents, including people in their 50s, rather than creating an intricate list of medical conditions and job categories that qualified people for shots (and that more privileged families often figure out how to game).

In New Mexico — which has the country’s highest rate of fully vaccinated people, despite also having a high poverty rate — Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has overseen the creation of a centralized sign-up system. The state has one vaccine portal that all residents can use to sign up for shots, rather than the piecemeal, confusing systems in many other states, my colleague Simon Romero reports from Albuquerque.

South Dakota, the red state with the highest share of vaccinated residents, has also taken a centralized approach, NPR’s Ailsa Chang points out.

polls show. But it is still notably high among registered Republicans.

CNN’s Harry Enten writes, “while the reverse is true in the states with high vaccination rates.”

Dr. Vernon Rayford, an internal medicine doctor in Tupelo, Miss., told The Times that he had noticed a difference in the sources of skepticism. White skeptics often express a general distrust of government. Black skeptics are particularly mistrustful of the medical system, which has a long history of giving them substandard care — and even outright harmful treatments.

Across much of Mississippi — the state with the smallest share of residents to have received a shot — vaccine appointments are going unfilled largely because of a lack of demand. Two big reasons for the skepticism, Dr. Brian Castrucci, a public health expert, told The Times’s Andrew Jacobs, are misinformation on social media and mixed messages from Republican governors about the urgency of vaccination.

“It’s time to do the heavy lifting needed to overcome the hesitancy we’re encountering,” said Dr. Obie McNair, an internal medicine physician in Jackson.

Vaccine rates still are not high enough — in any state — to have ended the pandemic. In Connecticut and New Mexico, combined, about 11 people have died on a typical recent day. But that toll has fallen more than 80 percent since mid-January, even more than in the rest of the country.

declined to testify in his trial over the killing of George Floyd. Both sides will make closing arguments on Monday.

  • Officials in Chicago released video of the fatal police shooting of Adam Toledo, 13, last month. Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the footage “excruciating.”

  • A Hong Kong court sentenced several opposition leaders to prison for holding an unauthorized protest. The sentences send a clear message that activism carries severe risks, The Times’s Austin Ramzy writes.

  • Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Afghanistan to reassure its leaders that the U.S. would continue its support after withdrawing troops.

  • The Dallas Wings selected Charli Collier, a center from the University of Texas, as the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. draft.

    • Can Biden be as transformative as Franklin Roosevelt?

    And it did.

    Lives Lived: Carol Prisant was a 51-year-old former antiques dealer with no journalism experience when she decided she wanted to work for the magazine The World of Interiors. She went on to an illustrious three-decade career. Prisant died at 82.

    will be buried tomorrow in England. The ceremony will be limited to 30 people and will have “minimal fuss,” according to the BBC, which will televise the funeral.

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    George Bass, Archaeologist of the Ocean Floor, Dies at 88

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    George F. Bass, who was often called the father of underwater archaeology, scouring shipwrecks for revelatory artifacts and developing new techniques for exploring the ocean, died on March 2 at a hospital in Bryan, Texas. He was 88.

    His son Gordon confirmed the death.

    Professor Bass was a graduate student in 1960 when he first donned a scuba tank and dived to the seabed of the Mediterranean. He went on to find bronze ingots more than 3,000 years old, wooden fragments that solved mysteries about shipbuilding from the time of the “Odyssey,” and much more — treasures that opened up a new field for archaeology, one that seemed to him as limitless as the Seven Seas.

    Excavation of shipwrecks could provide not only “the ultimate histories of watercraft,” he later wrote, but also “the ultimate histories of virtually everything ever made by humans.”

    Professor Bass led or co-directed archaeological efforts around the world, including in the United States, but he focused on the coast of Turkey — for thousands of years a maritime trade route for a succession of civilizations, from the ancient Canaanites to the early Byzantine Empire.

    wrote that the Uluburun ship cast new light “on the histories of literacy, trade, ideas, metallurgy, metrology, art, music, religion, and international relations, as well as for fields as diverse as Homeric studies and Egyptology.”

    The historical value of sunken treasure began to be recognized at the turn of the 20th century, when Greeks diving for sponge encountered a shipwreck carrying, among other goods, a magnificent ancient Greek bronze statue of a young man known as the Antikythera Youth. But sustained archaeological work under the sea was not feasible until 1943, when the oceanographers Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emil Gagnan invented the aqualung.

    Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.

    Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.

    “Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”

    In his lectures, Professor Bass was fond of telling audiences about the ancientness of sea travel — which he said humans had developed before farming, shepherding or metalworking — and about the infinitude of shipwrecks to be discovered.

    “We will never run out of worthy sites,” he wrote in “Beneath the Seven Seas” (2005), a book that chronicles his career. “Hundreds of ships have sunk in Aegean storms in a single day. We cannot calculate the number of wrecks in that one sea.”

    Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.

    Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.

    “You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.

    He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and became a professor there in 1964. Though tenured, he left his position in 1973 to form, with his colleagues J. Richard Steffy and Michael L. Katzev, an independent institute devoted to nautical archaeology.

    Professor Bass and his wife — he had married Ann Singletary in 1960 — sold their house, car and furniture and, with their two sons, moved to Cyprus. Their stay was short-lived. When Turkey invaded in 1974 in a struggle with Greece over control over the island, the Basses fled in the middle of the night.

    Texas A&M University, in College Station, offered to house Professor Bass’s institute and make him and his colleagues members of the faculty. Now known as the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, it has excavated dozens of shipwrecks across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Professor Bass’s early research helped put in motion the establishment of Turkey’s Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which today is one of the premier institutions of its kind worldwide.

    He called them “destructive of our search for knowledge of the past.”

    “It is relatively simple to find and salvage antiques or antiquities,” he said. “It is what happens to those antiques or antiquities later that makes their recovery part of archaeology.”

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    Long-Lost Mosaic From a ‘Floating Palace’ of Caligula Returns Home

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    NEMI, Italy — If stones could speak, the mosaic unveiled recently at an archaeological museum just south of Rome would have quite the tale to tell.

    It was crafted in the first century for the deck of one of two spectacularly decorated ships on Lake Nemi that the Emperor Caligula commissioned as floating palaces. Recovered from underwater wreckage in 1895, the mosaic was later lost for decades, only to re-emerge several years ago as a coffee table in the living room of a Manhattan antiques dealer.

    “If you look at it from an angle, you can still see traces of a ring from a cup bottom,” said Daniela De Angelis, the director of the Museum of the Roman Ships in Nemi, referring to the piece’s modern use. The mosaic has been installed in the museum next to two other marble fragments salvaged from Caligula’s ships, and was put on display on Thursday.

    “For us it’s a great satisfaction today to see the mosaic in this museum,” said Maj. Paolo Salvatori of Italy’s elite art theft squad, whose investigations led to the mosaic’s return. “Bringing back cultural artifacts to their original context” is the ultimate goal of the squad, he said, and the recovery of the mosaic reflected cooperation among the squad, Italy’s cultural authorities and law enforcement in the United States.

    opulent residential compound on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, a villa on the southwest shore of Lake Nemi and the two ships.

    “They were floating palaces,” whose “aquatic luxury” was likely inspired by a renowned barge used by Anthony and Cleopatra on the Nile, said Massimo Osanna, the director general of Italy’s national museums.

    Scholars are still unsure whether the ships had a specific purpose, though some have posited that one was used for the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis. In any case, Caligula didn’t skimp on the ships’ décor, which included mosaics on the walls, intricately inlaid marble floors, decorated fountains and marble columns. Bronze figures decorated the beams, headboards and other wooden parts.

    2013 presentation in New York of a book by an Italian marble expert, Dario Del Bufalo, on the use of red porphyry in imperial art. He happened to show a photograph of the missing mosaic.

    “That’s Helen’s table,” Mr. Del Bufalo recalled one of the attendees exclaiming. Helen turned out to be Helen Costantino Fioratti, president of L’Antiquaire and the Connoisseur, a Manhattan fine art and antiques gallery.

    Mr. Del Bufalo said Thursday that he had assisted Italy’s art theft squad in identifying Ms. Fioratti’s mosaic as the section of the marble floor restored by Mr. Borghi. The piece was seized by American authorities in 2017 and returned to Italy. Ms. Fioratti said at the time that she and her husband had bought the mosaic in good faith, in the late 1960s, from a member of an aristocratic family.

    recovered between 1929 and 1931, after the lake was drained, an enterprise that exemplified “the highest feat of Italian hydraulic engineering,” said Alberto Bertucci, mayor of Nemi, which is arguably better known for its strawberries than its archaeological heritage.

    The Nemi museum was specially designed in the 1930s to house the massive ships — which measured roughly 240 feet long and 78 feet wide — as well as other artifacts dredged up at the time, including fragments of mosaics and brass tiles that covered the roof of a structure on one of the ships.

    But on the night of May 31, 1944, the ships were destroyed by a fire that scholars believe was deliberately set by vengeful German troops.

    “There was little left afterward because the fire was devastating,” said Ms. De Angelis. But some artifacts survived because they had been sent to Rome for safekeeping.

    “The fire in the museum was ignited to destroy, and it did not disappoint,” said the Rev. John McManamon, a visiting scholar at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, who has written a book on the ships that is scheduled to be published next year. Father McManamon’s research backed the conclusions of a 1944 investigative commission which found that “in all likelihood, the fire that destroyed the two ships was caused by a deliberate choice on the part of the German soldiers,” he wrote in an email.

    Mr. Bertucci said he had initiated discussions with Italy’s Foreign Ministry about demanding compensation from the German government for the destruction of the ships. Any money received would be used to build scale models of the ships and to “return to humanity what was lost,” he said in an interview this week.

    “Today is a very important day,” said Ms. De Angelis at the Thursday unveiling. “Visitors to the museum will find a new addition in its natural place, alongside other marble fragments from the ship, as if it had never been away.”

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