James' World 2

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Zackary Dunivin, a sociologist now at the University of California, Davis, was watching a movie about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat when something in the epilogue caught his attention. Basquiat, the explanatory text stated, died of a drug overdose at the age of 27. Dunivin felt that something about this particular age seemed to lend additional weight to the tragedy of Basquiat’s death, and he quickly realized why: Basquiat was a member of the “27 Club.” This widespread myth holds that famous people, especially musicians, are unusually likely to die at age 27.

The film, Basquiat, made Dunivin wonder about how the 27 Club myth propagates itself and what that means for the people who are caught up in it. In a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA paper, he provides some answers: more attention is paid to people who die at the age of 27 because of the existence of the club, he found, and this creates a positive feedback loop that both strengthens the legend’s potency and the fame of those it pertains to.

“The weird thing about this particular myth is: even if you don’t know about the 27 Club, you encounter more famous dead people who died at 27,” Dunivin says. “We’ve made this myth appear to be true because the appearance that more people who die at 27 is real.”

The idea that especially talented people are prone to untimely deaths goes back to ancients. As noted by the Greek playwright Menander in the Fourth Century B.C.E., “Whom the gods love die young.”

The idea that musicians, artists, actors, and other creative people are more likely to die specifically at the age of 27, however, emerged more recently, after a series of high-profile deaths in the early 1970s. Between 1969 and 1971, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison each died at that age. By chance, these rock stars were all icons of the counterculture movement, and the first and last of their deaths occurred two years apart to the day. “We are meaning-making machines—that’s what we do as human beings,” Dunivin says. “You look at that and say, ‘It can’t be a coincidence!’”

The fact that people latched on to this particular group of deaths in the 1970s is somewhat justified, Dunivin continues, because of just how unusual it was. In the new paper, he calculated a steep one in 100,000 chance that four 27-year-olds at the top of a Wikipedia list of famous people—the list’s 99.9th percentile, “true superstars,” as Dunivin says—would die in a two-year period.

The myth’s popularity has been revived and reinforced over the years, he adds, by other headline-making deaths of famous 27-year-olds, including Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

Dunivin did not set out to debunk the myth itself—that had already been done by another group of researchers in 2011. Instead, he wanted to untangle how a legend that emerged out of a random but “truly strange” series of events went on to have a real-world impact by shaping the legacies of other famous people who subsequently died at 27.

For the data, Dunivin and his co-author, sociologist Patrick Kaminski of Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Stuttgart in Germany, turned to a database of notable people that includes nearly everyone with a Wikipedia page in all languages. They limited their analysis to people who were born after 1900 and who died before 2015, leaving them with 344,156 individuals. The researchers used page visits as a proxy for fame.

Statistical models that they used reconfirmed that there is no increased risk of famous people dying at age 27. Among those in the 90th percentile of fame and higher, however, those who died at 27 did experience an extra boost in popularity that could not be accounted for by other factors. The effect was particularly pronounced for the most famous of the famous, or individuals who roughly achieved the 99th percentile of fame. That bump indicates that people who die at age 27 “are considerably more likely to be more famous” than those who die at 26 or 28, Dunivin says.

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CLIMATEWIRE | ON NAVAJO LAND, Arizona — It was a solar panel array that finally gave Norma Toledo a place to call home.

For nights at a time this year, Toledo slept outside a Walmart in the cab of her Toyota Tacoma. But on one milestone day last month, as temperatures dipped below freezing, Toledo found herself in a warm RV that — for the first time — had access to electricity.

Her new solar power hookup was made possible by two of the biggest measures of the Biden administration: the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. Its installation is part of a more than $200 million effort to build out clean energy resources on tribal lands, including the Navajo reservation where Toledo lives.

“I’m out of this world right now. It’s like I finally got a homestead — I’m a homesteader,” said Toledo, 65, with a grin. “I didn’t think I’d ever get this far, but I kept trying, you know, I just kept trying and trying.”

Her time without electricity is a common experience on the Navajo reservation. About 17,000 homes on tribal lands nationally don’t have energy access. Most of them — about 15,000 — are on Navajo lands or the Hopi reservation contained within its borders.

The lack of electricity means tens of thousands of people must figure out a way to live without an amenity many Americans take for granted.

Food is stored in coolers that have to be continually stocked with ice. Diesel generators must run 24 hours a day to power refrigerators that store life-saving medication. Kerosene lanterns keep the lights on at night. Fuel runs can take an hour or more to reach a gas station.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law are designed to change that. But electrifying tribal homes with solar power could come to a halt if former President Donald Trump is reelected. The Republican presidential nominee has called the laws a “Green New Scam” and pledged to gut them.

“I will immediately terminate the green new scam, that will be such an honor, the greatest scam in the history of any country,” Trump said at a rally in New Mexico on Thursday.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from POLITICO’s E&E News on whether he would continue the Biden administration’s push to bring more power to tribal lands if he defeats Vice President Kamala Harris this week and wins back the White House.

In the three months since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, she has said very little about the Inflation Reduction Act. Nor has she introduced any new initiatives to address global warming. But Harris is broadly expected to continue the climate policies put in place during the Biden administration.

“When we invest in climate, we also invest in families, in communities, in opportunity and prosperity for all people,” Harris said in a video she posted to X on Saturday. “When we invest in climate, we invest in America.”

The federal money for tribal energy projects, estimated at more than $200 million, represents a tiny fraction of the $1.6 trillion in climate and infrastructure spending that was passed into law under Biden.

Even so, supporters say the initiative can be a life-changing experience for the people it connects to the grid. And it can be a boon for local businesses, too.

Navajo Power Home, one of several installers working to connect people to solar, recently received a $5 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Act as part of its effort to install off-grid battery storage solar in 1,000 homes by the end of 2025.

Local workers benefit, too. Solar companies on the reservation largely train and hire local people for installation and repairs — an opportunity that can be transformative for many families because good-paying jobs on tribal lands can be scarce.

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Marburg virus is notorious for its killing ability. In past outbreaks, as many as 9 out of 10 patients have died from the disease. And there are no approved vaccines or medications.

That was the grim situation in Rwanda just over a month ago, when officials made the announcement that nobody wants to make: The country was in the midst of its first Marburg outbreak. 

Now those same Rwandan officials have better news to share. Remarkably better.

“We are at a case fatality rate of 22.7% — probably among the lowest ever recorded [for a Marburg outbreak],” said Dr. Yvan Butera, the Rwandan Minister of State for Health at a press conference hosted by Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.

There’s more heartening news: Two of the Marburg patients, who experienced multiple organ failure and were put on life support, have now been extubated — had their breathing tubes successfully removed — and have recovered from the virus.

“We believe this is the first time patients with Marburg virus have been extubated in Africa,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. “These patients would have died in previous outbreaks.”

The number of new cases in Rwanda has also dwindled dramatically, from several a day to just 4 reported in the last two weeks, bringing the total for this outbreak to 66 Marburg patients and 15 deaths.

“It’s not yet time to declare victory, but we think we are headed in a good direction,” says Butera. Public health experts are already using words like “remarkable,” “unprecedented” and “very, very encouraging” to characterize the response.

How did Rwanda — an African country of some 14 million — achieve this success? And what can other countries learn from Rwanda’s response?

Doing the basics really well

Rwanda is known for the horrific 1994 genocide — one of the worst in modern times. Since then, the country has charted a different path. In 20 years, life expectancy increased by 20 years from 47.5 years old in 2000 to 67.5 years old in 2021 — about double the gains seen across the continent. And Rwanda has spent decades building up a robust health-care system.

“The health infrastructure, the health-care providers in Rwanda — they’re really, really great,” says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health. Spencer specializes in global health issues and has been following the Rwandan outbreak closely.

There are well-run hospitals and well-trained nurses and doctors, he says. There are laboratories that can quickly do diagnostic testing. There is personal protective equipment for medical workers.

For this outbreak, there was the know-how and infrastructure to set up a separate Marburg treatment facility. That’s been a boon for other patients and medical staff, preventing exposure to the virus — which crosses over from bats to humans and can be transmitted through bodily fluids like blood, sweat and diarrhea.

And even though there aren’t approved medications to treat Marburg, patients in Rwanda have received good supportive care for all their symptoms — like the IV fluids critical for symptoms like high fevers, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

This stands in stark contrast to the response in past Marburg scenarios. For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo — next door to Rwanda — had an outbreak between 1998 and 2000. Dr. Daniel Bausch, now a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an expert in tropical diseases like Marburg, provided care in that outbreak. He says what the country’s health centers were able to offer patients was rudimentary at best.

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