In the Shambles of Hollywood: The Decadent Trans Feminine Allegory in Myra Breckinridge

When Twentieth Century Fox announced there would be a 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s controversial novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), Candy Darling considered it her prime opportunity to break into mainstream cinema. The novel follows its titular character, an addled trans woman obsessed with the films of the 1940s, as she seeks to claim her inheritance from an uncle who runs an acting academy in Hollywood. Darling, a trans woman herself, had begun her acting career in Andy Warhol’s movies, where she formed an important part of the Factory set along with other trans feminine people such as Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. But these underground films had a limited circulation, and it was Darling’s deepest-held ambition to become a legitimate starlet. When she applied for the role, she was rejected in favour of the cisgender actress Raquel Welch [fig. 1]. ‘They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite’, she recounted. While Welch obviously lent the production some star power at the time, Darling’s exclusion seems counterintuitive: she was about the same age as Myra in the novel and was also obsessed with vintage Hollywood, modelling herself after peroxide blonde actresses such as Lana Turner, Kim Novak, and Jean Harlow. She could recite whole passages from films such as Picnic (1955), demonstrating something of Myra’s encyclopaedic film knowledge; in fact, Warhol thought ‘she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did’. In the novel there are several references to Myra’s career as an underground film star prior to her transition that may well allude to films such as Warhol’s Flesh (1968), a film that Darling had actually been in. She was, in other words, already engaged in the sexual avant-gardism Myra Breckinridge apparently represented, as well as what in the novel becomes a tragi-comic obsession with the Golden Age of Hollywood. &nbsp

Exponential growth, high prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, and vaccine effectiveness associated with the Delta variant

SARS-CoV-2 infections were rising during early summer 2021 in many countries associated with the Delta variant. We assessed RT-PCR swab-positivity in the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study in England. We observed sustained exponential growth with average doubling time (June-July 2021) of 25 days driven by complete replacement of Alpha variant by Delta, and by high prevalence at younger less-vaccinated ages. Unvaccinated people were three times more likely than double-vaccinated people to test positive. However, after adjusting for age and other variables, vaccine effectiveness for double-vaccinated people was estimated at between ~50% and ~60% during this period in England. Increased social mixing in the presence of Delta had the potential to generate sustained growth in infections, even at high levels of vaccination

Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken

Domestic chickens are members of an order, Aves, which has been the focus of a revolution in our understanding of neuroanatomical, cognitive, and social complexity. At least some birds are now known to be on par with many mammals in terms of their level of intelligence, emotional sophistication, and social interaction. Yet, views of chickens have largely remained unrevised by this new evidence. In this paper, I examine the peer-reviewed scientific data on the leading edge of cognition, emotions, personality, and sociality in chickens, exploring such areas as self-awareness, cognitive bias, social learning and self-control, and comparing their abilities in these areas with other birds and other vertebrates, particularly mammals. My overall conclusion is that chickens are just as cognitively, emotionally and socially complex as most other birds and mammals in many areas, and that there is a need for further noninvasive comparative behavioral research with chickens as well as a re-framing of current views about their intelligence