Peripheral visions: you would not want to be staring like that at me: the American other and the carnival spectacle in HBO’s True Blood, Deadwood and Carnivàle, & a novel, Tarnished

‘You would not want to be staring like that at me.’ The minacious words of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen ring out beyond the show’s Wild West confines and speak to the wider cultural anatomy of the United States. Swearengen is threatening his nemesis, Sheriff Bullock, who has decided to communicate his contempt for Swearengen with one, long look. Al returns this glare, his verbal riposte a mere addendum to their power struggle that is, in that moment, reaching its climactic end through a distinctly visual discourse. The visual, what we look like, what we look at and how we look at each other, the superficial dermal sign and what it signifies, not only about itself but about the viewer also, permeates and produces American subcultural interactions. Philip McGowan calls this ‘an economy of seeing’, and conceives it as a distinctly American version of the Carnivalesque that renders the act of looking a method of both highlighting and monetising difference and negating the different, of constructing and deconstructing the identities of those who do not fit into the template of the norm (white, able-bodied), and of creating a binary between this norm and an American ‘Other’, the racial, physiological, cultural outsider. McGowan traces the development of restrictive visual exchange through the chronology of the American exposition, the midway and the freak show, arguing that these public events provided a model for the paying public on how to frame and interact with this ‘Other’ in both showground and more quotidian spaces. McGowan follows this historical precedent through to its literary permutations, exploring texts that best illustrate his conceptual reframing of the Carnivalesque in distinctly American terms. I seek to take this updated framework and apply it to its other natural counterpart, serial television (HBO specifically), the filmic, opt-in, long-form narratives that have overtaken cinema as both our premier visual product and primary means of replicating, investigating and evaluating culture. The shows I have selected (True Blood, Deadwood and Carnivàle) each stand as and offer up instances of these visual behaviours through their narratives and aesthetics, depicting this normal/’Other’ binary in illuminative, intersectional and often disruptive ways. With these concerns in mind, I also present my own creative work, a novel that attempts to converge American Gothic and Western tropes (succeeding other less explicitly coalesced examples) in order to more fully materialise the inherent potential of this specific hybrid, and that was, in part, written in consideration of and as response to this critical discourse and its associated visual, cultural and historical cues

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Convalescent plasma in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised controlled, open-label, platform trial

SummaryBackground Azithromycin has been proposed as a treatment for COVID-19 on the basis of its immunomodulatoryactions. We aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of azithromycin in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19.Methods In this randomised, controlled, open-label, adaptive platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19Therapy [RECOVERY]), several possible treatments were compared with usual care in patients admitted to hospitalwith COVID-19 in the UK. The trial is underway at 176 hospitals in the UK. Eligible and consenting patients wererandomly allocated to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus azithromycin 500 mg once perday by mouth or intravenously for 10 days or until discharge (or allocation to one of the other RECOVERY treatmentgroups). Patients were assigned via web-based simple (unstratified) randomisation with allocation concealment andwere twice as likely to be randomly assigned to usual care than to any of the active treatment groups. Participants andlocal study staff were not masked to the allocated treatment, but all others involved in the trial were masked to theoutcome data during the trial. The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality, assessed in the intention-to-treatpopulation. The trial is registered with ISRCTN, 50189673, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04381936.Findings Between April 7 and Nov 27, 2020, of 16 442 patients enrolled in the RECOVERY trial, 9433 (57%) wereeligible and 7763 were included in the assessment of azithromycin. The mean age of these study participants was65·3 years (SD 15·7) and approximately a third were women (2944 [38%] of 7763). 2582 patients were randomlyallocated to receive azithromycin and 5181 patients were randomly allocated to usual care alone. Overall,561 (22%) patients allocated to azithromycin and 1162 (22%) patients allocated to usual care died within 28 days(rate ratio 0·97, 95% CI 0·87–1·07; p=0·50). No significant difference was seen in duration of hospital stay (median10 days [IQR 5 to >28] vs 11 days [5 to >28]) or the proportion of patients discharged from hospital alive within 28 days(rate ratio 1·04, 95% CI 0·98–1·10; p=0·19). Among those not on invasive mechanical ventilation at baseline, nosignificant difference was seen in the proportion meeting the composite endpoint of invasive mechanical ventilationor death (risk ratio 0·95, 95% CI 0·87–1·03; p=0·24).Interpretation In patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, azithromycin did not improve survival or otherprespecified clinical outcomes. Azithromycin use in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 should be restrictedto patients in whom there is a clear antimicrobial indication

Effect of Antiplatelet Therapy on Survival and Organ Support–Free Days in Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19

International audienc