A 67-year-old man from Long Island has become the first person in New York State to be diagnosed with Bourbon virus, a rare tick-borne illness for which there is currently no approved vaccine or targeted treatment. The man developed severe fatigue and persistent headaches after discovering two lone star ticks attached to his leg while doing landscaping work near his home. Doctors initially suspected a more common tick-borne infection, but Lyme disease tests came back negative, and antibiotics failed to improve his condition. After an extensive investigation, including antibody testing that took about a year, specialists identified Bourbon virus as the cause of his illness. First identified in Kansas in 2014, Bourbon virus is thought to be transmitted through the bite of infected lone star ticks. Human infections remain uncommon, but some reported cases have resulted in serious complications. People infected with the virus may experience fever, extreme tiredness, headaches, muscle aches, skin rash, nausea, and vomiting. The infection can also lower levels of white blood cells and platelets, making it harder for the body to fight infection and increasing the risk of bleeding. Diagnosing Bourbon virus can be challenging because there is no widely available commercial test. Confirmation typically requires testing through specialized public health laboratories. Treatment is limited to supportive medical care, such as managing fever, relieving pain, maintaining hydration, and providing hospital care when symptoms become severe. No antiviral medication has been approved specifically for the virus. Scientists suspect the virus may be more common than reported because its symptoms closely resemble those of other tick-borne diseases, increasing the chance that infections are overlooked or mistaken for something else. To reduce the risk of infection, experts recommend avoiding tick bites by using insect repellent, wearing long sleeves and trousers in areas where ticks are common, and checking yourself carefully after spending time outdoors.

Grok is basically my main doctor now, especially when it comes to understanding a medical decision before I say yes to it. Today, a family member walked out of oral surgery with a plan to remove all 4 wisdom teeth, use platelet-rich fibrin, and go under general anesthesia. Instead of immediately booking another consult, I uploaded the panoramic X-ray, the pocket measurements, and the treatment plan into Grok. Then I had it break down the case, challenge the assumptions, organize the reasoning, and turn the whole conversation into a PDF. I’m attaching that PDF of my convo to this post so you can read exactly what it saw and how the decision was worked through. The biggest thing Grok helped separate was diagnosis from treatment choice. The lower wisdom teeth looked like the real problem. The deep pockets were next to the second molars, and leaving that untreated could put those more important teeth at risk. The uppers were a different question: Are they coming out bc they have their own pathology? Or bc we’re already doing surgery anyway? Same thing with general anesthesia. GA may absolutely be the right choice. BUT, “we recommend GA” and “this medically requires GA” are not the same thing. Grok turned one intimidating treatment plan into a few simple questions: 1/ Which teeth actually need treatment? 2/ Which teeth are putting the second molars at risk? 3/ What happens if the uppers stay? 4/ Why exactly is GA being recommended? 5/ What is the smallest operation that actually solves the problem? Grok was incredibly valuable for us to make a decision on the next steps: • Lower right (#32#): treat it. The 9–10 mm pocket made this the clearest problem and the tooth we were least comfortable leaving alone. • Lower left (#17#): treat it too. There’s still meaningful pocketing, and the priority is protecting the second molar beside it,= especially with an existing implant nearby. • Uppers (#1# and #16#): don’t remove them automatically. We want the surgeon to show us the specific reason each upper needs to come out - disease, decay, position, or whether they would become nonfunctional after the lowers are removed. • PRF for the two lower sockets: reasonable. But that decision is separate from the anesthesia decision. • General anesthesia: ask why it is necessary for this patient. If GA is mainly for comfort or workflow rather than a medical necessity, we want to discuss the other appropriate options the surgeon is willing to offer - local anesthesia, nitrous, oral sedation, IV sedation, or even staging the procedure. And this is where I started to understand what Elon means when he talks about AI helping reduce poverty. Imagine giving this level of reasoning to anyone with internet. Someone who can’t afford three specialist opinions can still upload their records, understand what they were told, organize the evidence, and walk into the appointment asking much better questions. Someone in a small town or a poor country may not have the best specialist nearby. But increasingly, they can have access to powerful medical reasoning right in their pocket. It may not fully replace the world's best surgeon... the surgeon will still need to examine the patient, explain the risks, and performs the procedure... for now, until Optimus arrives. But AI will completely change how informed the patient is before making the decision. This is what democratizing intelligence starts to look like.

I’ve spent so much of my life wandering through galleries in New York — ducking into openings, tracking down a particular work I just had to see in person, encountering exhibitions that have stayed with me for years. Now, surreally, one of those gallery shows is mine. THIS PLACE WAS HOME BEFORE I LIVED HERE: POEMS AFTER JANGAR (Sept 25 - Nov 6) begins with Jangar, the centuries-old Kalmyk-Mongolian oral epic, and with the idea of poetry as a technology of inheritance: a way of carrying language, memory, identity, and imagination across time, distance, generations. The works move between ancestral and contemporary systems of transmission: oral tradition, beads, binary code, scrolls, symbols, cyanotypes, sculpture, voice, verse, generative imagery. They continue my longstanding interest in the digital as something handmade and embodied — something we touch, count, and craft with the digits of the hand — and in language as simultaneously visceral and virtual, a hybrid being not unlike the one we’ve become, and are becoming. They reflect my fascination with resonances between my nomadic roots and the ceaseless movement and “placelessness” of our increasingly mobile, networked world. And they deepen my curiosity about how one of humanity’s oldest technologies, poetic intelligence — a synthesis of emotion and algorithm we use to make meaning — might help us better understand the ones we are creating now. Opening tonight, 6–8 PM SAPAR Contemporary 9 N. Moore Street, New York There will be Kalmyk tea…and my mother has made bortzig… I’ll also be around this afternoon and Saturday morning for walkthroughs if you can’t make it tonight — please send a note to arrange a time.