Michael Bilow

A Toast!: RKO Army Raises $4,100 for RI Pride Food Drive

“The Rocky Horror Stay-at-Home Show” was an online event on May 8 that raised more than $4,100 for the RI Pride Emergency Supply Drive, a COVID-19 relief program that provides boxes containing a one-week supply of food and hygiene supplies to those in need. After The Rocky Horror Picture Show film was released in 1975 […]

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Smoothing the Curve: Recent data display from the gov is more artistic than mathematic

RI Gov. Gina Raimondo at her press conference on Saturday, May 2, displayed a chart showing new hospitalizations per day from March 13 to April 26. The point of the chart, the governor claimed, was to illustrate discontinuities on April 1, “Two weeks after first closures,” and April 13, “Two weeks after stay at home […]

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Pandemic Non-fiction: What you don’t know can kill you

There is no shortage of books about diseases through human history, but a few have become definitive classics. I’ve curated an admittedly highly opinionated selection of the best. Some books that arguably would have qualified have been left off simply because they are too old, and medicine changes so rapidly that it could be misleading […]

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Opinion – Stop Criticizing Shepard Fairey’s “RI Angel of Hope and Strength”

At her daily press briefing on April 25, RI Gov. Gina Raimondo announced an arts initiative, inviting anyone in whatever medium to submit original family-friendly work on a new website RIarts.org created for that purpose. The governor said that she contacted internationally renowned artist Shepard Fairey and asked him to help by creating a work […]

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Crisis Standards of Care Reviews Ordered at All RI Hospitals

Reviews of “Crisis Standards of Care” documents from all hospitals in RI have been ordered by the Department of Health (DoH), according to a statement by its director, Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, at the governor’s press conference on Apr 17. Such documents set out rules for rationing limited resources, such as intensive care unit (ICU) beds […]

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RI COVID-19 Daily Press Conference: April 3, 2020

Cloth-based face coverings RI Department of Health (DoH) Director Nicole Alexander-Scott, following new federal guidance, advised everyone to wear cloth-based face coverings, such as bandannas, that cover the mouth and nose. Face coverings can be hand-sewn or improvised from T-shirts and scarves. These are not intended to protect the wearer but to prevent the wearer, […]

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News Analysis: Cannabis Proposal Focuses on Medical as Lead-In to Recreational

There is a famously sarcastic aphorism “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made,” but the Rhode Island General Assembly despite all of the unpleasant grinding often fails even to produce sausage. While the legislature has dithered for nearly a decade about legalizing recreational use of cannabis, […]

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