The Secret Service has designated Nantucket a "No Drone Zone" ahead of President Biden's Thanksgiving visit. "Due to protective operations in Nantucket, MA, the Secret Service, in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has established a drone flight restriction from November 23, 2021 to November 28, 2021," the agency said in a press release. The restriction applies to all aircraft and pilots, including drone pilots. The Bidens were scheduled to arrive at Nantucket Memorial Airport at 7:10 p.m. Tuesday, the White House Press Office announced this week. The 46th president is a frequent visitor to the Massachusetts coastal island.

Between 2009 and 2017, approximately 18,458 unique bills were introduced to the legislature of Massachusetts (out of 33,201 total). I know this because Dru Tarr, a legislative aide at the Massachusetts House of Representatives, very kindly compiled the publicly available list of bills into a neural network-digestible format. A neural network is a kind of computer program I train to imitate human data, usually to humorous effect. It looks at examples and then learns to generate more like them (at least, that's the idea). So, I gave the neural network this set of bills.

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the "sculpting evolution" group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If the residents of Nantucket agree, Esvelt intends to use those tools to rewrite the DNA of white-footed mice to make them immune to the bacteria that cause Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. He and his team would breed the mice in the laboratory and then, as an initial experiment, release them on an uninhabited island. If the number of infected ticks begins to plummet, he would seek permission to repeat the process on Nantucket and on nearby Martha's Vineyard. More than a quarter of Nantucket's residents have been infected with Lyme, which has become one of the most rapidly spreading diseases in the United States. The illness is often accompanied by a red bull's-eye rash, along with fever and chills. When the disease is caught early enough, it can be cured in most cases with a single course of antibiotics. For many people, though, pain and neurological symptoms can persist for years. In communities throughout the Northeast, the fear of ticks has changed the nature of summer itself--few parents these days would permit a child to run barefoot through the grass or wander blithely into the woods. "What if we could wave our hands and make this problem go away?" Esvelt asked the two dozen officials and members of the public who had assembled at the island's police station for his presentation. He explained that white-footed mice are the principal reservoir of Lyme disease, which they pass, through ticks, to humans.