Paibul

“In practice, the social mirror had helped to overthrow the conceit of a single, unified, and regimented ‘Thai culture’ or ‘Thai nation’. What remained was something more casual, and more subject to personal interpretation.”
― Chris Baker, A History of Thailand

“Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA—“one damn thing after another”—without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Khaosai, Somluck, Paveena, and Mum all came from the rural northeast. Religion, song, sport, and comedy broadened the class range of the social mirror and breached old psychological”
― Chris Baker, A History of Thailand