newyorker--2020-08-02--Fighting the Coronavirus, from New York to Utah

In late March , Scott Aberegg , a critical-care doctor at the University of Utah , was eating lunch in his hospital cafeteria .
On his phone , he noticed an e-mail that was circulating among the trainees in his department .
It was from the American Thoracic Society , a professional organization of physicians who treat lung disease and critical illness .
“ As you have undoubtedly heard , there is a coronavirus surge in New York City , ” the message read .
“ The situation is dire .
.
.
and your colleagues need your help.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as well as free travel , housing , and meals to doctors who volunteered to work in the city ’ s hospitals .
The e-mail was so extraordinary that Aberegg wondered if it could be a scam .
Aberegg grew up on a small horse farm in Alliance , Ohio , about sixty miles southeast of Cleveland .
His father worked in retail at Sears and later trained horses and sold livestock equipment ; Aberegg was the first in his family to attend college .
In the winter of 1997 , when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ medical school at Ohio State , he did a rotation with James Gadek , a legendary critical-care doctor .
A few weeks in , Gadek heard that a trainee ’ s relative was dying in a hospital several hours away .
The medical team there believed the case to be hopeless ; Gadek rode down in an ambulance , brought the patient back , and started treatment himself , in his own I.C.U .
The patient recovered .
Watching his supervisor go to such lengths , Aberegg thought , I want to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Salt Lake City , he replied to the e-mail from the American Thoracic Society , saying that he was available .
Around the same time , Tony Edwards , a third-year critical-care fellow who worked at Aberegg ’ s hospital , got the same e-mail .
He and his wife , Ashley , a former I.C.U .
nurse , had been working in Dallas in 2014 , when the first Ebola patient on American soil—a man fleeing the outbreak in Liberia—grew sick there , and the virus threatened to spread .
Tony was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Ashley ’ s I.C.U .
was chosen as the one to which Ebola patients would be sent if the outbreak grew .
Though the virus was contained , a patient died and two nurses were infected .
The Edwardses felt that they ’ d experienced a near-miss .
“ We kind of went through the drill before , ” Ashley said .
“ Being through that got us ready for this.
” At dinner , Tony told Ashley about the e-mail .
She ’ d seen it , too , and also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I.C.U.-trained nurses was , in many cases , even greater than the need for physicians .
Soon afterward , the Edwardses learned that Aberegg had volunteered as well .
The three began making preparations .
Aberegg backed out of a family vacation .
The Edwardses began arranging child care for their fourteen-month-old daughter .
Tony ’ s mother , Marianne , cried when she heard that they ’ d volunteered ; she agreed to drive from Denver to Salt Lake City to take care of the baby .
Before leaving , Tony and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t take effect for another month .
They tried to make a joke out of it .
Tony told his mother , “ If we get sick , make sure you keep us alive until then !
” In early April , when New York City was recording around five thousand new coronavirus cases per day , I met Aberegg in a makeshift I.C.U .
in the hospital where I work , on the East Side .
We stood near the central nursing station .
Doctors and nurses darted around us ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The wooden doors on the patients ’ rooms had been taken down and replaced with metal ones ; they had large glass windows that allowed us to see the patients , connected to ventilators .
On each window , dry-erase markers were used to record ventilator settings , oxygen levels , medication rates , and the number and location of the tubes and catheters keeping each patient alive .
Aberegg , muscular and no-nonsense , seemed relatively at ease .
“ When someone says they need help , you go help them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his decision to come .
“ If they didn ’ t need help , they wouldn ’ t be asking.
” He had arrived a few days before , and was staying in a hospital-run hotel across the street , in a room two floors up from the Edwardses .
He had already seen dozens of critically ill COVID-19 patients .
In the mornings , he met Tony in the I.C.U.
, and they talked about what had happened overnight : some patients had improved and might be extubated , others had worsened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ started their rounds .
Later , I went to see Tony and Ashley in their hotel room , where we sat pushed back from the small dining table , six feet from one another , with our masks and surgical caps on .
They recalled the frenzied week between their decision to volunteer and their arrival in New York .
Ashley , who had changed her specialty from critical care to interventional radiology , had reviewed I.C.U .
procedures online and in old textbooks ; Tony , while caring for patients in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out the requirements for New York State credentialling .
Twelve hours before they were set to depart , the airline cancelled their flight .
They scrambled to book another .
On the way to the airport , Tony became apprehensive .
“ He was freaking out , ” Ashley said .
“ He was shaking and couldn ’ t talk .
That ’ s when I think it hit him.
” On their flight , there were fewer than a dozen passengers , all wearing masks .
There was no food or drinks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hungry when they landed at J.F.K.
, a little after midnight .
As they walked through the empty terminal , past a lone T.S.A .
officer sitting in a chair , their sense of unease grew .
Their Uber driver seemed tense .
At the hotel , they ate a pizza they ’ d ordered from a food-delivery app .
Five hours later , Tony picked up his I.D .
badge and got to work .
Later , Ashley went to an office in midtown to complete her credentialling process .
Afterward , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lights were on and the signs were flashing , but the streets were deserted .
They ’ d been to New York before , but not this version .
For Tony , nervous energy quickly gave way to reflexive action .
There was almost no time to meet his new colleagues .
His first day was marked by a constant flow of patients : just as one was stabilized , another arrived , gasping for breath or already intubated .
When a spare moment presented itself , he and his team would swap @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few studies that had been published .
He felt disoriented , not just by the tumult of the ward and the uncertainties of the virus but by the unfamiliar faces and layout of a new hospital .
One morning , he entered a break room and sank , exhausted , into a chair .
“ Hey !
You ’ re the Utah guy , ” one doctor said .
Around him , many others were reviewing cases and debating treatments .
He had known that all of the units on his floor had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now did he realize that the same was true of nearly the whole hospital .
He took the stairs down to a surgical floor and made his way along a hallway with operating rooms on both sides .
There , he got a hint of the pandemic ’ s true scale : in each room , rows of unconscious patients were connected to ventilators , their alarms echoing eerily down the empty corridor .
“ It was straight out of a science-fiction movie , ” he recalled .

In late March, Scott Aberegg, a critical-care doctor at the University of Utah, was eating lunch in his hospital cafeteria. On his phone, he noticed an e-mail that was circulating among the trainees in his department. It was from the American Thoracic Society, a professional organization of physicians who treat lung disease and critical illness. “As you have undoubtedly heard, there is a coronavirus surge in New York City,” the message read. “The situation is dire . . . and your colleagues need your help.” The e-mail offered same-day credentialling and licensing, as well as free travel, housing, and meals to doctors who volunteered to work in the city’s hospitals. The e-mail was so extraordinary that Aberegg wondered if it could be a scam.
Aberegg grew up on a small horse farm in Alliance, Ohio, about sixty miles southeast of Cleveland. His father worked in retail at Sears and later trained horses and sold livestock equipment; Aberegg was the first in his family to attend college. In the winter of 1997, when he was in his third year of medical school at Ohio State, he did a rotation with James Gadek, a legendary critical-care doctor. A few weeks in, Gadek heard that a trainee’s relative was dying in a hospital several hours away. The medical team there believed the case to be hopeless; Gadek rode down in an ambulance, brought the patient back, and started treatment himself, in his own I.C.U. The patient recovered. Watching his supervisor go to such lengths, Aberegg thought, I want to be like that guy. Now, in Salt Lake City, he replied to the e-mail from the American Thoracic Society, saying that he was available.
Around the same time, Tony Edwards, a third-year critical-care fellow who worked at Aberegg’s hospital, got the same e-mail. He and his wife, Ashley, a former I.C.U. nurse, had been working in Dallas in 2014, when the first Ebola patient on American soil—a man fleeing the outbreak in Liberia—grew sick there, and the virus threatened to spread. Tony was a medical resident in the infectious-disease service; Ashley’s I.C.U. was chosen as the one to which Ebola patients would be sent if the outbreak grew. Though the virus was contained, a patient died and two nurses were infected. The Edwardses felt that they’d experienced a near-miss. “We kind of went through the drill before,” Ashley said. “Being through that got us ready for this.”
At dinner, Tony told Ashley about the e-mail. She’d seen it, too, and also wanted to go: the need for I.C.U.-trained nurses was, in many cases, even greater than the need for physicians. Soon afterward, the Edwardses learned that Aberegg had volunteered as well. The three began making preparations. Aberegg backed out of a family vacation. The Edwardses began arranging child care for their fourteen-month-old daughter. Tony’s mother, Marianne, cried when she heard that they’d volunteered; she agreed to drive from Denver to Salt Lake City to take care of the baby. Before leaving, Tony and Ashley bought life-insurance policies, which wouldn’t take effect for another month. They tried to make a joke out of it. Tony told his mother, “If we get sick, make sure you keep us alive until then!”
Tony Edwards, a critical-care fellow in Utah, spent part of the spring treating coronavirus patients in New York City. Photograph by Lindsay D'Addato for The New Yorker
In early April, when New York City was recording around five thousand new coronavirus cases per day, I met Aberegg in a makeshift I.C.U. in the hospital where I work, on the East Side. We stood near the central nursing station. Doctors and nurses darted around us; alarms sounded; monitors flashed red warnings. The wooden doors on the patients’ rooms had been taken down and replaced with metal ones; they had large glass windows that allowed us to see the patients, connected to ventilators. On each window, dry-erase markers were used to record ventilator settings, oxygen levels, medication rates, and the number and location of the tubes and catheters keeping each patient alive. Aberegg, muscular and no-nonsense, seemed relatively at ease. “When someone says they need help, you go help them,” he told me, describing his decision to come. “If they didn’t need help, they wouldn’t be asking.” He had arrived a few days before, and was staying in a hospital-run hotel across the street, in a room two floors up from the Edwardses. He had already seen dozens of critically ill COVID-19 patients. In the mornings, he met Tony in the I.C.U., and they talked about what had happened overnight: some patients had improved and might be extubated, others had worsened and needed immediate attention. Then they started their rounds.
Later, I went to see Tony and Ashley in their hotel room, where we sat pushed back from the small dining table, six feet from one another, with our masks and surgical caps on. They recalled the frenzied week between their decision to volunteer and their arrival in New York. Ashley, who had changed her specialty from critical care to interventional radiology, had reviewed I.C.U. procedures online and in old textbooks; Tony, while caring for patients in his Utah I.C.U., had tried to sort out the requirements for New York State credentialling. Twelve hours before they were set to depart, the airline cancelled their flight. They scrambled to book another. On the way to the airport, Tony became apprehensive. “He was freaking out,” Ashley said. “He was shaking and couldn’t talk. That’s when I think it hit him.”
On their flight, there were fewer than a dozen passengers, all wearing masks. There was no food or drinks service on board, and they were hungry when they landed at J.F.K., a little after midnight. As they walked through the empty terminal, past a lone T.S.A. officer sitting in a chair, their sense of unease grew. Their Uber driver seemed tense. At the hotel, they ate a pizza they’d ordered from a food-delivery app. Five hours later, Tony picked up his I.D. badge and got to work. Later, Ashley went to an office in midtown to complete her credentialling process. Afterward, she walked to Times Square. The lights were on and the signs were flashing, but the streets were deserted. They’d been to New York before, but not this version.
For Tony, nervous energy quickly gave way to reflexive action. There was almost no time to meet his new colleagues. His first day was marked by a constant flow of patients: just as one was stabilized, another arrived, gasping for breath or already intubated. When a spare moment presented itself, he and his team would swap theories about the coronavirus and discuss the few studies that had been published. He felt disoriented, not just by the tumult of the ward and the uncertainties of the virus but by the unfamiliar faces and layout of a new hospital. One morning, he entered a break room and sank, exhausted, into a chair. “Hey! You’re the Utah guy,” one doctor said. Around him, many others were reviewing cases and debating treatments. He had known that all of the units on his floor had been transformed into COVID-19 wards; only now did he realize that the same was true of nearly the whole hospital. He took the stairs down to a surgical floor and made his way along a hallway with operating rooms on both sides. There, he got a hint of the pandemic’s true scale: in each room, rows of unconscious patients were connected to ventilators, their alarms echoing eerily down the empty corridor. “It was straight out of a science-fiction movie,” he recalled.
In the evenings, Tony would head back to the hotel. Sometimes, Aberegg would stop by for a drink or dinner. They’d eat leftovers or takeout from any place that would deliver; then Aberegg would go to his room to FaceTime with his family, while the Edwardses would do the same with Marianne and their daughter. With each passing day, it got harder to be away from home. Ashley’s credentials had been held up, and she began making plans to head back to Utah early. But the need for critical-care clinicians in New York was growing, and Tony Edwards’s and Aberegg’s duties were expanding. In addition to treating patients, they were now teaching doctors from other specialties—hospitalists, cardiologists—the specifics of work in the I.C.U. Masked, gowned, gloved, and goggled, Edwards and Aberegg led these doctors from room to room every morning; they repositioned patients, fiddled with ventilator settings, adjusted sedative medications, and explained their choices. A day on which a single patient was extubated was cause for celebration. Ashley flew home; Edwards and Aberegg continued working with their team. They started staying late at the hospital after their shifts had ended, to talk with the group about what had happened and to plan for the following morning.
In the days that followed, the surge peaked—there were nearly a thousand COVID-19 deaths a day in New York during this time—and then diminished. As the flow of new patients ebbed, and new doctors started work, Edwards and Aberegg began preparing to go home, too. Near the end of their time in New York, Justin Kingery, a doctor with whom they’d grown close in the I.C.U., handed them a goodbye letter. Addressed to “Scott and Tedwards”—his nickname for Tony—it began with a description of “the overwhelming sense of community” that Kingery had experienced while growing up “in the coal fields of West Virginia.” There, Kingery wrote, the desperation that set in after the coal mines started to fail had been offset by the feeling of “everyone helping, everyone pushing forward.” Recalling the death of a neighbor in the mines, Kingery wrote, what stood out in his mind was not the tragedy itself but the communal response to it. When he’d left West Virginia for New York, he had imagined that this communal feeling would never be replaced.
Then I met you two. Two renegades from Utah who flew literally into the most dangerous city in the world from a viral perspective. Two people who weren’t required to help but were standing in front of me nonetheless. Two people who could have easily lived great lives and “prayed for us,” etc. like the rest of the world. But here you were, helping with top notch ICU care, teaching us physiology along the way . . . in short, kicking ass and taking names in the face of danger.
In the envelope, Kingery included a piece of coal-mining scrip: one of the metal coins, for use at the company store, with which past generations of miners in his town had been paid. It was, he wrote, “a physical symbol of a deep sense of Appalachian community, very very similar to the sense of community you brought here.”
In the middle of April, Edwards left for the airport. The pandemic had begun weighing on him: the flow of COVID-19 patients was unending, and many were dying. “I don’t think I could have done one more shift,” he said. At J.F.K., the terminal was as empty as it had been when he’d arrived; he trudged along its automated walkways, now frozen and empty. The trip home added to his exhaustion: with routes severely restricted, he had to fly from New York to Detroit and then to Minneapolis before landing in Salt Lake City.
Aberegg left soon afterward. He arrived home on a Sunday evening and, the next morning, went back to work in the University of Utah Hospital’s I.C.U. Everyone wanted to know about his experience. “All I could tell them was COVID is real,” he said. “It makes people really sick—a ton of them.” Later that week, he and Edwards presented what they’d learned at a division meeting. Doctors and nurses wanted to know the details of managing the disease; hospital administrators sought to understand the physical and emotional toll the pandemic took on clinicians. What could be done to support them? How could they be kept safe? Should schedules be redesigned? Edwards emphasized the importance of camaraderie. “If you don’t have a core group of people to talk to, you’re going to burn out really fast,” he said.
In anticipation of a surge, administrators cancelled elective procedures, pushed back office visits, and restructured wards. But, for much of May, the hospital was quiet. “We called it Mundane May,” Aberegg recalled. Case counts were so low that half a dozen more critical-care doctors left the hospital to volunteer in New York. The Mormon Church may have been partly responsible for the state’s gentle curve: Russell M. Nelson, the Church’s prophet and president, is a ninety-five-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon, who, in the early nineteen-fifties, helped pioneer the use of the heart-lung machine for bypass surgery. There are 3.2 million people in Utah; two million of them are members of the Mormon Church. On March 12th, while Mayor Bill de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers to dine in restaurants, and while Utah schools remained open, the Church suspended in-person services and moved to church from home; it announced that its General Conference, scheduled for April, would become a virtual event. Nelson spoke about the importance of both spirituality and science, and church elders joined other local religious organizations in urging everyone in Utah to wear masks, asking them to forgo “a small measure of comfort for the sake of saving lives.”


newyorker--2020-08-02--The Cryptic Crossword: No. 79

The Cryptic Crossword: No. 79

Some clues have been edited for clarity .
Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle ’ s answers in @ @ @

Some clues have been edited for clarity. Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle’s answers in our archive.


newyorker--2020-08-02--How a Cheese Goes Extinct

How a Cheese Goes Extinct

The late Mary Holbrook , a white-haired maestro in the British cheesemaking world , was known for her soft cheeses and her sharp temper .
Once a week , she made the trip from Sleight Farm , her home in the southwest of England , to London to check on her wares as they ripened in the maturation rooms of an upscale cheese shop .
Holbrook ’ s apprentices , hardened to her singular style of mentorship , knew to brace themselves for reprimands when she returned .
Occasionally , though , Holbrook would come back with bags of treats—yogurt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the kitchen table of her cold mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse on the crest of a hill , and they knew that the cheese must be tasting good , and that Mary ’ s little world was in order .
Before turning to cheesemaking , in the nineteen-seventies , Holbrook had been an archeologist .
Some forty years into her second career , she still had a way of getting history to rise to the surface .
Sleight Farm was littered with relics , pieces of rusting machinery scattered across the rolling fields .
“ If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who worked with Holbrook for a little over three and a half years , said , “ they broke forever.
” In one shabby outbuilding , alongside vats of oil and parts of a tractor , craggy wheels of hard Old Ford cheese aged in the cool , damp shade .
In a room along a little track , French influences converged with old English traditions of goat ’ s- and sheep ’ s-milk cheesemaking .
There , Holbrook made Tymsboro , an ash-rubbed pyramid of soft cheese , with bright , peppery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , meanwhile , borrowed from Portuguese tradition , using a vegetarian rennet made from thistle stamens .
As Holbrook ’ s renown spread—as well as gaining acclaim for her cheeses , she made her name by supplying pork to some of London ’ s most famous restaurants—aspiring cheesemakers made pilgrimages to the farm , keen to learn from the woman who had built a reputation as one of Britain ’ s finest .
Some journeyed down for only a week or two ; others stayed for years .
In 2004 , Martin Gott @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sleight Farm from their jobs in Lancashire , in the northwest of England .
They bought a flock of sheep and rented some grazing land and barn space from Holbrook , developing their own washed-rind sheep ’ s cheese—St .
James—in snatched moments when they weren ’ t farming and cheesemaking for Holbrook .
Their vision didn ’ t always align with Holbrook ’ s : Gott recalls that , much of the time , he was left to make his own mistakes , with his mentor only chiming in to express disappointment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moments , too .
In the evening , they would leaf through cheese-industry catalogues , laughing about the incredible strangeness of being able to buy starter cultures—packages of concentrated bacteria designed to help the milk sour safely and with the right flavor—with futuristic names like G017-B .
“ I wouldn ’ t say that Mary taught us a huge amount of practical cheesemaking , ” Gott said .
“ But she put us in a position where we could learn.
” If the work of an archeologist is to let objects tell their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forward in her cheesemaking , too : smelling , tasting , observing , and touching the cheese as it was made and aged , letting it speak for itself .
Holbrook died in February , 2019 , at the age of eighty , following a short illness .
She left behind no children , and her cousin ’ s daughter , Catherine Ochiltree , was unable to continue the difficult work of farming and cheesemaking in her absence .
Ochiltree and her partner were travelling nearly a hundred and fifty miles from their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weekends , in addition to working full-time jobs .
“ We just didn ’ t have that resilience , ” Ochiltree said .
“ We were running on a very skeleton staff .
I took the decision that we needed to bow out , so we started to dry the goats off and started to sell the herd.
” By July of that year , the farm ceased production , and Holbrook ’ s cheeses—Old Ford , Cardo , Sleightlett , and Tymsboro—slipped out of the living tradition and into the pages of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small piece of the world—one lump of microbe-riddled milk curds—but each is an endpoint of centuries of tradition .
Some disappear for months or years ; others never return .
The cheesemonger and writer Ned Palmer told me that , when a cheese is lost , “ Your grief reaches back into the past—into decades and centuries and millennia of culture .
You feel all of that.
” When you talk with cheese aficionados , it doesn ’ t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way : away from curds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toward matters of life and death .
With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists , they discuss great lineages and endangered species , painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history .
In his classic “ The Great British Cheese Book , ” from 1982 , Major Patrick Rance—a monocled founding father of modern British cheese—intersperses his tales of surviving regional cheeses with obituaries for those that never made it so far , going as far as to describe their disappearance as extinction .
Under “ Extinct cheeses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Rance pays his respects to a lost Newmarket cheese , “ a 40lb marigold-coloured cheese , ” pressed under cloth and rubbed with salt and cream , the recipe for which was unearthed in a 1774 housekeeping manual .
There are countless ways for a cheese to disappear .
Some , like Holbrook ’ s , die with their makers .
Others fall out of favor because they ’ re simply not good : one extinct Suffolk cheese , “ stony-hard ” because it was made only with skimmed milk , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Hampshire Chronicle reported that one ship ’ s cargo of grindstones was eaten by rats while the neighboring haul of Suffolk cheese escaped untouched .
As Palmer has outlined in his book , “ A Cheesemonger ’ s History of the British Isles , ” the fate of a cheese is often entangled with economic and political circumstances , as well as the failings of its makers .
During the Second World War , much milk was redirected away from cheese production and toward drinking .
The small amount of cheese @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strictly regulated , with only a small roster of cheeses—mostly hard cow ’ s-milk cheeses similar to Cheddar—approved for production .
Soft and blue cheeses , which tended to contain higher moisture levels than those permitted in ration cheese , and which were less durable , didn ’ t make the cut .
Within two decades , the number of farmhouse cheesemakers had plummeted from more than a thousand to less than two hundred .
Even if a cheese can be rescued , the act of bringing it back to life can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ founder of the artisanal-cheese retailer Neal ’ s Yard Dairy , Randolph Hodgson , and the cheesemaker Joe Schneider decided to make a raw-milk version of Stilton , the process was like trying to resurrect the dinosaurs using only a sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex on the back of a napkin for reference .
Although Stilton is celebrated as a jewel among British cheeses , a raw-milk version hadn ’ t been made since the late nineteen-eighties , when a health scare led the final few creameries making it to switch to pasteurized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an authentic Stilton taste and texture—the way it had been made for more than two hundred years—Schneider had to rely on the “ taste memory ” of people who had last eaten the cheese a decade earlier .
“ I felt like a blind man trying to navigate my way , while these guys shouted orders at me to move a little bit left or a little bit right , ” he said .
He found images in old books of wheels of Stilton stacked high at market : these scraps of information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , moisture , and structure of the traditional version .
“ You could never do that with a modern Stilton , ” Schneider said .
“ It would crush—it ’ s too broken down and soft .
”

The late Mary Holbrook, a white-haired maestro in the British cheesemaking world, was known for her soft cheeses and her sharp temper. Once a week, she made the trip from Sleight Farm, her home in the southwest of England, to London to check on her wares as they ripened in the maturation rooms of an upscale cheese shop. Holbrook’s apprentices, hardened to her singular style of mentorship, knew to brace themselves for reprimands when she returned. Occasionally, though, Holbrook would come back with bags of treats—yogurt, mangoes, sweets—which she spilled across the kitchen table of her cold mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse on the crest of a hill, and they knew that the cheese must be tasting good, and that Mary’s little world was in order.
Before turning to cheesemaking, in the nineteen-seventies, Holbrook had been an archeologist. Some forty years into her second career, she still had a way of getting history to rise to the surface. Sleight Farm was littered with relics, pieces of rusting machinery scattered across the rolling fields. “If they broke,” Julianna Sedli, who worked with Holbrook for a little over three and a half years, said, “they broke forever.” In one shabby outbuilding, alongside vats of oil and parts of a tractor, craggy wheels of hard Old Ford cheese aged in the cool, damp shade. In a room along a little track, French influences converged with old English traditions of goat’s- and sheep’s-milk cheesemaking. There, Holbrook made Tymsboro, an ash-rubbed pyramid of soft cheese, with bright, peppery notes. Her semi-soft washed-rind Cardo cheese, meanwhile, borrowed from Portuguese tradition, using a vegetarian rennet made from thistle stamens.
As Holbrook’s renown spread—in addition to gaining acclaim for her cheeses, she made her name by supplying pork to some of London’s most famous restaurants—aspiring cheesemakers made pilgrimages to the farm, keen to learn from the woman who had built a reputation as one of Britain’s finest. Some journeyed down for only a week or two; others stayed for years. In 2004, Martin Gott and his partner, Nicola Robinson, moved to Sleight Farm from their jobs in Lancashire, in the northwest of England. They bought a flock of sheep and rented some grazing land and barn space from Holbrook, developing their own washed-rind sheep’s cheese—St. James—in snatched moments when they weren’t farming and cheesemaking for Holbrook. Their vision didn’t always align with Holbrook’s: Gott recalls that, much of the time, he was left to make his own mistakes, with his mentor only chiming in to express disappointment or dissent. But there were bright moments, too. In the evening, they would leaf through cheese-industry catalogues, laughing about the incredible strangeness of being able to buy starter cultures—packages of concentrated bacteria designed to help the milk sour safely and with the right flavor—with futuristic names like G017-B.
“I wouldn’t say that Mary taught us a huge amount of practical cheesemaking,” Gott said. “But she put us in a position where we could learn.” If the work of an archeologist is to let objects tell their own story, Mary carried this philosophy forward in her cheesemaking, too: smelling, tasting, observing, and touching the cheese as it was made and aged, letting it speak for itself.
Holbrook died in February, 2019, at the age of eighty, following a short illness. She left behind no children, and her cousin’s daughter, Catherine Ochiltree, was unable to continue the difficult work of farming and cheesemaking in her absence. Ochiltree and her partner were travelling nearly a hundred and fifty miles from their home, in Kent, to the farm on weekends, in addition to working full-time jobs. “We just didn’t have that resilience,” Ochiltree said. “We were running on a very skeleton staff. I took the decision that we needed to bow out, so we started to dry the goats off and started to sell the herd.”
By July of that year, the farm ceased production, and Holbrook’s cheeses—Old Ford, Cardo, Sleightlett, and Tymsboro—slipped out of the living tradition and into the pages of history. A cheese is just one small piece of the world—one lump of microbe-riddled milk curds—but each is an end point of centuries of tradition. Some disappear for months or years; others never return. The cheesemonger and writer Ned Palmer told me that, when a cheese is lost, “Your grief reaches back into the past—into decades and centuries and millennia of culture. You feel all of that.”
When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history. In his classic “The Great British Cheese Book,” from 1982, Major Patrick Rance—a monocled founding father of modern British cheese—intersperses his tales of surviving regional cheeses with obituaries for those that never made it so far, going as far as to describe their disappearance as extinction. Under “Extinct cheeses of the Midlands and East Anglia,” Rance pays his respects to a lost Newmarket cheese, “a 40lb marigold-coloured cheese,” pressed under cloth and rubbed with salt and cream, the recipe for which was unearthed in a 1774 housekeeping manual.
There are countless ways for a cheese to disappear. Some, like Holbrook’s, die with their makers. Others fall out of favor because they’re simply not good: one extinct Suffolk cheese, “stony-hard” because it was made only with skimmed milk, was so notoriously bad that, in 1825, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that one ship’s cargo of grindstones was eaten by rats while the neighboring haul of Suffolk cheese escaped untouched. As Palmer has outlined in his book, “A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles,” the fate of a cheese is often entangled with economic and political circumstances, as well as the failings of its makers. During the Second World War, much milk was redirected away from cheese production and toward drinking. The small amount of cheese that was permitted to be made was strictly regulated, with only a small roster of cheeses—mostly hard cow’s-milk cheeses similar to Cheddar—approved for production. Soft and blue cheeses, which tended to contain higher moisture levels than those permitted in ration cheese, and which were less durable, didn’t make the cut. Within two decades, the number of farmhouse cheesemakers had plummeted from more than a thousand to less than two hundred.
Even if a cheese can be rescued, the act of bringing it back to life can be fraught. In 2004, when the founder of the artisanal-cheese retailer Neal’s Yard Dairy, Randolph Hodgson, and the cheesemaker Joe Schneider decided to make a raw-milk version of Stilton, the process was like trying to resurrect the dinosaurs using only a sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex on the back of a napkin for reference. Although Stilton is celebrated as a jewel among British cheeses, a raw-milk version hadn’t been made since the late nineteen-eighties, when a health scare led the final few creameries making it to switch to pasteurized milk. To find a path toward an authentic Stilton taste and texture—the way it had been made for more than two hundred years—Schneider had to rely on the “taste memory” of people who had last eaten the cheese a decade earlier. “I felt like a blind man trying to navigate my way, while these guys shouted orders at me to move a little bit left or a little bit right,” he said. He found images in old books of wheels of Stilton stacked high at market: these scraps of information gave him vital clues about the size, moisture, and structure of the traditional version. “You could never do that with a modern Stilton,” Schneider said. “It would crush—it’s too broken down and soft.”


newyorker--2020-08-02--Trump Warns That Mail-In Ballots Could Result in Voting

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Calling the situation a “ total disaster , ” Donald J. Trump warned on Sunday that the use of mail-in ballots could result in voting .
Appearing on Fox News , Trump said that there were “ all kinds of studies ” showing a “ direct link ” between mail-in ballots and votes cast .
“ Wherever you ’ ve had mail-in ballots , there have been widespread cases of voting , ” he said .
“ We ’ re not going to let that happen.
” He said that other countries have solved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” by banning mail-in ballots altogether .
“ You look at North Korea , ” Trump said .
“ They don ’ t have mail-in ballots .
They barely have mail .
They ’ re doing an amazing job.
” Raising another issue with what he called “ excessive voting , ” Trump warned that “ the more votes you have , the higher the number you have to count to.
” “ When I took my cognitive test , I had to count to ten , and that was no walk in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ And now you ’ re telling me there ’ s somebody out there who can count into the millions ?
Give me a break .
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the situation a “total disaster,” Donald J. Trump warned on Sunday that the use of mail-in ballots could result in voting.
Appearing on Fox News, Trump said that there were “all kinds of studies” showing a “direct link” between mail-in ballots and votes cast.
“Wherever you’ve had mail-in ballots, there have been widespread cases of voting,” he said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
He said that other countries have solved the problem of “too many votes” by banning mail-in ballots altogether.
“You look at North Korea,” Trump said. “They don’t have mail-in ballots. They barely have mail. They’re doing an amazing job.”
Raising another issue with what he called “excessive voting,” Trump warned that “the more votes you have, the higher the number you have to count to.”
“When I took my cognitive test, I had to count to ten, and that was no walk in the park,” he said. “And now you’re telling me there’s somebody out there who can count into the millions? Give me a break.”


newyorker--2020-08-03--The Uncertainties Facing New York City’s Young Essential Workers

Unity Prep is a tight-knit community ; this year , there were only two hundred and seventy-seven students , with eighty-one in the senior class .
Nearly all are Black and Latino .
“ Children have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize , ” Gonzalez said , of the tendency of his students to joke around with him , even when he was checking in about difficult personal situations .
He worried about their options after they left the protective environment of his school .
“ There is going to be a sweeping reconsideration of college if students are not on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rates , especially at schools that are in not in New York State or are private , are extremely high , ” Alia Roth , the director of academic counselling at the school , who helps students plan for options after graduation , said .
“ Our students are questioning whether or not it ’ s worth it to pay or take out loans.
” For students going into culinary , paramedic , and other technical programs , or who need hands-on teaching , online learning will be a struggle .
And , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prospects look even dimmer .
The mass protests of police violence against Black people added another layer to the crisis facing students .
Though many had had experiences with racism , others had not .
One student told Gonzalez that she had never had a bad interaction with the police , but that recently , while having a socially distanced picnic in the park with her boyfriend and friends , she felt scared when she saw police officers nearby .
“ She had the realization that there are good officers , and then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to people who look like her and the people she was with , ” Gonzalez said .
“ And that it ’ s very hard to tell which one was which until it ’ s too late to get out of a situation.
” On a recent afternoon , Caitlin Lindsay was walking to work at the same supermarket where Watt works ; Lindsay , who is eighteen , and Watt are best friends .
They both applied for jobs in the first days of the pandemic .
Her curly hair was pulled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was wearing bright-green high-top Nike sneakers .
“ Lockdown was horrible , and I just felt bad , ” Lindsay told me .
“ I ’ m finally becoming a young adult , and my mom is gon na finally start giving me more freedom .
And I have to stay in the house ?
” As the school year wound down , Lindsay usually woke up in the morning exhausted , five minutes before her first virtual class started , at eight , and stayed in bed as she listened with her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she had an hour to get ready between her last class , and her work shift .
Before heading to the store , she showered , tried to eat something , and checked on her mom , who was working from home .
She and her mother live alone , but Lindsay also helps care for her grandmother , who is self-isolating .
For now , Lindsay dropped off fresh fruit , bread , and other items only at her grandmother ’ s front door .
“ While I ’ m working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ask , ‘ Do you need anything ?
’ If she says yes , I ’ ll just pick it up , ” Lindsay said .
She missed being close .
“ I ’ m used to hugging .
I have a really touchy family.
” She was worried about her dad , too , who lives in Nevada and works in health care .
Her parents , who are divorced , were trying to figure out how they would pay for her freshman year of college .
Lindsay ’ s grandmother was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but she planned to keep working through the summer .
“ Working is my escape , ” Lindsay said—and a way to take some control of the future .
The supermarket had cut her hours , and she was thinking about taking a second job .

Watt lives with her mother and her eleven-year old sister; her older sister, who also lives in Brooklyn, runs a restaurant in Flatbush. Watt takes care of her younger sister, helping her with homework and making sure that she eats. It was strange not to be with her friends, and the other kids in her senior class at Unity Prep, for prom and graduation. Many of them had known each other since sixth grade. Watt felt most stressed out about college: what it would be like, if she would be able to attend in person. In her free time, she rode bikes with her boyfriend or sat on stoops with him, and wondered what would happen in the fall.
“I feel tired almost every day,” she told me. “I feel tired when I go to work. I feel tired when I leave work. I think I’m just always tired.” She still needed to finish her final school projects for the year. After that, she would work more shifts at the grocery store, increasing from two or three shifts a week to four or five. “But I’ll be O.K.,” she went on. “It’s only a matter of time before things will get better.” She waved at me and started walking home.
Unity Prep is a tight-knit community; this year, there were only two hundred and seventy-seven students, with eighty-one in the senior class. Nearly all are Black and Latino. “Children have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize,” Gonzalez said, of the tendency of his students to joke around with him, even when he was checking in about difficult personal situations. He worried about their options after they left the protective environment of his school.
“There is going to be a sweeping reconsideration of college if students are not on campus in the fall, because tuition rates, especially at schools that are in not in New York State or are private, are extremely high,” Alia Roth, the director of academic counselling at the school, who helps students plan for options after graduation, said. “Our students are questioning whether or not it’s worth it to pay or take out loans.” For students going into culinary, paramedic, and other technical programs, or who need hands-on teaching, online learning will be a struggle. And, for those going straight to work, prospects look even dimmer.
The mass protests of police violence against Black people added another layer to the crisis facing students. Though many had had experiences with racism, others had not. One student told Gonzalez that she had never had a bad interaction with the police, but that recently, while having a socially distanced picnic in the park with her boyfriend and friends, she felt scared when she saw police officers nearby. “She had the realization that there are good officers, and then there are officers who will do harm to people who look like her and the people she was with,” Gonzalez said. “And that it’s very hard to tell which one was which until it’s too late to get out of a situation.”
On a recent afternoon, Caitlin Lindsay was walking to work at the same supermarket where Watt works; Lindsay, who is eighteen, and Watt are best friends. They both applied for jobs in the first days of the pandemic. Her curly hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing bright-green high-top Nike sneakers. “Lockdown was horrible, and I just felt bad,” Lindsay told me. “I’m finally becoming a young adult, and my mom is gonna finally start giving me more freedom. And I have to stay in the house?”
As the school year wound down, Lindsay usually woke up in the morning exhausted, five minutes before her first virtual class started, at eight, and stayed in bed as she listened with her laptop camera off. In the afternoon, she had an hour to get ready between her last class, and her work shift. Before heading to the store, she showered, tried to eat something, and checked on her mom, who was working from home. She and her mother live alone, but Lindsay also helps care for her grandmother, who is self-isolating. For now, Lindsay dropped off fresh fruit, bread, and other items only at her grandmother’s front door. “While I’m working, I’ll call her and ask, ‘Do you need anything?’ If she says yes, I’ll just pick it up,” Lindsay said. She missed being close. “I’m used to hugging. I have a really touchy family.” She was worried about her dad, too, who lives in Nevada and works in health care.
Her parents, who are divorced, were trying to figure out how they would pay for her freshman year of college. Lindsay’s grandmother was concerned about her safety at the grocery, but she planned to keep working through the summer. “Working is my escape,” Lindsay said—and a way to take some control of the future. The supermarket had cut her hours, and she was thinking about taking a second job.


newyorker--2020-08-03--The Second Act of Social-Media Activism

The Second Act of Social-Media Activism

Three months of quarantine taught us to live online , so it ’ s perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets .
On May 25th , the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyd ’ s murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests .
Three nights later , our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapolis ’ s Third Police Precinct .
In the course of June , uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scale—growing nationally and then internationally , leaving a series of now iconic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their wake .
Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentation—the novel , the photograph , the television—and what we ’ re witnessing feels like an exceptionally “ online ” moment of social unrest .
Indeed , the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one .
Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues , the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media .
Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate .
Protest guides , generated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram , telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests .
There are e-mail and phone-call templates , pre-scripted and mass-circulated .
Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre .
And city-council meetings , which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic , have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation .
( Well-timed appeals for the police department to “ suck my dick , ” it turns out , can be as effective online as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s uprisings evolve into today ’ s encampments , the long revolutionary summer of 2020—made all the longer by quarantine—continues apace online .
Some of this story may seem familiar .
In “ Twitter and Tear Gas : The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest , ” from 2017 , the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a “ digitally networked public sphere ” had come to shape social movements .
Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings , whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Istanbul , the Occupy action , in New York City , and the Black Lives Matter movement , in Ferguson .
For Tufekci , the use of the Internet linked these various , decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement .
Whereas “ older movements had to build their organizing capacity first , ” Tufekci argued , “ modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however , as much its peril as its promise .
After a swift expansion , spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls “ tactical freezes.
” Because they are often leaderless , and can lack “ both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions , ” they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands .
At a more fundamental level , social media ’ s corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coöptation and censorship .
Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ slacktivism ” laid out , for example , by Evgeny Morozov ’ s “ The Net Delusion , ” from 2011 .
“ Twitter and Tear Gas ” remains trenchant about how social media can and can not enact reform .
But movements change , as does technology .
Since Tufekci ’ s book was published , social media has helped represent—and , in some cases , helped organize—the Arab Spring 2.0 , France ’ s “ Yellow Vest ” movement , Puerto Rico ’ s RickyLeaks , the 2019 Iranian protests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what we might call the B.L.M .
uprising of 2020 .
This last event , still ongoing , has evinced a scale , creativity , and endurance that challenges those skeptical of the Internet ’ s ability to mediate a movement .
As Tufekci notes in her book , the real-world effects of Occupy , the Women ’ s March , and even Ferguson-era B.L.M .
were often underwhelming .
By contrast , since George Floyd ’ s death , cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets ; school districts have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bills have been introduced in Congress ; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing .
Plenty of work remains , but the link between activism , the Internet , and material action seems to have deepened .
What ’ s changed ?
The current uprisings slot neatly into Tufekci ’ s story , with one exception .
As the flurry of digital activism continues , there is no sense that this movement is unclear about its aims—abolition—or that it might collapse under a tactical freeze .
Instead , the many protest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the like have made clear both the objectives of abolition and the digital savvy of abolitionists .
It is a message so legible that even Fox News grasped it with relative ease .
Rachel Kuo , an organizer and scholar of digital activism , told me that this clarity has been shaped partly by organizers who increasingly rely on “ a combination of digital platforms , whether that ’ s Google Drive , Signal , Messenger , Slack , or other combinations of software , for collaboration , information storage , resource access @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tends to focus , understandably , on the profusion of hashtags and sleek graphics , but Kuo stressed that it was this “ back end ” work—an inventory of knowledge , a stronger sense of alliance—that has allowed digital activism to “ reflect broader concerns and visions around community safety , accessibility , and accountability.
” The uprisings might have unfolded organically , but what has sustained them is precisely what many prior networked protests lacked : preëxisting organizations with specific demands for a better world .
Some of this growth is simply @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been seven years since Black Lives Matter was founded .
Since then , groups such as the Movement for Black Lives—an explicitly abolitionist , anti-capitalist network that includes more than a hundred and fifty organizations—have lent unity and direction to a coalition that was once , perhaps , too diffuse to articulate shared principles .
These groups have also become better at using the Internet to frame , formalize , and advance their agenda .
As Sarah J. Jackson , Moya Bailey , and Brooke Foucault Welles write in “ # HashtagActivism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counterpublic , ” in which voices excluded from “ elite media spaces ” can engage “ alternative networks of debate.
” When moments of rupture occur , this counterpublic can more readily make mainstream interventions .
Recent discourse about prison and police abolition might be the clearest example of a shift in the Overton window , though Bailey points even to “ the language that we ’ re hearing on television , white supremacy being named for what it is , ” as unimaginable just a few years ago .
What ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just the clarity of its messaging , but its ability to convey that message through so much noise .
On June 2nd , the music industry launched # BlackoutTuesday , an action against police brutality that involved , among other things , Instagram and Facebook users posting plain black boxes to their accounts .
The posts often included the hashtag # BlackLivesMatter ; almost immediately , social-media users were inundated with even more posts , which explained why using that hashtag drowned out crucial information about events and resources with a sea of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia , the response illustrated how the B.L.M .
movement had honed its ability to stick to a program , and to correct those who deployed that program naïvely .
In 2014 , many people had only a thin sense of how a hashtag could organize actions or establish circles of care .
Today , “ people understand what it means to use a hashtag , ” Clark told me .
They use “ their own social media in a certain way to essentially quiet background @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that need to connect with each other the space to do so.
” The # BlackoutTuesday affair exemplified an increasing awareness of how digital tactics have material consequences .

Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyd’s murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests. Three nights later, our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct. In the course of June, uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scale—growing nationally and then internationally, leaving a series of now iconic images, videos, and exhortations in their wake. Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentation—the novel, the photograph, the television—and what we’re witnessing feels like an exceptionally “online” moment of social unrest.
Indeed, the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one. Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues, the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media. Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate. Protest guides, generated from years of on-the-ground activist experience, are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram, telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests. There are e-mail and phone-call templates, pre-scripted and mass-circulated. Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre. And city-council meetings, which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic, have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation. (Well-timed appeals for the police department to “suck my dick,” it turns out, can be as effective online as off.) As some of June’s uprisings evolve into today’s encampments, the long revolutionary summer of 2020—made all the longer by quarantine—continues apace online.
Some of this story may seem familiar. In “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a “digitally networked public sphere” had come to shape social movements. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. For Tufekci, the use of the Internet linked these various, decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement. Whereas “older movements had to build their organizing capacity first,” Tufekci argued, “modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.”
The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. After a swift expansion, spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls “tactical freezes.” Because they are often leaderless, and can lack “both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions,” they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands. At a more fundamental level, social media’s corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coöptation and censorship. Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls, even as she rejects the broader criticisms of “slacktivism” laid out, for example, by Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion,” from 2011.
“Twitter and Tear Gas” remains trenchant about how social media can and cannot enact reform. But movements change, as does technology. Since Tufekci’s book was published, social media has helped represent—and, in some cases, helped organize—the Arab Spring 2.0, France’s “Yellow Vest” movement, Puerto Rico’s RickyLeaks, the 2019 Iranian protests, the Hong Kong protests, and what we might call the B.L.M. uprising of 2020. This last event, still ongoing, has evinced a scale, creativity, and endurance that challenges those skeptical of the Internet’s ability to mediate a movement. As Tufekci notes in her book, the real-world effects of Occupy, the Women’s March, and even Ferguson-era B.L.M. were often underwhelming. By contrast, since George Floyd’s death, cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets; school districts have severed ties with police; multiple police-reform-and-accountability bills have been introduced in Congress; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing. Plenty of work remains, but the link between activism, the Internet, and material action seems to have deepened. What’s changed?
The current uprisings slot neatly into Tufekci’s story, with one exception. As the flurry of digital activism continues, there is no sense that this movement is unclear about its aims—abolition—or that it might collapse under a tactical freeze. Instead, the many protest guides, syllabi, Webinars, and the like have made clear both the objectives of abolition and the digital savvy of abolitionists. It is a message so legible that even Fox News grasped it with relative ease. Rachel Kuo, an organizer and scholar of digital activism, told me that this clarity has been shaped partly by organizers who increasingly rely on “a combination of digital platforms, whether that’s Google Drive, Signal, Messenger, Slack, or other combinations of software, for collaboration, information storage, resource access, and daily communications.” The public tends to focus, understandably, on the profusion of hashtags and sleek graphics, but Kuo stressed that it was this “back end” work—an inventory of knowledge, a stronger sense of alliance—that has allowed digital activism to “reflect broader concerns and visions around community safety, accessibility, and accountability.” The uprisings might have unfolded organically, but what has sustained them is precisely what many prior networked protests lacked: preëxisting organizations with specific demands for a better world.
Some of this growth is simply a function of time. It has been seven years since Black Lives Matter was founded. Since then, groups such as the Movement for Black Lives—an explicitly abolitionist, anti-capitalist network that includes more than a hundred and fifty organizations—have lent unity and direction to a coalition that was once, perhaps, too diffuse to articulate shared principles. These groups have also become better at using the Internet to frame, formalize, and advance their agenda. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles write in “#HashtagActivism,” social media provides a digital “counterpublic,” in which voices excluded from “elite media spaces” can engage “alternative networks of debate.” When moments of rupture occur, this counterpublic can more readily make mainstream interventions. Recent discourse about prison and police abolition might be the clearest example of a shift in the Overton window, though Bailey points even to “the language that we’re hearing on television, white supremacy being named for what it is,” as unimaginable just a few years ago.
What’s distinct about the current movement is not just the clarity of its messaging, but its ability to convey that message through so much noise. On June 2nd, the music industry launched #BlackoutTuesday, an action against police brutality that involved, among other things, Instagram and Facebook users posting plain black boxes to their accounts. The posts often included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; almost immediately, social-media users were inundated with even more posts, which explained why using that hashtag drowned out crucial information about events and resources with a sea of mute boxes. For Meredith Clark, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia, the response illustrated how the B.L.M. movement had honed its ability to stick to a program, and to correct those who deployed that program naïvely. In 2014, many people had only a thin sense of how a hashtag could organize actions or establish circles of care. Today, “people understand what it means to use a hashtag,” Clark told me. They use “their own social media in a certain way to essentially quiet background noise” and “allow those voices that need to connect with each other the space to do so.” The #BlackoutTuesday affair exemplified an increasing awareness of how digital tactics have material consequences.
Another example arrived on June 3rd, when Campaign Zero—a Black Lives Matter branch often associated with the activist DeRay Mckesson—launched a campaign, #8cantwait, to “reduce police violence.” The campaign endorsed a reformist platform, which included banning choke holds and enforcing deëscalation training; it was widely circulated, and won support from names like Jon Lovett and Ariana Grande. By the end of that weekend, though, the campaign had been roundly criticized as too moderate—and perhaps even misleading, as many of its proposals had already been adopted—and it was abandoned by many within and without the B.L.M. movement. In response, a “group of abolitionist comrades,” in the words of the human-rights lawyer Derecka Purnell, presented a competing campaign with its own hashtag: #8toabolition. The immense speed with which #8toabolition was born and broadcast illustrates the tactical efficiency of today’s abolitionists. When I spoke to three of #8toabolition’s co-writers—Mon Mohapatra, Reina Sultan, and Rachel Kuo—over Zoom, they told me that their campaign’s demands were drafted by ten different activists in a shared Google doc in the course of twenty-four hours. That speed was enabled by the networks of trust and collaboration built through years of organizing.
These networks suggest that digital activism has entered a second act, in which the tools of the Internet have been increasingly integrated into the hard-won structure of older movements. Though, as networked protest grows in scale and popularity, it still risks being hijacked by the mainstream. Any urgent circulation of information—the same memes filtering through your Instagram stories, the same looping images retweeted into your timeline—can be numbing, and any shift in the Overton window means that hegemony drifts with it. You know something has gone wrong when the San Francisco 49ers post a #BlackoutTuesday box. From the renaming (and repainting) of “Black Lives Matter Plaza” by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, to ahistorical citations of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s speeches, the discourse of Black struggle remains open to aggressive co-optation. The meme-ification of Breonna Taylor’s death—in which calls to arrest her killers are prefaced by mundane observations about, say, the weather—may be the most depressing example yet of how social media can trivialize a movement.
In “Twitter and Tear Gas,” Tufekci wrote, “The Black Lives Matter movement is young, and how it will develop further capacities remains to be seen.” The movement is older now. It has developed its tactics, its messaging, its reach—but perhaps its most striking new capacity is a sharper recognition of social media’s limits. “This movement has mastered what social media is good for,” Deva Woodly, a professor of politics at the New School, told me. “And that’s basically the meme: it’s the headline.” Those memes, Woodly said, help “codify the message” that leads to broader, deeper conversations offline, which, in turn, build on a long history of radical pedagogy. As more and more of us join those conversations, prompted by the words and images we see on our screens, it’s clear that the revolution will not be tweeted—at least, not entirely.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests


newyorker--2020-08-03--Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King”

The story of Disney ’ s “ The Lion King , ” about a cub who avenges his uncle ’ s regicide , is said to have borrowed its bones from “ Hamlet ” ( though Marlon James would say otherwise ) .
“ Black Is King , ” the new “ visual album ” from Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter , borrows its bones from “ The Lion King , ” and is comparably interested in rehearsing the drama of its source material—which is to say , not very interested at all .
The project is a cinematic adaptation of “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the Beyoncé-produced companion album to Disney ’ s 2019 remake of the film , in which she voiced the part of Nala and for which she created an original song .
“ Black Is King ” follows a young child ( Folajomi Akinmurele ) whose wayward adventures and visions provoke the question of what kind of man he will become .
Royal titles are treated , with urgency , as a means of affirming the innate worth of the human spirit , a message that the film aims especially at the many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ status of human ( and , depending on who is asked , still are ) .
Anchored by the lyrical grandeur of its soundtrack , which includes the fourteen songs co-written and co-produced by Beyoncé for “ The Gift ” ( “ BLACK PARADE , ” a bonus single on the deluxe edition of the soundtrack , plays during the credits ) , “ Black Is King ” expertly slides between talk of bloodlines and molded thrones and more modest—but far from modest—footage of impeccably styled , beautiful Black people in motion .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Is King ” was filmed in various natural and man-made climes found in Ghana , Nigeria , Belgium , the U.S. , the U.K. , and South Africa , but it consists mostly of dreamscapes , rhapsodies of high fantasy unfurled in what may be called , without insult , a loosely twined collection of music videos—which , in their serial form , more closely resemble the album “ Beyoncé , ” from 2013 , ” than “ Lemonade , ” from 2016 .
The detour from reality benefits “ Black Is King @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saddled with all the colonial baggage of rendering Africa onscreen .
For Americans , including those of the darker cast and caste , Africa tends to be little more than an idea , a formless place in which to house so much grief and longing .
In this context—the context out of which both versions of “ The Lion King ” emerge—whatever is called “ African ” functions as shorthand , connoting , in a single English word , a literally unimaginable plenitude of lives and livelihoods .
The first teaser for “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ June , led some observers to doubt how that shorthand might read under Beyoncé ’ s direction : there were worries that the film would yield yet another primitivist sketch of so many bustling nations .
They weren ’ t assuaged when Beyoncé ’ s mother , Tina Knowles , in an Instagram post highlighting the project ’ s Ghanaian-American collaborators , Joshua Kissi and Blitz Bazawule , accused skeptics of “ discrediting the work of their own people , ” as if recruiting African talent should preclude post-colonial critique .
A clumsy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the continent : “ Wakandafication , ” a reference to the fictional civilization brought to Technicolor in Ryan Coogler ’ s Marvel superhero film “ Black Panther.
” In fact , there ’ s nothing clumsy about “ Black Is King ” —other than its name , perhaps .
The album ’ s knowingly ethnic splendor is mesmerizing in its scope ; it does not attempt to provide cultural lessons but , rather , invitations to awesome delights .
Above all , “ Black Is King ” is a tribute to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ displayed , from root to toe , dressed up and painted in white , gold , seafoam , lilac , electric green , and pink ; in cowhide , denim and tulle , ink , acrylic , lace , leopard , and satin , and fringe ; cowry shells and goddess braids ; bejewelled everything ; good shirts tucked into good chinos ; pearl-drenched headdresses , harnesses , thick gold rings ; gowns and bleached tips , evening gloves , track jackets , catsuits , tunics , chunky sneakers , mammoth gele ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and trapezoidal shades .
Also , the manifold ways in which a body can move : legwork , footwork , shaku shaku , zanku , twerk , wine , gbese , thrust , grind , shake—the grounded , weight-changing style of choreography that Beyoncé has been fond of since working with the Mozambican trio Tofo Tofo on “ Run the World ( Girls ) , ” which is prominently shown here in her duet with the Afrobeats artist and divine dancer Stephen Ojo , in “ ALREADY , ” performed with Shatta @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when she appears onscreen , is usually at its center , “ Black Is King ” also cedes the floor to such charismatic movers as the Afropop artist Yemi Alade , who is featured on “ DON ’ T JEALOUS ME ” and “ MY POWER , ” alongside the South African artists Moonchild Sanelly and Busiswa and also a supreme slate of professional dancers .
There is , in our present moment , a palpable , and reasonable , fatigue when it comes to the superlative showiness of a certain class @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Beyoncé , in particular , given the outsized scale at which she has been working for a while now .
But this production—or , rather , the dozens of credited designers , stylists , artists , tailors , architects , weavers , seamstresses , builders , braiders , jewellers , and dancers whose crafts are on display in it—marvels in a way that is difficult to scoff at , especially given that we aren ’ t likely to see such feats again soon .
For all its texture and color , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a fairly conservative idea of Black being , one that is rooted inexorably in the integrity of Mother and Father , Son and Daughter—this is Disney , after all .
The emphasis on an intact family structure will not come as a surprise to fans ( or mere observers ) of Beyoncé ’ s work , which has long been informed by a sense of her life ’ s calling as a matriarch , even when she ’ s at her baddest .
( Speaking of royal pronouncements , who can forget the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her fifth touring concert , the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour ? )
As in “ The Lion King , ” the young cub in “ Black Is King ” suffers the profound loss of a patriarch ; in the end , the breakage is repaired by a restoration of the nuclear tableau—both “ Lion King ” films and “ Black Is King ” conclude on the iconic postnatal image , the next in line held skyward .
In between , the album depicts the magnetic sites of coupling : “ BROWN SKIN @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glittering shades of brownness among Black people , is set at a débutante ball , featuring girls in lush gowns and men in stoles ( plus cheery cameos from Kelly Rowland , Naomi Campbell , Adut Akech , and Lupita Nyong ’ o ) .
In “ MOOD 4 EVA , ” our young prince is molded in Jay-Z ’ s image , with a young girl playing the princess to Hov ’ s Beyoncé .
Connected to this narrative of succession is a notion of roots , though in a sense more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in “ Black Is King , ” to the work of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire , whose words resounded throughout “ Lemonade.
” Shire ’ s selected aphorisms , spoken in a measured cadence— “ You are welcome to come home to yourself .
Let Black be synonymous with glory ” —undertake the weight of history , but shakily so .
The time-honored cultural honorifics of “ ancestors ” and “ elders ” begin to become conflated ; this , along with lyrical entreaties to the motherland , impose a too-linear account @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insistence , elsewhere in the film—in its sounds , fashion , settings—that Blackness is anything but straightforward .
And , given the film ’ s brilliant palette , I longed for a bit of the theoretical sensibility of someone like Terence Nance ( who collaborated with Bazawule on the 2011 short film “ Native Son ” ) , whose television series “ Random Acts of Flyness , ” with its vertiginous storytelling , makes a multidimensional case for a contemporary Blackness that is not necessarily beholden to the legacy of a pre-colonial continent—what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ epiphenomenal time.
” As far as archetypes go , I prefer the virtuosa to the Earth Mother : give me Beyoncé in formation , in the pool , behind a mansion , for no reason other than fabulosity .
When “ Lemonade ” was released , during the last Presidential election year , it felt like Beyoncé and pop music could save the world , and knowing , deep down , the folly of that belief did little to waylay the sentiment .
I suspect that viewers of “ Black Is King , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turns , will not retain such illusions .
The energy once reserved for plumbing the political depths of Bey ’ s speech will , perhaps , be redirected , preoccupied now with the awesome might of the moving Black image .
It is a much more local joy , witnessing something lovely impress itself onto the senses , but one that rises to the limits of what pop can do for us now .

The story of Disney’s “The Lion King,” about a cub who avenges his uncle’s regicide, is said to have borrowed its bones from “Hamlet” (though Marlon James would say otherwise). “Black Is King,” the new “visual album” from Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, borrows its bones from “The Lion King,” and is comparably interested in rehearsing the drama of its source material—which is to say, not very interested at all. The project is a cinematic adaptation of “The Lion King: The Gift,” the Beyoncé-produced companion album to Disney’s 2019 remake of the film, in which she voiced the part of Nala and for which she created an original song. “Black Is King” follows a young child (Folajomi Akinmurele) whose wayward adventures and visions provoke the question of what kind of man he will become. Royal titles are treated, with urgency, as a means of affirming the innate worth of the human spirit, a message that the film aims especially at the many Black peoples who were long denied the status of human (and, depending on who is asked, still are). Anchored by the lyrical grandeur of its soundtrack, which includes the fourteen songs co-written and co-produced by Beyoncé for “The Gift” (“BLACK PARADE,” a bonus single on the deluxe edition of the soundtrack, plays during the credits),“Black Is King” expertly slides between talk of bloodlines and molded thrones and more modest—but far from modest—footage of impeccably styled, beautiful Black people in motion.
This is not Africa. “Black Is King” was filmed in various natural and man-made climes found in Ghana, Nigeria, Belgium, the U.S., the U.K., and South Africa, but it consists mostly of dreamscapes, rhapsodies of high fantasy unfurled in what may be called, without insult, a loosely twined collection of music videos—which, in their serial form, more closely resemble the album “Beyoncé,” from 2013,” than “Lemonade,” from 2016. The detour from reality benefits “Black Is King,” which would otherwise have been saddled with all the colonial baggage of rendering Africa onscreen. For Americans, including those of the darker cast and caste, Africa tends to be little more than an idea, a formless place in which to house so much grief and longing. In this context—the context out of which both versions of “The Lion King” emerge—whatever is called “African” functions as shorthand, connoting, in a single English word, a literally unimaginable plenitude of lives and livelihoods. The first teaser for “Black Is King,” released in June, led some observers to doubt how that shorthand might read under Beyoncé’s direction: there were worries that the film would yield yet another primitivist sketch of so many bustling nations. They weren’t assuaged when Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, in an Instagram post highlighting the project’s Ghanaian-American collaborators, Joshua Kissi and Blitz Bazawule, accused skeptics of “discrediting the work of their own people,” as if recruiting African talent should preclude post-colonial critique. A clumsy word arose to describe this inflated reduction of the continent: “Wakandafication,” a reference to the fictional civilization brought to Technicolor in Ryan Coogler’s Marvel superhero film “Black Panther.”
In fact, there’s nothing clumsy about “Black Is King”—other than its name, perhaps. The album’s knowingly ethnic splendor is mesmerizing in its scope; it does not attempt to provide cultural lessons but, rather, invitations to awesome delights. Above all, “Black Is King” is a tribute to the manifold ways that a body can be displayed, from root to toe, dressed up and painted in white, gold, seafoam, lilac, electric green, and pink; in cowhide, denim and tulle, ink, acrylic, lace, leopard, and satin, and fringe; cowry shells and goddess braids; bejewelled everything; good shirts tucked into good chinos; pearl-drenched headdresses, harnesses, thick gold rings; gowns and bleached tips, evening gloves, track jackets, catsuits, tunics, chunky sneakers, mammoth gele; cornrows, ribbon-wrapped feet, cargo pants, and trapezoidal shades. Also, the manifold ways in which a body can move: legwork, footwork, shaku shaku, zanku, twerk, wine, gbese, thrust, grind, shake—the grounded, weight-changing style of choreography that Beyoncé has been fond of since working with the Mozambican trio Tofo Tofo on “Run the World (Girls),” which is prominently shown here in her duet with the Afrobeats artist and divine dancer Stephen Ojo, in “ALREADY,” performed with Shatta Wale and Major Lazer. Though Beyoncé, when she appears onscreen, is usually at its center, “Black Is King” also cedes the floor to such charismatic movers as the Afropop artist Yemi Alade, who is featured on “DON’T JEALOUS ME” and “MY POWER,” alongside the South African artists Moonchild Sanelly and Busiswa and also a supreme slate of professional dancers. There is, in our present moment, a palpable, and reasonable, fatigue when it comes to the superlative showiness of a certain class of celebrity. Some of this sticks to Beyoncé, in particular, given the outsized scale at which she has been working for a while now. But this production—or, rather, the dozens of credited designers, stylists, artists, tailors, architects, weavers, seamstresses, builders, braiders, jewellers, and dancers whose crafts are on display in it—marvels in a way that is difficult to scoff at, especially given that we aren’t likely to see such feats again soon.
“BROWN SKIN GIRL,” a tribute to the glittering shades of brownness among Black people, is set at a débutante ball, featuring Blue Ivy Carter and Kelly Rowland. Photograph Courtesy Parkwood Entertainment
For all its texture and color, though, “Black Is King” envisions a fairly conservative idea of Black being, one that is rooted inexorably in the integrity of Mother and Father, Son and Daughter—this is Disney, after all. The emphasis on an intact family structure will not come as a surprise to fans (or mere observers) of Beyoncé’s work, which has long been informed by a sense of her life’s calling as a matriarch, even when she’s at her baddest. (Speaking of royal pronouncements, who can forget the feminist media hubbub surrounding the branding of her fifth touring concert, the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour?) As in “The Lion King,” the young cub in “Black Is King” suffers the profound loss of a patriarch; in the end, the breakage is repaired by a restoration of the nuclear tableau—both “Lion King” films and “Black Is King” conclude on the iconic postnatal image, the next in line held skyward. In between, the album depicts the magnetic sites of coupling: “BROWN SKIN GIRL,” a tribute to the glittering shades of brownness among Black people, is set at a débutante ball, featuring girls in lush gowns and men in stoles (plus cheery cameos from Kelly Rowland, Naomi Campbell, Adut Akech, and Lupita Nyong’o). In “MOOD 4 EVA,” our young prince is molded in Jay-Z’s image, with a young girl playing the princess to Hov’s Beyoncé.
Connected to this narrative of succession is a notion of roots, though in a sense more teleological than genealogical. Beyoncé returns, in “Black Is King,” to the work of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, whose words resounded throughout “Lemonade.” Shire’s selected aphorisms, spoken in a measured cadence—“You are welcome to come home to yourself. Let Black be synonymous with glory”—undertake the weight of history, but shakily so. The time-honored cultural honorifics of “ancestors” and “elders” begin to become conflated; this, along with lyrical entreaties to the motherland, impose a too-linear account of culture and time, despite the insistence, elsewhere in the film—in its sounds, fashion, settings—that Blackness is anything but straightforward. And, given the film’s brilliant palette, I longed for a bit of the theoretical sensibility of someone like Terence Nance (who collaborated with Bazawule on the 2011 short film “Native Son”), whose television series “Random Acts of Flyness,” with its vertiginous storytelling, makes a multidimensional case for a contemporary Blackness that is not necessarily beholden to the legacy of a pre-colonial continent—what the scholar Michelle M. Wright calls “epiphenomenal time.” As far as archetypes go, I prefer the virtuosa to the Earth Mother: give me Beyoncé in formation, in the pool, behind a mansion, for no reason other than fabulosity.
When “Lemonade” was released, during the last Presidential election year, it felt like Beyoncé and pop music could save the world, and knowing, deep down, the folly of that belief did little to waylay the sentiment. I suspect that viewers of “Black Is King,” watching the world as it presently turns, will not retain such illusions. The energy once reserved for plumbing the political depths of Bey’s speech will, perhaps, be redirected, preoccupied now with the awesome might of the moving Black image. It is a much more local joy, witnessing something lovely impress itself onto the senses, but one that rises to the limits of what pop can do for us now.