newyorker--2020-04-20--Trying Not to Jewbarrass the Guests at a Socially Distant Passover

New Yorkers of a certain vintage might recall the witty Manhattan Mini Storage billboards that , appearing in the heart of the “ Sex and the City ” era , gave a boom-time upgrade to the city ’ s normal grousing .
“ I loved ‘ NYC : Tolerant of your beliefs , judgmental of your shoes , ’ ” Archie Gottesman , who co-wrote the ads , said on the phone .
So when , three years ago , she left Manhattan Mini Storage ( her family ’ s company ) to find fresh pasture for her branding skills @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the urbane kvetching of a different tribe .
“ I was , like , Ugh , why isn ’ t Judaism , this religion that ’ s so full of wisdom , so full of smart values , selling itself better ?
” she recalled .
Her rebrand begat a Web-site venture , JewBelong , with its own hip sloganeering ( “ Imagine your cell phone battery was on 6 % and lasted 8 days .
That ’ s Hanukkah !
” ) , and , for holidays such as Passover , do-it-yourself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , sometimes unorthodox practice .
“ They have this Fireball whiskey that tastes like cinnamon , and we play where , every time you hear the name Moses , you take a shot , ” she said .
“ It ’ s the burning bush !
” ( See also : a Red Sea centerpiece made of Jell-O . )
The campaign has not been without controversy , and last year an especially daring ad— “ Even if you think kugel is an exercise for your vagina .
.
.
JewBelong ” —inspired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for your vagina ” on the sides of Upper West Side phone kiosks .
Portnoy lives .
The other day , as Jews of the old , square cast broke square matzo in squarish Zoom windows , JewBelong moved its Seder operations online with an eye to greater meshugas and scale .
Fourteen hundred screens had tuned in .
Gottesman got two of her friends , the actress Alysia Reiner and the former magazine editor Joanna Coles , to co-host ( Reiner : Jewish ; Coles : down with the cause ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ list .
At 7:04 p.m. , Gottesman appeared onscreen wearing silver hoop earrings and her white hair in a ponytail .
“ I can ’ t see you guys , ” she said .
“ But we have lots of fun in store—including Venmo cash prizes for finding the afikoman !
” The night ’ s text was JewBelong ’ s own , a Haggadah with sans-serif type and festive songs written to familiar tunes .
Some readings were self-recorded , then edited together into a multivocal patchwork ; others were done solo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ Scandal ” actor , started with a blessing .
“ May everyone who shares in a Jewish life feel welcome and integrated , ” he said , speaking from a red-painted room , with all the curtains drawn .
“ Hi , everybody , it ’ s Cory Booker , ” the New Jersey senator ( also down with the cause ) , said , appearing onscreen , in a kitchen .
He was wearing a pin-striped suit , the jacket buttoned at the waist , and a red tie .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ taking part in Passover Seders , ” he went on .
“ This idea of escaping slavery—how powerful it was for my ancestors who were slaves.
” “ Now is the time that we describe the Seder plate , ” said Reiner , coming onscreen with her daughter and her husband , and sitting in front of a painting of the ocean .
Food had presented a challenge for most Zooming Jews ; a Seder requires specific items , but shop closures had made some hard to acquire .
Reiner mixed salt water @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this with intention , it becomes more than salt water ; it becomes the memory of sweat and tears , ” she said , swirling it like a Cabernet .
Her family walked distant viewers through the offerings , adding optional signifiers .
“ The orange , ” Reiner said , holding an orange , “ is a symbol of fruitfulness and love and inclusion of our L.G.B.T.Q.-plus friends.
” Five comedians narrated part of the Maggid , the story of the Jews ’ passage from Egypt to Israel , in tag-team patter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is , like , ‘ Look , first of all , I hate to break it to you , but you ’ re a Jew.
’ ” Judy Gold : “ Matzo !
Unleavened bread !
Constipation.
” ) David Simon , the creator of “ The Wire , ” appeared and , sombre , helped lead a Dayenu thankfulness prayer .
Then Coles , in a red blouse and a white blazer , poured wine for Elijah .
“ Elijah ’ s not here , so I may drink his as well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ We must all contribute our best talents and energies to help fulfill Elijah ’ s promise of a peaceful world.
” A comment feed from viewers ran alongside the video .
“ I have never drunk so much so quickly , ” someone wrote .
Offline , Gottesman explained , “ We really try our best not to Jewbarrass anyone ” —her term for Jews ( and non-Jews ) being made to feel sheepish for not knowing the rules .
She herself had been compelled to get creative with the zeroa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Seder .
“ Alysia found a raccoon bone in the road , and I ’ m , like , Perfect , ” she said .
“ I mean , this is COVID time .
This is our plague , but we are going to get through it.
” ♦

New Yorkers of a certain vintage might recall the witty Manhattan Mini Storage billboards that, appearing in the heart of the “Sex and the City” era, gave a boom-time upgrade to the city’s normal grousing. “I loved ‘NYC: Tolerant of your beliefs, judgmental of your shoes,’ ” Archie Gottesman, who co-wrote the ads, said on the phone. So when, three years ago, she left Manhattan Mini Storage (her family’s company) to find fresh pasture for her branding skills, it seemed natural to focus on the urbane kvetching of a different tribe.
“I was, like, Ugh, why isn’t Judaism, this religion that’s so full of wisdom, so full of smart values, selling itself better?” she recalled. Her rebrand begat a Web-site venture, JewBelong, with its own hip sloganeering (“Imagine your cell phone battery was on 6% and lasted 8 days. That’s Hanukkah!”), and, for holidays such as Passover, do-it-yourself guidelines based on Gottesman’s own, sometimes unorthodox practice. “They have this Fireball whiskey that tastes like cinnamon, and we play where, every time you hear the name Moses, you take a shot,” she said. “It’s the burning bush!” (See also: a Red Sea centerpiece made of Jell-O.) The campaign has not been without controversy, and last year an especially daring ad—“Even if you think kugel is an exercise for your vagina . . . JewBelong”—inspired a conservative vandal to spray-paint over “for your vagina” on the sides of Upper West Side phone kiosks. Portnoy lives.
The other day, as Jews of the old, square cast broke square matzo in squarish Zoom windows, JewBelong moved its Seder operations online with an eye to greater meshugas and scale. Fourteen hundred screens had tuned in. Gottesman got two of her friends, the actress Alysia Reiner and the former magazine editor Joanna Coles, to co-host (Reiner: Jewish; Coles: down with the cause), and they pulled together a highfalutin guest list. At 7:04 p.m., Gottesman appeared onscreen wearing silver hoop earrings and her white hair in a ponytail. “I can’t see you guys,” she said. “But we have lots of fun in store—including Venmo cash prizes for finding the afikoman!”
The night’s text was JewBelong’s own, a Haggadah with sans-serif type and festive songs written to familiar tunes. Some readings were self-recorded, then edited together into a multivocal patchwork; others were done solo, via Webcam. Dan Bucatinsky, the “Scandal” actor, started with a blessing. “May everyone who shares in a Jewish life feel welcome and integrated,” he said, speaking from a red-painted room, with all the curtains drawn.
“Hi, everybody, it’s Cory Booker,” the New Jersey senator (also down with the cause), said, appearing onscreen, in a kitchen. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, the jacket buttoned at the waist, and a red tie. “I’ve had long experience taking part in Passover Seders,” he went on. “This idea of escaping slavery—how powerful it was for my ancestors who were slaves.”
“Now is the time that we describe the Seder plate,” said Reiner, coming onscreen with her daughter and her husband, and sitting in front of a painting of the ocean. Food had presented a challenge for most Zooming Jews; a Seder requires specific items, but shop closures had made some hard to acquire. Reiner mixed salt water in a wineglass. “In doing this with intention, it becomes more than salt water; it becomes the memory of sweat and tears,” she said, swirling it like a Cabernet. Her family walked distant viewers through the offerings, adding optional signifiers. “The orange,” Reiner said, holding an orange, “is a symbol of fruitfulness and love and inclusion of our L.G.B.T.Q.-plus friends.”
Five comedians narrated part of the Maggid, the story of the Jews’ passage from Egypt to Israel, in tag-team patter. (Rick Crom: “God is, like, ‘Look, first of all, I hate to break it to you, but you’re a Jew.’ ” Judy Gold: “Matzo! Unleavened bread! Constipation.”) David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” appeared and, sombre, helped lead a Dayenu thankfulness prayer. Then Coles, in a red blouse and a white blazer, poured wine for Elijah. “Elijah’s not here, so I may drink his as well as my own,” she said. “We must all contribute our best talents and energies to help fulfill Elijah’s promise of a peaceful world.” A comment feed from viewers ran alongside the video. “I have never drunk so much so quickly,” someone wrote.
Offline, Gottesman explained, “We really try our best not to Jewbarrass anyone”—her term for Jews (and non-Jews) being made to feel sheepish for not knowing the rules. She herself had been compelled to get creative with the zeroa, the shank bone included in the Seder. “Alysia found a raccoon bone in the road, and I’m, like, Perfect,” she said. “I mean, this is COVID time. This is our plague, but we are going to get through it.” ♦


newyorker--2020-04-20--What a White-Supremacist Coup Looks Like

On November 10 , 1898 , just after Election Day , white supremacists overthrew the city government of Wilmington , North Carolina , forcing the resignation of the mayor , the aldermen , and the chief of police .
A mob of white people burned down the office of an African-American newspaper and killed an unknown number of black townspeople .
An eyewitness believed that more than a hundred died , and a state guardsman recalled , “ I nearly stepped on negroes laying in the street dead.
” In “ Wilmington ’ s Lie ” ( Atlantic Monthly ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the coup , David Zucchino , who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid-era South Africa , estimates the number of deaths at more than sixty .
The conspirators went on to expel prominent blacks from the city—by means of threats in some cases , and under armed guard in others—and also white politicians unsympathetic to the cause .
The plan was hatched in secret , but the conspirators were remarkably open about the coup once it began .
A reporter from out of town marvelled , “ What they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ No conspirator was ever prosecuted , and white supremacists went on to alter state law so as to disenfranchise black people for more than two generations .
There were more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand registered black voters in North Carolina in 1896 , but only six thousand or so were still on the books by 1902 .
African-Americans fled Wilmington in large numbers , decimating what had been a large , thriving community .
Before the coup , the city was majority black—at one point , it had the highest proportion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the South—and had several racially integrated neighborhoods .
A visitor from Raleigh remembered black homes as having pianos , lace curtains , and servants .
By the time of the 1900 census , a majority of its citizens were white .
In Plato ’ s Republic , Socrates proposes the concept of the “ noble lie ” —a fable that , though untrue , could inspire citizens to virtue , and “ make them care more for the city and each other.
” But what about the reverse—something all too true that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state and their fellow-citizens ?
In Wilmington , the victory of racial prejudice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete .
Within the lifetimes of those who experienced the coup , the arc of history that passed through Wilmington in 1898 didn ’ t bend toward anything close to justice .
“ Up to but a few years ago , the best feeling among the races prevailed , ” the black writer David Bryant Fulton wrote , in “ Hanover ; Or the Persecution of the Lowly , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Politically , however , tensions were rising , as the dominance that Democrats had enjoyed for decades waned .
Since Reconstruction , the Party had won elections by harping on its history of thwarting federal attempts to grant rights to blacks , but , by the eighteen-nineties , white voters had other grievances on their minds .
Farmers felt extorted by railroad companies and by creditors , and Democrats , cozy with corporate interests , opposed any government regulation of business .
Voters defected to a new party , the Populists , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , still the party of Lincoln and committed to equal rights for blacks—to form the so-called Fusion ticket .
In 1894 , Fusionists swept state and county elections , and , two years later , North Carolina elected its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction .
Once in office , Fusionists restored political power to African-Americans by making elections more fair—decentralizing control over them and reducing obstacles to voter registration .
In 1896 , a black Republican , George Henry White , beat a Democratic incumbent to become the only African-American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also sent black politicians to the State Assembly and the State Senate .
The next year , Wilmington installed several black aldermen and a Republican mayor , and pretty soon the city had a black jailer , coroner , superintendent of streets , and cattle weigher ; the county treasurer and a federal customs collector were also black .
To forestall white resentment , Wilmington ’ s new police chief took the precaution of instructing the ten city police officers who were black never to arrest a white man .
The proportion of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the proportion of Wilmington citizens who were , was tiny .
Still , “ Negro domination ” became a powerful talking point for Democrats , because even progressive white politicians were not ready to make the case that it was desirable to have black people in office .
The best defense that the Republican governor , Daniel Russell , was willing to offer was that , out of the more than eight hundred people he had appointed to office , only eight were black .
When the Democrats launched their 1898 campaign season @ @ @ @ @ @ @ convention , in May , they made so-called Negro domination “ the burden of their song , ” as Helen G. Edmonds put it in a pioneering history of black political participation in North Carolina and the backlash against it .
She meant it metaphorically , but there really was a song .
The lyrics , which Zucchino reprints , call on “ Proud Caucasians ” to “ Rise and drive this Black despoiler from your state.
” The state chairman of the Democratic Party tapped the editor of the Raleigh News & @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an anti-black propaganda campaign .
Daniels ’ s paper ran provocative headlines ( “ No Rape Committed ; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro ” ) and wrote luridly about a white woman who had died trying to abort the child of her black lover .
In an editorial cartoon , a black vampire , its wings emblazoned with the words “ Negro Rule , ” extended claws toward fleeing whites .
“ The Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality , ” Daniels later recalled , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ careful about winnowing out the stories.
” Newspapers across the state joined in , and a national magazine reported that a black man had fired into a trolley car and that black cooks were hinting they might poison their white employers .
Sometimes a news item about a small misunderstanding between whites and blacks would hopscotch from paper to paper across the state , further exaggerated in each retelling , until it was reprinted in the paper where it started , unrecognized , as if it were a different story .
The Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a white man ’ s country ” and organized more than eight hundred White Government Union clubs , whose constitution called for “ the SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE.
” Come November , the clubs were to provide manpower for challenging black-voter registrations .
When Wilmington ’ s Democratic Party chair , George Rountree , gave a speech to one of the clubs , even he was taken aback by the members ’ racist zeal .
“ They were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were looking forward to a landslide in November , but in Wilmington the next municipal election wasn ’ t until the following year , and the city ’ s whites were impatient to regain power .
So they planned a coup .
“ For a period of six to twelve months prior to November 10 , 1898 , the white citizens of Wilmington prepared quietly but effectively , ” a Democratic newspaperman there later wrote .
Preparations were directed by two networks of élite whites , the Secret Nine and Group Six .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ because , in the nineteen-thirties , Harry Hayden , an amateur historian with white-supremacist sympathies , interviewed surviving participants and recorded their side of the story in a self-published pamphlet .
According to Hayden , the Secret Nine set up a system of nightly patrols run by volunteers .
Each block was assigned a lieutenant , each of the city ’ s five wards was assigned a captain , and atop the chain of command stood a former Confederate colonel who had once led Wilmington ’ s branch of the Ku Klux Klan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preparing for a siege instead of an election , ” a visiting reporter wrote , much impressed .

On November 10, 1898, just after Election Day, white supremacists overthrew the city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, forcing the resignation of the mayor, the aldermen, and the chief of police. A mob of white people burned down the office of an African-American newspaper and killed an unknown number of black townspeople. An eyewitness believed that more than a hundred died, and a state guardsman recalled, “I nearly stepped on negroes laying in the street dead.” In “Wilmington’s Lie” (Atlantic Monthly), a judicious and riveting new history of the coup, David Zucchino, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid-era South Africa, estimates the number of deaths at more than sixty. The conspirators went on to expel prominent blacks from the city—by means of threats in some cases, and under armed guard in others—and also white politicians unsympathetic to the cause. The plan was hatched in secret, but the conspirators were remarkably open about the coup once it began. A reporter from out of town marvelled, “What they did was done in broad daylight.”
No conspirator was ever prosecuted, and white supremacists went on to alter state law so as to disenfranchise black people for more than two generations. There were more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand registered black voters in North Carolina in 1896, but only six thousand or so were still on the books by 1902. African-Americans fled Wilmington in large numbers, decimating what had been a large, thriving community. Before the coup, the city was majority black—at one point, it had the highest proportion of African-American residents of any large city in the South—and had several racially integrated neighborhoods. A visitor from Raleigh remembered black homes as having pianos, lace curtains, and servants. By the time of the 1900 census, a majority of its citizens were white.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes the concept of the “noble lie”—a fable that, though untrue, could inspire citizens to virtue, and “make them care more for the city and each other.” But what about the reverse—something all too true that might embolden bad actors to harm the state and their fellow-citizens? In Wilmington, the victory of racial prejudice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete. Within the lifetimes of those who experienced the coup, the arc of history that passed through Wilmington in 1898 didn’t bend toward anything close to justice.
“Up to but a few years ago, the best feeling among the races prevailed,” the black writer David Bryant Fulton wrote, in “Hanover; Or the Persecution of the Lowly,” his 1900 novel about the coup. Politically, however, tensions were rising, as the dominance that Democrats had enjoyed for decades waned. Since Reconstruction, the Party had won elections by harping on its history of thwarting federal attempts to grant rights to blacks, but, by the eighteen-nineties, white voters had other grievances on their minds. Farmers felt extorted by railroad companies and by creditors, and Democrats, cozy with corporate interests, opposed any government regulation of business. Voters defected to a new party, the Populists, which allied itself with the Republicans—at the time, still the party of Lincoln and committed to equal rights for blacks—to form the so-called Fusion ticket. In 1894, Fusionists swept state and county elections, and, two years later, North Carolina elected its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction.
Once in office, Fusionists restored political power to African-Americans by making elections more fair—decentralizing control over them and reducing obstacles to voter registration. In 1896, a black Republican, George Henry White, beat a Democratic incumbent to become the only African-American congressman at the time, and voters also sent black politicians to the State Assembly and the State Senate. The next year, Wilmington installed several black aldermen and a Republican mayor, and pretty soon the city had a black jailer, coroner, superintendent of streets, and cattle weigher; the county treasurer and a federal customs collector were also black. To forestall white resentment, Wilmington’s new police chief took the precaution of instructing the ten city police officers who were black never to arrest a white man. The proportion of officeholders who were black, compared with the proportion of Wilmington citizens who were, was tiny. Still, “Negro domination” became a powerful talking point for Democrats, because even progressive white politicians were not ready to make the case that it was desirable to have black people in office. The best defense that the Republican governor, Daniel Russell, was willing to offer was that, out of the more than eight hundred people he had appointed to office, only eight were black.
When the Democrats launched their 1898 campaign season, at the Party’s state convention, in May, they made so-called Negro domination “the burden of their song,” as Helen G. Edmonds put it in a pioneering history of black political participation in North Carolina and the backlash against it. She meant it metaphorically, but there really was a song. The lyrics, which Zucchino reprints, call on “Proud Caucasians” to “Rise and drive this Black despoiler from your state.” The state chairman of the Democratic Party tapped the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, Josephus Daniels, to head an anti-black propaganda campaign. Daniels’s paper ran provocative headlines (“No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro”) and wrote luridly about a white woman who had died trying to abort the child of her black lover. In an editorial cartoon, a black vampire, its wings emblazoned with the words “Negro Rule,” extended claws toward fleeing whites.
“The Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” Daniels later recalled, in a memoir. “We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories.” Newspapers across the state joined in, and a national magazine reported that a black man had fired into a trolley car and that black cooks were hinting they might poison their white employers. Sometimes a news item about a small misunderstanding between whites and blacks would hopscotch from paper to paper across the state, further exaggerated in each retelling, until it was reprinted in the paper where it started, unrecognized, as if it were a different story.
The Democrats issued a handbook identifying America as “a white man’s country” and organized more than eight hundred White Government Union clubs, whose constitution called for “the SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE.” Come November, the clubs were to provide manpower for challenging black-voter registrations. When Wilmington’s Democratic Party chair, George Rountree, gave a speech to one of the clubs, even he was taken aback by the members’ racist zeal. “They were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes,” he recalled.
Statewide, Democrats were looking forward to a landslide in November, but in Wilmington the next municipal election wasn’t until the following year, and the city’s whites were impatient to regain power. So they planned a coup. “For a period of six to twelve months prior to November 10, 1898, the white citizens of Wilmington prepared quietly but effectively,” a Democratic newspaperman there later wrote. Preparations were directed by two networks of élite whites, the Secret Nine and Group Six. The groups are known to history only because, in the nineteen-thirties, Harry Hayden, an amateur historian with white-supremacist sympathies, interviewed surviving participants and recorded their side of the story in a self-published pamphlet. According to Hayden, the Secret Nine set up a system of nightly patrols run by volunteers. Each block was assigned a lieutenant, each of the city’s five wards was assigned a captain, and atop the chain of command stood a former Confederate colonel who had once led Wilmington’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan. “The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election,” a visiting reporter wrote, much impressed.
The ostensible justification for the patrols was the threat of a violent uprising among the city’s black population. These rumors, a white Populist sardonically recalled, alarmed “every one but those who were behind the plot.” One white woman in Wilmington dismissed the patrols as a “perfect farce,” commenting that, in the run-up to the coup, blacks were “almost obsequiously polite.” But, as the rumors spread, whites in Wilmington bought guns—enough to equip an Army division, one reporter estimated. Zucchino has discovered that, in the five weeks before the coup, a single hardware store sold a hundred and twenty-five rifles, more than two hundred pistols, and nearly fifty shotguns. Merchants refused to sell guns to blacks, and not many blacks already owned them. When two black men tried to order pistols and rifles direct from an out-of-state manufacturer, their request was forwarded to Josephus Daniels’s newspaper, which then ran a story headlined “THE WILMINGTON NEGROES ARE TRYING TO BUY GUNS.”
There was one Wilmington newspaper not in the service of the Democratic Party—the Daily Record, a broadsheet that claimed to be “of the Negro, for the Negro and by the Negro.” It had been established some five years earlier by Alex Manly, a former housepainter, who ran it with his three brothers. Few editions of the paper have survived. David Bryant Fulton, in his novel about Wilmington, wrote that the paper exposed unsanitary conditions in the African-American ward at the city hospital and advocated for better roads. The fragments that remain were recently pieced together by the Third Person Project, a group of North Carolina writers and history buffs, and reveal an outlet for mostly local stories—a clergyman’s birthday party, the theft of fourteen chickens from a coop, political skirmishes over the apportionment of government jobs—along with household tips (“Cold eggs froth most readily”) and reprints of national news stories and short fiction.
In the summer of 1898, however, the Daily Record plunged into controversy. The Wilmington Morning Star had reprinted a speech by a Georgia congressman’s wife arguing that lynching was justified “to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts.” Manly replied in an editorial that not all rapists were black, and that black men were often lynched for sexual liaisons that were, in fact, consensual. Flouting one of the South’s most explosive taboos, he wrote that white women “are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.” Manly himself was strikingly handsome, and his complexion was so fair that even one of his sons admitted to wondering about his ancestry; so there may have been a bit of personal flourish in his assertion that many lynched men, far from being as “burly” and “black” as newspapers made them out to be, were “sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.”
Manly was writing almost seventy years before Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down laws against interracial marriage, and the editorial got him and his paper cancelled. White business owners pulled ads, and the Daily Record was evicted by its landlord and forced to find new premises. Manly received death threats, public and private, and Democratic newspapers across the state reprinted the editorial as tinder for the white-supremacy campaign, in some cases quoting from it daily. The Democrats’ outrage was to be expected, but even progressives felt compelled to denounce Manly. Governor Russell declared him his “enemy,” and the state’s Republican Party condemned the editorial as “impudent and villainous.”
“That editorial in the negro newspaper is good campaign matter,” a character says in Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel, “The Marrow of Tradition,” which lightly fictionalizes some of the events in Wilmington in 1898. “But we should reserve it until it will be most effective.” The whites were saving their ammunition.
Early in October, Wilmington merchants promised to set up a whites-only labor bureau, and a rumor spread that blacks wanted to colonize North Carolina and turn it into a black commonwealth. “North Carolina is to be the refuge of their people in America,” a journalist from Atlanta wrote. On October 20th, at a rally in Fayetteville, the South Carolina senator Ben Tillman, known as Pitchfork Ben, boasted to a crowd of eight thousand that whites there had smashed black civil rights two decades earlier, and wondered aloud why North Carolinians hadn’t yet killed Manly.
Tillman was accompanied by a group of armed South Carolina vigilantes known as Red Shirts. The Red Shirts had a reputation for violence; LeRae Sikes Umfleet, who was the lead historian on a state-commissioned investigation into the coup, in the early two-thousands, described them as “effectively a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” Their outfits were likely a reference to the phrase “waving the bloody shirt,” a meme-like label that Southerners habitually used to deride any attempt to call them out for political violence. After Tillman’s speech, the Red Shirts spread into North Carolina. In Wilmington, they were led by an Irish-American casual laborer named Mike Dowling, and, in the run-up to the election, they fired into a black school and at least one black home, and stabbed two black men.
“Go to sleep. Everything will be worse in the morning.” Cartoon by Kate Curtis Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In late October, the white-supremacist movement acquired a figurehead of sorts, a Wilmington lawyer and former congressman named Alfred Moore Waddell. Zucchino has discovered that, as a lawyer, Waddell defended lynchers, and that, while serving on a congressional committee investigating the Ku Klux Klan, he hosted the leader of the North Carolina Klan in his home. Described in Chesnutt’s novel as “a dapper little gentleman,” and in Fulton’s as having a comb-over, he was distrusted even by fellow-Democrats, but he excelled at racist oratory, so the Wilmington Party chairman invited him to give a speech at Thalian Hall, which contained both the city’s opera house and its municipal offices. Waddell asked the crowd of nearly a thousand if they were willing to surrender their liberty to “a ragged rabble of negroes led by a handful of white cowards” and urged them to defend their liberty even “if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” He reprised the line about carcasses in another speech, on the eve of the election.
By Election Day, a white Populist recalled, African-Americans were “asking their white friends not to let them be hurt.” Many confided to the police chief that they were not going to register or vote; Zucchino reports that, statewide, less than half the black voters who were eligible ended up going to the polls. Election Day itself was mostly peaceful, although Governor Russell, in Wilmington to cast his ballot, had to hide from Red Shirts on his train ride back to the capitol. For good measure, Wilmington’s Democrats also tampered with vote totals. In the evening, around a hundred and fifty whites stormed the building where the count in a predominantly black precinct was taking place. The Democratic candidate ended up winning the precinct with more votes than there were registered voters.
It wasn’t until the morning after the election, November 9th, that the brashest part of the conspiracy was put into action. The Secret Nine placed a notice in the Wilmington Messenger (“Attention White Men”) convening a meeting at the courthouse. Both Waddell and Rountree, the Democratic Party chair, later claimed to have been surprised by the announcement, and they might have been—neither was a member of the Secret Nine or Group Six, and the conspirators may have been keeping Waddell, in particular, at arm’s length. But at the meeting it was Waddell who read out the statement that the Secret Nine had prepared. The Wilmington Declaration of Independence, as it came to be known, proclaimed that whites had the right to “end the rule by Negroes,” because they paid ninety-five per cent of property taxes. It resolved to hand over black people’s jobs to whites; to shut down the “vile and slanderous” Daily Record; and to banish Manly, the mayor, and the police chief. Some four hundred and fifty whites signed the declaration, and most of them weren’t the poor whites often blamed for racist outbreaks; a historian who researched the occupations of the signatories found that, of those she was able to trace, eighty-five per cent were middle or upper class.
Waddell was chosen to act as chairman of the meeting. That evening, he summoned thirty-two prominent African-Americans, read them the declaration, and demanded a reply by seven-thirty the next morning. The black leaders conferred in a barber shop, and one of them, a lawyer, wrote a reply. A surviving draft disavows responsibility for Manly and promises to “use our influence to have your wishes carried out.” (In fact, as some of the men probably knew, Manly had already fled the city, reportedly having been given some money and the white patrols’ watchword by a white friend.) The way to Waddell’s house was guarded by the whites’ armed night patrols, so, instead of delivering the letter by hand, the lawyer dropped it at the post office. It didn’t reach Waddell by the early-morning deadline.
Zucchino thinks Waddell knew the letter was on the way, but, if he did, he didn’t mention it to the crowd of five hundred armed whites who gathered that morning at the armory of the Wilmington Light Infantry. Furious about the missed deadline, the crowd asked the militia’s officers to lead them to the Daily Record. The infantry’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, refused, even though he belonged to Group Six, and his brother to the Secret Nine. Technically, the militia was still in federal service—it was home on furlough from the Spanish-American War—and it may have seemed unwise to involve the federal government in what was about to happen.
While Colonel Taylor telegraphed the capitol—“Situation here serious”—Waddell, Dowling, and a few others took charge of the crowd, which soon swelled to fifteen hundred men. Many were workers, but there were clergy and lawyers as well; the Messenger reported that “capitalists and laborers marched together,” and a photograph later published in Collier’s Weekly shows some men wearing neckties and fashionable hats. The crowd marched through a black neighborhood known as Brooklyn to the paper’s new office, on the second floor of a building called the Love and Charity Hall. They broke in, tossed out furniture, a beaver hat, and a drawing of Manly, and set the building on fire. Waddell later claimed the fire was “purely accidental,” but when a crew of black firefighters arrived to put out the blaze whites held them off until the second story of the building had been consumed. Then they posed in front of the ruins for a group photo.


newyorker--2020-04-20--Style Rules You Must Never Break

Style Rules You Must Never Break

• With a three-button jacket , button the top button sometimes , the middle button always , and the lowest button never , even in a life-or-death situation .
• Match your belt to your shoehorn , which should dangle from a gauge in your earlobe .
• Don ’ t wear white to someone else ’ s wedding , unless it ’ s a wedding dress and you ’ re planning to object at the designated objecting moment in the ceremony and insist that you replace the bride .
• Don ’ t wear white before Memorial Day , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a wedding .
• Don ’ t wear white after Labor Day , except if you are planning to object at the wedding of the person who objected at your wedding , and thereby win back your ex .
• Never wear jeans with a blazer , unless the blazer is also denim and you have undergone multiple grafts to make all of your skin denim .
• As a general rule , anything Timothée Chalamet wears will look incredible on you .
• As long as you look exactly like Timothée Chalamet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while casting a spell to make yourself look like Timothée Chalamet—they don ’ t really fit with the spell-casting aesthetic .
• Dress for the job you want , not the job you have , assuming that the job you want is not one in which you get to lounge around your apartment naked .
• Shorts in the office are a no-go , unless you have curtains hanging from each knee that can be drawn to cover your calves in the event of an official business meeting .
• Don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of your eyes—people will think that you ’ re copying that Billie Eilish music video .
• Novelty ties are a bad look at funerals .
• Novelty funerals are a bad look in general .
• Don ’ t wear a brown gown with a frown in town in clown makeup , unless you want to scare a lot of children .
• A fireman ’ s uniform is work-appropriate only if you ’ re a fireman , a stripper , or an undercover agent trying to infiltrate a gang of firefighters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ socks with hiking boots—it ’ s like a hat on a hat .
Go sockless instead .
• Never wear bandages on the blisters you got from hiking without socks .
• Don ’ t wear a hat on a hat—it ’ s like a hat on a hat .
• Wear socks with sandals only if you put the socks on over the sandals to protect them .
• If you ’ re tall , don ’ t wear Heelys , the shoes with wheels .
• If you ’ re short @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shoes with wheels .
• If you ’ re of medium height , don ’ t wear Heelys , the shoes with wheels , unless the company offers you a lucrative endorsement deal .
• If your lucrative endorsement deal with Heelys falls through , get revenge by filming yourself wearing Heelys and “ accidentally ” rolling down a steep hill , losing control , and tumbling into a pile of garbage .
• Before leaving the house , look in the mirror and take off one eyebrow .
• Remember , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to someone else ’ s arbitrary rules .
It ’ s about expressing yourself .
• Unless the self you ’ re expressing is someone with bad style , in which case you ’ re a lost cause .
♦

• With a three-button jacket, button the top button sometimes, the middle button always, and the lowest button never, even in a life-or-death situation.
• Match your belt to your shoehorn, which should dangle from a gauge in your earlobe.
• Don’t wear white to someone else’s wedding, unless it’s a wedding dress and you’re planning to object at the designated objecting moment in the ceremony and insist that you replace the bride.
• Don’t wear white before Memorial Day, except if you plan to object at a wedding.
• Don’t wear white after Labor Day, except if you are planning to object at the wedding of the person who objected at your wedding, and thereby win back your ex.
• Never wear jeans with a blazer, unless the blazer is also denim and you have undergone multiple grafts to make all of your skin denim.
• As a general rule, anything Timothée Chalamet wears will look incredible on you.
• As long as you look exactly like Timothée Chalamet.
• Don’t wear chinos while casting a spell to make yourself look like Timothée Chalamet—they don’t really fit with the spell-casting aesthetic.
• Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, assuming that the job you want is not one in which you get to lounge around your apartment naked.
• Shorts in the office are a no-go, unless you have curtains hanging from each knee that can be drawn to cover your calves in the event of an official business meeting.
• Don’t wear blue with black ink coming out of your eyes—people will think that you’re copying that Billie Eilish music video.
• Novelty ties are a bad look at funerals.
• Novelty funerals are a bad look in general.
• Don’t wear a brown gown with a frown in town in clown makeup, unless you want to scare a lot of children.
• A fireman’s uniform is work-appropriate only if you’re a fireman, a stripper, or an undercover agent trying to infiltrate a gang of firefighters or strippers.
• Never match hiking socks with hiking boots—it’s like a hat on a hat. Go sockless instead.
• Never wear bandages on the blisters you got from hiking without socks.
• Don’t wear a hat on a hat—it’s like a hat on a hat.
• Wear socks with sandals only if you put the socks on over the sandals to protect them.
• If you’re tall, don’t wear Heelys, the shoes with wheels.
• If you’re short, don’t wear Heelys, the shoes with wheels.
• If you’re of medium height, don’t wear Heelys, the shoes with wheels, unless the company offers you a lucrative endorsement deal.
• If your lucrative endorsement deal with Heelys falls through, get revenge by filming yourself wearing Heelys and “accidentally” rolling down a steep hill, losing control, and tumbling into a pile of garbage.
• Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and take off one eyebrow.
• Remember, true style isn’t about adhering to someone else’s arbitrary rules. It’s about expressing yourself.
• Unless the self you’re expressing is someone with bad style, in which case you’re a lost cause. ♦


newyorker--2020-04-20--It’s Not Too Late to Go on Offense Against the Coronavirus

For weeks now , we ’ ve watched the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the United States .
During much of that time , it ’ s seemed like the only thing to do is hunker down , wait , and hope .
We hope that a vaccine will arrive , even though we can ’ t be sure how long that might take , or whether an effective vaccine is even possible .
We hope that those who have had the virus will be able to return to work—never mind that we have yet to see proof of durable immunity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place will make the virus recede .
Perhaps summer will kill it , even though it has spread in the year-round heat of Singapore and other places .
We seem to be hoping that something miraculous will happen—that , somehow , the virus will leave of its own accord .
In the nineteen-nineties , as a co-founder of the global organization Partners in Health , I helped fight multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in the developing world .
In the early two-thousands , I led the World Health Organization ’ s H.I.V./AIDS department ; afterward , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I took on cholera in Haiti and Ebola in West Africa .
I ’ ve been fighting pandemics for most of my adult life .
That front-line experience has taught me that hope is a wonderful thing , essential to any difficult undertaking .
But , especially when it comes to infectious disease , hope is of little use unless it ’ s accompanied by a bold and vigorous plan .
South Korea , which so far has managed the pandemic better than any other country , has pursued such a plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as if it were a person .
Leaders at the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have told me that the virus is sneaky , nasty , and durable—and that it has to be hunted down .
In Singapore and China , large teams of public-health workers are on a war footing , confronting the virus like the mortal enemy it is .
In the face of such an enemy , America ’ s passivity has been puzzling and unworthy of the best episodes in our history .
The time has come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s not too late : we can still mobilize and start hunting down the virus .
What ’ s needed is a decisive investment in a public-health initiative big enough to meet the challenge .
What weapons are available to us ?
Important insights come from a recent study of more than thirty-two thousand coronavirus patients in Wuhan , China , published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and conducted as a coöperative effort by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health , in Cambridge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Health , in Wuhan .
The study outlines a strategy that has brought the coronavirus to heel , at least for now .
At first , the virus ran unchecked in Wuhan , and was highly transmissible .
The authorities locked down the city , and the “ flattening of the curve ” began .
The rate of transmission dropped dramatically .
And yet this wasn ’ t good enough .
The Chinese authorities worried that , if they lifted the lockdown , the virus would spread again as quickly as before .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ path to a virus-free future—that ’ s where we , across the U.S. , find ourselves today .
And so the health officials in Wuhan adopted a more aggressive approach .
They began widespread testing , finding the people who were infected .
They found out whom those people had been with , got in touch with those individuals , and tested them .
They quarantined people who they thought might have the virus and hospitalized those who were sick .
And they scaled up their health-care system , building more than a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the early stages of coronavirus infection .
Five elements , five weapons : social distancing , contact tracing , testing , isolation , and treatment .
After Wuhan began using these weapons simultaneously , the transmission rate dropped again , to the point where any single case led to less than one more .
Once that happens , an epidemic dies .
South Korea , Singapore , Taiwan , Hong Kong—by using these five weapons , they , too , have gained control over the virus .
Evidence from countries around the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strongly suggests that only this full , five-part response is capable of stopping COVID-19 .
Italy has yet to deploy the full arsenal ; there , the virus ’ s spread has slowed , but not enough to stop the outbreak and allow a restart of the economy .
Spain faces the same problem .
In the United States , we are seeing a flattening of the curve in places where social distancing has been practiced rigorously .
But we haven ’ t yet used the full arsenal , either .
We ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taking the fight to the virus and stopping its transmission .
We need to change our strategy .
Recent events in Massachusetts may signal a new beginning .
The state ’ s governor , Charlie Baker , has embarked on a plan that includes full-scale , statewide testing and contact tracing , which will be linked to an effective quarantine-and-treatment system .
A consortium—made up of state and local departments of health , the state ’ s health-insurance marketplace , and private companies , including Accenture and Salesforce—is working to build the system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the end of this month .
Partners in Health is drawing on its global disease-fighting experience to help coördinate the effort .
It ’ s a true mobilization : the state is taking on the virus directly , using the five-element anti-pandemic arsenal .
( I am a special adviser to the effort . )
Many people have the impression that it ’ s too late for contact tracing .
It ’ s useful for keeping an infection out of the country , they say , but it ’ s too hard once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of previous campaigns against epidemics , we can say with certainty that this is a misperception .
We agree that it is late , but countries that have succeeded in suppressing COVID-19 have shown that contact tracing is effective even at the peak of an epidemic .
In the fight against infection , you ’ re always late .
Lateness just means that there ’ s no time to waste .
Tracing , of course , must go hand in hand with fast and accurate testing .
We ’ ve all heard that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ currently has access to testing in the volume that ’ s needed .
But many new kinds of tests are in the works or on the way .
Using currently available technology , Massachusetts has already managed to dramatically increase the number of tests that it administers , from forty-one on March 9th to more than eight thousand on April 17th .
The Broad Institute has pledged to use its massive , state-of-the-art laboratories to process many thousands of tests per day .
Other states could achieve the same kind of results , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ local companies and universities .
We ’ ve been told that many Americans won ’ t put up with quarantine and isolation .
But the truth is that most people , once they learn that they ’ ve been exposed to the virus and may get sick in the near future , understand why they need to stay home .
What ’ s required is support .
You can ’ t stay at home if you don ’ t have any food ; you can ’ t answer a call from a contact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on your phone , or no phone at all .
You might need help explaining what ’ s happening to your boss .
You ’ ll need reassurance that you ’ ll be able to support your family .
The countries in Asia that have succeeded in fighting the virus have provided just this kind of support .
Helping people who are infected or at risk of infection stay home or at a designated facility requires money and staff .
But there are many Americans who would leap at the opportunity to help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , compared with the stimulus packages that we have passed and continue to contemplate , the cost of hiring them is a bargain .

For weeks now, we’ve watched the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the United States. During much of that time, it’s seemed like the only thing to do is hunker down, wait, and hope. We hope that a vaccine will arrive, even though we can’t be sure how long that might take, or whether an effective vaccine is even possible. We hope that those who have had the virus will be able to return to work—never mind that we have yet to see proof of durable immunity. Maybe wearing masks and sheltering in place will make the virus recede. Perhaps summer will kill it, even though it has spread in the year-round heat of Singapore and other places. We seem to be hoping that something miraculous will happen—that, somehow, the virus will leave of its own accord.
In the nineteen-nineties, as a co-founder of the global organization Partners in Health, I helped fight multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in the developing world. In the early two-thousands, I led the World Health Organization’s H.I.V./AIDS department; afterward, as the president of the World Bank, I took on cholera in Haiti and Ebola in West Africa. I’ve been fighting pandemics for most of my adult life. That front-line experience has taught me that hope is a wonderful thing, essential to any difficult undertaking. But, especially when it comes to infectious disease, hope is of little use unless it’s accompanied by a bold and vigorous plan.
South Korea, which so far has managed the pandemic better than any other country, has pursued such a plan. There, people talk about COVID-19 as if it were a person. Leaders at the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have told me that the virus is sneaky, nasty, and durable—and that it has to be hunted down. In Singapore and China, large teams of public-health workers are on a war footing, confronting the virus like the mortal enemy it is. In the face of such an enemy, America’s passivity has been puzzling and unworthy of the best episodes in our history. The time has come for us to get into the fight. It’s not too late: we can still mobilize and start hunting down the virus. What’s needed is a decisive investment in a public-health initiative big enough to meet the challenge.
What weapons are available to us? Important insights come from a recent study of more than thirty-two thousand coronavirus patients in Wuhan, China, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and conducted as a coöperative effort by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, in Cambridge, and the Tongji School of Public Health, in Wuhan. The study outlines a strategy that has brought the coronavirus to heel, at least for now.
At first, the virus ran unchecked in Wuhan, and was highly transmissible. The authorities locked down the city, and the “flattening of the curve” began. The rate of transmission dropped dramatically. And yet this wasn’t good enough. The Chinese authorities worried that, if they lifted the lockdown, the virus would spread again as quickly as before. Enduring the pain of lockdown without a path to a virus-free future—that’s where we, across the U.S., find ourselves today.
And so the health officials in Wuhan adopted a more aggressive approach. They began widespread testing, finding the people who were infected. They found out whom those people had been with, got in touch with those individuals, and tested them. They quarantined people who they thought might have the virus and hospitalized those who were sick. And they scaled up their health-care system, building more than a dozen new hospitals dedicated to treating patients in the early stages of coronavirus infection. Five elements, five weapons: social distancing, contact tracing, testing, isolation, and treatment. After Wuhan began using these weapons simultaneously, the transmission rate dropped again, to the point where any single case led to less than one more. Once that happens, an epidemic dies.
South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong—by using these five weapons, they, too, have gained control over the virus. Evidence from countries around the world, including Germany and Australia, strongly suggests that only this full, five-part response is capable of stopping COVID-19. Italy has yet to deploy the full arsenal; there, the virus’s spread has slowed, but not enough to stop the outbreak and allow a restart of the economy. Spain faces the same problem. In the United States, we are seeing a flattening of the curve in places where social distancing has been practiced rigorously. But we haven’t yet used the full arsenal, either. We’re not going on the offensive, taking the fight to the virus and stopping its transmission.
We need to change our strategy. Recent events in Massachusetts may signal a new beginning. The state’s governor, Charlie Baker, has embarked on a plan that includes full-scale, statewide testing and contact tracing, which will be linked to an effective quarantine-and-treatment system. A consortium—made up of state and local departments of health, the state’s health-insurance marketplace, and private companies, including Accenture and Salesforce—is working to build the system and hire hundreds of new employees by the end of this month. Partners in Health is drawing on its global disease-fighting experience to help coördinate the effort. It’s a true mobilization: the state is taking on the virus directly, using the five-element anti-pandemic arsenal. (I am a special adviser to the effort.)
Many people have the impression that it’s too late for contact tracing. It’s useful for keeping an infection out of the country, they say, but it’s too hard once the disease is widespread. As veterans of previous campaigns against epidemics, we can say with certainty that this is a misperception. We agree that it is late, but countries that have succeeded in suppressing COVID-19 have shown that contact tracing is effective even at the peak of an epidemic. In the fight against infection, you’re always late. Lateness just means that there’s no time to waste.
Tracing, of course, must go hand in hand with fast and accurate testing. We’ve all heard that no health authority in the United States currently has access to testing in the volume that’s needed. But many new kinds of tests are in the works or on the way. Using currently available technology, Massachusetts has already managed to dramatically increase the number of tests that it administers, from forty-one on March 9th to more than eight thousand on April 17th. The Broad Institute has pledged to use its massive, state-of-the-art laboratories to process many thousands of tests per day. Other states could achieve the same kind of results, and could also leverage labs at their local companies and universities.
We’ve been told that many Americans won’t put up with quarantine and isolation. But the truth is that most people, once they learn that they’ve been exposed to the virus and may get sick in the near future, understand why they need to stay home. What’s required is support. You can’t stay at home if you don’t have any food; you can’t answer a call from a contact tracer if you have no minutes left on your phone, or no phone at all. You might need help explaining what’s happening to your boss. You’ll need reassurance that you’ll be able to support your family. The countries in Asia that have succeeded in fighting the virus have provided just this kind of support. Helping people who are infected or at risk of infection stay home or at a designated facility requires money and staff. But there are many Americans who would leap at the opportunity to help their neighbors and their country. And, compared with the stimulus packages that we have passed and continue to contemplate, the cost of hiring them is a bargain.
Once you find all the people in a state who have been exposed to the virus, a lot becomes possible. If you help them stay away from other people, you stop the spread. And, if you start treatment earlier, you save lives. Experience with COVID-19 has shown that its mild symptoms can turn suddenly serious, so a truly comprehensive response shouldn’t leave sick people—especially the elderly—to languish at home. Medically supervised isolation facilities in converted hotels and dormitories are a key part of an effective offensive response. Imagine a system that kicks in the moment you’re exposed to or become sick with the virus. Health professionals find you, communicate with you, educate you and your family, and help everyone do the right thing, so that we’re all safe and cared for. Do this over and over and you defeat the virus. You also build a foundation for confidence in a post-virus future.
In Massachusetts, our integrative offensive began three weeks ago. In that time, we’ve encountered all sorts of unforeseen issues. Each state is different, with its own complexities; we have had to find our own way, which is why it’s important that we’ve already started.
Our country was woefully unprepared for an epidemic like this. We didn’t have enough masks to protect our health-care workers, or enough testing kits. The truth is that we hadn’t invested enough in our public-health system. Our national leaders have passed a critically important two-trillion-dollar stimulus bill. But this is a public-health crisis fundamentally, and the only way to avoid more trillion-dollar packages is to infuse cash directly into the fight against the virus. We need to align government spending with measures that will actually help to end the pandemic. We have to open the pocketbook of the United States Treasury and spend whatever we need to in order to put a proper public-health response in place at once. The cost of such an effort—perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars nationally—is small compared with the costs of hunkering down, waiting, and hoping for a miracle to happen.
Journalists, economists, and politicians have been debating and scrutinizing different models of the epidemic, which collectively make both dire and optimistic predictions. But many of these models rely on insufficient data or a set of assumptions that may or may not prove to be correct. Some models predict that the epidemic will peak in the second half of April, based off the timetable of progression in Wuhan—even though we haven’t mounted anything on the scale of Wuhan’s public-health response. People who have fought epidemics in the past know the reality. There is no way out of our predicament but to build the full, five-part program and keep it in place for the foreseeable future. Absent such a program, we won’t know if there are new infections or where they are occurring. We won’t know when we can safely relax travel restrictions and social-distancing measures. We won’t be able to give people the confidence they need to return to their normal lives. A vaccine, if it’s created, won’t be ready for at least a year. Until it arrives, there’s only one way to restart the economy for real: a diligent, targeted, fast-moving, and comprehensive public-health response.


newyorker--2020-04-20--“At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium,” by Campbell McGrath

It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine , café tables poised for selfies , windows squeegeed and fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square , former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeons today chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulips superimposed atop the old , familiar , unevictable dirt .
Lying on the couch , I am drifting with the conversation of bees , a guttural buzz undergirding the sound from a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgotten in the overgrown beech tree marooned out back , limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leaflets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe , pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok .
Rigorous investigation has identified two dialects buzzing through the plunder-fall , hovering black bumblebees and overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss , as the city to us , blundering against its oversaturated anthers until the pollen coats our skin , as if sugar-dusted , as if rolled in honey and flour to bake a cake for the queen , yes , she is with us , it is spring and this is her coronation , blossoming pear and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pinks to properly absorb , every inch of every branch lusting after beauty .
To this riot of stimuli , this vernal bombardment of the senses , I have capitulated without a fight .
But not the beech tree .
It never falters .
It is stalwart and grounded and garlanded , a site-specific creation , seed to rootling to this companionable giant , tolerant and benign , how many times have I reflected upon their superiority to our species , the trees of earth ?
Reflection , self-reflection—my job is to polish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Even now I am hard at work , researching the ineffable .
I loafe and invite my soul , for Walt Whitman is ever my companion in New York , thronged carcass of a city in which one is never alone and yet never un-nagged-at by loneliness , a hunger as much for the otherness of others as for the much-sung self , for something somewhere on the verge of realization , for what lies around the corner , five or six blocks uptown , hiding out in the Bronx or across @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the streets of the city right now somebody is meeting the love of their life for the very first time , somebody is drinking schnapps from a paper sack discussing Monty Python with a man impersonating a priest , someone is waiting for the bus to South Carolina to visit her sister in hospice , someone is teleconferencing with the office back in Hartford , Antwerp , Osaka , someone is dust-sweeping , throat-clearing , cart-wheeling , knife-grinding , day-trading , paying dues , dropping a dime , giving the hairy eyeball , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ snoozing , sniffling , cavorting , nibbling , roistering , chiding , snuggling , confiding , pub-crawling , speed-dating , pump-shining , ivy-trimming , tap-dancing , curb-kicking , rat-catching , tale-telling , getting lost , getting high , getting busted , breaking up , breaking down , breaking loose , losing faith , going broke , going green , feeling blue , seeing red , someone is davening , busking , hobnobbing , grandstanding , playing the ponies , feeding the pigeons , gull-watching , wolf-whistling , badgering the witness , pulling down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writing a letter home in Pashto or Xhosa , learning to play the xylophone , waiting for an Uber X , conspiring , patrolling , transcending , bedevilling , testifying , bloviating , absolving , kibbitzing , kowtowing , pinky-swearing , tarring and shingling , breaking and entering , delivering and carting away , enwreathing lampposts with yellow ribbons , reading Apollinaire on a bench littered with fallen petals , waiting for an ambulance to pass before crossing First Avenue toward home .
No wonder they fear it so intensely , the purists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Kandahar , it is a relentless negotiation with multiplicity , a constant engagement with the shape-shifting mob , diversely luminous as sunlight reflecting off mirrored glass in puzzle pieces of apostolic light .
Certainly this is not the Eternal City but it is certainly Imperial , certainly tyrannical , democratic , demagogic , dynastic , anarchic , hypertrophic , hyperreal .
An empire of rags and photons .
An empire encoded in the bricks from which it was built , each a stamped emblem of its labor-intensive materiality , hundreds of millions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the clay pits of Haverstraw and Kingston after the Great Fire of 1835 , a hinterland of dependencies , quarries and factories and arterial truck farms delivering serum to that muscular heart , a toiling collective of Irish sandhogs and Iroquois beam walkers and Ivoirian umbrella venders collecting kindling for the bonfire that has lured , like moths , the entire world to its blaze .
As with my tree , the hubbub of bees its exaltation .
Apis , maker of honey , Bombus , the humble bumbler , and the tree @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the yard , overawing a straggling ailanthus hard against the wall of the Con Ed substation .
Along the fence some scraggly boxwood shrubs , a table collapsed into rusted segments , two piles of bricks— what ’ s their story ?
—who made them , carted them , set them as a patio , and who undid that work to create these mundane , rain-eroded monuments to human neglect ?
Why does nobody tend this little garden ?
Undisciplined ivy scales the building in thick ropes and coils of porcelain berry vine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brilliance come autumn , those strange berries , turquoise , violet , azure .
.
.
Ah , I ’ ve lost my train of thought .
Berries .
The city .
People , bricks , the past .
Bees in a flowering beech tree .
Symbiosis .
Streams and webs and permutations , viruses replicating , mutating , evolving .
Books in a library , bricks in a wall , people in a city .
A man selling old golf clubs on the corner of Ludlow Street .
A woman on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down her red , swollen arms .
Acorns— tossing them into the Hudson River from a bench as I did when I was Peter Stuyvesant , when I was Walt Whitman , when we were of the Lenape and Broadway our hunting trail .
Then the deer vanished , the docks decayed , the towers fell .
The African graveyard was buried beneath concrete as the memory of slavery has been obscured by dogma and denial .
The city speaks a hundred languages , it straddles three rivers , it holds forty islands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ memory , essential and insubstantial and evasive as the progeny of steam grates at dawn , a gathering of apparitions .
The Irish have vanished from Washington Heights but I still see myself eating a cold pot-roast sandwich , watching “ McHale ’ s Navy ” on black-and-white TV in my grandmother ’ s old apartment .
I remember the parties we used to throw on Jane Street , shots of tequila and De La Soul on the tape deck , everyone dancing , everyone young and vibrant and vivacious— decades later we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , watching with bemused alarm , blurted out , Mom , you were so beautiful !
She was .
We all were , everyone except the city .
The city was a wreck and then it was a renovation project and now it is a playground of privilege and soon it will be something else , liquid as a dream .
Empires come and go , ours will fade in turn , even the city will retreat , step by step , as the Atlantic rises against it .
But water is not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clay and sand and when they disintegrate , when they return to silt , new bricks will be made by hands as competent as ours .
People will live in half-flooded tenements , people will live on houseboats moored to bank pillars along Wall Street .
It ’ s all going under , the entire Eastern Seaboard .
The capital will move to Kansas City but nobody will mourn for Washington .
Someone will invent virtual gasoline .
Someone will write a poem called “ At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium ” which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a media impresario and people in Ohio will sing it during the seventh-inning stretch remembering , or imagining , the glory of what was .
Time is with us viscerally , idiomatically , time inhabits us like a glass bowl filled with tap water at the kitchen sink , and some little pink stones , and a sunken plastic castle with a child ’ s face etched in a slate-gray window .
Fish swim past , solemn as ghosts , and the child smiles sadly , wondering , perhaps , how bees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little melancholy .
He must miss his old home , a skin-honeyed hive of multifarious humankind , a metropolis of stately filth doused in overrich perfume .
The castle door swings open and the boy emerges like an astronaut stepping warily onto the moon .
When he sees us , through the warping lens of the bowl , watching him with desperate , misfocussed passion , we are as cartoonishly gargantuan as the past , and he as spectral as the future , raising one small hand to wave goodbye .

Audio: Read by the author.
It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine,
café tables poised for selfies, windows squeegeed
and fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square,
former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeons
today chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulips
superimposed atop the old, familiar, unevictable dirt.
Lying on the couch, I am drifting with the conversation
of bees, a guttural buzz undergirding the sound
from a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgotten
in the overgrown beech tree marooned out back,
limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leaflets
forking through a blanket of white blossoms,
long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe,
pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok.
Rigorous investigation has identified two dialects
buzzing through the plunder-fall, hovering black bumblebees
and overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss,
as the city to us, blundering against its oversaturated anthers
until the pollen coats our skin, as if sugar-dusted,
as if rolled in honey and flour to bake a cake
for the queen, yes, she is with us, it is spring and this
is her coronation, blossoming pear and crab-apple
and cherry trees, too many pinks to properly absorb,
every inch of every branch lusting after beauty.
To this riot of stimuli, this vernal bombardment
of the senses, I have capitulated without a fight.
But not the beech tree. It never falters. It is stalwart
and grounded and garlanded, a site-specific creation,
seed to rootling to this companionable giant,
tolerant and benign, how many times have I reflected
upon their superiority to our species, the trees of earth?
Reflection, self-reflection—my job is to polish the mirror,
to amplify the echoes. Even now I am hard at work,
researching the ineffable. I loafe and invite my soul,
for Walt Whitman is ever my companion in New York,
thronged carcass of a city in which one is never alone
and yet never un-nagged-at by loneliness, a hunger
as much for the otherness of others as for the much-sung self,
for something somewhere on the verge of realization,
for what lies around the corner, five or six blocks uptown,
hiding out in the Bronx or across the river in Jersey.
Somewhere on the streets of the city right now somebody
is meeting the love of their life for the very first time,
somebody is drinking schnapps from a paper sack
discussing Monty Python with a man impersonating a priest,
someone is waiting for the bus to South Carolina
to visit her sister in hospice, someone is teleconferencing
with the office back in Hartford, Antwerp, Osaka,
someone is dust-sweeping, throat-clearing, cart-wheeling,
knife-grinding, day-trading, paying dues, dropping a dime,
giving the hairy eyeball, pissing against a wall,
someone is snoozing, sniffling, cavorting, nibbling,
roistering, chiding, snuggling, confiding,
pub-crawling, speed-dating, pump-shining, ivy-trimming,
tap-dancing, curb-kicking, rat-catching, tale-telling,
getting lost, getting high, getting busted, breaking up,
breaking down, breaking loose, losing faith,
going broke, going green, feeling blue, seeing red,
someone is davening, busking, hobnobbing, grandstanding,
playing the ponies, feeding the pigeons, gull-watching,
wolf-whistling, badgering the witness, pulling down the grill
and locking up shop, writing a letter home in Pashto or
Xhosa, learning to play the xylophone, waiting for an Uber X,
conspiring, patrolling, transcending, bedevilling,
testifying, bloviating, absolving, kibbitzing,
kowtowing, pinky-swearing, tarring and shingling,
breaking and entering, delivering and carting away,
enwreathing lampposts with yellow ribbons,
reading Apollinaire on a bench littered with fallen petals,
waiting for an ambulance to pass before crossing First Avenue
toward home. No wonder they fear it so intensely,
the purists and isolationists in Kansas, the ideologues
in Kandahar, it is a relentless negotiation with multiplicity,
a constant engagement with the shape-shifting mob,
diversely luminous as sunlight reflecting off mirrored glass
in puzzle pieces of apostolic light. Certainly this is not
the Eternal City but it is certainly Imperial, certainly
tyrannical, democratic, demagogic, dynastic, anarchic,
hypertrophic, hyperreal. An empire of rags and photons.
An empire encoded in the bricks from which it was built,
each a stamped emblem of its labor-intensive materiality,
hundreds of millions barged down the Hudson each year
from the clay pits of Haverstraw and Kingston
after the Great Fire of 1835, a hinterland of dependencies,
quarries and factories and arterial truck farms
delivering serum to that muscular heart, a toiling collective
of Irish sandhogs and Iroquois beam walkers and Ivoirian
umbrella venders collecting kindling for the bonfire
that has lured, like moths, the entire world to its blaze.
As with my tree, the hubbub of bees its exaltation.
Apis, maker of honey, Bombus, the humble bumbler,
and the tree a common American beech.
It rules the yard, overawing a straggling ailanthus
hard against the wall of the Con Ed substation.
Along the fence some scraggly boxwood shrubs,
a table collapsed into rusted segments, two piles of bricks—
what’s their story?—who made them, carted them,
set them as a patio, and who undid that work to create these
mundane, rain-eroded monuments to human neglect?
Why does nobody tend this little garden?
Undisciplined ivy scales the building in thick ropes
and coils of porcelain berry vine, whose fruit will ripen
to obscene brilliance come autumn, those strange berries,
turquoise, violet, azure . . . Ah, I’ve lost my train
of thought. Berries. The city. People, bricks, the past.
Bees in a flowering beech tree. Symbiosis. Streams and webs
and permutations, viruses replicating, mutating, evolving.
Books in a library, bricks in a wall, people in a city.
A man selling old golf clubs on the corner of Ludlow Street.
A woman on the F train carefully rubbing ointment
up and down her red, swollen arms. Acorns—
tossing them into the Hudson River from a bench as I did
when I was Peter Stuyvesant, when I was Walt Whitman,
when we were of the Lenape and Broadway our hunting trail.
Then the deer vanished, the docks decayed, the towers fell.
The African graveyard was buried beneath concrete
as the memory of slavery has been obscured by dogma
and denial. The city speaks a hundred languages,
it straddles three rivers, it holds forty islands hostage,
it is an archipelago of memory, essential and insubstantial
and evasive as the progeny of steam grates at dawn,
a gathering of apparitions. The Irish have vanished
from Washington Heights but I still see myself eating
a cold pot-roast sandwich, watching “McHale’s Navy”
on black-and-white TV in my grandmother’s old apartment.
I remember the parties we used to throw on Jane Street,
shots of tequila and De La Soul on the tape deck, everyone
dancing, everyone young and vibrant and vivacious—
decades later we discovered a forgotten videotape
and our sons, watching with bemused alarm, blurted out,
Mom, you were so beautiful! She was. We all were,
everyone except the city. The city was a wreck and then
it was a renovation project and now it is a playground of privilege
and soon it will be something else, liquid as a dream.
Empires come and go, ours will fade in turn, even the city
will retreat, step by step, as the Atlantic rises against it.
But water is not the end. Bricks are made of clay and sand
and when they disintegrate, when they return to silt,
new bricks will be made by hands as competent as ours.
People will live in half-flooded tenements, people will live
on houseboats moored to bank pillars along Wall Street.
It’s all going under, the entire Eastern Seaboard.
The capital will move to Kansas City but nobody will mourn
for Washington. Someone will invent virtual gasoline. Someone
will write a poem called “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium”
which will be set to a popular tune by a media impresario
and people in Ohio will sing it during the seventh-inning stretch
remembering, or imagining, the glory of what was.
Time is with us viscerally, idiomatically, time inhabits us
like a glass bowl filled with tap water at the kitchen sink,
and some little pink stones, and a sunken plastic castle
with a child’s face etched in a slate-gray window.
Fish swim past, solemn as ghosts, and the child smiles sadly,
wondering, perhaps, how bees will pollinate underwater.
He seems a little melancholy. He must miss his old home,
a skin-honeyed hive of multifarious humankind,
a metropolis of stately filth doused in overrich perfume.
The castle door swings open and the boy emerges
like an astronaut stepping warily onto the moon.
When he sees us, through the warping lens of the bowl,
watching him with desperate, misfocussed passion, we are
as cartoonishly gargantuan as the past, and he as spectral
as the future, raising one small hand to wave goodbye.


Brittany Howard’s Transformation

Before Brittany Howard was paid to make music , she bagged groceries at a Kroger , sold used cars , made pizzas at a Domino ’ s , fried eggs at a Cracker Barrel , built custom picture frames , sucked up trash for a commercial sanitation company , and delivered the U.S. mail along a rural route in northern Alabama , where she lived .
She practiced with her rock band , Alabama Shakes , whenever she could .
“ I would work thirteen hours at the post office , get off , and rush to rehearsal , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alabama Shakes released their début album , “ Boys & Girls.
” Howard was twenty-three , and had never travelled outside the South .
Critics scrambled to praise the record ; it briefly seemed as if Howard , whose voice is both burly and tender , a mixture of Robert Plant and Marvin Gaye , might be able to single-handedly resuscitate American rock and roll .
“ Boys & Girls , ” which was loose , open , and craggy , felt momentous and aberrant .
At the time , a good portion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radio—Imagine Dragons , Linkin Park—was so densely and fastidiously produced , so airless and unrelenting , that listening to it felt like getting whopped in the face with a snowball .
“ Boys & Girls ” suggested a different way forward : it was not without potency , but it drifted in like a salty breeze .
The album eventually sold more than a million copies in the United States .
Howard spent several years on tour with the band , an experience that she described as joyful and disorienting .
“ Right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all of a sudden I ’ m in England—I ’ m eating haggis !
” she told me .
“ All of a sudden , I ’ m in France—I ’ m eating a snail !
” Howard is a proud Southerner , yet she was eager to see the rest of the world .
“ In the deepest core of me , when I go to my happy place , there are cicadas in the background , the air is humid , I smell barbecue , and there ’ s a train @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But I ’ d never seen a mountain before .
I remember seeing the desert for the first time , the West Coast , the ocean .
I was so excited about everything.
” Soon , Howard had attracted some very famous fans , including Paul McCartney and Barack and Michelle Obama .
“ Hold On , ” the album ’ s first single , was nominated for three Grammy Awards and named the best song of the year by Rolling Stone .
The track gestures to the band ’ s Southern lineage—there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pickett ripping on “ Hey Jude ” at FAME Studios , in Muscle Shoals , and a bit of Rufus and Carla Thomas singing “ I Didn ’ t Believe ” at Satellite Records , in Memphis .
In the pre-chorus , Howard addresses herself : “ Come on , Brittany / You got to get back up !
” she bellows .
It ’ s a small choice , using her name like that , but it disarms me every time I hear it .
When Howard finally delivers the full chorus— @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on !
” —she ’ s singing with so much vigor and boldness that the lyric feels less like a plea than like a nonnegotiable demand .
Howard wrote “ Hold On ” while she was working for the sanitation company .
“ I was in this little fucking truck , going to my job cleaning commercial properties , ” she said .
“ We made CDs of our practices , and I put a CD in , and just started singing the hook : ‘ Hold on.
’ ” The band had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ & Tavern , a sports bar in Decatur , Alabama .
Howard improvised the rest of the song onstage .
When she arrived at the chorus , the crowd began singing along as if they had heard it before , as if it were a cover , as if they had known it all their lives .
Howard , who is now thirty-one , splits her time between Nashville , where she moved shortly after the success of “ Boys & Girls , ” and Taos , New Mexico .
She ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the West Coast .
She requires a certain amount of agitation to feel inspired .
“ Once I start getting comfortable , I get too comfortable .
I like things to change , ” she said .
“ I like things to move.
” “ Sound & Color , ” Alabama Shakes ’ second record , from 2015 , débuted at No .
1 on the Billboard 200 and was nominated for six Grammys , including Album of the Year .
That year , the British pop singer Adele told the Guardian that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ She ’ s so fucking full of soul , overflowing , dripping , that I almost can ’ t handle it.
” Prince invited the Shakes to play at Paisley Park , and asked if he could join them onstage for a song .
“ It comes time to do ‘ Give Me All Your Love , ’ and I ’ m getting worried , because I don ’ t see this dude , ” Howard recalled .
“ I step back from the mike , and then out of nowhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their minds , and he starts shredding .
Shred-ding .
So I was , like , ‘ I ’ m gon na double-shred with you .
When else am I gon na get to do this ?
’ Now we ’ re double-soloing , and it ’ s as sick as it sounds .
It ’ s happening , it ’ s psychedelic , it ’ s amazing .
And then he gives me a little kiss on the cheek , leaps like a baby fawn over all the amplifiers into the darkness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” When it came time for Alabama Shakes to produce a third album , the songs weren ’ t coming .
On a cross-country drive , Howard stared blankly out the window .
“ I was sitting there , silent , thinking to myself , What am I gon na do ?
What do I want ?
” she told me .
The safe choice—sticking around Nashville and grinding it out with the band—didn ’ t feel right .
“ I ’ d rather make a few mistakes and still be myself than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
In 2017 , Howard left Alabama Shakes to make a solo album .
“ Everyone was , like , ‘ No , don ’ t do that !
You can do this on the side , but don ’ t cancel the Shakes !
’ ” she said .
She cancelled the Shakes .
It requires a particular kind of bravura to untether oneself from a band that , to the outside world , still appeared to be on the come-up .
“ Jaime , ” her solo début , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resemble any album I can think of , though it does share some spiritual DNA with two of the boldest and most stylistically inscrutable releases of the past century : “ Black Messiah , ” the third album by the R. & B. singer D ’ Angelo , and Sly and the Family Stone ’ s “ There ’ s a Riot Goin ’ On , ” a psychedelic-rock masterpiece from 1977 .
“ Jaime ” is deep , freaky , and heartfelt .
Nearly all its songs feature some sort of heavy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by adding prickly guitar riffs at unusual intervals , folding in samples , or putting an effect on her voice that makes it sound tinny and distant , as if she ’ s singing into the receiver of a rotary phone .
“ Jaime ” is familiar enough that it ’ s easy to like—it ’ s the sort of record people will immediately ask about if you put it on during a party—but it is also intensely idiosyncratic , and does not hew to any genre constraints .
At first , Howard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted “ Jaime ” to sound like .
“ I ’ d be , like , ‘ I think I want it to be like this ?
’ ” she said .
“ And then I ’ d hear some song and be , like , ‘ No , I definitely want it to be like that.
’ And then I ’ d hear another song , and it ’ d be : ‘ Well , maybe more like this !
’ ” She went into the studio anyway .
“ The songs @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Before Brittany Howard was paid to make music, she bagged groceries at a Kroger, sold used cars, made pizzas at a Domino’s, fried eggs at a Cracker Barrel, built custom picture frames, sucked up trash for a commercial sanitation company, and delivered the U.S. mail along a rural route in northern Alabama, where she lived. She practiced with her rock band, Alabama Shakes, whenever she could. “I would work thirteen hours at the post office, get off, and rush to rehearsal,” she told me.
In 2012, Alabama Shakes released their début album, “Boys & Girls.” Howard was twenty-three, and had never travelled outside the South. Critics scrambled to praise the record; it briefly seemed as if Howard, whose voice is both burly and tender, a mixture of Robert Plant and Marvin Gaye, might be able to single-handedly resuscitate American rock and roll. “Boys & Girls,” which was loose, open, and craggy, felt momentous and aberrant. At the time, a good portion of the rock music played on the radio—Imagine Dragons, Linkin Park—was so densely and fastidiously produced, so airless and unrelenting, that listening to it felt like getting whopped in the face with a snowball. “Boys & Girls” suggested a different way forward: it was not without potency, but it drifted in like a salty breeze.
The album eventually sold more than a million copies in the United States. Howard spent several years on tour with the band, an experience that she described as joyful and disorienting. “Right place, right time, and now all of a sudden I’m in England—I’m eating haggis!” she told me. “All of a sudden, I’m in France—I’m eating a snail!” Howard is a proud Southerner, yet she was eager to see the rest of the world. “In the deepest core of me, when I go to my happy place, there are cicadas in the background, the air is humid, I smell barbecue, and there’s a train nearby,” she said. “But I’d never seen a mountain before. I remember seeing the desert for the first time, the West Coast, the ocean. I was so excited about everything.”
Soon, Howard had attracted some very famous fans, including Paul McCartney and Barack and Michelle Obama. “Hold On,” the album’s first single, was nominated for three Grammy Awards and named the best song of the year by Rolling Stone. The track gestures to the band’s Southern lineage—there are echoes of Duane Allman and Wilson Pickett ripping on “Hey Jude” at FAME Studios, in Muscle Shoals, and a bit of Rufus and Carla Thomas singing “I Didn’t Believe” at Satellite Records, in Memphis. In the pre-chorus, Howard addresses herself: “Come on, Brittany / You got to get back up!” she bellows. It’s a small choice, using her name like that, but it disarms me every time I hear it. When Howard finally delivers the full chorus—“Yeah, you got to hold on!”—she’s singing with so much vigor and boldness that the lyric feels less like a plea than like a nonnegotiable demand.
Howard wrote “Hold On” while she was working for the sanitation company. “I was in this little fucking truck, going to my job cleaning commercial properties,” she said. “We made CDs of our practices, and I put a CD in, and just started singing the hook: ‘Hold on.’ ” The band had a gig booked at the Brick Deli & Tavern, a sports bar in Decatur, Alabama. Howard improvised the rest of the song onstage. When she arrived at the chorus, the crowd began singing along as if they had heard it before, as if it were a cover, as if they had known it all their lives.
Howard, who is now thirty-one, splits her time between Nashville, where she moved shortly after the success of “Boys & Girls,” and Taos, New Mexico. She’s considering yet another relocation, possibly to the West Coast. She requires a certain amount of agitation to feel inspired. “Once I start getting comfortable, I get too comfortable. I like things to change,” she said. “I like things to move.”
“Sound & Color,” Alabama Shakes’ second record, from 2015, débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was nominated for six Grammys, including Album of the Year. That year, the British pop singer Adele told the Guardian that she was “obsessed” with Howard: “She’s so fucking full of soul, overflowing, dripping, that I almost can’t handle it.” Prince invited the Shakes to play at Paisley Park, and asked if he could join them onstage for a song. “It comes time to do ‘Give Me All Your Love,’ and I’m getting worried, because I don’t see this dude,” Howard recalled. “I step back from the mike, and then out of nowhere he just pops onstage, people lose their minds, and he starts shredding. Shred-ding. So I was, like, ‘I’m gonna double-shred with you. When else am I gonna get to do this?’ Now we’re double-soloing, and it’s as sick as it sounds. It’s happening, it’s psychedelic, it’s amazing. And then he gives me a little kiss on the cheek, leaps like a baby fawn over all the amplifiers into the darkness, and I never saw him again.”
When it came time for Alabama Shakes to produce a third album, the songs weren’t coming. On a cross-country drive, Howard stared blankly out the window. “I was sitting there, silent, thinking to myself, What am I gonna do? What do I want?” she told me. The safe choice—sticking around Nashville and grinding it out with the band—didn’t feel right. “I’d rather make a few mistakes and still be myself than be rich and bored,” she said.
In 2017, Howard left Alabama Shakes to make a solo album. “Everyone was, like, ‘No, don’t do that! You can do this on the side, but don’t cancel the Shakes!’ ” she said. She cancelled the Shakes. It requires a particular kind of bravura to untether oneself from a band that, to the outside world, still appeared to be on the come-up.
“I’m just saying it would be a mistake for you to mock this guy.” Cartoon by Frank Cotham Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Jaime,” her solo début, which came out last fall, does not resemble any album I can think of, though it does share some spiritual DNA with two of the boldest and most stylistically inscrutable releases of the past century: “Black Messiah,” the third album by the R. & B. singer D’Angelo, and Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” a psychedelic-rock masterpiece from 1977. “Jaime” is deep, freaky, and heartfelt. Nearly all its songs feature some sort of heavy groove, but Howard often complicates them by adding prickly guitar riffs at unusual intervals, folding in samples, or putting an effect on her voice that makes it sound tinny and distant, as if she’s singing into the receiver of a rotary phone. “Jaime” is familiar enough that it’s easy to like—it’s the sort of record people will immediately ask about if you put it on during a party—but it is also intensely idiosyncratic, and does not hew to any genre constraints. At first, Howard wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted “Jaime” to sound like. “I’d be, like, ‘I think I want it to be like this?’ ” she said. “And then I’d hear some song and be, like, ‘No, I definitely want it to be like that.’ And then I’d hear another song, and it’d be: ‘Well, maybe more like this!’ ” She went into the studio anyway. “The songs showed up,” she said.
When Howard first has an idea, she likes to record directly to her laptop. “The fancier shit stops me from working fast, because I have to turn everything on,” she said. “I’d say my first three ideas are usually the ones I throw out, because I’m trying to write.” She wrote “Georgia,” her favorite song on “Jaime,” while eating a sandwich and reading an article about the experimental R. & B. musician Georgia Anne Muldrow: “The song’s not to her, or about her, but I was, like, ‘Man, I wish Georgia would work with me!’ So I’m walking around the house going, ‘I just want Georgia / To notice me.’ ” Howard realized that the line was actually a chorus, and choked the sandwich down. “I’m hearing everything so suddenly, the most important thing is time,” she said.