newyorker--2020-08-15--Donald Trump’s Incoherent Policy on TikTok and China

On July 31st , President Trump stood on the White House lawn near Marine One and spoke over the whine of the engine .
“ We ’ re looking at TikTok , ” he said , in characteristically circular fashion , in response to a question .
“ We may be banning TikTok .
We may be doing some other things .
There are a couple of options .
But a lot of things are happening , so we ’ ll see what happens.
” The Trump Administration has been waging an on-again , off-again economic war with China , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ app , currently sits at the center of it .
TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based technology company called ByteDance , which was founded , in 2012 , by Zhang Yiming , one of China ’ s most successful technology entrepreneurs .
TikTok was launched in 2017 , but it didn ’ t really develop a user base in the United States until after ByteDance ’ s purchase , that same year , of another social-media site called Musical.ly , which already had an American presence .
From that point on , its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the TikTok app has been downloaded two billion times , and it has grown to eclipse Facebook ’ s Instagram as the platform of choice for teen-agers , celebrities , and influencers , prompting Facebook to scramble to develop its own video-sharing product , called Reels .
( The new service was recently declared a “ dud ” in the Times . )
On August 5th , the Secretary of State , Mike Pompeo , announced that the U.S. , prompted by national-security concerns , would pursue a broad campaign against Chinese @ @ @ @ @ @ @ popular Chinese apps , such as WeChat , as well .
The following day , the Senate passed a bill banning TikTok from government-issued phones , and Trump signed executive orders stating that TikTok would be barred from operating in the United States in forty-five days unless it was sold to an American buyer .
In response , TikTok entered into talks to sell its American operations to Microsoft .
During a briefing in May , Trump was blunt about his frustrations with China .
“ For decades , they have ripped off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever done before , ” he said .
“ China raided our factories , offshored our jobs , gutted our industries , stole our intellectual property , and violated their commitments under the World Trade Organization.
” His motivations for singling out TikTok , however , are unclear .
What is known is that TikTok is one of the only technology companies to actually pose a commercial threat to the handful of giants that dominate the American technology industry .
Google , Amazon , Apple , and Facebook are targets of federal and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of competitive pressure from TikTok that it hasn ’ t seen since it started buying up most of its nascent competitors and built a monopoly position in American social media .
More personally for Trump , TikTok played a key role in the public-relations failure surrounding his rally in Tulsa , Oklahoma , in June .
After the Trump campaign made lofty promises about the crowds of supporters expected at the rally—Brad Parscale , then the campaign chief , tweeted that they had more than a million requests for tickets—the local fire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ showed up .
The following day , news reports suggested that teens on TikTok had mobilized to undermine the rally by registering for tickets that they never intended to use .
The ensuing media attention has been a lingering source of embarrassment for the Trump campaign .
The argument against TikTok put forth by Trump and others in the Administration is based on fears that the vast amount of personal data which the app collects and retains could end up in the hands of the Chinese government .
Chinese companies tend to have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the argument goes , TikTok would be in no position to resist demands from Chinese officials that it hand over sensitive information about its American users .
“ It sounds like it collects an enormous amount of data about individuals and everything they do on their app and on their phones , ” Teresa Scassa , the Canada research chair in information law and policy at the University of Ottawa law school , told me .
“ It ’ s not necessarily that much different from what other social-media apps are collecting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Scassa noted the irony in the argument : American companies are also enormous collectors of users ’ personal data , and they have pushed back aggressively on attempts to restrict what they collect and what they can do with it , which has left the United States as one of the only Western countries without a comprehensive national data-privacy law .
“ The U.S. has built a huge industry on data , ” she said .
“ Facebook and many other companies in the U.S. have turned data into a commodity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is important to the economy , and that kind of depends on a Wild West in terms of personal data , and has lobbied the federal government accordingly.
” Data held by Facebook , Google , and other U.S. companies can end up in the hands of law-enforcement or national-security officials .
It can also be compromised by hackers .
Scassa points out that other countries , such as Canada and those in the European Union , have concerns about U.S. national-security access to the data of their residents that might be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states have taken steps to improve data protection in their jurisdictions , but there ’ s still no comprehensive national U.S. data-protection law , which raises concerns about privacy when individuals share data with U.S. companies ; due to privacy concerns , the European Court of Justice has rendered a decision that makes it more difficult for personal data to flow from the E.U .
to the U.S .
The need for more sophisticated measures to address China ’ s economic practices has become increasingly clear to Republicans and Democrats alike .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only as a distraction , and highlights just how inadequate the Administration ’ s response to this challenge has been .
“ The U.S.-China relationship is obviously due for a reset , and Trump , rather than embracing systematic policy change , is doing scattershot things that he thinks will make for good headlines , ” Robert Kuttner , the author of “ The Stakes : 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy , ” told me .
The problem goes back decades .
When China was admitted into the World Trade Organization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a move that would yield widespread economic benefits .
President Bill Clinton described it as “ an historic step toward continued prosperity in America , reform in China , and peace in the world.
” American companies took advantage of new access to a cheap , overseas workforce , and American consumers were offered inexpensive Chinese-made goods to buy .
Over all , though , it was a terrible arrangement for American workers .
Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost between 1999 and 2011 , as American companies moved their manufacturing facilities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accused of practices that American firms find unfair : they receive generous subsidies from the Chinese government , especially in highly competitive industries , and American technology companies must , in many cases , partner with Chinese companies in order to do business there , essentially transferring their innovations to competitors who are then in a position to copy them .
There are intelligent ways to try to change some of these dynamics , according to Kuttner , such as by investing heavily in domestic companies in technologically important industries , developing American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less dependent on Chinese-made products , and pushing for enforcement of existing trade rules .
Some of the steps would violate long-held assumptions about the benefits of free trade and how it ’ s supposed to work , but they could yield longer-term strategic and economic benefits .
“ If you were doing a systematic reset , you would take seriously the fact that China is obviously both a geopolitical and geo-economic rival , and you would decide whether or not to revise America ’ s historic reluctance to pursue industrial policies and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Kuttner said .
“ And that , in turn , would involve revising some of the cherished assumptions about how trade is supposed to work that have been bipartisan.
” There is real work to be done .
But , much as he has in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic , Trump has made superficial gestures while ignoring the substance of the problem and allowing it to worsen and spread .
“ If you look at what Trump has actually done , it ’ s all over the place , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been across-the-board tariffs , subsidies to agriculture , ad-hoc deals with the Chinese .
There ’ s a complete strategic incoherence to it .
It ’ s superficially in the spirit of economic nationalism , but it doesn ’ t add up to significant change in our relationship .
It ’ s a sugar high .
”

On July 31st, President Trump stood on the White House lawn near Marine One and spoke over the whine of the engine. “We’re looking at TikTok,” he said, in characteristically circular fashion, in response to a question. “We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options. But a lot of things are happening, so we’ll see what happens.”
The Trump Administration has been waging an on-again, off-again economic war with China, and TikTok, a wildly popular video-sharing app, currently sits at the center of it. TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based technology company called ByteDance, which was founded, in 2012, by Zhang Yiming, one of China’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. TikTok was launched in 2017, but it didn’t really develop a user base in the United States until after ByteDance’s purchase, that same year, of another social-media site called Musical.ly, which already had an American presence. From that point on, its growth was swift. By one estimate, the TikTok app has been downloaded two billion times, and it has grown to eclipse Facebook’s Instagram as the platform of choice for teen-agers, celebrities, and influencers, prompting Facebook to scramble to develop its own video-sharing product, called Reels. (The new service was recently declared a “dud” in the Times.) On August 5th, the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, announced that the U.S., prompted by national-security concerns, would pursue a broad campaign against Chinese apps, and promised to restrict other popular Chinese apps, such as WeChat, as well. The following day, the Senate passed a bill banning TikTok from government-issued phones, and Trump signed executive orders stating that TikTok would be barred from operating in the United States in forty-five days unless it was sold to an American buyer. In response, TikTok entered into talks to sell its American operations to Microsoft.
During a briefing in May, Trump was blunt about his frustrations with China. “For decades, they have ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before,” he said. “China raided our factories, offshored our jobs, gutted our industries, stole our intellectual property, and violated their commitments under the World Trade Organization.” His motivations for singling out TikTok, however, are unclear. What is known is that TikTok is one of the only technology companies to actually pose a commercial threat to the handful of giants that dominate the American technology industry. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are targets of federal and congressional antitrust investigations; Facebook faces the kind of competitive pressure from TikTok that it hasn’t seen since it started buying up most of its nascent competitors and built a monopoly position in American social media. More personally for Trump, TikTok played a key role in the public-relations failure surrounding his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June. After the Trump campaign made lofty promises about the crowds of supporters expected at the rally—Brad Parscale, then the campaign chief, tweeted that they had more than a million requests for tickets—the local fire department reported that only sixty-two hundred people showed up. The following day, news reports suggested that teens on TikTok had mobilized to undermine the rally by registering for tickets that they never intended to use. The ensuing media attention has been a lingering source of embarrassment for the Trump campaign.
The argument against TikTok put forth by Trump and others in the Administration is based on fears that the vast amount of personal data which the app collects and retains could end up in the hands of the Chinese government. Chinese companies tend to have close relationships with the state, and, the argument goes, TikTok would be in no position to resist demands from Chinese officials that it hand over sensitive information about its American users. “It sounds like it collects an enormous amount of data about individuals and everything they do on their app and on their phones,” Teresa Scassa, the Canada research chair in information law and policy at the University of Ottawa law school, told me. “It’s not necessarily that much different from what other social-media apps are collecting. But it’s a lot.”
Scassa noted the irony in the argument: American companies are also enormous collectors of users’ personal data, and they have pushed back aggressively on attempts to restrict what they collect and what they can do with it, which has left the United States as one of the only Western countries without a comprehensive national data-privacy law. “The U.S. has built a huge industry on data,” she said. “Facebook and many other companies in the U.S. have turned data into a commodity. So you’ve got this sector that is important to the economy, and that kind of depends on a Wild West in terms of personal data, and has lobbied the federal government accordingly.” Data held by Facebook, Google, and other U.S. companies can end up in the hands of law-enforcement or national-security officials. It can also be compromised by hackers. Scassa points out that other countries, such as Canada and those in the European Union, have concerns about U.S. national-security access to the data of their residents that might be shared with U.S. companies. Some individual states have taken steps to improve data protection in their jurisdictions, but there’s still no comprehensive national U.S. data-protection law, which raises concerns about privacy when individuals share data with U.S. companies; due to privacy concerns, the European Court of Justice has rendered a decision that makes it more difficult for personal data to flow from the E.U. to the U.S.
The need for more sophisticated measures to address China’s economic practices has become increasingly clear to Republicans and Democrats alike. But Trump’s fixation on TikTok serves only as a distraction, and highlights just how inadequate the Administration’s response to this challenge has been. “The U.S.-China relationship is obviously due for a reset, and Trump, rather than embracing systematic policy change, is doing scattershot things that he thinks will make for good headlines,” Robert Kuttner, the author of “The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy,” told me. The problem goes back decades. When China was admitted into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, it was presented as a move that would yield widespread economic benefits. President Bill Clinton described it as “an historic step toward continued prosperity in America, reform in China, and peace in the world.” American companies took advantage of new access to a cheap, overseas workforce, and American consumers were offered inexpensive Chinese-made goods to buy. Over all, though, it was a terrible arrangement for American workers. Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost between 1999 and 2011, as American companies moved their manufacturing facilities overseas.


newyorker--2020-08-15--How DeForrest Brown, Jr., Centers the Black Body in Techno Music

On a sweltering summer afternoon , the writer and techno musician DeForrest Brown , Jr. , welcomed a visitor into his cozy East Village apartment .
After the usual , awkward COVID-19 theatre—disclosing negative test results , adjusting masks—he climbed a vertiginous iron spiral staircase to a sun-drenched loft , stuffed with enough books to comprise “ a library for the End Times , ” he said .
“ Anyhoo , ” he continued , as we sat on some cushions in front of an overworked fan , “ I was upstate visiting my mom ’ s brother , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He says , ‘ I ’ m going to go out to the car and show you something.
’ He comes back with this laminated letter that was my great-grandfather ’ s signing for his freedom .
He said , ‘ I keep it there for spiritual protection.
’ I was , like , ‘ Our great-grandfather was enslaved ?
’ And he said , ‘ Oh , shit—they didn ’ t tell you.
’ ” This revelation came two years ago , when Brown , who is now thirty , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life situations of being Black in America under capitalism.
” Frustrated with his poorly paid freelance-writing career , Brown returned from upstate New York and launched a new project , Speaker Music , which on Juneteenth released its second album , “ Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry , ” a ferociously beautiful collection of fragmented , bruising techno and spoken word .
Later this year , Brown will publish his first book , “ Assembling a Black Counter-Culture , ” which explores the links between Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1990 on MacDill Air Force base in Tampa , Florida , and moved to Birmingham , Alabama , just blocks from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church , where , in 1963 , a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four little girls .
His father ran a G.E.D .
program for Black youth , taught business economics at the H.B.C .
Miles College , and was a Southern Baptist Deacon ; his mom was a social worker .
They lived in the house his great-grandfather built ; Brown slept in his bed after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and five , his great-grandfather had died .
Brown attended the prestigious Tuggle Elementary School , founded in 1903 as a school for homeless Black boys by the abolitionist Carrie A. Tuggle .
By the time he began high school , his family had moved to nearby Bessemer , “ where Gucci Mane grew up , ” he said , “ and there was also some Walter White stuff—a catfish farm that blew up while I was in high school , which I later found out was a meth lab.
” Brown ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days in the same college band as the Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra ( he quit after three days , Brown said , because he “ couldn ’ t keep up with the grandeur ” ) ; Brown learned to play trumpet from the same man who taught his father .
“ I grew up around Black marching bands , ” he said .
“ My ear is tuned to that stuff .
I ’ ve never heard something like tubas in a Black southern marching band—buildings would shake from the sound.
” As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alabama , Brown began downloading “ vast amounts ” of free jazz .
At a library sale , he found a copy of Alvin Toffler ’ s “ The Third Wave , ” from 1980 , which forecast a society in which technology would facilitate a shift from manufacturing to knowledge creation and “ expertise ” as sources of capital .
Toffler called the power structure that such experts would rule a “ technocracy ” ; when Brown looked up the term on Wikipedia , he came across “ techno , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Detroit , led by young Black men , including Kevin Saunderson , Derrick May , and Juan Atkins .
( Atkins , too , had read Toffler in high school . )
Brown began listening to techno at work .
“ I was driving a diesel truck , delivering pharmaceuticals and computer parts , ” he said .
“ That ’ s one of the ways I paid for school .
It was very isolated , listening on the speakers of a diesel truck.
” He began exploring a second wave of techno @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Carl Craig , Underground Resistance , and Drexcyia , artists who blended radical Black politics , Afrofuturist mythologies , and mastery of their drum machines .
It was music that had little to do with the oontz-oontz hedonism of mainstream techno , which was dominated by white European men .
Brown moved to New York City , in 2013 , sharing an apartment in Brownsville with his best friend from college , a former corrections officer who had been traumatized by seeing the school-to-prison pipeline up close and a “ white communist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrote for music Web sites and worked multiple bookstore gigs to make rent , danced all night at techno clubs like 285 Kent , Bossa Nova Civic Club , and Output , and met the statistical analyst , photographer , and fashion designer Ting Ding , a veteran of the hardcore-techno scene of Berlin .
She and Luz Fernandez had recently launched Make Techno Black Again , first as a meme and then as a campaign in their gender-fluid clothing line , Hecha .
Brown made them a mix , and M.T.B.A .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an online friend and musician , had been sending him tracks .
Brown used a mic belonging to another friend , the musician Jacqueline Miller , “ to do this spoken word thing .
It became a crazy assembly line .
It was for an art symposium , and our pieces were supposed to play in between each performer .
I figured that if I had to whisper to rich people in a lofty place , I might as well tell them what they did.
” New York City ’ s Purple @ @ @ @ @ @ @ PTP ) liked what they heard enough to release the work with Kepla as an album , “ Absent Personae.
” The idea of welding fighting words to techno appealed to Brown , but he needed to up his sonic game .
Miller spent three days teaching him Ableton , the music-production software .
“ We would be eating Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew and I would be , like , ‘ How do I make this sound woosh , ’ and she would be , like , ‘ Here.
’ ” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on PTP called “ The Wages of Being Black Is Death , ” which attracted the attention of Planet Mu , a prestigious U.K. label with a roster of leading Black American producers .
Brown ’ s first release on Planet Mu was a love letter to Ting called “ of desire , longing ” ; his subsequent EP , “ Percussive Therapy , ” offered billowing harmonies over complex drum programming—a Detroit homage that evokes sunsets burning over interstates .
At a recent Zoom with Carl Craig for Dia : Beacon , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Black bodies laboring in the cotton fields of Alabama , car-assembly lines of Detroit , and Amazon warehouses with the super-real visions of Afrofuturism—the themes of the forthcoming “ Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.
” Kraftwerk and generations of white techno artists have romanticized the “ man-machine , ” but , as Brown told me , “ It ’ s , like .
.
.
tell me more about this future , because I come from people who were literally machines in the field.
” In order to make techno Black again , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s always been .
“ Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry ” opens with a flash-bang called “ Amerikkka ’ s Bay ( ft. Maia Sanaa ) ” , in which Sanaa , a poet and Brown ’ s cousin , hollers an elegy for murdered Black Americans .
Over the album ’ s fifty minutes , sonic booms coalesce into rhythms only to tear themselves apart , amid invocations of marching bands , the communion of a drum circle , free-jazz riffing , and the rabble-rousing clatter of a protest ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Captiva island in the Rauschenberg Residency but because of the pandemic , finished it in his apartment , sitting on a cushion at the foot of the spiral stairs , in long takes of cross-legged improvisation , toggling between nine MPC programs on an iPad , playing the screen like hand drums .
“ My sincerest hope is that someone walks through the protests and blasts these beats , ” he said .
So far , at least , d.j.s are heeding its call : when I reached Carl Craig a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me about opening a recent virtual d.j .
set with “ Amerikkka ’ s Bay.
” “ It had to be spotlighted , ” he said .
“ To me , it ’ s as important as something from Last Poets , or even something like ‘ What ’ s Going On.
’ It ’ s just telling you what is happening.
” The album closes with “ It is the Negro who Represents the Revolutionary Struggles for a Classless Society , ” which gives the impression of a sonic riot—an excruciating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ named for a quotation from the auto worker and activist James Boggs .
“ I ripped it out in one take and put everything I have in my body into it , ” Brown said , likening the effect to “ shadow-boxing.
” As he showed me out of his apartment and the protective theatre resumed—hand sanitizer , strapping on a fresh mask—Brown spoke about the pantheon he ’ s at last a part of .
“ Archie Shepp would play saxophone blocks away .
Amiri Baraka lived around here .
I pass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day and try to absorb his energies and offer them to Juan Atkins and Derrick May—like , look , I can pull this together for you.
” He smiled , serious .
“ I ’ m shadow-boxing for them , too .
”

On a sweltering summer afternoon, the writer and techno musician DeForrest Brown, Jr., welcomed a visitor into his cozy East Village apartment. After the usual, awkward COVID-19 theatre—disclosing negative test results, adjusting masks—he climbed a vertiginous iron spiral staircase to a sun-drenched loft, stuffed with enough books to comprise “a library for the End Times,” he said.
“Anyhoo,” he continued, as we sat on some cushions in front of an overworked fan, “I was upstate visiting my mom’s brother, who has a nice house and a kid. He says, ‘I’m going to go out to the car and show you something.’ He comes back with this laminated letter that was my great-grandfather’s signing for his freedom. He said, ‘I keep it there for spiritual protection.’ I was, like, ‘Our great-grandfather was enslaved?’ And he said, ‘Oh, shit—they didn’t tell you.’ ”
This revelation came two years ago, when Brown, who is now thirty, was navigating what he called the “compromising life situations of being Black in America under capitalism.” Frustrated with his poorly paid freelance-writing career, Brown returned from upstate New York and launched a new project, Speaker Music, which on Juneteenth released its second album, “Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry,” a ferociously beautiful collection of fragmented, bruising techno and spoken word. Later this year, Brown will publish his first book, “Assembling a Black Counter-Culture,” which explores the links between Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music.
Brown was born in 1990 on MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida, and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, just blocks from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where, in 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four little girls. His father ran a G.E.D. program for Black youth, taught business economics at the H.B.C. Miles College, and was a Southern Baptist Deacon; his mom was a social worker. They lived in the house his great-grandfather built; Brown slept in his bed after, at the age of a hundred and five, his great-grandfather had died. Brown attended the prestigious Tuggle Elementary School, founded in 1903 as a school for homeless Black boys by the abolitionist Carrie A. Tuggle. By the time he began high school, his family had moved to nearby Bessemer, “where Gucci Mane grew up,” he said, “and there was also some Walter White stuff—a catfish farm that blew up while I was in high school, which I later found out was a meth lab.” Brown’s father had played trumpet for three days in the same college band as the Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra (he quit after three days, Brown said, because he “couldn’t keep up with the grandeur”); Brown learned to play trumpet from the same man who taught his father. “I grew up around Black marching bands,” he said. “My ear is tuned to that stuff. I’ve never heard something like tubas in a Black southern marching band—buildings would shake from the sound.”
As a student at the University of North Alabama, Brown began downloading “vast amounts” of free jazz. At a library sale, he found a copy of Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave,” from 1980, which forecast a society in which technology would facilitate a shift from manufacturing to knowledge creation and “expertise” as sources of capital. Toffler called the power structure that such experts would rule a “technocracy”; when Brown looked up the term on Wikipedia, he came across “techno,” the electronic music movement that emerged in early-nineteen-eighties Detroit, led by young Black men, including Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins. (Atkins, too, had read Toffler in high school.) Brown began listening to techno at work. “I was driving a diesel truck, delivering pharmaceuticals and computer parts,” he said. “That’s one of the ways I paid for school. It was very isolated, listening on the speakers of a diesel truck.” He began exploring a second wave of techno producers of the early nineties, such as Carl Craig, Underground Resistance, and Drexcyia, artists who blended radical Black politics, Afrofuturist mythologies, and mastery of their drum machines. It was music that had little to do with the oontz-oontz hedonism of mainstream techno, which was dominated by white European men.
Brown moved to New York City, in 2013, sharing an apartment in Brownsville with his best friend from college, a former corrections officer who had been traumatized by seeing the school-to-prison pipeline up close and a “white communist with a Huey Newton tattoo.” He wrote for music Web sites and worked multiple bookstore gigs to make rent, danced all night at techno clubs like 285 Kent, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and Output, and met the statistical analyst, photographer, and fashion designer Ting Ding, a veteran of the hardcore-techno scene of Berlin. She and Luz Fernandez had recently launched Make Techno Black Again, first as a meme and then as a campaign in their gender-fluid clothing line, Hecha. Brown made them a mix, and M.T.B.A. became a trio.
Meanwhile, Kepla, an online friend and musician, had been sending him tracks. Brown used a mic belonging to another friend, the musician Jacqueline Miller, “to do this spoken word thing. It became a crazy assembly line. It was for an art symposium, and our pieces were supposed to play in between each performer. I figured that if I had to whisper to rich people in a lofty place, I might as well tell them what they did.” New York City’s Purple Tape Pedigree collective (which later became PTP) liked what they heard enough to release the work with Kepla as an album, “Absent Personae.”
The idea of welding fighting words to techno appealed to Brown, but he needed to up his sonic game. Miller spent three days teaching him Ableton, the music-production software. “We would be eating Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew and I would be, like, ‘How do I make this sound woosh,’ and she would be, like, ‘Here.’ ” The result was a 2018 incendiary mixtape released on PTP called “The Wages of Being Black Is Death,” which attracted the attention of Planet Mu, a prestigious U.K. label with a roster of leading Black American producers. Brown’s first release on Planet Mu was a love letter to Ting called “of desire, longing”; his subsequent EP, “Percussive Therapy,” offered billowing harmonies over complex drum programming—a Detroit homage that evokes sunsets burning over interstates.
At a recent Zoom with Carl Craig for Dia:Beacon, Brown talked about how techno unites conditions of Black bodies laboring in the cotton fields of Alabama, car-assembly lines of Detroit, and Amazon warehouses with the super-real visions of Afrofuturism—the themes of the forthcoming “Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.” Kraftwerk and generations of white techno artists have romanticized the “man-machine,” but, as Brown told me, “It’s, like . . . tell me more about this future, because I come from people who were literally machines in the field.” In order to make techno Black again, the world needs to understand how Black it’s always been.


newyorker--2020-08-15--The Case for a Coronavirus-Vaccine Bond

The Case for a Coronavirus-Vaccine Bond

When people in the biopharmaceutical world speak of the valley of death , they ’ re not talking about a geographic hot spot where a lethal disease has infected a large number of people .
Rather , the valley of death is where scientists in a research program have spent the last of their grant money , or a young biotech company has burned through its preliminary financing , and , though a program may still be promising , potential funders decide that they don ’ t want to risk the costs of taking it to the next level , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ valley of death , and similar financial constraints , are hampering vaccine development , which health officials are counting on to release us from the scourge of COVID-19 and , perhaps even more important , from future pandemics that the novel coronavirus portends .
Judging from the Times ’ s “ Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker , ” a lack of research funds wouldn ’ t seem to be a serious problem .
More than a hundred and sixty-five vaccines are in development around the world .
Seven , including three in China , are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most talked-about in this country—Moderna ’ s , in Cambridge , Massachusetts , and AstraZeneca ’ s , at Oxford University—rely on new technologies , based on genetic engineering , being deployed with seemingly unprecedented speed .
Similar programs run by Pfizer , Johnson & Johnson , and Novavax claim to be not far behind .
All speak of a vaccine by 2021 .
The U.S. government is paying up to ten billion dollars in subsidies to five of these programs , for trials and manufacturing , under a plan called Operation Warp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was awarded a contract worth nearly two billion dollars , to pay for a hundred million doses , and to support the company ’ s scaling up to produce six hundred million .
On Tuesday , it was announced that Moderna would supply a hundred million doses for a billion and a half dollars .
This would all suggest that governments and Big Pharma are doing all that can be done .
And that may well have been the case if the vaccines currently under development were in response to a virus so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ; or if nothing like it will ever occur again , so that emergency funding on this scale will never be called for again , either .
But neither is true .
We have known about other fatal coronaviruses , such as SARS and MERS , for years—and we have also known that they would not be the last that we encountered .
Moreover , vaccines are developed in distinct research platforms : some work with genes , others with proteins , or parts of the virus itself .
Each requires particular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those methods , not to mention the extensive testing regimes that are required—in this country , by the Food and Drug Administration—all make the typical financial pitfalls of drug research worse in the case of vaccines .
For a start , costs are higher .
You aim to vaccinate millions of people who are still healthy , and whose responses to an inoculation may vary greatly by age , gender , body type , and other factors .
You don ’ t want to harm anyone unnecessarily , so advanced trials may involve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s the issue of demand .
A drug that could successfully treat a chronic disease such as cancer would be in demand around the world every day .
Right now , so would a COVID-19 vaccine , but that ’ s not typical of vaccine markets ; indeed , vaccine producers will likely face radically shrinking markets as soon as their products become widely available .
Other vaccines , for diseases such as malaria , which target poor countries , are often purchased by philanthropic organizations for distribution , and do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ MERS both subsided before vaccines for them could attract investment .
But , had investments been made , Ray Jordan , Moderna ’ s chief corporate-affairs officer , told me , by now we might have at least learned what levels of antibodies were sufficient to provide immunity against other coronaviruses .
He added that this knowledge might have expedited advanced human trials for COVID-19 , and , just as crucially , that we might now have had “ a vaccine-manufacturing system and supply-chain up and running.
” Little wonder that , prior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Big Pharma firms—most prominently , perhaps , Britain ’ s GlaxoSmithKline—considered the market for vaccines attractive enough to commit to developing them in their own labs .
Pfizer ’ s COVID-19 vaccine , for instance , is being developed by BioNTech , a twelve-year-old German biotech firm with which it entered into an agreement in August , 2018 , to do research on cancer and infectious diseases , where the former promised a more profitable return .
As things stand , even at the current accelerated pace , it will take a year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the coronavirus genome was sequenced , in January , for a COVID-19 vaccine to reach the first of us .
And who knows what new mutations or viruses may present themselves as we wait ?
Back in 2005 , Anthony Fauci , who was already the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , presented the problem in a lecture to the Milbank Memorial Fund .
“ Infectious diseases accounted for about twenty-six per cent of the fifty-seven million deaths worldwide in 2002 , ” he said , deploring the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tuberculosis .
But , “ faced with the choice of putting two hundred million dollars into a new area , will pharmaceutical companies make a product to combat an emerging microbe , for which there is an uncertain market , or will they develop a new Viagra or a better Lipitor ?
” No indictment was implied , at least not of individual companies , which have to answer to shareholders ; the companies were behaving normally , which only makes the crisis more vexing .
The challenge , Fauci suggested , calls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just for a moment of crisis but as part an ongoing , long-term process , and not just in the United States but internationally—in short , a radical breakthrough not only in biological science but also in financial engineering .
Andrew W. Lo and Roger M. Stein have been making the same argument for much of the past decade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ’ s Laboratory for Financial Engineering .
Lo , the lab ’ s founding director , was born in Hong Kong in 1960 , and was raised by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard , research in advanced financial models at Wharton , and , by 2010 , he had become an innovator in managing large asset funds .
He was one of the original quants , applying advanced mathematics to devise complex financial products .
Then , Lo told me , “ Over a four-year period , six people that were close to me all died of cancer , including my mother .
I thought that , somehow , knowing me was carcinogenic.
” He couldn ’ t reconcile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new drugs , and , he said , “ The more I studied this , the more I realized that finance actually plays a huge role in drug development—in many cases , way too big a role.
” It also became clear to him that it would be possible to secure better , more efficient financing “ just by taking some of the tools that we use routinely in financial-portfolio management and applying it to drug-portfolio management .
”

Stein told me that he and Lo agreed on two rules. “First, we didn’t care who got credit, and we were going to make all of our models available for free on the Web—the articles, spreadsheets, data, algorithms, everything,” he said. “Second, whatever we developed had to be able to stand on its own as a financial investment, though in partnership, at times, with governments and foundations. It had to promise continuing returns to investors, appropriate to the risks assumed.” That was the only way to make a model sustainable. “There are more people who want to do good and make a return,” he noted, “than there are people who want only to do good.”
In the earliest stages of drug research, it’s usually venture capitalists who keep programs viable. But a great deal more money has to be brought in to move a program through the three phased trials mandated by F.D.A.’s rigorous approval process. Bruce A. Chabner, a former director of the division of cancer treatment at the National Cancer Institute and now a professor of medicine at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, told me that “the success rate for any new drug for cancer even entering clinical trials is probably less than one in five, which is still a marked improvement over my earlier time at N.C.I., when it was one in twenty. The valley of death is still responsible for maybe twenty-five per cent of the failures.” It costs tens of millions of dollars just to move from preclinical development (testing on animals) to Phase I trials, which primarily prove a compound’s safety in humans. Getting to Phase III—large-scale trials, usually involving around a thousand people—can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. (If a compound is approved, production and distribution costs can be equal to or higher than those in Phase III.) The chance of moving from Phase I to market varies, depending on the disease, but, on average, it’s just about eleven per cent.
The hit rate for vaccines is actually higher—about nineteen per cent—in part because immunology is a comparatively mature science, at least where diseases can be clearly traced to invasive pathogens. Again, however, vaccines ordinarily present higher costs and lower rewards than other pharmaceuticals; profit margins are slightly more than five per cent, compared with more than fourteen per cent. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the total global vaccine market was about forty billion dollars annually; a big number, but only about three-and-a-half per cent of the total pharmaceutical market.
Biotech companies trying to move beyond Phase I with vaccines, then, may confront not just a valley but a canyon. This is where private-equity firms ought to come in, and occasionally they do. But their focus is typically on restructuring existing businesses, not on placing hundred-million-dollar bets on scientific breakthroughs. That brings us back to Big Pharma, which does make such bets, generally by scooping up the most attractive smaller biotech firms in the most profitable markets. America’s top three Big Pharma corporations—Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Merck—are, together, worth about three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and all three boast prestigious research specialties. So it may seem that the most important research is done at this level, and that the financial problems of thousands of scattered biotech companies are marginal to accelerating development. In fact, the scatter—a multitude of approaches, taking the greatest number of shots on goal—is crucial. According to a report from the IQVIA research group, emerging companies developed thirty-eight of the fifty-nine new therapies brought to market in 2018.
Stein presented the challenge succinctly in a 2014 TED talk. Imagine, he said, a hundred bottles of different compounds in various Phase I labs. They contain different compounds, six of which will save lives, and be worth billions of dollars—“sometimes, billions a year.” But for ten years, no one will know which six. Now imagine being asked to pick one of the hundred bottles and invest two hundred million dollars in it: if you fail to choose one of the winners, in ten years you’ll get nothing. Try raising an investment with that pitch.
The solution appeared obvious to Lo and Stein. (Nevertheless, no one seems to have connected the same dots in pharma.) They had studied Wall Street securitization methods—how investment banks bundle consumer debt (home mortgages, credit-card accounts) into a single bond, get it assessed by a rating agency, and market it to fund managers. They had also studied derivatives traders, who routinely profit from broad portfolios of high-risk, high-reward assets, basically on the assumption that, if just one of them hits, it will more than compensate for the losses on the rest.
Even before doing the math, they asked, as a thought experiment, what if the managers of a portfolio treated biotech firms purely as financial assets, eighty per cent of whose equity might be acquired at launch—a common split for venture capital. The portfolio would continue to invest in the companies as long as their research yielded positive results. Suppose that the portfolio acquired a hundred and fifty biotech firms in this way and, to pay for the equity, it raised a megafund of perhaps, twenty-five billion dollars, mainly through borrowing, using the companies’ scientific prospects as collateral. It could issue a bond—in the case of this portfolio, a ten-year, “zero-coupon” bond, the kind that pays no annual interest, but pays back a lump sum (capital plus compounded interest) at maturity. A number of companies, corresponding to the average success rate of compounds in Phase I reaching market, could be expected to provide enormous payoffs when a product is ready to be sold for manufacture, and the portfolio as a whole could be expected to earn a reasonable profit.
It’s simply a matter, Stein told me, of “scaling-up to smooth out risk.” In effect, he and Lo are proposing research-backed obligations (R.B.O.s); but these securities would avoid the moral hazards of, say, mortgage-backed securities, which helped to sink the markets in 2008, when mortgage brokers and investment bankers pocketed commissions irrespective of whether the bonds defaulted—which many did, in large part because of predatory subprime-lending practices, which roped in borrowers who could never have been expected to repay their loans.
With R.B.O.s, the science that serves as their collateral is subject to constant scrutiny. For portfolio managers, empirical results, not a lack of funds, or hype, would determine when to advance products and when to cut them off. Stein and Lo reckoned that the bond should gain a risk profile of among the safest assets that pension funds might acquire. But the concept is new, Stein added, “so having some kind of government guarantee, with little actual risk to the government, could be very, very helpful.” That guarantee wouldn’t substitute for private investment but catalyze it.
Portfolios, with government guarantees, have, in fact, already proven themselves in the health sciences, albeit on a smaller scale and without financing from long-term bonds. Glenn Yago, a founder of the Milken Institute’s Financial Innovation Lab, advised the Israeli government on a life-sciences fund, for which the government put up the first fifty million dollars and agreed to assume the first losses should the fund be liquidated. “A single new investment by Merck into one of the fund’s oncology companies,” Yago said, “has already put the entire fund in the black.”
Lo thinks that “the U.S. government could have played an amazing leadership role at the beginning of this crisis,” if it had securitized a portfolio of this kind for vaccine biotechs, launching “a global COVID-19 bond.” He imagines a portfolio that wouldn’t have acquired companies outright but would have infused them with money and taken a portion of their equity. “There are over a dozen late-stage vaccine developers, right?” Lo said. “What if the Administration announced that the U.S. Treasury would issue a fifty-billion dollar, three-per-cent, thirty-year government bond?” It would invest in every vaccine-development program that exists, and “for any one vaccine that’s developed, we sell a billion doses.” The portfolio, Lo added, “would just be incredibly profitable.”
Had a vaccine megafund been established before COVID-19, Lo adds, the pandemic might well have been brought more quickly under control. The model could still be useful in the current crisis, given that COVID-19 is still far from under control, and could mutate. As my colleague Carolyn Kormann has written, Moderna is working on a revolutionary “messenger-RNA” platform (as is BioNTech). “It is a function of the technology that if mutations occur, we expect to be able to react quickly and match a new vaccine to a new virus,” Moderna’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, told me. “The platform is like a digital software that can be optimized for different applications.”
The larger question, though, is how, when the current crisis is passed, such a megafund would help prepare us for the next one. In early May, the Social Science Research Network published a paper titled “Financing Vaccines for Global Health Security,” by Lo and co-authors from M.I.T., Brown University, and various investment companies. The paper appeared after COVID-19 had emerged, but the authors had been working on it for two years, and it describes a simulation of how such a megafund would function proactively in normal times. If the notional fund acquired a hundred and forty-one preclinical vaccine programs, targetting the nine most ominous emerging infections (including SARS and MERS), the portfolio would have needed to raise about thirty-five billion dollars, and its hypothetical bond would have had a fifteen-year maturity. It would have produced perhaps eleven vaccines, each earning approval after five years.
Given how uncertain vaccine markets are, the paper notes, governments (“public-sector interventions,” and so forth), would need to guarantee a vaccine bond by committing in advance to purchase and stockpile vaccines. The paper’s most creative suggestion is for a subscription model, a kind of vaccine Netflix, where governments would pay an annual fee to a new international-development fund, one that could perhaps be managed by the G7. The fund could float a bond to both advance vaccine biotechs and to make market commitments to Big Pharma. The virus, the markets, and the science are global.
Indeed, the paper refers to an already existing candidate for a development fund of this kind, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Headquartered in Oslo, CEPI was founded in 2017 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the World Economic Forum; the governments of Japan, Norway, Germany, and India; and the Wellcome Trust, a medical charity based in London. CEPI’s mandate is to accelerate the creation of vaccines for emerging infectious diseases; it was initially capitalized with about half a billion dollars, and it depends on philanthropic and public funding. It is currently committed to supporting nine COVID-19 vaccine programs in various countries; Moderna and other U.S. programs were its beneficiaries before Operation Warp Speed was established. (CEPI was set up to complement the work of another initiative, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation—GAVI—which the Gates Foundation, in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the World Bank, launched in 2000 to purchase vaccines for distribution in poorer nations.)
CEPI, Lo told me, is “grossly underfunded,” but it has “the right expertise” and “connections to all the relevant policymakers in the various different countries.” He thinks that, in time, a CEPI-like agency—an international “public-private partnership”—might well gain the sponsorship of the G20, including China. In fact, he thinks that a future vaccine bond might be launched in a coöperative venture with the European Investment Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and even the People’s Bank of China.
Talk of any new international agency may seem nostalgic in the era of Donald Trump, who, as the pandemic still rages, has announced his intention to withdraw from the W.H.O. Nevertheless, Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, who is one of CEPI’s founders and sits on its board, seems undaunted. He is a former professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, and from 1996 to 2013 he directed Oxford’s clinical research unit in Ho Chi Minh City. (In 2004, he and his colleague Tran Tinh Hien identified the reëmergence of the deadly bird flu H5N1 in humans.) He has gotten to know Lo and the work of his lab, and, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck, he met with a group of fund managers to discuss how CEPI, in acquiring a biotech portfolio, might diminish its reliance on intermittent government largesse.
“This is a once-in-a-hundred-years crisis,” he told me. “We need private as well as philanthropic and public support. They each come with their own challenges.” Public money brings “all sorts of problems”—bureaucracies, nationalism. CEPI, he said, needs “the discipline of the commercial sector,” although with the longer time horizon typical of bond markets, which attract far more money than equity funds, and, with interest rates plummeting, have few attractive offerings just now. The opportunity for the next few years is “a portfolio as opposed to individual assets.” Philanthropy, he added, cannot bring the scale to this. “Working with people like Andrew gives us the intellectual underpinning,” he said.
Farrar would also like to help organize governments to purchase vaccines together, thus enabling “a distributed model” of manufacturing. “Countries like Denmark—with just five million people, but fantastic manufacturing capacity—could be making hundreds of millions of doses,” he said. According to Kendall Hoyt, my colleague at Dartmouth, who has been a consultant to CEPI and is the author of the book “Long Shot: Vaccines for National Defense,” joint purchases would also prevent price gouging and bidding wars. Working from calculations she developed with the Dartmouth economist Christopher M. Snyder, Hoyt projects that rival countries could “bid-up the price of a vaccine by a factor of thirteen.” Glenn Yago would like to see a CEPI-like agency establish an insurance fund into which Big Pharma paid premiums; the insurance would require the companies to build manufacturing facilities while a vaccine is still in Phase III, and would indemnify losses in the event that the vaccine fails to win approval. That would help guarantee that distribution began as soon as approval was granted. If, as one might expect, more vaccines fail than succeed, the fund “could be subsidized with ‘warrants’ ” to acquire equity “in successful vaccine programs,” he said.


newyorker--2020-08-15--Trump Questions Whether Oakland Is Located in United States

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald Trump stirred controversy on Saturday by questioning whether the city of Oakland was @ @ @ @ @ of America .
“ Some very smart people are wondering about that , ” Trump @ @ @ @ @ House .
“ It ’ s something that needs to be looked into.
” Trump @ @ @ @ @ probably a completely different country , ” because “ a lot of countries end in @ @ @ @ @ ” “ You ’ ve got countries like Ireland , Iceland , and Greenland , @ @ @ @ @ So you probably would have to add a country like Oakland to that list.
” @ @ @ @ @ of countries drew a question from one of the reporters present , CNN ’ s @ @ @ @ @ also ends in ‘ land , ’ ” Acosta said .
“ Does that mean @ @ @ @ @ federal troops to Portland , you were invading a foreign country ?
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump stirred controversy on Saturday by questioning whether the city of Oakland was located in the United States of America.
“Some very smart people are wondering about that,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It’s something that needs to be looked into.”
Trump explained that Oakland was “probably a completely different country,” because “a lot of countries end in the word ‘land.’ ”
“You’ve got countries like Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland,” he said. “So you probably would have to add a country like Oakland to that list.”
Trump’s suffix-based theory of countries drew a question from one of the reporters present, CNN’s Jim Acosta.
“Portland also ends in ‘land,’ ” Acosta said. “Does that mean that, when you sent federal troops to Portland, you were invading a foreign country?”
“No, that means you’re a terrible person,” Trump replied.


newyorker--2020-08-16--My Cat Is More Like a Dog Than a Cat

My Cat Is More Like a Dog Than a Cat

My cat is more like a dog than a cat .
He plays fetch .
He guards the house .
He has a large tongue that hangs out of his mouth .
He ’ s also a descendant of wolves .
My cat is more like a dog than a cat .
He brings in the newspaper , but he also writes for it , actually .
He has a weekly column that he publishes under a pseudonym , giving advice to people who don ’ t like their friends .
Most cats would instruct advice-seekers to just not have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a lot more like a dog than a cat .
He supports the concept of friendship .
My cat is more like a dog than a cat .
He ’ s very adventurous and has a robust insurance policy that he took out on the entire family .
When we eventually kick it , he stands to gain upward of a million dollars .
He has no plans to resort to foul play , though , because he ’ s more like a dog than a cat .
He ’ s against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a dog than a cat .
He carries a little barrel of water on his collar and accompanies us humans on mountain-climbing escapades .
Then , when we become dehydrated and open his little barrel for a drink , we find that it ’ s actually full of butterscotch schnapps and that he ’ s been sipping it the whole way , which is why he ’ s in such a good mood .
Like I said , my cat is more like a dog than a cat—a dog with a drinking problem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cat eats dog bones .
I don ’ t mean dog biscuits shaped like bones—I mean actual dogs ’ bones .
He has them shipped in from one of the islands .
It ’ s a hundred per cent illegal .
He could be locked up any day now , but the idea of serving jail time doesn ’ t intimidate him in the slightest .
He would love jail , like dogs usually do .
My cat is more like a dog than a cat .
He has a forked tail .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ back-alley initiation ceremony to join a gang of cats that are more like dogs than cats .
He eventually had to overthrow the gang to escape it , and became an honorary federal agent in the process .
My cat is a corrupt mole for the United States government—like I said , way more like a dog than a cat .
My cat is also in the witness-protection program , just like a dog would be .
When he joined , he had to change his name and move to a new town @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family , the same family that he has a million-dollar insurance policy out on .
The insurance policy is still intact , even with our new names—he checked .
If he outlives us , he ’ ll be way more independently wealthy than most cats .
He ’ ll be much more like a dog then .
My cat sometimes goes to the airport and sniffs people for drugs , just like a dog .
When he finds drugs on a person , he totally freaks out .
He says that he doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but that he has to sniff it , to fight crime .
After he ’ s done sniffing all the cocaine , the airport cops pat him on the head and tell him he ’ s a good boy .
He really likes that .
Then , on the way home , he talks a blue streak before falling asleep for hours , just like a dog .
My cat had a special computer chip implanted in his neck while working for the United States government , because he ’ s so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cat .
It ’ s different from the microchip that regular , non-doglike cats get .
His chip is special .
It communicates information back to NASA via a satellite orbiting the moon .
And , just like a dog , he made a secret deal to sell the information to an extraterrestrial third party that intercepts the signal before it returns to Earth .
In exchange , he ’ s been promised shelter and elevated status on another planet when the Earth becomes uninhabitable , which is soon .
He ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in space , when the time comes .
Like I said , he ’ s much more like a dog than a cat .

My cat is more like a dog than a cat. He plays fetch. He guards the house. He has a large tongue that hangs out of his mouth. He’s also a descendant of wolves.
My cat is more like a dog than a cat. He brings in the newspaper, but he also writes for it, actually. He has a weekly column that he publishes under a pseudonym, giving advice to people who don’t like their friends. Most cats would instruct advice-seekers to just not have friends, but not my cat—he’s a lot more like a dog than a cat. He supports the concept of friendship.
My cat is more like a dog than a cat. He’s very adventurous and has a robust insurance policy that he took out on the entire family. When we eventually kick it, he stands to gain upward of a million dollars. He has no plans to resort to foul play, though, because he’s more like a dog than a cat. He’s against murder.
My cat is more like a dog than a cat. He carries a little barrel of water on his collar and accompanies us humans on mountain-climbing escapades. Then, when we become dehydrated and open his little barrel for a drink, we find that it’s actually full of butterscotch schnapps and that he’s been sipping it the whole way, which is why he’s in such a good mood. Like I said, my cat is more like a dog than a cat—a dog with a drinking problem.
Instead of cat food, my cat eats dog bones. I don’t mean dog biscuits shaped like bones—I mean actual dogs’ bones. He has them shipped in from one of the islands. It’s a hundred per cent illegal. He could be locked up any day now, but the idea of serving jail time doesn’t intimidate him in the slightest. He would love jail, like dogs usually do.
My cat is more like a dog than a cat. He has a forked tail. It’s the result of a back-alley initiation ceremony to join a gang of cats that are more like dogs than cats. He eventually had to overthrow the gang to escape it, and became an honorary federal agent in the process. My cat is a corrupt mole for the United States government—like I said, way more like a dog than a cat.
My cat is also in the witness-protection program, just like a dog would be. When he joined, he had to change his name and move to a new town. He had to relocate our entire family, the same family that he has a million-dollar insurance policy out on. The insurance policy is still intact, even with our new names—he checked. If he outlives us, he’ll be way more independently wealthy than most cats. He’ll be much more like a dog then.
My cat sometimes goes to the airport and sniffs people for drugs, just like a dog. When he finds drugs on a person, he totally freaks out. He says that he doesn’t like the way cocaine smells, but that he has to sniff it, to fight crime. After he’s done sniffing all the cocaine, the airport cops pat him on the head and tell him he’s a good boy. He really likes that. Then, on the way home, he talks a blue streak before falling asleep for hours, just like a dog.
My cat had a special computer chip implanted in his neck while working for the United States government, because he’s so much more like a dog than a cat. It’s different from the microchip that regular, non-doglike cats get. His chip is special. It communicates information back to NASA via a satellite orbiting the moon. And, just like a dog, he made a secret deal to sell the information to an extraterrestrial third party that intercepts the signal before it returns to Earth. In exchange, he’s been promised shelter and elevated status on another planet when the Earth becomes uninhabitable, which is soon.
He’ll be responsible for replenishing the cat population in space, when the time comes. Like I said, he’s much more like a dog than a cat.


newyorker--2020-08-16--Do V.P. Picks Matter?

Do V.P. Picks Matter?

Nowadays , the consensus seems to be that a Presidential contender ’ s running mate doesn ’ t matter in any direct , instrumental sense .
In the endless rehashing of Hillary Clinton ’ s loss to Donald Trump , Tim Kaine plays barely a walk-on role .
Vice-Presidential candidates can ’ t be counted on to deliver their own states or regions or to balance the ticket in any reliably strategic way .
Two political scientists who have studied the issue , Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko , write , “ While most voters say that the choice of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deciding their vote , few can recall a time when it actually has changed their vote.
” But the scholars also conclude that the choice can produce a sort of halo effect .
The selection of a running mate—sometimes called the first Presidential act—can influence perceptions of the candidate ’ s own qualities of character or judgment , and this , in turn , can make a difference electorally .
It ’ s why John McCain ’ s pick of the ill-qualified Sarah Palin is often thought to have done his campaign irreparable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ men were convinced that she was winking at them .
Joe Biden ’ s choice to fill the second spot on his ticket is , on that basis , a smart one .
Senator Kamala Harris is a fifty-five-year-old woman whose debating and cross-examining skills outshine his .
( “ I ’ m not able to be rushed this fast , ” then Attorney General Jeff Sessions complained when she questioned him about his contact with Russians preceding the 2016 election .
“ It makes me nervous.
” ) Her campaign ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself on the debate stage , for his onetime opposition to school busing and his willingness to work with Southern segregationists in the Senate .
So the choice marks a contrast with Trump , whose judgment of anyone ’ s worth depends on how much they capitulate to him .
Just as important , the choice also shows that Biden , who is seventy-seven , understands something more important than short-term strategy : that he is a transitional figure , and that the future of his party and of the country depends on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing , ” Harris told Dana Goodyear , who profiled her for this magazine , in 2019 .
“ Every office I ’ ve run for I was the first to win .
First person of color .
First woman .
First woman of color .
Every time.
” There are plenty of people who are exhilarated by the barrier-collapsing force of her selection .
Harris , born in Oakland , California , to Jamaican and Indian immigrants , will be only the third woman and the first Black woman to occupy the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I ’ m jumping for joy , ” Johnnetta Cole , the first Black female president of Spelman College , told the Washington Post .
“ Anyone who does not feel the significance of this , I have to ask , ‘ Who are they ?
Where have they been ?
’ ” Even the fact that Harris seems , to many Democrats , like such a safe , almost conventional choice , could be read as low-key revolutionary .
So could the fact that Biden , having signalled that he would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a demonstrably deep bench of prospects to choose from , including senators and congresspeople , a big-city mayor , and a former national-security adviser .
It didn ’ t take long for conservative pundits and Trump surrogates to start twisting that symbolism in predictably ugly ways : questioning Harris ’ s right to identify as Black , or—taking a page from the birther script concocted to smear Barack Obama—falsely suggesting that she is ineligible to be Vice-President , because ( as was the case with George Washington and many of his successors ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when she was born .
On Fox , Tucker Carlson griped about having to pronounce Harris ’ s first name right , as though this were an intolerable exercise in political correctness .
We ’ ll be in for a lot of that sort of nonsense .
With the pandemic raging and the economy tattering , in a campaign that will inevitably be a referendum on how the Trump Administration is managing these twinned crises , the President has little in his arsenal except the old rallying cries about beleaguered whiteness , immigrant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quick and easy line about Harris ’ s selection is that it was a kind of reward for , or , less transactionally , an acknowledgment of , the way that Black women voters have effectively mobilized for the Democratic Party .
Turnout among Black women is consistently high , and they overwhelmingly side with Democrats .
As many as ninety-eight per cent of Black women voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016—the highest rate of any major demographic .
They helped to deliver the Democratic victories in the last midterm elections and to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ critical South Carolina primary .
An analysis by the A.A.P.I .
Civic Engagement Fund and the Groundswell Fund found that turnout in those midterms “ was fueled by women of color mobilizing friends and family ” to vote , and that “ Black women led the way , ” with eighty-four per cent of them reporting that they had done such mobilizing .
That line has some flaws , though .
In the first place , Black women aren ’ t uniformly enthusiastic about Harris .
She has been criticized for her record @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and as California ’ s attorney general ; she pursued cases aggressively , without the commitment to reducing mass incarceration that has become central to the anti-racist movement .
( She declined to support mandatory reviews of police shootings and embraced a draconian initiative under which parents whose children were truant from school were subject to prosecution , a position for which she has since expressed regret . )
If their main concern was having a Black woman on the ticket , Black voters could have come out more strongly for Harris in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might be at the top of the ticket today .
Like female voters in general , Black women are more likely than men to support the policies of the Democratic Party , regardless of the candidate .
The gender gap in American politics has , in fact , only widened .
More women than men favor government action to insure access to health care , child care , and a strong social safety net .
Women , and particularly Black women , are more inclined to back gun-control legislation ; eighty-two per cent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should be stricter , according to a recent analysis of polling data .
Eighty-five per cent of Black women voters want to see undocumented immigrants given a path to citizenship , according to the same analysis .
And their leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates how important the issue of police violence is for them .
The real reward would be a Biden-Harris campaign that counters Trumpism with a commitment to issues that Black women have reason to care about .
♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
Nowadays, the consensus seems to be that a Presidential contender’s running mate doesn’t matter in any direct, instrumental sense. In the endless rehashing of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, Tim Kaine plays barely a walk-on role. Vice-Presidential candidates can’t be counted on to deliver their own states or regions or to balance the ticket in any reliably strategic way. Two political scientists who have studied the issue, Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko, write, “While most voters say that the choice of a running mate will be important in deciding their vote, few can recall a time when it actually has changed their vote.”
But the scholars also conclude that the choice can produce a sort of halo effect. The selection of a running mate—sometimes called the first Presidential act—can influence perceptions of the candidate’s own qualities of character or judgment, and this, in turn, can make a difference electorally. It’s why John McCain’s pick of the ill-qualified Sarah Palin is often thought to have done his campaign irreparable damage, no matter how many Republican men were convinced that she was winking at them.
Joe Biden’s choice to fill the second spot on his ticket is, on that basis, a smart one. Senator Kamala Harris is a fifty-five-year-old woman whose debating and cross-examining skills outshine his. (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast,” then Attorney General Jeff Sessions complained when she questioned him about his contact with Russians preceding the 2016 election. “It makes me nervous.”) Her campaign’s high point came when she attacked Biden himself on the debate stage, for his onetime opposition to school busing and his willingness to work with Southern segregationists in the Senate. So the choice marks a contrast with Trump, whose judgment of anyone’s worth depends on how much they capitulate to him. Just as important, the choice also shows that Biden, who is seventy-seven, understands something more important than short-term strategy: that he is a transitional figure, and that the future of his party and of the country depends on diversity.
“Here’s the thing,” Harris told Dana Goodyear, who profiled her for this magazine, in 2019. “Every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.” There are plenty of people who are exhilarated by the barrier-collapsing force of her selection. Harris, born in Oakland, California, to Jamaican and Indian immigrants, will be only the third woman and the first Black woman to occupy the Vice-Presidential spot on a major-party ticket. “I’m jumping for joy,” Johnnetta Cole, the first Black female president of Spelman College, told the Washington Post. “Anyone who does not feel the significance of this, I have to ask, ‘Who are they? Where have they been?’ ”
Even the fact that Harris seems, to many Democrats, like such a safe, almost conventional choice, could be read as low-key revolutionary. So could the fact that Biden, having signalled that he would pick a woman of color, had a demonstrably deep bench of prospects to choose from, including senators and congresspeople, a big-city mayor, and a former national-security adviser.
It didn’t take long for conservative pundits and Trump surrogates to start twisting that symbolism in predictably ugly ways: questioning Harris’s right to identify as Black, or—taking a page from the birther script concocted to smear Barack Obama—falsely suggesting that she is ineligible to be Vice-President, because (as was the case with George Washington and many of his successors) her parents weren’t U.S. citizens when she was born. On Fox, Tucker Carlson griped about having to pronounce Harris’s first name right, as though this were an intolerable exercise in political correctness. We’ll be in for a lot of that sort of nonsense. With the pandemic raging and the economy tattering, in a campaign that will inevitably be a referendum on how the Trump Administration is managing these twinned crises, the President has little in his arsenal except the old rallying cries about beleaguered whiteness, immigrant invasion, and progressive subversion.
One quick and easy line about Harris’s selection is that it was a kind of reward for, or, less transactionally, an acknowledgment of, the way that Black women voters have effectively mobilized for the Democratic Party. Turnout among Black women is consistently high, and they overwhelmingly side with Democrats. As many as ninety-eight per cent of Black women voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016—the highest rate of any major demographic. They helped to deliver the Democratic victories in the last midterm elections and to secure Biden’s win in the critical South Carolina primary. An analysis by the A.A.P.I. Civic Engagement Fund and the Groundswell Fund found that turnout in those midterms “was fueled by women of color mobilizing friends and family” to vote, and that “Black women led the way,” with eighty-four per cent of them reporting that they had done such mobilizing.
That line has some flaws, though. In the first place, Black women aren’t uniformly enthusiastic about Harris. She has been criticized for her record as San Francisco’s district attorney and as California’s attorney general; she pursued cases aggressively, without the commitment to reducing mass incarceration that has become central to the anti-racist movement. (She declined to support mandatory reviews of police shootings and embraced a draconian initiative under which parents whose children were truant from school were subject to prosecution, a position for which she has since expressed regret.) If their main concern was having a Black woman on the ticket, Black voters could have come out more strongly for Harris in her own Presidential bid, and she might be at the top of the ticket today.
Like female voters in general, Black women are more likely than men to support the policies of the Democratic Party, regardless of the candidate. The gender gap in American politics has, in fact, only widened. More women than men favor government action to insure access to health care, child care, and a strong social safety net. Women, and particularly Black women, are more inclined to back gun-control legislation; eighty-two per cent of Black women voters think gun laws should be stricter, according to a recent analysis of polling data. Eighty-five per cent of Black women voters want to see undocumented immigrants given a path to citizenship, according to the same analysis. And their leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates how important the issue of police violence is for them. The real reward would be a Biden-Harris campaign that counters Trumpism with a commitment to issues that Black women have reason to care about. ♦


newyorker--2020-08-16--Sunday Reading: Summer Fiction

Sunday Reading: Summer Fiction

This is a summer like no other .
And summer fiction , in all of its variety and scope , often offers a much needed escape from our routine .
This week , we ’ re bringing you a selection of astonishing short stories from our archive .
In “ Escape from New York , ” by Zadie Smith , three legendary figures—Elizabeth Taylor , Marlon Brando , and Michael Jackson—flee the city in the wake of September 11th and embark on a road trip to the Midwest .
In “ Black Box , ” Jennifer Egan crafts an intriguing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a woman on a secret mission in the Mediterranean .
( The story first ran as a series of tweets from the New Yorker Fiction Department ’ s Twitter account , during the spring of 2012 . )
Finally , in “ That Feeling , You Can Only Say What It Is in French , ” Stephen King writes about a couple who are enjoying their second honeymoon when the wife begins to experience an unsettling case of déjà vu .
We hope that these stories offer a welcome escape on this summer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far.
” “ Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.
” “ There were ordinary miracles ; there were also ordinary ghosts .
You found these things out as you got older .
”

This is a summer like no other. And summer fiction, in all of its variety and scope, often offers a much needed escape from our routine. This week, we’re bringing you a selection of astonishing short stories from our archive. In “Escape from New York,” by Zadie Smith, three legendary figures—Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Michael Jackson—flee the city in the wake of September 11th and embark on a road trip to the Midwest. In “Black Box,” Jennifer Egan crafts an intriguing, futuristic tale in short bites about a woman on a secret mission in the Mediterranean. (The story first ran as a series of tweets from the New Yorker Fiction Department’s Twitter account, during the spring of 2012.) Finally, in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French,” Stephen King writes about a couple who are enjoying their second honeymoon when the wife begins to experience an unsettling case of déjà vu. We hope that these stories offer a welcome escape on this summer weekend.
—David Remnick
Photo Illustration By Sara Cwynar
“He could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far.”
“Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.”
Photograph by Frank Schramm
“There were ordinary miracles; there were also ordinary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.”


newyorker--2020-08-16--The Cryptic Crossword: No. 77

The Cryptic Crossword: No. 77

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

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


newyorker--2020-08-16--Bill Barr Injures Back While Trying to Lift Mailbox Into Truck

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Attorney General William Barr suffered what was described as a “ severe back strain @ @ @ @ @ a mailbox into a pickup truck on Saturday .
According to Barr , he tried @ @ @ @ @ one good yank ” to heave it into the truck , when he heard “ @ @ @ @ @ his back .
At the White House , Donald J. Trump said that the injury @ @ @ @ @ ” and yet another argument against mail-in voting .
“ How can we expect the @ @ @ @ @ fair election when a mailbox almost killed poor Bill Barr ?
” he asked .
@ @ @ @ @ we ’ re going to be looking into very strongly.
” As for Barr , @ @ @ @ @ Reed Army Medical Center , the Attorney General acknowledged that lifting mailboxes was “ probably @ @ @ @ @ and said that next time he would get Mike Pence to help .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Attorney General William Barr suffered what was described as a “severe back strain” while trying to lift a mailbox into a pickup truck on Saturday.
According to Barr, he tried to give the mailbox “one good yank” to heave it into the truck, when he heard “something go pop” in his back.
“I remember thinking, Hoo, boy, that’s not good,” Barr said.
At the White House, Donald J. Trump said that the injury to Barr was “disgraceful” and yet another argument against mail-in voting.
“How can we expect the Postal Service to run a fair election when a mailbox almost killed poor Bill Barr?” he asked. “It’s something we’re going to be looking into very strongly.”
As for Barr, who is recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Attorney General acknowledged that lifting mailboxes was “probably a two-man job,” and said that next time he would get Mike Pence to help.


newyorker--2020-08-17--The Renegade Priest Helping Undocumented People Survive the Pandemic

In March , Victorino Narcizo developed a hacking cough .
He and his brother-in-law Fidel , undocumented immigrants who had lived together for a decade , disagreed about what to do .
Narcizo ’ s boss had threatened to fire him if he missed a shift .
His mother , in Mexico , depended on the money he sent home , so he resolved to keep working .
Twenty-five , and otherwise in good health , he doubted whether his symptoms were serious .
Fidel , however , argued , “ Stay home and get better .
There ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Narcizo and Fidel moved around the city as a duo , more like best friends than like extended family , and they shared a studio apartment in Harlem with two roommates who worked in restaurant kitchens , as they did .
A few days later , Narcizo woke up gasping for air , and he and Fidel rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside , on Amsterdam Avenue .
The waiting room was crowded , and a nurse in a mask and scrubs intercepted them .
“ Why did you bring him here ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re going to get other people sick.
” Fidel tried to respond , but his English faltered ; they left in a daze , with Narcizo leaning on his brother-in-law .
Eventually , a bilingual friend of theirs accompanied them to Bellevue , where Narcizo was admitted .
Fidel never saw him again ; on April 1st , Narcizo died , one of twenty-one thousand New Yorkers to succumb to COVID-19 this spring .
The following weeks were a confusion of mourning and logistics .
Fidel broke the news to Narcizo ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mexican state of Guerrero , and tried to raise money among friends on Facebook for a cremation .
But , as businesses shut down in response to the pandemic , some of the friends were losing their jobs , and they couldn ’ t spare the cash .
Fidel continued to go to work , at a sushi restaurant in downtown Manhattan , while trying to find someone to move into the studio apartment , to make up the rent .
A question consumed him that he didn ’ t have the time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ d also been exposed to the virus , why was he spared ?
Two weeks later , the hospital called to warn Fidel that city officials would bury Narcizo in an unmarked grave if he didn ’ t make other arrangements .
When Fidel began calling Narcizo ’ s relatives in New York to ask for advice , an uncle who ’ d just been laid off as a sandwichero at a Bronx deli gave him the name of someone who could help : Juan Carlos Ruiz , a fifty-year-old Mexican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ridge , Brooklyn .
Among undocumented immigrants in New York City , Ruiz has a reputation as a dedicated and implacable fighter for their community .
Everyone seems to know him , or to know someone who does , and it isn ’ t hard to see why .
On a recent day , he delivered meals to three apartments , received a truck full of donated food from a Bronx grocer , spoke at a street demonstration in solidarity with the city ’ s essential workers , and visited a local hospital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Other pastors have simply given him the keys to their churches .
Lately , with grim frequency , he has been arranging for discounted burials at a funeral home in Park Slope run by an old friend .
Ruiz has relatives in Puebla and Guerrero , and because of these ties officials and human-rights advocates there give out his phone number , too .
During their phone call , Ruiz told Fidel , “ Yo me encargo de todo ” — “ I ’ ll take care of everything.
” On a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd , an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway .
A cousin and two friends joined him , all dressed in black hoodies and wearing surgical masks , sitting silently around a folding table inside the empty church .
They ’ d taken the subway an hour and a half , from upper Manhattan and the Bronx , to attend a funeral service that Ruiz had arranged , free of charge .
Ruiz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a white robe , trailed by his dog , a yapping Havanese in a sweater .
Ruiz is short and trim , with a chinstrap beard and square-framed glasses , and he has an air of constant activity .
He greeted Fidel with an elbow bump , and guided the men to the pews , instructing each one to sit in his own row .
Ruiz ’ s wife , Cinthya Briones , an anthropologist and a photographer , entered with a camera , and a friend of theirs , a Oaxacan named @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the church for the past year , set up a video recorder .
“ You want us to be able to film this , right ?
” Ruiz asked Fidel , who nodded .
He planned to send footage of the ceremony to Narcizo ’ s family .
There was a simple program for the occasion , with a black-and-white photograph of Narcizo , smiling , in a chef ’ s cap .
An urn with his ashes rested on a small wood table .
Gesturing toward it , as the service @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a great abyss that invites us to perform an act of faith.
” He listed the hardships that the men there had endured : the death of Narcizo , their darkening work prospects , homesickness , fears of contracting the coronavirus , and traumatic memories of crossing the border .
The pews creaked as the men nodded .
“ God is out there , ” Ruiz said .
“ But there are flames everywhere around us , and the smoke makes it so hard to see.
” Throughout the spring and early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rang incessantly .
People were losing work , going hungry , falling ill , dying .
“ It was like a war had started , ” he told me .
A man called Ruiz late one night , after a fistfight with his landlord over rent he couldn ’ t pay because he ’ d lost his job .
Ruiz heard from an undocumented immigrant who ’ d been living for several days with the corpse of his brother in their shared apartment ; he was afraid to call city authorities but unable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the body .
Officials from Guerrero were regularly seeking advice on how to repatriate the remains of locals who had died in New York .
The pandemic has ravaged immigrant and minority communities , killing Blacks and Latinos at much higher rates than the rest of the public ; the subsequent recession , in which New York City has lost more than a million jobs , has left them disproportionately out of work .
The undocumented don ’ t qualify for unemployment benefits or severance , and they are excluded from federal aid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the coronavirus .
According to the Mayor ’ s Office of Immigrant Affairs , three hundred and sixty-six thousand workers and forty-seven thousand business owners are undocumented .
Although Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo routinely boast of their progressive accomplishments , neither has financed a relief fund for the undocumented , unlike municipal and state governments in California , Oregon , Washington , and Connecticut .
In April , the Open Society Foundations , the philanthropic organization founded by the liberal financier George Soros , donated twenty million dollars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It was a humanitarian intervention , ” Gregory Maniatis , the director of the organization ’ s International Migration Initiative , told me .
“ But we ’ re going to meet only a tiny sliver of the need in the community.
” The plan was to jump-start donations from other philanthropists , since the Mayor ’ s advisers , pointing to a budget shortfall , considered it impossible to spend public money on direct cash assistance to undocumented New Yorkers .
So far , though , no other donors have contributed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has kept his distance .
“ Cuomo ’ s not going to win or lose an election because of this issue , ” a city official told me .

Read in Spanish | Leer en español
In March, Victorino Narcizo developed a hacking cough. He and his brother-in-law Fidel, undocumented immigrants who had lived together for a decade, disagreed about what to do. Narcizo’s boss had threatened to fire him if he missed a shift. His mother, in Mexico, depended on the money he sent home, so he resolved to keep working. Twenty-five, and otherwise in good health, he doubted whether his symptoms were serious. Fidel, however, argued, “Stay home and get better. There’s work everywhere. This is New York.” Narcizo and Fidel moved around the city as a duo, more like best friends than like extended family, and they shared a studio apartment in Harlem with two roommates who worked in restaurant kitchens, as they did.
A few days later, Narcizo woke up gasping for air, and he and Fidel rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside, on Amsterdam Avenue. The waiting room was crowded, and a nurse in a mask and scrubs intercepted them. “Why did you bring him here?” he asked Fidel. “You’re going to get other people sick.” Fidel tried to respond, but his English faltered; they left in a daze, with Narcizo leaning on his brother-in-law. Eventually, a bilingual friend of theirs accompanied them to Bellevue, where Narcizo was admitted. Fidel never saw him again; on April 1st, Narcizo died, one of twenty-one thousand New Yorkers to succumb to COVID-19 this spring.
The following weeks were a confusion of mourning and logistics. Fidel broke the news to Narcizo’s family, who live in the Mexican state of Guerrero, and tried to raise money among friends on Facebook for a cremation. But, as businesses shut down in response to the pandemic, some of the friends were losing their jobs, and they couldn’t spare the cash. Fidel continued to go to work, at a sushi restaurant in downtown Manhattan, while trying to find someone to move into the studio apartment, to make up the rent. A question consumed him that he didn’t have the time or the energy to answer: If he’d also been exposed to the virus, why was he spared? Two weeks later, the hospital called to warn Fidel that city officials would bury Narcizo in an unmarked grave if he didn’t make other arrangements. When Fidel began calling Narcizo’s relatives in New York to ask for advice, an uncle who’d just been laid off as a sandwichero at a Bronx deli gave him the name of someone who could help: Juan Carlos Ruiz, a fifty-year-old Mexican pastor who leads a congregation in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Among undocumented immigrants in New York City, Ruiz has a reputation as a dedicated and implacable fighter for their community. Everyone seems to know him, or to know someone who does, and it isn’t hard to see why. On a recent day, he delivered meals to three apartments, received a truck full of donated food from a Bronx grocer, spoke at a street demonstration in solidarity with the city’s essential workers, and visited a local hospital to identify an immigrant’s remains. Other pastors have simply given him the keys to their churches. Lately, with grim frequency, he has been arranging for discounted burials at a funeral home in Park Slope run by an old friend. Ruiz has relatives in Puebla and Guerrero, and because of these ties officials and human-rights advocates there give out his phone number, too.
Ruiz, near Red Hook, Brooklyn, with food to distribute to families. Photograph by Gaia Squarci for The New Yorker
During their phone call, Ruiz told Fidel, “Yo me encargo de todo”—“I’ll take care of everything.”
On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. A cousin and two friends joined him, all dressed in black hoodies and wearing surgical masks, sitting silently around a folding table inside the empty church. They’d taken the subway an hour and a half, from upper Manhattan and the Bronx, to attend a funeral service that Ruiz had arranged, free of charge.
Ruiz entered a few minutes later, in a white robe, trailed by his dog, a yapping Havanese in a sweater. Ruiz is short and trim, with a chinstrap beard and square-framed glasses, and he has an air of constant activity. He greeted Fidel with an elbow bump, and guided the men to the pews, instructing each one to sit in his own row. Ruiz’s wife, Cinthya Briones, an anthropologist and a photographer, entered with a camera, and a friend of theirs, a Oaxacan named Próspero, who’s been volunteering at the church for the past year, set up a video recorder. “You want us to be able to film this, right?” Ruiz asked Fidel, who nodded. He planned to send footage of the ceremony to Narcizo’s family. There was a simple program for the occasion, with a black-and-white photograph of Narcizo, smiling, in a chef’s cap. An urn with his ashes rested on a small wood table.
Gesturing toward it, as the service began, Ruiz said, “Pain is a great abyss that invites us to perform an act of faith.” He listed the hardships that the men there had endured: the death of Narcizo, their darkening work prospects, homesickness, fears of contracting the coronavirus, and traumatic memories of crossing the border. The pews creaked as the men nodded. “God is out there,” Ruiz said. “But there are flames everywhere around us, and the smoke makes it so hard to see.”
Throughout the spring and early summer, Ruiz’s cell phone rang incessantly. People were losing work, going hungry, falling ill, dying. “It was like a war had started,” he told me. A man called Ruiz late one night, after a fistfight with his landlord over rent he couldn’t pay because he’d lost his job. Ruiz heard from an undocumented immigrant who’d been living for several days with the corpse of his brother in their shared apartment; he was afraid to call city authorities but unable to pay a funeral home to retrieve the body. Officials from Guerrero were regularly seeking advice on how to repatriate the remains of locals who had died in New York.
The pandemic has ravaged immigrant and minority communities, killing Blacks and Latinos at much higher rates than the rest of the public; the subsequent recession, in which New York City has lost more than a million jobs, has left them disproportionately out of work. The undocumented don’t qualify for unemployment benefits or severance, and they are excluded from federal aid programs designed to ease the financial blow of the coronavirus. According to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, three hundred and sixty-six thousand workers and forty-seven thousand business owners are undocumented. Although Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo routinely boast of their progressive accomplishments, neither has financed a relief fund for the undocumented, unlike municipal and state governments in California, Oregon, Washington, and Connecticut.
The Church of the Good Shepherd, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has served as a hub for pandemic-relief efforts. Photograph by Gaia Squarci for The New Yorker
In April, the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic organization founded by the liberal financier George Soros, donated twenty million dollars to the city to aid immigrants. “It was a humanitarian intervention,” Gregory Maniatis, the director of the organization’s International Migration Initiative, told me. “But we’re going to meet only a tiny sliver of the need in the community.” The plan was to jump-start donations from other philanthropists, since the Mayor’s advisers, pointing to a budget shortfall, considered it impossible to spend public money on direct cash assistance to undocumented New Yorkers. So far, though, no other donors have contributed to the fund, and the Governor has kept his distance. “Cuomo’s not going to win or lose an election because of this issue,” a city official told me.
For Ruiz, the state’s failure to help hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need is the latest reminder that the city’s most vulnerable immigrants have always been on their own. Since the nineteen-eighties, he told me, Central Americans have been squeezed in the tightening vise of American immigration policy and its daily effects: poorly paid jobs, increasing cost of living, ever-expanding immigration-enforcement operations. Now, Ruiz said, immigrants were questioning whether the benefits of coming to the U.S. exceeded the costs. He said, “I think we’re reaching the stage when things are getting so bad that people who have sacrificed everything to come here and work in New York City are doubting what the whole point is.”
Ruiz came to the United States in 1986, with his own hesitations. He was sixteen, and studying to be a Roman Catholic priest at a seminary in San Luis Potosí, a state in central Mexico, where he was born and raised. His parents and five siblings had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, more than a year before, but he hadn’t wanted to join them. “We Mexicans have an ambivalent sense of el norte,” he told me. (He likes to cite a popular saying: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”) He finally visited his family on a tourist visa, planning to return home to continue his studies, but leaving them a second time proved too difficult.
After his visa expired, he fell into a legal limbo that lasted eight years. During that time, he attended high school, college, and seminary, but he didn’t get a Social Security number until he was twenty-four. His family, who had entered the country legally, lost their status after failing to renew their visas. “My parents were in the shadows for the first eighteen years of their lives in the States,” he told me. “There is another world here, the underground life, the clandestine life.” Seeing the need for bilingual ministers to support this population was an epiphany for Ruiz, and one of the reasons he decided to stay in the U.S. He and his family eventually obtained green cards, but he never fully shed the feeling of being undocumented. “You’re out of the formalized, official way of doing things,” he said. “You disregard the law. You’re not breaking it—you’re not trying to. But it’s the sense that you’re doing something unlawful all the time, and that begins to seep into everyday life.”