The Glove Challenge

Barehanded on a Citi Bike , Ryan McKenzie , the owner of a NoMad bar called Patent Pending , rolled through his hushed East Village neighborhood on cleanup patrol the other afternoon .
In the early days of the lockdown , many New Yorkers marvelled at how litter had vanished from the streets , much as smog had cleared from the skies above New Delhi and Los Angeles .
But McKenzie , after seeing a handwritten sign on a lamppost which read “ Please Don ’ t Throw Your Gloves In The Street , ” began noticing them : blue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tree pits , and swirled by rain runoff onto sewer grates .
Now he sees them everywhere .
“ I ’ m an ocean guy , ” he said .
“ I surf .
This will all wash out to the bays and , in time , be distributed all over the world .
These gloves will be in Greenland.
” He added that the city ’ s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recommends frequent handwashing , not gloves , to the general public .
“ People are so selfish and shortsighted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis into an environmental crisis as well , ” he said .
“ It drives me nuts.
” Photographs of crumpled , discarded gloves have been appearing on social media lately , under the hashtag # TheGloveChallenge , which was started by Maria Algarra , the founder of a Miami-based organization called Clean This Beach Up .
Parking lots are particularly hard hit ; drivers doff their gloves before getting into their cars .
Subway exits are another hot spot .
The gloves will wind up in waterways .
Judith Enck , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Agency and the founder of a nonprofit called Beyond Plastics , said , “ The gloves may be too flimsy for sewage-plant screens to catch , and shoot right by them , ” ending up in riverbeds , and water columns , and on seafloors .
Or they could wash out to sea directly from storm drains and sewer overflows .
Even before the pandemic , the city ’ s sewer system was spending nineteen million dollars a year to deal with so-called fatbergs , caused by the buildup of tons of personal-hygiene @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many marketed as flushable ) .
When the plastic in vinyl and nitrile gloves gets in seawater , it becomes coated with dimethyl sulfide from algae and bacteria , which smells delectable to some species of birds , turtles , and marine mammals .
Once ingested , the debris—even biodegradable plant-derived latex—can obstruct these creatures ’ digestive tracts and kill them .
( Plastics can also disintegrate into smaller pieces , which enter the food chain at the very bottom ; a new species of crustacean , discovered deep in the Mariana Trench @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plasticus for the contents of its stomach . )
“ Those gloves will be very tied to this moment , ” Robin Nagle , an anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation , said .
“ It ’ s heartbreaking .
You are deliberately putting off onto someone else a potentially deadly hazard.
” ( Researchers are looking into whether the coronavirus might spread through spillovers of untreated sewage . )
In Hong Kong , glove-wearing is less common , but disposable masks are the norm .
Gary Stokes , a co-founder of OceansAsia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discarded medical masks on beaches about six weeks after COVID-19 alerts were first sounded .
In New York , the castoffs are just starting to appear .
Last week , dozens of gloves and masks were discovered on the shores of Jamaica Bay at Canarsie Pier , Rockaway Community Park , Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary , Floyd Bennett Field , Rockaway Beach , and MacNeil Park , and along the banks of the Bronx and Hackensack Rivers .
“ These are places no one goes when it ’ s cold like this , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they have to be drifting up , ” Alex Zablocki , the executive director of the Jamaica Bay–Rockaway Parks Conservancy , said , of the debris .
“ The city needs to come up with a truly innovative campaign against glove litter , ” Enck said .
It ’ s easy for the issue to fall through the cracks of city bureaucracy .
The Department of Sanitation is responsible for street sweeping , but sidewalk cleanup is the purview of the city ’ s individual business-improvement districts .
With most businesses closed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McKenzie to pick up litter .
A pandemic caused by airborne particles is not the best time for in-your-face confrontations , but McKenzie is undaunted .
“ I haven ’ t seen someone throwing gloves in the gutter , but I ’ d probably be yelling at them if I did , ” he said , brandishing a new metal grabber that he had just bought on First Avenue .
His original was stolen last week , from the sidewalk in front of his bar .
♦

Barehanded on a Citi Bike, Ryan McKenzie, the owner of a NoMad bar called Patent Pending, rolled through his hushed East Village neighborhood on cleanup patrol the other afternoon. In the early days of the lockdown, many New Yorkers marvelled at how litter had vanished from the streets, much as smog had cleared from the skies above New Delhi and Los Angeles. But McKenzie, after seeing a handwritten sign on a lamppost which read “Please Don’t Throw Your Gloves In The Street,” began noticing them: blue and purple disposable gloves dotting sidewalks and tree pits, and swirled by rain runoff onto sewer grates. Now he sees them everywhere.
“I’m an ocean guy,” he said. “I surf. This will all wash out to the bays and, in time, be distributed all over the world. These gloves will be in Greenland.” He added that the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recommends frequent handwashing, not gloves, to the general public. “People are so selfish and shortsighted that they’ll turn a health crisis into an environmental crisis as well,” he said. “It drives me nuts.”
Photographs of crumpled, discarded gloves have been appearing on social media lately, under the hashtag #TheGloveChallenge, which was started by Maria Algarra, the founder of a Miami-based organization called Clean This Beach Up. Parking lots are particularly hard hit; drivers doff their gloves before getting into their cars. Subway exits are another hot spot.
The gloves will wind up in waterways. Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and the founder of a nonprofit called Beyond Plastics, said, “The gloves may be too flimsy for sewage-plant screens to catch, and shoot right by them,” ending up in riverbeds, and water columns, and on seafloors. Or they could wash out to sea directly from storm drains and sewer overflows. Even before the pandemic, the city’s sewer system was spending nineteen million dollars a year to deal with so-called fatbergs, caused by the buildup of tons of personal-hygiene products, condoms, and wipes (many marketed as flushable).
When the plastic in vinyl and nitrile gloves gets in seawater, it becomes coated with dimethyl sulfide from algae and bacteria, which smells delectable to some species of birds, turtles, and marine mammals. Once ingested, the debris—even biodegradable plant-derived latex—can obstruct these creatures’ digestive tracts and kill them. (Plastics can also disintegrate into smaller pieces, which enter the food chain at the very bottom; a new species of crustacean, discovered deep in the Mariana Trench, in 2014, was named Eurythenes plasticus for the contents of its stomach.)
“Those gloves will be very tied to this moment,” Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation, said. “It’s heartbreaking. You are deliberately putting off onto someone else a potentially deadly hazard.” (Researchers are looking into whether the coronavirus might spread through spillovers of untreated sewage.)
In Hong Kong, glove-wearing is less common, but disposable masks are the norm. Gary Stokes, a co-founder of OceansAsia, a marine-conservation organization, began finding discarded medical masks on beaches about six weeks after COVID-19 alerts were first sounded. In New York, the castoffs are just starting to appear. Last week, dozens of gloves and masks were discovered on the shores of Jamaica Bay at Canarsie Pier, Rockaway Community Park, Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary, Floyd Bennett Field, Rockaway Beach, and MacNeil Park, and along the banks of the Bronx and Hackensack Rivers. “These are places no one goes when it’s cold like this, except for a few birders. So they have to be drifting up,” Alex Zablocki, the executive director of the Jamaica Bay–Rockaway Parks Conservancy, said, of the debris.
“The city needs to come up with a truly innovative campaign against glove litter,” Enck said. It’s easy for the issue to fall through the cracks of city bureaucracy. The Department of Sanitation is responsible for street sweeping, but sidewalk cleanup is the purview of the city’s individual business-improvement districts. With most businesses closed, it’s left to people like McKenzie to pick up litter.
A pandemic caused by airborne particles is not the best time for in-your-face confrontations, but McKenzie is undaunted. “I haven’t seen someone throwing gloves in the gutter, but I’d probably be yelling at them if I did,” he said, brandishing a new metal grabber that he had just bought on First Avenue. His original was stolen last week, from the sidewalk in front of his bar. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-11--War Poems of the Pandemic

War Poems of the Pandemic

Not long ago , as the world was halfway into week whatever of suspended animation , a man who lives with his wife and children in the Midwest arrived in New York City .
He is a writer and a musician in his early fifties .
His age means that he grew up listening to the Violent Femmes and Jim Carroll , reading poems by C. K. Williams and Galway Kinnell , and writing songs about the limited options available in a small city where the interstate keeps people flowing through without stopping .
He became a career military man @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Afghanistan and other unenviable places .
His latest deployment was to New York , where his expertise could be put to use saving lives and alleviating suffering in a temporary facility for coronavirus patients .
In the days after his arrival , he began documenting what he saw .
Walt Whitman , nursing the sick , wounded , and dying in the Civil War hospitals of Washington , D.C. , famously wrote that “ the real war will never get in the books.
” The military man ’ s notes , jotted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the real war currently being fought in hospitals around the world .
( He has not been authorized by the military to speak to the press . )
“ I am double gloved at all times and wear a gown , ” he wrote , of his routine .
“ After I get home , every time I cough I think I have caught the virus .
When I am floor leader , I have to carry a radio in case I need to call security .
I always want to call @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insecure.
” He is bivouacking in a high-rise hotel , the kind of place that is normally packed with tourists and honeymooners .
He and his colleagues are permitted to roam no more than a few blocks in any direction .
He often records his observations in verse : He wrote about the constant threat of losing a patient : There are funny bits , too , like his anecdote about composing a cute text message to one of his kids but accidentally sending it to fifty hospital colleagues instead .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he wrote .
“ Hope at least a few actually mean it.
” He wonders how long this hitch will last , and where the virus might take him next , as it leaps from city to city .
Like Whitman in the eighteen-sixties , he thinks about how future generations might see us .
“ When I left home , ” he wrote , “ I thought about what I would do when I arrived in New York : treat the sick and pray for the souls of the dead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when all of this is just a fairy tale about death becoming a person who takes the form of a bat to fly across the world : the next generations ’ story of the witch that eats children.
” ♦

Not long ago, as the world was halfway into week whatever of suspended animation, a man who lives with his wife and children in the Midwest arrived in New York City. He is a writer and a musician in his early fifties. His age means that he grew up listening to the Violent Femmes and Jim Carroll, reading poems by C. K. Williams and Galway Kinnell, and writing songs about the limited options available in a small city where the interstate keeps people flowing through without stopping. He became a career military man, medically trained, who did tours in Afghanistan and other unenviable places. His latest deployment was to New York, where his expertise could be put to use saving lives and alleviating suffering in a temporary facility for coronavirus patients.
In the days after his arrival, he began documenting what he saw. Walt Whitman, nursing the sick, wounded, and dying in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C., famously wrote that “the real war will never get in the books.” The military man’s notes, jotted down between fourteen-hour shifts, are glimpses into the real war currently being fought in hospitals around the world. (He has not been authorized by the military to speak to the press.)
“I am double gloved at all times and wear a gown,” he wrote, of his routine. “After I get home, every time I cough I think I have caught the virus. When I am floor leader, I have to carry a radio in case I need to call security. I always want to call just to tell them I am feeling insecure.” He is bivouacking in a high-rise hotel, the kind of place that is normally packed with tourists and honeymooners. He and his colleagues are permitted to roam no more than a few blocks in any direction. He often records his observations in verse:
New York
is a
ghost town
where
even the
birds took
the last
train
to Jersey
and
the night
rises blue
black as
an alley
cat and
my combat
boots echo
across
Broadway
like gun
shots or
a heartbeat
fading into
a silence
so complete
you can
hear the
crying
voice of
each and
every star.
He wrote about the constant threat of losing a patient:
He was
too tall
for the
Army
hospital bed
and had
an eagle
tattooed on
his arm
he was
older than
60 and
looked
like a
biker the
kind of
guy who
thought he
could still
take anybody
the kind
of guy
who loved
to tell
people he
wasn’t afraid
of anything
so it
really shook
me when
he spoke
in a
voice as
small as
my daughter’s
asking me
if he
was going
to die.
There are funny bits, too, like his anecdote about composing a cute text message to one of his kids but accidentally sending it to fifty hospital colleagues instead. “I received almost fifty return messages of love,” he wrote. “Hope at least a few actually mean it.”
He wonders how long this hitch will last, and where the virus might take him next, as it leaps from city to city. Like Whitman in the eighteen-sixties, he thinks about how future generations might see us. “When I left home,” he wrote, “I thought about what I would do when I arrived in New York: treat the sick and pray for the souls of the dead and wonder about 100 years from now, when all of this is just a fairy tale about death becoming a person who takes the form of a bat to fly across the world: the next generations’ story of the witch that eats children.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-11--The Fearless Invention of One of L.A.’s Greatest Poets

“ I make one chicken feed five , ” Wanda Coleman wrote in “ My Love Brings Flowers , ” a poem from 1983 .
“ Make clothes ten years old fashionable / rejuvenate one fake sable coat.
” Coleman , who died in 2013 , was one of the great menders in American verse : she found the extra wear in old forms like the sonnet and rummaged for new forms in everyday material , like aptitude tests , medical reports , and want ads .
Poets sometimes brag about their fearsome powers of transformation ; Coleman , beset @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , kept her boasts closer to the bone .
“ I scrape bottom , ” she wrote , and yet her poetry drew on deep reserves .
Given Coleman ’ s almost chaotic originality , it is touching to encounter her stark admissions of debt : “ I borrow from friends.
” At a moment when many of us are learning—and teaching one another—how to make a face mask out of a sock or a bra , Coleman ’ s poetry might be just the model of inspired , ecstatic thrift we need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poems , “ Wicked Enchantment ” ( Black Sparrow Press ) , edited by the American poet Terrance Hayes , has brought Coleman—who often seemed to relish the position of outsider—into the spotlight .
She was born in Watts , in South Los Angeles , in 1946 , and lived most of her life in and around the city .
Her mother worked as a housekeeper , sometimes for movie stars , including Ronald Reagan .
Her father , a boxer in his youth , worked as a sparring partner for the light-heavyweight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his / head for decades , ” Coleman writes , “ until / a tumor rose from the wound and devoured his eyes.
” Her parents ’ experiences must have shaped her art ’ s insistent transparency about what people do to make enough money .
And her choice of an art that barely paid meant that , for much of her life , Coleman , who had two children and often parented alone , had to get very good at economic improvisation .
Throughout her career , she worked as a Peace @ @ @ @ @ @ @ medical secretary , a radio host , a screenwriter , and a university lecturer—a very L.A. résumé .
Coleman won an Emmy , in 1976 , for her writing on the daytime soap opera “ Days of Our Lives , ” and wrote an episode of the much rerun buddy-cop show “ Starsky & Hutch.
” Soon she devoted herself more fully to her own writing and performing .
Her first full-length book of poetry , “ Mad Dog Black Lady , ” appeared in 1979 , and was followed by a dozen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short stories , essays , and a novel .
“ Mercurochrome ” ( 2001 ) , a volume of poetry , was a finalist for the National Book Award .
In an interview with the Poetry Society of America , Coleman defined herself as a “ Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Working Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-by-her-father.
” That checklist is a performance , building upon itself ; asked a second time , she might have produced an entirely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ funny , and tragic surprises .
In an early poem , Coleman describes a police officer appearing at her door at 7 A.M. ( “ Coitus interruptus LAPD is a drag.
” ) She “ showed ’ em alias # 3 ” and , returning to bed , “ started fucking again / but things had changed.
” American poets often insist on aliases and multiple identities : Bob Dylan plucked from Whitman ’ s famous line “ I am large , I contain multitudes ” for the title of his second coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not an aesthetic virtue but an inevitable means of survival , and also a lethal risk .
“ I have been known to imagine a situation / and then get involved in it , ” she writes , in “ Wanda in Worryland.
” She has “ gone after people / with guns ” and rocks and fists , but also “ with poems ” : Coleman evokes both senses of “ going after ” : confronting fighters but also following , imitating , and learning from writers .
To stand up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ homage .
Coleman often designated her poems as being “ after ” —not “ for ” —her mentors , heroes , and friends .
There are poems “ after June Jordan , ” “ after Elizabeth Bishop , ” “ after the song by Herbie Hancock , ” and “ after Sun Ra.
” The range of these dedications implies the variety of shapes a tribute can take : a poem “ after John Berryman ” is a spat ; another “ after Coltrane ” is a lovefest .
Coleman ’ s work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even as it acknowledges their genius .
A poem “ after Allen Ginsberg ” modifies his famous poem “ A Supermarket in California , ” which itself is a nod to a master .
“ What thoughts I have of you tonight , Walt Whitman , ” Ginsberg writes .
“ What bohunkian images i have of you , ” Coleman writes .
“ I sputter / between the confused and the absurd as i cruise for pudding / and citrus-free hand lotion.
” Ginsberg ’ s surreptitious queering of the American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ history ; Coleman , without the luxury of being furtive , is “ detected via camera / lens while picking over pepper mills ” and makes her own piqued revision , returning the experience of grocery shopping to quotidian reality .
For a black woman , this reality includes the fear of being accused of stealing .
“ The only Walt here is Disney , ” Coleman writes , trying to find cheap , healthy food .
“ The pork chops are killing me.
” Coleman ’ s one hundred “ American Sonnets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ African Sleeping Sickness ” ( 1990 ) , “ Hand Dance ” ( 1993 ) , “ American Sonnets ” ( 1994 ) , “ Bathwater Wine ” ( 1998 ) , and “ Mercurochrome.
” Sonnets are often at odds with their own brevity , building into their short span little interludes and pauses .
Rarely does a poet seem to want to take an already brutally brief form and speed it up .
But Coleman ’ s sonnets are sprints , which is what makes their improvisations , modelled on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ American Sonnet 61 ” has short lines , a jagged right margin , and a tricky tone , both barbed and passionate : “ reaching down into my griot bag , ” Coleman finds ancestral license ( a griot is a traditional West African poet ) but also the patronizing expectation that she will pull out “ womanish wisdom and wily / social commentary.
” Instead , she produces “ bricks / with which to either reconstruct / the past or deconstruct a head.
” The sonnet becomes a poem about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she writes : That last phrase , like so many of Coleman ’ s , abounds with sarcasm .
One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A. , she shaped the city ’ s literary scene like few before her .
And yet , even after she ’ d forged her own “ infinite alphabet of afroblues / intertwinings , ” she still felt that she was measured against the literary gatekeepers ’ idea of her “ poetic promise , ” now in “ ruins.
” Coleman ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , exasperation and joy .
They both tally and transcend the difficulties of an often broke black woman , working in perhaps the world ’ s least remunerative profession .
Cursing her art , she often manages some of its most memorable language : poetry is “ rood music for the cash bereft / as titans clash in the space of a Hollywood toilet.
” Yet few poets write so powerfully about the underground freedoms possible in an economy rigged to defeat them .
In “ Want Ads , ” part of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ads ( C. D. Wright ’ s “ Personals ” is an influential example ) , Coleman cites her daunting odds of finding a partner ( “ a 46 % remarriage rate for black women contrasted / with 76 % for white women ” ) and mocks the “ modest maidenly pubis ” of a white bride , her “ tresses ” kept “ glistening and tangle free.
” Such is the “ youthful stuff sonnets / and prayers are made of.
” Instead of that prim and coiffed material , Coleman offers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own body and of her poems .
You can hear in the title , “ Want Ads , ” a brilliant play on her own first name : in Wanda Coleman ’ s poems , it ’ s the want that adds the value .
♦

“I make one chicken feed five,” Wanda Coleman wrote in “My Love Brings Flowers,” a poem from 1983. “Make clothes ten years old fashionable / rejuvenate one fake sable coat.” Coleman, who died in 2013, was one of the great menders in American verse: she found the extra wear in old forms like the sonnet and rummaged for new forms in everyday material, like aptitude tests, medical reports, and want ads. Poets sometimes brag about their fearsome powers of transformation; Coleman, beset by hardship for much of her life, kept her boasts closer to the bone. “I scrape bottom,” she wrote, and yet her poetry drew on deep reserves. Given Coleman’s almost chaotic originality, it is touching to encounter her stark admissions of debt: “I borrow from friends.” At a moment when many of us are learning—and teaching one another—how to make a face mask out of a sock or a bra, Coleman’s poetry might be just the model of inspired, ecstatic thrift we need.
A new volume of her selected poems, “Wicked Enchantment” (Black Sparrow Press), edited by the American poet Terrance Hayes, has brought Coleman—who often seemed to relish the position of outsider—into the spotlight. She was born in Watts, in South Los Angeles, in 1946, and lived most of her life in and around the city. Her mother worked as a housekeeper, sometimes for movie stars, including Ronald Reagan. Her father, a boxer in his youth, worked as a sparring partner for the light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore. “They beat his / head for decades,” Coleman writes, “until / a tumor rose from the wound and devoured his eyes.” Her parents’ experiences must have shaped her art’s insistent transparency about what people do to make enough money. And her choice of an art that barely paid meant that, for much of her life, Coleman, who had two children and often parented alone, had to get very good at economic improvisation. Throughout her career, she worked as a Peace Corps recruiter, a waitress, a medical secretary, a radio host, a screenwriter, and a university lecturer—a very L.A. résumé. Coleman won an Emmy, in 1976, for her writing on the daytime soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” and wrote an episode of the much rerun buddy-cop show “Starsky & Hutch.” Soon she devoted herself more fully to her own writing and performing. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Mad Dog Black Lady,” appeared in 1979, and was followed by a dozen or so more, as well as short stories, essays, and a novel. “Mercurochrome” (2001), a volume of poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, Coleman defined herself as a “Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Working Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-by-her-father.” That checklist is a performance, building upon itself; asked a second time, she might have produced an entirely new inventory with its own brilliant, funny, and tragic surprises. In an early poem, Coleman describes a police officer appearing at her door at 7 A.M. (“Coitus interruptus LAPD is a drag.”) She “showed ’em alias #3” and, returning to bed, “started fucking again / but things had changed.”
American poets often insist on aliases and multiple identities: Bob Dylan plucked from Whitman’s famous line “I am large, I contain multitudes” for the title of his second coronavirus surprise single. For Coleman, shape-shifting was not an aesthetic virtue but an inevitable means of survival, and also a lethal risk. “I have been known to imagine a situation / and then get involved in it,” she writes, in “Wanda in Worryland.” She has “gone after people / with guns” and rocks and fists, but also “with poems”:
i get scared sometimes
and have to go look into the mirror to see if i’m
still here
Coleman evokes both senses of “going after”: confronting fighters but also following, imitating, and learning from writers. To stand up to her predecessors was a form of homage. Coleman often designated her poems as being “after”—not “for”—her mentors, heroes, and friends. There are poems “after June Jordan,” “after Elizabeth Bishop,” “after the song by Herbie Hancock,” and “after Sun Ra.” The range of these dedications implies the variety of shapes a tribute can take: a poem “after John Berryman” is a spat; another “after Coltrane” is a lovefest.
Coleman’s work recoups ground from her idols and rivals, even as it acknowledges their genius. A poem “after Allen Ginsberg” modifies his famous poem “A Supermarket in California,” which itself is a nod to a master. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,” Ginsberg writes. “What bohunkian images i have of you,” Coleman writes. “I sputter / between the confused and the absurd as i cruise for pudding / and citrus-free hand lotion.” Ginsberg’s surreptitious queering of the American supermarket was one kind of confrontation with history; Coleman, without the luxury of being furtive, is “detected via camera / lens while picking over pepper mills” and makes her own piqued revision, returning the experience of grocery shopping to quotidian reality. For a black woman, this reality includes the fear of being accused of stealing. “The only Walt here is Disney,” Coleman writes, trying to find cheap, healthy food. “The pork chops are killing me.”
Coleman’s one hundred “American Sonnets” are scattered throughout five books: “African Sleeping Sickness” (1990), “Hand Dance” (1993), “American Sonnets” (1994), “Bathwater Wine” (1998), and “Mercurochrome.” Sonnets are often at odds with their own brevity, building into their short span little interludes and pauses. Rarely does a poet seem to want to take an already brutally brief form and speed it up. But Coleman’s sonnets are sprints, which is what makes their improvisations, modelled on American blues and jazz, so compelling. “American Sonnet 61” has short lines, a jagged right margin, and a tricky tone, both barbed and passionate: “reaching down into my griot bag,” Coleman finds ancestral license (a griot is a traditional West African poet) but also the patronizing expectation that she will pull out “womanish wisdom and wily / social commentary.” Instead, she produces “bricks / with which to either reconstruct / the past or deconstruct a head.” The sonnet becomes a poem about sadness and its costs. “Dolor,” she writes:
robs me of art’s coin
as i push, for peanuts, to level walls and
rebuild the ruins of my poetic promise.
That last phrase, like so many of Coleman’s, abounds with sarcasm. One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A., she shaped the city’s literary scene like few before her. And yet, even after she’d forged her own “infinite alphabet of afroblues / intertwinings,” she still felt that she was measured against the literary gatekeepers’ idea of her “poetic promise,” now in “ruins.”
Coleman’s poems present, side by side, exasperation and joy. They both tally and transcend the difficulties of an often broke black woman, working in perhaps the world’s least remunerative profession. Cursing her art, she often manages some of its most memorable language: poetry is “rood music for the cash bereft / as titans clash in the space of a Hollywood toilet.” Yet few poets write so powerfully about the underground freedoms possible in an economy rigged to defeat them. In “Want Ads,” part of a contemporary mini-genre of poems inspired by personal ads (C. D. Wright’s “Personals” is an influential example), Coleman cites her daunting odds of finding a partner (“a 46% remarriage rate for black women contrasted / with 76% for white women”) and mocks the “modest maidenly pubis” of a white bride, her “tresses” kept “glistening and tangle free.” Such is the “youthful stuff sonnets / and prayers are made of.” Instead of that prim and coiffed material, Coleman offers the “kinky snarls” of her own body and of her poems. You can hear in the title, “Want Ads,” a brilliant play on her own first name: in Wanda Coleman’s poems, it’s the want that adds the value. ♦


newyorker--2020-05-11--“The Afterlife,” by Jonathan Lethem

“The Afterlife,” by Jonathan Lethem

“ It doesn ’ t add up to very much , does it ?
” R. said , with a shrug and a smile .
“ It doesn ’ t add up to anything at all !
” the man said .
“ Not unless you saw the sequel.
” R. understood , barely .
The fathomless movie , its fathomless sequel , panoplies of superhuman characters dying and being reborn .
A passion for those who cared .
R. didn ’ t , or hadn ’ t .
“ Of course .
You ’ re like me , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need someone much younger.
” Did the man really mean younger ?
Perhaps , R. thought , he only meant someone who ’ d arrived at this place more recently than him .
Or had they all arrived here at once ?
R. couldn ’ t know .
Such thoughts only confused him .
What he found sad was the drab common denominator , the franchise film .
R. would have liked to discuss something more exalted with the distinguished-looking man .
Real cinema , like Welles Orthman ’ s “ The Munificent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ choreography of Katrina Rausch .
That unforgettable long-ago evening at the Boerum Arts Museum , before Trina Mausch had died .
But now this all seemed wrong , the signifiers jumbled , and receding into irrelevancy .
Knowing the plot of “ Revengers : Spendblame ” might be the only social capital broad enough to signify here .
Even that might be laughably parochial .
Yet R. found himself wishing not to disappoint .
“ Come , there must be someone.
” He offered a hand , drew the man to his feet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Someone must know.
” The density of bodies had increased even since R. knelt .
Now the obstacle to communication was less the rapidity with which others moved than the cumbersome nearness of those to whom one spoke .
Still , R. worked on the man ’ s behalf .
“ Have you—did you happen to see— ” R. found that he arrested no one ’ s attention whatsoever .
He tried leading instead with the hook , calling to the ceiling , rather than to anyone in particular , “ ‘ Avoiders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turns out ?
” No reply came , only the rich incomprehensible babble and murmur of other voices , other priorities .
When R. turned fully around he saw that he ’ d lost the bearded man in the movement of bodies .
It wasn ’ t important , after all .
He ’ d wished only to help , but it was a thing that couldn ’ t be helped .
A middle-aged woman in a sari addressed him .
In indirect reply to his query ?
He wasn ’ t certain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he said , cupping his hand to his ear .
“ Could you .
.
.
I missed— ” She smiled , seeming to relish the scrap of continuity , an actual exchange .
“ I was just saying how hard this must be for Westerners like yourself.
” “ Oh , ” R. said .
“ Yes .
Thank you .
I mean— ” She was gone before he could ask her to define her terms : what was “ this , ” really ?
Then again , didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his certainty wavered ?
Yet what , precisely , had the woman in the sari assumed about him ?
R. was distracted from his quibbles by a sudden awareness , as if a suppressed frequency in his range of hearing had been nudged open by her suggestion : so many of the surrounding voices were speaking languages other than English .
He ’ d been filtering .
R. felt shame at his own assumptions , the limits in his own terms of inquiry .
Ahead , in the great stream of bodies , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an area left vacant .
He inferred it , as one moving through a landscape might infer the presence of a distant lake or beach from a break in the tree line .
What formed this airspace ?
Why should there be some zone that others here avoided ?
R. felt compelled toward it .
He longed for the elbow room .
It really had grown impossible to move without making contact with those edging him on every side , despite how all were invested in the imperative of constant motion .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sides banked and smooth .
It sloped to water , perhaps to a depth of four feet at the bottom , no more .
A handful of people had chosen—or at least R. preferred to think they ’ d chosen—to slide down .
They now cavorted and splashed there , though it was hardly wide enough at the bottom to qualify as a swimming pool .
There was no guardrail .
R. teetered briefly at the edge , trying to see .
Were those at the bottom truly happy , or were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out again ?
” R. asked the person beside him just then , who was too near to distinguish exactly .
“ We ’ d have to help them.
” The speaker ’ s tone was not uncompassionate .
“ Form some kind of human ladder , ” the person mused , then squeezed off under a hedge of bodies , duckwalking to make an escape .
The suggestion was adept , R. saw , though this level of organization seemed unlikely .
The waders had the pool to themselves , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , pushed away .
R. rode into the swirl , which had become almost like a human gear system .
He found himself jostled upward , taken off his feet for an instant .
His view of the plain of milling heads was instructive : the watery trenches were interspersed regularly throughout the vast concourse .
The density of bodies made the gaps unmistakable .
Had the floor slid open , at some point , to reveal the pools ?
Or was it that they ’ d become noticeable only now ?
R. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protruded quite unexpectedly into his path .
Nothing so large as the trenches , it had been hidden in bodies until the last second .
A kind of bench or table , it stood at elbow height .
No—a minibar , a thing he ’ d heard mentioned earlier .
Several bodies clung to it , like a raft .
Here , finally , a thing one might audition as a source for sculpture .
Some portion of this bar or pedestal might give formal joy—to R. , at least—if he envisioned it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over with his distinctive green-gray oatmeal polymer .
Yet how could he get far enough back to see it in its entirety ?
Hopeless .
Anyhow , now that he bent to examine its join to the floor , the object was flagrantly , remorselessly uninteresting .
He should quit thinking this way .
New people had been continuously arriving , that was the only possible explanation .
And R. felt he could judge this fact from their posture , from their murmured inquiries , the frisson of excitement in their tone even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of floor to claim for themselves .
You ’ ll get over it , R. wanted to tell them , but didn ’ t .
He supposed he ’ d become a kind of veteran of this place , in what felt like little more than an hour .
( Time was a ridiculous concept . )
Hey , you kids , get off my lawn !
he almost joked , but it was hardly funny .
He felt both sorry for them and irritated that they could have no idea how easy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At this thought , R. faintly recalled someone , long ago , trying to explain this place to him , the system that prevailed .
Of course , he ’ d paid no attention .
You don ’ t care about that kind of stuff until you ’ re forced to , mostly .
And why should he have cared to listen then ?
It wouldn ’ t have done any good .
No , be where you are .
Be there when you get there .
And now he was .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing .
R. was certain he ’ d been warned .
The teeming reached its limit , and R. found himself toppled with a mass of others down a smooth bank , into one of the trenches .
The only space that remained .
R. had had no idea how near to one he ’ d been , the instant before .
It had become impossible to see beyond the heads and shoulders massing so tightly , there was no one to blame but—R .
managed to arrest this thought .
No one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
None raised any real protest , despite their bodies struggling pointlessly , a residue of instinct .
No , the roar of voices seemed mainly to emanate from above , from those just discovering their nearness to the trench , just losing their foothold at the rim .
Down here , among the fallen , it was strangely quiet .
The bodies close—he ’ d grown accustomed to that .
R. found it almost consoling .
When the water reached him , though , he felt puzzled by the physics : could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shallow pool upward through the crevices ?
Or had more water been piped in now ?
Maybe so .
Then again , maybe not important to understand .
R. woke again on the bus .
He gathered himself just as they pulled up again , outside the place , the situation he ’ d so easily recognized , even the first time—curbside entrance , sliding doors , etc.—and allowed himself to be swept , with his cohort , into the afterlife .
♦

Audio available Listen to this story Audio: Jonathan Lethem reads.
1.
R., a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus to the afterlife. He had no baggage. That the destination was the afterlife was understood, a given. This fact R. couldn’t have explained. He didn’t have to. None of the others on the bus—it was loosely packed, perhaps a third of the seats full—challenged R.’s certainty. They knew as well.
The facility was large. At a glance, all he had time for, R. failed to see its limits. Wide glass doors slid open, and R. and his fellow-passengers moved inside as if swept, yet willingly. Once they were within, the whole matter of the bus seemed irretrievably distant. (Had a movie been playing on an overhead screen? Had R. slept? What caused him to pay so little notice to the scene outside the windows, the journey that had led him here, to the afterlife?) In fact, as R. milled about, he soon lost sight of the doors by which he’d entered.
The central room, if it could be called a room, was almost unimaginably vast. Atrium? That was a word R. knew. This wasn’t an atrium, nor was it a hangar. The ceiling, though high, wasn’t so high as that, or arched. Instead, it was a flat, bland grid, translucent panels concealing the source of light.
Despite the size, R. was almost immediately aware of the presence of side rooms. Continuing to be swept by the general imperative of motion that had guided their entry, he and the others from the bus—which, he’d begun to feel certain, was only the most recent—dispersed and explored. There was room enough. R. turned a corner into one of the side areas, one relatively unoccupied. Windowless and featureless, in other situations it would have been a large room. It was small only in contrast to the larger area at R.’s back. There were at the start only three or four others here, others who, like R., kept moving, circulating across the endless floor, in some cases exchanging words. There seemed to be no prohibition on speech.
2.
R.’s work, his efforts for the past decade or more (the work his gallerist had advertised as his “signature”), consisted of a green-gray oatmeal surface applied over a variety of acutely angled abstract forms. They were sized to stand on the floor, at a height of three or four feet, to stand as unthreatening, enigmatic bodies in public space. The surface was pebbly and matte, neither exactly fleshlike nor vegetal. It was approachable, natural in affect, though actually consisting of polymers and resin. The shapes were derived from elements of functional objects—computer stands, electrical outlets, dish racks, etc.—displaced from their context and enlarged, so as to become unrecognizable. Sculpture was everywhere; it only took his eye to know it, and a few gestures to render it and coat it in the green-gray oatmeal concoction. His eye was good. His work sold in bunches.
In this place, as anywhere, R.’s eye scouted for uncommonly funky or graceful design features—bannisters or handles, sconces or vents, junctures where piping met ceiling or floor. He indexed these wherever he went, and turned the best he found into new sculptures. Here, there were none.
3.
R. began to wonder whether he’d find anyone he knew. Even as he registered the thought, he understood that this was a preoccupation among many of those roaming the floor. In fact, he saw now that it was this imperative that dictated the general movement, the characteristic circular milling. All present had seized on it by instinct, the urge to sort through the faces of others, in search of recognition. R. was party to this. More bodies had moved into the side room, perhaps feeling a kind of reverse claustrophobia, a terror of the vastness of the main space.
He grasped instantly that there was no reason to deny strangers acknowledgment. Or more than acknowledgment—brief, friendly greeting. Yet the hurly-burly militated against doing more. One was driven. There might always be a person one knew from before, if one only kept looking. Under such circumstances, even the briefest acquaintance would signify enormously.
A teen-ager, grinning, reached down, and touched the knees of R.’s pants. The gesture was obscure, not necessarily unfriendly. In any case, the teen mingled into the bodies and was lost. The crowd, loose at the outset, seemed to be growing denser. Was this happening only in the side room he’d entered? Perhaps it had grown crowded with those like R., who’d felt curious to see what it held. It appeared as though at the far end of the side room it opened to another enormous indoor space, one perhaps as without boundary as the one that R. had just left. Yet the density of bodies in the current room made it unappealing to attempt to cross. So R. turned back toward the large room from which he’d come, seeking free space.
Though things had grown generally more crowded, it was looser there, yes. He felt a little animation at this discovery, and a thrill—for the first time? Again?—at the extent of this space, and all the possible encounters contained within it. The smaller room, he saw now, had been a mistake, a waste of time. He resumed energetically milling. The point was to relish the freedom here, to refuse constraint. And among these numbers R. felt certain he’d find, if not actual acquaintances, then those like himself—his tribe, his type, his people.
“I hear—”


newyorker--2020-05-11--The Engineers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage

On Monday , March 9th , Jake Kittell , a research engineer and machinist who builds scientific equipment for the University of Vermont , in Burlington , came into work fired up .
Approaching another engineer , Carl Silver , he said , “ We got ta build a ventilator.
” “ That sounds great , ” Silver replied .
“ What do we know about ventilators ?
” Neither had ever seen one .
But the coronavirus pandemic , once an abstraction , had recently made itself felt in Seattle , New York , and other American cities , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of ventilators could hasten the deaths of thousands .
“ You feel like you want to do something , ” Silver recalled .
The next week , Kittell e-mailed another professor at the university , Jason Bates , with whom they had worked in the past , and whom they knew to be a lung expert .
We have a shop , he wrote .
Can we build a ventilator ?
Well , sure , Bates thought .
He ’ d been working on the same problem for the previous four days .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with lucid , cheery confidence .
Originally from England , he is a professor of medicine and of biomedical engineering , and teaches in both the university ’ s engineering department and its medical school .
The author of “ Lung Mechanics : An Inverse Modeling Approach , ” he is one of the world ’ s foremost experts on ventilator-induced lung injury , or VILI .
Earlier in his career , at McGill University , in Montreal , Bates and his team invented a computer-controlled ventilator for mice that is still used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s settings and seeing how a mouse ’ s lungs react under pressure , scientists can study the physiology of lung disease .
They can also explore how different styles of ventilation—in which air is moved into and out of the lungs at various volumes , pressures , and rhythms—can help or hurt a damaged lung .
The previous Friday , March 13th , Bates had heard from Matt Kinsey , a pulmonologist at the University of Vermont medical school .
A COVID-19 patient there had been placed on a ventilator , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to use a technique known as airway pressure release ventilation , or A.P.R.V.
, in which the device delivers near-constant air pressure , with an occasional quick release .
( Try taking a long , slow breath in , then puffing out , quickly but gently ; repeat . )
Kinsey passed on a text message from the physician : “ APRV is da bomb for covid.
” Bates said , “ I was intrigued by this because I ’ d been studying A.P.R.V .
and trying to figure out how to optimally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inflicted more damage when the lungs were swinging between full inflation and full deflation , and had come to believe that A.P.R.V.
, by avoiding those extremes , was probably the gentlest ventilation strategy for those suffering from the disease .
Now his theory was being put to the test .
The ventilators used in today ’ s I.C.U.s are expensive , in large part because they are configurable .
Newer models have touch screens that allow clinicians to change and track dozens of parameters , carefully adjusting how breaths are delivered .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible to build a pared-down ventilator that did nothing but provide A.P.R.V.
, to be used when the supply of fancier ventilators ran out .
A typical I.C.U .
ventilator costs between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand dollars .
Bates replied to Kittell ’ s e-mail with a document titled “ APRV for $ 10 ( okay , maybe $ 50 .
.
. )
.
” In an included schematic , Bates had sketched a simple device : a box with three holes in it .
Gas under pressure—which many hospitals have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hole and out another , to the patient .
In normal breathing , exhalation typically takes about two to three times as long as inhalation ; in A.P.R.V.
, the length of exhalation is reduced from several seconds to about half a second , while inhalation can take five seconds or more .
To create this modified rhythm , the box ’ s third hole would be blocked by a rotating disk that also had a hole in it , and that was spun by a motor .
When the holes briefly aligned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opening .
By the next day , Silver had built a prototype and sent Bates a video .
A rubber glove was attached to the side of a box with some zip ties .
The glove inflated , then deflated , then inflated again .
“ I saw that and everything changed , ” Bates said .
Soon , the university agreed to fund the device .
Kittell and Silver were given free rein in the shop ; a lung analogue was brought in from the hospital for testing ; a regulatory expert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Food and Drug Administration , which had created a special approval process for stopgap ventilators ; and several local contract manufacturers were lined up so that the device , now known as the Vermontilator , could be mass-produced .
Engineering is quiet , methodical work , not often the stuff of high drama .
But for many engineers the coronavirus has been a call to arms .
Not since the space race has the whole world been so invested in problems that are fundamentally technical .
During the Apollo 13 mission , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the crew ; the nation watched as the astronauts , working with engineers in Mission Control , jury-rigged a filter using duct tape and spare parts .
In the film “ Apollo 13 , ” from 1995 , an engineer with a pocket protector explains the situation to his colleagues : “ The people upstairs handed us this one , and we got ta come through.
” Since February , engineers in industry and academia have been working on designs for cheap , easy-to-build ventilators .
Ford has christened its effort Project Apollo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ landings may understate the complexity of the problem .
COVID-19 is a mysterious illness , and ventilators admit to many styles of operation .
In the best case , the machines keep patients with failing lungs alive , buying time for the body to heal .
In the worst case , they can aggravate lung damage .
In the course of the pandemic , critical-care specialists have disagreed about how the devices should be operated and at what point in a patient ’ s decline they should be used ; mortality rates for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Manufacturing a ventilator is difficult , especially during a pandemic , when supply lines are unreliable .
Different designs negotiate different bargains between cost and functionality .
Reaching the moon is challenging enough .
It ’ s harder when no one is sure where the moon is .
The lung is a passive participant in breathing .
It ’ s the diaphragm , a large muscle that cuts the human body horizontally in half , that does the work .
When you inhale , your diaphragm pulls down like a piston , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while the muscles of the chest wall pull up and out .
Air , drawn in through the nose and the mouth , flows through the trachea and into the bronchial tree , which fans out into the lungs .
There , the breath nestles into hundreds of millions of gossamer sacs called alveoli .
Blood , meanwhile , has arrived at the rendezvous through a network of capillaries , the smallest vessels in the circulatory system .
Under a microscope , the alveoli look like bunches of grapes , and the capillaries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The tissues are so exquisitely thin that oxygen and carbon dioxide can diffuse across them , between air and blood .
The contact surface between the two networks , if it were unfolded flat , would be more than half the size of a tennis court .

Since February, engineers in industry and academia have been working on designs for cheap, easy-to-build ventilators. Ford has christened its effort Project Apollo. And yet comparisons to the moon landings may understate the complexity of the problem. COVID-19 is a mysterious illness, and ventilators admit to many styles of operation. In the best case, the machines keep patients with failing lungs alive, buying time for the body to heal. In the worst case, they can aggravate lung damage. In the course of the pandemic, critical-care specialists have disagreed about how the devices should be operated and at what point in a patient’s decline they should be used; mortality rates for COVID-19 patients on ventilators have ranged widely. Manufacturing a ventilator is difficult, especially during a pandemic, when supply lines are unreliable. Different designs negotiate different bargains between cost and functionality. Reaching the moon is challenging enough. It’s harder when no one is sure where the moon is.
The lung is a passive participant in breathing. It’s the diaphragm, a large muscle that cuts the human body horizontally in half, that does the work. When you inhale, your diaphragm pulls down like a piston, creating negative pressure around the lungs, while the muscles of the chest wall pull up and out. Air, drawn in through the nose and the mouth, flows through the trachea and into the bronchial tree, which fans out into the lungs. There, the breath nestles into hundreds of millions of gossamer sacs called alveoli. Blood, meanwhile, has arrived at the rendezvous through a network of capillaries, the smallest vessels in the circulatory system. Under a microscope, the alveoli look like bunches of grapes, and the capillaries like the mesh sacks that hold them. The tissues are so exquisitely thin that oxygen and carbon dioxide can diffuse across them, between air and blood. The contact surface between the two networks, if it were unfolded flat, would be more than half the size of a tennis court.
The alveolar flesh is elastic, and delicate like fruit pulp. It fares poorly when infected. The coronavirus multiplies in the alveolar cells, tearing them apart as it escapes; in the resulting chaos, fluid can leak into the air sacs, capillaries can constrict or clot, and tissues can become inflamed and stiffen. As the infection spreads, the number of healthy air sacs declines, and the exchange of gases becomes less efficient. A patient whose lung function degrades in this way can develop acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS.
When a COVID-19 patient arrives at the hospital with shortness of breath, physicians use a pulse oximeter, clipped to a finger, to monitor her blood-oxygen level, while supplemental oxygen is delivered. If the oxygen level continues to decline, doctors bring in a ventilator. A device that looks like an oversized shoehorn is wedged over the patient’s tongue and used to peel back the epiglottis. Then a tube is fed down the trachea, where a small balloon is inflated to hold it in place. Patients are usually sedated and paralyzed before being intubated; people suffering from COVID-19 may have to stay on ventilators for weeks, remaining sedated for the duration, and they are sometimes paralyzed again if their movement makes them hard to manage. It is an extreme intervention that, even when it saves a patient’s life, takes a toll on the body.
At the most basic level, a ventilator is a pump, no different from the plastic resuscitator bags that paramedics squeeze to push air into a patient’s lungs, in lieu of mouth-to-mouth. But, to avoid VILI, the lungs must be ventilated with care. Too little air pressure and the alveoli won’t inflate; too much and they’ll distend and get damaged. The balance grows harder to maintain as ARDS progresses. The lung is like a lattice, with each air sac supporting its neighbors. Damaged alveoli can press up against one another, spreading weakness with each breath; strained alveoli can burst. During exhalation, the insides of the alveoli, which get stickier as they fill with fluid, touch and cling together; inflating them again requires peeling them apart. In lung-physiology circles, this is sometimes called the “Velcro effect.” “If you have that Velcro effect going on with every single breath, breath after breath, that’s incredibly damaging in a fairly short time,” Bates said. “You get in this vicious spiral that’s really hard to get back from.”
With a typical I.C.U. ventilator, a clinician has a few ways to modulate the flow of air. She can adjust the “tidal volume”—the total amount of air to be delivered with each breath. She can designate a target pressure, in which case the ventilator delivers whatever volume is required to generate it. (Imagine filling a bicycle tire: you pump until the tire is firm.) She can also select the degree of PEEP, or positive end-expiratory pressure—the amount of pressure that’s left in the lungs at the end of each exhalation. Higher PEEP prevents the air sacs from collapsing. By decreasing the duration of exhalation and maintaining higher inspiratory pressure, A.P.R.V., Bates’s preferred ventilation style, does everything possible to avoid the Velcro effect.
The Vermontilator will likely cost around one or two thousand dollars when it ships—more than ten (or fifty) dollars, but a fraction of the cost of a full-fledged I.C.U. ventilator. It’s so inexpensive because it’s a minimalist device made from around fifteen parts, designed specifically for A.P.R.V. If the Velcro effect is as central to COVID-19 as Bates believes it to be, then this is a sound approach. But clinicians and researchers are still debating what kind of lung damage the coronavirus causes; they have come to recognize that it affects patients in unpredictable ways. “One of our mistakes at the beginning of this mass-casualty event was fixation: you come in with an idée fixe,” Sharon Einav, an I.C.U. specialist in Jerusalem who co-authored a set of well-known guidelines for critical-care surges, told me. “People knew ARDS. The intensive-care community has been discussing ARDS for the last twenty years. As time passes, we’re discovering that this disease has something more to it.” The Vermontilator is a bet on the nature of the virus that may not pay off.
If we could produce more of the high-end ventilators already in use in hospitals, doctors could choose their own settings. This is the cause now taken up by Ford and General Motors, which have each collaborated with a ventilator-maker—G.E. Healthcare, which licenses a design from Airon, and Ventec, respectively—to scale up manufacturing. In mid-March, Ford kicked off Project Apollo, after the company learned about Airon’s design; a personal introduction to representatives at Ventec led Mary T. Barra, the C.E.O. of G.M., to commit her company to Project V.
Ventec’s VOCSN ventilator—the name stands for “ventilator, oxygen, cough, suction, and nebulizer”—was designed to perform the functions of five devices in one. “We are the first and only multifunction ventilator,” Chris Brooks, the company’s chief strategy officer, told me. (The VOCSN was approved by the F.D.A. in 2017.) For G.M., Ventec has created a simplified version, without the cough, suction, and nebulizer functions, known as the V+Pro. Even so, Brooks sees it as a fighter jet in a race with prop planes. “There’s been a lot of conversation over the past few weeks with the shortage, a lot of very well-intentioned individuals and groups and very smart people, who have said, ‘Hey, we can create a ventilator,’ and ‘Hey, we’ve developed a ventilator overnight, it’s a hundred-dollar ventilator,’ ” he said. “There’s a reason that there are very high-end, very powerful and precise critical-care I.C.U. ventilators. That truly is what these patients need.”
On March 27th, in a tweet, President Trump urged G.M. to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!!”; in a subsequent tweet, he invoked the Defense Production Act to compel the company to do what it had started doing two weeks earlier. Preparing to manufacture ten thousand of Ventec’s ventilators per month, as G.M. plans to do, has required a crash effort. On March 19th, G.M. flew six engineers to Bothell, Washington, to study the VOCSN production process. “We took a lot of pictures and a lot of video,” Gerald Johnson, G.M.’s head of global manufacturing, told me. The VOCSN has around seven hundred parts; the V+Pro, around four hundred. By e-mailing lists of parts to around seventy of its “Tier 1” suppliers, G.M. was able to secure all of them by the following weekend. The scramble, Johnson said, was “miraculous.” Suppliers had to adapt production lines to new specifications; they had to ask their own suppliers to do the same. The most elusive part, a special DC motor, is being shipped from India, where it is being made in a factory that had closed and had to be reopened.
With the parts secured, a G.M. component-manufacturing facility in Kokomo, Indiana, was retrofitted for ventilators. Two hundred and fifty skilled workers, recruited from within and outside G.M., began work after a week of training. A few dozen Ventec engineers are helping run the operation. At stations, each person takes on a sub-assembly task—plugging in a hose, mounting a circuit board with tiny screws—and then passes a bucket containing the incomplete ventilator to someone else. “Because of the urgency and speed, automation was kept down,” Johnson said.
In mid-April, G.M. produced its first five units. Later in the month, the Kokomo plant and its trimmed-down ventilator were approved under an F.D.A. Emergency Use Authorization, and the first shipments were made to hospitals in Illinois and Indiana, at around sixteen thousand dollars per ventilator. (Ford is expected to begin delivering its first Airon ventilators by early July.) G.M. says that it is on pace to produce thirty thousand ventilators by the end of August.
Between the parsimonious minimalism of the Vermontilator and the maximalist ambition of Project Apollo and Project V, some engineers have ended up taking a middle path. In mid-March, at around the same time that Bates connected with Kittell and Silver to develop a prototype of the Vermontilator, Scott Cohen, a co-founder of New Lab, a center for researchers and startups in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, began reading up on the global ventilator hackathon. A doctor in Detroit had used a T-tube to split one ventilator among two or four patients. At the University of Florida, engineers were using a sprinkler valve and PVC water pipes to drive what looked like a wheezy bellows. At Rice University, a bare-bones ventilator was being built out of a plastic resuscitator bag and a motor. Groups in Ireland and at M.I.T. were pursuing the same idea—all open source, with instructions and parts lists posted freely online. Cohen, who is not an engineer, turned to friends to help him find a project that New Lab could assist with. One wrote back immediately and said that M.I.T.’s effort was a good bet.
The M.I.T. E-Vent, as the school’s ventilator is known, was based on a prototype that had been created ten years earlier, as a student project in a class on medical-device design. The students’ prototype ran on a battery for three and a half hours, and consisted of a resuscitator bag placed in an enclosure and squeezed by a motor-driven cam. It had a pressure sensor, and settings for tidal volume (squeeze more or less air from the bag) and breaths per minute (squeeze the bag more or less often). The idea had never been developed beyond the class, but it had been revived in early March, and was now being worked on by a team of alumni, professors, and graduate students from the mechanical-, civil-, electrical-, and environmental-engineering departments. The rig had been given to Albert Kwon, an anesthesiologist at Westchester Medical Center, in New York State, who had tested it on a live pig. By Porcine Study No. 4, the device was said to perform comparably to a commercial ventilator operated in a volume-control mode.
The M.I.T. team aimed to build a “reference implementation”—a prototype that proved the viability of its design, which could then be shared for anyone to build. Like other open-source ventilator efforts, it had attracted interest not just from organizations staffed with experts but from amateurs who might try to build a device of their own. “I’m not in favor of this open-source—” Cohen said, interrupting himself. “It’s misleading at a critical time to have people cowboying devices.” He and his friend Marcel Botha, the founder of 10xBeta, a product-design and -development firm in New York, wanted to build the ventilators themselves, or to oversee their production. For a time, engineers in New York and Cambridge worked together; among other things, Botha persuaded Bon Ku, an emergency-medicine doctor at Thomas Jefferson Hospital, in Philadelphia, to loan the M.I.T. engineers one of his hospital’s ventilators, so that they could compare it with their prototypes. But, eventually, the designs “forked,” as often happens in open source.
The New Lab team began calling its device the Spiro Wave, after the Latin word meaning “to breathe.” It has two hundred and fifteen parts; to avoid supply-chain problems, the engineers sourced as many of them as they could from within the state, and persuaded their suppliers to stay open as essential businesses. Under the vaulted ceilings of New Lab’s converted Navy hangar, and, later, at a manufacturing facility operated by Boyce Technologies, in Long Island City, a dozen engineers have been working day and night, in twelve-hour shifts, to perfect the design and solve production challenges. The group has received a ten-million-dollar purchase order from New York City: three thousand units, at $3,333 each. Regulatory experts were brought on to help push through an application for an F.D.A. Emergency Use Authorization. The device—still essentially a pair of robotic arms that squeeze a bag—has a slick metal casing and instructional videos. The Boyce facility is assembling about a hundred units per day.


newyorker--2020-05-11--The Myth of Henry Kissinger

The Myth of Henry Kissinger

In 1952 , at the age of twenty-eight , Henry Kissinger did what enterprising graduate students do when they want to hedge their academic future : he started a magazine .
He picked an imposing name—Confluence—and enlisted illustrious contributors : Hannah Arendt , Raymond Aron , Lillian Smith , Arthur Schlesinger , Jr. , Reinhold Niebuhr .
The publisher James Laughlin , who was a backer of the magazine , described the young Kissinger as “ a thoroughly sincere person ( terribly earnest Germanic type ) who is trying his hardest to do an idealistic job.
” Like his other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a summer program that convened participants from around the world—Kissinger gamely volunteered to spy on attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine opened channels for him not only with policymakers in Washington but also with an older generation of German Jewish thinkers whose political experience had been formed in the early thirties , when the Weimar Republic was supplanted by the Nazi regime .
For Cold War liberals , who saw the stirrings of fascism in everything from McCarthyism to the rise of mass culture , Weimar was a cautionary tale , conferring a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Kissinger cultivated the Weimar intellectuals , but he was not impressed by their prospects for influence .
Although he later invoked the memory of Nazism to justify all manner of power plays , at this stage he was building a reputation as an all-American maverick .
He appalled the émigrés by running an article in Confluence by Ernst von Salomon , a far-rightist who had hired a getaway driver for the men who assassinated the Weimar Republic ’ s foreign minister .
“ I have now joined you as a cardinal villain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told a friend afterward , joking that the piece was being taken as “ a symptom of my totalitarian and even Nazi sympathies.
” For more than sixty years , Henry Kissinger ’ s name has been synonymous with the foreign-policy doctrine called “ realism.
” In his time as national-security adviser and Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon , his willingness to speak frankly about the U.S. ’ s pursuit of power in a chaotic world brought him both acclaim and notoriety .
Afterward , the case against him built , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chronicling actions across the globe .
Seymour Hersh , in “ The Price of Power ” ( 1983 ) , portrayed Kissinger as an unhinged paranoiac ; Christopher Hitchens , in “ The Trial of Henry Kissinger ” ( 2001 ) , styled his attack as a charge sheet for prosecuting him as a war criminal .
But Kissinger , now approaching his ninety-seventh birthday , no longer inspires such widespread loathing .
As former critics crept toward the political center and rose to power themselves , passions cooled .
Hillary Clinton , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yale , vocally opposed Kissinger ’ s bombing of Cambodia , has described the “ astute observations ” he shared with her when she was Secretary of State , writing in an effusive review of his most recent book that “ Kissinger is a friend.
” During one of the 2008 Presidential debates , John McCain and Barack Obama each cited Kissinger as supporting their ( opposite ) postures toward Iran .
Samantha Power , the most celebrated critic of the U.S. ’ s failure to halt genocides , was not above receiving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Kissinger has proved fertile ground for historians and publishers .
There are psychoanalytic studies , tell-alls by former girlfriends , compendiums of his quotations , and business books about his dealmaking .
Two of the most significant recent assessments appeared in 2015 : the first volume of Niall Ferguson ’ s authorized biography , which appraised Kissinger sympathetically from the right , and Greg Grandin ’ s “ Kissinger ’ s Shadow , ” which approached him critically from the left .
From opposing perspectives , they converged in questioning the profundity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ferguson ’ s account , Kissinger enters as a young idealist who follows every postwar foreign-policy fashion and repeatedly attaches himself to the wrong Presidential candidates , until he finally gets lucky with Nixon .
Grandin ’ s Kissinger , despite speaking the language of realists— “ credibility , ” “ linkage , ” “ balance of power ” —has a view of reality so cavalier as to be radically relativist .
Barry Gewen ’ s new book , “ The Inevitability of Tragedy ” ( Norton ) , belongs to the neither-revile-him-nor-revere-him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has thought more deeply about international affairs , ” Gewen writes , and adds , “ Kissinger ’ s thinking runs so counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe.
” Gewen , an editor at the New York Times Book Review , traces Kissinger ’ s most momentous foreign-policy decisions to his experience as “ a child of Weimar.
” Although Gewen is aware of the pitfalls of attributing too much to a regime that collapsed before his subject ’ s tenth birthday , he is fascinated by the connections between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experiences of liberal democracy made them fear democracy ’ s capacity to undermine liberalism .
Heinz Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fürth , a city in Bavaria .
His family fled to New York shortly before Kristallnacht , settling in Washington Heights , a neighborhood with so many German immigrants that it was sometimes known as the Fourth Reich .
They spoke English at home , and Heinz became Henry .
In his youth , he displayed few remarkable qualities beyond enthusiasm for Italian defensive soccer tactics and a knack for advising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As a teen-ager , he worked in a shaving-brush factory before school , and aspired to become an accountant .
In 1942 , Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army .
At Camp Claiborne , Louisiana , he befriended Fritz Kraemer , a German-American private fifteen years his senior , whom Kissinger would call “ the greatest single influence on my formative years.
” A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shirts in the streets .
He had doctorates in political science and international law , and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the U.S. , in 1939 .
He warned Kissinger not to emulate “ cleverling ” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses .
Believing Kissinger to be “ musically attuned to history , ” he told him , “ Only if you do not ‘ calculate ’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.
” For all the imputations of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experience of his youth was serving in the 84th Infantry Division as it swept through Europe .
“ He was more American than I have ever seen any American , ” a comrade recalled .
The work of the U.S. occupation , with its opportunities for quickly assuming positions of authority , thrilled him .
In 1945 , Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp , outside Hanover , and earned a Bronze Star for his role in breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell .
In 1947 , Kissinger enrolled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , intending to study political science and English literature .
He found a second mentor , William Yandell Elliott , a well-connected history professor from the Wasp élite , who advised a series of U.S. Presidents on international affairs .
The young Kissinger was drawn less to the classic exponents of Realpolitik , such as Clausewitz and Bismarck , than to “ philosophers of history ” like Kant and anatomists of civilizational decay such as Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler .
From these thinkers , Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story of liberal progress , or of class consciousness , or of cycles of birth , maturity , and decline ; rather , it was “ a series of meaningless incidents , ” fleetingly given shape by the application of human will .
As a young infantryman , Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs , while the vanquished sought out the historical causes of their misfortune .

In 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, Henry Kissinger did what enterprising graduate students do when they want to hedge their academic future: he started a magazine. He picked an imposing name—Confluence—and enlisted illustrious contributors: Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Lillian Smith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr. The publisher James Laughlin, who was a backer of the magazine, described the young Kissinger as “a thoroughly sincere person (terribly earnest Germanic type) who is trying his hardest to do an idealistic job.” Like his other early production, the Harvard International Seminar, a summer program that convened participants from around the world—Kissinger gamely volunteered to spy on attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine opened channels for him not only with policymakers in Washington but also with an older generation of German Jewish thinkers whose political experience had been formed in the early thirties, when the Weimar Republic was supplanted by the Nazi regime.
For Cold War liberals, who saw the stirrings of fascism in everything from McCarthyism to the rise of mass culture, Weimar was a cautionary tale, conferring a certain authority on those who had survived. Kissinger cultivated the Weimar intellectuals, but he was not impressed by their prospects for influence. Although he later invoked the memory of Nazism to justify all manner of power plays, at this stage he was building a reputation as an all-American maverick. He appalled the émigrés by running an article in Confluence by Ernst von Salomon, a far-rightist who had hired a getaway driver for the men who assassinated the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister. “I have now joined you as a cardinal villain in the liberal demonology,” Kissinger told a friend afterward, joking that the piece was being taken as “a symptom of my totalitarian and even Nazi sympathies.”
For more than sixty years, Henry Kissinger’s name has been synonymous with the foreign-policy doctrine called “realism.” In his time as national-security adviser and Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon, his willingness to speak frankly about the U.S.’s pursuit of power in a chaotic world brought him both acclaim and notoriety. Afterward, the case against him built, bolstered by a stream of declassified documents chronicling actions across the globe. Seymour Hersh, in “The Price of Power” (1983), portrayed Kissinger as an unhinged paranoiac; Christopher Hitchens, in “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), styled his attack as a charge sheet for prosecuting him as a war criminal.
But Kissinger, now approaching his ninety-seventh birthday, no longer inspires such widespread loathing. As former critics crept toward the political center and rose to power themselves, passions cooled. Hillary Clinton, who, as a law student at Yale, vocally opposed Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia, has described the “astute observations” he shared with her when she was Secretary of State, writing in an effusive review of his most recent book that “Kissinger is a friend.” During one of the 2008 Presidential debates, John McCain and Barack Obama each cited Kissinger as supporting their (opposite) postures toward Iran. Samantha Power, the most celebrated critic of the U.S.’s failure to halt genocides, was not above receiving the Henry A. Kissinger Prize from him.
Kissinger has proved fertile ground for historians and publishers. There are psychoanalytic studies, tell-alls by former girlfriends, compendiums of his quotations, and business books about his dealmaking. Two of the most significant recent assessments appeared in 2015: the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography, which appraised Kissinger sympathetically from the right, and Greg Grandin’s “Kissinger’s Shadow,” which approached him critically from the left. From opposing perspectives, they converged in questioning the profundity of Kissinger’s realism. In Ferguson’s account, Kissinger enters as a young idealist who follows every postwar foreign-policy fashion and repeatedly attaches himself to the wrong Presidential candidates, until he finally gets lucky with Nixon. Grandin’s Kissinger, despite speaking the language of realists—“credibility,” “linkage,” “balance of power”—has a view of reality so cavalier as to be radically relativist.
Barry Gewen’s new book, “The Inevitability of Tragedy” (Norton), belongs to the neither-revile-him-nor-revere-him school of Kissingerology. “No one has thought more deeply about international affairs,” Gewen writes, and adds, “Kissinger’s thinking runs so counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe.” Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, traces Kissinger’s most momentous foreign-policy decisions to his experience as “a child of Weimar.” Although Gewen is aware of the pitfalls of attributing too much to a regime that collapsed before his subject’s tenth birthday, he is fascinated by the connections between Kissinger and his émigré elders, whose experiences of liberal democracy made them fear democracy’s capacity to undermine liberalism.
Heinz Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fürth, a city in Bavaria. His family fled to New York shortly before Kristallnacht, settling in Washington Heights, a neighborhood with so many German immigrants that it was sometimes known as the Fourth Reich. They spoke English at home, and Heinz became Henry. In his youth, he displayed few remarkable qualities beyond enthusiasm for Italian defensive soccer tactics and a knack for advising his friends on their amorous exploits. As a teen-ager, he worked in a shaving-brush factory before school, and aspired to become an accountant.
In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Kraemer, a German-American private fifteen years his senior, whom Kissinger would call “the greatest single influence on my formative years.” A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.”
For all the imputations of Kissinger’s Germanness, the indelible experience of his youth was serving in the 84th Infantry Division as it swept through Europe. “He was more American than I have ever seen any American,” a comrade recalled. The work of the U.S. occupation, with its opportunities for quickly assuming positions of authority, thrilled him. In 1945, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp, outside Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star for his role in breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell.
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In 1947, Kissinger enrolled at Harvard on the G.I. Bill, intending to study political science and English literature. He found a second mentor, William Yandell Elliott, a well-connected history professor from the Wasp élite, who advised a series of U.S. Presidents on international affairs. The young Kissinger was drawn less to the classic exponents of Realpolitik, such as Clausewitz and Bismarck, than to “philosophers of history” like Kant and anatomists of civilizational decay such as Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated. It was not a story of liberal progress, or of class consciousness, or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline; rather, it was “a series of meaningless incidents,” fleetingly given shape by the application of human will. As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out the historical causes of their misfortune.
Ferguson and Grandin both seize on one sentence in Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis, titled “The Meaning of History”: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.” Such a deeply subjective world view might seem surprising in Kissinger, but French existentialism had arrived at Harvard, and the thesis cited Jean-Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Kissinger believed that morality was determined by action. But for Sartre action created the possibility of individual and collective responsibility, whereas for Kissinger moral indeterminacy was a condition of human freedom.
In 1951, while pursuing graduate studies, Kissinger worked as a consultant with the Army’s Operations Research Office, where he became familiar with the Defense Department’s penchant for psychological warfare. To Kissinger’s peers at Harvard, tailoring their résumés to the needs of the U.S. security state, his doctoral work—on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences—seemed whimsically antiquarian. But his published dissertation invoked thermonuclear weapons in its first sentence, and presented readers in Washington with an unmistakable historical analogy: the British and Austrian Empires’ efforts to contain Napoleon’s France held lessons for dealing with the Soviet Union.
Kissinger is sometimes called the American Metternich, a reference to the Austrian statesman who forged the post-Napoleonic peace. But here, weighing the careers of the men he wrote about, he stressed the limitations of Metternich as a model:
Lacking in Metternich is the attribute which has enabled the spirit to transcend an impasse at so many crises of history: the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome—or perish in the process. . . . For men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but by the tasks they set themselves.
Kissinger was taking a swipe at the bright-eyed social scientists around him, who thought that the deadly confrontation of the Cold War could be solved with empirical and behavioral models, rather than with existential swagger.
In 1954, Harvard did not offer Kissinger the junior professorship he had hoped for, but the dean of the faculty, McGeorge Bundy, recommended him to the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kissinger started managing a study group on nuclear weapons. In Eisenhower-era Washington, a fresh take on nuclear weapons could make your name. In 1957, Kissinger published the book that established him as a public figure, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.” It argued that the Eisenhower Administration needed to steel itself to use tactical nuclear weapons in conventional wars. To reserve nuclear weapons only for doomsday scenarios left the U.S. unable to respond decisively to incremental Soviet incursions. Kissinger intended his thesis to be provocative, and could not have known that Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had been telling the President much the same thing for years.