newyorker--2020-03-02--The Coronavirus Is Causing a Global Panic—but That’s a Good Thing

In a “ Twilight Zone ” –like drama spawned by eerie uncertainty , the world is shutting down a bit more each day , as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across sixty countries on six continents—all in just nine weeks .
There ’ s no longer an illusion that the contagion can be contained .
And this is only the beginning .
Marc Lipsitch , a Harvard epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics , estimated that between forty per cent and seventy per cent of the world ’ s roughly five billion adults will get the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China , in late December .
The United States reached a turning point over the weekend , as cases of the sickness—initially isolated in California , Oregon , and Washington State , on the West Coast—were confirmed in Illinois , in the Midwest , and New York , Rhode Island , and Florida , on the East Coast .
( On Monday , four new coronavirus deaths were announced in Washington State , bringing the total to six . )
For Americans , the problem is no longer stemming the tide of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shifted—from stopping them from infecting us to stopping us from infecting each other , ” Lipsitch said .
“ There is no American exceptionalism in exposure to coronavirus.
” In the United States , transmission is likely already far , far wider than the ninety publicly confirmed cases on Monday because of U.S. officials ’ failure to do sufficient testing .
“ We haven ’ t found hundreds or thousands of cases because we ’ re not looking hard enough , ” Lipsitch said .
“ We don ’ t have the testing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going on .
We ’ ve looked largely at people who had a relation to China or high-risk areas.
” That ’ s too low , he said , by several factors of ten .
He called the initial U.S. response “ utterly inadequate.
” Lipsitch told me that the Chinese government ’ s response in Hubei Province , the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak , was more thorough than the approach taken so far in the U.S. by the Trump Administration .
In Guangdong province , Chinese health officials tested more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clinics , where people who think they have a fever of any origin are seen .
In contrast , the U.S. has been testing a handful of isolated cases .
“ Our government ’ s response was something like one per cent—or less—than what China did , ” Lipsitch said .
Asia and Europe also have reacted faster to the outbreak .
Disruptions have impacted virtually every aspect of public life there .
Japan has closed all schools , effective Monday , until April , turning away thirteen million students and leaving their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do with them .
On Saturday , baseball games were played without audiences , after the Japanese government ’ s order to cancel or postpone sports and entertainment events : Seiya Inoue , of the Chiba Lotte Marines , homered against the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in an empty stadium .
Models at the Tokyo Girls Collection strutted down the runway with no one in attendance .
And horses at the Nakayama Racecourse ran without spectators .
In a sign of the risks ahead , a cruise-ship operator in Japan filed for bankruptcy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cancellations of night cruises that once ferried up to a thousand people around the sights of Kobe .
The fate of the Summer Olympics , in Tokyo , is still to be determined .
In South Korea , the government is considering prosecuting the leader of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus for gross negligence or murder , because sixty percent of the country ’ s more than four thousand confirmed cases are sect members .
BTS , one of the country ’ s most popular musical groups , called off tour dates scheduled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American pop-punk band Green Day postponed shows across Asia .
In Europe , Italy has quarantined eleven towns—encompassing more than fifty thousand people—hit by the coronavirus , while the famed La Scala opera house , in Milan , was shuttered .
Despite the precautions , the number of confirmed cases in Italy shot up by fifty per cent over the weekend .
On Sunday , the staff of the Louvre , the world ’ s busiest museum , voted to close its doors , owing to a fear that the Paris institution—and its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a breeding ground for the virus .
France , which has more than a hundred cases , enacted a nationwide ban on all public events bringing together more than five thousand people .
Switzerland banned all events with more than a thousand attendees , which instantly axed the Geneva Motor Show .
In Spain , the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona , was cancelled .
Germany , where nine of the country ’ s sixteen states have reported cases of the coronavirus , cancelled one of the world ’ s most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be held in Berlin .
Greece cancelled all activities relating to the annual Carnival celebration .
In the Middle East , Iran , a coronavirus hot spot , with the highest mortality rate in the world , cancelled Friday prayers and closed schools and universities in twenty-four of its thirty-one provinces .
Saudi Arabia , the guardian of Islam ’ s holy sites , banned foreign pilgrims .
Qatar cancelled the motorcycle Grand Prix , which was scheduled to start Sunday .
Morocco announced that it was postponing all sports and cultural events @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases—yet .
“ This is not a time for fear , ” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , the head of the World Health Organization , said on Thursday .
“ This is a time for taking action to prevent infections and save lives now.
” On Friday , Americans began preparing for possible shutdowns and quarantines .
When the first cases were still three thousand miles away , on the West Coast , several stores where I live , in Washington , D.C. , were out of Purell , Clorox wipes , and cleaning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and nonperishable goods , such as canned vegetables and pasta .
“ We sold out of every can of beans in the store Friday night , ” a manager at a local Trader Joe ’ s told me .
The growing appearance of public panic may be a good thing , however .
Lipsitch called precautionary steps rational .
“ People are understandably confused .
I ’ ve been telling people to get bleach and alcohol-related cleansers and several months ’ supply of medicine and the like , ” he told me .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ ll have to use them , but there is a good chance that you will .
”

In a “Twilight Zone”–like drama spawned by eerie uncertainty, the world is shutting down a bit more each day, as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across sixty countries on six continents—all in just nine weeks. There’s no longer an illusion that the contagion can be contained. And this is only the beginning. Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, estimated that between forty per cent and seventy per cent of the world’s roughly five billion adults will get the virus, which was first reported in China, in late December.
The United States reached a turning point over the weekend, as cases of the sickness—initially isolated in California, Oregon, and Washington State, on the West Coast—were confirmed in Illinois, in the Midwest, and New York, Rhode Island, and Florida, on the East Coast. (On Monday, four new coronavirus deaths were announced in Washington State, bringing the total to six.) For Americans, the problem is no longer stemming the tide of a foreign pathogen. “The emphasis has shifted—from stopping them from infecting us to stopping us from infecting each other,” Lipsitch said. “There is no American exceptionalism in exposure to coronavirus.”
In the United States, transmission is likely already far, far wider than the ninety publicly confirmed cases on Monday because of U.S. officials’ failure to do sufficient testing. “We haven’t found hundreds or thousands of cases because we’re not looking hard enough,” Lipsitch said. “We don’t have the testing capacity to find out what’s going on. We’ve looked largely at people who had a relation to China or high-risk areas.” That’s too low, he said, by several factors of ten. He called the initial U.S. response “utterly inadequate.” Lipsitch told me that the Chinese government’s response in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was more thorough than the approach taken so far in the U.S. by the Trump Administration. In Guangdong province, Chinese health officials tested more than three hundred thousand patients in so-called fever clinics, where people who think they have a fever of any origin are seen. In contrast, the U.S. has been testing a handful of isolated cases. “Our government’s response was something like one per cent—or less—than what China did,” Lipsitch said.
Asia and Europe also have reacted faster to the outbreak. Disruptions have impacted virtually every aspect of public life there. Japan has closed all schools, effective Monday, until April, turning away thirteen million students and leaving their parents scrambling to figure out what to do with them. On Saturday, baseball games were played without audiences, after the Japanese government’s order to cancel or postpone sports and entertainment events: Seiya Inoue, of the Chiba Lotte Marines, homered against the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in an empty stadium. Models at the Tokyo Girls Collection strutted down the runway with no one in attendance. And horses at the Nakayama Racecourse ran without spectators. In a sign of the risks ahead, a cruise-ship operator in Japan filed for bankruptcy on Monday, due to the many cancellations of night cruises that once ferried up to a thousand people around the sights of Kobe. The fate of the Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, is still to be determined. In South Korea, the government is considering prosecuting the leader of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus for gross negligence or murder, because sixty percent of the country’s more than four thousand confirmed cases are sect members. BTS, one of the country’s most popular musical groups, called off tour dates scheduled for April in Seoul, while the American pop-punk band Green Day postponed shows across Asia.
In Europe, Italy has quarantined eleven towns—encompassing more than fifty thousand people—hit by the coronavirus, while the famed La Scala opera house, in Milan, was shuttered. Despite the precautions, the number of confirmed cases in Italy shot up by fifty per cent over the weekend. On Sunday, the staff of the Louvre, the world’s busiest museum, voted to close its doors, owing to a fear that the Paris institution—and its tens of thousands of monthly visitors—could become a breeding ground for the virus. France, which has more than a hundred cases, enacted a nationwide ban on all public events bringing together more than five thousand people. Switzerland banned all events with more than a thousand attendees, which instantly axed the Geneva Motor Show. In Spain, the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, was cancelled. Germany, where nine of the country’s sixteen states have reported cases of the coronavirus, cancelled one of the world’s most important travel-and-tourism trade fairs, due to be held in Berlin. Greece cancelled all activities relating to the annual Carnival celebration.
A bistro in Milan lacked customers on February 27th. Photograph by Andrea Mantovani / NYT / Redux
In the Middle East, Iran, a coronavirus hot spot, with the highest mortality rate in the world, cancelled Friday prayers and closed schools and universities in twenty-four of its thirty-one provinces. Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s holy sites, banned foreign pilgrims. Qatar cancelled the motorcycle Grand Prix, which was scheduled to start Sunday. Morocco announced that it was postponing all sports and cultural events, even though it has no confirmed cases—yet. “This is not a time for fear,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said on Thursday. “This is a time for taking action to prevent infections and save lives now.”
On Friday, Americans began preparing for possible shutdowns and quarantines. When the first cases were still three thousand miles away, on the West Coast, several stores where I live, in Washington, D.C., were out of Purell, Clorox wipes, and cleaning gloves, and low on toilet paper and nonperishable goods, such as canned vegetables and pasta. “We sold out of every can of beans in the store Friday night,” a manager at a local Trader Joe’s told me.
The growing appearance of public panic may be a good thing, however. Lipsitch called precautionary steps rational. “People are understandably confused. I’ve been telling people to get bleach and alcohol-related cleansers and several months’ supply of medicine and the like,” he told me. “That doesn’t mean that you’ll have to use them, but there is a good chance that you will.”
Behavioral scientists, psychologists, and epidemiologists are loath to use the word “panic.” “We prefer to think in terms of behavior, in conditions of uncertainty,” Kathleen Tierney, a sociologist at the Institute of Behavioral Science, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told me. Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and a former president of the Society for Risk Analysis, said that panic comes in three forms, only one of which applies to the range of reactions to the coronavirus crisis. The most basic form is feeling panicky, which most people feel at some time, Fischhoff said. It’s bad for quality of life, but it’s not associated with specific behavior; most people feel it at some point but don’t act on it. The second type of panic is allowing stress to overcome normal, reasoned responses. But it, too, is fairly rare, research shows. Most people don’t lose control of themselves. “The idea of mass panic—people running in the streets and abandoning normal behavior—is the myth of panic,” Fischhoff said. “That’s the kind of panic you see more in movies than in everyday life. In fact, most people band together.” An enduring image from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center is of people running from the scene. But the evacuation from the towers themselves—each with more than a hundred floors—was “extremely orderly,” Fischhoff said. “Egress was less viscous. In a horrible situation, people were brave and very orderly.”
The third kind of panic is the type witnessed—among people in widely diverse societies—since the outbreak of the coronavirus. It includes panic buying and hoarding. “It reflects the attitude ‘better safe than sorry,’ ” Tierney, the sociologist, said. The good news is that people are lining up—albeit in long lines—in an orderly fashion to buy groceries. No one is breaking into Trader Joe’s to get access to food, she said.


newyorker--2020-03-02--Tulsi Gabbard’s Nine Supporters Urge Her to Drop Out of Race

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Representative Tulsi Gabbard ( D-Hawaii ) is under intense pressure to drop out of the 2020 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination , her nine supporters announced on Monday .
The announcement from Gabbard ’ s nine followers surprised many Democrats , who had been unaware that the Hawaii congresswoman was still running .
In a conference call after the South Carolina primary , the nine members of Team Tulsi concluded that Gabbard ’ s path to the nomination had grown “ dauntingly narrow.
” “ We believe that Tulsi would be an amazing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Harland Dorrinson , a spokesman for the other eight Gabbard supporters , said .
“ But we have regretfully come to the conclusion that this is not her time.
” Dorrinson had nothing but praise for the way Gabbard had conducted her campaign , noting , “ By not appearing in the past two debates , she did much better than Mike Bloomberg.
” Reached at her office in Washington , a defiant Gabbard said that she was “ in it to win it ” and that she still had the strong support @ @ @ @ @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is under intense pressure to drop out of the 2020 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, her nine supporters announced on Monday.
The announcement from Gabbard’s nine followers surprised many Democrats, who had been unaware that the Hawaii congresswoman was still running.
In a conference call after the South Carolina primary, the nine members of Team Tulsi concluded that Gabbard’s path to the nomination had grown “dauntingly narrow.”
“We believe that Tulsi would be an amazing President of the United States,” Harland Dorrinson, a spokesman for the other eight Gabbard supporters, said. “But we have regretfully come to the conclusion that this is not her time.”
Dorrinson had nothing but praise for the way Gabbard had conducted her campaign, noting, “By not appearing in the past two debates, she did much better than Mike Bloomberg.”
Reached at her office in Washington, a defiant Gabbard said that she was “in it to win it” and that she still had the strong support of her imaginary friends.


newyorker--2020-03-03--Another Dinner Party, Another “Impromptu” von Trapp Family Concert

I readily admit it .
Like most of Salzburg society , I was thoroughly charmed the first time Captain von Trapp ’ s children gathered by the staircase to serenade us .
I tittered when his teen-age daughter asked for champagne .
I gushed when his youngest was carried off to bed .
The children ’ s high , clear voices seemed to ring with an innocence we all sensed would soon slip through our grasp .
But that was roughly a dozen social gatherings “ spontaneously ” interrupted by full-scale musical productions ago .
We get it !
You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
Your grieving father is learning to love again !
Now , can we eat our Funkenküchlein in peace ?
It was one thing when the family performances were restricted to family events .
O.K.
, sure , it wasn ’ t entirely appropriate when the children pranced into the Captain ’ s luncheon to honor veterans of the Great War , singing a four-part harmony about a randy goat .
But , hey—their house , their rules .
Then , a week later , they popped up at the Hopfengartens ’ spring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Where did they even come from ?
Were they disguised as caterers ?
I just about fell off my Lipizzaner .
Also , doesn ’ t Karl Hopfengarten have those two little nephews from Innsbruck who play accordion ?
Why weren ’ t they invited to perform ?
Granted , they ’ re not much to look at , and the younger one smokes like a chimney , but I ’ d put their bouncy rendition of “ Im Krug zum grünen Kranze ” up against that of the Schrammelmusik legend Johann Schrammel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , no , this has nothing to do with any moral objection to you-know-what .
So the Captain is shtupping the nanny who may still be a nun .
It ’ s 1938 !
She ’ s married to Jesus , not dead .
Fornicate all you want , sister , but , please , take a solemn vow never to teach an eight-year-old to chassé into a stag leap again .
That ’ s another thing—when did they tire of simply singing ?
In the last month alone , the perky siblings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ three marionette shows , two folk-dance revues , a mime routine , some light circus tumbling , and one very generously tolerated evening of improv .
I thought we ’ d at least get some respite during the summer regatta , out on the clear blue water , far from shore .
But up they swam , in the middle of the trophy ceremony , swirling and warbling like enchanted porpoises .
Where did they get scuba-certified in land-locked Austria , anyway ?
And who taught them to dive back into the water @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
There must be somewhere in this city where a landed noble can still sip a cocktail in peace .
If we organize a hunt , will they come cartwheeling out of the foxhole ?
If we go out ballooning , will they pursue us in a zeppelin ?
Fellow Salzburgers , I love my homeland with all of my heart , but the von Trapps ’ oppressive merrymaking may soon prove enough to send me fleeing over the Alps to freedom .

I readily admit it. Like most of Salzburg society, I was thoroughly charmed the first time Captain von Trapp’s children gathered by the staircase to serenade us. I tittered when his teen-age daughter asked for champagne. I gushed when his youngest was carried off to bed. The children’s high, clear voices seemed to ring with an innocence we all sensed would soon slip through our grasp.
But that was roughly a dozen social gatherings “spontaneously” interrupted by full-scale musical productions ago.
We get it! You’re all incredibly talented and cute! Your grieving father is learning to love again! Now, can we eat our Funkenküchlein in peace?
It was one thing when the family performances were restricted to family events. O.K., sure, it wasn’t entirely appropriate when the children pranced into the Captain’s luncheon to honor veterans of the Great War, singing a four-part harmony about a randy goat. But, hey—their house, their rules.
Then, a week later, they popped up at the Hopfengartens’ spring picnic—in the middle of a field! Where did they even come from? Were they disguised as caterers? I just about fell off my Lipizzaner.
Also, doesn’t Karl Hopfengarten have those two little nephews from Innsbruck who play accordion? Why weren’t they invited to perform? Granted, they’re not much to look at, and the younger one smokes like a chimney, but I’d put their bouncy rendition of “Im Krug zum grünen Kranze” up against that of the Schrammelmusik legend Johann Schrammel himself!
And before you say it, no, this has nothing to do with any moral objection to you-know-what. So the Captain is shtupping the nanny who may still be a nun. It’s 1938! She’s married to Jesus, not dead.
Fornicate all you want, sister, but, please, take a solemn vow never to teach an eight-year-old to chassé into a stag leap again.
That’s another thing—when did they tire of simply singing? In the last month alone, the perky siblings have materialized to perform no fewer than three marionette shows, two folk-dance revues, a mime routine, some light circus tumbling, and one very generously tolerated evening of improv.
I thought we’d at least get some respite during the summer regatta, out on the clear blue water, far from shore. But up they swam, in the middle of the trophy ceremony, swirling and warbling like enchanted porpoises. Where did they get scuba-certified in land-locked Austria, anyway? And who taught them to dive back into the water in a synchronized Esther Williams-esque fan formation?
There must be somewhere in this city where a landed noble can still sip a cocktail in peace. If we organize a hunt, will they come cartwheeling out of the foxhole? If we go out ballooning, will they pursue us in a zeppelin?
Fellow Salzburgers, I love my homeland with all of my heart, but the von Trapps’ oppressive merrymaking may soon prove enough to send me fleeing over the Alps to freedom.


newyorker--2020-03-03--The Uncanny Domestic Spaces of Becky Suss

On a recent gray and cold Sunday evening , the painter Becky Suss welcomed me into her studio in Philadelphia ’ s Fishtown neighborhood .
I had stopped by to see the paintings she was finishing up for her show “ Where They Are , ” which is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery , in New York City , through March 28th .
Suss and her husband , the photographer Micah Danges , work out of an old garage on an industrial block full of them .
The two-story space is scuffed up and forbidding on the outside , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ full of color and texture—bright paint drippings on the gray plywood floor , large and striking in-progress canvases on the wall , rolls of art works covering cluttered large work tables—and mammalian warmth .
Their sweet old mutt , Baja , greeted me , wearing a lifting harness that helps her to get up and down the stairs .
While I scratched her ears , I caught sight of a corner that Suss and Danges have blocked off for when their baby son joins them in the studio : a small love seat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of kid-size book racks .
“ We weren ’ t totally prepared when he started moving around and we realized how much he could get into here , ” Suss told me , with a laugh .
She is thirty-nine , but has the fresh look of a teen-ager , and was dressed comfortably in a pullover gray hoodie and jeans , her long , wavy hair in a low braid .
Suss ’ s best-known work—her flatly depicted , slightly uncanny domestic interiors—circle around the significance of homemaking and homemakers , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affection and provocation .
She is , as she told me , “ fascinated by the complete dependence on and dismissal of domesticity , ” and , now that she is a mother herself , she is haunted by the generations of women in her family whose intellectual and artistic abilities were mostly channelled into homemaking .
“ There ’ s this really rich inheritance of managing domestic space and life , ” she said of her family .
“ Even the shift for me in thinking of this as a ‘ heritage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generations of women have done—it was their livelihood—that little bit of shift in language has been very important to me.
” In her new show , Suss turns her attention to children ’ s literature , another undervalued cultural form , and how it encourages children and caretakers to imagine the domestic spaces that outline their worlds .
The series of mostly large-scale canvases draws inspiration from an idiosyncratic selection of classic children ’ s literature : E. L. Konigsburg ’ s “ From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs .
Basil E. Frankweiler @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Haroun and the Sea of Stories , ” James Baldwin ’ s “ Little Man , Little Man.
” Some of these are books that Suss read as a child , others she has been collecting and planning to read to her own child as he grows .
The show nudges Suss ’ s long-standing interest in the domestic both further inward , psychologically , and outward , socially and historically .
The title “ Where They Are ” refers to the educational philosophy of Lucy Sprague Mitchell , who founded the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now named Bank Street College of Education , in 1916 .
Mitchell championed a then-revolutionary child-centered educational philosophy that emphasized the “ here and now ” : the everyday and familiar , the routine rather than the fantastical .
One of the most famous students , Margaret Wise Brown , wrote the children ’ s-book classic “ Goodnight Moon , ” which was indelibly illustrated in simple shapes and bold , flat color by another Bank Street student , Clement Hurd .
Like Hurd ’ s famous illustrations , Becky Suss ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve always been a stacker and a flattener , ” she told me .
She works large—most of her paintings are around seven feet tall , and some five feet or more wide—and she uses pattern and distorted perspective to explore how memory alters the shape of domestic spaces that one once knew , or imagined , intimately .
Suss is an enthusiastic champion of representational painting , but she insists that her work is “ not a window.
” Scale and distortion are two ways for her to kindle this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them back to the object in front of them .
But they also , she offers , “ validate the distortions of remembering .
So instead of thinking of a distorted image in your mind as a lapse in memory or a misremembering—no , these distortions are the story.
” Suss pursues this idea in “ Houseboat on Dull Lake in the Valley of K , ” based on Rushdie ’ s oddball children ’ s novel from 1990 , which her father read to her .
The painting strikes a compromise between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the world the book depicts ( for example , a traditional Kashmiri khatamband ceiling ) and exploring her memories of the world she imagined as a child , which were also influenced by stories her father told her about his own experiences travelling to Kashmir in the nineteen-sixties .
Another painting , “ Behind the A-Z , ” was drawn from Zilpha Keatley Snyder ’ s Newbery-winning novel “ The Egypt Game , ” which , as Suss remembers , inspired her and her friends ’ neighborhood play for months .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remembering the book from remembering trying to play the game from the book in the woods behind her cul-de-sac .
It ’ s just all in the soup.
” Suss punctuates these large canvases with a series that includes small paintings of children ’ s books , and explained to me that she thinks of them as anchoring “ the viewer ’ s physical relationship in front of a big painting.
” They help remind viewers that the dreamlike , philosophical worlds of the large paintings all stem from a somewhat lowly object @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The small paintings feel comforting and familiar : Suss reproduces the penultimate page spread from “ Goodnight Moon ” —done in grayscale—which asks children and their caretakers to say goodnight to the stars and the air .
She sets a scene from “ Pat the Bunny ” against a navy-blue floral background that recalls a calico print .
She pays homage to Hurd in a striking pink-and-blue painting drawn from “ The World Is Round , ” a 1939 collaboration between him and Gertrude Stein .
Evoking modesty in both technique and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the genealogy of caretaking and the everyday shapes that care takes : ordinary fabrics , simple language , routine .
They prod reconsideration of art forms , like illustration or children ’ s literature , that are often considered secondary to the work of real aesthetic genius .
Likewise , they prod whatever false distinctions have been erected between feminized domestic culture—with its floral prints , privacies , and mundanity—and Art with a capital “ A.
” These “ everyday ” spaces of feminized domestic culture are not simply sweet and comforting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ addresses this head-on .
In a painting inspired by Frank Gilbreth , Jr. , and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey ’ s “ Cheaper by the Dozen , ” from 1948 , Suss depicts a quandary related to heterosexual family life : What ’ s the relationship between the lighthouse that stands on the family ’ s vacation property ( arguably a symbol for fatherhood : disciplinary , phallic , overpoweringly bright ) and the mysteries of the slowly moving night sky ( the feminized rounded space that surrounds ) ?
In “ Miss Beanpole @ @ @ @ @ @ @ painting drawn from Baldwin ’ s “ Little Man , Little Man , ” from 1976 , a lovely interior calm takes shape ( and changes shape ) in tension with the state-sponsored violence of the world outside the character ’ s Harlem apartment , signified by the locked front door .
As our conversation was wrapping up , Suss pointed out that most of her large paintings are still made with the “ teeny-tiniest brushes , ” which require and produce a kind of meditative patience to use at this scale .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the way the labor has been applied to the canvas.
” This emphasis on patience , process , interiority , and domesticity is what the most spectacular of the show ’ s paintings also explores .
In “ Bathroom ( Farmington , CT ) , ” Suss depicts one of the final scenes in “ From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs .
Basil E. Frankweiler , ” in which the young protagonist , Claudia , takes a bath in the titular character ’ s remarkable bathroom , which has floor-to-ceiling black marble and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fixtures .
The canvas is almost entirely covered with a kinetic and stark black-and-white marble pattern .
It ’ s visually overwhelming and sets enough off-kilter that the scene—which many readers will know well—starts to open up in new ways .
The painting renders both the ongoing infinity-mirror feeling of developing selfhood and the strangely enfolded experience of caretaking and children ’ s cultures .
In “ Bathroom ( Farmington , CT ) , ” viewers might meditate on the wonderful Claudia , who famously learns to keep secrets and take her time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are encouraged to consider E. L. Konigsburg , a B.A .
in chemistry turned suburban stay-at-home mom , writing a book about the complexities of art and attribution .
Or the anonymous Italian High Renaissance craftspeople who produced the vases that Suss places at the scene .
Or , of course , all the caretakers who have devoted time and energy to read and tell stories to children .
Put another way , these images help us feel the labor that not only Suss but so many others , named and unnamed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @

On a recent gray and cold Sunday evening, the painter Becky Suss welcomed me into her studio in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. I had stopped by to see the paintings she was finishing up for her show “Where They Are,” which is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, in New York City, through March 28th. Suss and her husband, the photographer Micah Danges, work out of an old garage on an industrial block full of them. The two-story space is scuffed up and forbidding on the outside, but, inside, it’s full of color and texture—bright paint drippings on the gray plywood floor, large and striking in-progress canvases on the wall, rolls of art works covering cluttered large work tables—and mammalian warmth. Their sweet old mutt, Baja, greeted me, wearing a lifting harness that helps her to get up and down the stairs. While I scratched her ears, I caught sight of a corner that Suss and Danges have blocked off for when their baby son joins them in the studio: a small love seat, a jumperoo, and a couple of kid-size book racks. “We weren’t totally prepared when he started moving around and we realized how much he could get into here,” Suss told me, with a laugh. She is thirty-nine, but has the fresh look of a teen-ager, and was dressed comfortably in a pullover gray hoodie and jeans, her long, wavy hair in a low braid.
Suss’s best-known work—her flatly depicted, slightly uncanny domestic interiors—circle around the significance of homemaking and homemakers, which are terms that she uses with both affection and provocation. She is, as she told me, “fascinated by the complete dependence on and dismissal of domesticity,” and, now that she is a mother herself, she is haunted by the generations of women in her family whose intellectual and artistic abilities were mostly channelled into homemaking. “There’s this really rich inheritance of managing domestic space and life,” she said of her family. “Even the shift for me in thinking of this as a ‘heritage,’ thinking of it as something generations of women have done—it was their livelihood—that little bit of shift in language has been very important to me.”
In her new show, Suss turns her attention to children’s literature, another undervalued cultural form, and how it encourages children and caretakers to imagine the domestic spaces that outline their worlds. The series of mostly large-scale canvases draws inspiration from an idiosyncratic selection of classic children’s literature: E. L. Konigsburg’s “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,,” Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” James Baldwin’s “Little Man, Little Man.” Some of these are books that Suss read as a child, others she has been collecting and planning to read to her own child as he grows. The show nudges Suss’s long-standing interest in the domestic both further inward, psychologically, and outward, socially and historically.
The title “Where They Are” refers to the educational philosophy of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who founded the Bureau of Educational Experiments, which is now named Bank Street College of Education, in 1916. Mitchell championed a then-revolutionary child-centered educational philosophy that emphasized the “here and now”: the everyday and familiar, the routine rather than the fantastical. One of the most famous students, Margaret Wise Brown, wrote the children’s-book classic “Goodnight Moon,” which was indelibly illustrated in simple shapes and bold, flat color by another Bank Street student, Clement Hurd.
Like Hurd’s famous illustrations, Becky Suss’s paintings can be deceptively simple. “I’ve always been a stacker and a flattener,” she told me. She works large—most of her paintings are around seven feet tall, and some five feet or more wide—and she uses pattern and distorted perspective to explore how memory alters the shape of domestic spaces that one once knew, or imagined, intimately. Suss is an enthusiastic champion of representational painting, but she insists that her work is “not a window.” Scale and distortion are two ways for her to kindle this realization in a viewer: to bring them back to the object in front of them. But they also, she offers, “validate the distortions of remembering. So instead of thinking of a distorted image in your mind as a lapse in memory or a misremembering—no, these distortions are the story.”
Suss pursues this idea in “Houseboat on Dull Lake in the Valley of K,” based on Rushdie’s oddball children’s novel from 1990, which her father read to her. The painting strikes a compromise between honoring the realistic details that are authentic to the world the book depicts (for example, a traditional Kashmiri khatamband ceiling) and exploring her memories of the world she imagined as a child, which were also influenced by stories her father told her about his own experiences travelling to Kashmir in the nineteen-sixties. Another painting, “Behind the A-Z,” was drawn from Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Newbery-winning novel “The Egypt Game,” which, as Suss remembers, inspired her and her friends’ neighborhood play for months. “I realized I can’t distinguish remembering the book from remembering trying to play the game from the book in the woods behind her cul-de-sac. It’s just all in the soup.”
“Houseboat on a Dull Lake in the Valley of K.” Art work by Becky Suss / Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery
Suss punctuates these large canvases with a series that includes small paintings of children’s books, and explained to me that she thinks of them as anchoring “the viewer’s physical relationship in front of a big painting.” They help remind viewers that the dreamlike, philosophical worlds of the large paintings all stem from a somewhat lowly object we could easily hold in our hands. The small paintings feel comforting and familiar: Suss reproduces the penultimate page spread from “Goodnight Moon”—done in grayscale—which asks children and their caretakers to say goodnight to the stars and the air. She sets a scene from “Pat the Bunny” against a navy-blue floral background that recalls a calico print. She pays homage to Hurd in a striking pink-and-blue painting drawn from “The World Is Round,” a 1939 collaboration between him and Gertrude Stein.
Evoking modesty in both technique and subject, the paintings attend to the genealogy of caretaking and the everyday shapes that care takes: ordinary fabrics, simple language, routine. They prod reconsideration of art forms, like illustration or children’s literature, that are often considered secondary to the work of real aesthetic genius. Likewise, they prod whatever false distinctions have been erected between feminized domestic culture—with its floral prints, privacies, and mundanity—and Art with a capital “A.”
These “everyday” spaces of feminized domestic culture are not simply sweet and comforting, however, and Suss’s work addresses this head-on. In a painting inspired by Frank Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey’s “Cheaper by the Dozen,” from 1948, Suss depicts a quandary related to heterosexual family life: What’s the relationship between the lighthouse that stands on the family’s vacation property (arguably a symbol for fatherhood: disciplinary, phallic, overpoweringly bright) and the mysteries of the slowly moving night sky (the feminized rounded space that surrounds)? In “Miss Beanpole’s Apartment,” an evocative painting drawn from Baldwin’s “Little Man, Little Man,” from 1976, a lovely interior calm takes shape (and changes shape) in tension with the state-sponsored violence of the world outside the character’s Harlem apartment, signified by the locked front door.
“Miss Beanpole’s Apartment.” Art work by Becky Suss / Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery “Bathroom (Farmington, CT).” Art work by Becky Suss / Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery
As our conversation was wrapping up, Suss pointed out that most of her large paintings are still made with the “teeny-tiniest brushes,” which require and produce a kind of meditative patience to use at this scale. She hopes the viewer can feel “the way the labor has been applied to the canvas.” This emphasis on patience, process, interiority, and domesticity is what the most spectacular of the show’s paintings also explores. In “Bathroom (Farmington, CT),” Suss depicts one of the final scenes in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” in which the young protagonist, Claudia, takes a bath in the titular character’s remarkable bathroom, which has floor-to-ceiling black marble and mirrors and a sunken tub with gold fixtures. The canvas is almost entirely covered with a kinetic and stark black-and-white marble pattern. It’s visually overwhelming and sets enough off-kilter that the scene—which many readers will know well—starts to open up in new ways.
The painting renders both the ongoing infinity-mirror feeling of developing selfhood and the strangely enfolded experience of caretaking and children’s cultures. In “Bathroom (Farmington, CT),” viewers might meditate on the wonderful Claudia, who famously learns to keep secrets and take her time in that bathroom. But they also are encouraged to consider E. L. Konigsburg, a B.A. in chemistry turned suburban stay-at-home mom, writing a book about the complexities of art and attribution. Or the anonymous Italian High Renaissance craftspeople who produced the vases that Suss places at the scene. Or, of course, all the caretakers who have devoted time and energy to read and tell stories to children. Put another way, these images help us feel the labor that not only Suss but so many others, named and unnamed, have applied to their various canvases.


newyorker--2020-03-03--Anne Enright Reads “Night Swim”

Anne Enright Reads “Night Swim”

Anne Enright reads her story from the March 9 , 2020 , issue of the magazine .
Enright is the @ @ @ @ @ and seven novels , including “ The Gathering , ” which won the Man Booker @ @ @ @ @ “ Actress , ” which was published this month .

Photograph by Sarah Lee / eyevine / Redux
Anne Enright reads her story from the March 9, 2020, issue of the magazine. Enright is the author of three short-story collections and seven novels, including “The Gathering,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007, and “Actress,” which was published this month.


newyorker--2020-03-03--Learning to Love Bernie Sanders, or Trying To

Any number of Obama-era liberals have been struggling , of late , to learn to love Bernie Sanders .
One can almost imagine a more benign , all-volunteer version of Winston ’ s Smith ’ s reëducation room from “ 1984 , ” made up this time of those shaky centrists and corporate shills and neoliberal hacks whom the most fervent of Sanders ’ s followers love to hate , now trying to feel the love , with their own children among the happy counsellors .
The split over Sanders is as much generational as intellectual , and , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ temperamental as ideological .
If anything , Elizabeth Warren , in the specificity of her proposals , is to the left of Sanders , but , sadly , not remotely as popular a figure .
( Nor nearly as “ polarizing ” —no one fears a Warren mob on Twitter . )
The period that this divide recalls most immediately is that of the late nineteen-sixties .
That was the last time a younger generation of declared leftists—the New Left , as they called themselves—confronted an older and somewhat baffled generation of liberals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ following the point and felt their own good intentions ridiculed and shouted down .
It was when , in 1968 , the New Left , protesting the Vietnam War , went head to head with mainstream liberals in the convention hall , with the farthest left fighting the cops in the streets of Chicago .
It was also a time ( and this is a crucial point ) when the unions , now looked back on fondly as lost bearers of socialist integrity , were still powerful—and sided entirely against the dissidents .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ A.F.L.-C.I.O .
and a genuine hero of the struggles of labor organizing in the nineteen-thirties , was , in the terms of the sixties , a very blue Meany .
“ A dirty-necked and dirty-mouthed group of kooks ” was his famous description of antiwar protesters .
Meany , who had lived through the fights against Fascism and Communism , saw the antiwar movement as frighteningly “ neo-isolationist ” ; like all of us , he had over-learned the lessons of the last war .
The irony is that Bernie Sanders , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ representative of the Old Left—the left , say , of Henry Wallace ’ s Progressive Party , of 1948—is actually a perfectly representative figure of the New Left , now grown old .
Sanders ’ s ideas , not to mention his tone , are entirely those of 1968 , and he bears the New Left ’ s temperamental hallmarks : excessive impatience and self-righteous certainty .
Whereas the Old Left was bureaucratic and collective in temperament , Sanders ’ s indignant finger-pointing is very New Leftish .
“ These are nonnegotiable demands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that time , and Sanders carries on in similar single-mindedness .
He is generationally true even unto his early-seventies migration to the backwoods , which , at the time , is what Vermont was .
That migration was very much a generational movement of the moment—the “ Workingman ’ s Dead ” moment .
It is almost too perfect that Sanders ’ s fellow Vermont-left migrant Ben Cohen , of Ben & Jerry ’ s ice cream—a perfect product of the slightly later moment when political energies became cultural or , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Back , and is a national co-chair of Sanders ’ s 2020 campaign .
Ben & Jerry ’ s was the New Left in a freezer , waiting to thaw out and live again .
( Curiously , Bernie seems a musically unacculturated figure .
Though his wife , Jane Sanders , has somewhat unconvincingly claimed Deadhead status , Bernie says that the Supremes and the Temptations are his favorites , showing excellent , if slightly off-centered , taste .
Motown belonged more to the early years of the sixties than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not-quite-adequate condemnation of Fidel Castro is very New Leftish .
To be anti-authoritarian but pro-socialist was a core New Left idea—Noam Chomsky argues for it now—while the general New Left attitude to Communism and the Old Left was not so much indignant as indifferent : it belonged to a time gone by .
Young people , if they think about 1968 at all , seem to see it as a time of revolutionary momentum , stopped dead , presumably , by undue caution .
For those who were around then , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that revolutionary politics in America lead not to social change but to accelerated reactionary politics : the “ silent majority ” steps into action , the rhetoric of law and order is invoked , and everything turns to the right .
Except for the brief and equivocal Jimmy Carter interval , the result was an ever more rightward-moving turn in American politics for the next quarter century .
So drastic was this revolution that , from 1968 to 1992 , it was a commonplace to see a Democratic wipeout each November , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked if one of our two parties , the Democrats , was simply disappearing from the scene .
The George McGovern crowd learned that America was far more naturally right-wing than the rhetoric of the civil-rights years would make you think , and then that there was , in the terms of the time , no limit to the rightward turns that the country could take .
( It is hard to remember that Ronald Reagan , a former Democrat who got widely known as a politician , rather than as the host @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by speaking up for Barry Goldwater and warning in apocalyptic terms against Medicare , was once seen as being as much on the far right of his party as Sanders is on the far left of his , but he was . )
Having lived through a rightward turn that was barely tolerable , older liberals are scared to death of a still farther right-wing turn , in a second Donald Trump term , to outright , unashamed , Viktor Orbán–style authoritarianism .
They are terrified not that Sanders can win but that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ events in the lives of the younger generation are not ’ 68—nor ’ 80 and ’ 84—but the crash of 2008 , which showed the hollowness of the system , and , above all , the last election .
The 2016 campaign is to their lives what the 1972 campaign was to the earlier generation .
The 2016 election effectively proceeded as if the laws of political gravity had been suspended , with everything tied down floating up and what went up never coming down .
Each supposedly crazy thing that Trump did—insulting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on women , mocking and bullying his fellow Republican candidates—turned out to be less than fatal , because the passion of his base abided and saw him through it all .
The rational lesson learned is that unwaveringly passionate one-sided politics wins , while the politics of compromise loses .
In-group solidarity is more important than coalition-building .
( That Trump actually did assemble a coalition of Republicans of all kinds is hard to grasp , because it happened so haphazardly . )
This is far from a uniquely 2016 lesson ; it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s classic explanation , in chapter fifteen of “ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , ” of why the Christians took over the Roman Empire .
It was not because they were even remotely the most numerous or , in any sense , the most popular group , but because they were united , purposeful , and uncompromising , while every other religious and political group was mushy .
Real politics bend to unbending passion .
These two viewpoints , one rooted in ’ 68 and ’ 72 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 16 , are hard to reconcile , and the great question—given the stakes , almost too painfully big a question—is who will end up schooling whom .
Sanders ’ s authenticity , his dogged insistence , makes even some among the older generation see him as potentially the “ Reagan of the left , ” meaning a once isolated figure with a simple set of slogans and agendas who can make them work nationally at the decisive moment .
And , just as tellingly , it is why a worried set—not all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the Jeremy Corbyn of the Democratic Party .
( As for the matter of personality , well , apparently the millennials missed out on Uncle Irving , of the S.D.S.
, banging the table ; what seems an anachronism to those who knew the type back then seems exciting to those who just discovered him now .
There is no accounting for , or arguing away , generational taste in these things . )

Any number of Obama-era liberals have been struggling, of late, to learn to love Bernie Sanders. One can almost imagine a more benign, all-volunteer version of Winston Smith’s reëducation room from “1984,” made up this time of those shaky centrists and corporate shills and neoliberal hacks whom the most fervent of Sanders’s followers love to hate, now trying to feel the love, with their own children among the happy counsellors. The split over Sanders is as much generational as intellectual, and, as usual in these things, as much temperamental as ideological. If anything, Elizabeth Warren, in the specificity of her proposals, is to the left of Sanders, but, sadly, not remotely as popular a figure. (Nor nearly as “polarizing”—no one fears a Warren mob on Twitter.)
The period that this divide recalls most immediately is that of the late nineteen-sixties. That was the last time a younger generation of declared leftists—the New Left, as they called themselves—confronted an older and somewhat baffled generation of liberals, who often had a hard time following the point and felt their own good intentions ridiculed and shouted down. It was when, in 1968, the New Left, protesting the Vietnam War, went head to head with mainstream liberals in the convention hall, with the farthest left fighting the cops in the streets of Chicago. It was also a time (and this is a crucial point) when the unions, now looked back on fondly as lost bearers of socialist integrity, were still powerful—and sided entirely against the dissidents. George Meany, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a genuine hero of the struggles of labor organizing in the nineteen-thirties, was, in the terms of the sixties, a very blue Meany. “A dirty-necked and dirty-mouthed group of kooks” was his famous description of antiwar protesters. Meany, who had lived through the fights against Fascism and Communism, saw the antiwar movement as frighteningly “neo-isolationist”; like all of us, he had over-learned the lessons of the last war.
The irony is that Bernie Sanders, though he seems to many to be a representative of the Old Left—the left, say, of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, of 1948—is actually a perfectly representative figure of the New Left, now grown old. Sanders’s ideas, not to mention his tone, are entirely those of 1968, and he bears the New Left’s temperamental hallmarks: excessive impatience and self-righteous certainty. Whereas the Old Left was bureaucratic and collective in temperament, Sanders’s indignant finger-pointing is very New Leftish. “These are nonnegotiable demands” was the motto on campuses of that time, and Sanders carries on in similar single-mindedness. He is generationally true even unto his early-seventies migration to the backwoods, which, at the time, is what Vermont was. That migration was very much a generational movement of the moment—the “Workingman’s Dead” moment. It is almost too perfect that Sanders’s fellow Vermont-left migrant Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—a perfect product of the slightly later moment when political energies became cultural or, at least, gastronomic—has launched a flavor, Bernie’s Back, and is a national co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign. Ben & Jerry’s was the New Left in a freezer, waiting to thaw out and live again. (Curiously, Bernie seems a musically unacculturated figure. Though his wife, Jane Sanders, has somewhat unconvincingly claimed Deadhead status, Bernie says that the Supremes and the Temptations are his favorites, showing excellent, if slightly off-center, taste. Motown belonged more to the early years of the sixties than their height.) Even Sanders’s not-quite-adequate condemnation of Fidel Castro is very New Leftish. To be anti-authoritarian but pro-socialist was a core New Left idea—Noam Chomsky argues for it now—while the general New Left attitude toward Communism and the Old Left was not so much indignant as indifferent: it belonged to a time gone by.
Young people, if they think about 1968 at all, seem to see it as a time of revolutionary momentum, stopped dead, presumably, by undue caution. For those who were around then, the essential revelation, painfully learned, was that revolutionary politics in America lead not to social change but to accelerated reactionary politics: the “silent majority” steps into action, the rhetoric of law and order is invoked, and everything turns to the right. Except for the brief and equivocal Jimmy Carter interval, the result was an ever more rightward-moving turn in American politics for the next quarter century. So drastic was this revolution that, from 1968 to 1992, it was a commonplace to see a Democratic wipeout each November, and the political columnist Nicholas von Hoffman even asked if one of our two parties, the Democrats, was simply disappearing from the scene.
The George McGovern crowd learned that America was far more naturally right-wing than the rhetoric of the civil-rights years would make you think, and then that there was, in the terms of the time, no limit to the rightward turns that the country could take. (It is hard to remember that Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat who got widely known as a politician, rather than as the host of “Death Valley Days,” by speaking up for Barry Goldwater and warning in apocalyptic terms against Medicare, was once seen as being as much on the far right of his party as Sanders is on the far left of his, but he was.) Having lived through a rightward turn that was barely tolerable, older liberals are scared to death of a still further right-wing turn, in a second Donald Trump term, to outright, unashamed, Viktor Orbán–style authoritarianism. They are terrified not that Sanders can win but that he can’t.
The crucial events in the lives of the younger generation are not ’68—nor ’80 and ’84—but the crash of 2008, which showed the hollowness of the system, and, above all, the last election. The 2016 campaign is to their lives what the 1972 campaign was to the earlier generation. The 2016 election effectively proceeded as if the laws of political gravity had been suspended, with everything tied down floating up and what went up never coming down. Each supposedly crazy thing that Trump did—insulting Gold Star families, boasting of preying on women, mocking and bullying his fellow Republican candidates—turned out to be less than fatal, because the passion of his base abided and saw him through it all. The rational lesson learned is that unwaveringly passionate one-sided politics wins, while the politics of compromise loses. In-group solidarity is more important than coalition-building. (That Trump actually did assemble a coalition of Republicans of all kinds is hard to grasp, because it happened so haphazardly.) This is far from a uniquely 2016 lesson; it is at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s classic explanation, in chapter fifteen of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” of why the Christians took over the Roman Empire. It was not because they were even remotely the most numerous or, in any sense, the most popular group, but because they were united, purposeful, and uncompromising, while every other religious and political group was mushy. Real politics bend to unbending passion.
These two viewpoints, one rooted in ’68 and ’72, the other in ’08 and ’16, are hard to reconcile, and the great question—given the stakes, almost too painfully big a question—is who will end up schooling whom. Sanders’s authenticity, his dogged insistence, makes even some among the older generation see him as potentially the “Reagan of the left,” meaning a once isolated figure with a simple set of slogans and agendas who can make them work nationally at the decisive moment. And, just as tellingly, it is why a worried set—not all of them elders, to be sure—see him as the Jeremy Corbyn of the Democratic Party. (As for the matter of personality, well, apparently the millennials missed out on Uncle Irving, of the S.D.S., banging the table; what seems an anachronism to those who knew the type back then seems exciting to those who just discovered him now. There is no accounting for, or arguing away, generational taste in these things.)


newyorker--2020-03-02--Coronavirus Is Causing Panic but Not Lawlessness


newyorker--2020-03-03--Primary Elections 2020: Delegate Count, Primary Results, and Analysis

Delegates in the Democratic primary are awarded on an ongoing basis , as different states and territories vote , with @ @ @ @ @ delegates up for grabs .
To win outright—and to avoid a brokered convention—a candidate will @ @ @ @ @ 1,991 delegates during the 2020 primary voting season .
The New Yorker will be tallying @ @ @ @ @ , alongside the rest of our Election 2020 campaign coverage .

Delegates in the Democratic primary are awarded on an ongoing basis, as different states and territories vote, with a total of 3,979 pledged delegates up for grabs. To win outright—and to avoid a brokered convention—a candidate will need to claim at least 1,991 delegates during the 2020 primary voting season. The New Yorker will be tallying the most recent totals below, alongside the rest of our Election 2020 campaign coverage. This post is being updated as voting schedules change due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic Candidates A candidate needs at least 1,991 pledged delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. 1,991 to win nomination Joe Biden 2687 Bernie Sanders Dropped Out 1073 Elizabeth Warren Dropped Out 63 Michael Bloomberg Dropped Out 59 Pete Buttigieg Dropped Out 21 Primary Results Prior to the national convention, in July, all states, the District of Columbia, and five territories hold elections to allocate pledged delegates. Biden Biden Sande... Sanders Warren Warren Bloom... Bloomberg Butti... Buttigieg Total Delegates 2687 1073 63 59 21 February 14 12 5 0 9 0 0 0 9 9 24 0 0 3 39 15 0 0 0 March 44 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 19 9 0 3 0 172 221 12 9 0 26 24 8 9 0 13 9 2 0 0 45 29 17 0 0 43 27 5 0 0 68 37 2 3 0 21 13 1 2 0 38 20 1 5 0 113 99 5 11 0 7 16 3 3 0 5 11 0 0 0 66 31 2 0 0 4 0 0 0 11 9 0 0 0 73 52 0 0 0 34 2 0 0 0 44 24 0 0 0 6 0 0 0 46 43 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 39 28 0 0 0 162 57 0 0 0 94 60 0 0 0 April 56 28 0 0 0 7 0 0 0 10 4 0 0 0 115 21 0 0 0 May 29 10 0 0 0 29 0 0 0 0 46 15 0 0 0 16 8 0 0 0 June 20 0 0 0 0 81 1 0 0 0 96 0 0 0 0 18 1 0 0 0 30 4 0 0 0 151 33 0 0 0 24 0 0 0 0 13 3 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 105 0 0 0 0 28 0 0 0 0 36 5 0 10 0 52 0 0 0 0 199 18 0 0 0 July 21 0 0 0 0 121 3 0 0 0 54 0 0 0 0 August 60 0 0 0 0 Noteworthy Events Democratic National Convention The Democratic Party will hold its nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Republican National Convention The Republican Party will hold its nominating convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.
First Presidential Debate The first Presidential debate will be held at the University of Notre Dame, near South Bend, Indiana
Second Presidential Debate The second Presidential debate will be held at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.
Third Presidential Debate The third and final Presidential debate will be held at Belmont University, in Nashville, Tennessee.
General Election


newyorker--2020-03-03--Netanyahu’s Cynical Third-Try Win in the Israeli Election

The final tally is not yet in , but with more than ninety-seven per cent of the vote counted , four things can be said for sure .
Benjamin Netanyahu ’ s Likud has surged past Benny Gantz ’ s Blue and White to become , again , the largest party in the Knesset .
Netanyahu ’ s bloc of parties has , nevertheless , fallen just short of a majority .
The political deadlock that has brought Israel to three elections in a year has not yet been broken .
And , for any democracy , general cynicism is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Netanyahu attacked the Justice Ministry , scorned the media , and mocked the valor of generals .
Netanyahu , in the words of the Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev , “ ran the most ruthless , sleazy , deceitful , and dishonest election campaign in Israeli history , which was also the most precise and lethal.
” It involved , he said , doctored videos , sexual innuendos , malicious rumors , and deliberate distortions .
But his success , Shalev adds , “ will whitewash his dirty campaign , which will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ populist , nationalist world.
” Indeed , Netanyahu is portraying the results , justifiably , as his personal victory .
Shadowed by three criminal indictments , and after suffering something close to defeat in September—Blue and White wound up the largest party then—he mobilized the Likud base , raising the total turnout of the election to more than seventy per cent , and positioned his Party to get the first ( and perhaps only plausible ) crack at forming the next government .
Given the polls before last week , which showed Netanyahu @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a majority , Avigdor Lieberman , the secular-rightist who held—and still holds—the balance of power , said that he thought Netanyahu might negotiate a plea bargain on the indictments against him with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit , and resign .
( His trial begins in two weeks . )
There is little chance of that happening now .
It ’ s more likely that , should Netanyahu form a government , he ’ ll seek to replace Mandelblit .
Lieberman reiterated on Monday night that he would “ not join any government led @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parties .
This , alas , could change .
As things stand , the parties opposed to Netanyahu have sixty-one seats—technically , a majority .
But it is hard to see how they would join forces to elect Gantz as Prime Minister , the only way to force Netanyahu out .
The Likud ’ s bloc has a decisive majority of Jewish members in the Knesset—as of now , fifty-nine to the opposition parties ’ forty-six .
This creates pressure on Lieberman not to foil what Likud spokespeople often call , ominously , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the will of the people .
The pressure on Lieberman is strong , also , not to instigate a fourth election , which he promised would not happen again on his account .
Netanyahu might be able to make Lieberman superfluous by luring just two opposition backbenchers into a government .
Indeed , Blue and White leaders may finally be persuaded to serve with him , even under him , in a national-unity government .
Whether any such coalition would organize a majority to retroactively award Netanyahu immunity from prosecution or , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ override rulings of the Supreme Court—which would likely be necessary to uphold immunity—is another matter .
In any case , in or out of court , Netanyahu has won a mandate to fight on .
I got an inkling of how he achieved that late last week , when I raised the dangers that Netanyahu posed to the rule of law with two middle-aged Jewish men of Moroccan-immigrant background .
They listened half patiently , and answered that , nevertheless , “ Netanyahu was Israel ’ s only great world leader , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with everyone from Trump to Putin.
” This reputation has been carefully cultivated .
It would be hard to overestimate the impact on this election of two spectacles choreographed by Netanyahu during his campaign : the Trump peace plan , which he openly admitted to working with the White House to “ fashion , ” and which overwhelmingly favors the Israeli right ’ s annexationism , and the international Holocaust conference that brought world leaders to Jerusalem to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz , which Netanyahu allowed Putin to turn into a platform @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a cynical use of government power .
Netanyahu preserved his survival , brilliantly , by also sowing cynicism among voters .
The polls began shifting seriously in his favor last week , when Netanyahu ’ s recently appointed state prosecutor reopened an investigation , despite a lack of any compelling new evidence , into Gantz ’ s former company , implying corruption in the firm ’ s acquisition of a police contract .
( Gantz is not a suspect in the case . )
The shift gained momentum when a recording emerged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s top campaign advisers and a rabbi whom the adviser knew .
The adviser got steered into saying that Gantz ’ s lack of “ courage ” might “ endanger ” Israel—and was fired .
Netanyahu had been seen with the rabbi the day before .
Gantz , in contrast , ran against Netanyahu ’ s various corruption charges , stressing his own decency and his determination to protect the integrity of the state institutions .
But Netanyahu apparently didn ’ t have to prove that he is not corrupt ; it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Gantz—and everybody else—may be .
( There are lessons here , obviously , for Democrats confronting Trump . )
Curiously , the Netanyahu campaign ’ s contempt for its own voters was exposed by the time the polls opened .
Netanyahu ’ s close adviser Natan Eshel was also recorded , in a conversation that was leaked to Channel 12 .
Despite the Attorney General ’ s decision to indict Netanyahu , Eshel said , Netanyahu “ went up by twenty per cent.
” Likud ’ s voters , disproportionately from of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Middle East—whom Eshel mocked as “ non-Ashkenazi ” —do not , by his lights , understand the idea of “ going into politics to do good.
” Rather , he said , they think “ you went into politics to steal—and you should be a man about it !
” The people in Likud ’ s camp “ hate everything ” —the media , the prosecutors , élites .
He added , “ We have managed to inflame this hatred to madness.
” Such open derision apparently made little difference—demonstrating , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We were twenty-something ” seats , he said , “ and then rose to thirty , then thirty-six .
If you ask me , we ’ ll keep going , God willing .
”

The final tally is not yet in, but with more than ninety-seven per cent of the vote counted, four things can be said for sure. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has surged past Benny Gantz’s Blue and White to become, again, the largest party in the Knesset. Netanyahu’s bloc of parties has, nevertheless, fallen just short of a majority. The political deadlock that has brought Israel to three elections in a year has not yet been broken. And, for any democracy, general cynicism is more dangerous than any one particular lie. Netanyahu attacked the Justice Ministry, scorned the media, and mocked the valor of generals.
Netanyahu, in the words of the Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev, “ran the most ruthless, sleazy, deceitful, and dishonest election campaign in Israeli history, which was also the most precise and lethal.” It involved, he said, doctored videos, sexual innuendos, malicious rumors, and deliberate distortions. But his success, Shalev adds, “will whitewash his dirty campaign, which will be scrutinized, dissected and admired throughout the populist, nationalist world.” Indeed, Netanyahu is portraying the results, justifiably, as his personal victory. Shadowed by three criminal indictments, and after suffering something close to defeat in September—Blue and White wound up the largest party then—he mobilized the Likud base, raising the total turnout of the election to more than seventy per cent, and positioned his Party to get the first (and perhaps only plausible) crack at forming the next government.
Given the polls before last week, which showed Netanyahu’s bloc falling well short of a majority, Avigdor Lieberman, the secular-rightist who held—and still holds—the balance of power, said that he thought Netanyahu might negotiate a plea bargain on the indictments against him with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, and resign. (His trial begins in two weeks.) There is little chance of that happening now. It’s more likely that, should Netanyahu form a government, he’ll seek to replace Mandelblit.
Lieberman reiterated on Monday night that he would “not join any government led by Netanyahu” or with the ultra-Orthodox parties. This, alas, could change. As things stand, the parties opposed to Netanyahu have sixty-one seats—technically, a majority. But it is hard to see how they would join forces to elect Gantz as Prime Minister, the only way to force Netanyahu out. The Likud’s bloc has a decisive majority of Jewish members in the Knesset—as of now, fifty-eight to the opposition parties’ forty-seven. This creates pressure on Lieberman not to foil what Likud spokespeople often call, ominously, “ratzon ha’am,” the will of the people. The pressure on Lieberman is strong, also, not to instigate a fourth election, which he promised would not happen again on his account.
Netanyahu might be able to make Lieberman superfluous by luring just two opposition backbenchers into a government. Indeed, Blue and White leaders may finally be persuaded to serve with him, even under him, in a national-unity government. Whether any such coalition would organize a majority to retroactively award Netanyahu immunity from prosecution or, in the same vein, pass legislation to override rulings of the Supreme Court—which would likely be necessary to uphold immunity—is another matter. In any case, in or out of court, Netanyahu has won a mandate to fight on.
I got an inkling of how he achieved that late last week, when I raised the dangers that Netanyahu posed to the rule of law with two middle-aged Jewish men of Moroccan-immigrant background. They listened half patiently, and answered that, nevertheless, “Netanyahu was Israel’s only great world leader,” someone who can have his way “with everyone from Trump to Putin.” This reputation has been carefully cultivated. It would be hard to overestimate the impact on this election of two spectacles choreographed by Netanyahu during his campaign: the Trump peace plan, which he openly admitted to working with the White House to “fashion,” and which overwhelmingly favors the Israeli right’s annexationism, and the international Holocaust conference that brought world leaders to Jerusalem to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz, which Netanyahu allowed Putin to turn into a platform for his scorn for Ukraine.
This was a cynical use of government power. Netanyahu preserved his survival, brilliantly, by also sowing cynicism among voters. The polls began shifting seriously in his favor last week, when Netanyahu’s recently appointed state prosecutor reopened an investigation, despite a lack of any compelling new evidence, into Gantz’s former company, implying corruption in the firm’s acquisition of a police contract. (Gantz is not a suspect in the case.) The shift gained momentum when a recording emerged of a conversation between one of Gantz’s top campaign advisers and a rabbi whom the adviser knew. The adviser got steered into saying that Gantz’s lack of “courage” might “endanger” Israel—and was fired. Netanyahu had been seen with the rabbi the day before. Gantz, in contrast, ran against Netanyahu’s various corruption charges, stressing his own decency and his determination to protect the integrity of the state institutions. But Netanyahu apparently didn’t have to prove that he is not corrupt; it was enough just to raise the possibility that Gantz—and everybody else—may be. (There are lessons here, obviously, for Democrats confronting Trump.)
Curiously, the Netanyahu campaign’s contempt for its own voters was exposed by the time the polls opened. Netanyahu’s close adviser Natan Eshel was also recorded, in a conversation that was leaked to Channel 12. Despite the Attorney General’s decision to indict Netanyahu, Eshel said, Netanyahu “went up by twenty per cent.” Likud’s voters, disproportionately from of immigrant families from North Africa and the Middle East—whom Eshel mocked as “non-Ashkenazi”—do not, by his lights, understand the idea of “going into politics to do good.” Rather, he said, they think “you went into politics to steal—and you should be a man about it!” The people in Likud’s camp “hate everything”—the media, the prosecutors, élites. He added, “We have managed to inflame this hatred to madness.” Such open derision apparently made little difference—demonstrating, in a way, Eshel’s point. “We were twenty-something” seats, he said, “and then rose to thirty, then thirty-six. If you ask me, we’ll keep going, God willing.”


newyorker--2020-03-03--How Pandemics Change History

How Pandemics Change History

In his new book , “ Epidemics and Society : From the Black Death to the Present , ” Frank M. Snowden , a professor emeritus of history and the history of medicine at Yale , examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have shaped politics , crushed revolutions , and entrenched racial and economic discrimination .
Epidemics have also altered the societies they have spread through , affecting personal relationships , the work of artists and intellectuals , and the man-made and natural environments .
Gigantic in scope , stretching across centuries and continents , Snowden ’ s account @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish .
“ Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning , ” he writes .
“ On the contrary , every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities .
To study them is to understand that society ’ s structure , its standard of living , and its political priorities.
” I spoke by phone with Snowden last Friday , as reports on the spread of COVID-19 tanked markets around the world , and governments engaged in varying degrees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed the politics of restricting travel during epidemics , how inhumane responses to sickness have upended governments , and the ways that artists have dealt with mass death .
I want to start with a big question , which is : What , broadly speaking , are the major ways in which epidemics have shaped the modern world ?
One way of approaching this is to examine how I got interested in the topic , which was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are .
That is to say , they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality , to death , to our lives .
They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds .
They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people , and we ’ re seeing that today .
That ’ s one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Health Organization keeps discussing .
The main part of preparedness to face these events is that we need as human beings to realize that we ’ re all in this together , that what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere , that we are therefore inevitably part of a species , and we need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity , economic status , and all the rest of it .
I had done some preliminary reading and thought this was an issue that raises @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moral issues .
And I think epidemics have shaped history in part because they ’ ve led human beings inevitably to think about those big questions .
The outbreak of the plague , for example , raised the whole question of man ’ s relationship to God .
How could it be that an event of this kind could occur with a wise , all-knowing and omniscient divinity ?
Who would allow children to be tortured , in anguish , in vast numbers ?
It had an enormous effect on the economy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ full continents and , therefore , had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution , on slavery and serfdom .
Epidemics also , as we ’ re seeing now , have tremendous effects on social and political stability .
They ’ ve determined the outcomes of wars , and they also are likely to be part of the start of wars sometimes .
So , I think we can say that there ’ s not a major area of human life that epidemic diseases haven ’ t touched profoundly .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about how the way we respond to these things is often a function of our racial or ethnic or religious views rather than our general humanity , and that the response has shown the flaws of human beings in some way ?
Or were you making a different point ?
I think I was trying to make two points .
I think the causal chain works in both directions .
Diseases do not afflict societies in random and chaotic ways .
They ’ re ordered events , because microbes selectively expand and diffuse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beings have created .
Those niches very much show who we are—whether , for example , in the industrial revolution , we actually cared what happened to workers and the poor and the condition that the most vulnerable people lived in .
Cholera and tuberculosis in today ’ s world move along the fault lines created by poverty and inequality and the way in which , as a people , we seem to be prepared to accept that as somehow right and proper , or at least inevitable .
But it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ respond very much depends on our values , our commitments , and our sense of being part of the human race and not smaller units .
When Bruce Aylward , who led the W.H.O .
mission to China , came back to Geneva at the end of it and was asked a question very similar to the one you posed , he said that the major thing that needs to happen , if we are to be prepared now and in the future , is there has to be an absolutely fundamental change @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think that we have to work together as a human species to be organized to care for one another , to realize that the health of the most vulnerable people among us is a determining factor for the health of all of us , and , if we aren ’ t prepared to do that , we ’ ll never , ever be prepared to confront these devastating challenges to our humanity .
Well , that ’ s a very bleak thought , if I may say so , because I think it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experience that change of mind-set .
[ Laughs ] I didn ’ t want to suggest that I ’ m a great optimist in this matter , but I do agree it ’ s what needs to happen .
There ’ s also a dark side to humanity and that is part of the interest of this .
What choice will we make ?
How will we go when we ’ re faced with this ?
I don ’ t think it ’ s predetermined , and a great human moral drama is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The idea of a connection between how we respond to these things and the prevalence of them is almost Biblical .
I would entirely agree with that .
It really is a matter that exists at that level and is that big a part of our sense of moral imperative .
I think that ’ s a huge part of the history of epidemic diseases .
Before this gets too dark , let me ask you a lighter question— Yeah , I ’ m sorry to have such interests .
My daughters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the response has shown something inspiring about humanity ?
Oh , I certainly think that .
I think when I said it shows a mirror to ourselves , it doesn ’ t show just the dark side of humanity .
It also shows the heroic side .
A really good example is Doctors Without Borders in the Ebola crisis , and the way in which they put their lives and their futures knowingly , directly on the line for no self-interest whatsoever and no reward , but purely because they were committed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weakest people in the world .
And Doctors Without Borders is doing that every day in many parts of the world , and they ’ re even now in China confronting this .

In his new book, “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” Frank M. Snowden, a professor emeritus of history and the history of medicine at Yale, examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions, and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. Epidemics have also altered the societies they have spread through, affecting personal relationships, the work of artists and intellectuals, and the man-made and natural environments. Gigantic in scope, stretching across centuries and continents, Snowden’s account seeks to explain, too, the ways in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish. “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning,” he writes. “On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”
I spoke by phone with Snowden last Friday, as reports on the spread of COVID-19 tanked markets around the world, and governments engaged in varying degrees of preparation for even worse to come. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the politics of restricting travel during epidemics, how inhumane responses to sickness have upended governments, and the ways that artists have dealt with mass death.
I want to start with a big question, which is: What, broadly speaking, are the major ways in which epidemics have shaped the modern world?
One way of approaching this is to examine how I got interested in the topic, which was a realization—I think a double one. Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.
That’s one of the great messages that the World Health Organization keeps discussing. The main part of preparedness to face these events is that we need as human beings to realize that we’re all in this together, that what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere, that we are therefore inevitably part of a species, and we need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity, economic status, and all the rest of it.
I had done some preliminary reading and thought this was an issue that raises really deep philosophical, religious, and moral issues. And I think epidemics have shaped history in part because they’ve led human beings inevitably to think about those big questions. The outbreak of the plague, for example, raised the whole question of man’s relationship to God. How could it be that an event of this kind could occur with a wise, all-knowing and omniscient divinity? Who would allow children to be tortured, in anguish, in vast numbers? It had an enormous effect on the economy. Bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution, on slavery and serfdom. Epidemics also, as we’re seeing now, have tremendous effects on social and political stability. They’ve determined the outcomes of wars, and they also are likely to be part of the start of wars sometimes. So, I think we can say that there’s not a major area of human life that epidemic diseases haven’t touched profoundly.
Were you trying to make a point about how the way we respond to these things is often a function of our racial or ethnic or religious views rather than our general humanity, and that the response has shown the flaws of human beings in some way? Or were you making a different point?
I think I was trying to make two points. I think the causal chain works in both directions. Diseases do not afflict societies in random and chaotic ways. They’re ordered events, because microbes selectively expand and diffuse themselves to explore ecological niches that human beings have created. Those niches very much show who we are—whether, for example, in the industrial revolution, we actually cared what happened to workers and the poor and the condition that the most vulnerable people lived in.
Cholera and tuberculosis in today’s world move along the fault lines created by poverty and inequality and the way in which, as a people, we seem to be prepared to accept that as somehow right and proper, or at least inevitable. But it’s also true that the way that we respond very much depends on our values, our commitments, and our sense of being part of the human race and not smaller units. When Bruce Aylward, who led the W.H.O. mission to China, came back to Geneva at the end of it and was asked a question very similar to the one you posed, he said that the major thing that needs to happen, if we are to be prepared now and in the future, is there has to be an absolutely fundamental change in our mind-set. We have to think that we have to work together as a human species to be organized to care for one another, to realize that the health of the most vulnerable people among us is a determining factor for the health of all of us, and, if we aren’t prepared to do that, we’ll never, ever be prepared to confront these devastating challenges to our humanity.
Well, that’s a very bleak thought, if I may say so, because I think it’s unlikely we are going to experience that change of mind-set.
[Laughs] I didn’t want to suggest that I’m a great optimist in this matter, but I do agree it’s what needs to happen. There’s also a dark side to humanity and that is part of the interest of this. What choice will we make? How will we go when we’re faced with this? I don’t think it’s predetermined, and a great human moral drama is being played out in front of us.
The idea of a connection between how we respond to these things and the prevalence of them is almost Biblical.
I would entirely agree with that. It really is a matter that exists at that level and is that big a part of our sense of moral imperative. I think that’s a huge part of the history of epidemic diseases.
Before this gets too dark, let me ask you a lighter question—
Yeah, I’m sorry to have such interests. My daughters protest.
Are there certain epidemics where the response has shown something inspiring about humanity?
Oh, I certainly think that. I think when I said it shows a mirror to ourselves, it doesn’t show just the dark side of humanity. It also shows the heroic side. A really good example is Doctors Without Borders in the Ebola crisis, and the way in which they put their lives and their futures knowingly, directly on the line for no self-interest whatsoever and no reward, but purely because they were committed to defending the lives and health of the weakest people in the world. And Doctors Without Borders is doing that every day in many parts of the world, and they’re even now in China confronting this.
I believe that this is something that also does bring out the highest qualities. Indeed, novels are also written about these major events. It affects our literature and our culture. I’m thinking of the great plague novel, which is “The Betrothed,” by the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni. He talks about the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Borromeo, who went into the pest houses and was willing to lay down his life to look after the poorest and most unwell people in his flock.


newyorker--2020-03-03--Super Tuesday Primary Election 2020: Live Results, Maps, and Analysis

Delegates in the Democratic primary are awarded on an ongoing basis , as different states and territories vote , with @ @ @ @ @ delegates up for grabs .
To win outright—and to avoid a brokered Convention—a candidate will @ @ @ @ @ 1,991 delegates during the 2020 primary voting season .
On Super Tuesday , the contest @ @ @ @ @ of voting , 1,357 delegates—more than a third of all available pledged delegates—are at stake @ @ @ @ @ be tracking the results below , alongside the rest of our Election 2020 campaign coverage @

Delegates in the Democratic primary are awarded on an ongoing basis, as different states and territories vote, with a total of 3,979 pledged delegates up for grabs. To win outright—and to avoid a brokered Convention—a candidate will need to claim at least 1,991 delegates during the 2020 primary voting season. On Super Tuesday, the contest’s most critical round of voting, 1,357 delegates—more than a third of all available pledged delegates—are at stake. The New Yorker will be tracking the results below, alongside the rest of our Election 2020 campaign coverage. Follow our delegate counter for the over-all delegate tally.
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