newyorker--2020-04-23--Who Should Get Bailed Out in the Coronavirus Economy?

According to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin , the new Paycheck Protection Program , which was designed to provide emergency funding for small businesses that have been affected by the coronavirus crisis , is working well .
At a White House briefing on Tuesday , he said that the banks participating in the program , which is overseen by the Small Business Administration , have already distributed loans to more than a million companies that have ten or fewer employees .
A summary report from the Treasury Department showed that the average size of the P.P.P .
loans , which recipient @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if they use the money to keep workers on their payroll , has been two hundred and six thousand dollars .
“ We ’ re pleased with the success of this program and how quickly this got up operationally , ” Mnuchin said .
By the end of last week , the P.P.P .
had already exhausted the three hundred and forty billion dollars that Congress set aside for it in the $ 2.2 trillion CARES Act , which Donald Trump signed at the end of March .
On Tuesday , the Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundred and ten billion dollars to the small-business program .
But the P.P.P .
is also embroiled in controversy .
In recent days , a number of small firms have filed lawsuits against banks , claiming lenders have favored their bigger customers and excluded many of the businesses that the program was intended to help .
It has also emerged that a number of large companies , including the Shake Shack and Potbelly restaurant chains , exploited a carve-out to obtain loans through the P.P.P .
After widespread complaints , Shake Shack announced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars it received .
At Tuesday ’ s briefing , Mnuchin said he would be asking other companies to follow suit , and he insisted , “ We want to make sure this money is available to small businesses that need it.
” These complaints illuminate the challenges of trying to create a huge economic-assistance program on the fly , particularly one that is administered through third parties—banks—that have their own financial interests and incentives .
( Other governments , including those in the United Kingdom and Denmark , are distributing wage subsidies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anger over the P.P.P .
rollout also raises the issue of fairness , which is going to loom ever larger as the human and economic toll from the pandemic mounts .
Who should get bailed out ?
And who shouldn ’ t ?
It isn ’ t just small businesses that are struggling to get financial help .
In Florida alone , according to an analysis by the Associated Press , about six hundred and fifty thousand people have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March , but only thirty-three thousand and six hundred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of applications has surged , Florida ’ s Department of Labor has been overwhelmed .
Unable to file claims online , some people have defied stay-at-home orders to line up at sites issuing paper forms , putting their health at risk .
In other parts of the country , people who have been laid off or furloughed are having similar difficulties .
With many economists predicting that the unemployment rate will rise to as high as twenty per cent in the coming months , the government ’ s failure to quickly address this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans in the Senate refused to include any additional financial aid for the states in the new funding package .
Mitch McConnell , the Republican leader , said that helping the states could be taken up in another stimulus bill , but he also expressed concern about the amount of money the federal government is spending .
On Wednesday , McConnell said he wanted to hit the “ Pause button ” on any plans for state aid , and his office derided the idea as a “ blue-state bailout.
” Yet there is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ large corporations .
The CARES Act set aside about fifty billion dollars in grants and loans to rescue the airline industry , and on Monday the Treasury Department said it had disbursed $ 2.9 billion in loans to six major airlines , including American , Delta , and United .
( The Department said that it expected five more airlines to participate in its Payroll Support Program ( not to be confused with the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses ) and that it would also “ make additional payments to approved applicants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has devastated the airlines ’ revenues , of course , and the Treasury imposed a number of conditions for the loans , including requiring recipients to maintain payrolls , limit executive compensation , suspend dividend payments , and grant stock warrants to the government .
But the precise terms of the bailout are still murky .
And there is a basic question of whether the airlines , and their top executives , deserve to be rescued in this fashion .
Before the pandemic hit , the airlines enjoyed years of profitability .
Rather @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day , many C.E.O.s spent vast sums buying back their own airlines ’ stocks to boost their prices and , not coincidentally , the value of their often stock-based pay packages .
In a Twitter post on Tuesday , Robert Reich , the Berkeley professor who served as Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration , pointed out that the “ $ 50 billion taxpayers have spent bailing out the airline industry almost equals the $ 48 billion the airlines spent buying back their shares of stock since 2010.
” The airline bailout is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In addition to rescuing the airline industry and others deemed critical to national security , the CARES Act created a bailout fund for hospitals and health-care providers , including for-profit ones .
After the new spending bill is enacted , this fund will total a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars .
On Tuesday , Axios ’ s Bob Herman reported that HCA Healthcare , a publicly traded company that runs a vast network of hospitals and medical centers , has received seven hundred million dollars in emergency funding that it doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more money coming for corporate America—a great deal more .
In a provision that hasn ’ t received as much attention as others , the CARES Act also set aside four hundred and fifty-four billion dollars to backstop some new lending facilities at the Fed , including one that will extend credit to medium-sized corporations that have between five hundred and ten thousand employees .
The Fed hasn ’ t turned on the new money spigot yet .
But it ’ s reportedly finalizing the details of the new program .
Is all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of taxpayers ’ money ?
It ’ s hard to know .
Although the CARES Act provided for a system of oversight by an independent inspector general and two new committees , to be appointed by Congress , this system isn ’ t up and running .
“ Right now , you have nothing , ” Neil Barofsky , a New York lawyer who served as the inspector general of the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP fund that Congress established during the financial crisis of 2008 , told MarketWatch .
“ You have no congressional oversight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a chairperson .
You have no special inspector general , because he ’ s not been confirmed .
And you have no active Pandemic Response Accountability Committee , because it ’ s leaderless.
” About all we do have is the knowledge that the government is distributing a great deal of money .
And yet many millions of Americans are still facing terrible hardship .
That is a combustible combination .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disease and rescue the economy ?
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• With each new virus , we have scrambled for a new treatment .
Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public-health innovations , prefigured revolutions , and redrawn maps .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under coronavirus quarantine .

According to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the new Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to provide emergency funding for small businesses that have been affected by the coronavirus crisis, is working well. At a White House briefing on Tuesday, he said that the banks participating in the program, which is overseen by the Small Business Administration, have already distributed loans to more than a million companies that have ten or fewer employees. A summary report from the Treasury Department showed that the average size of the P.P.P. loans, which recipient businesses don’t have to repay if they use the money to keep workers on their payroll, has been two hundred and six thousand dollars. “We’re pleased with the success of this program and how quickly this got up operationally,” Mnuchin said.
By the end of last week, the P.P.P. had already exhausted the three hundred and forty billion dollars that Congress set aside for it in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which Donald Trump signed at the end of March. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill that allots another three hundred and ten billion dollars to the small-business program. But the P.P.P. is also embroiled in controversy. In recent days, a number of small firms have filed lawsuits against banks, claiming lenders have favored their bigger customers and excluded many of the businesses that the program was intended to help. It has also emerged that a number of large companies, including the Shake Shack and Potbelly restaurant chains, exploited a carve-out to obtain loans through the P.P.P. After widespread complaints, Shake Shack announced that it would repay the ten million dollars it received. At Tuesday’s briefing, Mnuchin said he would be asking other companies to follow suit, and he insisted, “We want to make sure this money is available to small businesses that need it.”
These complaints illuminate the challenges of trying to create a huge economic-assistance program on the fly, particularly one that is administered through third parties—banks—that have their own financial interests and incentives. (Other governments, including those in the United Kingdom and Denmark, are distributing wage subsidies directly to businesses.) But the anger over the P.P.P. rollout also raises the issue of fairness, which is going to loom ever larger as the human and economic toll from the pandemic mounts. Who should get bailed out? And who shouldn’t?
It isn’t just small businesses that are struggling to get financial help. In Florida alone, according to an analysis by the Associated Press, about six hundred and fifty thousand people have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March, but only thirty-three thousand and six hundred have received checks. As the number of applications has surged, Florida’s Department of Labor has been overwhelmed. Unable to file claims online, some people have defied stay-at-home orders to line up at sites issuing paper forms, putting their health at risk.
In other parts of the country, people who have been laid off or furloughed are having similar difficulties. With many economists predicting that the unemployment rate will rise to as high as twenty per cent in the coming months, the government’s failure to quickly address this problem will create enormous hardship. Yet Republicans in the Senate refused to include any additional financial aid for the states in the new funding package. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said that helping the states could be taken up in another stimulus bill, but he also expressed concern about the amount of money the federal government is spending. On Wednesday, McConnell said he wanted to hit the “Pause button” on any plans for state aid, and his office derided the idea as a “blue-state bailout.”
Yet there is no shortage of money to bail out large corporations. The CARES Act set aside about fifty billion dollars in grants and loans to rescue the airline industry, and on Monday the Treasury Department said it had disbursed $2.9 billion in loans to six major airlines, including American, Delta, and United. ( The Department said that it expected five more airlines to participate in its Payroll Support Program (not to be confused with the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses) and that it would also “make additional payments to approved applicants on a rolling basis.”
The virus has devastated the airlines’ revenues, of course, and the Treasury imposed a number of conditions for the loans, including requiring recipients to maintain payrolls, limit executive compensation, suspend dividend payments, and grant stock warrants to the government. But the precise terms of the bailout are still murky. And there is a basic question of whether the airlines, and their top executives, deserve to be rescued in this fashion.
Before the pandemic hit, the airlines enjoyed years of profitability. Rather than setting aside reserves for a rainy day, many C.E.O.s spent vast sums buying back their own airlines’ stocks to boost their prices and, not coincidentally, the value of their often stock-based pay packages. In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Robert Reich, the Berkeley professor who served as Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, pointed out that the “$50 billion taxpayers have spent bailing out the airline industry almost equals the $48 billion the airlines spent buying back their shares of stock since 2010.”
The airline bailout is but one of many to come. In addition to rescuing the airline industry and others deemed critical to national security, the CARES Act created a bailout fund for hospitals and health-care providers, including for-profit ones. After the new spending bill is enacted, this fund will total a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars. On Tuesday, Axios’s Bob Herman reported that HCA Healthcare, a publicly traded company that runs a vast network of hospitals and medical centers, has received seven hundred million dollars in emergency funding that it doesn’t have to repay.
There’s more money coming for corporate America—a great deal more. In a provision that hasn’t received as much attention as others, the CARES Act also set aside four hundred and fifty-four billion dollars to backstop some new lending facilities at the Fed, including one that will extend credit to medium-sized corporations that have between five hundred and ten thousand employees. The Fed hasn’t turned on the new money spigot yet. But it’s reportedly finalizing the details of the new program.
Is all of this a fair and proper use of taxpayers’ money? It’s hard to know. Although the CARES Act provided for a system of oversight by an independent inspector general and two new committees, to be appointed by Congress, this system isn’t up and running. “Right now, you have nothing,” Neil Barofsky, a New York lawyer who served as the inspector general of the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP fund that Congress established during the financial crisis of 2008, told MarketWatch. “You have no congressional oversight committee, because it doesn’t have a chairperson. You have no special inspector general, because he’s not been confirmed. And you have no active Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, because it’s leaderless.”
About all we do have is the knowledge that the government is distributing a great deal of money. And yet many millions of Americans are still facing terrible hardship. That is a combustible combination.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-22--Jimmy Webb’s Undying Love for New York City (and Tight Pants)

In 2000 , the owner of 5 St. Marks Place , a tall brick building near Third Avenue , decided to paint over a sixty-by-hundred-foot mural that had decorated the side of the edifice for over fifteen years .
The mural , by the East Village artist Art Guerra , was originally conceived as a clever act of guerrilla marketing : the filmmaker Lech Kowalski had made a gritty film called “ Gringo , ” released in 1985 , chronicling the struggles of a heroin addict searching for his next fix .
The film was touted as fiction , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its star , John Spacely , an addict known around St. Marks Place as Gringo .
Guerra ’ s mural was a caricature of John Spacely on a grand scale , his bleach-blond hair , signature eye patch , and dangling cross earring blaring in neon colors against a black background .
By the time the mural disappeared , St. Marks Place was already a radically different block than it had been when Guerra painted it .
Spacely had died , of AIDS , in the mid-nineties .
A new wave of gentrification @ @ @ @ @ @ @ peak “ Sex and the City ” era—and only the most stalwart punks continued to linger on St. Marks .
One of these was Jimmy Webb , a buyer for the legendary punk-clothing boutique Trash & Vaudeville .
Webb had started working at the store a year earlier , in 1999 , after several peripatetic years around the neighborhood .
He loved St. Marks Place , and he cherished its history ; with his sinewy , tattooed limbs and rangy puff of platinum hair , he looked not unlike the visage of Gringo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s book “ St .
Marks Is Dead , ” from 2015 , which chronicles the countercultural history of the street , Webb took the erasure of Guerra ’ s street art particularly hard : “ When they painted over the mural of Spacely , ” Webb told Calhoun .
“ I stood on the stairs in front of the store and cried.
” Webb , who died last week , of cancer , at the age of sixty-two , was a stalwart of St. Marks Place for decades , as consistent a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dealers and the discount piercing stands .
At Trash & Vaudeville , he became more than a salesman ; he was a mascot , a time capsule , a preening peacock from a more colorful era .
In a 2007 profile in The New Yorker , Webb told Alec Wilkinson that he once tried to go to Cape Cod but started having doubts the moment he left New York City .
“ Sandpipers rock , ” Webb said , “ but how long can I look at a sandpiper ?
I was back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Counting travel time.
” Webb grew up in the small upstate town of Wynantskill , New York , where his father owned a two-pump gas station attached to the family home .
When he arrived in New York City , via a brief hitchhiking adventure to Florida , in 1975—the same year Trash & Vaudeville opened—his clothes were stuffed in a pillowcase .
To make ends meet , he worked the bar at a gay club , and soon became entrenched in the decadent after-hours scene downtown .
He would go above Fourteenth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the East Village became his main stamping ground ; after developing a heroin habit , he slept for some time in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park .
( He later embraced sobriety with the same vigor he had hard living . )
Webb told Wilkinson that he would walk into Trash & Vaudeville and dream of working there some day .
After writing a letter to the owner , Ray Goodman , he finally landed a job as a salesperson .
Trash & Vaudeville had gained an early reputation among rock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on silver platform shoes , leather fringe jackets , and slim-cut black jeans .
It was also popular among the teen-agers who haunted St. Marks , as a place to stock up on T-shirts bearing the names of long-defunct bands they would never see play live .
For Webb , making customers feel like rock stars—even if they were taking the bus back to their parents ’ houses in the suburbs—became a life ’ s calling .
He was fluent in latex , lace-up boots , chaps , dangly pendants , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Trousers , he believed , should fit like a second skin .
Styling musicians was a special passion .
He dressed Slash and Alice Cooper ; he sold his longtime friend Iggy Pop his many pairs of pubic-bone-baring leather pants .
In a remembrance posted online , Pop recalled how Webb would shower him with gifts , which were “ invariably wrapped in pink leopard skin , spritzed with glitter and little gold stars like the kind you get in kindergarten for being a very good boy.
” ( According to Goodman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to stars and other customers by giving out freebies from the store , a practice that annoyed the boss but remained true to Webb ’ s punkish ethos . )
“ The brilliant thing about Jimmy Webb is he was in everybody ’ s band , ” Michael Des Barres , an English rock musician , actor , and radio host who was a regular Trash & Vaudeville shopper , told me .
“ He was a rock-and-roll instrument that people played , and the game was the right trousers.
” Webb told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trash & Vaudeville : “ I want to have them stuff me like—what ’ s it called ?
—taxidermy , and put me in a corner .
They can rig it so someone can pull a string and I ’ ll say , ‘ You rock , ’ or ‘ Tighter , tighter , those pants need to be tighter ’ —the things I say every day.
’ ” In the end Webb did leave , after the store moved off of St. Marks Place , in 2016 .
The following year , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lower East Side , I NEED MORE .
( The name , borrowed from an Iggy Pop song , was also tattooed across his back . )
The store was an extension of the Trash & Vaudeville aesthetic—you could still buy bondage harnesses and motorcycle jackets , under hot-pink neon lights—but it was also full of Webb ’ s many souvenirs of a life lived among rockers .
There are two signed electric guitars , a skull chandelier and a bulletin board covered in band pins , from Mötley Crüe to Jem and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you could purchase a hand-knit , bright-yellow sweater featuring Debbie Harry ’ s face for thirteen hundred and fifty dollars .
But the store ’ s most popular item was its signature “ I NEED MORE ” T-shirt , which became a semi-cult object after Slash wore one during a Guns N ’ Roses concert at Madison Square Garden .
Matthew Aquino , who for the last two years worked as the photographer and graphic designer for I NEED MORE , met Webb when he was wandering around downtown Manhattan .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and they dragged me in , ” he told me .
“ I saw Jimmy pop up behind the counter , and I dropped my phone .
I was like , ‘ Dude , you ’ re the punk-rock guy everyone knows !
’ I fell in love with the guy .
He took me in like one of his own.
” Aquino said that he and Webb would talk on the phone most nights , often until three in the morning .
When Webb found out he had cancer , Aquino said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his close friends .
“ He would call me the night before an event and say , ‘ Matt , I ’ m so sick , I can ’ t move , I ’ m wearing sweatpants.
’ But then he would always make it to those events , dressed for his star moment.
” Webb lived his life in public , but the coronavirus pandemic has made it hard to commemorate him in a public way .
A proper sendoff , Aquino said , “ would have bright lights , a lot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In the meantime , he added , he is choosing to remember one of his great days with Webb , stalking the block his friend loved .
“ He took me to St. Marks Place to eat falafel at Mamoun ’ s , and then we went to see Basquiat paintings .
”

Jimmy Webb was more than a clothing salesman; he was a preening peacock from a more colorful era. Photograph by Deidre Schoo / NYT / Redux
In 2000, the owner of 5 St. Marks Place, a tall brick building near Third Avenue, decided to paint over a sixty-by-hundred-foot mural that had decorated the side of the edifice for over fifteen years. The mural, by the East Village artist Art Guerra, was originally conceived as a clever act of guerrilla marketing: the filmmaker Lech Kowalski had made a gritty film called “Gringo,” released in 1985, chronicling the struggles of a heroin addict searching for his next fix. The film was touted as fiction, but it borrowed heavily from the life of its star, John Spacely, an addict known around St. Marks Place as Gringo. Guerra’s mural was a caricature of John Spacely on a grand scale, his bleach-blond hair, signature eye patch, and dangling cross earring blaring in neon colors against a black background.
By the time the mural disappeared, St. Marks Place was already a radically different block than it had been when Guerra painted it. Spacely had died, of AIDS, in the mid-nineties. A new wave of gentrification in Manhattan was in full swing—this was peak “Sex and the City” era—and only the most stalwart punks continued to linger on St. Marks. One of these was Jimmy Webb, a buyer for the legendary punk-clothing boutique Trash & Vaudeville. Webb had started working at the store a year earlier, in 1999, after several peripatetic years around the neighborhood. He loved St. Marks Place, and he cherished its history; with his sinewy, tattooed limbs and rangy puff of platinum hair, he looked not unlike the visage of Gringo himself. According to Ada Calhoun’s book “St. Marks Is Dead,” from 2015, which chronicles the countercultural history of the street, Webb took the erasure of Guerra’s street art particularly hard: “When they painted over the mural of Spacely,” Webb told Calhoun. “I stood on the stairs in front of the store and cried.”
Webb, who died last week, of cancer, at the age of sixty-two, was a stalwart of St. Marks Place for decades, as consistent a presence on the block as the bong dealers and the discount piercing stands. At Trash & Vaudeville, he became more than a salesman; he was a mascot, a time capsule, a preening peacock from a more colorful era. In a 2007 profile in The New Yorker, Webb told Alec Wilkinson that he once tried to go to Cape Cod but started having doubts the moment he left New York City. “Sandpipers rock,” Webb said, “but how long can I look at a sandpiper? I was back in two and a half days. Counting travel time.”
Webb grew up in the small upstate town of Wynantskill, New York, where his father owned a two-pump gas station attached to the family home. When he arrived in New York City, via a brief hitchhiking adventure to Florida, in 1975—the same year Trash & Vaudeville opened—his clothes were stuffed in a pillowcase. To make ends meet, he worked the bar at a gay club, and soon became entrenched in the decadent after-hours scene downtown. He would go above Fourteenth Street to frequent Studio 54, but the East Village became his main stamping ground; after developing a heroin habit, he slept for some time in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park. (He later embraced sobriety with the same vigor he had hard living.) Webb told Wilkinson that he would walk into Trash & Vaudeville and dream of working there some day. After writing a letter to the owner, Ray Goodman, he finally landed a job as a salesperson.
Trash & Vaudeville had gained an early reputation among rock musicians as a place to stock up on silver platform shoes, leather fringe jackets, and slim-cut black jeans. It was also popular among the teen-agers who haunted St. Marks, as a place to stock up on T-shirts bearing the names of long-defunct bands they would never see play live. For Webb, making customers feel like rock stars—even if they were taking the bus back to their parents’ houses in the suburbs—became a life’s calling. He was fluent in latex, lace-up boots, chaps, dangly pendants, and the proper way to break in Doc Martens. Trousers, he believed, should fit like a second skin. Styling musicians was a special passion. He dressed Slash and Alice Cooper; he sold his longtime friend Iggy Pop his many pairs of pubic-bone-baring leather pants. In a remembrance posted online, Pop recalled how Webb would shower him with gifts, which were “invariably wrapped in pink leopard skin, spritzed with glitter and little gold stars like the kind you get in kindergarten for being a very good boy.” (According to Goodman, Webb often endeared himself to stars and other customers by giving out freebies from the store, a practice that annoyed the boss but remained true to Webb’s punkish ethos.) “The brilliant thing about Jimmy Webb is he was in everybody’s band,” Michael Des Barres, an English rock musician, actor, and radio host who was a regular Trash & Vaudeville shopper, told me. “He was a rock-and-roll instrument that people played, and the game was the right trousers.”
Jimmy Webb hailing a cab after an Iggy Pop concert during New York Fashion Week, in September, 2010. Photograph by Piotr Redlinski / NYT / Redux
Webb told Wilkinson that he planned to never leave Trash & Vaudeville: “I want to have them stuff me like—what’s it called?—taxidermy, and put me in a corner. They can rig it so someone can pull a string and I’ll say, ‘You rock,’ or ‘Tighter, tighter, those pants need to be tighter’—the things I say every day.’ ” In the end Webb did leave, after the store moved off of St. Marks Place, in 2016. The following year, he opened his own boutique on the Lower East Side, I NEED MORE. (The name, borrowed from an Iggy Pop song, was also tattooed across his back.) The store was an extension of the Trash & Vaudeville aesthetic—you could still buy bondage harnesses and motorcycle jackets, under hot-pink neon lights—but it was also full of Webb’s many souvenirs of a life lived among rockers. There are two signed electric guitars, a skull chandelier and a bulletin board covered in band pins, from Mötley Crüe to Jem and the Holograms. If you so wanted, you could purchase a hand-knit, bright-yellow sweater featuring Debbie Harry’s face for thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. But the store’s most popular item was its signature “I NEED MORE” T-shirt, which became a semi-cult object after Slash wore one during a Guns N’Roses concert at Madison Square Garden.
Matthew Aquino, who for the last two years worked as the photographer and graphic designer for I NEED MORE, met Webb when he was wandering around downtown Manhattan. “I saw giant pink L.E.D. lights and they dragged me in,” he told me. “I saw Jimmy pop up behind the counter, and I dropped my phone. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re the punk-rock guy everyone knows!’ I fell in love with the guy. He took me in like one of his own.” Aquino said that he and Webb would talk on the phone most nights, often until three in the morning. When Webb found out he had cancer, Aquino said, he disclosed the illness only to his close friends. “He would call me the night before an event and say, ‘Matt, I’m so sick, I can’t move, I’m wearing sweatpants.’ But then he would always make it to those events, dressed for his star moment.”
Webb lived his life in public, but the coronavirus pandemic has made it hard to commemorate him in a public way. A proper sendoff, Aquino said, “would have bright lights, a lot of people, and vegan cookies.” In the meantime, he added, he is choosing to remember one of his great days with Webb, stalking the block his friend loved. “He took me to St. Marks Place to eat falafel at Mamoun’s, and then we went to see Basquiat paintings.”


newyorker--2020-04-22--Chicago Plans for a Slow Recovery from the Coronavirus

Nearly every morning , at eleven o ’ clock , Allison Arwady takes a seat at a round table in front of a video camera , with a laptop and a set of charts before her , and answers questions about COVID-19 from worried Chicago residents .
Arwady , the city ’ s commissioner of public health , displays graphs that show the number of positive cases , and explains the demographics of the city ’ s death toll .
A primary-care doctor who previously worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , staffing an Ebola outbreak in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upbeat and accessible language .
If you touch an elevator button or a doorknob while you are out , wash your hands .
If you go to the store , make a list , move efficiently , and don ’ t touch your face .
Germs do not jump from grocery-cart handles into your nose or mouth , she likes to say .
Arwady , who is forty-three , and oversees a staff of five hundred , spends her days interpreting streams of data about the unpredictable path of the contagion .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ five hundred people in Chicago .
As she scrambled last month to prepare for a wave of COVID-19 cases , Arwady saw shortages and dysfunction that reminded her of Liberia in 2014 .
Then and now , she said , she had a sense of “ I just need somebody to listen.
” She had a dream the other night that she was solving all sorts of problems , only to wake up and realize that none of it had been done .
As Mayor Lori Lightfoot ’ s top public-health adviser , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the perilous next phase of Chicago ’ s response to the virus , when Lightfoot and Governor J .
B. Pritzker decide when to lift restrictions on the city—and how to monitor and block the spread of the virus as infections inevitably continue .
Political and business leaders across the country are confronting these questions , with the added pressure of President Trump ’ s hectoring demands for a swift economic rebirth .
Pretty much everyone promises to be guided by data and science .
And yet , as Arwady and her colleagues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out , the data are riddled with imperfections and the science is racing to keep up .
Four months into the pandemic , knowledge about the virus , how deeply it has spread , and what can stop it remains frustratingly thin .
As Harlan Krumholz , a cardiologist and researcher at the Yale School of Medicine , put it to me , “ We ’ re so damned ignorant about this thing.
” In practical terms , the United States is facing a prolonged period of trial and error as cities and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaccine becomes available , likely sometime in 2021 .
Different states and communities will open at different speeds and will face varying degrees of risk from a pathogen that is proving cruelest to elderly and African-American residents .
There is nothing to indicate that COVID-19 is any less deadly simply because several weeks have passed since social distancing began .
Chicago ’ s opening , when it comes , will be gradual , and answers won ’ t come quickly , especially if the gaps in testing remain unfilled .
Arwady said , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make sure you ’ ve got good , real-time data .
If you make some change , you ’ ve got to wait a couple of weeks to really see how that works.
” At a press conference last week , Lightfoot similarly sought to dampen expectations : “ What we can ’ t do , as other places across the globe have done , is come out of these stay-at-home measures too soon , following some gains , only to have cases surge all over again.
” Chicago was one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and among the first to implement widespread closures .
On March 13th , Pritzker announced the closure of all Illinois schools .
On March 20th , four days after Chicago ’ s first death , he issued a stay-at-home order .
Since then , Lightfoot has shut down access to public areas along Lake Michigan and ordered liquor stores to close at 9 P.M. , to prevent customers from congregating .
Today , car traffic is sparse in the city and suburbs .
Passenger jets , typically lined up in the night @ @ @ @ @ @ @ International Airport like orderly fireflies , are mostly gone .
Many pedestrians are wearing masks , but the practice is far from universal .
At the Beth Eden Baptist Church in the working-class Roseland neighborhood , on the far South Side , where Barack Obama was a community organizer in the mid-eighties , an electric sign announces that in-person services have been suspended , though the prayer line is open .
“ Stay safe and follow the guidelines set by the CDC , ” the sign flashes .
“ Wash hands for at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forty-six hundred people hospitalized in Illinois due to COVID-19 at last count , including more than twelve hundred in intensive care , some hospitals are struggling more than others .
The president of Roseland Community Hospital , down the street , told the Chicago Tribune , “ We are outgunned , outmanned , underfunded , and no one is coming to help us.
” There are signs that , with severe social-distancing measures , Chicago ’ s outbreak is slowing .
COVID-19 cases are now doubling every twelve days , compared with every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Still , as summer beckons and , with it , baseball season and music festivals , including Lollapalooza , Pritzker urged organizers of large events to “ think carefully about canceling.
” In order to consider any reopening , he said , Illinois must conduct at least ten thousand coronavirus tests a day , to know who is infected with the virus and where it is spreading .
“ Obviously , we want more than that , ” Ngozi Ezike , the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health , told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to conduct tests , while also delivering equipment to hospitals and universities .
Still , the state has been falling well short of Pritzker ’ s target number .
Illinois has machines available to examine large numbers of specimens , he said this week , but “ we don ’ t have the supplies to run those tests.
” From the beginning , the federal government has been slow to develop or support testing .
An early test created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed , leading to unreliable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then , labs nationwide have suffered from a lack of supplies needed to conduct tests , including nasal swabs , reagent , and the personal protective equipment that technicians need when gathering specimens .
Trump has adamantly avoided developing a national testing strategy while instructing governors , by tweet , to perfect their testing programs : “ Be ready , big things are happening .
No excuses !
” On March 6th , Trump falsely declared , “ Anybody that wants a test can get a test , ” a claim that remains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 10th , Vice-President Mike Pence promised during a White House briefing that four million tests would be available within a week .
The total number of tests conducted since the pandemic began is only slightly more than four million , according to the White House ’ s own count .
On Friday , the American Association for Clinical Chemistry said that the federal government is the only institution that can solve the critical supply shortages for tests , which are required under the White House ’ s own guidelines for reopening the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about her frustration with the scattershot White House response , believes that Chicago is “ still not testing nearly enough people ” and says that she has raised the issue with Pence .

Nearly every morning, at eleven o’clock, Allison Arwady takes a seat at a round table in front of a video camera, with a laptop and a set of charts before her, and answers questions about COVID-19 from worried Chicago residents. Arwady, the city’s commissioner of public health, displays graphs that show the number of positive cases, and explains the demographics of the city’s death toll. A primary-care doctor who previously worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, staffing an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, she offers practical advice in upbeat and accessible language. If you touch an elevator button or a doorknob while you are out, wash your hands. If you go to the store, make a list, move efficiently, and don’t touch your face. Germs do not jump from grocery-cart handles into your nose or mouth, she likes to say.
Arwady, who is forty-three, and oversees a staff of five hundred, spends her days interpreting streams of data about the unpredictable path of the contagion. So far, it has killed more than five hundred people in Chicago. As she scrambled last month to prepare for a wave of COVID-19 cases, Arwady saw shortages and dysfunction that reminded her of Liberia in 2014. Then and now, she said, she had a sense of “I just need somebody to listen.” She had a dream the other night that she was solving all sorts of problems, only to wake up and realize that none of it had been done.
As Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s top public-health adviser, Arwady will be a central figure in the perilous next phase of Chicago’s response to the virus, when Lightfoot and Governor J. B. Pritzker decide when to lift restrictions on the city—and how to monitor and block the spread of the virus as infections inevitably continue. Political and business leaders across the country are confronting these questions, with the added pressure of President Trump’s hectoring demands for a swift economic rebirth. Pretty much everyone promises to be guided by data and science. And yet, as Arwady and her colleagues in medical research and public health point out, the data are riddled with imperfections and the science is racing to keep up. Four months into the pandemic, knowledge about the virus, how deeply it has spread, and what can stop it remains frustratingly thin. As Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, put it to me, “We’re so damned ignorant about this thing.”
In practical terms, the United States is facing a prolonged period of trial and error as cities and states navigate the long stretch before a vaccine becomes available, likely sometime in 2021. Different states and communities will open at different speeds and will face varying degrees of risk from a pathogen that is proving cruelest to elderly and African-American residents. There is nothing to indicate that COVID-19 is any less deadly simply because several weeks have passed since social distancing began. Chicago’s opening, when it comes, will be gradual, and answers won’t come quickly, especially if the gaps in testing remain unfilled. Arwady said, “You have to be able to make sure you’ve got good, real-time data. If you make some change, you’ve got to wait a couple of weeks to really see how that works.” At a press conference last week, Lightfoot similarly sought to dampen expectations: “What we can’t do, as other places across the globe have done, is come out of these stay-at-home measures too soon, following some gains, only to have cases surge all over again.”
Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities to identify COVID-19 cases, and among the first to implement widespread closures. On March 13th, Pritzker announced the closure of all Illinois schools. On March 20th, four days after Chicago’s first death, he issued a stay-at-home order. Since then, Lightfoot has shut down access to public areas along Lake Michigan and ordered liquor stores to close at 9 P.M., to prevent customers from congregating. Today, car traffic is sparse in the city and suburbs. Passenger jets, typically lined up in the night sky, headed to O’Hare International Airport like orderly fireflies, are mostly gone. Many pedestrians are wearing masks, but the practice is far from universal. At the Beth Eden Baptist Church in the working-class Roseland neighborhood, on the far South Side, where Barack Obama was a community organizer in the mid-eighties, an electric sign announces that in-person services have been suspended, though the prayer line is open. “Stay safe and follow the guidelines set by the CDC,” the sign flashes. “Wash hands for at least 20 seconds.” With more than forty-six hundred people hospitalized in Illinois due to COVID-19 at last count, including more than twelve hundred in intensive care, some hospitals are struggling more than others. The president of Roseland Community Hospital, down the street, told the Chicago Tribune, “We are outgunned, outmanned, underfunded, and no one is coming to help us.”
There are signs that, with severe social-distancing measures, Chicago’s outbreak is slowing. COVID-19 cases are now doubling every twelve days, compared with every two or three days in mid-March. Still, as summer beckons and, with it, baseball season and music festivals, including Lollapalooza, Pritzker urged organizers of large events to “think carefully about canceling.” In order to consider any reopening, he said, Illinois must conduct at least ten thousand coronavirus tests a day, to know who is infected with the virus and where it is spreading. “Obviously, we want more than that,” Ngozi Ezike, the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, told me. Her laboratories are working extra shifts to conduct tests, while also delivering equipment to hospitals and universities. Still, the state has been falling well short of Pritzker’s target number. Illinois has machines available to examine large numbers of specimens, he said this week, but “we don’t have the supplies to run those tests.”
From the beginning, the federal government has been slow to develop or support testing. An early test created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed, leading to unreliable results and weeks of delay. Since then, labs nationwide have suffered from a lack of supplies needed to conduct tests, including nasal swabs, reagent, and the personal protective equipment that technicians need when gathering specimens. Trump has adamantly avoided developing a national testing strategy while instructing governors, by tweet, to perfect their testing programs: “Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses!” On March 6th, Trump falsely declared, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” a claim that remains untrue six weeks later. On March 10th, Vice-President Mike Pence promised during a White House briefing that four million tests would be available within a week. The total number of tests conducted since the pandemic began is only slightly more than four million, according to the White House’s own count. On Friday, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry said that the federal government is the only institution that can solve the critical supply shortages for tests, which are required under the White House’s own guidelines for reopening the country. Lightfoot, who has spoken publicly about her frustration with the scattershot White House response, believes that Chicago is “still not testing nearly enough people” and says that she has raised the issue with Pence.
Beyond testing for new cases, officials are anxious to receive reliable serological tests, done with a finger prick or a blood draw, which will show who has been infected by the virus and may have developed protective antibodies. With an unknown number of people contracting the virus but showing no symptoms, that figure is still anyone’s guess. Manufacturers are rushing dozens of serological tests onto the market, but few have been reviewed by federal authorities. Stephen M. Hahn, the U.S. commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned in early April that some companies are making false claims about the reliability of their tests. Adding to the complexity, it remains unknown how long a patient infected with COVID-19 can infect others, and finding out will require multiple tests during patients’ convalescence. Without proof that a “large percentage of the population” is immune to the virus, Ezike said, “you open the door, and all of these people who are not immune are just now going to get sick.”
To understand how one hospital network is approaching the testing challenge, I spoke with Karen Kaul, who chairs the pathology and laboratory-medicine department at NorthShore University HealthSystem. It was her molecular-diagnostics lab in Evanston that produced and validated the first hospital test in Illinois for COVID-19, duplicating an updated C.D.C. test. A small team in Kaul’s lab has been working for more than two weeks to assess the incoming serological offerings. “There’s been a lot of hope and a lot of hype,” she said, urging people not to “get overexcited.” She added, “We have to maintain our data-driven approach to these things. We can’t get caught up in hoping it works.” When I asked when we might have a solid estimate of how many people in Illinois have been infected, based on a targeted sampling, she said, “I would think it would be a few weeks, unfortunately. We’d like to know sooner.” Crucially, it remains unknown whether a positive test, indicating exposure to the virus, is evidence of immunity, or how long it takes, in patients with widely different experiences with the virus, for sufficient antibodies to appear. Krumholz, the Yale cardiologist, said that it will be essential to be honest with the public as the serological tests are rolled out: “Right now, I don’t think anyone can say that ‘Yeah, if you’ve got the antibodies and you’ve been infected, you’re safe.’ ”
Beyond testing, the quest to control the spread of the virus will also require an unprecedented expansion of public-health teams around the country, in order to identify COVID-19 cases and trace everyone who comes in contact with a patient. The goal of contact-tracing, said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, is to break “chains of transmission” by identifying people who came into contact with the patient during a certain period of time, and urging them to self-quarantine. The work is essential. Without it, she said, “we won’t know where the virus is; we won’t be able to intervene in a timely way, and so we’re going to have flare-ups of the virus.” Watson believes that states and municipalities should be in charge of the COVID-19 sleuthing, since they know their communities best. But she said that they cannot be expected to coördinate the procurement of tests or provide all of the funding. Johns Hopkins researchers have estimated that rolling out contact-tracing nationwide would require a hundred thousand workers, at a cost of 3.6 billion dollars. Watson said, “States that aren’t able to do this are going to be harder hit because of that.”
In Illinois, Ezike and Arwady are working to build a corps of contact tracers, drawing on their own staffs and community health workers. Ezike expects that the effort will require thousands of workers, including dozens in each of the state’s hundred and two counties. They believe that it can be done. Arwady recalled her experience during the Ebola outbreak, in 2014 and 2015, when she was working for the C.D.C. Through a coördinated effort led by the Obama Administration, public-health authorities in Liberia moved from the early days of disarray to an effective Ebola-surveillance program. “We were able to go literally home to home to home to home. ‘Who’s got a temperature? Who are we missing?’ ” Arwady said. “Every time there was a case, you could do a really thorough investigation. You could do isolation. You could do quarantine.”
The curve in Illinois, Pritzker said, “is bending, but it isn’t flat yet.” Hospitalizations continue to rise, and a peak in cases, which was expected in mid-April, may not arrive for another month, he said. Leaders in some Republican-led, Southern states, including Georgia and Florida, have said that they will start reopening their economies, while Illinois is moving more cautiously, with Pritzker saying that he will announce plans soon. Arwady is increasingly preoccupied with the challenge of coaxing residents to comply with citywide orders—“to get people to hang in with you,” she said—especially when the weather and the COVID-19 numbers improve. The next phase, when restrictions are loosened and business resumes, will almost certainly stretch through the summer and beyond, with some epidemiologists forecasting a second wave of infections in the fall or winter.


newyorker--2020-04-22--Texas’s Lieutenant Governor Says Dying Not as Bad as Living in State Where He Is Lieutenant Governor

AUSTIN ( The Borowitz Report ) —Urging Texans to “ keep things in perspective , ” Texas ’ s lieutenant @ @ @ @ @ said on Wednesday that dying is “ surely not as bad ” as living in @ @ @ @ @ lieutenant governor .
Patrick , whose vehement anti-living message has stirred controversy across the country @ @ @ @ @ speaking out to remind Texans that there are “ some things worse than dying.
” @ @ @ @ @ for a reality check , folks , ” Patrick said .
“ If you wake @ @ @ @ @ that I am the second-highest-ranking elected official in your state , maybe dying doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ after all.
” Arguing that “ dying has got a bad rap , ” he @ @ @ @ @ he called its “ flagrant anti-death bias.
” “ All these media people who go @ @ @ @ @ the worst thing in the world have never spent any time with me , ” @ @ @

AUSTIN (The Borowitz Report)—Urging Texans to “keep things in perspective,” Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said on Wednesday that dying is “surely not as bad” as living in a state where he is lieutenant governor.
Patrick, whose vehement anti-living message has stirred controversy across the country, said that he was speaking out to remind Texans that there are “some things worse than dying.”
“It’s time for a reality check, folks,” Patrick said. “If you wake up every morning and remember that I am the second-highest-ranking elected official in your state, maybe dying doesn’t look so bad, after all.”
Arguing that “dying has got a bad rap,” he blasted the media for what he called its “flagrant anti-death bias.”
“All these media people who go on about how dying is the worst thing in the world have never spent any time with me,” he said.


newyorker--2020-04-22--Careful How You Hate on Philadelphia

Careful How You Hate on Philadelphia

When news reports reflect on the 1918 flu pandemic and how it affected cities a hundred years ago , they almost invariably mention Philadelphia , citing it as the American city with the highest death toll—a little more than seventeen thousand in six months .
And the story of Philadelphia ’ s tremendous loss invariably centers on a parade for First World War Liberty Loans , a parade that local officials allowed to proceed despite the flu outbreak that was already running rampant through the city .
“ What happens if parades aren ’ t canceled during pandemics ?
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Philadelphia found out in 1918 , with disastrous results.
” “ By the time Philadelphia banned public gatherings , ” a commentator at Fox News wrote , “ it was too late.
” The national coverage of Philadelphia during the 2020 pandemic has described empty streets near City Hall , indicating that Philadelphia has learned from its parade mistake and is taking social distancing seriously this time .
This is true , to some extent : Mayor Jim Kenney issued a stay-at-home order on March 22nd , nearly two months before the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hospitalizations peaking .
Yet lavishing attention on the 1918 parade and the importance of social distancing doesn ’ t just give a skewed picture of the past ; it stresses perseverance and individual response over the need to fix centuries of government-sponsored inequalities .
Overemphasizing the parade also runs the risk of warping how we respond to the pandemic in a place like Philadelphia , which , as deaths are tallied , is representative of why the virus is killing a disproportionate number of African-Americans and other people of color .
Philadelphia , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the poorest big city in the U.S. , where twenty-five per cent of people live below the poverty line and vast swaths of deeply concentrated poverty separate black and brown communities from the historically wealthy neighborhoods and the newly gentrified ones that are becoming increasingly white .
Months into the pandemic , Americans are realizing that , although the virus doesn ’ t see race , its effects do , thanks to the landscape of public health in the U.S. What the looks back at Philadelphia miss is that the story was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highest among Philadelphia ’ s African-American community and newly arrived European immigrants , the latter poor by circumstance , the former by Jim Crow-era design .
The Great Migration was in the process of more than doubling Philadelphia ’ s black population , which would go from sixty-three thousand in 1900 to a hundred and thirty-four thousand by 1920 , making it one of the North ’ s largest .
Nearly half the city ’ s longshoremen were black , and Philly ’ s port , humming with war work , was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longshoremen and their families were all shoved into substandard housing built by the crooked , mostly Irish-American landlords who were politically in charge of the city .
William Berg , the secretary of Philadelphia ’ s Inter-Church Federation , described “ unspeakably filthy conditions.
” “ White and colored tenants , ” he wrote , “ paying from $ 7 and $ 8 a month rental , are obliged to live in surroundings which a farmer would not tolerate for one moment in his cow stable.
” Just two decades before , W. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his groundbreaking 1899 book “ The Philadelphia Negro , ” used maps and statistics to carefully describe how the poor health in the city ’ s black community was an indicator of social inequality— “ vastly different conditions ” —as opposed to the result of a genetic tendency , which was the accepted view of white scientists at the time .
Du Bois ’ s report also showed a diverse African-American community , as opposed to the white vision of a monolithic slum , and , not surprisingly , he found that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the poorest communities .
In the three years leading up to 1918 , when African-Americans were migrating to Philadelphia for jobs in the port—and fleeing the guerrilla war being waged against them in the South—scarlet fever , whooping cough , influenza , and tuberculosis were all on the rise in the neighborhoods where they settled .
In the terms of the 2020 pandemic , African-Americans settled in communities with a preëxisting condition called racism .
“ The most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” wrote Du Bois .
“ There have .
.
.
been few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference.
” The other lesson that we are not getting when we look back at Philadelphia ’ s experience is how public-health officials differed over the response to epidemics and disease in cities .
There were what you might call environmentalists on one side—those who saw sanitation as key to a community ’ s health—and , on the other , contagionists , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from teaching individuals better habits .
“ Remember the three C ’ s—a clean mouth , a clean skin , and clean clothes , ” went one city campaign .
The reformers advocating for clean environments pushed the city for sewers and better housing , while the politicians in charge liked the cheaper idea of education .
Those who promoted individual cleanliness thought that African-Americans and the European poor were genetically inclined to be dirty , and that even if the poor underclass had decent living conditions , they would need education to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ People may live in houses and still be environed by filth and rags because they have not been trained away from deplorable habits , ” said a July 4 , 1917 , Public Ledger editorial .
The takeaway from Philadelphia ’ s battle of public-health ideologies is that both sides lost .
Thus , when the flu hit , the only response , aside from the frenzy of desperate medical triage , was social distancing .
Later , as the Great Migration continued , and as Franklin D. Roosevelt ’ s Administration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ redlining neighborhoods , cities were officially sorted by race and class , helping to create the landscape of chronic health conditions in neighborhoods that are testing high for COVID-19 today .
What is ( hopefully ) becoming horrifyingly clear to a larger public is that poor communities are suffering the most from this pandemic .
Almost two-thirds of Philly ’ s neighborhoods are below the national average for broadband Internet connections .
Formal , computer-based learning in the city ’ s public schools is set to begin only this week , after a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the student body , seventy-five per cent of whom live below the poverty line .
Which means that people aren ’ t worrying about Zoom-bombing in many of the poorest sections of North Philly , where ( not coincidentally ) positive COVID-19 test rates are among the highest .
A week ago , Ala Stanford , a Philadelphia-born and -bred pediatric surgeon , established the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium , which began setting up testing sites at African-American churches , using donated protective gear and running the test results through Stanford ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black Philadelphians and African-Americans around the U.S. , who were anxious about being blocked for testing , because they had no referrals from providers or could only walk to a testing site that required a car .
This was despite working in grocery stores , at post offices , on city buses—in direct contact with the public and not necessarily having the option to stay home .
“ We needed to , as a group of black physicians , ” Stanford said in a recent TV interview , “ take it upon ourselves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus , we have scrambled for a new treatment .
Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis ?
• How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations , prefigured revolutions , and redrawn maps .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under coronavirus quarantine .

When news reports reflect on the 1918 flu pandemic and how it affected cities a hundred years ago, they almost invariably mention Philadelphia, citing it as the American city with the highest death toll—a little more than seventeen thousand in six months. And the story of Philadelphia’s tremendous loss invariably centers on a parade for First World War Liberty Loans, a parade that local officials allowed to proceed despite the flu outbreak that was already running rampant through the city. “What happens if parades aren’t canceled during pandemics?” a recent Washington Post headline asked. “Philadelphia found out in 1918, with disastrous results.” “By the time Philadelphia banned public gatherings,” a commentator at Fox News wrote, “it was too late.”
The national coverage of Philadelphia during the 2020 pandemic has described empty streets near City Hall, indicating that Philadelphia has learned from its parade mistake and is taking social distancing seriously this time. This is true, to some extent: Mayor Jim Kenney issued a stay-at-home order on March 22nd, nearly two months before the latest modelling predicts Philadelphia’s COVID-19 hospitalizations peaking. Yet lavishing attention on the 1918 parade and the importance of social distancing doesn’t just give a skewed picture of the past; it stresses perseverance and individual response over the need to fix centuries of government-sponsored inequalities. Overemphasizing the parade also runs the risk of warping how we respond to the pandemic in a place like Philadelphia, which, as deaths are tallied, is representative of why the virus is killing a disproportionate number of African-Americans and other people of color.
Philadelphia, a majority African-American city, is today the poorest big city in the U.S., where twenty-five per cent of people live below the poverty line and vast swaths of deeply concentrated poverty separate black and brown communities from the historically wealthy neighborhoods and the newly gentrified ones that are becoming increasingly white. Months into the pandemic, Americans are realizing that, although the virus doesn’t see race, its effects do, thanks to the landscape of public health in the U.S. What the looks back at Philadelphia miss is that the story was the same in 1918: death rates were highest among Philadelphia’s African-American community and newly arrived European immigrants, the latter poor by circumstance, the former by Jim Crow-era design. The Great Migration was in the process of more than doubling Philadelphia’s black population, which would go from sixty-three thousand in 1900 to a hundred and thirty-four thousand by 1920, making it one of the North’s largest. Nearly half the city’s longshoremen were black, and Philly’s port, humming with war work, was the nation’s second-busiest.
The black longshoremen and their families were all shoved into substandard housing built by the crooked, mostly Irish-American landlords who were politically in charge of the city. William Berg, the secretary of Philadelphia’s Inter-Church Federation, described “unspeakably filthy conditions.” “White and colored tenants,” he wrote, “paying from $7 and $8 a month rental, are obliged to live in surroundings which a farmer would not tolerate for one moment in his cow stable.” Just two decades before, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his groundbreaking 1899 book “The Philadelphia Negro,” used maps and statistics to carefully describe how the poor health in the city’s black community was an indicator of social inequality—“vastly different conditions”—as opposed to the result of a genetic tendency, which was the accepted view of white scientists at the time.
Du Bois’s report also showed a diverse African-American community, as opposed to the white vision of a monolithic slum, and, not surprisingly, he found that the death rates among African-Americans were highest in the poorest communities. In the three years leading up to 1918, when African-Americans were migrating to Philadelphia for jobs in the port—and fleeing the guerrilla war being waged against them in the South—scarlet fever, whooping cough, influenza, and tuberculosis were all on the rise in the neighborhoods where they settled. In the terms of the 2020 pandemic, African-Americans settled in communities with a preëxisting condition called racism. “The most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the well-being of the race,” wrote Du Bois. “There have . . . been few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference.”
The other lesson that we are not getting when we look back at Philadelphia’s experience is how public-health officials differed over the response to epidemics and disease in cities. There were what you might call environmentalists on one side—those who saw sanitation as key to a community’s health—and, on the other, contagionists, who believed that good health would come from teaching individuals better habits. “Remember the three C’s—a clean mouth, a clean skin, and clean clothes,” went one city campaign. The reformers advocating for clean environments pushed the city for sewers and better housing, while the politicians in charge liked the cheaper idea of education. Those who promoted individual cleanliness thought that African-Americans and the European poor were genetically inclined to be dirty, and that even if the poor underclass had decent living conditions, they would need education to fully assimilate and become clean Americans. “People may live in houses and still be environed by filth and rags because they have not been trained away from deplorable habits,” said a July 4, 1917, Public Ledger editorial.
The takeaway from Philadelphia’s battle of public-health ideologies is that both sides lost. Thus, when the flu hit, the only response, aside from the frenzy of desperate medical triage, was social distancing. Later, as the Great Migration continued, and as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration used the Federal Housing Administration to begin redlining neighborhoods, cities were officially sorted by race and class, helping to create the landscape of chronic health conditions in neighborhoods that are testing high for COVID-19 today. What is (hopefully) becoming horrifyingly clear to a larger public is that poor communities are suffering the most from this pandemic. Almost two-thirds of Philly’s neighborhoods are below the national average for broadband Internet connections. Formal, computer-based learning in the city’s public schools is set to begin only this week, after a scramble to buy and deliver Chromebooks to the student body, seventy-five per cent of whom live below the poverty line. Which means that people aren’t worrying about Zoom-bombing in many of the poorest sections of North Philly, where (not coincidentally) positive COVID-19 test rates are among the highest. A week ago, Ala Stanford, a Philadelphia-born and -bred pediatric surgeon, established the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which began setting up testing sites at African-American churches, using donated protective gear and running the test results through Stanford’s practice. Stanford was getting e-mails from black Philadelphians and African-Americans around the U.S., who were anxious about being blocked for testing, because they had no referrals from providers or could only walk to a testing site that required a car. This was despite working in grocery stores, at post offices, on city buses—in direct contact with the public and not necessarily having the option to stay home. “We needed to, as a group of black physicians,” Stanford said in a recent TV interview, “take it upon ourselves to remove those barriers.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-22--Comedy Loses a Home: The Shuttering of the Upright Citizens Brigade

A lot of people texted me on Tuesday , when Amy Poehler , Ian Roberts , Matt Besser , and Matt Walsh—the co-founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade , an improvisational-comedy colossus—announced that they would be permanently closing their swanky Hell ’ s Kitchen theatre and their bustling training center , near Penn Station .
Essentially , they would be withdrawing from New York , the city where they ’ d got their start , in the mid-nineties , as a scrappy improv troupe from Chicago with plans to proselytize the “ yes , and ” approach to comedy and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way they do when a beloved but long-toothed public figure dies of natural causes—accompanied by a frowny emoji , no condolence note necessary .
To be clear , I am not an improv fanatic .
I am not one of those guys who initiate unwanted conversations in bars about their Harold teams .
But , five or so years ago , I took a U.C.B .
Improv 101 class “ undercover , ” to write about the experience—and the rapid ascent of U.C.B.
, the institution—for this magazine .
So the news was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as I wrote the piece , I found myself obsessed with improv comedy , and might even have started some unwanted conversations on the subject , in bars and out of them .
We ’ re not so different , improv guy and I. I , too , felt a sharp pang reading a tweet by the comedian Max Silvestri : “ Now UCB , Now You Don ’ t. ” U.C.B.
, which started as a mom-and-pop comedy-instruction shop housed in a former strip club , expanded , in the course of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a veritable laugh factory , with schools and theatres on both coasts and a star-studded pool of alumni .
( Donald Glover , Ilana Glazer , and Aubrey Plaza all got their start in U.C.B .
classes . )
Along the way , the company encountered many of the issues that typically accompany sudden growth—issues of inclusion , safety , oversight , authenticity , and quality .
Performers weren ’ t paid , even as ticket prices were raised .
Venues with character ( read : grime ) and major infrastructural flaws ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sleek , anonymous arenas ( with perfectly normal bathrooms ) .
On March 12th , as many performance spaces in New York and L.A. began to shutter , U.C.B.
’ s artistic directors informed employees that their theatres and training centers would be closing indefinitely .
Less than a week later , they laid off all theatre staff .
Back when I was reporting my magazine piece , graduates of the system often described U.C.B .
as cultlike .
It ’ s true that the company asked you to pay hundreds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that you could—maybe , eventually—become an unpaid performer .
( As a favorite parody video put it , “ Look at the rules they force you to follow : you have to agree with everything , you can ’ t say no , you can ’ t ask questions.
” ) But , even as someone who ’ d signed on as a skeptic , I felt , hearing the news , a bit like an ex-acolyte who couldn ’ t help but look fondly on my sunny days doing collective farm work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ field ( or a cramped stage ) .
U.C.B.
, whatever its flaws , did provide a real home to many wide-eyed dreamers in New York , who wandered in seeking camaraderie , or a new identity .
Improv guy is probably a step up from hacky-sack guy or essential-oils girl , after all .
Improv guy gets a bad rap because improv comedy is often very bad .
The honing that comes from editing and rehearsing a sketch tends to be absent in a spontaneously generated scene .
Watching people fail at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ improv can also be shockingly good , and when it is , it feels like a bit of closeup magic .
The truth is that this coronavirus pandemic comes for good and bad culture alike .
This pandemic does not distinguish between open-mike nights at your local Laff Shack and a perfectly crafted set played to thousands .
Comedy clubs of all stripes have taken baseball bats to their knees , and comedians are gig-less , audience-less , at a time when we need humor most .
U.C.B .
was a wonderfully imperfect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the performers gave nitrous hits to the audience and Adam McKay staged his faux suicide off a roof with a mannequin .
Even if it has morphed into something more corporate , more generic , the closure of its New York spaces hit me the way the cancellation of N.B.A .
basketball hit my partner .
I remember watching his face fall—if that ’ s gone , what ’ s left ?
For everyone , I suspect , there is something that has been put on pause or entirely eradicated that , however @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our awful new reality .
Sometimes , it can even feel like the bulldozing of a former home .
But I won ’ t wax too elegiac .
In February , I dragged the aforementioned partner to a Valentine ’ s Day performance at the former U.C.B .
theatre in Chelsea , now inhabited by Improv Asylum .
We saw a show called “ Nate , ” starring Natalie Palamides , which was the most inventive , fucked-up , hilarious , one-woman , topless , tragicomic performance about sexual consent I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.C.B.
, where I ’ d attended a show called “ Gutenberg !
The Musical !
” as a teen and laughed so hard I thought I ’ d pass out .
But it was the same space .
Same sticky floors .
Slightly better-staffed bar .
In their parting letter , the U.C.B .
Four , as the empire ’ s founders have come to be known , wrote , “ UCB is not leaving New York City .
The school and the theater will continue on in a pared-down form , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we operated when we first started in NYC over 20 years ago.
” The plan is to hold classes and shows in rented spaces around the city .
I hope this means that more people will be able to find a home , a family , a cult , whatever , among their fellow comedy nerds , at a safe distance .
But the real hope—other than that for the health of our community—is that all truly good things will find a way back .
Maybe , in the case of improv comedy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same venture , helmed by the same four friends .
But Poehler , Roberts , Besser , and Walsh , via an ever-extending web of talent , have trained thousands and thousands of people in their faith of truth in comedy .
No virus can stifle that .
Just try to rid “ King Lear ” of the Fool .
Bad play .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• Can survivors help cure the disease and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• With each new virus , we have scrambled for a new treatment .
Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis ?
• How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under coronavirus quarantine .

A lot of people texted me on Tuesday, when Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Besser, and Matt Walsh—the co-founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improvisational-comedy colossus—announced that they would be permanently closing their swanky Hell’s Kitchen theatre and their bustling training center, near Penn Station. Essentially, they would be withdrawing from New York, the city where they’d got their start, in the mid-nineties, as a scrappy improv troupe from Chicago with plans to proselytize the “yes, and” approach to comedy and life. People were texting me the way they do when a beloved but long-toothed public figure dies of natural causes—accompanied by a frowny emoji, no condolence note necessary.
To be clear, I am not an improv fanatic. I am not one of those guys who initiate unwanted conversations in bars about their Harold teams. But, five or so years ago, I took a U.C.B. Improv 101 class “undercover,” to write about the experience—and the rapid ascent of U.C.B., the institution—for this magazine. So the news was of interest. For many months, as I wrote the piece, I found myself obsessed with improv comedy, and might even have started some unwanted conversations on the subject, in bars and out of them. We’re not so different, improv guy and I. I, too, felt a sharp pang reading a tweet by the comedian Max Silvestri: “Now UCB, Now You Don’t.”
U.C.B., which started as a mom-and-pop comedy-instruction shop housed in a former strip club, expanded, in the course of two and a half decades, into a veritable laugh factory, with schools and theatres on both coasts and a star-studded pool of alumni. (Donald Glover, Ilana Glazer, and Aubrey Plaza all got their start in U.C.B. classes.) Along the way, the company encountered many of the issues that typically accompany sudden growth—issues of inclusion, safety, oversight, authenticity, and quality. Performers weren’t paid, even as ticket prices were raised. Venues with character (read: grime) and major infrastructural flaws (read: grimy bathrooms) were upgraded to sleek, anonymous arenas (with perfectly normal bathrooms). On March 12th, as many performance spaces in New York and L.A. began to shutter, U.C.B.’s artistic directors informed employees that their theatres and training centers would be closing indefinitely. Less than a week later, they laid off all theatre staff.
Back when I was reporting my magazine piece, graduates of the system often described U.C.B. as cultlike. It’s true that the company asked you to pay hundreds of dollars for each successive class, so that you could—maybe, eventually—become an unpaid performer. (As a favorite parody video put it, “Look at the rules they force you to follow: you have to agree with everything, you can’t say no, you can’t ask questions.”) But, even as someone who’d signed on as a skeptic, I felt, hearing the news, a bit like an ex-acolyte who couldn’t help but look fondly on my sunny days doing collective farm work (or object work) in a field (or a cramped stage). U.C.B., whatever its flaws, did provide a real home to many wide-eyed dreamers in New York, who wandered in seeking camaraderie, or a new identity. Improv guy is probably a step up from hacky-sack guy or essential-oils girl, after all.
Improv guy gets a bad rap because improv comedy is often very bad. The honing that comes from editing and rehearsing a sketch tends to be absent in a spontaneously generated scene. Watching people fail at it can be viscerally painful. But improv can also be shockingly good, and when it is, it feels like a bit of closeup magic. The truth is that this coronavirus pandemic comes for good and bad culture alike. This pandemic does not distinguish between open-mike nights at your local Laff Shack and a perfectly crafted set played to thousands. Comedy clubs of all stripes have taken baseball bats to their knees, and comedians are gig-less, audience-less, at a time when we need humor most.
U.C.B. was a wonderfully imperfect thing. In its early days, the performers gave nitrous hits to the audience and Adam McKay staged his faux suicide off a roof with a mannequin. Even if it has morphed into something more corporate, more generic, the closure of its New York spaces hit me the way the cancellation of N.B.A. basketball hit my partner. I remember watching his face fall—if that’s gone, what’s left? For everyone, I suspect, there is something that has been put on pause or entirely eradicated that, however frivolous, drives home the fact of our awful new reality. Sometimes, it can even feel like the bulldozing of a former home.
But I won’t wax too elegiac. In February, I dragged the aforementioned partner to a Valentine’s Day performance at the former U.C.B. theatre in Chelsea, now inhabited by Improv Asylum. We saw a show called “Nate,” starring Natalie Palamides, which was the most inventive, fucked-up, hilarious, one-woman, topless, tragicomic performance about sexual consent I’ve ever seen. It was no longer U.C.B., where I’d attended a show called “Gutenberg! The Musical!” as a teen and laughed so hard I thought I’d pass out. But it was the same space. Same sticky floors. Slightly better-staffed bar.
In their parting letter, the U.C.B. Four, as the empire’s founders have come to be known, wrote, “UCB is not leaving New York City. The school and the theater will continue on in a pared-down form, which will be very similar to how we operated when we first started in NYC over 20 years ago.” The plan is to hold classes and shows in rented spaces around the city. I hope this means that more people will be able to find a home, a family, a cult, whatever, among their fellow comedy nerds, at a safe distance. But the real hope—other than that for the health of our community—is that all truly good things will find a way back. Maybe, in the case of improv comedy, it won’t be the same venture, helmed by the same four friends. But Poehler, Roberts, Besser, and Walsh, via an ever-extending web of talent, have trained thousands and thousands of people in their faith of truth in comedy. No virus can stifle that. Just try to rid “King Lear” of the Fool. Bad play.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-22--Fifty Years Past the First Earth Day, a Frayed Planet—and a Sublime One

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day , let ’ s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life , but also a planet .
One can observe it dispassionately , through scientific instruments , as if it were any other planet .
And here ’ s how it looks , these past five decades : • None The white ice at the northern pole , one of the most obvious features on the planet , has shrunk dramatically : at least half the summer sea ice in the Arctic is now gone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Earth have frayed badly : the Amazon and the African rain forests are threadbare , patchy , increasingly prone to fire .
The coral reefs , including the giant system fringing the coast of Australia , are shrinking fast , bleaching white as hotter water sloshes through them .
• None Great droughts have spread on the various continental landmasses , drying for a time some of the globe ’ s vast river systems—in the Colorado Basin , in the United States , and in the Murray-Darling Basin , in Australia—while storms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Pacific and the Atlantic .
• None There has been , on average , a sixty-per-cent decline in populations of wild animals , part of an epic silencing with few precedents even in the deep record that geology provides .
• None The composition of its atmosphere has changed with shocking speed , and , as a result , the temperature has risen sharply—in the air , in the oceans .
But one can also observe our planet passionately , through eye and hand and foot , through nose and ear and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ begun to rise , washing out beaches—but there are still strips of sand where the sea washes in with a warm hiss or a bracing crash .
Yes , the glaciers have begun to melt in earnest , but there are still high valleys where ice hangs like a curtain , still seasons and latitudes where snow still falls , erasing friction .
This morning there was a new spread of snow in the woods of Vermont—late , but welcome .
Yes , the forests have begun to burn with shocking intensity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sometimes with the spring of moss underfoot .
And people have come to understand the complexity of these woodlands in new and charming ways : the groves of aspen that turn out to be one living thing , the miles of fungi “ talking ” beneath us .
Yes , the extinction tables show a mounting tally , and yet there is still the hoot of owls in the evening , still the flash of orange as monarch butterflies make their way north with the spring , still the boil of water before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the squawk and stench of a hundred thousand penguin chicks in a rookery , still the patient trudge of a tortoise across the sand , still the slap of a beaver tail against a still nighttime pond , still the craning neck of a giraffe stretching for the last acacia leaf at the top of a tree .
Yes , too many of the leaders of our species are coarse and brutal , and far too much wealth and power have ended up in far too few hands .
And yet so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these strange silent weeks of the pandemic , most people shift their lives to protect others , and some—heroes—walk each day into the hospitals and clinics to tend to the weakest and most vulnerable .
Yes , it ’ s a planet badly degraded , and , yes , it ’ s a planet worth fighting for , as hard as we know how .

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but also a planet.
One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five decades:
The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea ice in the Arctic is now gone.
The largest living systems on Earth have frayed badly: the Amazon and the African rain forests are threadbare, patchy, increasingly prone to fire. The coral reefs, including the giant system fringing the coast of Australia, are shrinking fast, bleaching white as hotter water sloshes through them.
Great droughts have spread on the various continental landmasses, drying for a time some of the globe’s vast river systems—in the Colorado Basin, in the United States, and in the Murray-Darling Basin, in Australia—while storms of unprecedented intensity have lashed islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic.
There has been, on average, a sixty-per-cent decline in populations of wild animals, part of an epic silencing with few precedents even in the deep record that geology provides.
The composition of its atmosphere has changed with shocking speed, and, as a result, the temperature has risen sharply—in the air, in the oceans.
But one can also observe our planet passionately, through eye and hand and foot, through nose and ear and heart.
Yes, the oceans have begun to rise, washing out beaches—but there are still strips of sand where the sea washes in with a warm hiss or a bracing crash.
Yes, the glaciers have begun to melt in earnest, but there are still high valleys where ice hangs like a curtain, still seasons and latitudes where snow still falls, erasing friction. This morning there was a new spread of snow in the woods of Vermont—late, but welcome.
Yes, the forests have begun to burn with shocking intensity, but they remain calm, quiet, sometimes with the spring of moss underfoot. And people have come to understand the complexity of these woodlands in new and charming ways: the groves of aspen that turn out to be one living thing, the miles of fungi “talking” beneath us.
Yes, the extinction tables show a mounting tally, and yet there is still the hoot of owls in the evening, still the flash of orange as monarch butterflies make their way north with the spring, still the boil of water before a fluke breaks the surface, still the squawk and stench of a hundred thousand penguin chicks in a rookery, still the patient trudge of a tortoise across the sand, still the slap of a beaver tail against a still nighttime pond, still the craning neck of a giraffe stretching for the last acacia leaf at the top of a tree.
Yes, too many of the leaders of our species are coarse and brutal, and far too much wealth and power have ended up in far too few hands. And yet so much goodness and kindness endure. Even in these strange silent weeks of the pandemic, most people shift their lives to protect others, and some—heroes—walk each day into the hospitals and clinics to tend to the weakest and most vulnerable.
Yes, it’s a planet badly degraded, and, yes, it’s a planet worth fighting for, as hard as we know how.


newyorker--2020-04-22--How My Soviet Mom Prepared Me for the Coronavirus Pandemic

By reading me the Soviet classic “ Wash Your Hands or Perish.
” “ We used to stand in a @ @ @ @ @ get toilet paper !
” “ Are you sure you want to eat that so @ @ @ @ @ be in the stores tomorrow.
” “ Is that how you wash vegetables ?
You @ @ @ @ @ And soak your grapes in baking soda for thirty minutes.
” “ It could be @ @ @ @ @ of Leningrad , your grandfather almost starved to death when his neighbors stole his food @ @ @ @ @ !
Pushkin spent months in quarantine during the cholera epidemic .
”

By reading me the Soviet classic “Wash Your Hands or Perish.”
“We used to stand in a long line for hours to get toilet paper!”
“Are you sure you want to eat that so fast? It may not be in the stores tomorrow.”
“Don’t touch anything—it’s all full of cholera!”
“Is that how you wash vegetables? You have to use soap! And soak your grapes in baking soda for thirty minutes.”
“It could be worse. During the Siege of Leningrad, your grandfather almost starved to death when his neighbors stole his food supplies.”
“Cheer up! Pushkin spent months in quarantine during the cholera epidemic.”