newyorker--2020-10-01--David Plunkert’s “Red Meat”

David Plunkert’s “Red Meat”

On Tuesday night , in the first Presidential debate , Donald Trump was asked to denounce white supremacists—and , specifically , the Proud Boys , a far-right group associated with political violence .
“ Proud Boys , stand back and stand by , ” Trump said .
The next day , the Proud Boys ’ chairman , Enrique Tarrio , wrote online , “ Standing by sir.
” In the cover for the October 12 , 2020 , issue , David Plunkert speaks to the ways in which Trump ’ s appeal to extremists has moved beyond a mere dog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hungry attack dog makes an appropriate symbol for the forces that seem ready to march , ” Plunkert told us . )
It ’ s a familiar theme for Plunkert , whose first cover for the magazine , in 2017 , came after a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville led to the killing of a protester .
Trump later said there were “ very fine people ” on both sides of the event .
For more coverage , read : John Cassidy on the alt-right ’ s response to the debate : Even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know what Trump was really doing at the debate , members of the Proud Boys and other alt-right groups were in no doubt .
“ Starting Tuesday night and continuing Wednesday , Trump ’ s comments were enshrined in memes , including one depicting Trump in one of the Proud Boys ’ signature polo shirts , ” the Washington Post reported .
“ Another meme showed Trump ’ s quote alongside an image of bearded men carrying American flags and appearing to prepare for a fight .
A third incorporated ‘ STAND BACK @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s logo.
” He added , “ I think we now have a President with some of the same ideals.
” He insisted that the Loyal White Knights had been growing since Trump ’ s victory .
When I asked him for specifics , he replied , “ I can ’ t give out exact numbers—that ’ s why we ’ re called ‘ the invisible empire.
’ But I can tell you this : since Trump has been elected , people have been calling us left and right wanting to join @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The claim was difficult to fact-check .
In February , the S.P.L.C .
published a report asserting that the number of operating U.S. hate groups rose from eight hundred and ninety-two , in 2015 , to nine hundred and seventeen , in 2016 .
“ The radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump , ” the report read .
And Jelani Cobb , from 2017 , on Charlottesville and the toll of white terrorism : There have been at least thirty attacks carried out by white terrorists since 9/11 ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ majority of people killed on American soil in acts of terrorism .
Two years ago , when Dylann Roof murdered nine people , in the sanctuary of Emanuel A.M.E. Church , in Charleston , he described himself as a kind of rageful prophet , one whose actions would awaken white people to the perils they faced from people of color in the United States .
Those forces took Trump as a like-minded figure , and saw in his reluctance to denounce David Duke during the campaign , and his willingness to retweet white-supremacist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black crime , a sign that their moment had arrived .
And for more political covers , see below :

On Tuesday night, in the first Presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked to denounce white supremacists—and, specifically, the Proud Boys, a far-right group associated with political violence. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said. The next day, the Proud Boys’ chairman, Enrique Tarrio, wrote online, “Standing by sir.” In the cover for the October 12, 2020, issue, David Plunkert speaks to the ways in which Trump’s appeal to extremists has moved beyond a mere dog whistle. (“I feel like the hungry attack dog makes an appropriate symbol for the forces that seem ready to march,” Plunkert told us.) It’s a familiar theme for Plunkert, whose first cover for the magazine, in 2017, came after a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville led to the killing of a protester. Trump later said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the event. For more coverage, read:
John Cassidy on the alt-right’s response to the debate:
Even as some Republican senators professed not to know what Trump was really doing at the debate, members of the Proud Boys and other alt-right groups were in no doubt. “Starting Tuesday night and continuing Wednesday, Trump’s comments were enshrined in memes, including one depicting Trump in one of the Proud Boys’ signature polo shirts,” the Washington Post reported. “Another meme showed Trump’s quote alongside an image of bearded men carrying American flags and appearing to prepare for a fight. A third incorporated ‘STAND BACK AND STAND BY’ into the group’s logo.”
Charles Bethea’s conversation with a white supremacist after Trump’s election:
He added, “I think we now have a President with some of the same ideals.” He insisted that the Loyal White Knights had been growing since Trump’s victory. When I asked him for specifics, he replied, “I can’t give out exact numbers—that’s why we’re called ‘the invisible empire.’ But I can tell you this: since Trump has been elected, people have been calling us left and right wanting to join, from all walks of life.” The claim was difficult to fact-check. In February, the S.P.L.C. published a report asserting that the number of operating U.S. hate groups rose from eight hundred and ninety-two, in 2015, to nine hundred and seventeen, in 2016. “The radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump,” the report read.
And Jelani Cobb, from 2017, on Charlottesville and the toll of white terrorism:
There have been at least thirty attacks carried out by white terrorists since 9/11; the victims of those attacks constitute the majority of people killed on American soil in acts of terrorism. Two years ago, when Dylann Roof murdered nine people, in the sanctuary of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, he described himself as a kind of rageful prophet, one whose actions would awaken white people to the perils they faced from people of color in the United States. Those forces took Trump as a like-minded figure, and saw in his reluctance to denounce David Duke during the campaign, and his willingness to retweet white-supremacist accounts and parrot their mythical statistics about black crime, a sign that their moment had arrived.
And for more political covers, see below:


newyorker--2020-10-01--A Bellevue Doctor’s Pandemic Diary

A Bellevue Doctor’s Pandemic Diary

Six years earlier , when Ebola attempted its global assault , Bellevue Hospital created its Special Pathogens Unit .
The working philosophy on Ebola was : “ If it ’ s coming to the U.S. , it ’ s coming to Bellevue.
” Our patients hail from nearly every country , the United Nations is just up the road , and , for nearly three centuries , Bellevue ’ s doors have remained open to all .
With the coronavirus now percolating in Washington State , planning begins in earnest .
The E-team , as it ’ s been known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the four-room super-isolation unit is readied for the handful of patients expected to turn up .
The next week , the staff e-mail informs us that there are “ isolated cases in the US ( 6 total ) , ” and that the E-team stands “ ready to respond for any patient admitted for potential coronavirus evaluations , quarantine , or confirmed cases.
” The same message is sent out the following week , and the week after that , and the week after that .
In the evening , the first patient @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When we learn of this , there is a collective catching of the breath , and what feels like a communal churning of thought .
Will this be like Ebola—intense but cordoned off into an isolated unit ?
Will it be like Hurricane Sandy—widespread havoc compacted into a single nightmarish week ?
Will it be like AIDS—ubiquitous , protracted , and exquisitely brutal ?
Or maybe the coronavirus will end up like brucellosis , Chagas disease , leprosy , and plague—just another of the many offbeat infections that periodically find their way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ area includes the mayor , the N.Y.P.D.
, and the President as well as the undocumented and the homeless , and everyone in between .
Maybe it will assume its place among the legions of oddball “ zebras ” that keep us on our toes at Bellevue but don ’ t otherwise perturb our daily routines , other than to remind us why we ’ d never want to work anyplace else .
To minimize contact , the initial medical evaluations are carried out by phone .
Afterward , I gown up and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whirring , battery-powered hazmat helmet whooshes filtered air across my face .
( “ I wish I ’ d had this during menopause , ” a colleague remarked . )
The COVID Clinic has been open for only three days , but the testing protocol has already changed at least that many times—with or without an influenza test , nasopharynx vs. oropharynx , double-bag vs. single-bag .
I squeeze into Room 1 with four swabs , eight specimen bags , four tubes , double sets of labels , and double sets of gloves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a breadbox , plus a charming three-year-old who needs the potty , stat .
My biggest fear is that I ’ ll mix up the tubes , or the swabs , or the bags , or the patients .
The fathers are both tall , slim , masked , dressed in mid-thirties-dad casual .
They are immensely gracious as I ask who is who over and over during the ordeal .
For every patient I test , I duly recite the social-distancing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control , but these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a separate bedroom , use a separate bathroom and eating area , keep six feet apart from the rest of the household .
This is New York City .
Six feet apart at all times means someone ’ s going to end up out on the fire escape .
And what happens when there ’ s no home at all in which to isolate ?
In the afternoon , a patient with a fever and a cough arrives for testing ; he isn ’ t sick enough to be admitted to the hospital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to send him back to the shelter where he ’ s living .
Hours pass as we make calls , trying to figure out what to do .
One nurse brings him a sandwich ; another passes a urinal into the room .
The clinic will be closing soon .
We wonder if his shelter could somehow provide a single room and bathroom , but he doesn ’ t remember its name or its phone number .
But this is Bellevue .
Someone figures out the name of the restaurant next door to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ persuades a waiter to run over and procure the phone number , calls the shelter , works out an arrangement for a private room , and then gets the patient home , all before the sun shimmers down over the Hudson River .
According to Mayor Bill de Blasio ’ s briefing today , there are ninety-five confirmed cases in all of New York City , with twenty-two New Yorkers hospitalized .
Italy is experiencing a steep rise .
Bellevue ’ s Special Pathogens team has been strategizing about where extra hospital beds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next .
Her test is negative .
His , however , is marked with a garish red rectangle highlighting the word “ Detected !
!
” next to the words “ Novel Coronavirus.
” It ’ s hard to convey how earth-shattering this first positive result is .
On the day I ’ d swabbed him , COVID-19 was still a disease in China and Italy ; there hadn ’ t yet been a single coronavirus death in all of New York City .
We had more gallstones in Bellevue than we had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , the virus feels in-my-hands real .
But the open-sided tent of Abraham feels decidedly less welcoming amid the flood of Noah .
The rain is furious ; the corner where I ’ m swabbing one anxious patient after another has become a muddy lagoon .
The temperature hovers near forty degrees , and we take turns doing jumping jacks to stay warm , looking like harbor seals with our bright yellow surgical gowns bulging over our down jackets .
The steady , pelting rhythm of rain , the musty dampness of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lawn—this singular sensory combination evokes the gloriously sodden camping trips of my childhood , despite the surreal circumstances .
As I ease the swab inside her nasopharynx , my mind scours frantically over the previous two weeks .
Did we experience any breaches of protocol ?
Did we inadvertently expose her ?
In the urgency of reinvention , did we grow careless ?
I slip her sample into the bag and pray that it will be negative .
At his press conference , the Mayor announces that there are now twelve thousand three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and that there have been ninety-nine deaths .
New York is officially the epicenter of the pandemic .
As of last night , the city is on lockdown .
There are practically tumbleweeds on Madison Avenue .
Twelve hundred patients have me listed as their primary-care doctor .
Internal medicine can often feel pedestrian—there are no edgy Netflix series about primary-care physicians counselling patients on sciatica .
With the acute rupturing of our clinic system , primary care is suddenly a minefield .
I call patient after patient , undertaking rudimentary triage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , vitals , nurses , or even eye contact .
Swollen joints , fevers , and abdominal pain have to be evaluated without a physical exam ; some of my diabetic patients have started rationing their insulin ; home-care arrangements for my elderly patients are splintering because necessary forms have gone missing .
Some patients are holding up well ; others are panicked and floundering .
To a one , though , their foremost worry seems to be about us , the staff : they thank us , they bless us , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to take care .
All the patients with the coronavirus are being admitted to the general-medicine service , and at noon there ’ s a staff meeting .
We learn that there are now almost thirty COVID-19 patients in the I.C.U.
, and more than ninety on the wards .
Attending physicians are being pulled from everywhere—clinic , cardiology , G.I.
, rheumatology , retirement .
Senior residents from urology , orthopedics , surgery , and ophthalmology have been drafted to be interns on the medicine service .
The staffing schedule looks like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Resource allocation is something we actually do all the time in medicine .
Usually , though , it ’ s a low-stakes affair , measuring your patient ’ s situation against some abstract concept—clinical appropriateness , cost , availability , the risk of adverse outcomes .
You aren ’ t measuring up against another flesh-and-blood patient in the next bed over .
This is the first night I can ’ t sleep .
Normally , the inner workings of the hospital are invisible to doctors and nurses .
We show up every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the beds are there , the supplies are there , the lights turn on , the floors are clean .
Now it ’ s as if we can feel the pulse of the hospital ’ s vasculature—the complex network of administrators , suppliers , maintenance workers , technicians , housekeepers , phone operators , transporters , and I.T .
support staff that keep the clinical enterprise afloat .
An influx of ventilators arrives that morning .
New wards are opening up .
Beds are materializing .
The tent gets a sink with running @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s nothing short of miraculous .
But the patients keep coming .
On the news , Boris Johnson , the Prime Minister of the U.K. , is diagnosed with COVID-19 .
On Twitter , an E.R .
doctor says that he ’ s just had to intubate one of his colleagues .
This Monday , March 30th , is no different—six new updates are announced at our morning meeting , and we dutifully recalibrate the way we ’ re going to practice medicine today , mentally jettisoning all of last week ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whose unpretentious competence and unflappable effervescence have made this ongoing cyclone feel manageable , usually conducts our morning meetings from a hospital conference room .
Today , her babysitter has called out sick , and so she ’ s broadcasting from home .
Over the video chat , strains of “ Frozen ” drift in from another room .
Daily life feels vertiginous , and these morning check-ins have become vital ballast .
The meetings are part war room and part family reunion : our now scattered colleagues log on from the wards @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tent and the medical clinic , from offices and exam rooms , from overnight call rooms , from home , from East Twenty-eighth Street as they rush to the hospital .
One colleague on the wards describes feeling like a medical student again , learning absolutely everything from scratch .
Another recounts adjusting a patient ’ s oxygen : the patient stopped her and asked , “ Should you really be touching me ?
” One doctor is spending his evenings persuading phone companies to donate chargers for patients whisked here by ambulance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resident is training medical students to call patients ’ families with daily updates .
Someone is working from home on depositions for patients who were applying for political asylum when the pandemic hit .
Someone else is single-handedly insuring that every homeless patient with the coronavirus gets a place to isolate .
Another colleague is coördinating follow-up care for the waves of COVID-19 patients discharged from the hospital .
Yet another is tackling the avalanche of studies about hydroxychloroquine , remdesivir , and tocilizumab , steadily synthesizing the otherwise dizzying data for us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of how oddly fortunate we are .
In this quarantine culture of aimless boredom , we have a fraternity of purpose .
In a world now riven by isolation and loneliness , we have one another .
Before the pandemic , staff meetings were modestly attended .
Now they are standing room only .
In the tent , I triage a patient who ’ s been diverted from the overwhelmed E.R .
I watch him plod unsteadily toward us .
It ’ s another chilly day , with temperatures in the low forties @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this , wearing sweatpants over jeans and an overcoat over a parka over a hoodie .
He tells me that he ’ s been feeling tired for the past two months .
He ’ s been living in Penn Station , having long since lost touch with his family .
When I ask him how long he ’ s been smoking , he mumbles , “ Four years.
” When I ask him how long he ’ s been drinking , he says , “ Four years.
” Heroin ?
“ Four years.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ questions and lean forward .
“ What happened four years ago ?
” I ask .
“ I got my heart broken , ” he says .
We sit in silence , the March wind chiselling around us .
His oxygen saturation is ninety-five per cent , but when we walk him along the garden path it plummets into the low eighties ; he has to be admitted to the hospital .
I swab his nasopharynx for the coronavirus , but I perform the rest of the physical exam , too .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ indicate chronic pulmonary disease or possibly lung cancer .
Distant heart sounds could reflect pericardial effusion—fluid accumulating around the heart .
Edematous legs swollen with interstitial fluid could mean heart failure , or liver failure , or kidney failure .
These other diseases still exist .
After work I head up First Avenue .
Two blocks north of Bellevue is the chief medical examiner ’ s office .
As a first-year medical student , I ’ d had nightmares for weeks after visiting the infamous “ Evidence Room ” on the fifth floor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of New York ’ s gruesome oddities—the bone crushers used by serial killers , the severed factory workers ’ fingers found in cans of ill-prepared food—sit on display .
As I pass by now , I see that a C.M.E .
van has blocked off traffic to East Thirtieth Street .
I turn down the now silent block toward F.D.R .
Drive .
Four construction workers are slivering planks of fresh plywood over a sawhorse .
Through the open back of their truck , I can see what look like triple-level bunks , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end of the block , where Bellevue faces the East River , I count eleven trailers .
They are lined up with military precision .
They occupy the same site as the 9/11 tent , the cavernous white structure that served as an extension of the C.M.E.
’ s office for a decade , safeguarding the remains that awaited identification .
Carpenters and engineers have been working their way through the I.C.U .
floor , converting all the rooms into the negative-pressure spaces required to keep highly contagious pathogens out of circulation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ room , an intubated patient is wheeled in behind them—and so it goes , for every one of the fifty-four rooms .
The coronavirus has now taken over the entire I.C.U .
It ’ s as if all the other calamities—heart attacks , strokes , traumas , appendicitis—have evanesced on cue .
A flash mob in reverse .
The I.C.U .
service has spread well beyond its own floor , usurping two sections of the E.R.
, the endoscopy suite , the post-op units , plus another surgical ward .
Walking through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that every patient is hooked up to a different model of ventilator , each with its own arrangement of buttons , dials , and touch screens .
These are the ventilators that averted our harrowingly close call two weeks ago .
The basics are the same , but operating them is like being saddled with ten different TV remote controls .
I ’ m helping one of the nurses when a patient erupts into a cytokine storm—a runaway immune-system response , resulting in life-threatening inflammation .
She ’ s already intubated , sedated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has started to jump the rails : first it ’ s 103.8 , then 104.5 , then 105.3 .
Three of us gingerly roll her to one side and attempt to slide an electric cooling blanket beneath her , without dislodging her breathing tube , arterial line , cardiac monitors , or I.V .
drips .
Her temperature hits 106.1 .
We cram specimen bags with ice as quickly as we can , tucking them into her armpits , under her neck , and between her legs .
They turn to water almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 106.9 , and her pulse has soared to a hundred and seventy .
Someone says that there ’ s a cooling tub , but no one knows where it is .
One nurse is from the surgery department .
The other is from Ohio .
The patient ’ s temperature climbs to 107.6 , then 108.2 .
I ’ ve never seen a temperature this high in my life .
It hits 108.8 , and I worry that she ’ ll start seizing .
A veteran E.R .
nurse materializes like a demigod @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ice , procured from who knows where .
We heave the bags up over the bed rails , and they buckle across the contours of her body , the ice cubes sloshing and clanking .
Slowly , slowly the mercury eases down , settling at 103.1 .
With all the commotion , the patient ’ s arterial line has been dislodged from her right wrist ; she now needs one on the left .
But the subcutaneous tissue of her arm has swollen up on either side of her hospital I.D .
band @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an assortment of colors—carve parallel lines into her skin .
As the I.C.U .
resident preps the boggy wrist with antiseptic , I pull scissors from a suture kit and snip off each bracelet in turn .
The resident and I catch eyes over our masks : “ It ’ s like the last bit of her , ” she murmurs .
I put the bracelets in a specimen bag and crouch down to the base of the stretcher , where patient belongings are stored .
For a moment , I contemplate slipping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like this could so easily disappear in the general tumult—knocked over , stepped on , slipped on , swept up .
But it ’ s not my place to take it , even if to protect it .
I bury the bag as deeply as I can within her clothing and hope for the best .
Sunshine cascades through the generous windows of the I.C.U.
, but the rays seem to flounder once in the rooms—an aubade without an audience .
A few glass doors are distinguished by a hastily taped-up E.K.G .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ marker .
Otherwise , there is a wearying sameness as we make our way around the unit .
The patients are starkly sedated , chemically paralyzed , and mechanically ventilated .
They seem entirely without agency .
In truth , so do we : we set up ventilators , fluids , vasopressors , and the crapshoot antiviral drug of the day , and then stand back and wait .
The churn of physiology that will determine the patients ’ outcomes is shrouded within their unnaturally still bodies while we watch from behind the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in my office to tackle my mountain of phone calls .
I ’ ve known most of my twelve hundred patients for years , a few even since I was an intern at Bellevue .
Ten calls in , I decide to check on a woman whose fragile diabetes often flies out of control .
She ’ s in her mid-sixties , but slim and scampery as a teen-ager .
Last year , she fell into a severe depression .
She was unrecognizable—lethargic , sobbing , unable to find a reason to live @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as was her psychiatric team , and toward the end of November the pall had lifted .
Two months ago , she ’ d bustled into my office as bright as a freshly tuned violin , her ebullient Spanish galloping faster than my brain could translate .
Slam-dunk success stories like this are rare in primary care , and I was effusive in her chart .
“ Incredible improvement of mood !
Back to cheerful , happy baseline , ” I ’ d written .

It isn’t that the coronavirus doesn’t come up during our staff meetings in the early days of 2020. It’s more that it’s crushed to the bottom of the agenda by a pending hospital inspection—the triennial, bureaucratic steeplechase that we must run in order to maintain our accreditation. The first formal mention of the virus to the rank and file of our medical clinic comes in the weekly staff e-mail, on January 24th:
—This is a novel coronavirus with its epicenter in Wuhan, China, with a ~14 day incubation period and potential for person-to-person transmission (though limited) —Thus far this virus appears to have a milder illness compared to MERS or SARS —Risk to New Yorkers is considered low, and there have been no known healthcare worker infections —There are currently 830 confirmed cases worldwide, 26 deaths, and 2 confirmed US cases
Six years earlier, when Ebola attempted its global assault, Bellevue Hospital created its Special Pathogens Unit. The working philosophy on Ebola was: “If it’s coming to the U.S., it’s coming to Bellevue.” Our patients hail from nearly every country, the United Nations is just up the road, and, for nearly three centuries, Bellevue’s doors have remained open to all. With the coronavirus now percolating in Washington State, planning begins in earnest. The E-team, as it’s been known since Ebola, is reconstituted, and the four-room super-isolation unit is readied for the handful of patients expected to turn up.
The next week, the staff e-mail informs us that there are “isolated cases in the US (6 total),” and that the E-team stands “ready to respond for any patient admitted for potential coronavirus evaluations, quarantine, or confirmed cases.” The same message is sent out the following week, and the week after that, and the week after that.
On Monday, March 2nd, we’re told that the first coronavirus case has been documented in N.Y.C. “Remain vigilant at all points of entry at Bellevue and screen every person for fever, cough, rash AND travel history,” we’re advised. “In addition to the global outbreak of COVID-19, remember that there are also ongoing outbreaks of Ebola, Lassa, and MERS.”
On Tuesday, March 10th, we line up in the morning for P.P.E. training, with all its attendant goofiness. Get serially spritzed with aspartame while bobbling your head inside a tent-like contraption balanced on your shoulders—if you can taste the aspartame, the seal on your N95 is leaky.
In the evening, the first patient with the coronavirus is admitted to Bellevue. When we learn of this, there is a collective catching of the breath, and what feels like a communal churning of thought. Will this be like Ebola—intense but cordoned off into an isolated unit? Will it be like Hurricane Sandy—widespread havoc compacted into a single nightmarish week? Will it be like AIDS—ubiquitous, protracted, and exquisitely brutal?
Or maybe the coronavirus will end up like brucellosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, and plague—just another of the many offbeat infections that periodically find their way to Bellevue, a hospital whose catchment area includes the mayor, the N.Y.P.D., and the President as well as the undocumented and the homeless, and everyone in between. Maybe it will assume its place among the legions of oddball “zebras” that keep us on our toes at Bellevue but don’t otherwise perturb our daily routines, other than to remind us why we’d never want to work anyplace else.
Thursday, March 12th, is my first day in Bellevue’s new Primary Care Special Pathogens Clinic, a cramped three-room space which we all refer to simply as the COVID Clinic. Room 1 hosts two fathers and their three-year-old daughter. Room 2 holds a set of millennial roommates who have been trying to socially distance in an apartment with one bedroom, one bathroom, and two cats. In Room 3, a mother gamely distracts her seven-year-old with a card game while her own darting panic saturates the air.
To minimize contact, the initial medical evaluations are carried out by phone. Afterward, I gown up and gather supplies for the tests. A whirring, battery-powered hazmat helmet whooshes filtered air across my face. (“I wish I’d had this during menopause,” a colleague remarked.) The COVID Clinic has been open for only three days, but the testing protocol has already changed at least that many times—with or without an influenza test, nasopharynx vs. oropharynx, double-bag vs. single-bag. I squeeze into Room 1 with four swabs, eight specimen bags, four tubes, double sets of labels, and double sets of gloves and face a workspace the size of a breadbox, plus a charming three-year-old who needs the potty, stat. My biggest fear is that I’ll mix up the tubes, or the swabs, or the bags, or the patients. The fathers are both tall, slim, masked, dressed in mid-thirties-dad casual. They are immensely gracious as I ask who is who over and over during the ordeal.
For every patient I test, I duly recite the social-distancing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control, but these feel tailored for suburbia: isolate in a separate bedroom, use a separate bathroom and eating area, keep six feet apart from the rest of the household. This is New York City. Six feet apart at all times means someone’s going to end up out on the fire escape.
And what happens when there’s no home at all in which to isolate? In the afternoon, a patient with a fever and a cough arrives for testing; he isn’t sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, but it’s too risky to send him back to the shelter where he’s living. Hours pass as we make calls, trying to figure out what to do. One nurse brings him a sandwich; another passes a urinal into the room. The clinic will be closing soon. We wonder if his shelter could somehow provide a single room and bathroom, but he doesn’t remember its name or its phone number.
But this is Bellevue. Someone figures out the name of the restaurant next door to the shelter, calls the restaurant, persuades a waiter to run over and procure the phone number, calls the shelter, works out an arrangement for a private room, and then gets the patient home, all before the sun shimmers down over the Hudson River.
According to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s briefing today, there are ninety-five confirmed cases in all of New York City, with twenty-two New Yorkers hospitalized. Italy is experiencing a steep rise. Bellevue’s Special Pathogens team has been strategizing about where extra hospital beds could fit.
It’s Monday, March 16th: I’ve been desperately checking for the results of my COVID Clinic tests. This afternoon, they finally start arriving from the testing lab, which, it turns out, is conveniently located in Alabama. I look first at the family of three. Father One is negative; the daughter’s test is still pending; Father Two’s test is “sample spilled.” Spilled? After all that preparation and anxiety? I’m crushed.
The millennial roommates are next. Her test is negative. His, however, is marked with a garish red rectangle highlighting the word “Detected!!” next to the words “Novel Coronavirus.”
It’s hard to convey how earth-shattering this first positive result is. On the day I’d swabbed him, COVID-19 was still a disease in China and Italy; there hadn’t yet been a single coronavirus death in all of New York City. We had more gallstones in Bellevue than we had coronavirus.
Now, for the first time, the virus feels in-my-hands real.
It’s Wednesday, March 18th, and the COVID Clinic has been reconstituted alfresco, in the shadow of Bellevue’s imperious, turn-of-the-century brick building. Open-sided to decrease infection risk, the white tent sits primly in the courtyard, hugged on three sides by a flowering dogwood, a magnificent magnolia, and a Callery pear tree laden with snowy blooms.
But the open-sided tent of Abraham feels decidedly less welcoming amid the flood of Noah. The rain is furious; the corner where I’m swabbing one anxious patient after another has become a muddy lagoon. The temperature hovers near forty degrees, and we take turns doing jumping jacks to stay warm, looking like harbor seals with our bright yellow surgical gowns bulging over our down jackets. The steady, pelting rhythm of rain, the musty dampness of canvas, the petrichor of wet springtime lawn—this singular sensory combination evokes the gloriously sodden camping trips of my childhood, despite the surreal circumstances.
On Saturday, March 21st, one of our nurses has a fever. We’re both in the COVID tent, bundled up against yet another day of frigid rain, but I’m the only one wearing P.P.E., because she’s now the patient.
As I ease the swab inside her nasopharynx, my mind scours frantically over the previous two weeks. Did we experience any breaches of protocol? Did we inadvertently expose her? In the urgency of reinvention, did we grow careless?
I slip her sample into the bag and pray that it will be negative.
It’s Monday, March 23rd. Over the past week, the number of coronavirus patients admitted to Bellevue has tripled—there are now close to a hundred. Meanwhile, the outpatient side of the hospital has screeched into reverse gear: a battalion’s worth of staff works the phones, doing its best to keep our seventy thousand outpatients away from the hospital at all costs.
At his press conference, the Mayor announces that there are now twelve thousand three hundred and thirty-nine cases in the city, and that there have been ninety-nine deaths. New York is officially the epicenter of the pandemic. As of last night, the city is on lockdown. There are practically tumbleweeds on Madison Avenue.
It’s Tuesday, March 24th, and I’m back at the primary-care clinic where I normally work. It’s strange to be inside after working outdoors in the tent for the past week. I’ve gotten used to prodigious natural light and crisp spring air. Sequestered in my six-by-six exam room, with its fluorescent lights and obdurate walls, I feel twitchy and trapped.
Twelve hundred patients have me listed as their primary-care doctor. Internal medicine can often feel pedestrian—there are no edgy Netflix series about primary-care physicians counselling patients on sciatica. With the acute rupturing of our clinic system, primary care is suddenly a minefield. I call patient after patient, undertaking rudimentary triage without the aid of labs, X-rays, vitals, nurses, or even eye contact. Swollen joints, fevers, and abdominal pain have to be evaluated without a physical exam; some of my diabetic patients have started rationing their insulin; home-care arrangements for my elderly patients are splintering because necessary forms have gone missing. Some patients are holding up well; others are panicked and floundering. To a one, though, their foremost worry seems to be about us, the staff: they thank us, they bless us, they inquire after our families and admonish us to take care.
All the patients with the coronavirus are being admitted to the general-medicine service, and at noon there’s a staff meeting. We learn that there are now almost thirty COVID-19 patients in the I.C.U., and more than ninety on the wards. Attending physicians are being pulled from everywhere—clinic, cardiology, G.I., rheumatology, retirement. Senior residents from urology, orthopedics, surgery, and ophthalmology have been drafted to be interns on the medicine service. The staffing schedule looks like a NASA flowchart for the moon landing.
Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, another dozen patients have been intubated, and apparently there are only a few ventilators left in the hospital. A committee is being formed, we’re told, to start working on the practical aspects of “resource allocation”—a grim euphemism for deciding who will get a ventilator and, conversely, who might be extubated if their improvement stalls.
Resource allocation is something we actually do all the time in medicine. Usually, though, it’s a low-stakes affair, measuring your patient’s situation against some abstract concept—clinical appropriateness, cost, availability, the risk of adverse outcomes. You aren’t measuring up against another flesh-and-blood patient in the next bed over.
This is the first night I can’t sleep.
On Friday, the magnolia tree next to the COVID tent bursts into riotous blossom despite the chilly weather. Until now, the flowers have been delicate cups of pink and lavender, spaced along the spindly gray branches. Now they’ve abruptly reversed their concavity, spilling open into an unbroken blanket of defiant white.
Normally, the inner workings of the hospital are invisible to doctors and nurses. We show up every day and the patients are there, the beds are there, the supplies are there, the lights turn on, the floors are clean. Now it’s as if we can feel the pulse of the hospital’s vasculature—the complex network of administrators, suppliers, maintenance workers, technicians, housekeepers, phone operators, transporters, and I.T. support staff that keep the clinical enterprise afloat. An influx of ventilators arrives that morning. New wards are opening up. Beds are materializing. The tent gets a sink with running water and an air-filtration system. It’s nothing short of miraculous.
But the patients keep coming. On the news, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the U.K., is diagnosed with COVID-19. On Twitter, an E.R. doctor says that he’s just had to intubate one of his colleagues.
Every day, the rules of engagement reshuffle. Medical teams are reconfigured, treatment guidelines are revised, infection-control protocols are modified, sick-call procedures are altered, testing criteria change, P.P.E. rules evolve, pharmacy policies shift, a new ward opens, another I.C.U. is created, new C.D.C. recommendations are announced, another batch of research data is published, much of it not peer-reviewed.
This Monday, March 30th, is no different—six new updates are announced at our morning meeting, and we dutifully recalibrate the way we’re going to practice medicine today, mentally jettisoning all of last week’s protocols. Our section chief, whose unpretentious competence and unflappable effervescence have made this ongoing cyclone feel manageable, usually conducts our morning meetings from a hospital conference room. Today, her babysitter has called out sick, and so she’s broadcasting from home. Over the video chat, strains of “Frozen” drift in from another room.
Daily life feels vertiginous, and these morning check-ins have become vital ballast. The meetings are part war room and part family reunion: our now scattered colleagues log on from the wards and the I.C.U, from the COVID tent and the medical clinic, from offices and exam rooms, from overnight call rooms, from home, from East Twenty-eighth Street as they rush to the hospital. One colleague on the wards describes feeling like a medical student again, learning absolutely everything from scratch. Another recounts adjusting a patient’s oxygen: the patient stopped her and asked, “Should you really be touching me?”
One doctor is spending his evenings persuading phone companies to donate chargers for patients whisked here by ambulance without time to pack. A chief resident is training medical students to call patients’ families with daily updates. Someone is working from home on depositions for patients who were applying for political asylum when the pandemic hit. Someone else is single-handedly insuring that every homeless patient with the coronavirus gets a place to isolate. Another colleague is coördinating follow-up care for the waves of COVID-19 patients discharged from the hospital. Yet another is tackling the avalanche of studies about hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, and tocilizumab, steadily synthesizing the otherwise dizzying data for us.
There’s an unspoken recognition of how oddly fortunate we are. In this quarantine culture of aimless boredom, we have a fraternity of purpose. In a world now riven by isolation and loneliness, we have one another. Before the pandemic, staff meetings were modestly attended. Now they are standing room only.
The next day, March 31st, Bellevue begins distributing masks for the whole staff to wear all day, even when not involved in patient care. This is so we don’t infect one another. There are now over forty thousand cases in New York City; the death toll has passed a thousand.
In the tent, I triage a patient who’s been diverted from the overwhelmed E.R. I watch him plod unsteadily toward us. It’s another chilly day, with temperatures in the low forties, but he is overdressed even for this, wearing sweatpants over jeans and an overcoat over a parka over a hoodie. He tells me that he’s been feeling tired for the past two months. He’s been living in Penn Station, having long since lost touch with his family. When I ask him how long he’s been smoking, he mumbles, “Four years.” When I ask him how long he’s been drinking, he says, “Four years.” Heroin? “Four years.”
I stop my rundown of medical questions and lean forward. “What happened four years ago?” I ask.
“I got my heart broken,” he says. We sit in silence, the March wind chiselling around us.
His oxygen saturation is ninety-five per cent, but when we walk him along the garden path it plummets into the low eighties; he has to be admitted to the hospital. I swab his nasopharynx for the coronavirus, but I perform the rest of the physical exam, too. The bulbous clubbing of his fingernail beds could indicate chronic pulmonary disease or possibly lung cancer. Distant heart sounds could reflect pericardial effusion—fluid accumulating around the heart. Edematous legs swollen with interstitial fluid could mean heart failure, or liver failure, or kidney failure. These other diseases still exist.
After work I head up First Avenue. Two blocks north of Bellevue is the chief medical examiner’s office. As a first-year medical student, I’d had nightmares for weeks after visiting the infamous “Evidence Room” on the fifth floor, where a century’s worth of New York’s gruesome oddities—the bone crushers used by serial killers, the severed factory workers’ fingers found in cans of ill-prepared food—sit on display. As I pass by now, I see that a C.M.E. van has blocked off traffic to East Thirtieth Street. I turn down the now silent block toward F.D.R. Drive. Four construction workers are slivering planks of fresh plywood over a sawhorse. Through the open back of their truck, I can see what look like triple-level bunks, constructed from raw two-by-fours.
At the end of the block, where Bellevue faces the East River, I count eleven trailers. They are lined up with military precision. They occupy the same site as the 9/11 tent, the cavernous white structure that served as an extension of the C.M.E.’s office for a decade, safeguarding the remains that awaited identification.
Kalustyan’s—the venerable purveyor of Middle Eastern and Indian food on Lexington Avenue—is joining its neighbors on lockdown, but doesn’t want its fresh food to go to waste. On Thursday, the restaurant loads up cartons with hummus, mujadara, za’atar, ful, t’hina, and zhoug, plus enough pita for a minor caliphate, and I lug it all to Bellevue. It’s oddly comforting to watch my colleagues scarf down the food. Two years ago, almost to the day, my Yemenite-Israeli father passed away. Ful and zhoug were his elixirs, and he slathered them on anything that didn’t move. “They ward off bacteria,” he swore to me. I load up my pita—it can’t hurt.
As of Monday, April 6th, the coronavirus-case count in New York City is almost a hundred thousand. The inpatient count at Bellevue has pushed past three hundred. Our partner city hospitals—Lincoln, Jacobi, Elmhurst—are being pummelled even harder. Bellevue has begun taking patients from them, at first in handfuls and then in batches of thirty or forty; almost six hundred patients make their way across the East River to Bellevue, a staggering feat of coördination.
Carpenters and engineers have been working their way through the I.C.U. floor, converting all the rooms into the negative-pressure spaces required to keep highly contagious pathogens out of circulation. As soon as the workers exit a room, an intubated patient is wheeled in behind them—and so it goes, for every one of the fifty-four rooms. The coronavirus has now taken over the entire I.C.U. It’s as if all the other calamities—heart attacks, strokes, traumas, appendicitis—have evanesced on cue. A flash mob in reverse.
The I.C.U. service has spread well beyond its own floor, usurping two sections of the E.R., the endoscopy suite, the post-op units, plus another surgical ward. Walking through the E.R. that evening, I notice that every patient is hooked up to a different model of ventilator, each with its own arrangement of buttons, dials, and touch screens. These are the ventilators that averted our harrowingly close call two weeks ago. The basics are the same, but operating them is like being saddled with ten different TV remote controls.
I’m helping one of the nurses when a patient erupts into a cytokine storm—a runaway immune-system response, resulting in life-threatening inflammation. She’s already intubated, sedated, and paralyzed, but her temperature has started to jump the rails: first it’s 103.8, then 104.5, then 105.3. Three of us gingerly roll her to one side and attempt to slide an electric cooling blanket beneath her, without dislodging her breathing tube, arterial line, cardiac monitors, or I.V. drips.
Her temperature hits 106.1. We cram specimen bags with ice as quickly as we can, tucking them into her armpits, under her neck, and between her legs. They turn to water almost on contact. Her temperature is now 106.9, and her pulse has soared to a hundred and seventy.
Someone says that there’s a cooling tub, but no one knows where it is. One nurse is from the surgery department. The other is from Ohio. The patient’s temperature climbs to 107.6, then 108.2.
I’ve never seen a temperature this high in my life. It hits 108.8, and I worry that she’ll start seizing. A veteran E.R. nurse materializes like a demigod, lugging three bulging trash bags of ice, procured from who knows where. We heave the bags up over the bed rails, and they buckle across the contours of her body, the ice cubes sloshing and clanking.
Slowly, slowly the mercury eases down, settling at 103.1.
With all the commotion, the patient’s arterial line has been dislodged from her right wrist; she now needs one on the left. But the subcutaneous tissue of her arm has swollen up on either side of her hospital I.D. band. Slender friendship bracelets—beaded and braided in an assortment of colors—carve parallel lines into her skin.


newyorker--2020-10-01--How Trump Brought Home the Endless War

How Trump Brought Home the Endless War

What is under way now , during the Presidency of Donald Trump , is something different .
War—its implements , its enmities—pervades civic life .
In June , the National Guard deployed to the streets of Washington , D.C. , in the face of largely peaceful protests against police brutality and systemic racism , and active-duty troops were stationed outside the city .
“ You have to dominate , ” Trump told the nation ’ s governors .
In July , his Administration sent to Portland , Oregon , paramilitary-style agents who forced people into unmarked cars , predictably causing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off September by visiting the scene of police and paramilitary shootings in Kenosha , Wisconsin .
After making excuses for Kyle Rittenhouse , his seventeen-year-old supporter charged with using a military-style rifle to commit two homicides , Trump crowed that “ all the violence is coming from the left ” and is “ really domestic terror.
” At Tuesday ’ s debate , asked to condemn white supremacists , Trump appeared to encourage them instead , telling the far-right Proud Boys to “ stand back and stand by.
” As the war on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaders cast fellow-citizens as akin to foreign enemies .
Senators call for an “ overwhelming show of force ” against protesters with the knee-jerk zeal once reserved for distant peoples .
Endless war has not merely come home ; endless war increasingly is home .
American politics has taken on the qualities of American wars .
They think so for a reason .
American society reaped certain gains from the international struggles of the twentieth century .
Fascists in the Second World War and communists in the Cold War offered the global masses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with them spurred the United States to make sure it delivered material abundance to its own people .
From the nineteen-forties to the sixties , the United States enjoyed not only stellar rates of economic growth but also greater equality in incomes than before or since .
The Cold War played a role in this success .
Capital put a ceiling on its share of the gains ; labor remained resolutely anti-communist in return .
Then , as colonized peoples broke free of their imperial masters , U.S. leaders grew embarrassed by racist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Soviet propaganda .
As the historian Mary Dudziak has shown , some came to favor civil-rights legislation partly in order to win hearts and minds around the globe .
Even then , however , military mobilization came at a steep price .
Throughout the Second World War , the government baselessly interned around a hundred and twenty thousand persons of Japanese ancestry .
The Cold War unleashed Senator Joseph McCarthy ’ s attacks on alleged subversives and left a legacy of demagoguery and paranoia .
And , although the Cold War spurred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The result , as Dudziak argues , was a series of formal , legal improvements that could be touted abroad even as social and economic inequalities persisted at home .
Perhaps the United States would have achieved more progress , and faster , had it never mobilized against outside foes .
However one assesses the record , the domestic effect of foreign antagonism has never been straightforward .
It depends on the forces ascendant within the United States .
It also hinges on how America defines its adversary and how the two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In fighting the other , we remake ourselves .
So far , the twenty-first century looks much less auspicious than its predecessor .
The President agreed .
On September 15 , 2001 , George W. Bush declared , “ A terrorist attack designed to tear us apart has instead bound us together as a nation.
” America ’ s indulgent interlude after the Cold War had ended ; in taking up arms , the nation would find its purpose and keep the carnage away .
Bush maintained this view to the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Legion , in 2007 , “ Our strategy is this : we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.
” Becoming the dictatress of the world would renew America ’ s spirit .
Bush ’ s argument depended on the very thing that made it fail—his refusal to limit the enemy to the Al Qaeda organization that perpetrated the attacks .
Wishing to cast the United States as the liberator of mankind , Bush defined the enemy variously as terror , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was to render the United States under permanent assault and require it to wage permanent war .
Nor did President Barack Obama solve the problem by substituting Bush ’ s grandiose nouns for the lower-key “ violent extremism.
” That , too , was an ineradicable feature of the world , and Obama ’ s Administration acted accordingly .
Even after killing Osama bin Laden , the United States under Obama expanded its officially acknowledged warfighting to seven countries : Afghanistan , Iraq , Libya , Pakistan , Somalia , Syria , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s actual scope is wider ; researchers at Brown University counted fourteen countries in which U.S. troops saw combat to fight terrorism in 2017 and 2018 . )
Many Americans looked at the actions of their government and wondered who the enemy really was .
Bush and Obama maintained that America was not fighting Islam , only select malefactors who hijacked the true faith .
Yet why was the United States invading , occupying , or bombing much of the Muslim world ?
And if the enemy lay across the greater Middle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ?
In the twentieth century , American leaders advanced a plausible claim that they were acting to prevent the Axis powers and then Soviet-backed Communism from achieving world domination .
But Al Qaeda and other terrorist adversaries were different ; they threatened lives but were too weak to hold territory beyond their own region .
This time , if any power was seeking to dominate the world by force , the most obvious candidate was the United States , the sole superpower , which opted to extend its globe-spanning armaments after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost as much .
“ If we have to use force , it is because we are America ; we are the indispensable nation , ” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared , in 1998 .
“ We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.
” Albright summed up the bipartisan consensus : the United States had the right and responsibility to determine the fate of the world .
The world , in turn , consisted of either threats or wards .
They waited upon America to defeat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turned out to have other ideas .
The United States faced a crossroads from 2005 onward , once Iraqis , Afghans , Libyans , and others refused to follow America ’ s script and instead resisted violently .
Leaders and intellectuals in the United States had to explain what had gone awry .
They might have decided that the United States had acted aggressively—that it was wrong to invade and occupy countries , that those on the receiving end understandably struck back .
But they did not .
President Obama called the invasion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but not an illegal war of aggression , as the United States would have judged it had any other power launched it .
Part of the country was left to conclude that the United States was not too domineering but , rather , too meek , too willing to trust that Muslims in particular and foreigners in general would gladly receive the gift of freedom that America bestowed .
To win the war , to restore its rightful place of mastery , America would have to get tough .
Endless war began to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ border .
In “ The End of the Myth , ” the historian Greg Grandin describes two surges of anti-immigrant vigilantism .
The first came with the launch of the Minuteman Project , in 2005 , the year a majority of Americans turned against the Iraq War .
Founded by Jim Gilchrist , a Vietnam veteran , the Minuteman network claimed to seek an end to illegal immigration coming from Mexico .
Volunteers in Long Island , Kansas City , and San Clemente patrolled their communities to catch undocumented immigrants and either turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them directly .
The vigilantes located the border , as one leader put it , “ all over America.
” A second infusion occurred during Obama ’ s second term , as young service members returned from battle and Central American migration swelled .
For some , the country ’ s foreign threats melded together ; the head of the group Arizona Border Recon claimed to spot “ Somalis and Middle Eastern guys with beards and everything else ” among the border crossers .
Trump rode nativist militancy to the White House .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ radical Islamic terrorism ” and Central American migrants into a single spectre of nonwhite threat .
Two years later , as President , he warned that a caravan of migrants arriving from Central America constituted an “ invasion of our country.
” Trump declared a national emergency and ordered the U.S. military to the border .
“ Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in , ” Trump tweeted .
From the beginning of his right-wing ascent , Trump also connected African-Americans to the foreign threat .
By promulgating the lie that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ America ’ s first Black President was subverting the nation .
As soon as this summer ’ s Black Lives Matter protests began , the President and his allies treated any violence not merely as lawbreaking but as an attack on the country as grave as an outside invasion .
Four days after police killed George Floyd , Trump warned that “ when the looting starts , the shooting starts , ” a word-for-word echo of segregationists .
Then he had peaceful protesters tear-gassed in Washington ’ s Lafayette Square so that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley , the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , to be photographed holding a Bible outside St. John ’ s Episcopal Church .
The military , dispatched to the southern border two years before , took up positions in the nation ’ s capital .
In case the theatrics did not speak for themselves , the Administration did plenty of talking .
“ Most of you are weak , ” Trump told state leaders , egging them on to deploy the National Guard .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ battlespace , ” by which he meant U.S. cities .
The vocabulary of the war on terror exploded into domestic life .
Trump referred to Portland ’ s racial-justice protesters as a “ beehive of terrorists ” as he threatened to send in the National Guard to smoke them out .
The protesters “ hate our country , ” Trump said .
He called the whole situation “ worse than Afghanistan.
” It ’ s a phrase he often applies to cities with large Black populations , including Chicago , which also received @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surge ” of federal security forces .
Having come to power exploiting the fears spawned by perpetual war abroad , Trump is defining the enemy of his war at home just as expansively .
“ To stop the political violence , ” he said in Kenosha , “ we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence.
” For Trump , this allegedly radical ideology pushes “ the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist.
” The implication is that anyone who objects to police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Either you are with Trump , in other words , or you are with the terrorists .
If he loses the election in November , will he step aside in deference to those he claims would destroy the country ?
Will his supporters ?
This summer the United States entered into a condition of “ incipient insurgency , ” in the estimation of David Kilcullen , a former adviser to the Army .
The vast majority of protests associated with Black Lives Matter have been completely peaceful , but twenty violent groups @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entered the fray , in addition to individual attackers and routine shootings by police .
In the name of law and order , the President has stoked one side of the violence , encouraging toughness by police and militias and waving away the lethal conduct of Trump supporters like Kyle Rittenhouse .
The Republican National Convention made clear that Trump is no longer running against the establishment .
This time around , he is running a militant campaign against the half of the country that rejects his rule and is certain to vote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists , agitators , rioters , looters , and flag burners , that is up to them , ” Trump declared in his seventy-minute address .
He has since suggested that protesters are well funded , organized , and part of a coup to take him down .
The Department of Homeland Security indicates otherwise ; it reportedly projects that white supremacists , not left-wing radicals , will remain the most “ persistent and lethal threat ” in the United States in the next year .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cold civil war become hot ?
Has it already ?

Every generation delivers its own update to the worry, as old as democracy, that military crusades abroad will come back to damage freedom at home. The Founders of the United States, haunted by ancient Rome’s descent from republic to empire, resisted establishing a standing army. At the end of the First World War, the American Civil Liberties Union formed in opposition to mass arrests and deportations carried out by the Department of Justice. In our own time, it seemed apparent, until recently, that the main blowback of the war on terror would be the surveillance state inaugurated by the Patriot Act of 2001. Yet, while troubling, mass surveillance did not prompt most Americans to think that their country had become fundamentally unfree. The link between foreign intervention and domestic repression retained an almost metaphorical quality, as when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned, in 1821, that if it became “the dictatress of the world,” America “would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
What is under way now, during the Presidency of Donald Trump, is something different. War—its implements, its enmities—pervades civic life. In June, the National Guard deployed to the streets of Washington, D.C., in the face of largely peaceful protests against police brutality and systemic racism, and active-duty troops were stationed outside the city. “You have to dominate,” Trump told the nation’s governors. In July, his Administration sent to Portland, Oregon, paramilitary-style agents who forced people into unmarked cars, predictably causing resistance to swell. The President kicked off September by visiting the scene of police and paramilitary shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After making excuses for Kyle Rittenhouse, his seventeen-year-old supporter charged with using a military-style rifle to commit two homicides, Trump crowed that “all the violence is coming from the left” and is “really domestic terror.” At Tuesday’s debate, asked to condemn white supremacists, Trump appeared to encourage them instead, telling the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
As the war on terror loses its emotive force, American leaders cast fellow-citizens as akin to foreign enemies. Senators call for an “overwhelming show of force” against protesters with the knee-jerk zeal once reserved for distant peoples. Endless war has not merely come home; endless war increasingly is home. American politics has taken on the qualities of American wars.
According to a great deal of prevailing wisdom, this was not supposed to happen. Politicians and intellectuals often hold up America’s armed leadership of the world as one of the last remaining sources of unity at home. Inverting John Quincy Adams, they assume that global dominance is part of the solution to political division, not one of its sources.
They think so for a reason. American society reaped certain gains from the international struggles of the twentieth century. Fascists in the Second World War and communists in the Cold War offered the global masses an alluring model of modernity. Competing with them spurred the United States to make sure it delivered material abundance to its own people. From the nineteen-forties to the sixties, the United States enjoyed not only stellar rates of economic growth but also greater equality in incomes than before or since. The Cold War played a role in this success. Capital put a ceiling on its share of the gains; labor remained resolutely anti-communist in return. Then, as colonized peoples broke free of their imperial masters, U.S. leaders grew embarrassed by racist violence and segregation at home, spotlighted by Soviet propaganda. As the historian Mary Dudziak has shown, some came to favor civil-rights legislation partly in order to win hearts and minds around the globe.
Even then, however, military mobilization came at a steep price. Throughout the Second World War, the government baselessly interned around a hundred and twenty thousand persons of Japanese ancestry. The Cold War unleashed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on alleged subversives and left a legacy of demagoguery and paranoia. And, although the Cold War spurred civil-rights reforms, it also contained them. The result, as Dudziak argues, was a series of formal, legal improvements that could be touted abroad even as social and economic inequalities persisted at home. Perhaps the United States would have achieved more progress, and faster, had it never mobilized against outside foes.
However one assesses the record, the domestic effect of foreign antagonism has never been straightforward. It depends on the forces ascendant within the United States. It also hinges on how America defines its adversary and how the two define what they are competing to achieve. In fighting the other, we remake ourselves. So far, the twenty-first century looks much less auspicious than its predecessor.
Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States was fracturing. Bitter partisanship, culture wars, and economic stagnation led the writer David Brooks to travel to some red states. “Are Americans any longer a common people?” he asked. After 9/11, he answered yes, in large part because he believed the attacks were having the effect of healing the nation’s wounds. Their aftermath, Brooks concluded, “has been a bit like a national Sabbath, taking us out of our usual pleasures and distractions and reminding us what is really important.”
The President agreed. On September 15, 2001, George W. Bush declared, “A terrorist attack designed to tear us apart has instead bound us together as a nation.” America’s indulgent interlude after the Cold War had ended; in taking up arms, the nation would find its purpose and keep the carnage away. Bush maintained this view to the end of his tenure, telling the American Legion, in 2007, “Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Becoming the dictatress of the world would renew America’s spirit.
Bush’s argument depended on the very thing that made it fail—his refusal to limit the enemy to the Al Qaeda organization that perpetrated the attacks. Wishing to cast the United States as the liberator of mankind, Bush defined the enemy variously as terror, tyranny, and evil. The result was to render the United States under permanent assault and require it to wage permanent war. Nor did President Barack Obama solve the problem by substituting Bush’s grandiose nouns for the lower-key “violent extremism.” That, too, was an ineradicable feature of the world, and Obama’s Administration acted accordingly. Even after killing Osama bin Laden, the United States under Obama expanded its officially acknowledged warfighting to seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. (The war on terror’s actual scope is wider; researchers at Brown University counted fourteen countries in which U.S. troops saw combat to fight terrorism in 2017 and 2018.)
Many Americans looked at the actions of their government and wondered who the enemy really was. Bush and Obama maintained that America was not fighting Islam, only select malefactors who hijacked the true faith. Yet why was the United States invading, occupying, or bombing much of the Muslim world? And if the enemy lay across the greater Middle East, then who were “we”? In the twentieth century, American leaders advanced a plausible claim that they were acting to prevent the Axis powers and then Soviet-backed Communism from achieving world domination. But Al Qaeda and other terrorist adversaries were different; they threatened lives but were too weak to hold territory beyond their own region. This time, if any power was seeking to dominate the world by force, the most obvious candidate was the United States, the sole superpower, which opted to extend its globe-spanning armaments after the Soviet Union collapsed. Its leaders said almost as much. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared, in 1998. “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
Albright summed up the bipartisan consensus: the United States had the right and responsibility to determine the fate of the world. The world, in turn, consisted of either threats or wards. They waited upon America to defeat them or lead them.
Actual people turned out to have other ideas. The United States faced a crossroads from 2005 onward, once Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, and others refused to follow America’s script and instead resisted violently. Leaders and intellectuals in the United States had to explain what had gone awry. They might have decided that the United States had acted aggressively—that it was wrong to invade and occupy countries, that those on the receiving end understandably struck back. But they did not. President Obama called the invasion of Iraq a “dumb war” but not an illegal war of aggression, as the United States would have judged it had any other power launched it. Part of the country was left to conclude that the United States was not too domineering but, rather, too meek, too willing to trust that Muslims in particular and foreigners in general would gladly receive the gift of freedom that America bestowed. To win the war, to restore its rightful place of mastery, America would have to get tough.
This kind of war could not be confined outside the United States proper. The same categories of people whom the United States continually killed—whether construed as Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, brown, or colored—were also inside America, as citizens and immigrants. The foreign enemy could easily morph into the enemy within.
Endless war began to come home on America’s southern border. In “The End of the Myth,” the historian Greg Grandin describes two surges of anti-immigrant vigilantism. The first came with the launch of the Minuteman Project, in 2005, the year a majority of Americans turned against the Iraq War. Founded by Jim Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran, the Minuteman network claimed to seek an end to illegal immigration coming from Mexico. Volunteers in Long Island, Kansas City, and San Clemente patrolled their communities to catch undocumented immigrants and either turn them over to law enforcement or harass them directly. The vigilantes located the border, as one leader put it, “all over America.”
A second infusion occurred during Obama’s second term, as young service members returned from battle and Central American migration swelled. For some, the country’s foreign threats melded together; the head of the group Arizona Border Recon claimed to spot “Somalis and Middle Eastern guys with beards and everything else” among the border crossers. Trump rode nativist militancy to the White House. Throughout his 2016 campaign, he jumbled “radical Islamic terrorism” and Central American migrants into a single spectre of nonwhite threat. Two years later, as President, he warned that a caravan of migrants arriving from Central America constituted an “invasion of our country.” Trump declared a national emergency and ordered the U.S. military to the border. “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” Trump tweeted.
From the beginning of his right-wing ascent, Trump also connected African-Americans to the foreign threat. By promulgating the lie that Obama was foreign-born, Trump implied that America’s first Black President was subverting the nation. As soon as this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests began, the President and his allies treated any violence not merely as lawbreaking but as an attack on the country as grave as an outside invasion. Four days after police killed George Floyd, Trump warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a word-for-word echo of segregationists. Then he had peaceful protesters tear-gassed in Washington’s Lafayette Square so that he could cross the street, flanked by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be photographed holding a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church. The military, dispatched to the southern border two years before, took up positions in the nation’s capital.
In case the theatrics did not speak for themselves, the Administration did plenty of talking. “Most of you are weak,” Trump told state leaders, egging them on to deploy the National Guard. Esper urged them to “dominate the battlespace,” by which he meant U.S. cities. The vocabulary of the war on terror exploded into domestic life. Trump referred to Portland’s racial-justice protesters as a “beehive of terrorists” as he threatened to send in the National Guard to smoke them out. The protesters “hate our country,” Trump said. He called the whole situation “worse than Afghanistan.” It’s a phrase he often applies to cities with large Black populations, including Chicago, which also received what the President characterized as a “surge” of federal security forces.


newyorker--2020-10-01--Preserving Vegetables for Winter Is a Balm

I ’ ve been preparing , though I ’ m not exactly sure for what .
I stand at my kitchen counter for hours at a time , nights in a row , washing , trimming , shelling , chopping , shearing , packing in oil , in vinegar , combining , freezing—until the soles of my feet ache .
I feel like a marionette strung from my kitchen ceiling , and I keep wondering , Am I preparing for winter ?
For illness ?
For a fresh round of quarantine ?
For the end of the world ?
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ particular , and maybe a little bit of each .
I ’ m responding to something less rational , more like a lunar stirring , independent of earthly details .
Culinarily speaking , this is the time of year to prepare , and this year , more than in the past , I can ’ t rest until it is done .
The irrational part of my brain believes—it seems to , anyway—that my household ’ s security depends on having an abundance of dumpling ingredients ready in the freezer .
It took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the dumpling wrappers and then hours at my cutting board producing several cups of a combination of finely chopped ginger and scallions or garlic chives , plus another two cups of finely chopped ginger on its own .
In addition to serving as a base for good dumplings , thawed and combined with ground pork or shrimp or tofu , these ingredients double as a beginning to countless other dishes—stir-fries , stews , what have you—that , realistically , I ’ ll make more often than dumplings .
But now , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the freezer , I can allow myself to feel something like calm .
Though I don ’ t know when I ’ ll next be serving dinner to anyone but my family of three , I have bought and shelled sixty pounds of fresh cranberry beans and stored them in the freezer in small bags .
The shelling , which took place on my front porch , was a blur ; by the second day , face-masked neighbors were stopping by to help .
They probably wondered , Why would anyone put their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gordo dried beans are so good ?
The answer is that , simply put , fresh beans are fast food , whether or not you have a special pot or recipe or trick .
They ’ ve never been dried , so they don ’ t need soaking , and they take between thirty and forty minutes to cook in a regular pot .
They ’ re creamy and miraculous and warming and so versatile that you can eat them a different way every week for as long as you have little bags @ @ @ @ @ @ @ took planning , but cooking them won ’ t .
With the exception of whole tomatoes , which are indisputably great blanched and peeled and pressure-jarred , the best way I know of to store vegetables in the nightshade family is in fat .
When you replace the water in watery vegetables with olive oil , you achieve a miracle of flavor : the intense acidity and sweetness and savor of the vegetable combined with the deep and pleasurable richness of good fat .
This principle is put to work in my kitchen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preserved in olive oil and on little fairy-tale eggplants roasted in a combination of olive oil , wine , and vinegar .
The tomatoes I cook , on racks with herbs and salt , in a low oven—which means sitting in the kitchen with a glass of wine past midnight and getting back to it over coffee the next morning—then pack in jars , covered in more olive oil .
Kept in the refrigerator , they last for a few months , which is enough time to miss tomatoes and be grateful for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are simpler and more essential .
They go into a wide , lidded pot in a single layer or so , with lots of thyme and rosemary and a bay leaf and whole cloves of garlic .
Then , covered in a combination of olive oil and vinegar and wine , they both pickle and get internally larded .
They absorb enough oil that when you pack them in jars , after they cool , the fat will form a seal on top , protecting the little eggplants for months and months .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ mania , I made these with leftover mignonette sauce , instead of wine and vinegar .
They were irreproachable .
Of course , vinegar alone is a vital preservative .
I have not yet finished pickling the twenty pounds of hot and extra-hot chilies that I bought , in bulk , from a Massachusetts farm .
Chopping the chilies is the only hard part of the process , requiring gloves and shallow breathing .
Otherwise , it couldn ’ t be easier : combine distilled vinegar , half as much water , equal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it all a quick boil .
I already have a full case of pickled chilies crammed in my office refrigerator , but I will make more , probably late one night , because I ’ ve never had too many .
Then , I think , I will be ready .
• A few whole sprigs each thyme and rosemary 2 .
Place all ingredients in a shallow , heavy , oven-safe pot large enough to hold eggplant in nearly a single layer .
Bake , covered , for about 35 minutes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the oven temperature up to 400 degrees and uncover .
Cook for about 25 minutes more , until much of the liquid is gone and eggplant has just begun to brown and sink into the cooking liquid .
3 .
Allow to cool .
Serve at room temperature , or store eggplant in its liquid , in the refrigerator , for weeks and weeks .

I’ve been preparing, though I’m not exactly sure for what. I stand at my kitchen counter for hours at a time, nights in a row, washing, trimming, shelling, chopping, shearing, packing in oil, in vinegar, combining, freezing—until the soles of my feet ache. I feel like a marionette strung from my kitchen ceiling, and I keep wondering, Am I preparing for winter? For illness? For a fresh round of quarantine? For the end of the world? The answer is not any one thing in particular, and maybe a little bit of each. I’m responding to something less rational, more like a lunar stirring, independent of earthly details. Culinarily speaking, this is the time of year to prepare, and this year, more than in the past, I can’t rest until it is done.
The irrational part of my brain believes—it seems to, anyway—that my household’s security depends on having an abundance of dumpling ingredients ready in the freezer. It took a whole afternoon to drive to Albany for the dumpling wrappers and then hours at my cutting board producing several cups of a combination of finely chopped ginger and scallions or garlic chives, plus another two cups of finely chopped ginger on its own. In addition to serving as a base for good dumplings, thawed and combined with ground pork or shrimp or tofu, these ingredients double as a beginning to countless other dishes—stir-fries, stews, what have you—that, realistically, I’ll make more often than dumplings. But now, with the pieces and parts stacked neatly in the freezer, I can allow myself to feel something like calm.
Though I don’t know when I’ll next be serving dinner to anyone but my family of three, I have bought and shelled sixty pounds of fresh cranberry beans and stored them in the freezer in small bags. The shelling, which took place on my front porch, was a blur; by the second day, face-masked neighbors were stopping by to help. They probably wondered, Why would anyone put their neighborhood through this labor, when Rancho Gordo dried beans are so good? The answer is that, simply put, fresh beans are fast food, whether or not you have a special pot or recipe or trick. They’ve never been dried, so they don’t need soaking, and they take between thirty and forty minutes to cook in a regular pot. They’re creamy and miraculous and warming and so versatile that you can eat them a different way every week for as long as you have little bags in your freezer. Putting them by took planning, but cooking them won’t.
With the exception of whole tomatoes, which are indisputably great blanched and peeled and pressure-jarred, the best way I know of to store vegetables in the nightshade family is in fat. When you replace the water in watery vegetables with olive oil, you achieve a miracle of flavor: the intense acidity and sweetness and savor of the vegetable combined with the deep and pleasurable richness of good fat. This principle is put to work in my kitchen annually, on cherry tomatoes slow-roasted and preserved in olive oil and on little fairy-tale eggplants roasted in a combination of olive oil, wine, and vinegar. The tomatoes I cook, on racks with herbs and salt, in a low oven—which means sitting in the kitchen with a glass of wine past midnight and getting back to it over coffee the next morning—then pack in jars, covered in more olive oil. Kept in the refrigerator, they last for a few months, which is enough time to miss tomatoes and be grateful for the reminder of them. The eggplants are simpler and more essential. They go into a wide, lidded pot in a single layer or so, with lots of thyme and rosemary and a bay leaf and whole cloves of garlic. Then, covered in a combination of olive oil and vinegar and wine, they both pickle and get internally larded. They absorb enough oil that when you pack them in jars, after they cool, the fat will form a seal on top, protecting the little eggplants for months and months. One time, before my current preserving mania, I made these with leftover mignonette sauce, instead of wine and vinegar. They were irreproachable.
Of course, vinegar alone is a vital preservative. I have not yet finished pickling the twenty pounds of hot and extra-hot chilies that I bought, in bulk, from a Massachusetts farm. Chopping the chilies is the only hard part of the process, requiring gloves and shallow breathing. Otherwise, it couldn’t be easier: combine distilled vinegar, half as much water, equal parts sugar and salt, and give it all a quick boil. I already have a full case of pickled chilies crammed in my office refrigerator, but I will make more, probably late one night, because I’ve never had too many. Then, I think, I will be ready.
Preserved Eggplant
(Adapted from “Something Old, Something New.”)
Makes 1 or 2 quart-size jars
Ingredients
1 pound little fairy-tale eggplants
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup red-wine vinegar
¼ cup water
¼ cup white wine
A few whole sprigs each thyme and rosemary
3 cloves garlic, unpeeled
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp. kosher salt
⅛ tsp. fresh or dried coriander seeds
Directions
1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Place all ingredients in a shallow, heavy, oven-safe pot large enough to hold eggplant in nearly a single layer. Bake, covered, for about 35 minutes, until eggplant is quite tender. Turn the oven temperature up to 400 degrees and uncover. Cook for about 25 minutes more, until much of the liquid is gone and eggplant has just begun to brown and sink into the cooking liquid.
3. Allow to cool. Serve at room temperature, or store eggplant in its liquid, in the refrigerator, for weeks and weeks.


Data 4 Sale

Sure , we ’ re not the biggest cobbler in the St. Louis area , but we ’ ve collected some pretty sweet data that we ’ re certain corporate America will want a piece of .
For instance , we know precisely how many of our customers had their loafers shined last month .
It was seven .
Full disclosure : we ’ re not a hundred per cent clear on how to sell user data for profit , but we ’ re working on figuring it out .
Our son Ronnie is stopping by this weekend to pick @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s pretty good at computers .
I ’ m sure he ’ ll help us design a vast data-mining operation with tentacles extending across the globe .
Last time , he showed us how to do emoji !
Look , we get that Facebook has a near-comprehensive global database of facial-recognition analytics , but we can tell you who in the greater St. Louis area likes wingtips .
Then you can hit them with some targeted ads for more wingtips !
You know , assuming they want a second pair of wingtips @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but , hey , we ’ re oxford folks .
What we ’ re offering isn ’ t just some unwieldy data dump that takes hundreds of man-hours to sift through .
On the contrary , we can pinpoint specific individuals and tell you everything you ever wanted to know about their shoe preferences .
For instance , James Lankford wears size 11s , and he has arch problems .
He also recently bought an odor-fighting insole , so that tells us either he or his wife has smelly feet .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ galoshes where that came from .
Just so you know , not all of our sales data is available online , because we print out our receipts and store them in the office .
But , if you slip us a few extra bucks , you can check out the shoebox where we keep them while we ’ re out on our lunch break .
We ’ ll tell Sharon that you ’ ll be there , so she won ’ t make a fuss .
You can even make copies at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ got a Xerox machine that does color copies when it ’ s not on the fritz .
But it ’ s not just shoe-related data .
We also sell belts !
So we ’ re sitting on a treasure trove of information about how our customers keep their pants up .
If they haven ’ t bought a belt , then , logically , they must use suspenders , or some kind of pulley system .
Unless they just roll the dice each day that their pants won ’ t fall down .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ case , they ’ re probably too reckless to market products of any kind to .
Still not convinced ?
Then it ’ s time to sweeten the deal .
We share an office with a tailor and sometimes overhear the seamstress talking on the phone to fabric wholesalers .
That ’ s right , she discusses everything from garment lining to needle preferences .
And you ’ d better believe we know which customers pick up their dry-cleaning without bringing their ticket .
The details will blow your hair back .
On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not interested in our data , however , just know that there ’ s no better place than Ernie ’ s to pick up replacement shoelace casings .
They ’ re called aglets , and they ’ re priced to move !

These days, it seems like everyone is concerned about their privacy on the Internet. Mega-companies are taking people’s data and selling it to the highest bidder, making billions in the process. And, frankly, we at Ernie’s Shoe Repair would love to get in on the action.
Sure, we’re not the biggest cobbler in the St. Louis area, but we’ve collected some pretty sweet data that we’re certain corporate America will want a piece of. For instance, we know precisely how many of our customers had their loafers shined last month.
It was seven.
Full disclosure: we’re not a hundred per cent clear on how to sell user data for profit, but we’re working on figuring it out. Our son Ronnie is stopping by this weekend to pick up his dirt bike, and he’s pretty good at computers. I’m sure he’ll help us design a vast data-mining operation with tentacles extending across the globe. Last time, he showed us how to do emoji!
Look, we get that Facebook has a near-comprehensive global database of facial-recognition analytics, but we can tell you who in the greater St. Louis area likes wingtips. Then you can hit them with some targeted ads for more wingtips! You know, assuming they want a second pair of wingtips. Seems a bit pretentious to us, but, hey, we’re oxford folks.
What we’re offering isn’t just some unwieldy data dump that takes hundreds of man-hours to sift through. On the contrary, we can pinpoint specific individuals and tell you everything you ever wanted to know about their shoe preferences. For instance, James Lankford wears size 11s, and he has arch problems. He also recently bought an odor-fighting insole, so that tells us either he or his wife has smelly feet.
There’s a lot more data about galoshes where that came from.
Just so you know, not all of our sales data is available online, because we print out our receipts and store them in the office. But, if you slip us a few extra bucks, you can check out the shoebox where we keep them while we’re out on our lunch break. We’ll tell Sharon that you’ll be there, so she won’t make a fuss. You can even make copies at the pharmacy next door! They’ve got a Xerox machine that does color copies when it’s not on the fritz.
But it’s not just shoe-related data. We also sell belts! So we’re sitting on a treasure trove of information about how our customers keep their pants up. If they haven’t bought a belt, then, logically, they must use suspenders, or some kind of pulley system. Unless they just roll the dice each day that their pants won’t fall down. But, if that’s the case, they’re probably too reckless to market products of any kind to.
Still not convinced? Then it’s time to sweeten the deal. We share an office with a tailor and sometimes overhear the seamstress talking on the phone to fabric wholesalers. That’s right, she discusses everything from garment lining to needle preferences. And you’d better believe we know which customers pick up their dry-cleaning without bringing their ticket.
The details will blow your hair back.
On the off chance that you’re not interested in our data, however, just know that there’s no better place than Ernie’s to pick up replacement shoelace casings. They’re called aglets, and they’re priced to move!


newyorker--2020-10-01--ZZ Packer Reads Lesley Nneka Arimah

ZZ Packer Reads Lesley Nneka Arimah

ZZ Packer joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “ Who Will Greet You at Home , ” by Lesley @ @ @ @ @ in a 2015 issue of the magazine .
Packer ’ s story collection , “ @ @ @ @ @ was published in 2003 .

Audio available Listen to this story
Photograph by Marion Ettlinger
ZZ Packer joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Who Will Greet You at Home,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah, which appeared in a 2015 issue of the magazine. Packer’s story collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” was published in 2003.