newyorker--2020-05-18--Where Do Eels Come From?

Where Do Eels Come From?

In the spring of 1876 , a young man of nineteen arrived in the seaside city of Trieste and set about a curious task .
Every morning , as the fishermen brought in their catch , he went to meet them at the port , where he bought eels by the dozens and then the hundreds .
He carried them home , to a dissection table in a corner of his room , and—from eight until noon , when he broke for lunch , and then again from one until six , when he quit for the day and went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the street—he diligently slashed away , in search of gonads .
“ My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures , ” he wrote to a friend .
“ All I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue , which haunts my dreams , and all I can think about are the big questions , the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries—the universal , pivotal questions.
” The young man , whose name was Sigmund Freud , eventually followed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But in Trieste , elbow-deep in slime , he hoped to be the first person to find what men of science had been seeking for thousands of years : the testicles of an eel .
To see them would be to begin to solve a profound mystery , one that had stumped Aristotle and countless successors throughout the history of natural science : Where do eels come from ?
The nineteenth century had brought Darwin and Mendel , Pasteur and Mendeleev , and a growing sense that scientists ( a word coined only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ studies and their systems and their microscopes , were at last equal to solving the great quandaries of the natural world .
Questions that had befuddled mankind for centuries—where life comes from , what it is made of , how it changes , why it ends—were now seen as knowable , quantifiable , explicable .
Just two years before Freud arrived in Trieste , the German biologist Max Schultze , lying on his deathbed , observed , perhaps wistfully , that he was leaving a world where “ all the important questions .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ All of them , that is , “ except the eel question.
” What could be more ordinary than an eel ?
Not so long ago , European eels , Anguilla anguilla , were widely eaten .
In Sweden , they might be smoked , braised in beer , or fried in butter ; in Italy , boiled in tomato sauce ; in England , jellied in stock , or fried with eggs into an elver cake .
They were a simple and abundant food enjoyed by members of the poorer classes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ King Lear ” who accidentally puts them in a pie still alive .
People caught eels in brooks , rivers , lakes , the sea .
They also caught them , inexplicably , in ponds that dried out and refilled each year , and that had no access to other bodies of water .
They couldn ’ t help but notice that the creatures seemed to have no ovaries , no testicles , no eggs , no milt .
That they were never observed to mate .
That they sometimes seemed to issue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unaccountable , and so , writes the Swedish journalist Patrik Svensson in “ The Book of Eels ” ( Ecco ) , an unusual and beguiling guide to an unusual and beguiling animal , it fell to us to try our best to account for them .
The ancient Egyptians believed that eels were produced by the sun warming the Nile ; Aristotle decided that eels emerged spontaneously from mud and rainwater .
Pliny the Elder thought that new eels developed when old eels rubbed away parts of their bodies on rocks .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scottish author espoused an old belief that they began their lives as beetles .
“ Some believed eels were born of sea-foam , ” Svensson writes , “ or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew that covered lakeshores and riverbanks in the spring .
In the English countryside , where eel fishing was popular , most people adhered to the theory that eels were born when hairs from horses ’ tails fell into the water.
” The truth emerged only slowly , and was , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than the fiction .
Careful observers discovered that what had long been taken for several different kinds of animals were in fact just one .
The eel was a creature of metamorphosis , transforming itself over the course of its life into four distinct beings : a tiny gossamer larva with huge eyes , floating toward Europe in the open sea ; a shimmering glass eel , known as an elver , a few inches in length with visible insides , making its way along coasts and up rivers ; a yellow-brown eel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ponds , which can move across dry land , hibernate in mud until you ’ ve forgotten it was ever there , and live quietly for half a century in a single place ; and , finally , the silver eel , a long , powerful muscle that ripples its way back to sea .
When this last metamorphosis happens , the eel ’ s stomach dissolves—it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone—and its reproductive organs develop for the first time .
In the eels of Europe , no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did not yet exist .
But , even as these answers were arrived at , “ the eel question , ” as it was widely known , proved to be as changeable as the eel .
It seemed to be forever unsolvable , for behind any eel answer there was always another eel question , shrouded by more layers of mystery .
“ We know , then , that the old eels vanish from our ken into the sea , and that the sea sends us in return innumerable hosts of elvers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wrote .
“ But whither have they wandered , these old eels , and whence have the elvers come ?
” Schmidt became consumed by his questions ; in 1904 , he left his family in Copenhagen and set out to scour the seas for the very smallest of eels .
For seven years , he trawled the coasts of Europe , but found only larger larvae .
For another three years , he enlisted shipping companies to net larvae as they plied the North Atlantic , and turned his own schooner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he mapped the ocean according to which parts of it contained eel larvae , and how large those larvae were , until the tiniest ones led him to their point of origin .
It was a slow process , made slower by a shipwreck and a world war .
Finally , nineteen years after he first set out , Schmidt announced his findings .
“ How long the journey lasts we can not say , ” he wrote , summoning the grandeur warranted by the occasion .
“ But we know now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ situated in the western Atlantic , N.E .
and N. of the West Indies .
Here lie the breeding grounds of the eel.
” Schmidt had traced the Anguilla anguilla to the Sargasso Sea—a sea within a sea , a garden of seaweed bounded not by land but by great currents of water .
( The American eel breeds there as well , and it is still something of a mystery how the larvae , all mixed together but genetically distinct , know which continent is their future home .
The Japanese eel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Pacific , and another famous freshwater eel , the electric one of South America , is not actually an eel at all ; it ’ s a knifefish . )
Schmidt ’ s discovery was an answer , and , in the past century , no one has successfully challenged it ; that European eels come from the Sargasso Sea remains the official word of science .
But , as with that sea and the animal born there , the boundaries of this knowledge are fluid and strange .
Many expeditions have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the decades since , each with better technology than the last .
They , too , have found plenty of larvae , but , when one expedition collected and examined seven thousand fish eggs , not one of them turned out to be from an eel .
Scientists have put G.P.S .
trackers on silver eels beginning their migration ; they ’ ve used hormones to bring females into heat , transported them to the breeding grounds , and attached them to buoys to use their pheromones as bait .
They have dropped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stomachs of predators .
And yet no one has ever seen Anguilla anguilla mating anywhere , or so much as set eyes on a mature eel , living or dead , in the Sargasso Sea .
When Svensson was a child , in Sweden , he spent many evenings with his father , a road paver , on the banks of a stream that ran past his father ’ s childhood home .
Together , as dusk fell , they would rig and bait their lines and throw them into the stream , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bats .
At sunrise , they checked to see which hooks had been taken by yellow-brown eels , which they collected in buckets and ate fried or boiled .
( His father relished the taste , but Svensson found it nauseating ; it was the fishing , and the time with his father , that he loved . )
He describes his father as a thoughtful man , “ fascinated by all the strange and wonderful forms life took , ” but most of all by the peculiarity of eels : “ ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ Dad would say .
And he always seemed mildly delighted when he said it .
As though he needed the mystery .
As though it filled some kind of emptiness in him .
”

In the spring of 1876, a young man of nineteen arrived in the seaside city of Trieste and set about a curious task. Every morning, as the fishermen brought in their catch, he went to meet them at the port, where he bought eels by the dozens and then the hundreds. He carried them home, to a dissection table in a corner of his room, and—from eight until noon, when he broke for lunch, and then again from one until six, when he quit for the day and went to ogle the women of Trieste on the street—he diligently slashed away, in search of gonads.
“My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures,” he wrote to a friend. “All I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue, which haunts my dreams, and all I can think about are the big questions, the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries—the universal, pivotal questions.”
The young man, whose name was Sigmund Freud, eventually followed his evolving questions in other directions. But in Trieste, elbow-deep in slime, he hoped to be the first person to find what men of science had been seeking for thousands of years: the testicles of an eel. To see them would be to begin to solve a profound mystery, one that had stumped Aristotle and countless successors throughout the history of natural science: Where do eels come from?
The nineteenth century had brought Darwin and Mendel, Pasteur and Mendeleev, and a growing sense that scientists (a word coined only in the eighteen-thirties), with their studies and their systems and their microscopes, were at last equal to solving the great quandaries of the natural world. Questions that had befuddled mankind for centuries—where life comes from, what it is made of, how it changes, why it ends—were now seen as knowable, quantifiable, explicable. Just two years before Freud arrived in Trieste, the German biologist Max Schultze, lying on his deathbed, observed, perhaps wistfully, that he was leaving a world where “all the important questions . . . had now been settled.” All of them, that is, “except the eel question.”
What could be more ordinary than an eel? Not so long ago, European eels, Anguilla anguilla, were widely eaten. In Sweden, they might be smoked, braised in beer, or fried in butter; in Italy, boiled in tomato sauce; in England, jellied in stock, or fried with eggs into an elver cake. They were a simple and abundant food enjoyed by members of the poorer classes, like the Cockney woman described in “King Lear” who accidentally puts them in a pie still alive.
People caught eels in brooks, rivers, lakes, the sea. They also caught them, inexplicably, in ponds that dried out and refilled each year, and that had no access to other bodies of water. They couldn’t help but notice that the creatures seemed to have no ovaries, no testicles, no eggs, no milt. That they were never observed to mate. That they sometimes seemed to issue from the earth itself. Eels were unaccountable, and so, writes the Swedish journalist Patrik Svensson in “The Book of Eels” (Ecco), an unusual and beguiling guide to an unusual and beguiling animal, it fell to us to try our best to account for them.
The ancient Egyptians believed that eels were produced by the sun warming the Nile; Aristotle decided that eels emerged spontaneously from mud and rainwater. Pliny the Elder thought that new eels developed when old eels rubbed away parts of their bodies on rocks. As late as the eighteen-sixties, a Scottish author espoused an old belief that they began their lives as beetles. “Some believed eels were born of sea-foam,” Svensson writes, “or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew that covered lakeshores and riverbanks in the spring. In the English countryside, where eel fishing was popular, most people adhered to the theory that eels were born when hairs from horses’ tails fell into the water.”
The truth emerged only slowly, and was, in its own slippery way, stranger than the fiction. Careful observers discovered that what had long been taken for several different kinds of animals were in fact just one. The eel was a creature of metamorphosis, transforming itself over the course of its life into four distinct beings: a tiny gossamer larva with huge eyes, floating toward Europe in the open sea; a shimmering glass eel, known as an elver, a few inches in length with visible insides, making its way along coasts and up rivers; a yellow-brown eel, the kind you might catch in ponds, which can move across dry land, hibernate in mud until you’ve forgotten it was ever there, and live quietly for half a century in a single place; and, finally, the silver eel, a long, powerful muscle that ripples its way back to sea. When this last metamorphosis happens, the eel’s stomach dissolves—it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone—and its reproductive organs develop for the first time. In the eels of Europe, no one could find those organs because they did not yet exist.
But, even as these answers were arrived at, “the eel question,” as it was widely known, proved to be as changeable as the eel. It seemed to be forever unsolvable, for behind any eel answer there was always another eel question, shrouded by more layers of mystery.
“We know, then, that the old eels vanish from our ken into the sea, and that the sea sends us in return innumerable hosts of elvers,” a Danish searcher, Johannes Schmidt, wrote. “But whither have they wandered, these old eels, and whence have the elvers come?” Schmidt became consumed by his questions; in 1904, he left his family in Copenhagen and set out to scour the seas for the very smallest of eels. For seven years, he trawled the coasts of Europe, but found only larger larvae. For another three years, he enlisted shipping companies to net larvae as they plied the North Atlantic, and turned his own schooner west and south. Net by net, he mapped the ocean according to which parts of it contained eel larvae, and how large those larvae were, until the tiniest ones led him to their point of origin. It was a slow process, made slower by a shipwreck and a world war. Finally, nineteen years after he first set out, Schmidt announced his findings. “How long the journey lasts we cannot say,” he wrote, summoning the grandeur warranted by the occasion. “But we know now the destination sought: a certain area situated in the western Atlantic, N.E. and N. of the West Indies. Here lie the breeding grounds of the eel.”
“But, Mommy, we just played find your glasses this morning.” Cartoon by Suzy Becker Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Schmidt had traced the Anguilla anguilla to the Sargasso Sea—a sea within a sea, a garden of seaweed bounded not by land but by great currents of water. (The American eel breeds there as well, and it is still something of a mystery how the larvae, all mixed together but genetically distinct, know which continent is their future home. The Japanese eel has its own breeding grounds, in the Pacific, and another famous freshwater eel, the electric one of South America, is not actually an eel at all; it’s a knifefish.) Schmidt’s discovery was an answer, and, in the past century, no one has successfully challenged it; that European eels come from the Sargasso Sea remains the official word of science. But, as with that sea and the animal born there, the boundaries of this knowledge are fluid and strange. Many expeditions have followed Schmidt to the breeding grounds in the decades since, each with better technology than the last. They, too, have found plenty of larvae, but, when one expedition collected and examined seven thousand fish eggs, not one of them turned out to be from an eel. Scientists have put G.P.S. trackers on silver eels beginning their migration; they’ve used hormones to bring females into heat, transported them to the breeding grounds, and attached them to buoys to use their pheromones as bait. They have dropped microphones into the water and opened the stomachs of predators. And yet no one has ever seen Anguilla anguilla mating anywhere, or so much as set eyes on a mature eel, living or dead, in the Sargasso Sea.
When Svensson was a child, in Sweden, he spent many evenings with his father, a road paver, on the banks of a stream that ran past his father’s childhood home. Together, as dusk fell, they would rig and bait their lines and throw them into the stream, then drive home to the swooping of bats. At sunrise, they checked to see which hooks had been taken by yellow-brown eels, which they collected in buckets and ate fried or boiled. (His father relished the taste, but Svensson found it nauseating; it was the fishing, and the time with his father, that he loved.) He describes his father as a thoughtful man, “fascinated by all the strange and wonderful forms life took,” but most of all by the peculiarity of eels: “ ‘They’re odd, eels,’ Dad would say. And he always seemed mildly delighted when he said it. As though he needed the mystery. As though it filled some kind of emptiness in him.”
Once, the pair tried an old Swedish fishing method that involved stringing lots of worms on a thread and then rolling them “into a quivering, stinking ball of slime and secretions and writhing bodies.” To catch the necessary worms, Svensson’s father attached electric cables to the prongs of a pitchfork sunk into a freshly watered lawn, creating a surge of electricity that brought a wave of panicked worms wriggling to the surface. With the worm ball, they caught eel after eel, more than they’d ever caught before, “like pulling carrots out of a vegetable patch.” But they didn’t do it again. There was no struggle in it, no mystery or chance or solemnity. “It didn’t tally with what we wanted the eel to be,” Svensson muses. “Maybe we had gotten too close to it.”
Svensson’s book, like its subject, is a strange beast: a creature of metamorphosis, a shape-shifter that moves among realms. It is a book of natural history, and a memoir about a son and his father. It is also an exploration of literature and religion and custom, and what it means to live in a world full of questions we can’t always answer. Svensson writes on page 1 that the eel “eludes the usual measures of the world,” and as the book progresses he begins to see other things as similarly elusive. He has seen eels that appear to be dead but are not, and eels that really are dead—chopped up and frying in butter, even—but still move as though they were alive. “To the eel, death seemed relative,” he writes. He has learned that the timing of an eel’s final transformation, the one that brings it to both its own death and the birth of the next generation, seems to be unrelated to time itself: eels might feel the pull to return to the sea after eight years inland, or after nearly sixty, or never, remaining behind in a sort of suspended animation. The eels that travel together across the ocean might be at the same stage of life, yet decades apart in age. Svensson is captivated by the implications of this. “You have to ask yourself: How does a creature like that perceive time?” he wonders.
Svensson’s grandmother was a believer in both God and gnomes. His father was not a believer, and neither is Svensson; their skepticism faltered “only where the eel was concerned.” When his grandmother was dying, she told Svensson, “I will always be with you,” and he immediately trusted her: “I didn’t need to believe in God to believe that.” Eventually, Svensson’s father became sick with cancer, likely a result of his years paving roads, breathing in the steam of asphalt. In the summers before the diagnosis, Svensson had often visited him. “We drank coffee, and talked about eels we’d caught and eels we’d lost and not much else,” he writes. As his father faded, Svensson lingered over the mysteries of time and existence, the watery border between death and life. He read Rachel Carson, who kept a tank of eels in her office and made an eel named Anguilla a protagonist of her first book, “Under the Sea-Wind.” Anguilla lived in the pleasantly warm mud of a pond, “beyond all reminders of the sea” that another of her selves once knew. Still, one day, she felt the urge to depart her current life, her current self, to transform and make her way through “frigid waters, deliberate and inexorable as time itself,” to a place where no one could follow. “No one can trace the path of the eels,” Carson wrote.


newyorker--2020-05-18--Will the Coronavirus Make Us Rethink Mass Incarceration?

On March 14th , Roslyn Crouch , a mother of twelve , left her house in New Orleans to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods , and didn ’ t return .
Crouch , who is forty-two , with slender braids down to her knees , had been feeling anxious about the spread of the coronavirus .
At home , she cared for her elderly mother , and for a half-dozen children , including a son with sickle-cell anemia , a blood disorder .
She herself had chronic bronchitis , and worried that it put her at risk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ access to high-quality medical care .
( Black residents of Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic ; they make up about thirty per cent of the state ’ s population , but account for almost sixty per cent of documented deaths from the virus . )
She thought , This is some serious stuff .
After scrolling through a few too many coronavirus stories on her phone that Saturday morning , she got dressed , spritzed herself with her favorite perfume , A Thousand Wishes , and drove to a dollar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to buy shelter-in-place supplies .
On the way , Crouch failed to stop at a stop sign in Jefferson Parish and was pulled over by the police .
She was then arrested for a string of petty crimes , including driving without proper registration and with a stolen license plate that police valued at twenty-five dollars .
The most serious charge resulted from a nine-year-old warrant for possession of marijuana .
As Crouch was put in the back of a police car , with Kyi , she pleaded with the arresting officers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worked as a security guard .
Tae sped across the Mississippi River , arriving just in time to pry her sobbing little brother from the police car and prevent him from being turned over to child-protective services .
“ I call him Hip Baby , because he ’ s attached to my mom ’ s hip , ” Tae told me .
She took Kyi home , but it was “ hell on earth trying to tame him without her.
” The cops drove Crouch to the Jefferson Parish jail .
In late @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Louisiana had the fastest-growing coronavirus infection rate in the world .
According to state reports at the end of last year , Louisiana also had the highest incarceration rate in the country .
The pandemic posed an immediate threat in the state ’ s jails , where cells are crowded and poorly sanitized , and people frequently cycle in and out of custody .
Since 2013 , the main jail in Orleans Parish has been under a consent decree for what the Department of Justice called “ dangerous and unacceptable ” conditions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prisons , too , present a contagion risk ; they have less rapid turnover than jails , but staff come and go , and large populations and underfunded health services make outbreaks hard to contain .
Ben Smith , who served thirteen years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary , commonly known as Angola , remembers how quickly infections passed through the prison each year .
Lacking accessible treatment , men devised remedies using instant soup , garlic , oranges , and peppermint leaves .
Smith—who now works for the First 72+ , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after incarceration—worried about his friends who were still inside , among them an older man with Stage IV colon cancer who was nearing parole .
“ Imagine a prisoner serving a life sentence , with age on him .
If he got the virus , would they choose to give him a ventilator ?
” Smith asked .
“ It ’ s a very , very contagious virus .
Now you could be sentenced to death.
” At the Jefferson Parish jail , Crouch shared an intake cell with four other women .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for sleeping , and the only source of drinking water was a faucet above a toilet without a lid , where some of Crouch ’ s cellmates , apparently detoxing from drugs , spent the night vomiting .
She draped an extra sleeping mat over her body , hoping that it would shield her from germs , but a guard chastised her—one person , one mat , she was told .
Crouch asked the guards , “ Y ’ all sure those ladies don ’ t have the virus ?
” By the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phone , she was crying .
She told her daughter , “ I ’ ve got to get out of here before this virus gets me.
” For decades , community groups have pointed out the social costs of mass incarceration : its failure to address the root causes of addiction and violence ; its steep fiscal price tag ; its deepening of racial inequalities .
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed another danger of the system : its public-health risks .
In April , the American Civil Liberties Union worked with epidemiologists and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measures in jails and prisons , including rapid reductions in incarcerated populations , the virus could kill an additional hundred thousand Americans .
Families of the incarcerated—along with national legal organizations , grassroots groups , and religious leaders—began to push for mass releases , focussing on defendants arrested for nonviolent offenses , those nearing the ends of their sentences , and the medically vulnerable .
In Philadelphia , outside the Criminal Justice Center , protesters lined up coffins to mark the coronavirus-related death of a woman who had been eligible to be released @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ohio , they wore masks reading “ 20K by May , ” the number of releases they were demanding .
A team based at U.C.L.A.
’ s law school started a spreadsheet to track such actions , calling itself the Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project .
By mid-May , it had tallied more than five hundred legal filings and court orders , along with dozens of protests .
Some efforts accomplished in weeks or months what activists had been working toward for decades , leading to large experiments in decarceration .
Since @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jail population by nearly forty per cent , and California has made plans to release thousands of people from state prisons .
In New Jersey , the State Supreme Court authorized the release of as many as a thousand detainees from county jails .
Each week in April , the federal-prison population declined by around a thousand people ; by May , it had reached its lowest level in two decades .
In dozens of cities , cops were ordered to make fewer arrests , district attorneys dropped low-level charges , and judges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other minor infractions .
“ Advocates on the ground have been challenging mass incarceration for so long—and now much of what we ’ ve been calling for , pre-COVID-19 , we ’ re seeing it transpire , ” Patrisse Cullors , the co-founder of Black Lives Matter , told me , from Los Angeles , where she ’ s been organizing for releases with Reform L.A. Jails .
“ At the local , state , and national level , this is a moment when we can collectively transform how our country relates to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ occurred in Santa Clara County , California , where the country ’ s first coronavirus deaths were recorded .
Raj Jayadev runs Silicon Valley De-Bug , a grassroots group that helps incarcerated people devise creative strategies to fight their cases .
Some eighty per cent of people in the county jail are awaiting trial , often because they can ’ t afford bail .
At weekly De-Bug meetings , families put together “ social biography packets , ” stuffed with personal photos , letters , and eight-to-ten-minute videos , to present a fuller @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the virus spread , Jayadev worked with Carson White , an attorney with the public defender ’ s office , who compiled a list of people seeking release from the county jail .
White negotiated with prosecutors , the sheriff ’ s office , and pretrial services , and an agreement was reached to shrink the jail ’ s population by twenty per cent .
On March 19th , the county released an initial group of about a hundred and fifty people .
Since then , the jail ’ s population has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ This moment has flipped the script on mass incarceration , ” White told me .
“ It ’ s laid bare that caging huge swaths of our society isn ’ t necessary—it ’ s just convenient .
”

On March 14th, Roslyn Crouch, a mother of twelve, left her house in New Orleans to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods, and didn’t return. Crouch, who is forty-two, with slender braids down to her knees, had been feeling anxious about the spread of the coronavirus. At home, she cared for her elderly mother, and for a half-dozen children, including a son with sickle-cell anemia, a blood disorder. She herself had chronic bronchitis, and worried that it put her at risk. Many people in her neighborhood lacked access to high-quality medical care. (Black residents of Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; they make up about thirty per cent of the state’s population, but account for almost sixty per cent of documented deaths from the virus.) She thought, This is some serious stuff. After scrolling through a few too many coronavirus stories on her phone that Saturday morning, she got dressed, spritzed herself with her favorite perfume, A Thousand Wishes, and drove to a dollar store with her two-year-old son, Kyi, to buy shelter-in-place supplies.
On the way, Crouch failed to stop at a stop sign in Jefferson Parish and was pulled over by the police. She was then arrested for a string of petty crimes, including driving without proper registration and with a stolen license plate that police valued at twenty-five dollars. The most serious charge resulted from a nine-year-old warrant for possession of marijuana. As Crouch was put in the back of a police car, with Kyi, she pleaded with the arresting officers to call her daughter Tae, who worked as a security guard. Tae sped across the Mississippi River, arriving just in time to pry her sobbing little brother from the police car and prevent him from being turned over to child-protective services. “I call him Hip Baby, because he’s attached to my mom’s hip,” Tae told me. She took Kyi home, but it was “hell on earth trying to tame him without her.” The cops drove Crouch to the Jefferson Parish jail.
In late March, Governor John Bel Edwards announced that Louisiana had the fastest-growing coronavirus infection rate in the world. According to state reports at the end of last year, Louisiana also had the highest incarceration rate in the country. The pandemic posed an immediate threat in the state’s jails, where cells are crowded and poorly sanitized, and people frequently cycle in and out of custody. Since 2013, the main jail in Orleans Parish has been under a consent decree for what the Department of Justice called “dangerous and unacceptable” conditions, including “inadequate medical care.” Prisons, too, present a contagion risk; they have less rapid turnover than jails, but staff come and go, and large populations and underfunded health services make outbreaks hard to contain. Ben Smith, who served thirteen years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, remembers how quickly infections passed through the prison each year. Lacking accessible treatment, men devised remedies using instant soup, garlic, oranges, and peppermint leaves. Smith—who now works for the First 72+, a nonprofit that helps people adjust to life after incarceration—worried about his friends who were still inside, among them an older man with Stage IV colon cancer who was nearing parole. “Imagine a prisoner serving a life sentence, with age on him. If he got the virus, would they choose to give him a ventilator?” Smith asked. “It’s a very, very contagious virus. Now you could be sentenced to death.”
“I didn’t come all this way to do work.” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
At the Jefferson Parish jail, Crouch shared an intake cell with four other women. There were mats on the floor, for sleeping, and the only source of drinking water was a faucet above a toilet without a lid, where some of Crouch’s cellmates, apparently detoxing from drugs, spent the night vomiting. She draped an extra sleeping mat over her body, hoping that it would shield her from germs, but a guard chastised her—one person, one mat, she was told. Crouch asked the guards, “Y’all sure those ladies don’t have the virus?” By the time she reached Tae on the jailhouse phone, she was crying. She told her daughter, “I’ve got to get out of here before this virus gets me.”
For decades, community groups have pointed out the social costs of mass incarceration: its failure to address the root causes of addiction and violence; its steep fiscal price tag; its deepening of racial inequalities. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed another danger of the system: its public-health risks. In April, the American Civil Liberties Union worked with epidemiologists and statisticians to show that, without protective measures in jails and prisons, including rapid reductions in incarcerated populations, the virus could kill an additional hundred thousand Americans. Families of the incarcerated—along with national legal organizations, grassroots groups, and religious leaders—began to push for mass releases, focussing on defendants arrested for nonviolent offenses, those nearing the ends of their sentences, and the medically vulnerable. In Philadelphia, outside the Criminal Justice Center, protesters lined up coffins to mark the coronavirus-related death of a woman who had been eligible to be released in a few months. In Columbus, Ohio, they wore masks reading “20K by May,” the number of releases they were demanding. A team based at U.C.L.A.’s law school started a spreadsheet to track such actions, calling itself the Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project. By mid-May, it had tallied more than five hundred legal filings and court orders, along with dozens of protests.
Some efforts accomplished in weeks or months what activists had been working toward for decades, leading to large experiments in decarceration. Since mid-March, San Francisco has reduced its jail population by nearly forty per cent, and California has made plans to release thousands of people from state prisons. In New Jersey, the State Supreme Court authorized the release of as many as a thousand detainees from county jails. Each week in April, the federal-prison population declined by around a thousand people; by May, it had reached its lowest level in two decades. In dozens of cities, cops were ordered to make fewer arrests, district attorneys dropped low-level charges, and judges vacated bench warrants for unpaid fines and other minor infractions. “Advocates on the ground have been challenging mass incarceration for so long—and now much of what we’ve been calling for, pre-COVID-19, we’re seeing it transpire,” Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told me, from Los Angeles, where she’s been organizing for releases with Reform L.A. Jails. “At the local, state, and national level, this is a moment when we can collectively transform how our country relates to the most vulnerable.”
One early push occurred in Santa Clara County, California, where the country’s first coronavirus deaths were recorded. Raj Jayadev runs Silicon Valley De-Bug, a grassroots group that helps incarcerated people devise creative strategies to fight their cases. Some eighty per cent of people in the county jail are awaiting trial, often because they can’t afford bail. At weekly De-Bug meetings, families put together “social biography packets,” stuffed with personal photos, letters, and eight-to-ten-minute videos, to present a fuller picture of defendants. In mid-March, as the virus spread, Jayadev worked with Carson White, an attorney with the public defender’s office, who compiled a list of people seeking release from the county jail. White negotiated with prosecutors, the sheriff’s office, and pretrial services, and an agreement was reached to shrink the jail’s population by twenty per cent. On March 19th, the county released an initial group of about a hundred and fifty people. Since then, the jail’s population has been reduced by more than a thousand. “This moment has flipped the script on mass incarceration,” White told me. “It’s laid bare that caging huge swaths of our society isn’t necessary—it’s just convenient.”
Even after mass releases began, Jayadev feared that many defendants were being “left off the rescue boat,” particularly those charged with felonies. “Just because someone has been accused of a crime with a higher bail schedule doesn’t mean they deserve a potential death sentence,” he said. With court systems shutting down because of the pandemic, it was harder to advocate for defendants. “I don’t even have access to my clients right now—that whole system is out the window,” White told me, in March. Normally, she could bring a defendant before a judge within two days of filing a motion; now a client’s only chance for release was a prosecutor’s mercy. (In April, the county court in Santa Clara began hearing a limited number of cases, with a focus on defendants with a strong likelihood of release.) Many clients had agreed to attend drug-treatment or mental-health programs as a condition of their release, but the programs had been suspended. White had a ninety-one-year-old client with dementia who had been arrested following an outburst in his home; he was being held in the jail’s infirmary with at least one coronavirus patient. “My in-box is full of heartbreaking e-mails from community members asking if our office can help release their sister with asthma, their father with emphysema, their fiancé awaiting a lung biopsy,” she told me.
Jayadev was working with Johnny Page, who was being held in the Elmwood Correctional Complex, in Milpitas, California, awaiting trial on drug charges. “He has Type 2 diabetes and he’s not taking his insulin shots,” Rebecca Rivera, the mother of his child, told me; several sheriff’s deputies had tested positive for COVID-19, and Page refused to enter the common area of the jail, where medical staff administered the shots, because he’d noticed unsanitary practices there. “My son keeps asking, ‘Is Dad O.K.?’ ” she said. Page called her daily, with updates: men were shackled in dirty chains; they slept in bunk beds a few feet apart. Rivera jotted down notes—“The inmates are starving as they have not been allowed canteen for two weeks”—and urged Page to organize.
In late March, I spoke with Page on the phone. He and other men on his cellblock had drawn up a list of fifteen grievances. Since COVID-19 hit, the commissary had shut down, and the men could no longer buy meals, soap, Tylenol, or stamps and stationery to communicate with their families. (The phone service at the jail is run by a private company that charges steep fees.) Food was being delivered by people who had touched potentially contaminated surfaces. He asked if he could read me a statement. “We, the inmates in this county jail, want the public to know that we are human,” he said. “We are undergoing treatment that is inhumane and unjust.” Without swift depopulation of the jail and other protective measures, he went on, “the virus will spread like a California wildfire.” In the weeks that followed, officials instituted reforms, which included distributing masks and agreeing to a health inspection. On April 18th, after California temporarily suspended cash bail for those charged with most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, Page was released. He is now working with Silicon Valley De-Bug to help people still trapped in jails. “By far, the most effective driver of change right now has come directly from those locked up, on the inside,” Jayadev said. “Their voices, their demands for survival.”
On March 16th, at Crouch’s red brick home in New Orleans, where pink azaleas were on the verge of blooming, Tae managed to rustle up the money for her mother’s bail—nearly four thousand dollars. Crouch would be free by dinnertime; she could watch Lifetime that evening, curled up with her kids. But Crouch called her daughter in the afternoon. “I’m not getting out,” she said. She was being transferred to the jail in Orleans Parish, a neighboring jurisdiction, for reasons she didn’t understand. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore,” she said. Tae promised to investigate, but, when she called officials at the jail and other authorities, “all I got was closed doors and brick walls.”
Even by mid-March, as infection rates began to soar, Orleans Parish resisted public pressure to reduce its jail population. Police officers continued to make arrests for nonviolent crimes, including graffiti, failure to return a rental car, and obstructing sidewalks. In bail hearings, when public defenders raised the threat of COVID-19, the district attorney’s office accused them of trying to “exploit” the coronavirus to benefit their clients. “This is hardly a time to encourage lawlessness,” the D.A.’s spokesperson told the press. Prosecutors opposed some bond reductions, especially for defendants without a home address, arguing that, if they were released, they would “pose a threat to the general public by potentially spreading the virus to others.” This logic was pernicious; according to an open letter written by the dean of Tulane’s public-health school and other experts, the longer the parish delayed releases, the more genuine the threat of mass infection in the jail was—and thus the more likely it would be to spread to the public. (The D.A.’s office said that it has instructed prosecutors to stop making this argument in bond hearings.)
As coronavirus cases mounted in Louisiana, incarcerated people often had no access to their lawyers. At several juvenile-detention centers, minors were kept in lockdown or solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection. The mother of a sixteen-year-old boy detained in northern Louisiana told me, in April, that the facility did not respond to her e-mails and calls. “It’s been a whole month, and I don’t know if my child is dead or alive, sick or healthy,” she said. Another woman reached out to Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), a local nonprofit, for help in finding her mother, who had tested positive for COVID-19 in a state prison and then been shuffled to an unknown location, where her lawyer couldn’t contact her. “WHERE IS MY MOTHER!!!??? IS SHE OK!?” she wrote, in a note that VOTE posted on social media. “That’s all we want to know. That’s it. Let me hear her voice! Anything!!!”
Crouch called her daughter Tae (left) from the Jefferson Parish jail. “I’ve got to get out of here before this virus gets me,” she said. Photograph by William Widmer for The New Yorker
Tae worried about her mother’s transfer to Orleans Parish, and eventually got in touch with Thomas Frampton, a public-interest lawyer and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Ordinarily, Frampton would have been on campus, teaching Legal Research and Writing to first-year students. But his class now met on Zoom, and he was in New Orleans, where he lives part time. Frampton started looking through court records and found that Crouch had a four-year-old material-witness warrant out for her arrest in Orleans Parish.


The Rogue Experimenters

One evening in February , I went to hear a lecture at the Baltimore Underground Science Space , a community lab in a former bottle-top factory .
Like several dozen other “ biospaces ” around the country , BUGSS , as the lab is known , is animated by a spirit of subversive amateurism .
Anybody can go there to learn about , and then do , the kind of cutting-edge bench science—gene editing , synthetic biology—that is generally confined to well-funded academic institutions and private corporations .
Inside , a chalkboard with cartoon drawings of a microbe and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lab areas are seriously kitted out .
BUGSS has a real-time PCR machine , the gadget that allows scientists to make millions of copies of a particular strand of DNA , in order to study and manipulate it .
“ We don ’ t have a lot else that ’ s super fancy , ” Lisa Scheifele , the lab ’ s executive director , told me , though that might depend on how fancy you consider such items as a laminar-flow hood ( “ for working with cells and cultures that you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” according to the lab ’ s Web site ) , an Alpha Innotech gel imager , or a negative-seventy–degree storage freezer .
“ We have what we need , ” Scheifele said .
“ You can do most genetics here .
You can do microbiology.
” That night , two dozen people had filed in to hear Yann Huon de Kermadec—a low-key thirty-three-year-old with a Ph.D. in protein biochemistry from the University of Grenoble—talk about the Open Insulin Project , for which he hoped to recruit local volunteers .
The project , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biospace Counter Culture Labs , in Oakland , proposes a “ biohack ” for a stark failing in the American health-care system : the rising cost of insulin , the synthetic form of the hormone that 7.5 million diabetics must inject daily in order to live .
Its goal is to replicate the insulin that is manufactured and sold in this country by three pharmaceutical companies—Eli Lilly , Novo Nordisk , and Sanofi—and to publish a protocol for safely producing it .
The three U.S. manufacturers have lately been charging upward of three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the project hopes to launch a network of patient-and-worker-owned coöperatives that will produce small batches of insulin and offer vials to diabetics for about seven dollars each .
At the very least , Open Insulin wants to show that such pharmaceutical code-breaking can be done , in the hope that it will demystify the drug-production process .
The Baltimore lecture took place a few weeks before the COVID-19 crisis necessitated social distancing , so we sat in tight semicircles .
Pepperidge Farm cookies and mixed nuts were set out on a table , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero : The Beginner ’ s Guide to Programming Bacteria at Home , School & in the Makerspace.
” A flyer advertised an event , BioPrinting Breakout , which promised to introduce “ 3D tissue engineering to new audiences and applications.
” In the crowd , there were some hip-looking young couples , a middle-aged African-American man in a parka , and a sixty-one-year-old regular who works in computer security and loves the community-lab scene because , he told me , you can talk science as much as you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ situations people start running away.
” Huon de Kermadec , who wore Clark Kent glasses , jeans , and a gray hoodie , introduced himself as “ a French guy having my Ph.D. who followed my wife when she found a position.
” ( He is married to Louise Lassalle , who also works with Open Insulin , and came to the U.S. to do a postdoc in biochemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . )
Huon de Kermadec was originally attracted to Open Insulin because he thought the lab work would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but is annoyed by the academic pressure to publish .
He noted to the audience that nearly half of American adults have diabetes or high blood-sugar levels , yet there are currently no generic forms of insulin available in the U.S. , nor are there any mechanisms in place for controlling the price , as there are in Canada and in Europe .
“ If one of the three big companies increases the price , they all increase the price , ” he said .
“ Because they can.
” He showed a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ curve for insulin prices .
In 1996 , Eli Lilly introduced Humalog , its synthetic version of the hormone , at twenty-one dollars for a ten-millilitre vial ; during the next two decades , the retail price increased tenfold .
Sanofi ’ s Lantus and Novo Nordisk ’ s Novolog have similarly soared in cost .
( Eli Lilly recently announced that , during the COVID-19 epidemic , it would lower the monthly out-of-pocket cost of insulin to thirty-five dollars , but the drug is a crucial source of revenue for the company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
Patients with Type 1 diabetes typically require two to three vials of insulin a month .
Even if they have insurance , it doesn ’ t necessarily cover the entire expense .
A 2018 study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that one in four diabetes patients scrimped on insulin usage—not filling prescriptions regularly , using less than prescribed—risking kidney failure , blindness , and death .
Jean Peccoud , a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Colorado State University and the founder of the journal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The price of insulin is something for which there is no technical justification , no justification other than greed .
It ’ s simple to make , with a large market .
It should be as cheap as Tylenol.
” The scientist who discovered that injections of insulin could save diabetics from a painful death wanted to see the drug affordable and widely available .
In 1921 , Frederick Banting , a Canadian orthopedist , derived insulin from the pancreases of dogs ; he sold the patent to the University of Toronto for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it to be mass-produced .
“ Insulin does not belong to me , ” he declared .
“ It belongs to the world.
” Open Insulin plans to use protocols laid out in published papers to perform genetic engineering on two organisms—yeast and E. coli—causing them to produce insulin .
This is how pharmaceutical factories generally make the drug .
Last spring , the group announced that preliminary results indicated the successful insertion of a target gene into E. coli cells , and the subsequent production of a protein that converts into insulin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the samples , using mass spectrometry and other technologies .
When Huon de Kermadec mentioned this development , a guy with a close-shaved head and a Russian accent interjected to say that he ran a drug-testing lab , and wouldn ’ t mind vetting some of Open Insulin ’ s samples .
The project was a “ fascinating testament to the prospect of citizens doing science , ” the man said .
Still , he noted , maybe it would be simpler for people who needed expensive medications to get hold of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other countries .
Huon de Kermadec sighed .
“ You could find a way with a black market , ” he said .
“ But who will have access to that ?
You don ’ t change the system.
” Pacing the front of the room , he went on , “ What we aim for is more changing the way this is produced .
It doesn ’ t have to be a situation where Big Pharma exploits people ’ s misery .
We can design a better system .
”

In February, I spoke to Licina on the phone. He was in South Bend, Indiana, where he runs a community lab, Scihouse, out of his home. “This is going to sound so flippant,” he said. “But my friends and I decided to do the Glybera thing because we thought it would be funny. I mean, this was a million-dollar drug.” Yet even its secrets were unlocked with relative ease, he claimed. (UniQure, which retains a patent on the drug, said that it was blindsided by Licina’s “knockoff” but has not sued.) Licina said that he doesn’t want anyone to use his creation therapeutically. He just wanted biohackers like him to stop making glow-in-the-dark beer—yes, that’s a thing—and focus their thrill-seeking minds on more substantive projects. He was pleased when two Stanford undergraduates, Alec Luiz Lourenco and Cooper Veit, volunteered to test his version of Glybera at a university lab. Lourenco and Veit are part of BIOME, a student group that takes inspiration from the D.I.Y. movement and pursues what Lourenco calls “independent-type” biological research. (The BIOME project is pending, having been delayed by the pandemic shutdown.)
In many ways, the earnest, democratizing amateurism of community labs feels nothing like the snarky, performative energy projected by biohackers. The people I spoke with at Open Insulin are modest, serious, and, in some cases, steeped in social-justice activism. Still, there is overlap between members of the two factions—they know one another, attend some of the same conferences, and share a belief that real science can be conducted outside institutional settings. And they are similarly committed to making their protocols and findings transparent. One of Open Insulin’s founders, Anthony Di Franco—a computer scientist who lives in Berkeley and is himself a Type 1 diabetic—told me that, though he thinks of Open Insulin as belonging to the “lineage of mutual-aid societies,” he also sees the group as “definitely part of the biohacking community.”
The D.I.Y.-bio movement first emerged in places where biotech was booming, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Bay Area. Some people who lacked the funding or the credentials required to work on biological research at the academic and corporate labs where it was being done began to equip themselves. Others wanted to demonstrate that high-level medical information and techniques could be shared. In 2008, Kay Aull had just graduated from M.I.T. with a degree in biological engineering when she decided that, before moving on to grad school, she would spend five hundred dollars setting up a lab in a closet in her apartment, and see what she could do with it. Among other things, she created a genetic test that could be taken at home for a disease that afflicts her father, hemochromatosis—excess iron in the blood. She told me that, for her, it was an important way of “demystifying the science” and “showing it wasn’t magic.”
Community labs were launched in a similar spirit, bringing in members of the public to learn how to perform the latest in synthetic biology: DNA sequencing, protein engineering, CRISPR techniques. The pioneering GenSpace, in Brooklyn, was followed by BioCurious, in Santa Clara, California; Counter Culture Labs, in Oakland; and BUGSS, in Baltimore. In 2010, at a conference in Los Angeles, Meredith Patterson, a thirty-two-year-old computer scientist and science-fiction writer, gave a rousing speech that was later circulated as “A Biopunk Manifesto.” She declared, “We reject the popular perception that science is only done in million-dollar university, government, or corporate labs; we assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one’s own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion. We have no quarrel with Big Science; we merely recall that small science has always been just as critical to the development of the body of human knowledge. . . . A thirteen-year-old kid in South Central Los Angeles has just as much of a right to investigate the world as does a university professor. If thermocyclers”—PCR machines—“are too expensive to give one to every interested person, then we’ll design cheaper ones and teach people how to build them.”
In a 2017 book, “Synthetic,” Sophia Roosth, a historian of science at Harvard, differentiates D.I.Y. bio from citizen science, the wholesome enterprise in which volunteers do such things as count migratory butterflies or identify celestial bodies, then hand over their data to professionals. “Though democratic, D.I.Y. bio is notably antagonistic, roguish, and mischievous in tone,” Roosth writes. She also distinguishes it from pseudoscience: biohackers rarely put forward “ ‘crackpot’ theories.” Their aim “is for amateurs or nonprofessionals to make not new theories, but new things.” The credo of D.I.Y. bio might be that of the physicist Richard Feynman, who, shortly before his death, in 1988, wrote on a chalkboard at Caltech, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Community labs such as BUGSS take pains to avoid looking jerry-built. They maintain safety standards and codes of ethics modelled on those of academic labs, and add extra precautions, on the ground that some participants aren’t steeped in such practices. (At BUGSS, the rules include no use of infectious agents—phew!—and no work with human or other mammalian cells.) Christi Guerrini, a legal scholar and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who is conducting a research project about biohackers, told me that many community labs go well beyond “check-the-box compliance,” adding, “There was one individual I interviewed who really struck me in his thoughtfulness around to what extent organisms can experience pain—he was very conflicted about it. The organisms he was considering working with were jellyfish.”
“All units—we’ve got about half a revolting panini at the northeast corner of Bleecker and Tenth.” Cartoon by Hartley Lin Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Guerrini feels that D.I.Y. biologists often have a greater commitment than their professional counterparts do to making their work open to scrutiny—and available for free on the Internet. Their research might not be paradigm-shifting, but you or I could access it without having an institutional affiliation or an expensive journal subscription. (We’d have less confidence, of course, that the research was legit.) Among professionals, Guerrini said, “you have the phenomenon of scientists wanting to hold onto their data and sort of dribble it out, because they are responding to incentives around promotion and tenure and intellectual property.”
If transparency is a core tenet of biohacker culture, it’s also a defensive strategy. D.I.Y. bio arose soon after 9/11, and its practitioners sometimes attracted the attention of law-enforcement officials, who equated biohacking with bioterrorism. In a notorious 2004 case, Steven Kurtz, a SUNY Buffalo art professor who worked with bacterial cultures, had his home raided by federal agents. (Kurtz was eventually cleared of all charges.) Todd Kuiken, a researcher at N.C. State who has studied the D.I.Y.-bio community for years, told me, “At first, there was this fear that biohackers in the basement were going to release pandemics. These were really myths.”
In recent years, biohackers have largely figured out how to avoid intervention by the law. In 2016, Mixæl Laufer, a math professor in California who oversees an anarchist biohacking collective called Four Thieves Vinegar, devised instructions for building an EpiPen, the device that opens the airway of someone suffering an allergic reaction. He called his version an EpiPencil, and said that making it would cost about thirty dollars. At the time, Mylan, the manufacturer of the EpiPen, was charging as much as three hundred dollars for one. The EpiPencil was made by combining off-the-shelf parts: an auto-injector designed for diabetics which could be purchased online; epinephrine, which could be prescribed by coöperative doctors; a syringe and a needle. Four Thieves Vinegar, which is named after a medieval legend about a home-brewed antidote for the bubonic plague, shared the directions for the EpiPencil on its Web site and on YouTube. Because the group was not manufacturing or distributing the product, it technically did not violate F.D.A. rules. (YouTube removed the video, claiming that it promoted “acts that have an inherent risk of serious physical harm or death.”)
Since then, Four Thieves has started disseminating other work-around protocols, including a recipe for making a version of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone out of oxycodone, and instructions for concocting a homemade version of the abortion pill out of misoprostol. (Veterinary suppliers, Laufer points out, dispense a form of the drug, without a prescription, for treating ulcers in horses.) In February, I spoke by Skype with Laufer, who was in Singapore, where his wife recently took a job. He told me that he does not interact with patients who make something using Four Thieves instructions: “A lot of people ask about the relationships we have with people who use our protocols and technologies. But we don’t really have them, very intentionally, because we don’t want to be pushing what we’re creating.”
In early March, I spent an afternoon with Sebastian Cocioba, a twenty-nine-year-old self-taught plant biologist who has built a remarkable lab in his parents’ Long Island City apartment by making clever use of items purchased on eBay and what he calls “a little bit of electronics know-how.” In a small spare bedroom, Cocioba has a PCR machine (“one of the schmanciest, with an actual freakin’ touch screen!”); a gene gun, for injecting DNA or RNA into cells; a laminar-flow hood; a centrifuge; a vortex shaker, for mixing fluids; and shelves lined with bottles of chemicals and proteins. He put together this suite of equipment at a cost of about seven thousand dollars. (For fun, he’s affixed googly eyes to some of the machines.) Cocioba works on plant-tissue cultures and genetic engineering, and has expertise in designing and producing flowers with new colors and patterns. In his parents’ kitchen, the white cabinets are covered in notes, scrawled in Sharpie, from a meeting that Cocioba had several months ago with a Japanese businessman and an N.Y.U. biologist, who were hoping to create a specially patterned morning glory as a symbol for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Cocioba’s mom, who sometimes doubles as his lab manager, likes how the marked-up cabinets look. On the refrigerator was a list describing the steps involved in engineering a blue rose.
I watched Cocioba lead a synthetic-biology workshop for students at the Parsons School of Design, in New York, and it was clear how much he enjoys sharing his techniques. He made the students laugh with stories about how, as a teen-ager, he’d first funded his lab by “flipping orchids”: he’d take home plants that Home Depot had thrown away because they weren’t flowering, expose them to blue light until they bloomed, then sell them back to the store. Cocioba, who studied for a few years at Stony Brook University but left for financial and family reasons, is now getting outside research contracts—one is from a private donor interested in genetically engineering plants to produce pharmaceuticals. (In 2017, a British research center announced that it had conducted an experiment that used genetically engineered plants to produce polio vaccines.)
Cocioba has shoulder-length hair, which he sometimes wears in a samurai-style bun; he favors shorts and T-shirts, and has a genial manner. He welcomes collaborations with academics and thinks it important that they not “ostracize the D.I.Y.-bio community,” because “science is science.” “Amateur scientist” is a label that he embraces, pointing out that the word “amateur” doesn’t mean a novice. He likes to cite the example of Félix d’Hérelle, a French microbiologist who, with only a high-school education, “basically founded bacterial phage research in the early twentieth century.” (Phages are viruses that infect bacteria but don’t harm humans.)
When Cocioba has genetic-engineering clients, he “sets up an open lab notebook for them” online, so that “they see every day what is happening, as opposed to what my competitors—universities, mostly—do, which is just give them the plant at the end.” When a student at Parsons asked him if he worried about being scooped, Cocioba said, “I’d rather be totally open and give these tools away for free. Because nothing is more inspirational than being able to build something yourself.”
So far, D.I.Y. medicine’s biggest successes have been less in making pharmaceuticals than in manufacturing tests and medical hardware. In 1994, Sharon Terry, a former college chaplain turned stay-at-home mom in the Boston area, learned that her two young children, Elizabeth and Ian, had a rare genetic disorder, pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), which causes premature aging and other problems. After the children’s diagnoses, two teams of researchers from separate academic institutions came around to collect blood samples. Terry didn’t want her kids to get poked with needles repeatedly, and asked the researchers why they didn’t just share the samples. That wasn’t how academic research worked, she was told: the teams were competing to see which could publish findings first.
Terry and her then husband, Pat, a construction manager, read all the articles they could find about PXE. The literature was daunting, but eventually they began to see patterns. They decided that it would be helpful to create a DNA repository for studying the disease, so they collected tissue and blood samples from PXE patients and their families and began conducting research on the samples at night, in a space that they borrowed from a Harvard lab. In time, they became part of a team that identified the gene for PXE and patented it—not for profit but to try to insure that the discovery would be shared for research. Terry went on to co-author a hundred and forty peer-reviewed articles, published in such journals as Nature and Science. She now heads an organization called the Genetic Alliance, and a research consortium on PXE that is conducting clinical trials on a cocktail of possible treatments for the disease. (Her children are now in their thirties.)
In 2013, Dana Lewis, a twenty-five-year-old with Type 1 diabetes who had no engineering or medical background, was trying to figure out how to make the alarms louder on the glucose monitor she used at night, so that she wouldn’t sleep through them. Lewis, who worked in public relations and lived in Seattle, started collaborating with a software engineer she was dating, Scott Leibrand, and they developed an algorithm that predicted when her glucose levels would fall dangerously low at night. Eventually, they came up with a more ambitious device that precluded the need to get up out of bed and inject insulin. They called it an Open Artificial Pancreas System and posted instructions for making one online. The device linked up glucose sensors, open-source software that could run on a smartphone, and an insulin pump, allowing patients to automatically calibrate dosing through the night. Though the Open Artificial Pancreas System is not an approved medical device, and no company manufactures one commercially, more than seventeen hundred people have assembled their own. Initial review studies, in The Lancet and other journals, have shown it to be effective.


newyorker--2020-05-18--Shecky Greene’s Horse Habit

Shecky Greene’s Horse Habit

Some of those who are missing sports right now are turning to a miracle cure , as scientifically proven as hydroxychloroquine .
This sport is live on TV every day , featuring athletes who go all out , regardless of who is watching .
Actually , the athletes couldn ’ t care less .
“ I ’ m watching horses right now , ” Shecky Greene , the nonagenarian comedian , said the other day , over the phone .
“ Oaklawn , Tampa Bay , Gulfstream.
” These are racetracks—in Arkansas and Florida—that are closed to fans but not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ workers .
In March , when the N.B.A.
, the N.H.L.
, and M.L.B .
postponed their seasons , state horse-racing bodies asserted a kind of equine exception : the races not only could go on without the public but should go on—if only for the health of the horses , who , unlike LeBron James , can ’ t work out on their own .
At Oaklawn , whose spring meet just ended , the staff was sanitizing the starting gate between races , and the jockeys ’ “ hot box , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to their allotted weight before a race , had been closed .
Meanwhile , the coronavirus has shown up at Aqueduct , in Queens .
And Golden Gate Fields , in the Bay Area , was shut down by the health inspector .
( It reopened last week . )
The Kentucky Derby , in Louisville , was moved from early May to September 5th , the first such postponement since 1945 .
Horseplayers have now become acquainted with a place called Fonner Park , in Grand Island , Nebraska .
In Nevada @ @ @ @ @ @ @ March 18th , Greene , the onetime Rat Pack-adjacent tummler-raconteur of Las Vegas night-club comedy , who once commanded a hundred thousand dollars a week playing the big hotels , was under quarantine only in the sense that he couldn ’ t drive the short distance from his home to the race and sports book at the Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa & Casino .
He could bet online , but he finds that avenue to be nothing but trouble , and was content placing two-dollar win bets in his mind .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care if you miss betting a horse , ” he said .
“ I bet 8–5 that I wake up breathing.
” TVG , the horse-racing channel , was on in the background .
In 1973 , a front-running horse named Shecky Greene went off at 6–1 in the Kentucky Derby and held the lead for seven furlongs , only to be left in the dust by the Triple Crown legend Secretariat .
“ He took the lead for almost a mile , ” Shecky Greene ( the person ) said .
Then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was standing still.
” Shecky Greene ( the horse ) was owned by Joe Kellman , a Chicago businessman and a friend of Buddy Hackett .
Greene said that he liked the seven horse , Ever Smart , in the seventh race at Tampa Bay Downs .
It was a lower-level , twenty-thousand-dollar race for three-year-old fillies .
Despite federal indictments against the racing industry alleging horse doping—not to mention the plague of animal deaths at Santa Anita Park , in California— the TV racing hosts have been adapting their broadcasts , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father took me to the racetrack when I was six , seven years old , ” Greene said .
“ He was a degenerate .
In Chicago .
My father was a salesman , and he used to carry heavy suitcases with shoes in them.
” At the track , “ he once sat next to Capone , and Capone gave him a horse.
” Naturally , the horse won .
“ Well , sure , because Capone bet on it .
They shot the other eight horses before they finished the race.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Las Vegas appeared on CNN and seemed to tell Anderson Cooper that she would offer up her city as a “ control group ” for the pandemic-liberation crowd .
Greene was less sanguine .
“ People think this is going to be over soon .
This is not going to be over soon , ” he said .
“ I think it ’ s going to be a long time .
I don ’ t think I may see the end of this.
” The race at Tampa went off , and Ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the field through the first turn and down the backstretch .
“ He ’ s got a nice lead , he ’ s 12–1 , ” Greene said .
His wife , Marie Musso , the daughter of the jazz saxophonist Vido Musso , who roomed with Frank Sinatra as part of Tommy Dorsey ’ s band , wanted to know whom Greene was talking to .
“ She allows me ten minutes on the phone , ” he said .
“ And I can sing for ten minutes.
” In the 2015 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nesteroff wrote , of Greene , “ He was a creature of the nightclub—flying off on wild tangents , climbing walls , and fighting owners .
It was a free-form approach to comedy that a five-minute television spot could not convey.
” Later in life , he stopped performing and announced that he had bipolar disorder .
Ever Smart was still leading as the pack turned for home .
“ He ’ s pulling away very nice .
Oh , my God , he ’ s gon na win , ” Greene said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the wire and finished second .
Greene began probing a Rainbow Pick 6 situation at Gulfstream .
“ I have never really stayed in the house this long , ” he observed .
“ Once , when I was arrested , but not this long.
” ♦ • Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic : nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th .
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus .
New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time ?
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read , watch , cook , and listen to under quarantine .

Some of those who are missing sports right now are turning to a miracle cure, as scientifically proven as hydroxychloroquine. This sport is live on TV every day, featuring athletes who go all out, regardless of who is watching. Actually, the athletes couldn’t care less. “I’m watching horses right now,” Shecky Greene, the nonagenarian comedian, said the other day, over the phone. “Oaklawn, Tampa Bay, Gulfstream.” These are racetracks—in Arkansas and Florida—that are closed to fans but not to horses, jockeys, and backstretch workers. In March, when the N.B.A., the N.H.L., and M.L.B. postponed their seasons, state horse-racing bodies asserted a kind of equine exception: the races not only could go on without the public but should go on—if only for the health of the horses, who, unlike LeBron James, can’t work out on their own.
At Oaklawn, whose spring meet just ended, the staff was sanitizing the starting gate between races, and the jockeys’ “hot box,” the sauna where riders sweat down to their allotted weight before a race, had been closed. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has shown up at Aqueduct, in Queens. And Golden Gate Fields, in the Bay Area, was shut down by the health inspector. (It reopened last week.) The Kentucky Derby, in Louisville, was moved from early May to September 5th, the first such postponement since 1945. Horseplayers have now become acquainted with a place called Fonner Park, in Grand Island, Nebraska.
In Nevada, where casinos have been closed since March 18th, Greene, the onetime Rat Pack-adjacent tummler-raconteur of Las Vegas night-club comedy, who once commanded a hundred thousand dollars a week playing the big hotels, was under quarantine only in the sense that he couldn’t drive the short distance from his home to the race and sports book at the Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa & Casino. He could bet online, but he finds that avenue to be nothing but trouble, and was content placing two-dollar win bets in his mind. “I’m ninety-four—you don’t care if you miss betting a horse,” he said. “I bet 8–5 that I wake up breathing.”
TVG, the horse-racing channel, was on in the background. In 1973, a front-running horse named Shecky Greene went off at 6–1 in the Kentucky Derby and held the lead for seven furlongs, only to be left in the dust by the Triple Crown legend Secretariat. “He took the lead for almost a mile,” Shecky Greene (the person) said. Then Secretariat passed him, “like he was standing still.” Shecky Greene (the horse) was owned by Joe Kellman, a Chicago businessman and a friend of Buddy Hackett.
Greene said that he liked the seven horse, Ever Smart, in the seventh race at Tampa Bay Downs. It was a lower-level, twenty-thousand-dollar race for three-year-old fillies. Despite federal indictments against the racing industry alleging horse doping—not to mention the plague of animal deaths at Santa Anita Park, in California— the TV racing hosts have been adapting their broadcasts, with helpful tips for newcomers.
“My father took me to the racetrack when I was six, seven years old,” Greene said. “He was a degenerate. In Chicago. My father was a salesman, and he used to carry heavy suitcases with shoes in them.” At the track, “he once sat next to Capone, and Capone gave him a horse.” Naturally, the horse won. “Well, sure, because Capone bet on it. They shot the other eight horses before they finished the race.”
Last month, the mayor of Las Vegas appeared on CNN and seemed to tell Anderson Cooper that she would offer up her city as a “control group” for the pandemic-liberation crowd. Greene was less sanguine. “People think this is going to be over soon. This is not going to be over soon,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a long time. I don’t think I may see the end of this.”
The race at Tampa went off, and Ever Smart broke to the lead, besting the field through the first turn and down the backstretch. “He’s got a nice lead, he’s 12–1,” Greene said. His wife, Marie Musso, the daughter of the jazz saxophonist Vido Musso, who roomed with Frank Sinatra as part of Tommy Dorsey’s band, wanted to know whom Greene was talking to. “She allows me ten minutes on the phone,” he said. “And I can sing for ten minutes.”
In the 2015 book “The Comedians,” Kliph Nesteroff wrote, of Greene, “He was a creature of the nightclub—flying off on wild tangents, climbing walls, and fighting owners. It was a free-form approach to comedy that a five-minute television spot could not convey.” Later in life, he stopped performing and announced that he had bipolar disorder.
Ever Smart was still leading as the pack turned for home. “He’s pulling away very nice. Oh, my God, he’s gonna win,” Greene said. But Ever Smart was caught near the wire and finished second. Greene began probing a Rainbow Pick 6 situation at Gulfstream. “I have never really stayed in the house this long,” he observed. “Once, when I was arrested, but not this long.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-18--Fiona McFarlane on the Private Lives of Houses

Your story in this week ’ s issue , “ Demolition , ” revolves around the demolition of a house in which a serial killer named Paul Biga used to live .
Why did you choose to approach the story through the eyes of Eva , the wheelchair-bound retired teacher who lives across the street ?
I was thinking about the deeply private history of houses and wondering what it would be like to have a personal house become part of public history—of particularly horrifying public history .
What happens to the private histories of the house ?
Whom do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it take to destroy them ?
Eva inhabited those questions for me : she ’ s known the house since her childhood , long before Paul Biga was born .
Eva ’ s wheelchair isn ’ t a deliberate reference to Hitchcock , but the connection is inescapable ; I suppose this is my version of “ Rear Window , ” in which the blinds are mostly closed .
Eva is attached to the house , not because Paul Biga used to live there but because she loved a girl who lived there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a teen-ager , in the nineteen-forties .
Eva treasures her memories of that love and its physical expression , even though the girl ’ s parents ’ discovery of it led the family to leave the town abruptly .
Why do you think , given the “ drama ” the relationship caused , Eva still thinks of it as “ pure ” and “ wholesome ” ?
I suspect that Eva ’ s insistence on the purity of that first love is a way of claiming its pleasure and sweetness back from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Josie ’ s parents obviously considered the relationship neither pure nor wholesome , so it would have been very easy for Eva to conclude that there must have been something perverse about it .
Perhaps she did , for a while , but , as an older woman , she ’ s able to see it for the lovely thing it was .
Eva seems to have lived a conventional life since then : she hasn ’ t had any other same-sex relationships , and she married a boy she went to school @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anomaly in her romantic and sexual development ?
How does she think of her own sexuality ?
The story doesn ’ t specify .
I wanted the reader to be placed in a position similar to that of Kate Hawkins , the journalist who ’ s interviewing Eva : we can speculate about certain things , but Eva keeps them private .
I suspect that Eva has loved two people—Josie and Gerald—and that she ’ s reached a point in her life where neither of those loves feels like an anomaly .
On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Kate Hawkins , who wrote a book about Paul Biga a few years ago , has come to interview Eva .
Kate clearly thinks that she ’ ll guide Eva into revealing new information about Biga , and yet Eva subtly takes control of the conversation and withholds what she knows .
Was it difficult to get across in writing the unspoken struggle for control between these two women ?
Eva and Kate negotiated with each other across many drafts .
In some of them , Eva told Kate everything ; perhaps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a resistance to Kate ’ s questions .
The story is exposition-heavy , so I knew that its single scene—the interview—had to be robust enough to bear that weight .
In a way , Eva protects Paul , by not revealing the details of a completely inappropriate letter he once sent her .
Why do you think she does that ?
Eva isn ’ t protecting Paul ; she ’ s protecting her own privacy , and that of the Lainey house .
Any benefit to Paul is incidental .
I think Eva @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t want to examine it too closely .
I understand that “ Demolition ” is one in a series of stories that address the life of Paul Biga .
What inspired the cycle ?
The Paul Biga stories were inspired by our current moment ’ s fascination with true crime .
I don ’ t think this fascination is a new phenomenon , but I ’ m interested in the ways in which true-crime audiences have started to define , defend , and celebrate themselves over the past few years .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ listen to all the podcasts .
The stories I ’ m writing are my attempt to think through what I find interesting about this particular way of consuming narrative and making sense of the world .
It does feel important to say that the stories don ’ t address Biga ’ s life directly : each of them is about a person who ’ s on the edge of Biga ’ s life , one or two steps removed from Biga himself .
I ’ m interested in the wider radius of damage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and I want the killer himself to remain something of a vacancy : we ’ ll know him by his deeds , and the consequences of those deeds , but he ’ ll never be given the satisfaction of being at the center of his own story .

Photograph by Stefano Mazzola / Getty
Your story in this week’s issue, “Demolition,” revolves around the demolition of a house in which a serial killer named Paul Biga used to live. Why did you choose to approach the story through the eyes of Eva, the wheelchair-bound retired teacher who lives across the street?
I was thinking about the deeply private history of houses and wondering what it would be like to have a personal house become part of public history—of particularly horrifying public history. What happens to the private histories of the house? Whom do they belong to, and what does it take to destroy them? Eva inhabited those questions for me: she’s known the house since her childhood, long before Paul Biga was born. Eva’s wheelchair isn’t a deliberate reference to Hitchcock, but the connection is inescapable; I suppose this is my version of “Rear Window,” in which the blinds are mostly closed.
Eva is attached to the house, not because Paul Biga used to live there but because she loved a girl who lived there long before he did, when she was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-forties. Eva treasures her memories of that love and its physical expression, even though the girl’s parents’ discovery of it led the family to leave the town abruptly. Why do you think, given the “drama” the relationship caused, Eva still thinks of it as “pure” and “wholesome”?
I suspect that Eva’s insistence on the purity of that first love is a way of claiming its pleasure and sweetness back from the drama caused by its discovery. Josie’s parents obviously considered the relationship neither pure nor wholesome, so it would have been very easy for Eva to conclude that there must have been something perverse about it. Perhaps she did, for a while, but, as an older woman, she’s able to see it for the lovely thing it was.
Eva seems to have lived a conventional life since then: she hasn’t had any other same-sex relationships, and she married a boy she went to school with. How does she view that anomaly in her romantic and sexual development? How does she think of her own sexuality?
The story doesn’t specify. I wanted the reader to be placed in a position similar to that of Kate Hawkins, the journalist who’s interviewing Eva: we can speculate about certain things, but Eva keeps them private. I suspect that Eva has loved two people—Josie and Gerald—and that she’s reached a point in her life where neither of those loves feels like an anomaly.
On the day that the story takes place, Kate Hawkins, who wrote a book about Paul Biga a few years ago, has come to interview Eva. Kate clearly thinks that she’ll guide Eva into revealing new information about Biga, and yet Eva subtly takes control of the conversation and withholds what she knows. Was it difficult to get across in writing the unspoken struggle for control between these two women?
Eva and Kate negotiated with each other across many drafts. In some of them, Eva told Kate everything; perhaps Eva and I both had to develop a resistance to Kate’s questions. The story is exposition-heavy, so I knew that its single scene—the interview—had to be robust enough to bear that weight.
In a way, Eva protects Paul, by not revealing the details of a completely inappropriate letter he once sent her. Why do you think she does that?
Eva isn’t protecting Paul; she’s protecting her own privacy, and that of the Lainey house. Any benefit to Paul is incidental. I think Eva is conscious of this incidental benefit but doesn’t want to examine it too closely.
I understand that “Demolition” is one in a series of stories that address the life of Paul Biga. What inspired the cycle?
The Paul Biga stories were inspired by our current moment’s fascination with true crime. I don’t think this fascination is a new phenomenon, but I’m interested in the ways in which true-crime audiences have started to define, defend, and celebrate themselves over the past few years. I’m not immune to this—I listen to all the podcasts. The stories I’m writing are my attempt to think through what I find interesting about this particular way of consuming narrative and making sense of the world. It does feel important to say that the stories don’t address Biga’s life directly: each of them is about a person who’s on the edge of Biga’s life, one or two steps removed from Biga himself. I’m interested in the wider radius of damage caused by this kind of crime, and I want the killer himself to remain something of a vacancy: we’ll know him by his deeds, and the consequences of those deeds, but he’ll never be given the satisfaction of being at the center of his own story.


newyorker--2020-05-18--The Essential Workers of the New York Botanical Garden

“ In here , if they don ’ t have people caring for them every day , three hundred sixty-five days a year , they ’ ll die , ” Todd Forrest said .
He was referring not to I.C.U .
patients but to the delicate cuttings and plants in the Nolen Greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden , where he has been the head of horticulture since 2004 .
“ As we triage and allocate resources , the time has to go to the plants that need the most care , ” he said , and headed for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glass buildings , a skeleton staff was misting orchids and tropical specimens .
“ The first priority is always watering , ” Forrest said through a bandanna that he had tied around his face , bank-robber style .
Normally , watering occurs in the conservatory in a mad rush between 8 A.M. and 10 A.M. , before the garden opens to the public .
But since March 15th , when the Botanical Garden closed to visitors ( this has been the longest closure in its hundred-and-thirty-year history ) , a third of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from one another , but intimate with every plant .
An automated sprinkler system would never do .
“ The plants all have slightly different needs , ” Forrest said .
He had worried , at first , whether his team would be deemed “ essential ” enough to continue working through the pandemic .
But , even before Governor Andrew Cuomo added horticultural maintenance to New York ’ s list of indispensable jobs , many Botanical Garden employees already met the criteria for essential workers .
“ Because we are curating an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ in our case , of plants.
” The garden stretches across two hundred and fifty acres , and Forrest uses a golf cart to make his rounds .
He whizzed past the Stone Mill , a structure from 1840 that normally would be rented out for spring weddings , and a stand of white birches that looked almost Scandinavian against the steel-gray sky .
When he got to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory , a horticulturist named Jennifer Henry waved at him as she misted plants .
Henry , who wore rubber @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that her husband and kids don ’ t worry about her coming in to work .
“ But my mom and dad , in Ottawa , that ’ s another story .
They see me as being in the epicenter.
” She had been enjoying the chance to commune with the plants privately .
“ It feels like our own little palace right now , ” she said .
At this time of year , the garden can get up to ten thousand visitors a day .
Back in his cart , Forrest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was first planted in the nineteen-twenties .
“ Relatively few of the original bulbs remain , ” he said .
“ There ’ s always something that upsets the plans of even the most knowledgeable and dedicated gardener—there ’ s always some drought or some deluge or some insect.
” Just as he was climbing off his cart , the sun came out from behind the clouds , and the sky was transformed from spooky gray to jubilant blue .
It was like the moment in “ The Wizard of Oz ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the rolling landscape was animated by brilliant hues—the reddish haze of crab-apple trees in the distance , green grass paths snaking up the hillside .
In every direction , daffodils glowed in the light .
Since 2015 , the staff has been planting a hundred thousand daffodil bulbs every fall .
“ We want to reach a million , ” Forrest said .
“ We create these pathways so people won ’ t walk on the daffodils— and then they walk on them anyway.
” He shook his head .
“ Those of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we always have a love-hate relationship with the public .
They pick flowers and they climb trees , and we get exasperated .
But what has really struck home for me since the pandemic started is how we exist only for the public .
I love plants more than people , but you realize that the life of the garden is as much about the visitors who come to it as the plants we grow.
” Forrest was a philosophy major at Wesleyan before he did graduate work in horticulture .
“ This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ is based on what we provide for people , ” he said .
“ Those of us who are able to work right now are grateful that we have jobs , and that we ’ re well enough to do them , especially in such a special and beautiful place .
The payback on that is , Let ’ s do everything we can to make sure that the garden does what it needs to do whenever people are able to return to it .
We want the garden to be an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what was lost.
” ♦ • Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic : nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th .
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus .
New York leaders did not .
• Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under quarantine .

Todd Forrest Illustration by João Fazenda
“In here, if they don’t have people caring for them every day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, they’ll die,” Todd Forrest said. He was referring not to I.C.U. patients but to the delicate cuttings and plants in the Nolen Greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden, where he has been the head of horticulture since 2004. “As we triage and allocate resources, the time has to go to the plants that need the most care,” he said, and headed for the tropics.
Inside one of the glass buildings, a skeleton staff was misting orchids and tropical specimens. “The first priority is always watering,” Forrest said through a bandanna that he had tied around his face, bank-robber style. Normally, watering occurs in the conservatory in a mad rush between 8 A.M. and 10 A.M., before the garden opens to the public. But since March 15th, when the Botanical Garden closed to visitors (this has been the longest closure in its hundred-and-thirty-year history), a third of the staff members have worked in shifts—socially distant from one another, but intimate with every plant. An automated sprinkler system would never do. “The plants all have slightly different needs,” Forrest said. He had worried, at first, whether his team would be deemed “essential” enough to continue working through the pandemic. But, even before Governor Andrew Cuomo added horticultural maintenance to New York’s list of indispensable jobs, many Botanical Garden employees already met the criteria for essential workers. “Because we are curating an irreplaceable museum,” Forrest said, “in our case, of plants.”
The garden stretches across two hundred and fifty acres, and Forrest uses a golf cart to make his rounds. He whizzed past the Stone Mill, a structure from 1840 that normally would be rented out for spring weddings, and a stand of white birches that looked almost Scandinavian against the steel-gray sky. When he got to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a horticulturist named Jennifer Henry waved at him as she misted plants. Henry, who wore rubber boots and a surgical mask, said that her husband and kids don’t worry about her coming in to work. “But my mom and dad, in Ottawa, that’s another story. They see me as being in the epicenter.” She had been enjoying the chance to commune with the plants privately. “It feels like our own little palace right now,” she said. At this time of year, the garden can get up to ten thousand visitors a day.
Back in his cart, Forrest zoomed onward, to Daffodil Hill, which was first planted in the nineteen-twenties. “Relatively few of the original bulbs remain,” he said. “There’s always something that upsets the plans of even the most knowledgeable and dedicated gardener—there’s always some drought or some deluge or some insect.” Just as he was climbing off his cart, the sun came out from behind the clouds, and the sky was transformed from spooky gray to jubilant blue. It was like the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when the film switches to Technicolor: the rolling landscape was animated by brilliant hues—the reddish haze of crab-apple trees in the distance, green grass paths snaking up the hillside. In every direction, daffodils glowed in the light.
Since 2015, the staff has been planting a hundred thousand daffodil bulbs every fall. “We want to reach a million,” Forrest said. “We create these pathways so people won’t walk on the daffodils— and then they walk on them anyway.” He shook his head. “Those of us who work in public gardens, we always have a love-hate relationship with the public. They pick flowers and they climb trees, and we get exasperated. But what has really struck home for me since the pandemic started is how we exist only for the public. I love plants more than people, but you realize that the life of the garden is as much about the visitors who come to it as the plants we grow.”
Forrest was a philosophy major at Wesleyan before he did graduate work in horticulture. “This notion that we’re ‘essential’ is based on what we provide for people,” he said. “Those of us who are able to work right now are grateful that we have jobs, and that we’re well enough to do them, especially in such a special and beautiful place. The payback on that is, Let’s do everything we can to make sure that the garden does what it needs to do whenever people are able to return to it. We want the garden to be an escape, and not a reminder of what was lost.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus