newyorker--2020-07-17--Eye-Catching Art for an Unprecedented Summer, in “Monuments Now”

The outdoor exhibition “ Monuments Now , ” at Socrates Sculpture Park , in Long Island City ( through March @ @ @ @ @ this unprecedented summer of American reckoning .
The eye-catching ziggurat “ Because Once You Enter @ @ @ @ @ Our House , ” by Jeffrey Gibson ( pictured ) —a member of the Mississippi @ @ @ @ @ a 2019 MacArthur Fellow—doubles as a stage for a trio of indigenous American artists , @ @ @ @ @ filmed and released online .

Artist Jeffrey Gibson photographed at Socrates Park, featuring his new installment for the parks summer exhibtion, "Monuments Now" on June 6th, 2020.
Photograph by Steven Molina Contreras for The New Yorker


newyorker--2020-07-17--Living Through Turbulent Times with Jane Austen

About eight years ago , not too long before my daughter was born , and a year before my father died , Jane Austen became my only author .
I read her before going to sleep , and whenever I woke in the night ; I read her at my desk , when I couldn ’ t make progress with the biography I was supposed to have finished writing ; and on the slow bus that crossed the river to the ob-gyn .
I would come to the end of a scene and turn the pages back to read it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this a retreat , a seclusion ?
Life was running thin and fast across unfamiliar land .
A baby was coming , a baby that M. and I had wanted for a long time .
I had lived and taught in New York , but now we were in Cambridge , Massachusetts , where M. was teaching .
My desk was in our living room .
My father had been ill for several years , and we waited , anxiously , for news of his health .
News from the rest of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Syria ; in February , Trayvon Martin was killed .
The coming election felt tense and consequential .
At night , I folded up the day , as I did the small clothes people were giving us—uneasily .
In the past , when I was in the middle of a project , if anyone happened to ask me what I was reading , I was relieved .
To say “ I ’ m reading ‘ Nervous Conditions ’ ” or “ I ’ m reading Russian poets ” was to say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m paying attention.
” If you had told me that years were coming when the doings of a few English families would come to define much of my reading imagination , I would have been appalled .
I read Austen , as Virginia Woolf said , of reading “ Mansfield Park , ” “ two words at a time.
” Of all the fragments and snatches I had nearly memorized , my favorite was the scene toward the end of “ Persuasion ” when Anne Elliot ( the book ’ s lonely , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friend Captain Harville .
They are discussing who loves with most fidelity—men or women .
Harville , whose marriage has endured many stints at sea , sides with men , noting that books always portray women ’ s inconstancy .
At first , Anne struggles to respond .
She has been silent for much of the book ; on the rare occasions when she has spoken , no one really listens .
But , faced with Harville ’ s provocation , she finds new courage .
“ Men have had every advantage of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she says .
“ Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree ; the pen has been in their hands .
I will not allow books to prove anything.
” Instead , she speaks from her own experience and observations of love and mourning , insisting that women are capable of “ loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.
” Why is it important for Anne not only to mourn but to make a declaration of what she understands about mourning ?
At first , I didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just loved the feeling of the scene , its openness , the sense of a breeze .
I sat on the bus that went across the river , a finger holding a place in “ Persuasion , ” thinking about the baby who was coming , my father who was ill .
I felt , dimly , detached from both the past I thought I knew and the future I had expected .
Our baby was born in the spring of 2012 .
All our parents were there .
In September , my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conference .
He was a professor of organization theory , interested in leadership and collaboration .
He studied the ways people learn and work and play together .
On that visit , he and I took a long walk around Fresh Pond , in Cambridge , the baby alert and looking around from her stroller .
I did not allow myself to think what would turn out to be true : that it would be my last real walk with my father .
He told me that he thought I should consider returning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with him .
In many ways , death was a presence in the world our child entered .
Reading the news , violence was at times viscerally close , at others far away and unreal .
In December , my friends wondered how to tell their children about the twenty-seven people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School .
By Christmas , my family and I had begun to understand that my father was very ill .
In February , he died .
We were all able to go home to be with him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life , and leaves nothing untouched .
Our daughter ’ s growth contained daily efforts and beautiful moments .
She liked to be held up to look at the stop sign on our corner .
In April , I sent a picture of her with the sign to a friend , who texted me to stay inside ; Cambridge was under lockdown , after the Boston Marathon bombing .
The standoff ended with shots we heard through our open kitchen windows .
I was mostly reading “ Sense and Sensibility ” then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was girls giddy over uniforms , servants spoke once or not at all , poverty was easy to overlook .
Our daughter was not yet two when I was able to get pregnant again .
When I went to the hospital to give birth , I brought “ Pride and Prejudice ” with me .
All through the incredibly snowy winter and the beautiful spring that followed , I came back to seven words : “ Till this moment , ” Elizabeth Bennett says to herself , holding Mr. Darcy ’ s revelatory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never knew myself.
” I did not know why these lines felt clear and whole and inexhaustible , but they did .
Days with the children were hazy , repetitious , intimate .
I can no longer remember when I first read Lionel Trilling ’ s last , unfinished essay , “ Why We Read Jane Austen.
” Trilling had taught a course on Austen at Columbia University , in 1973 , amid constant anti-war demonstrations on campus and the deepening Watergate scandal .
He was astonished when more than a hundred and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if to read Austen were a “ vocation ” and a way to express “ disgust with modern life.
” His students , he wrote ,

After leaving Steventon, it was eight and a half years before Austen was settled again, and she could write books to completion. She published four novels between 1811 and her own death, in 1817, at the age of forty-one. The manuscripts she left, of “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey,” were published by her family posthumously.
Running through the losses in Jane Austen’s life—of her father, her home, her confidence in the future, her space to write—were the fissures of her world. Austen lived and wrote and died in a period that might have seemed to her almost as convulsive as ours does to us. Throughout her life, England poured its resources into building a maritime empire of rapacious and complex power. Austen spent several summers near the coast, anxiously waiting to hear if Napoleon had invaded. After 1807, when the United Kingdom finally banned the trading of enslaved people—though not the practice of slavery itself—Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, helped patrol the waters to catch illegal slave ships.
Austen’s own sympathies were firmly with the abolitionists. She lived in Frank’s household, not far from the shipping hub of Portsmouth, and wrote often to both her brothers while they were at sea, learning from their firsthand reports about the conditions of the enslaved people onboard.
And yet, in her books, historic events appear glancingly, and may be easily overlooked by a modern reader. The slave trade is hardly mentioned explicitly—once in a few lines in “Emma,” and again in a famous passage in “Mansfield Park.” That novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, leaves her poor family in Portsmouth to live at Mansfield Park with her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, and his family. Sir Thomas also owns an estate in Antigua and, we can infer, the enslaved people who would have labored there. He is a severe patriarch, who treats people as means to acquiring property—or else as property themselves. (As Edward Said observed, “To earn the right to Mansfield Park you must first leave home as a kind of indentured servant or, to put the case in extreme terms, as a kind of transported commodity.”) After Sir Thomas returns from a journey to the West Indies, Fanny asks her cousin, “Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?” She is referring to a scene that seems of the utmost importance, but which Austen has deliberately left out of the book. The report of the conversation passes so unobtrusively that many readers of Austen, myself included, only answer Fanny’s question much later, perhaps with consternation: No, I didn’t hear you.
When I went home to be with my father for the last time, I brought “Mansfield Park.” What I thought I wanted from the book was Fanny’s secret room, high up under the eaves, where she goes through the keepsakes of her childhood, remembering the family from whom she has been separated. I wasn’t thinking about Said, or forced labor, I wasn’t even listening to Fanny—not entirely. But the book sustained me because it had a complicated geography that connects different families and a various history. There are many ways that you can lose a childhood home; grappling with the loss is part of how you make another sense of home, another view of the world.
In the apprehensive summer of 2016, the water protectors were at Standing Rock, the country was waiting for another election, and our family was moving to Chicago. At the airport, our daughter, now four years old, hoped for a good omen—that ours would be the plane with a rainbow painted on its tail. We arrived in a new city, and began to learn the neighborhood. Places I had written about in earlier books were now before my eyes—a few blocks north, on Woodlawn, was the place where Elijah Muhammad had lived and where James Baldwin had dined in “The Fire Next Time”; we were often in Grant Park, where the police had assaulted protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
By then, the long essay I had been writing about Austen had stretched and twisted and was turning into a book. But certain friends’ voices nagged in my mind. “Comfort reading,” one intellectual had said, briskly. “Austen is domestic,” another had noted, looking around our living room.
For the first time in five years, I was about to return to teaching again, as my father, on his last visit, had urged me to do. I was excited, nervous, and sad. As I prepared for my class, I wondered what he would make of this place he had never seen us in, what he would think about the books I was reading, or the one I was writing.
What I would have given to talk to him about the world. That summer, photos of children dying in Syria, Yemen, and El Salvador appeared on my screen; by September, more than three hundred thousand migrants had crossed the Mediterranean. Looking back through essays about travel, reading, and art, many seemed encased, unaware of the world. I did not think of assigning Austen; reading her still felt like a private concern of mine. I had taught writing about voyages and islands before, and I decided to do so again, but, this time, to think more about forced migration and flight. I would still teach V. S. Naipaul’s “The Middle Passage,” but I would add Edwidge Danticat’s essays on Haiti, and chapters from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography.
My class that autumn was bisected by the election. We met the morning after the vote. No one was quite sure what to do. We read a poem out loud, slowly. It was “Crusoe in England,” by Elizabeth Bishop, a bleak poem about being shipwrecked on a volcanic island, and about whether it is ever possible to feel at home. Our different voices sounded the patient attention of the whole. In the weeks and months that followed, I, like many, searched for signs that it was still ethical to do contemplative work.
With a colleague, I had begun editing an anthology of migration stories from people at the university and in our neighborhood—stories beginning in Vietnam, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, India. When I tried to talk to my children about these stories, I felt that they knew I was talking to them about death. Another summer came, and we waited for the midterm elections. M. and I took each of our children to the emergency room for the kinds of injuries that children get at playgrounds. In June, we made signs to carry at a protest against family separations. Our son wept because he could not yet write, and the signs seemed so important.
In the study at the top of our house, I kept losing, and sometimes finding, my way through “Mansfield Park” and “Emma.” Gradually, I was learning a more radical, difficult Austen, who was already familiar to many other scholars. Beginning in 1811, Austen’s brother Charles, his wife, Fanny, and their small children were on harbor duty in Portsmouth, aboard H.M.S. Namur. The Namur was a storied ship, which had seen action in the wars for American independence and the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar. The Namur was also a ship that Olaudah Equiano had served on, in 1759, and had later written about. Regardless of whether Austen read Equiano, his book circulated widely after 1789. The beauty of his language and the living voices of his many characters became a part of the language of the abolitionist writers who read him, like the historian of Clarkson, whom Austen, as she wrote to her sister, was “in love with,” and William Cowper, Austen’s favorite poet.
Since Paula Byrne’s “The Real Jane Austen” (2013), it has become widely accepted that Austen named the Mansfield estate in her novel after Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who laid the judicial groundwork for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The fictional Mansfield Park is no beacon of liberty, so Austen must have intended something complex when she chose to associate the novel with the actual Lord Mansfield, a man whose public and private life ran together in interesting ways. He and his wife did not have children of their own, but they raised two adoptive daughters. One was their great-niece, Dido Belle, born in 1761. Belle was the daughter of Lord Mansfield’s nephew, a British naval officer, and Maria Belle, a woman who was enslaved in the West Indies. History has not yet found any record of how Maria Belle was treated or what she thought when, in 1765, her daughter, only around four years old, was brought to England to be raised by her great-uncle. Dido Belle would have been about eleven when Lord Mansfield wrote, in Somersett v. Stewart, that the institution of slavery had persisted long after the reasons for it had been “erased from memory,” and concluded that “no authority can be found for [slavery] in the laws of this country.”
Austen became acquainted with the other daughter of the Mansfield household in 1805, a year or so after Dido Belle died. Austen may have wondered, as others have, whether Belle, who was given an education and went on to be her great-uncle’s private secretary, had an influence on Lord Mansfield’s work. In the book that shares the Mansfield name, Fanny is a poor niece, not a servant, and certainly not enslaved. But, at ten years old, she is brought against her inclination to an uncle’s house and forced to understand certain dynamics of power.
Walking with a companion one day in a green hedgerow, Fanny considers the nature of memory:
There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Fanny uses the language of empires—their obediences, tyrannies, and inequalities—suggesting an intertwined understanding of personal and historical memory. Over time, that understanding, born of the rupture in Fanny’s life, helped me to think of my father and his history without turning away from the world.
Our children are eight and five now. My father is often on my mind, but it’s only happened a couple of times that I’ve really felt his presence—one day, walking at Fresh Pond, when the wind was up; once in a plane, flying low over the water. Thoughts of him come back at unexpected moments, and incompletely, as history has a way of doing.
On a spring morning last year, I read the news—hundreds of people were buried after a bombing in Sri Lanka, the President had tweeted about impeachment—and then I went to a colleague’s graduate seminar, to talk with her students about “Emma.” The students had also read a personal essay of mine about reading “Emma,” which had become a part of my book. My colleague had told me about her own book, which she had been working on for ten years. It was hard, she told me, to finish a project begun in such a different place, with different ideas and aspirations. When class began, I found myself saying to her students that books are like that: they very often have more layers than they can quite contain. This is part of what makes a book a place that a reader can return to at different times over the course of a life.
Austen herself worked on ideas, scenes, phrases, and characters in “Emma” on and off for twenty years. There was another Emma, in a novel she called “The Watsons,” a book Austen gave up writing after her father died. That Emma, too, was very lovely, and especially lovely with children, and found a right place among a community at a country dance. The later Emma bears some similarities to her, but Austen’s preoccupation with leadership—“in every respect, it suited Emma best to lead,” she writes—probably developed later, when war had long been part of daily life. Austen wrote the last version of “Emma” in the months leading up to the Hundred Days War. The Allies had begun to march on Napoleon again just as Austen finished her manuscript. Emma must reckon with her own Napoleonism; she is what Austen calls “an imaginist.” Lost in her imagination, and in herself, Emma is, as she eventually realizes, susceptible to “insufferable vanity,” to grandiosity and “unpardonable arrogance,” to tyrannical attempts “to arrange everybody’s destiny.” But she is also capable of another kind of imagination, one which helps her pay attention to others. Austen sees the true faculty of imagination not only as empathy but as a kind of groundedness in a difficult world.
It interested me, talking with the students about “Emma,” after years of fighting with it myself, to see how eagerly and painstakingly they read the novel. To them, it was natural to argue over Austen and the institution of slavery, Austen and the position of women, Austen and the Napoleonic Wars. It was even natural for them to discuss my relationship to Emma. The students told me that personal criticism gave them a different way to think about the relationships they had to reading. One of the students was from Cambridge, and he said that he had often walked around Fresh Pond, where I had described walking with my father. I realized that my father was now a figure in the landscape of someone else’s imagination. My essay—a kind of conversation with Austen and with my father—was not a declaration of the kind Anne Elliot makes, but I had written it to think about what it means to love “when existence is gone.” The students, too, were finding ways of walking through books—across time and within history. A “green thought” is neither nostalgic nor utopian; it is a way of moving with other people over rough ground.
This excerpt is drawn from "Austen Years," by Rachel Cohen, which is out in July from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.


newyorker--2020-07-17--What Is Distance Learning For?

What Is Distance Learning For?

Through the fog of memory , and despite everything that ’ s happened since , I still vividly remember the last day of school .
In the morning , I listened to the Mayor on the radio insisting that the schools would not close .
Too many vulnerable children got their only meals at school , he said .
Too much of the city ’ s workforce depended on schools for child care .
In the afternoon , Emily and I went on our big pandemic shopping run .
And then , at 5 p.m. on the dot , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The school , our beloved school , was its usual self : lots of parents , lots of kids , everyone in a pretty good mood .
As usual , his after-school teachers were exhausted .
“ The Mayor doesn ’ t want to close the schools , ” I said .
“ If he doesn ’ t close them , we ’ ll close them , ” one of the teachers said .
“ Attendance is already down , ” the other teacher said .
“ People are keeping their kids at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knew the schools were going to close , and soon .
Raffi and I went outside , and he ran to the swings .
I talked with some of the other parents .
One , a lawyer , said her boss had told her to bring home as much work as she could , as the office was probably going to be closed ; another , a computer programmer , had already started working from home .
None of us was wearing a mask , but already some of the parents seemed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We discussed various contingencies in the event of school closure .
Maybe we could set up a parent-run child-care co-op ?
In any case , we ’ d see each other on the playgrounds !
None of us , I think , had any conception at the time of just how serious this was going to turn out to be .
After half an hour , I managed to extract Raffi from the playground .
We picked up his little brother , Ilya , from day care .
Then , together , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , through beautiful Clinton Hill and Fort Greene , across dangerous Atlantic Avenue , and into the huge Atlantic Yards development , still mostly a construction site , where we live .
And that was it : the last day of school .
It was Friday , March 13th .
At first , there was just fear : fear that we would get sick ; fear that our parents would get sick ; fear that society would collapse , like in disaster movies , and people would start attacking one another on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , there was the matter of our kids .
Ilya was not yet two , too young to greet the sudden end of full-time day care with anything but joy .
We had been dropping him off there for seven months , and he still sometimes cried .
Ilya did not ask any questions about why he was staying home .
Raffi , approaching his fifth birthday , was a different story .
He had been hearing about the coronavirus for a few weeks now , in part because his teachers at school @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their hands .
The dance teacher had taught the class how to sneeze into the crook of their elbows .
And we , to the best of our ability , had explained to him what the coronavirus was .
Because I had done the explaining in Russian , and corona , in Russian , as in many other languages , means “ crown , ” he had translated the name of the virus as “ King Germ.
” When we told him that because of the King Germ he had to stay home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he seemed to take it very much in stride .
Who wouldn ’ t trade the stress and rigidity of school for long , contemplative breakfasts followed by hours of “ Wild Kratts , ” “ Spider-Man , ” and a terrible show called “ Heroes of Goo Jit Zu ” ?
But , in fact , as it turned out , Raffi craved the structure that school provided , and pretty soon he began , as Emily put it , “ to lose his little mind.
” The first week after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both sick .
According to later antibody testing , it probably wasn ’ t COVID-19 , but it wasn ’ t pleasant , either , and we mostly let the kids watch TV .
But even Raffi would eventually grow bored of this and embark on chasing Ilya around the apartment and playing with stuff in the freezer and drawing on the walls .
Our apartment was small , and a rental .
From the twenty-first floor , we watched the traffic grow thinner and thinner on Atlantic Avenue .
In between sleeping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Raffi to stop whatever violent or destructive game he ’ d now invented , we wondered if we should leave New York .
We looked at Airbnb listings near my father ’ s house in Massachusetts .
But we didn ’ t want to leave , and , when push came to shove , we couldn ’ t afford it .
Then friends who had temporarily left their house in Crown Heights , about a mile from us , asked if we ’ d like to house-sit .
They had two floors and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We said yes right away and moved house a couple of days later .
Once we ’ d put away our groceries , set up the travel crib for the baby , and figured out the Netflix situation on the television , it was time to face our new reality .
It was time for distance learning to begin .
What was school ?
How did it work ?
Raffi ’ s teacher , Ms. V , had always done her best to send photos and updates , and Raffi , for his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gossip about his friends : who ’ d had a time-out , who had not yet learned how to open a bag of potato chips , who had stepped on Raffi ’ s hand ( deliberately , he believed ) during recess .
But how did school turn Raffi into a person , a member of society , someone who sat still for up to fifteen minutes at a time and didn ’ t seem to just randomly start throwing things at people ’ s heads ?
This part of it was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day of distance learning , Ms. V sent us the class ’ s daily schedule .
From 8:20 to 8:40 A.M. , the kids wrote out their names and ate some breakfast .
From 8:45 to 9 , they had a morning meeting to discuss their feelings , listen to the song of the week , and practice letter sounds .
Then they went outside .
Then they had “ center time activities.
” And on and on until 2:40 p.m. For the sake of continuity and the kids ’ continuing enrichment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the schedule at home .
We agreed to try .
Ms. V did this with eighteen kids , every single day .
How hard could it be for us to do it with one kid , our own ?
It turned out to be impossible .
Raffi would sit staring at his assigned task for a minute , but then he ’ d want to find something in the refrigerator to eat , or to chase after Ilya , or to just run away and hide .
When we tried to go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether to the park down the street or just to the back yard , Raffi claimed not to want to go .
Later on , we heard from lots of parents that their Raffi-age kids had this reaction to the lockdown , either from fear or inertia or something else , and had refused to go outside for weeks .
But , between the two of them , our kids were just doing too much damage to our friends ’ house—to their floors , their stairs , their beautiful white couch .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times , I simply carried Raffi onto the front stoop in his shirt and socks .
Once outside in the cold ( it was still , in late March , pretty cold ) , he would agree to put on shoes and a jacket .
Then we would go for a peaceful walk on the eerily empty streets .

Through the fog of memory, and despite everything that’s happened since, I still vividly remember the last day of school. In the morning, I listened to the Mayor on the radio insisting that the schools would not close. Too many vulnerable children got their only meals at school, he said. Too much of the city’s workforce depended on schools for child care. In the afternoon, Emily and I went on our big pandemic shopping run. And then, at 5 p.m. on the dot, I picked up Raffi from his pre-K. The school, our beloved school, was its usual self: lots of parents, lots of kids, everyone in a pretty good mood. As usual, his after-school teachers were exhausted.
“The Mayor doesn’t want to close the schools,” I said.
“If he doesn’t close them, we’ll close them,” one of the teachers said.
“Attendance is already down,” the other teacher said. “People are keeping their kids at home.”
That’s when I knew the schools were going to close, and soon.
Raffi and I went outside, and he ran to the swings. I talked with some of the other parents. One, a lawyer, said her boss had told her to bring home as much work as she could, as the office was probably going to be closed; another, a computer programmer, had already started working from home. None of us was wearing a mask, but already some of the parents seemed to be keeping their distance from one another. We discussed various contingencies in the event of school closure. Maybe we could set up a parent-run child-care co-op? In any case, we’d see each other on the playgrounds! None of us, I think, had any conception at the time of just how serious this was going to turn out to be.
After half an hour, I managed to extract Raffi from the playground. We picked up his little brother, Ilya, from day care. Then, together, we ambled along the streets of Brooklyn, through beautiful Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, across dangerous Atlantic Avenue, and into the huge Atlantic Yards development, still mostly a construction site, where we live. And that was it: the last day of school. It was Friday, March 13th.
At first, there was just fear: fear that we would get sick; fear that our parents would get sick; fear that society would collapse, like in disaster movies, and people would start attacking one another on the street for groceries.
In the meantime, there was the matter of our kids. Ilya was not yet two, too young to greet the sudden end of full-time day care with anything but joy. We had been dropping him off there for seven months, and he still sometimes cried. Ilya did not ask any questions about why he was staying home.
Raffi, approaching his fifth birthday, was a different story. He had been hearing about the coronavirus for a few weeks now, in part because his teachers at school had begun making everyone very carefully wash their hands. The dance teacher had taught the class how to sneeze into the crook of their elbows. And we, to the best of our ability, had explained to him what the coronavirus was. Because I had done the explaining in Russian, and corona, in Russian, as in many other languages, means “crown,” he had translated the name of the virus as “King Germ.” When we told him that because of the King Germ he had to stay home from school for a little while, he seemed to take it very much in stride. Who wouldn’t trade the stress and rigidity of school for long, contemplative breakfasts followed by hours of “Wild Kratts,” “Spider-Man,” and a terrible show called “Heroes of Goo Jit Zu”? But, in fact, as it turned out, Raffi craved the structure that school provided, and pretty soon he began, as Emily put it, “to lose his little mind.”
The first week after the school closure, Emily and I were both sick. According to later antibody testing, it probably wasn’t COVID-19, but it wasn’t pleasant, either, and we mostly let the kids watch TV. But even Raffi would eventually grow bored of this and embark on chasing Ilya around the apartment and playing with stuff in the freezer and drawing on the walls. Our apartment was small, and a rental. From the twenty-first floor, we watched the traffic grow thinner and thinner on Atlantic Avenue.
In between sleeping and sweating from fever and yelling at Raffi to stop whatever violent or destructive game he’d now invented, we wondered if we should leave New York. We looked at Airbnb listings near my father’s house in Massachusetts. But we didn’t want to leave, and, when push came to shove, we couldn’t afford it. Then friends who had temporarily left their house in Crown Heights, about a mile from us, asked if we’d like to house-sit. They had two floors and, crucially, a back yard. We said yes right away and moved house a couple of days later. Once we’d put away our groceries, set up the travel crib for the baby, and figured out the Netflix situation on the television, it was time to face our new reality. It was time for distance learning to begin.
What was school? How did it work? Raffi’s teacher, Ms. V, had always done her best to send photos and updates, and Raffi, for his part, was actually pretty willing to gossip about his friends: who’d had a time-out, who had not yet learned how to open a bag of potato chips, who had stepped on Raffi’s hand (deliberately, he believed) during recess. But how did school turn Raffi into a person, a member of society, someone who sat still for up to fifteen minutes at a time and didn’t seem to just randomly start throwing things at people’s heads? This part of it was a mystery to us.
On the first day of distance learning, Ms. V sent us the class’s daily schedule. From 8:20 to 8:40 A.M., the kids wrote out their names and ate some breakfast. From 8:45 to 9, they had a morning meeting to discuss their feelings, listen to the song of the week, and practice letter sounds. Then they went outside. Then they had “center time activities.” And on and on until 2:40 p.m. For the sake of continuity and the kids’ continuing enrichment, Ms. V suggested we follow some form of the schedule at home. We agreed to try. Ms. V did this with eighteen kids, every single day. How hard could it be for us to do it with one kid, our own?
It turned out to be impossible. Raffi would sit staring at his assigned task for a minute, but then he’d want to find something in the refrigerator to eat, or to chase after Ilya, or to just run away and hide. When we tried to go outside, as per the schedule, whether to the park down the street or just to the back yard, Raffi claimed not to want to go. Later on, we heard from lots of parents that their Raffi-age kids had this reaction to the lockdown, either from fear or inertia or something else, and had refused to go outside for weeks. But, between the two of them, our kids were just doing too much damage to our friends’ house—to their floors, their stairs, their beautiful white couch. We had to get them out. Several times, I simply carried Raffi onto the front stoop in his shirt and socks. Once outside in the cold (it was still, in late March, pretty cold), he would agree to put on shoes and a jacket. Then we would go for a peaceful walk on the eerily empty streets.
We had never lived anywhere so quiet. A residential side street, a back yard—since the kids had been born, these had been our aspiration. But now it was too quiet. People were not hanging out on the corner, nor sitting on their stoops, nor driving around with music playing. One time, a procession of Hasidim drove down our street in vans, blaring music, in celebration of Passover. But aside from that it was just sirens, day and night, taking people down Brooklyn Avenue to Kings County Hospital, or up New York Avenue to Brooklyn Hospital, or along Eastern Parkway to Methodist. In the paper we read about the scenes at these places. We looked at photos of the mobile morgues.


newyorker--2020-07-18--What to Stream: “Come and Get It,” One of the Greatest Films by Howard Hawks

When I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman and newly in thrall to movies , I read the book “ Godard on Godard , ” a collection of Jean-Luc Godard ’ s criticism and interviews , and stumbled upon his reference to “ the greatest American artist ” —someone I ’ d never heard of , Howard Hawks .
Soon thereafter , I noticed that “ Bringing Up Baby ” ( which I ’ d also never heard of ) , a film directed by Hawks , was playing at a revival house ; I saw it and felt , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gotten it—essentially and immediately—and it made me a devotee both of Hawks and of all things classic-Hollywood .
What I felt I ’ d gotten was symbolism : the sense that the core of the movie wasn ’ t in the details of the story but in emblematic gestures , antics , and winks , which leapt out of the film ’ s dramatic fabric .
I ’ d been , until then , put off by the extreme unreality , the obvious distortions of experience , that Hollywood embodied ; now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and from any craving for a compensating realism .
The viewing of Hollywood movies suddenly struck me as an aesthetic world apart , an entirely new mode of expression—and , ever since , Hawks ’ s films held a special place for me in it .
I was deeply excited to learn recently that one of my favorites of his films—and , indeed , one of my favorite movies of all—has finally become available to stream , on Amazon Prime : his boisterous melodrama “ Come and Get It , ” from 1936 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a novel by Edna Ferber , who was among the most popular writers of the time . )
It ’ s a mysterious outpost of Hawks ’ s distinctive and original cinematic universe , a tale that seethes with perversity beneath its robust surfaces ; it ’ s a Möbius strip of erotic obsession that anticipates , by more than two decades , Alfred Hitchcock ’ s ultimate sexual doppelgänger drama , “ Vertigo.
” “ Come and Get It , ” set in the world of big-time commercial logging , begins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ An ambitious logging foreman named Barney Glasgow ( Edward Arnold ) and a saloon singer , Lotta Morgan ( Frances Farmer ) , fall in love , but he has to marry his boss ’ s daughter in order to become a partner in the firm .
Lotta instead marries Barney ’ s best friend , Swan Bostrom ( Walter Brennan ) .
The friends lose touch , Barney gets rich , Lotta dies—and , in 1907 , Barney and Swan meet again , and Barney falls in love with his friend ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and also played by Farmer ) , who looks just like her late mother .
In Hawks ’ s adaptation of the novel ( he worked , uncredited , with the credited screenwriters , Jane Murfin and Jules Furthman ) , much of the movie plays like raucously antic action comedy .
Barney , as played by the hearty and blustery Arnold , swaggers in motion and in repose , projecting purpose and power along with insinuating bonhomie and crude challenges .
He ’ s introduced at a lumberjacks ’ mess table , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are threatening him ; as he ’ s dragging them toward the door , Swan comes through it—and takes a flying leap into Barney ’ s arms and clamps his legs around Barney ’ s waist as they greet each other loudly and laughingly .
( Moments later , they repeat the gesture , when Swan delivers news of Barney ’ s big promotion . )
The elder Lotta , in Farmer ’ s kaleidoscopic interpretation , comes off as a forerunner of Lauren Bacall ’ s character in “ To Have and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voice , a feline prowl , and a reckoning gaze blending wariness and design .
She and Barney meet at the saloon , where he is playing a rigged shell game while scheming to outsmart the house and she is an interested observer cannily working the floor for her boss ’ s interest and her own .
Farmer lends Lotta a distinctive repertory of gestures : cracking a sardonic half-grin , waving her hand in an exaggerated folksiness , parking her chewing gum under the bar before singing .
She seals her bond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of violence , which , in a brilliant touch , has the effect of a loud public declaration of love .
The result is an uproariously destructive bar fight , giving rise to another of her grandly violent and inspired gestures , this one mightily comedic : hurling large round metal serving trays , like giant frisbees .
As Swan , Brennan practically leaps out of his skin with the energy of his comedic imagination .
The character is Swedish , and Brennan gleefully chews the accent to a language-garbling nub .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a door with a stomping dance and hoisting himself up on the transom to peer in on Lotta and Barney .
Yet his rambunctious comedy gives rise to the movie ’ s mightiest moment of bitter pathos : when Barney , heading off to marry the boss ’ s daughter , delegates Swan to inform Lotta that it ’ s over between them .
It ’ s a long scene , done in a mere handful of shots , that emphasizes , in a wry set of pretenses , Swan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of the pain that he himself will inflict in delivering the news .
Hawks dispels the scene ’ s potentially maudlin mood , foregrounding antics that imply a tragic depth of darkness—which is all the greater for being merely hinted at .
By 1907 , Barney is the sole owner of what is no longer just a logging concern , the mighty Glasgow Pulp , Paper , & Power Co. , and the benignly gruff tyrant at home , in his mansion , with his devoted , formal , and fretful wife @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , whom he doesn ’ t love .
Their son , Richard ( Joel McCrea ) , a modern , educated , statistically minded and socially progressive industrial engineer , works at the firm and is being groomed to inherit it .
Their daughter , Evvie ( Andrea Leeds ) , has a brusquely affectionate complicity with Barney , calling him by his first name ( when out of her mother ’ s earshot ) and engaging him , and only him , in bracingly frank discussion of her love life .
These @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and touches : a door sill on which Barney habitually stumbles , a pool of syrup in which Richard gets stuck , a batch of taffy that he and young Lotta twist and shred , even a paper cup—the little invention with which Richard and a young factory worker are planning to make their mark .
Yet the tone of some of these later scenes is different , and there ’ s a practical reason for it : the direction of the film is credited both to Hawks and to William Wyler , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Alsace-Lorraine , whose earnest expressivity is rarely pierced by humor or mixed emotions .
Hawks had been hired to make the film by the producer Samuel Goldwyn , and he took advantage of Goldwyn ’ s hospitalization , during production , to depart drastically from the novel .
When Goldwyn returned to the studio , he reacted with outrage at what Hawks had done .
It ’ s not clear whether Hawks then quit or was fired , but he was in any case replaced , and many of the film ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ followed the script that Hawks had overseen ) lack the first half ’ s richness of gesture , ambivalence of expression , and instability of mood , replaced instead by straightforward dramatic declamations .
( The scenes are also briefer , more illustrative , and rendered in Wyler ’ s habitually more ornate style . )
Nonetheless , “ Come and Get It ” is very much a Hawks film ; the framework that he set and developed carries through to the end of the movie.. Farmer ’ s performance , especially as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hawkian trope—the independent woman brazenly confronting trouble with daring decisions—that she realizes with an apt spirit of creative freedom .
( In “ Hawks on Hawks , ” Joseph McBride ’ s book of interviews with the director from the nineteen-seventies , the director said , “ I don ’ t think there ’ s any doubt that Frances Farmer was the best actress I ever worked with.
” ) So is the crude , swaggering portrayal of Barney and his close , homoerotically tinged relationship with Swan .
( Hawks had already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ men who made asses of themselves in love , as in “ A Girl in Every Port ” and “ Tiger Shark.
” ) Hawks was a great director of actors—Brennan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “ Come and Get It ” —because he was , in effect , a great coach of actors , creating provocative ideas and situations that sparked performers ’ inventiveness .
His process overleaps both his own era and the later age of method acting and psychological identification , foreshadowing the modern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s films have a modernity that was lacking from those of many of his peers , because he invented not just a world of experience but a process for creating it .

Frances Farmer in Howard Hawks’s “Come and Get It,” from 1936. Photograph by Everett
When I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman and newly in thrall to movies, I read the book “Godard on Godard,” a collection of Jean-Luc Godard’s criticism and interviews, and stumbled upon his reference to “the greatest American artist”—someone I’d never heard of, Howard Hawks. Soon thereafter, I noticed that “Bringing Up Baby” (which I’d also never heard of), a film directed by Hawks, was playing at a revival house; I saw it and felt, at once, as if I’d gotten it—essentially and immediately—and it made me a devotee both of Hawks and of all things classic-Hollywood. What I felt I’d gotten was symbolism: the sense that the core of the movie wasn’t in the details of the story but in emblematic gestures, antics, and winks, which leapt out of the film’s dramatic fabric. I’d been, until then, put off by the extreme unreality, the obvious distortions of experience, that Hollywood embodied; now, I was free both from that revulsion and from any craving for a compensating realism. The viewing of Hollywood movies suddenly struck me as an aesthetic world apart, an entirely new mode of expression—and, ever since, Hawks’s films held a special place for me in it.
I was deeply excited to learn recently that one of my favorites of his films—and, indeed, one of my favorite movies of all—has finally become available to stream, on Amazon Prime: his boisterous melodrama “Come and Get It,” from 1936. (The story is loosely adapted from a novel by Edna Ferber, who was among the most popular writers of the time.) It’s a mysterious outpost of Hawks’s distinctive and original cinematic universe, a tale that seethes with perversity beneath its robust surfaces; it’s a Möbius strip of erotic obsession that anticipates, by more than two decades, Alfred Hitchcock’s ultimate sexual doppelgänger drama, “Vertigo.”
“Come and Get It,” set in the world of big-time commercial logging, begins in northern Wisconsin, in 1884. An ambitious logging foreman named Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold) and a saloon singer, Lotta Morgan (Frances Farmer), fall in love, but he has to marry his boss’s daughter in order to become a partner in the firm. Lotta instead marries Barney’s best friend, Swan Bostrom (Walter Brennan). The friends lose touch, Barney gets rich, Lotta dies—and, in 1907, Barney and Swan meet again, and Barney falls in love with his friend’s daughter, also named Lotta (and also played by Farmer), who looks just like her late mother.
In Hawks’s adaptation of the novel (he worked, uncredited, with the credited screenwriters, Jane Murfin and Jules Furthman), much of the movie plays like raucously antic action comedy. Barney, as played by the hearty and blustery Arnold, swaggers in motion and in repose, projecting purpose and power along with insinuating bonhomie and crude challenges. He’s introduced at a lumberjacks’ mess table, punching out a pair of workers who are threatening him; as he’s dragging them toward the door, Swan comes through it—and takes a flying leap into Barney’s arms and clamps his legs around Barney’s waist as they greet each other loudly and laughingly. (Moments later, they repeat the gesture, when Swan delivers news of Barney’s big promotion.)
The elder Lotta, in Farmer’s kaleidoscopic interpretation, comes off as a forerunner of Lauren Bacall’s character in “To Have and Have Not,” with a husky voice, a feline prowl, and a reckoning gaze blending wariness and design. She and Barney meet at the saloon, where he is playing a rigged shell game while scheming to outsmart the house and she is an interested observer cannily working the floor for her boss’s interest and her own. Farmer lends Lotta a distinctive repertory of gestures: cracking a sardonic half-grin, waving her hand in an exaggerated folksiness, parking her chewing gum under the bar before singing. She seals her bond with Barney by means of a gesture of violence, which, in a brilliant touch, has the effect of a loud public declaration of love. The result is an uproariously destructive bar fight, giving rise to another of her grandly violent and inspired gestures, this one mightily comedic: hurling large round metal serving trays, like giant frisbees.
As Swan, Brennan practically leaps out of his skin with the energy of his comedic imagination. The character is Swedish, and Brennan gleefully chews the accent to a language-garbling nub. He bounces angularly through each scene, knocking at a door with a stomping dance and hoisting himself up on the transom to peer in on Lotta and Barney. Yet his rambunctious comedy gives rise to the movie’s mightiest moment of bitter pathos: when Barney, heading off to marry the boss’s daughter, delegates Swan to inform Lotta that it’s over between them. It’s a long scene, done in a mere handful of shots, that emphasizes, in a wry set of pretenses, Swan’s dread of the mission and, especially, of the pain that he himself will inflict in delivering the news. Hawks dispels the scene’s potentially maudlin mood, foregrounding antics that imply a tragic depth of darkness—which is all the greater for being merely hinted at.
By 1907, Barney is the sole owner of what is no longer just a logging concern, the mighty Glasgow Pulp, Paper, & Power Co., and the benignly gruff tyrant at home, in his mansion, with his devoted, formal, and fretful wife, Emma Louise (Mary Nash), whom he doesn’t love. Their son, Richard (Joel McCrea), a modern, educated, statistically minded and socially progressive industrial engineer, works at the firm and is being groomed to inherit it. Their daughter, Evvie (Andrea Leeds), has a brusquely affectionate complicity with Barney, calling him by his first name (when out of her mother’s earshot) and engaging him, and only him, in bracingly frank discussion of her love life. These later scenes also bounce with resonant gestures and touches: a door sill on which Barney habitually stumbles, a pool of syrup in which Richard gets stuck, a batch of taffy that he and young Lotta twist and shred, even a paper cup—the little invention with which Richard and a young factory worker are planning to make their mark.
Yet the tone of some of these later scenes is different, and there’s a practical reason for it: the direction of the film is credited both to Hawks and to William Wyler, a cultured and literary filmmaker, born in Alsace-Lorraine, whose earnest expressivity is rarely pierced by humor or mixed emotions. Hawks had been hired to make the film by the producer Samuel Goldwyn, and he took advantage of Goldwyn’s hospitalization, during production, to depart drastically from the novel. When Goldwyn returned to the studio, he reacted with outrage at what Hawks had done. It’s not clear whether Hawks then quit or was fired, but he was in any case replaced, and many of the film’s later scenes (though they generally followed the script that Hawks had overseen) lack the first half’s richness of gesture, ambivalence of expression, and instability of mood, replaced instead by straightforward dramatic declamations. (The scenes are also briefer, more illustrative, and rendered in Wyler’s habitually more ornate style.)
Nonetheless, “Come and Get It” is very much a Hawks film; the framework that he set and developed carries through to the end of the movie.. Farmer’s performance, especially as the elder Lotta, incarnates a central Hawkian trope—the independent woman brazenly confronting trouble with daring decisions—that she realizes with an apt spirit of creative freedom. (In “Hawks on Hawks,” Joseph McBride’s book of interviews with the director from the nineteen-seventies, the director said, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Frances Farmer was the best actress I ever worked with.”) So is the crude, swaggering portrayal of Barney and his close, homoerotically tinged relationship with Swan. (Hawks had already made a batch of films about rugged men who made asses of themselves in love, as in “A Girl in Every Port” and “Tiger Shark.”) Hawks was a great director of actors—Brennan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “Come and Get It”—because he was, in effect, a great coach of actors, creating provocative ideas and situations that sparked performers’ inventiveness. His process overleaps both his own era and the later age of method acting and psychological identification, foreshadowing the modern cinema of reflexivity and improvisation. Hawks’s films have a modernity that was lacking from those of many of his peers, because he invented not just a world of experience but a process for creating it.


newyorker--2020-07-17--To Fight the Coronavirus, You Need an Army

On June 24th , as Texas was beginning to reckon with its dramatic spike in coronavirus cases , I received a phone call from an alarmed friend .
He ’ d heard a rumor about Houston ’ s Ben Taub Hospital , where I work as an internist : apparently , it was so full of patients that some seeking treatment for COVID-19 were lining the hallways , while others had left after spending too long in line .
“ Do we have a New York situation on our hands , or what ?
” he asked .
I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four weeks without a break .
The stress on the system was evident , but I hadn ’ t seen anything like what he described .
“ We ’ re busy , but it ’ s not chaos , ” I said .
Still , I was unnerved , and , after hanging up , I took a walk around the hospital to make sure I hadn ’ t missed something .
The emergency room and its waiting area were orderly and nearly empty .
At the triage station , a single patient @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blood pressure was being taken .
I greeted the nurses on the medical-surgical units : “ How ’ re y ’ all doing ?
” They seemed overworked but in control .
In the I.C.U.
, doctors in gowns clustered around computer workstations , rounding as they normally did .
It was hardly a scene from a disaster film .
In one hallway , a set of flat-screen televisions explained what I was seeing .
They showed the capacity levels of hospitals across Harris County , which includes Houston .
The county as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of its 1,614 I.C.U .
beds , 1,509 were full .
Around five hundred of those patients were sick with COVID-19 ; the rest suffered from the mix of conditions that were typical before the pandemic .
Ben Taub Hospital , I saw , had reached “ saturation , ” which meant that incoming ambulances were being diverted elsewhere .
The grim statistics contrasted oddly with the calm atmosphere surrounding me , but also made sense of it .
My hospital , evidently , was “ saturated ” and empty at the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that this situation isn ’ t unusual at overburdened hospitals during the pandemic .
Earlier this spring , when I first began worrying about whether Houston had enough resources to handle a spike in infections , I thought mostly about equipment and space .
I counted our hospital ’ s ventilators and negative-pressure rooms , taking the concept of an I.CU .
“ bed ” literally .
Now I understand that Houston , a first-rate medical city , doesn ’ t lack space or equipment .
If our hospitals can ’ t accept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we don ’ t have enough I.C.U .
nurses to care for them .
Our scarcest resource is human .
In late March , patients with COVID-19 started arriving at my hospital .
To avoid exposure and conserve P.P.E.
, I treated my first patient with the virus mostly from the hallway , calling him on the phone .
The nurses took a different approach .
“ We ’ re in there all the time , ” one told me .
Day and night , she and her colleagues were checking his vital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and addressing the alarms emanating from the medical devices surrounding him .
At that point in the progression of the illness , they were doing most of the work that COVID-19 required .
My only job was to see whether the patient ’ s breathing was improving .
When he left the hospital fully recovered , I was happy but not proud .
I had little reason to be : the victory belonged to the nurses and respiratory therapists .
In the treatment of virtually all diseases , the number of personnel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ escalates .
For COVID-19 , the most basic level of care involves a nasal cannula—a forked tube leading from an oxygen tank into the nostrils—which delivers about twice as much oxygen as is contained in ordinary air .
On the medical-surgical wards where such devices are used , a single nurse can oversee the care of five patients .
But people with more advanced cases of COVID-19 have fluctuating oxygen levels and more extensive needs .
Respiratory therapists must visit at least once every six hours ; doctors must order more frequent blood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ monitoring .
In the intermediate-care units where patients like these are treated , the nurse-to-patient ratio is one to four .
In the I.C.U.
, where patients receive an even higher level of attention and care , each nurse can work with only two at a time .
Often , many people must converge to offer care simultaneously .
“ Proning , ” which has emerged as a valuable therapeutic advance in the treatment of severe COVID-19 , is a good example of work-intensive I.C.U .
care .
A patient who is proned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ belly while her breathing tube , I.V.s , and monitors are kept intact and attached ; many hours later , the move must be reversed .
During the pandemic , proning has been shown to make a life-saving difference for some patients ; it allows the fluid in the lungs to redistribute itself , opening up new areas to oxygenation .
But carefully flipping an unconscious , paralyzed patient can require as many as six people—nurses , assistants , therapists , and sometimes doctors , each gowned in P.P.E.—to coördinate their efforts , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sculpture .
In order for an I.C.U .
to prone large numbers of patients each day , it must be fully staffed .
Staffing , therefore , shapes I.C.U .
capacity just as much as equipment .
Not long ago , I received a phone call from a nurse who was caring for a patient of mine ; we suspected that she had COVID-19 , and though her vitals weren ’ t necessarily concerning , she wasn ’ t looking great .
Within half an hour of my arrival at her bedside , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Our I.C.U.s were full , meaning that the ratio of nurses to patients there was holding steady at one to two .
But the critical-care team and the hospital ’ s nursing leadership were able to accommodate her , finding not just a room where she could receive I.C.U.-level care but also a dedicated , trained nurse .
I recalled something Esmaeil Porsa , the chief executive of Ben Taub Hospital , had said in an interview : “ If somehow , magically , there ’ s a group of ten or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have , then I can transform more of my beds into I.C.U.s.
” But there are rarely extra nurses to be found—and so a COVID-19 spike ends up diverting staff from the hospital as a whole .
At Ben Taub , nurses have been moving from the medical-surgical wards to intermediate care , or from intermediate care to the I.C.U .
( Similarly , internal-medicine doctors like me , who are used to seeing patients in medical-surgical units , have begun working in I.C.U.s under the supervision of critical-care doctors . )
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I.C.U .
has occasionally climbed to one to three , or higher .
Meanwhile , the need to stretch personnel trickles down .
A nurse on a medical-surgical unit might now be responsible for eight patients instead of four—a lower ratio that increases risks .
Nurses aren ’ t interchangeable ; many have extensive training and experience in specific areas , such as post-anesthesia , labor and delivery , or burns .
Last week , as the number of new coronavirus cases per day in Texas passed ten thousand , and as I.C.U.s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I called up a former I.C.U .
nurse I know who now works as an administrator at a large , private hospital near mine .
I asked her how the nurses there were doing .
“ We are not O.K.
, ” she said .
Under the pressures of the surge , the nurse-to-patient ratio in her I.C.U .
was regularly being pushed to one to three , and many nurses were working six twelve-hour shifts each week .
With more COVID-19 patients coming in , the hospital had opened pop-up units , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ People think a nurse is a nurse is a nurse , but they are just as specialized as doctors , ” she said .
In patient care , , nothing is as stressful as having to learn new tasks and replicate them quickly .
Many nurses were showing signs of burnout .

On June 24th, as Texas was beginning to reckon with its dramatic spike in coronavirus cases, I received a phone call from an alarmed friend. He’d heard a rumor about Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital, where I work as an internist: apparently, it was so full of patients that some seeking treatment for COVID-19 were lining the hallways, while others had left after spending too long in line. “Do we have a New York situation on our hands, or what?” he asked.
I’d been working at the hospital for four weeks without a break. The stress on the system was evident, but I hadn’t seen anything like what he described. “We’re busy, but it’s not chaos,” I said. Still, I was unnerved, and, after hanging up, I took a walk around the hospital to make sure I hadn’t missed something. The emergency room and its waiting area were orderly and nearly empty. At the triage station, a single patient wearing a mask stood calmly while his blood pressure was being taken. I greeted the nurses on the medical-surgical units: “How’re y’all doing?” They seemed overworked but in control. In the I.C.U., doctors in gowns clustered around computer workstations, rounding as they normally did. It was hardly a scene from a disaster film.
In one hallway, a set of flat-screen televisions explained what I was seeing. They showed the capacity levels of hospitals across Harris County, which includes Houston. The county as a whole was on the edge: of its 1,614 I.C.U. beds, 1,509 were full. Around five hundred of those patients were sick with COVID-19; the rest suffered from the mix of conditions that were typical before the pandemic. Ben Taub Hospital, I saw, had reached “saturation,” which meant that incoming ambulances were being diverted elsewhere. The grim statistics contrasted oddly with the calm atmosphere surrounding me, but also made sense of it. My hospital, evidently, was “saturated” and empty at the same time.
I’ve since learned that this situation isn’t unusual at overburdened hospitals during the pandemic. Earlier this spring, when I first began worrying about whether Houston had enough resources to handle a spike in infections, I thought mostly about equipment and space. I counted our hospital’s ventilators and negative-pressure rooms, taking the concept of an I.CU. “bed” literally. Now I understand that Houston, a first-rate medical city, doesn’t lack space or equipment. If our hospitals can’t accept more patients, it’s because we don’t have enough I.C.U. nurses to care for them. Our scarcest resource is human.
In late March, patients with COVID-19 started arriving at my hospital. To avoid exposure and conserve P.P.E., I treated my first patient with the virus mostly from the hallway, calling him on the phone. The nurses took a different approach. “We’re in there all the time,” one told me. Day and night, she and her colleagues were checking his vital signs, helping him use the bathroom, and addressing the alarms emanating from the medical devices surrounding him. At that point in the progression of the illness, they were doing most of the work that COVID-19 required. My only job was to see whether the patient’s breathing was improving. When he left the hospital fully recovered, I was happy but not proud. I had little reason to be: the victory belonged to the nurses and respiratory therapists.
In the treatment of virtually all diseases, the number of personnel needed increases as the level of care escalates. For COVID-19, the most basic level of care involves a nasal cannula—a forked tube leading from an oxygen tank into the nostrils—which delivers about twice as much oxygen as is contained in ordinary air. On the medical-surgical wards where such devices are used, a single nurse can oversee the care of five patients. But people with more advanced cases of COVID-19 have fluctuating oxygen levels and more extensive needs. Respiratory therapists must visit at least once every six hours; doctors must order more frequent blood draws, vital-sign checks, and heart monitoring. In the intermediate-care units where patients like these are treated, the nurse-to-patient ratio is one to four.
In the I.C.U., where patients receive an even higher level of attention and care, each nurse can work with only two at a time. Often, many people must converge to offer care simultaneously. “Proning,” which has emerged as a valuable therapeutic advance in the treatment of severe COVID-19, is a good example of work-intensive I.C.U. care. A patient who is proned is flipped from her back to her belly while her breathing tube, I.V.s, and monitors are kept intact and attached; many hours later, the move must be reversed. During the pandemic, proning has been shown to make a life-saving difference for some patients; it allows the fluid in the lungs to redistribute itself, opening up new areas to oxygenation. But carefully flipping an unconscious, paralyzed patient can require as many as six people—nurses, assistants, therapists, and sometimes doctors, each gowned in P.P.E.—to coördinate their efforts, as though they are moving a large sculpture. In order for an I.C.U. to prone large numbers of patients each day, it must be fully staffed.
The I.C.U. at the United Memorial Medical Center, in Houston. Photograph by Go Nakamura / Bloomberg / Getty
Staffing, therefore, shapes I.C.U. capacity just as much as equipment. Not long ago, I received a phone call from a nurse who was caring for a patient of mine; we suspected that she had COVID-19, and though her vitals weren’t necessarily concerning, she wasn’t looking great. Within half an hour of my arrival at her bedside, she had been intubated at my request. Our I.C.U.s were full, meaning that the ratio of nurses to patients there was holding steady at one to two. But the critical-care team and the hospital’s nursing leadership were able to accommodate her, finding not just a room where she could receive I.C.U.-level care but also a dedicated, trained nurse. I recalled something Esmaeil Porsa, the chief executive of Harris Health System, had said in an interview: “If somehow, magically, there’s a group of ten or twenty I.C.U. nurses that I can have, then I can transform more of my beds into I.C.U.s.”
But there are rarely extra nurses to be found—and so a COVID-19 spike ends up diverting staff from the hospital as a whole. At Ben Taub, nurses have been moving from the medical-surgical wards to intermediate care, or from intermediate care to the I.C.U. (Similarly, internal-medicine doctors like me, who are used to seeing patients in medical-surgical units, have begun working in I.C.U.s under the supervision of critical-care doctors.) The ratio of nurses to patients in the I.C.U. has occasionally climbed to one to three, or higher. Meanwhile, the need to stretch personnel trickles down. A nurse on a medical-surgical unit might now be responsible for eight patients instead of four—a lower ratio that increases risks.
Nurses aren’t interchangeable; many have extensive training and experience in specific areas, such as post-anesthesia, labor and delivery, or burns. Last week, as the number of new coronavirus cases per day in Texas passed ten thousand, and as I.C.U.s across Houston grew even more saturated, I called up a former I.C.U. nurse I know who now works as an administrator at a large, private hospital near mine. I asked her how the nurses there were doing. “We are not O.K.,” she said. Under the pressures of the surge, the nurse-to-patient ratio in her I.C.U. was regularly being pushed to one to three, and many nurses were working six twelve-hour shifts each week. With more COVID-19 patients coming in, the hospital had opened pop-up units, which had stretched nursing ratios further. “People think a nurse is a nurse is a nurse, but they are just as specialized as doctors,” she said. In patient care, , nothing is as stressful as having to learn new tasks and replicate them quickly. Many nurses were showing signs of burnout.
The farther one travels from Houston, the more easily one finds hospitals struggling with I.C.U. staffing. On a recent morning, when I called around, I found that six I.C.U. beds sat unused, for lack of nurses, at a hospital in Richmond, thirty miles from downtown. Forty-five miles further down I-59, Frances Lerma, the head of nursing at El Campo Memorial Hospital, told me that she hasn’t had the time to uptrain her staff; instead, she relies on their adaptability as she transfers them to COVID-19 care as quickly as possible. By settling in El Campo, a small city of twelve thousand, Lerna had figured that she’d be taking a break from the strenuous life of big-city nursing administration. Now, she said, “every day, twenty-four hours a day, I staff.” A scramble for nurses in hospitals that are empty but saturated: that’s what Houston’s version of a “New York situation” looks like.
Ultimately, in a hospital, the fight against the pandemic depends on individuals. The same is true at the state level. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, pursued a risky reopening plan, until the surge in cases forced him to roll it back; just before the July 4th weekend, in an about face, he issued an order requiring nearly all adults in Texas to wear masks. He now faces a series of tough decisions. Texas, has no income tax and depends on consumption taxes for revenue; with the state’s cash reserves depleted and consumption locked down, Abbott must find a way to pay for enough testing and contact tracing to bring the virus under control. One option would be to expand Medicaid coverage, as Oklahoma has done; this would give safety-net hospitals like mine increased access to federal funding. Abbott could also use resources more efficiently by declaring a state of emergency and asking the Catastrophic Medical Operations Center, a clearinghouse used during disasters, to distribute patients to I.C.U.s. (Right now, individual physicians must call multiple hospitals to find beds for their patients.)
Recently, in one of his regular pandemic update letters, James McDeavitt, a Dean at the Baylor Medical College, explained how the situation in Houston is evolving in ways that are both hopeful and disconcerting. Like many people, McDeavitt wrote, he had been watching the virus's reproduction number—an estimate of how often any given case of the virus leads to more cases. When the reproduction number is greater than one, the virus is spreading; if it’s less than one, the number stabilizes or even declines. In early July, widespread distancing and masking helped drive the number in Houston from nearly two to below one. But July 4th marked an inflection point. After the holiday, which many celebrated in large groups with relaxed safety measures, the number has climbed again to 1.5, a level at which community spread grows more likely.
Meanwhile, Houston hospitals have been seeing improved outcomes for COVID-19 patients. In April and May, those admitted to Baylor St. Luke’s, a large hospital, stayed an average of eighteen days, and nearly half were put on ventilators; now, by contrast, the average length of stay has dropped to just over five days, and only around fourteen per cent of patients have needed mechanical ventilation. In part, we’ve been seeing younger patients. But hospitals are also adapting. Staffing changes are helping us squeeze more out of our strained capacity. Some new nurses, recently arrived from out of state, are expanding it. And new treatment approaches, including proning and the use of “high flow” nasal cannulas, which deliver higher concentrations of oxygen without the need for intubation, have made a difference. Nurses, respiratory therapists, doctors, hospital administrators, and others are working to outrace the virus.
Texas, in short, is expanding and retraining its medical army. And yet, in the absence of a vaccine or game-changing treatment, the only way to beat COVID-19 is to prevent it. In that sense, the troops that matter most are ordinary Texans, who alone have the power to decrease infections by maintaining distance and wearing masks. Houston is a medical city, with more than eighty-five hospitals. But in this pandemic its medical might is deceptive. No hospital system can cope with a virus this infectious without help from the people and their leaders. “The only means of fighting a plague,” Albert Camus wrote, is “common decency.”
A previous version of this story misstated Esmaeil Porsa’s title
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-07-17--Chance the Rapper’s Art and Activism, and the Perils of Prison Reform

Chance is one of the biggest stars in hip-hop , and one of the most political musicians working today .
In the midst of nationwide protests for racial justice , he talks with David Remnick about his commitment to the city of Chicago and his journey toward calling himself an activist .
Plus : Sarah Stillman interviews two journalists and prison abolitionists who examine how policies designed to end mass incarceration end up expanding the reach of the prison-industrial system .
And , on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act , the filmmaker Rodney @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” which tells the stories of three artists who are , like him , visually impaired .
Chance is one of the biggest stars in hip-hop , and one of the most political musicians working today .
He talks with David Remnick about the fight for racial justice in his home city of Chicago .
The movement to reduce mass incarceration has relied on probation , drug courts , and electronic monitoring .
Two prison abolitionists argue that these measures do as much harm as good .
A New Documentary Explores How @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Portraits , ” which has been streaming on PBS , examines the work of a writer , a dancer , and a photographer who are—like the filmmaker—visually impaired .

Illustration by Aurélia Durand
Chance is one of the biggest stars in hip-hop, and one of the most political musicians working today. In the midst of nationwide protests for racial justice, he talks with David Remnick about his commitment to the city of Chicago and his journey toward calling himself an activist. Plus: Sarah Stillman interviews two journalists and prison abolitionists who examine how policies designed to end mass incarceration end up expanding the reach of the prison-industrial system. And, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the filmmaker Rodney Evans discusses his documentary “Vision Portraits,” which tells the stories of three artists who are, like him, visually impaired.
Chance the Rapper’s Art and Activism
Chance is one of the biggest stars in hip-hop, and one of the most political musicians working today. He talks with David Remnick about the fight for racial justice in his home city of Chicago.
The Perils of Prison Reform
The movement to reduce mass incarceration has relied on probation, drug courts, and electronic monitoring. Two prison abolitionists argue that these measures do as much harm as good.
A New Documentary Explores How to Make Art While Blind
“Vision Portraits,” which has been streaming on PBS, examines the work of a writer, a dancer, and a photographer who are—like the filmmaker—visually impaired.


newyorker--2020-07-17--What the Removal of a K.G.B. Statue Can Teach America

As I was riding my bike home along the Moscow River recently , I stopped in a sculpture park tucked behind the New Tretyakov art museum .
On pedestals scattered among the trees , busts of Lenin gazed at me , with the many variations of Vladimir Ilyich ’ s head seemingly floating in space , wizened and mystical , resembling a character from retro science fiction .
His compatriot and successor Stalin lurked in the bushes , but even here , surrounded by the cheerful tableau of picnicking families and skateboarding teen-agers , his visage felt somehow taboo—a short-lived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sixties meant that nearly all of his statues had disappeared from public view long before Lenin monuments fell out of favor in the wake of the Soviet collapse , in 1991 .
Arguably the most imposing statue , at twenty feet tall , and the one for which the sculpture garden , called Muzeon , is most known , is a bronze likeness of Felix Dzerzhinsky , the fearsome Bolshevik revolutionary , who , in 1917 , founded the first iteration of the Soviet secret police , known as the Cheka .
Dzerzhinsky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ N.K.V.D.
, responsible for the bloodletting of the Stalin purges of the thirties ; which , after the war , morphed into the K.G.B.
, the notorious state within a state that embodied the Soviet system ’ s fundamental illiberalism ; today ’ s F.S.B.
, modern Russia ’ s chief security agency , is a direct successor to that tradition .
I ’ ve visited Muzeon , an open-air gathering place for the sculptural detritus of the Soviet period , several times , going back to my first visits to Moscow in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statue has stood there , unmolested and largely ignored , since 1991 , when he was removed from the square in front of K.G.B .
headquarters and unceremoniously dumped in what was then an empty plot of land .
( The notion of Muzeon as a coherent , looked-after park came together with time , in the course of many years . )
Every now and then , some revanchist Communists within the security services make noises of returning the statue to its former home , but that talk never goes anywhere .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ statue—his gaze stern , his hand tucked in the pocket of his flowing trenchcoat—prompted me to think of the statues that have come down in the United States in recent weeks .
What might the travels of the Dzerzhinsky monument say not only about Russia ’ s own unfinished reckoning with its past but also about the role of statues in such processes , whether through their swift disappearance or continued presence ?
Dzerzhinsky first appeared on Lubyanka Square , in front of K.G.B .
headquarters , in 1958 , five years after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there , a totem of the violence that lay at the root of the Soviet project and a reminder of its potential for capricious and far-reaching brutality , through the final gasps of Soviet power .
In August , 1991 , a number of hard-liners from within the military and K.G.B.—Dzerzhinsky ’ s heirs and protégés—mounted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev , whose policy of perestroika had ushered in reforms and a general atmosphere of openness , along with relative , step-by-step freedoms .
The coup plotters acted far too late : the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back into the tube .
( What ’ s more , the putschists turned out to be a bunch of aged and bumbling drunks , who had no clue what to do with the levers of state power once they had seized them . )
After three days , the last-ditch attempt failed .
Tens of thousands of pro-reform demonstrators , giddy at their seeming victory , took to the streets of Moscow .
They concluded their march in front of the K.G.B .
headquarters and gathered around “ Iron Felix , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We hadn ’ t discussed it ahead of time , but it felt natural , obvious even , to end up in front of the K.G.B .
building , ” Lev Ponomaryov , a longtime democratic activist , who was among those at the head of the column , told me .
The crowd , buoyed by the sense that , in some irreparable way , the power to determine the course of events had shifted away from the K.G.B .
and toward those on the streets , gathered around the Dzerzhinsky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the songs of Alexander Galich , an underground mid-century poet , playwright , and singer .
Others intimated that they might move on the K.G.B .
building itself , leading the more cautious to worry about a counterattack from those K.G.B .
officers who eyed the crowd warily from inside their darkened offices .
Pro-democracy marchers and Gorbachev supporters addressed the protesters ; a vibrant and uncertain energy rippled through the square .
“ No matter what I said , the crowd roared , thundered with applause , ” Alexander Yakovlev , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his memoirs .
“ I felt with my skin that a critical minute was coming.
” Attention quickly settled on removing the Dzerzhinsky statue .
“ He embodied an organization that , no matter how many times it changed its name , killed millions of its own countrymen , ” Ponomaryov told me .
“ The desire in that moment to rid ourselves of his traces was more emotional than rational , but that doesn ’ t make it any less correct.
” A few dozen people from the crowd threw some ropes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to no avail .
Fastening the rope to a heavy truck , which heaved and grunted on the square , didn ’ t help much either .
Ponomaryov feared that if the crowd managed to pull down the statue , it would topple on the heads of those standing underneath it , or even crash through the asphalt and into the metro station below .
A Moscow city official named Alexander Muzykantsky rushed off to the mayor ’ s office to secure an official decree for its removal .
Sergey Stankevich , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thought—he was at the square and feared for the safety of the crowd—but he also wanted to make sure that Dzerzhinsky left his perch as part of a legal process .
The year before , in a free election—another manifestation of perestroika—a new mayor , Gavriil Popov , had been voted into office in Moscow , bringing with him a team of would-be reformers .
As Stankevich told me recently , he considered himself and others in Popov ’ s administration to be the capital ’ s legitimate authorities , not the secret @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from them .
“ This was not a rebellion , ” he said .
“ We were the legal authorities , and our job was to defend the principles of rule of law from those who had acted unlawfully .
It was important to preserve this difference.
” Dzerzhinsky should come down , but the statue shouldn ’ t be torn asunder by the crowd—that was the Bolshevik way , Stankevich reasoned .
( He also thought a legal order would protect the statue from being immediately put back up if the mood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his case in Popov ’ s office , Stankevich secured a line from Lubyanka Square and pled his case , too .
Popov issued a decree ordering the statue ’ s removal , calling it a symbol of those organs that played a “ criminal role ” in Russian history .
( It says something about the country ’ s regression in the years since that it ’ s impossible to imagine the mayor of Moscow today having the gumption or desire to label Soviet institutions “ criminal.
” ) A municipal construction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they confirmed that the mayor ’ s decree was legitimate , hoisted Dzerzhinsky up on a crane .
He dangled in the air as if from a hangman ’ s noose , before being laid on a flatbed truck and driven away .
“ Symbols were broken .
An epoch ended , ” Muzykantsky wrote in his memoirs .
As he explained to me , “ It was a change not just in power but of generations , and in mentality .
We needed to mark this passage , to draw a line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That night , Dzerzhinsky lay sideways in an empty lot by the river , a once mighty figure suddenly rendered impotent and pathetic ; four months later , the Soviet Union itself gave way , dissolving with a whimper .

As I was riding my bike home along the Moscow River recently, I stopped in a sculpture park tucked behind the New Tretyakov art museum. On pedestals scattered among the trees, busts of Lenin gazed at me, with the many variations of Vladimir Ilyich’s head seemingly floating in space, wizened and mystical, resembling a character from retro science fiction. His compatriot and successor Stalin lurked in the bushes, but even here, surrounded by the cheerful tableau of picnicking families and skateboarding teen-agers, his visage felt somehow taboo—a short-lived wave of de-Stalinization in the nineteen-fifties and sixties meant that nearly all of his statues had disappeared from public view long before Lenin monuments fell out of favor in the wake of the Soviet collapse, in 1991.
Arguably the most imposing statue, at twenty feet tall, and the one for which the sculpture garden, called Muzeon, is most known, is a bronze likeness of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the fearsome Bolshevik revolutionary, who, in 1917, founded the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, known as the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka gave way to the N.K.V.D., responsible for the bloodletting of the Stalin purges of the thirties; which, after the war, morphed into the K.G.B., the notorious state within a state that embodied the Soviet system’s fundamental illiberalism; today’s F.S.B., modern Russia’s chief security agency, is a direct successor to that tradition.
I’ve visited Muzeon, an open-air gathering place for the sculptural detritus of the Soviet period, several times, going back to my first visits to Moscow in the early two-thousands. Dzerzhinsky’s statue has stood there, unmolested and largely ignored, since 1991, when he was removed from the square in front of K.G.B. headquarters and unceremoniously dumped in what was then an empty plot of land. (The notion of Muzeon as a coherent, looked-after park came together with time, in the course of many years.) Every now and then, some revanchist Communists within the security services make noises of returning the statue to its former home, but that talk never goes anywhere. Standing in front of Dzerzhinsky’s statue—his gaze stern, his hand tucked in the pocket of his flowing trenchcoat—prompted me to think of the statues that have come down in the United States in recent weeks. What might the travels of the Dzerzhinsky monument say not only about Russia’s own unfinished reckoning with its past but also about the role of statues in such processes, whether through their swift disappearance or continued presence?
Dzerzhinsky first appeared on Lubyanka Square, in front of K.G.B. headquarters, in 1958, five years after Stalin’s death. He stood there, a totem of the violence that lay at the root of the Soviet project and a reminder of its potential for capricious and far-reaching brutality, through the final gasps of Soviet power.
In August, 1991, a number of hard-liners from within the military and K.G.B.—Dzerzhinsky’s heirs and protégés—mounted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of perestroika had ushered in reforms and a general atmosphere of openness, along with relative, step-by-step freedoms. The coup plotters acted far too late: the toothpaste of perestroika could not be put back into the tube. (What’s more, the putschists turned out to be a bunch of aged and bumbling drunks, who had no clue what to do with the levers of state power once they had seized them.) After three days, the last-ditch attempt failed. Tens of thousands of pro-reform demonstrators, giddy at their seeming victory, took to the streets of Moscow. They concluded their march in front of the K.G.B. headquarters and gathered around “Iron Felix,” as the Dzerzhinsky statue was known.
The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, in front of K.G.B. headquarters. Photograph by Shepard Sherbell / Corbis / Getty
“We hadn’t discussed it ahead of time, but it felt natural, obvious even, to end up in front of the K.G.B. building,” Lev Ponomaryov, a longtime democratic activist, who was among those at the head of the column, told me. The crowd, buoyed by the sense that, in some irreparable way, the power to determine the course of events had shifted away from the K.G.B. and toward those on the streets, gathered around the Dzerzhinsky statue. Some read poems and sang the songs of Alexander Galich, an underground mid-century poet, playwright, and singer. Others intimated that they might move on the K.G.B. building itself, leading the more cautious to worry about a counterattack from those K.G.B. officers who eyed the crowd warily from inside their darkened offices. Pro-democracy marchers and Gorbachev supporters addressed the protesters; a vibrant and uncertain energy rippled through the square. “No matter what I said, the crowd roared, thundered with applause,” Alexander Yakovlev, a close adviser to Gorbachev, wrote in his memoirs. “I felt with my skin that a critical minute was coming.”
Attention quickly settled on removing the Dzerzhinsky statue. “He embodied an organization that, no matter how many times it changed its name, killed millions of its own countrymen,” Ponomaryov told me. “The desire in that moment to rid ourselves of his traces was more emotional than rational, but that doesn’t make it any less correct.” A few dozen people from the crowd threw some ropes around the fifteen-ton monument. They tugged, to no avail. Fastening the rope to a heavy truck, which heaved and grunted on the square, didn’t help much either. Ponomaryov feared that if the crowd managed to pull down the statue, it would topple on the heads of those standing underneath it, or even crash through the asphalt and into the metro station below. A Moscow city official named Alexander Muzykantsky rushed off to the mayor’s office to secure an official decree for its removal.
Sergey Stankevich, the deputy mayor, had the same thought—he was at the square and feared for the safety of the crowd—but he also wanted to make sure that Dzerzhinsky left his perch as part of a legal process. The year before, in a free election—another manifestation of perestroika—a new mayor, Gavriil Popov, had been voted into office in Moscow, bringing with him a team of would-be reformers. As Stankevich told me recently, he considered himself and others in Popov’s administration to be the capital’s legitimate authorities, not the secret policemen who had tried to seize power from them. “This was not a rebellion,” he said. “We were the legal authorities, and our job was to defend the principles of rule of law from those who had acted unlawfully. It was important to preserve this difference.” Dzerzhinsky should come down, but the statue shouldn’t be torn asunder by the crowd—that was the Bolshevik way, Stankevich reasoned. (He also thought a legal order would protect the statue from being immediately put back up if the mood changed.)
While Muzykantsky was arguing his case in Popov’s office, Stankevich secured a line from Lubyanka Square and pled his case, too. Popov issued a decree ordering the statue’s removal, calling it a symbol of those organs that played a “criminal role” in Russian history. (It says something about the country’s regression in the years since that it’s impossible to imagine the mayor of Moscow today having the gumption or desire to label Soviet institutions “criminal.”)
A municipal construction crew showed up, and, once they confirmed that the mayor’s decree was legitimate, hoisted Dzerzhinsky up on a crane. He dangled in the air as if from a hangman’s noose, before being laid on a flatbed truck and driven away. “Symbols were broken. An epoch ended,” Muzykantsky wrote in his memoirs. As he explained to me, “It was a change not just in power but of generations, and in mentality. We needed to mark this passage, to draw a line separating one age from the next.” That night, Dzerzhinsky lay sideways in an empty lot by the river, a once mighty figure suddenly rendered impotent and pathetic; four months later, the Soviet Union itself gave way, dissolving with a whimper.


newyorker--2020-07-17--Oh, to Be a Migratory Bird

Oh, to Be a Migratory Bird

This summer , like every other , the migrating birds are back in town to sing , socialize , and flirt .
May we live vicariously through them as we isolate in our homes !
To that end , I present to you the most aspirational and enviable of our annual feathered visitors .
The male scarlet tanager is a sight to behold , with his vibrant and unmistakable plumage .
His confidence is unparalleled !
When this is all over , you should definitely wear that enormous prairie dress you impulse-bought after watching “ Little Women.
” You ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the goldfinch has a smaller carbon footprint than his meat-loving peers .
( Though he accidentally ate a worm once while drunk on a fermented apple—and kind of liked it . )
A famous author wrote a book about her once .
Must be nice .
This bird recently got back from Tulum , which is where you were supposed to be last month for your friend ’ s wedding .
You had already bought a new swimsuit .
The woodcock is an incredibly silly-looking bird , but he doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dances .
So who cares !
Cut your own bangs , then dance away the shame .
It ’ s what everyone on TikTok is doing .

This summer, like every other, the migrating birds are back in town to sing, socialize, and flirt. May we live vicariously through them as we isolate in our homes!
To that end, I present to you the most aspirational and enviable of our annual feathered visitors.
Scarlet Tanager
The male scarlet tanager is a sight to behold, with his vibrant and unmistakable plumage. His confidence is unparalleled! When this is all over, you should definitely wear that enormous prairie dress you impulse-bought after watching “Little Women.” You’ll rock it.
American Goldfinch
A strict vegetarian, the goldfinch has a smaller carbon footprint than his meat-loving peers. (Though he accidentally ate a worm once while drunk on a fermented apple—and kind of liked it.)
Cerulean Warbler
A famous author wrote a book about her once. Must be nice.
Green Heron
This bird recently got back from Tulum, which is where you were supposed to be last month for your friend’s wedding. You had already bought a new swimsuit.
American Woodcock
The woodcock is an incredibly silly-looking bird, but he doesn’t give a hoot what you think—he just dances. So who cares! Cut your own bangs, then dance away the shame. It’s what everyone on TikTok is doing.


newyorker--2020-07-17--Trump Sues the Coronavirus for Treating Him Unfairly

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Alleging that it “ has treated me very unfairly , ” Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he is suing the coronavirus .
“ This is a very nasty virus , and by that I mean it has been nasty to me personally , ” Trump told reporters .
“ I never thought that there could be anything more terrible than Jim Acosta , but the coronavirus is like an invisible Jim Acosta.
” Offering a preview of his lawsuit , Trump said that he was accusing the coronavirus of meddling in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the numbers and , every time the virus ’ s numbers go up , my numbers go down , ” he said .
“ This virus is trying to rig the election for Sleepy Joe.
” Trump said that he was prepared to take his case against the coronavirus all the way to the Supreme Court , claiming , “ My case is so perfect , even those ungrateful beauties Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will side with me.
” Relations between Trump and the virus have reportedly grown so strained that he no longer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Coronavirus Task Force .
At the White House , the press secretary , Kayleigh McEnany , said that Trump felt “ deeply betrayed ” by the coronavirus .
“ COVID-19 would not be what it is today without President Trump , ” she said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Alleging that it “has treated me very unfairly,” Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he is suing the coronavirus.
“This is a very nasty virus, and by that I mean it has been nasty to me personally,” Trump told reporters. “I never thought that there could be anything more terrible than Jim Acosta, but the coronavirus is like an invisible Jim Acosta.”
Offering a preview of his lawsuit, Trump said that he was accusing the coronavirus of meddling in the 2020 election.
“You look at the numbers and, every time the virus’s numbers go up, my numbers go down,” he said. “This virus is trying to rig the election for Sleepy Joe.”
Trump said that he was prepared to take his case against the coronavirus all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming, “My case is so perfect, even those ungrateful beauties Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will side with me.”
Relations between Trump and the virus have reportedly grown so strained that he no longer allows discussions of the coronavirus at meetings of the Coronavirus Task Force.
At the White House, the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said that Trump felt “deeply betrayed” by the coronavirus.
“COVID-19 would not be what it is today without President Trump,” she said.