newyorker--2020-09-10--With a New Pipeline in East Africa, an Oil Company Flouts France’s Leadership on Climate

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Our tight focus on America as it fights the slide into authoritarianism this fall is right and good , but it does allow dismal developments in the rest of the world to pass by with too little notice .
These developments range from the poisoning of Vladimir Putin ’ s main rival to the acceleration of China ’ s campaign against the Uighur Muslim minority to the rapid moves to start construction on one of the planet ’ s ugliest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oil Pipeline , or EACOP .
As the environmental journalist Fred Pearce notes in his excellent account of the pipeline plan for Yale Environment 360 ( one of the few mentions it has received in the Western press ) , “ the middle of a global pandemic , during which oil demand is in freefall and prices at rock bottom , might seem an odd moment to boost the world ’ s oil production.
” But Big Oil ( in this case , the French giant Total and the Chinese National Offshore Oil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are always years in the making , and this one just happens to be coming to fruition now .
By April of next year , construction could conceivably begin on the pipeline , which will need to be heated at all times to keep the oil flowing , and which will stretch nine hundred miles , from the shores of Lake Albert , on the Uganda-Congo border , to the Tanzanian port of Tanga , where the crude will be loaded into tankers .
The proposed route looks almost as if it were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible : the drilling pads are in the Murchison Falls National Park , in Uganda , and the pipeline runs through the Taala Forest Reserve and encroaches on the Bugoma Forest ( home to large groups of chimpanzees ) before crossing into Tanzania and the Biharamulo Game Reserve , home to lions , buffalo , elands , lesser kudu , impalas , hippos , giraffes , zebras , roan antelopes , sitatungas , sables , aardvarks , and the red colobus monkey .
The pipeline also manages to traverse the Wembere steppe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundreds of square kilometres of elephant habitat .
( Indeed , a charismatic elephant is featured in the online petition that an international nonprofit organization launched last week opposing the plan . )
And , once the pipeline gets to Tanzania , tankers the length of three football fields will try to transport the oil out through mangrove swamps and over coral reefs , in waters teeming with dugongs and sea turtles .
If all this makes you feel a little sad , that ’ s the correct emotion : at this point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis , it ’ s sickening to endanger wildlife .
( Those ashy red colobus monkeys in the Tanzanian reserve , for instance , are one of just five colonies left in the world . )
But if this project—the longest heated pipeline ever planned—gets built , it will also take out wide swaths of farmland , almost all of it tilled by peasant farmers .
Some have already been evicted , and are living in concrete houses in a “ resettlement village.
” But many are still on the land , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way , and for many of the same reasons , that indigenous people in the American West have been steadfast in their battle against the Dakota Access pipeline .
The Africa team at 350.org , the global climate campaign that I helped found , has been helping to coördinate the opposition , which is not an easy task .
Tanzania ’ s government is increasingly authoritarian , and , in Uganda , President Yoweri Museveni , who has been in power since 1986 , has seen the Parliament remove the country ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him to maintain control for the foreseeable future .
These governments want the pipeline , arguing that it will bring economic benefit , but , if history is any indication , that benefit won ’ t be widely shared .
By now , the evidence of a “ resource curse , ” which leaves oil-exporting countries with lower G.D.P.-growth rates , is overwhelming .
But the unwavering support of ruling governments for the project is why much of the opposition has been aimed instead at the banks that would finance the plan ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Japan ’ s Sumitomo chief among them ) and at Total .
The French oil giant , if it proceeds with the pipeline , would make a total mockery of its pretensions to climate leadership .
Already , fourteen French cities have filed a complaint against the company for its failure to live up to the Paris climate accords .
( Paris , as it happens , is in France . )
Total ’ s oil imperialism is also giving the lie to President Emmanuel Macron ’ s soaring climate rhetoric .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , climate politics is too often a cynical morality play .
“ In essence , we have offered an outlet for our young people ’ s impatience , ” Macron said .
“ We have given them the opportunity to express themselves .
We tell them , ‘ We hear you , you ’ re amazing.
’ And then , all too often , we continue on with whatever we were already doing .
That will not work.
” True enough , and the EACOP is perhaps the best example of that precise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Africa needs to stop , and it is not too late to do that .
Almost too late , but not quite .
Erin Brockovich has been famous since at least 2000 , when Julia Roberts played her in a movie about her fight , in the early nineteen-nineties , to safeguard the drinking water of a small Southern California town .
But she ’ s kept fighting ever since , and her new book , “ Superman ’ s Not Coming : Our National Water Crisis and What We Can Do About @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The story we ’ ve told ourselves is that the Clean Water Act really made America ’ s water safe , and that stories like Flint are an exception .
But it sounds like that ’ s not the case ?
The Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act are good laws .
The problem really comes down to enforcement .
The Clean Water Act was created to protect large bodies of water , such as streams , rivers , and bays , from being destroyed by things like sewage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industrial and agricultural waste .
But this one act was violated more than half a million times between 2004 and 2009 , and most of the big polluters evaded any kind of punishment .
And these violations continue to pile up .
In 2015 , community water systems reported more than eighty thousand infractions of the Safe Water Drinking Act , which include everything from violating health standards , to failing to test for contaminants , to not reporting contamination to authorities or the public .
In Flint , the city should have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a problem .
Instead , they covered it up and told residents the water was fine , exposing a hundred thousand people , including thousands of children , to dangerous levels of lead , which is why so many officials there have stepped down , been fired , or are facing felony charges .
Plus , millions of people across the country are drinking water with lead violations that are as bad as or worse than Flint .

Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
Our tight focus on America as it fights the slide into authoritarianism this fall is right and good, but it does allow dismal developments in the rest of the world to pass by with too little notice. These developments range from the poisoning of Vladimir Putin’s main rival to the acceleration of China’s campaign against the Uighur Muslim minority to the rapid moves to start construction on one of the planet’s ugliest infrastructure projects, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP.
As the environmental journalist Fred Pearce notes in his excellent account of the pipeline plan for Yale Environment 360 (one of the few mentions it has received in the Western press), “the middle of a global pandemic, during which oil demand is in freefall and prices at rock bottom, might seem an odd moment to boost the world’s oil production.” But Big Oil (in this case, the French giant Total and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation) never rests: its plans are always years in the making, and this one just happens to be coming to fruition now. By April of next year, construction could conceivably begin on the pipeline, which will need to be heated at all times to keep the oil flowing, and which will stretch nine hundred miles, from the shores of Lake Albert, on the Uganda-Congo border, to the Tanzanian port of Tanga, where the crude will be loaded into tankers.
The proposed route looks almost as if it were drawn to endanger as many animals as possible: the drilling pads are in the Murchison Falls National Park, in Uganda, and the pipeline runs through the Taala Forest Reserve and encroaches on the Bugoma Forest (home to large groups of chimpanzees) before crossing into Tanzania and the Biharamulo Game Reserve, home to lions, buffalo, elands, lesser kudu, impalas, hippos, giraffes, zebras, roan antelopes, sitatungas, sables, aardvarks, and the red colobus monkey. The pipeline also manages to traverse the Wembere steppe, a seasonal paradise for birds, and hundreds of square kilometres of elephant habitat. (Indeed, a charismatic elephant is featured in the online petition that an international nonprofit organization launched last week opposing the plan.) And, once the pipeline gets to Tanzania, tankers the length of three football fields will try to transport the oil out through mangrove swamps and over coral reefs, in waters teeming with dugongs and sea turtles. If all this makes you feel a little sad, that’s the correct emotion: at this point in the planet’s building extinction crisis, it’s sickening to endanger wildlife. (Those ashy red colobus monkeys in the Tanzanian reserve, for instance, are one of just five colonies left in the world.)
But if this project—the longest heated pipeline ever planned—gets built, it will also take out wide swaths of farmland, almost all of it tilled by peasant farmers. Some have already been evicted, and are living in concrete houses in a “resettlement village.” But many are still on the land, and still fighting, in much the same way, and for many of the same reasons, that indigenous people in the American West have been steadfast in their battle against the Dakota Access pipeline. The Africa team at 350.org, the global climate campaign that I helped found, has been helping to coördinate the opposition, which is not an easy task. Tanzania’s government is increasingly authoritarian, and, in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986, has seen the Parliament remove the country’s age limit for its rulers, allowing him to maintain control for the foreseeable future. These governments want the pipeline, arguing that it will bring economic benefit, but, if history is any indication, that benefit won’t be widely shared. By now, the evidence of a “resource curse,” which leaves oil-exporting countries with lower G.D.P.-growth rates, is overwhelming. But the unwavering support of ruling governments for the project is why much of the opposition has been aimed instead at the banks that would finance the plan (South Africa’s Standard Bank and Japan’s Sumitomo chief among them) and at Total.
The French oil giant, if it proceeds with the pipeline, would make a total mockery of its pretensions to climate leadership. Already, fourteen French cities have filed a complaint against the company for its failure to live up to the Paris climate accords. (Paris, as it happens, is in France.) Total’s oil imperialism is also giving the lie to President Emmanuel Macron’s soaring climate rhetoric. As he told the United Nations last year, climate politics is too often a cynical morality play. “In essence, we have offered an outlet for our young people’s impatience,” Macron said. “We have given them the opportunity to express themselves. We tell them, ‘We hear you, you’re amazing.’ And then, all too often, we continue on with whatever we were already doing. That will not work.” True enough, and the EACOP is perhaps the best example of that precise failing. What France has started in Africa needs to stop, and it is not too late to do that. Almost too late, but not quite.
Passing the Mic
Erin Brockovich has been famous since at least 2000, when Julia Roberts played her in a movie about her fight, in the early nineteen-nineties, to safeguard the drinking water of a small Southern California town. But she’s kept fighting ever since, and her new book, “Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It,” has just been published.
The story we’ve told ourselves is that the Clean Water Act really made America’s water safe, and that stories like Flint are an exception. But it sounds like that’s not the case?
The Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act are good laws. The problem really comes down to enforcement.
The Clean Water Act was created to protect large bodies of water, such as streams, rivers, and bays, from being destroyed by things like sewage, biological and radioactive waste, and industrial and agricultural waste. But this one act was violated more than half a million times between 2004 and 2009, and most of the big polluters evaded any kind of punishment. And these violations continue to pile up. In 2015, community water systems reported more than eighty thousand infractions of the Safe Water Drinking Act, which include everything from violating health standards, to failing to test for contaminants, to not reporting contamination to authorities or the public.
In Flint, the city should have taken action as soon as they discovered a problem. Instead, they covered it up and told residents the water was fine, exposing a hundred thousand people, including thousands of children, to dangerous levels of lead, which is why so many officials there have stepped down, been fired, or are facing felony charges.


newyorker--2020-09-10--Jiayang Fan on Navigating Her Mother’s Illness While Becoming a Target for Chinese Nationalists Onli

Jiayang Fan on Navigating Her Mother’s Illness While Becoming a Target for Chinese Nationalists Online

Jiayang Fan immigrated to the United States from China at age seven .
Her mother , who had been a @ @ @ @ @ Greenwich , Connecticut , so that Jiayang could attend good schools .
In 2011 , @ @ @ @ @ diagnosed with A.L.S.
, and Jiayang oversaw her care as her condition worsened .
This @ @ @ @ @ lockdown threatened to separate her mother from the health aides who kept her alive , @ @ @ @ @ media .
In response , she received a torrent of threats against her life and @ @ @ @ @ Jiayang Fan joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how she and her mother struggled to adjust @ @ @ @ @ how she became a target for anti-American sentiments in China .

Photograph courtesy Jiayang Fan
Jiayang Fan immigrated to the United States from China at age seven. Her mother, who had been a doctor, cleaned houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that Jiayang could attend good schools. In 2011, Jiayang’s mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., and Jiayang oversaw her care as her condition worsened. This year, when the coronavirus lockdown threatened to separate her mother from the health aides who kept her alive, Jiayang spoke out on social media. In response, she received a torrent of threats against her life and that of her mother. Jiayang Fan joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how she and her mother struggled to adjust to American culture, and how she became a target for anti-American sentiments in China.


newyorker--2020-09-10--Kayleigh McEnany Claims No One Has Worked Harder Than Trump to Protect Americans from Facts

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —In a full-throated defense of Donald J. Trump ’ s coronavirus response , the @ @ @ @ @ Kayleigh McEnany , said on Thursday that no one has worked harder than the President @ @ @ @ @ from facts .
“ President Trump had the facts about the coronavirus as early as @ @ @ @ @ reporters .
“ If he had not taken bold and swift action , those facts @ @ @ @ @ ” She drew a sharp contrast between the United States and countries such as South @ @ @ @ @ “ where facts have spread out of control.
” “ It all comes down to @ @ @ @ @ .
McEnany added that Trump ’ s war on facts was “ far from over @ @ @ @ @ “ daily struggle.
” “ This President has worked tirelessly , every day , to @ @ @ @ @ to the American people , and on Election Day the American people will repay him @ @ @ @ @ said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a full-throated defense of Donald J. Trump’s coronavirus response, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said on Thursday that no one has worked harder than the President to protect the American people from facts.
“President Trump had the facts about the coronavirus as early as February,” she told reporters. “If he had not taken bold and swift action, those facts could have spread like wildfire.”
She drew a sharp contrast between the United States and countries such as South Korea and New Zealand, “where facts have spread out of control.”
“It all comes down to leadership,” she said.
McEnany added that Trump’s war on facts was “far from over,” calling it a “daily struggle.”
“This President has worked tirelessly, every day, to prevent facts from being transmitted to the American people, and on Election Day the American people will repay him for that,” she said.


newyorker--2020-09-10--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Notes on Grief

From England , my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday , our boisterous lockdown ritual , two siblings joining from Lagos , three from the United States , and my parents , sometimes echoing and crackly , from Abba , our ancestral home town , in southeastern Nigeria .
On June 7th , there was my father , only his forehead on the screen , as usual , because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls .
“ Move your phone a bit , Daddy , ” one of us would say .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about a new nickname , then he was saying that he hadn ’ t had dinner because they ’ d had a late lunch , then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village ’ s ancestral land .
He felt a bit unwell , had been sleeping poorly , but we were not to worry .
On June 8th , Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired .
On June 9th , I kept our chat brief so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative .
“ Ka chi fo , ” he said .
( “ Good night.
” ) His last words to me .
On June 10th , he was gone .
My brother Chuks called to tell me , and I came undone .
My four-year-old daughter says I scared her .
She gets down on her knees to demonstrate , her small clenched fist rising and falling , and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was , utterly unravelling , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ news is like a vicious uprooting .
I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood .
And I am resistant : my father read the newspaper that afternoon ; he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day ; he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma , who is a doctor , and so how can this be ?
But there he is .
Okey is holding a phone over my father ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , his face relaxed , beautiful in repose .
Our Zoom call is beyond surreal , all of us weeping and weeping and weeping , in different parts of the world , looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed .
It happened a few minutes before midnight , Nigerian time , with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone .
I stare and stare at my father .
My breathing is difficult .
Is this what shock means , that the air turns to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she has just told a family friend by text , and I almost scream , “ No !
Don ’ t tell anyone , because if we tell people , then it becomes true.
” My husband is saying , “ Breathe slowly ; drink some of this water.
” My housecoat , my lockdown staple , is lying crumpled on the floor .
Later , my brother Kene will jokingly say , “ You better not get any shocking news in public , since you react to shock by tearing off your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of education .
You learn how ungentle mourning can be , how full of anger .
You learn how glib condolences can feel .
You learn how much grief is about language , the failure of language and the grasping for language .
Why are my sides so sore and achy ?
It ’ s from crying , I ’ m told .
I did not know that we cry with our muscles .
The pain is not surprising , but its physicality is , my tongue unbearably bitter , as though I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clean my teeth , on my chest a heavy , awful weight , and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving .
My heart—my actual physical heart , nothing figurative here—is running away from me , has become its own separate thing , beating too fast , its rhythms at odds with mine .
This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body .
Flesh , muscles , organs are all compromised .
No physical position is comfortable .
For weeks , my stomach is in turmoil , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever-present certainty that somebody else will die , that more will be lost .
One morning , Okey calls me a little earlier than usual , and I think , Just tell me , tell me immediately , who has died now .
Is it Mummy ?
In my American home , I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise , and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it .
“ I just thought about how Daddy was always turning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turning it back on .
He probably thought it was wasteful in some way , ” I tell Okey .
“ Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba .
I ’ d so happily let him now if he ’ ll just come back , ” Okey says , and we laugh .
“ And I will start to wake up early , and I ’ ll start to eat garri , and I ’ ll go to Mass every Sunday , ” I say , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale , where I say , “ Daddy , will you have some pomegranate juice ?
And he says , ‘ No , thank you , whatever that is.
’ ” Pomegranate juice became a standing joke .
All those standing jokes we had , frequently told and retold , my father ’ s expression this minute utterly deadpan and , in the next , wide open with delighted laughter .
Another revelation : how much laughter is a part of grief .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ argot , and now we laugh , remembering my father , but somewhere in the background of the laughter there is a haze of disbelief .
The laughter trails off .
The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage .
I am unprepared for my wretched , roaring rage .
In the face of this inferno that is sorrow , I am callow and unformed .
But how is it that in the morning he was joking and talking , and at night he was gone forever ?
It was so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not supposed to happen like this , not like a malicious surprise , not during a pandemic that has shut down the world .
Throughout the lockdown , my father and I talked about how strange it all was , how scary , and he told me often not to worry about my doctor husband .
“ You actually drink warm water , Daddy ?
” I asked one day , surprised , after he said with sheepish humor that he ’ d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me that warm water was harmless , after all , not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare , when people were bathing in saline before dawn .
To my “ How are you , Daddy ?
, ” he would always respond , “ Enwerom nsogbu chacha.
” ( “ I have no problems at all .
I ’ m perfectly fine.
” ) And he really was , until he wasn ’ t .
Messages pour in , and I look at them as through a mist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ On the loss of your father , ” one says .
Whose father ?
My sister forwards a message from her friend , saying that my father was humble despite his accomplishments .
My fingers start to tremble , and I push my phone away .
He was not .
He is .
There is a video of people trooping into our house for mgbalu , to give condolences , and I want to reach in and wrench them away from our living room , where already my mother is settled on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A table is in front of her like a barrier , to maintain social distance .
Already friends and relatives are saying that this must be done and that must be done .
A condolence register must be placed by the front door , and my sister goes off to buy a bolt of white lace to cover the table , and my brother buys a hardcover notebook , and already people are bending to write in the book .
I think , Go home !
Why are you coming to our house @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How dare you make this thing true ?
Somehow , these well-wishers have become complicit .
I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies .
Needle pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old , older than my father and alive and well .
My anger scares me , my fear scares me , and somewhere in there is shame , too—why am I so enraged and so scared ?
I am afraid of going to bed and of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the tomorrows after .
I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and people are inviting me to speak somewhere and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen .
How is it that the world keeps going , breathing in and out unchanged , while in my soul there is a permanent scattering ?
Grief is forcing new skins on me , scraping scales from my eyes .
I regret my past certainties : Surely you should mourn , talk through it , face it , go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a person yet unacquainted with grief .
I have mourned in the past , but only now have I touched grief ’ s core .
Only now do I learn , while feeling for its porous edges , that there is no way through .
I am in the center of this churning , and I have become a maker of boxes , and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts .
I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone .
I can not think too much ; I dare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I will be defeated , not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism , a cycle of thinking there ’ s no point , what ’ s the point , there ’ s no point to anything .
There is a grace in denial , Chuks says , words that I repeat to myself .
A refuge , this denial , this refusal to look .
Of course , the effort is its own grieving , and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking , but imagine the catastrophe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Often , too , there is the urge to run and run , to hide .
But I can not always run , and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief—when I read the death certificate , when I draft a death announcement—I feel a shimmering panic .
In such moments , I notice a curious physical reaction : my body begins to shake , my fingers tap uncontrollably , one leg bobs .
For the first time in my life , I am enamored of sleeping pills , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a meal , I burst into tears .
My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away : June 10 , 2020 , was the worst day of my life .
The week before June 10th , while running around playing with my daughter , I fell and hit my head and suffered a concussion .
For days , I felt unmoored , sensitive to sound and light .
I did not call my parents daily as usual .
When I finally called , my father wanted to talk not about his feeling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can be slow to heal , he told me .
“ You just said ‘ concoction ’ ; the word is ‘ concussion , ’ ” my mother said from the background .
I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them , because I would have sensed that he wasn ’ t only mildly unwell , and I would have insisted that he go to the hospital much sooner .
I wish , I wish .
The guilt gnaws at my soul .
I think of all the things @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways that the world could be reshaped , to prevent what happened on June 10th , to make it un-happen .
I worry about Okey , a stalwart , sensitive soul , whose burden is different from ours because he is the one who was there .
He agonizes about what else he could have done when my father that night started to show discomfort , telling him , “ Help me sit up ” and then saying , no , he would rather lie back down .
Okey says that my father @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sounded like lines from the rosary in Igbo .
Does it comfort me to hear this ?
Only in the sense that it must have comforted my father .

In memoriam: James Nwoye Adichie, 1932-2020
1.
From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria. On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. “Move your phone a bit, Daddy,” one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying that he hadn’t had dinner because they’d had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village’s ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. “Ka chi fo,” he said. (“Good night.”) His last words to me. On June 10th, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone.
2.
My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon; he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day; he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor, and so how can this be? But there he is. Okey is holding a phone over my father’s face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. I stare and stare at my father. My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says that she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, “No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.” My husband is saying, “Breathe slowly; drink some of this water.” My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. Later, my brother Kene will jokingly say, “You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes.”
3.
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual, and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy?
4.
In my American home, I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise, and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it.
“I just thought about how Daddy was always turning off the radio and I was always turning it back on. He probably thought it was wasteful in some way,” I tell Okey.
“Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba. I’d so happily let him now if he’ll just come back,” Okey says, and we laugh.
“And I will start to wake up early, and I’ll start to eat garri, and I’ll go to Mass every Sunday,” I say, and we laugh.
I retell the story of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale, where I say, “Daddy, will you have some pomegranate juice? And he says, ‘No, thank you, whatever that is.’ ”
Pomegranate juice became a standing joke. All those standing jokes we had, frequently told and retold, my father’s expression this minute utterly deadpan and, in the next, wide open with delighted laughter. Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh, remembering my father, but somewhere in the background of the laughter there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. But how is it that in the morning he was joking and talking, and at night he was gone forever? It was so fast, too fast. It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world. Throughout the lockdown, my father and I talked about how strange it all was, how scary, and he told me often not to worry about my doctor husband. “You actually drink warm water, Daddy?” I asked one day, surprised, after he said with sheepish humor that he’d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent the coronavirus infection. He laughed at himself and told me that warm water was harmless, after all, not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare, when people were bathing in saline before dawn. To my “How are you, Daddy?,” he would always respond, “Enwerom nsogbu chacha.” (“I have no problems at all. I’m perfectly fine.”) And he really was, until he wasn’t.
5.
Messages pour in, and I look at them as through a mist. Who is this message for? “On the loss of your father,” one says. Whose father? My sister forwards a message from her friend, saying that my father was humble despite his accomplishments. My fingers start to tremble, and I push my phone away. He was not. He is. There is a video of people trooping into our house for mgbalu, to give condolences, and I want to reach in and wrench them away from our living room, where already my mother is settled on the sofa in placid widow pose. A table is in front of her like a barrier, to maintain social distance. Already friends and relatives are saying that this must be done and that must be done. A condolence register must be placed by the front door, and my sister goes off to buy a bolt of white lace to cover the table, and my brother buys a hardcover notebook, and already people are bending to write in the book. I think, Go home! Why are you coming to our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true? Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit. I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies. Needle pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old, older than my father and alive and well. My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too—why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up, afraid of tomorrow and all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and people are inviting me to speak somewhere and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?
6.
Grief is forcing new skins on me, scraping scales from my eyes. I regret my past certainties: Surely you should mourn, talk through it, face it, go through it. The smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. I cannot think too much; I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look. Of course, the effort is its own grieving, and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking, but imagine the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare. Often, too, there is the urge to run and run, to hide. But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief—when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement—I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, my fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobs. For the first time in my life, I am enamored of sleeping pills, and, in the middle of a shower or a meal, I burst into tears.
7.
My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away: June 10, 2020, was the worst day of my life. The week before June 10th, while running around playing with my daughter, I fell and hit my head and suffered a concussion. For days, I felt unmoored, sensitive to sound and light. I did not call my parents daily as usual. When I finally called, my father wanted to talk not about his feeling unwell but about my head. Concussions can be slow to heal, he told me. “You just said ‘concoction’; the word is ‘concussion,’ ” my mother said from the background. I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them, because I would have sensed that he wasn’t only mildly unwell, and I would have insisted that he go to the hospital much sooner. I wish, I wish. The guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could have happened and all the ways that the world could be reshaped, to prevent what happened on June 10th, to make it un-happen. I worry about Okey, a stalwart, sensitive soul, whose burden is different from ours because he is the one who was there. He agonizes about what else he could have done when my father that night started to show discomfort, telling him, “Help me sit up” and then saying, no, he would rather lie back down. Okey says that my father prayed, calmly, quietly, what sounded like lines from the rosary in Igbo. Does it comfort me to hear this? Only in the sense that it must have comforted my father.
The cause was complications from kidney failure. An infection, the doctor said, exacerbated his long-term kidney disease. But what infection? Of course, I wonder about the coronavirus. Some journalists had come to our house to interview him a few weeks before, about the case of the billionaire who wanted to take our home town’s land—a dispute that consumed my father these past two years. Might he have been exposed then? The doctor doesn’t think so, even though he was not tested, because he would have had symptoms, and nobody else around him had symptoms. He needed hydration, and so he was admitted to the hospital and put on I.V. fluids. Okey stripped the tatty hospital bedsheets and brought sheets from home.
8.
Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always at the back of my mind feared this day. But lulled by his relative good health, I thought we had time. I thought it was not yet time. “I was so sure Daddy was nineties material,” my brother Kene says. We all did. But did I sense a truth that I also fully denied? Did my spirit know, the way anxiety sat sharp like claws in my stomach once I heard that he was unwell, the hovering, darkening pall that I could neither name nor shake off? I am the Family Worrier, but even for me it was extreme, how desperately I wished that Nigerian airports were open so I could get on a flight to Lagos, and then on a flight to Asaba and drive the hour to my home town to see my father for myself. So I knew. I was so close to my father that I knew, without wanting to know, without fully knowing that I knew. A thing like this, dreaded for so long, comes at last, and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened; my father is gone; my madness will now bare itself.
9.
How quickly my life has become another life, how pitiless this becoming is, and yet how slow I am to adapt. Okey sends me a video of an elderly woman who walks through our front door, crying, and I think, I have to ask Daddy who she is. In that small moment, what has been true for the forty-two years of my life is still true—that my father is tactile, inhaling, exhaling, reachable to talk to and to watch the twinkle of his eyes behind his glasses. Then, with a horrible lurch, I remember again. That brief forgetting feels like both a betrayal and a blessing. Do I forget because I am not there? I think so. My brother and sister are there, face to face with the desolation of a house without my father. They can see that he is not at the dining table for breakfast, on his chair backing the window’s light, and that after breakfast he is not settled on the sofa in his midmorning ritual of napping, reading, and napping again. If only I could be there, too, but I am stuck in America, my frustration like a blister, scouring for news on when the Nigerian airports will open. Even the Nigerian authorities don’t seem to know. A report says July, then August, then we hear it might be in October, but the aviation minister tweets to say “may be earlier than October.” Maybe, maybe not, like playing yo-yo with a cat.
10.
I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less. “On the demise of your father.” Demise. A favorite of Nigerians, it conjures for me dark distortions. “He is resting” brings not comfort but a scoff that trails its way to pain. He could very well be resting in his room in our house in Abba, fan whirring warm air, his bed strewn with folded newspapers, a sudoku book, an old brochure from a funeral, a Knights of St. Mulumba calendar, a bag filled with his bottles of medicine, and his notebooks with the carefully lined pages, where he recorded every single thing he ate, a diabetic’s account-taking. “He is in a better place” is startling in its presumptuousness and has a taint of the inapt. How would you know—and shouldn’t I, the bereaved, be privy to this information first; should I really be learning this from you? “He was eighty-eight” so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. “It has happened so just celebrate his life,” an old friend wrote, and it incensed me—how facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. “Find peace in your memories,” I used to say. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.”


newyorker--2020-09-10--Bob Woodward on a Nightmare Presidency

Bob Woodward on a Nightmare Presidency

If Donald Trump possessed a soul , a trace of conscience or character , he would resign the Presidency .
He will not resign the Presidency .
Trump is who he has always been , and the details that we learn with every passing day merely fill in the portrait with sharper focus and more lurid colors .
The man who lied about the nature of the novel coronavirus to the American people ( but confided in Bob Woodward ) is the same man who , as a real-estate huckster , used to say that the best way to hype @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give them the old Trump bullshit.
” Deception is his brand .
It is hard to identify a constituency that Trump has not betrayed .
A self-proclaimed populist , his greatest legislative triumph was a gargantuan tax cut for the wealthy .
( “ You all just got a lot richer , ” he told his cronies at Mar-a-Lago . )
A self-proclaimed champion of the military , he reportedly says “ my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies ” and refers to fallen American soldiers as “ losers ” and “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contempt are so routine , so numerous , that we grow inured to their gravity and even forget that only recently he was impeached in the House of Representatives , avoiding conviction thanks only to a conscience-free Republican majority in the Senate .
Trump ’ s lack of stability is so pronounced that he inspires nightmares in his closest aides .
As we learn from “ Rage , ” Woodward ’ s new book , Trump ’ s defense secretary , James Mattis , was so concerned that the President would set off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mattis slept in his clothes in case he had to race to the Pentagon or the White House in the middle of the night .
In his interviews with Woodward , Trump seems so hungry for approbation that , like a child , he spills news of a secret weapons system–– “ We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.
” ( This weapons system is presumably different from the hypersonic “ super duper ” missile that Trump hinted at in May . )
The polls show Joe Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the election could go either way .
As he proves almost daily , Trump is capable of saying or doing anything to win .
And if he doesn ’ t win , the presumption that he will hand over power without some sort of duplicity is far from assured .
And yet the dismissive reaction on Fox News to the revelations in Woodward ’ s book was telling .
On Wednesday night , Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were all smug laughter as they tried to describe the excerpts from Woodward ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hokum and to redirect attention to all the many devilish ways that Biden was describing the country as “ evil ” and “ racist.
” And , by the way , Ingraham said , there ’ s another book that you really ought to read !
“ Obsession : Inside the Washington Establishment ’ s Never-Ending War on Trump , ” by Byron York , a Fox contributor and correspondent for the Washington Examiner .
Trump ’ s Presidency has been appalling––but not unpredictably so .
That he would bring misery and division @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the start .
Flagrantly corrupt and instinctually autocratic , he immediately set about threatening democratic values and the rule of law , while encouraging autocrats abroad and white nationalists at home .
He has aroused hatred for the free press and slimed the patriotism of everyone from John McCain to John Lewis .
It is a painful thing to say , but the evidence assaults us daily : Trump is a miserable human being .
Ask his sister , a retired federal judge ; in a taped conversation with the President ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ cruel.
” It is the rare adviser or satrap who leaves the White House and does not hasten to write a memoir or speak to the press with the intention of sounding a common alarm , that Trump poses a threat to national security even more profound than the news-weary public can imagine .
Woodward reports that the former director of National Intelligence , Dan Coats , came to believe , more and more , that the Russians had something on Trump .
“ How else to explain the President ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Coats could see no other explanation.
” “ So you just had to deal with it , ” Woodward quotes Mattis as saying , about the situation inside Trump ’ s White House .
“ It was , how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year ?
” Mattis says he resigned only when Trump went “ beyond stupid to felony stupid ” and made an abrupt decision to withdraw troops fighting ISIS .
Trump ’ s reaction to the book has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , often calling Woodward at home at night just to deepen the hole he began to dig at more formal sessions in the Oval Office .
Woodward taped the conversations with the President ’ s knowledge .
But , as a way to cover all bases , Trump tweeted last month , “ The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE , as always , just as many of the others have been.
” And , of course , he has now tried to pick at the critical thread that the reporter should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of COVID-19 earlier .
“ Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months , ” Trump tweeted Thursday morning .
“ If he thought they were so bad or dangerous , why didn ’ t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives ?
Didn ’ t he have an obligation to do so ?
No , because he knew they were good and proper answers .
Calm , no panic !
” The executive in charge of saving lives was , and is , Donald Trump , not Bob Woodward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and denials insured that the American response , compared with that of other nations , would be tragic .
William Haseltine , the chairman and president of ACCESS Health International and a world-renowned biologist , told CNN , “ How many people could have been saved out of the hundred and ninety thousand who have died ?
My guess is a hundred and eighty thousand of those .
We have killed a hundred and eighty thousand of our fellow-Americans because we have not been honest with the truth.
” With just two months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ obvious that Trump , seemingly unable to expand his base and , according to a recent report in the Times , running short on money and the ability to blanket the battleground states with ads , will stick with the ugliest tactics available to him .
And , in doing so , he is making the calculation that a decisive segment of the electorate will be attracted to his appeals to racism and fear .
Trump is not unique in such tactical thinking .
In November , 1971 , Richard Nixon was concerned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , at least fleetingly , the publication of Philip Roth ’ s “ Our Gang , ” a withering satire of the Nixon Administration .
It hardly mattered to Nixon that the people most likely to read “ Our Gang ” were probably not in the undecided camp .
In a White House meeting , Nixon asked his chief of staff , H. R. Haldeman , about the plot of Roth ’ s book .
After Haldeman patiently ran through the Swiftian plot mechanics for the President , Nixon got to the @ @

If Donald Trump possessed a soul, a trace of conscience or character, he would resign the Presidency. He will not resign the Presidency.
Trump is who he has always been, and the details that we learn with every passing day merely fill in the portrait with sharper focus and more lurid colors. The man who lied about the nature of the novel coronavirus to the American people (but confided in Bob Woodward) is the same man who, as a real-estate huckster, used to say that the best way to hype a new building was to “just give them the old Trump bullshit.” Deception is his brand.
It is hard to identify a constituency that Trump has not betrayed. A self-proclaimed populist, his greatest legislative triumph was a gargantuan tax cut for the wealthy. (“You all just got a lot richer,” he told his cronies at Mar-a-Lago.) A self-proclaimed champion of the military, he reportedly says “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies” and refers to fallen American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” His lies and expressions of contempt are so routine, so numerous, that we grow inured to their gravity and even forget that only recently he was impeached in the House of Representatives, avoiding conviction thanks only to a conscience-free Republican majority in the Senate. Trump’s lack of stability is so pronounced that he inspires nightmares in his closest aides. As we learn from “Rage,” Woodward’s new book, Trump’s defense secretary, James Mattis, was so concerned that the President would set off a nuclear confrontation with North Korea that Mattis slept in his clothes in case he had to race to the Pentagon or the White House in the middle of the night. In his interviews with Woodward, Trump seems so hungry for approbation that, like a child, he spills news of a secret weapons system––“We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.” (This weapons system is presumably different from the hypersonic “super duper” missile that Trump hinted at in May.)
The polls show Joe Biden ahead, but there is no question that the election could go either way. As he proves almost daily, Trump is capable of saying or doing anything to win. And if he doesn’t win, the presumption that he will hand over power without some sort of duplicity is far from assured. And yet the dismissive reaction on Fox News to the revelations in Woodward’s book was telling. On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were all smug laughter as they tried to describe the excerpts from Woodward’s book as so much irrelevance and hokum and to redirect attention to all the many devilish ways that Biden was describing the country as “evil” and “racist.” And, by the way, Ingraham said, there’s another book that you really ought to read! “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump,” by Byron York, a Fox contributor and correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
Trump’s Presidency has been appalling––but not unpredictably so. That he would bring misery and division to this country should have been obvious from the start. Flagrantly corrupt and instinctually autocratic, he immediately set about threatening democratic values and the rule of law, while encouraging autocrats abroad and white nationalists at home. He has aroused hatred for the free press and slimed the patriotism of everyone from John McCain to John Lewis. It is a painful thing to say, but the evidence assaults us daily: Trump is a miserable human being. Ask his sister, a retired federal judge; in a taped conversation with the President’s niece, she refers to him as “cruel.” It is the rare adviser or satrap who leaves the White House and does not hasten to write a memoir or speak to the press with the intention of sounding a common alarm, that Trump poses a threat to national security even more profound than the news-weary public can imagine. Woodward reports that the former director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, came to believe, more and more, that the Russians had something on Trump. “How else to explain the President’s behavior?” Woodward writes. “Coats could see no other explanation.”
“So you just had to deal with it,” Woodward quotes Mattis as saying, about the situation inside Trump’s White House. “It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?” Mattis says he resigned only when Trump went “beyond stupid to felony stupid” and made an abrupt decision to withdraw troops fighting ISIS.
Trump’s reaction to the book has been Trumpian. He gave Woodward eighteen interviews, often calling Woodward at home at night just to deepen the hole he began to dig at more formal sessions in the Oval Office. Woodward taped the conversations with the President’s knowledge. But, as a way to cover all bases, Trump tweeted last month, “The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been.” And, of course, he has now tried to pick at the critical thread that the reporter should have published his remarks about the dangers of COVID-19 earlier. “Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!”
The executive in charge of saving lives was, and is, Donald Trump, not Bob Woodward. And the President’s delays and denials insured that the American response, compared with that of other nations, would be tragic. William Haseltine, the chairman and president of ACCESS Health International and a world-renowned biologist, told CNN, “How many people could have been saved out of the hundred and ninety thousand who have died? My guess is a hundred and eighty thousand of those. We have killed a hundred and eighty thousand of our fellow-Americans because we have not been honest with the truth.”
With just two months remaining before the election, it is obvious that Trump, seemingly unable to expand his base and, according to a recent report in the Times, running short on money and the ability to blanket the battleground states with ads, will stick with the ugliest tactics available to him. And, in doing so, he is making the calculation that a decisive segment of the electorate will be attracted to his appeals to racism and fear.


newyorker--2020-09-10--Daily Cartoon: Thursday, September 10th

Daily Cartoon: Thursday, September 10th

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newyorker--2020-09-10--Trump’s Agreeing to Talk to Woodward Shows Downside of Never Having Read a Book in Entire Life

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald J. Trump ’ s decision to talk to Bob Woodward demonstrates the downside of never having read a book in his entire life , experts say .
While millions of Americans were astonished that Trump would voluntarily speak at great length to an author famous for his takedowns of Presidents , experts believe that a total obliviousness to books and what is inside them might have played a pivotal role .
Davis Logsdon , a University of Minnesota professor who studies the psychology of people who have never read a book in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be overconfident about how they would be portrayed if a book were ever written about them .
“ If you ’ ve never read a book in your life , you might be under the impression that all books are flattering , ” he said .
“ You would have no idea that a book could portray you as a human dumpster fire.
” As for Trump , Logsdon said that the President would “ definitely benefit ” from reading a book someday , but added , “ It ’ s a little @ @ @ @ @ @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump’s decision to talk to Bob Woodward demonstrates the downside of never having read a book in his entire life, experts say.
While millions of Americans were astonished that Trump would voluntarily speak at great length to an author famous for his takedowns of Presidents, experts believe that a total obliviousness to books and what is inside them might have played a pivotal role.
Davis Logsdon, a University of Minnesota professor who studies the psychology of people who have never read a book in their lives, said that such people might be overconfident about how they would be portrayed if a book were ever written about them.
“If you’ve never read a book in your life, you might be under the impression that all books are flattering,” he said. “You would have no idea that a book could portray you as a human dumpster fire.”
As for Trump, Logsdon said that the President would “definitely benefit” from reading a book someday, but added, “It’s a little late for that now.”


newyorker--2020-09-10--Trump’s Epic Lies Become His Campaign Coronavirus Story Line

It would not seem possible that Donald Trump could sell himself as the hero of the coronavirus crisis , but , as he demonstrated on Tuesday evening , at the Winston-Salem airport , in North Carolina , he is not one to let either shame or the truth get in the way of a boast .
The tally of Americans who have died of COVID-19 , according to Johns Hopkins University , is now more than a hundred and ninety thousand—a figure that is almost certainly too low , given testing shortages—but the number that Trump was interested in was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told fifteen thousand people !
” he said .
An airport official told the Winston-Salem Journal that he guessed there were seven to nine thousand people there .
Some of the people in the stand behind the President were wearing masks , printed with “ MAGA ” or “ TRUMP , ” but , judging from videos of the milling crowd and from press reports , few other attendees were .
The President certainly was not .
He told the crowd that he normally held rallies in indoor venues , “ But because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arenas aren ’ t working out too well , right ?
You can ’ t really do that anymore for a while.
” When Trump said “ China , ” he wasn ’ t just using a shorthand version of “ China virus , ” his xenophobic label for SARS-CoV-2 .
He was referring to what might be called the Trump 2020 coronavirus story line , which is as epic as it is fictitious .
The synopsis , a version of which he offered at the rally in North Carolina , goes like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economy in the history of the world , we were forced to close it because of the China plague that came in , ” Trump said .
Leave it to Trump to dream up a myth of lost greatness about not only America but also about his Presidency .
His plan seems to be to use his great failing as an all-purpose excuse—the coronavirus did it , not me .
A Trump drama , though , demands more than an unthinking virus—it requires a villain .
And so , later in the speech @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he said , “ We just have the plague .
We ’ ve had other plagues sent by them .
I wonder if they did it on purpose .
What do you think , huh ?
” The crowd cheered its affirmation .
Perhaps it makes sense to Trump ’ s supporters that the Chinese government would unleash a pandemic on its own population in a bank-shot attempt to bring him down .
It does not , however , make any logical sense .
“ People don ’ t realize we saved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the crowd .
The President who , in the spring , during the depths of the pandemic , told governors to scrounge up the supplies they needed on their own , claimed to have masterminded “ the largest national mobilization since World War II.
” In fact , to this day , there is no effective national testing strategy , and even less of one for contact tracing .
And the state , local , and public-health officials who were frantically trying to save lives had to push back against his dismissiveness , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a Washington Post report on “ Rage , ” a new book by Bob Woodward , Trump was quite aware of how dangerous the virus was .
( “ I wanted to always play it down , ” he said . )
He simply chose to lie to the public , further undermining trust .
In North Carolina , Trump added , “ We have achieved some of the great numbers , the case-fatality rates—we have the lowest of any major country in the world .
People don ’ t know that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to write about it.
” The United States does not have the lowest case-fatality rate of any major country , unless Japan and India aren ’ t major countries .
And , by another measure—deaths per hundred thousand—the U.S. is doing very badly , and its relative position keeps getting worse .
That ’ s because many countries in Europe that were badly hit now have the virus largely under control , and we do not .
It ’ s true that there are scenarios in which far more Americans could have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measures had been taken at all , or if Trump held indoor rallies at the rate he did before the pandemic .
But too many did die , and too many are dying now .
“ Your state should be open !
Your state should be open !
” Trump told the crowd in North Carolina .
He urged his supporters to vote against Governor Roy Cooper , a Democrat , with whom he clashed over his desire to hold a non-socially-distanced Republican National Convention , in Charlotte—Cooper had too many rules—and who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in North Carolina are , in fact , open , including gyms and restaurants , albeit with limits on capacity , and other restrictions .
For example , outdoor mass gatherings are supposed to be limited to fifty people , a cap that Trump dismissed by saying that he ’ d just call his rallies “ peaceful protests.
” ( He also ignored the statewide mask mandate . )
But there are closures : the University of North Carolina , for example , switched to remote classes in early August after a hundred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the virus .
( Last week , cases at U.N.C .
were more than a thousand .
College towns across the country have become regional hotspots . )
It should be clear by now that opening prematurely or without restrictions , contact tracing , and widespread access to testing in place , as many states did in the early summer , is counterproductive : doing so just leads to more outbreaks and more closures , perpetuating the pandemic cycle .
But Trump seems willing to risk further infections , and deaths .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ young people would be just fine .
He admired their immune systems .
He said , vaguely , that there are ways to protect the vulnerable while everyone else goes back to work , as if the vulnerable—a very large category in COVID-19 terms , including people with a wide range of preëxisting conditions as well as those who are obese—could be pushed aside indefinitely .
Trump also promised the crowd that , thanks to him , a safe , effective vaccine will be available by the end of the year , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” He wondered if any other Administration in American history would have been capable of this feat .
Anthony Fauci , pharmaceutical companies , and any number of public-health experts have warned of the need for caution , and the fact that the actual distribution of a vaccine will take far longer ; given that many people are already suspicious about vaccines , releasing a dangerous one prematurely , according to a timeline set by Trump ’ s need to make big promises at rallies , would be a disaster .
But , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , anyone who worried that pledges like his might lead to a politicized approval process was part of a “ Biden-Harris effort to spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
” After decrying the effect of closures on people in Michigan ( “ They want to have football !
” ) , another state with a Democratic governor , Trump said , “ They ’ re doing it for political reasons .
They think by hurting the economy , by keeping all these store owners and all these people that work in shops , stores , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re hurting our economy.
” ( He couldn ’ t help but add , “ Our economy is doing phenomenally well.
” ) Also , Trump told the crowd , “ They want to indoctrinate your children and implement their ruinous shutdown of the United States economy again .
”

It would not seem possible that Donald Trump could sell himself as the hero of the coronavirus crisis, but, as he demonstrated on Tuesday evening, at the Winston-Salem airport, in North Carolina, he is not one to let either shame or the truth get in the way of a boast. The tally of Americans who have died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University, is now more than a hundred and ninety thousand—a figure that is almost certainly too low, given testing shortages—but the number that Trump was interested in was the crowd size. “I was told fifteen thousand people!” he said. An airport official told the Winston-Salem Journal that he guessed there were seven to nine thousand people there. Some of the people in the stand behind the President were wearing masks, printed with “MAGA” or “TRUMP,” but, judging from videos of the milling crowd and from press reports, few other attendees were. The President certainly was not. He told the crowd that he normally held rallies in indoor venues, “But because of, uh, China, the arenas aren’t working out too well, right? You can’t really do that anymore for a while.”
When Trump said “China,” he wasn’t just using a shorthand version of “China virus,” his xenophobic label for SARS-CoV-2. He was referring to what might be called the Trump 2020 coronavirus story line, which is as epic as it is fictitious. The synopsis, a version of which he offered at the rally in North Carolina, goes like this:
Act I: Paradise Betrayed
“We built the greatest economy in the history of the world, we were forced to close it because of the China plague that came in,” Trump said. Leave it to Trump to dream up a myth of lost greatness about not only America but also about his Presidency. His plan seems to be to use his great failing as an all-purpose excuse—the coronavirus did it, not me. A Trump drama, though, demands more than an unthinking virus—it requires a villain. And so, later in the speech, returning to the subject of China, he said, “We just have the plague. We’ve had other plagues sent by them. I wonder if they did it on purpose. What do you think, huh?” The crowd cheered its affirmation. Perhaps it makes sense to Trump’s supporters that the Chinese government would unleash a pandemic on its own population in a bank-shot attempt to bring him down. It does not, however, make any logical sense.
Act II: Trump Versus the Virus
“People don’t realize we saved millions of lives,” Trump told the crowd. The President who, in the spring, during the depths of the pandemic, told governors to scrounge up the supplies they needed on their own, claimed to have masterminded “the largest national mobilization since World War II.” In fact, to this day, there is no effective national testing strategy, and even less of one for contact tracing. And the state, local, and public-health officials who were frantically trying to save lives had to push back against his dismissiveness, quackery, and conspiracy-mongering—even though, according to a Washington Post report on “Rage,” a new book by Bob Woodward, Trump was quite aware of how dangerous the virus was. (“I wanted to always play it down,” he said.) He simply chose to lie to the public, further undermining trust.
In North Carolina, Trump added, “We have achieved some of the great numbers, the case-fatality rates—we have the lowest of any major country in the world. People don’t know that because the fake news doesn’t want to write about it.” The United States does not have the lowest case-fatality rate of any major country, unless Japan and India aren’t major countries. And, by another measure—deaths per hundred thousand—the U.S. is doing very badly, and its relative position keeps getting worse. That’s because many countries in Europe that were badly hit now have the virus largely under control, and we do not. It’s true that there are scenarios in which far more Americans could have perished, for example if no distancing measures had been taken at all, or if Trump held indoor rallies at the rate he did before the pandemic. But too many did die, and too many are dying now.
Act III: Enter the Democrats as Saboteurs
“Your state should be open! Your state should be open!” Trump told the crowd in North Carolina. He urged his supporters to vote against Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, with whom he clashed over his desire to hold a non-socially-distanced Republican National Convention, in Charlotte—Cooper had too many rules—and who is up for reëlection. Many things in North Carolina are, in fact, open, including gyms and restaurants, albeit with limits on capacity, and other restrictions. For example, outdoor mass gatherings are supposed to be limited to fifty people, a cap that Trump dismissed by saying that he’d just call his rallies “peaceful protests.” (He also ignored the statewide mask mandate.)
But there are closures: the University of North Carolina, for example, switched to remote classes in early August after a hundred and seventy-seven students and staff tested positive for the virus. (Last week, cases at U.N.C. were more than a thousand. College towns across the country have become regional hotspots.) It should be clear by now that opening prematurely or without restrictions, contact tracing, and widespread access to testing in place, as many states did in the early summer, is counterproductive: doing so just leads to more outbreaks and more closures, perpetuating the pandemic cycle. But Trump seems willing to risk further infections, and deaths. He emphasized to the crowd that most young people would be just fine. He admired their immune systems. He said, vaguely, that there are ways to protect the vulnerable while everyone else goes back to work, as if the vulnerable—a very large category in COVID-19 terms, including people with a wide range of preëxisting conditions as well as those who are obese—could be pushed aside indefinitely.
Trump also promised the crowd that, thanks to him, a safe, effective vaccine will be available by the end of the year, and maybe even “much sooner than that.” He wondered if any other Administration in American history would have been capable of this feat. Anthony Fauci, pharmaceutical companies, and any number of public-health experts have warned of the need for caution, and the fact that the actual distribution of a vaccine will take far longer; given that many people are already suspicious about vaccines, releasing a dangerous one prematurely, according to a timeline set by Trump’s need to make big promises at rallies, would be a disaster. But, as Trump told it in North Carolina, anyone who worried that pledges like his might lead to a politicized approval process was part of a “Biden-Harris effort to spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.”
After decrying the effect of closures on people in Michigan (“They want to have football!”), another state with a Democratic governor, Trump said, “They’re doing it for political reasons. They think by hurting the economy, by keeping all these store owners and all these people that work in shops, stores, buildings, offices—they think by hurting them they’re hurting our economy.” (He couldn’t help but add, “Our economy is doing phenomenally well.”) Also, Trump told the crowd, “They want to indoctrinate your children and implement their ruinous shutdown of the United States economy again.”
Who are “they”? In a particularly crude passage of his speech, Trump described “Biden people.” “If they win, the mobs win. You see these guys, they go around saying, ‘Yeah, I want your meal, gimme that food, gimme that’—a woman, sitting there, she wants to eat,” he said, pantomiming a person bent timorously over a plate, lifting a fork. “And they come and grab her food, they grab her drink, nobody’s ever seen stuff like this. This is all that ideology!” Behind him, the people in Trump gear shook their heads in horror. Pulling the threads of the plot together, he added, “It’s clear why both China and the flag-burning rioters want Biden to win. They know his policies will be the downfall of America. And they know my policies will lift America to new heights of national greatness like we’ve never seen before. That’s what’s happening.”
That’s not what’s happening. Trump has long required that his supporters cease to care about the truth—that they suspend disbelief when they listen to him. Now, though, he is asking that they not care about American lives, particularly those of the most vulnerable. “I got to tell you, I was sailing to an easy election. This was going to be so easy . . . and now we have to work against a guy that doesn’t know where he is!” Trump said. The election is going to be a lot of work, and it never was going to be easy. Defeating Trump will be worth it.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-09-11--I’m a Fairy Unicorn Ballerina, and This Job Is a Nightmare

Hello !
I am a fairy unicorn ballerina named Joan .
Yes , a real one .
Recently , it has come to my attention that many young children wish to have my job someday .
It might seem like this work is all about fun , sparkle , dancing , and sliding down rainbows .
But you do not want this life .
I ’ ve toiled away as a fairy unicorn ballerina for years , and it ’ s time I set the record straight : this job is a nightmare .
My days are exhausting .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cotton-candy sky , I awake for dance rehearsal—I am a principal in a fairy-unicorn ballet company called Unicorndance .
After I put on my silver headband and leotard , I trudge along the lemonade stream to our studio , in a far-off buttercup meadow .
Our company director , John , drives us to clip-clop , leap , and twirl en hoofe all day , with only one break to sip from the waterfall .
By midnight , I am weak , sore , and nearly broken .
My fellow-dancers and I hobble @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Thank the Great Spirit—another day of Unicorndance is done , ” we say .
To coerce myself to sleep , I take a double dose of Spellatonin and pull a weighted hay blanket over my weary body .
My schedule takes a toll on my social life .
My friends are pixies , leprechauns , and mermaids .
Each week , they gather for Thirsty Thursday at the Potion Puddle .
“ Joan , ” they message me on WandsApp , “ you never join us for potion hour after work.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my favorite elixir made by the puddletender , Jeffrey the Gnome .
I adore Jeffrey the Gnome and find his lustrous mustache to be very alluring , but he hardly notices me .
Last month , he called me Jean , which I do not understand .
What kind of fairy unicorn ballerina is named Jean ?
Even though we work nonstop , fairy unicorn ballerinas earn pitiful monthly allotments of gold coins .
I spend most of my meagre wages on staples such as oats and cloudberries .
I also have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alma mater , Hooflliard .
Since I am uninsured , I do not have access to horn upkeep or annual wing cleanings .
I am always afraid that my new dance partner , Jared , will drop me , and that I will not be able to afford surgery .
Jared has a tendency to drop his partners .
All the stress has led to health problems .
My hooves have become gnarled and ingrown ; I can no longer paint them with sparkly gold polish , and clip-clopping has become more challenging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always sore , and my joints are inflamed .
Don ’ t even get me started on my deep digital-flexor tendons—they ’ re a wreck .
Worst of all , my long mane hangs limp , with split ends .
It ’ s no wonder Jeffrey the Gnome doesn ’ t notice little old Joan .
I ’ m almost thirty-one , which is old by fairy-unicorn-ballerina-industry standards .
John is already transitioning me to play matronly roles in performances .
The other day , he cast me as Mother Bubble in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , This is the beginning of the end for me .
As my position in the company slips away , I must twirl even harder to stay relevant at Unicorndance .
As you can see , life as a fairy unicorn ballerina is an endless string of miseries .
Young human children who wish to follow in my hoofsteps must reconsider !
The Jeffreys and Jareds and Johns will disappoint you .
Twirling makes you dizzy after a while .
And the sparkle and shine—it ’ s really just sweat .

Hello! I am a fairy unicorn ballerina named Joan. Yes, a real one. Recently, it has come to my attention that many young children wish to have my job someday. It might seem like this work is all about fun, sparkle, dancing, and sliding down rainbows. But you do not want this life. I’ve toiled away as a fairy unicorn ballerina for years, and it’s time I set the record straight: this job is a nightmare.
My days are exhausting. As soon as the sun appears in the cotton-candy sky, I awake for dance rehearsal—I am a principal in a fairy-unicorn ballet company called Unicorndance. After I put on my silver headband and leotard, I trudge along the lemonade stream to our studio, in a far-off buttercup meadow. Our company director, John, drives us to clip-clop, leap, and twirl en hoofe all day, with only one break to sip from the waterfall. By midnight, I am weak, sore, and nearly broken. My fellow-dancers and I hobble to the clearing that we share. “Thank the Great Spirit—another day of Unicorndance is done,” we say. To coerce myself to sleep, I take a double dose of Spellatonin and pull a weighted hay blanket over my weary body.
My schedule takes a toll on my social life. My friends are pixies, leprechauns, and mermaids. Each week, they gather for Thirsty Thursday at the Potion Puddle. “Joan,” they message me on WandsApp, “you never join us for potion hour after work.” Sometimes, I dream about indulging in my favorite elixir made by the puddletender, Jeffrey the Gnome. I adore Jeffrey the Gnome and find his lustrous mustache to be very alluring, but he hardly notices me. Last month, he called me Jean, which I do not understand. What kind of fairy unicorn ballerina is named Jean?
Even though we work nonstop, fairy unicorn ballerinas earn pitiful monthly allotments of gold coins. I spend most of my meagre wages on staples such as oats and cloudberries. I also have to make payments every moon cycle to my alma mater, Hooflliard. Since I am uninsured, I do not have access to horn upkeep or annual wing cleanings. I am always afraid that my new dance partner, Jared, will drop me, and that I will not be able to afford surgery. Jared has a tendency to drop his partners.
All the stress has led to health problems. My hooves have become gnarled and ingrown; I can no longer paint them with sparkly gold polish, and clip-clopping has become more challenging. The muscles in my forelimbs are always sore, and my joints are inflamed. Don’t even get me started on my deep digital-flexor tendons—they’re a wreck. Worst of all, my long mane hangs limp, with split ends. It’s no wonder Jeffrey the Gnome doesn’t notice little old Joan.
I’m almost thirty-one, which is old by fairy-unicorn-ballerina-industry standards. John is already transitioning me to play matronly roles in performances. The other day, he cast me as Mother Bubble in the annual bubble ballet, and I thought, This is the beginning of the end for me. As my position in the company slips away, I must twirl even harder to stay relevant at Unicorndance.
As you can see, life as a fairy unicorn ballerina is an endless string of miseries. Young human children who wish to follow in my hoofsteps must reconsider! The Jeffreys and Jareds and Johns will disappoint you. Twirling makes you dizzy after a while. And the sparkle and shine—it’s really just sweat.


newyorker--2020-09-11--Touchstones of El Salvador in New York

Touchstones of El Salvador in New York

The cashew is a remarkably versatile ingredient .
It ’ s as delicious treated simply—raw or roasted , with or without salt—as it is soaked and processed and used to mimic cheese , butter , and cream , sometimes with astonishing success .
My favorite thing about it is how it grows : each nut , encased in a hard , kidney-shaped shell , hangs from the end of a bulbous , shiny-skinned fruit , which turns red or yellow when ripe and could be easily mistaken for an apple or a bell pepper .
In countries across Asia and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make a spectacular juice , with a sweet , tart flavor that ’ s as recognizable yet as confoundingly complex as Coca-Cola .
In El Salvador , where the fruit is known as marañón , the juice is ubiquitous .
In the U.S. , you have to hunt for it , so I ’ m delighted to report a new source : a restaurant called Pupusas Ridgewood , where you can order a plastic cup of it to go .
At a moment when travel is fraught , if not out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to partake of a distinctive touchstone of another place , to shift perspective with a sip .
The griddled masa cake known as the pupusa is also a touchstone of El Salvador , where it ’ s considered the national dish , and where , in 2005 , a yearly holiday was instituted in its honor .
Adjacent to the taco and the arepa , the pupusa is harder to find in the U.S. than either of those , although it was here that Pupusas Ridgewood ’ s owner , Guillermina Ramírez , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , became infatuated with the dish .
After she moved to New York , pupusas were the first food she ordered from a restaurant .
Her menu offers little else , beyond a few other fresh juices , including a cucumber lemonade , and treats such as candied squash topped with pumpkin seeds and a three-tiered parfait of jello .
Undeterred by the pandemic , Ramírez opened her tiny pupusería—which would have fulfilled mostly to-go orders anyhow—in July .
The other day , she presided over the cash register while , behind her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who is from El Salvador , tossed palmfuls of salt into a huge metal bowl of masa , hand-mixing the dough until it was thick and sticky , then molding it into saucer-size disks .
Each pupusa encases some combination of mozzarella cheese , refried beans , stewed pork ( called chicharrón in El Salvador ) or chicken , and vegetables , including loroco , an earthy-tasting flowering vine that grows in El Salvador .
They ’ re seared on a flattop and come with the traditional accompaniments of a thin , mild @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a tart Salvadoran slaw of supple shredded cabbage , carrot , jalapeño , and dried oregano .
Pupusas , you may discover , can be habit-forming .
At Mirna ’ s , which opened in Kensington in August of last year , you can try a slightly different iteration , smaller and served two per order , also with salsa and curtido .
Here , the menu is more expansive .
A Salvadoran breakfast platter comes with scrambled eggs , fried plantain , refried beans , crumbly duro blando cheese , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in place of dough to form empanadas , stuffed with beans or crema , their browned exteriors caramelized to the point where they ’ re almost sweet enough for dessert—as are the wonderfully rich fresh-corn tamales .
At Mirna ’ s , whose married proprietors , Mirna Elisabeth Marroquin and Lorenzo Garcia , hail from El Salvador and Mexico , respectively , you will find both jugo de marañón and atol de piña , a warm , drinkable porridge made from masa and pineapple simmered in water .
You ’ ll also find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most Americans conjures the Mexican dish comprising a tortilla folded around cheese and other fillings .
In El Salvador , a quesadilla is a sweet and savory rice-flour poundcake with cheese mixed into the batter .
It ’ s perfect with morning coffee , and a tantalizing reminder of the possibilities of places near and far .
( Pupusas Ridgewood , pupusas $ 3 .
Mirna ’ s Pupuseria , pupusas start at $ 2.25 . )
♦

The cashew is a remarkably versatile ingredient. It’s as delicious treated simply—raw or roasted, with or without salt—as it is soaked and processed and used to mimic cheese, butter, and cream, sometimes with astonishing success. My favorite thing about it is how it grows: each nut, encased in a hard, kidney-shaped shell, hangs from the end of a bulbous, shiny-skinned fruit, which turns red or yellow when ripe and could be easily mistaken for an apple or a bell pepper.
At Mirna’s and Pupusas Ridgewood, pupusas are served with a tart, spicy cabbage slaw called curtido. Photograph by Steven Molina Contreras for The New Yorker
In countries across Asia and Latin America, this fruit is used to make a spectacular juice, with a sweet, tart flavor that’s as recognizable yet as confoundingly complex as Coca-Cola. In El Salvador, where the fruit is known as marañón, the juice is ubiquitous. In the U.S., you have to hunt for it, so I’m delighted to report a new source: a restaurant called Pupusas Ridgewood, where you can order a plastic cup of it to go. At a moment when travel is fraught, if not out of the question, it feels especially miraculous to partake of a distinctive touchstone of another place, to shift perspective with a sip.
The griddled masa cake known as the pupusa is also a touchstone of El Salvador, where it’s considered the national dish, and where, in 2005, a yearly holiday was instituted in its honor. Adjacent to the taco and the arepa, the pupusa is harder to find in the U.S. than either of those, although it was here that Pupusas Ridgewood’s owner, Guillermina Ramírez, who was born and raised in Mexico, became infatuated with the dish. After she moved to New York, pupusas were the first food she ordered from a restaurant. Her menu offers little else, beyond a few other fresh juices, including a cucumber lemonade, and treats such as candied squash topped with pumpkin seeds and a three-tiered parfait of jello.
The other traditional accompaniment is a thin tomato salsa. Photograph by Steven Molina Contreras for The New Yorker
Undeterred by the pandemic, Ramírez opened her tiny pupusería—which would have fulfilled mostly to-go orders anyhow—in July. The other day, she presided over the cash register while, behind her, a chef named Yolanda Rosales, who is from El Salvador, tossed palmfuls of salt into a huge metal bowl of masa, hand-mixing the dough until it was thick and sticky, then molding it into saucer-size disks. Each pupusa encases some combination of mozzarella cheese, refried beans, stewed pork (called chicharrón in El Salvador) or chicken, and vegetables, including loroco, an earthy-tasting flowering vine that grows in El Salvador. They’re seared on a flattop and come with the traditional accompaniments of a thin, mild tomato salsa and a tangle of curtido, a tart Salvadoran slaw of supple shredded cabbage, carrot, jalapeño, and dried oregano.
Pupusas, you may discover, can be habit-forming. At Mirna’s, which opened in Flatbush in August of last year, you can try a slightly different iteration, smaller and served two per order, also with salsa and curtido. Here, the menu is more expansive. A Salvadoran breakfast platter comes with scrambled eggs, fried plantain, refried beans, crumbly duro blando cheese, and thick crema. Mashed plantain is used in place of dough to form empanadas, stuffed with beans or crema, their browned exteriors caramelized to the point where they’re almost sweet enough for dessert—as are the wonderfully rich fresh-corn tamales.
At Mirna’s, the more expansive Salvadoran menu includes fried yucca (top right). Photograph by Steven Molina Contreras for The New Yorker
At Mirna’s, whose married proprietors, Mirna Elisabeth Marroquin and Lorenzo Garcia, hail from El Salvador and Mexico, respectively, you will find both jugo de marañón and atol de piña, a warm, drinkable porridge made from masa and pineapple simmered in water. You’ll also find a quesadilla, a word that for most Americans conjures the Mexican dish comprising a tortilla folded around cheese and other fillings. In El Salvador, a quesadilla is a sweet and savory rice-flour poundcake with cheese mixed into the batter. It’s perfect with morning coffee, and a tantalizing reminder of the possibilities of places near and far. (Pupusas Ridgewood, pupusas $3. Mirna’s Pupuseria, pupusas start at $2.25.) ♦
This article has been updated to match the version that ran in print.