newyorker--2020-04-26--On Loving “Terrace House” Now More Than Ever

Recalling how “ Terrace House ” made its way into my life is as tricky as defining the show ’ s allure .
There was a time , obviously , before the Japanese reality show was part of my consciousness , but I couldn ’ t tell you exactly when that time ended .
Among fans of the series , this isn ’ t terribly unique .
We were introduced to “ Terrace House ” by a friend , or we came across a screencap , or a clip , and then suddenly , inexplicably , we were involved .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ lifting weights and thinking about Han-san and some perfect piece of advice he ’ d given another cast member , which the cast member had inevitably ignored .
I ’ d blink myself awake at a gay bar , then doze off again to the thought of Seina ’ s picture-perfect wineglass twirls .
I ’ d wait in line at the boba shop , daydreaming about Yusuke ’ s ukulele strumming , or Misaki ’ s fortitude .
The house members danced dimly in the background of my life , and , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of its less-heralded pieces of magic—reaching across space and time and screens to quietly absorb everyone in its vicinity .
The premise of “ Terrace House ” is brazenly simple : three men and three women live unsupervised in an immaculately stocked house .
The house is somewhere in Japan , except for when it isn ’ t .
The cast members are Japanese , except for when they aren ’ t .
In the latest season , “ Terrace House : Tokyo 2019-2020 , ” the roommates include Hana Kimura , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wildly GIF-able moments ; Ryo Tawatari , a pro basketball player who ’ s both confident and stupefyingly oblivious ; Vivi Razdumina , an aspiring actress ; Emika Mizokushi , a university student ; a bumbling personal assistant named Johnkimverlu Tupas ; and a standup comedian named Kai Kobayashi , whose material could be called “ challenging ” at best .
The show drew interest in this country in part because it so lacks the histrionics that are integral to other reality programs , like “ Big Brother ” or “ The Real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ similar setup .
Each house member stays until he or she simply decides to leave .
No one is kicked out of the house or voted off the property .
The house ’ s largely unbothered rhythms are broken by interjections from a panel of commentators , who watch footage from the house at another location , in real time .
Like members of a hyper-smart group chat , the commentators , all of them Japanese celebrities—with the occasional guest spot—pick apart interactions and unspoken dynamics among the cast members , providing insight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just bullshit ( “ How would I know how big his member is ?
” ) .
For viewers used to louder , faster programming , “ Terrace House ” ’ s appeal might sound negligible .
( “ That ’ s all they do ?
” a new viewer asks in a satirical video about defensive “ Terrace House ” fans .
“ They just talk ?
” ) The only way to truly get a sense of the thing is to watch it for hours on end , until the housemates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves onto your own .
More than a handful of my messages with friends have dissolved into debates about how our partners ’ transgressions fared in relation to “ the meat incident.
” At a night-club get-together , I sat in a conversation where participants had not a single thing in common , until someone mentioned Tsubasa ( “ Captain Tsubasa !
” ) , and the circle erupted in appreciation .
We ended the evening confessing that we ’ d all , to varying degrees , found a means of pirating episodes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to American Netflix .
In the States , the show ’ s fandom has crept from maintaining a relatively subdued fascination to entertaining a level of interest that can , at times , veer on fanatical ( I am talking about myself ; I am one of the fanatics ) .
Fan accounts , from Terrace House Food Shots to No context Terrace House , find their wares in heavy circulation on Twitter , and the series ’ s Reddit account hosts a deeply active membership .
Podcasts like “ No Script At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ episodes from moment to moment , intersplicing the show ’ s built-in commentary with their own .
There ’ s consensus among American critics that the show ’ s tranquility relative to its siblings in the genre is a balm , and it is ; but that unhurriedness also places it among the most radical enterprises on television .
In a media ecosystem where most successful programming hinges on competition , subterfuge , discourtesy , and obliqueness for obliqueness ’ s sake , it ’ s hard to imagine anything bolder .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year , I found something Masao Wada said in the “ Opening New Doors ” season , stuck in my head : chatting with a housemate about their respective lives , he asked , “ Does love need a reason ?
” A friend who ’ s a fellow-fan sent me a screencap of the line , apropos of nothing , before two more folks , from entirely unrelated social circles , sent me the exact same one : each of us , in our own way , found it to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time , I was in the middle of writing a romance-ish novel , and that question sent me into something of a professional crisis , whose only remedy was rewatch after rewatch .
Or , rather , the rewatching became the answer .
Not too long afterward , Wada ’ s quote became my novel ’ s epigraph .
A few months before our current global hellscape manifested in full , I decided to rewatch the show again , in anticipation of the U.S. release of the latest batch of episodes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the cast members unfolded alongside mine , whether as the backdrop for a volley of e-mails or as accompaniment to a midnight snack .
Fans of the show have praised the calming effect of repeat viewings .
But as the coronavirus pandemic has been taking its toll , from one continent to another , the show ’ s amiability , the casual jaunts of its housemates , and its overarching emphasis on communion take on a peculiar new dimension .
The cast ’ s casual runs to the bakery grew further and further @ @ @ @ @ @ @ date seemed all but mythical .
And scenes showing the roommates ’ mere acts of joining friends for dinner , cooking alongside others , touching hands and brushing shoulders and laughing ( and coughing , and sneezing ! )
seemed like footage from another world .
It was a delight to watch each scene again , having once taken those interactions for granted .
It was also just as much of a sorrow .
In light of the coronavirus , the producers suspended further filming earlier this month .
Still , there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world of “ Terrace House ” and the world we live in now .
Characters flip through cookbooks , searching for the perfect recipe .
They wash dishes .
They lounge on pieces of furniture , remarking on the weather .
They cook some more .
They wash more dishes .
They blog .
Though the cast members get to venture outside more often than we do , their quiet domestic lives are similarly weighted with a sense of great , impending change .
Upon arriving at the house each season , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve chosen to participate in the show .
Some move into the house thinking that a stint on “ Terrace House ” will jumpstart their careers , and others come looking for love , some swearing , convincingly , that a sojourn on “ Terrace House ” is their absolute last chance at it .
The difference between their experiment and ours is , among other things , that they can choose when theirs ends .
But they display , above all , an admirable willingness to confront the unknown .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ notes early on in the current season , while her housemate bemoans his romantic life , “ We have to be proactive in finding love for ourselves .
What else can we do ?
”

Recalling how “Terrace House” made its way into my life is as tricky as defining the show’s allure. There was a time, obviously, before the Japanese reality show was part of my consciousness, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when that time ended. Among fans of the series, this isn’t terribly unique. We were introduced to “Terrace House” by a friend, or we came across a screencap, or a clip, and then suddenly, inexplicably, we were involved. One day, I’d be lifting weights and thinking about Han-san and some perfect piece of advice he’d given another cast member, which the cast member had inevitably ignored. I’d blink myself awake at a gay bar, then doze off again to the thought of Seina’s picture-perfect wineglass twirls. I’d wait in line at the boba shop, daydreaming about Yusuke’s ukulele strumming, or Misaki’s fortitude. The house members danced dimly in the background of my life, and, little by little, the show worked one of its less-heralded pieces of magic—reaching across space and time and screens to quietly absorb everyone in its vicinity.
The premise of “Terrace House” is brazenly simple: three men and three women live unsupervised in an immaculately stocked house. The house is somewhere in Japan, except for when it isn’t. The cast members are Japanese, except for when they aren’t. In the latest season, “Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020,” the roommates include Hana Kimura, a wrestler with a penchant for creating wildly GIF-able moments; Ryo Tawatari, a pro basketball player who’s both confident and stupefyingly oblivious; Vivi Razdumina, an aspiring actress; Emika Mizokushi, a university student; a bumbling personal assistant named Johnkimverlu Tupas; and a standup comedian named Kai Kobayashi, whose material could be called “challenging” at best.
The show drew interest in this country in part because it so lacks the histrionics that are integral to other reality programs, like “Big Brother” or “The Real World,” that rely on a similar setup. Each house member stays until he or she simply decides to leave. No one is kicked out of the house or voted off the property. The house’s largely unbothered rhythms are broken by interjections from a panel of commentators, who watch footage from the house at another location, in real time. Like members of a hyper-smart group chat, the commentators, all of them Japanese celebrities—with the occasional guest spot—pick apart interactions and unspoken dynamics among the cast members, providing insight, predictions, or, sometimes, just bullshit (“How would I know how big his member is?”).
For viewers used to louder, faster programming, “Terrace House” ’s appeal might sound negligible. (“That’s all they do?” a new viewer asks in a satirical video about defensive “Terrace House” fans. “They just talk?”) The only way to truly get a sense of the thing is to watch it for hours on end, until the housemates’ daily interpersonal conflicts and resolutions superimpose themselves onto your own. More than a handful of my messages with friends have dissolved into debates about how our partners’ transgressions fared in relation to “the meat incident.” At a night-club get-together, I sat in a conversation where participants had not a single thing in common, until someone mentioned Tsubasa (“Captain Tsubasa!”), and the circle erupted in appreciation. We ended the evening confessing that we’d all, to varying degrees, found a means of pirating episodes that have yet to make their way to American Netflix.
In the States, the show’s fandom has crept from maintaining a relatively subdued fascination to entertaining a level of interest that can, at times, veer on fanatical (I am talking about myself; I am one of the fanatics). Fan accounts, from Terrace House Food Shots to No context Terrace House, find their wares in heavy circulation on Twitter, and the series’s Reddit account hosts a deeply active membership. Podcasts like “No Script At All” and “Tadaima” follow episodes from moment to moment, intersplicing the show’s built-in commentary with their own. There’s consensus among American critics that the show’s tranquility relative to its siblings in the genre is a balm, and it is; but that unhurriedness also places it among the most radical enterprises on television. In a media ecosystem where most successful programming hinges on competition, subterfuge, discourtesy, and obliqueness for obliqueness’s sake, it’s hard to imagine anything bolder.
In the midst of finishing a novel last year, I found something Masao Wada said in the “Opening New Doors” season, stuck in my head: chatting with a housemate about their respective lives, he asked, “Does love need a reason?” A friend who’s a fellow-fan sent me a screencap of the line, apropos of nothing, before two more folks, from entirely unrelated social circles, sent me the exact same one: each of us, in our own way, found it to be a simply perfect piece of dialogue. At the time, I was in the middle of writing a romance-ish novel, and that question sent me into something of a professional crisis, whose only remedy was rewatch after rewatch. Or, rather, the rewatching became the answer. Not too long afterward, Wada’s quote became my novel’s epigraph.
A few months before our current global hellscape manifested in full, I decided to rewatch the show again, in anticipation of the U.S. release of the latest batch of episodes, on April 7th. The lives of the cast members unfolded alongside mine, whether as the backdrop for a volley of e-mails or as accompaniment to a midnight snack. Fans of the show have praised the calming effect of repeat viewings. But as the coronavirus pandemic has been taking its toll, from one continent to another, the show’s amiability, the casual jaunts of its housemates, and its overarching emphasis on communion take on a peculiar new dimension. The cast’s casual runs to the bakery grew further and further out of reach. A midday foot-spa date seemed all but mythical. And scenes showing the roommates’ mere acts of joining friends for dinner, cooking alongside others, touching hands and brushing shoulders and laughing (and coughing, and sneezing!) seemed like footage from another world. It was a delight to watch each scene again, having once taken those interactions for granted. It was also just as much of a sorrow. In light of the coronavirus, the producers suspended further filming earlier this month.
Still, there are constructive parallels to be drawn between the world of “Terrace House” and the world we live in now. Characters flip through cookbooks, searching for the perfect recipe. They wash dishes. They lounge on pieces of furniture, remarking on the weather. They cook some more. They wash more dishes. They blog. Though the cast members get to venture outside more often than we do, their quiet domestic lives are similarly weighted with a sense of great, impending change. Upon arriving at the house each season, the new roommates immediately ask each other why they’ve chosen to participate in the show. Some move into the house thinking that a stint on “Terrace House” will jumpstart their careers, and others come looking for love, some swearing, convincingly, that a sojourn on “Terrace House” is their absolute last chance at it. The difference between their experiment and ours is, among other things, that they can choose when theirs ends. But they display, above all, an admirable willingness to confront the unknown. As Vivi, the aspiring actress, notes early on in the current season, while her housemate bemoans his romantic life, “We have to be proactive in finding love for ourselves. What else can we do?”


newyorker--2020-04-27--Víkingur Ólafsson, Liza Lim, and a Surge of Streaming in Quarantine

“ The blessed damozel leaned out / From the gold bar of Heaven.
” Dante Gabriel Rossetti ’ s lines caught the attention of Claude Debussy in 1887 , when the composer was twenty-five .
His setting of “ The Blessed Damozel , ” in the form of the orchestral cantata “ La Damoiselle Élue , ” is among his first fully characteristic works , opening a door to a landscape of unearthly radiance .
The prelude begins with a spare procession of isolated harmonies : E minor , D minor , C major , D minor .
The key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the piece , but for some thirty bars we wander through various adjacent tonalities and ambiguous zones , in a narcotizing haze .
Finally , at the beginning of a passage marked “ Un peu animé , ” or “ A bit animated , ” C major arrives—but it , too , feels new .
The music could not be simpler , with a lilting , rising-and-falling melody over block chords , but the addition of B ’ s and A ’ s to the harmony , flavorings tart and sweet , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not to mention jazz clubs and lounges that had yet to come into existence .
Four bars later , Debussy falls back on a stark E-minor chord that has a vaguely medieval quality , as if this torch song of the future were being performed in a cold room in an ancient castle .
I ’ d heard “ La Damoiselle Élue ” several times over the years , but a recent rendition of the prelude , by the young Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson , made me listen anew .
It appears on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” on the Deutsche Grammophon label .
Ólafsson plays Debussy ’ s own transcription of the work for piano , and it sounds more modern than the orchestral version , which has traces of Wagner ’ s “ Parsifal.
” The pianist ’ s technique is astonishingly exact and clear , almost translucent .
He avoids ostentatiously rolled chords , misty articulation , blurry pedalling , and other atmospherics in which Debussy is too often smothered .
There is a gentle sway to the rhythm , as though a steady breeze were pushing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is what happens next .
Ólafsson segues from the prelude ’ s final , inconclusive E octave to “ Le Rappel des Oiseaux , ” or “ The Rally of the Birds , ” a delicately swirling piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau .
It was written more than a hundred and sixty years before “ La Damoiselle Élue , ” but there is little sense of a sharp stylistic break—a sign both of Rameau ’ s forward-thinking , freewheeling imagination and of Debussy ’ s acute consciousness of the French past .
Ólafsson inevitably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it from the harpsichord , for which it was written , but the dancing delicacy of his touch prevents any encroachment of Romantic heaviness .
Debussy once said of Rameau ’ s opera “ Castor et Pollux ” that it is “ so personal in tone , so new in construction , that space and time are defeated and Rameau seems to be a contemporary.
” The same sense of historical collapse takes hold as one listens to Ólafsson ’ s recital , which switches back and forth between Rameau ’ s “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Rally of the Birds ” —and selections from Debussy : the Préludes , “ Estampes , ” “ Children ’ s Corner , ” “ Images.
” The idiomatic brilliance of the playing and the ingenuity of the programming combine to make “ Debussy Rameau ” one of the most entrancing piano records of recent years .
If Ólafsson ’ s disk offers a refuge of otherworldly beauty , “ Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus , ” a 2018 work by the Australian composer Liza Lim , confronts us with the catastrophic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The piece can be heard on a new recording by Klangforum Wien , on Kairos .
It is scored for twelve musicians—four winds , three brass , three strings , piano , percussion—and it is dominated by seething , roiling , corrosive textures .
At the same time , it echoes the fragmentary melodies of animal voices that have yet to be crushed by the anthropogenic apocalypse .
The composer cites Shakespeare ’ s Sonnet 65 in her program note : “ How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ vast conglomerations of plastic trash ” that float in the oceans and disintegrate into toxic particles .
She alludes to the awful image of albatross chicks choking on plastic fragments that their mothers have mistaken for food .
The extinction of species is likened to the passing away of cultural forms : musical styles , languages , maps .
In the score , these processes of obliteration are mimicked in distortions of instrumental voices : coarse attacks , underblown and overblown notes , tongue slaps , glissandos , all manner of scraping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sonic eddies form , with a motif getting caught in a repeating pattern before breaking free .
At one point , we hear the noise of crinkling cellophane .
Birdlike calls periodically ring out , but they are confined , desperate , strangulated .
This tumultuous soundscape never feels needlessly assaultive or brutal—a tribute to Lim ’ s keen ear for instrumental writing and to her knack for tracing musical gestures that have the fluid shape of organic life .
She seems to adopt the point of view of the suffering earth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we have ejected into the environment .
“ There is broken grandeur , ” she writes , “ and there are attempts to sing.
” The phrase “ broken grandeur ” captures the music ’ s mesmerizing impact .
Ruin is ennobled without being prettified , aestheticized , pushed into the mental distance .
The final section of the piece , “ Dawn Chorus , ” takes a turn toward the hopeful , though it is a low , muted kind of hope .
It is a chorus not of birds but of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Australian coral reefs and make grunting , hooting , and droning noises as the sun rises .
To approximate these ritual calls , Lim has her performers set aside their instruments and twirl wind wands ( resonators with stretched rubber bands ) and operate waldteufels ( small drums that make a croaking sound as a cord is drawn through the membrane ) .
Brass tones emerge from those textures and build to a majestic roar before fading to a subterranean murmur , with the contrabassoonist using a tube extension to produce tones below @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I listened to “ Extinction Events ” during the coronavirus shutdown , I was reminded of how the long-suppressed music of nature has swelled in volume as humanity goes into temporary retreat .
During the weeks of quarantine , homebound music lovers have been depending more than usual on recordings and streaming music .
The likes of Spotify , Apple Music , and YouTube have doubtless profited from the surge , as have major labels and superstar artists .
But the paltry royalties doled out by the streaming services will not save the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shutdown .
The virus has exposed more clearly than ever the vicious economic logic of the streaming era , which favors monopolistic consolidation and consumer convenience over an equitable distribution of profits across the musical ecosystem .
An extinction event is looming over the performing arts , and it calls for a change of practices .
When we take music for free off the Internet , we should seek ways to give concrete support to the people who made it .
Sites such as Bandcamp have a far more generous way of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impact of paying for a recording directly : the income from a single CD sale is equivalent to that of more than a thousand streams .
Streaming also exacts a hidden environmental toll , in the form of increased carbon emissions generated by electricity-consuming servers .
If the performing arts are to retain a place in our society , we will have to rethink how we value them—economically , culturally , politically .
For now , we can try to repay artists for the immense library of music that we have been given @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we have taken .
♦

“The blessed damozel leaned out / From the gold bar of Heaven.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lines caught the attention of Claude Debussy in 1887, when the composer was twenty-five. His setting of “The Blessed Damozel,” in the form of the orchestral cantata “La Damoiselle Élue,” is among his first fully characteristic works, opening a door to a landscape of unearthly radiance. The prelude begins with a spare procession of isolated harmonies: E minor, D minor, C major, D minor. The key of C is the apparent home ground of the piece, but for some thirty bars we wander through various adjacent tonalities and ambiguous zones, in a narcotizing haze.
Finally, at the beginning of a passage marked “Un peu animé,” or “A bit animated,” C major arrives—but it, too, feels new. The music could not be simpler, with a lilting, rising-and-falling melody over block chords, but the addition of B’s and A’s to the harmony, flavorings tart and sweet, conjures the café and the cabaret, not to mention jazz clubs and lounges that had yet to come into existence. Four bars later, Debussy falls back on a stark E-minor chord that has a vaguely medieval quality, as if this torch song of the future were being performed in a cold room in an ancient castle.
I’d heard “La Damoiselle Élue” several times over the years, but a recent rendition of the prelude, by the young Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, made me listen anew. It appears on an album titled “Debussy Rameau,” on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Ólafsson plays Debussy’s own transcription of the work for piano, and it sounds more modern than the orchestral version, which has traces of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The pianist’s technique is astonishingly exact and clear, almost translucent. He avoids ostentatiously rolled chords, misty articulation, blurry pedalling, and other atmospherics in which Debussy is too often smothered. There is a gentle sway to the rhythm, as though a steady breeze were pushing the music forward.
Even more wonderful is what happens next. Ólafsson segues from the prelude’s final, inconclusive E octave to “Le Rappel des Oiseaux,” or “The Rally of the Birds,” a delicately swirling piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was written more than a hundred and sixty years before “La Damoiselle Élue,” but there is little sense of a sharp stylistic break—a sign both of Rameau’s forward-thinking, freewheeling imagination and of Debussy’s acute consciousness of the French past. Ólafsson inevitably modernizes Rameau’s music by transferring it from the harpsichord, for which it was written, but the dancing delicacy of his touch prevents any encroachment of Romantic heaviness.
Debussy once said of Rameau’s opera “Castor et Pollux” that it is “so personal in tone, so new in construction, that space and time are defeated and Rameau seems to be a contemporary.” The same sense of historical collapse takes hold as one listens to Ólafsson’s recital, which switches back and forth between Rameau’s “Pièces de Clavecin”—among them “The Rally of the Birds”—and selections from Debussy: the Préludes, “Estampes,” “Children’s Corner,” “Images.” The idiomatic brilliance of the playing and the ingenuity of the programming combine to make “Debussy Rameau” one of the most entrancing piano records of recent years.
If Ólafsson’s disk offers a refuge of otherworldly beauty, “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus,” a 2018 work by the Australian composer Liza Lim, confronts us with the catastrophic reality of the world as it is. The piece can be heard on a new recording by Klangforum Wien, on Kairos. It is scored for twelve musicians—four winds, three brass, three strings, piano, percussion—and it is dominated by seething, roiling, corrosive textures. At the same time, it echoes the fragmentary melodies of animal voices that have yet to be crushed by the anthropogenic apocalypse. The composer cites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 in her program note: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”
Lim also makes mention of the “vast conglomerations of plastic trash” that float in the oceans and disintegrate into toxic particles. She alludes to the awful image of albatross chicks choking on plastic fragments that their mothers have mistaken for food. The extinction of species is likened to the passing away of cultural forms: musical styles, languages, maps. In the score, these processes of obliteration are mimicked in distortions of instrumental voices: coarse attacks, underblown and overblown notes, tongue slaps, glissandos, all manner of scraping and scrubbing sounds in the percussion. Sonic eddies form, with a motif getting caught in a repeating pattern before breaking free. At one point, we hear the noise of crinkling cellophane. Birdlike calls periodically ring out, but they are confined, desperate, strangulated.
This tumultuous soundscape never feels needlessly assaultive or brutal—a tribute to Lim’s keen ear for instrumental writing and to her knack for tracing musical gestures that have the fluid shape of organic life. She seems to adopt the point of view of the suffering earth, or even of the lifeless objects that we have ejected into the environment. “There is broken grandeur,” she writes, “and there are attempts to sing.” The phrase “broken grandeur” captures the music’s mesmerizing impact. Ruin is ennobled without being prettified, aestheticized, pushed into the mental distance.
The final section of the piece, “Dawn Chorus,” takes a turn toward the hopeful, though it is a low, muted kind of hope. It is a chorus not of birds but of fish—various “chatterbox” species that inhabit Australian coral reefs and make grunting, hooting, and droning noises as the sun rises. To approximate these ritual calls, Lim has her performers set aside their instruments and twirl wind wands (resonators with stretched rubber bands) and operate waldteufels (small drums that make a croaking sound as a cord is drawn through the membrane). Brass tones emerge from those textures and build to a majestic roar before fading to a subterranean murmur, with the contrabassoonist using a tube extension to produce tones below the range of human hearing. As I listened to “Extinction Events” during the coronavirus shutdown, I was reminded of how the long-suppressed music of nature has swelled in volume as humanity goes into temporary retreat.
During the weeks of quarantine, homebound music lovers have been depending more than usual on recordings and streaming music. The likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube have doubtless profited from the surge, as have major labels and superstar artists. But the paltry royalties doled out by the streaming services will not save the working musicians who have lost income during the shutdown. The virus has exposed more clearly than ever the vicious economic logic of the streaming era, which favors monopolistic consolidation and consumer convenience over an equitable distribution of profits across the musical ecosystem.
An extinction event is looming over the performing arts, and it calls for a change of practices. When we take music for free off the Internet, we should seek ways to give concrete support to the people who made it. Sites such as Bandcamp have a far more generous way of sharing revenue, though nothing equals the impact of paying for a recording directly: the income from a single CD sale is equivalent to that of more than a thousand streams. Streaming also exacts a hidden environmental toll, in the form of increased carbon emissions generated by electricity-consuming servers. If the performing arts are to retain a place in our society, we will have to rethink how we value them—economically, culturally, politically. For now, we can try to repay artists for the immense library of music that we have been given, or, more precisely, that we have taken. ♦


newyorker--2020-04-27--What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine

At 4:18 a.m. on February 1 , 1997 , a fire broke out in the Aisin Seiki company ’ s Factory No .
1 , in Kariya , a hundred and sixty miles southwest of Tokyo .
Soon , flames had engulfed the plant and incinerated the production line that made a part called a P-valve—a device used in vehicles to modulate brake pressure and prevent skidding .
The valve was small and cheap—about the size of a fist , and roughly ten dollars apiece—but indispensable .
The Aisin factory normally produced almost thirty-three thousand valves a day , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exclusive supplier of the part for the Toyota Motor Corporation .
Within hours , the magnitude of the loss was evident to Toyota .
The company had adopted “ just in time ” ( J.I.T . )
production : parts , such as P-valves , were produced according to immediate needs—to precisely match the number of vehicles ready for assembly—rather than sitting around in stockpiles .
But the fire had now put the whole enterprise at risk : with no inventory in the warehouse , there were only enough valves to last a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Toyota vehicles was about to grind to a halt .
“ Such is the fragility of JIT : a surprise event can paralyze entire networks and even industries , ” the management scholars Toshihiro Nishiguchi and Alexandre Beaudet observed the following year , in a case study of the episode .
Toyota ’ s response was extraordinary : by six-thirty that morning , while the factory was still smoldering , executives huddled to organize the production of P-valves at other factories .
It was a “ war room , ” one official recalled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , small and large factories , some with no direct connection to Toyota , or even to the automotive industry , received detailed instructions for manufacturing the P-valves .
By February 4th , three days after the fire , many of these factories had repurposed their machines to make the valves .
Brother Industries , a Japanese company best known for its sewing machines and typewriters , adapted a computerized milling device that made typewriter parts to start making P-valves .
The ad-hoc work-around was inefficient—it took fifteen minutes to complete each valve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s largest company was in trouble , and so the crisis had become a test of national solidarity .
All in all , Toyota lost some seventy thousand vehicles—an astonishingly small number , given the millions of orders it fulfilled that year .
By the end of the week , it had increased shifts and lengthened hours .
Within the month , the company had rebounded .
Every enterprise learns its strengths and weaknesses from an Aisin-fire moment—from a disaster that spirals out of control .
What those of us in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis has been dismaying , and on several fronts .
Medicine isn ’ t a doctor with a black bag , after all ; it ’ s a complex web of systems and processes .
It is a health-care delivery system—providing antibiotics to a child with strep throat or a new kidney to a patient with renal failure .
It is a research program , guiding discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside .
It is a set of protocols for quality control—from clinical-practice guidelines to drug and device approvals .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , allowing for continuous improvement in patient care .
In each arena , the pandemic has revealed some strengths—including frank heroism and ingenuity—but it has also exposed hidden fractures , silent aneurysms , points of fragility .
Systems that we thought were homeostatic—self-regulating , self-correcting , like a human body in good health—turned out to be exquisitely sensitive to turbulence , like the body during critical illness .
Everyone now asks : When will things get back to normal ?
But , as a physician and researcher , I fear that the resumption @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learn .
We need to think not about resumption but about revision .
Start with health care as a delivery system .
In this state of emergency , delivering care has required both personal protective equipment ( masks , gowns , gloves ) for medical personnel and devices ( including supplemental oxygen and ventilators ) for patients .
In the absence of effective drugs , care is mainly supportive .
As the pandemic advanced , the delivery of these goods to hospitals and clinics should have been akin to a soldierly deployment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supply chain within a matter of days .
Instead , the medical infrastructure of one of the world ’ s wealthiest nations fell apart , like a slapdash house built by one of the three little pigs .
N95 respirators , those heavy-duty face masks with two straps and a metal nose bridge , are a case in point .
Before the pandemic , each cost between fifty cents and a dollar or so .
They come in various sizes and styles , and every year health-care workers have their size “ fit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air can ’ t get in around the edges .
( A puff of aerosolized saccharin might be sprayed near your face ; if you can detect the sweetness , the mask isn ’ t fitting properly . )
The N95 , meant for a single use , is designed to filter particulates as small as 0.3 microns in diameter .
In the pre-pandemic world , when I encountered a patient suspected of having influenza or TB , say , I would put one on , and discard it in the biohazard trash @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when the need for these masks in hospitals and clinics was most acute , doctors and nurses ran short .
An anesthesiologist from New Jersey told me that he was forced to reuse his mask for the whole day : “ We get one , per shift , per day.
” His nursing staff , he said , initially got none .
A resident in Boston who worked in an E.R .
told me that he had no N95 mask until the end of March ; the few that were available were reserved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that can send viral particles airborne , and pose the highest risk of infection .
He recalled seeing a patient with symptoms that could have signalled COVID-19 : “ When I went to examine him , I had a surgical mask ” —a simple clothlike cover , leaky at the sides— “ and a face shield I had been cleaning and reusing for a month.
” We ’ ve all heard stories about the absence of masks in hospitals ; we know that their production was typically outsourced to suppliers in China , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that made these devices so necessary .
Meanwhile , the shortage of these mass-manufactured fifty-cent items has imperilled the safety of our medical personnel .
The question is : Why ?
Days after the Aisin fire , a typewriter factory was putting out brake-system components .
Why weren ’ t our suppliers responding with the same urgency and resilience ?
The story of Mike Bowen , a manufacturer in North Richland Hills , Texas , offers some clues .
His company , Prestige Ameritech , which he and his partners started fifteen years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s largest domestic manufacturers of surgical and N95 masks .
Because companies that moved manufacturing abroad—including Bowen ’ s old employer , Kimberly-Clark—would undercut him on price , he often had a hard time landing orders .
“ Hospitals typically don ’ t order masks as individual buyers , ” he told me .
He spoke deliberately , with the slightest Texan drawl .
Instead , they negotiate contracts as members of a Group Purchasing Organization—representing hundreds or thousands of hospitals—and , as Bowen explained , the G.P.O .
always “ chooses the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In 2009 , though , preparations were made for the H1N1 influenza pandemic , and Bowen was asked to ramp up his production of face masks to meet the anticipated demand .
“ We bought the old Kimberly-Clark factory , ” he recalled .
“ We outfitted it with new machines .
We hired an extra hundred and fifty people .
And then , when it ended , the whole thing fell apart .
The people that we helped went back to the foreign-made masks .
So we had to lay off all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bankrupt .
“ Hospitals promised to retain us as suppliers after the flu.
” But promises are not contracts .
“ We were just naïve , ” he said .

What’s more, it was known that SARS and MERS were deadly coronaviruses with animal reservoirs that could hop to humans. Disease modellers had determined that a respiratory virus with modes of transmission similar to SARS-CoV-2 was a likely culprit in a future pandemic. Why wasn’t our research investment remotely commensurate with our threat assessments?
On Sunday, April 4th, Tatiana Prowell, a doctor at Johns Hopkins, messaged me on Twitter. She forwarded an e-mail from a radiologist in Los Angeles, along with a CT scan of a young patient’s lung, with a golf-ball-size clot. An unusual finding was cropping up in patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 infections: blood clots in the lung, called pulmonary emboli (P.E.s), and strokes caused by clots in the brain. Some were tiny, nearly undetectable, and some were huge. “I think this is a major unrecognized cause of mortality,” Prowell wrote. “My phone is full of msgs from physicians from every specialty asking if others are also seeing unexpected thromboembolic events in young, healthy patients with COVID-19. Neurologists getting consulted for stroke, cardiologists finding large clots on echocardiograms, nephrologists noticing dialysis catheters clotting, radiologists finding PEs on scans. I think there is a slow collective awakening to the fact that this is not an isolated phenomenon.”
In fact, the “slow collective” awakening was already well under way—elsewhere. Chinese doctors had apparently seen such blood clots, and started giving patients blood thinners to prevent them. (“Why are American doctors so resistant to learning from excellent Chinese doctors who . . . have been on the front line longer,” someone admonished me on Twitter.) One patient—a man in his twenties—texted me a picture of bluish spots on his thighs, evidently a scattering of minuscule clots in the skin. I e-mailed a doctor in London; in autopsies, he told me, “we are finding micro-emboli, small clots, in the lungs.” During the next few days, my in-box and my Twitter feed brimmed with notes from doctors and researchers remarking on these findings, and wondering about trials for virus-infected patients and blood thinners.
“It’s my weekend with the kids.” Cartoon by Lars Kenseth Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Is this loose, informal transmission of anecdotal findings—call it chatter, call it rumor—part of medicine? It isn’t what anyone is taught in medical school; it doesn’t fit in with the professional’s image as a purveyor of rigorously tested interventions. But continuous, iterative clinical knowledge—the kind that can be updated minute by minute—is invaluable during this tumult, when time is of the essence and there’s scant research to fall back on. Such updates are like weather reports in the middle of a storm. They matter in the moment; once the storm passes, they’re yesterday’s news. COVID-19 has similarities to familiar conditions, but it is a new condition and, like all new conditions, it has its peculiarities. When doctors exchange notes on their experiences—about an odd incidence of blood clots, about a ventilator setting that seems easier on the lungs, about the results of putting patients in a prone position in order to ease breathing—they can adjust treatments and improve patient outcomes. Not every provisional finding will pan out. Medical chatter can prove misguided, just as there’s plenty of bunk in open research archives. Still, anecdotal patterns can lay the groundwork for a case series, and then a case-control study, and, ultimately, a randomized, controlled trial of a clinical approach. Already, observations that began as scattered tweets about emboli in COVID-19 cases have migrated into preprint journal articles, Webinars, and official recommendations from professional bodies.
The way clinicians have made use of Twitter and Facebook during this crisis has been a heartening development. We’ve cobbled together an informal medical bulletin board for the pandemic; even as we wade through the muddy slop of fake news, we have a forum of exchange that is flexible, versatile, and timely. This is a story of something that’s gone right—and of something that’s gone very wrong.
That’s because clinical medicine is, among other things, an information system, and a central part of that system is broken. Patient records that once were scribbled on clipboards now sit in electronic medical-record (E.M.R.) systems, many of them provided by the Wisconsin-based software company Epic. A standardized digital database of patient-care records, searchable across hospital and medical-care systems, could be an invaluable way of identifying effective approaches to a novel disease—like moving from a patchwork meteorological system where towns keep their own records of wind and rainfall to a national weather-tracking grid. A putative advantage of digital hospital records is to enable on-the-fly searches—not the kind of data project that the N.I.H. might fund (its grants take weeks to process even on an accelerated schedule) but the kind that might be completed in an hour. Perhaps, I thought, we should be advising COVID-19 patients to call us if they suspected clots—if their breathing rate and heart rate increased suddenly, for instance. Perhaps our hospital system’s emergency department should be alerted.
Because clotting is a frequent issue among patients with cancers, I called my colleague Azra Raza, the director of Columbia’s Myelodysplastic Syndrome Center, to ask if we could search through the database of her patients for any who had reported being infected, and, if so, had experienced blood clots. She sighed. “I can’t think of a simple way to do this,” she told me. “And in any case, because of all the concerns around privacy, if you wanted to report the findings you would have to file with the institutional review board.”
“But that would take a month, at least,” I protested. (In recent weeks, many hospitals have accelerated their review process to deal with the pace of the pandemic.)
“It’s the way the system is,” she said. “If you want to report the number of times a patient has cut her nails in the last week, you would need approval. And it’s not easy at all to search the E.M.R. for any of this information. You’d have to hire someone specifically to look through it.”
A cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, echoed this frustration on Twitter: “Why are nearly all notes in Epic . . . basically *useless* to understand what’s happening to patient during hospital course?” Another doctor’s reply: “Because notes are used to bill, determine level of service, and document it rather than their intended purpose, which was to convey our observations, assessment, and plan. Our important work has been co-opted by billing.”
The promise of bringing medical recordkeeping into the digital age was to maintain a live record of a live patient, enabling clinicians to track patient care across hospital systems and over time. Instead, we’ve been saddled with systems that cut into patient care (clinicians typically spend an hour feeding documentation into a computer for every hour they spend with patients) and, often, are too fragmented to allow a patient’s file to follow her from one medical center to another. The E.M.R., as a colleague of mine put it, is “electronic in the same sense that your grandfather’s radio is electronic.” The energized, improvisatory role of medical Twitter inevitably draws attention to what our balky, billion-dollar systems should have been providing—to the cost, in dollars and lives, of the rapid clinical learning that we’ve forgone.
It’s hardly news that our E.M.R. systems have failed medicine, and yet an executive order from New York State, issued at the end of March by Governor Andrew Cuomo, amounted to a grim epitaph: “Health care providers are relieved of recordkeeping requirements to the extent necessary for health care providers to perform tasks as may be necessary to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. . . . Any person acting reasonably and in good faith under this provision shall be afforded absolute immunity from liability.” A system designed to expedite and improve the delivery of health care was officially recognized as an obstacle.
“When the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett once said, “you discover who has been swimming naked.” The pandemic has been merciless in what it has exposed. In many cases, the weaknesses in our medical system were ones that had already been the subject of widespread attention, such as the national scandal of health-care coverage that leaves millions of Americans uninsured. In others, they should have been the subject of widespread attention, because we had plenty of warning. Again and again, in the past several weeks, we’ve heard of shortages—shortages of protective gear, of ventilators, of pharmaceuticals. Yet, even before the crisis, medicine was dealing with troubling scarcities of needed drugs and support systems. Last summer, long before the pandemic, pulmonologists were raising concerns about a lack of oxygen supplies—the result of cost-cutting measures by suppliers of durable medical equipment. Competitive-bidding programs drove margins down so low that more than forty per cent of such companies—responsible for the supply of portable oxygen tanks and concentrators—went out of business. Inventory diminished; delivery times increased. Patients suffered. Neeta Thakur, a pulmonologist and researcher at the University of California in San Francisco, told me about the byzantine process (involving “ten to fifteen disconnected steps”) that was required in order for a patient to receive oxygen at home—a patient who is then at the mercy of the intermittent delivery schedules of understocked venders. The problem builds into a failure cascade: if patients cannot be discharged from the hospital because they cannot have oxygen at home, the resultant logjam delays the treatment of other patients who need those beds for acute care.
The pharmaceutical system was clearly fraying as well. Vincristine, which I use to treat blood cancers, was among a hundred important drugs that have been in critically short supply in recent years. Even bags of sterile saline solution—the most basic I.V. fluid, nothing more than salt and water—were hard to source. (Many American hospitals used bags made by a single manufacturer, in Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria.) An F.D.A. report published in October noted that manufacturers had little incentive to produce less profitable drugs; that the market failed to reward “ ‘mature quality systems’ that focus on continuous improvement and early detection of supply chain issues”; and that “logistical and regulatory challenges make it difficult for the market to recover from a disruption.” If one factory went offline, the entire nation’s supply of a critical drug could be imperilled.
“Could we talk about something else?” Cartoon by Peter Steiner Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
As such pre-pandemic stories proliferate, they point toward more fundamental reckonings. Leave aside the tragedies of those who died alone in isolation rooms in hospitals, or of the disproportionate disease burden borne by African-Americans and working-class immigrants. Leave aside the windblown avenues of an empty, joyless city, the generation-defining joblessness that has shifted so many from precarity to outright peril. To what extent did the market-driven, efficiency-obsessed culture of hospital administration contribute to the crisis? Questions about “best practices” in management have become questions about best practices in public health. The numbers in the bean counter’s ledger are now body counts in a morgue.
For decades, consultants had taught the virtues of taut business practices. “Slack”—underutilized resources, inventory waiting to be put to use—was shunned. I spoke to David Simchi-Levi, an M.I.T. professor who studies supply-chain economics and how enterprises respond to disasters. “Cost is easy to measure,” he told me. “But resilience is much harder.” So we reward managers for efficiencies—and overlook any attendant fragilities. His view can be summarized simply: we’ve been overtaught to be overtaut.
“We’ve been teaching these finance guys how to squeeze,” Willy Shih, an operations expert at Harvard Business School, told me, emphasizing the word. “Squeeze more efficiency, squeeze cost, squeeze more products out at the same cost, squeeze out storage costs, squeeze out inventory. We really need to educate them about the value of slack.”
Simchi-Levi is particularly interested in two variables that could serve as metrics for resilience. The first is the “time to survive”; that is, how long can an enterprise endure when there’s a sudden shortage of some critical good? The second is the “time to recover”: how much time will it take to restore adequate supplies of some critical good? By quantifying each variable under different scenarios, a business can model its ability to recover from a disaster. He told me about floods in Thailand that shut down factories responsible for critical computer and automotive parts. Afterward, some companies expanded their supply lines to other parts of Asia. Having seen the fragility of a tight chain, those companies had now established a network with some spring in it. In the future, their “time to survive” would exceed the suppliers’ “time to recover.”
Toyota’s recovery from the Aisin factory fire in 1997 can sound like a story of triumph, as, in many respects, it was. But the company’s executives realized that it was also a story of failure. The company shouldn’t have been so vulnerable to such an event. The fire, along with a later disaster—the 2011 earthquake, which cut off its supply of a crucial microchip—taught Toyota the value of redundancy and risk assessment. It modified its just-in-time system to allow for at least a month’s worth of specialized components, building strategic slack into its operation. It created a database, called Rescue, with dozens of companies organized into tiers, their risks regularly evaluated under conditions of adversity, and information on sixty-eight hundred parts continually updated. The company maintains constant communication with its suppliers under “ordinary operating conditions.” But it also trains employees to operate during disasters, and evaluates the risk to the entire company if nodes in the network should falter. No enterprise is truly disaster-proof, but in cultivating networks of mutual loyalties the company has engineered resilience.


newyorker--2020-04-27--The Art of Making Do (and Emergency AirPod Retrieval)

The last time the artist Tom Sachs was at his SoHo studio before he began quarantining with his wife and young son at their house in Queens , he had only thirty minutes to grab whatever he might need in order to work remotely .
“ I thought it was just going to be for a long weekend , ” he said , on a video call from his basement studio in Rockaway .
“ I brought my laptop and an extra phone charger .
I brought a Cup O ’ Noodles cardboard box filled with the scraps that were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I only brought one pencil , so I ’ m shaving my pencil perfectly.
” Sachs , who is in his early fifties , has the wavy swept-back locks of a nineteen-thirties leading man , and the seductively rounded speech patterns and strong eye contact of a very good pitchman .
Pre-virus , he was used to a more elaborate work setup .
Sachs ’ s studio is typically a bustling operation ; his team of assistants , which he refers to as a “ coven ” ( “ I take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about sixty per cent women ” ) , labor side by side to produce sculptures and installations for major museums , scheduled years into the future , as well as collaborations with Nike .
Still , Sachs is more ready than most to take on the challenges of a suddenly constricted work environment .
His sculptures—which have ranged from cheeky takes on consumer culture , such as a Chanel-logo chainsaw or a Prada toilet , to gussied-up reimaginings of street-culture avatars , such as boom boxes—look deliberately handmade , and are built out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foam core , and duct tape .
( “ I can never make something as perfect as an iPhone , but Apple could never make something as flawed as what I do.
” ) And his studio work has always involved a make-do ethos that would not be out of place on a Great Plains homestead—or during a New York City quarantine .
For years , he modelled his team ’ s work on that of NASA , creating large-scale installations that provide a Sachs-made twist on a space camp or a Mars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus , he decided to reinterpret another NASA tenet , I.S.R.U .
( “ in-situ resource utilization ” ) , a term meant to gauge how astronauts can best use their limited on-site materials in space .
Sachs ’ s version , similarly , urges people to discover how much they can do with what they have at hand .
On March 31st , he called on his quarter-million Instagram followers to watch a weekly video of his I.S.R.U .
practice and submit their own .
In one episode , Sachs showed how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down a drainage hole by repurposing odds and ends .
( No spoilers , but the mission involved double-sided tape . )
On a recent Monday , on Instagram Live , he held the first of a series of I.S.R.U .
“ office hours , ” a conversation with his followers which , he felt , had philosophical potential .
“ The shiny part of this time is that it ’ s allowing me to take a little pause and confront the existential abyss and see what I want to do with my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The dark side is that I have all this time to confront the existential abyss and think about what I ’ m going to do with my life.
” Wearing a faded blue chore coat , AirPods now tucked securely in ears , he scanned queries on a laptop .
“ How can I intern for you ?
” he read aloud .
“ Great question.
” He pushed his glasses up and hesitated , his gaze drifting toward the scroll of real-time comments bubbling up on his iPhone screen .
( From @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be talented to make art ?
” ; from @ jaypooleyjay : “ If you ever moved to Canada would you adopt the superior Robertson screw system ?
” ) Sachs returned to the question : “ How do you join the studio ?
The best way to join us is right now .
Immediately .
Do the research .
Read the books we all read in the studio .
The one I ’ d recommend this week is ‘ Endurance , ’ by Alfred Lansing .
It ’ s appropriate for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ e_fish007 : “ I ’ m on it !
” ) Sachs read another : “ What ’ s your go-to brand of spray paint ?
” Easy : “ I ’ m really frustrated with Krylon , because you can ’ t change the tips , but Montana has some great colors , ” he said .
Then , “ What ’ s the museum with the best curation of contemporary art ?
” He paused .
“ I would highly recommend the Donald Judd show at the Museum of Modern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he finally said .
( @ cooper_clementine : “ Do you smoke weed ?
” ) “ I hope it stays open for a little longer after the apocalypse , because then we can all go and see it and have a session about it.
” ( @ cooper_clementine : “ Are you microdosing rn ?
” ) Next : “ Is it advised to maintain a schedule or routine during an isolated creation ?
” He rubbed his head .
“ You can go as hard as you can , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in some fun , schedule recreation , observe weekends.
” ( @ cooper_clementine : “ Mushrooms ?
Acid ?
DMT ?
” ) Sachs went on , “ I don ’ t believe in alarm clocks , but I live and die by the calendar .
So that means going to sleep early , and getting up early , with the sun.
” His eyes wandered toward the screen .
The questions were still coming .
♦

Tom Sachs Illustration by João Fazenda
The last time the artist Tom Sachs was at his SoHo studio before he began quarantining with his wife and young son at their house in Queens, he had only thirty minutes to grab whatever he might need in order to work remotely. “I thought it was just going to be for a long weekend,” he said, on a video call from his basement studio in Rockaway. “I brought my laptop and an extra phone charger. I brought a Cup O’Noodles cardboard box filled with the scraps that were on the table that were really disorganized. I only brought one pencil, so I’m shaving my pencil perfectly.” Sachs, who is in his early fifties, has the wavy swept-back locks of a nineteen-thirties leading man, and the seductively rounded speech patterns and strong eye contact of a very good pitchman. Pre-virus, he was used to a more elaborate work setup. Sachs’s studio is typically a bustling operation; his team of assistants, which he refers to as a “coven” (“I take the word from the matriarchy—we’re actually about sixty per cent women”), labor side by side to produce sculptures and installations for major museums, scheduled years into the future, as well as collaborations with Nike.
Still, Sachs is more ready than most to take on the challenges of a suddenly constricted work environment. His sculptures—which have ranged from cheeky takes on consumer culture, such as a Chanel-logo chainsaw or a Prada toilet, to gussied-up reimaginings of street-culture avatars, such as boom boxes—look deliberately handmade, and are built out of everyday materials such as plywood, foam core, and duct tape. (“I can never make something as perfect as an iPhone, but Apple could never make something as flawed as what I do.”) And his studio work has always involved a make-do ethos that would not be out of place on a Great Plains homestead—or during a New York City quarantine.
For years, he modelled his team’s work on that of NASA, creating large-scale installations that provide a Sachs-made twist on a space camp or a Mars mission. With the arrival of the coronavirus, he decided to reinterpret another NASA tenet, I.S.R.U. (“in-situ resource utilization”), a term meant to gauge how astronauts can best use their limited on-site materials in space. Sachs’s version, similarly, urges people to discover how much they can do with what they have at hand. On March 31st, he called on his quarter-million Instagram followers to watch a weekly video of his I.S.R.U. practice and submit their own. In one episode, Sachs showed how he rescued an AirPod that had fallen down a drainage hole by repurposing odds and ends. (No spoilers, but the mission involved double-sided tape.)
On a recent Monday, on Instagram Live, he held the first of a series of I.S.R.U. “office hours,” a conversation with his followers which, he felt, had philosophical potential. “The shiny part of this time is that it’s allowing me to take a little pause and confront the existential abyss and see what I want to do with my life,” he said. “The dark side is that I have all this time to confront the existential abyss and think about what I’m going to do with my life.” Wearing a faded blue chore coat, AirPods now tucked securely in ears, he scanned queries on a laptop. “How can I intern for you?” he read aloud. “Great question.” He pushed his glasses up and hesitated, his gaze drifting toward the scroll of real-time comments bubbling up on his iPhone screen. (From @naseba._: “Do you need to be talented to make art?”; from @jaypooleyjay: “If you ever moved to Canada would you adopt the superior Robertson screw system?”) Sachs returned to the question: “How do you join the studio? The best way to join us is right now. Immediately. Do the research. Read the books we all read in the studio. The one I’d recommend this week is ‘Endurance,’ by Alfred Lansing. It’s appropriate for this time. Required reading.” (@e_fish007: “I’m on it!”)
Sachs read another: “What’s your go-to brand of spray paint?” Easy: “I’m really frustrated with Krylon, because you can’t change the tips, but Montana has some great colors,” he said. Then, “What’s the museum with the best curation of contemporary art?” He paused. “I would highly recommend the Donald Judd show at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Ann Temkin,” he finally said. (@cooper_clementine: “Do you smoke weed?”) “I hope it stays open for a little longer after the apocalypse, because then we can all go and see it and have a session about it.” (@cooper_clementine: “Are you microdosing rn?”)
Next: “Is it advised to maintain a schedule or routine during an isolated creation?” He rubbed his head. “You can go as hard as you can, but life’s a marathon. Schedule in some fun, schedule recreation, observe weekends.” (@cooper_clementine: “Mushrooms? Acid? DMT?”) Sachs went on,“I don’t believe in alarm clocks, but I live and die by the calendar. So that means going to sleep early, and getting up early, with the sun.” His eyes wandered toward the screen. The questions were still coming. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-27--Allan Gurganus on His Interest in Epidemics

Your story in this week ’ s issue , “ The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor , ” revolves around a cholera epidemic and how it manifested in a small ( fictional ) town in western Illinois in 1849 .
It may seem facetious to ask in these times , but what got you thinking about this subject ?
Did you know that the story would have a particular resonance with current events ?
No .
But this rhyming across time is something every writer hopes for .
I drafted the story five years ago .
Did lots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ itself the week we all first read that spiky word “ coronavirus.
” ( That Richard III of a word ! )
I feel so lucky to write fiction , not journalism .
I was born a Southerner , and my sole legacy is my motley family history .
My great “ scoops ” all seem to spring from the eighteen-fifties and sixties !
( Viz .
my first novel , “ Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All ” ) .
My fascination with epidemics started when I was eight and “ Compton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bubonic plague had killed fifty million people .
I was home from school , in bed with the flu , wearing blue flannel pajamas , and I remember blinking at that figure .
It seemed a misprint , but I somehow knew better .
Further preparation for writing this story came with my surviving military service in Vietnam only to wash up in Manhattan during those terrifying years when H.I.V .
made its first subtractions from my community .
Like now , we had an unknown illness , a blundering government ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then a cohort of passionate amateurs stepping in to save or salve their friends .
When I wrote of those days in my second novel , “ Plays Well with Others , ” I quoted Defoe ’ s 1776 “ A Journal of the Plague Year , ” about the London disaster of 1665 .
It ’ s a small comfort to know that—when it comes to epochal catastrophes—if history doesn ’ t exactly repeat itself , it sometimes stutters .
We all think it ’ s happening solely to us .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ decide to frame the nineteenth-century story with the tale of a seventies hippie grad student and the old antique-store proprietor he encounters ?
I wanted that central story to be contested , bartered for , and then exchanged .
I was a student at the Iowa Writers ’ Workshop in the seventies , arriving directly from stimulating Sarah Lawrence and glittering Manhattan .
I brought with me a certain East Coast snobbery that soon softened , complicated .
I ’ ve always been a collector , and the antiques in Iowa and Illinois @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ d tried gathering in the South and the Northeast .
The owners of Midwestern junk shops truly knew their stock and were more willing to tell tales .
Since most shops were located in small towns , the owners often knew the human sources of their wares .
I soon came to recognize Iowa ’ s liberal political tradition .
My young narrator ’ s education is a reflection of my own humbled gratitude for the fly-over zone I ’ d underestimated .
This whole story emerged from a painting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a lady dealer .
That valued portrait is still in my possession and not for sale at any price .
At the end of the story , you give a list of guidelines for dealing with the cholera epidemic , which were published in the local paper by your fictional country doctor , Frederick Markus Petrie .
You mentioned to me that for that part of the story you were drawing on actual newspaper pieces you ’ d come across .
Who wrote those articles , and how did you find them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an archive of information about home-crafted campaigns that were staged against cholera .
The history of medicine fascinates and surprises me .
In some of the eighteen-fifties cholera suggestions , you see eighteenth-century practices still being recommended .
“ Bleeding ” a patient is prescribed for its calming effects on the dying individual !
My invented doctor , Petrie , thirty years old , is a new arrival in his rural community , fresh out of med school and making things up .
He is first resisted , then trusted , and finally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ community he ’ s dedicated to saving turn on him .
I am now struck by his resemblance to a strong , young , earnest doctor in Wuhan , China .
Doctor Li Wenliang , thirty-four , died February 6 , 2020 , a month after going online to warn friends about the lethal virus surging through his hospital .
His public-spiritedness drew immediate threats from government authorities .
Today , on Weibo , the Chinese social-media platform , admirers and disciples continue to address the dead man as a guardian figure meriting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is offered prayers , is asked to go on healing , is shown images of his favorite snacks .
One recent message to him began , “ My cat died today.
” It is oddly confirming to invent an 1849 reality and to see that replicated in contemporary life .
“ The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor ” will be the leading tale in “ The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus , ” to be published in January , 2021 .
What made you choose to gather the stories now ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The New Yorker published my earliest effort , eons back , in 1974 .
Since the story collection “ White People , ” in 1990 , I ’ ve released only novels and novellas .
But all along I ’ ve written stories .
It ’ s the most difficult discipline and therefore the perfect gym for writing students .
If you can write a dynamic free-standing story , any buttressed , load-sharing chapter of a novel is a cinch .
An effective story must have the unity and lyricism of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a novel .
Now , at seventy-two , I have thirty years of ungathered stories to choose from .
I ’ ve included this , my newest one , and two others that were published in The New Yorker : “ He ’ s at the Office ” and “ My Heart Is a Snake Farm.
” I ’ ll offer as many modes , characters , and voices as I ’ ve risked these three decades .
In the book , I thank my great teachers , some of them geniuses of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cheever , John L ’ Heureux , and Stanley Elkin .
I should also include Anton Chekhov , a general practitioner who treated tens of thousands of patients for free .
Chekhov , dead of the plague of tuberculosis at age forty-four , all but invented the modern short story , and never ceased being the earnest young doctor we all wish for today .

Photograph by Vallery Jean / Getty
Your story in this week’s issue, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” revolves around a cholera epidemic and how it manifested in a small (fictional) town in western Illinois in 1849. It may seem facetious to ask in these times, but what got you thinking about this subject? Did you know that the story would have a particular resonance with current events?
No. But this rhyming across time is something every writer hopes for. I drafted the story five years ago. Did lots of research. And it somehow finished itself the week we all first read that spiky word “coronavirus.” (That Richard III of a word!)
I feel so lucky to write fiction, not journalism. I was born a Southerner, and my sole legacy is my motley family history. My great “scoops” all seem to spring from the eighteen-fifties and sixties! (Viz. my first novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”).
My fascination with epidemics started when I was eight and “Compton’s Encyclopedia” told me that the bubonic plague had killed fifty million people. I was home from school, in bed with the flu, wearing blue flannel pajamas, and I remember blinking at that figure. It seemed a misprint, but I somehow knew better.
Further preparation for writing this story came with my surviving military service in Vietnam only to wash up in Manhattan during those terrifying years when H.I.V. made its first subtractions from my community. Like now, we had an unknown illness, a blundering government’s denial, an overwhelmed medical establishment, then a cohort of passionate amateurs stepping in to save or salve their friends. When I wrote of those days in my second novel, “Plays Well with Others,” I quoted Defoe’s 1776 “A Journal of the Plague Year,” about the London disaster of 1665. It’s a small comfort to know that—when it comes to epochal catastrophes—if history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it sometimes stutters. We all think it’s happening solely to us. It never is.
Why did you decide to frame the nineteenth-century story with the tale of a seventies hippie grad student and the old antique-store proprietor he encounters?
I wanted that central story to be contested, bartered for, and then exchanged. I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the seventies, arriving directly from stimulating Sarah Lawrence and glittering Manhattan. I brought with me a certain East Coast snobbery that soon softened, complicated. I’ve always been a collector, and the antiques in Iowa and Illinois seemed homemade, very different from those I’d tried gathering in the South and the Northeast. The owners of Midwestern junk shops truly knew their stock and were more willing to tell tales. Since most shops were located in small towns, the owners often knew the human sources of their wares. I soon came to recognize Iowa’s liberal political tradition. My young narrator’s education is a reflection of my own humbled gratitude for the fly-over zone I’d underestimated. This whole story emerged from a painting that I was once given, gratis, by a lady dealer. That valued portrait is still in my possession and not for sale at any price.
At the end of the story, you give a list of guidelines for dealing with the cholera epidemic, which were published in the local paper by your fictional country doctor, Frederick Markus Petrie. You mentioned to me that for that part of the story you were drawing on actual newspaper pieces you’d come across. Who wrote those articles, and how did you find them?
The Centers for Disease Control offers an archive of information about home-crafted campaigns that were staged against cholera. The history of medicine fascinates and surprises me. In some of the eighteen-fifties cholera suggestions, you see eighteenth-century practices still being recommended. “Bleeding” a patient is prescribed for its calming effects on the dying individual!
My invented doctor, Petrie, thirty years old, is a new arrival in his rural community, fresh out of med school and making things up. He is first resisted, then trusted, and finally lionized, only to have the very community he’s dedicated to saving turn on him. I am now struck by his resemblance to a strong, young, earnest doctor in Wuhan, China. Doctor Li Wenliang, thirty-four, died February 6, 2020, a month after going online to warn friends about the lethal virus surging through his hospital. His public-spiritedness drew immediate threats from government authorities. Today, on Weibo, the Chinese social-media platform, admirers and disciples continue to address the dead man as a guardian figure meriting almost religious veneration. This martyred doctor is offered prayers, is asked to go on healing, is shown images of his favorite snacks. One recent message to him began, “My cat died today.” It is oddly confirming to invent an 1849 reality and to see that replicated in contemporary life.
“The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor” will be the leading tale in “The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus,” to be published in January, 2021. What made you choose to gather the stories now?
The short-story form was my first love. The New Yorker published my earliest effort, eons back, in 1974. Since the story collection “White People,” in 1990, I’ve released only novels and novellas. But all along I’ve written stories. It’s the most difficult discipline and therefore the perfect gym for writing students. If you can write a dynamic free-standing story, any buttressed, load-sharing chapter of a novel is a cinch. An effective story must have the unity and lyricism of a poem while giving the comforting facticity of a novel.
Now, at seventy-two, I have thirty years of ungathered stories to choose from. I’ve included this, my newest one, and two others that were published in The New Yorker: “He’s at the Office” and “My Heart Is a Snake Farm.” I’ll offer as many modes, characters, and voices as I’ve risked these three decades. In the book, I thank my great teachers, some of them geniuses of the form: Grace Paley, John Cheever, John L’Heureux, and Stanley Elkin. I should also include Anton Chekhov, a general practitioner who treated tens of thousands of patients for free. Chekhov, dead of the plague of tuberculosis at age forty-four, all but invented the modern short story, and never ceased being the earnest young doctor we all wish for today.


newyorker--2020-04-27--The Man Who Thought Too Fast

The Man Who Thought Too Fast

“ The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out , ” the belletrist Lytton Strachey , a member of London ’ s Bloomsbury literary set , wrote to a friend on January 19 , 1930 .
Frank Ramsey , a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University , had died that day at the age of twenty-six , probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam .
“ There was something of Newton about him , ” Strachey continued .
“ The ease and majesty of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst : Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton ’ s old college , Trinity , in 1920 .
He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein ’ s “ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , ” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time ; two years later , he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English , Mind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s editor , who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up , confessed that he was “ distinctly nervous ” when this first-year student was in the audience , because he was “ very much cleverer than I was.
” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey ’ s judgment and intellectual prowess .
When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving , Keynes called it “ one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one .
Discounting the interests of future people , Ramsey wrote , is “ ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.
” In the wake of the Great Depression , economists had more pressing concerns ; only decades later did the paper ’ s enormous impact arrive .
And so it went with most of Ramsey ’ s work .
His contribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ theorems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the validity of logical formulas .
More than forty years after they were published , these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory , which analyzes order and disorder .
( As an Oxford mathematician , Martin Gould , has explained , Ramsey theory tells us , for instance , that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ lived too early , or so it can seem .
He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas , and his modesty did not help .
He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy .
At the same time , the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page .
The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “ the Ramsey effect.
” You ’ d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was also the problem of Wittgenstein , whose looming example and cultlike following distracted attention from Ramsey ’ s ideas for decades .
But Ramsey rose again .
Economists now study Ramsey pricing ; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers .
Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences , Ramseyfication , and the Ramsey test .
Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine .
Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ publication of the first full biography of him , “ Frank Ramsey : A Sheer Excess of Powers ” ( Oxford ) , by Cheryl Misak , a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto .
Drawing on family papers and records of interviews conducted four decades ago for a biography that was never written , Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended .
Ramsey ’ s father , Arthur , claimed that Frank , his eldest child , learned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could talk .
His political sense was precocious , too .
One day , little Frank told his mother , Agnes , that his younger brother , Michael , was , unfortunately , a conservative : The two brothers later diverged in religious matters as well .
Frank was an atheist by the age of thirteen ; Michael entered the Anglican Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury .
By the last year of Frank ’ s school days , he was apparently consuming books about economics , politics , physics , logic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of almost one a day .
On the holidays , he learned German , so that he could read some volumes of mathematics and philosophy in their original language .
In his aptitude for math , he followed his father , a Cambridge mathematician and the author of textbooks in math and physics .
But Frank ’ s temperament—he became known for his jovial spirits and loud , infectious laugh—was in marked contrast to that of his father , who was less notable for his academic work than for his sulkiness , quarrels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the records of Magdalene College , where Arthur Ramsey was second-in-command for twenty-two years , described his rule as “ austere.
” In childhood , Frank ’ s way of dealing with his father ’ s foul moods was to slip calmly out of the room whenever the going got rough .
Perhaps it was this pacific ease that , later in life , enabled Ramsey to cope better than most with Wittgenstein ’ s frequent fits of tormented umbrage .
At a time when few women went to university , Agnes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also attended the logic lectures of Charles Dodgson ( better known as Lewis Carroll ) .
She had been among the little girls whom Dodgson liked to take boating .
More progressive than her husband , Agnes was an activist for left-wing and feminist causes .
Frank was similarly inclined ; at school , he was seen as an “ ardent Bolshevik.
” At university , he became involved in local politics and was a keen , though undoctrinaire , member of the Socialist Society .
The Ramseys were part of an intellectual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a young age .
After his first meeting with Keynes , in Cambridge , Ramsey recorded that he found him “ very pleasant ” ; on a walk , they had talked about the history of economics , the lamentable state of probability theory , and the difficulty of writing .
Ramsey was seventeen at the time ; Keynes was advising the League of Nations and the Bank of England , and lunching with Winston Churchill .

“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”
Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.
When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.” Its most controversial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” In the wake of the Great Depression, economists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enormous impact arrive. And so it went with most of Ramsey’s work. His contribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on something else. It consisted of two theorems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the validity of logical formulas. More than forty years after they were published, these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory, which analyzes order and disorder. (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.)
Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “the Ramsey effect.” You’d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that Ramsey had got there first.
There was also the problem of Wittgenstein, whose looming example and cultlike following distracted attention from Ramsey’s ideas for decades. But Ramsey rose again. Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine.
Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier. That exercise has become more entertaining with the publication of the first full biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers” (Oxford), by Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. Drawing on family papers and records of interviews conducted four decades ago for a biography that was never written, Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended.
Ramsey’s father, Arthur, claimed that Frank, his eldest child, learned to read almost as soon as he could talk. His political sense was precocious, too. One day, little Frank told his mother, Agnes, that his younger brother, Michael, was, unfortunately, a conservative:
You see, I asked him, “Michael are you a liberal or a conservative?” And he said “What does that mean?” And I said “Do you want to make things better by changing them or do you want to keep things as they are?” And he said—“I want to keep things.” So he must be a conservative.
The two brothers later diverged in religious matters as well. Frank was an atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael entered the Anglican Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury.
By the last year of Frank’s school days, he was apparently consuming books about economics, politics, physics, logic, and other subjects at a rate of almost one a day. On the holidays, he learned German, so that he could read some volumes of mathematics and philosophy in their original language. In his aptitude for math, he followed his father, a Cambridge mathematician and the author of textbooks in math and physics. But Frank’s temperament—he became known for his jovial spirits and loud, infectious laugh—was in marked contrast to that of his father, who was less notable for his academic work than for his sulkiness, quarrels, and rigidity. An obituary notice in the records of Magdalene College, where Arthur Ramsey was second-in-command for twenty-two years, described his rule as “austere.” In childhood, Frank’s way of dealing with his father’s foul moods was to slip calmly out of the room whenever the going got rough. Perhaps it was this pacific ease that, later in life, enabled Ramsey to cope better than most with Wittgenstein’s frequent fits of tormented umbrage.
At a time when few women went to university, Agnes Ramsey studied history at Oxford, and also attended the logic lectures of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll). She had been among the little girls whom Dodgson liked to take boating. More progressive than her husband, Agnes was an activist for left-wing and feminist causes. Frank was similarly inclined; at school, he was seen as an “ardent Bolshevik.” At university, he became involved in local politics and was a keen, though undoctrinaire, member of the Socialist Society.
The Ramseys were part of an intellectual aristocracy, in which Frank was comfortable from a young age. After his first meeting with Keynes, in Cambridge, Ramsey recorded that he found him “very pleasant”; on a walk, they had talked about the history of economics, the lamentable state of probability theory, and the difficulty of writing. Ramsey was seventeen at the time; Keynes was advising the League of Nations and the Bank of England, and lunching with Winston Churchill.
In his final year of secondary school, Ramsey decided to focus on pure mathematics, which is what he would earn his degree in, teach, and use as a tool. But philosophy was always what gripped him most. At school, he had read Bertrand Russell’s “The Principles of Mathematics,” which argued for the “logicist” view that mathematical truths and concepts can be derived from logical ones. Much of Ramsey’s early technical work in philosophy built on Russell’s logicist ideas and sorted through their ramifications. For one thing, he improved a theory of Russell’s that had dealt with self-referential paradoxes. (One famous example concerns a barber who shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?)