newyorker--2020-03-30--Carolyn Forché’s Education in Looking

Carolyn Forché’s Education in Looking

In order to understand what Forché is doing on the page , you have to look between the rows of type , and see what she leaves in the white space of your imagination .
You have to rejigger , if not jettison entirely , your ideas or preconceptions about political writing and about what makes a poem .
Forché ’ s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter , Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley .
Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity , Forché ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be or to become a thinking , caring , communicating adult .
Taken together , Forché ’ s five books of verse—the most recent , “ In the Lateness of the World ” ( Penguin Press ) , was published in March—are about action : memory as action , vision and writing as action .
She asks us to consider the sometimes unrecognized , though always felt , ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know .
History—with its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ In the Lateness of the World.
” In “ Museum of Stones , ” the first poem in the book , Forché ’ s delicate but hawklike observations show us the broken dreams and false idols that are left in the wake of violence , folly , and time .
She also shows how to pick our way through that detritus to search for clues as to who we were or might have been : These are your stones , assembled in matchbox and tin , collected from roadside , culvert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ floor , basilica , abattoir— stones , loosened by tanks in the streets , from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen , schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse , pebble from Baudelaire ’ s oui , stone of the mind within us carried from one silence to another .
.
.
stone from the tunnel lined with bones , lava of a city ’ s entombment , stones chipped from lighthouse , cell wall , scriptorium , paving stones from the hands of those who rose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bells had fallen , where the bridges were blown .
.
.
all earth a quarry , all life a labor , stone faced , stone-drunk with hope that this assemblage of rubble , taken together , would become a shrine or holy place , an ossuary , immovable and sacred like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn .
Faith has been part of Forché ’ s story from the beginning .
Born in 1950 , she is the oldest of seven children .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Michael , a tool-and-die maker , raised their brood in Farmington , Michigan , a suburb of Detroit .
When Forché was about nine , her mother , whom she has described as a feminist , suggested that her bright , bookish daughter entertain herself by composing a poem .
To show her how , Louise dusted off an old textbook—she had attended college for two years before marrying—and explained to Carolyn what meter was and taught her the importance of stresses .
Forché was instantly taken by the poetic form .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ pentameter because I didn ’ t know there was anything else , ” she told Cott .
“ Writing was simply the reverie that I recorded.
” While the surreal horror of the Vietnam War was still a daily reality , Forché completed a bachelor ’ s degree in international relations at Michigan State University in 1972 , and a master ’ s of fine arts at Bowling Green State University three years later .
In an essay for her essential 2014 anthology , “ Poetry of Witness : The Tradition in English @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scholar Duncan Wu , Forché relates how , in her early twenties , she read excerpts from the transcript of the 1964 trial , in Leningrad , of the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky—Soviet officials weren ’ t thrilled by his assertion , among other things , that it was God who gave him the authority to be a poet—and sent him some poems .
Brodsky , who was then teaching in Ann Arbor , Michigan , near where Forché grew up , wrote back to the burgeoning writer , suggesting , first , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ philosophy in her writing , and , second , that she read Anna Akhmatova .
This was another turning point for Forché .
She was moved not only by Akhmatova ’ s spare , dissident “ Requiem ” but by how , under Stalinist rule , Akhmatova had largely composed the poem in her mind and , with help from some friends , memorized it to avoid committing anything to paper—an act that , according to Akhmatova ’ s biographer Amanda Haight , was possible only “ if one was convinced of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ All of this—Brodsky ’ s sense that his vocation was a gift from God , the fleeting smile of a woman who ’ d asked Akhmatova if she could describe the horror of the Yezhov terror ( Akhmatova ’ s answer : “ I can ” ) —began to change Forché .
In her essay for “ Poetry of Witness , ” she writes : As I was still in my early twenties and educated in the United States , I hadn ’ t thought of poetry in these terms .
I had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this form , and had not yet , therefore , imagined the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination , nor conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation : to stand with them in the hour of need , even abject and destitute , in supplication and without need of response .
If it were so—if description were possible , of the world and its sufferings , then the response would be that smile , or rather something resembling it .

In a 1961 interview, the great modernist poet Marianne Moore expressed ambivalence about her popular 1943 antiwar verse, “In Distrust of Merits.” “As form, what has it?” Moore said. “It is just a protest—disjointed, exclamatory. . . . First this thought and then that.” Moore was not the first author to question what you might call her reactive voice. W. H. Auden famously turned his back on his poem “September 1, 1939,” written on the occasion of Germany’s invasion of Poland—“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie . . . / We must love one another or die”—because he considered the work fundamentally dishonest. “After it had been published,” he said, “I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway!’ ” Implicit in Auden’s and Moore’s self-criticism is their aversion not only to the declarative but to the general—to the poet’s “I” taking on the mantle of “we.” And yet the English-language reader is particularly attuned to that kind of broad rhetoric, which can be found in poems ranging from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” because, despite Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen,” we equate political poetry with momentum and a kind of galvanizing sound—a cry of victory in a world hellbent on oppression and darkness.
It’s precisely the absence of those easy markers—the triumph of good over evil, truth lighting the way—that makes the poet and activist Carolyn Forché’s work chilling and unique. For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now sixty-nine, has been characterized as a political poet. Which she is, though she prefers the term “poetry of witness.” Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? They help us to consider our memories of Auschwitz or an image of immigrants drowned in the Rio Grande. In our deeply bifurcated world, Forché’s best writing engages in a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination. Her poetry and her fascinating 2019 memoir, “What You Have Heard Is True,” which describes her time in El Salvador shortly before and during the civil war there, are filled with refugees, the dispossessed, and survivors, acutely observed in public places, near bodies of water, in garbage dumps. These are people Forché is desperate not to forget. Nor can she forget the young woman she once was, a woman who, as she told Jonathan Cott, for his 1987 book, “Visions and Voices,” “wasn’t equipped to see or analyze the world.” Of her travels in El Salvador, she said to Cott:
My perceptions were very distorted—and I’m even talking about visual perception. I would notice things in very general terms, but there were certain things I would fail to see. I would always marvel at the wealthy women in the suburbs of San Salvador—women playing canasta all day—and I spent many hours talking to them. They did not see poverty, it didn’t exist for them. First of all, they never went outside the capital city, but even in the city they could go through a street in a car and not see the mother who had made a nest in rubber tires for her babies. . . . Now, as to what I didn’t see: I was once driving past rows of cotton fields—all I could see on either side of the highway for miles was cotton fields, and it was dusty and hot, and I was rolling along thinking about something in my usual way, which is the way that has been nurtured in this country. But I didn’t see between the rows, where there were women and children, emaciated, in a stupor, because pesticide planes had swept over and dropped chemicals all over them, and they were coughing and lethargic from those poisonous clouds . . . There they were, and I hadn’t seen them. I had only seen cotton and soil between cotton plants, and a hot sky—I saw the thing endlessly and aesthetically, I saw it in a certain spatial way. So I had to be taught to look and to remember and to think about what I was seeing. . . . [W]e Americans . . . tend to register perceptions without codifying them in any political, historical, or social way. There’s no sense of what creates or contributes to or who benefits from a situation. And I’m not talking about a prescriptive political ideology now . . . [but] a process of understanding.
In order to understand what Forché is doing on the page, you have to look between the rows of type, and see what she leaves in the white space of your imagination. You have to rejigger, if not jettison entirely, your ideas or preconceptions about political writing and about what makes a poem. Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult. Taken together, Forché’s five books of verse—the most recent, “In the Lateness of the World” (Penguin Press), was published in March—are about action: memory as action, vision and writing as action. She asks us to consider the sometimes unrecognized, though always felt, ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know. History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of “In the Lateness of the World.” In “Museum of Stones,” the first poem in the book, Forché’s delicate but hawklike observations show us the broken dreams and false idols that are left in the wake of violence, folly, and time. She also shows how to pick our way through that detritus to search for clues as to who we were or might have been:
These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Baudelaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another . . .
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown . . .
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.
Faith has been part of Forché’s story from the beginning. Born in 1950, she is the oldest of seven children. Her working-class religious Catholic parents, Louise and Michael, a tool-and-die maker, raised their brood in Farmington, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. When Forché was about nine, her mother, whom she has described as a feminist, suggested that her bright, bookish daughter entertain herself by composing a poem. To show her how, Louise dusted off an old textbook—she had attended college for two years before marrying—and explained to Carolyn what meter was and taught her the importance of stresses. Forché was instantly taken by the poetic form. “I began to work in iambic pentameter because I didn’t know there was anything else,” she told Cott. “Writing was simply the reverie that I recorded.”
While the surreal horror of the Vietnam War was still a daily reality, Forché completed a bachelor’s degree in international relations at Michigan State University in 1972, and a master’s of fine arts at Bowling Green State University three years later. In an essay for her essential 2014 anthology, “Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001,” co-edited with the scholar Duncan Wu, Forché relates how, in her early twenties, she read excerpts from the transcript of the 1964 trial, in Leningrad, of the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky—Soviet officials weren’t thrilled by his assertion, among other things, that it was God who gave him the authority to be a poet—and sent him some poems. Brodsky, who was then teaching in Ann Arbor, Michigan, near where Forché grew up, wrote back to the burgeoning writer, suggesting, first, that she include more of her own philosophy in her writing, and, second, that she read Anna Akhmatova. This was another turning point for Forché. She was moved not only by Akhmatova’s spare, dissident “Requiem” but by how, under Stalinist rule, Akhmatova had largely composed the poem in her mind and, with help from some friends, memorized it to avoid committing anything to paper—an act that, according to Akhmatova’s biographer Amanda Haight, was possible only “if one was convinced of the absolute importance and necessity of poetry.” All of this—Brodsky’s sense that his vocation was a gift from God, the fleeting smile of a woman who’d asked Akhmatova if she could describe the horror of the Yezhov terror (Akhmatova’s answer: “I can”)—began to change Forché. In her essay for “Poetry of Witness,” she writes:


newyorker--2020-03-30--“Love Letter,” by George Saunders

“Love Letter,” by George Saunders

How would you know about that ?
I said .
Have a good night , sir , he said .
Stay off the computer .
Good Lord , his stupidity and bulk there in the darkness , the metallic clanking from his belt area , the palpable certainty he seemed to feel regarding his cause , a cause I can not begin , even at this late date , to get my head around , or view from within , so to speak .
I do not want you anywhere near , or under the sway of , that sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here a need to address the last part of your e-mail , which ( I want to assure you ) did not upset me or “ hurt my feelings.
” No .
When you reach my age , and if you are lucky enough to have a grandson like you ( stellar ) , you will know that nothing that that grandson could say could ever hurt your feelings , and , in fact , I am so touched that you thought to write me in your time of need and be so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) somewhat rough with me .
Seen in retrospect , yes : I have regrets .
There was a certain critical period .
I see that now .
During that period , your grandmother and I were doing , every night , a jigsaw puzzle each , at that dining-room table I know you know well , we were planning to have the kitchen redone , were in the midst of having the walls out in the yard rebuilt at great expense , I was experiencing the first intimations of the dental issues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( too much ? )
about .
Every night , as we sat across from each other , doing those puzzles , from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened , that we could never have imagined happening , that were now happening , and the only response from the TV pundits was a wry , satirical smugness that assumed , as we assumed , that those things could and would soon be undone and that all would return to normal—that some adult or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always arrived in the past , to set things right .
It did not seem ( and please destroy this letter after you have read it ) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong , that had been with us literally every day of our lives .
We had taken , in other words , a profound gift for granted .
Did not know the gift was a fluke , a chimera , a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding .
Because this destruction was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who seemed ( at that time ) merely comically thuggish , who seemed to know so little about what he was disrupting , and because life was going on , and because every day he/they burst through some new gate of propriety , we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore .
If you ’ ll allow me a crude metaphor ( as I ’ m sure you , the King of las Bromas de Fartos , will ) : a guy comes into a dinner party , takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living room .
The guests get all excited , yell in protest .
He takes a second dump .
The guests feel , Well , yelling didn ’ t help .
( While some of them applaud his audacity . )
He takes a third dump , on the table , and still no one throws him out .
At that point , the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps .
So , although your grandmother and I , during this critical period , often said , you know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” or “ Those f___ing Republican senators , ” we soon grew weary of hearing ourselves saying those things and , to avoid being old people emptily repeating ourselves , stopped saying those things , and did our puzzles and so forth , waiting for the election .
I ’ m speaking here of the second , not the third ( of the son ) , which , being a total sham , didn ’ t hurt ( surprise ) as much .
Post-election , doing new puzzles ( mine a difficult sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those early pardons ( which , by the time they were granted , we ’ d been well prepared to expect , and tolerate ) , and then that deluge of pardons ( each making way for the next ) , and the celebratory verbal nonsense accompanying the pardons ( to which , again , we were , by this time , somewhat inured ) , and the targeting of judges , and the incidents in Reno and Lowell , and the investigations into pundits , and the casting aside of term limits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the thing that was happening .
Birds still burst out of the trees and so forth .
I just want to say that history , when it arrives , may not look as you expect , based on the reading of history books .
Things in there are always so clear .
One knows exactly what one would have done .
Your grandmother and I ( and many others ) would have had to be more extreme people than we were , during that critical period , to have done whatever it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And our lives had not prepared us for extremity , to mobilize or to be as focussed and energized as I can see , in retrospect , we would have needed to be .
We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was , to us , like oxygen : used constantly , never noted .
We were spoiled , I think I am trying to say .
As were those on the other side : willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we all lived , a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history .
What would you have had me do ?
What would you have done ?
I know what you will say : you would have fought .
But how ?
How would you have fought ?
Would you have called your senator ?
( In those days , you could still , at least , record your feeble message on a senator ’ s answering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as well have been singing or whistling or passing wind into it for all the good it did . )
Well , we did that .
We called , we wrote letters .
Would you have given money to certain people running for office ?
We did that as well .
Would you have marched ?
For some reason , there were suddenly no marches .
Organized a march ?
Then and now , I did not and do not know how to arrange a march .
I was still working full time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That rather occupies the mind .
You know where we live : would you have had me go down to Waterville and harangue the officials there ?
They were all in agreement with us .
At that time .
Would you have armed yourself ?
I would not and will not , and I do not believe you would , either .
I hope not .
By that , all is lost .
Let me , at the end , return to the beginning .
I advise and implore you : stay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Your involvement will not help ( especially if you don ’ t know where they have taken her , fed or state ) and may , in fact , hurt .
I hope I do not offend if I here use the phrase “ empty gesture.
” Not only would J.
’ s situation be made worse , so might that of your mother , father , sister , grandmother , grandfather , etc.
, etc .
Part of the complication is that you are not alone in this .

When you reach a certain age, you see that time is all we have. By which I mean, moments like those overhead geese this morning, and watching your mother be born, and sitting at the dining-room table here waiting for the phone to ring and announce that a certain baby (you) had been born, or that day when all of us hiked out at Point Lobos. Those baby deer, the extremely loud seal, your sister’s scarf drifting down, down to that black, briny boulder, the replacement you so generously bought her in Monterey, how pleased you made her with your kindness. Those things were real. That is what (that is all) one gets. This other stuff is real only to the extent that it interferes with those moments.
Now, you may say (I can hear you saying it and see the look on your face as you do) that this incident with J. is an interference. I respect that. But, as your grandfather, I beg you not to underestimate the power/danger of this moment. Perhaps I haven’t told you this yet: in the early days, I wrote two letters to the editor of the local rag, one overwrought, the other comic. Neither had any effect. Those who agreed with me agreed with me; those who did not remained unpersuaded. After a third attempt was rejected, I found myself pulled over, up near the house, for no reason I could discern. The cop (nice guy, just a kid, really, from my perspective) asked what I did all day. Did I have any hobbies? I said no. He said, Some of us heard you like to type. I sat in my car, looking over at his large, pale arm. His face was the face of a kid. His arm, though, was the arm of a man.
How would you know about that? I said.
Have a good night, sir, he said. Stay off the computer.
Good Lord, his stupidity and bulk there in the darkness, the metallic clanking from his belt area, the palpable certainty he seemed to feel regarding his cause, a cause I cannot begin, even at this late date, to get my head around, or view from within, so to speak.
I do not want you anywhere near, or under the sway of, that sort of person, ever.
I feel here a need to address the last part of your e-mail, which (I want to assure you) did not upset me or “hurt my feelings.” No. When you reach my age, and if you are lucky enough to have a grandson like you (stellar), you will know that nothing that that grandson could say could ever hurt your feelings, and, in fact, I am so touched that you thought to write me in your time of need and be so direct and even (I admit it) somewhat rough with me.
Cartoon by Tom Chitty Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Seen in retrospect, yes: I have regrets. There was a certain critical period. I see that now. During that period, your grandmother and I were doing, every night, a jigsaw puzzle each, at that dining-room table I know you know well, we were planning to have the kitchen redone, were in the midst of having the walls out in the yard rebuilt at great expense, I was experiencing the first intimations of the dental issues I know you have heard so much (too much?) about. Every night, as we sat across from each other, doing those puzzles, from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened, that we could never have imagined happening, that were now happening, and the only response from the TV pundits was a wry, satirical smugness that assumed, as we assumed, that those things could and would soon be undone and that all would return to normal—that some adult or adults would arrive, as they had always arrived in the past, to set things right. It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding.
Because this destruction was emanating from such an inept source, who seemed (at that time) merely comically thuggish, who seemed to know so little about what he was disrupting, and because life was going on, and because every day he/they burst through some new gate of propriety, we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore. If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.
So, although your grandmother and I, during this critical period, often said, you know, “Someone should arrange a march” or “Those f___ing Republican senators,” we soon grew weary of hearing ourselves saying those things and, to avoid being old people emptily repeating ourselves, stopped saying those things, and did our puzzles and so forth, waiting for the election.
I’m speaking here of the second, not the third (of the son), which, being a total sham, didn’t hurt (surprise) as much.
Post-election, doing new puzzles (mine a difficult sort of Catskills summer scene), noting those early pardons (which, by the time they were granted, we’d been well prepared to expect, and tolerate), and then that deluge of pardons (each making way for the next), and the celebratory verbal nonsense accompanying the pardons (to which, again, we were, by this time, somewhat inured), and the targeting of judges, and the incidents in Reno and Lowell, and the investigations into pundits, and the casting aside of term limits, we still did not really believe in the thing that was happening. Birds still burst out of the trees and so forth.
I feel I am disappointing you.
I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.
Your grandmother and I (and many others) would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period, to have done whatever it was we should have been doing. And our lives had not prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focussed and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noted. We were spoiled, I think I am trying to say. As were those on the other side: willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly nourished by the vacuous plenty in which we all lived, a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history.


newyorker--2020-03-30--“Shelter,” by José Antonio Rodríguez

“Shelter,” by José Antonio Rodríguez

Don ’ t misunderstand me , I love a good poem Like half my Facebook friends , one that transports you To a corner of the soul you didn ’ t know was there Because you couldn ’ t find the precise metaphor , Even if you felt it , like that time my parents saw A local news story of an older woman asking for help With an ailing husband , and I volunteered to drive them To the address onscreen , a neighborhood I ’ d never driven through , though it looked familiar With its usual poverty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house And inside the woman from the news in half-light Thanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointing To a foldout chair where we could place them Before introducing us to her husband , a scraggly beard Beneath a crinkled blanket on a cot right there In what would have been the living room , groaning In the muted manner of those who know this is As good as it ’ ll get , the woman ’ s non-stop small talk About “ So it is , life ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” And “ Take a seat , ” as if we were long-missed relatives , All this in Spanish , though I translate it here Because I want to reach the widest audience And not burden the monolingual English reader When they ’ ve already gifted me their time by reading this , Which I ’ ll call a poem , one that my parents can ’ t read , As they only speak Spanish with that poor Mexican lilt of apology Which kept them from interrupting the woman , a Spanish I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though I did that moment When I kept telling my mother “ We have to go ” With an almost impolite urgency , because I couldn ’ t bear One more minute in that near-replica of the room of my childhood , Even as the woman said “ He seems to be in such a hurry ” And my mother smiled , making excuses as we turned to leave , While I bemoaned my parents ’ passive politeness So common in the Mexican in America , though by then I was already a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down in South Texas for the winter break Between semesters of reading Adichie and Alexie And risking words together to find something Like the point of this , some search for the reason For the speaker ’ s love of poems , that pull Of the written word as artifact , as a kind of tool Against the sometimes overwhelming sadness about all of it— Including the fact that some of us it seems will never be allowed The time and energy to sit with a poem , like them In that illusion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ closer to poetry ’ s pursuit , that edge of oblivion Where words begin becoming insufficient—the woman With her frantic speech beseeching us and the man Extending his bony hand out , as if from the cot itself , The tremor of it trying to say something that sounded Like a greeting , that sounded like a plea .

Audio: Read by the author.
Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good poem
Like half my Facebook friends, one that transports you
To a corner of the soul you didn’t know was there
Because you couldn’t find the precise metaphor,
Even if you felt it, like that time my parents saw
A local news story of an older woman asking for help
With an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them
To the address onscreen, a neighborhood
I’d never driven through, though it looked familiar
With its usual poverty: a few leaning boards called a house
And inside the woman from the news in half-light
Thanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointing
To a foldout chair where we could place them
Before introducing us to her husband, a scraggly beard
Beneath a crinkled blanket on a cot right there
In what would have been the living room, groaning
In the muted manner of those who know this is
As good as it’ll get, the woman’s non-stop small talk
About “So it is, life’s a struggle” and “Please stay awhile”
And “Take a seat,” as if we were long-missed relatives,
All this in Spanish, though I translate it here
Because I want to reach the widest audience
And not burden the monolingual English reader
When they’ve already gifted me their time by reading this,
Which I’ll call a poem, one that my parents can’t read,
As they only speak Spanish with that poor Mexican lilt of apology
Which kept them from interrupting the woman, a Spanish
I’ve kept but rarely use, though I did that moment
When I kept telling my mother “We have to go”
With an almost impolite urgency, because I couldn’t bear
One more minute in that near-replica of the room of my childhood,
Even as the woman said “He seems to be in such a hurry”
And my mother smiled, making excuses as we turned to leave,
While I bemoaned my parents’ passive politeness
So common in the Mexican in America, though by then
I was already a grad student in upstate New York
And down in South Texas for the winter break
Between semesters of reading Adichie and Alexie
And risking words together to find something
Like the point of this, some search for the reason
For the speaker’s love of poems, that pull
Of the written word as artifact, as a kind of tool
Against the sometimes overwhelming sadness about all of it—
Including the fact that some of us it seems will never be allowed
The time and energy to sit with a poem, like them
In that illusion of shelter, though perhaps
They were closer to poetry’s pursuit, that edge of oblivion
Where words begin becoming insufficient—the woman
With her frantic speech beseeching us and the man
Extending his bony hand out, as if from the cot itself,
The tremor of it trying to say something that sounded
Like a greeting, that sounded like a plea.


newyorker--2020-03-30--The History of Loneliness

The History of Loneliness

The loneliness epidemic , in this sense , is rather like the obesity epidemic .
Evolutionarily speaking , panicking while being alone , like finding high-calorie foods irresistible , is highly adaptive , but , more recently , in a world where laws ( mostly ) prevent us from killing one another , we need to work with strangers every day , and the problem is more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little .
These drives backfire .
Loneliness , Murthy argues , lies behind a host of problems—anxiety , violence , trauma , crime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and even political polarization .
Murthy writes with compassion , but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow , not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties , when “ homelessness ” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say than “ poverty ” —and saying it didn ’ t help .
( Since then , the number of homeless Americans has increased . )
Curiously , Murthy often conflates the two , explaining loneliness as feeling homeless .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ To be at home is to be known , ” he writes .
Home can be anywhere .
Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful , intimate ties of all kinds , with all sorts of groups of other people , even across distances .
You can feel at home with friends , or at work , or in a college dining hall , or at church , or in Yankee Stadium , or at your neighborhood bar .
Loneliness is the feeling that no place is home .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writes , “ I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.
” Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them , and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them .
That ’ s not a policy agenda .
That ’ s an indictment of modern life .
In “ A Biography of Loneliness : The History of an Emotion ” ( Oxford ) , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ a conscious , cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others , ” and she objects to the idea that it ’ s universal , transhistorical , and the source of all that ails us .
She argues that the condition really didn ’ t exist before the nineteenth century , at least not in a chronic form .
It ’ s not that people—widows and widowers , in particular , and the very poor , the sick , and the outcast—weren ’ t lonely ; it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible to survive without living among other people , and without being bonded to other people , by ties of affection and loyalty and obligation , loneliness was a passing experience .
Monarchs probably were lonely , chronically .
( Hey , it ’ s lonely at the top ! )
But , for most ordinary people , daily living involved such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying .
The word “ loneliness ” very seldom appears in English before about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but never lonely .
One exception is “ Hamlet ” : Ophelia suffers from “ loneliness ” ; then she drowns herself .
Modern loneliness , in Alberti ’ s view , is the child of capitalism and secularism .
“ Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world , individual and community , public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism , ” she writes .
“ Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coincidence .
The rise of privacy , itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness .
So is individualism , which you also have to pay for .
Alberti ’ s book is a cultural history ( she offers an anodyne reading of “ Wuthering Heights , ” for instance , and another of the letters of Sylvia Plath ) .
But the social history is more interesting , and there the scholarship demonstrates that whatever epidemic of loneliness can be said to exist is very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living alone makes people lonely or whether people live alone because they ’ re lonely might seem to be harder to say , but the preponderance of the evidence supports the former : it is the force of history , not the exertion of choice , that leads people to live alone .
This is a problem for people trying to fight an epidemic of loneliness , because the force of history is relentless .
Before the twentieth century , according to the best longitudinal demographic studies , about five per cent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cent of the world population ) consisted of just one person .
That figure began rising around 1910 , driven by urbanization , the decline of live-in servants , a declining birth rate , and the replacement of the traditional , multigenerational family with the nuclear family .
By the time David Riesman published “ The Lonely Crowd , ” in 1950 , nine per cent of all households consisted of a single person .
In 1959 , psychiatry discovered loneliness , in a subtle essay by the German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ painful , frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it , ” she wrote .
She , too , shrank in horror from its contemplation .
“ The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life , ” she wrote , “ and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.
” People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely , afraid that the condition might be contagious .
And people who are lonely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed— “ it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced , ” Fromm-Reichmann wrote .
One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can ’ t see that lots of people feel the same way they do .
“ During the past half century , our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment , ” the sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote in “ Going Solo : The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ For the first time in human history , great numbers of people—at all ages , in all places , of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.
” Klinenberg considers this to be , in large part , a triumph ; more plausibly , it is a disaster .
Beginning in the nineteen-sixties , the percentage of single-person households grew at a much steeper rate , driven by a high divorce rate , a still-falling birth rate , and longer lifespans over all .
( After the rise of the nuclear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alone , with women typically outliving their husbands . )
A medical literature on loneliness began to emerge in the nineteen-eighties , at the same time that policymakers became concerned with , and named , “ homelessness , ” which is a far more dire condition than being a single-person household : to be homeless is to be a household that does not hold a house .
Cacioppo began his research in the nineteen-nineties , even as humans were building a network of computers , to connect us all .
Klinenberg , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ particularly interested in people who chose to live alone right about then .
I suppose I was one of them .
I tried living alone when I was twenty-five , because it seemed important to me , the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me , as a sign that I had come of age , could pay rent without subletting a sublet .
I could afford to buy privacy , I might say now , but then I ’ m sure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become “ my own person.
” I lasted only two months .
I didn ’ t like watching television alone , and also I didn ’ t have a television , and this , if not the golden age of television , was the golden age of “ The Simpsons , ” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door .
I moved in with him , and then I married him .

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April, together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches, out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia, in the monkey house, where it was just the two of them, they had become “accustomed to sleep at night in each other’s arms on a blanket on the floor,” clutching each other, desperately, achingly, through the long, cold night.
The Philadelphia Zoological Garden was the first zoo in the United States. It opened in 1874, two years after Charles Darwin published “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in which he related what he had learned about the social attachments of primates from Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Society of London:
Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behavior of two chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much protruded lips; and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. They then mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths, and yelled with delight.
Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four chimpanzees in America, and when she died human observers mourned her loss, but, above all, they remarked on the behavior of her companion. For a long time, they reported, he tried in vain to rouse her. Then he “went into a frenzy of grief.” This paroxysm accorded entirely with what Darwin had described in humans: “Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements.” The bereaved chimpanzee began to pull out the hair from his head. He wailed, making a sound the zookeeper had never heard before: Hah-ah-ah-ah-ah. “His cries were heard over the entire garden. He dashed himself against the bars of the cage and butted his head upon the hard-wood bottom, and when this burst of grief was ended he poked his head under the straw in one corner and moaned as if his heart would break.”
Nothing quite like this had ever been recorded. Superintendent Brown prepared a scholarly article, “Grief in the Chimpanzee.” Even long after the death of the female, Brown reported, the male “invariably slept on a cross-beam at the top of the cage, returning to inherited habit, and showing, probably, that the apprehension of unseen dangers has been heightened by his sense of loneliness.”
Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it. And yet, long before the present pandemic, with its forced isolation and social distancing, humans had begun building their own monkey houses. Before modern times, very few human beings lived alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for your health. In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K. appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition, doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?
I am unhappy doing so many things alone.
I have nobody to talk to.
I cannot tolerate being so alone.
I feel as if nobody really understands me.
I am no longer close to anyone.
There is no one I can turn to.
I feel isolated from others.
In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?
“Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state of profound distress. Neuroscientists identify loneliness as a state of hypervigilance whose origins lie among our primate ancestors and in our own hunter-gatherer past. Much of the research in this field was led by John Cacioppo, at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago. Cacioppo, who died in 2018, was known as Dr. Loneliness. In the new book “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World” (Harper Wave), Murthy explains how Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory of loneliness has been tested by anthropologists at the University of Oxford, who have traced its origins back fifty-two million years, to the very first primates. Primates need to belong to an intimate social group, a family or a band, in order to survive; this is especially true for humans (humans you don’t know might very well kill you, which is a problem not shared by most other primates). Separated from the group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness,” Murthy writes. We breathe fast, our heart races, our blood pressure rises, we don’t sleep. We act fearful, defensive, and self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually want to help, and tend to stop lonely people from doing what would benefit them most: reaching out to others.
The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little. These drives backfire.
Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and even political polarization. Murthy writes with compassion, but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow, not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties, when “homelessness” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say than “poverty”—and saying it didn’t help. (Since then, the number of homeless Americans has increased.) Curiously, Murthy often conflates the two, explaining loneliness as feeling homeless. To belong is to feel at home. “To be at home is to be known,” he writes. Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar. Loneliness is the feeling that no place is home. “In community after community,” Murthy writes, “I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.” Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.
In “A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion” (Oxford), the British historian Fay Bound Alberti defines loneliness as “a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others,” and she objects to the idea that it’s universal, transhistorical, and the source of all that ails us. She argues that the condition really didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, at least not in a chronic form. It’s not that people—widows and widowers, in particular, and the very poor, the sick, and the outcast—weren’t lonely; it’s that, since it wasn’t possible to survive without living among other people, and without being bonded to other people, by ties of affection and loyalty and obligation, loneliness was a passing experience. Monarchs probably were lonely, chronically. (Hey, it’s lonely at the top!) But, for most ordinary people, daily living involved such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying. The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely. One exception is “Hamlet”: Ophelia suffers from “loneliness”; then she drowns herself.
Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for.
Alberti’s book is a cultural history (she offers an anodyne reading of “Wuthering Heights,” for instance, and another of the letters of Sylvia Plath). But the social history is more interesting, and there the scholarship demonstrates that whatever epidemic of loneliness can be said to exist is very closely associated with living alone. Whether living alone makes people lonely or whether people live alone because they’re lonely might seem to be harder to say, but the preponderance of the evidence supports the former: it is the force of history, not the exertion of choice, that leads people to live alone. This is a problem for people trying to fight an epidemic of loneliness, because the force of history is relentless.
Before the twentieth century, according to the best longitudinal demographic studies, about five per cent of all households (or about one per cent of the world population) consisted of just one person. That figure began rising around 1910, driven by urbanization, the decline of live-in servants, a declining birth rate, and the replacement of the traditional, multigenerational family with the nuclear family. By the time David Riesman published “The Lonely Crowd,” in 1950, nine per cent of all households consisted of a single person. In 1959, psychiatry discovered loneliness, in a subtle essay by the German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it,” she wrote. She, too, shrank in horror from its contemplation. “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life,” she wrote, “and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.” People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely, afraid that the condition might be contagious. And people who are lonely are themselves so horrified by what they are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed—“it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.
“During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment,” the sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote in “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” from 2012. “For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.” Klinenberg considers this to be, in large part, a triumph; more plausibly, it is a disaster. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, the percentage of single-person households grew at a much steeper rate, driven by a high divorce rate, a still-falling birth rate, and longer lifespans over all. (After the rise of the nuclear family, the old began to reside alone, with women typically outliving their husbands.) A medical literature on loneliness began to emerge in the nineteen-eighties, at the same time that policymakers became concerned with, and named, “homelessness,” which is a far more dire condition than being a single-person household: to be homeless is to be a household that does not hold a house. Cacioppo began his research in the nineteen-nineties, even as humans were building a network of computers, to connect us all. Klinenberg, who graduated from college in 1993, is particularly interested in people who chose to live alone right about then.
I suppose I was one of them. I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.
This experience might not fit so well into the story Klinenberg tells; he argues that networked technologies of communication, beginning with the telephone’s widespread adoption, in the nineteen-fifties, helped make living alone possible. Radio, television, Internet, social media: we can feel at home online. Or not. Robert Putnam’s influential book about the decline of American community ties, “Bowling Alone,” came out in 2000, four years before the launch of Facebook, which monetized loneliness. Some people say that the success of social media was a product of an epidemic of loneliness; some people say it was a contributor to it; some people say it’s the only remedy for it. Connect! Disconnect! The Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.” The epidemic only grew.
This is not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Living alone, while common in the United States, is more common in many other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Australia, and Canada, and it’s on the rise in China, India, and Brazil. Living alone works best in nations with strong social supports. It works worst in places like the United States. It is best to have not only an Internet but a social safety net.
Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday? ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-03-30--Alex Jones’s Bogus Coronavirus Cures

Alex Jones’s Bogus Coronavirus Cures

On March 6th , government officials in Austin , Texas , cancelled South by Southwest , because of COVID-19 .
Although the cancellation would surely save lives , it would also , the festival ’ s organizers said in a statement , take a toll on “ hundreds of small businesses.
” But at least one small business in Austin did not let the crisis go to waste .
Infowars is a group of Web sites—a “ news ” blog , audio and video feeds , an online store—founded by Alex Jones , the nation ’ s most prolific disinformation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( One of Jones ’ s most prominent fans , Donald Trump , once told him , on air , “ Your reputation is amazing.
” ) In a video broadcast the day after South by Southwest was called off , Jones and a guest speculated that the reason was not concern for public safety but rather a “ psy-op ” —a psychological operation to sow panic and consolidate government power .
“ Controlling people is a stopgap , ” Jones said .
“ But having antivirals , getting your immune system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yes , folks , we sell great antivirals.
” Jones is best known for his paranoid rants , which have brought him some revenue in the form of online ads , but he makes most of his income as a snake-oil salesman .
The Infowars store sells hundreds of products , from “ nutraceuticals ” to “ tactical pens ” to “ survival food ” ( dried beans and the like , perfect for stocking a bunker ) .
For the past few weeks , nearly every food item has been sold out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Our expanded team is focusing on and will deliver the tens of thousands of orders already in our queue as we work diligently through this national emergency together.
” Many of Jones ’ s “ health and wellness ” products contain colloidal silver : SuperSilver Whitening Toothpaste , SuperSilver Wound Dressing Gel , ABL Nano Silver Gargle .
Colloidal silver has only one known effect on the body—if you take too much of it , your skin might turn blue .
Still , disaster-prepper types have long touted it as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
to the common cold .
“ This stuff kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range , ” Jones said in a live stream on March 10th .
“ It kills every virus.
” This is not true .
On March 6th , the F.D.A .
had issued an open letter , warning , “ There currently are no vaccines , pills , potions , lotions , lozenges or other prescription or over-the-counter products available to treat or cure coronavirus disease.
” Jones was only one of many opportunists advertising bogus coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was also selling a colloidal-silver gel ; on Facebook , Vivify Holistic Clinic advertised a “ very strong boneset tea.
” Although the Infowars studio is in Texas , none of that state ’ s officials did anything to derail Jones ’ s sales pitch .
But since Infowars content is viewable wherever people have Internet , including New York , this state ’ s consumer-protection laws apply .
“ Whenever there ’ s heightened fear and hysteria , we start to see scammers , ” Letitia James , New York ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We see stores around Brooklyn selling hand sanitizer for eighty dollars a bottle .
We see people setting up fake charities—phishing attempts , essentially .
We see medical scams—Web sites that have a magic cure .
We have a responsibility to take action against anything that is putting New Yorkers in danger.
” James instructed Lisa Landau , the chief of her office ’ s health-care bureau , to send Jones a cease-and-desist letter .
In a footnote , Landau acknowledged that the Infowars site did include some vague verbiage disclaiming liability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ size makes it unlikely that potential customers will read or even see the disclaimer.
” Days later , a new disclaimer appeared , this one in a non-minuscule font : “ The products sold on this site are not intended for use in the cure , treatment , prevention , or mitigation of any disease , including the novel coronavirus.
” Near the disclaimer , however , was a link to products such as a “ Build the Wall , Protect Texas ” T-shirt , George Washington socks ( “ We need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shut down globalist censorship ” ) , and bottles of ABL Nano Silver Gargle ( sold out , wait list available ) .
“ This is the plan , folks , ” Jones said .
“ They plan on , if they ’ ve fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerized you with the TV and put you in a trance , on killing you.
” Meanwhile , “ they ” were determined “ to make sure you don ’ t learn about the known antivirals that are in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new disclaimer , but he hasn ’ t stopped selling the products , ” James said .
“ We are still in contact with his lawyers , and , at a certain point , if they refuse to comply with our order , then enough is enough.
” Meaning what ?
“ Meaning we hit them with an array of violations , we issue subpoenas , and we could haul them to court , ” she said .
“ My advice to Mr. Jones and any other scammers out there would be to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we go to court , we have a pretty high success rate.
” ♦ • How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic .
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
• How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
• Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• We are all irrational panic shoppers .
• The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

Alex Jones Illustration by João Fazenda
On March 6th, government officials in Austin, Texas, cancelled South by Southwest, because of COVID-19. Although the cancellation would surely save lives, it would also, the festival’s organizers said in a statement, take a toll on “hundreds of small businesses.” But at least one small business in Austin did not let the crisis go to waste. Infowars is a group of Web sites—a “news” blog, audio and video feeds, an online store—founded by Alex Jones, the nation’s most prolific disinformation agent who does not hold elective office. (One of Jones’s most prominent fans, Donald Trump, once told him, on air, “Your reputation is amazing.”) In a video broadcast the day after South by Southwest was called off, Jones and a guest speculated that the reason was not concern for public safety but rather a “psy-op”—a psychological operation to sow panic and consolidate government power. “Controlling people is a stopgap,” Jones said. “But having antivirals, getting your immune system healthy—that is the answer. And, yes, folks, we sell great antivirals.”
Jones is best known for his paranoid rants, which have brought him some revenue in the form of online ads, but he makes most of his income as a snake-oil salesman. The Infowars store sells hundreds of products, from “nutraceuticals” to “tactical pens” to “survival food” (dried beans and the like, perfect for stocking a bunker). For the past few weeks, nearly every food item has been sold out. A note on the site read, “Our expanded team is focusing on and will deliver the tens of thousands of orders already in our queue as we work diligently through this national emergency together.”
Many of Jones’s “health and wellness” products contain colloidal silver: SuperSilver Whitening Toothpaste, SuperSilver Wound Dressing Gel, ABL Nano Silver Gargle. Colloidal silver has only one known effect on the body—if you take too much of it, your skin might turn blue. Still, disaster-prepper types have long touted it as a cure for viral ailments, from H.I.V. to the common cold. “This stuff kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range,” Jones said in a live stream on March 10th. “It kills every virus.” This is not true. On March 6th, the F.D.A. had issued an open letter, warning, “There currently are no vaccines, pills, potions, lotions, lozenges or other prescription or over-the-counter products available to treat or cure coronavirus disease.” Jones was only one of many opportunists advertising bogus coronavirus cures. Jim Bakker, the televangelist, was also selling a colloidal-silver gel; on Facebook, Vivify Holistic Clinic advertised a “very strong boneset tea.”
Although the Infowars studio is in Texas, none of that state’s officials did anything to derail Jones’s sales pitch. But since Infowars content is viewable wherever people have Internet, including New York, this state’s consumer-protection laws apply. “Whenever there’s heightened fear and hysteria, we start to see scammers,” Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, said recently. “We see stores around Brooklyn selling hand sanitizer for eighty dollars a bottle. We see people setting up fake charities—phishing attempts, essentially. We see medical scams—Web sites that have a magic cure. We have a responsibility to take action against anything that is putting New Yorkers in danger.”
James instructed Lisa Landau, the chief of her office’s health-care bureau, to send Jones a cease-and-desist letter. In a footnote, Landau acknowledged that the Infowars site did include some vague verbiage disclaiming liability, but that its “miniscule font size makes it unlikely that potential customers will read or even see the disclaimer.”
Days later, a new disclaimer appeared, this one in a non-minuscule font: “The products sold on this site are not intended for use in the cure, treatment, prevention, or mitigation of any disease, including the novel coronavirus.” Near the disclaimer, however, was a link to products such as a “Build the Wall, Protect Texas” T-shirt, George Washington socks (“We need to broadcast true Americana everywhere we go to shut down globalist censorship”), and bottles of ABL Nano Silver Gargle (sold out, wait list available). “This is the plan, folks,” Jones said. “They plan on, if they’ve fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerized you with the TV and put you in a trance, on killing you.” Meanwhile, “they” were determined “to make sure you don’t learn about the known antivirals that are in the environment.”
“He has added a new disclaimer, but he hasn’t stopped selling the products,” James said. “We are still in contact with his lawyers, and, at a certain point, if they refuse to comply with our order, then enough is enough.” Meaning what? “Meaning we hit them with an array of violations, we issue subpoenas, and we could haul them to court,” she said. “My advice to Mr. Jones and any other scammers out there would be to heed our warnings, because, when we go to court, we have a pretty high success rate.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-03-30--Performers on Lockdown Turn to Their Smartphones

Nine days , which feel like nine weeks , have gone by , as of this writing , since Broadway went dark and New York ’ s theatres closed their doors .
By the time you read this , it may well feel like nine years .
The suddenness with which the city ’ s performance ecosystem has vanished defies comprehension—it ’ s as if the Great Barrier Reef had died overnight .
Grasping for comparison , we have to look well beyond the proximate disasters of Hurricane Sandy and 9/11 , when , ultimately , the shows went resolutely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ optimistic speculation online as to whether Shakespeare wrote “ King Lear ” in quarantine when the plague forced the Globe to close , in the summer of 1606 .
( A comforting thought , if you happen to be both a genius and good at focussing in times of existential crisis . )
During the Second World War , London initially shut its theatres and cinemas— “ a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity , ” George Bernard Shaw called the decision—only to reopen many of them when it became clear that morale needed boosting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not in the pandemic playbook .
We are our own threat .
The enemy is within .
What ’ s immediately apparent , in a suddenly theatreless world , is how difficult theatre is to replace .
The mechanism—bodies doing things in front of other bodies—is too basic .
( Or bodies cavorting with other bodies , as the case may be ; among this season ’ s now suspended offerings was Taylor Mac ’ s new play , “ The Fre , ” in which the audience was seated in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ theatre and stream it , for which I am hugely grateful , not least because it gives more people access to shows .
But what you watch through this method is inevitably only a facsimile of the real thing .
It ’ s like eating a food that you can smell but not taste .
I hope it doesn ’ t sound too prematurely elegiac to say that one of the things I miss about going to the theatre is the going : leaving home , travelling , with a sense of purpose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appointed hour .
I miss threading my way through the obstacle course of Times Square , secretly proud of my agility .
And I miss being part of an audience , one soul among many .
I even miss the reliable , infuriating madness of other people .
Dear Elderly Sir , who inexplicably texted throughout “ Greater Clements ” : I may not think highly of you personally , but I hope you ’ re doing all right .
Dear Madam , whose chromatic , flutelike snoring during the first act of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intra-aisle shushing war the likes of which I have never heard before or since : my best wishes to you .
To the tweens who packed together in a line around the block , just before the advent of social distancing , for a preview of “ Six ” : your energy was infectious , I hope only in the figurative sense .
Please stay home .
Theatre artists and technicians are out of work right now , which spells terrible anxiety and financial distress .
It also means that creative people are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If there is one silver lining to this crisis , it ’ s that it hit in the age of the smartphone , when performance is everywhere .
So we find our perspective shifted .
The ratio is now one to one : me watching you , my screen to yours .
Glamour ?
Mystique ?
Polish ?
Shine ?
No , no , no , and no .
But who needs them ?
This is a time for the curtain to be pulled back .
Instagram Live , previously a place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glimpses into their worlds , has been repurposed as a cabaret , abuzz with performing artists doing what they can for us from their living rooms .
Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Paris Smith squeezed together to serenade their followers through the screen .
The sublime jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant , with Sullivan Fortner on the piano , gave an impromptu concert ; it looked as though the pair were performing for their own pleasure , which , in turn , bolstered ours .
Rosie O ’ Donnell raised money for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ video stream , with other performers , including Cynthia Erivo , Patti LuPone , Idina Menzel , and Chita Rivera .
LuPone showed off her jukebox .
Andrew Lloyd Webber sang “ Happy Birthday ” to Stephen Sondheim ; Stephen Sondheim sang “ Happy Birthday ” to Andrew Lloyd Webber while vigorously washing his hands .
Alan Menken , at a piano stationed in front of a grandfather clock , performed a career-skimming medley that ended , on the nose , with “ A Whole New World , ” from “ Aladdin.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these bits was like getting stuck on a FaceTime call between the famous : cute at first , then a little boring , but endearingly nerdy , with Channel Thirteen fund-raiser-style energy .
It must be hard to make original work under these conditions of general menace , but some performers are persevering .
The best I ’ ve seen in the past week was produced by the 24 Hour Plays , an organization whose regular stunt involves putting together plays and musicals that are written , rehearsed , and performed in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instagram , the group has been hosting a series of “ viral monologues ” : new , very short pieces that were commissioned from homebound playwrights and performed by homebound actors .
The first installment , still available for viewing , was posted on March 17th .
No surprise that the subject most on the minds of the playwrights was disaster .
In a monologue by Lily Padilla , Marin Ireland , playing a dissolute young teacher , delivers , directly into a phone camera , what we soon realize is an application @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s ready to be beamed up and away from this cursed planet , but the question is whether the aliens will have her .
“ What I would contribute to your galaxy ?
” she asks , chewing her lip .
“ Well .
.
.
I am enthusiastic .
And I .
.
.
think that ’ s an important quality on any team.
” In just four minutes , Ireland , with her big , distant , unreadable eyes and expressive mouth , sketches a portrait of a woman who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her known life and surrender to the intoxicating unknown .
“ Honestly , I ’ m afraid the world is burning , ” she says .
“ And it ’ s not that I ’ m afraid of dying or even catching fire .
I just don ’ t want to watch.
” Part of the pleasure of the 24 Hour viral monologues lies in seeing what actors do when left to their own devices , far from the smoothing , sculpting hand of a director .
The selfie-video format has the feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the great Richard Kind makes explicit in a quick , clever monologue by Jesse Eisenberg , in which Kind asks Hollywood to cast him against type , for once , as a Gentile .
In a piece by Stephen Adly Guirgis called “ L.A .
Yoga Motherfuckers , ” Andre Royo sits in a car and launches into a disgruntled , hilariously unhinged rant about civility and “ these Bernie bros and their Bernie hos , ” who appear to have chased him out of a yoga class after he expressed support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ falls flat , but it ’ s good to see playwrights bringing new characters into the world to respond , in the moment , to the same things that we ’ re responding to .
Free from motive , free of the harness of plot , they flicker briefly alive to share these strange times with us and then disappear , but not without leaving a mysterious , human trace .
In good times , we want performance to shake us and stir us , to horrify or delight , to rouse , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Daily living can dull the senses ( including the moral one ) , and we ask the theatre to help us sharpen them again .
But in a time of fear and strained feeling , when we are thinking non-stop about our welfare and its connection to other people , it ’ s comfort that we want .
That ’ s why , while watching the 24 Hour viral monologues , I thought of one of my preferred forms of digital direct address , the soft-spoken parallel universe of the Internet genre called @ @

Nine days, which feel like nine weeks, have gone by, as of this writing, since Broadway went dark and New York’s theatres closed their doors. By the time you read this, it may well feel like nine years. The suddenness with which the city’s performance ecosystem has vanished defies comprehension—it’s as if the Great Barrier Reef had died overnight. Grasping for comparison, we have to look well beyond the proximate disasters of Hurricane Sandy and 9/11, when, ultimately, the shows went resolutely on. There’s been some optimistic speculation online as to whether Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in quarantine when the plague forced the Globe to close, in the summer of 1606. (A comforting thought, if you happen to be both a genius and good at focussing in times of existential crisis.) During the Second World War, London initially shut its theatres and cinemas—“a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity,” George Bernard Shaw called the decision—only to reopen many of them when it became clear that morale needed boosting. But keeping calm and carrying on is not in the pandemic playbook. We are our own threat. The enemy is within.
What’s immediately apparent, in a suddenly theatreless world, is how difficult theatre is to replace. The mechanism—bodies doing things in front of other bodies—is too basic. (Or bodies cavorting with other bodies, as the case may be; among this season’s now suspended offerings was Taylor Mac’s new play, “The Fre,” in which the audience was seated in a ball pit.) You can tape theatre and stream it, for which I am hugely grateful, not least because it gives more people access to shows. But what you watch through this method is inevitably only a facsimile of the real thing. It’s like eating a food that you can smell but not taste.
I hope it doesn’t sound too prematurely elegiac to say that one of the things I miss about going to the theatre is the going: leaving home, travelling, with a sense of purpose, to a specific place at an appointed hour. I miss threading my way through the obstacle course of Times Square, secretly proud of my agility. And I miss being part of an audience, one soul among many. I even miss the reliable, infuriating madness of other people. Dear Elderly Sir, who inexplicably texted throughout “Greater Clements”: I may not think highly of you personally, but I hope you’re doing all right. Dear Madam, whose chromatic, flutelike snoring during the first act of “The Ferryman” led to an intra-aisle shushing war the likes of which I have never heard before or since: my best wishes to you. To the tweens who packed together in a line around the block, just before the advent of social distancing, for a preview of “Six”: your energy was infectious, I hope only in the figurative sense. Please stay home.
Theatre artists and technicians are out of work right now, which spells terrible anxiety and financial distress. It also means that creative people are trying to find creative things to do. If there is one silver lining to this crisis, it’s that it hit in the age of the smartphone, when performance is everywhere. So we find our perspective shifted. The ratio is now one to one: me watching you, my screen to yours. Glamour? Mystique? Polish? Shine? No, no, no, and no. But who needs them? This is a time for the curtain to be pulled back.
Instagram Live, previously a place for celebrities to offer the public slick glimpses into their worlds, has been repurposed as a cabaret, abuzz with performing artists doing what they can for us from their living rooms. Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Paris Smith squeezed together to serenade their followers through the screen. The sublime jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, with Sullivan Fortner on the piano, gave an impromptu concert; it looked as though the pair were performing for their own pleasure, which, in turn, bolstered ours. Rosie O’Donnell raised money for the Actors Fund by chatting, via video stream, with other performers, including Cynthia Erivo, Patti LuPone, Idina Menzel, and Chita Rivera. LuPone showed off her jukebox. Andrew Lloyd Webber sang “Happy Birthday” to Stephen Sondheim; Stephen Sondheim sang “Happy Birthday” to Andrew Lloyd Webber while vigorously washing his hands. Alan Menken, at a piano stationed in front of a grandfather clock, performed a career-skimming medley that ended, on the nose, with “A Whole New World,” from “Aladdin.” The lighting was reassuringly awful. Watching these bits was like getting stuck on a FaceTime call between the famous: cute at first, then a little boring, but endearingly nerdy, with Channel Thirteen fund-raiser-style energy.
It must be hard to make original work under these conditions of general menace, but some performers are persevering. The best I’ve seen in the past week was produced by the 24 Hour Plays, an organization whose regular stunt involves putting together plays and musicals that are written, rehearsed, and performed in the space of a single day. On Instagram, the group has been hosting a series of “viral monologues”: new, very short pieces that were commissioned from homebound playwrights and performed by homebound actors. The first installment, still available for viewing, was posted on March 17th. No surprise that the subject most on the minds of the playwrights was disaster. In a monologue by Lily Padilla, Marin Ireland, playing a dissolute young teacher, delivers, directly into a phone camera, what we soon realize is an application to be abducted by extraterrestrials. She’s ready to be beamed up and away from this cursed planet, but the question is whether the aliens will have her. “What I would contribute to your galaxy?” she asks, chewing her lip. “Well . . . I am enthusiastic. And I . . . think that’s an important quality on any team.” In just four minutes, Ireland, with her big, distant, unreadable eyes and expressive mouth, sketches a portrait of a woman who wants nothing more than to trade in her known life and surrender to the intoxicating unknown. “Honestly, I’m afraid the world is burning,” she says. “And it’s not that I’m afraid of dying or even catching fire. I just don’t want to watch.”
“I’m going to be vacuuming, if you want to go into the farthest room and start asking me questions.” Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Part of the pleasure of the 24 Hour viral monologues lies in seeing what actors do when left to their own devices, far from the smoothing, sculpting hand of a director. The selfie-video format has the feel of an audition tape, an allusion that the great Richard Kind makes explicit in a quick, clever monologue by Jesse Eisenberg, in which Kind asks Hollywood to cast him against type, for once, as a Gentile. In a piece by Stephen Adly Guirgis called “L.A. Yoga Motherfuckers,” Andre Royo sits in a car and launches into a disgruntled, hilariously unhinged rant about civility and “these Bernie bros and their Bernie hos,” who appear to have chased him out of a yoga class after he expressed support for Joe Biden. A coronavirus joke falls flat, but it’s good to see playwrights bringing new characters into the world to respond, in the moment, to the same things that we’re responding to. Free from motive, free of the harness of plot, they flicker briefly alive to share these strange times with us and then disappear, but not without leaving a mysterious, human trace.
In good times, we want performance to shake us and stir us, to horrify or delight, to rouse, to make us feel strong things. Daily living can dull the senses (including the moral one), and we ask the theatre to help us sharpen them again. But in a time of fear and strained feeling, when we are thinking non-stop about our welfare and its connection to other people, it’s comfort that we want. That’s why, while watching the 24 Hour viral monologues, I thought of one of my preferred forms of digital direct address, the soft-spoken parallel universe of the Internet genre called ASMR.
If you’re a digital native, you know what I’m talking about, so bear with me while I offer a brief introduction. ASMR is the name given to a physical sensation, without known neurological cause, of gentle and pervasive pleasure. The name, which is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” suggests some scientific authority that is as yet unfounded. No one knows what this thing is, or which neurons fire in the heads of the people who flock in droves to old Bob Ross videos on YouTube to bask in the unflappable lilt of his folksy patter and the calm, sure sound of his palette knife as it flicks and scrapes pigment onto the canvas.
One way to describe ASMR is as a kind of sustained tingling that begins in the scalp and spreads to the back and the limbs, a bit like the tickling that leads up to a sneeze. It’s as if a tiny hand has reached through the ear canal to deftly, tenderly, brush the surface of the brain with a feather. The shoulders relax; the jaw loosens. The feeling is induced by certain stimuli, or, in the language of the large Internet subculture of people who make videos to elicit an ASMR response in others, “triggers.” The sound of whispering and that of a low, calm voice are popular triggers, as are “mouth noises”: the light smack of lips parting, the clack of a hard consonant born at the back of the throat, the slur of the tongue sliding along the palate. Hundreds of ASMR videos on YouTube show women tapping and scratching long, manicured nails against countertops and makeup cases and the covers of hardback books. There are paper-crinkling videos, and videos in which women (it is usually, but not always, women; the genre has a bias toward a maternal, nurturing tone) pop bubble wrap, or plunge their fingers into bowls filled with buttons or M&M’s, or scatter and stroke the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I have listened to someone count in a slow whisper from one to a hundred in German, for no other reason than that it seemed soothing at the time.
Can this get a little creepy? Sure it can. I had thought that fixed notions of the eternal feminine were pretty much dead, and yet the band of young women who practice ASMR tend to take her as their guide. It can all get a bit haremesque. Click and click and click; one whisper chamber leads to another, and another, and another, the Internet turned, for a change, into a pleasure palace made by women for one another. The women of ASMR see themselves as caregivers, unofficial tenders to their fellow video watchers’ mental health, and, as totally nuts as that seems, they’re not altogether wrong.


newyorker--2020-03-30--The Soup Kitchen That the Coronavirus Couldn’t Stop

People still have to eat .
The soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles , the largest in the city , still feeds lunch to many of the hungriest among us , as it has done every weekday , including holidays , for thirty-eight years .
A major fire in the church in 1990 didn ’ t stop it , nor did September 11th or Superstorm Sandy .
It has never missed a day .
Lately , the serving station has been moved outdoors , to the church ’ s front gate , on Ninth Avenue , near @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offers a hot meal but packaged in a to-go sack with recyclable dishes , which are the biggest expense at the moment .
In non-pandemic times , the servers and other helpers include fifty or sixty volunteers .
Many of these are retirees , and to keep them safe the soup kitchen has told most not to come in .
Now all the preparation , serving , cleanup , and security is done by a core group of about fourteen soup-kitchen staff and select volunteers , who wear gloves , wash their hands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distancing.
” The Reverend Dr. Anna Pearson , the church ’ s rector and head of the soup kitchen , told a visitor , “ We don ’ t call it ‘ social distancing , ’ because what we offer here is not only food , it ’ s a human connection , even when we must stay physically farther apart.
” Early on a recent morning , the sun came down the city ’ s canyons , hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church .
Construction workers walked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going , to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River , and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings ’ steel frameworks were going up and down .
By eight o ’ clock , most of the staff had shown up , and some were preparing that day ’ s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato .
Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river .
First in line , by the church gate , a man in two hooded coats sat with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up , reading the News .
White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil .
Christopher Molinari , the head chef and culinary manager , said , “ When all the restaurants started closing , some sent us their leftover supplies , and we ’ re still improvising menus from what we got .
The food-service situation in the city changed so fast , some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled.
” By ten-fifteen , the line stretched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth .
A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another .
They complied , reluctantly , but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself .
A strange , almost taxicab-less version of traffic went by on Ninth—delivery trucks , police tow trucks , police cars , home-health-care-worker vans , almost empty buses .
Now and then a dog-walker , masked or swathed in a scarf @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , were enjoying the sunny day .
At ten-thirty , lunch service started .
The guests ( as the soup kitchen refers to them ) were admitted to the serving station one at a time , like travellers in airport security .
Opening their lunch sacks , they began to eat standing on the sidewalk or leaning against the Citi Bike stands , or they crossed to the courtyard of a public building across the street and sat on benches by a statue of a soldier in the First World War .
Michael @ @ @ @ @ @ @ C.O.O.
, stood watching .
“ We ’ re doing about eight hundred meals a day right now , ” he said .
“ We may have to increase that as more people lose their jobs .
At any time , we ’ re ready to go to a thousand a day , or higher.
” Christopher Molinari stepped outside to join him , along with Ginger Pierce , a volunteer , who was the executive chef at Jams , a farm-to-table restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street , until it recently shut down .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad economy donors might get nervous and the soup kitchen ’ s funding might go dry .
“ But we , the staff , are in it to stay , ” Molinari said .
“ This is a great place .
As other soup kitchens have closed , Holy Apostles is the last light still on .
Without us , a lot of our guests would probably fall by the wayside .
We ’ re not going to let that happen.
” On the avenue , masked and gloved delivery people from upscale @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trailers piled with green-and-yellow plastic bins .
♦ • How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic .
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
• How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
• Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ panic shoppers .
• The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

People still have to eat. The soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles, the largest in the city, still feeds lunch to many of the hungriest among us, as it has done every weekday, including holidays, for thirty-eight years. A major fire in the church in 1990 didn’t stop it, nor did September 11th or Superstorm Sandy. It has never missed a day. Lately, the serving station has been moved outdoors, to the church’s front gate, on Ninth Avenue, near West Twenty-eighth Street. The menu still offers a hot meal but packaged in a to-go sack with recyclable dishes, which are the biggest expense at the moment.
In non-pandemic times, the servers and other helpers include fifty or sixty volunteers. Many of these are retirees, and to keep them safe the soup kitchen has told most not to come in. Now all the preparation, serving, cleanup, and security is done by a core group of about fourteen soup-kitchen staff and select volunteers, who wear gloves, wash their hands a lot, and practice “physical distancing.” The Reverend Dr. Anna Pearson, the church’s rector and head of the soup kitchen, told a visitor, “We don’t call it ‘social distancing,’ because what we offer here is not only food, it’s a human connection, even when we must stay physically farther apart.”
Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled.”
By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself. A strange, almost taxicab-less version of traffic went by on Ninth—delivery trucks, police tow trucks, police cars, home-health-care-worker vans, almost empty buses. Now and then a dog-walker, masked or swathed in a scarf, passed. The dogs, unconcerned, were enjoying the sunny day. At ten-thirty, lunch service started. The guests (as the soup kitchen refers to them) were admitted to the serving station one at a time, like travellers in airport security. Opening their lunch sacks, they began to eat standing on the sidewalk or leaning against the Citi Bike stands, or they crossed to the courtyard of a public building across the street and sat on benches by a statue of a soldier in the First World War.
Michael Ottley, the soup kitchen’s C.O.O., stood watching. “We’re doing about eight hundred meals a day right now,” he said. “We may have to increase that as more people lose their jobs. At any time, we’re ready to go to a thousand a day, or higher.” Christopher Molinari stepped outside to join him, along with Ginger Pierce, a volunteer, who was the executive chef at Jams, a farm-to-table restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street, until it recently shut down. Reverend Pearson is concerned that in a bad economy donors might get nervous and the soup kitchen’s funding might go dry. “But we, the staff, are in it to stay,” Molinari said. “This is a great place. As other soup kitchens have closed, Holy Apostles is the last light still on. Without us, a lot of our guests would probably fall by the wayside. We’re not going to let that happen.” On the avenue, masked and gloved delivery people from upscale grocery stores went pedalling by, towing trailers piled with green-and-yellow plastic bins. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-03-30--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons April 6, 2020

“ Just because they all work from home now doesn ’ t mean I don ’ t still keep an @ @ @ @ @

“Just because they all work from home now doesn’t mean I don’t still keep an eye on them.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey


newyorker--2020-03-30--The Wait for COVID-19 Tests in Queens

The Wait for COVID-19 Tests in Queens

March 23rd : The wait for COVID-19 tests at Elmhurst Hospital .
Queens had the most confirmed coronavirus cases of @ @ @ @ @ hospitals are among the most overtaxed in the city .
Photograph by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao @ @ @ @

March 23rd: The wait for COVID-19 tests at Elmhurst Hospital. Queens had the most confirmed coronavirus cases of any borough, and its hospitals are among the most overtaxed in the city.
Photograph by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao for The New Yorker