newyorker--2020-05-14--Telling the Stories of the Dead Is Essential Work

The contest between story and statistic began with the second death .
More than eighty-three thousand people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone—one every minute last month , several hundred a day in some cities .
One of the many challenges the crisis has presented is how to count so many deaths ; another is how to honor them .
It is not safe to gather for individual funerals or memorials , much less for community-wide vigils at city halls or courthouses , the way we have in the past for victims of gun violence or acts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states have ordered their flags to be flown at half-staff to remember the dead , but there has been no national moment of silence or day of mourning , no collective call to pause and grieve together .
A few television news programs , including “ All In with Chris Hayes , ” Nicolle Wallace ’ s “ Deadline : White House , ” and “ PBS NewsHour , ” have committed to airing weekly or daily memorial segments , an echo of the way the names of casualties of war were read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religious organizations have added prayers for those who mourn and requiems for those who have died to their regular worship services .
But the dead , especially as the pandemic takes an ever-greater toll , too easily dissolve into a plural noun , their identities fading as their number grows .
Such is the perverse mathematics of tragedy : the staggering specificity of any one life lost ; the overwhelming obscurity of lives lost .
In the early days of the virus , it was possible to read about individual cases as they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death as it was announced , but , as the virus spread into all fifty states and the death count grew , it became difficult to keep pace .
Already , even though the tragedy is far from over , it is almost impossible to comprehend its scale .
If you have ever read some of the nearly three thousand names carved into bronze parapets around the edges of the reflecting pools at the World Trade Center , or seen even a portion of the more than forty-eight thousand memorial panels of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial etched with fifty-eight thousand names , then you have been moved and sobered by mass deaths that are now dwarfed by our current one .
Even just speaking the names of those Americans who have so far died of COVID-19 would take more than three days .
Yet one way of recognizing the dead is taking place all around us , even under our strange and isolated conditions .
In the search for plague literature these last few weeks—the welcome if grim resurgence of interest in Albert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Thucydides—we have perhaps overlooked its simplest form .
The obituary is an ancient genre , sometimes arranged into verse but more often written in prose , originally carved into stone , then recorded on scrolls , and lately printed in newspapers or hosted on Web sites .
Although an obituary is still wildly far from complete as a record of a life , it is as close as we come in times like these to squaring the demands of statistic and story ; obituaries are a way to memorialize the dead in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reporting the facts of people ’ s deaths , but also recording the facts of their lives .
An obituary may be the briefest kind of biography , but , in the age of the coronavirus , even they have started to run long—not individually but , tragically , collectively .
Individual obituaries are measured in words or inches , but lately their page counts have become notable .
The Enterprise , a daily newspaper in Brockton , Massachusetts , went from three obituaries the week of the first coronavirus case in its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weeks later .
In New Orleans , the Advocate has seen more than double its usual number of obituaries for weeks now ; in New Jersey , the Star-Ledger went from seventeen obituaries one week last year to a hundred and nine that same week this year .
Across social media , users have shared videos of themselves turning the pages of their local papers or posted tiled pictures of all the pages of death notices , the obituaries blurring into a yearbook of the dead .
So drastic is the increase that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outlets are running stories quantifying the change , confirming for readers that , yes , there are many more obituaries than usual .
That increase is not just because of the coronavirus but also because families , unable to gather to eulogize the dead together in person , are turning more frequently to death notices to inform their communities and commemorate the loss of a loved one .
These obituaries appear in many different venues .
There are online portals for obituaries , and funeral homes often host Web pages for the dead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continue to offer the experience of print and paper , a physical remembrance that can be clipped and placed in a family Bible or tucked into a picture frame , and it is in these pages that the quantity of lives lost feels most visible .
So is the reason we lost them .
Taken together , these obituaries illustrate some of the trends that scientists and epidemiologists have been warning us of : not only that so many could die but that the elderly would die in larger numbers ; that certain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , were more vulnerable ; and that the racial disparities that plague our health system under the best of times would be reflected , or even intensified , by the pandemic .
But the obituaries themselves can replicate some of these same biases : for those submitted by private individuals , the time and resources required to produce them and pay for their placement are more easily borne by some families than others ; for those produced by professional writers , systemic biases can make some lives seem more newsworthy than others .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ death notices are the most threadbare , generally just indicating the name of the deceased and the date of death—a perfunctory , quasi-official public statement originally intended to let heirs and creditors know how to collect their inheritance or debt .
Even those are welcome during social distancing , when it is more difficult to spread the word that someone has died .
For a nominal fee , survivors can buy extra words , paying for as much additional space as they want in order to share whatever information about the deceased they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to revel in the distinctiveness of those we knew : the way they cooked their pasta , how they spent their misspent youth , where they went on their honeymoon , or why they never left home .
This distinctiveness is especially stark when so many remarkably different lives have ended because of the same disease .
Obituaries are how we know that among those who have died from COVID-19 in this country are a ninety-seven-year-old survivor of the bombing of Pearl Harbor , who years later had a son born on December @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the daughter of a coal miner and a cook , who died , at the age of twenty-eight , in a health clinic in the Navajo Nation , leaving behind a year-old daughter ; and a couple from Wauwatosa , Wisconsin , married for seventy-three years , who died within a few hours of each other , their hospital beds moved close together so that they could hold hands .
We know that the virus took a high-school senior in Illinois , born with an immune deficiency , who loved memes and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after her eighteenth birthday ; as well as a paramedic from Colorado , who came out of retirement to drive an ambulance in New York City and got the virus three weeks later .
A parade of ambulances and fire trucks escorted his body to the airport ; another was waiting in Denver to carry him home .
Obituaries are also how we know about some of the many other deaths caused less directly by the coronavirus , including that of a forty-three-year-old fisherman from Maine , who died from an overdose after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when he could no longer attend recovery meetings in person .

The contest between story and statistic began with the second death. More than eighty-three thousand people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone—one every minute last month, several hundred a day in some cities. One of the many challenges the crisis has presented is how to count so many deaths; another is how to honor them. It is not safe to gather for individual funerals or memorials, much less for community-wide vigils at city halls or courthouses, the way we have in the past for victims of gun violence or acts of terrorism or natural disasters. Some states have ordered their flags to be flown at half-staff to remember the dead, but there has been no national moment of silence or day of mourning, no collective call to pause and grieve together.
A few television news programs, including “All In with Chris Hayes,” Nicolle Wallace’s “Deadline: White House,” and “PBS NewsHour,” have committed to airing weekly or daily memorial segments, an echo of the way the names of casualties of war were read aloud in decades past, and many religious organizations have added prayers for those who mourn and requiems for those who have died to their regular worship services. But the dead, especially as the pandemic takes an ever-greater toll, too easily dissolve into a plural noun, their identities fading as their number grows. Such is the perverse mathematics of tragedy: the staggering specificity of any one life lost; the overwhelming obscurity of lives lost. In the early days of the virus, it was possible to read about individual cases as they were diagnosed, and then every individual death as it was announced, but, as the virus spread into all fifty states and the death count grew, it became difficult to keep pace.
Already, even though the tragedy is far from over, it is almost impossible to comprehend its scale. If you have ever read some of the nearly three thousand names carved into bronze parapets around the edges of the reflecting pools at the World Trade Center, or seen even a portion of the more than forty-eight thousand memorial panels of the AIDS Quilt, or walked along the granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial etched with fifty-eight thousand names, then you have been moved and sobered by mass deaths that are now dwarfed by our current one. Even just speaking the names of those Americans who have so far died of COVID-19 would take more than three days.
Yet one way of recognizing the dead is taking place all around us, even under our strange and isolated conditions. In the search for plague literature these last few weeks—the welcome if grim resurgence of interest in Albert Camus and Daniel Defoe, Boccaccio and Thucydides—we have perhaps overlooked its simplest form. The obituary is an ancient genre, sometimes arranged into verse but more often written in prose, originally carved into stone, then recorded on scrolls, and lately printed in newspapers or hosted on Web sites. Although an obituary is still wildly far from complete as a record of a life, it is as close as we come in times like these to squaring the demands of statistic and story; obituaries are a way to memorialize the dead in a few hundred or thousand words, ostensibly reporting the facts of people’s deaths, but also recording the facts of their lives. An obituary may be the briefest kind of biography, but, in the age of the coronavirus, even they have started to run long—not individually but, tragically, collectively.
Individual obituaries are measured in words or inches, but lately their page counts have become notable. The Enterprise, a daily newspaper in Brockton, Massachusetts, went from three obituaries the week of the first coronavirus case in its county to three pages of obituaries four weeks later. In New Orleans, the Advocate has seen more than double its usual number of obituaries for weeks now; in New Jersey, the Star-Ledger went from seventeen obituaries one week last year to a hundred and nine that same week this year. Across social media, users have shared videos of themselves turning the pages of their local papers or posted tiled pictures of all the pages of death notices, the obituaries blurring into a yearbook of the dead. So drastic is the increase that the news desks of some of these outlets are running stories quantifying the change, confirming for readers that, yes, there are many more obituaries than usual. That increase is not just because of the coronavirus but also because families, unable to gather to eulogize the dead together in person, are turning more frequently to death notices to inform their communities and commemorate the loss of a loved one.
These obituaries appear in many different venues. There are online portals for obituaries, and funeral homes often host Web pages for the dead whose services they handle. But newspapers continue to offer the experience of print and paper, a physical remembrance that can be clipped and placed in a family Bible or tucked into a picture frame, and it is in these pages that the quantity of lives lost feels most visible. So is the reason we lost them. Taken together, these obituaries illustrate some of the trends that scientists and epidemiologists have been warning us of: not only that so many could die but that the elderly would die in larger numbers; that certain professions, from doctors to grocery clerks, were more vulnerable; and that the racial disparities that plague our health system under the best of times would be reflected, or even intensified, by the pandemic. But the obituaries themselves can replicate some of these same biases: for those submitted by private individuals, the time and resources required to produce them and pay for their placement are more easily borne by some families than others; for those produced by professional writers, systemic biases can make some lives seem more newsworthy than others.
Of all forms of obituary, paid death notices are the most threadbare, generally just indicating the name of the deceased and the date of death—a perfunctory, quasi-official public statement originally intended to let heirs and creditors know how to collect their inheritance or debt. Even those are welcome during social distancing, when it is more difficult to spread the word that someone has died. For a nominal fee, survivors can buy extra words, paying for as much additional space as they want in order to share whatever information about the deceased they see fit. Obituaries offer a chance to revel in the distinctiveness of those we knew: the way they cooked their pasta, how they spent their misspent youth, where they went on their honeymoon, or why they never left home.
This distinctiveness is especially stark when so many remarkably different lives have ended because of the same disease. Obituaries are how we know that among those who have died from COVID-19 in this country are a ninety-seven-year-old survivor of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, who years later had a son born on December 7th; a former Miss Western Navajo, the daughter of a coal miner and a cook, who died, at the age of twenty-eight, in a health clinic in the Navajo Nation, leaving behind a year-old daughter; and a couple from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, married for seventy-three years, who died within a few hours of each other, their hospital beds moved close together so that they could hold hands. We know that the virus took a high-school senior in Illinois, born with an immune deficiency, who loved memes and electronic music, and died two weeks after her eighteenth birthday; as well as a paramedic from Colorado, who came out of retirement to drive an ambulance in New York City and got the virus three weeks later. A parade of ambulances and fire trucks escorted his body to the airport; another was waiting in Denver to carry him home. Obituaries are also how we know about some of the many other deaths caused less directly by the coronavirus, including that of a forty-three-year-old fisherman from Maine, who died from an overdose after nearly a year’s sobriety, when he could no longer attend recovery meetings in person.
These are just some of the tens of thousands of men and women lost to the pandemic. Only a fraction of the dead have received obituaries, and while most of those have appeared only in local outlets, some have been memorialized by professional writers in national papers. Early in March, the Times began planning a section similar to the one it published after the September 11th terrorist attacks, to memorialize the victims of another national tragedy. “But this time there was no finite number of the dead,” Daniel J. Wakin, an obituary editor, observed in an explanation of the section. “No geographical point united them. Their backgrounds were of infinite variety. They did not die all at once on a bright blue morning.” Still, the Times felt its series should try to overcome those challenges, and, for the last few weeks, “Those We’ve Lost” has attempted “to convey the human toll of Covid-19 by putting faces and names to the growing numbers of the dead, and to portray them in all of their variety.”
Similar efforts are under way at other papers, including the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. At the Washington Post, the obituary editor Adam Bernstein manages a small team of three staffers and a few freelancers who together do the work of “getting readers to care about people they’ve never heard of, especially now that we are all stuck at home, yearning for connections with other people, even strangers.” He knows that resources are finite—not just the time it takes to report, write, and edit the obituaries but also space in the newspaper and, perhaps most limited of all, the attention of readers. The news desk produced a feature in early April called “The First 1,000,” which told the story of the first thousand Americans known to have died of the coronavirus. Eighty thousand more deaths and counting later, that kind of comprehensive coverage is beyond any newspaper, but Bernstein estimates that the Post’s obituaries desk has continued to produce roughly twice as many pieces as it normally does. This is not only because of the coronavirus but, as Bernstein is quick to note, because deaths of all other kinds continue in the midst of the pandemic. “The workload is daunting in the best of times,” he says, “but this has turned into a deluge.”
For Bernstein and his colleagues in the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, of which he is the president, no deluge can distract from their craft. Bernstein has always considered obituaries the best kind of feature writing on the tightest deadline with the highest stakes, but when he first started writing them, twenty-one years ago, few journalists would have agreed. Newspaper obituaries are as old as newspapers, and readers have always loved them, but there was little obvious admiration for them within the profession. They very rarely break news, the veil of neutrality can easily slip into approbation or judgment depending on the subject, and the obits desk was assumed by many to be the last stop before retirement or oblivion. But eventually the section came into its own, celebrated in Marilyn Johnson’s “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” and in the more recent documentary “Obit,” directed by Vanessa Gould, which follows the obituary writers at the Times.
Both the film and the book bring into focus what readers have long cherished about the form: the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality. The best of them read like short stories, introducing us to memorable characters and confronting us, in ways that can range from amusing to moving, with the diversity of human experience.
All this helps explain why so many readers have been drawn to the obituary section during the coronavirus pandemic, finding in its swelling pages some of what has been missing from everyday life: an intimate connection with other people. It is the tragic version of what life on its best days used to offer us, chance encounters with strangers and the joyful serendipity of learning a little about their lives. But, of course, these growing obituary sections also quantify the fear we all feel, and the grief that is creeping closer to all of us. Local newspapers, especially, have provided a home for this coverage, memorializing lives large and small. As more and more of those papers have disappeared, people have rightfully lamented the loss of investigative journalism and community reporting, but obituary desks were some of the first to be scrapped when the news industry started to constrict, and there are far fewer venues for a service whose importance has seldom in our history been more obvious. So many lives that never made the front page used to get at least a little space closer to the back; now even that foothold in the historical record is imperilled.
Social media also provides a space for grieving, and it is there that some of these local obituaries have been shared over the past few weeks, spreading from one state to all fifty, from one small network to national attention. To some extent, obituaries are popular now for the same reasons they have always been popular: a curiosity about lives both everyday and extraordinary, plus a certain actuarial self-interest. But they are also serving as a kind of admonishment, a record of the dead that doubles as a warning for the living. Look, the dead say from their obituaries, we are not numbers; we were real people, like you and those you love.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-14--Trump Wishes He Could Replace Fauci with the Doctor Who Saved Him from Vietnam

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald Trump wishes he could replace Anthony Fauci with the podiatrist who helped him avoid serving in the Vietnam War , Trump said on Thursday .
Speaking to reporters , Trump disparaged Fauci by arguing that he is not “ half the doctor ” that his former podiatrist was .
“ You tell Tony to do something , and he says he has to look at a bunch of numbers and charts first , and even then he maybe doesn ’ t do what you told him to , ” Trump complained .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say I had bone spurs and , boom , ten minutes later you got the note.
” If his podiatrist were still alive , Trump said , “ I would tell him that the country was at war with coronavirus , and he would get me out of it , no questions asked.
” He also questioned whether Fauci was as medically qualified as his former podiatrist .
“ An epidemiologist like Tony specializes in just one thing , ” Trump said .
“ A podiatrist has to know about both feet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knowledge , medically speaking.
” Trump grew emotional as he recalled the “ unbelievable service ” that his beloved podiatrist performed for him .
“ That doctor saved lives , ” he said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump wishes he could replace Anthony Fauci with the podiatrist who helped him avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Trump said on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters, Trump disparaged Fauci by arguing that he is not “half the doctor” that his former podiatrist was.
“You tell Tony to do something, and he says he has to look at a bunch of numbers and charts first, and even then he maybe doesn’t do what you told him to,” Trump complained. “You asked my foot doctor in Queens to say I had bone spurs and, boom, ten minutes later you got the note.”
If his podiatrist were still alive, Trump said, “I would tell him that the country was at war with coronavirus, and he would get me out of it, no questions asked.”
He also questioned whether Fauci was as medically qualified as his former podiatrist. “An epidemiologist like Tony specializes in just one thing,” Trump said. “A podiatrist has to know about both feet. That’s twice as much knowledge, medically speaking.”
Trump grew emotional as he recalled the “unbelievable service” that his beloved podiatrist performed for him. “That doctor saved lives,” he said.


newyorker--2020-05-15--Joe Biden’s Pitch to the Left

Joe Biden’s Pitch to the Left

Subscribers to The New Yorker ’ s new 2020 election newsletter , On the Trail , received this piece in their in-boxes .
Sign up to receive future installments .
“ We hear this every Presidential election cycle , ” Harry Reid , the former Senate Majority Leader , told me in February , on the eve of the Nevada caucuses .
“ At least every one I ’ ve been involved in for these many decades .
‘ The Party is moving too far to the left .
It ’ s just terrible .
What are we going to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when the primaries are over , the candidate moves back to the middle.
” At the time , we were talking about what it would mean for the Democratic Party to have a democratic socialist as its standard-bearer .
Bernie Sanders appeared very likely to become the Democratic Presidential nominee .
The question of the moment was , how would the ascendent left win over the middle ?
But , of course , Sanders has suspended his campaign , and Joe Biden is the Party ’ s de facto nominee .
And that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Party have seen so many times .
As the primaries ended , the general election began , and the coronavirus crisis hit , Biden , catching up to his own nomination , has spent as much time trying to move left as move forward .
“ A united party is key to winning the White House this November , ” Biden tweeted on Wednesday , linking to an article about the task forces that he and Sanders—erstwhile opponents , now allies—have appointed and charged with working toward Party unity in six @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care , immigration , education , criminal-justice reform , and the economy .
“ The work of the task forces will be essential to identifying ways to build on our progress and not simply turn the clock back to a time before Donald Trump—but transform our country , ” Biden wrote .
The appointees to the task forces include pairings of new progressive stars with veterans of the Obama Administration : former Secretary of State John Kerry and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will co-chair the climate-change group ; Representative Pramila Jayapal and former Surgeon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group .
For much of the primaries , Biden ’ s rhetoric was that Donald Trump was an aberration , and that the soul of America needed to be restored .
Now he ’ s saying that the country can not “ turn the clock back.
” The blend of old and new faces on the task forces suggest that a Biden Administration will be a bit of both .
The left is unlikely to be completely won over .
After Tara Reade , a former Biden staffer in the Senate , came @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sexually assaulting her in the nineteen-nineties , a number of prominent writers on the left called for Biden ’ s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket .
The Old Left has been warning the New Left not to reject Biden .
The former Vice-President ’ s consolidation of progressives in Washington has been more successful .
Sanders has endorsed him ; Elizabeth Warren has co-authored an op-ed with Biden on coronavirus oversight .
In many ways , the left has found a more willing partner in Biden than they have in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which has ignored calls for universal basic income , rent cancellation , and other progressive-backed responses to the economic crisis brought on by the viral outbreak .
The task forces , and what comes of them , will be worth paying attention to as signs for how successful Biden can be in consolidating the factions he ’ s wooing .
Ocasio-Cortez in particular has been adamant that unity is not a state of being but a process .
Last week , asked why she had yet to fully endorse Biden , she told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ means , you know , we have come to a place where we ’ ve developed a vision together not just for winning in November but for getting our country to a better place .
”

Subscribers to The New Yorker’s new 2020 election newsletter, On the Trail, received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
“We hear this every Presidential election cycle,” Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, told me in February, on the eve of the Nevada caucuses. “At least every one I’ve been involved in for these many decades. ‘The Party is moving too far to the left. It’s just terrible. What are we going to do about it?’ Well, when the primaries are over, the candidate moves back to the middle.” At the time, we were talking about what it would mean for the Democratic Party to have a democratic socialist as its standard-bearer. Bernie Sanders appeared very likely to become the Democratic Presidential nominee. The question of the moment was, how would the ascendent left win over the middle? But, of course, Sanders has suspended his campaign, and Joe Biden is the Party’s de-facto nominee. And that’s complicated the scenario that Reid and the Party have seen so many times. As the primaries ended, the general election began, and the coronavirus crisis hit, Biden, catching up to his own nomination, has spent as much time trying to move left as move forward.
“A united party is key to winning the White House this November,” Biden tweeted on Wednesday, linking to an article about the task forces that he and Sanders—erstwhile opponents, now allies—have appointed and charged with working toward Party unity in six policy areas: climate change, health care, immigration, education, criminal-justice reform, and the economy. “The work of the task forces will be essential to identifying ways to build on our progress and not simply turn the clock back to a time before Donald Trump—but transform our country,” Biden wrote. The appointees to the task forces include pairings of new progressive stars with veterans of the Obama Administration: former Secretary of State John Kerry and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will co-chair the climate-change group; Representative Pramila Jayapal and former surgeon general Vivek Murthy will co-chair the health-care group. For much of the primaries, Biden’s rhetoric was that Donald Trump was an aberration, and that the soul of America needed to be restored. Now he’s saying that the country cannot “turn the clock back.” The blend of old and new faces on the task forces suggest that a Biden Administration will be a bit of both.
The left is unlikely to be completely won over. After Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer in the Senate, came forward in March and accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in the nineteen-nineties, a number of prominent writers on the left called for Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket. The Old Left has been warning the New Left not to reject Biden. The former Vice-President’s consolidation of progressives in Washington has been more successful. Sanders has endorsed him; Elizabeth Warren has co-authored an op-ed with Biden on coronavirus oversight. In many ways, the left has found a more willing partner in Biden than it has in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress, which has ignored calls for universal basic income, rent cancellation, and other progressive-backed responses to the economic crisis brought on by the viral outbreak. The task forces, and what comes of them, will be worth paying attention to as signs for how successful Biden can be in consolidating the factions he’s wooing. Ocasio-Cortez in particular has been adamant that unity is not a state of being but a process. Last week, asked why she had yet to fully endorse Biden, she told NPR, “I think an endorsement means, you know, we have come to a place where we’ve developed a vision together not just for winning in November but for getting our country to a better place.”


newyorker--2020-05-15--Questions for Scientists During Any Downtime They Might Have

Why do ten days ’ worth of groceries last six days ?
If I meditate for ten seconds once , is the psychological benefit high or very high ?
After how many consecutive days of wear do gym shorts cease to be a discrete object and become a second skin ?
Does the love I feel for the scallions growing in a glass by my window release the same neurochemicals as love for a human person does ?
Is the neckbeard a recessive trait or is there an evolutionary benefit to what ’ s happening to my face ?
Is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the social scientists ) to say “ I ’ m eating for two ” when the two is me and my patchy , pathetic neckbeard ?
Where should I position the light source relative to my face on video calls so that I don ’ t look so “ very , very sad , Zach ” ?
Yesterday , I made devilled eggs and it was not Thanksgiving .
Is this a medical emergency ?
Why does one side of the omelette take one minute to cook , but the other side takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bottle of cold-brew concentrate makes eight glasses of cold brew , but I just pour it all in a glass , is that one glass of cold brew or eight glasses ?
How many episodes of “ RuPaul ’ s Drag Race ” can be watched in a single day without causing Brain Damage Eleganza Extravaganza ?
Is there a Nobel Prize for going back and reading the books you bought in college but never actually opened ?
I ’ m considering letting my boyfriend cut my hair .
How do you recommend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why does thirty-day delivery from Amazon take three hours , but waiting in a grocery-store line for three minutes takes seventeen years ?
My step tracker said that I took zero steps yesterday .
How should I go about donating my body to science ?
When is an omelette a scramble ?
Is a frittata just a fat omelette ?
How many eggs can one eat before one becomes an egg ?
How many online history courses can one take before officially being declared a straight grandpa ?
How much of a jog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ categorized as a walk ?
If you receive ten nudes on Tuesday , fifteen nudes on Wednesday , and ten nudes on Thursday , will I ever know love ?
How can one manage to dirty every single dish one owns in a single calendar day ?
How do I turn off Instagram Live notifications ?

Why do ten days’ worth of groceries last six days?
If I meditate for ten seconds once, is the psychological benefit high or very high?
After how many consecutive days of wear do gym shorts cease to be a discrete object and become a second skin?
Does the love I feel for the scallions growing in a glass by my window release the same neurochemicals as love for a human person does?
Is the neckbeard a recessive trait or is there an evolutionary benefit to what’s happening to my face?
Is it culturally acceptable (this is for the social scientists) to say “I’m eating for two” when the two is me and my patchy, pathetic neckbeard?
Where should I position the light source relative to my face on video calls so that I don’t look so “very, very sad, Zach”?
Yesterday, I made devilled eggs and it was not Thanksgiving. Is this a medical emergency?
Why does one side of the omelette take one minute to cook, but the other side takes one second to cook?
If a bottle of cold-brew concentrate makes eight glasses of cold brew, but I just pour it all in a glass, is that one glass of cold brew or eight glasses?
How many episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can be watched in a single day without causing Brain Damage Eleganza Extravaganza?
Is there a Nobel Prize for going back and reading the books you bought in college but never actually opened?
I’m considering letting my boyfriend cut my hair. How do you recommend I go about getting a boyfriend?
Why does thirty-day delivery from Amazon take three hours, but waiting in a grocery-store line for three minutes takes seventeen years?
My step tracker said that I took zero steps yesterday. How should I go about donating my body to science?
When is an omelette a scramble? Is a frittata just a fat omelette? How many eggs can one eat before one becomes an egg?
How many online history courses can one take before officially being declared a straight grandpa?
How much of a jog has to be jogged to not be categorized as a walk?
If you receive ten nudes on Tuesday, fifteen nudes on Wednesday, and ten nudes on Thursday, will I ever know love?
How can one manage to dirty every single dish one owns in a single calendar day?
How do I turn off Instagram Live notifications?


newyorker--2020-05-15--Ballet Hispánico’s Weekly Watch Parties

Ballet Hispánico’s Weekly Watch Parties

Ballet Hispánico had big plans for its fiftieth anniversary : two weeks at the Joyce , new works , a @ @ @ @ @ ’ s limited to releasing content online , with weekly watch parties ( “ El @ @ @ @ @ 20 ) .
Still , there ’ s a lot to celebrate .
Born out @ @ @ @ @ and ensemble , Hispánico is now a thriving institution with gorgeous dancers .
Two of @ @ @ @ @ Melissa Verdecia and Lyvan Verdecia ( above , sheltering in Miami ) , represent the @ @ @ @ @ , and amazingly versatile .

Ballet Hispánico had big plans for its fiftieth anniversary: two weeks at the Joyce, new works, a retrospective. Instead, it’s limited to releasing content online, with weekly watch parties (“El Beso” is on May 20). Still, there’s a lot to celebrate. Born out of a small Manhattan school and ensemble, Hispánico is now a thriving institution with gorgeous dancers. Two of them, the married couple Melissa Verdecia and Lyvan Verdecia (above, sheltering in Miami), represent the new Ballet Hispánico—vibrant, diverse, and amazingly versatile.


newyorker--2020-05-15--You’ve Got Chain E-Mail

You’ve Got Chain E-Mail

God only knows when it began , but I can tell you this : it is never going to end .
I don ’ t mean the pandemic , the origins of which are more or less clear , temporally if not yet biologically , and I don ’ t mean our great national hunkering-down , which hadn ’ t even started back on the Groundhog Day it now so resembles .
I mean a minor , unexpected , and vexing byproduct of them both : the feel-good chain e-mail , some version of which you have almost certainly received @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home .
Friends !
I know these are trying times , so , in the interest of bringing a little joy into all of our lives , I ’ m inviting you to join in sharing a beloved poem/recipe/Bible verse/inspiring quote/home workout/elephant joke/photo of yourself in your favorite Renaissance Faire outfit/drawing of a cat in a litter box .
This is meant to be FUN !
, so please don ’ t spend too much time on it .
It shouldn ’ t take more than fifty hours of wondering how to graciously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hours of ignoring it followed by six hours of obsessively refining your recipe for microwave chocolate-chip cheesecake in a mug .
When you ’ re done , simply add your name to the seventh empty slot below , copy and paste this note into a new e-mail , move my name to the third slot above your own , hit “ reply all ” to send your response to the non-blind-carbon-copied strangers on this note , then forward it to twenty friends you never want to speak to again .
I am being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are trying times , and , assuming you steer clear of pyramid schemes , I can think of no good reason , if it makes you feel even the slightest bit better , to discourage you from sending Joyce Kilmer or Psalm 91 or Chicken Surprise winging around the Internet .
I can , however , think of a very good reason to discourage you from sending any of those things to me , which is that your Great Chain of Being E-mailed will promptly rupture .
In every one of these that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are numerous , I am the weak link , by which I mean I am the intransigent link .
The issue is not that I am an introvert , liable to feel invaded by what one astute commentator called , in describing these e-mails , “ social homework.
” Nor am I temporarily running a third- , fifth- , and eighth-grade classroom out of my kitchen while simultaneously running a legal-aid office out of my bedroom .
As a childless magazine writer whose peaceful rural home makes a quarantine look basically indistinguishable from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ excuse of being too overburdened to rummage through my cookbooks .
But am I going to send you my favorite soufflé recipe ?
I am not .
There is a scene in “ The Sopranos ” ( I can tell you this because , in a rare welcome side effect of stay-at-home orders , I finally got around to watching it ) in which , following the death of Tony Soprano ’ s mother , his sister tries to convince everyone gathered for the memorial service to share a special memory of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of organized emoting is that it is wildly at odds with the funerary traditions of Italian-Catholic mobsters .
Another is that the late Mrs .
Soprano was so manipulative , embittered , narcissistic , and homicidal as to render her entirely eulogy-proof .
But the chief problem is that Tony ’ s sister , being similarly manipulative and murderous , is incapable of proposing the idea without coming across as equal parts deranged , disingenuous , and smarmy , like Madame Defarge doing a turn as a camp counsellor .
Watching the scene @ @ @ @ @ @ @ studiously examine their freshly shined loafers , I felt a combination of vicarious horror and dismayed recognition .
This was a month or so ago , and already it felt strikingly familiar : a bunch of people who don ’ t want to participate in something but also don ’ t want to express their real feelings about it , given the prevailing atmosphere of solemnity , solidarity , and grief .
All this is to say that there are few things in life more irritating than coerced participation in an allegedly uplifting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between that and just being a good sport can be a fine one , and it is drawn in different places by different people .
The family dinner where , guest or not , everyone at the table is expected to join hands in prayer before tucking into the pot roast ?
To my mind , perfectly acceptable .
The corporate retreat where everyone is expected to take part in restorative breathing exercises before the budget meeting ?
Unforgivable .
You may have the opposite feeling .
Because of these differences in opinion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about feel-good chain e-mails—to claim that whether they are a wholesome stress-reliever or a demanding intrusion is simply a matter of taste .
But that is not quite true .
I love taste .
It is infinitely branching , endlessly interesting , and , all told , one of the most delightful and comic realms of human existence .
But the thing about taste is that , although we all absorb some of it from outside influences , it is , by definition , a private matter—which is exactly what it ceases to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone else .
That is the problem with the chain e-mail .
Other people ’ s vinyl recliners do not show up in your living room and require you to sit on them .
The defining feature of chain e-mails , in other words , is that , unlike taste , everybody is obliged to share them , in every sense : endorse them , participate in them , send them along to others .
For those of us who are disinclined to do so , that makes them beneath their banal , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s not just that they are a pain in the neck .
It ’ s that they are designed to make you seem like a pain in the neck , a feat they achieve by falling somewhat short of being actually horrible : because they are basically well-intentioned and , in the scheme of things , basically inoffensive , it is impossible to criticize them without seeming mean-spirited , especially in these dire times .
Which is a problem , because it is precisely in these dire times that the feel-good chain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only before the coronavirus but before SARS and before MERS and before a quarter of the world ’ s current population was even born , has suddenly come back to haunt us .
When the chain e-mail itself was born is , as I said , a matter of some mystery .
To an unimpressed recipient , it may seem like the regrettable offspring of multilevel marketing and the four-page family holiday letter , but in fact its roots are much older than both of those .
One person who has tried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Daniel W. VanArsdale , the curator of an archive of more than nine hundred chain letters and author of a digital publication called Chain Letter Evolution .
VanArsdale traces the form back more than a thousand years , to early religious texts that include demands for their own reproduction and promises of good fortune or eternal salvation to those who comply .
But it took many centuries , plus the rise of printing technologies , widespread literacy , and international mail , for the chain letter to assume its modern form .

God only knows when it began, but I can tell you this: it is never going to end. I don’t mean the pandemic, the origins of which are more or less clear, temporally if not yet biologically, and I don’t mean our great national hunkering-down, which hadn’t even started back on the Groundhog Day it now so resembles. I mean a minor, unexpected, and vexing byproduct of them both: the feel-good chain e-mail, some version of which you have almost certainly received since you’ve been stuck at home. Friends! I know these are trying times, so, in the interest of bringing a little joy into all of our lives, I’m inviting you to join in sharing a beloved poem/recipe/Bible verse/inspiring quote/home workout/elephant joke/photo of yourself in your favorite Renaissance Faire outfit/drawing of a cat in a litter box. This is meant to be FUN!, so please don’t spend too much time on it. It shouldn’t take more than fifty hours of wondering how to graciously decline this request followed by another thirty hours of ignoring it followed by six hours of obsessively refining your recipe for microwave chocolate-chip cheesecake in a mug. When you’re done, simply add your name to the seventh empty slot below, copy and paste this note into a new e-mail, move my name to the third slot above your own, hit “reply all” to send your response to the non-blind-carbon-copied strangers on this note, then forward it to twenty friends you never want to speak to again.
I am being, perhaps, overly harsh. These are trying times, and, assuming you steer clear of pyramid schemes, I can think of no good reason, if it makes you feel even the slightest bit better, to discourage you from sending Joyce Kilmer or Psalm 91 or Chicken Surprise winging around the Internet. I can, however, think of a very good reason to discourage you from sending any of those things to me, which is that your Great Chain of Being E-mailed will promptly rupture. In every one of these that I have ever received, and they are numerous, I am the weak link, by which I mean I am the intransigent link. The issue is not that I am an introvert, liable to feel invaded by what one astute commentator called, in describing these e-mails, “social homework.” Nor am I temporarily running a third-, fifth-, and eighth-grade classroom out of my kitchen while simultaneously running a legal-aid office out of my bedroom. As a childless magazine writer whose peaceful rural home makes a quarantine look basically indistinguishable from Yaddo, I do not have the excuse of being too overburdened to rummage through my cookbooks.
But am I going to send you my favorite soufflé recipe? I am not. There is a scene in “The Sopranos” (I can tell you this because, in a rare welcome side effect of stay-at-home orders, I finally got around to watching it) in which, following the death of Tony Soprano’s mother, his sister tries to convince everyone gathered for the memorial service to share a special memory of the deceased. One problem with this kind of organized emoting is that it is wildly at odds with the funerary traditions of Italian-Catholic mobsters. Another is that the late Mrs. Soprano was so manipulative, embittered, narcissistic, and homicidal as to render her entirely eulogy-proof. But the chief problem is that Tony’s sister, being similarly manipulative and murderous, is incapable of proposing the idea without coming across as equal parts deranged, disingenuous, and smarmy, like Madame Defarge doing a turn as a camp counsellor. Watching the scene, in which all the other mourners studiously examine their freshly shined loafers, I felt a combination of vicarious horror and dismayed recognition. This was a month or so ago, and already it felt strikingly familiar: a bunch of people who don’t want to participate in something but also don’t want to express their real feelings about it, given the prevailing atmosphere of solemnity, solidarity, and grief.
All this is to say that there are few things in life more irritating than coerced participation in an allegedly uplifting group activity. Granted, the line between that and just being a good sport can be a fine one, and it is drawn in different places by different people. The family dinner where, guest or not, everyone at the table is expected to join hands in prayer before tucking into the pot roast? To my mind, perfectly acceptable. The corporate retreat where everyone is expected to take part in restorative breathing exercises before the budget meeting? Unforgivable. You may have the opposite feeling. Because of these differences in opinion, it is possible to play neutral about feel-good chain e-mails—to claim that whether they are a wholesome stress-reliever or a demanding intrusion is simply a matter of taste. But that is not quite true. I love taste. It is infinitely branching, endlessly interesting, and, all told, one of the most delightful and comic realms of human existence. But the thing about taste is that, although we all absorb some of it from outside influences, it is, by definition, a private matter—which is exactly what it ceases to be the moment you foist it on someone else. That is the problem with the chain e-mail. Other people’s vinyl recliners do not show up in your living room and require you to sit on them.
The defining feature of chain e-mails, in other words, is that, unlike taste, everybody is obliged to share them, in every sense: endorse them, participate in them, send them along to others. For those of us who are disinclined to do so, that makes them—beneath their banal, formulaic, exclamation-mark-heavy prose—precision-engineered traps. It’s not just that they are a pain in the neck. It’s that they are designed to make you seem like a pain in the neck, a feat they achieve by falling somewhat short of being actually horrible: because they are basically well-intentioned and, in the scheme of things, basically inoffensive, it is impossible to criticize them without seeming mean-spirited, especially in these dire times. Which is a problem, because it is precisely in these dire times that the feel-good chain letter, which had its last recrudesce not only before the coronavirus but before SARS and before MERS and before a quarter of the world’s current population was even born, has suddenly come back to haunt us.
When the chain e-mail itself was born is, as I said, a matter of some mystery. To an unimpressed recipient, it may seem like the regrettable offspring of multilevel marketing and the four-page family holiday letter, but in fact its roots are much older than both of those. One person who has tried to unearth those origins is the folklorist Daniel W. VanArsdale, the curator of an archive of more than nine hundred chain letters and author of a digital publication called Chain Letter Evolution. VanArsdale traces the form back more than a thousand years, to early religious texts that include demands for their own reproduction and promises of good fortune or eternal salvation to those who comply. But it took many centuries, plus the rise of printing technologies, widespread literacy, and international mail, for the chain letter to assume its modern form.
Here is a representative specimen, also in the religious vein, that appears to have originated in Massachusetts in 1951:
We are making a novena to Our Lady of Fatima. It is not much and requires little time. Just one Our Father each day for nine days. It is the first one started and is going around the world. . . . Make nine copies of this letter and send them to nine different persons before the fourth day after receiving this letter. . . . The fourth day after sending this, a favor will come to you.
That is the contemporary chain letter distilled down to its mathematical essence: do x thing (it’s easy and won’t take much time), make y number of copies, send them out within z days, and something good will befall you within n period of time. (With its fanatical emphasis on numbers, protocols, and timing, the chain letter has more in common with astrology, witchcraft, and voodoo than with any mainline religion.) This particular example departs in only two ways from the standard formula. First, it is more modest than the majority of its kin, in that it merely proposes to circumnavigate the world, while most others claim to have already done so, often multiple times. Second, it lacks a threat, even though chain letters traditionally menace their recipients: not only will good luck come to you if you send it along but terrible things await you if you do not. From one such letter that began sometime around 1939:
Mrs. Gay Field received $5000, five hours after mailing.
Mrs. Ambrose received $4000, four hours after mailing.
Mr. Nevin broke the chain and lost everything he had.
That reads like the juvenilia of Edward Gorey (who was, as it happens, fourteen years old at the time), and it is representative: almost all the threats in chain letters operate in this vein of comic gloom. Mr. Wilcox failed to take the enclosed request seriously and his house was destroyed; Antonio Martinez had his secretary type it up but forgot to mail the copies and promptly lost his job; Detective Segundo B. Villanueva laughed at this note and “met instantaneous death in an accident.”
Threat, testimonial, quota, deadline: within these broadly shared constraints, chain letters vary widely and have changed considerably over time. VanArsdale’s own view of them is para-biological; not by accident is his treatise called Chain Letter Evolution. By his count, there are more than four thousand known generations of chain letters, which collectively contain a great many “mutations” that have caused certain prototypes to thrive while others fade away. Thus, the addition of “Send no money” at the bottom of one might increase its circulation, as might swapping a more ominous threat for a more imploring one: in place of instant death, “Please, I beg of you, for your soul and mine, don’t take the risk. If you have the slightest doubt, obey the instructions.” Other changes are effectively spandrels, variations that are neither beneficial nor advantageous but that can still be fascinating: a man who declined to answer a chain letter starts out losing his life and ends up losing his wife. (That kind of change all but vanished with the advent of e-mail chains, which eradicated the need for hand-copying and the inevitable errors that came with it.)
Subject to the evolutionary forces of mutation and competition, the chain e-mail, like beetles and finches, gradually evolved over time, until its basic template diversified into a wide range of sub-varieties. Some remained essentially religious. Some offered a secularized promise of protection from bad luck. Some claimed to raise funds for charitable causes, while others, less altruistic, promised a large sum of money in exchange for a small one upfront. Some claimed to be trying to set a new world record for the longest unbroken chain. Some advocated for one or another political cause (the end of Prohibition, the election of Wendell Willkie, nuclear disarmament). Others—the most direct antecedent of today’s feel-good chain e-mail—asked participants to send along an easily shared object: stamps, aprons, postcards, quilt squares, handkerchiefs, tea towels, T-shirts, earrings, paperback books, children’s books, dog toys, grocery coupons, “new panties.” Still others, perennially popular among schoolgirls, promised romantic fulfillment:


newyorker--2020-05-15--Blue Hill in a Box

Blue Hill in a Box

The other day , a procession of cars on a road near Stone Barns Center , the nonprofit educational farm in Pocantico Hills , New York , halted in its tracks to make way for goslings : a gaggle of them , waddling across the pavement .
For decades , Dan Barber , the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and its sister restaurant , Blue Hill , in Greenwich Village , has been using his restaurants to familiarize diners with the principles of sustainable agriculture .
He has long been aware , he told me recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ model .
“ It wasn ’ t exactly the most equitable or open-arms food chain , ” he said—as of March , the prix fixe at Blue Hill in Manhattan was ninety-five dollars per person , and the tasting menu at Stone Barns was two hundred and seventy-eight .
What Barber didn ’ t realize was how incredibly fragile the model was .
“ I still would have argued that it was the most resilient in terms of health , flavor , ecological functioning , ” he said .
But enter the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restaurants are closed for the foreseeable future , but what worries Barber even more than the question of when and how to reopen them is the question of whether his most trusted suppliers—much of whose revenue comes from restaurants , in some cases largely from Blue Hill alone—will still be there when he does .
Preventing the collapse of the supply chain is a main objective of an evolving program he ’ s calling resourcED , a C.S.A .
for the most discerning aesthete .
The week before last , I made a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sleek cardboard boxes containing an array of astonishingly lovely things to eat , accompanied by illustrated broadsheets that described every item in painstaking detail and offered suggestions for what to do with each .
In my produce box , a bundle of sweet carrots as tiny as golf pencils , just dug from the earth ( “ if you must cook them , do it with a gentle hand ” ) , cozied up to fat spears of asparagus ( “ kiss on a grill ” ) and to a Mason jar of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be sprouted .
In the corners of my bread box , tins of butter—made with “ single udder ” milk from a cow named Billie , in different seasons—played sentry to an enormous sourdough miche , made from freshly milled local grains and inspired by Barber ’ s stint as a young cook in France .
The garde-manger box—named for the station in a restaurant kitchen where sides , salads , and condiments are composed—turned my refrigerator into the cold case at an exquisite gourmet grocery store , neatly stacked with fresh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pistou ) ; pork rillettes , capped in a layer of thick white fat ; and miso made from nixtamalized corn and sake refuse , to name just a few .
The garde-manger box perhaps best illustrates Barber ’ s approach to weathering the pandemic , and to preparing for future disasters .
In the U.S. , he said , “ processed food ” is “ the lowest bar .
It ’ s an insult.
” But transforming agricultural products into shelf-stable ones is “ what everyone else in the history of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has figured out .
There are flushes of harvest everywhere , and you better do something to the harvest that preserves it—and , by the way , makes it more delicious , and more nutritious.
” Keeping his favorite independent farms and day-boat fishermen afloat , he realized , would require thinking of himself less as a restaurant chef than as a food processor .
At a price range of sixty-eight to a hundred and seventy dollars—which barely covers his costs , Barber says , even with the kitchen staff pared down by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But for the quality of food they provide they ’ re more affordable than a lot of takeout , and designed to last much longer .
They ’ re a bargain compared to dinner at Stone Barns , and arguably even more pleasurable , freed from the pomp of fine dining .
My only complaint is proof of success : the contents of the boxes were so beautiful that they filled me with anxiety , unable to bear the thought of wasting a single bite .
( Boxes $ 68- $ 170 .
@ @

The other day, a procession of cars on a road near Stone Barns Center, the nonprofit educational farm in Pocantico Hills, New York, halted in its tracks to make way for goslings: a gaggle of them, waddling across the pavement. For decades, Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and its sister restaurant, Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village, has been using his restaurants to familiarize diners with the principles of sustainable agriculture.
Boxes of food that each adhere to a theme—produce, bread, seafood—are available for pickup at Blue Hill, in Manhattan, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Pocantico Hills, New York. A recent iteration of the bread box included an enormous miche and several kinds of butter, including one blended with umeboshi, a Japanese style of salted plums. Photograph by Heather Sten for The New Yorker
He has long been aware, he told me recently, of the flaws in the farm-to-table model. “It wasn’t exactly the most equitable or open-arms food chain,” he said—as of March, the prix fixe at Blue Hill in Manhattan was ninety-five dollars per person, and the tasting menu at Stone Barns was two hundred and seventy-eight. What Barber didn’t realize was how incredibly fragile the model was. “I still would have argued that it was the most resilient in terms of health, flavor, ecological functioning,” he said. But enter the coronavirus “and it just collapses.”
Produce comes from a number of local, small, sustainable farms. Photograph by Heather Sten for The New Yorker
Both restaurants are closed for the foreseeable future, but what worries Barber even more than the question of when and how to reopen them is the question of whether his most trusted suppliers—much of whose revenue comes from restaurants, in some cases largely from Blue Hill alone—will still be there when he does. Preventing the collapse of the supply chain is a main objective of an evolving program he’s calling resourcED, a C.S.A. for the most discerning aesthete.
The week before last, I made a reservation to pick up a stack of sleek cardboard boxes containing an array of astonishingly lovely things to eat, accompanied by illustrated broadsheets that described every item in painstaking detail and offered suggestions for what to do with each. In my produce box, a bundle of sweet carrots as tiny as golf pencils, just dug from the earth (“if you must cook them, do it with a gentle hand”), cozied up to fat spears of asparagus (“kiss on a grill”) and to a Mason jar of wheat berries sealed with cheesecloth, ready to be sprouted. In the corners of my bread box, tins of butter—made with “single udder” milk from a cow named Billie, in different seasons—played sentry to an enormous sourdough miche, made from freshly milled local grains and inspired by Barber’s stint as a young cook in France.
The garde-manger box, named for the station in a restaurant kitchen where salads, sides, and condiments are prepared, includes things like a seeded cracker and a wedge of small-batch cheese. Photograph by Heather Sten for The New Yorker
The garde-manger box—named for the station in a restaurant kitchen where sides, salads, and condiments are composed—turned my refrigerator into the cold case at an exquisite gourmet grocery store, neatly stacked with fresh linguine (to be tossed with stinging-nettle pistou); pork rillettes, capped in a layer of thick white fat; and miso made from nixtamalized corn and sake refuse, to name just a few.
The garde-manger box perhaps best illustrates Barber’s approach to weathering the pandemic, and to preparing for future disasters. In the U.S., he said, “processed food” is “the lowest bar. It’s an insult.” But transforming agricultural products into shelf-stable ones is “what everyone else in the history of the world, for ten thousand years, has figured out. There are flushes of harvest everywhere, and you better do something to the harvest that preserves it—and, by the way, makes it more delicious, and more nutritious.” Keeping his favorite independent farms and day-boat fishermen afloat, he realized, would require thinking of himself less as a restaurant chef than as a food processor.
A spread compiled from the garde-manger, produce, and seafood boxes, including a ready-to-eat Corsican fish stew and grilled ramps. Photograph by Heather Sten for The New Yorker
At a price range of sixty-eight to a hundred and seventy dollars—which barely covers his costs, Barber says, even with the kitchen staff pared down by half—the resourcEd boxes are hardly cheap. But for the quality of food they provide they’re more affordable than a lot of takeout, and designed to last much longer. They’re a bargain compared to dinner at Stone Barns, and arguably even more pleasurable, freed from the pomp of fine dining. My only complaint is proof of success: the contents of the boxes were so beautiful that they filled me with anxiety, unable to bear the thought of wasting a single bite. (Boxes $68-$170.) ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-15--What African Nations Are Teaching the West About Fighting the Coronavirus

In early March , Ingrid Gercama left her home in the Netherlands and flew to war-torn South Sudan .
An applied-research anthropologist with a special interest in epidemics , she had spent time on the African continent during a public-health emergency before , remaining in Liberia , in 2014 , during that country ’ s Ebola outbreak .
When she landed at the frill-free airport in South Sudan ’ s capital of Juba , she was taken to a separate screening area , the shape and size of a shipping container , where her temperature was recorded by government health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and her local telephone number .
Gercama was asked a series of questions about her travel and health , she recalled , including whether she had recently come into contact with a bat .
The screening area ’ s walls were covered with posters about COVID-19 and its symptoms , and she was ushered into the country past a banner explaining the disease and offering a telephone number for a national coronavirus hotline , which she was to call if she developed a fever .
She had to wash her hands once to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ again when she left .
Much of what Gercama encountered at the airport had been designed to prevent Ebola .
Since 2018 , the Democratic Republic of the Congo , South Sudan ’ s neighbor to the southwest , has been struggling with the disease .
But local public-health officials ’ quick repurposing of Ebola protocols and infrastructure impressed Gercama , as did the work of its rapid-response teams , whom she twice witnessed respond to suspected coronavirus cases during the week she spent in the country .
She left South Sudan on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country began quarantining arriving passengers , and a few days before they stopped international flights altogether .
From Juba , she flew through Stockholm , where no one asked her where she had been nor recorded her temperature , and landed back in Amsterdam , where , again , she was not questioned about her travel history or health .
When she passed through passport control , she found no leaflets , no COVID-19 awareness banners , no hotline .
“ They didn ’ t even tell me to self-isolate , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so because I have common sense.
” African governments , unlike their Western counterparts , aren ’ t relying on common sense .
Judging from the numbers , and interpreting them with the scientific information that ’ s understood so far , Africa has made the better bet .
Although cases on the continent are increasing , many African countries are not seeing the exponential daily growth in confirmed cases , nor in mortality , that has been happening in the United States and Western Europe .
There are exceptions , especially above @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Morocco alone account for a third of the continent ’ s seventy-two thousand cases , and fifty-one per cent of its 2,475 deaths .
But in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—the forty-odd countries below the sand belt of the Sahara , the places about which the world is almost always wringing its hands—the picture is more optimistic .
“ Rwanda , in their first month , went from two cases to a hundred and thirty-four , ” Joia Mukherjee , the chief medical officer for Partners in Health , a Boston-based non-profit organization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Belgium , which is the same size—twelve million people—and is the former colonizer of Rwanda , grew from two cases to seventy-four hundred.
” Uganda has only a hundred and thirty-nine known cases .
Ethiopia has two hundred and sixty-three .
South Sudan has two hundred and three .
Burundi has twenty-seven .
Botswana has twenty-four .
Each of them saw their first cases later than Europe and the United States—but not that much later .
If the virus had followed the same trajectory there that it has in the West @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explosive transmission rates by now .
Confronted with data patterns that don ’ t match our own , the impulse among Western observers has been to identify what makes these countries like each other but unlike us—to reach for the science ( or its best guesses ) that tells a soothing story about why Africa appears to have it so much better than , say , New York City .
The most obvious question , to people from countries still lacking a true picture of their disease burdens , is whether Africa has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is , often , yes . )
From there , and in no particular order , Western analysts cite climate , demography , and magic .
Africa is hot , which is to say sunny , and it is humid .
Sunlight , some scientists have argued , degrades the virus , and humidity ( maybe ? )
slows it down .
Quite a bit of Africa isn ’ t actually humid , however , and its sun , like the sun the world over , is seasonal .
In fact , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home to the majority of their country ’ s coronavirus cases , it can get downright cold .
Brazil , meanwhile , has nearly two hundred thousand cases of coronavirus and is quite humid .
So is Singapore , where a second wave of infections has sent the country back into lockdown .
Some experts point to the continent ’ s comparative youth : the median age in Africa is barely twenty , and studies ( still ) suggest that the disease is less severe in young people .
Being young may help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less satisfying explanation for the raw number of COVID-19 cases , the majority of which have been occurring in people in their twenties and thirties .
Finally , some experts speculate about the existence of a special African immunology , suggesting that diseases like malaria ( or their treatments ) act as biological talismans against the new disease .
This coronavirus may be novel , but essentialist Western tropes about magical dark-skinned Africans date back centuries .
Meanwhile , a rather obvious possibility stares us in the face : What if some African @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our own of managing the coronavirus ?
“ One reason why we may be seeing what we are seeing is that the continent of Africa reacted aggressively , ” John Nkengasong , the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention , told me .
“ Countries were shutting down and declaring states of emergency when no or single cases were reported .
We have evidence to show that that helped a lot.
” Rwandan officials responded to their first coronavirus cases by tracing , isolating , and testing “ contacts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carriers might have encountered before realizing they were , in fact , COVID-19 patients .
Five days after the first cases were confirmed , commercial flights were halted , and two days later , the country was locked down , both to limit the spread of the disease and to ease the tedious work of contact tracing .
By the end of April , health workers had tested more than twenty thousand people and conducted two random community surveys , a method for guarding against the bias of testing too narrowly , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We did not find any community transmission of COVID-19 in Rwanda , which was quite good news for us , ” Sabin Nsanzimana , an epidemiologist who heads the Rwanda Biomedical Center , which also houses the national reference laboratory that processes COVID-19 tests , said .
“ So far , we are at the phase of containing the epidemic in Rwanda , which means that we know who has the disease.
” Uganda and Ethiopia also responded to their first cases with aggressive contact tracing and isolation , and they ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In early May , Uganda completed its first rapid-assessment survey , a randomized sampling of twenty thousand people ; it uncovered only two new local cases .
Ethiopia completed a door-to-door survey of its capital , Addis Ababa , in just three weeks , documenting symptoms and travel history for its five million residents , and testing anyone who was found to be at risk for the disease or symptomatic .
South Africa , where health officials say early intervention staved off exponential transmission , sent thirty thousand community-health workers to survey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in less than a month ; it uncovered only two positive cases for every thousand people .
The remarkably low number of cases uncovered by community surveys , experts told me , suggest that contact tracing and isolation are working the way they ’ re supposed to .
“ Think of it as a web of transmission , not so much a chain , ” Tom Frieden , who directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and now spearheads Resolve to Save Lives , a health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ With every filament in that web that you break , you reduce the burden of disease.
” Moses Massaquoi , who directed Liberia ’ s case-management system during the Ebola outbreak and today is the senior adviser for management system for COVID-19 , told me , “ I think we are better off because we went through Ebola .
This disease is different , of course , but the structure is there—the incident-management system , the protocols , the guidelines .
I imagine countries in Africa that didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times.
” The East African countries that are , so far , outperforming the global West benefitted from Ebola preparations as well .
Rwanda , Burundi , South Sudan , and Uganda all border the Democratic Republic of the Congo , and were forced to respond to its Ebola outbreak in 2018 .
Each country already has rapid-response teams , trained contact tracers , logistics routes , and other public-health tools and protocols in place , which they have adapted to respond to the coronavirus .
That level of cöordination—indeed , of practice—also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve seen that in an epidemic , one day can mean a lot , ” Nsanzimana , of the Rwanda Biomedical Center , told me .

In early March, Ingrid Gercama left her home in the Netherlands and flew to war-torn South Sudan. An applied-research anthropologist with a special interest in epidemics, she had spent time on the African continent during a public-health emergency before, remaining in Liberia, in 2014, during that country’s Ebola outbreak. When she landed at the frill-free airport in South Sudan’s capital of Juba, she was taken to a separate screening area, the shape and size of a shipping container, where her temperature was recorded by government health workers, along with her hotel address and her local telephone number. Gercama was asked a series of questions about her travel and health, she recalled, including whether she had recently come into contact with a bat. The screening area’s walls were covered with posters about COVID-19 and its symptoms, and she was ushered into the country past a banner explaining the disease and offering a telephone number for a national coronavirus hotline, which she was to call if she developed a fever. She had to wash her hands once to get into the screening area, and again when she left.
Much of what Gercama encountered at the airport had been designed to prevent Ebola. Since 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan’s neighbor to the southwest, has been struggling with the disease. But local public-health officials’ quick repurposing of Ebola protocols and infrastructure impressed Gercama, as did the work of rapid-response teams, whom she twice witnessed respond to suspected coronavirus cases during the week she spent in the country. She left South Sudan on March 19th, a few days after the country began quarantining arriving passengers, and a few days before they stopped international flights altogether. From Juba, she flew through Stockholm, where no one asked her where she had been nor recorded her temperature, and landed back in Amsterdam, where, again, she was not questioned about her travel history or health. When she passed through passport control, she found no leaflets, no COVID-19 awareness banners, no hotline. “They didn’t even tell me to self-isolate,” Gercama told me. “I did so because I have common sense.”
African governments, unlike their Western counterparts, aren’t relying on common sense. Judging from the numbers, and interpreting them with the scientific information that’s understood so far, Africa has made the better bet. Although cases on the continent are increasing, many African countries are not seeing the exponential daily growth in confirmed cases, nor in mortality, that has been happening in the United States and Western Europe. There are exceptions, especially above the Sahel: Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco alone account for a third of the continent’s seventy-two thousand cases, and fifty-one per cent of its 2,475 deaths. But in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—the forty-odd countries below the sand belt of the Sahara, the places about which the world is almost always wringing its hands—the picture is more optimistic. “Rwanda, in their first month, went from two cases to a hundred and thirty-four,” Joia Mukherjee, the chief medical officer for Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that works in ten countries, said. “Belgium, which is the same size—twelve million people—and is the former colonizer of Rwanda, grew from two cases to seventy-four hundred.” Uganda has only a hundred and thirty-nine known cases. Ethiopia has two hundred and sixty-three. South Sudan has two hundred and three. Burundi has twenty-seven. Botswana has twenty-four. Each of them saw their first cases later than Europe and the United States—but not that much later. If the virus had followed the same trajectory there that it has in the West, most African countries would have seen explosive transmission rates by now.
Confronted with data patterns that don’t match our own, the impulse among Western observers has been to identify what makes these countries like each other but unlike us—to reach for the science (or its best guesses) that tells a soothing story about why Africa appears to have it so much better than, say, New York City. The most obvious question, to people from countries still lacking a true picture of their disease burdens, is whether Africa has enough tests. (The short answer is, often, yes.) From there, and in no particular order, Western analysts cite climate, demography, and magic. Africa is hot, which is to say sunny, and it is humid. Sunlight, some scientists have argued, degrades the virus, and humidity (maybe?) slows it down. Quite a bit of Africa isn’t actually humid, however, and its sun, like the sun the world over, is seasonal. In fact, in several East African capital cities that are home to the majority of their country’s coronavirus cases, it can get downright cold. Brazil, meanwhile, has nearly two hundred thousand cases of COVID-19 and is quite humid. So is Singapore, where a second wave of infections has sent the country back into lockdown.
Some experts point to the continent’s comparative youth: the median age in Africa is barely twenty, and studies (still) suggest that the disease is less severe in young people. Being young may help reduce mortality, but youth is a less satisfying explanation for the raw number of COVID-19 cases, the majority of which have been occurring in people in their twenties and thirties. Finally, some experts speculate about the existence of a special African immunology, suggesting that diseases like malaria (or their treatments) act as biological talismans against the new disease. This coronavirus may be novel, but essentialist Western tropes about magical dark-skinned Africans date back centuries.
Meanwhile, a rather obvious possibility stares us in the face: What if some African governments are doing a better job than our own of managing the coronavirus? “One reason why we may be seeing what we are seeing is that the continent of Africa reacted aggressively,” John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Countries were shutting down and declaring states of emergency when no or single cases were reported. We have evidence to show that that helped a lot.”
Rwandan officials responded to their first coronavirus cases by tracing, isolating, and testing “contacts,” people whom confirmed or suspected carriers might have encountered before realizing they were, in fact, COVID-19 patients. Five days after the first cases were confirmed, commercial flights were halted, and two days later, the country was locked down, both to limit the spread of the disease and to ease the tedious work of contact tracing. By the end of April, health workers had tested more than twenty thousand people and conducted two random community surveys, a method for guarding against the bias of testing too narrowly, which might artificially deflate case figures. “We did not find any community transmission of COVID-19 in Rwanda, which was quite good news for us,” Sabin Nsanzimana, an epidemiologist who heads the Rwanda Biomedical Center, which also houses the national reference laboratory that processes COVID-19 tests, said. “So far, we are at the phase of containing the epidemic in Rwanda, which means that we know who has the disease.”
Uganda and Ethiopia also responded to their first cases with aggressive contact tracing and isolation, and they’ve put considerable resources into checking their work. In early May, Uganda completed its first rapid-assessment survey, a randomized sampling of twenty thousand people; it uncovered only two new local cases. Ethiopia completed a door-to-door survey of its capital, Addis Ababa, in just three weeks, documenting symptoms and travel history for its five million residents, and testing anyone who was found to be at risk for the disease or symptomatic. South Africa, where health officials say early intervention staved off exponential transmission, sent thirty thousand community-health workers to survey roughly fifteen per cent of its population in less than a month; it uncovered only two positive cases for every thousand people. The remarkably low number of cases uncovered by community surveys, experts told me, suggest that contact tracing and isolation are working the way they’re supposed to. “Think of it as a web of transmission, not so much a chain,” Tom Frieden, who directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and now spearheads Resolve to Save Lives, a health initiative focussed on global pandemic response, said. “With every filament in that web that you break, you reduce the burden of disease.”
Moses Massaquoi, who directed Liberia’s case-management system during the Ebola outbreak and today is the senior adviser for management system for COVID-19, told me, “I think we are better off because we went through Ebola. This disease is different, of course, but the structure is there—the incident-management system, the protocols, the guidelines. I imagine countries in Africa that didn’t have that experience are going through difficult times.” The East African countries that are, so far, outperforming the global West benefitted from Ebola preparations as well. Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and Uganda all border the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and were forced to respond to its Ebola outbreak in 2018. Each country already has rapid-response teams, trained contact tracers, logistics routes, and other public-health tools and protocols in place, which they have adapted to respond to the coronavirus. That level of cöordination—indeed, of practice—also makes a difference. “We’ve seen that in an epidemic, one day can mean a lot,” Nsanzimana, of the Rwanda Biomedical Center, told me.


newyorker--2020-05-15--Quarantine Is Making Puzzle Enthusiasts of Us All

Before the pandemic , I identified solidly as a hater of games and puzzles .
They seemed pointless to me , a waste of time , an impediment to conversation .
Weren ’ t they just labor masquerading as fun ?
My former roommate , an avid gamer , would host nights for a group of friends when they would play elaborate board games , the strategies , or even basic rules , of which I could never quite parse .
Eventually , I learned to opt out entirely , hiding in my room or jeering on the sidelines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schemes only on special occasions , such as his birthday .
But , with the descent into quarantine , I found myself , like many , with an unprecedented amount of idle time and its attendant restlessness .
Under these conditions , I began to understand more clearly the appeal of tasks that offer the illusion of stakes but confer no real consequences if you fail at them .
The point of games is that they manage to be absorbing without being productive .
A crossword puzzle , I realized , is as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but refreshingly free of the grim sense of duty that keeps its users scavenging for scraps of information and morsels of attention .
A simple , nostalgic game of Uno with my co-quarantiner , over glasses of wine , managed to temporarily quiet the low thrum of dread rattling our nervous systems .
The professional puzzler Chris Ramsay , whose YouTube channel has millions of subscribers , is sensitive to the power of playful concentration .
In the video above , he talks about why people are enjoying puzzles so much during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unusual career .
A magician , he found his current calling when he recorded a video of himself using the tricks he ’ d picked up through magic to unlock a three-dimensional puzzle that resembled a padlock .
The popularity of the video led him to solve and record similarly elaborate puzzles , which are handmade by a niche community of enthusiasts and can be deviously counterintuitive .
Ramsay describes his mixture of calm and frustration as he spends hours finishing one .
“ I feel like I have better things to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he is , technically , doing his job ) .
Diversions like these offer the rare sensation of absolute focus and the joy of accomplishment without the exhausting requirement that they contribute to the larger goals of survival .
• Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic : nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th .
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus .
New York leaders did not .
• Can survivors help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time ?
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• What to read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to under quarantine .

Before the pandemic, I identified solidly as a hater of games and puzzles. They seemed pointless to me, a waste of time, an impediment to conversation. Weren’t they just labor masquerading as fun? My former roommate, an avid gamer, would host nights for a group of friends when they would play elaborate board games, the strategies, or even basic rules, of which I could never quite parse. Eventually, I learned to opt out entirely, hiding in my room or jeering on the sidelines, and vowed to participate in his gaming schemes only on special occasions, such as his birthday.
But, with the descent into quarantine, I found myself, like many, with an unprecedented amount of idle time and its attendant restlessness. Under these conditions, I began to understand more clearly the appeal of tasks that offer the illusion of stakes but confer no real consequences if you fail at them. The point of games is that they manage to be absorbing without being productive. A crossword puzzle, I realized, is as difficult to pull away from as Twitter, but refreshingly free of the grim sense of duty that keeps its users scavenging for scraps of information and morsels of attention. A simple, nostalgic game of Uno with my co-quarantiner, over glasses of wine, managed to temporarily quiet the low thrum of dread rattling our nervous systems.
The professional puzzler Chris Ramsay, whose YouTube channel has millions of subscribers, is sensitive to the power of playful concentration. In the video above, he talks about why people are enjoying puzzles so much during isolation and how he arrived at his unusual career. A magician, he found his current calling when he recorded a video of himself using the tricks he’d picked up through magic to unlock a three-dimensional puzzle that resembled a padlock. The popularity of the video led him to solve and record similarly elaborate puzzles, which are handmade by a niche community of enthusiasts and can be deviously counterintuitive. Ramsay describes his mixture of calm and frustration as he spends hours finishing one. “I feel like I have better things to do,” he says (even though he is, technically, doing his job). Diversions like these offer the rare sensation of absolute focus and the joy of accomplishment without the exhausting requirement that they contribute to the larger goals of survival.
A Guide to the Coronavirus