newyorker--2020-05-25--Lionel Shriver Is Looking for Trouble

Lionel Shriver Is Looking for Trouble

In Lionel Shriver ’ s novel “ The Mandibles , ” it ’ s 2029 , the United States has defaulted on its loans , and the country is plunging into an economic abyss .
Suddenly , a cabbage costs thirty-eight dollars .
Savings accumulated over a lifetime evaporate in an hour .
Former hedge-fund managers compete for jobs as waiters .
( Their new patrons are foreigners ; America , like other failed states , has become a magnet for tourists who can afford luxuries that the natives can only dream of . )
Everyone is grimy , because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infrequent .
This is made particularly troublesome by another post-apocalyptic issue : there ’ s not enough toilet paper .
“ I found that really gratifying , ” Shriver said , as she considered her prescience , one recent afternoon in London .
Since the lockdown went into effect , she has been sequestered with her husband , Jeff Williams , at their row house in Bermondsey .
It is a modest , comfortable place , decorated with thrift-store finds and small ceramic sculptures—smooth , faceless figures—that Shriver made , along with memorabilia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a jazz drummer .
But Shriver was not feeling cozy .
“ Truth is , I ’ ve never been this shaken , ” she told me .
She wasn ’ t worried about getting sick .
“ The virus doesn ’ t faze me , ” she said .
She was afraid that she would prove oracular about more than toilet paper , and that we are hurtling toward global financial cataclysm—what she described in “ The Mandibles ” as “ an ongoing , borderless nightmare ended only by death.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2016 , Ruth Franklin called Shriver , who is originally from North Carolina , the “ Cassandra of American letters , ” and reminded readers that “ the curse of Cassandra , after all , was that she told the truth.
” Shriver has often been convinced that we are freaking out about the wrong things—focussing on climate change , for instance , instead of contemplating the population explosion that fuels it .
The coronavirus , she believes , will ultimately prove less destructive than the international fiscal contraction that it has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the media all the time now to ‘ monetizing the debt , ’ as if that ’ s the most normal thing in the world .
But there ’ s no real difference between monetizing the debt and defaulting on it—it just takes longer , ” she said .
“ We ’ re now in such an interconnected and complex financial world that we don ’ t know what we ’ re playing with.
” Shriver , who is sixty-three , thinks people are ridiculous for congratulating themselves on enduring quarantine , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ This is not the bad part , ” she said .
“ This is the nothing part—as long as you ’ re not one of the people who are gravely ill , or have lost someone who became gravely ill. Obviously , I wouldn ’ t diminish that .
Given that I would be characterized as a lockdown skeptic , one of the pitfalls of that role is to be cast as someone who thinks that the virus is trivial , and I wouldn ’ t want to be stuck with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s column in The Spectator—the magazine that Boris Johnson edited before he became a politician—might be surprised to learn of that last concern .
In April , Shriver wrote that even the shocking fatalities in Italy and Spain seemed not so distressing , compared with other dangers : “ I shout at the TV : ‘ These numbers are ridiculously low !
’ ” A month later , she added , “ Covid deaths will barely register in the big picture even if their total multiplies by several times.
” She is unmoved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aren ’ t higher because quarantine is working .
Instead of worrying about the virus , she argues , you should worry about your bank account—and your neighbor ’ s , your employer ’ s , and your country ’ s .
“ There ’ s going to be a rash of defaults across every single kind of loan , ” she predicted .
“ Car loans , houses , defaults on credit cards.
” Devastating inflation will follow , and finally money will be drained of value .
If you want a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something for it that is actually useful—like toilet paper .
“ I do not believe you can get away with conjuring value from nothing to an infinite degree , ” Shriver said .
“ We came so close to things just going completely to hell in 2008 that I don ’ t think any of us who kept up even slightly during that period can pretend that that ’ s not a possibility .
And it scares the living shit out of me.
” All of this might be keeping Shriver up at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the fact that she doesn ’ t sleep at night anyway .
She usually goes to bed at about 5 A.M. Shriver is relentlessly contrarian , not only in her political positions—she is a pro-Brexit , anti-woke , # MeToo-skeptical Democrat—but in most aspects of life .
She eats only one meal a day : dinner , usually around midnight , often featuring “ burn your face off ” quantities of chili pepper .
She dislikes babies .
Before moving to England , in 1999 , she elected to live in Belfast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She and Williams leave London every summer , but not for the beach : they have a place in Windsor Terrace , Brooklyn , with no air-conditioning .
She rarely uses the subway or taxis , preferring to ride a bicycle , no matter the distance , the weather , or the time of day .
She is a woman with a man ’ s name that she chose for herself at the age of fifteen .
Shriver has always been constitutionally inclined toward defiance .
Fittingly , her novels tend to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Game Control ” is about demography and AIDS , “ Big Brother ” about morbid obesity and filial duty .
“ So Much for That ” ( a National Book Award finalist ) describes a slow death by cancer , made even more miserable by the failing American health-care system .
In “ We Need to Talk About Kevin , ” Shriver ’ s breakout hit , a mother comes to terms with her son ’ s committing mass murder at school .
( The book , which won the Orange Prize in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found myself keeping Shriver ’ s hours when I read it , because I was too hooked to sleep . )
“ I tackle precisely the subjects that everyone yearns to avoid , ” Shriver has said .
Her new novel , “ The Motion of the Body Through Space , ” is notionally about fitness fanaticism , but it ’ s really about physical decline and mortality : “ One of the biggest transformations of aging was the way that healing grew horribly slow , as if your cells were reluctant to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organism en route to the scrap heap.
” Shriver has a leathery imperviousness to conflict , which could be either the cause or the effect of her impulse to provoke .
Last fall , back in the old world of congregating and speaking to people with uncovered faces , I met Shriver late one night at a crowded bar in Manhattan .
She got into an argument about Brexit with an English acquaintance of mine , which culminated in actual screaming .
He left outraged , and e-mailed me the next morning , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if the dispute had bothered her , she had no memory of it .
She is so accustomed to scrapping that it registers for her as little more than small talk .
If the coronavirus has made us all warier of our fellow-humans and more pessimistic about the future , then Shriver has spent a lifetime preparing for it .
“ I am a type .
I don ’ t like groups .
I maintain few memberships , ” Shriver wrote in a recent column , titled “ I Have Herd Immunity.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms .
Everyone ’ s met such obstreperous specimens—the original self-isolators .
”

Shriver has a leathery imperviousness to conflict, which could be either the cause or the effect of her impulse to provoke. Last fall, back in the old world of congregating and speaking to people with uncovered faces, I met Shriver late one night at a crowded bar in Manhattan. She got into an argument about Brexit with an English acquaintance of mine, which culminated in actual screaming. He left outraged, and e-mailed me the next morning, still upset. When I asked Shriver if the dispute had bothered her, she had no memory of it. She is so accustomed to scrapping that it registers for her as little more than small talk.
If the coronavirus has made us all warier of our fellow-humans and more pessimistic about the future, then Shriver has spent a lifetime preparing for it. “I am a type. I don’t like groups. I maintain few memberships,” Shriver wrote in a recent column, titled “I Have Herd Immunity.” “I’m leery of orthodoxy. I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms. Everyone’s met such obstreperous specimens—the original self-isolators.”
Last month, in the Los Angeles Times, Shriver described her quarantine schedule: “Jeff and I arise at dawn, so we can sit out back and watch the sunrise. London is so much more peaceful when no one is doing anything unnecessarily productive in it.” It was a time of intense focus, she reported. She was reading Proust; Williams was learning the sitar; they’d both decided to forgo alcohol until normal life resumed. Then she wrote, “I lied. We got up at noon. I read the Telegraph, the New York Times and The Spectator, then maniacally worked on my new manuscript, the only fiction I can stand to read. We watched the Channel 4 News, Newsnight, Sky News, PBS NewsHour and one more car-crash presidential press briefing on CNN. We killed a second bottle of wine. We made a fumbling stab at sex but Jeff was too drunk.”
Shriver likes to describe her relationship with Williams by saying that they are both “divorced from the same woman.” His first wife was Shriver’s agent, and for years they had dinner together every summer. Then Williams and his wife split up, in 2000, and the tradition dissolved. A year later, Shriver gave her agent a draft of “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” The agent was “horrified,” Shriver said, believing that it was too dark to sell, and they parted ways soon afterward. (The novel was turned down by a dozen other agents and some thirty British publishers before it was bought by Serpent’s Tail, for four figures. It has sold almost two million copies.)
Williams recalled a consequential reconnection the following summer: “I had a gig in New York, and Lionel came by herself, and we had our annual dinner. It went from there.” First, though, Shriver had to extricate herself from a nine-year relationship, with an American journalist she’d lived with in Belfast. “Feeling really pulled in two different directions, between two completely different men—it’s an embarrassment of riches, and also the worst thing that can ever happen to you,” she told me. The experience inspired her next novel, “The Post-Birthday World,” a book that is as comforting as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is disturbing. “The Post-Birthday World” tracks two realities: one in which the protagonist, Irina, has a passionate affair with a snooker player (starting when they stumble into having dinner together on his birthday), and one in which Irina withstands temptation. Shriver renders her characters’ emotions with exquisite specificity and empathy. Irina’s irresolute yearning, in both scenarios, is agonizing and yet oddly reassuring. The message of the book is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever decision you make will have its rewards and its costs, and you will sometimes be tormented by the alternative, because to be human is to doubt.
What’s remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters’ ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding. Immigration, for example. “I’m willing to admit that strict policies are potentially good for ‘us’ and bad for ‘them,’ ” Shriver told me last fall, when she was at home in London, preparing dinner for some friends. “But the European sensibility is very uncomfortable with self-interest. You would never do something just because it’s good for you—it has to be good. And I reject that!” She banged a pan of homemade cannelloni into the oven. (Shriver was a caterer before she was a writer.) “My whole sensibility is pretty brutal,” she said. “I believe that it is the right of countries to decide that, even though all these people want to come to your country and work in nail salons and send a bunch of money home, that doesn’t mean you necessarily let them in.” That day, the London papers had led with the story of thirty-nine Vietnamese people who died trying to sneak into England in a refrigerated container truck. “The coverage has been incredibly sentimental,” Shriver continued, as Williams, a lanky man of sixty-nine, poured wine. “I mean, I’m sorry for their sake that they are dead, but insofar as it instigates yet another conversation about immigration—‘Well, it’s our fault, because we don’t let people come in by regular channels, so they’re forced to come in the freezer containers’—if you advance that argument, you let everybody in, and then the country they’re coming for no longer exists.” She had argued strenuously for Brexit in her columns and on numerous television programs and podcasts. She was unable to vote for it, however, because she is not a British citizen: she is an immigrant.
Shriver had her hair up in a clip, and she was wearing a red dress under a black overcoat, which she did not take off all night. Williams had on a flannel shirt under a heavy wool cardigan. It was unbelievably cold in their house, because Shriver refuses to turn the heat on unless the alternative is genuinely dangerous. She has shared this quirk with several of her characters: in “The Mandibles,” her protagonists are too apocalyptically broke to warm up the house; in “The Post-Birthday World,” Irina’s imperious Russian mother keeps her apartment in Brighton Beach so chilly that Irina has to wear gloves. Irina—like Shriver—suffers from Raynaud’s syndrome, a circulatory condition that causes painful sensitivity to cold. Shriver eschews heat partly for pragmatic reasons: “I’m cheap!” But she is also fascinated by testing her own toughness.
Like the characters in her new novel, Shriver is a lifelong fitness fanatic: trim and muscular and bristling with strength. “I don’t have to use it,” she said. “You just like knowing you’ve got it in reserve.” In her thirties, she sometimes fasted for three weeks at a time. She is proud of facing even the worst things in life with fortitude. In a column around the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, she wrote, “I have my own sexual abuse story, and it’s way worse than Christine Ford’s. . . . What happened to me does not haunt my adulthood unduly, does not explain all my problems, and did not result in a host of ineradicable neuroses. I don’t mean that others who still battle demons as a consequence of sexual trauma simply need to suck it up. I mean only to establish that moving on is possible, and to suggest that we start celebrating resilience as well as baring our scars.”
The bell rang, and, as Williams went to answer the door, Shriver whispered conspiratorially, “Our guests are Remainers.” Her own sentiments about Brexit began with political pique (“The EU is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers,” she wrote in Harper’s) and escalated to moral outrage (“If unintended consequences were grounds for invalidating a vote, we’d have to nullify most elections, or simply stop bothering to hold them”). But the topic was carefully avoided until about 1 A.M., when everyone was a little drunk, and digging into Shriver’s apple-raspberry pie. By that point, she was in no mood to argue about the deficiencies of the European Union. She was in her other mode: entertaining, self-deprecating, training her relentlessness on a good time instead of on a good point. “Sometimes I wonder: Why do I give a shit?” Shriver asked merrily from the head of the table, puffing on an e-cigarette that resembled a tiny blowtorch. “I think I have an addictive personality, and it doesn’t just extend to drinking a little too much red wine. It’s also a narrative addiction. I do think there is a principle involved with Brexit, but it’s not going to make any big economic difference one way or the other, and everything will plod along in either case! So why do I care so much? I can’t quite answer it, aside from the fact that these stories have a momentum. And, once you have aligned yourself with one side or the other, then it’s like a sport.”
Shriver’s highest-profile moments in the past few years have been as an ideological competitor. Depending on your point of view, the stakes of the game were either profound insensitivity to racial and cultural traumas or a hat and a mailbox, respectively. In the first instance, Shriver gave a keynote address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, in which she argued against the concept of cultural appropriation. She briefly donned a sombrero, in solidarity with students at Bowdoin College who had been censured for hosting a tequila party at which revellers wore the hats. “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: You’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats,” Shriver said, and cautioned, “The ultimate end point of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction.” People walked out in protest. A piece in the Guardian said that the speech “drips of racial supremacy.” The festival disavowed Shriver and her perspective. Two weeks later, Francine Prose wrote, in The New York Review of Books, “Shriver takes a familiar tack often used on Fox News: trivializing valid concerns by ridiculing their most absurd manifestations.” She added, “It’s worth noting that Shriver’s own visibility has greatly increased in the aftermath of her Brisbane lecture.”
“That’s all well and good, but do we have enough non-perishables?” Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
More recently, Shriver appeared on the popular British talk show “Question Time,” and told a live audience that she didn’t understand what the big deal was about Boris Johnson writing, in the Telegraph, that women in burqas look like mailboxes. “Why is that so insulting?” Shriver asked. The audience booed, and a woman in a hijab shouted, “I’m from here! From that rhetoric I get told to get back to my own country! Take responsibility!”
“Did you read the original op-ed?” Shriver asked, and the woman rolled her eyes, disgusted. (The piece, which Johnson wrote before he became Prime Minister, was introduced with the line “Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous—but that’s still no reason to ban it.”) When the interaction began, Shriver had seemed to be barely containing a smirk, but now her tone shifted to pleading: “He was standing up for Muslim women’s right to wear whatever they want!”
A week later, she wrote to me, “I have managed to get myself into trouble again,” adding that she’d appeared on the program “against my better judgment—and I have to say that my better judgment doesn’t get a lot of exercise these days.” After a clip of the spat went viral, an old friend of Shriver’s ended their relationship. “All over a difference of opinion about whether ‘letter box’ has pejorative qualities. For pity’s sake, one could as well be vilified for saying, ‘You look like a chair.’ ”
Shriver argues that her detractors engage in “malicious misinterpretation,” hunting for the worst—the most racist, sexist, homophobic—possible reading of whatever they encounter. In one column, for example, Shriver expressed distaste for a Penguin Random House plan to make its authors and staff members reflect the U.K.’s demographic breakdown by “ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.” She was accused of being a literary white supremacist, and she responded indignantly. “In a polarised and broadly illiterate digital universe, full of predators gorging on animosity who are determined to read whatever they wish to, words cease to function,” she wrote. “All nuance out the window, the language no longer serves to communicate, and what we writers do for a living is worse than pointless.”


newyorker--2020-05-25--“The Estuary,” by Vijay Seshadri

“The Estuary,” by Vijay Seshadri

The brown bear living near the estuary , and wading out when the tide swells and the salmon run , during the days of the dwindling salmon runs , and slapping with his big right paw a hook-nosed fish whipsawing inland to spawn , the ambidextrous bear , furred like the forest from which he emerged , waddling into the unteachable waters to swat the salmon out the fast-running tide and catch the red salmon in his mouth and toss and juggle the sockeye salmon thrashing and drowning in the air— and when he ’ s expressed himself completely he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swam ten thousand miles to the estuary and daintily , mincingly , with one paw grasping the caudal fin and the other the head , eats that salmon as if he were we and the fish an ear of boiled corn— that bear is a bear about whom rich and complicated feelings can be felt .
That is a bear from whom ideas about the state of nature can be derived .
Cruelty is the wrong word to describe the pleasure he gets from playing with his lunch .
Play and life are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and life , life and death .
Creation impinging on a consciousness clear and crystalline .
Pinpoint revelatory explosions unsoiled by words , unbesmirched .
Creation clambering out of the waters , shaking itself off , creation surrounding itself with itself .
.
.
Stay down on the pavement where you just fell in a heap like a bag of laundry , just stay there .
Move even a little and you might damage something else .
You ’ ve already done plenty of damage .
Stay down , supine .
Stay down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over you , let them in their abstract imperium stun you with their indifference .
Wasn ’ t that the reason you built them in the first place ?
Stay down , stay down , and ask yourself : “ Could I be the bear in this fable ?
” “ Could I be the fish ?
” “ Could I be whoever is imagining all this ?
”

Audio: Read by the author.
The brown bear living near the estuary,
and wading out when the tide swells and the salmon run,
during the days of the dwindling salmon runs,
and slapping with his big right paw a hook-nosed fish
whipsawing inland to spawn,
the ambidextrous bear,
furred like the forest from which he emerged,
waddling into the unteachable waters
to swat the salmon out the fast-running tide
and catch the red salmon in his mouth
and toss and juggle the sockeye salmon
thrashing and drowning in the air—
and when he’s expressed himself completely
he catches with his jaw the self
that swam ten thousand miles to the estuary
and daintily, mincingly, with one paw grasping
the caudal fin and the other the head,
eats that salmon as if he were we
and the fish an ear of boiled corn—
that bear is a bear about whom rich and complicated
feelings can be felt. That is a bear from whom ideas
about the state of nature can be derived.
Cruelty is the wrong word to describe
the pleasure he gets from playing with his lunch.
Play and life are the same thing to him,
art and life, life and death.
Creation impinging on a consciousness
clear and crystalline. Pinpoint revelatory
explosions unsoiled by words, unbesmirched.
Creation clambering out of the waters,
shaking itself off, creation
surrounding itself with itself . . .
Stay down on the pavement where you just fell in a heap
like a bag of laundry, just stay there. Move even a
little and you might damage something else.
You’ve already done plenty of damage.
Stay down, supine. Stay down,
and let the giant buildings loom over you, let them
in their abstract imperium stun you with their indifference.
Wasn’t that the reason you built them in the first place?
Stay down, stay down, and ask yourself:
“Could I be the bear in this fable?”
“Could I be the fish?”
“Could I be whoever is imagining all this?”


newyorker--2020-05-25--What’s a Writers’ Room Without Junk Food?

A few days before most of America ’ s workplaces shut down , Mark Levin had the prescient notion that maybe it was time for him and his colleagues to stop sharing plates of charcuterie .
Levin is a co-creator of Netflix ’ s animated sitcom “ Big Mouth ” ; the show ’ s writers ’ room , like many in Hollywood , is generally organized around takeout food .
The next day , the “ Big Mouth ” room had been disbanded , replaced by a Zoom grid .
TV and film productions all around Los Angeles have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can still get made in quarantine .
Early in the pandemic , when the producers of “ The Simpsons ” moved their writers ’ room online , the “ Big Mouth ” staff felt that they were overreacting , akin to Y2K preppers .
“ We thought , Oh , they have a bunch of old people , ” one “ Big Mouth ” producer said .
“ But we probably don ’ t need to do it.
” They did .
The “ Big Mouth ” staff was working on two seasons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which , conveniently , had an anxiety theme— “ We thought everyone was going to be so anxious about the election , ” Jennifer Flackett , a co-creator , said—and writing Season 5 .
In writers ’ rooms , staff members regularly trot out humiliating details from their childhoods and their sex lives for inspiration .
But looking around the insides of one another ’ s houses was a new level of intimacy .
“ You get to see everybody ’ s baby or cat or dog , ” Nick Kroll , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The first challenge was pulling off the table read , during which the actors read the script aloud for the first time .
“ A table read tells you , Oh , no , that joke doesn ’ t work , ” Flackett said .
“ Comedies need audiences , to hear where the laughs are , ” Levin added .
The following Tuesday , forty-five writers , showrunners , production staff , Netflix executives , and actors ( including Kroll , John Mulaney , Jenny Slate , Jason Mantzoukas , Richard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on to Zoom for the table read .
“ We are so glad that you are all in this room with us , ” Levin said from his bedroom .
He sat slumped in a polo shirt and an orange ball cap , clasping his hands like a coach at halftime .
“ We are in the third day of our Zoom writers ’ room , ” he said .
“ It ’ s given us incredible solace and company and distraction and laughter .
And that ’ s what we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ today , O.K .
?
” Motivational speech complete , he turned to logistics .
“ If you ’ re reading , it ’ s good to have your camera turned on , ” he said , seeing some black squares .
“ Cool !
” Mulaney shouted .
He was the only other person who had spoken so far .
Andrew Goldberg , another co-creator , who was seated in front of a bookshelf with no books in it , began , reading : “ ‘ Thanksgiving , ’ written by Brandon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Yay !
” Jenny Slate said .
It was a Thanksgiving episode , inspired by the time that Goldberg ’ s father ferried a cooked turkey to a relative ’ s house in the trunk of his car , and Goldberg refused to eat it .
Goldberg continued , reading the stage directions : “ The door of the oven flies open and through the screen we see Marty ’ s face.
” Richard Kind , who plays Marty , the character based on Goldberg ’ s father , leaned into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Are you golden brown yet , you lazy son of a bitch ?
” he shouted at the cartoon turkey .
Kroll laughed .
A few barks interrupted the session , and Lena Waithe ( “ Sorry !
” ) could be seen scooping up a squirming dog .
At one point , Mulaney ’ s feed cut out and Goldberg read his lines for him .
Halfway through , the unscripted voice of a toddler screamed “ Dad !
” Victor Quinaz , a writer with tortoiseshell glasses and a quarantine beard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zach Galifianakis , who was to play a new character .
“ Happy Thanksgiving , Connie !
” he read in a booming voice .
“ I ’ m grateful for your ample bosom !
Permission to motorboat you ?
” Flackett , who was filling in for Maya Rudolph , as Connie , the Hormone Monstress , smiled and nodded , her red curls bouncing .
“ It ’ s Thanksgiving , baby !
Gobble away !
” Claps and cheers broke out again .
“ That was actually a blast !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ was over .
Goldberg deemed the read-through a success .
“ Maybe not as clear as an in-person read , ” he said .
“ But it was actually pretty useful.
” Kroll liked what he called “ the human connection and community ” of the event .
“ I think we ’ ve found it comforting to have each other , and to still be making each other laugh , ” Goldberg said .
“ If we lost that , I think that would be really depressing.
” Kroll admitted that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ screens of people interacting with each other , ” he said .
“ It ’ s amusing right now , but , long term , I would rather be dreaming of actual interactions , with human contact.
” ♦

A few days before most of America’s workplaces shut down, Mark Levin had the prescient notion that maybe it was time for him and his colleagues to stop sharing plates of charcuterie. Levin is a co-creator of Netflix’s animated sitcom “Big Mouth”; the show’s writers’ room, like many in Hollywood, is generally organized around takeout food. The next day, the “Big Mouth” room had been disbanded, replaced by a Zoom grid.
TV and film productions all around Los Angeles have come to a halt, but cartoons can still get made in quarantine. Early in the pandemic, when the producers of “The Simpsons” moved their writers’ room online, the “Big Mouth” staff felt that they were overreacting, akin to Y2K preppers. “We thought, Oh, they have a bunch of old people,” one “Big Mouth” producer said. “But we probably don’t need to do it.”
They did. The “Big Mouth” staff was working on two seasons at once: post-production for Season 4, which, conveniently, had an anxiety theme—“We thought everyone was going to be so anxious about the election,” Jennifer Flackett, a co-creator, said—and writing Season 5.
In writers’ rooms, staff members regularly trot out humiliating details from their childhoods and their sex lives for inspiration. But looking around the insides of one another’s houses was a new level of intimacy. “You get to see everybody’s baby or cat or dog,” Nick Kroll, an actor and a co-creator, said.
The first challenge was pulling off the table read, during which the actors read the script aloud for the first time. “A table read tells you, Oh, no, that joke doesn’t work,” Flackett said.
“Comedies need audiences, to hear where the laughs are,” Levin added.
The following Tuesday, forty-five writers, showrunners, production staff, Netflix executives, and actors (including Kroll, John Mulaney, Jenny Slate, Jason Mantzoukas, Richard Kind, and Lena Waithe) logged on to Zoom for the table read.
“We are so glad that you are all in this room with us,” Levin said from his bedroom. He sat slumped in a polo shirt and an orange ball cap, clasping his hands like a coach at halftime. “We are in the third day of our Zoom writers’ room,” he said. “It’s given us incredible solace and company and distraction and laughter. And that’s what we’re all going to give to each other today, O.K.?”
Motivational speech complete, he turned to logistics. “If you’re reading, it’s good to have your camera turned on,” he said, seeing some black squares.
“Cool!” Mulaney shouted. He was the only other person who had spoken so far.
Andrew Goldberg, another co-creator, who was seated in front of a bookshelf with no books in it, began, reading: “ ‘Thanksgiving,’ written by Brandon Kyle Goodman.”
Cheers rang out. “Yay!” Jenny Slate said. It was a Thanksgiving episode, inspired by the time that Goldberg’s father ferried a cooked turkey to a relative’s house in the trunk of his car, and Goldberg refused to eat it. Goldberg continued, reading the stage directions: “The door of the oven flies open and through the screen we see Marty’s face.”
Richard Kind, who plays Marty, the character based on Goldberg’s father, leaned into the camera. “C’mon! Are you golden brown yet, you lazy son of a bitch?” he shouted at the cartoon turkey. Kroll laughed.
A few barks interrupted the session, and Lena Waithe (“Sorry!”) could be seen scooping up a squirming dog. At one point, Mulaney’s feed cut out and Goldberg read his lines for him. Halfway through, the unscripted voice of a toddler screamed “Dad!”
Victor Quinaz, a writer with tortoiseshell glasses and a quarantine beard, was subbing for the absent actor Zach Galifianakis, who was to play a new character. “Happy Thanksgiving, Connie!” he read in a booming voice. “I’m grateful for your ample bosom! Permission to motorboat you?”
Flackett, who was filling in for Maya Rudolph, as Connie, the Hormone Monstress, smiled and nodded, her red curls bouncing. “It’s Thanksgiving, baby! Gobble away!”
Claps and cheers broke out again.
“That was actually a blast!” Kind said, when the session was over.
Goldberg deemed the read-through a success. “Maybe not as clear as an in-person read,” he said. “But it was actually pretty useful.” Kroll liked what he called “the human connection and community” of the event.
“I think we’ve found it comforting to have each other, and to still be making each other laugh,” Goldberg said. “If we lost that, I think that would be really depressing.”
Kroll admitted that he has started dreaming in Zoomscapes—“Rotating screens of people interacting with each other,” he said. “It’s amusing right now, but, long term, I would rather be dreaming of actual interactions, with human contact.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-25--The Bushwick House Share Was a Haven—Then COVID-19 Struck

Samuel and his friends found the apartment in 2014 .
They were all in their twenties , mostly Bard graduates , living in a Victorian house in Prospect Lefferts Gardens , Brooklyn , which held ten people .
But the owner was selling , so six of them found a place in Bushwick , where they could keep living together as a big , happy postgraduate commune .
It was a duplex on the top two floors of a small building , part of a row of new residences across the street from a Baptist church .
“ It looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ walls , wood floor , ” Samuel recalled .
“ It had almost no character at all.
” But it had a washer-dryer , lots of bedrooms , two bathrooms , and a roof-deck , where , on a clear night , you could see the lights of the bridges from the Verrazzano up to the Queensboro .
On move-in day , Samuel , a soft-spoken photographer who wears rimless glasses , arrived first .
“ I got the keys , and I sat in the empty apartment until everyone showed up with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alone , he made a recording of the silence interrupted by the chirping of a faulty smoke alarm .
In the Victorian , he ’ d had the smallest bedroom , so he quickly claimed a nice room on the lower floor , which , he soon realized , was not well insulated from the noise of the common area .
The roommates—artists , academics , and service-industry workers ( Samuel sells fish and pork at the Union Square farmers ’ market ) —trucked over the street-scavenged brown-and-beige striped couch from the old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yellow and teal and filled it with plants .
Someone had a pyrography kit , and they burned their names into a wooden sign for the front door , along with the half-ironic , half-aspirational name Sky Palace .
Inevitably , people started moving out , and others moved in .
McSherry , a blond , punkish guy from suburban Maryland , arrived in 2015 .
He had moved to New York three years earlier , after studying dance at Sarah Lawrence , and had embraced Brooklyn ’ s queer night-life scene .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is trans , did drag under the name Princess Mickey Jäger , with an androgynous look that combined heavy makeup with glued-on facial hair .
He eventually quit the night-life world , and , as he considered what to do next , he thought about leaving the city .
But his friend Claire was looking for someone to sublet her room on the top floor of Sky Palace for the summer , and McSherry grabbed it .
“ I ’ m very much a nester , and , if I hadn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I would have left New York , ” he said .
The other tenants were considering dropping the lease , but McSherry said to them , “ Guys , are you kidding ?
This apartment is great !
” He stayed on , painting his room a deep-fuchsia shade called Diva Glam .
Javier moved in around the same time .
A licensed beautician from Fresno , with a gelled pompadour and a thin , dark beard , he had come East in 2014 , to pursue hairdressing .
Years earlier , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dressed as Big Bird in a “ Sesame Street ” play area , and one of his co-workers had a couch that he could crash on , in Sunset Park .
He found a job at a salon , and eventually worked up to hair styling for a spread in Vogue Arabia .
The SeaWorld friend told him she and the other tenants were losing their lease , and he heard about an open room in Bushwick .
( He later found out that she had lied to him , and had stayed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
When he showed up to look at it , he knocked on the wrong door .
“ You ’ re not the girl we ’ re expecting , ” the guy who answered said .
Javier was at Sky Palace , which happened to have a room available , too .
He took it .
Javier ’ s boyfriend , Aziz , came two months later .
Tall and thin and partial to knit beanies , he had emigrated from West Africa in 2013 and become a nursing assistant .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in America was a friend from back home , Lemine , and they lived together on DeKalb Avenue .
But the relationship was tense ; their mothers gossiped about them back in Africa .
“ I ’ d had enough of it , ” Aziz recalled .
Sky Palace protocol discouraged couples from sharing bedrooms , so Aziz took the cheapest room , which had a skylight but no windows or air-conditioning .
In September , 2018 , Shannon moved in .
She knew McSherry through the queer party scene and had been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Elmhurst apartment with a cheating boyfriend , a West Harlem place with a former co-worker , who “ started telling me every week that my rent was increasing.
” Shannon , a trans woman with auburn hair and a Valley Girl drawl , was recovering from a gender-confirmation surgery when she moved into Sky Palace .
She took over the windowless room from Aziz , who moved to the room next to Javier ’ s .
By the time Erik arrived , this past February , Samuel was the only original tenant .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ B.F.A .
in acting , was subletting from a multidisciplinary artist called Candystore , whose top-floor room he ’ d found on Facebook .
“ I love the Sky Palace , ” Erik told me , earlier this spring .
“ Because everyone does help each other and support each other , but it is not expected that you be everybody ’ s emotional life coach.
” The apartment had turned into a queer-friendly community of strangers .
McSherry grew basil and cilantro on the roof and kept the house supplied with fresh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infestation in 2016 , and an ongoing mouse problem .
For a couple of months , there was a cat , and for a few weeks there was a bulldog named Woman , which was returned after she wouldn ’ t stop growling at one tenant .
Rents range from six hundred and sixty-six dollars to eight hundred and sixteen dollars a month .
Cleaning is done without a chore wheel .
“ We meet every few months , and we talk about how almost all of us could be doing a better @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Then things get a little better for a while , and then they get a little worse again , and then we have another meeting.
” For the most part , though , McSherry told me , “ conflicts usually are smoothed over relatively quickly.
” Javier and Aziz broke up around New Year ’ s , but neither moved out .
When Shannon ( who asked to be identified by a pseudonym ) fell three months behind on rent , the other roommates covered for her , so she wouldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She soon got a job at a Trader Joe ’ s in Manhattan—she also worked part time as a political canvasser—and started paying them back .
But she smoked pot in her windowless room , which irked other house members .
“ Javier is extremely averse to having any smoke in the house whatsoever , ” McSherry said .
“ Whereas Shannon felt that it was her right to use her room however she liked.
” At a house meeting in December , Javier made a speech about everyone being more accountable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over as a unit , ” Shannon told me .
“ And then COVID happened.
” In mid-March , as the city was shutting down , the housemates met over pizza to discuss protocols .
They agreed to keep alcohol wipes by the entrance , to sanitize the door handle behind them , and to wash their hands after coming in .
Each person would be limited to one guest at a time .

McSherry, playing diplomat, wrote back, “You have the autonomy to behave however you like, but it’s extremely childish to slam doors and yell when you get upset. none of us gets to live exactly like we would if we lived alone; we all make compromises in consideration for one another.”
A moment later, Shannon replied:
Literally fuck u
Fuck you ALL
“I’m just a very honest person,” Shannon told me, a couple of days later. “I don’t really believe in passive-aggression. I believe in conflict.” Her life before Sky Palace had been rocky. She was brought up in a working-class town in western New York State. She went to college in Arizona on a music scholarship, then transferred to Brooklyn College in 2012, to study linguistics and film. After living in what she describes as a “slumlord coke-dealing-landlord situation” in Bensonhurst, she moved to Jersey City, to be closer to a bad boyfriend. When they broke up, she recalled, “I had to move everything by train, all my belongings. I didn’t have any resources and had no friends anymore, because I was with someone who was abusive toward me.” For a while, she worked at American Apparel, but, she said, “I was just, like, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.” McSherry helped her find a job at a restaurant, while she was recovering from getting hit by a cab.
In 2014, she began experimenting with gender expression, wearing crop tops and nail polish, something that wasn’t safe to do back home. She started transitioning the month before Donald Trump was elected. “Being trans, everything is political for us,” she said. Bernie Sanders’s loss in the 2016 primary pushed her toward community organizing. She started working in Amnesty International’s canvassing division, where she tried to unionize her co-workers. She says that she was demoted to a part-time position after missing work. A few months later, she filed a paid-sick-leave complaint with the N.Y.C. Department of Consumer Affairs and was awarded $3,434.70. She struggled on and off with depression and alcoholism. Last spring, she was elected co-chair of a local branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, but meeting new people made her anxious, so she drank to boost her confidence. “I basically was really messy,” she said.
Before the pandemic, she had scheduled a glottoplasty (to raise the pitch of her voice) and a consultation for a facial-feminization surgery, but both were cancelled. Part of the reason she had started the sex work, she said, was to save up for additional procedures. She told me, “If I didn’t have surgery, I would kill myself.” But she realized that the activity posed a health risk to herself and to others. “If I don’t work, I might lose my apartment,” she said. “But also we need to rent strike. It’s very confusing for me.”
She maintained that the riskier job was at Trader Joe’s, where hundreds of customers passed through each day. After two of her co-workers were thought to be infected, the store closed briefly, for a deep cleaning. In order to avoid contact, she volunteered to work in the spoiled-foods and donations area, but she still had to do shifts at the checkout, where customers could be snappish. She was skeptical of the outpouring of gratitude for essential workers. “I think people are appreciative that they’re able to get their groceries,” she said.
“O.K., in three . . . two . . . one . . .” Cartoon by Emily Flake Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Some days, her duties included standing on the sidewalk and making sure that customers were wearing masks. But, at home, she showed little interest in obeying the rules. After the oven incident, she texted an apology to the group, saying, “My bipolar is coming out.” But the damage was done. Javier blocked her number. McSherry offered to be out of the kitchen by eight every night, but he was spending more time at a boyfriend’s place in the Bronx. “It sucks for us to be in this space when it feels like there’s unresolved conflict,” he told me. “I don’t think Javier feels any confidence that Shannon would be willing to come to any kind of compromise. And he’s probably right. She feels comfortable just standing her ground and icing people out.” By late April, Shannon was dating one of her clients, whom she called her “COVID boo.”
The roommates stayed in their bedrooms as much as possible. “If Starbucks was open—or anything was open—I would have preferred sitting there,” Aziz told me, on a day off. He was trying to study for prerequisite courses to get his nursing license, but he couldn’t concentrate: “It’s like a little prison over here. Depressing. I wish I had some Xanax.” He preferred being at the nursing home to being at Sky Palace. Samuel came over one day to do laundry, but he didn’t stay long. He extended his cat-sitting gig through the summer. “Watching this stuff remotely rather than being embroiled in it gives me a little perspective,” he told me. “At this point, I have no desire to re-sign the lease at Sky Palace, but I don’t have a plan to get out permanently yet, either.”
As May approached, the tenants’ union expanded throughout Brooklyn. McSherry had been involved in organizing from the start, but then Shannon took the baton, posting flyers and knocking on doors. The organizers distributed a form e-mail for tenants to send to their landlords, saying that they would negotiate through the union.
But Sky Palace was not a united front. Javier and Aziz were nervous about joining the rent strike. Aziz had no savings, and he worried that their landlord would evict tenants who participated in the strike. “I cannot afford that stress, to have a month to find a place in New York City,” he said. Javier was also wary. He had grown up in a low-income Mexican-American household—his mother works at Walmart, and his father is employed at a food-packaging plant; both are now “essential workers”—and learned to be careful with money. “My mother would always tell me, ‘We can’t afford that, but when we can we’ll buy it,’ ” he recalled. He is the only member of his immediate family to have left Fresno County, and the first to finish college.
In mid-April, Javier learned that ten of his relatives, all of whom live together back in California, had tested positive for COVID. And Shannon was driving him crazy, constantly asking the roommates to sign for packages, which arrived in a steady stream. “To her, this is like a shopping spree. Woo-hoo!” Javier said.
One day, Shannon casually mentioned to Aziz that she was selling drugs. He thought she might have been joking, but she later told me that it was true. “I have not a second of time to spare,” she said. She was Skyping from her room, her hair in braids, applying blush before a john arrived. The packages had mostly been splurges or gifts from clients: Gucci sunglasses, a Nintendo Switch, a clock made from a Lana Del Rey LP. “I saw a client in Jersey the other night, and I got a gaming keyboard. And a knife—a really nice one, if anyone fucks with me,” she said, flicking it open.
She misted herself with perfume. Trader Joe’s was now screening employees for symptoms, and she had been sent home with a cough, which she chalked up to allergies. “If I die, I die,” she said, shrugging. She flashed a letter from the government: she had been receiving food stamps, but now the benefit was being discontinued on the ground that she hadn’t submitted her information—“even though I did.” She wasn’t worried; she now had multiple income streams to cover any back rent she might owe after the rent strike (if she chooses to pay it at all), and also to fund her “new bougie life style.” She told me, “Money is the most important thing to me. It insures my stability.”
But her illegal activities frightened Aziz. “This house is going to be on the list to watch,” he told me. “I don’t like that. I’m an immigrant! It’s not cute.” At the nursing home, the virus has spread to at least fifteen residents, and six have died. “It’s literally every other day,” he said. The staff was short on protective equipment, and Aziz heard rumors of co-workers testing positive. But he couldn’t get tested unless he had symptoms. He warned Shannon, “You’re putting everybody in danger.” She doesn’t remember the confrontation. “My life is risky already,” she told me. “It’s nothing new for me, honestly.”
In May, all the roommates except Aziz withheld rent; Javier said that he might pay at the end of the month. Samuel, who was still in Fort Greene, wasn’t surprised by the lack of solidarity. He was hoping to find another cat-sitting gig after the summer, or maybe crash at a kimchi farm upstate. He was unsure whether he would ever return to Sky Palace. “Things boiled that probably would have stayed simmering,” he said.
No one knew what would happen when the lease came up for renewal, in September. “I don’t think that both Javier and Shannon will stay,” McSherry told me. “Either Javier will try to rally the troops and convince the rest of the house to kick her out, or he will be unable to convince everyone else to ask her to leave, and he will decide to leave.”
Shannon told me that she had no plans to move: “It’s a simple yes. I’m staying.” Her year and a half at Sky Palace had been the longest she had lived in one place as an adult. And if her roommates wanted her out? “They can sue me,” she said. “They all had an option to leave and they didn’t, and that was their decision. What did they think I was going to do, just quit my job and stay in my room all day without seeing anyone?” But, a week later, when Javier tried to call a house meeting, she refused to attend, saying that she would be moving out in the fall. “I can’t stand it here anymore,” she said.
The nice weather had given the roommates more opportunities to escape the tension, and some had taken up cycling—but, unlike many of the young people crowding city parks, they were serious about wearing masks. At home, they practiced their own form of social distancing; what was once a casual collective was now a failed state. The living room was like Times Square, a deserted thoroughfare.
One Saturday in May, a tempting, sunny afternoon, Javier and Aziz went to Lemine’s house to help him with some renovations. The couple’s romantic embers had dimmed. “When everything started, Javier was always making jokes, saying, ‘Oh, we can arrange a good therapist and get back together,’ ” Aziz told me. “No way! I did not ask for that.” Javier’s harshness with Shannon was more evidence of his moodiness. Aziz said, “When he passes by you and he’s having a bad day, you can see it in his face.”


newyorker--2020-05-25--How to Social-Distance as America Opens Back Up

Two months ago , I interviewed Asaf Bitton , a primary-care physician and public-health researcher who directs the Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women ’ s Hospital and Harvard ’ s School of Public Health , about the guidelines he had compiled on how to best practice social distancing .
These guidelines were released on March 13th , just as states were issuing shelter-in-place orders and Americans were wondering how they should perform basic activities , like daily walks and grocery runs .
Now , with businesses beginning to open up , and activity set to increase , I spoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted to know what scientists had learned over the past few months about best practices for social distancing , what activities people should feel more comfortable doing , and where people should exercise more caution .
In our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed why public-health officials have changed the way they think about masks , the risks of socializing indoors , and the problem of public bathrooms .
What have we learned about the best social-distancing practices in the last ten weeks ?
I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number of studies that social distancing , when practiced en masse and consistently , actually can work to drive down the rate of growth of cases .
This has gone from theoretical economic-modelling literature to a lot better epidemiological data .
The practices that work are really the practices that reduce the ability of respiratory droplets to easily travel to other people .
So that means that we ’ ve learned that it ’ s not just the distance quotient or equation .
In fact , we ’ ve learned that sneezes and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feet , but , in fact , that masks are really effective .
Ventilation is really important .
And the time interval that separates people from touching the same objects is important .
So making sure that we ’ re not just washing hands but also not touching the same objects , especially indoor objects , is the hallmark of effective distancing strategies .
I ’ ve heard people say , well , six feet is not necessarily the exact distance .
Is there an argument that you need to sell social distancing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feet is kind of a handy , helpful way of thinking about it ?
I think it ’ s helpful , but it ’ s not fully complete .
It has an idiosyncratic history that comes from both old literature on the spread of meningitis among kids in a Texas classroom , in the early nineteen-eighties , and some old studies by the military on sneezing , as well as how people got SARS from a flight between Hong Kong and Beijing twenty years ago .
I think the important thing that people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s at least six feet .
And what I mean by that is , there ’ s no evidence that anything less than six feet is at all safe .
And there is evidence that , again , when people who are uncovered have big coughs or sneezes , they can sneeze twenty feet or more .
So the key , to me , since “ six feet ” is already in the lexicon , is not to debate six or eight or twelve , when the science isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s so much individual variation .
Let ’ s have a minimum .
And let ’ s extend our knowledge by saying it ’ s at least six feet .
And since it may be more , be wary of that , especially in indoor environments .
Understand that masks can really help , I think , a lot more than we understood at first with this condition , because of their containment capacity .
And understand , from some of these super-spreader events , like the choir in Washington or the religious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ singing or talking for long periods of time in an enclosed space can be risky .
And so it ’ s both distance and density , and then time exposure .
So six feet is a good starting point , but it ’ s not the end of the discussion .
We didn ’ t talk about masks two months ago , but from what you ’ re saying it seems that they ’ re extremely helpful , primarily because they keep people from spreading , rather than preventing people from breathing it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We were , I think , way too focussed on the protective properties of the particular material in the mask as constructed , and whether it can protect you when you enter a zone of known infection .
So we were thinking about masks , really , in too much of a biomedical context .
Is this mask safe enough for a health-care worker or a relative to step into a zone with someone who has an infection ?
Now , that ’ s an important use case .
But now that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or at least expanded it , to think more from a public-health or community perspective , we ’ ve actually learned to think of masks from the inside out .
And this is why , even a hundred years ago , they were so popular and actually sternly advised by public-health authorities during the great influenza outbreak .
And so if everyone ’ s wearing a mask , even if each individual mask has holes , you have that protection because we ’ re containing it .
So that ’ s been a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this dynamic .
So I assume you would say that we should all be wearing masks if we do something like go to a beach , or go to a hiking trail , even if we ’ re six feet apart from everyone while we ’ re there .
I do .
People love to be Talmudic about this : “ If I ’ m walking in the woods , and there ’ s no one around me , not even a bear , can I take the mask off ?
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fine .
If you can not see another person around you , and it ’ s in a well-ventilated , outdoor area , fine , I would suppose that you don ’ t need a mask .
But if you are going to a crowded beach , a crowded park , walking down the street where people are talking and breathing and coughing and sneezing , you should wear a mask .
Would you say that the conventional wisdom in the last couple months , as you have hinted at , is moving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less concern about outdoor spaces , even with people ?
Yes .
I think that what we ’ ve learned by understanding some of these super-spreading events , but also by carefully monitoring what ’ s happened to our health-care-worker population , is that by far the riskier interactions happen in densely packed indoor spaces , where there ’ s poor air circulation and where there are more surfaces that are coming in contact with multiple people .
So the biker who ’ s whizzing past you , even if they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outdoor environment with wind and air , you need a certain density of viral particles to effectively transmit the disease .
And while a person breathing heavily on a bike zooming past you might exhale more air , they ’ re doing it over a huge space and they ’ re doing it in a way that is so transient that it ’ s unlikely to affect you .
We ’ ve learned more about surfaces , and the fact that this can stay around on metal or plastic for three hours .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to not climb all over the same playground structures , though that ’ s not where the majority of transmission has happened .
The majority of transmission is happening in indoor , poorly ventilated environments commonly used by multiple people who are coming in and out .
And I think that ’ s where the focus of our transmission reduction should be .

Two months ago, I interviewed Asaf Bitton, a primary-care physician and public-health researcher who directs the Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard’s School of Public Health, about the guidelines he had compiled on how to best practice social distancing. These guidelines were released on March 13th, just as states were issuing shelter-in-place orders and Americans were wondering how they should perform basic activities, like daily walks and grocery runs.
Now, with businesses beginning to open up, and activity set to increase, I spoke by phone with Bitton again. I wanted to know what scientists had learned over the past few months about best practices for social distancing, what activities people should feel more comfortable doing, and where people should exercise more caution. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why public-health officials have changed the way they think about masks, the risks of socializing indoors, and the problem of public bathrooms.
What have we learned about the best social-distancing practices in the last ten weeks?
I think that we’ve learned from a number of studies that social distancing, when practiced en masse and consistently, actually can work to drive down the rate of growth of cases. This has gone from theoretical economic-modelling literature to a lot better epidemiological data. The practices that work are really the practices that reduce the ability of respiratory droplets to easily travel to other people. So that means that we’ve learned that it’s not just the distance quotient or equation. In fact, we’ve learned that sneezes and coughs can actually amplify beyond the six feet, but, in fact, that masks are really effective. Ventilation is really important. And the time interval that separates people from touching the same objects is important. So making sure that we’re not just washing hands but also not touching the same objects, especially indoor objects, is the hallmark of effective distancing strategies.
I’ve heard people say, well, six feet is not necessarily the exact distance. Is there an argument that you need to sell social distancing to the public, and that six feet is kind of a handy, helpful way of thinking about it?
I think it’s helpful, but it’s not fully complete. It has an idiosyncratic history that comes from both old literature on the spread of meningitis among kids in a Texas classroom, in the early nineteen-eighties, and some old studies by the military on sneezing, as well as how people got SARS from a flight between Hong Kong and Beijing twenty years ago. I think the important thing that people need to remember is the idea that it’s at least six feet. And what I mean by that is, there’s no evidence that anything less than six feet is at all safe. And there is evidence that, again, when people who are uncovered have big coughs or sneezes, they can sneeze twenty feet or more.
So the key, to me, since “six feet” is already in the lexicon, is not to debate six or eight or twelve, when the science isn’t really perfect about that and there’s so much individual variation. Let’s have a minimum. And let’s extend our knowledge by saying it’s at least six feet. And since it may be more, be wary of that, especially in indoor environments. Understand that masks can really help, I think, a lot more than we understood at first with this condition, because of their containment capacity. And understand, from some of these super-spreader events, like the choir in Washington or the religious service in California, that even people singing or talking for long periods of time in an enclosed space can be risky. And so it’s both distance and density, and then time exposure. So six feet is a good starting point, but it’s not the end of the discussion.
We didn’t talk about masks two months ago, but from what you’re saying it seems that they’re extremely helpful, primarily because they keep people from spreading, rather than preventing people from breathing it in. Is that correct?
Exactly. We were, I think, way too focussed on the protective properties of the particular material in the mask as constructed, and whether it can protect you when you enter a zone of known infection. So we were thinking about masks, really, in too much of a biomedical context. Is this mask safe enough for a health-care worker or a relative to step into a zone with someone who has an infection?
Now, that’s an important use case. But now that we’ve inverted our thinking, or at least expanded it, to think more from a public-health or community perspective, we’ve actually learned to think of masks from the inside out. And this is why, even a hundred years ago, they were so popular and actually sternly advised by public-health authorities during the great influenza outbreak. And so if everyone’s wearing a mask, even if each individual mask has holes, you have that protection because we’re containing it. So that’s been a major extension of our imagination or understanding of this dynamic.
So I assume you would say that we should all be wearing masks if we do something like go to a beach, or go to a hiking trail, even if we’re six feet apart from everyone while we’re there.
I do. People love to be Talmudic about this: “If I’m walking in the woods, and there’s no one around me, not even a bear, can I take the mask off?” And you know what? Yes. Fine. If you cannot see another person around you, and it’s in a well-ventilated, outdoor area, fine, I would suppose that you don’t need a mask. But if you are going to a crowded beach, a crowded park, walking down the street where people are talking and breathing and coughing and sneezing, you should wear a mask.
Would you say that the conventional wisdom in the last couple months, as you have hinted at, is moving more toward concern about indoor areas and less concern about outdoor spaces, even with people?
Yes. I think that what we’ve learned by understanding some of these super-spreading events, but also by carefully monitoring what’s happened to our health-care-worker population, is that by far the riskier interactions happen in densely packed indoor spaces, where there’s poor air circulation and where there are more surfaces that are coming in contact with multiple people. So the biker who’s whizzing past you, even if they’re breathing heavily—if you’re in an outdoor environment with wind and air, you need a certain density of viral particles to effectively transmit the disease. And while a person breathing heavily on a bike zooming past you might exhale more air, they’re doing it over a huge space and they’re doing it in a way that is so transient that it’s unlikely to affect you.


newyorker--2020-05-25--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons June 1, 2020

“ The great thing about napping is you don ’ t need much in an initial outlay to get started @ @

“The great thing about napping is you don’t need much in an initial outlay to get started.”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller


newyorker--2020-05-25--A Brooklyn Guitar Hero

A Brooklyn Guitar Hero

“ I remember thinking , first instinct , This will affect piano sales , ” Brian Whiton said the other day , describing the moment , this winter , when he heard about the coronavirus .
Whiton , the owner of Brooklyn Fine Guitars and Big Wrench Piano Care , is a piano technician by training .
He started stocking guitars in his Carroll Gardens shop only because people kept wandering in asking for them .
As the outbreak reached the city , Whiton began disinfecting his merchandise .
“ People seemed so relieved when I would wipe a guitar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he said .
Initially , he didn ’ t think it was necessary to restrict the number of customers inside the store , crowds being a rarity .
But he eventually began having customers e-mail or text him their orders , and he carried guitars out to the sidewalk for them to try .
Payment was via Venmo , or Zelle .
Whiton even offered to put guitars into Ubers or Lyfts and send them off to their new owners , although no one took him up on it .
When , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Andrew Cuomo ordered all “ non-essential businesses ” to close by Sunday , the news prompted a run on guitars .
On a normal weekend , Whiton sells between one and four of the instruments .
That weekend , he sold sixteen .
“ Most of the people who were buying were beginners , ” he said .
Customers would say , “ I ’ m looking for something entry-level to get through this.
” Carmen Tellez , a twenty-seven-year-old who recently graduated from law school , was one of them .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with her boyfriend in their one-bedroom near Barclays Center .
“ I thought about whether I could just be content watching YouTube videos all day , which often I am , ” she said .
“ Or what kind of crafting skills I have.
” She ’ d played a little guitar as a teen-ager .
“ I was , like , Oh , maybe that ’ s something I could do.
” Tellez e-mailed Whiton .
“ I had my eye on the Yamaha JR1 3/4-size , ” she wrote , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ am healthy , social-distancing , and avoiding public transportation !
” When she arrived , he was on the corner , handling a ukulele sale .
“ I Venmoed him the money , and he brought out the guitar , and he said he had sanitized it , ” she recalled .
Tellez consecrated her new axe by plucking out a little “ Smoke on the Water.
” She has been watching YouTube video tutorials , and during FaceTime calls with her mother she looks over notebooks from the lessons she took as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finished learning the beginning of Led Zeppelin ’ s “ Stairway to Heaven.
” Next up : “ Wish You Were Here , ” by Pink Floyd .
Tellez ’ s boyfriend has pronounced the new hobby “ less annoying ” than he expected .
Another customer was Olivia Brackins , who just turned twenty-one and worked in retail , at a zero-waste store in Williamsburg .
Before the pandemic , she said , she met a guy on Hinge who sings in a rock band .
“ We were on , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all got kind of messed up , because we were all social- distancing , so we just had to hang out in each other ’ s apartments , ” she said .
“ But we wrote a song together , in one day .
He was playing the guitar , and I was writing lyrics.
” The song , called “ Sanity , ” opens with the lines “ Chase me/I ’ m ready/To be your allegory.
” When the lockdown began , Brackins made her move .
“ I was , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and I don ’ t have a musical instrument of my own , ” she said .
She e-mailed Whiton , then made her way over from Bushwick to pick up her guitar .
“ I ’ m learning it pretty fresh , ” she said .
“ I ’ ve been playing it every day .
My fingers are getting calluses.
” Brackins loves movie scores—she ’ s hoping to make a career of them—and is a fan of the Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy .
Also , she ’ s moving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ His roommates left their apartment in Flatbush , ” she said .
“ So might as well.
” With his store shut down , Whiton now has more time for his own music .
He ’ s been playing his Yamaha CG192C ( rosewood back and sides , solid cedar top ) for hours at a stretch .
“ Just standard classical stuff , ” he said .
Villa-Lobos .
Albéniz .
“ Playing music is very therapeutic , ” he went on .
Whiton came to New York from Minneapolis two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the “ music scene , ” and opened his store in 2011 .
With so much spare time , all of a sudden , he ’ s been taking FaceTime guitar lessons .
“ Sometimes it ’ s easy to lose sight of how simple it is , ” he said .
“ It ’ s funny , because even though it ’ s just picking it up , sometimes it ’ s just the hardest thing to do.
” ♦

Brian Whiton Illustration by João Fazenda
“I remember thinking, first instinct, This will affect piano sales,” Brian Whiton said the other day, describing the moment, this winter, when he heard about the coronavirus. Whiton, the owner of Brooklyn Fine Guitars and Big Wrench Piano Care, is a piano technician by training. He started stocking guitars in his Carroll Gardens shop only because people kept wandering in asking for them.
As the outbreak reached the city, Whiton began disinfecting his merchandise. “People seemed so relieved when I would wipe a guitar down right in front of them,” he said. Initially, he didn’t think it was necessary to restrict the number of customers inside the store, crowds being a rarity. But he eventually began having customers e-mail or text him their orders, and he carried guitars out to the sidewalk for them to try. Payment was via Venmo, or Zelle. Whiton even offered to put guitars into Ubers or Lyfts and send them off to their new owners, although no one took him up on it.
When, on Friday, March 20th, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all “non-essential businesses” to close by Sunday, the news prompted a run on guitars. On a normal weekend, Whiton sells between one and four of the instruments. That weekend, he sold sixteen. “Most of the people who were buying were beginners,” he said. Customers would say, “I’m looking for something entry-level to get through this.” Carmen Tellez, a twenty-seven-year-old who recently graduated from law school, was one of them. She faced the prospect of being cooped up with her boyfriend in their one-bedroom near Barclays Center. “I thought about whether I could just be content watching YouTube videos all day, which often I am,” she said. “Or what kind of crafting skills I have.” She’d played a little guitar as a teen-ager. “I was, like, Oh, maybe that’s something I could do.”
Tellez e-mailed Whiton. “I had my eye on the Yamaha JR1 3/4-size,” she wrote, and asked for curbside pickup. “I am healthy, social-distancing, and avoiding public transportation!” When she arrived, he was on the corner, handling a ukulele sale. “I Venmoed him the money, and he brought out the guitar, and he said he had sanitized it,” she recalled. Tellez consecrated her new axe by plucking out a little “Smoke on the Water.” She has been watching YouTube video tutorials, and during FaceTime calls with her mother she looks over notebooks from the lessons she took as a kid. She’s nearly finished learning the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Next up: “Wish You Were Here,” by Pink Floyd. Tellez’s boyfriend has pronounced the new hobby “less annoying” than he expected.
Another customer was Olivia Brackins, who just turned twenty-one and worked in retail, at a zero-waste store in Williamsburg. Before the pandemic, she said, she met a guy on Hinge who sings in a rock band. “We were on, like, our fifth date, and it all got kind of messed up, because we were all social- distancing, so we just had to hang out in each other’s apartments,” she said. “But we wrote a song together, in one day. He was playing the guitar, and I was writing lyrics.” The song, called “Sanity,” opens with the lines “Chase me/I’m ready/To be your allegory.”
When the lockdown began, Brackins made her move. “I was, like, we’re going into quarantine, and I don’t have a musical instrument of my own,” she said. She e-mailed Whiton, then made her way over from Bushwick to pick up her guitar. “I’m learning it pretty fresh,” she said. “I’ve been playing it every day. My fingers are getting calluses.” Brackins loves movie scores—she’s hoping to make a career of them—and is a fan of the Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy. Also, she’s moving in with the guy from Hinge. “His roommates left their apartment in Flatbush,” she said. “So might as well.”
With his store shut down, Whiton now has more time for his own music. He’s been playing his Yamaha CG192C (rosewood back and sides, solid cedar top) for hours at a stretch. “Just standard classical stuff,” he said. Villa-Lobos. Albéniz. “Playing music is very therapeutic,” he went on. Whiton came to New York from Minneapolis two decades ago, to be a part of the “music scene,” and opened his store in 2011. With so much spare time, all of a sudden, he’s been taking FaceTime guitar lessons. “Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of how simple it is,” he said. “It’s funny, because even though it’s just picking it up, sometimes it’s just the hardest thing to do.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-25--The 1975 Has More to Say

The 1975 Has More to Say

Pop music , once ruled by constraint and conformity , now faces a tyranny of freedom .
Technology has eroded boundaries of taste and influence , cracking open a trove of stylistic opportunity .
No mainstream act has embraced this freedom more wholeheartedly than the 1975 , a group from Britain that could loosely be classified as a band , if only because its members sometimes play instruments .
The group was formed , in the early two-thousands , as a teen-age punk cover band but has morphed into a genre-defying shape that poses a series of questions : Where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What counts as rock and roll , and why should anyone care ?
What ’ s the difference between ambition and self-indulgence ?
Is self-awareness an asset or a cross to bear ?
The 1975 has four members , but its front man , a charismatic thirty-one-year-old named Matty Healy , assumes the responsibility of addressing these questions—and then he asks more .
Rock music has all but disappeared from pop culture , but the mythology of the rock star looms large , and Healy embodies the archetype .
Scrawny and outspoken , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a love of eyeliner , illicit substances , and shirtlessness , he ’ s become an avatar of modern authenticity , wit , and flamboyance—someone unfiltered and agile enough to spar with Maroon 5 on a public platform .
The 1975 functions as a vessel for his ponderings about the psychic burdens of millennials , and the self-loathing he feels for even bothering to talk about them .
( Healy has described himself , a bit sheepishly , as “ a millennial that baby boomers like.
” ) The band ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to metabolize musical styles and eras , but even more dazzling was the attitudinal tap dance that Healy performed in his lyrics .
He could harshly critique the preferences and habits of an entire generation while implicating himself in the same breath .
“ You lack substance when you say something like ‘ Oh what a shame , ’ ” he sings , on “ Sincerity Is Scary , ” from 2018 .
“ It ’ s just a self-referential way that stops you having to be human.
” At first , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pop rock , writing big-tent anthems that drew heavily on eighties synth-pop , filled with kick drums and clever hooks—a default mode for plenty of mainstream musicians who can ’ t rap convincingly .
Gradually , the group began to take stylistic digressions , with the same sort of imaginative confidence that David Byrne and the Talking Heads had in the late seventies .
The 1975 buffered its hooks with gospel choirs , funky bass lines , glitchy electronic noodling , and flushes of psychedelia .
Healy , at his most existentially confused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never exhausted by the intellectual and emotional loop-de-loops he made in his lyrics .
He knew how to write hooks , and how to be sentimental without being treacly .
And if he did come off as treacly he could find the appropriate way to make fun of himself for it .
Each of the 1975 ’ s first three records topped the British charts , in part because the group cultivated an uncommonly sincere bond with its fans , a cross-section of whom appeared in the video for the single “ TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s ostentatiously titled album “ I like it when you sleep , for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it ” débuted at No .
1 in the United States in 2016 , even though it wasn ’ t made available on Spotify until two weeks later .
Healy , in a quest to imbue every aspect of his work with cinematic importance , said that the band would quit making records when the decade ended .
But after recording their ambitious “ A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there was more to say .
When the 1975 toured last fall to promote “ A Brief Inquiry , ” crowds often cheered for encores .
In response , Healy would return to the stage alone , stand with his back to the audience , and broadcast a five-minute speech by the teen-age climate activist Greta Thunberg .
“ I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible , ” she says .
“ To do your best is no longer good enough.
” The band ’ s first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ track simply called “ The 1975.
” For its new record , “ Notes on a Conditional Form , ” which was released last week , the 1975 instead chose a talk by Thunberg—which was recorded specifically for this purpose but is indistinguishable from any number of her viral sermons .
The speech segues neatly into a song called “ People , ” a screeching manifesto that nods to the band ’ s punk-rock origins .
“ Wake up , wake up , wake up !
” Healy screams .
“ It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only got a thousand of them left.
” It ’ s a song about the frenzy of dispiriting news that Healy and his generational peers have encountered , and the way that apathy can appear as the only reasonable path forward .
But Healy is too conflicted , and too resistant to cliché , to make a pure protest album .
“ Notes on a Conditional Form ” is not , despite its opening moments , a political record .
On much of the album , he takes a more resigned stance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than his trademark wail .
And he ’ s more inclined to probe the sense of inertia that threatens to undermine serious political action among young people—a kind of ennui disguised as comfort , thanks to the trivial conveniences that technology offers .
After many years of struggling with heroin abuse , Healy spent a stint in rehab while recording “ A Brief Inquiry.
” He ’ s since suffered a short relapse and got clean again , and on the new album he wrestles with the tedium of sobriety , describing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to wish he was back at home .
Yet Healy is also too skeptical of his own internal monologue to make anything that could be described as a recovery album .
“ Now I ’ m clean , ” he announces on “ The Birthday Party , ” a drowsy acoustic song with some of the conversational spoken-word touches found in many threads of modern country music .
“ It would seem.
” “ Notes on a Conditional Form ” sometimes functions as a self-referential corrective to earlier records , disputing claims that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The opening line of “ Love It if We Made It , ” an electro-rock hit from 2018 , said that Healy was “ fucking in a car , shooting heroin.
” Now , on “ Nothing Revealed Everything Denied , ” he sings , “ Life feels like a lie / I need something to be true .
.
.
.
I never fucked in a car , I was lying.
” Musically , too , this album diverges from the band ’ s prior work .
They once assimilated their influences @ @ @ @ @ @ @ synth-pop , but now these individual styles appear more or less preserved as discrete entities , the band shape-shifting from song to song .
And if Healy once represented a globalist version of pop music , drawing more from social media than from regional sentiment , he ’ s refocussed himself on his homeland , offering a survey of distinctly British subgenres : shoe-gazey Britpop , rousing punk , skittering jungle , and ragga .
More than blind experimentation , this is a gesture of faith in the 1975 ’ s fans , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any path he chooses to take .
Healy has so many ideas—and so many rejoinders and addenda to those ideas—that the 1975 ’ s albums , at times , suffer from a lack of editing .
( Or did they benefit from it ?
one can imagine Healy pondering . )
All the records are lengthy and grandiloquent , but “ Notes on a Conditional Form , ” with twenty-two tracks , crosses a new threshold .
This excess used to be a matter of lyrical verbosity and an abundance of restless energy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that occasionally veers into sluggishness .
There are a number of tracks—movie-score instrumentals , electronic-dance interludes—that do not contain his voice at all .
Once a bottomless well of questions , Healy sounds , faintly , as if he ’ d grown tired of his own contemplation .
Which leads only to more contemplation : Is this the sound of growing up ?
What ’ s the difference between maturity and complacency ?
Is compromise a form of defeat ?
Is irreverence the same thing as innovation ?
Healy , you can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answers .
♦

Pop music, once ruled by constraint and conformity, now faces a tyranny of freedom. Technology has eroded boundaries of taste and influence, cracking open a trove of stylistic opportunity. No mainstream act has embraced this freedom more wholeheartedly than the 1975, a group from Britain that could loosely be classified as a band, if only because its members sometimes play instruments. The group was formed, in the early two-thousands, as a teen-age punk cover band but has morphed into a genre-defying shape that poses a series of questions: Where does nostalgia end and innovation begin? What counts as rock and roll, and why should anyone care? What’s the difference between ambition and self-indulgence? Is self-awareness an asset or a cross to bear?
The 1975 has four members, but its front man, a charismatic thirty-one-year-old named Matty Healy, assumes the responsibility of addressing these questions—and then he asks more. Rock music has all but disappeared from pop culture, but the mythology of the rock star looms large, and Healy embodies the archetype. Scrawny and outspoken, with a thicket of wild black hair and a love of eyeliner, illicit substances, and shirtlessness, he’s become an avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance—someone unfiltered and agile enough to spar with Maroon 5 on a public platform. The 1975 functions as a vessel for his ponderings about the psychic burdens of millennials, and the self-loathing he feels for even bothering to talk about them. (Healy has described himself, a bit sheepishly, as “a millennial that baby boomers like.”)
The band’s first three albums showed an impressive ability to metabolize musical styles and eras, but even more dazzling was the attitudinal tap dance that Healy performed in his lyrics. He could harshly critique the preferences and habits of an entire generation while implicating himself in the same breath. “You lack substance when you say something like ‘Oh what a shame,’ ” he sings, on “Sincerity Is Scary,” from 2018. “It’s just a self-referential way that stops you having to be human.”
At first, the band worked mostly within the parameters of pop rock, writing big-tent anthems that drew heavily on eighties synth-pop, filled with kick drums and clever hooks—a default mode for plenty of mainstream musicians who can’t rap convincingly. Gradually, the group began to take stylistic digressions, with the same sort of imaginative confidence that David Byrne and the Talking Heads had in the late seventies. The 1975 buffered its hooks with gospel choirs, funky bass lines, glitchy electronic noodling, and flushes of psychedelia. Healy, at his most existentially confused, still sounded exuberant and warm-blooded, never exhausted by the intellectual and emotional loop-de-loops he made in his lyrics. He knew how to write hooks, and how to be sentimental without being treacly. And if he did come off as treacly he could find the appropriate way to make fun of himself for it.
Each of the 1975’s first three records topped the British charts, in part because the group cultivated an uncommonly sincere bond with its fans, a cross-section of whom appeared in the video for the single “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME,” from 2018. The band’s ostentatiously titled album “I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it” débuted at No. 1 in the United States in 2016, even though it wasn’t made available on Spotify until two weeks later. Healy, in a quest to imbue every aspect of his work with cinematic importance, said that the band would quit making records when the decade ended. But after recording their ambitious “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” in 2018, he found that there was more to say.
When the 1975 toured last fall to promote “A Brief Inquiry,” crowds often cheered for encores. In response, Healy would return to the stage alone, stand with his back to the audience, and broadcast a five-minute speech by the teen-age climate activist Greta Thunberg. “I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible,” she says. “To do your best is no longer good enough.” The band’s first three albums begin with an ambient instrumental track simply called “The 1975.” For its new record, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” which was released last week, the 1975 instead chose a talk by Thunberg—which was recorded specifically for this purpose but is indistinguishable from any number of her viral sermons. The speech segues neatly into a song called “People,” a screeching manifesto that nods to the band’s punk-rock origins. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” Healy screams. “It’s Monday morning and we’ve only got a thousand of them left.” It’s a song about the frenzy of dispiriting news that Healy and his generational peers have encountered, and the way that apathy can appear as the only reasonable path forward.
But Healy is too conflicted, and too resistant to cliché, to make a pure protest album. “Notes on a Conditional Form” is not, despite its opening moments, a political record. On much of the album, he takes a more resigned stance, his voice slipping into a whisper rather than his trademark wail. And he’s more inclined to probe the sense of inertia that threatens to undermine serious political action among young people—a kind of ennui disguised as comfort, thanks to the trivial conveniences that technology offers. After many years of struggling with heroin abuse, Healy spent a stint in rehab while recording “A Brief Inquiry.” He’s since suffered a short relapse and got clean again, and on the new album he wrestles with the tedium of sobriety, describing the sensation of arriving at social gatherings only to wish he was back at home. Yet Healy is also too skeptical of his own internal monologue to make anything that could be described as a recovery album. “Now I’m clean,” he announces on “The Birthday Party,” a drowsy acoustic song with some of the conversational spoken-word touches found in many threads of modern country music. “It would seem.”
“Notes on a Conditional Form” sometimes functions as a self-referential corrective to earlier records, disputing claims that Healy has made about his life. The opening line of “Love It if We Made It,” an electro-rock hit from 2018, said that Healy was “fucking in a car, shooting heroin.” Now, on “Nothing Revealed Everything Denied,” he sings, “Life feels like a lie / I need something to be true. . . . I never fucked in a car, I was lying.” Musically, too, this album diverges from the band’s prior work. They once assimilated their influences into a cogent, ecstatic form of synth-pop, but now these individual styles appear more or less preserved as discrete entities, the band shape-shifting from song to song. And if Healy once represented a globalist version of pop music, drawing more from social media than from regional sentiment, he’s refocussed himself on his homeland, offering a survey of distinctly British subgenres: shoe-gazey Britpop, rousing punk, skittering jungle, and ragga. More than blind experimentation, this is a gesture of faith in the 1975’s fans, who are eager to follow Healy down any path he chooses to take.
Healy has so many ideas—and so many rejoinders and addenda to those ideas—that the 1975’s albums, at times, suffer from a lack of editing. (Or did they benefit from it? one can imagine Healy pondering.) All the records are lengthy and grandiloquent, but “Notes on a Conditional Form,” with twenty-two tracks, crosses a new threshold. This excess used to be a matter of lyrical verbosity and an abundance of restless energy, but Healy has a newfound reserve that occasionally veers into sluggishness. There are a number of tracks—movie-score instrumentals, electronic-dance interludes—that do not contain his voice at all. Once a bottomless well of questions, Healy sounds, faintly, as if he’d grown tired of his own contemplation. Which leads only to more contemplation: Is this the sound of growing up? What’s the difference between maturity and complacency? Is compromise a form of defeat? Is irreverence the same thing as innovation? Healy, you can be sure, has already begun drafting the answers. ♦


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Each week , we provide a cartoon in need of a caption .
You , the reader , submit your @ @ @ @ @ three finalists , and you vote for your favorite .
Anyone age thirteen or older @ @ @ @ @ To read the complete rules , click here .

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption here, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
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newyorker--2020-05-25--To Test a Vaccine for COVID-19, Should Volunteers Risk Their Lives?

When he was eighteen , Abie Rohrig decided that he wanted to donate a kidney to save the life of a stranger who needed it .
At twenty , he put his name on a list of volunteers for a human-challenge trial that would test the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine .
A human-challenge trial for a vaccine would be nearly unprecedented : it would entail giving subjects a candidate vaccine against the virus , and then infecting them deliberately to test its efficacy .
The side effects would be largely unknown , and the viral infection could be deadly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experiment could shave months off of the process of vaccine development and save countless lives .
In a conversation with his mother , Elaine Perlman , Rohrig points out that many occupations involve taking on risks to help others .
But how much risk is too much ?
Larissa MacFarquhar , who has written extensively about altruism , talks with Marc Lipsitch , an epidemiologist who co-authored a journal article calling for human-challenge trials , and Angela Rasmussen , a virologist who feels that SARS-CoV2 is too unknown for any volunteer to meaningfully @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Photograph by Anton Vaganov / Reuters
When he was eighteen, Abie Rohrig decided that he wanted to donate a kidney to save the life of a stranger who needed it. At twenty, he put his name on a list of volunteers for a human-challenge trial that would test the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine. A human-challenge trial for a vaccine would be nearly unprecedented: it would entail giving subjects a candidate vaccine against the virus, and then infecting them deliberately to test its efficacy. The side effects would be largely unknown, and the viral infection could be deadly. But, if successful, this experiment could shave months off of the process of vaccine development and save countless lives. In a conversation with his mother, Elaine Perlman, Rohrig points out that many occupations involve taking on risks to help others. But how much risk is too much? Larissa MacFarquhar, who has written extensively about altruism, talks with Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who co-authored a journal article calling for human-challenge trials, and Angela Rasmussen, a virologist who feels that SARS-CoV2 is too unknown for any volunteer to meaningfully give informed consent about its risks.


newyorker--2020-05-25--How My Misdirected Feelings Have Come Out Lately

Became utterly livid upon learning about rebus squares in crossword puzzles .
Wept with joy when Miranda finally got invited @ @ @ @ @ “ Sex and the City.
” Convinced myself that a murderer would burst in while @ @ @ @ @ .
Spent forty-five minutes choreographing a victory dance for remembering to put grounds in the @ @ @ @ @ bed .
Got in a heated argument with a column of ants .
Waxed nostalgic @ @ @ @ @ I once carried around in my wallet for eight months .
Wrote Will Shortz an @ @ @ @ @ the injustice of rebus squares in crossword puzzles .
Sulked for hours after catching only @ @ @ @ @ ’ s “ How You Remind Me ” on the radio .
Panicked over not @ @ @ @ @ s e-mail address .
Became heavily emotionally invested in whether a particular leaf would unfurl @ @ @ @ @ world in which everyone is happy and secure because there are no rebus squares in @ @ @

Became utterly livid upon learning about rebus squares in crossword puzzles.
Wept with joy when Miranda finally got invited to have a threesome on “Sex and the City.”
Convinced myself that a murderer would burst in while I was in the bath.
Spent forty-five minutes choreographing a victory dance for remembering to put grounds in the coffee machine before going to bed.
Got in a heated argument with a column of ants.
Waxed nostalgic over a receipt from Marshalls I once carried around in my wallet for eight months.
Wrote Will Shortz an angry, paragraphs-long e-mail about the injustice of rebus squares in crossword puzzles.
Sulked for hours after catching only the very tail-end of Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” on the radio.
Panicked over not actually having Will Shortz’s e-mail address.
Became heavily emotionally invested in whether a particular leaf would unfurl.
Dreamt of a better world in which everyone is happy and secure because there are no rebus squares in crossword puzzles.


newyorker--2020-05-26--Events We Are Actually Glad Were Cancelled

Trump Dropping His Tax-Return Envelope Into a Post-Office Box at 11:55 P.M. on April 14th Through His Limo Window and @ @ @ @ @ Symphony Orchestra Plays the Throat Noises of Rudy Giuliani Mario Lopez ’ s Acceptance Speech @ @ @ @ @ Ceremony for His Searing Investigative Work on “ Access Hollywood ” NBC Live Event : @ @ @ @ @ ” Harvests Bone Marrow from a Prisoner Rick Steves Travel Seminar : Screwing Your Way @ @ @ @ @ Room Where Every Clue Is Embedded in a Rambling Forty-five-Minute David Lee Roth Monologue About @ @ @ @ @ Apologizing to Phoenix-Area Strippers on Behalf of the Groom “ Getting Pressured Into Trying the @ @ @ @ @ Pudding ” Day at Work The Kid Rock Reads from the Works of Emily Dickinson @

Scott Jacobson, Todd Levin, Jason Roeder, Mike Sacks, Ted Travelstead

Insufferably Hot, Shadeless Outdoor SushiFest 2020
Hologram Tupac Seduces Your Date
Trump Dropping His Tax-Return Envelope Into a Post-Office Box at 11:55 P.M. on April 14th Through His Limo Window and Giving a Thumbs-Up
The Boston Symphony Orchestra Plays the Throat Noises of Rudy Giuliani
Nathan’s Hot-Dog-Processing Contest
Mario Lopez’s Acceptance Speech at the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Ceremony for His Searing Investigative Work on “Access Hollywood”
Craig and Anita’s Paintball Wedding
JarJarCon: A Gathering of Jar Jar Binks Cosplayers and Fetishists
Slide-Whistle Night at Yankee Stadium
Stephen Miller Loses His Virginity
New York City’s Gay Men’s Chorus Sings Solo Sammy Hagar
Kevin Smith Takes a Sativa Gummy and Explains Bitcoin
Cousin Joshua’s Adult Bris
A Weekend at Clothing-Optional M&M’s World
Brian and Lisa’s Gender-Reveal Orgy
NBC Live Event: The Cast of “Friends” Harvests Bone Marrow from a Prisoner
Rick Steves Travel Seminar: Screwing Your Way Across Europe
That New Escape Room Where Every Clue Is Embedded in a Rambling Forty-five-Minute David Lee Roth Monologue About Doo-Wop Music
Uncle Ed’s Annual Garage Fudge Festival
A Night of Apologizing to Phoenix-Area Strippers on Behalf of the Groom
The 2020 Raw-Milk-Salmonella Coachella Porta-Potty Shortage
The “Make America Great Again” Key Party
“Getting Pressured Into Trying the Boss’s Homemade Chia Pudding” Day at Work
The Kid Rock Reads from the Works of Emily Dickinson Tour
Def Misogyny Jam
President Trump’s Private White House Quinceañera for a Hundred Very Lucky Fifteen-Year-Olds
Co-worker’s Vasectomy-Reveal Party
Soccer