newyorker--2020-03-28--What Bob Dylan Is Doing in “Murder Most Foul”

What a weird new song for Bob Dylan to drop—and what better time to drop it .
“ Weird ” with its full Shakespearean force , as in the “ weird sisters ” of “ Macbeth , ” possessing “ the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.
” And “ new ” —well , new to us , at any rate .
In announcing the song on Twitter early Friday morning , Dylan described it only as “ an unreleased song we recorded a while back.
” By the sound of it—both Dylan ’ s voice and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Foul ” was recorded sometime in the past decade .
The song ’ s reference to our searching for John F. Kennedy ’ s soul “ for the last fifty years ” might pin it to 2013 , until we know better .
Dylan last released original material on his album “ Tempest , ” from 2012 .
Ever since , he ’ s been covering the Great American Songbook , notably large portions of the Frank Sinatra catalogue .
“ Murder Most Foul ” is the first evidence of original songwriting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from one of the most original songwriters of our era .
The first half of the song is disappointing .
When I ’ d finished playing the track on YouTube , the autoplay sent me directly into “ Desolation Row , ” which is a pretty canny pull for an algorithm to make from a new release .
But—though it pains me to say it—the song ’ s opening minutes more closely resemble a doggerel version of Don McLean ’ s eight-and-a-half minute pseudo-epic “ American Pie , ” with aspirations to “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ m goin ’ to Woodstock , it ’ s the Aquarian age , / Then I ’ ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage ” : if they weren ’ t written by Dylan , would anyone take lines like these seriously ?
Or these , which open the song : “ ’ Twas , ” indeed : at least it wasn ’ t a dark and stormy night .
We recognize Dylan ’ s playfulness in the invented Kennedy quote , of course—a playfulness underscored by his voice in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Pearl Harbor speech in the second line , and to the Book of Isaiah in the sixth .
But all the clichés ( including Kennedy riding into Dallas like a cowboy in the third line ) aren ’ t adding up to much .
The “ Desolation Row ” -style associative lyrics actively invite speculation from the kind of amateur sleuth for whom the term “ Dylanologist ” was coined .
Reading through the YouTube comments section , I was initially tempted to compare it to a QAnon-style conspiracy message board—until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ QAnon .
The song is seventeen minutes long ; “ Q ” is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet .
Coincidence ?
The first half of the song often descends into doggerel in a way that “ Desolation Row ” never does .
The relatively brisk ( at eleven minutes and twenty seconds ) closing track on “ Highway 61 Revisited ” is both allusive and elusive ; for its first ten minutes , “ Murder Most Foul ” is merely allusive .
Then something amazing happens—Wolfman Jack shows up and starts to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with another version of the Great American Songbook , one that would have Sinatra turning in his grave .
Indeed , the last seven minutes of the song resemble nothing so much as a playlist from one of the “ Theme Time Radio Hour ” shows that Dylan hosted from 2006 to 2009 .
“ Speaking in tongues ” : this is what Greil Marcus calls “ the shape of things to come , ” “ prophecy and the American voice.
” The lyric “ my long Cadillac ” calls out to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Uranium Rock , ” which Dylan covered in live shows ( sometimes with Tom Petty ) in the mid-eighties .
“ Only the good die young ” is , of course , Billy Joel ’ s twist on the old saw ; the Kingston Trio charted with “ Tom Dooley ” in 1958 .
“ Play ” becomes the controlling verb for the remainder of the song and opens the majority of the song ’ s remaining lines .
The song-as-playlist reaches far and wide , with an admirable ecumenicism—the Eagles are there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Getz , and Patsy Cline , the Everly Brothers , John Lee Hooker , the Animals , and the Who .
The song closes by inscribing itself into the corpus of American song through which American history is both forged and preserved :

What a weird new song for Bob Dylan to drop—and what better time to drop it. “Weird” with its full Shakespearean force, as in the “weird sisters” of “Macbeth,” possessing “the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.” And “new”—well, new to us, at any rate.
In announcing the song on Twitter early Friday morning, Dylan described it only as “an unreleased song we recorded a while back.” By the sound of it—both Dylan’s voice and the spare piano/upright bass/violin/drum arrangement—“Murder Most Foul” was recorded sometime in the past decade. The song’s reference to our searching for John F. Kennedy’s soul “for the last fifty years” might pin it to 2013, until we know better. Dylan last released original material on his album “Tempest,” from 2012. Ever since, he’s been covering the Great American Songbook, notably large portions of the Frank Sinatra catalogue. “Murder Most Foul” is the first evidence of original songwriting that we’ve had in eight years from one of the most original songwriters of our era.
The first half of the song is disappointing. When I’d finished playing the track on YouTube, the autoplay sent me directly into “Desolation Row,” which is a pretty canny pull for an algorithm to make from a new release. But—though it pains me to say it—the song’s opening minutes more closely resemble a doggerel version of Don McLean’s eight-and-a-half minute pseudo-epic “American Pie,” with aspirations to “Sympathy for the Devil.” “I’m goin’ to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian age, / Then I’ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage”: if they weren’t written by Dylan, would anyone take lines like these seriously? Or these, which open the song:
’Twas a dark day in Dallas, November, ’63
The day that would live on in infamy
President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high
Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?”
“ ’Twas,” indeed: at least it wasn’t a dark and stormy night. We recognize Dylan’s playfulness in the invented Kennedy quote, of course—a playfulness underscored by his voice in the recording—and hear the allusion to F.D.R.’s Pearl Harbor speech in the second line, and to the Book of Isaiah in the sixth.
But all the clichés (including Kennedy riding into Dallas like a cowboy in the third line) aren’t adding up to much. The “Desolation Row”-style associative lyrics actively invite speculation from the kind of amateur sleuth for whom the term “Dylanologist” was coined. Reading through the YouTube comments section, I was initially tempted to compare it to a QAnon-style conspiracy message board—until I began running into literal invocations of QAnon. The song is seventeen minutes long; “Q” is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet. Coincidence?
The first half of the song often descends into doggerel in a way that “Desolation Row” never does. The relatively brisk (at eleven minutes and twenty seconds) closing track on “Highway 61 Revisited” is both allusive and elusive; for its first ten minutes, “Murder Most Foul” is merely allusive.
Then something amazing happens—Wolfman Jack shows up and starts to play tracks. We’re presented with another version of the Great American Songbook, one that would have Sinatra turning in his grave. Indeed, the last seven minutes of the song resemble nothing so much as a playlist from one of the “Theme Time Radio Hour” shows that Dylan hosted from 2006 to 2009.
Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack
Play it for me in my long Cadillac
Play me that only the good die young
Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung
“Speaking in tongues”: this is what Greil Marcus calls “the shape of things to come,” “prophecy and the American voice.” The lyric “my long Cadillac” calls out to a late-fifties Warren Smith deep track, “Uranium Rock,” which Dylan covered in live shows (sometimes with Tom Petty) in the mid-eighties. “Only the good die young” is, of course, Billy Joel’s twist on the old saw; the Kingston Trio charted with “Tom Dooley” in 1958.
“Play” becomes the controlling verb for the remainder of the song and opens the majority of the song’s remaining lines. The song-as-playlist reaches far and wide, with an admirable ecumenicism—the Eagles are there, and Fleetwood Mac, and Stan Getz, and Patsy Cline, the Everly Brothers, John Lee Hooker, the Animals, and the Who. The song closes by inscribing itself into the corpus of American song through which American history is both forged and preserved:


newyorker--2020-03-28--What Do the Names of British Houses Mean?

Since the nineteen-eighties , Laura Wright , a historical linguist at the University of Cambridge , has carried out much of her research at London ’ s Metropolitan Archives .
Wright studies the way that Standard English , as linguists call it , came to be standardized .
“ My career has been spent looking up , What did people actually write in the thirteen-hundreds ?
What did they actually write in the fourteen-hundreds ?
” she told me recently .
One of Wright ’ s subjects has been the records of medieval shopkeepers and businesses on London Bridge , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French , Anglo-Norman , and Old English that became the modern English language .
Waiting for her manuscripts to appear at the archives , which are kept in Clerkenwell , not far from the ancient heart of the city , she fell into the habit of flicking through old post-office directories that were on the shelves nearby .
Wright considers British names and accents to be vessels of deep history , complex codes that indicate our place in the social order .
“ We live in a democracy , supposedly , but we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she said .
People have named dwellings in the British Isles for as long as there have been dwellings , and over the centuries there have been periods , like the turn of the twentieth century , when these names have acquired an astonishing expressiveness .
Here are some house names from Selsey , a seaside town in West Sussex , from 1915 : Wright used to have a slot on local radio , to discuss language in London , and she would occasionally talk about house names that caught her eye @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some weird , wonderful house name from the eighteen-eighties , you can sometimes work out who lived in the house and who called it that , and why they called it that , ” she said .
“ That was fun to do.
” But Wright didn ’ t think house names were worthy of academic attention .
That ’ s because , to most contemporary British middle-class ears , they are naff .
If you don ’ t know what naff means , the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “ unfashionable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The O.E.D.
’ s fourth citation , taken from the Sunday Telegraph , in 1983 , reads , “ It is naff to call your house The Gables , Mon Repos , or Dunroamin.
” In 2011 , Wright decided to take house names seriously .
“ I examined my own prejudice , ” she told me .
Sociolinguistics in a class-conscious country like Britain is a charged subject .
“ You won ’ t find anything in textbooks on how Shakespeare might have been what we call a T-H-fronter—he would have said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ’ and ‘ muvver ’ rather than ‘ mother ’ —because that has been taboo , ” Wright explained .
“ I realized I , too , am suffering from this blindness to house names , even though they are literally staring you in the face.
” Earlier this month , Wright published “ Sunnyside : A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names , ” in which she organizes roughly a thousand years of the nation ’ s house names into categories that include the transferred place name , the nostalgically rural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the latest fad .
( The twenties were mad for puns : Wright has tracked an early use of “ Dunroamin ” —a play on the Scottish place-name element , as in Dundee , and “ roamin , ” as in drifting around—to 1926 . )
Naming habits have remained amazingly stable .
The mead hall in “ Beowulf , ” the oldest known work of English literature , is called Heorot , which survives as the White Hart , a common pub name .
House names from before 1200 often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like Ceolmund or Wærman , but by the fourteenth century , inspired by chivalric crests and religious imagery , they had titles like Le Griffon , La Worm , Le Dolfyn , and Le Harpe .
During the Enlightenment , it became fashionable across Europe to name houses after a state of mind .
In 1746 , Frederick the Great , of Prussia , like some latter-day retiree to the English seaside , named his favorite palace Sans Souci—No Worries—which was written in gold letters above the door .
Wright detects ruptures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the bestowal of house names .
In 1762 , London ’ s authorities began to number buildings , deleting centuries of coded symbols and allusive names .
( For a long time , a perfumer in London would be identified by the civet cat on his sign . )
Eighty years later , the spread of railways led to a construction free-for-all in the suburbs , as well as the florid era of Victorian house names .
One of my favorite lists in Wright ’ s book is a collection of lawyers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with their orderly central London office addresses ( 22 Bedford Row ) juxtaposed with their poet ’ s idylls on the edge ( Rosemont , in Finchley ) .
“ I chose lawyers because they were the least romantic subset of people that I could think of , ” Wright said .
The thrill of social mobility and first-time homeownership rings out from the naming abandon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries .
Property speculators and the bourgeoisie grabbed at old-sounding British words and bodged them together in novel hybrids , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ artisanal grammar .
They did the same with place-name elements , fusing fashionable “ Fern ” with evocative “ dale.
” Wright describes this linguistic technique as “ pick and mix , ” an attempt to create new identities on old soil .
“ They are legitimizing themselves by giving themselves a rooted history , ” she told me .
“ It doesn ’ t matter that it ’ s bogus .
Most legitimizing histories are bogus.
” Wright grew up in Wealdstone and Barnet , North London neighborhoods on the farther reaches @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ m a suburban girl , ” she told me .
She was born in a house named Fayre House , complete with rusticated “ Y ” and “ E , ” on Barnet High Street .
Her father mended watches .
Like most British people , she grew up surrounded by house names and , consciously or not , learned to read them as class signifiers of the people that lived behind them .
There is a social chasm between matching bungalows named Oak Lodge and Jeannette .
“ I had this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what is posh and what is not posh , ” Wright recalled .
( It can be a subtle game of signalling : my grandfather sold fat to bakers in Kent .
When he and my grandmother bought their first house , which was called Old Moorings , they renamed it Langford , an aspirational , rural , “ pick and mix ” name , which they had already given to my father as a middle name .
They named their son for a place , and a respectability , they hadn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hierarchy of names , Wright had always been confident that “ Sunnyside , ” which became popular during Britain ’ s interwar housing boom , was at the naff end .
But , in 2011 , she came across the name , dating from 1872 , on a grand villa in Ealing , in West London , bestowed by a British Army general .
“ It was shocking , ” Wright said .
“ As a kid growing up in Wealdstone , to me ‘ Sunnyside ’ was the tackiest of the tacky.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ s book follows the name back to the old Norse practice of solskifte—dividing land between sunnier and shadier sides—which mostly predates documentary evidence but lives on in the names of ancient farms in Scotland and northern England .
“ We ’ ve got deep-time farmers , I mean , before writing , ” Wright said .
“ They are telling us something about how they divided up their land and how they bequeathed it.
” In the eighteenth century , Sunnyside was used by Quakers and other nonconformist religious households , who often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then brought the name to hundreds of new churches in the United States . )
Sunnyside went mass market only in the eighteen-forties , after Washington Irving gave the name to his farmhouse near Tarrytown , in upstate New York , and images of its gables , piazza , and “ Spanish Tower ” circulated in the American press .
Wright triumphantly traces Irving ’ s appropriation of the name to a visit to Walter Scott ’ s own confected castle , Abbotsford , in lowland Scotland , in 1816 , where there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far away upon a hill .

Since the nineteen-eighties, Laura Wright, a historical linguist at the University of Cambridge, has carried out much of her research at London’s Metropolitan Archives. Wright studies the way that Standard English, as linguists call it, came to be standardized. “My career has been spent looking up, What did people actually write in the thirteen-hundreds? What did they actually write in the fourteen-hundreds?” she told me recently. One of Wright’s subjects has been the records of medieval shopkeepers and businesses on London Bridge, which captured the blend of Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, and Old English that became the modern English language. Waiting for her manuscripts to appear at the archives, which are kept in Clerkenwell, not far from the ancient heart of the city, she fell into the habit of flicking through old post-office directories that were on the shelves nearby. Wright considers British names and accents to be vessels of deep history, complex codes that indicate our place in the social order. “We live in a democracy, supposedly, but we are still feudal in our voices,” she said. People have named dwellings in the British Isles for as long as there have been dwellings, and over the centuries there have been periods, like the turn of the twentieth century, when these names have acquired an astonishing expressiveness. Here are some house names from Selsey, a seaside town in West Sussex, from 1915:
Elsinore
Santa Kilda
The Hut
Verica
Indiana
Ingleside
Hazeltryst
Tythe Barn
Tamarisk
Wright used to have a slot on local radio, to discuss language in London, and she would occasionally talk about house names that caught her eye. “If you just pick out some weird, wonderful house name from the eighteen-eighties, you can sometimes work out who lived in the house and who called it that, and why they called it that,” she said. “That was fun to do.” But Wright didn’t think house names were worthy of academic attention. That’s because, to most contemporary British middle-class ears, they are naff. If you don’t know what naff means, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “unfashionable, vulgar; lacking in style.” The O.E.D.’s fourth citation, taken from the Sunday Telegraph, in 1983, reads, “It is naff to call your house The Gables, Mon Repos, or Dunroamin.” In 2011, Wright decided to take house names seriously. “I examined my own prejudice,” she told me. Sociolinguistics in a class-conscious country like Britain is a charged subject. “You won’t find anything in textbooks on how Shakespeare might have been what we call a T-H-fronter—he would have said ‘birfday’ rather than ‘birthday,’ and ‘muvver’ rather than ‘mother’—because that has been taboo,” Wright explained. “I realized I, too, am suffering from this blindness to house names, even though they are literally staring you in the face.”
Earlier this month, Wright published “Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names,” in which she organizes roughly a thousand years of the nation’s house names into categories that include the transferred place name, the nostalgically rural, the commemorative, the upwardly mobile, and the latest fad. (The twenties were mad for puns: Wright has tracked an early use of “Dunroamin”—a play on the Scottish place-name element, as in Dundee, and “roamin,” as in drifting around—to 1926.) Naming habits have remained amazingly stable. The mead hall in “Beowulf,” the oldest known work of English literature, is called Heorot, which survives as the White Hart, a common pub name. House names from before 1200 often derived from the head of the household, like Ceolmund or Wærman, but by the fourteenth century, inspired by chivalric crests and religious imagery, they had titles like Le Griffon, La Worm, Le Dolfyn, and Le Harpe. During the Enlightenment, it became fashionable across Europe to name houses after a state of mind. In 1746, Frederick the Great, of Prussia, like some latter-day retiree to the English seaside, named his favorite palace Sans Souci—No Worries—which was written in gold letters above the door.
Wright detects ruptures in town planning and great social changes in the bestowal of house names. In 1762, London’s authorities began to number buildings, deleting centuries of coded symbols and allusive names. (For a long time, a perfumer in London would be identified by the civet cat on his sign.) Eighty years later, the spread of railways led to a construction free-for-all in the suburbs, as well as the florid era of Victorian house names. One of my favorite lists in Wright’s book is a collection of lawyers, from the 1882 post-office directory, with their orderly central London office addresses (22 Bedford Row) juxtaposed with their poet’s idylls on the edge (Rosemont, in Finchley). “I chose lawyers because they were the least romantic subset of people that I could think of,” Wright said. The thrill of social mobility and first-time homeownership rings out from the naming abandon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Property speculators and the bourgeoisie grabbed at old-sounding British words and bodged them together in novel hybrids, like Thorne Blae—Blue Thorn, but with artisanal grammar. They did the same with place-name elements, fusing fashionable “Fern” with evocative “dale.” Wright describes this linguistic technique as “pick and mix,” an attempt to create new identities on old soil. “They are legitimizing themselves by giving themselves a rooted history,” she told me. “It doesn’t matter that it’s bogus. Most legitimizing histories are bogus.”
Wright grew up in Wealdstone and Barnet, North London neighborhoods on the farther reaches of the Tube system. “I’m a suburban girl,” she told me. She was born in a house named Fayre House, complete with rusticated “Y” and “E,” on Barnet High Street. Her father mended watches. Like most British people, she grew up surrounded by house names and, consciously or not, learned to read them as class signifiers of the people that lived behind them. There is a social chasm between matching bungalows named Oak Lodge and Jeannette. “I had this strong visual sense of the hierarchy, what is posh and what is not posh,” Wright recalled. (It can be a subtle game of signalling: my grandfather sold fat to bakers in Kent. When he and my grandmother bought their first house, which was called Old Moorings, they renamed it Langford, an aspirational, rural, “pick and mix” name, which they had already given to my father as a middle name. They named their son for a place, and a respectability, they hadn’t yet obtained.)
In the hierarchy of names, Wright had always been confident that “Sunnyside,” which became popular during Britain’s interwar housing boom, was at the naff end. But, in 2011, she came across the name, dating from 1872, on a grand villa in Ealing, in West London, bestowed by a British Army general. “It was shocking,” Wright said. “As a kid growing up in Wealdstone, to me ‘Sunnyside’ was the tackiest of the tacky.” The second half of Wright’s book follows the name back to the old Norse practice of solskifte—dividing land between sunnier and shadier sides—which mostly predates documentary evidence but lives on in the names of ancient farms in Scotland and northern England. “We’ve got deep-time farmers, I mean, before writing,” Wright said. “They are telling us something about how they divided up their land and how they bequeathed it.” In the eighteenth century, Sunnyside was used by Quakers and other nonconformist religious households, who often had Scottish heritage. (These communities then brought the name to hundreds of new churches in the United States.) Sunnyside went mass market only in the eighteen-forties, after Washington Irving gave the name to his farmhouse near Tarrytown, in upstate New York, and images of its gables, piazza, and “Spanish Tower” circulated in the American press. Wright triumphantly traces Irving’s appropriation of the name to a visit to Walter Scott’s own confected castle, Abbotsford, in lowland Scotland, in 1816, where there was an old Sunnyside farm standing not far away upon a hill.
House naming in Britain began to die out in the mid-twentieth century. Public housing and apartment blocks don’t lend themselves to the practice. And the rising cost of home ownership means that people now tend to buy property later in life, if they manage it at all. Between 1995 and 2016, the average British house price rose by a hundred and fifty-two per cent, after inflation. It seems unlikely that we will ever return to the house-naming glee of the interwar years, when Dunroamin and Ersanmine (Hers and Mine) were filling up the telephone books. There has also been a shift in mores. No longer naming our houses is a communicative act in itself. “What you don’t call your house speaks volumes as well,” Wright said. “So what we’ve decided to do collectively, I suppose, since the Second World War, is to distance ourselves from the many working-class people who were suddenly in a position to name houses.” And, finally, there is the fact that, over time, these names—of faded whimsies, invented places, and quiet, desperate strivings —have acquired meanings of their own. Wright told me about a friend of hers who lives in a house in Cambridgeshire with a slightly dreadful name; he wouldn’t change it for the world. “And I think that goes for most of us, if it’s got a name it fits,” Wright said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s called Shanklin or Ventnor or Rose Cottage or Stonelands. That is so going to fit with what you are purchasing that there will be no need for you to change it. You are buying a bit of England.”


newyorker--2020-03-28--Board Games Adapted for the Pandemic

Board Games Adapted for the Pandemic

Sorry Not Sorry !
: Each player rolls the dice to determine how many steps closer Trump and his staff will move toward one another , behind the press-conference microphone .
The winner gets to yell out , “ I don ’ t take responsibility !
” or “ That ’ s a nasty question !
” and revoke a reporter ’ s press credentials .
Medical Risk : Players survey physicians and researchers across the globe to assess various medical risks and best practices for flattening the curve .
Then they ignore all logical advice in an attempt to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible .
All-Inclusive Battleship : Every ship is a cruise ship with an open-air buffet and only four serving spoons .
Hungry Hungry Hoarders : Players attempt to grab as much toilet paper as possible , in sixty-second intervals .
Then the losers judge the winners for their callous selfishness , while buying up all the pasta .
Delivery Monopoly : Players compete to see who can set up the most Amazon warehouses in a neighborhood .
Chance cards tell you whether your dried garbanzo beans and low-sodium Progresso soups are still in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tap various industries out of the economic chain , hoping they don ’ t remove a link that sends the Dow crashing down .
Chutes and Ladders , Spring-Break Edition : A team game .
One team diligently climbs the flattened-curve ladder .
The other insists on getting drunk and engaging in sloppy Fort Lauderdale orgies , determined to slide everyone back into crisis mode .
But I Really Need This Operation : This game is actually impossible to play because , in addition to the regular missing organs , there are now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rooms left .
The Game of Quarantined Life : Landmark events include getting an ( online ) degree , cancelling your wedding , and saying “ fuck these streaming yoga classes ” before eating a dozen Toll House cookies , while watching the “ Real Housewives of New Jersey .
”

Sorry Not Sorry!: Each player rolls the dice to determine how many steps closer Trump and his staff will move toward one another, behind the press-conference microphone. The winner gets to yell out, “I don’t take responsibility!” or “That’s a nasty question!” and revoke a reporter’s press credentials.
Medical Risk: Players survey physicians and researchers across the globe to assess various medical risks and best practices for flattening the curve. Then they ignore all logical advice in an attempt to destroy their home countries as quickly as possible.
All-Inclusive Battleship: Every ship is a cruise ship with an open-air buffet and only four serving spoons.
Hungry Hungry Hoarders: Players attempt to grab as much toilet paper as possible, in sixty-second intervals. Then the losers judge the winners for their callous selfishness, while buying up all the pasta.
Delivery Monopoly: Players compete to see who can set up the most Amazon warehouses in a neighborhood. Chance cards tell you whether your dried garbanzo beans and low-sodium Progresso soups are still in stock.
Stock-Market Jenga: Players carefully tap various industries out of the economic chain, hoping they don’t remove a link that sends the Dow crashing down.
Chutes and Ladders, Spring-Break Edition: A team game. One team diligently climbs the flattened-curve ladder. The other insists on getting drunk and engaging in sloppy Fort Lauderdale orgies, determined to slide everyone back into crisis mode.
But I Really Need This Operation: This game is actually impossible to play because, in addition to the regular missing organs, there are now no masks, gloves, or hospital rooms left.
The Game of Quarantined Life: Landmark events include getting an (online) degree, cancelling your wedding, and saying “fuck these streaming yoga classes” before eating a dozen Toll House cookies, while watching the “Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
Solitaire: No adjustments required.


newyorker--2020-03-28--Todd Haynes’s Masterpiece “Safe” Is Now a Tale of Two Plagues

“ I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS , ” Bob Hope said , on July 4 , 1986 .
It was the setup to a joke in a routine that three hundred and sixty people had paid a thousand dollars each to hear .
Those donors , as well as President Ronald Reagan and his wife , Nancy , and the French President , François Mitterrand , and his wife , Danielle , were celebrating the rededication of the Statue of Liberty aboard a yacht named Princess .
“ Nobody knows , ” Hope continued , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island ‘ fairy.
’ ” Cameras caught the Mitterrands cringing and the Reagans laughing .
More than fifty thousand Americans were diagnosed with AIDS between 1981 and 1987 , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , and 95.5 per cent of those people died from it .
The numbers of sick and dead would spike in the years that followed .
The image of a President and his wife , surrounded by swells and supplicants , roaring with laughter in the face of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a fossilized icon of showbiz convention and at a celebration dedicated to a monument of the nation ’ s greathearted inclusiveness—honestly , it is a bit much .
But metaphors tend to fail in the face of a plague .
Under that kind of pressure , everything just comes to look more and more uncomfortably like itself .
Todd Haynes ’ s 1995 masterpiece , “ Safe , ” begins with the camera crawling at something like the speed limit through a meticulous stretch of twilit upscale suburbia that a credit somewhat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fernando Valley , and much more helpfully as 1987 .
It is a specific moment that Haynes chose for a specific reason , but it is also a moment to which , in the culture ’ s grim and farcical process of lapping itself , everything seems to have returned .
A lower-rung celebrity that no one ever really held in terribly high regard , and whom everyone had lately figured out was a crook , is somehow in charge .
Joe Biden is somehow still running for President , if only he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even wants the gig .
The houses lining the road are white and proud and modern and ensconced behind tall gates ; there are no pedestrians to be seen .
When Haynes ’ s camera finally arrives at the home of Carol White , the film ’ s blankly afflicted heroine , it pauses while an electronic gate yields to admit the Mercedes-Benz that is carrying her back to the gracious modern living space and comfortable life that will , in short order , begin trying to kill her .
Then , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the premises and trying the locks .
Then , as now , those in power have disclaimed any responsibility and elected to wait and see how things play out ; the President is once again posturing and chuckling through a crisis that he can ’ t quite bring himself to take seriously .
Once Carol is safely inside the home she ’ s made with her husband and the son from his first marriage , she is on her own , stuck fast at the shrinking center of one deep long shot after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the start .
We first see her face , impassive and absent , under the convulsive rutting body of her husband , in bleakest missionary position .
The camera , in a series of queasily patient zooms , stands in for the oppressive moment in which Carol finds herself increasingly trapped and lost .
The casual lies and happy-talking denial and leering qualification of the crises gathering outside the gates by the people in power , the blithe cutting of bait when it came to the vulnerable people and politically useful cities that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ invisible and absent in these tasteful interiors .
And yet Carol seems not just lost in all those lovely rooms but surrounded by them .
The comforts of home close in on her .
Carol , played by Julianne Moore in one of the great performances of her career , fits into all these luxe California rooms like a luminous furnishing or abstruse piece of art .
She ’ s breathy and passive and somehow all the more indistinct for being so beautiful ; her friends from aerobics class notice , with playful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever sweat .
The radio is a wash of AM-band evangelical blood and thunder and prosaically dire traffic updates .
Her tween stepson ’ s current-events essay for school is a fetishistic recitation of both the carnage wrought by gang warfare in “ the black ghettos of Los Angeles ” and the specific weapons used to deliver it .
Her life as a homemaker , on the other hand , is a series of light errands and lighter lunches .
Even before she contracts the mysterious illness that will send her reeling and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ floats through her days—and , in a white silken robe on sleepless nights , through her icy , Kubrickian home—like a ghost .
When Carol develops an acute and sudden sensitivity to unseen and unknown elements in her environment—toxins , fumes , chemicals , particulates—the ambient chaos of the broader world breaches the gate and leaves her weak , confused , and without any real avenue of retreat .
Her doctors are helpless , baffled , and then impatient as her condition grows worse .
Carol brightens into something like assertiveness after embracing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then recedes as the poisons around her ( and , perhaps , her fixation on the poisons around her ) begin to overwhelm her defenses .
She finds Wrenwood , a community of the similarly afflicted , presided over by the spookily self-assured guru Peter Dunning ( Peter Friedman ) , who lives high above his flock in a grandiose hilltop manse .
He speaks the scattershot language of what we now call “ wellness , ” one rooted in self-lacerating shame , ritual , jargon , and a suffocating individualism .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a full house that includes Carol ’ s visiting husband and stepson , “ I have a confession to make .
I ’ ve stopped reading the papers .
I ’ ve stopped watching the news on television.
” Even reports of the outside world , he ’ s concluded , are simply too big a risk .
“ If I really believe that life is that devastating , that destructive , I ’ m afraid that my immune system will believe it , too .
And I can ’ t afford to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” At Wrenwood , Carol learns that her affliction , whatever it is , is fundamentally her fault , and can only be cured by loving herself—that is , by embracing her poisoner and tormenter—more fully .
( “ The only one who can make you sick is you , ” Dunning tells a patient mourning the recent loss of her husband .
“ If your immune system is damaged , it ’ s because you allowed it to be.
” ) At the end of the film , put on the spot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gentle addict ( James LeGros ) with whom she ’ d enjoyed a tentative flirtation , Carol delivers a halting speech about what she ’ s learned at Wrenwood .
“ I don ’ t know what I ’ m saying , ” she apologizes , “ just that I really hated myself before I came here , so I ’ m trying to see myself hopefully more as I am , more positive , like , seeing the pluses .
Like , I think it ’ s slowly opening up now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like , educating , like , AIDS , like , other types of diseases—and it is a disease—we just have to be more aware of it , even ourselves .
Like , reading labels , and going into buildings.
” The film leaves Carol , in a rare close shot in the porcelain-lined igloo on Wrenwood ’ s grounds into which she ’ s made her last long retreat , staring into a mirror , uncertainly saying “ I love you ” to her own reflection .
Haynes would go on to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s mid-century Hollywood dramas of buried domestic despair , but this inverted moment , a “ happy ending ” that is unmistakably a moment of abject , wrung-dry defeat , is particularly devastating because of how little Carol has left : that grim sanitized room , a place under the thumb of a smug sadist who offers only blame and calls it love , and the impossible task of healing herself .
“ For her to say ‘ I love you ’ in the mirror should feel like something has resolved , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2015 .
“ But all the film language in Safe should be telling you that nothing is resolved.
” Anyone watching this movie in this moment , shut away in their homes for the greater good but also for their own tenuous safety , will know the feeling .

“I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS,” Bob Hope said, on July 4, 1986. It was the setup to a joke in a routine that three hundred and sixty people had paid a thousand dollars each to hear. Those donors, as well as President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and the French President, François Mitterrand, and his wife, Danielle, were celebrating the rededication of the Statue of Liberty aboard a yacht named Princess. “Nobody knows,” Hope continued, “if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island ‘fairy.’ ” Cameras caught the Mitterrands cringing and the Reagans laughing. More than fifty thousand Americans were diagnosed with AIDS between 1981 and 1987, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 95.5 per cent of those people died from it. The numbers of sick and dead would spike in the years that followed. The image of a President and his wife, surrounded by swells and supplicants, roaring with laughter in the face of all that suffering, at the prompting of a fossilized icon of showbiz convention and at a celebration dedicated to a monument of the nation’s greathearted inclusiveness—honestly, it is a bit much. But metaphors tend to fail in the face of a plague. Under that kind of pressure, everything just comes to look more and more uncomfortably like itself.
Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece, “Safe,” begins with the camera crawling at something like the speed limit through a meticulous stretch of twilit upscale suburbia that a credit somewhat redundantly identifies as California’s San Fernando Valley, and much more helpfully as 1987. It is a specific moment that Haynes chose for a specific reason, but it is also a moment to which, in the culture’s grim and farcical process of lapping itself, everything seems to have returned. A lower-rung celebrity that no one ever really held in terribly high regard, and whom everyone had lately figured out was a crook, is somehow in charge. Joe Biden is somehow still running for President, if only he could figure out why he deserves or even wants the gig. The houses lining the road are white and proud and modern and ensconced behind tall gates; there are no pedestrians to be seen. When Haynes’s camera finally arrives at the home of Carol White, the film’s blankly afflicted heroine, it pauses while an electronic gate yields to admit the Mercedes-Benz that is carrying her back to the gracious modern living space and comfortable life that will, in short order, begin trying to kill her.
Then, as now, there is a plague haunting the premises and trying the locks. Then, as now, those in power have disclaimed any responsibility and elected to wait and see how things play out; the President is once again posturing and chuckling through a crisis that he can’t quite bring himself to take seriously. Once Carol is safely inside the home she’s made with her husband and the son from his first marriage, she is on her own, stuck fast at the shrinking center of one deep long shot after another. Her isolation is clear from the start. We first see her face, impassive and absent, under the convulsive rutting body of her husband, in bleakest missionary position. The camera, in a series of queasily patient zooms, stands in for the oppressive moment in which Carol finds herself increasingly trapped and lost. The casual lies and happy-talking denial and leering qualification of the crises gathering outside the gates by the people in power, the blithe cutting of bait when it came to the vulnerable people and politically useful cities that those crises came to claim—these are all invisible and absent in these tasteful interiors. And yet Carol seems not just lost in all those lovely rooms but surrounded by them. The comforts of home close in on her.
Carol, played by Julianne Moore in one of the great performances of her career, fits into all these luxe California rooms like a luminous furnishing or abstruse piece of art. She’s breathy and passive and somehow all the more indistinct for being so beautiful; her friends from aerobics class notice, with playful envy, that she doesn’t ever sweat. The radio is a wash of AM-band evangelical blood and thunder and prosaically dire traffic updates. Her tween stepson’s current-events essay for school is a fetishistic recitation of both the carnage wrought by gang warfare in “the black ghettos of Los Angeles” and the specific weapons used to deliver it. Her life as a homemaker, on the other hand, is a series of light errands and lighter lunches. Even before she contracts the mysterious illness that will send her reeling and shrinking away from this life, Carol floats through her days—and, in a white silken robe on sleepless nights, through her icy, Kubrickian home—like a ghost.
When Carol develops an acute and sudden sensitivity to unseen and unknown elements in her environment—toxins, fumes, chemicals, particulates—the ambient chaos of the broader world breaches the gate and leaves her weak, confused, and without any real avenue of retreat. Her doctors are helpless, baffled, and then impatient as her condition grows worse. Carol brightens into something like assertiveness after embracing her identity as a sick person, then recedes as the poisons around her (and, perhaps, her fixation on the poisons around her) begin to overwhelm her defenses. She finds Wrenwood, a community of the similarly afflicted, presided over by the spookily self-assured guru Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who lives high above his flock in a grandiose hilltop manse. He speaks the scattershot language of what we now call “wellness,” one rooted in self-lacerating shame, ritual, jargon, and a suffocating individualism. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dunning tells a full house that includes Carol’s visiting husband and stepson, “I have a confession to make. I’ve stopped reading the papers. I’ve stopped watching the news on television.” Even reports of the outside world, he’s concluded, are simply too big a risk. “If I really believe that life is that devastating, that destructive, I’m afraid that my immune system will believe it, too. And I can’t afford to take that risk. Neither can you.”
At Wrenwood, Carol learns that her affliction, whatever it is, is fundamentally her fault, and can only be cured by loving herself—that is, by embracing her poisoner and tormenter—more fully. (“The only one who can make you sick is you,” Dunning tells a patient mourning the recent loss of her husband. “If your immune system is damaged, it’s because you allowed it to be.”) At the end of the film, put on the spot at an impromptu dance party by a gentle addict (James LeGros) with whom she’d enjoyed a tentative flirtation, Carol delivers a halting speech about what she’s learned at Wrenwood. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she apologizes, “just that I really hated myself before I came here, so I’m trying to see myself hopefully more as I am, more positive, like, seeing the pluses. Like, I think it’s slowly opening up now, like, people’s minds, like, educating, like, AIDS, like, other types of diseases—and it is a disease—we just have to be more aware of it, even ourselves. Like, reading labels, and going into buildings.”
The film leaves Carol, in a rare close shot in the porcelain-lined igloo on Wrenwood’s grounds into which she’s made her last long retreat, staring into a mirror, uncertainly saying “I love you” to her own reflection. Haynes would go on to make numerous more overt nods to Douglas Sirk’s mid-century Hollywood dramas of buried domestic despair, but this inverted moment, a “happy ending” that is unmistakably a moment of abject, wrung-dry defeat, is particularly devastating because of how little Carol has left: that grim sanitized room, a place under the thumb of a smug sadist who offers only blame and calls it love, and the impossible task of healing herself. “For her to say ‘I love you’ in the mirror should feel like something has resolved,” Haynes told Film Comment, in 2015. “But all the film language in Safe should be telling you that nothing is resolved.” Anyone watching this movie in this moment, shut away in their homes for the greater good but also for their own tenuous safety, will know the feeling.
It’s a testament to the relentless command of Haynes’s filmmaking that the baffled and constricted horror of Carol’s story has so readily outlasted his original intent. “Safe” was conceived and executed as a sort of fable about a disease that landed with brutal specificity and unprecedented cruelty on marginalized communities, and which was not merely misunderstood but laughed off—quite literally laughed at—by people in power, well into its devastating peak. In his essay accompanying the film’s Criterion Collection release, Dennis Lim notes that the blame-driven denialism that rules Wrenwood echoes that of the New Age author Louise Hay, whose “The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach” offered a similarly specious self-reliance approach to an epidemic that the state had pointedly chosen to ignore.
That particular plague was eventually brought to heel by activists and scientists, but the pervasive and implacable unease running through “Safe” has outlasted it, in large part because the dread at the heart of it—that something invisible and relentless is loose and at prey, and that anyone could become susceptible to it, at which point they would be very much on their own—has never really dispersed. The film’s vision of a culture fundamentally incapable of comprehending or countenancing illness and weakness has insured that “Safe” has stayed not just unsettling but queasily current. Carol is pursued by an “environmental illness,” and so is everyone else. The sinister plumes of exhaust and vanishing aerosol clouds and grim drips of hairdressing chemicals that Haynes foregrounds so ominously are much less metaphorical by now. The oceans rise and the earth bakes and novel viruses ride the train at rush hour. The symptoms are barely even symptoms anymore, but a broad and defiant cultural denial remains very firmly in place. What’s everyone’s problem will eventually be yours, but it will still be yours alone.
In 2014, Haynes told the critic Scott Tobias that his film “feels like this allegory about all kinds of indeterminate and imprecise notions of health, well-being, and immunity in peril.” Those notions have assumed different names and valances over the years, but the heavy sense of peril that Haynes identifies has not abated, in large part because American culture and politics are incapable of acting with empathy where there is weakness, “particularly in the way we try to attach meaning and personal responsibility to illness,” Haynes said.
On Tuesday, after reminding the public about “avoiding large gatherings and hand washing” and remarking that he’d like to “open things up” by Easter, President Trump offered a brief pep talk to the American people. “In order to defeat this virus, we must continue to be very strong,” he stated. “Your resilience and spirit has been inspiring to everyone. . . . Stay focussed and stay strong.” It is a hell of a thing to watch the country’s political and business leaders bluster about facing down a surging pandemic with the power of positive thinking—along with the sadistic coercive force of a ravening market and a state that is unwilling and unable to protect its citizenry from it—in the face of all expert advice and available evidence. But that response is also the only one that our politics and culture have offered for many years. The desperate national dedication to mistaking “strength” for an actual value, twinned with an instinct to rebuke weakness and further punish those who have been made weak, has never really wavered. We just keep on coming up with new ways to say the same things.


newyorker--2020-03-28--The Coronavirus Spurs a Movement of People Reclaiming Vacant Homes

California has the worst housing crisis in the country—so bad that , when Governor Gavin Newsom took office , in 2019 , he used his inaugural address to call for a “ Marshall Plan for affordable housing , ” entailing the construction of 3.5 million housing units by 2025 .
This month , with an uptick in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles , and orders from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti directing city residents to stay home at all costs , activists have turned their attention to hundreds of empty , publicly owned houses .
There are thirty-six thousand homeless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in crowded , inadequate , and unstable situations .
Wouldn ’ t they , too , be safer in a home ?
The acute crisis of the coronavirus , and the paradox of stay-at-home orders for a homeless population , might offer activists a chance to force decisive change .
In mid-March , a group of homeless and housing-insecure people calling themselves the Reclaimers took possession of eleven vacant houses in a quiet working-class neighborhood called El Sereno , east of downtown .
The houses are among hundreds that Caltrans , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last century , with the goal of demolishing them to make way for an expansion of the 710 Freeway .
They were vacant—many of them unoccupied for years .
According to Roberto Flores , a tenants-rights activist , after buying the houses , Caltrans rented them out , sometimes to their previous owners , then raised rents precipitously , forcing many of them out .
( That ’ s what happened to him . )
Recently , after decades of protest from environmentalists , preservationists , and social-justice activists in El Sereno , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ freeway project was finally spiked , leaving the real estate in limbo—conspicuous waste amid a catastrophic housing shortage .
For years , Flores and his organization , United Caltrans Tenants , have been petitioning Caltrans to make the houses available for sale or rent at affordable prices , and the coronavirus has sharpened the urgency .
“ It is not the case where we took advantage of COVID-19 , but COVID-19 gave us more of a reason why we had to do this , ” he told me .
“ It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yes , this is the time to do it.
’ It ’ s ‘ Oh , shit .
This is more of a reason we have to do this.
’ It ’ s not just putting people in houses—it ’ s saving lives , allowing families to self-isolate and keep their children safe.
” He and other activists identified the safest houses , in the best condition , and matched them with potential occupants , good custodians who would work to improve the houses .
It was important , he said , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not to have people squatting in the houses but to add moral force to the argument they are making to Caltrans .
“ Of course , anyone can do it .
But there ’ s a lot of respect here for us and what we do and our opinion .
I say , ‘ You want to ruin the movement ?
We ’ re not going to take anymore ; we ’ re going to work on the ones we have.
’ ” Among the Reclaimers is Ruby Gordillo , a thirty-three-year-old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been living several miles away , with her children and husband , in a small studio apartment .
Her queen-size bed doubled as a dining table/homework area/trampoline , and the kids , aged eight to fourteen , slept in a triple-decker bunk an arm ’ s length away .
Rent was just under a thousand dollars a month , about half of what Gordillo ’ s husband earns as a convenience-store attendant at a gas station : unaffordable , even in decent economic conditions , and potentially disastrous in those posed by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the family found the studio , they had no home of their own .
Gordillo and the kids stayed on a futon at her brother ’ s house while her husband slept elsewhere .
Living on top of one another , especially in someone else ’ s space , was problematic : Gordillo ’ s children have neurological challenges , and also respiratory conditions .
Several months ago , on social media , she learned about a group of homeless mothers in the Bay Area who had moved into a developer-owned vacant house @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called Moms 4 Housing .
( The Oakland moms , removed by the sheriff ’ s department under court order , are negotiating with the city of Oakland and the developer for the property to be sold to a land trust , which would allow the families to return . )
After researching properties owned by the city , state , school district , and Metro , and talking to the local homeless community , Gordillo went door-knocking in El Sereno to learn more about the empty Caltrans homes .
With the outbreak @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could no longer wait .
As she sees it , the pandemic has exposed the reality of many lives like her own , including those of her former neighbors .
“ For us , in the apartment , there are twenty units like mine , and folks have roommates because they can ’ t afford to pay the rent—they get paid very little .
A lot may be undocumented , very underpaid—they ’ re going to work every day and having different jobs and being exposed to many people and coming back and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said .
“ You ’ re constantly near somebody .
.
.
.
With COVID-19 , if we ’ re constantly being exposed to others , it ’ s going to spread , and it ’ s going to spread real quick.
” Gordillo found the house unlocked—Flores told me that anonymous housing activists had “ facilitated entry ” —and moved her family into a vacant three-bedroom house owned by Caltrans .
They hung a bedsheet across the lintel on which they had written , in thick , black Sharpie , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Gordillo over FaceTime a few hours before the mayor ’ s orders took full effect , instructing everyone in the city to stay indoors .
Her hair , dark and curly , was white at the roots .
She smiled tensely—a jittery combination of delight and fear .
“ It ’ s a very beautiful home , ” she said .
It appeared to date to the nineteen-thirties ; growth charts pencilled in doorways suggested that its last occupants left in 2013 .
Had they been forced out ?
Would she be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Gordillo asked , turning the camera around as she walked me through the rooms : a living room , with a built-in desk and a faux fireplace , a dining room , and breakfast nook .
In the kitchen , I could see the remains of breakfast : a bunch of bananas and a large bag of Mocha Mix out on the counter , a stack of plates in the sink .
There was no stove , but volunteers had brought over a donated washer-dryer , and , because of abundant shelves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place to store canned food away from detergent .
Off a hallway lined with duffel bags was a bedroom , with suitcases on the bed .
Up a short flight of stairs , Gordillo showed me another bedroom , a spacious master bedroom with a donated king-size bed and a walk-in closet .
The master bath had turquoise-and-yellow tile , seemingly original .
“ This is a girl ’ s dream come true , ” Gordillo said .
But she didn ’ t feel settled .
“ The first night we all slept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me .
“ We were iffy , scared a little .
Then , last night , the girls slept in one room , and my son and I slept in the other.
” She went on , “ At 11 P.M. , California Highway Patrol ” —the law-enforcement body with jurisdiction over the Caltrans houses— “ came through , with twelve patrol vehicles into the street , driving up to the driveways to the known vacant houses .
They knew we were here , and they shone lights in the windows , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kids , she was scared to see the men outside her window : “ I was here by myself .
I want to be vigilant .
I ’ m being real ; I ’ m a woman.
” She made her children put on their shoes , just in case , triggering a panic attack in her eldest , who is on the autism spectrum .

California has the worst housing crisis in the country—so bad that, when Governor Gavin Newsom took office, in 2019, he used his inaugural address to call for a “Marshall Plan for affordable housing,” entailing the construction of 3.5 million housing units by 2025. This month, with an uptick in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles, and orders from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti directing city residents to stay home at all costs, activists have turned their attention to hundreds of empty, publicly owned houses. There are thirty-six thousand homeless people in Los Angeles and countless others living in crowded, inadequate, and unstable situations. Wouldn’t they, too, be safer in a home? The acute crisis of the coronavirus, and the paradox of stay-at-home orders for a homeless population, might offer activists a chance to force decisive change.
In mid-March, a group of homeless and housing-insecure people calling themselves the Reclaimers took possession of eleven vacant houses in a quiet working-class neighborhood called El Sereno, east of downtown. The houses are among hundreds that Caltrans, the state’s transportation authority, bought last century, with the goal of demolishing them to make way for an expansion of the 710 Freeway. They were vacant—many of them unoccupied for years. According to Roberto Flores, a tenants-rights activist, after buying the houses, Caltrans rented them out, sometimes to their previous owners, then raised rents precipitously, forcing many of them out. (That’s what happened to him.) Recently, after decades of protest from environmentalists, preservationists, and social-justice activists in El Sereno, South Pasadena, and Pasadena, the freeway project was finally spiked, leaving the real estate in limbo—conspicuous waste amid a catastrophic housing shortage.
For years, Flores and his organization, United Caltrans Tenants, have been petitioning Caltrans to make the houses available for sale or rent at affordable prices, and the coronavirus has sharpened the urgency. “It is not the case where we took advantage of COVID-19, but COVID-19 gave us more of a reason why we had to do this,” he told me. “It’s not, like, ‘Oh, yes, this is the time to do it.’ It’s ‘Oh, shit. This is more of a reason we have to do this.’ It’s not just putting people in houses—it’s saving lives, allowing families to self-isolate and keep their children safe.” He and other activists identified the safest houses, in the best condition, and matched them with potential occupants, good custodians who would work to improve the houses. It was important, he said, to limit the reclamations; his ultimate goal was not to have people squatting in the houses but to add moral force to the argument they are making to Caltrans. “Of course, anyone can do it. But there’s a lot of respect here for us and what we do and our opinion. I say, ‘You want to ruin the movement? We’re not going to take anymore; we’re going to work on the ones we have.’ ”
Among the Reclaimers is Ruby Gordillo, a thirty-three-year-old, L.A.-born mother of three who had been living several miles away, with her children and husband, in a small studio apartment. Her queen-size bed doubled as a dining table/homework area/trampoline, and the kids, aged eight to fourteen, slept in a triple-decker bunk an arm’s length away. Rent was just under a thousand dollars a month, about half of what Gordillo’s husband earns as a convenience-store attendant at a gas station: unaffordable, even in decent economic conditions, and potentially disastrous in those posed by the pandemic. For the six months before the family found the studio, they had no home of their own. Gordillo and the kids stayed on a futon at her brother’s house while her husband slept elsewhere.
Living on top of one another, especially in someone else’s space, was problematic: Gordillo’s children have neurological challenges, and also respiratory conditions. Several months ago, on social media, she learned about a group of homeless mothers in the Bay Area who had moved into a developer-owned vacant house in West Oakland, sparking a movement called Moms 4 Housing. (The Oakland moms, removed by the sheriff’s department under court order, are negotiating with the city of Oakland and the developer for the property to be sold to a land trust, which would allow the families to return.) After researching properties owned by the city, state, school district, and Metro, and talking to the local homeless community, Gordillo went door-knocking in El Sereno to learn more about the empty Caltrans homes.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, Gordillo decided that she could no longer wait. As she sees it, the pandemic has exposed the reality of many lives like her own, including those of her former neighbors. “For us, in the apartment, there are twenty units like mine, and folks have roommates because they can’t afford to pay the rent—they get paid very little. A lot may be undocumented, very underpaid—they’re going to work every day and having different jobs and being exposed to many people and coming back and hanging out in the building,” she said. “You’re constantly near somebody. . . . With COVID-19, if we’re constantly being exposed to others, it’s going to spread, and it’s going to spread real quick.”
Gordillo found the house unlocked—Flores told me that anonymous housing activists had “facilitated entry”—and moved her family into a vacant three-bedroom house owned by Caltrans. They hung a bedsheet across the lintel on which they had written, in thick, black Sharpie, “Shelter in the Storm.” I talked to Gordillo over FaceTime a few hours before the mayor’s orders took full effect, instructing everyone in the city to stay indoors. Her hair, dark and curly, was white at the roots. She smiled tensely—a jittery combination of delight and fear. “It’s a very beautiful home,” she said. It appeared to date to the nineteen-thirties; growth charts pencilled in doorways suggested that its last occupants left in 2013. Had they been forced out? Would she be?
“You want a tour?” Gordillo asked, turning the camera around as she walked me through the rooms: a living room, with a built-in desk and a faux fireplace, a dining room, and breakfast nook. In the kitchen, I could see the remains of breakfast: a bunch of bananas and a large bag of Mocha Mix out on the counter, a stack of plates in the sink. There was no stove, but volunteers had brought over a donated washer-dryer, and, because of abundant shelves and cupboards, Gordillo finally had a place to store canned food away from detergent.
Off a hallway lined with duffel bags was a bedroom, with suitcases on the bed. Up a short flight of stairs, Gordillo showed me another bedroom, a spacious master bedroom with a donated king-size bed and a walk-in closet. The master bath had turquoise-and-yellow tile, seemingly original. “This is a girl’s dream come true,” Gordillo said. But she didn’t feel settled. “The first night we all slept in the same room,” she told me. “We were iffy, scared a little. Then, last night, the girls slept in one room, and my son and I slept in the other.” She went on, “At 11 P.M., California Highway Patrol”—the law-enforcement body with jurisdiction over the Caltrans houses—“came through, with twelve patrol vehicles into the street, driving up to the driveways to the known vacant houses. They knew we were here, and they shone lights in the windows, took photographs.” Home alone with the kids, she was scared to see the men outside her window: “I was here by myself. I want to be vigilant. I’m being real; I’m a woman.” She made her children put on their shoes, just in case, triggering a panic attack in her eldest, who is on the autism spectrum.
In mid-March, Mayor Garcetti temporarily suspended evictions for those unable to pay rent due to the economic effects of COVID-19. The Reclaimers are hoping that these provisions apply to them. But at least one woman who moved into an El Sereno house may have been prevented from reëntering by the California Highway Patrol. (A spokesperson for the C.H.P denies that they have locked out any of the Reclaimers.) Flores, the tenants-rights activist, told me that the woman is a sixty-seven-year-old housekeeper and aide who left the house to go to work. In the evening, she returned to find that the front door, which she had left open by mistake, was locked; her key only worked on the deadbolt, so she could not get in. Flores says that for now the woman is back to sleeping in a one-bedroom house with her disabled son, his pregnant wife, and their teen-ager. Before the eviction moratorium, the family was on the brink of being kicked out of their home. Caltrans has said little publicly about the Reclaimers. “We are aware of the situation, and Caltrans is currently in discussions regarding the use of these properties,” Matt Rocco, a spokesman for the agency, wrote to me in an e-mail.


newyorker--2020-03-28--Coronavirus-Quarantine Diary: Counting the Dead

Jacqueline Dupree , who works at the Washington Post , running the newsroom ’ s internal Web site , volunteered to help with the paper ’ s attempts at tracking the novel coronavirus state by state—the number of confirmed cases , the number of deaths , any change from the day before—from her home office , furnished with a desktop computer , two laptops , an extra monitor , and two cats .
The Post is making its coverage of the pandemic free online , where you can see that New York State is leading in this race that nobody @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 461 deaths ) , followed by New Jersey ( 6,876 , 81 deaths ) , California ( 4,040 cases , 82 deaths ) , and Washington State ( 3,207 cases , 150 deaths ) .
The statistics include cruise ships : the Diamond Princess ( 49 , 0 ) and the Grand Princess ( 28 , 3 ) .
The count is updated as information becomes available , and nationwide the number of cases is climbing .
The District of Columbia itself , as of Friday morning , had 267 cases and 3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the global catastrophe last week to meet friends and colleagues at Congressional Cemetery—a generous parcel of land in the Capitol Hill neighborhood , sloping down to the Anacostia River—to mark her own personal catastrophe : the death of her husband , Bill Walsh , three years earlier .
Walsh , a copy editor at the Post for some twenty years , wrote a trilogy of books on usage : “ Lapsing Into a Comma ” ( 2000 ) , “ The Elephants of Style ” ( 2004 ) , and “ Yes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk ” ( 2013 ) .
About ten of us gathered at the main gate to the cemetery , on E Street S.E.
, and proceeded past a gatehouse , a wooden box full of brochures , and a dispenser of hand sanitizer , all squeezed out .
Dupree had instructed latecomers , via Facebook , to “ walk in toward the little chapel , make the first right , then turn left just past John Philip Sousa ( no , I ’ m not kidding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ space between people—at least , the live ones .
Congressional Cemetery was originally conceived as the final resting place for members of Congress .
Senators John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay are memorialized there , in a section of identical stones—blocky with a dome on top and placed in long lines equidistant from one another , like shrubs in a formal garden .
Dupree pointed out a musician ’ s gravestone in the shape of a fanned-out accordion and a memorial designed to look like an entry in a card catalogue , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ filed away for eternity .
“ Thank God Bill didn ’ t see that , ” Dupree said , adding that she and her husband “ had a bit of a to-do over the fonts ” on his gravestone .
He had chosen one she hated , and she had countered with Comic Sans .
They compromised on an elegant modern typeface .
The memorial to William F. Walsh ( December 20 , 1961 to March 15 , 2017 ) is a stone bench along a path beneath overarching cherry trees , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are engraved on top : “ If I write a book it will be called life and how to live it ” ( R.E.M . )
and “ There is a light / and it never goes out ” ( Steven Patrick Morrissey ) .
“ Gen X meets the cemetery , ” Dupree said , adding , “ Bill is not here—he is at home , on the mantel.
” In the summer of 2016 , after giving the keynote address at a conference in Vancouver , Bill didn ’ t feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testing , he was given a diagnosis of Stage IV bile-duct cancer , and he died less than a year later .
When it was time to inter his ashes , Dupree was recovering from hip surgery .
“ I just .
.
.
I couldn ’ t do it , ” she said .
Her name is also on the bench , and when the time comes , she promised her colleagues at the Post , Bill ’ s ashes will be placed in the thermos that went with his bespoke lunchbox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Slot.
” In the old days , when newspapers employed a full brace of copy editors , they sat in a circle around the chief , whose position was called the slot , because everything went through him .
Bill ’ s Twitter handle , a flame tended by Dupree , is @ TheSlot .
Dupree had to get back to work , helping to compile the grim statistics , in the full knowledge that people are not statistics , that every death is the loss of a real person in someone ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she took us past Marion Barry , the former mayor of the District , whose monument looks like an ad campaign ( “ Mayor for Life ” ) , and J. Edgar Hoover , the director of the F.B.I.
, whose remains are part of an elaborate family plot .
A row of mausoleums , like town houses for troglodytes , was topped with bee boxes in stacked pastels .
The chalky white and gray of the stones was punctuated here and there with pink-blossoming trees and saucer magnolias .
One of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is that the death toll is mounting just as the land is coming alive .
The drive home , along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway , went past mounds and cones of white blossoms stuck to the trees like snow , as if the season had been inverted and the weather came from below instead of above—hope as light as foam .

Jacqueline Dupree, who works at the Washington Post, running the newsroom’s internal Web site, volunteered to help with the paper’s attempts at tracking the novel coronavirus state by state—the number of confirmed cases, the number of deaths, any change from the day before—from her home office, furnished with a desktop computer, two laptops, an extra monitor, and two cats. The Post is making its coverage of the pandemic free online, where you can see that New York State is leading in this race that nobody wants to win (39,140 cases, 461 deaths), followed by New Jersey (6,876 cases, 81 deaths), California (4,040 cases, 82 deaths), and Washington State (3,207 cases, 150 deaths). The statistics include preliminary figures for cruise ships: the Diamond Princess (49, 0) and the Grand Princess (28, 3). The count is updated as information becomes available, and nationwide the number of cases is climbing. The District of Columbia itself, as of Friday morning, had 267 cases and 3 deaths.
Dupree took a breather from the global catastrophe last week to meet friends and colleagues at Congressional Cemetery—a generous parcel of land in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, sloping down to the Anacostia River—to mark her own personal catastrophe: the death of her husband, Bill Walsh, three years earlier. Walsh, a copy editor at the Post for some twenty years, wrote a trilogy of books on usage: “Lapsing Into a Comma” (2000), “The Elephants of Style” (2004), and “Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk” (2013). About ten of us gathered at the main gate to the cemetery, on E Street S.E., and proceeded past a gatehouse, a wooden box full of brochures, and a dispenser of hand sanitizer, all squeezed out. Dupree had instructed latecomers, via Facebook, to “walk in toward the little chapel, make the first right, then turn left just past John Philip Sousa (no, I’m not kidding).” There was plenty of space between people—at least, the live ones.
Congressional Cemetery was originally conceived as the final resting place for members of Congress. Senators John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay are memorialized there, in a section of identical stones—blocky with a dome on top and placed in long lines equidistant from one another, like shrubs in a formal garden. Dupree pointed out a musician’s gravestone in the shape of a fanned-out accordion and a memorial designed to look like an entry in a card catalogue, as if a librarian had chosen to be filed away for eternity. “Thank God Bill didn’t see that,” Dupree said, adding that she and her husband “had a bit of a to-do over the fonts” on his gravestone. He had chosen one she hated, and she had countered with Comic Sans. They compromised on an elegant modern typeface.
The memorial to William F. Walsh (December 20, 1961 to March 15, 2017) is a stone bench along a path beneath overarching cherry trees, which were not yet in bloom. Lyrics are engraved on top: “If I write a book it will be called life and how to live it” (R.E.M.) and “There is a light / and it never goes out” (Steven Patrick Morrissey). “Gen X meets the cemetery,” Dupree said, adding, “Bill is not here—he is at home, on the mantel.” In the summer of 2016, after giving the keynote address at a conference in Vancouver, Bill didn’t feel well. Back home, after medical testing, he was given a diagnosis of Stage IV bile-duct cancer, and he died less than a year later. When it was time to inter his ashes, Dupree was recovering from hip surgery. “I just . . . I couldn’t do it,” she said. Her name is also on the bench, and when the time comes, she promised her colleagues at the Post, Bill’s ashes will be placed in the thermos that went with his bespoke lunchbox, emblazoned with the words “The Slot.” In the old days, when newspapers employed a full brace of copy editors, they sat in a circle around the chief, whose position was called the slot, because everything went through him. Bill’s Twitter handle, a flame tended by Dupree, is @TheSlot.
Dupree had to get back to work, helping to compile the grim statistics, in the full knowledge that people are not statistics, that every death is the loss of a real person in someone’s life. Leaving the cemetery, she took us past Marion Barry, the former mayor of the District, whose monument looks like an ad campaign (“Mayor for Life”), and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., whose remains are part of an elaborate family plot. A row of mausoleums, like town houses for troglodytes, was topped with bee boxes in stacked pastels. The chalky white and gray of the stones was punctuated here and there with pink-blossoming trees and saucer magnolias. One of the most poignant things about our current dilemma is that the death toll is mounting just as the land is coming alive. The drive home, along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, went past mounds and cones of white blossoms stuck to the trees like snow, as if the season had been inverted and the weather came from below instead of above—hope as light as foam.


newyorker--2020-03-28--The Most Effective Stimulus Is Doing Whatever It Takes to Control the Coronavirus

On Friday , with the House of Representatives passing a two-trillion-dollar emergency-spending bill , and Donald Trump signing it , the U.S. government put in place the most extensive economic support operation ever seen in peacetime .
The crisis measures go well beyond the big fiscal stimulus .
From its headquarters , in Washington , D.C. , the Federal Reserve Board has committed to creating as much money as it takes to keep credit flowing throughout the economy , which could ultimately be many trillions of dollars .
Over the past couple of weeks , the Fed has launched a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Going beyond what it did during the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 , it has provided substantial support for the markets for Treasury bonds , mortgage securities , long-term corporate bonds , short-term commercial paper , and credit-card debts .
It has also acted to bolster money-market mutual funds , and it has promised to unveil a lending program for Main Street , which will probably involve the Fed working hand in hand with commercial banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America .
“ You can be sure that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fed to have this in place and work out the details , ” Robert Kaplan , the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , said on Friday .
In an era of unceasing partisan warfare , and serious tensions between the Trump White House and the Fed , this two-pronged policy response to the coronavirus has come together quickly .
To be sure , it ’ s been far from perfect .
On Thursday , I pointed out some of the stimulus bill ’ s ugly features , particularly those relating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ More shortcomings have now emerged , including a set of provisions that could save wealthy real-estate developers like Trump and Jared Kushner tens of billions of dollars in taxes .
The U.S. political system has been corrupted through and through , of course .
But , if you compare the passage of the stimulus bill with the halting efforts of the European Union to produce a coördinated economic response , the difference is telling .
For all the dysfunction and partisan warfare that have afflicted the U.S. institutions of governance , they did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an unprecedented crisis .
The result is a series of programs designed to keep households and businesses on economic life support until the public-health crisis recedes .
If the Trump Administration had shown a similar alacrity in responding to the outbreak of the virus in China , the country would be in a much better place , in terms of both a public-health and an economic perspective .
It didn ’ t do that , of course , and that ’ s why , despite the passage of the stimulus bill and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outlook for the economy remains dire .
With rates of infection rising alarmingly in many parts of the country , it is far more likely , despite what Trump has been saying in the past few days , that the emergency health measures will be extended rather than relaxed .
That points to more closures , more job losses , and more economic misery .
“ I think this is going to be deeper than the great recession of 2008-2009 , probably twice as large , ” Claudia Sahm , the director of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Equitable Growth , told me on Friday .
“ I think the unemployment rate could skyrocket to more than twenty per cent.
” But Sahm , who used to work at the Fed , also stressed that these predictions were provisional , and that until we get a grip on the pandemic it is impossible to know just how deep and long the slump is going to be .
“ The only thing that is going to stop the economic plummet is killing this goddam virus , ” she said .
“ Public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we go .
We ’ ve never seen the U.S. economy and the world economy shut down like this .
The people who are saying ‘ V-shaped recovery ’ —how would you even know ?
” Ian Shepherdson , of Pantheon Macroeconomics , agrees .
He said that the effort to stabilize the economy had three pillars , all of which were essential : keeping credit flowing ( the Fed ’ s job ) ; providing financial support for households and firms ( Congress ’ s job ) ; and checking the progress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has devolved to the state level in the absence of effective leadership from the White House .
The lesson of Hubei Province , in China , where the first cases of COVID-19 occurred , Shepherdson said , “ is that it took almost two months from the start of the lockdown to a point at which some economic activities could resume .
So the United States potentially has quite a long way to go.
” Arguably , that is an optimistic analysis .
The comparison with China rests on the assumption that isolation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a sizable outbreak .
In the United States , there is evidence that the lockdowns in Northern California and Washington State are having some effect .
But the failure to act forcefully and quickly on the part of the governors in Florida , Mississippi , and other states where major outbreaks are developing is willful negligence .
So is Trump ’ s talk about reopening the economy on Easter Sunday .
In any case , the most effective stimulus policy is doing whatever it takes to get some control over the virus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much of the economy has stopped , and people are simply trying to get through it .
If the rate of new infections were to fall , it would restore the spirits of everyone—consumers , businesses , and investors—and at least raise the possibility of resuming some activities before very long .
“ When we get to the bottom economically , we will know it because the public-health crisis will be starting to abate , and the case numbers will be starting to drop , ” Sahm said .
Getting there won ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It will involve a great deal more suffering and loss ; expanding testing until it is ubiquitous ; continuing the lockdowns , and expanding them where necessary ; and procuring much more medical equipment and protective gear .
“ I have confidence in the public-health professionals , ” Sahm added .
“ If we get them what they need , they will beat this thing.
” At the end of a week when the United States became the world ’ s leader in the number of COVID-19 infections , let ’ s end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic .
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
• How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
• Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available .
• We are all irrational panic shoppers .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus take Rome .

On Friday, with the House of Representatives passing a two-trillion-dollar emergency-spending bill, and Donald Trump signing it, the U.S. government put in place the most extensive economic support operation ever seen in peacetime. The crisis measures go well beyond the big fiscal stimulus. From its headquarters, in Washington, D.C., the Federal Reserve Board has committed to creating as much money as it takes to keep credit flowing throughout the economy, which could ultimately be many trillions of dollars.
Over the past couple of weeks, the Fed has launched a whole series of lending and liquidity programs. Going beyond what it did during the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, it has provided substantial support for the markets for Treasury bonds, mortgage securities, long-term corporate bonds, short-term commercial paper, and credit-card debts. It has also acted to bolster money-market mutual funds, and it has promised to unveil a lending program for Main Street, which will probably involve the Fed working hand in hand with commercial banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. “You can be sure that we are working furiously here at the Fed to have this in place and work out the details,” Robert Kaplan, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said on Friday.
In an era of unceasing partisan warfare, and serious tensions between the Trump White House and the Fed, this two-pronged policy response to the coronavirus has come together quickly. To be sure, it’s been far from perfect. On Thursday, I pointed out some of the stimulus bill’s ugly features, particularly those relating to its treatment of corporate bailouts. More shortcomings have now emerged, including a set of provisions that could save wealthy real-estate developers like Trump and Jared Kushner tens of billions of dollars in taxes.
The U.S. political system has been corrupted through and through, of course. But, if you compare the passage of the stimulus bill with the halting efforts of the European Union to produce a coördinated economic response, the difference is telling. For all the dysfunction and partisan warfare that have afflicted the U.S. institutions of governance, they did act pretty rapidly in the face of an unprecedented crisis. The result is a series of programs designed to keep households and businesses on economic life support until the public-health crisis recedes.
If the Trump Administration had shown a similar alacrity in responding to the outbreak of the virus in China, the country would be in a much better place, in terms of both a public-health and an economic perspective. It didn’t do that, of course, and that’s why, despite the passage of the stimulus bill and the Fed’s measures, the immediate outlook for the economy remains dire. With rates of infection rising alarmingly in many parts of the country, it is far more likely, despite what Trump has been saying in the past few days, that the emergency health measures will be extended rather than relaxed. That points to more closures, more job losses, and more economic misery.
“I think this is going to be deeper than the great recession of 2008-2009, probably twice as large,” Claudia Sahm, the director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told me on Friday. “I think the unemployment rate could skyrocket to more than twenty per cent.” But Sahm, who used to work at the Fed, also stressed that these predictions were provisional, and that until we get a grip on the pandemic it is impossible to know just how deep and long the slump is going to be. “The only thing that is going to stop the economic plummet is killing this goddam virus,” she said. “Public health is going to determine how low we go. We’ve never seen the U.S. economy and the world economy shut down like this. The people who are saying ‘V-shaped recovery’—how would you even know?”
Ian Shepherdson, of Pantheon Macroeconomics, agrees. He said that the effort to stabilize the economy had three pillars, all of which were essential: keeping credit flowing (the Fed’s job); providing financial support for households and firms (Congress’s job); and checking the progress of the disease, an effort that has devolved to the state level in the absence of effective leadership from the White House. The lesson of Hubei Province, in China, where the first cases of COVID-19 occurred, Shepherdson said, “is that it took almost two months from the start of the lockdown to a point at which some economic activities could resume. So the United States potentially has quite a long way to go.”
Arguably, that is an optimistic analysis. The comparison with China rests on the assumption that isolation measures will be effectively implemented everywhere there is a sizable outbreak. In the United States, there is evidence that the lockdowns in Northern California and Washington State are having some effect. But the failure to act forcefully and quickly on the part of the governors in Florida, Mississippi, and other states where major outbreaks are developing is willful negligence. So is Trump’s talk about reopening the economy on Easter Sunday.
In any case, the most effective stimulus policy is doing whatever it takes to get some control over the virus’s trajectory. Right now, much of the economy has stopped, and people are simply trying to get through it. If the rate of new infections were to fall, it would restore the spirits of everyone—consumers, businesses, and investors—and at least raise the possibility of resuming some activities before very long.
“When we get to the bottom economically, we will know it because the public-health crisis will be starting to abate, and the case numbers will be starting to drop,” Sahm said. Getting there won’t be easy, of course. It will involve a great deal more suffering and loss; expanding testing until it is ubiquitous; continuing the lockdowns, and expanding them where necessary; and procuring much more medical equipment and protective gear. “I have confidence in the public-health professionals,” Sahm added. “If we get them what they need, they will beat this thing.” At the end of a week when the United States became the world’s leader in the number of COVID-19 infections, let’s end on that optimistic note.
A Guide to the Coronavirus