newyorker--2020-06-12--Economic Reality Bites Wall Street and Trump

Donald Trump often sounds angry on Twitter ; sometimes , he sounds nuts .
On Thursday morning , he sounded like a man who had just emerged from a doctor ’ s office with a grim prognosis that he couldn ’ t bring himself to accept .
“ The Federal Reserve is wrong so often , ” he wrote .
“ I see the numbers also , and do MUCH better than they do .
We will have a very good Third Quarter , a great Fourth Quarter , and one of our best ever years in 2021 .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Therapeutics/Cure .
That ’ s my opinion .
WATCH !
” The President was referring to the Fed ’ s warning , on Wednesday , that the economy would take years to recover from the recession that began in March , when states started to impose economic shutdowns because of the coronavirus .
After completing a two-day meeting , the members of the Fed ’ s main policymaking committee released a set of projections which showed that they expect the official unemployment rate , which understates the real rate , and which is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 9.3 per cent at the end of 2020 , 6.5 per cent at the end of 2021 , and 5.5 per cent at the end of 2022 .
As recently as February of this year , the jobless rate was just 3.5 per cent .
These gloomy forecasts alone would have been enough to irk Trump .
But they were also accompanied by some downbeat comments from Jerome Powell , the Fed chairman , who has often been the object of the President ’ s jibes .
At a press conference , Powell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or even a modest rebound in some sectors of the economy.
” But he went on to say that “ well into the millions ” of people won ’ t get their jobs back even after the shutdowns end , and added , “ It could be some years before we get back to those people finding jobs.
” For one day , at least , Wall Street took Powell ’ s words more seriously than Trump did .
On Thursday , the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1,861.2 points , closing down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stock market ’ s remarkable rally since March—the biggest upward move ever seen in such a short period—one down day doesn ’ t mean very much .
( On Friday morning , the Dow rebounded somewhat . )
But from a political perspective as well as an economic one , what is important is that Powell ’ s warning , combined with news that the number of COVID-19 infections is rising sharply in several states , has undermined Trump ’ s claims that the American economy is about to take off “ like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dubious idea to begin with , of course .
There was always going to be a pickup in employment when states ended their shutdowns and businesses called workers back from furloughs .
That happened earlier than expected—and perhaps earlier than it should have , as the figures for new COVID-19 cases in places like Arizona and Texas suggest .
Last week , when the jobs report for May showed payrolls rising by 2.5 million , and Trump used his astronautical simile , the President chose to ignore the fact that more than thirty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or working part-time for economic reasons .
On Thursday , the Labor Department reported that another 1.5 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the past week .
Another weakness of the argument that the economy would come roaring back is its parochialism .
Thanks to globalization , major economies tend to move in tandem more than they used to , and the COVID-19 pandemic has “ delivered a global economic shock of enormous magnitude , leading to steep recessions in many countries , ” as the World Bank noted , in an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Bank predicted that global G.D.P .
would decline by 5.2 per cent in 2020 , which would make this “ the deepest global recession in eight decades , despite unprecedented policy support.
” And the worldwide downturn would be even deeper “ if bringing the pandemic under control took longer than expected , or if financial stress triggered cascading defaults , ” the Bank warned .
This sombre analysis has been echoed by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development , an intergovernmental research group based in Paris .
In its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was released at the start of this week , the O.E.C.D .
predicted that G.D.P .
in the Eurozone and the United Kingdom would decline by more than ten per cent this year , which is virtually without precedent ; China and India , meanwhile , would also see their economies contract for the first time in many years .
Laurence Boone , the O.E.C.D.
’ s chief economist , played down any hopes of a rapid global rebound .
“ Most people see a V-shaped recovery , but we think it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Boone said .
“ By the end of 2021 , the loss of income exceeds that of any previous recession over the last 100 years outside wartime , with dire and long-lasting consequences for people , firms and governments.
” To be sure , this is merely a prediction , and forecasting has made idiots of many eminent economists .
But you don ’ t have to rely on economists , or Powell , the Fed chairman , to tell you that things are unlikely to snap back to normal .
Just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ announced that it would close up to four hundred of its North American coffee shops and open a number of pickup-only locations .
Alaska Airlines said it was cutting three thousand jobs .
Major hotel chains in cities across the country are extending layoffs to affect thousands of their employees .
In Florida , one of the first states to reopen , Google mobility data suggests that visits to retail and recreation locations are still down twenty-eight per cent .
The over-all picture is of an economy groping , rather than sprinting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imply for the political outlook ?
Earlier this week , I noted that , with Trump ’ s poll ratings sagging , the best thing he has going for him is the perception , however unfounded , that he is better equipped than Joe Biden to insure an economic recovery .
Forty-eight per cent of respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said that they trust Trump over Biden to reduce the unemployment rate , compared with the thirty-five per cent who said they trusted Biden more .
A new poll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s approval rating on economic issues five points higher than his over-all approval rating .
Perceptions can change , though .
After the warnings from Powell and others about the likelihood of persistent mass unemployment , a more subtle politician than Trump would be looking to temper expectations and urging Congress to pass another stimulus package quickly .
Subtlety isn ’ t in his nature , of course .
With his incessant economic boosterism , he ’ s strapped himself into his own rocket ship .
If the arc of the vessel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , points back to Earth , there will be only one thing left for him to do : blame Powell , or China , or Anthony Fauci—anybody but himself .

Donald Trump often sounds angry on Twitter; sometimes, he sounds nuts. On Thursday morning, he sounded like a man who had just emerged from a doctor’s office with a grim prognosis that he couldn’t bring himself to accept. “The Federal Reserve is wrong so often,” he wrote. “I see the numbers also, and do MUCH better than they do. We will have a very good Third Quarter, a great Fourth Quarter, and one of our best ever years in 2021. We will also soon have a Vaccine & Therapeutics/Cure. That’s my opinion. WATCH!”
The President was referring to the Fed’s warning, on Wednesday, that the economy would take years to recover from the recession that began in March, when states started to impose economic shutdowns because of the coronavirus. After completing a two-day meeting, the members of the Fed’s main policymaking committee released a set of projections which showed that they expect the official unemployment rate, which understates the real rate, and which is currently 13.3 per cent, to be 9.3 per cent at the end of 2020, 6.5 per cent at the end of 2021, and 5.5 per cent at the end of 2022. As recently as February of this year, the jobless rate was just 3.5 per cent.
These gloomy forecasts alone would have been enough to irk Trump. But they were also accompanied by some downbeat comments from Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, who has often been the object of the President’s jibes. At a press conference, Powell identified signs of “a stabilization, or even a modest rebound in some sectors of the economy.” But he went on to say that “well into the millions” of people won’t get their jobs back even after the shutdowns end, and added, “It could be some years before we get back to those people finding jobs.”
For one day, at least, Wall Street took Powell’s words more seriously than Trump did. On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1,861.2 points, closing down almost seven per cent. Given the stock market’s remarkable rally since March—the biggest upward move ever seen in such a short period—one down day doesn’t mean very much. (On Friday morning, the Dow rebounded somewhat.) But from a political perspective as well as an economic one, what is important is that Powell’s warning, combined with news that the number of COVID-19 infections is rising sharply in several states, has undermined Trump’s claims that the American economy is about to take off “like a rocket ship.” This was a dubious idea to begin with, of course. There was always going to be a pickup in employment when states ended their shutdowns and businesses called workers back from furloughs. That happened earlier than expected—and perhaps earlier than it should have, as the figures for new COVID-19 cases in places like Arizona and Texas suggest. Last week, when the jobs report for May showed payrolls rising by 2.5 million, and Trump used his astronautical simile, the President chose to ignore the fact that more than thirty million Americans were still out of work or working part-time for economic reasons. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that another 1.5 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the past week.
Another weakness of the argument that the economy would come roaring back is its parochialism. Thanks to globalization, major economies tend to move in tandem more than they used to, and the COVID-19 pandemic has “delivered a global economic shock of enormous magnitude, leading to steep recessions in many countries,” as the World Bank noted, in an analysis released this week. Looking ahead, the Bank predicted that global G.D.P. would decline by 5.2 per cent in 2020, which would make this “the deepest global recession in eight decades, despite unprecedented policy support.” And the worldwide downturn would be even deeper “if bringing the pandemic under control took longer than expected, or if financial stress triggered cascading defaults,” the Bank warned.
This sombre analysis has been echoed by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, an intergovernmental research group based in Paris. In its latest analysis of the world economy, which was released at the start of this week, the O.E.C.D. predicted that G.D.P. in the Eurozone and the United Kingdom would decline by more than ten per cent this year, which is virtually without precedent; China and India, meanwhile, would also see their economies contract for the first time in many years. Laurence Boone, the O.E.C.D.’s chief economist, played down any hopes of a rapid global rebound. “Most people see a V-shaped recovery, but we think it’s going to stop halfway,” Boone said. “By the end of 2021, the loss of income exceeds that of any previous recession over the last 100 years outside wartime, with dire and long-lasting consequences for people, firms and governments.”
To be sure, this is merely a prediction, and forecasting has made idiots of many eminent economists. But you don’t have to rely on economists, or Powell, the Fed chairman, to tell you that things are unlikely to snap back to normal. Just look around. On Wednesday, Starbucks announced that it would close up to four hundred of its North American coffee shops and open a number of pickup-only locations. Alaska Airlines said it was cutting three thousand jobs. Major hotel chains in cities across the country are extending layoffs to affect thousands of their employees. In Florida, one of the first states to reopen, Google mobility data suggest that visits to retail and recreation locations are still down twenty-eight per cent. The over-all picture is of an economy groping, rather than sprinting, its way back.
What does this imply for the political outlook? Earlier this week, I noted that, with Trump’s poll ratings sagging, the best thing he has going for him is the perception, however unfounded, that he is better equipped than Joe Biden to insure an economic recovery. Forty-eight per cent of respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said that they trust Trump over Biden to reduce the unemployment rate, compared with the thirty-five per cent who said they trusted Biden more. A new poll from The Economist and YouGov has Trump’s approval rating on economic issues five points higher than his over-all approval rating.
Perceptions can change, though. After the warnings from Powell and others about the likelihood of persistent mass unemployment, a more subtle politician than Trump would be looking to temper expectations and urging Congress to pass another stimulus package quickly. Subtlety isn’t in his nature, of course. With his incessant economic boosterism, he’s strapped himself into his own rocket ship. If the arc of the vessel levels off, or, worse still, points back to Earth, there will be only one thing left for him to do: blame Powell, or China, or Anthony Fauci—anybody but himself.


newyorker--2020-06-12--What to Stream: “The Story of a Three-Day Pass,” a Precursor to Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”

The release on Friday of Spike Lee ’ s new movie , “ Da 5 Bloods , ” about four black Vietnam War veterans who return to the country where they fought and to their memories of the time , brought to mind both Lee ’ s earlier film “ The Miracle at St. Anna ” and a remarkable precursor of both , Melvin Van Peebles ’ s “ The Story of a Three-Day Pass.
” ( It ’ s streaming on Amazon Prime and Kanopy . )
The first feature by Van Peebles , the film , from 1967 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imaginatively at the double life of a black soldier in the U.S. Army .
All the more remarkably , it ’ s a French film : Van Peebles made it while living in Paris , and although its protagonist is American and much of the film is in English , the movie reflects the stylistic variety and the freewheeling innovation of the French New Wave .
It ’ s among the great American films of the sixties—including Juleen Compton ’ s “ Stranded ” and Jim McBride ’ s “ David Holzman ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reach of that Paris-centered movement .
In an on-camera prologue to the film ’ s DVD release , in 2006 , Van Peebles tells the story of how he became a French director .
He had made some short films , brought them to Hollywood to find work as a director , and was offered work by a studio first as an elevator operator and then as a dancer .
Instead , he went to Europe—and when he learned that French law granted writers temporary membership in the directors ’ guild , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ membership , and made his first feature—which is based on one of those novels , “ La Permission.
” Van Peebles ’ s powerful insights and teeming imagination are on display in the very first scene , in which Corporal Turner ( Harry Baird ) , alone in his barracks , in his service uniform , happily beams at himself in the bathroom mirror and anticipates a promotion .
And then his reflection looks back at him and , in a split screen , talks back to him , charging that , if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ll be due not to his merit but to his docility and obsequiousness to white superiors— “ You are the captain ’ s new good colored boy , you are the captain ’ s Uncle Tom , baby !
” Summoned to the office of Captain Lutz ( Harold Brav ) , Turner indeed gets his promotion to sergeant—as well as a three-day pass , which Turner uses to drive to Paris .
Out of uniform , Turner , in the hip garb of a trenchcoat , sunglasses , and a black fedora @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city in melancholy silence , taking in the unglamorous sights , which Van Peebles ( working with the cinematographer Michel Kelber ) films in a fusion of drama and documentary—a busking escape artist , distinctive passersby in a park , a striptease show , a street of beckoning prostitutes , a tour of a subterranean war memorial—before seeking refuge at night in the lightly louche throng of a small bar and dance club .
Sex is already in the air—Turner ’ s first move in the city was a thwarted pickup—and he enters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( in a foreshadowing of Lee ’ s signature visual trope , the so-called double dolly shot , with both the camera and the actor rolling together ) .
Turner looks probingly at the mostly white clientele , and they stare back at him—and then his imagination kicks into high gear , along with that of Van Peebles .
Leaning on the bar and staring across the crowded dance floor at a young white woman , Turner imagines his ghostly double detaching itself from him and making its way toward her in slow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for him like the Red Sea .
There follows a deliriously funny romantic-drama parody of him and the woman running toward each other , open-armed , on a country road .
But in reality Turner can ’ t get her , or any other woman , to dance with him , until he chances to cute-meet another woman , Miriam Duval ( Nicole Berger ) , who ’ d also turned him down at first .
As the erotic tension between the couple rises , Van Peebles unleashes some wildly inspired cinematic devices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fragmentation that suggest their inner turmoil .
On the dance floor , as the band plays uptempo instrumental rock , Turner and Miriam circle around each other , and , as the camera holds its place , they stare into the camera , which takes his and her point of view successively .
( Van Peebles and the guitarist Mickey Baker—who also acts in Godard ’ s “ Masculine Feminine ” —composed the music , and Baker performs with his band in it . )
Turner persuades Miriam to join him on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and he celebrates his conquest by playing loud funky music on the jukebox , but back in his hotel room his double visits him again to caution him not to get his hopes up .
Turner himself is indeed a double—both a hipster and a nerd , a coolly elegant man of style and a cheerful company man clumsily eager to impress white people , whether it be Lutz or Miriam .
The character ’ s doubleness brings to mind a remark by James Baldwin , from the documentary “ Take This Hammer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of black people chatting on the sidewalk in front of a hotel : “ Negroes have great style .
.
.
and one of the reasons that Negroes have a certain style is because they are aware of the conditions of their lives , they can ’ t fool themselves about it.
” Turner is both aware of his conditions and wishes them away ; his incisive elegance is one with his sense of melancholy isolation , with his sense of outsiderness , and his jovial awkwardness emerges when he tries to fit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brings Miriam into the foreground in a remarkable sequence of the long drive to Normandy .
The camera takes Turner ’ s point of view from the driver ’ s seat as he glances over at her , fragmenting and freeze-framing images of her face and her body as she delivers , in English , the story of her life—her frustrations in the store where she works , her failed efforts to become a teacher , her fragile health .
Van Peebles balances and contrasts the two characters ’ points of view in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a sequence of bold and giddy inspiration , filmed as if to prove the maxim , mentioned in Renoir ’ s “ The Rules of the Game , ” that “ love is the contact between two epidermises and the exchange of two fantasies.
” The two epidermises make much contact , punctuated by both characters ’ extravagantly costumed fantasy sequences : Turner ’ s is of himself as a velvet-cloaked and lace-bedecked aristocrat , sipping wine by the fire and approaching his lady fair on her canopied bed ; whereas Miriam @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the wild by grass-skirted , spear-bearing , pelt-wearing black men and rescued by a similarly garbed and styled Turner .
It isn ’ t giving away too much to say that , through a series of coincidences , reality reasserts itself : at the Army base , Captain Lutz has found out that Turner was with a white woman and severely punishes him for it .
Reality overtook the movie , too .
In 1966 , France ’ s President , Charles de Gaulle , ordered all foreign troops out of France @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out , in 1968 , there were no more American bases there .
“ The Story of a Three-Day Pass ” was the last performance by the lead actress , Nicole Berger , who had been with the New Wave from the early days , appearing in short films by Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard and co-starring in François Truffaut ’ s second feature , “ Shoot the Piano Player.
” She died in a car accident in April , 1967 , at the age of thirty-two .
As for Van Peebles , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was released in the United States , in 1968 , and it launched his Hollywood career .

The release on Friday of Spike Lee’s new movie, “Da 5 Bloods,” about four black Vietnam War veterans who return to the country where they fought and to their memories of the time, brought to mind both Lee’s earlier film “The Miracle at St. Anna” and a remarkable precursor of both, Melvin Van Peebles’s “The Story of a Three-Day Pass.” (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime and Kanopy.) The first feature by Van Peebles, the film, from 1967, looks starkly, intimately, and imaginatively at the double life of a black soldier in the U.S. Army. All the more remarkably, it’s a French film: Van Peebles made it while living in Paris, and although its protagonist is American and much of the film is in English, the movie reflects the stylistic variety and the freewheeling innovation of the French New Wave. It’s among the great American films of the sixties—including Juleen Compton’s “Stranded” and Jim McBride’s “David Holzman’s Diary”—that display the global reach of that Paris-centered movement.
In an on-camera prologue to the film’s DVD release, in 2006, Van Peebles tells the story of how he became a French director. He had made some short films, brought them to Hollywood to find work as a director, and was offered work by a studio first as an elevator operator and then as a dancer. Instead, he went to Europe—and when he learned that French law granted writers temporary membership in the directors’ guild, he wrote novels in French, requested his membership, and made his first feature—which is based on one of those novels, “La Permission.”
Van Peebles’s powerful insights and teeming imagination are on display in the very first scene, in which Corporal Turner (Harry Baird), alone in his barracks, in his service uniform, happily beams at himself in the bathroom mirror and anticipates a promotion. And then his reflection looks back at him and, in a split screen, talks back to him, charging that, if he’s promoted, it’ll be due not to his merit but to his docility and obsequiousness to white superiors—“You are the captain’s new good colored boy, you are the captain’s Uncle Tom, baby!” Summoned to the office of Captain Lutz (Harold Brav), Turner indeed gets his promotion to sergeant—as well as a three-day pass, which Turner uses to drive to Paris.
Out of uniform, Turner, in the hip garb of a trenchcoat, sunglasses, and a black fedora with a short brim, strolls the city in melancholy silence, taking in the unglamorous sights, which Van Peebles (working with the cinematographer Michel Kelber) films in a fusion of drama and documentary—a busking escape artist, distinctive passersby in a park, a striptease show, a street of beckoning prostitutes, a tour of a subterranean war memorial—before seeking refuge at night in the lightly louche throng of a small bar and dance club. Sex is already in the air—Turner’s first move in the city was a thwarted pickup—and he enters the bar as if gliding into it (in a foreshadowing of Lee’s signature visual trope, the so-called double dolly shot, with both the camera and the actor rolling together). Turner looks probingly at the mostly white clientele, and they stare back at him—and then his imagination kicks into high gear, along with that of Van Peebles. Leaning on the bar and staring across the crowded dance floor at a young white woman, Turner imagines his ghostly double detaching itself from him and making its way toward her in slow motion as the dancers stop and part for him like the Red Sea.
There follows a deliriously funny romantic-drama parody of him and the woman running toward each other, open-armed, on a country road. But in reality Turner can’t get her, or any other woman, to dance with him, until he chances to cute-meet another woman, Miriam Duval (Nicole Berger), who’d also turned him down at first. As the erotic tension between the couple rises, Van Peebles unleashes some wildly inspired cinematic devices, starting with abrupt editing and dramatic fragmentation that suggest their inner turmoil. On the dance floor, as the band plays uptempo instrumental rock, Turner and Miriam circle around each other, and, as the camera holds its place, they stare into the camera, which takes his and her point of view successively. (Van Peebles and the guitarist Mickey Baker—who also acts in Godard’s “Masculine Feminine”—composed the music, and Baker performs with his band in it.)
Turner persuades Miriam to join him on a trip to the beach in Normandy, and he celebrates his conquest by playing loud funky music on the jukebox, but back in his hotel room his double visits him again to caution him not to get his hopes up.
Turner himself is indeed a double—both a hipster and a nerd, a coolly elegant man of style and a cheerful company man clumsily eager to impress white people, whether it be Lutz or Miriam. The character’s doubleness brings to mind a remark by James Baldwin, from the documentary “Take This Hammer,” as he observes a group of black people chatting on the sidewalk in front of a hotel: “Negroes have great style . . . and one of the reasons that Negroes have a certain style is because they are aware of the conditions of their lives, they can’t fool themselves about it.” Turner is both aware of his conditions and wishes them away; his incisive elegance is one with his sense of melancholy isolation, with his sense of outsiderness, and his jovial awkwardness emerges when he tries to fit in with white society.
Van Peebles brings Miriam into the foreground in a remarkable sequence of the long drive to Normandy. The camera takes Turner’s point of view from the driver’s seat as he glances over at her, fragmenting and freeze-framing images of her face and her body as she delivers, in English, the story of her life—her frustrations in the store where she works, her failed efforts to become a teacher, her fragile health. Van Peebles balances and contrasts the two characters’ points of view in the scene of their first sexual encounter, a sequence of bold and giddy inspiration, filmed as if to prove the maxim, mentioned in Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” that “love is the contact between two epidermises and the exchange of two fantasies.” The two epidermises make much contact, punctuated by both characters’ extravagantly costumed fantasy sequences: Turner’s is of himself as a velvet-cloaked and lace-bedecked aristocrat, sipping wine by the fire and approaching his lady fair on her canopied bed; whereas Miriam’s fantasy is of being captured in the wild by grass-skirted, spear-bearing, pelt-wearing black men and rescued by a similarly garbed and styled Turner. It isn’t giving away too much to say that, through a series of coincidences, reality reasserts itself: at the Army base, Captain Lutz has found out that Turner was with a white woman and severely punishes him for it.
Reality overtook the movie, too. In 1966, France’s President, Charles de Gaulle, ordered all foreign troops out of France; by the time the movie came out, in 1968, there were no more American bases there. “The Story of a Three-Day Pass” was the last performance by the lead actress, Nicole Berger, who had been with the New Wave from the early days, appearing in short films by Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard and co-starring in François Truffaut’s second feature, “Shoot the Piano Player.” She died in a car accident in April, 1967, at the age of thirty-two. As for Van Peebles, his French connection served its purpose: it was released in the United States, in 1968, and it launched his Hollywood career.


The Way I Ate

“ Diet ” is a strange word , used to describe both a deviation from the norm and the norm itself : the foods that make up a day , a week , a lifetime .
From the beginning , my diet was a big part of my story , even the one that others told about me .
“ All babies like rice cereal , ” my mother will say .
“ But you didn ’ t. ” In the high chair , I would tighten my lips and turn away .
When I was two , at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my mother , “ Susan never eats snack.
” Recalling encounters with foods I disliked as a small child raises an old alarm in me .
A sip of a soda at the zoo one afternoon , the prickling shock of the bubbles .
It would be more than a decade before I would try something fizzy again .
Melba toast at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Chicago .
The next day , I vomited .
The bright yellow worm of mustard on a hot dog at a public beach .
The jagged chopped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though I ’ d asked for it plain .
In any choice related to food , I always preferred plain .
I went through primary school never eating a salad or a single bite of fruit .
The term “ picky eater ” didn ’ t apply to me .
Picky eaters had to be reminded to pay attention to their plates .
But I never forgot about food , in the way you never forget about anything you fear .
I was scared of feeling sick .
I was scared of not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something getting in me that I could never get out .
I was scared of something happening to my body that would make me not me .
In many ways , my adolescence was stereotypical .
I was an awkward middle-schooler who transformed herself with the help of Seventeen magazine .
I stood in bleachers at Friday-night football games .
I read Sylvia Plath and wrote furiously in my journal .
I learned to smoke cigarettes on a weekday afternoon in a wood-panelled car .
I signed the notes I passed in class @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be the perfect teen-age girl .
But I was also a troubled one , and the dark part of my adolescence became its heart .
I was anorexic first .
I remember reading a story in People magazine about Karen Carpenter , how she ’ d grown so bony that her heart had stopped .
I was scared of the information but greedy for it : the pictures of her skull-like face , the assertion that she had once loved tacos and chili .
The mix of things I felt : disgusted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , too .
By junior year , I ’ d lost so much weight that my period , which had plagued me since the age of ten , had ceased .
On the morning of my first day of school , I stood on the pebbly white surface of the bathroom scale , lighter than I ’ d ever been in adolescence .
“ Lighter ” : everything in that word , air and joy and wonder .
I didn ’ t see the peril .
When I started eating again , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
By my senior year , everything besides eating , and trying not to eat , was a distant flare .
Sometimes , a flare would attract my attention : when Operation Desert Storm started , I marched and protested and spoke at a rally at school .
I was quoted in the Daily Camera , and my mother hung the article on the refrigerator .
The same refrigerator to which I ’ d inevitably return .
Once in the kitchen , I ’ d turn the dial for the overhead light .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I saw the dead flies on the fixture , the refrigerator ’ s coiled back .
I ’ d go to the freezer calmly , as if I were a normal girl considering the possibility of a midnight snack .
Then I ’ d open the door , take out a pint of ice cream , and eat .
If a bite fell on the floor , I ’ d rue it , because now I would have trouble judging how much I had consumed , and also I would have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up .
I ’ d finish the pint , return to the freezer , pull out a ziplock bag full of muffins , eat one that was still frozen—an oat-bran muffin from Alfalfa ’ s , with a hard , grainy edge .
Then I ’ d open the cupboard , rip off the gold wrapper of a malt-nut PowerBar , which was like pressed taffy and made my jaw sore .
I ’ d keep going .
There were times I ate so much food that I worried something bad could happen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rupture , or compress my other organs .
The fear of the harm I was doing was worse than the humiliation of my body growing larger .
I ’ d turn the light off , my heart racing .
I didn ’ t brush my teeth .
I had to get in bed—bloated , sated , hating myself—to hide from what I had done .
I would sleep it off , and wait for the next day to begin .
I logged my eating habits with the compulsive focus of someone with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ girl of my era , my subject was not atypical .
Joan Jacobs Brumberg , for her book “ The Body Project : An Intimate History of American Girls , ” read hundreds of diaries kept by adolescent girls from an almost two-hundred-year period , and discerned a pattern : while nineteenth-century girls used their diaries to write about their goals for character improvement , girls at the end of the twentieth century wrote almost solely about the ways they wanted to improve their bodies .
There ’ d been a shift in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ good looks.
” I , too , had undergone such a shift .
At the age of fifteen , I ’ d written in my journal that I wanted to be “ confident , happier .
.
.
friendlier , outgoing , mature.
” Now , a year and a half later , I was examining little other than what I ate , how much I hated myself for the way I ate it , and how desperate I was to stop .
What I did at college scared me even more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I thought , the impulse would fade .
It did , for the first few nights , of pizza and pitchers and jukeboxes ; of joy in new friends ; of smoking bud in the courtyard and zoning out in front of fractal screen savers in the bedroom and talking about our parents ’ divorces at 2 A.M .
But one morning I just broke .
I needed to do it the way I did it , hovering , shoving , all alone .
I left my room and went across the street @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Heath Bar Crunch and then walked down the sidewalk as if someone were tailing me .
I had no idea where I could go to eat this .
It was a beautiful fall Saturday morning , the sky a coastal New England blue ; a perfect morning , which I was ruining .
Had already ruined , because being on the way to doing this was tantamount to having done it .
A block down , there was a parking lot , almost empty , except for a dumpster .
I went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of ice cream with a spoon I ’ d taken from my dorm room .
The spoon belonged to one of my roommates ; it had a thin silver handle with flowers .
The ice cream was deep-frozen , and when I drove into it the spoon ’ s handle bent .
When I finished the pint , I threw the carton in the dumpster ( so convenient ! )
and then I threw the spoon away , too .
Partly because it was bent , but partly because I felt like I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as soon as I ’ d tossed these things in the trash , I started walking again , as if I had never stopped .
I felt exhausted relief , but also disgust , because is this where I would be ?
Crouching behind dumpsters while everyone else was tailgating before the football game ?
These were still just questions ; I hadn ’ t yet accepted this as my certain end .
I had binge-eating disorder , but I couldn ’ t have told you so back then .
When I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ B.E.D . )
—eating uncontrollably without “ purging , ” by vomiting or taking a laxative , as people with bulimia do—wasn ’ t on the radar as a thing you could have .
There were no after-school specials or first-person magazine stories about binge eating .
B.E.D .
wasn ’ t recognized as a formal eating-disorder diagnosis until 2013 .
It is also called compulsive eating , a name I like better , because it captures the defining qualities of this illness : urgent , gripping , and hard to kick .

“Diet” is a strange word, used to describe both a deviation from the norm and the norm itself: the foods that make up a day, a week, a lifetime. From the beginning, my diet was a big part of my story, even the one that others told about me. “All babies like rice cereal,” my mother will say. “But you didn’t.” In the high chair, I would tighten my lips and turn away. When I was two, at the first preschool parent-teacher conference, they told my mother, “Susan never eats snack.”
Recalling encounters with foods I disliked as a small child raises an old alarm in me. A sip of a soda at the zoo one afternoon, the prickling shock of the bubbles. It would be more than a decade before I would try something fizzy again. Melba toast at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Chicago. The next day, I vomited. The bright yellow worm of mustard on a hot dog at a public beach. The jagged chopped nuts on a hot-fudge sundae, even though I’d asked for it plain. In any choice related to food, I always preferred plain. I went through primary school never eating a salad or a single bite of fruit.
The term “picky eater” didn’t apply to me. Picky eaters had to be reminded to pay attention to their plates. But I never forgot about food, in the way you never forget about anything you fear. I was scared of feeling sick. I was scared of not liking tastes. I was scared of something getting in me that I could never get out. I was scared of something happening to my body that would make me not me.
In many ways, my adolescence was stereotypical. I was an awkward middle-schooler who transformed herself with the help of Seventeen magazine. I stood in bleachers at Friday-night football games. I read Sylvia Plath and wrote furiously in my journal. I learned to smoke cigarettes on a weekday afternoon in a wood-panelled car. I signed the notes I passed in class “Love, Susan.” I tried to be the perfect teen-age girl. But I was also a troubled one, and the dark part of my adolescence became its heart.
I was anorexic first. I remember reading a story in People magazine about Karen Carpenter, how she’d grown so bony that her heart had stopped. I was scared of the information but greedy for it: the pictures of her skull-like face, the assertion that she had once loved tacos and chili. The mix of things I felt: disgusted, enthralled, superior. And recognition, too. By junior year, I’d lost so much weight that my period, which had plagued me since the age of ten, had ceased. On the morning of my first day of school, I stood on the pebbly white surface of the bathroom scale, lighter than I’d ever been in adolescence. “Lighter”: everything in that word, air and joy and wonder. I didn’t see the peril.
When I started eating again, I found that I couldn’t stop. By my senior year, everything besides eating, and trying not to eat, was a distant flare. Sometimes, a flare would attract my attention: when Operation Desert Storm started, I marched and protested and spoke at a rally at school. I was quoted in the Daily Camera, and my mother hung the article on the refrigerator. The same refrigerator to which I’d inevitably return.
Once in the kitchen, I’d turn the dial for the overhead light. Our sunny kitchen looked different at night. I saw the dead flies on the fixture, the refrigerator’s coiled back. I’d go to the freezer calmly, as if I were a normal girl considering the possibility of a midnight snack. Then I’d open the door, take out a pint of ice cream, and eat. If a bite fell on the floor, I’d rue it, because now I would have trouble judging how much I had consumed, and also I would have to pause at some point to clean it up. I’d finish the pint, return to the freezer, pull out a ziplock bag full of muffins, eat one that was still frozen—an oat-bran muffin from Alfalfa’s, with a hard, grainy edge. Then I’d open the cupboard, rip off the gold wrapper of a malt-nut PowerBar, which was like pressed taffy and made my jaw sore. I’d keep going. There were times I ate so much food that I worried something bad could happen to my body: my stomach could rupture, or compress my other organs. The fear of the harm I was doing was worse than the humiliation of my body growing larger. I’d turn the light off, my heart racing. I didn’t brush my teeth. I had to get in bed—bloated, sated, hating myself—to hide from what I had done. I would sleep it off, and wait for the next day to begin.
I logged my eating habits with the compulsive focus of someone with a disease. Yet, for a teen-age girl of my era, my subject was not atypical. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, for her book “The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls,” read hundreds of diaries kept by adolescent girls from an almost two-hundred-year period, and discerned a pattern: while nineteenth-century girls used their diaries to write about their goals for character improvement, girls at the end of the twentieth century wrote almost solely about the ways they wanted to improve their bodies. There’d been a shift in focus from “good works” to “good looks.” I, too, had undergone such a shift. At the age of fifteen, I’d written in my journal that I wanted to be “confident, happier . . . friendlier, outgoing, mature.” Now, a year and a half later, I was examining little other than what I ate, how much I hated myself for the way I ate it, and how desperate I was to stop.
What I did at college scared me even more. Away from my own kitchen, I thought, the impulse would fade. It did, for the first few nights, of pizza and pitchers and jukeboxes; of joy in new friends; of smoking bud in the courtyard and zoning out in front of fractal screen savers in the bedroom and talking about our parents’ divorces at 2 A.M. But one morning I just broke. I needed to do it the way I did it, hovering, shoving, all alone. I left my room and went across the street to Wall Food and bought a pint of Heath Bar Crunch and then walked down the sidewalk as if someone were tailing me. I had no idea where I could go to eat this. It was a beautiful fall Saturday morning, the sky a coastal New England blue; a perfect morning, which I was ruining. Had already ruined, because being on the way to doing this was tantamount to having done it.
A block down, there was a parking lot, almost empty, except for a dumpster. I went behind the dumpster and ate the pint of ice cream with a spoon I’d taken from my dorm room. The spoon belonged to one of my roommates; it had a thin silver handle with flowers. The ice cream was deep-frozen, and when I drove into it the spoon’s handle bent. When I finished the pint, I threw the carton in the dumpster (so convenient!) and then I threw the spoon away, too. Partly because it was bent, but partly because I felt like I’d desecrated it. And then, as soon as I’d tossed these things in the trash, I started walking again, as if I had never stopped. I felt exhausted relief, but also disgust, because is this where I would be? Crouching behind dumpsters while everyone else was tailgating before the football game? These were still just questions; I hadn’t yet accepted this as my certain end.
I had binge-eating disorder, but I couldn’t have told you so back then. When I was growing up, binge-eating disorder (B.E.D.)—eating uncontrollably without “purging,” by vomiting or taking a laxative, as people with bulimia do—wasn’t on the radar as a thing you could have. There were no after-school specials or first-person magazine stories about binge eating. B.E.D. wasn’t recognized as a formal eating-disorder diagnosis until 2013. It is also called compulsive eating, a name I like better, because it captures the defining qualities of this illness: urgent, gripping, and hard to kick.
Because B.E.D. was only recently formally recognized, there’s a lack of research on its prevalence. Many of the studies that do exist suggest that B.E.D. is more common than anorexia and bulimia, though just how much more is hard to say. Eating disorders of all kinds are often characterized by secrecy, but, for a long time, it was easier for me to admit to anorexia than to binge eating. Even after I stopped bingeing, for years I told no one about it. Not my husband, not a therapist, not anyone.
In her book “Growing Up Female,” the literary critic Barbara A. White observes that authors of coming-of-age stories often present “a weak adolescent self to furnish a happy contrast with the transcendent mature writing self.” The mature writing self offers perspective and context that the adolescent self cannot. But the transcendent mature writing self would be a false pose for me.
I’m healthier than I was as a young woman, but “recovered”? No. In my early twenties, I became anorexic again. I lost my period; I grew stony, obsessive. When a bone-density scan showed “frank evidence” of osteoporosis in my wrist and spine, I was shaken, and began a slow return to something closer to health. But for years I remained preoccupied with food. “Preoccupied” is too mild, but it was the word I used in my head. My days were structured around food. If I ate the right thing at the right time, I was fine, but if I didn’t, I wasn’t, and most of the time I wasn’t, because most of the time I didn’t. Each year, on my birthday, I’d make the resolution I’d made on every birthday since I was seventeen—to “fix my eating.” I was a grown woman still thinking her teen-age thoughts. “Fix my eating” didn’t mean “get help” or “recover.” To me, it meant “eat perfectly.”


newyorker--2020-06-13--A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control Over a Large Swath of Utah

Even if you ’ ve never been to the vast red-rock desert country around Moab , Utah , you ’ ve been there—its mesas and buttes , its towering arches , have been the backdrop for a thousand movies ( and even more S.U.V .
commercials ) .
It ’ s what we think about when we think about “ the West , ” a truly mythic place .
Some of it has been protected in national monuments and parks : Arches and Canyonlands .
But the fate of a large swath of it , though nominally belonging to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a guy named Craig Larson .
Here ’ s the story so far .
Under a long-standing law known as the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 , anyone can “ nominate ” a parcel of federal land for oil-and-gas development—it doesn ’ t cost a thing .
The rules are so lax that you don ’ t even have to supply your name if you want to nominate a piece of land , but Prairie Hills Oil & Gas did provide at least that much context when it asked the federal Bureau of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Arches and Canyonlands .
Prairie Hills Oil & Gas , of North Dakota , it turns out , is headquartered at a home that Larson , an attorney , co-owns in Big Lake , Minnesota , about forty miles northwest of Minneapolis .
After the land is nominated , and certain review processes are completed , the B.L.M .
moves to set up a lease auction , which , in the case of Larson and Utah , is scheduled for September .
( Although Larson has nominated the parcels , anyone , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bidder . )
The minimum competitive bid for an acre is two dollars , and that ’ s often the price it goes for in areas like Moab—the prospects are far from guaranteed .
The lease has a term of ten years , and , after the gavel comes down , the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the first five years , and two dollars for the second .
As Steve Bloch , of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance , explained it to me , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lease , they will write B.L.M .
a check for five hundred and twenty dollars.
” That would include the bid , the first-year rental rate , and an administrative fee .
If the company drills for oil and gas , it also pays the government a royalty of 12.5 per cent on the production , and the lease can be extended .
I recently called Larson to ask him about the company ’ s plans , and he couldn ’ t have been more polite or more unhelpful .
“ I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ask for those leases , ” I said .
“ You know , I really don ’ t have much to add than what we ’ ve done as far as the nominations , ” he answered .
“ Are you worried about the local Native American groups ?
Some have been upset.
” “ I don ’ t really have anything more to say about it other than that our actions are public record.
” “ What are the next steps in the disposition ?
” “ It ’ s up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ steps.
” “ Does the current economic environment around oil and gas give you pause ?
” “ I guess our actions speak for themselves , and I really don ’ t have much more to add .
.
.
.
” “ These aren ’ t technical or legal questions .
I was trying to get at whether you took seriously the things people were raising.
” Larson does not seem like a villain to me here , and he ’ s done nothing illegal .
In fact , what ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is .
The law itself is the crime—a gift to the oil and gas businesses .
It awards the industry chunks of federal land through a process designed to move real estate out of public control as easily as possible .
Perhaps you could argue that , a century ago , it was an improvement over the previously unregulated disorder that gave industrialists almost literal free rein over the landscape , in that it provided at least some government oversight .
But now ?
Now Moab , a city of some five thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ each year from mountain bikers and rafters , from people coming to visit the parks—though not during a pandemic .
It ’ s world-famous for its dark skies ; an Instagram capital of Milky Way viewing .
Will oil wells flaring off gas help that business ?
“ When you look at that map it just sends chills up your spine , ” the chairwoman of the local county council told Bloomberg Law .
( She also asked , “ Why would you put an oil well in the center of a Picasso @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the world is awash in oil .
The pandemic crash could mean that the planet reached peak oil demand in 2019 , and that , as economic recovery follows , any new growth in energy supplies is likely to come from solar and wind power .
And now , above all , the world is overheating , and dangerously ; the last thing it needs is more oil .
The rivers of the Southwest are perfect examples of the mortal peril we now face .
Moab is situated in the Colorado Plateau watershed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ showed that , over the past century , the flow of the Colorado River was down by twenty per cent , owing mainly to climate change , and that it could fall another twenty per cent by 2050 , if we don ’ t cut emissions .
But , instead , as Bloch told me , the Trump Administration is “ putting the Interior Department and B.L.M.
’ s pedal to the floor to sell as many leases as possible.
” ( A B.L.M .
spokesperson said that the agency “ follows its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Indeed , the B.L.M .
has scheduled nearly twenty oil-and-gas-lease sales on federal land nationwide through the end of 2020 , and the Administration has shrunk the size of wildernesses and national monuments , paving the way for more drilling .
It is a classic land rush .
The Southwest is not my landscape—I ’ ve spent my life in the wet mountains of the East , where an unobstructed view comes only if you devote a day to climbing the highest peaks .
But I know that others feel entirely at home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ This land is beautiful , ” Davis Filfred , a Navajo leader , told me , as he was delivering groceries to people suffering through the coronavirus pandemic , which has hit the Navajo Nation with particular force .
At least , it ’ s beautiful until the fossil-fuel companies get there .
“ Where they ’ ve come , the land is completely contaminated , ” Filfred said .
“ The water base is completely contaminated with petroleum , and with arsenic and selenium .
The air—it smells like a rotten @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundred years from now—let ’ s say when my kid ’ s grandkids are here , we ’ re robbing them .
I want them to see this land as it was Day One.
” I first got to know the region through the writings of Edward Abbey , whose classic book from 1968 , “ Desert Solitaire , ” plays out against that remarkable terrain .
“ Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit , and as vital to our lives as water and good bread , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which destroys what little remains of the wild , the spare , the original , is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
” I visited Abbey in Moab when I was in my mid-twenties , gathering string for what became my book “ The End of Nature.
” It was a memorable trip , ripping around desert backroads in a rental car ; I was a little overwhelmed both by Abbey ’ s outsized personality and by the scale of the place itself .
( I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had a chance to read any Abbey .
“ I thank you for your call , but I really don ’ t have anything more to tell you , ” he said . )
In later years , I ’ ve gotten to know the land better through the eyes of a dear friend , the writer Terry Tempest Williams , who has succeeded Abbey as the chronicler of that region .
I asked her to describe the scene near Moab as spring turns toward summer .
“ I was up before dawn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ desert and fill it with birdsong , ” she wrote .
“ The globe mallow are blooming .
Claret cup cactus , too .
Clouds like schooners sailing across the blue skies .
”

Even if you’ve never been to the vast red-rock desert country around Moab, Utah, you’ve been there—its mesas and buttes, its towering arches, have been the backdrop for a thousand movies (and even more S.U.V. commercials). It’s what we think about when we think about “the West,” a truly mythic place. Some of it has been protected in national monuments and parks: Arches and Canyonlands. But the fate of a large swath of it, though nominally belonging to the American people, may soon fall to a guy named Craig Larson.
Here’s the story so far. Under a long-standing law known as the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, anyone can “nominate” a parcel of federal land for oil-and-gas development—it doesn’t cost a thing. The rules are so lax that you don’t even have to supply your name if you want to nominate a piece of land, but Prairie Hills Oil & Gas did provide at least that much context when it asked the federal Bureau of Land Management to set aside land between Arches and Canyonlands. Prairie Hills Oil & Gas, of North Dakota, it turns out, is headquartered at a home that Larson, an attorney, co-owns in Big Lake, Minnesota, about forty miles northwest of Minneapolis. After the land is nominated, and certain review processes are completed, the B.L.M. moves to set up a lease auction, which, in the case of Larson and Utah, is scheduled for September. (Although Larson has nominated the parcels, anyone, in fact, could be the ultimate winning bidder.)
The minimum competitive bid for an acre is two dollars, and that’s often the price it goes for in areas like Moab—the prospects are far from guaranteed. The lease has a term of ten years, and, after the gavel comes down, the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the first five years, and two dollars for the second. As Steve Bloch, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, explained it to me, “If Company A buys a hundred-acre lease, they will write B.L.M. a check for five hundred and twenty dollars.” That would include the bid, the first-year rental rate, and an administrative fee. If the company drills for oil and gas, it also pays the government a royalty of 12.5 per cent on the production, and the lease can be extended.
I recently called Larson to ask him about the company’s plans, and he couldn’t have been more polite or more unhelpful.
“I was curious how it was you decided to ask for those leases,” I said.
“You know, I really don’t have much to add than what we’ve done as far as the nominations,” he answered.
“Are you worried about the local Native American groups? Some have been upset.”
“I don’t really have anything more to say about it other than that our actions are public record.”
“What are the next steps in the disposition?”
“It’s up to the B.L.M. to decide the next steps.”
“Does the current economic environment around oil and gas give you pause?”
“I guess our actions speak for themselves, and I really don’t have much more to add. . . .”
“These aren’t technical or legal questions. I was trying to get at whether you took seriously the things people were raising.”
“I understand.”
Larson does not seem like a villain to me here, and he’s done nothing illegal. In fact, what’s preposterous is how entirely legal it all is. The law itself is the crime—a gift to the oil and gas businesses. It awards the industry chunks of federal land through a process designed to move real estate out of public control as easily as possible. Perhaps you could argue that, a century ago, it was an improvement over the previously unregulated disorder that gave industrialists almost literal free rein over the landscape, in that it provided at least some government oversight. But now?
Now Moab, a city of some five thousand people, makes a lot of money each year from mountain bikers and rafters, from people coming to visit the parks—though not during a pandemic. It’s world-famous for its dark skies; an Instagram capital of Milky Way viewing. Will oil wells flaring off gas help that business? “When you look at that map it just sends chills up your spine,” the chairwoman of the local county council told Bloomberg Law. (She also asked, “Why would you put an oil well in the center of a Picasso or van Gogh?”)
Now the world is awash in oil. The pandemic crash could mean that the planet reached peak oil demand in 2019, and that, as economic recovery follows, any new growth in energy supplies is likely to come from solar and wind power.
And now, above all, the world is overheating, and dangerously; the last thing it needs is more oil. The rivers of the Southwest are perfect examples of the mortal peril we now face. Moab is situated in the Colorado Plateau watershed. In February, a new study showed that, over the past century, the flow of the Colorado River was down by twenty per cent, owing mainly to climate change, and that it could fall another twenty per cent by 2050, if we don’t cut emissions. But, instead, as Bloch told me, the Trump Administration is “putting the Interior Department and B.L.M.’s pedal to the floor to sell as many leases as possible.” (A B.L.M. spokesperson said that the agency “follows its congressional mandate regarding lease sales.”) Indeed, the B.L.M. has scheduled nearly twenty oil-and-gas-lease sales on federal land nationwide through the end of 2020, and the Administration has shrunk the size of wildernesses and national monuments, paving the way for more drilling. It is a classic land rush.
The Southwest is not my landscape—I’ve spent my life in the wet mountains of the East, where an unobstructed view comes only if you devote a day to climbing the highest peaks. But I know that others feel entirely at home in that sere, spectacular region. “This land is beautiful,” Davis Filfred, a Navajo leader, told me, as he was delivering groceries to people suffering through the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit the Navajo Nation with particular force. At least, it’s beautiful until the fossil-fuel companies get there. “Where they’ve come, the land is completely contaminated,” Filfred said. “The water base is completely contaminated with petroleum, and with arsenic and selenium. The air—it smells like a rotten egg.” He added, “A hundred years from now—let’s say when my kid’s grandkids are here, we’re robbing them. I want them to see this land as it was Day One.”
I first got to know the region through the writings of Edward Abbey, whose classic book from 1968, “Desert Solitaire,” plays out against that remarkable terrain. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread, “ he wrote. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” I visited Abbey in Moab when I was in my mid-twenties, gathering string for what became my book “The End of Nature.” It was a memorable trip, ripping around desert backroads in a rental car; I was a little overwhelmed both by Abbey’s outsized personality and by the scale of the place itself. (I asked Craig Larson if he’d had a chance to read any Abbey. “I thank you for your call, but I really don’t have anything more to tell you,” he said.) In later years, I’ve gotten to know the land better through the eyes of a dear friend, the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who has succeeded Abbey as the chronicler of that region. I asked her to describe the scene near Moab as spring turns toward summer. “I was up before dawn this morning just watching light touch the desert and fill it with birdsong,” she wrote. “The globe mallow are blooming. Claret cup cactus, too. Clouds like schooners sailing across the blue skies.”
As it happens, Terry and her husband, Brooke, went to a B.L.M. auction in 2016 and tried to lease land—they paid $1,680 for a ten-year lease on 1,120 acres, plus a processing fee, and formed a company, Tempest Exploration L.L.C. (Not all the parcels were leased in the auction, and some were discounted afterward, in a sort of “fire sale.” That’s where Terry and Brooke obtained their lease.) She had no hesitation in explaining her motives, as she wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times, “The energy we hope to produce through Tempest Exploration is not the kind that will destroy our planet, but the kind that will fuel moral imagination. We need to harness this spiritual and political energy to sustain the planet we call home.” They made it clear that they would not drill for oil “until science could show it was worth more above ground than below.” The lease was eventually denied; they appealed, and a decision is still pending, four years later.
Another friend, an environmentalist named Tim DeChristopher, bid for leases on a large area at a competitive Salt Lake City auction, in 2008. He bid $1.8 million, and then said that he had no intention of paying the sum, which he didn’t have. For that, he was sentenced to two years in a federal correctional facility, in California. I visited him there, and remember thinking that Ed Abbey would have been proud of him. (He served twenty-one months, and was released in 2013.) Terry Tempest Williams has been one of his biggest supporters.
Now, finally, something may change. Joe Biden has promised, repeatedly, that, if elected President, he would end new leasing on federal lands for oil, gas, and coal. As he said during a primary debate in March, “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.” That would make a massive difference for the climate: fossil fuels pulled from public lands account for about twenty per cent of the nation’s total greenhouse-gas output.
But it would also make a massive difference for those parts of the Utah desert that have lain empty and sublime. I don’t know exactly whom they belong to—Native people, all of us, the coyotes, God? But the answer clearly shouldn’t be some guy named Craig.


newyorker--2020-06-13--The Trump Administration’s Hateful Message on Health Care for Transgender Americans

On Friday , the Trump Administration released a set of guidelines dictating that discrimination against L.G.B.T .
people in health care is not forbidden .
It was the fourth anniversary of the Pulse massacre , when forty-nine people were murdered in a gay night club in Orlando , Florida .
It was three months and one day since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic .
It was days , perhaps a week or two , before the Supreme Court is expected to release its ruling on whether discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Civil Rights Act .
The timing is conspicuous .
The new document reverses a rule , put in place by the Obama Administration , in 2016 , that banned health-care providers from discriminating on the basis of gender identity or whether a patient had sought an abortion .
The Obama-era rule was immediately challenged in court and still hasn ’ t taken effect , so the new rule serves only to put an end to that particular legal battle—and to draw attention to the issue .
The new document claims that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the authority to try to implement the old rule in the first place .
If the Supreme Court , in its forthcoming decision , rules that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity , or both , constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex , which is banned by Title VII , then the three-hundred-page document published , on Friday , by Health and Human Services will be rendered legally irrelevant : the discrimination it encourages will be banned .
That the Administration decided to speak now suggests that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ favor of discrimination before the Supreme Court either preëmpted or weakened the rhetorical impact of the rule .
The H.H.S .
document is a statement not of policy but of hatred .
Its message is amplified by its appearance on the anniversary of the largest mass murder of queer people in U.S. history .
This was the day the Administration chose to try to inhibit L.G.B.T .
people ’ s access to health care—in the middle of a deadly pandemic .
The document contains a long list of comments submitted by members of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ draft of the rule , and detailed responses from H.H.S .
One such response reads , in part , “ A healthcare provider is not impermissibly stereotyping biological males ( notwithstanding their internal sense of gender ) on the basis of sex if it uses pronouns such as ‘ him ’ ; limits access to lactation rooms and gynecological practices to female users and patients ; or lists a male ’ s sex as ‘ male ’ on medical forms .
Similarly , a covered health care entity is not impermissibly stereotyping biological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gender ) on the basis of sex if it uses pronouns such as ‘ her ’ ; warns females that heart-attack symptoms are likely to be quite different than those a man may experience ; advises women that certain medications tend to affect women differently than men ; or lists a female ’ s sex as ‘ female ’ on medical forms .
Finally , it is not stereotyping for covered entities to have bathrooms or changing rooms designated by reference to sex , or to group patients in shared hospital rooms by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might read to someone who has not spent time thinking about issues that transgender people face when seeking health care , it is certain to send shivers down the spine of any trans person , because it conjures a specific series of images : a transgender woman , in a doctor ’ s waiting room , being referred to as “ he ” ; a trans man being refused access to a gynecologist ’ s office ; transgender people receiving inappropriate medical advice and pharmacological guidance based solely on the sex indicated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surgeries and hormonal treatments that change their physiology ; and , of course , trans people unable to use the bathroom in a health-care facility .
All of this , the document says , is all right—indeed , it seems to indicate that this is the desirable state of affairs .
The H.H.S .
rule can not force doctors to start discriminating against trans patients ; it can only broadcast the Administration ’ s attitudes .
In fact , trans people as a group are at once unusually dependent on the health-care system—for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may include hormonal treatments or surgeries is vital—and accustomed to facing casual , systematic discrimination .
I have written about my own experience of landing in a New York City emergency room with a broken jaw and being compelled to take a pregnancy test in order to have a CT scan—despite being transgender , being on testosterone , having undergone a radical hysterectomy , and being past child-bearing age , but solely because my medical records indicated that I had been born female .
As a well-insured privileged white person in New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that fairly inconsequential battle ( if I ’ d lost , I would have had to pee in a cup ) , but it was an example of the sort of obstacles health-care providers unthinkingly and automatically throw up in front of trans patients .
For many people , the stakes are much higher than they were for me .
On trans men ’ s online forums , I frequently read accounts of being unable to obtain gynecological care .
Trans care is often illegally carved out of insurance coverage , forcing people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the black market .
Lack of access to trans care leads to another important health concern : the risk of suicide , which is far higher for trans people than it is for other Americans .
In April , the Williams Institute , an L.G.B.T .
policy think tank at the U.C.L.A .
School of Law , released a report on vulnerabilities to COVID-19 that are specific to transgender adults in the United States .
The report estimates that nearly half a million people—a third of all adult transgender Americans— “ feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity , they could be denied good medical care.
” Nearly as many reported that they had not gone to the doctor within the past year because they could not afford it .
Trans people are more likely to be homeless , and L.G.B.T .
people are more likely to be regular smokers than other Americans—two more factors that translate into a higher risk of dying from a coronavirus infection .
The new H.H.S .
rule may not have an immediate effect on trans people ’ s experience of health care , because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at this moment in time , it broadcasts a clear message from the Trump Administration to trans Americans .
That message is that they want us dead .

On Friday, the Trump Administration released a set of guidelines dictating that discrimination against L.G.B.T. people in health care is not forbidden. It was the fourth anniversary of the Pulse massacre, when forty-nine people were murdered in a gay night club in Orlando, Florida. It was three months and one day since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. It was days, perhaps a week or two, before the Supreme Court is expected to release its ruling on whether discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The timing is conspicuous. The new document reverses a rule, put in place by the Obama Administration, in 2016, that banned health-care providers from discriminating on the basis of gender identity or whether a patient had sought an abortion. The Obama-era rule was immediately challenged in court and still hasn’t taken effect, so the new rule serves only to put an end to that particular legal battle—and to draw attention to the issue. The new document claims that the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the authority to try to implement the old rule in the first place.
If the Supreme Court, in its forthcoming decision, rules that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, or both, constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex, which is banned by Title VII, then the three-hundred-page document published, on Friday, by Health and Human Services will be rendered legally irrelevant: the discrimination it encourages will be banned. That the Administration decided to speak now suggests that it was rushing to raise its voice in favor of discrimination before the Supreme Court either preëmpted or weakened the rhetorical impact of the rule. The H.H.S. document is a statement not of policy but of hatred. Its message is amplified by its appearance on the anniversary of the largest mass murder of queer people in U.S. history. This was the day the Administration chose to try to inhibit L.G.B.T. people’s access to health care—in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
The document contains a long list of comments submitted by members of the public in response to the original draft of the rule, and detailed responses from H.H.S. One such response reads, in part, “A healthcare provider is not impermissibly stereotyping biological males (notwithstanding their internal sense of gender) on the basis of sex if it uses pronouns such as ‘him’; limits access to lactation rooms and gynecological practices to female users and patients; or lists a male’s sex as ‘male’ on medical forms. Similarly, a covered health care entity is not impermissibly stereotyping biological females (notwithstanding their internal sense of gender) on the basis of sex if it uses pronouns such as ‘her’; warns females that heart-attack symptoms are likely to be quite different than those a man may experience; advises women that certain medications tend to affect women differently than men; or lists a female’s sex as ‘female’ on medical forms. Finally, it is not stereotyping for covered entities to have bathrooms or changing rooms designated by reference to sex, or to group patients in shared hospital rooms by sex.”
As innocuous as that quote might read to someone who has not spent time thinking about issues that transgender people face when seeking health care, it is certain to send shivers down the spine of any trans person, because it conjures a specific series of images: a transgender woman, in a doctor’s waiting room, being referred to as “he”; a trans man being refused access to a gynecologist’s office; transgender people receiving inappropriate medical advice and pharmacological guidance based solely on the sex indicated in their medical records, without regard for surgeries and hormonal treatments that change their physiology; and, of course, trans people unable to use the bathroom in a health-care facility. All of this, the document says, is all right—indeed, it seems to indicate that this is the desirable state of affairs.
The H.H.S. rule cannot force doctors to start discriminating against trans patients; it can only broadcast the Administration’s attitudes. In fact, trans people as a group are at once unusually dependent on the health-care system—for many of us, trans care that may include hormonal treatments or surgeries is vital—and accustomed to facing casual, systematic discrimination. I have written about my own experience of landing in a New York City emergency room with a broken jaw and being compelled to take a pregnancy test in order to have a CT scan—despite being transgender, being on testosterone, having undergone a radical hysterectomy, and being past child-bearing age, but solely because my medical records indicated that I had been born female. As a well-insured privileged white person in New York City, I was able to win that fairly inconsequential battle (if I’d lost, I would have had to pee in a cup), but it was an example of the sort of obstacles health-care providers unthinkingly and automatically throw up in front of trans patients. For many people, the stakes are much higher than they were for me. On trans men’s online forums, I frequently read accounts of being unable to obtain gynecological care. Trans care is often illegally carved out of insurance coverage, forcing people to crowdfund their surgeries or buy hormones on the black market. Lack of access to trans care leads to another important health concern: the risk of suicide, which is far higher for trans people than it is for other Americans.
In April, the Williams Institute, an L.G.B.T. policy think tank at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, released a report on vulnerabilities to COVID-19 that are specific to transgender adults in the United States. The report estimates that nearly half a million people—a third of all adult transgender Americans—“feel concerned that if they express their gender identity, they could be denied good medical care.” Nearly as many reported that they had not gone to the doctor within the past year because they could not afford it. Trans people are more likely to be homeless, and L.G.B.T. people are more likely to be regular smokers than other Americans—two more factors that translate into a higher risk of dying from a coronavirus infection. The new H.H.S. rule may not have an immediate effect on trans people’s experience of health care, because legally, it changes nothing, but at this moment in time, it broadcasts a clear message from the Trump Administration to trans Americans. That message is that they want us dead.


newyorker--2020-06-13--How Utah’s Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing

At a White House briefing , on April 23rd , Mike Pence offered what he described as “ encouraging news ” about COVID-19 testing .
Commercial labs , he said , were processing a hundred thousand tests per day , and a number of states had developed “ methods that they are employing to significantly increase testing.
” One of the specific efforts that Pence identified was Test Iowa , a public-private partnership that the Vice-President said would “ triple testing capacity ” in the state .
In the course of introducing the initiative , Pence mentioned two of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a health-care startup , and Domo , a cloud-software firm .
Josh James , the founder of Domo , was ecstatic .
“ You ’ ve got to be kidding me !
!
” he wrote on Twitter .
“ So stoked that all of my team ’ s work and all their all-nighters are paying off.
” Test Iowa was , in fact , the second statewide testing initiative launched by a group of Utah tech companies that included Nomi , Domo , and Qualtrics , an “ experience management ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ six weeks earlier , in their home state , as a philanthropic effort to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic .
Since then , it had transformed into a multistate commercial enterprise .
The tech executives had procured thousands of COVID-19 tests from a local company , arranged for the deployment of mobile testing sites , hired a small army of nurses to collect specimens , partnered with a laboratory near their companies ’ headquarters , and signed a two-month contract with the state of Utah to provide three thousand tests per day .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ an online-assessment tool , an algorithm to determine who would get a test , and a data-tracking crisis command center .
Mark Newman , the thirty-seven-year-old founder of Nomi and one of the major drivers of the initiative , admitted openly that “ none of us knew anything about lab testing ” at the start of the effort .
But Newman was nevertheless confident that a combination of creativity , willpower , and ingenuity had allowed him and a handful of other tech executives , in just a few weeks , to upend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Newman said , “ the exact same story of Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation.
” Having “ put together a low-cost alternative that the incumbent providers just laugh at , ” he and his colleagues were “ going to take over testing capacity , and be the thing that ’ s there to solve this problem.
” In addition to Utah and Iowa , which had purchased half a million tests , the group eventually signed agreements with state governments in Nebraska and Tennessee .
Together , the four contracts were worth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these apparent successes , significant questions about the program ’ s performance began to appear in public shortly after Pence ’ s press briefing .
On April 24th , a columnist for the Iowa Gazette noted that TestUtah had conducted fewer than thirteen thousand tests during the first three weeks of the month , about a quarter of what it had agreed to provide the state .
A week later , the Salt Lake Tribune published an investigation into the quality of TestUtah ’ s COVID-19 tests .
Citing internal e-mails from a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Utah Department of Health , the Tribune reported that the initiative ’ s results showed a lower proportion of positive tests than at other labs in the state .
TestUtah , some members of the task force feared , might be missing a significant number of people who were sick with COVID-19 .
“ We have been watching TestUtah ’ s positivity rate closely and have had multiple discussions with them about different practices that may be impacting their testing results , ” one state official wrote to his peers on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the task force , Bert Lopansri , an infectious-disease doctor at a hospital chain called Intermountain Healthcare , was more direct .
“ This is a potential public health disaster that will be compounded by the fact that they are constantly promoting themselves publicly , ” Lopansri wrote .
“ What alarms me the most is that they are expanding collection and testing with these unknowns about how their test performs.
” A pandemic , he said , “ is not the time for amateurs to learn.
” The effort that would become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
On a Zoom-enabled virtual “ town hall , ” Newman proposed a plan that included as many as a hundred thousand tests “ bought up front for the good of the community.
” To achieve this , Newman said , Silicon Slopes , a nonprofit that promotes Utah ’ s tech industry , was asking for five million dollars in donations “ so that we can increase the volume of tests , access to care , and community support.
” The tests themselves would come from Co-Diagnostics , a small , publicly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Before the pandemic , Co-Diagnostics had sold tests for use in agriculture and mosquito abatement in the United States and clinical diagnostic tests abroad ; its 2019 annual report said that the company did not “ anticipate offering our tests in the United States in the near future.
” But the dire shortage of COVID-19 tests in the U.S. had caused the F.D.A .
to relax its policies for the distribution of new diagnostic tests , which meant that , for the first time , Co-Diagnostics would be able to sell tests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the start of the pandemic , Utah had been , in many ways , better equipped than other states to deal with the testing crisis .
Besides its public-health laboratory and a large lab operated by Intermountain Healthcare , it was home to ARUP , one of the country ’ s largest reference laboratories .
During a Zoom meeting , on March 26th , Angela Dunn , the Utah state epidemiologist , said that the state had more than twice the capacity necessary to test everyone with COVID-19 symptoms .
Newman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ll be completely blunt , and I guess I ’ m sharing more from the perspective of the business community , ” he said .
“ I think the posture of , ‘ We have tests and there ’ s no demand for them ’ is complete B.S.
” Senior members of Utah ’ s state government felt similarly .
“ From very early on , the governor ’ s office had come forward and said that , in order to effectively crush the curve , we needed to be testing up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Robyn Atkinson-Dunn , who was , until recently , the director of Utah ’ s public-health laboratory , told me .
“ Because it was felt that the laboratory community wasn ’ t doing enough , the governor ’ s office put out this call to say , ‘ Hey , whoever thinks they can solve this problem , come talk to us.
’ And that ’ s when the Silicon Slopes guys came along.
” Over the course of two weeks , the tech executives developed what was intended to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the program ’ s official launch , on April 2nd , Utah ’ s governor , Gary Herbert , called TestUtah “ a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership.
” The lieutenant governor , Spencer Cox , whom Herbert had asked to chair the state ’ s coronavirus task force , and who is a candidate to replace Herbert in this fall ’ s gubernatorial election , called the program “ a game changer.
” Two days later , the actor Ashton Kutcher retweeted a post about the program and added , “ seems to me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state.
” Newman , for his part , estimated that TestUtah would soon be able to process three to five thousand tests per day , and boasted that it was “ going to be the hub of absolutely kicking butt across the country .
”

At a White House briefing, on April 23rd, Mike Pence offered what he described as “encouraging news” about COVID-19 testing. Commercial labs, he said, were processing a hundred thousand tests per day, and a number of states had developed “methods that they are employing to significantly increase testing.” One of the specific efforts that Pence identified was Test Iowa, a public-private partnership that the Vice-President said would “triple testing capacity” in the state. In the course of introducing the initiative, Pence mentioned two of the companies behind the project: Nomi Health, a health-care startup, and Domo, a cloud-software firm. Josh James, the founder of Domo, was ecstatic. “You’ve got to be kidding me!!” he wrote on Twitter. “So stoked that all of my team’s work and all their all-nighters are paying off.”
Test Iowa was, in fact, the second statewide testing initiative launched by a group of Utah tech companies that included Nomi, Domo, and Qualtrics, an “experience management” firm. The project had originated, six weeks earlier, in their home state, as a philanthropic effort to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, it had transformed into a multistate commercial enterprise. The tech executives had procured thousands of COVID-19 tests from a local company, arranged for the deployment of mobile testing sites, hired a small army of nurses to collect specimens, partnered with a laboratory near their companies’ headquarters, and signed a two-month contract with the state of Utah to provide three thousand tests per day. Their contract also included the development of an online-assessment tool, an algorithm to determine who would get a test, and a data-tracking crisis command center.
Mark Newman, the thirty-seven-year-old founder of Nomi and one of the major drivers of the initiative, admitted openly that “none of us knew anything about lab testing” at the start of the effort. But Newman was nevertheless confident that a combination of creativity, willpower, and ingenuity had allowed him and a handful of other tech executives, in just a few weeks, to upend the established diagnostic-testing industry. It was, Newman said, “the exact same story of Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation.” Having “put together a low-cost alternative that the incumbent providers just laugh at,” he and his colleagues were “going to take over testing capacity, and be the thing that’s there to solve this problem.” In addition to Utah and Iowa, which had purchased half a million tests, the group eventually signed agreements with state governments in Nebraska and Tennessee. Together, the four contracts were worth more than eighty million dollars.
Despite these apparent successes, significant questions about the program’s performance began to appear in public shortly after Pence’s press briefing. On April 24th, a columnist for The Gazette, in Cedar Rapids, noted that TestUtah had conducted fewer than thirteen thousand tests during the first three weeks of the month, about a quarter of what it had agreed to provide the state. A week later, the Salt Lake Tribune published an investigation into the quality of TestUtah’s COVID-19 tests. Citing internal e-mails from a testing task force that had been organized by the Utah Department of Health, the Tribune reported that the initiative’s results showed a lower proportion of positive tests than at other labs in the state.
TestUtah, some members of the task force feared, might be missing a significant number of people who were sick with COVID-19. “We have been watching TestUtah’s positivity rate closely and have had multiple discussions with them about different practices that may be impacting their testing results,” one state official wrote to his peers on the task force. Another member of the task force, Bert Lopansri, an infectious-disease doctor at a hospital chain called Intermountain Healthcare, was more direct. “This is a potential public health disaster that will be compounded by the fact that they are constantly promoting themselves publicly,” Lopansri wrote. “What alarms me the most is that they are expanding collection and testing with these unknowns about how their test performs.” A pandemic, he said, “is not the time for amateurs to learn.”
The effort that would become TestUtah began in earnest on March 18th. On a Zoom-enabled virtual “town hall,” Newman proposed a plan that included as many as a hundred thousand tests “bought up front for the good of the community.” To achieve this, Newman said, Silicon Slopes, a nonprofit that promotes Utah’s tech industry, was asking for five million dollars in donations “so that we can increase the volume of tests, access to care, and community support.” The tests themselves would come from Co-Diagnostics, a small, publicly traded company based in Salt Lake City. Before the pandemic, Co-Diagnostics had sold tests for use in agriculture and mosquito abatement in the United States and clinical diagnostic tests abroad; its 2019 annual report said that the company did not “anticipate offering our tests in the United States in the near future.” But the dire shortage of COVID-19 tests in the U.S. had caused the F.D.A. to relax its policies for the distribution of new diagnostic tests, which meant that, for the first time, Co-Diagnostics would be able to sell tests for clinical use in the United States.
At the start of the pandemic, Utah had been, in many ways, better equipped than other states to deal with the testing crisis. Besides its public-health laboratory and a large lab operated by Intermountain Healthcare, it was home to ARUP, one of the country’s largest reference laboratories. During a Zoom meeting, on March 26th, Angela Dunn, the Utah state epidemiologist, said that the state had more than twice the capacity necessary to test everyone with COVID-19 symptoms. Newman, however, disagreed. “I’ll be completely blunt, and I guess I’m sharing more from the perspective of the business community,” he said. “I think the posture of, ‘We have tests and there’s no demand for them’ is complete B.S.”
Senior members of Utah’s state government felt similarly. “From very early on, the governor’s office had come forward and said that, in order to effectively crush the curve, we needed to be testing up to seven thousand people a day,” Robyn Atkinson-Dunn, who was, until recently, the director of Utah’s public-health laboratory, told me. “Because it was felt that the laboratory community wasn’t doing enough, the governor’s office put out this call to say, ‘Hey, whoever thinks they can solve this problem, come talk to us.’ And that’s when the Silicon Slopes guys came along.”
Over the course of two weeks, the tech executives developed what was intended to be a comprehensive statewide testing infrastructure. At the program’s official launch, on April 2nd, Utah’s governor, Gary Herbert, called TestUtah “a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership.” The lieutenant governor, Spencer Cox, whom Herbert had asked to chair the state’s coronavirus task force, and who is a candidate to replace Herbert in this fall’s gubernatorial election, called the program “a game changer.” Two days later, the actor Ashton Kutcher retweeted a post about the program and added, “seems to me we should roll this out state by state.” Newman, for his part, estimated that TestUtah would soon be able to process three to five thousand tests per day, and boasted that it was “going to be the hub of absolutely kicking butt across the country.”
Within Utah, however, concerns about the initiative arose almost immediately. One question was why TestUtah’s online assessment asked users whether they were allergic to hydroxychloroquine, a malaria and lupus drug that raised hopes, early on, of a possible treatment for COVID-19, and whose effects, in the absence of much evidence, President Trump had praised as “like a miracle.” From the beginning, Newman had envisioned treatment as a central pillar of TestUtah’s efforts, along with assessment and testing. In an e-mail he’d sent to his peers in Utah’s tech industry, in March, which was first obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune, Newman said that he was negotiating access to twenty thousand “med packs,” which included hydroxychloroquine, through a local pharmacy chain called Meds in Motion. By the time TestUtah launched, however, medical opinion had begun to turn against hydroxychloroquine; one prominent Utah physician warned state officials in late March that making the drug available without a prescription, as they had been discussing, “could be a grave mistake medically.” On April 24th, the Tribune reported that Newman sat on the board of directors of Meds in Motion. The pharmacy chain’s owner, anticipating a run on the drug, had purchased eighteen hundred pounds of hydroxychloroquine, some of which he sold to Utah at elevated prices before the state unwound the contract. In a statement, Nomi, Newman’s startup, told me that “there was no conflict of interest.”
A more persistent concern about TestUtah was its funding. At the launch, Clint Betts, the executive director of Silicon Slopes, had promised that “no tech company is going to make any money off of this. We’re going to make sure of that.” A few hours later, on a Zoom call with the governor, the lieutenant governor, and others, Ryan Smith, whose company, Qualtrics, had designed the online assessment for TestUtah, said, “We’re happy to help. We’re doing it all for free.” Smith, who wore a crisp white hoodie and a black Silicon Slopes ball cap, acknowledged that there would always be skeptics, but said that “they should know by now, we’re all just trying to help because our families are here. There’s nothing else to read into. There’s no angle.”
By the next day, however, the TestUtah tech execs were offering a different financial picture. On a Zoom call that afternoon, Betts asked Newman to “talk about what we mean by nobody’s making a profit, or clarify or help clean up whatever I may have said.” Newman told him, “Let’s be clear. There are costs in facilitating all of this: tents, generators, heat, electricity, people, cones, security, public safety, tests, swabs, test kits, extraction kits, you name it.” Newman did not quite promise not to take any profits. “There will be no profiteering,” he said. “If we were going to try to make money, we would tune this up as fast as we can and go sell it to New York.” As the Tribune would later report, the companies involved in TestUtah had already negotiated their agreements, worth more than five million dollars for two months of services, with the state.
Newman and others in the group had been holding Zoom town halls to track the progress of their initiative. The day after TestUtah launched, he said that more than thirty-five thousand people had completed the digital assessment, more than twenty-five hundred people had scheduled COVID-19 tests, and more than eight hundred had visited one of the two drive-through testing sites to be swabbed. “It took any state weeks and weeks to ramp up to this type of volume,” Newman said. “We’ve done this in twenty-four hours.”
On an earlier call, Newman had boasted of creating “an open-source system around the supply chain: the swabs, the transfer kits, the extractive reagent, the test kits, the labs, and the machines to run it.” Behind the scenes, however, not everything was running as smoothly as he suggested. According to Atkinson-Dunn, at the state lab, the initiative ran headlong into the same shortages every other lab in the country was facing. “They needed swabs,” she said. “They found a local distributor here in Utah who said he could get product out of China. But, after about a week or so, their shipments were not coming in from China. And so TestUtah came to us and said, ‘Hey, we’re out of stuff. We’re going to be out of commission. Can you help us out?’ ” (Nomi confirmed that it “borrowed swabs while we waited on one of our orders during the start of the pandemic.”.)


newyorker--2020-06-13--Trump Boasts That He Has Much Higher TV Ratings Than Lincoln

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —In his latest attack on the nation ’ s sixteenth President , Donald Trump boasted on Saturday that his television ratings were “ much higher ” than Abraham Lincoln ’ s .
“ If you put my TV ratings side by side with Lincoln ’ s , there ’ s no comparison , ” Trump told Fox News .
“ Honest Abe would want me to be honest about it , and , honestly , his ratings were terrible.
” Trump argued that Lincoln ’ s television ratings were especially poor “ when you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to compete with Netflix and Amazon , like I have to.
” “ Abraham Lincoln had zero competition and he still couldn ’ t get a decent number , ” Trump said .
“ He might have been O.K .
at some other things , but he was a total loser on TV.
” Theorizing about Lincoln ’ s poor ratings performance , Trump mused that “ it might have been the beard.
” “ People don ’ t like to look at people with beards on TV , ” he said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ but that ’ s different .
If I was advising Lincoln , I would say , ‘ Abe , lose the beard .
It ’ s making you look like a joker.
’ I wish I had been alive back then .
I could have given Lincoln all kinds of good advice .
It ’ s sad how bad he was .
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In his latest attack on the nation’s sixteenth President, Donald Trump boasted on Saturday that his television ratings were “much higher” than Abraham Lincoln’s.
“If you put my TV ratings side by side with Lincoln’s, there’s no comparison,” Trump told Fox News. “Honest Abe would want me to be honest about it, and, honestly, his ratings were terrible.”
Trump argued that Lincoln’s television ratings were especially poor “when you consider that he didn’t have to compete with Netflix and Amazon, like I have to.”
“Abraham Lincoln had zero competition and he still couldn’t get a decent number,” Trump said. “He might have been O.K. at some other things, but he was a total loser on TV.”
Theorizing about Lincoln’s poor ratings performance, Trump mused that “it might have been the beard.”
“People don’t like to look at people with beards on TV,” he said. “Tom Selleck has a mustache, but that’s different. If I was advising Lincoln, I would say, ‘Abe, lose the beard. It’s making you look like a joker.’ I wish I had been alive back then. I could have given Lincoln all kinds of good advice. It’s sad how bad he was.”