newyorker--2020-03-11--Medical Ethics and the Novel Coronavirus

I don ’ t know which ethicists are advising the current Administration .
The Trump Administration decided not to have a National Bioethics Commission , so there isn ’ t one in place .
So I don ’ t know who ’ s doing that .
If there were a National Bioethics Commission , what sort of things would they be talking about and thinking about ?
So they really have to—and we do as ethicists working with people in public health—think about how we actually allocate limited resources .
We clearly don ’ t have enough diagnostic tests , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in making them available .
And clinicians have developed some workarounds , by taking pulmonary CT scans , and things like that .
And figuring out , by history , who are the presumptive cases that we should use the limited numbers of tests that we have on now .
It ’ s just , over all , issues about allocation of limited resources , or that word that lots of people don ’ t like to utter , “ rationing.
” We are going to have to figure out how we choose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether it ’ s the testing piece , or it ’ s inpatient treatment , or it ’ s the testing of the new vaccines when we , a year or more away , get to the point where we ’ ve got something suitable for human testing .
And then , if we ’ ve got vaccines to use , as we ramp those up , on whom are they used ?
One of the most live issues in this kind of debate is using those limited numbers of vaccines in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ providers in order to maximize the capacity of the health-care system to treat the people for whom we don ’ t have enough vaccines yet .
So it ’ s those kinds of allocation and rationing decisions that I worry about and anticipate are going to get more intense .
How does an ethicist come to conclusions about that , or to give advice about that ?
Are you looking at past pandemics ?
Are you consulting philosophy books ?
What does a medical ethicist do , exactly ?
Often , the job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taking a historical look at past ways of responding to pandemics .
In the United States , there are some states that are further ahead than others in their departments of emergency medicine and departments of public health , in getting consensus within the state about how they will handle pandemics and how they will allocate resources .
Part of it is looking to see what ’ s already been done .
Part of it is comparing the values of a variety of stakeholders , about both what people think ought to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think is practically implementable , and why or why not ?
That kind of deliberation together is very typical of how ethicists work with clinicians and others to figure out , all things considered , what ’ s the best approach to , say , allocating scarce resources .
One of the things that we talk about with philosophers are the differences between something like a straight egalitarian approach , where everybody ’ s life is equal and you don ’ t make distinctions among people in how you allocate resources , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , defensible approach in a situation like this , which is to think about maximizing the number of lives saved—which I ’ m sure , from your years in undergraduate philosophy courses , you ’ ll recognize as a utilitarian approach .
So a lot of us have settled , and I would put myself in this camp , on a kind of prioritarian approach , where we want to both acknowledge that the primary goal is to maximize the public ’ s health and the number of lives saved .
But we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attention to those who are the worst off , and particularly making sure that the most vulnerable have special attention as we think through whether they can benefit from the allocation of these resources and how they are included among those to whom the resources would be allocated .
So it ’ s kind of a modification of a utilitarian approach .
How much are you thinking about ethical problems involving restricting people ’ s freedoms , however necessary that might be ?
I have to say , when I saw what China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , my God , that ’ s amazing that they can do that .
I was impressed at the way in which China could impose a quarantine and lock things down .
And I think that ’ s hard to do , but Italy ’ s doing it .
In the United States , we have a level of voluntary compliance , for the most part .
People who are trapped on cruise ships—that ’ s not voluntary .
But , for the most part , we have people who are responding to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way we behave .
I do think that tension between the community good and the restriction of individual liberty is absolutely of concern to ethicists .
It ’ s just that it seems like people are tolerating the restriction of individual liberty pretty well so far .
Do you think about media coverage and the ethical responsibilities of how something like this should be covered ?
I do , indeed .
I ’ m not usually such a Pollyanna , especially about the media , but , in a time when our politicians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s going on , I have been grateful to the media—at least , the media that I watch—about how diligent the efforts have been to get as much information as they can publicly accessible , and as quickly as they can .
Have your opinions about medical ethics changed over the course of your career in some broad way ?
And , if so , how ?
Well , it hasn ’ t changed dramatically .
What I have realized , and this is probably more a function of age than anything else @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aware of the necessity of carving out institutional space for deliberation on hard ethical tensions .
So , in the debate about allocating resources in a pandemic , we have to work with our colleagues around what kind of space is going to be made available—which means that other people and other services have to be dislocated—what kind of supplies we ’ re going to have , whether we ’ re going to reuse them , how we will reallocate staff , whether we can have staff who are not specialists take care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patients than the number of specialized staff .
So one of the things that we ’ ve crafted in the past is this understanding that it ’ s the responsibility of those at the political level and at the departments of public health to establish when it ’ s appropriate to signify , not only to health-care providers , but also to the population in general , when we are actually going to be operating under crisis standards of care , because the need is so major and the spread is so massive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there yet , but it ’ s possible that we will be there .
And what that also means is not only that the standard of medical care is going to shift a little bit in order to treat these huge numbers , but also our choices about treating some and not treating others .
So it has an ethical component to it .
Do you remember the big earthquake in Haiti , when we sent our ship down there ?
A colleague of mine was on that ship .
He was an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ developed a system in the allocation of resources for people who would be transported to the ship for surgeries and other kinds of care , around the really hard , one-to-one ethical choices that have to be made about not having enough spots on the surgical schedule or not having enough ventilators , and taking someone off .
And our understanding of individual care providers ’ compassionate response and responsibility to individual patients is such that expecting every clinician to withdraw resources from a patient , or not allocating them to a patient @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not going to be something we can always expect everyone to do .

As the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, spreads across the globe, governments have been taking increasingly severe measures to limit the virus’s infection rate. China, where it originated, has instituted quarantines in areas with a large number of cases, and Italy—which is now facing perhaps the most serious threat outside of China—is entirely under quarantine. In the United States, the National Guard has been deployed to manage a “containment area” in New Rochelle, New York, where one of the country’s largest clusters has emerged. As the number of cases rises, we will soon face decisions on limiting movement and, potentially, rationing supplies and hospital space. These issues will be decided at the highest level by politicians, but they are often influenced by medical ethicists, who advise governments and other institutions about the way to handle medical emergencies.
One of those ethicists, with whom I recently spoke by phone, is Christine Mitchell, the executive director at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. Mitchell, who has master’s degrees in nursing and philosophical and religious ethics, has been a clinical ethicist for thirty years. She founded the ethics program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and has served on national and international medical-ethics commissions. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what ethicists tend to focus on during a health crisis, how existing health-care access affects crisis response, and the importance of institutions talking through the ethical implications of their decisions.
What coronavirus-related issue has most occupied your mental space over the past weeks?
One of the things I think about but that we don’t often have an opportunity to talk about, when we are mostly focussing on what clinicians are doing and trying to prepare for, is the more general ways this affects our society. People get sick out there in the real world, and then they come to our hospitals, but, when they are sick, a whole bunch of them don’t have health insurance, or are afraid to come to a hospital, or they don’t have coverage for sick time or taking a day off when their child is sick, so they send their child to school. So these all have very significant influences on our ability to manage population health and community transmission that aren’t things that nurses and physicians and people who work in acute-care hospitals and clinics can really affect. They are elements of the way our society is structured and has failed to meet the needs of our general population, and they influence our ability to manage a crisis like this.
Is there anything specifically about a pandemic or something like coronavirus that makes these issues especially acute?
If a person doesn’t have health insurance and doesn’t come to be tested or treated, and if they don’t have sick-time coverage and can’t leave work, so they teach at a school, or they work at a restaurant, or do events that have large numbers of people, these are all ways in which the spread of a virus like this has to be managed—and yet can’t be managed effectively because of our social-welfare policies, not just our health-care resources.
Just to take a step back, and I want to get back to coronavirus stuff, but what got you interested in medical ethics?
What got me interested were the actual kinds of problems that came up when I was taking care of patients, starting as early as when I was in nursing school and was taking care of a patient who, as a teen-ager, had a terminal kind of cancer that his parents didn’t want him to know about, and which the health-care team had decided to defer to the parents. And yet I was spending every day taking care of him, and he was really puzzled about why he was so sick and whether he was going to get better, and so forth. And so of course I was faced with this question of, What do I do if he asks me? Which, of course, he did.
And this question about what you should tell an adolescent and whether the deference should be to his parents’ judgment about what’s best for him, which we would ordinarily respect, and the moral demands of the relationship that you have with a patient, was one of the cases that reminded me that there’s a lot more to being a nurse or a health-care provider than just knowing how to give cancer chemotherapy and change a bed, or change a dressing, or whatever. That a lot of it is in the relationship you have with a patient and the kinds of ethical choices they and their families are facing. They need your information, but also your help as they think things through. That’s the kind of thing that got me interested in it. There are a whole host of those kinds of cases, but they’re more individual cases.
As I began to work in a hospital as an ethicist, I began to worry about the broader organizational issues, like emergency preparedness. Some years ago, here in Boston, I had a joint appointment running the ethics program at Children’s Hospital and doing clinical ethics at Harvard Medical School. We pulled together a group, with the Department of Public Health and the emergency-preparedness clinicians in the Harvard-affiliated hospitals, to look at what the response within the state of Massachusetts should be to big, major disasters or rolling pandemics, and worked on some guidelines together.
When you looked at the response of our government, in a place like Washington State or in New York City, what things, from a medical-ethics perspective, are you noticing that are either good or maybe not so good?
To be candid and, probably, to use language that’s too sharp for publication, I’m appalled. We didn’t get ourselves ready. We’ve had outbreaks—SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2013, Zika in 2016. We’ve known, and the general population in some ways has known. They even have movies like “Contagion” that did a great job of sharing publicly what this is like, although it is fictional, and that we were going to have these kinds of infectious diseases in a global community that we have to be prepared to handle. And we didn’t get ourselves as ready, in most cases, as we should have. There have been all these cuts to the C.D.C. budget, and the person who was the Ebola czar no longer exists in the new Administration.
And it’s not just this Administration. But the thing about this Administration that perhaps worries me the most is a fundamental lack of respect for science and the facts. Managing the crisis from a public-relations perspective and an economic, Dow Jones perspective are important, but they shouldn’t be fudging the facts. And that’s the piece that makes me feel most concerned—and not just as an ethicist. And then, of course, I want to see public education and information that’s forthright and helps people get the treatment that they need. But the disrespect for the public, and not providing honest information, is . . . yeah, that’s pretty disconcerting.
What would an ethicist advising Washington State or New York City say to policymakers?
I don’t know which ethicists are advising the current Administration. The Trump Administration decided not to have a National Bioethics Commission, so there isn’t one in place. So I don’t know who’s doing that.
If there were a National Bioethics Commission, what sort of things would they be talking about and thinking about?
So they really have to—and we do as ethicists working with people in public health—think about how we actually allocate limited resources. We clearly don’t have enough diagnostic tests, and we’ve been very slow in making them available. And clinicians have developed some workarounds, by taking pulmonary CT scans, and things like that. And figuring out, by history, who are the presumptive cases that we should use the limited numbers of tests that we have on now.


newyorker--2020-03-11--With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People

The strangest thing about the coronavirus is that we can ’ t help one another through it .
We can ’ t lay on hands , we can only wash them : in fact , the way we ’ ve been explicitly told to help is to stay away from one another .
That makes epidemiological sense , but it also makes us a little crazy : social distancing , quarantine , and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are .
Every other time that we face a natural disaster , we come together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost inevitable human response to a crisis .
Rebecca Solnit , in her soaringly optimistic book from 2009 , “ A Paradise Built in Hell , ” proved that point with example after example : from the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina , people rallied in the most extraordinary ways .
In Louisiana , people with boats just kept arriving and shoving off into the murky and dangerous waters to rescue people stranded on the roofs of their flooded homes .
The Cajun Navy , as the group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives by the score , and they were not an exception .
“ In the wake of an earthquake , a bombing or a major storm , most people are altruistic , urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them , strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones , ” Solnit writes .
Looters are rare—and sometimes what ’ s called looting is just people trying to get medicine or food for others .
She adds , “ The image of the selfish , panicky or regressively savage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little truth to it .
Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters , from the bombings of World War II to floods , tornadoes , earthquakes and storms across the continent and around the world , have demonstrated this.
” I ’ ve seen it firsthand a dozen times : when Hurricane Irene devastated my state , Vermont , in 2011 , people turned out within hours , bringing tools from backhoes to brooms .
They mucked out basements and rebuilt driveways , and they kept coming back for weeks , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did it for strangers , mostly—although they didn ’ t remain strangers for long .
But , with coronavirus , none of that is possible .
There ’ s little way to be of use except to disappear inside your home , so that you can ’ t infect anyone .
Indeed , even the places we gather for solace are increasingly off limits .
Churches are closed in Italy and in South Korea ( where one particular sect was the epicenter of the growing epidemic ) .
Schools , where people find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their lives , are increasingly shutting their doors or moving to “ remote instruction.
” Even the things that take our minds off crises are going to be closed off : with every disaster that I can recall , including unnatural horrors such as 9/11 , the resumption of pro sports some days later was a way to ease the feelings of pain and fear and anger .
But now ski races in Norway are being held in empty arenas , Italy has cancelled league soccer matches , and there ’ s talk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be held in Tokyo , may need to be postponed .
All of this is wise , of course : the evidence that cutting down on crowds can slow the spread and flatten the curve of eventual infection is clear , dating back to the Spanish flu of 1918 .
( President Trump ’ s minimization of the risk will be remembered for the classic foolishness that it is : you can ’ t spin a microbe . )
But isolation comes at a real cost .
Loneliness turns out to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Everything we can measure , from immune response to the onset of dementia to coronary-artery disease is worsened , often dramatically , in people with fewer friends .
Forget the physical risks , though ; it ’ s the social cost that we should be absorbing , so that we ’ ll remember it when these days are past .
We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we ’ ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society , even without illness as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hanging out with friends dropped precipitously in 2012 , when for the first time more than half of Americans owned smartphones ( a situation that has been linked to rising rates of depression ) .
If we pay attention , we may value more fully the moment we ’ re released from our detention , and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result .
It will be a relief , above all , when we ’ re allowed to get back to caring for one another , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
The coronavirus is likely to spread for months , if not more than a year , before a vaccine could be widely available .
We are all irrational panic shoppers .
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

The strangest thing about the coronavirus is that we can’t help one another through it. We can’t lay on hands, we can only wash them: in fact, the way we’ve been explicitly told to help is to stay away from one another. That makes epidemiological sense, but it also makes us a little crazy: social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are.
Every other time that we face a natural disaster, we come together: that’s the natural, almost inevitable human response to a crisis. Rebecca Solnit, in her soaringly optimistic book from 2009, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” proved that point with example after example: from the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina, people rallied in the most extraordinary ways. In Louisiana, people with boats just kept arriving and shoving off into the murky and dangerous waters to rescue people stranded on the roofs of their flooded homes. The Cajun Navy, as the group of volunteer boaters was known, saved lives by the score, and they were not an exception.
“In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones,” Solnit writes. Looters are rare—and sometimes what’s called looting is just people trying to get medicine or food for others. She adds, “The image of the selfish, panicky or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.”
I’ve seen it firsthand a dozen times: when Hurricane Irene devastated my state, Vermont, in 2011, people turned out within hours, bringing tools from backhoes to brooms. They mucked out basements and rebuilt driveways, and they kept coming back for weeks, until the job was done. They did it for strangers, mostly—although they didn’t remain strangers for long.
But, with the coronavirus, none of that is possible. There’s little way to be of use except to disappear inside your home, so that you can’t infect anyone. Indeed, even the places we gather for solace are increasingly off limits. Churches are closed in Italy and in South Korea (where one particular sect was the epicenter of the growing epidemic). Schools, where people find community during the first two decades of their lives, are increasingly shutting their doors or moving to “remote instruction.” Even the things that take our minds off crises are going to be closed off: with every disaster that I can recall, including unnatural horrors such as 9/11, the resumption of pro sports some days later was a way to ease the feelings of pain and fear and anger. But now ski races in Norway are being held in empty arenas, Italy has cancelled league soccer matches, and there’s talk that the Summer Olympics, scheduled to be held in Tokyo, may need to be postponed.
All of this is wise, of course: the evidence that cutting down on crowds can slow the spread and flatten the curve of eventual infection is clear, dating back to the Spanish flu of 1918. (President Trump’s minimization of the risk will be remembered for the classic foolishness that it is: you can’t spin a microbe.) But isolation comes at a real cost. Loneliness turns out to be a huge factor in diminishing human lives. Everything we can measure, from immune response to the onset of dementia to coronary-artery disease is worsened, often dramatically, in people with fewer friends.
Forget the physical risks, though; it’s the social cost that we should be absorbing, so that we’ll remember it when these days are past. We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse. The number of adolescents hanging out with friends dropped precipitously in 2012, when for the first time more than half of Americans owned smartphones (a situation that has been linked to rising rates of depression).
If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
The coronavirus is likely to spread for months, if not more than a year, before a vaccine could be widely available.
We are all irrational panic shoppers.
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
How pandemics change history.


newyorker--2020-03-11--During the Coronavirus Outbreak, the Urge to Touch One’s Face Is Stronger Than Ever

It is hard to resist the urge to touch one ’ s face .
This has been true , an irrefutable fact of human existence , for a while now .
At the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History , there is a life-size sculptural reconstruction of one of our ancestors , Australopithecus sediba , who roamed the earth two million years ago .
The creature is shown pressing a gnarled forefinger to an earlobe .
Now , with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus , humanity is confronting a face-touching crisis .
The virus has brought widespread confusion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consensus among public-health officials that the most basic step you can take to protect yourself and others is to wash your hands frequently and to keep those hands from colliding with your face .
Science tells us that this is easier said than done .
One study of “ hand-to-face contact rates ” found that subjects touched their faces some fifteen times per hour .
Researchers in Australia put the number at twenty-three .
Another measure of the prevalence of face-touching is the social stigma against it .
All of our lives , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our faces , especially in public , in the interest of etiquette .
It ’ s bad form to go digging for eye gunk at a dinner-party table ; it ’ s unwise to trouble a zit during a job interview .
There are particularly strong taboos against probing facial orifices—picking your nose , mining earwax , using your fingernail to pry loose the scrap of Swiss chard that has wound itself around a tooth—perhaps because the impulse to perform this kind of under-the-hood maintenance is so powerful .
Yet the prospect of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out friends and neighbors , the knowledge that we are liable to introduce bacteria to our bodies and offload it to others in the vicinity—none of this , apparently , is enough to stop us from jabbing and tugging and kneading our faces .
A Washington Post article from last week detailed instances of politicians brushing hair from their brows and licking their fingertips mere seconds after warning Americans to refrain from such behaviors .
In short , the coronavirus crisis has reminded us that , for all our airs and graces , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in oceans of schmutz ; we smear additional schmutz on and in our faces , more or less continuously .
Face-touching haunts our history ; it is immortalized in art and literature .
Depictions of the expulsion from Eden show Adam with hands clapped over his eyes in shame .
Images of hand-to-face contact echo in the songs of bards .
Think of Romeo , gazing up at Juliet on the balcony : “ See , how she leans her cheek upon her hand !
/ O , that I were a glove @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might touch that cheek !
” Consider some other icons : Rodin ’ s Thinker ; Clement Clarke Moore ’ s St. Nicholas , “ laying his finger aside of his nose ” ; Munch ’ s Screamer ; Macaulay Culkin ’ s Screamer ; Dr .
Evil , with his pinky poised coquettishly on his lips ; Beyoncé , holding her titanium “ roboglove ” to her cheek in the “ Single Ladies ” video .
Writers in particular are inveterate face-touchers .
Flip open a book to the author photo and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a hand , a pose whose mix of thoughtful , blasé , and smug is evidently international code for “ I am a litterateur.
” Face-touching inflects our modern language of memes and GIFs and SMS , from the facepalm hashtag to the see- , hear- , and speak-no-evil monkey emojis .
What would life be like if strict segregation of hands and faces was in place ?
What would culture look like going forward ?
These are questions—as Arsenio Hall might put it , raising a slender finger to his temple—that make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the meantime , logistics are getting complicated .
Without touching your face , it is hard to eat and drink , at least in the modern , urban way , gulping down a bagel and coffee on the run .
It is difficult to turn a presentable face to the world .
Fluffing up coiffure and smoothing down eyebrows , putting on makeup and keeping it shipshape , applying moisturizer and sunscreen—performing these actions hands-free is tricky .
Communication is undermined .
This morning , I called out to a friend across the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over the traffic , I encircled my mouth with my hands to form a little megaphone ; my friend cupped a hand around his right ear .
It was a face-touching two-fer .
I probably should have waited for the light to change .
Some of the most eloquent statements we make require no spoken words .
But our vocabulary of gestures is impoverished when hand-to-face contact is removed from the equation .
Children on the playground will have to jettison the “ Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah ” taunt , where the thumbs are thrust into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will have to find a way to indicate snobbery that doesn ’ t involve lifting the tip of the nose .
Obscene gestures will be particularly hard hit .
It is interesting to note how many of these gestures , from the Italian chin flick to the South Asian Cutis , reflect the idea of contagion : launching an armada of microbes in the direction of your adversary .
Under the present conditions , it is advisable to avoid the kind of guy who does a lot of chin-flicking .
Of course the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s own reckless hand-to-face contact .
The Brooklyn café where I am typing these words , cheek by jowl with other laptoppers , may well be a coronavirus incubator—every tabletop slathered in pathogens , each oat-milk cortado topped with a frothy dollop of SARS-CoV-2 .
It is a place where , you would think , a person could remember to stop touching his face , especially a person who is in the process of writing an article on the subject of face-touching .
Yet in the last hour I must have rubbed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scratched my cheeks , itched my nose , yanked my earlobes , and stroked my chin dozens of times .
Brain researchers have offered a possible explanation .
The authors of a study published in 2014 hypothesized that “ spontaneous facial self-touch ” helps to jump-start the memory , process information , and regulate emotions .
Like many self-employed information-economy workers , I perform my job in a near-permanent state of blind panic , hunched over a screen for hours on end .
Without that soothing self-touch , a little massage to calm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the entire enterprise might grind to a halt .
It is an irony of the moment : the moratorium on anxiety-alleviating hand-to-face action has come at a time when we ’ re extra anxious , more apt than ever to reflexively stretch our fingers toward the old bean in an attempt to restore equilibrium .
Even those who appear to have little in the way of a functional interior life are affected .
( “ I haven ’ t touched my face in weeks , ” Donald Trump told reporters last week @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There is perhaps another , deeper reason why , now more than ever , we find ourselves inclined to clutch at our faces .
In this new plague time , when life has turned surreal , when news of quarantines and skyrocketing infections fill the news and frightening prospects loom on the horizon , face-touching may meet a unconscious psychic-spiritual need , serving as a kind of existential spot-check .
Eyes , ears , nose , mouth : yep , all present and accounted for .
For the time being , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available .
We are all irrational panic shoppers .
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

It is hard to resist the urge to touch one’s face. This has been true, an irrefutable fact of human existence, for a while now. At the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, there is a life-size sculptural reconstruction of one of our ancestors, Australopithecus sediba, who roamed the earth two million years ago. The creature is shown pressing a gnarled forefinger to an earlobe. Now, with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, humanity is confronting a face-touching crisis. The virus has brought widespread confusion and uncertainty, but there is a consensus among public-health officials that the most basic step you can take to protect yourself and others is to wash your hands frequently and to keep those hands from colliding with your face.
Science tells us that this is easier said than done. One study of “hand-to-face contact rates” found that subjects touched their faces some fifteen times per hour. Researchers in Australia put the number at twenty-three. Another measure of the prevalence of face-touching is the social stigma against it. All of our lives, we have been told not to touch our faces, especially in public, in the interest of etiquette. It’s bad form to go digging for eye gunk at a dinner-party table; it’s unwise to trouble a zit during a job interview. There are particularly strong taboos against probing facial orifices—picking your nose, mining earwax, using your fingernail to pry loose the scrap of Swiss chard that has wound itself around a tooth—perhaps because the impulse to perform this kind of under-the-hood maintenance is so powerful.
Yet the prospect of social ostracism, the fear of grossing out friends and neighbors, the knowledge that we are liable to introduce bacteria to our bodies and offload it to others in the vicinity—none of this, apparently, is enough to stop us from jabbing and tugging and kneading our faces. A Washington Post article from last week detailed instances of politicians brushing hair from their brows and licking their fingertips mere seconds after warning Americans to refrain from such behaviors. In short, the coronavirus crisis has reminded us that, for all our airs and graces, we are filthy beasts. We wallow in oceans of schmutz; we smear additional schmutz on and in our faces, more or less continuously.
Face-touching haunts our history; it is immortalized in art and literature. Depictions of the expulsion from Eden show Adam with hands clapped over his eyes in shame. Images of hand-to-face contact echo in the songs of bards. Think of Romeo, gazing up at Juliet on the balcony: “See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! / O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!” Consider some other icons: Rodin’s Thinker; Clement Clarke Moore’s St. Nicholas, “laying his finger aside of his nose”; Munch’s Screamer; Macaulay Culkin’s Screamer; Dr. Evil, with his pinky poised coquettishly on his lips; Beyoncé, holding her titanium “roboglove” to her cheek in the “Single Ladies” video. Writers in particular are inveterate face-touchers. Flip open a book to the author photo and you will find a head balanced on a hand, a pose whose mix of thoughtful, blasé, and smug is evidently international code for “I am a litterateur.” Face-touching inflects our modern language of memes and GIFs and SMS, from the facepalm hashtag to the see-, hear-, and speak-no-evil monkey emojis. What would life be like if strict segregation of hands and faces was in place? What would culture look like going forward? These are questions—as Arsenio Hall might put it, raising a slender finger to his temple—that make you go, “Hmmm.”
In the meantime, logistics are getting complicated. Without touching your face, it is hard to eat and drink, at least in the modern, urban way, gulping down a bagel and coffee on the run. It is difficult to turn a presentable face to the world. Fluffing up coiffure and smoothing down eyebrows, putting on makeup and keeping it shipshape, applying moisturizer and sunscreen—performing these actions hands-free is tricky. Communication is undermined. This morning, I called out to a friend across the street. To make my voice heard over the traffic, I encircled my mouth with my hands to form a little megaphone; my friend cupped a hand around his right ear. It was a face-touching two-fer. I probably should have waited for the light to change.
Some of the most eloquent statements we make require no spoken words. But our vocabulary of gestures is impoverished when hand-to-face contact is removed from the equation. Children on the playground will have to jettison the “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” taunt, where the thumbs are thrust into ears and the fingers waggle. We will have to find a way to indicate snobbery that doesn’t involve lifting the tip of the nose. Obscene gestures will be particularly hard hit. It is interesting to note how many of these gestures, from the Italian chin flick to the South Asian Cutis, reflect the idea of contagion: launching an armada of microbes in the direction of your adversary.
Under the present conditions, it is advisable to avoid the kind of guy who does a lot of chin-flicking. Of course the more pressing challenge is to control one’s own reckless hand-to-face contact. The Brooklyn café where I am typing these words, cheek by jowl with other laptoppers, may well be a coronavirus incubator—every tabletop slathered in pathogens, each oat-milk cortado topped with a frothy dollop of SARS-CoV-2. It is a place where, you would think, a person could remember to stop touching his face, especially a person who is in the process of writing an article on the subject of face-touching. Yet in the last hour I must have rubbed my eyes, massaged my forehead, scratched my cheeks, itched my nose, yanked my earlobes, and stroked my chin dozens of times.
Brain researchers have offered a possible explanation. The authors of a study published in 2014 hypothesized that “spontaneous facial self-touch” helps to jump-start the memory, process information, and regulate emotions. Like many self-employed information-economy workers, I perform my job in a near-permanent state of blind panic, hunched over a screen for hours on end. Without that soothing self-touch, a little massage to calm the nerves and get the synapses firing, the entire enterprise might grind to a halt.
It is an irony of the moment: the moratorium on anxiety-alleviating hand-to-face action has come at a time when we’re extra anxious, more apt than ever to reflexively stretch our fingers toward the old bean in an attempt to restore equilibrium. Even those who appear to have little in the way of a functional interior life are affected. (“I haven’t touched my face in weeks,” Donald Trump told reporters last week. “I miss it.”) There is perhaps another, deeper reason why, now more than ever, we find ourselves inclined to clutch at our faces. In this new plague time, when life has turned surreal, when news of quarantines and skyrocketing infections fill the news and frightening prospects loom on the horizon, face-touching may meet a unconscious psychic-spiritual need, serving as a kind of existential spot-check. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: yep, all present and accounted for. For the time being, at least, everything is in its place.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
We are all irrational panic shoppers.
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
How pandemics change history.


newyorker--2020-03-11--Notes from a Couples Therapist for Former Reality-Show Contestants

Lauren R. and Max Lauren R. and Max are a newly engaged couple going through a bit of a rough patch .
Lauren expressed frustration that their most recent date , a trip to Red Lobster to “ use a soon-to-expire coupon , ” didn ’ t give her the same rush as their previous date—bungee helicoptering over Icelandic fjords .
Max retorted that Lauren ’ s expectations were unrealistic , as he has neither the funds nor the connections to secure private concerts with midlevel country bands .
Lauren said that she thinks that Max gets his aggressiveness from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ play his mom .
Max can ’ t actually remember meeting Lauren ’ s family because he met “ like , four other families that week.
” Lauren brought up , multiple times , that she had given Max a lot of passes , considering that he was dating twenty-eight other girls when they first met .
Max cited being “ emotionally raw ” after having to break up with all twenty-eight individuals , and countered that Lauren always knew where she stood in his eyes .
He asked her to please not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to direct her ire at “ the game.
” Aughbreigh and Theo Aughbreigh and Theo met under pretty intense circumstances .
They moved in instantly upon being introduced and then continued cohabitation after leaving their first situation , a sixteen-week stay on the coast of Puerto Vallarta in a complex that they shared with six other couples .
In their current space , they ’ ve each expressed surprise and disappointment at the other ’ s inability to recreate the gourmet meals that they enjoyed at the complex , and in particular , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during the third-to-last voting ceremony .
Theo noted that since returning to the “ real world , ” Aughbreigh has spent an inordinate amount of time on her phone .
Aughbreigh countered that she ’ s just catching up , since the only thing close to a phone she had at the complex was the “ House Connect™ ” —a device that only allowed incoming calls from a seemingly omniscient , Australian-accented voice giving the couples innuendo-laden instructions for their next physical challenge .
Aughbreigh also feels that Theo has become restless now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seven hours a day .
They ’ ve discussed moving , but since their winnings only totaled around two thousand pounds after taxes , they ’ re “ kinda tied up until the lease is over.
” Steve and Callie Steve and Callie came to me with concerns about their ability to communicate with each other .
Their relationship began mostly over text , owing to the fact that they were sequestered on separate soundstages and were only allowed to communicate via a voice-to-text service called “ the Hang.
” After Steve lamented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Callie laugh like he used to , ” Callie admitted that every time she messaged “ LMFAO ” in the Hang , she was in fact dead-faced , flossing her teeth over the kitchen sink .
This destabilized the already troubled relationship , built mostly on a foundation of inexplicable hashtags and a shared “ love of dogs and tacos.
” As an experiment in exposure therapy , I had Steve and Callie each sit behind a screen and communicate via text like they used to , intending to then reintroduce them to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more comfortable in a state where they couldn ’ t touch .
I was thoroughly impressed by the subjects ’ ability to express complex emotions through emoji faces .
Robert and Alexander Both Robert and Alexander expressed deep appreciation to someone named Tammy at a high-end dating service for pairing them up based on their shared love of Palm Springs and the “ fact that they were gay.
” Though they haven ’ t expressed it outright , I suspect that these partners feel pressure to stay together to impress and affirm the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their favorite Bravo-lebrity.
” While I ’ m happy that they ’ ve committed to spending more time together , I ’ m not sure that staging elaborate selfies with the hashtag # TammyDidThis is a constructive relationship exercise .
I predict the need for further sessions when they eventually break up and must negotiate custody of their French bulldog , who is also , unfortunately , named Tammy .
Kaley Cuoco and Salt Bae Despite the intense pressure Kaley and Nusret ( Salt Bae ) face as public figures , they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couple in my appointment book .
They met in an unconventional way—on a popular reality singing competition—and actually learned a lot about each other through their in-depth , pre-taped video packages .
Kaley is extremely empathetic to Nusret ’ s struggles with viral fame and appreciates a partner who “ had no idea who she was ” prior to the relationship .
Nusret recalled being moved by Kaley ’ s performance of Tal Bachman ’ s “ High Above Me , ” which they plan to use as their wedding song .
Truly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need to work through is their inability to connect to each other without the aid of the elaborate costumes they were forced to wear on the show .
I personally am put off by the way they attend sessions dressed as , respectively , a shrimp in a leather jacket and a giant anthropomorphic chili pepper , but love is love .

Lauren R. and Max
Lauren R. and Max are a newly engaged couple going through a bit of a rough patch. Lauren expressed frustration that their most recent date, a trip to Red Lobster to “use a soon-to-expire coupon,” didn’t give her the same rush as their previous date—bungee helicoptering over Icelandic fjords. Max retorted that Lauren’s expectations were unrealistic, as he has neither the funds nor the connections to secure private concerts with midlevel country bands. Lauren said that she thinks that Max gets his aggressiveness from the woman whom the producers cast to play his mom. Max can’t actually remember meeting Lauren’s family because he met “like, four other families that week.” Lauren brought up, multiple times, that she had given Max a lot of passes, considering that he was dating twenty-eight other girls when they first met. Max cited being “emotionally raw” after having to break up with all twenty-eight individuals, and countered that Lauren always knew where she stood in his eyes. He asked her to please not “hate the player” and instead to direct her ire at “the game.”
Aughbreigh and Theo
Aughbreigh and Theo met under pretty intense circumstances. They moved in instantly upon being introduced and then continued cohabitation after leaving their first situation, a sixteen-week stay on the coast of Puerto Vallarta in a complex that they shared with six other couples. In their current space, they’ve each expressed surprise and disappointment at the other’s inability to recreate the gourmet meals that they enjoyed at the complex, and in particular, the papaya salmon provided by craft services during the third-to-last voting ceremony. Theo noted that since returning to the “real world,” Aughbreigh has spent an inordinate amount of time on her phone. Aughbreigh countered that she’s just catching up, since the only thing close to a phone she had at the complex was the “House Connect™”—a device that only allowed incoming calls from a seemingly omniscient, Australian-accented voice giving the couples innuendo-laden instructions for their next physical challenge. Aughbreigh also feels that Theo has become restless now that he’s not working out seven hours a day. They’ve discussed moving, but since their winnings only totaled around two thousand pounds after taxes, they’re “kinda tied up until the lease is over.”
Steve and Callie
Steve and Callie came to me with concerns about their ability to communicate with each other. Their relationship began mostly over text, owing to the fact that they were sequestered on separate soundstages and were only allowed to communicate via a voice-to-text service called “the Hang.” After Steve lamented that he “didn’t make Callie laugh like he used to,” Callie admitted that every time she messaged “LMFAO” in the Hang, she was in fact dead-faced, flossing her teeth over the kitchen sink. This destabilized the already troubled relationship, built mostly on a foundation of inexplicable hashtags and a shared “love of dogs and tacos.” As an experiment in exposure therapy, I had Steve and Callie each sit behind a screen and communicate via text like they used to, intending to then reintroduce them to one another, but both were exponentially more comfortable in a state where they couldn’t touch. I was thoroughly impressed by the subjects’ ability to express complex emotions through emoji faces.
Robert and Alexander
Both Robert and Alexander expressed deep appreciation to someone named Tammy at a high-end dating service for pairing them up based on their shared love of Palm Springs and the “fact that they were gay.” Though they haven’t expressed it outright, I suspect that these partners feel pressure to stay together to impress and affirm the decision of the person they call “their favorite Bravo-lebrity.” While I’m happy that they’ve committed to spending more time together, I’m not sure that staging elaborate selfies with the hashtag #TammyDidThis is a constructive relationship exercise. I predict the need for further sessions when they eventually break up and must negotiate custody of their French bulldog, who is also, unfortunately, named Tammy.
Kaley Cuoco and Salt Bae
Despite the intense pressure Kaley and Nusret (Salt Bae) face as public figures, they are by far the most loving and healthy couple in my appointment book. They met in an unconventional way—on a popular reality singing competition—and actually learned a lot about each other through their in-depth, pre-taped video packages. Kaley is extremely empathetic to Nusret’s struggles with viral fame and appreciates a partner who “had no idea who she was” prior to the relationship. Nusret recalled being moved by Kaley’s performance of Tal Bachman’s “High Above Me,” which they plan to use as their wedding song. Truly, the only issue that these two need to work through is their inability to connect to each other without the aid of the elaborate costumes they were forced to wear on the show. I personally am put off by the way they attend sessions dressed as, respectively, a shrimp in a leather jacket and a giant anthropomorphic chili pepper, but love is love.


newyorker--2020-03-11--Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” and the Drawbacks of Explainer Journalism

About halfway through his new book , “ Why We ’ re Polarized , ” Ezra Klein inserts a helpful “ Interlude , ” a mini-chapter summarizing what has thus far been an ambitiously synthetic argument .
Klein is the co-founder of Vox , the explanatory news site that launched in 2014 , and his “ Interlude ” is quintessential Vox : a plainspoken , user-friendly distillation of an otherwise complex phenomenon .
Once ( so this summary goes ) , the country ’ s two major political parties generated a weak sense of group affiliation .
Economic classes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distributed somewhat evenly between them , and so any one group ’ s influence on either party was softened .
For fear of repelling a core constituency , the parties could not afford to become ideological monoliths .
Another way to put this is that the Democratic and Republican parties once performed , internally , the work of liberalism .
They moderated passions , forced dissimilar people to coexist , and settled differences with compromise .
They also , as Klein makes clear , formed a duopoly committed to moral complacency , especially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in the nineteen-sixties , the Democrats passed major civil-rights legislation , and the American electorate began a great re-sorting .
As black voters gravitated toward the Democrats , white voters fled toward the Republicans .
Over time , the effects registered more broadly .
Voting patterns are now highly correlated with religion , race , ethnicity , gender , and neighborhood , Klein notes .
In the Trump era , each party has a world view that is internally coherent , and those world views are mutually exclusive and hostile to each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have all but merged .
Klein is a maestro at compactly and elegantly summarizing the work of others , and he patiently moves us through the scholarship of Alan Abramowitz on political polarization and Lilliana Mason on social polarization , along the way to concluding that “ our political identities have become political mega-identities.
” Then , in Chapter 3 , he hits upon his big idea .
When the two parties were less sorted , our politics worked helpfully against our deep tribal instincts .
“ The human mind , ” Klein @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group affiliation and group difference ” —so much so that , as soon as an affiliation has formed , the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group .
To make matters worse , Klein goes on , human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem , and esteem is zero-sum : more for you means less for me .
We would rather “ win ” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose .
“ The mechanism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because “ our brains know we need our groups to survive.
” The style of argumentation on display here will be familiar to most readers of contemporary nonfiction .
Our distant ancestors were born into small , kinship-based bands ; blind loyalty enhanced their chance for survival ; they passed their loyalty genes down to us .
By mixing experimental psychology with evolutionary biology , then aligning their findings with exciting new developments in cognitive neuroscience , political commentators can explain any social behavior by pointing to its origins in an adaptive advantage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Ultimate Explainer , whose influence has dominated the pop-intellectual mode since Richard Dawkins published “ The Selfish Gene , ” in 1976 .
In a recent conversation with Klein , Ta-Nehisi Coates described “ Why We ’ re Polarized ” as a “ cold , atheist book.
” He had in mind the broadly systemic , impersonal framing of its argument .
In place of a call to worship or to arms , Klein offers us a theory of human cognition , by which our inborn tendency to group chauvinism compromises @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and merely rationalized as calculation ?
” he asks .
There is an amiable hope at the center of the atheism : that we might remove the goggles of human partiality , acknowledge our character as a species , and build a better liberal polity , one that takes into account our tribal disposition .
Klein exhorts us to do so with an easygoing intellectual generosity , as if to imply by the grace of his own example that science might lead us back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us .
But Darwinian truisms are true only to the extent that they describe what is more or less fixed about the human animal .
It may be that we “ naturally form groups , ” as Klein writes , but the groups that we form are not facts of nature ; they are contingencies of time and place .
Klein ’ s argument is addressed to a historical predicament—to the rise of polarization and , consequently , of Trump and Trumpism .
But the authority that the book projects derives from ahistorical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Early on in “ Why We ’ re Polarized , ” Klein seems to suggest , accurately , that the core alliance of the modern G.O.P.—economic élites and poor whites—is the strategic creation of nameable individuals .
But then those individuals recede from view .
As elegant as the ensuing presentation is , I struggled to understand who the protagonist was .
I think Klein did , too .
Klein begins “ Why We ’ re Polarized ” by telling a story .
Its protagonist is Strom Thurmond , the late senator from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a leathery centenarian with an unyieldingly right-wing world view and a mixed-race daughter whose existence he never publicly acknowledged .
But , when Thurmond was a younger man , he did something remarkable : he created the Republican Party .
Republicans try to hide that fact by calling it “ the party of Lincoln , ” but this is a cynical sleight of hand .
The contemporary G.O.P .
is , in nearly every respect , the party of Thurmond .
The clarity with which Klein describes how Thurmond led the exodus of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and into the Republican Party is outdone only by the rapidity with which Thurmond disappears from the book ’ s pages .
Not coincidentally , this disappearance happens just as Klein goes from telling a story to offering an Explanation .
The Story featured a villain—a particular , nameable Southern politician fighting tooth and nail against racial justice .
The Explanation features an undifferentiated first-person plural—we , us , our .
( According to Klein , “ the political psychologists ” argue that “ our politics , much like our interest in travel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ psychological makeup.
” ) Klein impresses us with summary upon summary of peer-reviewed studies and books with titles like “ Predisposed : Liberals , Conservatives , and the Biology of Political Differences , ” all of which purport to show , via patterns in the data , that we are an inherently tribal , in-group-identifying species .
But the effect is not clarifying .
“ The parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility , ” Klein writes .
But , in fact , the parties are dividing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encouraged by one party in particular .
Perhaps Klein is oblivious to cynicism because he himself is so uncynical .
But I think something else may be going on here .
At one point in the book , Klein , who briefly worked on Howard Dean ’ s Presidential campaign , in 2004 , cites an anti-Dean TV ad that featured a counterfeit man-on-the-street interview .
In it , an older couple , played by actors , are asked what they think of Dean .
“ Well , ” the fake husband begins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take his tax-hiking , government-expanding , latte-drinking , sushi-eating , Volvo-driving , New York Times-reading ” —and here the fake wife picks up the beat— “ body-piercing , Hollywood-loving , left-wing freak show back to Vermont , where it belongs.
” The ad is a showpiece of Orwellian cynicism .
Yet Klein is so devoted to a morally neutral framework that the most he can say is , “ And , that , my friends , is pure , un-cut mega-identity politics.
” Maybe the appeal , in the ad , is to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was made by specific selfish rich people—the anti-tax zealots at Club for Growth .
Lost in Klein ’ s gloss is not just the staggering amount of money that has been spent turning people like me into reprehensible bogeymen , but why it has been spent .

About halfway through his new book, “Why We’re Polarized,” Ezra Klein inserts a helpful “Interlude,” a mini-chapter summarizing what has thus far been an ambitiously synthetic argument. Klein is the co-founder of Vox, the explanatory news site that launched in 2014, and his “Interlude” is quintessential Vox: a plainspoken, user-friendly distillation of an otherwise complex phenomenon. Once (so this summary goes), the country’s two major political parties generated a weak sense of group affiliation. Economic classes, social types, and racial groups were distributed somewhat evenly between them, and so any one group’s influence on either party was softened. For fear of repelling a core constituency, the parties could not afford to become ideological monoliths.
Another way to put this is that the Democratic and Republican parties once performed, internally, the work of liberalism. They moderated passions, forced dissimilar people to coexist, and settled differences with compromise. They also, as Klein makes clear, formed a duopoly committed to moral complacency, especially on the issue of race. Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the Democrats passed major civil-rights legislation, and the American electorate began a great re-sorting. As black voters gravitated toward the Democrats, white voters fled toward the Republicans. Over time, the effects registered more broadly. Voting patterns are now highly correlated with religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and neighborhood, Klein notes. In the Trump era, each party has a world view that is internally coherent, and those world views are mutually exclusive and hostile to each other. Our social and partisan selves have all but merged.
Klein is a maestro at compactly and elegantly summarizing the work of others, and he patiently moves us through the scholarship of Alan Abramowitz on political polarization and Lilliana Mason on social polarization, along the way to concluding that “our political identities have become political mega-identities.” Then, in Chapter 3, he hits upon his big idea. When the two parties were less sorted, our politics worked helpfully against our deep tribal instincts. “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.
“The mechanism is evolutionary,” Klein writes, because “our brains know we need our groups to survive.” The style of argumentation on display here will be familiar to most readers of contemporary nonfiction. Our distant ancestors were born into small, kinship-based bands; blind loyalty enhanced their chance for survival; they passed their loyalty genes down to us. By mixing experimental psychology with evolutionary biology, then aligning their findings with exciting new developments in cognitive neuroscience, political commentators can explain any social behavior by pointing to its origins in an adaptive advantage. Behind every parochial explanation lies Darwin, the Ultimate Explainer, whose influence has dominated the pop-intellectual mode since Richard Dawkins published “The Selfish Gene,” in 1976.
In a recent conversation with Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates described “Why We’re Polarized” as a “cold, atheist book.” He had in mind the broadly systemic, impersonal framing of its argument. In place of a call to worship or to arms, Klein offers us a theory of human cognition, by which our inborn tendency to group chauvinism compromises our ability to reason. “What if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and merely rationalized as calculation?” he asks. There is an amiable hope at the center of the atheism: that we might remove the goggles of human partiality, acknowledge our character as a species, and build a better liberal polity, one that takes into account our tribal disposition. Klein exhorts us to do so with an easygoing intellectual generosity, as if to imply by the grace of his own example that science might lead us back to civility, and civility might heal us.
But Darwinian truisms are true only to the extent that they describe what is more or less fixed about the human animal. It may be that we “naturally form groups,” as Klein writes, but the groups that we form are not facts of nature; they are contingencies of time and place. Klein’s argument is addressed to a historical predicament—to the rise of polarization and, consequently, of Trump and Trumpism. But the authority that the book projects derives from ahistorical constructs, like brains and genes. Early on in “Why We’re Polarized,” Klein seems to suggest, accurately, that the core alliance of the modern G.O.P.—economic élites and poor whites—is the strategic creation of nameable individuals. But then those individuals recede from view. As elegant as the ensuing presentation is, I struggled to understand who the protagonist was. I think Klein did, too.
Klein begins “Why We’re Polarized” by telling a story. Its protagonist is Strom Thurmond, the late senator from South Carolina who is commonly remembered as a leathery centenarian with an unyieldingly right-wing world view and a mixed-race daughter whose existence he never publicly acknowledged. But, when Thurmond was a younger man, he did something remarkable: he created the Republican Party. Republicans try to hide that fact by calling it “the party of Lincoln,” but this is a cynical sleight of hand. The contemporary G.O.P. is, in nearly every respect, the party of Thurmond.
The clarity with which Klein describes how Thurmond led the exodus of white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party is outdone only by the rapidity with which Thurmond disappears from the book’s pages. Not coincidentally, this disappearance happens just as Klein goes from telling a story to offering an Explanation. The Story featured a villain—a particular, nameable Southern politician fighting tooth and nail against racial justice. The Explanation features an undifferentiated first-person plural—we, us, our. (According to Klein, “the political psychologists” argue that “our politics, much like our interest in travel and spicy food, emerges from our psychological makeup.”) Klein impresses us with summary upon summary of peer-reviewed studies and books with titles like “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences,” all of which purport to show, via patterns in the data, that we are an inherently tribal, in-group-identifying species. But the effect is not clarifying.
“The parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility,” Klein writes. But, in fact, the parties are dividing because of hostility and intolerance, as encouraged by one party in particular. Perhaps Klein is oblivious to cynicism because he himself is so uncynical. But I think something else may be going on here. At one point in the book, Klein, who briefly worked on Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign, in 2004, cites an anti-Dean TV ad that featured a counterfeit man-on-the-street interview. In it, an older couple, played by actors, are asked what they think of Dean. “Well,” the fake husband begins, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading”—and here the fake wife picks up the beat—“body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” The ad is a showpiece of Orwellian cynicism. Yet Klein is so devoted to a morally neutral framework that the most he can say is, “And, that, my friends, is pure, un-cut mega-identity politics.” Maybe the appeal, in the ad, is to the selfish gene, but the spot was made by specific selfish rich people—the anti-tax zealots at Club for Growth. Lost in Klein’s gloss is not just the staggering amount of money that has been spent turning people like me into reprehensible bogeymen, but why it has been spent.
The normative framework of transparency and reason, a broader humanistic appeal to values, a faith in institutions: these constitute the “liberal” in “liberal democracy.” Living on the coast, owning a Subaru, dicing scallions to NPR: these comprise the “lib” in “libtard.” The cynical confusion of liberal democracy with a well-heeled social type that is easy to despise is an attempt to undermine the very civic virtues that Klein cherishes. But the more one relies on Darwinian explanations for the decisions that people make, the less room is left for the motivations of conscious, rational agents.
Journalism has always been small-E explanatory; it links events semi-causally, which is to say narratively—this happened because of that, and, further, this is meaningful because of that. Such storytelling has its own drawbacks and shortcomings, which are often on display during campaign season, as questionable narratives gain in popularity and shape reporting. One way to beat back a bad or inaccurate story is with a better, more accurate one, but that is not Klein’s primary approach. Much of “Why We’re Polarized” is an analysis of a political system riddled with glitches and coding errors and good intentions gone awry—to be solved, accordingly, with patches, hacks, and good-faith bipartisanship. Even this sort of wonkery, though, is subsumed by the book’s Darwinian formalism. Darwin can be used to explain anything; in the psycho-evolutionary rummage bin, you can dig up totalitarian tendencies just as easily as you can unearth an inherent love of liberty. Along the way, the difference is lost between Explaining and Explaining Away. Is my “negative partisanship” best explained by my genes, my neural pathways, the great Pleistocene We? Or by the fact that the Republican Party has become transparently racist and anti-science? Do the methods of the contemporary G.O.P. work because of some ahistorical constant, or because white Americans are susceptible to race panics? Klein, ultimately, cannot square his desire to nudge the polity back toward capital-L Liberalism—the creation of a polis built on the dialogue of free citizens with one another—with his inclination to offer capital-E Explanations for our political behavior.
Darwinism played a significant role in the first Gilded Age. By equating success with biological fitness, it forgave industrial capitalism its cruelties. Darwinism has played a subtler, but no less legitimating, role in the second Gilded Age. The universe, Darwin taught us, is blind, morally neutral, mechanistic, and design-free. Nonetheless, its powers of pattern-making are exquisite—witness galaxies, crystals, dendrites, the whorls of a flower—and science is the apprehension of spontaneous and self-organizing systems, which, once detected, can be formalized mathematically, for purposes of prediction and control. Among human institutions, the closest thing to a self-organizing system that can be formalized mathematically is a market. From there, it is easy to argue that the closest thing to a true science of human behavior is economics.
The most prominent explainer journalists belong, more or less, to the center-left; they include Klein, his Vox colleague Matthew Yglesias, their former Vox colleague Max Fisher (who is now at the Times), and the data-oriented FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. They and many of their peers are youngish white men who came of age during a period of general decline in the humanities and a corresponding rise of economistic styles of explanation. For them, simply digesting and distilling existing news stories is not enough of a “value-add,” to use an economistic term of art; that would be mere summary. The holiest of intellectual grails, circa 2020, is to discover a “pattern in the data”—i.e., to arbitrage what everyone sees against what only you see, then sell it as an “explanation.”


newyorker--2020-03-11--Rebecca Solnit’s Memoir Is Much More Than a Feminist Manifesto

In a now-storied anecdote , Rebecca Solnit and her friend go to a party at an Aspen chalet .
While there , they are cornered by the older , wealthy host , and , after Solnit mentions that she has written a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge , subjected to a grandiose lecture about a “ very important ” Muybridge book that has just been published .
“ That ’ s her book , ” Solnit ’ s friend keeps trying to say .
But , as Solnit recounts in the blockbuster essay “ Men Who Explain Things , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on , “ with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth , eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
” The encounter was a gift : it magnified absurdities that often skitter away in the light of direct observation .
When Guernica republished the essay in 2012 , the year of a gang sexual assault in Steubenville , Ohio , the connection between rape and condescending to women at parties shone less brightly than it does now .
But there was a stink in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to it .
( The piece inspired a now-ubiquitous term , “ mansplaining.
” ) Solnit ’ s essay collection , called “ Men Explain Things to Me , ” arrived in 2014 ; three years later , she tackled themes of power , misogyny , and gendered violence in another book , “ The Mother of All Questions.
” Since then , Solnit has been recognized as one of the country ’ s most incisive feminist writers .
What perhaps goes less acknowledged is her omnivorousness .
In the twenty-plus titles she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s examined disaster utopias ; arctic expeditions ; her mother ’ s Alzheimer ’ s ; the allure of getting lost ; San Francisco , New Orleans , and New York ( in the atlas series “ Infinite Cities ” ) ; and popular and literary imaginings of the American West .
These are subjects , not coincidentally , that open themselves to Solnit ’ s broader interests : in place and nature , in margins and silenced voices , and in the inability of words and history to capture reality .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emotions and intuitions you almost don ’ t recognize , because language is so seldom considered the best way to approach them .
Although Solnit has long worked in a personal register , her latest book , “ Recollections of My Nonexistence , ” is her first to bear the label of “ memoir ” —and the first , perhaps , not to take its author ’ s existence for granted .
The book begins with a nineteen-year-old Solnit , a woman who feels only half there , drifting through the world like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Francisco State University , she moves into a new apartment .
The place is huge , antiquated , and cheap .
It ’ s situated in a historically working-class neighborhood that is “ alive , ” Solnit writes , “ in a way that made the suburban places I ’ d grown up in seem dead and bereft.
” Living there , an outsider among outsiders , Solnit begins to claim a sort of “ nonexistence ” : a romantic , freeing state , in which she finds herself unburdened by society ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feel for placeness—a mirror is a body of water ; a woman ’ s body is “ territory ” to annex or defend—and she imbues even literal sites with symbolic meaning .
For her , the apartment represents an education in the richness of the margins .
At one point , she strips away its brick-patterned wallpaper to reveal an inner layer , imprinted with brown ivy lattices .
Not long after , she dreams that she is tearing the wallpaper off again , and surfacing a different design .
( One of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ title from “ Diving into the Wreck , ” the Adrienne Rich poem about self-excavation . )
These episodes—aside from winking at the work of memoir—introduce some of the crucial architecture of Solnit ’ s world view : a hunger for histories and for the bounty of what often goes unseen .
One lineage resides in her walls ; another lives outside them , in her city ’ s thriving queer culture , which offers her fresh insight on how to exist as a woman .
Gay men , she writes , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ refusing your assignment , and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be , then neither did I.
” To her credit , Solnit acknowledges the privilege of her position .
She is a guest of poverty , not a permanent resident .
At any moment , she can leave the communities that she has chosen as her own .
And there is , at times , a hint of adolescent rebellion to her early fantasies of vanishing , of slipping the grasp of place .
Writing about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Solnit exults , “ When I read , I ceased to be myself , and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug .
.
.
.
I was a fog , a miasma , a mist.
” The freedom of hovering everywhere and nowhere is a child ’ s prerogative , evidence of an unformed self .
And yet owning her particular body and mind is never less of a preoccupation for Solnit than disappearing is .
“ I was trying not to be the subject of someone else ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she writes , tartly summarizing her twenties .
Such lines point to the book ’ s political dimension .
Although Solnit sometimes attributes her “ nonexistence ” to benign causes—her apartment , her beckoning inner life—there is , of course , a darker explanation .
“ That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women , especially young women , that a lot of people relished that harm , and a lot more dismissed it , impacted me in profoundly personal ways , ” Solnit writes .
She begins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living through a war that no one will acknowledge .
Self-negation becomes not a thrill but a truce , a promise of safety .
At “ its most brutally conventional , ” Solnit writes , femininity is “ a perpetual disappearing act , an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men.
” She develops an obsession with armor , which stifles one ’ s “ tender depths ” and obscures “ how much of life that matters takes place there.
” Killing yourself in order to spare men the trouble @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Writing , then , becomes how Solnit declares her identity over the next several decades .
Perhaps more important , it becomes how she creates her identity , because one can not transform into an author without first transforming into a person with beliefs , values , and desires—in short , a person with something to say .
Solnit movingly describes her efforts to fashion “ the self who will speak.
” Her first persona strove for a cool and silky archness .
“ It was a hard voice on a short @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one hears echoes of her passage on armor , the “ cage that moves with you ” as you “ throw all your consciousness into that surface.
” As the memoir ’ s various channels of imagery—the wallpaper , the ocean—converge to suggest , the work of Solnit ’ s writing and life has since been to withdraw from the surface to the “ tender depths.
” This inward pull relates to her sense of memory and place : all topics are topos , terrain , their meanings leaved in geologic strata .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ women ’ s stories , ” “ silencing , ” or “ gaslighting , ” that contemporary discourse has emptied out .
Solnit revives these terms with the breath of their own histories .
When Solnit dedicates herself fully to writing , her life changes , and so does her experience of sexism .
The animal , physical threat of men turns into the professional inconvenience of men , the careerist jealousy of men .
Solnit describes Lawrence Ferlinghetti , the president of her publishing house , City Lights , greeting , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her , someone he ’ d briefly met once , while ignoring Solnit , an author he ’ d run into dozens of times over two years .
She describes the publicist who assured her that he ’ d scheduled a series of readings to promote one of her books , only for her to discover , on the road , that none of the events existed .
Solnit ’ s insight , ambient now , is that these slights are not discrete incidents ; they fall on a spectrum .
Especially in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less to do with gendered violence or professional discrimination than with how authority—over the facts , over oneself—is distributed .
This represents a modest adjustment to Solnit ’ s earlier writings .
After “ The Mother of All Questions ” came out , she drew criticism , in The New Yorker and elsewhere , for overestimating the impact of feminist storytelling .
Here , Solnit separates voice-having , “ that vital power , ” into three pieces : audibility ( people can hear you ) , credibility ( people are willing to believe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words have an effect ) .

Rebecca Solnit can be most persuasive not when dispensing feminist credos but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience. Photograph by David Levenson / Getty
In a now-storied anecdote, Rebecca Solnit and her friend go to a party at an Aspen chalet. While there, they are cornered by the older, wealthy host, and, after Solnit mentions that she has written a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, subjected to a grandiose lecture about a “very important” Muybridge book that has just been published. “That’s her book,” Solnit’s friend keeps trying to say. But, as Solnit recounts in the blockbuster essay “Men Who Explain Things,” from 2008, the host presses on, “with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.”
The encounter was a gift: it magnified absurdities that often skitter away in the light of direct observation. When Guernica republished the essay in 2012, the year of a gang sexual assault in Steubenville, Ohio, the connection between rape and condescending to women at parties shone less brightly than it does now. But there was a stink in the air, and Solnit put words to it. (The piece inspired a now-ubiquitous term, “mansplaining.”) Solnit’s essay collection, called “Men Explain Things to Me,” arrived in 2014; three years later, she tackled themes of power, misogyny, and gendered violence in another book, “The Mother of All Questions.” Since then, Solnit has been recognized as one of the country’s most incisive feminist writers. What perhaps goes less acknowledged is her omnivorousness. In the twenty-plus titles she has to her name, she’s examined disaster utopias; arctic expeditions; her mother’s Alzheimer’s; the allure of getting lost; San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York (in the atlas series “Infinite Cities”); and popular and literary imaginings of the American West. These are subjects, not coincidentally, that open themselves to Solnit’s broader interests: in place and nature, in margins and silenced voices, and in the inability of words and history to capture reality. To read Solnit is to brush up against emotions and intuitions you almost don’t recognize, because language is so seldom considered the best way to approach them.
Although Solnit has long worked in a personal register, her latest book, “Recollections of My Nonexistence,” is her first to bear the label of “memoir”—and the first, perhaps, not to take its author’s existence for granted. The book begins with a nineteen-year-old Solnit, a woman who feels only half there, drifting through the world like mist. While a senior at San Francisco State University, she moves into a new apartment. The place is huge, antiquated, and cheap. It’s situated in a historically working-class neighborhood that is “alive,” Solnit writes, “in a way that made the suburban places I’d grown up in seem dead and bereft.” Living there, an outsider among outsiders, Solnit begins to claim a sort of “nonexistence”: a romantic, freeing state, in which she finds herself unburdened by society’s expectations.
Solnit has a deep feel for placeness—a mirror is a body of water; a woman’s body is “territory” to annex or defend—and she imbues even literal sites with symbolic meaning. For her, the apartment represents an education in the richness of the margins. At one point, she strips away its brick-patterned wallpaper to reveal an inner layer, imprinted with brown ivy lattices. Not long after, she dreams that she is tearing the wallpaper off again, and surfacing a different design. (One of the book’s chapters takes its title from “Diving into the Wreck,” the Adrienne Rich poem about self-excavation.) These episodes—aside from winking at the work of memoir—introduce some of the crucial architecture of Solnit’s world view: a hunger for histories and for the bounty of what often goes unseen. One lineage resides in her walls; another lives outside them, in her city’s thriving queer culture, which offers her fresh insight on how to exist as a woman. Gay men, she writes, “modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I.”
To her credit, Solnit acknowledges the privilege of her position. She is a guest of poverty, not a permanent resident. At any moment, she can leave the communities that she has chosen as her own. And there is, at times, a hint of adolescent rebellion to her early fantasies of vanishing, of slipping the grasp of place. Writing about her life as a young reader, Solnit exults, “When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. . . . I was a fog, a miasma, a mist.” The freedom of hovering everywhere and nowhere is a child’s prerogative, evidence of an unformed self. And yet owning her particular body and mind is never less of a preoccupation for Solnit than disappearing is. “I was trying not to be the subject of someone else’s poetry and not to get killed,” she writes, tartly summarizing her twenties.
Such lines point to the book’s political dimension. Although Solnit sometimes attributes her “nonexistence” to benign causes—her apartment, her beckoning inner life—there is, of course, a darker explanation. “That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways,” Solnit writes. She begins to feel as though she’s living through a war that no one will acknowledge. Self-negation becomes not a thrill but a truce, a promise of safety. At “its most brutally conventional,” Solnit writes, femininity is “a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men.” She develops an obsession with armor, which stifles one’s “tender depths” and obscures “how much of life that matters takes place there.” Killing yourself in order to spare men the trouble, Solnit decides, is characteristically female.
Writing, then, becomes how Solnit declares her identity over the next several decades. Perhaps more important, it becomes how she creates her identity, because one cannot transform into an author without first transforming into a person with beliefs, values, and desires—in short, a person with something to say. Solnit movingly describes her efforts to fashion “the self who will speak.” Her first persona strove for a cool and silky archness. “It was a hard voice on a short leash,” Solnit admits, and one hears echoes of her passage on armor, the “cage that moves with you” as you “throw all your consciousness into that surface.” As the memoir’s various channels of imagery—the wallpaper, the ocean—converge to suggest, the work of Solnit’s writing and life has since been to withdraw from the surface to the “tender depths.” This inward pull relates to her sense of memory and place: all topics are topos, terrain, their meanings leaved in geologic strata. There are phrases, such as “women’s stories,” “silencing,” or “gaslighting,” that contemporary discourse has emptied out. Solnit revives these terms with the breath of their own histories.
When Solnit dedicates herself fully to writing, her life changes, and so does her experience of sexism. The animal, physical threat of men turns into the professional inconvenience of men, the careerist jealousy of men. Solnit describes Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the president of her publishing house, City Lights, greeting, one afternoon, the man standing next to her, someone he’d briefly met once, while ignoring Solnit, an author he’d run into dozens of times over two years. She describes the publicist who assured her that he’d scheduled a series of readings to promote one of her books, only for her to discover, on the road, that none of the events existed. Solnit’s insight, ambient now, is that these slights are not discrete incidents; they fall on a spectrum. Especially in “Recollections,” her argument has less to do with gendered violence or professional discrimination than with how authority—over the facts, over oneself—is distributed. This represents a modest adjustment to Solnit’s earlier writings. After “The Mother of All Questions” came out, she drew criticism, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, for overestimating the impact of feminist storytelling. Here, Solnit separates voice-having, “that vital power,” into three pieces: audibility (people can hear you), credibility (people are willing to believe you), and consequence (your words have an effect).
Do Solnit’s words have an effect? Strangely, given her reputation as a polemicist, she seems to avoid resolution; many of her chapters end on unshowy, almost awkward lines. This quality speaks to a tension in her work—the extent to which her political activism is subsumed by her diffuse, lyrical sensibility. In fact, Solnit can be most persuasive not when dispensing feminist credos—“I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition,” she writes at one point—but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience. Conjuring the pre-smartphone past, she writes:
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book. . . . We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. . . . It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.
In the minute or so it took me to read that passage, my phone chirped twice. I had a Twitter notification; the Times sent a news alert about the coronavirus. I thought then that the world was designed to drag people to its exhausting surface, and yearned for its depths.