newyorker--2020-10-09--The Airbnb Gold Rush in Upstate New York

Wharton would not have approved of the three-story Airbnb house upstate that some friends and I rented at the end of July , seeking to escape not so much our fellow city dwellers as the isolation of quarantining in our dark city apartments .
( Theirs were in New York and Boston ; mine in D.C. We all got COVID-19 tests before the trip . )
When I first searched for rental listings in the region , in June , I discovered that the usually plentiful pickings on the platform were slim—fewer than a dozen properties across the Hudson Valley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The place we ended up booking , in the Catskills village of Tannersville , had no reviews , but the photos were appealing , with a blurb pointing out a new leather Chesterfield sofa , from the furniture startup Joybird .
The listing ’ s owner told me a woman had just cancelled her monthlong stay , so I should grab it fast .
It was only when my group arrived that we discovered there was no furniture in the TV area except a credenza and television pushed against a wall .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A loose bedroom window sash fell out onto one guest ’ s forehead .
On the same property across the yard , not more than twenty feet away , were two smaller cabins .
A family with young children had been renting them for two months , quarantining in one and lending the second to rotating groups of friends .
The ground was scattered with toys and drying bathing suits .
I later learned that the owner , Deirdre Patton , a former bar owner in New York City who moved to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the property with her partner at the beginning of the year and expected to spend a leisurely year fixing up the houses , in between renting them for the weekends .
Instead , she told me , the coronavirus struck , and “ we went into mad pandemic time just trying to renovate them really quickly , because so many people wanted long-term rentals.
” When the house and larger cabin first went on Airbnb in early June , “ We rented both of them without any pictures.
” The woman who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disappointed with the lack of polish : “ It wasn ’ t quite the condo they were hoping for , so they left , ” Patton said .
I reserved it less than twelve hours later .
Patton ’ s three Airbnbs on the property in Tannersville , and another two nearby , have been booked solid the entire summer , and fall looks no slower .
In another act of pandemic entrepreneurship , she also turned a coffee shop she owns in town into an artisanal contactless grocery store .
When the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in March , most people did not immediately attempt to get away .
Second-home owners who did retreat to the countryside became the targets of public disdain for serving as vectors of possible infection ; in late March , several upstate New York counties issued announcements asking weekenders to stay away .
But , as social distancing continued into the summer and infection rates in New York declined , city dwellers became desperate for a break from urban quarantine and newly interested in the spatial plenitude to be found in rural areas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hudson Valley , just to the north of the city along the river ; the Catskills , the mountainous area west of the Hudson ; and even central New York , north of the Catskills .
These areas have been standbys for New Yorkers since the eighteenth century , but their peak passed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties , when affordable air travel expanded horizons .
The area has seen growth again in the past decade , but nothing like that of the past six months .
During the pandemic , affluent New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Springs , Tulum , or Bali have settled for a different kind of vacation , more like taking a leave of absence from urban life , a few hours ’ car ride away .
The consequence is a kind of upstate gold rush , with property owners cashing in .
Airbnb searches for “ less densely populated ” destinations were up fifty per cent in August of 2020 , with upstate New York one of the most in-demand areas for long-term stays , according to a report released by the company .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Portland , Maine ; Summit County , Colorado ; Whitefish , Montana ; and the Shenandoah region , in Virginia . )
“ Our rural hosts are earning much more , ” Alexandra Dagg , the senior policy director at Airbnb for Canada and the northeastern United States , told me , adding that those in Oneonta , in central New York , saw a two-hundred-per-cent increase in income in June , 2020 , over June , 2019 .
I was shocked to learn that even Utica , a bleak , clammy Rust @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , where my grandparents live , saw a forty-one-per-cent jump .
The surge in demand has left both hosts and guests scrambling .
Aleksis Bertoni , an architectural designer living in Brooklyn , was searching for an upstate Airbnb for his fiancée ’ s thirtieth birthday , in August .
“ We asked to reserve three or four , and all of them rejected or denied our requests , ” Bertoni said ; it turned out that many owners had moved into their second homes during the pandemic but failed to take down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a polished four-bedroom house , in downtown Hudson .
The owner had been living in it , too , but noticing the boom she decided it would be worth vacating for a weekend rental—for two thousand dollars , more than double the usual price .
Bertoni had a pleasant stay there , but a friend of mine had less luck renting a Catskills cabin with a group of friends in August .
On the group ’ s first night in the house , my friend explained , the water from the faucets ran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the guests happened to work in water treatment and later jerry-rigged a solution , but the management company didn ’ t respond to their complaints until after the trip was over .
There was also a baby gate installed on the stairs to the basement , which had been advertised as finished ; when they clambered down , they discovered a large hole in the ceiling .
Jennifer Grimes runs Red Cottage Inc. , a boutique upstate vacation-rental service , which promises to free guests from the inconsistency of Airbnb .
Her “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ barely had a day available since the middle of March .
( I know because I tried . )
“ Everybody was contacting us saying , ‘ Your calendar isn ’ t working !
’ Sadly for them , it ’ s working just fine.
” Many of the homes listed on the site , three of which Grimes herself owns , are well renovated , modern , bright , and stocked with mid-century chairs , partaking of the airy smoothness that characterizes the archetypal appealing Airbnb .
With the pandemic , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safe housing , ” Grimes said .
“ The questions changed overnight , from ‘ Is the hot tub open ?
’ to ‘ What are the megabits per second for the Internet ?
’ ” Many white-collar workers are still working remotely , which is encouraging them to book longer stays , as the Airbnb report found .
Grimes set a two-week minimum booking to comply with coronavirus quarantine recommendations , and many of her clients have extended their stays ; two sets of guests are booked through next March .
Paul @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agency in Manhattan and a usual resident of Clinton Hill , is one of the owners who decided to rent out his family ’ s “ Ideal Mountain House , ” as Red Cottage lists it , in the Catskills hamlet of Olivebridge .
In March , as things were worsening in the city , he and his wife and two children fled to the house , a glassy box with the austere décor of a Blue Bottle Coffee .
They stayed until June 1st .
“ I always knew that I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but we all harbor a fantasy that we can be , ” Caiozzo said .
“ I was thrilled to go home.
” When he opened the house to rentals , it was booked immediately .
“ You get to an Airbnb , there ’ s no pots and pans , there ’ s no knives ; we have really fancy stuff in the house.
” The listing advertises mattresses , linens , and towels from the startup Parachute and a chef ’ s kitchen featuring a Bertazzoni range—a “ modern take on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so , Caiozzo isn ’ t optimistic about city dwellers ’ long-term prospects upstate .
“ What you ’ re going to see is a next wave back , call it a year or two away .
You ’ ll see people come home , ” he said .
His family , however , has moved once more , from Brooklyn across the Atlantic , to a rental apartment in Lisbon .
They looked for a place with low infection rates where schools were fully open , and Portugal won out .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a white wall somewhere else .
It came down to , did we want to move to Stockholm in September or be on the beach in September ?
” Caiozzo , who also has Italian citizenship , said .
“ I got introduced to this guy named João—he lived around the block in Brooklyn .
Now we ’ re renting a place from his best friend .
The government is working really hard to get you here .
They ’ re trying to position themselves as a remote-work hub.
” Meanwhile , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ availability in November and December , at a pandemic premium of two thousand and seven hundred dollars per week .
Pandemic migration , temporary or not , is the continuation of a very old inequity .
The rich are always more mobile than the poor , especially in the case of an emergency .
The Times has recently made a cottage industry out of urban flight , trumpeting “ coronavirus escape ” as early as May and offering guides for buyers on choosing the right suburb .
Such headlines have been met with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ houses are not actually selling any faster than urban ones and urban real estate is not seeing price cuts in many cities , as Curbed reported .
But in specific spots like upstate , at least , the shift is very real .
Megan Brenn-White , a marketer turned real-estate agent who moved from Brooklyn to Kerhonkson , in the Catskills , in 2016 , told me that her Keller Williams team did twenty-four million dollars in sales in 2019 ; this year , she predicts sixty million dollars .
In Ulster County @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is based , the median home-closing price in July , 2020 , was three hundred and twenty thousand dollars , compared with a little more than two hundred and seventy thousand in July , 2019 .
“ We ’ re seeing prices routinely ten to twenty per cent above ask or more , ” she said .
( Data are still scarce because homes take up to three months to close . )
Sales aren ’ t just to new residents .
“ We ’ re seeing people who are also starting to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ places or places that are less remote , ” Brenn-White said .
The dream for a lot of people , she said , is no longer a cabin hidden in the trees down a long dirt road : “ They want to be within ten minutes of Kingston.
” It ’ s another throwback : many of the grandest houses in the area were built boastfully close to main roads , long before the risk of motor noise .
Driving through the region today , you see the houses standing stately and tall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps due for revival .
On Brenn-White ’ s Instagram account , @ upstate_realestate , she shares stories and posts presenting an aspirational image of upstate life , offering all the possibilities attracting city dwellers : rustic barns , secret hiking trails , easy dog ownership , hygge cabin interiors with big fireplaces .
Along with her husband , a designer , she owns three houses ; when I spoke with Brenn-White , they were living in one of them and renting out the other two on Airbnb , one in Kerhonkson and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ booked a two-week-long stay in March and ended up staying through July , extending month by month , forcing Brenn-White to cancel other preëxisting bookings .
She had little recourse : “ When people stay over thirty days , they get the same rights as long-term tenants , ” she said , plus “ there were no evictions because of COVID.
” She threw her agency ’ s resources into helping the family find an alternative ; they eventually bought a property and left the Airbnb .
“ What we ’ re telling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can , ” Brenn-White said .
“ Think of it as a rental ; don ’ t make it be perfect.
” Profiting from pandemic-era travel or migration—whether by renting out a home , selling off property , or taking a commission on either—is almost as fraught as deciding to travel yourself : the safest option , as long as the pandemic lasts , is for people to stay put .
Many states , including New York , Connecticut , Kentucky , New Mexico , and Maine , still mandate fourteen-day self-quarantine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infection rates ; some accept negative test results as an alternative .
Still , Casey Scieszka , the proprietor of the Spruceton Inn in West Kill , New York , decided to remain closed when other hotels began reopening in June .
“ I have not become more comfortable with being personally responsible for any possible hospitalizations or deaths , ” Scieszka said .
It ’ s not for lack of demand : “ People e-mail me , direct-message me , call me every single day.
” In a typical summer , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Scieszka said ; she worries about the impact so many visitors would have on the county , which doesn ’ t have its own hospital .
“ When you grow up in a capitalist society in America , you are trained to feel crazy when you choose to not make money when you possibly could , ” she said .
For now , her family is instead living off her husband ’ s earnings as a children ’ s-book author and illustrator and painter .

In her late-career novel “Hudson River Bracketed,” Edith Wharton memorialized the landscape just north of New York City—the “precipitate plunge of many-tinted forest, the great sweep of the Hudson, and the cliffs on its other shore.” In Wharton’s time, upstate was where Manhattan’s wealthy migrated seasonally, taking trains to enormous homes like Wyndcliffe, in Rhinebeck—the stolid mansion of Wharton’s aunt, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, which is said to be the source of the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”—or the Mills family’s sixty-five-room Staatsburgh mansion, designed by McKim, Mead, and White and thought to be the inspiration for Bellomont in “The House of Mirth.” If they didn’t decamp to Beaux-Arts piles, they sought “the elaborate rusticity of an Adirondack camp,” as Wharton put it in that novel. For the gentry, leaving the city was practically compulsory, she wrote in “The Custom of the Country”: “In the early summer New York was the only place one could escape from New Yorkers.”
Wharton would not have approved of the three-story Airbnb house upstate that some friends and I rented at the end of July, seeking to escape not so much our fellow city dwellers as the isolation of quarantining in our dark city apartments. (Theirs were in New York and Boston; mine in D.C. We all got COVID-19 tests before the trip.) When I first searched for rental listings in the region, in June, I discovered that the usually plentiful pickings on the platform were slim—fewer than a dozen properties across the Hudson Valley and the Catskills matched my search. The place we ended up booking, in the Catskills village of Tannersville, had no reviews, but the photos were appealing, with a blurb pointing out a new leather Chesterfield sofa, from the furniture startup Joybird. The listing’s owner told me a woman had just cancelled her monthlong stay, so I should grab it fast. It was only when my group arrived that we discovered there was no furniture in the TV area except a credenza and television pushed against a wall. The dishwasher held a pond of stagnant water. A loose bedroom window sash fell out onto one guest’s forehead. On the same property across the yard, not more than twenty feet away, were two smaller cabins. A family with young children had been renting them for two months, quarantining in one and lending the second to rotating groups of friends. The ground was scattered with toys and drying bathing suits.
I later learned that the owner, Deirdre Patton, a former bar owner in New York City who moved to the Catskills in 2016, had closed on the property with her partner at the beginning of the year and expected to spend a leisurely year fixing up the houses, in between renting them for the weekends. Instead, she told me, the coronavirus struck, and “we went into mad pandemic time just trying to renovate them really quickly, because so many people wanted long-term rentals.” When the house and larger cabin first went on Airbnb in early June, “We rented both of them without any pictures.” The woman who had cancelled had actually arrived and been disappointed with the lack of polish: “It wasn’t quite the condo they were hoping for, so they left,” Patton said. I reserved it less than twelve hours later. Patton’s three Airbnbs on the property in Tannersville, and another two nearby, have been booked solid the entire summer, and fall looks no slower. In another act of pandemic entrepreneurship, she also turned a coffee shop she owns in town into an artisanal contactless grocery store.
When the pandemic first arrived in New York City, in March, most people did not immediately attempt to get away. Second-home owners who did retreat to the countryside became the targets of public disdain for serving as vectors of possible infection; in late March, several upstate New York counties issued announcements asking weekenders to stay away. But, as social distancing continued into the summer and infection rates in New York declined, city dwellers became desperate for a break from urban quarantine and newly interested in the spatial plenitude to be found in rural areas. The closest at hand were the Hudson Valley, just to the north of the city along the river; the Catskills, the mountainous area west of the Hudson; and even central New York, north of the Catskills. These areas have been standbys for New Yorkers since the eighteenth century, but their peak passed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when affordable air travel expanded horizons. The area has seen growth again in the past decade, but nothing like that of the past six months. During the pandemic, affluent New Yorkers who might otherwise escape to Palm Springs, Tulum, or Bali have settled for a different kind of vacation, more like taking a leave of absence from urban life, a few hours’ car ride away.
The consequence is a kind of upstate gold rush, with property owners cashing in. Airbnb searches for “less densely populated” destinations were up fifty per cent in August of 2020, with upstate New York one of the most in-demand areas for long-term stays, according to a report released by the company. (Others include the mountains of Vermont; Portland, Maine; Summit County, Colorado; Whitefish, Montana; and the Shenandoah region, in Virginia.) “Our rural hosts are earning much more,” Alexandra Dagg, the senior policy director at Airbnb for Canada and the northeastern United States, told me, adding that those in Oneonta, in central New York, saw a two-hundred-per-cent increase in income in June, 2020, over June, 2019. I was shocked to learn that even Utica, a bleak, clammy Rust Belt city an hour north of Oneonta, where my grandparents live, saw a forty-one-per-cent jump.
Catskill Mountain House, between 1900 and 1910. Photograph from Detroit Publishing Company / Library of Congress
The surge in demand has left both hosts and guests scrambling. Aleksis Bertoni, an architectural designer living in Brooklyn, was searching for an upstate Airbnb for his fiancée’s thirtieth birthday, in August. “We asked to reserve three or four, and all of them rejected or denied our requests,” Bertoni said; it turned out that many owners had moved into their second homes during the pandemic but failed to take down their listings. Bertoni finally came upon a polished four-bedroom house, in downtown Hudson. The owner had been living in it, too, but noticing the boom she decided it would be worth vacating for a weekend rental—for two thousand dollars, more than double the usual price. Bertoni had a pleasant stay there, but a friend of mine had less luck renting a Catskills cabin with a group of friends in August. On the group’s first night in the house, my friend explained, the water from the faucets ran rust-red before stopping entirely. One of the guests happened to work in water treatment and later jerry-rigged a solution, but the management company didn’t respond to their complaints until after the trip was over. There was also a baby gate installed on the stairs to the basement, which had been advertised as finished; when they clambered down, they discovered a large hole in the ceiling.
Jennifer Grimes runs Red Cottage Inc., a boutique upstate vacation-rental service, which promises to free guests from the inconsistency of Airbnb. Her “curated portfolio” of rentals—clear water guaranteed—has barely had a day available since the middle of March. (I know because I tried.) “Everybody was contacting us saying, ‘Your calendar isn’t working!’ Sadly for them, it’s working just fine.” Many of the homes listed on the site, three of which Grimes herself owns, are well renovated, modern, bright, and stocked with mid-century chairs, partaking of the airy smoothness that characterizes the archetypal appealing Airbnb. With the pandemic, though, “We went from hospitality to safe housing,” Grimes said. “The questions changed overnight, from ‘Is the hot tub open?’ to ‘What are the megabits per second for the Internet?’ ” Many white-collar workers are still working remotely, which is encouraging them to book longer stays, as the Airbnb report found. Grimes set a two-week minimum booking to comply with coronavirus quarantine recommendations, and many of her clients have extended their stays; two sets of guests are booked through next March.
Paul Caiozzo, the founder of a branding agency in Manhattan and a usual resident of Clinton Hill, is one of the owners who decided to rent out his family’s “Ideal Mountain House,” as Red Cottage lists it, in the Catskills hamlet of Olivebridge. In March, as things were worsening in the city, he and his wife and two children fled to the house, a glassy box with the austere décor of a Blue Bottle Coffee. They stayed until June 1st. “I always knew that I’m not a permanent country guy, but we all harbor a fantasy that we can be,” Caiozzo said. “I was thrilled to go home.” When he opened the house to rentals, it was booked immediately. “You get to an Airbnb, there’s no pots and pans, there’s no knives; we have really fancy stuff in the house.” The listing advertises mattresses, linens, and towels from the startup Parachute and a chef’s kitchen featuring a Bertazzoni range—a “modern take on a cabin in the woods.”
Even so, Caiozzo isn’t optimistic about city dwellers’ long-term prospects upstate. “What you’re going to see is a next wave back, call it a year or two away. You’ll see people come home,” he said. His family, however, has moved once more, from Brooklyn across the Atlantic, to a rental apartment in Lisbon. They looked for a place with low infection rates where schools were fully open, and Portugal won out. “I can talk on Zoom in front of a white wall somewhere else. It came down to, did we want to move to Stockholm in September or be on the beach in September?” Caiozzo, who also has Italian citizenship, said. “I got introduced to this guy named João—he lived around the block in Brooklyn. Now we’re renting a place from his best friend. The government is working really hard to get you here. They’re trying to position themselves as a remote-work hub.” Meanwhile, Caiozzo’s mountain house has scattered availability in November and December, at a pandemic premium of two thousand and seven hundred dollars per week.
Pandemic migration, temporary or not, is the continuation of a very old inequity. The rich are always more mobile than the poor, especially in the case of an emergency. The Times has recently made a cottage industry out of urban flight, trumpeting “coronavirus escape” as early as May and offering guides for buyers on choosing the right suburb. Such headlines have been met with a riposte of data showing that suburban houses are not actually selling any faster than urban ones and urban real estate is not seeing price cuts in many cities, as Curbed reported. But in specific spots like upstate, at least, the shift is very real. Megan Brenn-White, a marketer turned real-estate agent who moved from Brooklyn to Kerhonkson, in the Catskills, in 2016, told me that her Keller Williams team did twenty-four million dollars in sales in 2019; this year, she predicts sixty million dollars. In Ulster County, in the Catskills, where she is based, the median home-closing price in July, 2020, was three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, compared with a little more than two hundred and seventy thousand in July, 2019. “We’re seeing prices routinely ten to twenty per cent above ask or more,” she said. (Data are still scarce because homes take up to three months to close.)
Sales aren’t just to new residents. “We’re seeing people who are also starting to sell their weekend places to get bigger places or places that are less remote,” Brenn-White said. The dream for a lot of people, she said, is no longer a cabin hidden in the trees down a long dirt road: “They want to be within ten minutes of Kingston.” It’s another throwback: many of the grandest houses in the area were built boastfully close to main roads, long before the risk of motor noise. Driving through the region today, you see the houses standing stately and tall but often crumbling, their faded glamour perhaps due for revival.
On Brenn-White’s Instagram account, @upstate_realestate, she shares stories and posts presenting an aspirational image of upstate life, offering all the possibilities attracting city dwellers: rustic barns, secret hiking trails, easy dog ownership, hygge cabin interiors with big fireplaces. Along with her husband, a designer, she owns three houses; when I spoke with Brenn-White, they were living in one of them and renting out the other two on Airbnb, one in Kerhonkson and one in Livingston Manor. One family booked a two-week-long stay in March and ended up staying through July, extending month by month, forcing Brenn-White to cancel other preëxisting bookings. She had little recourse: “When people stay over thirty days, they get the same rights as long-term tenants,” she said, plus “there were no evictions because of COVID.” She threw her agency’s resources into helping the family find an alternative; they eventually bought a property and left the Airbnb. “What we’re telling people now is, just buy if you can,” Brenn-White said. “Think of it as a rental; don’t make it be perfect.”


newyorker--2020-10-10--“The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Reviewed: A Playwright’s Boldly Self-Aware Comedy of Art and Compromis

“The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Reviewed: A Playwright’s Boldly Self-Aware Comedy of Art and Compromise

The delightful chutzpah of Radha Blank ’ s first feature , “ The Forty-Year-Old Version ” ( streaming on Netflix ) —which she wrote , directed , and stars in—starts with the fact that she plays a character named Radha Blank , who , like the real-life person , is a playwright , mostly of unproduced plays , who seeks an alternative artistic outlet as a hip-hop artist .
Radha ( that ’ s the character , as distinguished from the real-life Blank ) , a Black woman who lives in Harlem , was a young star of the theatre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Under 30 ” award , but now , months away from turning forty , has long been unable to get her plays produced .
She works , without fulfillment , as a teacher of playwriting at a Harlem high school .
She lives alone , with no romantic relationship anywhere in the vicinity , and she is mourning the loss of her mother , an artist , who died a year ago .
She enjoys her hip-hop efforts , though they , too , prove fruitless .
Then opportunity unexpectedly knocks : a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( Reed Birney ) , agrees to produce her new play , “ Harlem Ave. , ” about a young Black couple in Harlem who own a grocery store threatened by gentrification—but he demands that she whiten it up and add elements which she considers “ poverty porn.
” When a playwright writes and directs a movie , it should be no surprise that it ’ s teeming with dialogue , and that the actors are directed to deliver it with vigorous inflection .
Those things are true of “ The Forty-Year-Old Version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something rarer , more precious , and more original : she has crafted an aesthetic that frames these voices and seemingly extrudes them from the screen in high relief .
The images—shot in black-and-white , often in long takes , often with piquantly oblique framings of the characters and with brisk camera moves linking different parts of the action—foreground the actors ’ presence and ideas forcefully and distinctively .
The movie is a treasure chest of voices , thanks not only to the dialogue but to the synergy of writing , acting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is Eric Branco . )
That sense of intimacy and proximity is all the more surprising inasmuch as “ The Forty-Year-Old Version ” is a comedy , and one that borrows from the conventions and the playbook of TV sketches , sitcoms , and Hollywood tradition .
The movie ’ s artifices are conspicuous , and the positioning of Radha ’ s character is familiar—the solitary urbanite who ’ s a discerning observer of the city life that she loves even while she contends with its practical difficulties .
But “ The Forty-Year-Old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which Blank doesn ’ t spare Radha—and in which the character ’ s attitudes and antipathies don ’ t take place in a void but , rather , snap back at her and make her feel their sting .
With her loneliness , her frustration , and her self-conscious drift toward middle age , Radha has an edge of cantankerousness , but she finds it consistently challenged .
She gets publicly shamed for her unseemly impatience during a commute to work , when the bus she ’ s riding is delayed by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regards her students ’ work with transparently toned-down disapproval , but when she tunes them out she loses control of the class .
Her homeless neighbor , Lamont ( Jacob Ming-Trent ) , calls her out for treating him with condescension .
Radha ’ s story is centered on self-consciousness , on conscience , and it ’ s mirrored in the bustling and jostling of her daily encounters and routines as much as in her major personal and artistic crises .
Blank fills the film with types—her main characters are introduced in caricatures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet their prime traits , too , are those of consciousness and self-awareness ( or the absurd lack thereof ) .
Radha ’ s manager , Archie Choi ( Peter Kim ) , is a gay Korean-American man who has been her friend since high school .
( She was his prom date when he was still in the closet . )
He ’ s much more successful in the theatre world than she is , but he represents her—vigorously—as something of a special , unprofitable client on the basis of their friendship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the two attend a cocktail party to meet Whitman , and the encounter proves disastrous , Radha finds all theatre doors definitively slammed shut in her face .
So , picking up on her high-school passion and responding to a few coincidental signs and hints , she visits a young hip-hop producer , in Brooklyn , in the hope of finding a more direct outlet for her literary voice .
That producer , named D , is played by Oswin Benjamin , in his first film role , and it ’ s one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Benjamin , who has an extraordinary vocal instrument , low and grainy and quietly urgent , also has a distinctive physical presence ; he seems to fill the room even when just sitting still , and Blank perceptively deploys these qualities to define both D ’ s character and Radha ’ s personal and creative relationship with him .
The comedic complications of Radha ’ s hip-hop adventures—spoiler alert : she ’ s not an overnight sensation—nonetheless yield deeply moving , thrilling , fine-grained bursts of creative energy .
Her first , uneasy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Brownsville , turns out to be an extraordinary performance that impresses even the skeptical D. There ’ s a remarkable rap-battle scene featuring only female performers , to which D brings Radha and which Blank films with rapt admiration .
Even more extraordinary is a scene—the morning after the pair ’ s first night together , in Radha ’ s apartment—in which D coaxes Radha and himself , both mourning their mothers , to commemorate them in improvised rhymes , which Blank films in a matched pair of images , one from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coalesces , and another , closer and in shadows , of the two as they reach deep into themselves to give lyrical voice to their grief and their longing .
It ’ s one of the most moving fusions of image and performance in recent movies .
Throughout “ The Forty-Year-Old Version , ” Blank confronts the dramatist ’ s over-all problem of having her creative expression mediated by professional , administrative , financial , and social forces—and the particular problem of a Black artist whose career depends on white decision-makers .
One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involves Whitman ’ s admonition to Radha that , in order for the white theatregoing audience to appreciate her play about white gentrifiers in Harlem , they need to see versions of themselves in it .
Needless to say , the results of such mandated compromise don ’ t turn out well .
Yet in the very depiction of Whitman , and also of the obliviously racist white director he hires ( played by Welker White ) , Blank mirrors , with a sly and sardonic wink , the very same maneuver , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In dramatizing the efforts of a Black artist to present her experience honestly in a white-run media environment , the movie links the New York theatre scene with the world of movies in which Blank is working .
Blank punctuates the action with brief montages of New York voices , whether from Radha ’ s neighbors or students , that come off not as mini-documentaries but as Radha ’ s sharpened and crafted , character-like versions of the vibrant personalities who populate her daily life—of the transmuting of experience into imagination , life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” is the story of the forging of artistic consciousness , of having something to say and creating a persona with which to say it ; of finding ways to convey reality by means of artifice in search of inner truth—and confronting with practical wisdom the hostile environment in which that truth will be presented .
“ The Forty-Year-Old Version ” is a self-aware movie on the subject of self-awareness , a quality that Blank anchors , conspicuously and self-revealingly , in pain , grief , humiliation , self-doubt , and struggle .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that renders it endurable—and enjoyable .
That makes the entire movie its own happy ending .

The delightful chutzpah of Radha Blank’s first feature, “The Forty-Year-Old Version” (streaming on Netflix)—which she wrote, directed, and stars in—starts with the fact that she plays a character named Radha Blank, who, like the real-life person, is a playwright, mostly of unproduced plays, who seeks an alternative artistic outlet as a hip-hop artist. Radha (that’s the character, as distinguished from the real-life Blank), a Black woman who lives in Harlem, was a young star of the theatre, the winner of a “30 Under 30” award, but now, months away from turning forty, has long been unable to get her plays produced. She works, without fulfillment, as a teacher of playwriting at a Harlem high school. She lives alone, with no romantic relationship anywhere in the vicinity, and she is mourning the loss of her mother, an artist, who died a year ago. She enjoys her hip-hop efforts, though they, too, prove fruitless. Then opportunity unexpectedly knocks: a nearly elderly white producer, J. Whitman (Reed Birney), agrees to produce her new play, “Harlem Ave.,” about a young Black couple in Harlem who own a grocery store threatened by gentrification—but he demands that she whiten it up and add elements which she considers “poverty porn.”
When a playwright writes and directs a movie, it should be no surprise that it’s teeming with dialogue, and that the actors are directed to deliver it with vigorous inflection. Those things are true of “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” but Blank has also accomplished something rarer, more precious, and more original: she has crafted an aesthetic that frames these voices and seemingly extrudes them from the screen in high relief. The images—shot in black-and-white, often in long takes, often with piquantly oblique framings of the characters and with brisk camera moves linking different parts of the action—foreground the actors’ presence and ideas forcefully and distinctively. The movie is a treasure chest of voices, thanks not only to the dialogue but to the synergy of writing, acting, and visual composition. (The cinematographer is Eric Branco.)
That sense of intimacy and proximity is all the more surprising inasmuch as “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is a comedy, and one that borrows from the conventions and the playbook of TV sketches, sitcoms, and Hollywood tradition. The movie’s artifices are conspicuous, and the positioning of Radha’s character is familiar—the solitary urbanite who’s a discerning observer of the city life that she loves even while she contends with its practical difficulties. But “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is a full-circle city satire in which Blank doesn’t spare Radha—and in which the character’s attitudes and antipathies don’t take place in a void but, rather, snap back at her and make her feel their sting. With her loneliness, her frustration, and her self-conscious drift toward middle age, Radha has an edge of cantankerousness, but she finds it consistently challenged. She gets publicly shamed for her unseemly impatience during a commute to work, when the bus she’s riding is delayed by the boarding of disabled passengers. She regards her students’ work with transparently toned-down disapproval, but when she tunes them out she loses control of the class. Her homeless neighbor, Lamont (Jacob Ming-Trent), calls her out for treating him with condescension. Radha’s story is centered on self-consciousness, on conscience, and it’s mirrored in the bustling and jostling of her daily encounters and routines as much as in her major personal and artistic crises.
Blank fills the film with types—her main characters are introduced in caricatures that range from tender to sardonic, yet their prime traits, too, are those of consciousness and self-awareness (or the absurd lack thereof). Radha’s manager, Archie Choi (Peter Kim), is a gay Korean-American man who has been her friend since high school. (She was his prom date when he was still in the closet.) He’s much more successful in the theatre world than she is, but he represents her—vigorously—as something of a special, unprofitable client on the basis of their friendship, which Radha sorely tests. When the two attend a cocktail party to meet Whitman, and the encounter proves disastrous, Radha finds all theatre doors definitively slammed shut in her face. So, picking up on her high-school passion and responding to a few coincidental signs and hints, she visits a young hip-hop producer, in Brooklyn, in the hope of finding a more direct outlet for her literary voice. That producer, named D, is played by Oswin Benjamin, in his first film role, and it’s one of the great recent acting débuts. Benjamin, who has an extraordinary vocal instrument, low and grainy and quietly urgent, also has a distinctive physical presence; he seems to fill the room even when just sitting still, and Blank perceptively deploys these qualities to define both D’s character and Radha’s personal and creative relationship with him.
The comedic complications of Radha’s hip-hop adventures—spoiler alert: she’s not an overnight sensation—nonetheless yield deeply moving, thrilling, fine-grained bursts of creative energy. Her first, uneasy effort in D’s apartment-studio, in Brownsville, turns out to be an extraordinary performance that impresses even the skeptical D. There’s a remarkable rap-battle scene featuring only female performers, to which D brings Radha and which Blank films with rapt admiration. Even more extraordinary is a scene—the morning after the pair’s first night together, in Radha’s apartment—in which D coaxes Radha and himself, both mourning their mothers, to commemorate them in improvised rhymes, which Blank films in a matched pair of images, one from afar, as the idea arises and coalesces, and another, closer and in shadows, of the two as they reach deep into themselves to give lyrical voice to their grief and their longing. It’s one of the most moving fusions of image and performance in recent movies.
Throughout “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Blank confronts the dramatist’s over-all problem of having her creative expression mediated by professional, administrative, financial, and social forces—and the particular problem of a Black artist whose career depends on white decision-makers. One of the key pivots of the movie involves Whitman’s admonition to Radha that, in order for the white theatregoing audience to appreciate her play about white gentrifiers in Harlem, they need to see versions of themselves in it. Needless to say, the results of such mandated compromise don’t turn out well. Yet in the very depiction of Whitman, and also of the obliviously racist white director he hires (played by Welker White), Blank mirrors, with a sly and sardonic wink, the very same maneuver, albeit without the sense of compromise. In dramatizing the efforts of a Black artist to present her experience honestly in a white-run media environment, the movie links the New York theatre scene with the world of movies in which Blank is working.
Blank punctuates the action with brief montages of New York voices, whether from Radha’s neighbors or students, that come off not as mini-documentaries but as Radha’s sharpened and crafted, character-like versions of the vibrant personalities who populate her daily life—of the transmuting of experience into imagination, life into art. “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is the story of the forging of artistic consciousness, of having something to say and creating a persona with which to say it; of finding ways to convey reality by means of artifice in search of inner truth—and confronting with practical wisdom the hostile environment in which that truth will be presented. “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is a self-aware movie on the subject of self-awareness, a quality that Blank anchors, conspicuously and self-revealingly, in pain, grief, humiliation, self-doubt, and struggle. It’s the element of comedy that renders it endurable—and enjoyable. That makes the entire movie its own happy ending.


newyorker--2020-10-09--The French Secret to Ratatouille, a Last Taste of Summer

The kitchen was at Citronelle , the Washington , D.C. , restaurant run by the great Michel Richard .
The executive chef , David Deshaies , was showing me how to prepare ratatouille .
“ It is made with the five vegetables that every family can grow in its home garden , ” he said—nothing exotic , nothing hard to find ( essential principle No .
1 ) .
He then counted them off , on his fingers : “ Eggplant , red peppers , onions , tomatoes , and zucchini.
” ( Plus garlic , which somehow is never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though no ratatouille can be made without it . )
I remembered Deshaies ’ s point several years later , when I found myself , on an early-autumn day , in the Alpine village of Lanslebourg , overlooking a river and a row of domestic gardens .
There they were , in leafy abundance : all five ingredients , in their end-of-summer ratatouille bounty .
The quantities are roughly equal ( essential principle No .
2 ) , a matter of eyeball judgment rather than weighing on a scale , since the onions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ zucchini less so , peppers hollow , and eggplants only marginally heavier than air .
In an equally casual spirit , they are cut up in chunks : i.e.
, no fine dice .
“ We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version , with small and perfect cubes , ” Richard said , watching David and me .
“ But it was too fancy .
Ratatouille is a rustic dish.
” Most importantly ( principle No .
3 ) , the ingredients are cooked separately—never in the same pan .
“ What you want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I thought , Who wouldn ’ t want that ?
In Richard ’ s kitchen , the onions , eggplants , and zucchini were sautéed in olive oil , one after the other .
The peppers were cooked , on a tray , in a hot oven .
The tomatoes were the most involved .
First , they were skinned in accordance with a particular French practice involving two baths of water , one just-boiled and the other iced .
( “ The French never eat the skin .
It comes out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me confidently . )
The naked tomatoes were then cut into quarters .
The juices and drippy , jellylike seeds got scooped out and dropped into a sieve atop a bowl , producing , by the end of the session , a formidably goopy , splashy pond of tomato water .
( This was for later , to be added when completing the ratatouille , a magic hydrating element . )
The tomato quarters , meanwhile , now looking like red flower petals , were arranged on a baking sheet , painted with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sugar , and roasted at a low heat until they were plump and swollen .
They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients .
Only at the end were the five cooked vegetables mixed together—in a pot , with shots of red-wine vinegar ( a bright , slightly racy acidity , to balance the dish ’ s sweetness ) —and heated gently .
The process is said to produce a more animated jumble of flavors than if all of the ingredients had been plopped in a pan at the same time .
After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t think further of it , except to register that , after having given up on ratatouille for many years , I liked this one so much that I have made it every summer thereafter , without fail .
It was only upon serving the dish to friends , who inquired about the recipe , that I learned that most people don ’ t bother cooking their ratatouille ingredients separately , and that many didn ’ t know it was a possibility .
Even the most recent and generally pretty impressive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” tells you to heap the onion , peppers , and tomatoes into a pot together .
The practice put me in mind of the last pre-Citronelle ratatouille I ’ d made , which was M. F. K. Fisher ’ s version , learned from “ a large strong woman ” from “ an island off Spain.
” This , too , was a dump-and-stir preparation , and it was then stewed for five to six hours .
It tasted of mush .
It was only then that I realized how important the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Even vignerons , when bottling a wine made of different grape varieties , can either toss everything in a vat together and ferment the lot ( creating what is sometimes known as a “ field blend ” ) or vinify each one separately and blend at the end , producing a more controlled product in which you can often taste each grape .
And many famous French stews turn out—at least in their classic , cheffy version—to be minimally stewed .
Consider , for instance , a navarin d ’ agneau , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or turnip , which was the traditional accompaniment until the acceptance of the potato in the late eighteen century .
While the meat roasts , the vegetables are cooked one by one—turnips ( if you ’ re a traditionalist ) or potatoes ( if not ) , baby carrots , small onions , and spring peas—and only combined at the end .
The practice doesn ’ t seem to have a name , which is a curiosity for a culture that seems to have one for every possible culinary preparation or tool .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ found a name yet , although I may have come across the first instance of the method being described , in Menon ’ s “ La Cuisinière bourgeoise , ” or “ The Household Cook , ” from 1746 .
( The “ bourgeoise ” of the title , in the context of a cookbook , could be loosely translated as “ of the home ” or “ of the family.
” ) There are many “ cuisine bourgeoise ” books in France—almost every accomplished chef has written for the layman—but Menon ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book ’ s second edition ( from 1759 ) , he describes two ways of making duck and turnips : the home cook ’ s approach , browning the bird in a pot with flour and butter , and tossing in the other ingredients as you prepare them ( some broth , your sliced turnips , a bouquet garni , salt , pepper ) , and letting them cook until they are a stew .
Finish it with a splash of vinegar and you have , in the same pot , both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with it .
“ Voilà la façon de faire le canard aux navets à la Bourgeoise.
” Or there is the cheffy approach , in which the duck is cooked on its own , as are the turnips ( turned like almonds and cooked in “ bon bouillon ” ) , as is the sauce ( a reduction of veal jus and a vegetable coulis ) .
By the time your sauce is finished , your duck will be ready for it .
Voilà : the things cooked separately , together .
• @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together into a bouquet garni , plus 1 tsp .
of thyme leaves 1 .
Prepare tomatoes .
Heat oven to 225 degrees .
Make a small slit at the top of each tomato without cutting into the flesh .
Prepare two bowls , one with ice water and one with just-boiled water .
Drop the tomatoes into the hot water , and , if necessary , weigh them down with a heavy slotted spoon , to keep them from floating .
After 2–3 minutes , check the skin for wrinkles and signs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Test by pulling off a bit of skin with a paring knife .
If it comes off easily , pull tomatoes out , one by one , and drop them into the ice bath .
After a minute or two , retrieve them and peel off the skin with your fingers .
It should come right off , though some tomatoes might need to be peeled with a knife ( not to worry , it ’ s normal ) .

“Ratatouille”: the word evokes French vegetables, meatless health, sunshine, and a jolly Pixar film that, for about six months, my young twin sons watched, seated at the kitchen table, while waiting for their dinner. The word also evokes memories of disappointment. I’ve always loved the idea of the dish but was never thrilled with what I made, and eventually I stopped trying. That was before I learned three essential ratatouille principles, which were proffered—very casually—when I was helping out in a French kitchen, and which changed my approach irrevocably.
The kitchen was at Citronelle, the Washington, D.C., restaurant run by the great Michel Richard. The executive chef, David Deshaies, was showing me how to prepare ratatouille. “It is made with the five vegetables that every family can grow in its home garden,” he said—nothing exotic, nothing hard to find (essential principle No. 1). He then counted them off, on his fingers: “Eggplant, red peppers, onions, tomatoes, and zucchini.” (Plus garlic, which somehow is never treated as a sixth ingredient, even though no ratatouille can be made without it.) I remembered Deshaies’s point several years later, when I found myself, on an early-autumn day, in the Alpine village of Lanslebourg, overlooking a river and a row of domestic gardens. There they were, in leafy abundance: all five ingredients, in their end-of-summer ratatouille bounty.
The quantities are roughly equal (essential principle No. 2), a matter of eyeball judgment rather than weighing on a scale, since the onions are dense, tomatoes fairly weighty, zucchini less so, peppers hollow, and eggplants only marginally heavier than air. In an equally casual spirit, they are cut up in chunks: i.e., no fine dice. “We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version, with small and perfect cubes,” Richard said, watching David and me. “But it was too fancy. Ratatouille is a rustic dish.”
Most importantly (principle No. 3), the ingredients are cooked separately—never in the same pan. “What you want is vegetable jam,” Deshaies said. I thought, Who wouldn’t want that?
In Richard’s kitchen, the onions, eggplants, and zucchini were sautéed in olive oil, one after the other. The peppers were cooked, on a tray, in a hot oven. The tomatoes were the most involved. First, they were skinned in accordance with a particular French practice involving two baths of water, one just-boiled and the other iced. (“The French never eat the skin. It comes out in your poop!” Richard told me confidently. ) The naked tomatoes were then cut into quarters. The juices and drippy, jellylike seeds got scooped out and dropped into a sieve atop a bowl, producing, by the end of the session, a formidably goopy, splashy pond of tomato water. (This was for later, to be added when completing the ratatouille, a magic hydrating element.) The tomato quarters, meanwhile, now looking like red flower petals, were arranged on a baking sheet, painted with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and sugar, and roasted at a low heat until they were plump and swollen. They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients.
Only at the end were the five cooked vegetables mixed together—in a pot, with shots of red-wine vinegar (a bright, slightly racy acidity, to balance the dish’s sweetness)—and heated gently. The process is said to produce a more animated jumble of flavors than if all of the ingredients had been plopped in a pan at the same time. After learning the recipe at Citronelle, I didn’t think further of it, except to register that, after having given up on ratatouille for many years, I liked this one so much that I have made it every summer thereafter, without fail. It was only upon serving the dish to friends, who inquired about the recipe, that I learned that most people don’t bother cooking their ratatouille ingredients separately, and that many didn’t know it was a possibility. Even the most recent and generally pretty impressive edition of “The Joy of Cooking” tells you to heap the onion, peppers, and tomatoes into a pot together. The practice put me in mind of the last pre-Citronelle ratatouille I’d made, which was M. F. K. Fisher’s version, learned from “a large strong woman” from “an island off Spain.” This, too, was a dump-and-stir preparation, and it was then stewed for five to six hours. It tasted of mush.
It was only then that I realized how important the cook-things-separately approach is in French cooking. Even vignerons, when bottling a wine made of different grape varieties, can either toss everything in a vat together and ferment the lot (creating what is sometimes known as a “field blend”) or vinify each one separately and blend at the end, producing a more controlled product in which you can often taste each grape. And many famous French stews turn out—at least in their classic, cheffy version—to be minimally stewed. Consider, for instance, a navarin d’agneau, a spring-lamb-and-vegetable dish named after the navet, or turnip, which was the traditional accompaniment until the acceptance of the potato in the late eighteen century. While the meat roasts, the vegetables are cooked one by one—turnips (if you’re a traditionalist) or potatoes (if not), baby carrots, small onions, and spring peas—and only combined at the end.
The practice doesn’t seem to have a name, which is a curiosity for a culture that seems to have one for every possible culinary preparation or tool. At least, I haven’t found a name yet, although I may have come across the first instance of the method being described, in Menon’s “La Cuisinière bourgeoise,” or “The Household Cook,” from 1746. (The “bourgeoise” of the title, in the context of a cookbook, could be loosely translated as “of the home” or “of the family.”) There are many “cuisine bourgeoise” books in France—almost every accomplished chef has written for the layman—but Menon’s was the first. In the book’s second edition (from 1759), he describes two ways of making duck and turnips: the home cook’s approach, browning the bird in a pot with flour and butter, and tossing in the other ingredients as you prepare them (some broth, your sliced turnips, a bouquet garni, salt, pepper), and letting them cook until they are a stew. Finish it with a splash of vinegar and you have, in the same pot, both the duck and a thick sauce to serve with it. “Voilà la façon de faire le canard aux navets à la Bourgeoise.” Or there is the cheffy approach, in which the duck is cooked on its own, as are the turnips (turned like almonds and cooked in“bon bouillon”), as is the sauce (a reduction of veal jus and a vegetable coulis). By the time your sauce is finished, your duck will be ready for it. Voilà: the things cooked separately, together.
Ratatouille
Serves 8
Ingredients
2 lbs. tomatoes, preferably fleshy plum tomatoes (rather than a juicy heritage breed)
A good olive oil
A pinch of sugar
A pinch of saffron (optional)
4 medium-sized red bell peppers
3 large onions, peeled and roughly diced
3 medium-sized eggplants, peeled and roughly diced
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
Sprigs of rosemary and thyme, tied together into a bouquet garni, plus 1 tsp. of thyme leaves
A handful of basil leaves (optional)
3 medium-sized zucchini
1-3 Tbsp. red-wine vinegar, according to taste
A dozen pitted black Kalamata olives (optional)
Salt and pepper
Basil leaves
Directions
1. Prepare tomatoes. Heat oven to 225 degrees. Make a small slit at the top of each tomato without cutting into the flesh. Prepare two bowls, one with ice water and one with just-boiled water. Drop the tomatoes into the hot water, and, if necessary, weigh them down with a heavy slotted spoon, to keep them from floating. After 2–3 minutes, check the skin for wrinkles and signs that it is separating from the fruit. Test by pulling off a bit of skin with a paring knife. If it comes off easily, pull tomatoes out, one by one, and drop them into the ice bath. After a minute or two, retrieve them and peel off the skin with your fingers. It should come right off, though some tomatoes might need to be peeled with a knife (not to worry, it’s normal).


newyorker--2020-10-09--Nobel Laureate Louise Glück in The New Yorker

Though Glück ’ s first poems in the magazine belong to a style she soon abandoned , they establish themes and attitudes that have carried through her career .
“ Late Snow ” and “ The Racer ’ s Widow ” unsparingly intertwine mortality with intimacy ; “ Letter from Provence ” lampoons the tourist ’ s ( and perhaps the poet ’ s ) tendency to romanticize and thus obscure the real .
As Chiasson put it , “ Only a poet susceptible to authentic rapture makes an art out of hunting down its counterfeit , ” and , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Glück began to hone the “ intensity of address , leanness of sentiment , and precision of speech ” that would allow her access to the sublime .
Glück has long and famously used mythology to explore—though , crucially , not to elevate—experience .
Early examples , such as “ Pietà ” and “ Aphrodite , ” physicalize the female archetypes of mother and lover ; in Glück ’ s taut telling , these idealized women are subject not only to the narrative structures they support but also to the effects of time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ephemeral past and the inevitable future , between transience and permanence .
In “ Night Song , ” a moment of passion banishes a fear of change— “ Tonight I ’ m not afraid / to feel the revolutions.
” Sex is a memento mori : “ You ’ ll get what you want .
You ’ ll get your oblivion.
” The often dreamlike universe of Glück ’ s poems is largely indifferent to human affairs ; its sense of alienation can be devastating but also , sometimes simultaneously , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In “ Field Flowers , ” from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “ The Wild Iris , ” a collectively voiced bunch of buttercups jab at humans ’ , and maybe especially artists ’ , transcendent ambitions : “ What are you saying ?
That you want / eternal life ?
Are your thoughts really / as compelling as all that ?
” ( Lyric poetry takes another hit— “ O / the soul !
the soul !
Is it enough / only to look inward ?
” ) Meanwhile , the gardener-speaker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a humble , businesslike fashion : “ In your extended absence , you permit me / use of earth , anticipating / some return on investment.
” The speaker admits “ failure in my assignments ” but goes on to claim a right to that failure , as a creator .
“ All this / belongs to you : on the other hand , / I planted the seeds .
.
.
” Glück writes , “ and it was my heart / broken by the blight.
” Furthermore , the divine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plight : The gardener ’ s lament is echoed in “ Gold Lily.
” “ All around , / my companions are failing , thinking / you do not see , ” the dying flower entreats .
“ How / can they know you see / unless you save us ?
” These are creations forsaken by their creator .
In “ Nest , ” a sort of ars poetica that The New Yorker published , in 1999 , Glück asserts , “ in my life , I was trying to be / @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all its transformation and ventriloquy , her work ’ s revelations are rooted in observation ; epic frameworks illuminate frequently ugly truths .
“ I never turned anyone into a pig , ” begins “ Circe ’ s Power.
” “ Some people are pigs ; I make them / look like pigs.
” That poem ’ s penultimate stanza contains a succinct description of Glück ’ s own particular skill : “ every sorceress is / a pragmatist at heart ; nobody / sees essence who can ’ t / face limitation.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ individual perspective and syntax , she continually probes toward a deeper , wider resonance .
“ The world / was whole because / it shattered , ” she writes , in “ Formaggio.
” “ But in the deep fissures , smaller worlds appeared.
” The world ’ s multiplicity engenders the same in its inhabitants : “ Tributaries / feeding into a large river : I had / many lives.
” “ Prism , ” a haunting long poem that The New Yorker published , in 2003 , shows how a single @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and love ( or the idea of love ) .
Childhood and its ending provide a central subject for Glück , who here turns over and recombines certain elements , repeating lines and motifs within and across sections , to results at once searching and highly controlled ; the potentially infinite realm of the imagination runs up against the confines of the body , not to mention of social expectation .
“ The riddle was : why couldn ’ t we live in the mind .
// The answer was : the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Tributaries ” of the self reconfigure as streets that meet at a central fountain in Glück ’ s 2009 collection , “ A Village Life.
” The book ’ s apocryphal setting , like the writer ’ s mind , is possessed of its own legends and customs , along with its own perimeters .
Although poems like “ Noon , ” “ March , ” and “ Marriage ” are more linear and less fragmentary than much of Glück ’ s work , they remain keenly conscious of what they can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Storm ” ends , “ The night is an open book .
/ But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.
” Part of Glück ’ s oracular bearing lies in her ability to evoke that “ world beyond ” what the poem names , even as the poem , in its texture and strangeness , seems a world unto itself .
Glück won the 2014 National Book Award for “ Faithful and Virtuous Night , ” which encompasses “ the ambience and mystery of childhood , recollected from the far shore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a misheard description of King Arthur , whose chivalrous quests provide a template for Glück ’ s muted existential ones ; there ’ s also an allusion to J. M. Barrie ’ s “ Peter Pan ” when her persona envisions “ the kingdom of death ” in “ An Adventure.
” Glück approaches the abyss with curiosity and trepidation , receptive to its messages but refusing to submit : “ Neigh , neigh , said my heart , / or perhaps nay , nay—it was hard to know.
” The competing impulses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Glück ’ s poetics from the beginning and continue to animate her recent work , including “ Autumn , ” from 2017 : “ Life , my sister said , / is like a torch passed now / from the body to the mind , ” but “ Our best hope is that it ’ s flickering.
” Even the simplest language—as a juncture between body and mind , between what is shared and what is private , between definition and flux—serves as the site of this struggle , through which Glück has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ It took what there was : / the available material .
Spirit / wasn ’ t enough , ” she writes , in “ Nest.
” Her poems offer a rare glimpse into the ineffable yet understand that it resides within—and is nothing without—the scaffolding of everyday stuff .
“ Presidents ’ Day , ” Glück ’ s latest poem in The New Yorker , was published last year .
A new poem will appear in the October 19 , 2020 , issue .

For Louise Glück, art negotiates between the ephemeral past and the inevitable future, between transience and permanence. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah / Getty
On Thursday, Louise Glück was announced as the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Glück, a former United States Poet Laureate, has contributed poems to The New Yorker for more than fifty years. Reviewing her collected poems, in 2012, Dan Chiasson placed her “among the most moving poets of our era, even while remaining the most disabusing”; the Nobel committee commended “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Though Glück’s first poems in the magazine belong to a style she soon abandoned, they establish themes and attitudes that have carried through her career. “Late Snow” and “The Racer’s Widow” unsparingly intertwine mortality with intimacy; “Letter from Provence” lampoons the tourist’s (and perhaps the poet’s) tendency to romanticize and thus obscure the real. As Chiasson put it, “Only a poet susceptible to authentic rapture makes an art out of hunting down its counterfeit,” and, with her second and third books, Glück began to hone the “intensity of address, leanness of sentiment, and precision of speech” that would allow her access to the sublime.
Glück has long and famously used mythology to explore—though, crucially, not to elevate—experience. Early examples, such as “Pietà” and “Aphrodite,” physicalize the female archetypes of mother and lover; in Glück’s taut telling, these idealized women are subject not only to the narrative structures they support but also to the effects of time. For Glück, art negotiates between the ephemeral past and the inevitable future, between transience and permanence. In “Night Song,” a moment of passion banishes a fear of change—“Tonight I’m not afraid / to feel the revolutions.” Sex is a memento mori: “You’ll get what you want. You’ll get your oblivion.”
The often dreamlike universe of Glück’s poems is largely indifferent to human affairs; its sense of alienation can be devastating but also, sometimes simultaneously, the source of a dry, trenchant humor. In “Field Flowers,” from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “The Wild Iris,” a collectively voiced bunch of buttercups jab at humans’, and maybe especially artists’, transcendent ambitions: “What are you saying? That you want / eternal life? Are your thoughts really / as compelling as all that?” (Lyric poetry takes another hit—“O / the soul! the soul! Is it enough / only to look inward?”) Meanwhile, the gardener-speaker of “Vespers” converses with God in a humble, businesslike fashion: “In your extended absence, you permit me / use of earth, anticipating / some return on investment.” The speaker admits “failure in my assignments” but goes on to claim a right to that failure, as a creator. “All this / belongs to you: on the other hand, / I planted the seeds . . .” Glück writes, “and it was my heart / broken by the blight.” Furthermore, the divine cannot comprehend the mortal’s plight:
I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear . . .
The gardener’s lament is echoed in “Gold Lily.” “All around, / my companions are failing, thinking / you do not see,” the dying flower entreats. “How / can they know you see / unless you save us?” These are creations forsaken by their creator.
In “Nest,” a sort of ars poetica that The New Yorker published, in 1999, Glück asserts, “in my life, I was trying to be / a witness not a theorist.” For all its transformation and ventriloquy, her work’s revelations are rooted in observation; epic frameworks illuminate frequently ugly truths. “I never turned anyone into a pig,” begins “Circe’s Power.” “Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs.” That poem’s penultimate stanza contains a succinct description of Glück’s own particular skill: “every sorceress is / a pragmatist at heart; nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation.” In recognizing the boundaries of an individual perspective and syntax, she continually probes toward a deeper, wider resonance. “The world / was whole because / it shattered,” she writes, in “Formaggio.” “But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared.” The world’s multiplicity engenders the same in its inhabitants: “Tributaries / feeding into a large river: I had / many lives.”
“Prism,” a haunting long poem that The New Yorker published, in 2003, shows how a single life is refracted through memory, art, and love (or the idea of love). Childhood and its ending provide a central subject for Glück, who here turns over and recombines certain elements, repeating lines and motifs within and across sections, to results at once searching and highly controlled; the potentially infinite realm of the imagination runs up against the confines of the body, not to mention of social expectation. “The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind. // The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.”
The “Tributaries” of the self reconfigure as streets that meet at a central fountain in Glück’s 2009 collection, “A Village Life.” The book’s apocryphal setting, like the writer’s mind, is possessed of its own legends and customs, along with its own perimeters. Although poems like “Noon,” “March,” and “Marriage” are more linear and less fragmentary than much of Glück’s work, they remain keenly conscious of what they cannot contain: as “Before the Storm” ends, “The night is an open book. / But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.” Part of Glück’s oracular bearing lies in her ability to evoke that “world beyond” what the poem names, even as the poem, in its texture and strangeness, seems a world unto itself.
Glück won the 2014 National Book Award for “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” which encompasses “the ambience and mystery of childhood, recollected from the far shore of old age.” The title is a misheard description of King Arthur, whose chivalrous quests provide a template for Glück’s muted existential ones; there’s also an allusion to J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” when her persona envisions “the kingdom of death” in “An Adventure.” Glück approaches the abyss with curiosity and trepidation, receptive to its messages but refusing to submit: “Neigh, neigh, said my heart, / or perhaps nay, nay—it was hard to know.”
The competing impulses to court and combat oblivion have driven Glück’s poetics from the beginning and continue to animate her recent work, including “Autumn,” from 2017: “Life, my sister said, / is like a torch passed now / from the body to the mind,” but “Our best hope is that it’s flickering.” Even the simplest language—as a juncture between body and mind, between what is shared and what is private, between definition and flux—serves as the site of this struggle, through which Glück has forged her inimitable, nearly supernatural craft. “It took what there was: / the available material. Spirit / wasn’t enough,” she writes, in “Nest.” Her poems offer a rare glimpse into the ineffable yet understand that it resides within—and is nothing without—the scaffolding of everyday stuff.
“Presidents’ Day,” Glück’s latest poem in The New Yorker, was published last year. A new poem will appear in the October 19, 2020, issue.


newyorker--2020-10-09--Can the Economy Be Saved?

Can the Economy Be Saved?

After the coronavirus lockdown , unemployment soared and the stock market crashed .
Congress quickly passed the CARES Act , @ @ @ @ @ action to shore up the economy , averting a collapse of the financial system .
@ @ @ @ @ still unemployed , and another wave of business closures looms .
John Cassidy joins Dorothy @ @ @ @ @ and political response to the coronavirus pandemic thus far , and what can be done @ @ @ @ @ economy and to Americans ’ lives .

Photograph by Craig F. Walker / Boston Globe / Getty
After the coronavirus lockdown, unemployment soared and the stock market crashed. Congress quickly passed the CARES Act, and the Federal Reserve took action to shore up the economy, averting a collapse of the financial system. But millions of Americans are still unemployed, and another wave of business closures looms. John Cassidy joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the economic and political response to the coronavirus pandemic thus far, and what can be done to restore stability to the economy and to Americans’ lives.
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-10-09--The Battle Over Portland

The Battle Over Portland

Dr. Anthony Fauci , who has been the public face of establishment science during the AIDS crisis and the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ as a lightning rod for criticism .
Plus , we explore how white nationalists have @ @ @ @ @ as they clash with anti-racism protesters .
And Radha Blank , the writer and director @ @ @ @ @ , ” talks theatre , rap , and film with Vinson Cunningham .
Anthony Fauci @ @ @ @ @ Fauci , who has been the public face of establishment science during the AIDS and @ @ @ @ @ Michael Specter about how his career has been a lightning rod for criticism .
Oregon @ @ @ @ @ white-supremacist violence .
Today ’ s far-right extremists have made the liberal bastion of Portland @ @ @ @ @ and director talks theatre , rap , and film with Vinson Cunningham .

Illustration by Golden Cosmos
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the public face of establishment science during the AIDS crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, discusses his career as a lightning rod for criticism. Plus, we explore how white nationalists have made liberal Portland a battleground as they clash with anti-racism protesters. And Radha Blank, the writer and director of “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” talks theatre, rap, and film with Vinson Cunningham.
Anthony Fauci, Then and Now
Dr. Fauci, who has been the public face of establishment science during the AIDS and coronavirus crises, speaks with Michael Specter about how his career has been a lightning rod for criticism.
The Battle Over Portland
Oregon has a unique history of white-supremacist violence. Today’s far-right extremists have made the liberal bastion of Portland their battleground.
Radha Blank’s “Forty-Year-Old Version”
The writer and director talks theatre, rap, and film with Vinson Cunningham.


newyorker--2020-10-09--Word-Salad Recipe for Your Upcoming Corporate Meeting

A big , jargon-laden word salad is the best way to satiate employees starved for information .
It ’ s quick , it ’ s easy , and it has become a staple of any corporate meeting .
Whether you ’ re an overwhelmed C.E.O .
or a lacklustre middle manager , you ’ ll find yourself returning to this recipe again and again .
● Three to four sentence starters .
These will form the base of your corporate word salad .
● Positive adjectives—look for long ones , and variety is key .
● Data—can be cooked several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ items—homemade is best , but they can be bought from a consulting firm in a pinch .
Simmer the specifics until reduced by half .
Step 3 : Toss in the data .
Make sure to trim off any context .
Only add in data that enhances the flavor of your company ’ s success .
Data that ’ s particularly hard for employees to digest can be set aside and served as a garnish , in handout form .
Note : Some people prefer to massage the data and cook the numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are too harsh on many corporate digestive tracts , especially those of potential investors or employees who are about to get laid off .
Mix in rhetorical questions .
This is a cheap way to add density to your salad .
Toss with positive adjectives until each statement is evenly coated with an optimistic glaze .
Word salad has a very short shelf life .
Always serve fresh word salad—old word salad will make your employees sick to their stomachs .

A big, jargon-laden word salad is the best way to satiate employees starved for information. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it has become a staple of any corporate meeting. Whether you’re an overwhelmed C.E.O. or a lacklustre middle manager, you’ll find yourself returning to this recipe again and again.
INGREDIENTS
● Three to four sentence starters. These will form the base of your corporate word salad.
● Positive adjectives—look for long ones, and variety is key.
● Data—can be cooked several days ahead of time.
● Rhetorical questions.
● Action items—homemade is best, but they can be bought from a consulting firm in a pinch.
Step 1:
Create a dense base layer of sentence starters. Artfully arrange them to insure variety. Employees will keep consuming them if they think that they’re getting a new bite of information every time.
Step 2:
Simmer the specifics until reduced by half.
Step 3:
Toss in the data. Make sure to trim off any context. Only add in data that enhances the flavor of your company’s success. Data that’s particularly hard for employees to digest can be set aside and served as a garnish, in handout form.
Note: Some people prefer to massage the data and cook the numbers before serving. Cold, hard facts are too harsh on many corporate digestive tracts, especially those of potential investors or employees who are about to get laid off.
Step 4:
Mix in rhetorical questions. This is a cheap way to add density to your salad.
Step 5:
Toss with positive adjectives until each statement is evenly coated with an optimistic glaze.
Step 6:
Serve with action items. These can be offered in bullet form, at the end of the salad, or scattered throughout.
Chef’s Note:
Word salad has a very short shelf life. Always serve fresh word salad—old word salad will make your employees sick to their stomachs.


newyorker--2020-10-09--The Pandemic Sparks a Real-Estate Gold Rush in Upstate New York


newyorker--2020-10-10--Six Things Millennials Have in Common with Dr. Frasier Crane (No. 5 Will Drive You Into a Deep Depre

Six Things Millennials Have in Common with Dr. Frasier Crane (No. 5 Will Drive You Into a Deep Depression)

That ’ s right , just like the generation that popularized avocado toast , Frasier appreciated the finer things in life , including top-notch cuisine from Seattle ’ s premier fictional dining destination , Chez Henri .
O.K.
, so obviously you want to skip to No .
5 .
Please don ’ t .
It ’ ll hurt you .
In fact , the best thing you can do right now is close your computer , turn off your phone , and forget that this listicle exists .
Go live your life .
Hug your kid .
Walk over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cumin .
( When ’ s the last time you just enjoyed the earthy smell of cumin ? )
Of course , you could also keep reading this stupid thing , but if you do , No .
5 will ruin you .
Although Dr. Crane and his brother Niles might have preferred sherry over the hoppy ales and craft cocktails of today ’ s bar scene , Frasier ’ s fondness for daily alcohol consumption is shared by millennials , too .
Seriously , though , once you know No .
5 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s an incurable thought-virus .
Like seeing weird porn in your dad ’ s browser history , or watching “ Midsommar , ” No .
5 will stay with you .
Sure , you ’ ll still be able to do regular things .
You ’ ll go to work .
You ’ ll play Zelda .
But whenever you ’ re alone for too long without any outside stimulus—say , when your phone dies and you ’ re just sitting quietly on a train—you ’ ll remember it .
Although @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to afford Frasier ’ s swanky Seattle condo , they too are living in bigger cities and smaller spaces .
( Ahem— “ tiny homes , ” anyone ? )
You know what , fine .
Keep reading .
Ignore my warnings .
I actually respect it , in a weird way .
Even though he didn ’ t have access to Tinder or Bumble , Frasier , like many millennials , loved to play the field .
In fact , the famed barfly and Harvard alumnus dated more than sixty women over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( and was married twice ) .
Think about what you ’ re doing .
Why are you still here ?
What is it about human beings and big red buttons ?
Is it indeed a drive beyond curiosity , perhaps “ der Todestrieb , ” as Frasier would have put it , drawing from Freudian psychoanalytic theory—a kind of death drive ?
Are you truly so fascinated by destruction that you will sublimate your own well-being ?
Fine .
Here ’ s No .
5 .
5 .
He was your age @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most adult adult who ’ s ever existed in reality or fiction , was in his early thirties when he joined the gang at Cheers .
And , although the character may have aged barely into his forties when his self-titled spinoff first aired , Kelsey Grammer was only thirty-eight .
Which means that if “ Frasier ” were to première today , its marquee actor would be a millennial .
Like you .
So there you have it .
You read No .
5 .
Now you know that you are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Platonic form of “ middle-aged man.
” And , however you feel about your home , your career , and your station in life , you know that you are not Frasier .
He was a grownup .
He could quote Shakespeare and Proust , from memory and at appropriate moments .
He approached everything with effortless expertise , as if he ’ d done it all before .
He played squash on the weekends and piano in the evening .
He had a breakfast robe .
Hell , this isn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re the same age as Chandler Bing .
Now , you might be thinking that Frasier Crane wasn ’ t actually mature—that the tension between his pompous exterior and juvenile motivations served as the foundational wellspring of humor for the character .
You might say that the viewer was meant to see the worlds of his shows through the everyman eyes of Marty , Sam Malone , or even Bulldog .
But be honest—you know that ’ s not true .
Frasier Crane was adulthood manifest .
And you ’ re just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ O.K.
, that ’ s it .
You have the knowledge of No .
5 .
And , now that you do , you can never wash yourself clean of it—not with all the sherry in Seattle .
6 .
He lived with his dad .

Photograph from Alamy
Here they are—the six things that millennials have in common with America’s favorite radio psychiatrist, Frasier Crane. As a quick heads-up, No. 5 is going to punch you in the gut so hard you’ll piss blood.
1. He was a foodie.
That’s right, just like the generation that popularized avocado toast, Frasier appreciated the finer things in life, including top-notch cuisine from Seattle’s premier fictional dining destination, Chez Henri.
O.K., so obviously you want to skip to No. 5. Please don’t. It’ll hurt you. In fact, the best thing you can do right now is close your computer, turn off your phone, and forget that this listicle exists. Go live your life. Hug your kid. Walk over to your spice rack and smell the cumin. (When’s the last time you just enjoyed the earthy smell of cumin?) Of course, you could also keep reading this stupid thing, but if you do, No. 5 will ruin you.
2. He liked drinking.
Although Dr. Crane and his brother Niles might have preferred sherry over the hoppy ales and craft cocktails of today’s bar scene, Frasier’s fondness for daily alcohol consumption is shared by millennials, too.
Seriously, though, once you know No. 5, there is no unknowing it. It’s an incurable thought-virus. Like seeing weird porn in your dad’s browser history, or watching “Midsommar,” No. 5 will stay with you. Sure, you’ll still be able to do regular things. You’ll go to work. You’ll play Zelda. But whenever you’re alone for too long without any outside stimulus—say, when your phone dies and you’re just sitting quietly on a train—you’ll remember it.
3. He preferred urban living.
Although most millennials wouldn’t be able to afford Frasier’s swanky Seattle condo, they too are living in bigger cities and smaller spaces. (Ahem—“tiny homes,” anyone?)
You know what, fine. Keep reading. Ignore my warnings. I actually respect it, in a weird way.
4. He was a serial dater.
Even though he didn’t have access to Tinder or Bumble, Frasier, like many millennials, loved to play the field. In fact, the famed barfly and Harvard alumnus dated more than sixty women over the course of his “lifetime” (and was married twice).
Think about what you’re doing. Why are you still here? What is it about human beings and big red buttons? Is it indeed a drive beyond curiosity, perhaps “der Todestrieb,” as Frasier would have put it, drawing from Freudian psychoanalytic theory—a kind of death drive? Are you truly so fascinated by destruction that you will sublimate your own well-being? Fine. Here’s No. 5.
5. He was your age.
That’s right—Frasier Crane, the most adult adult who’s ever existed in reality or fiction, was in his early thirties when he joined the gang at Cheers. And, although the character may have aged barely into his forties when his self-titled spinoff first aired, Kelsey Grammer was only thirty-eight. Which means that if “Frasier” were to première today, its marquee actor would be a millennial. Like you.
So there you have it. You read No. 5. Now you know that you are currently the same age as Frasier Crane, the Platonic form of “middle-aged man.” And, however you feel about your home, your career, and your station in life, you know that you are not Frasier. He was a grownup. He could quote Shakespeare and Proust, from memory and at appropriate moments. He approached everything with effortless expertise, as if he’d done it all before. He played squash on the weekends and piano in the evening. He had a breakfast robe. Hell, this isn’t exactly like realizing that you’re the same age as Chandler Bing.
Now, you might be thinking that Frasier Crane wasn’t actually mature—that the tension between his pompous exterior and juvenile motivations served as the foundational wellspring of humor for the character. You might say that the viewer was meant to see the worlds of his shows through the everyman eyes of Marty, Sam Malone, or even Bulldog. But be honest—you know that’s not true. Frasier Crane was adulthood manifest. And you’re just an aging tween with imposter syndrome.
O.K., that’s it. You have the knowledge of No. 5. And, now that you do, you can never wash yourself clean of it—not with all the sherry in Seattle.
6. He lived with his dad.


newyorker--2020-10-10--What Do Colleges Owe Their Most Vulnerable Students?

Since March , schools have stepped in to buy laptops and Wi-Fi hot spots for disadvantaged students , or created emergency funds to cover transportation and groceries .
Davis argues that universities should go further , and view this semester as “ an opportunity to prioritize these students , ” she said .
“ You could have a cohort of three hundred high-need students come to campus and be their own pod , and you could have faculty engage with them in person.
” Some institutions have adopted this model for first years , complete with seminars held in tent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ innovative things that acknowledge that high-income students are already getting these supports at home , ” Davis said .
“ Instead , basically , you get a hotel.
” Davis ’ s proposals would represent an expansion of what it means for universities to serve as students ’ guardians in loco parentis ( “ in place of a parent ” ) , the legal doctrine that governs schools ’ roles in their students ’ lives .
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , the concept justified the control that universities exerted over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , curfews , and restrictions on their freedom of speech and assembly .
Beginning in the nineteen-sixties , the meaning of in loco parentis began to shift : First , student activists won back basic rights of expression and assembly ; then they argued that colleges owed them protection and care as well as freedom .
Since the nineteen-eighties and nineties , the new in loco parentis has increasingly held that schools must provide a safe and equal learning environment ( for example , shielding students from hazing rituals ) and supply services @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years , student activism around sexual assault has revealed the conflict between some schools ’ promise to keep students safe from harm and their contention that drinking and partying fall outside their purview .
The dangers of the coronavirus have placed the concept of in loco parentis under new pressure : Universities feel newly compelled to patrol students ’ social behavior in the name of health and safety , and many students are expecting more forms of support .
Lucy Wickings , a junior at Harvard , was granted a room when the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She suffered a depressive episode and experienced suicidal ideation while living on campus in the spring ; she said that although she had told a professor that she was struggling with her mental health , and the professor had relayed the information to her dean , she often went weeks over the summer without hearing from any of the deans or tutors assigned to advise her .
In July , she criticized the university on Twitter : “ The fact that students on campus ( or at least students like me ) were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ / regular way during a PANDEMIC in which we did not have HOMES suited to take care of us , to me feels BEYOND neglectful , ” she wrote .
( Harvard declined to comment on any individual student ’ s experience , but noted that the college provides mental-health programming , most of which is virtual this year owing to safety concerns . )
When we spoke on the phone , Wickings described chafing at e-mails to the student body that advised them to cope with pandemic stress by spending time with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ underlying everything was that people were at home with their families , ” she told me .
“ But what about students who don ’ t have those things ?
” When I first interviewed Bella Thomas , a senior at Smith College , in early September , she felt optimistic about the coming fall .
Thomas had spent six months without a stable address .
She had been unable to finish the semester from the one-room house where her mother lives with her younger brother , but she had been afraid to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seemed rife with unknowable risks .
Instead , she crashed with an ex-boyfriend and his parents and then with an older sibling , only to land back at her mom ’ s house in July .
Returning to Smith with roughly a hundred and ten other students was “ a mostly okay situation , ” she said .
“ I ’ m very grateful to be here.
” When we met in person three weeks later , her outlook had dimmed .
Slouched on a bench by Smith ’ s Paradise Pond , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Thomas told me that her math classes felt more difficult than ever before—she was used to solving problem sets through collaboration , but she hated Zoom so much that she couldn ’ t bring herself to find a virtual study group .
Thomas felt deeply homesick and preoccupied with her family ’ s well-being .
After months of searching for an alternative to living at her mother ’ s house , she had even considered taking the semester off to be with her .
“ An advantaged student can live at home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still have broadband Internet and complete their coursework , ” Hill pointed out .
“ Students who are disadvantaged are being asked to trade being with their families in a distressed time for being able to complete their degree.
” “ You get less support from the government when you ’ re a student than when you ’ re not , ” Sara Goldrick-Rab , the founder of the Hope Center for College , Community , and Justice , said .
For example , students aren ’ t eligible for many public housing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to reduce housing insecurity on college campuses is to combat our country ’ s broader housing crisis , making shelter more available to all .
“ Students are humans first , and all humans need housing , ” she said .
She also advocates rewriting rules that exclude students from affordable-housing programs such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit .
The fact that students are struggling in a time of disaster “ is not primarily a moral failure on the part of colleges .
It ’ s a moral failure on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
Matt Bodo , a homeless student at the University of California , Los Angeles , has lined up three jobs this quarter in an effort to pay his roughly fifty-five-hundred-dollar housing bill while continuing to send money to his mother .
One of those roles is as a fellow with Rise , a student advocacy organization that has pressured U.C.L.A .
to devote at least a million dollars from a recent $ 5.5 billion capital campaign to building a shelter for homeless students .
“ The university seems to have this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take out loans and be in crippling student debt , then at that point it ’ s your choice to be homeless or housing insecure , ” Bodo said .
When Bodo left his dorm last March , he finished the semester as best he could from his car , attending classes on his phone .
One professor required him to download a proctoring software to monitor for cheating during a midterm , and to prove that he was sitting at a computer in an empty room .
Since that wasn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He was permitted to return to campus over the summer , though he was behind on his rent by the time we spoke in September .

On a breezy Sunday afternoon in early September, Marco Maldonado, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sat in a small courtyard behind his dorm, in the shadow of an abandoned academic building where the skeletons of forgotten plants lined the windows. Every few minutes, other students passed through the courtyard on the path to the dining hall. Most traveled solo or in pairs. When a group of ten—he counted—ambled by, Maldonado watched them until they rounded a corner. “Did you see that?” he asked when they were gone. “They did have masks, but they were all bunched up”—walking close together. “It makes me wonder what’s happening indoors, where people aren’t being tracked,” he said.
Maldonado worries about a coronavirus outbreak at UMass Amherst, to the point that he often has trouble concentrating during virtual classes. “There’s always the possibility of a flare-up, and they’ll have to throw everyone out,” he said. That prospect fills him with anxiety, although he’s not particularly worried about contracting COVID-19. “I would be more scared of losing my housing and having to go back home,” he said. “That seems like the greater hardship.”
For Maldonado, going home would mean moving in with his father, who rents a single room in an apartment near Boston from a family with two young children. Before the pandemic, Maldonado stayed there only occasionally, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but, when his summer internship went virtual and his plans to visit his mother in Puerto Rico evaporated, he became an unwelcome addition to the household. He overheard the landlords complaining to his father that his presence “stuck out like a sore thumb.” They barred Maldonado from their Wi-Fi, which he had been helping to pay for. “I felt like I needed to leave, whether I could come back to school or not,” he said. Now Maldonado is one of just three hundred and sixty-five students who were approved to live on the UMass Amherst campus this semester owing to “extenuating circumstances”—meaning, essentially, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Marco Maldonado, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, worries about the coronavirus to the point that he can’t concentrate during his virtual classes. Photograph by Zhidong Zhang for The New Yorker
This fall, most discussion of college students has revolved around the risks that they pose to others: the unchecked transmission at illicit parties, the campus outbreaks that could sow death in college towns. To date, the Times reports that at least a hundred and seventy-eight thousand coronavirus cases have been linked to institutions of higher education. Reopened campuses present obvious dangers, but shuttered dorms and dining halls create a more acute crisis for a smaller number of students, depriving them of stable housing, regular meals, and the broadband they need to attend virtual classes.
“It was my hope that colleges would do two things this fall,” Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies low-income students, said. “First, go one hundred per cent remote. And, second, invite back any undergraduates who cannot be full students if they are away from campus.” This group, Jack said, would include victims of domestic abuse and L.G.B.T.Q. students whose parents are hostile to their identities, as well as anyone facing food or housing insecurity.
The pandemic has exacerbated disparities that Jack has been highlighting in his research for years. When campus is open, administrators can imagine that students coëxist in the same, equal environment: sleeping in the same dorms, eating in the same dining halls, studying in the same libraries with assistance from the same staff and faculty. In truth, studies suggest that more than a third of students at four-year institutions were struggling with housing insecurity before the pandemic, and sixteen per cent had at some point been homeless. When college moved online, it became harder to miss the difference between the student frustrated to be trapped in her childhood bedroom and the one attempting to take an exam in his car.
The idea that universities owe support beyond financial aid to the students they recruit from poor backgrounds first gained attention in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when student groups for low-income and first-generation degree seekers began to organize for rights such as access to dorms and dining halls during school breaks. “There was an active taking up of a first-gen identity,” Bridgette Davis, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago who studies low-income students, and who was the first person in her family to graduate from college, said. “Had that groundwork not been laid, I don’t know where we would be right now.”