newyorker--2020-09-02--Bill and Ted and the Bogus Letdown of Gen X Middle Age

The year , let ’ s admit , has been most heinous .
A time traveller to the present would be well advised to turn right back .
And yet late summer has brought a rustling in the distance and a telephone booth bearing two unlikely saviors , Bill S. Preston , Esq.
, and Ted Theodore Logan , known to future generations as the Great Ones .
In a word : whoa .
Once Generation X icons , Bill and Ted have not appeared in a movie since the waning months of the Soviet Union .
But now Hollywood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and revivable I.P.
, has brought back the Great Ones in “ Bill & Ted Face the Music , ” and not a moment too soon : their two-pronged philosophy , to party on and to be excellent to each other , has gone woefully unheeded .
But do they have it in them to turn things around ?
As played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves , Bill and Ted are now in their fifties and still rocking out , though middle age has taken its toll .
Their band , Wyld @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re playing at weddings and dive bars , and their marriages to the medieval babes they picked up in the first movie are on the rocks .
“ I ’ m tired , dude , ” Ted says to Bill , and you can see it under his eyes .
It ’ s a striking contrast to their first appearance , in the 1989 film “ Bill & Ted ’ s Excellent Adventure , ” in which our heroes are happy-go-lucky San Dimas teen-agers with bad report cards and aspirations of heavy-metal glory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sees coming , a messenger from the year 2688 named Rufus ( the much missed George Carlin ) informs them that the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders ; it turns out that Wyld Stallyns will someday write a song that will put an end to war and poverty and align the planets in “ universal harmony ” —but only if Bill and Ted ace their history report .
To that end , Rufus sends them on a journey through time , where they collect figures such as Napoleon , Socrates , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back to nineteen-eighties San Dimas , where Joan of Arc takes up aerobics and Genghis Kahn lays waste to a sporting-goods store .
In the 1991 sequel , “ Bill & Ted ’ s Bogus Journey , ” the duo travel through Heaven and Hell and beat Death himself in a game of Twister—perhaps cinema ’ s most unlikely Ingmar Bergman homage .
Let ’ s get one thing straight about “ Bill & Ted ’ s Excellent Adventure ” : it rules .
If you haven ’ t watched the movie lately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time travel , back to an era when flannel shirts were cinched around the waist , phone booths were modern technology , and malls were not desiccated infrastructure but the nexus of American social life .
The characters were created by Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson , U.C.L.A .
grads who first played the duo in an improv sketch , in 1983 .
They wrote the “ Excellent Adventure ” screenplay in four days .
The movie was shot in 1987 but then shelved , when its original distribution company , the De @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When it finally came out , in 1989 , it grossed forty million dollars and launched a franchise that included an animated series and a breakfast tie-in , Bill & Ted ’ s Excellent Cereal .
At the time , Bill and Ted epitomized a youth culture that was pointing the way from the eighties into the nineties .
The characters grew out of and fed the archetype of the Gen X teen boy , specifically the Southern Californian variety that speaks in terms like “ dude ” and “ bodacious.
” They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who made their first appearance on “ Saturday Night Live ” the day after “ Bill & Ted ’ s Excellent Adventure ” premièred , and with Beavis and Butthead , who débuted on MTV in 1993 .
All three duos belong to a subset of the late-eighties , early-nineties teen-ager : the metalhead , a type that overlapped with stoners , slackers , skaters , and surfer dudes ( epitomized by Michelangelo , of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , and Jeff Spicoli , Sean Penn ’ s character in “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These subspecies were the predominantly male answer to the Valley Girl , another SoCal archetype whose trendy upspeak was codified , in 1982 , by the handbook “ The Valley Girl ’ s Guide to Life ” and in Frank Zappa ’ s song “ Valley Girl , ” featuring his fourteen-year-old daughter , Moon Zappa , yapping phrases such as “ Like , ohmigod !
” and “ Totally !
” But metalheads were their own thing .
As Winter helpfully clarified , in a 1991 interview , “ Bill and Ted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re not part of that culture .
.
.
.
What they want is very real—they want to be great rock-and-roll musicians , and that ’ s a very tangible thing .
Their only problem is that they ’ re too stupid to be able to achieve it.
” What these teen subcultures shared , apart from their fealty to malls , was a lack of traditional ambition .
As the Baltimore Sun described the likes of Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth , in 1992 , “ Their hair is long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attitude lackadaisical .
They still live at home , and work—when they can find it—generally involves a name tag and a hair net .
At school , they would have been voted ‘ Least Likely to Succeed , ’ had anyone bothered to notice them.
” Despite their California roots , their life-style spread through American suburbia : Wayne and Garth hail from Aurora , Illinois ; Beavis and Butthead are from the fictional Highland , Texas ; and their slacker cousins Jay and Silent Bob first appear in the 1994 film “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New Jersey .
That they tend to come in pairs is no accident .
Much of the joy of “ Bill & Ted ’ s Excellent Adventure ” lies in its depiction of carefree teen-boy friendship .
Bill and Ted speak in what feels like a secret vernacular , often in unison .
( In the movie ’ s best joke , a “ royal ugly dude ” in medieval England threatens to put them in the iron maiden , and they both scream , “ Excellent !
” ) They ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idiots , their love for each other matched only by their love for Van Halen .
When they experience a moment of shared awesomeness , they lock eyes and play an air-guitar shred , and we can hear the imagined riff .
They ’ re Marty McFly split in two , with half the brainpower—but , unlike the protagonist of “ Back to the Future , ” they never seem burdened by their quest .
Journeying through time is a mind-blowing thrill ride .
The young Winter and Reeves embodied the spirit of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s twitchy exuberance like two baby roosters .
Stephen Herek , the director of “ Excellent Adventure , ” later explained , “ I used to tell both Alex and Keanu : ‘ I need more Labrador retriever.
’ Because I felt that these guys were sort of like lovable Labs.
” Reeves , especially , has an open , perpetually awestruck face that straddles blankness and Zen-like serenity , a quality that would serve him in the “ Matrix ” movies and in latter-day memes .
Only one moment in “ Excellent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ winning harmlessness , when Ted is presumed to be slain by a “ medieval dickweed ” and then reappears .
He and Bill hug , then pull away from each other and say , in mutual disgust , “ Fag !
” No matter how accurate to straight-teen bromances , then or now , the joke obviously wouldn ’ t fly these days , and it makes you wonder who isn ’ t welcome in Bill and Ted ’ s happy brotherhood of two .
Then again , their relationship is not without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ orgasmic .

The year, let’s admit, has been most heinous. A time traveller to the present would be well advised to turn right back. And yet late summer has brought a rustling in the distance and a telephone booth bearing two unlikely saviors, Bill S. Preston, Esq., and Ted Theodore Logan, known to future generations as the Great Ones. In a word: whoa.
Once Generation X icons, Bill and Ted have not appeared in a movie since the waning months of the Soviet Union. But now Hollywood, with its bottomless appetite for nostalgia and revivable I.P., has brought back the Great Ones in “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” and not a moment too soon: their two-pronged philosophy, to party on and to be excellent to each other, has gone woefully unheeded. But do they have it in them to turn things around? As played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, Bill and Ted are now in their fifties and still rocking out, though middle age has taken its toll. Their band, Wyld Stallyns, has tanked, they’re playing at weddings and dive bars, and their marriages to the medieval babes they picked up in the first movie are on the rocks. “I’m tired, dude,” Ted says to Bill, and you can see it under his eyes.
It’s a striking contrast to their first appearance, in the 1989 film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” in which our heroes are happy-go-lucky San Dimas teen-agers with bad report cards and aspirations of heavy-metal glory. In a plot twist that neither sees coming, a messenger from the year 2688 named Rufus (the much missed George Carlin) informs them that the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders; it turns out that Wyld Stallyns will someday write a song that will put an end to war and poverty and align the planets in “universal harmony”—but only if Bill and Ted ace their history report. To that end, Rufus sends them on a journey through time, where they collect figures such as Napoleon, Socrates, and Abraham Lincoln, and bring them back to nineteen-eighties San Dimas, where Joan of Arc takes up aerobics and Genghis Kahn lays waste to a sporting-goods store. In the 1991 sequel, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” the duo travel through Heaven and Hell and beat Death himself in a game of Twister—perhaps cinema’s most unlikely Ingmar Bergman homage.
Let’s get one thing straight about “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”: it rules. If you haven’t watched the movie lately, it feels an awful lot like time travel, back to an era when flannel shirts were cinched around the waist, phone booths were modern technology, and malls were not desiccated infrastructure but the nexus of American social life. The characters were created by Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, U.C.L.A. grads who first played the duo in an improv sketch, in 1983. They wrote the “Excellent Adventure” screenplay in four days. The movie was shot in 1987 but then shelved, when its original distribution company, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, went bankrupt. When it finally came out, in 1989, it grossed forty million dollars and launched a franchise that included an animated series and a breakfast tie-in, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Cereal.
At the time, Bill and Ted epitomized a youth culture that was pointing the way from the eighties into the nineties. The characters grew out of and fed the archetype of the Gen X teen boy, specifically the Southern Californian variety that speaks in terms like “dude” and “bodacious.” They share a lineage with Wayne and Garth, who made their first appearance on “Saturday Night Live” the day after “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” premièred, and with Beavis and Butthead, who débuted on MTV in 1993. All three duos belong to a subset of the late-eighties, early-nineties teen-ager: the metalhead, a type that overlapped with stoners, slackers, skaters, and surfer dudes (epitomized by Michelangelo, of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”) These subspecies were the predominantly male answer to the Valley Girl, another SoCal archetype whose trendy upspeak was codified, in 1982, by the handbook “The Valley Girl’s Guide to Life” and in Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl,” featuring his fourteen-year-old daughter, Moon Zappa, yapping phrases such as “Like, ohmigod!” and “Totally!” But metalheads were their own thing. As Winter helpfully clarified, in a 1991 interview, “Bill and Ted are not surfer dudes. They’re not part of that culture. . . . What they want is very real—they want to be great rock-and-roll musicians, and that’s a very tangible thing. Their only problem is that they’re too stupid to be able to achieve it.”
What these teen subcultures shared, apart from their fealty to malls, was a lack of traditional ambition. As the Baltimore Sun described the likes of Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth, in 1992, “Their hair is long, their music loud, and their attitude lackadaisical. They still live at home, and work—when they can find it—generally involves a name tag and a hair net. At school, they would have been voted ‘Least Likely to Succeed,’ had anyone bothered to notice them.” Despite their California roots, their life-style spread through American suburbia: Wayne and Garth hail from Aurora, Illinois; Beavis and Butthead are from the fictional Highland, Texas; and their slacker cousins Jay and Silent Bob first appear in the 1994 film “Clerks,” set in Leonardo, New Jersey. That they tend to come in pairs is no accident. Much of the joy of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” lies in its depiction of carefree teen-boy friendship. Bill and Ted speak in what feels like a secret vernacular, often in unison. (In the movie’s best joke, a “royal ugly dude” in medieval England threatens to put them in the iron maiden, and they both scream, “Excellent!”) They’re idiots, but they’re happy idiots, their love for each other matched only by their love for Van Halen. When they experience a moment of shared awesomeness, they lock eyes and play an air-guitar shred, and we can hear the imagined riff. They’re Marty McFly split in two, with half the brainpower—but, unlike the protagonist of “Back to the Future,” they never seem burdened by their quest. Journeying through time is a mind-blowing thrill ride.
The young Winter and Reeves embodied the spirit of punch-drunk fun, mirroring each other’s twitchy exuberance like two baby roosters. Stephen Herek, the director of “Excellent Adventure,” later explained, “I used to tell both Alex and Keanu: ‘I need more Labrador retriever.’ Because I felt that these guys were sort of like lovable Labs.” Reeves, especially, has an open, perpetually awestruck face that straddles blankness and Zen-like serenity, a quality that would serve him in the “Matrix” movies and in latter-day memes. Only one moment in “Excellent Adventure” breaks the spell of their winning harmlessness, when Ted is presumed to be slain by a “medieval dickweed” and then reappears. He and Bill hug, then pull away from each other and say, in mutual disgust, “Fag!” No matter how accurate to straight-teen bromances, then or now, the joke obviously wouldn’t fly these days, and it makes you wonder who isn’t welcome in Bill and Ted’s happy brotherhood of two. Then again, their relationship is not without traces of homoeroticism—that air-guitar riff looks positively orgasmic.


newyorker--2020-09-02--Greenland’s Tradition of Narwhal Hunting, in “The Other World”

Qaanaaq , one of the northernmost villages in Greenland , has winters where the sun does not appear for more than three months .
The town is so remote that its six hundred or so residents remain virtually isolated from the rest of the country year-round .
In the spring , when the ice thaws , some of the community ’ s Inuit members begin to hunt narwhal , small whales with large , sharply pointed tusks which live only in the Arctic .
The film “ The Other World ” peers into this tradition of whale hunting , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the catch .
The hunters in Qaanaaq , most of whom are men , are “ some of the most rugged , independent human beings left on earth , ” the director , David McLain , told me .
“ But , at the same time , they ’ re deeply part of the collective .
And the work that they do , which quite literally is feeding the young and old , is always in the service of community.
” One scene shows the town celebrating Greenland ’ s National Day outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and pass out slices of whale on paper plates , much like a Sunday lunch at church .
“ Greenlanders believe in communion , with each other and nature , ” Michael Paterniti , the writer and narrator of the film , says .
Hunting in Qaanaaq is perilous .
In winter , the Inuit hunt seal and walrus that approach breathing holes in the ice , which , already mercurial , gets thinner every year .
The hunters are pulled on handmade sleds by dogs that are only partly domesticated—there are cases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dogs .
When the ice melts , the hunters focus on narwhal , using kayaks and harpoons that they build themselves .
There are less than a hundred people who continue this tradition , and they are both in competition and collaboration with one another .
When they return from a hunt , they often post on Facebook to announce that there is fresh whale meat and skin in town .
McLain first visited Qaanaaq in 2006 , on a photography assignment for National Geographic .
He showed up in a custom padded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Everest ( “ picture the Michelin Man but , instead of filled with tires and air , you ’ re filled with down ” ) , was inadequate for the Arctic cold .
A group of narwhal hunters , dressed in traditional winter clothes—polar-bear-fur pants and sealskin boots—laughed when they saw him .
“ They were taking a bet on how soon I would die , ” McLain said .
Qaanaaq is difficult to reach , even for other Greenlanders .
Many have never met narwhal hunters , who , “ even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” McLain said .
Yet the figure of the Qaanaaq hunter looms large in the country ’ s cultural imagination , the way the cowboy might for Americans .
But , although the mythology of cowboys , for all its flaws , represents a masculinity centered around stoicism and independence , McLain said that the hunters he spent time with were complex in ways that might seem contradictory .
They are at once quiet and antic ; they are brave and cautious , tough and gentle , aggressive and generous .
“ They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need their independence , ” McLain explained .
“ And they don ’ t see these things as mutually exclusive.
” In June , 2019 , McLain returned to Greenland .
He and Paterniti travelled around the country for a month and stayed in Qaanaaq for a week to film .
Upon returning to the town after thirteen years , McLain observed that very little had changed .
“ Every dog sled looked the same ; every configuration of the dog harnesses looked the same ; the harpoons , ” he said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ hotel .
It hadn ’ t changed at all.
” He recognized many of the people of Qaanaaq .
At an airport in the south of Greenland , McLain met one of the hunters he had photographed years before .
The hunter , McLain told me , “ said , with a big smile on his face , ‘ I remember you .
You smelled really , really bad.
’ ” In Qaanaaq , McLain met a group who had travelled by dog sled from a nearby town to attend a wedding .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ often happens , and the group , which included three hunters and young children , was stuck , potentially for months .
The residents of Qaanaaq enfolded them into their community , setting up an empty house and a space for their dogs .
In the middle of the film , one of the men from this group is shown just back from a hunt , pulling two long narwhal tusks out of his sled and showing them to a young boy , who stands in his little snow boots and stares up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ natural sounds of the environment as a sort of minimalist music .
“ We were trying to replicate the experience of being there and the lives of these hunters where things get really stripped down , ” Paterniti told me .
Behind the sounds and sights of the slate Arctic tundra , there is the lurking threat—not expressed explicitly in the film—of climate change .
The current chaos of a global pandemic and political fracturing also serve as a background to a place that seems absolutely still .
McLain and Paterniti both muse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the hunters could teach the wider world—lessons that we might hold close during moments of crisis and beyond .

Qaanaaq, one of the northernmost villages in Greenland, has winters where the sun does not appear for more than three months. The town is so remote that its six hundred or so residents remain virtually isolated from the rest of the country year-round. In the spring, when the ice thaws, some of the community’s Inuit members begin to hunt narwhal, small whales with large, sharply pointed tusks which live only in the Arctic.
The film “The Other World” peers into this tradition of whale hunting, the heart of which is the sharing of the catch. The hunters in Qaanaaq, most of whom are men, are “some of the most rugged, independent human beings left on earth,” the director, David McLain, told me. “But, at the same time, they’re deeply part of the collective. And the work that they do, which quite literally is feeding the young and old, is always in the service of community.” One scene shows the town celebrating Greenland’s National Day outside, where women stand behind foldable tables and pass out slices of whale on paper plates, much like a Sunday lunch at church. “Greenlanders believe in communion, with each other and nature,” Michael Paterniti, the writer and narrator of the film, says.
Hunting in Qaanaaq is perilous. In winter, the Inuit hunt seal and walrus that approach breathing holes in the ice, which, already mercurial, gets thinner every year. The hunters are pulled on handmade sleds by dogs that are only partly domesticated—there are cases annually of people being attacked by hunting dogs. When the ice melts, the hunters focus on narwhal, using kayaks and harpoons that they build themselves. There are less than a hundred people who continue this tradition, and they are both in competition and collaboration with one another. When they return from a hunt, they often post on Facebook to announce that there is fresh whale meat and skin in town. McLain first visited Qaanaaq in 2006, on a photography assignment for National Geographic. He showed up in a custom padded jacket that, although designed for Mt. Everest (“picture the Michelin Man but, instead of filled with tires and air, you’re filled with down”), was inadequate for the Arctic cold. A group of narwhal hunters, dressed in traditional winter clothes—polar-bear-fur pants and sealskin boots—laughed when they saw him. “They were taking a bet on how soon I would die,” McLain said.
Qaanaaq is difficult to reach, even for other Greenlanders. Many have never met narwhal hunters, who, “even by Greenland standards, are extreme,” McLain said. Yet the figure of the Qaanaaq hunter looms large in the country’s cultural imagination, the way the cowboy might for Americans. But, although the mythology of cowboys, for all its flaws, represents a masculinity centered around stoicism and independence, McLain said that the hunters he spent time with were complex in ways that might seem contradictory. They are at once quiet and antic; they are brave and cautious, tough and gentle, aggressive and generous. “They need each other as much as they need their independence,” McLain explained. “And they don’t see these things as mutually exclusive.”
In June, 2019, McLain returned to Greenland. He and Paterniti travelled around the country for a month and stayed in Qaanaaq for a week to film. Upon returning to the town after thirteen years, McLain observed that very little had changed. “Every dog sled looked the same; every configuration of the dog harnesses looked the same; the harpoons,” he said. “There’s only one little hotel. It hadn’t changed at all.” He recognized many of the people of Qaanaaq. At an airport in the south of Greenland, McLain met one of the hunters he had photographed years before. The hunter, McLain told me, “said, with a big smile on his face, ‘I remember you. You smelled really, really bad.’ ”
In Qaanaaq, McLain met a group who had travelled by dog sled from a nearby town to attend a wedding. The ice had partially melted, as often happens, and the group, which included three hunters and young children, was stuck, potentially for months. The residents of Qaanaaq enfolded them into their community, setting up an empty house and a space for their dogs. In the middle of the film, one of the men from this group is shown just back from a hunt, pulling two long narwhal tusks out of his sled and showing them to a young boy, who stands in his little snow boots and stares up at them.
The film uses the natural sounds of the environment as a sort of minimalist music. “We were trying to replicate the experience of being there and the lives of these hunters where things get really stripped down,” Paterniti told me. Behind the sounds and sights of the slate Arctic tundra, there is the lurking threat—not expressed explicitly in the film—of climate change. The current chaos of a global pandemic and political fracturing also serve as a background to a place that seems absolutely still. McLain and Paterniti both muse on the lessons of humility and connection that the hunters could teach the wider world—lessons that we might hold close during moments of crisis and beyond.


newyorker--2020-09-02--Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Uzi Vert, and the Emptiness of the Live Virtual Concert

Quarantine is a disorienting time machine .
One on hand , any lockdown , even a partial one , transports us back to a world in which humans are less connected , more sensitized to our environment , and more attuned to the tactile rhythms of domestic activity .
But we can also feel thrust , prematurely , into a strange new future .
These days , N.B.A .
fans are digitally rendered inside a makeshift basketball arena owned by Disney .
Presidential candidates address the nation from a mostly empty convention center , and wedding officiants dial into ceremonies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a genuine dystopia .
But the pandemic ’ s downstream effects , especially in the culture , can suggest not so much a fallen world as a shoddy , awkward version of the utopia that technology always promised .
This is the feeling I had while watching two virtual concerts over the last week .
In lieu of real-life tours , Lil Uzi Vert and Megan Thee Stallion—two young rappers who ’ ve ascended from breakout talents to full-on superstars—each staged their own virtual take on stadium shows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shift from the scrappy , D.I.Y .
performances of the early-quarantine era to a new phase of COVID-19 entertainment—the big-budget livestream .
Both events partnered with the entertainment giant LiveNation , set ticket prices at fifteen dollars each , and required audience members to sign up for the music-streaming service Tidal before entering the show .
Both were highly produced and carefully planned , or at least more so than an Instagram Live stream .
And both were executed with the theatrical vigor of a major tour , with a handful of vague @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ There ’ s a lot going on , but I just want to make sure y ’ all good , ” Uzi told the virtual audience near the top of his set .
He was perched alone on a slick black platform , with a d.j .
in the distant background and an elaborate light show flashing around him .
Then he launched into “ XO Tour Llif3 , ” a lively emo-rap song that dominated the summer of 2017 .
“ Push me to the edge / All my friends @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the song ’ s chorus taking on an eerie cast .
Uzi , a twenty-six-year-old Philadelphia native beloved for his flamboyance , did not need to deliver a monologue about quarantine to capture the odd state of music today .
For most of his hour-long broadcast , he did not perform so much as sing along with a backing track , adding emphasis here and there .
There were no backup dancers ; everything he did felt improvised .
At times , the stream acquired the texture and comedy of a TikTok video @ @ @ @ @ @ @ joint or remove an article of clothing .
Lacking feedback from a physical audience , he treated the spectacle as what it was : a dress rehearsal for real life .
Two summers ago , Uzi was best known for his death-defying stage dives .
Those stunts are hard to replicate on the Internet , and it was no surprise to see the artist look constricted onscreen .
At one point , he pulled his knit beanie over his face and swayed , seemingly overcome with boredom .
If Uzi did not show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Megan Thee Stallion approached it with special care .
Fresh off two No .
1 hits this year—a remix of “ Savage ” with Beyoncé and , more recently , the confidently bawdy “ WAP , ” with Cardi B—the rapper treated her show as a would-be inauguration , sporting a bejewelled costume , employing a group of acrobatic backup dancers , and using an elaborate stage design that shifted thematically with each song .
( The choreographer was JaQuel Knight , one of the minds behind Beyoncé ’ s Coachella performances .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and physicality , introducing her dancers at various interludes .
At one point , the stage went dark , in tribute to Black Lives Matter ; onscreen , the names of victims appeared , along with details about their deaths , followed by a slide that read , “ Why is it so hard being Black in America ?
” By the third song , Megan was glistening with sweat .
Still , watching her perform with such gusto , without reciprocity from an audience , felt disheartening , as though a compact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk about their relationship with fans , and particularly about the soul-nourishing experience of performing for people who draw meaning from their work .
Fans , too , cherish the communion of a live concert .
Given how much cultural performance has shifted to the Internet , there is increasingly a premium on physical proximity .
That premium is partly why ticket sales are such a huge percentage of revenue in the music business , and why quarantine has posed such an existential threat to the industry .
Watching Uzi and Megan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live ” events to an already digitally saturated world may not be the future—or even the near-future—of music .
This is to say nothing of the term “ live , ” which has been so mangled in recent months that it ’ s become synonymous with “ prerecorded but now airing online.
” Uzi and Megan may very well have prerecorded their shows—both were exceedingly , suspiciously smooth , until , near the end of Megan ’ s set , the camera struggled to find the right angle , and the music halted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is our first time doing this kind of show , so bear with me , ” Megan said .
“ I ain ’ t perfect and never said I was.
” Oddly , this hiccup was invigorating—the first moment , in either concert , that conjured the flesh , blood , and intimacy of a live performance .
Megan ’ s fans might have felt a similar intimacy just a few days prior , when she used her Instagram Live feed to address an incident that had been dominating the news .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both feet by the fellow-musician Tory Lanez , prompting weeks of online gossip , confusion , and glib jokes .
On her stream , a hoodie pulled over her head , Megan confirmed that the story was true , and explained that she ’ d initially tried to cover up the shooting in order to protect herself , Lanez , and their friends from police violence .
“ I ’ m thinking the doctors is the police , and I ’ m still trying not to tell them , ” she said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve never been shot before .
I don ’ t have to lie about that.
” In other streams about the incident , she broke into tears .
These were raw and candid moments shared , live , between an artist and her fans .
It was almost as if one were in the same room as her .

Quarantine is a disorienting time machine. On one hand, any lockdown, even a partial one, transports us back to a world in which humans are less connected, more sensitized to our environment, and more attuned to the tactile rhythms of domestic activity. But we can also feel thrust, prematurely, into a strange new future. These days, N.B.A. fans are digitally rendered inside a makeshift basketball arena owned by Disney. Presidential candidates address the nation from a mostly empty convention center, and wedding officiants dial into ceremonies via Zoom. For many, the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a genuine dystopia. But the pandemic’s downstream effects, especially in the culture, can suggest not so much a fallen world as a shoddy, awkward version of the utopia that technology always promised.
This is the feeling I had while watching two virtual concerts over the last week. In lieu of real-life tours, Lil Uzi Vert and Megan Thee Stallion—two young rappers who’ve ascended from breakout talents to full-on superstars—each staged their own virtual take on stadium shows. Together, their acts announced a shift from the scrappy, D.I.Y. performances of the early-quarantine era to a new phase of COVID-19 entertainment—the big-budget livestream. Both events partnered with the entertainment giant LiveNation, set ticket prices at fifteen dollars each, and required audience members to sign up for the music-streaming service Tidal before entering the show. Both were highly produced and carefully planned, or at least more so than an Instagram Live stream. And both were executed with the theatrical vigor of a major tour, with a handful of vague, tossed-off nods to the unusual circumstances. “There’s a lot going on, but I just want to make sure y’all good,” Uzi told the virtual audience near the top of his set. He was perched alone on a slick black platform, with a d.j. in the distant background and an elaborate light show flashing around him. Then he launched into “XO Tour Llif3,” a lively emo-rap song that dominated the summer of 2017. “Push me to the edge / All my friends are dead,” he sang, the song’s chorus taking on an eerie cast.
Uzi, a twenty-six-year-old Philadelphia native beloved for his flamboyance, did not need to deliver a monologue about quarantine to capture the odd state of music today. For most of his hour-long broadcast, he did not perform so much as sing along with a backing track, adding emphasis here and there. There were no backup dancers; everything he did felt improvised. At times, the stream acquired the texture and comedy of a TikTok video. Uzi occasionally paused to smoke his joint or remove an article of clothing. Lacking feedback from a physical audience, he treated the spectacle as what it was: a dress rehearsal for real life. Two summers ago, Uzi was best known for his death-defying stage dives. Those stunts are hard to replicate on the Internet, and it was no surprise to see the artist look constricted onscreen. At one point, he pulled his knit beanie over his face and swayed, seemingly overcome with boredom.
If Uzi did not show much interest in the virtual-concert experiment, Megan Thee Stallion approached it with special care. Fresh off two No. 1 hits this year—a remix of “Savage” with Beyoncé and, more recently, the confidently bawdy “WAP,” with Cardi B—the rapper treated her show as a would-be inauguration, sporting a bejewelled costume, employing a group of acrobatic backup dancers, and using an elaborate stage design that shifted thematically with each song. (The choreographer was JaQuel Knight, one of the minds behind Beyoncé’s Coachella performances.) Megan infused the act with grandeur and physicality, introducing her dancers at various interludes. At one point, the stage went dark, in tribute to Black Lives Matter; onscreen, the names of victims appeared, along with details about their deaths, followed by a slide that read, “Why is it so hard being Black in America?” By the third song, Megan was glistening with sweat. Still, watching her perform with such gusto, without reciprocity from an audience, felt disheartening, as though a compact had been broken.
Musicians love to talk about their relationship with fans, and particularly about the soul-nourishing experience of performing for people who draw meaning from their work. Fans, too, cherish the communion of a live concert. Given how much cultural performance has shifted to the Internet, there is increasingly a premium on physical proximity. That premium is partly why ticket sales are such a huge percentage of revenue in the music business, and why quarantine has posed such an existential threat to the industry. Watching Uzi and Megan, it was clear that adding virtual “live” events to an already digitally saturated world may not be the future—or even the near-future—of music. This is to say nothing of the term “live,” which has been so mangled in recent months that it’s become synonymous with “prerecorded but now airing online.” Uzi and Megan may very well have prerecorded their shows—both were exceedingly, suspiciously smooth, until, near the end of Megan’s set, the camera struggled to find the right angle, and the music halted for a few seconds. “This is our first time doing this kind of show, so bear with me,” Megan said. “I ain’t perfect and never said I was.”
Oddly, this hiccup was invigorating—the first moment, in either concert, that conjured the flesh, blood, and intimacy of a live performance. Megan’s fans might have felt a similar intimacy just a few days prior, when she used her Instagram Live feed to address an incident that had been dominating the news. In July, the rapper was shot in both feet by her fellow-musician Tory Lanez, prompting weeks of online gossip, confusion, and glib jokes. On her stream, a hoodie pulled over her head, Megan confirmed that the story was true, and explained that she’d initially tried to cover up the shooting in order to protect herself, Lanez, and their friends from police violence. “I’m thinking the doctors is the police, and I’m still trying not to tell them,” she said. “I’m scared. I’ve never been shot before. I don’t have to lie about that.” In other streams about the incident, she broke into tears. These were raw and candid moments shared, live, between an artist and her fans. It was almost as if one were in the same room as her.


newyorker--2020-09-02--Teachers in Texas Are Fighting for Their Lives

When COVID-19 came to Brownsville , Texas , in March , Louis Leal was in the early months of his thirtieth year of teaching .
He had started in the district in 1990 , just weeks after graduating from college .
An imposing man , tall and wide-shouldered , with a gentle manner , Leal now teaches language arts and theatre at Stillman Middle School .
Over the years , though , he has taught reading comprehension all over the district , to kids of all ages , worked with good principals and bad , and seen superintendents come and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said , to respect authority .
“ It ’ s in the culture down here , ” he told me .
“ You respect your elders.
” In thirty years , he never once went against the grain .
And then , in the middle of a pandemic , the state asked teachers to return to their classrooms .
Leal discovered a well of frustration that had been building for years .
“ It ’ s scary and it ’ s dangerous , ” he said .
“ There are lives being played @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to teachers .
We have to go to extremes to be listened to.
” Texas first shut down its schools in March , when it seemed as if the state would be spared the worst of the pandemic , and Leal and his fellow-teachers threw themselves into remote education .
He rebuilt a curriculum for students to follow without the regular classroom resources .
He studied their faces online to gauge their well-being and their understanding .
He lives , he says , “ out in the boonies , ” and he struggled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his students drop on and off his radar .
“ We were putting in sixteen-hour days , calling kids who were not getting online , ” he said .
“ We couldn ’ t go knock on doors .
We couldn ’ t send our parent liaison .
Some of these kids didn ’ t wake up at eight in the morning .
Instead , they were e-mailing me at eight o ’ clock at night , and me , being me—they ’ re my kids—I ’ m going to help them.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a border town of factories , migratory birds , and hurricanes that blow up off the Gulf of Mexico .
It sits above Matamoros and just west of a marshy conservation area called the Bahia Grande .
It is also one of the most impoverished cities in the United States—more than ninety per cent of the forty thousand students in the Brownsville Independent School District , or B.I.S.D.
, are economically disadvantaged—and one of the national epicenters of COVID-19 .
While Leal was struggling to keep track of his students , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
By mid-summer , B.I.S.D .
had served more than six hundred and seventy thousand meals .
They had packaged Chromebooks to send to students who needed them .
They had organized a call-in counselling service .
And all this still fell short of what the district could offer a student in an average year .
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced plans to reopen schools , the state was about two months out from the regularly scheduled first day , and at the start of a precipitous spike in COVID-19 infections .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ public school students , teachers , and staff to return to school campuses for in-person instruction this fall , ” Mike Morath , the state ’ s commissioner of education , said in a statement released on June 18th .
Masks would not be required , he said .
Health screenings would be optional .
Flexibility would be offered to parents and students who wanted to continue learning online .
Teachers , however , were expected to show up and do their jobs no matter what .
Leal read the news and looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He thought about his students .
“ When you see something like this , something you know is not right , ” Leal told me , “ you have to say something.
” Leal was not the only one .
Early on , the pandemic had forced teachers to spend their days in front of their computers .
As plans to send them back into classrooms materialized , teachers across the country turned to online forums to help make decisions , share tips , and voice their grievances .
Teachers on TikTok @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( in place of a hug or a high-five , how about “ ten seconds of uninterrupted eye contact ?
” ) or talk about how exhausted they are .
Facebook groups have proliferated , including Texas Teachers United Against Reopening Schools and Teachers Against Dying .
In Galveston , north of where Leal works , a garrulous environmental-science and biology teacher named Dan Hochman started a Facebook group called Texas Teachers for a Safe Reopening .
Within forty-eight hours , more than forty thousand teachers had joined .
Public schools offer an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also sit at a crossroads of social services : expected to bridge a growing divide between poverty and privilege , there to educate students , and , beyond that , to provide food security , health screenings , and counselling to those in need .
And , in the middle of an economic crisis that is disproportionately impacting women , schools provide child care .
It is a heavy burden on a system that is underfunded and a profession that has , over time , been devalued .
Like other professions associated with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , for that matter , most essential workers—teaching is at once vital to the functioning of the U.S. economy and subject to painful contradictions .
Teachers , and other essential workers , are praised for their heroism , expected to serve selflessly , and provided with very little in the way of support .
“ A school district alone can not formulate the entire response for children , ” a Los Angeles Unified School District board member wrote in a Times Op-Ed , when schools shuttered in March .
But , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schools and teachers were being counted on to do just that .
According to Meira Levinson , a professor at Harvard ’ s Graduate School of Education , this scramble was playing out in school districts everywhere .
“ Every school district across the United States made their first priority feeding kids , ” Levinson said .
“ And then you thought , Oh , so this is actually what school is about .
It ’ s about providing those services.
” To explain the disproportionate demands placed on teachers like Leal , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ project , led by the sociologist James Coleman , that was released in 1966 .
The study found that educational attainment was determined primarily by factors outside a teacher ’ s sphere of influence—particularly race and class .
“ The data has been clear for over fifty years , ” Levinson said .
Despite that , “ the emphasis has been ever more on schools ’ role in fostering academic learning .
.
.
.
But the teacher accounts for at most fifteen per cent of a kid ’ s academic learning.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to higher standards , and schools rewarded and punished according to academic achievement , they have at the same time been called upon to ameliorate the challenges that students face outside school walls .
Districts across the U.S. are dealing with a rise in homelessness .
School nurses serve as primary care .
“ Teachers have long been the first responders in trying to address our kids ’ needs , ” Rob D ’ Amico , the communications director at the Texas A.F.T.
, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come to school and they ’ ve forgotten their shoes .
Or their parents have split up .
Or if they ’ re moving .
It hasn ’ t really been accounted for other than teachers trying to do what they could.
” For Leal and Hochman , this has meant that they work harder and take more risks .
Their responsibilities have expanded past their job descriptions to the point that their lives seemed expendable .
“ No , we shouldn ’ t fix the gun problem ; we should make teachers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hochman said .
“ We shouldn ’ t fix the virus ; we should make teachers be willing to die .
”

When COVID-19 came to Brownsville, Texas, in March, Louis Leal was in the early months of his thirtieth year of teaching. He had started in the district in 1990, just weeks after graduating from college. An imposing man, tall and wide-shouldered, with a gentle manner, Leal now teaches language arts and theatre at Stillman Middle School. Over the years, though, he has taught reading comprehension all over the district, to kids of all ages, worked with good principals and bad, and seen superintendents come and go. He was raised, he said, to respect authority. “It’s in the culture down here,” he told me. “You respect your elders.” In thirty years, he never once went against the grain. And then, in the middle of a pandemic, the state asked teachers to return to their classrooms. Leal discovered a well of frustration that had been building for years. “It’s scary and it’s dangerous,” he said. “There are lives being played with. And no one is listening to teachers. We have to go to extremes to be listened to.”
Texas first shut down its schools in March, when it seemed as if the state would be spared the worst of the pandemic, and Leal and his fellow-teachers threw themselves into remote education. He rebuilt a curriculum for students to follow without the regular classroom resources. He studied their faces online to gauge their well-being and their understanding. He lives, he says, “out in the boonies,” and he struggled with his own Internet as he watched his students drop on and off his radar. “We were putting in sixteen-hour days, calling kids who were not getting online,” he said. “We couldn’t go knock on doors. We couldn’t send our parent liaison. Some of these kids didn’t wake up at eight in the morning. Instead, they were e-mailing me at eight o’clock at night, and me, being me—they’re my kids—I’m going to help them.”
Brownsville, where Leal grew up, is a border town of factories, migratory birds, and hurricanes that blow up off the Gulf of Mexico. It sits above Matamoros and just west of a marshy conservation area called the Bahia Grande. It is also one of the most impoverished cities in the United States—more than ninety per cent of the forty thousand students in the Brownsville Independent School District, or B.I.S.D., are economically disadvantaged—and one of the national epicenters of COVID-19. While Leal was struggling to keep track of his students, the district was scrambling to keep everyone fed. By mid-summer, B.I.S.D. had served more than six hundred and seventy thousand meals. They had packaged Chromebooks to send to students who needed them. They had organized a call-in counselling service. And all this still fell short of what the district could offer a student in an average year.
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced plans to reopen schools, the state was about two months out from the regularly scheduled first day, and at the start of a precipitous spike in COVID-19 infections. “It will be safe for Texas public school students, teachers, and staff to return to school campuses for in-person instruction this fall,” Mike Morath, the state’s commissioner of education, said in a statement released on June 18th. Masks would not be required, he said. Health screenings would be optional. Flexibility would be offered to parents and students who wanted to continue learning online. Teachers, however, were expected to show up and do their jobs no matter what. Leal read the news and looked at his wife and his adopted daughter. He thought about his students. “When you see something like this, something you know is not right,” Leal told me, “you have to say something.”
Leal was not the only one. Early on, the pandemic had forced teachers to spend their days in front of their computers. As plans to send them back into classrooms materialized, teachers across the country turned to online forums to help make decisions, share tips, and voice their grievances. Teachers on TikTok make jokes about their pre-pandemic-versus-post-pandemic greeting routine (in place of a hug or a high-five, how about “ten seconds of uninterrupted eye contact?”) or talk about how exhausted they are. Facebook groups have proliferated, including Texas Teachers United Against Reopening Schools and Teachers Against Dying. In Galveston, north of where Leal works, a garrulous environmental-science and biology teacher named Dan Hochman started a Facebook group called Texas Teachers for a Safe Reopening. Within forty-eight hours, more than forty thousand teachers had joined.
Public schools offer an ideal environment to spread disease. They also sit at a crossroads of social services: expected to bridge a growing divide between poverty and privilege, there to educate students, and, beyond that, to provide food security, health screenings, and counselling to those in need. And, in the middle of an economic crisis that is disproportionately impacting women, schools provide child care. It is a heavy burden on a system that is underfunded and a profession that has, over time, been devalued. Like other professions associated with women—those of nurses, care workers, and, for that matter, most essential workers—teaching is at once vital to the functioning of the U.S. economy and subject to painful contradictions. Teachers, and other essential workers, are praised for their heroism, expected to serve selflessly, and provided with very little in the way of support. “A school district alone cannot formulate the entire response for children,” a Los Angeles Unified School District board member wrote in a Times Op-Ed, when schools shuttered in March. But, as reopening loomed, it seemed as if schools and teachers were being counted on to do just that.
According to Meira Levinson, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, this scramble was playing out in school districts everywhere. “Every school district across the United States made their first priority feeding kids,” Levinson said. “And then you thought, Oh, so this is actually what school is about. It’s about providing those services.” To explain the disproportionate demands placed on teachers like Leal, Levinson pointed to a famous government research project, led by the sociologist James Coleman, that was released in 1966. The study found that educational attainment was determined primarily by factors outside a teacher’s sphere of influence—particularly race and class. “The data has been clear for over fifty years,” Levinson said. Despite that, “the emphasis has been ever more on schools’ role in fostering academic learning. . . . But the teacher accounts for at most fifteen per cent of a kid’s academic learning.”
So, while teachers have been held to higher standards, and schools rewarded and punished according to academic achievement, they have at the same time been called upon to ameliorate the challenges that students face outside school walls. Districts across the U.S. are dealing with a rise in homelessness. School nurses serve as primary care. “Teachers have long been the first responders in trying to address our kids’ needs,” Rob D’Amico, the communications director at the Texas A.F.T., the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, said. “If the kids come to school and they’ve forgotten their shoes. Or their parents have split up. Or if they’re moving. It hasn’t really been accounted for other than teachers trying to do what they could.” For Leal and Hochman, this has meant that they work harder and take more risks. Their responsibilities have expanded past their job descriptions to the point that their lives seemed expendable. “No, we shouldn’t fix the gun problem; we should make teachers stand in front of bullets,” Hochman said. “We shouldn’t fix the virus; we should make teachers be willing to die.”
The pandemic might have been an opportunity to reconsider the demands placed on all essential workers. We might have reëvaluated the roles that teachers and schools play in our society. Levinson worries that the moment might already have passed. “Potentially, for a couple minutes, there was a chance for people to see that we have asked schools to take a range of challenges that would be more efficient and more effective if we chose to address them with universal wage laws, health care, or dental care,” she said. “I already see it slipping away.”
Leal and Hochman first met after Leal staged a protest in Brownsville while wearing a grim-reaper costume. “It was a costume I had purchased to wear to class on Halloween,” he said. “It just fit the situation.” Leal’s grim reaper held a sign that read “I’m ready for school, are you?” The picture went viral in online teacher groups. Around the same time, Hochman had organized a protest in Austin and had connected with a number of teachers across the state, and some outside Texas. They invited Leal to speak to an online group called TeachUP, a weeks-old effort to get teachers involved in policy- and decision-making.
Following Abbott’s official announcement on June 18th, Leal had waited to see how things would shape up in the state. Texas is big, he said—he did not expect the rules to be uniform across every district when the virus was spreading unevenly. As he waited, the cases of COVID-19 skyrocketed. Abbott issued a mandatory-mask order on July 2nd. Houston became a national hot spot. Numbers rose in San Antonio, in Austin, and along the border. In Cameron County, where Brownsville sits, around four per cent of the population has tested positive for COVID-19, a rate that exceeds that of New York City. A custodian from Leal’s school died over the summer—a tiny woman in her fifties, whom everyone in the building knew. “On Mondays, we would go and play bingo, and we would see her there,” Leal said. “I used to buy her extra cards.”
Still, the steady drumbeat of reopening was coming down from D.C. In early July, Donald Trump threatened to cut funding from schools that refused to open for face-to-face learning. He told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to revisit its guidelines on school reopening, calling them “very tough & expensive.” “We’re very much going to put pressure on our governors and everybody else to open schools, to get them open,” he said. In Texas, it did not take long for the message to gain a foothold. On July 7th, Abbott threatened to take away funding from schools in the state that did not open. “On-campus instruction in Texas public schools is where it’s at,” Morath said. The Texas Education Agency gave school districts a three-week grace period from the regular start date in August, and then expected classes to open for anyone who wanted to attend, five days a week.
This, in Texas, is when the protests started. Leal and a few other teachers from B.I.S.D. held signs outside the district’s main office. Hochman organized a protest caravan of more than a thousand cars in Austin. Teachers have staged protests in Dallas, San Antonio, Cypress-Fairbanks, and Killeen. Considering the events of the past year, these demonstrations may not seem significant, but, in Texas—which has five and a half million students and more than three hundred thousand teachers—organizing is difficult and risky. The Texas A.F.T. is one of four teachers’ organizations in the state; two of the others oppose collective bargaining, which has been outlawed for most public employees in the state since the forties, anyway. If teachers strike, they can lose their jobs, their certifications, and their pensions. They can be formally reprimanded for speaking out online. So, even as school budgets have been slashed (the state cut $5.4 billion from the education budget in 2011) and teacher pay has stayed stagnant (pay in Texas is around six thousand dollars less than the national average)—and even as teachers in other states staged walkouts in 2018 and 2019—Texas had been relatively quiet. “Teachers are usually pretty hesitant about speaking out, because they fear retribution,” D’Amico told me. “But not in this case. It’s really unusual.”
In addition to protesting, some teachers across the state resigned, despite the fact that they would lose their jobs and their health care and would have their teaching certificates suspended for a year. (“One of the things we are trying to do is get those consequences waived for this year,” Leal told me.) The Texas A.F.T., according to D’Amico, has seen more interest in its activities than ever before. And, early on, it seemed to be having an effect. As teachers and administrators protested and sent letters to Abbott, the state, however reluctantly, amended its position. The three-week grace period was extended to four. Four more weeks were added as an option—pushing potential start dates into October. Abbott had given individual school districts and school boards an eight-week window to make their own decisions about in-person reopening. Beyond that, the decisions would be made by the state.
As teachers watched this back-and-forth, they continued to banter online. In Hochman’s group, one teacher shared a picture of a wall of shower-curtain liners that she had erected around the desk where she did lesson plans; another wondered if teachers would bring microwaves into classrooms. Several versions of the same meme made the rounds, showing a police officer and a teacher; the officer is saying, “You can’t cut our funding and expect us to do our jobs!” The teacher, with eyebrows raised, is looking at him over his glasses. But some real activism has grown out of the online chatter, as well. In Dallas, a chapter of the Texas A.F.T. protested until the district agreed to delay in-person learning until at least October 6th. (The union is still pushing for classes to remain online until January.)
Hochman and Leal have recently joined with other teachers from the TeachUp group to launch an online protest called Drawing the Line. The group meets on Zoom to discuss the movement that they hope is building. During a session in August, a woman named Abi Baiza worried about her students’ connectivity issues in the upcoming school year. In Pennsylvania, one of the founders of TeachUp, Sarah Steinhauer, was concerned about the retribution that teachers faced when they voiced their opinions. (Steinhauer recently retired rather than return to teach this year.) There was commiseration about low pay and high-stakes testing. Nearly everyone was worried about their safety, and felt a sense of injustice about what they were being asked to do. “The undeniable truth is that teachers are in a position where they do not have a say,” Baiza said. “Teachers are in a position where decisions are made for them. Decisions are made not including them. Decisions are made by people who are not teachers.”


newyorker--2020-09-02--We Can Solve the Coronavirus-Test Mess Now—if We Want To

To get out of this pandemic , we need fast , easy coronavirus testing that ’ s accessible to everyone .
From the way people often talk , you might think we need a technological breakthrough to achieve this .
In fact , we don ’ t have a technological problem ; we ’ ve got an implementation problem .
We could have the testing capacity we need within weeks .
The reason we don ’ t is not simply that our national leadership is unfit but also that our health-care system is dysfunctional .
Many developed countries have met @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to speedy tests has been key to containing outbreaks and resuming social and economic activity .
Whether you live in England or South Korea , scheduling is straightforward .
No doctor ’ s order is required .
Tests , where indicated , are free .
And you typically get results within forty-eight hours .
In the United States , getting a test is anything but easy .
Take a look at the Texas public directory of COVID-19 testing sites , which features a bold , red-highlighted disclaimer : “ ATTENTION : Unless otherwise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ co-insurance may apply .
May require physician referral or prior authorization .
Please call site to confirm.
” Congress has mandated that insurers fully cover the costs both of testing and of the medical-office visit that produces the test order .
But providers may still require payment until the insurer has confirmed coverage .
Some twenty-eight million Americans had no insurance before the pandemic , including eighteen per cent of Texans , and millions more have lost their insurance since it started .
Although legislation allowed states to expand Medicaid to cover coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states ( including Texas ) have yet to do so .
Health-care providers are left to seek disaster-relief funds to cover testing costs for the uninsured .
The Texas disclaimer also warns that its test-site directory is incomplete .
On another page , the Web site alerts you to additional considerations to take into account when seeking a test site , including what the screening criteria are ( sites vary as to whom they are willing to test ) ; whether the site is covered by your insurer ; and what types of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only antibody tests , which do not help establish a diagnosis ) .
Appointments can take days , results days more .
Most testing in the United States is done by four companies—Quest Diagnostics , LabCorp , BioReference Laboratories , and Sonic Healthcare .
Through early August , results routinely took four days or more , making the tests essentially useless .
Times improved only when testing volumes declined , because many people gave up on getting tested .
The vast majority of infected Americans , including those with symptoms , never get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reached the fall , when flu season will hit and coronavirus-testing needs and demand are expected to rise substantially .
As the saying goes , it ’ s as messed up as a pile of coat hangers .
Further complicating matters , insurers don ’ t pay for testing that they don ’ t consider medically necessary .
Yet testing people who don ’ t have symptoms will be important to getting COVID-19 under control .
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that around forty per cent of viral transmissions occur @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Yes , a combination of distancing , hygiene , and mask-wearing when people can ’ t stay six feet apart can markedly reduce such transmissions .
But , in many situations , we can ’ t count on people being able to maintain those measures .
Testing is the only way to know whether a person is potentially contagious and in need of isolation .
Such “ assurance testing ” has been required by countries such as Iceland , France , and Germany for travellers from abroad in order to avoid a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Maine and Massachusetts to Hawaii and Alaska for out-of-state travellers ; by many U.S. hospitals for all patients admitted for non-emergent surgery ; and by the film and television industry , which plans to do regular testing of cast and crew members in order to start production again .
The federal government has recommended that nursing homes test all staff once a week .
Numerous colleges and universities have included repeated testing in their protocols for bringing students back to campus .
Individuals are seeking assurance tests before visiting older family members .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ going further , saying that regular testing for every person in the United States should be our lead strategy for getting society back to normal .
Those with a recent negative test would have permission to go without a mask ; those with a positive test would be required to isolate for two weeks .
The small Italian town of Vò , outside Padua City , took a similar approach .
It offered testing to all its thirty-three hundred inhabitants at two points over two weeks during lockdown .
Eighty-six per cent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ round .
Almost three per cent were infected , half of whom had no symptoms .
In the second round , seventy-two per cent of the population was tested , with a 0.3-per-cent new-infection rate .
With these last few cases isolated , the town was able to reopen long before the rest of Italy could .
But is any of this remotely feasible when we can ’ t even make sure that sick people can get tested in a timely way ?
The lunacy of our testing system is the lunacy of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are now paying the price of our long , uniquely American resistance to making sure that everyone has proper health-care coverage , and to building an adequate public-health infrastructure .
We have not fully grappled with the difficulties we ’ re up against .
But , if we do , we have a chance to fix the problem before the worst of flu season hits .
The need for speed The course of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is relatively brief .
It starts with perhaps as little as a few hundred viral @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then , if they take hold , they multiply to a viral count so high that you are exhaling millions of viral particles per hour .
You are typically at your most contagious around day five of infection .
Symptoms usually begin about the same time .
In more than eighty per cent of cases , adequate oxygen levels can be maintained without hospitalization , and the body ’ s immune system can reduce viral counts rapidly .
In these mild to moderate cases , researchers have found almost no transmission a week @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recovery takes upward of two to three weeks for a third of such patients .
( In cases of serious illness , the reduction in viral counts can take a week or so longer . )
The goal of testing is to detect the virus as early as possible during infection .
The standard diagnostic test involves , as tens of millions of people now intimately know , a swab of the cavity deep behind the nasal passage—or , as more recently authorized by the Food and Drug Administration , of just inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been approved to test saliva .
The sample from the patient is analyzed for evidence of viral genetic material .
The method of analysis , real-time polymerase chain reaction , PCR , is a small wonder of science , and , if it detects the SARS-CoV-2 virus , the diagnosis approaches a-hundred-per-cent accuracy : false positives are rare .
But false negatives are another matter .
The miss rate among people with a symptomatic infection is upward of twenty per cent , owing either to sampling problems ( the swab didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a viral count too low to be detected .
That miss rate is even higher during the four days or so before symptoms begin—going from a hundred per cent on the first day of an infection to sixty-seven per cent on the fourth day , according to a Johns Hopkins study .
A negative test is not a guarantee that a person is infection-free .

To get out of this pandemic, we need fast, easy coronavirus testing that’s accessible to everyone. From the way people often talk, you might think we need a technological breakthrough to achieve this. In fact, we don’t have a technological problem; we’ve got an implementation problem. We could have the testing capacity we need within weeks. The reason we don’t is not simply that our national leadership is unfit but also that our health-care system is dysfunctional.
Many developed countries have met their testing needs, and ready access to speedy tests has been key to containing outbreaks and resuming social and economic activity. Whether you live in England or South Korea, scheduling is straightforward. No doctor’s order is required. Tests, where indicated, are free. And you typically get results within forty-eight hours.
In the United States, getting a test is anything but easy. Take a look at the Texas public directory of COVID-19 testing sites, which features a bold, red-highlighted disclaimer: “ATTENTION: Unless otherwise stated, deductible, co-pay, or co-insurance may apply. May require physician referral or prior authorization. Please call site to confirm.” Congress has mandated that insurers fully cover the costs both of testing and of the medical-office visit that produces the test order. But providers may still require payment until the insurer has confirmed coverage. Some twenty-eight million Americans had no insurance before the pandemic, including eighteen per cent of Texans, and millions more have lost their insurance since it started. Although legislation allowed states to expand Medicaid to cover coronavirus testing-related costs for the uninsured, many states (including Texas) have yet to do so. Health-care providers are left to seek disaster-relief funds to cover testing costs for the uninsured. The Texas disclaimer also warns that its test-site directory is incomplete. On another page, the Web site alerts you to additional considerations to take into account when seeking a test site, including what the screening criteria are (sites vary as to whom they are willing to test); whether the site is covered by your insurer; and what types of tests they provide (some may have only antibody tests, which do not help establish a diagnosis).
Appointments can take days, results days more. Most testing in the United States is done by four companies—Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, BioReference Laboratories, and Sonic Healthcare. Through early August, results routinely took four days or more, making the tests essentially useless. Times improved only when testing volumes declined, because many people gave up on getting tested. The vast majority of infected Americans, including those with symptoms, never get tested. And we have not even reached the fall, when flu season will hit and coronavirus-testing needs and demand are expected to rise substantially. As the saying goes, it’s as messed up as a pile of coat hangers.
Further complicating matters, insurers don’t pay for testing that they don’t consider medically necessary. Yet testing people who don’t have symptoms will be important to getting COVID-19 under control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that around forty per cent of viral transmissions occur before an infected person has any symptoms. Yes, a combination of distancing, hygiene, and mask-wearing when people can’t stay six feet apart can markedly reduce such transmissions. But, in many situations, we can’t count on people being able to maintain those measures. Testing is the only way to know whether a person is potentially contagious and in need of isolation.
Such “assurance testing” has been required by countries such as Iceland, France, and Germany for travellers from abroad in order to avoid a mandatory two-week quarantine; by states from Maine and Massachusetts to Hawaii and Alaska for out-of-state travellers; by many U.S. hospitals for all patients admitted for non-emergent surgery; and by the film and television industry, which plans to do regular testing of cast and crew members in order to start production again. The federal government has recommended that nursing homes test all staff once a week. Numerous colleges and universities have included repeated testing in their protocols for bringing students back to campus. Individuals are seeking assurance tests before visiting older family members.
The economist Paul Romer has argued for going further, saying that regular testing for every person in the United States should be our lead strategy for getting society back to normal. Those with a recent negative test would have permission to go without a mask; those with a positive test would be required to isolate for two weeks. The small Italian town of Vò, outside Padua City, took a similar approach. It offered testing to all its thirty-three hundred inhabitants at two points over two weeks during lockdown. Eighty-six per cent of the population came forward in the first round. Almost three per cent were infected, half of whom had no symptoms. In the second round, seventy-two per cent of the population was tested, with a 0.3-per-cent new-infection rate. With these last few cases isolated, the town was able to reopen long before the rest of Italy could.
But is any of this remotely feasible when we can’t even make sure that sick people can get tested in a timely way? The lunacy of our testing system is the lunacy of our health system in microcosm. We are now paying the price of our long, uniquely American resistance to making sure that everyone has proper health-care coverage, and to building an adequate public-health infrastructure. We have not fully grappled with the difficulties we’re up against. But, if we do, we have a chance to fix the problem before the worst of flu season hits.
The need for speed
The course of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is relatively brief. It starts with perhaps as little as a few hundred viral particles getting into your respiratory passage; then, if they take hold, they multiply to a viral count so high that you are exhaling millions of viral particles per hour. You are typically at your most contagious around day five of infection. Symptoms usually begin about the same time. In more than eighty per cent of cases, adequate oxygen levels can be maintained without hospitalization, and the body’s immune system can reduce viral counts rapidly. In these mild to moderate cases, researchers have found almost no transmission a week after the onset of symptoms, although recovery takes upward of two to three weeks for a third of such patients. (In cases of serious illness, the reduction in viral counts can take a week or so longer.) The goal of testing is to detect the virus as early as possible during infection.


newyorker--2020-09-02--Trump Claims That Sleepy Person With No Energy Will Somehow Be Peppy Enough to Destroy Entire Countr

Trump Claims That Sleepy Person With No Energy Will Somehow Be Peppy Enough to Destroy Entire Country

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday that Joe Biden is “ incredibly sleepy ” and has “ zero energy , ” yet somehow is peppy enough to destroy life in the United States as we know it .
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News , Trump attempted to explain the apparent contradiction between a person being barely sentient yet capable of singlehandedly dismantling a global superpower .
“ Sleepy Joe is practically unconscious and almost doesn ’ t have a pulse , ” Trump said .
“ But that ’ s because he has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a bear.
” Trump went on to say that he had seen a documentary about bears on Animal Planet “ that was so scary , every voter needs to see it.
” “ This bear hibernated all winter , but then , when he woke up , he had enough energy to rip a hiker ’ s face off , ” he said .
“ Just you watch .
Joe Biden is conserving his energy right now , but , as sure as you ’ re sitting there , the minute he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s face off.
” Trump said that , in November , the American people face a stark choice .
“ It ’ s between me , their favorite President , and an angry bear who hasn ’ t eaten in months , ” he said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday that Joe Biden is “incredibly sleepy” and has “zero energy,” yet somehow is peppy enough to destroy life in the United States as we know it.
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump attempted to explain the apparent contradiction between a person being barely sentient yet capable of singlehandedly dismantling a global superpower.
“Sleepy Joe is practically unconscious and almost doesn’t have a pulse,” Trump said. “But that’s because he has put his entire body into hibernation, like a bear.”
Trump went on to say that he had seen a documentary about bears on Animal Planet “that was so scary, every voter needs to see it.”
“This bear hibernated all winter, but then, when he woke up, he had enough energy to rip a hiker’s face off,” he said. “Just you watch. Joe Biden is conserving his energy right now, but, as sure as you’re sitting there, the minute he takes office he will rip this country’s face off.”
Trump said that, in November, the American people face a stark choice. “It’s between me, their favorite President, and an angry bear who hasn’t eaten in months,” he said.