newyorker--2020-07-23--The Long Game of Coronavirus Research

The Long Game of Coronavirus Research

Last month , Anthony Fauci , the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , spoke at a biotech conference , where he emphasized how much is still unknown about the coronavirus .
“ I thought H.I.V .
was a complicated disease , ” he said .
“ It ’ s really simple compared to what ’ s going on with COVID-19.
” To anyone who knows the history of AIDS research—Fauci has spent much of his career studying the disease—this was a dismaying thing to hear .
In 1984 , President Reagan ’ s Health and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said , “ We hope to have a vaccine ready for testing in about two years.
” Almost four decades later , there is still no vaccine .
If Heckler ’ s words now seem like wishful thinking , the Trump Administration has worried scientists and physicians with what may prove to be a similar overpromise .
In May , it unveiled a plan to deliver “ hundreds of millions of doses ” of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this year .
The plan ’ s name—Operation Warp Speed—is meant to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , true hope is clear-eyed and brings a tight focus on the barriers and potential setbacks that exist along the path to desired results .
In the face of a crisis as urgent as COVID-19 , speed is desirable , and the worldwide mobilization to conquer the virus has been inspiring .
But what Fauci said illustrates why it ’ s a grave mistake to favor speed at the cost of rigor .
Quite simply , this is a disease that we are only beginning to understand : since the outbreak began , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are , like those of AIDS , astonishingly diverse and complex .
Still largely thought of as a respiratory disease—it can indeed inflict devastating damage to the lungs—it is actually , as Fauci noted , capable of roving throughout the body .
There are cases in which it causes kidney failure , stroke , or a so-called cytokine storm , an overreaction of the body ’ s immune system that can lead to multiple organ failure .
In children , infection can lead to multisystem inflammatory syndrome , a condition that can damage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ COVID-19 has a startling spectrum of severity—from no symptoms to death—depending on a host of poorly understood factors .
Fauci also pointed out another unknown : whether some survivors , especially those with the severest symptoms , would end up dealing with lifelong debilitating effects .
Currently , we are not even sure how to assess protective immunity if we had a vaccine in hand—whether protection would be broad among all age groups and encompass the healthy as well as those whose clinical conditions , such as diabetes , heart disease , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Even more worrying , for those who imagine a vaccine might end the pandemic like turning off a light switch , a number of recent studies suggest that people who ’ ve had the disease may not emerge with robust , lasting immunity .
If so , it ’ s possible that the initial protection offered by a successful vaccine would similarly wane , and people could be infected again .
It ’ s understandable how desperate we all are for quick solutions , with the number of infections and deaths skyrocketing .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ designed since January , but many are too small to have much chance of producing clear results .
Researchers have been publishing their papers online before they have undergone peer review .
In May , the biotech company Moderna published initial results of an early trial of their vaccine in a press release .
Moderna ’ s vaccine dominated research news again last week , after fuller results of that trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine .
That work is still a preliminary achievement , since there were only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaccine dose groups , and , in the moderate- and high-dose groups , almost every volunteer had side effects .
An accompanying editorial from Penny Heaton , of the Gates Foundation , cautioned that we won ’ t really know about the safety of Moderna ’ s vaccine until many thousands receive it , nor whether the reported immune response in volunteers is actually protective against the virus .
There are clear risks with proceeding to human trials in haste .
As Kenneth Frazier , the C.E.O .
of Merck , pointed out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in the past , in which trial vaccines “ not only didn ’ t confer protection , but actually helped the virus invade the cell , because it was incomplete in terms of its immunogenic properties.
” Promises to have a vaccine ready by the end of the year , he said , did a “ grave disservice to the public.
” Producing a vaccine that is able to confer immunity on disparate age groups with varying levels of vulnerability is an enormous task , especially because COVID-19 is a brand new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to which we have no natural immunity .
( Even a vaccine as comparatively simple as the annual flu shot reduces the risk of flu sickness for only about forty to sixty per cent of recipients . )
All this means that a first vaccine , while a welcome tool in fighting COVID-19 , may well turn out to be of limited use .
The lesson learned from AIDS is the value of building a protective scientific infrastructure beyond a vaccine , something that requires legions of scientists working carefully and in concert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus causes disease .
In early June , I visited the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories ( NEIDL ) , to interview researchers there who are working on COVID-19 .
Part of Boston University , NEIDL ( pronounced like “ needle ” ) is one of two academically-affiliated institutions in the U.S. with laboratories that are certified to handle the deadliest pathogens known to man , like the Ebola and Marburg viruses and yellow fever .
NEIDL ’ s origins date to the period after 9/11 , when Fauci warned that the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible bioterrorism attacks , and the government earmarked billions of dollars to prepare for such an event .
NEIDL received its funding in 2003 , but getting a facility ready to handle such pathogens takes years : the building itself was completed in 2008 ; acquiring the necessary environmental approvals from local government and community representatives took almost a decade .
It wasn ’ t until 2017 , that NEIDL was fully approved to undertake all the work for which it was created .
The facility , which is on B.U.
’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ South End , stands seven stories high , a modern structure of glass and concrete .
Barriers surround the site at a distance of a hundred and fifty feet from the building ; they are fitted with motion-detection sensors and are strong enough to stop a fifteen-thousand-pound truck going fifty miles an hour .
Inside , there are around a dozen containment laboratories for dangerous microbes , which hold specialized microscopic equipment and robotic devices , and secure environmental facilities designed for pathogen vectors , like mosquitos and ticks , and animals , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
NEIDL ’ s Biosafety Level 4 facility—the part of the building that is licensed to handle the most dangerous microbes—is constructed as a building within the larger building .
That nested structure has twelve-inch-thick concrete walls coated with multiple layers of epoxy resin .
While NEIDL itself is built on piling that go into bedrock , the B.S.L.-4 floors are flexible , and can move at a different frequency from the main structure in case of an earthquake .
Researchers work in sealed suits , resembling those of astronauts , with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supplied with filtered air via a hose connected to the ceiling .
If there is a spill , the space is typically decontaminated with chlorine dioxide , and low air pressure maintained in the lab insures that air rushes in rather than out , so that no airborne virus can escape .

Last month, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke at a biotech conference, where he emphasized how much is still unknown about the coronavirus. “I thought H.I.V. was a complicated disease,” he said. “It’s really simple compared to what’s going on with COVID-19.” To anyone who knows the history of AIDS research—Fauci has spent much of his career studying the disease—this was a dismaying thing to hear. In 1984, President Reagan’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Margaret Heckler, said, “We hope to have a vaccine ready for testing in about two years.” Almost four decades later, there is still no vaccine. If Heckler’s words now seem like wishful thinking, the Trump Administration has worried scientists and physicians with what may prove to be a similar overpromise. In May, it unveiled a plan to deliver “hundreds of millions of doses” of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this year. The plan’s name—Operation Warp Speed—is meant to spark hope. But, in science, true hope is clear-eyed and brings a tight focus on the barriers and potential setbacks that exist along the path to desired results.
In the face of a crisis as urgent as COVID-19, speed is desirable, and the worldwide mobilization to conquer the virus has been inspiring. But what Fauci said illustrates why it’s a grave mistake to favor speed at the cost of rigor. Quite simply, this is a disease that we are only beginning to understand: since the outbreak began, it has become evident that its effects are, like those of AIDS, astonishingly diverse and complex. Still largely thought of as a respiratory disease—it can indeed inflict devastating damage to the lungs—it is actually, as Fauci noted, capable of roving throughout the body. There are cases in which it causes kidney failure, stroke, or a so-called cytokine storm, an overreaction of the body’s immune system that can lead to multiple organ failure. In children, infection can lead to multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a condition that can damage the heart and other vital organs. COVID-19 has a startling spectrum of severity—from no symptoms to death—depending on a host of poorly understood factors. Fauci also pointed out another unknown: whether some survivors, especially those with the severest symptoms, would end up dealing with lifelong debilitating effects. Currently, we are not even sure how to assess protective immunity if we had a vaccine in hand—whether protection would be broad among all age groups and encompass the healthy as well as those whose clinical conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, predispose them to COVID-19. Even more worrying, for those who imagine a vaccine might end the pandemic like turning off a light switch, a number of recent studies suggest that people who’ve had the disease may not emerge with robust, lasting immunity. If so, it’s possible that the initial protection offered by a successful vaccine would similarly wane, and people could be infected again.
It’s understandable how desperate we all are for quick solutions, with the number of infections and deaths skyrocketing. Some twelve hundred clinical studies have been designed since January, but many are too small to have much chance of producing clear results. Researchers have been publishing their papers online before they have undergone peer review. In May, the biotech company Moderna published initial results of an early trial of their vaccine in a press release. Moderna’s vaccine dominated research news again last week, after fuller results of that trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. That work is still a preliminary achievement, since there were only fifteen healthy volunteers in each of three vaccine dose groups, and, in the moderate- and high-dose groups, almost every volunteer had side effects. An accompanying editorial from Penny Heaton, of the Gates Foundation, cautioned that we won’t really know about the safety of Moderna’s vaccine until many thousands receive it, nor whether the reported immune response in volunteers is actually protective against the virus. There are clear risks with proceeding to human trials in haste. As Kenneth Frazier, the C.E.O. of Merck, pointed out last week, there have been cases, in the past, in which trial vaccines “not only didn’t confer protection, but actually helped the virus invade the cell, because it was incomplete in terms of its immunogenic properties.” Promises to have a vaccine ready by the end of the year, he said, did a “grave disservice to the public.”
Producing a vaccine that is able to confer immunity on disparate age groups with varying levels of vulnerability is an enormous task, especially because COVID-19 is a brand new disease in humans, and therefore one to which we have no natural immunity. (Even a vaccine as comparatively simple as the annual flu shot reduces the risk of flu sickness for only about forty to sixty per cent of recipients.) All this means that a first vaccine, while a welcome tool in fighting COVID-19, may well turn out to be of limited use. The lesson learned from AIDS is the value of building a protective scientific infrastructure beyond a vaccine, something that requires legions of scientists working carefully and in concert to understand the numerous ways that a virus causes disease.
In early June, I visited the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), to interview researchers there who are working on COVID-19. Part of Boston University, NEIDL (pronounced like “needle”) is one of two academically-affiliated institutions in the U.S. with laboratories that are certified to handle the deadliest pathogens known to man, like the Ebola and Marburg viruses and yellow fever. NEIDL’s origins date to the period after 9/11, when Fauci warned that the country needed a better system to defend against possible bioterrorism attacks, and the government earmarked billions of dollars to prepare for such an event. NEIDL received its funding in 2003, but getting a facility ready to handle such pathogens takes years: the building itself was completed in 2008; acquiring the necessary environmental approvals from local government and community representatives took almost a decade. It wasn’t until 2017, that NEIDL was fully approved to undertake all the work for which it was created.
The facility, which is on B.U.’s medical campus, in Boston’s South End, stands seven stories high, a modern structure of glass and concrete. Barriers surround the site at a distance of a hundred and fifty feet from the building; they are fitted with motion-detection sensors and are strong enough to stop a fifteen-thousand-pound truck going fifty miles an hour. Inside, there are around a dozen containment laboratories for dangerous microbes, which hold specialized microscopic equipment and robotic devices, and secure environmental facilities designed for pathogen vectors, like mosquitos and ticks, and animals, which researchers use to model human diseases. NEIDL’s Biosafety Level 4 facility—the part of the building that is licensed to handle the most dangerous microbes—is constructed as a building within the larger building. That nested structure has twelve-inch-thick concrete walls coated with multiple layers of epoxy resin. While NEIDL itself is built on piling that go into bedrock, the B.S.L.-4 floors are flexible, and can move at a different frequency from the main structure in case of an earthquake. Researchers work in sealed suits, resembling those of astronauts, with a large transparent bubble over the head, supplied with filtered air via a hose connected to the ceiling. If there is a spill, the space is typically decontaminated with chlorine dioxide, and low air pressure maintained in the lab insures that air rushes in rather than out, so that no airborne virus can escape.
NEIDL has been working with live samples of the coronavirus since March, when it received a sample that was derived from the U.S.’s first diagnosed case: a thirty-five-year-old man in Washington State who had recently returned from Wuhan. But its staff had been making plans to investigate the virus since January, when early reports of its rapid spread convinced them that it would proliferate worldwide and lead to severe outbreaks in the U.S. They immediately began writing protocols for using the virus and submitting requests for approval from B.U. In March, institutions at B.U., including NEIDL, received 1.9 million dollars in funding from the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, part of a hundred-and-fifteen-million-dollar grant—coördinated by the Dean of Harvard Medical School and financed by a Chinese investment fund—to support researchers working in the Boston area and Guangzhou.
In the U.S., most of the B.S.L.-4 labs are in government or military facilities, but NEIDL, despite its origin as part of a federal initiative, operates on an open academic model. “We work with absolute transparency,” its director, Ronald Corley, told me. “We have to have the trust of the public, so everything we do is known and communicated freely.” In the past two years, Corley, a lanky microbiologist in his seventies, has recruited fourteen scientists to join the center, looking for researchers with a wide range of expertise. The staff of NEIDL and its affiliates includes experts in the basic biology of the deadliest pathogens, in animal models that can be used to mimic the progress of human diseases, and in effective treatments and potential vaccines. Corley believes in giving them the freedom to pursue their hunches without being micromanaged. From the outset, he organized the center’s COVID-19 research on the presumption that it would be, as recent evidence has borne out, an evolving target—and that progress would more likely come from a cluster of approaches than from a single breakthrough.
Since Donald Trump took office, his Administration has worked to systematically disassemble key elements of federal pandemic planning. In 2018, it largely disbanded the National Security Council unit responsible for pandemic preparedness, which was formed during the Obama Administration, after having ignored the council’s playbook for fighting pandemics. It removed Rick Bright, from his job as a Health and Human Services official in charge of vaccine development, after he submitted a three-hundred-page complaint about the Administration’s coronavirus response. Most recently, the White House directed the National Institutes of Health to cut off federal grant funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization headquartered in New York that studies the global spread of viruses from animals to humans, and which collaborated on research about coronaviruses with researchers based in China.
But some aspects of the country’s pandemic planning have managed to survive, in large part because they were designed as enduring homes of scientific inquiry into the most dangerous biological threats. NEIDL was conceived to be at once independent of politics and ready to respond in a cohesive way to a national emergency. Its approach represents the polar opposite of the “warp speed” language popularized for the public.
“There’s lots of good work going on across the globe,” Corley said. “There’s also a lot of junk, because people are rushing.” The issue is not just sloppiness; laboratories are inherently artificial environments, and even the most careful work can yield apparent breakthroughs that turn out to be artifacts of the experimental process. When a virus infects human cells grown in a lab, it can mutate slightly. It is possible to spend years developing a therapy for an altered form of a pathogen only to find that that therapy brings no benefit to patients. Corley and his team have been sequencing the genes of their virus samples repeatedly as they work, in order to make sure that the pathogen is not morphing into a form that no longer corresponds with what was originally retrieved from the Seattle patient—a time-consuming, but necessary, precaution.
As Corley led me on a tour of the facility and introduced me to its researchers, I got a sense of NEIDL’s institutional preference for care over speed. Anthony Griffiths, a virologist and an Ebola expert whose focus is on animal modelling, stated the value of deliberate science plainly. “I learned lessons from Ebola. I understand speed,” he told me. “But, if you do science in a rush, you are at risk of going down the garden path.” Griffiths hopes to use observations of the progress of the disease in animal hosts—genetically manipulated mice, golden Syrian hamsters, and rhesus monkeys—to learn about its mechanisms and to test possible treatments. This could help determine how much virus has to be present to cause infection, and what the routes to inoculation might be, with the aim of uncovering the dynamics of human immunity against the coronavirus. “I would love to be first, but we’re not going to be,” he told me. “But we want to put ourselves in the best position to do the kind of work that can help understand the performance of the vaccine, and what its limitations may prove to be.”
Griffiths works closely with Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at Boston Medical Center who is an expert in emerging pathogens. In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, she was part of a W.H.O. team that treated patients and training local caregivers. Part of her role is to draw the attention of NEIDL scientists to evolving and unexplained clinical findings of COVID-19, such as those that Fauci highlighted, so that they investigate them in the laboratory. For example, she has observed patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, then repeatedly tested negative, and then tested positive again. “Have they become reinfected or has their immunity waned?” she said. “Or were they just shedding virus from the initial infection?” With scientists at NEIDL, she is working to take a chronological sequence of virus samples from such patients. Genetic analysis can show whether a patient was carrying the same pathogen at different times, or whether the virus mutated in a way that outflanked the person’s immune response. This work will ultimately make it easier to assess the likely potency of prospective vaccines. Bhadelia has also noted that some patients who were “not terribly sick, meaning they weren’t in the I.C.U,” nonetheless appear to have residual problems with cognition. Such persistent effects could potentially be modelled in animal studies at NEIDL.
Rob Davey, an Australian microbiologist with a wry sense of humor and hyperkinetic way of talking, is an expert on discovering novel treatments for pathogens. In 2018, while he was working with the biotech company Regeneron, Davey helped identify a kind of antibody that successfully treated Ebola in animal test subjects by latching onto viral proteins and blocking the microbe from entering cells. These antibodies ultimately became treatments for patients with the infection. Since he began working on COVID-19, he has been looking for agents with the potential to disrupt the progress of the disease. He is currently screening almost seven thousand chemicals that he obtained from the Broad Institute (the joint Harvard–M.I.T. enterprise that specializes in assembling large libraries of chemical compounds), along with an additional thirty-two hundred provided by B.U. Some of these compounds are drugs already in use for illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, and migraine. If Davey’s screening process indicates that one of them has potential as a COVID-19 treatment, testing on patients could follow quickly, since they already have F.D.A. approval.


newyorker--2020-07-23--Confused Federal Agents Unable to Determine Which Unmarked Van In D.H.S. Garage Is Theirs

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald Trump ’ s plan to dispatch troops to several American cities has hit a major snag , as federal agents have been unable to determine which unmarked van in the Department of Homeland Security parking garage is theirs .
According to one agent who spoke on condition of anonymity , hundreds of agents are currently wandering around the huge D.H.S .
garage in Washington , fruitlessly attempting to locate the correct unmarked van .
“ It ’ s like a baggage-claim nightmare , ” the agent complained .
“ Many unmarked vans look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cities “ seemed like a really cool idea at first , ” the ensuing confusion might be a compelling reason to “ maybe think about going with marked vans instead , ” the frustrated agent said .
Speaking to reporters , the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security , Chad Wolf , said that agents ’ inability to locate the correct unmarked vans had been “ exaggerated , ” and added that he was working with the D.H.S .
laundry to insure that agents stop receiving other agents ’ unmarked uniforms @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump’s plan to dispatch troops to several American cities has hit a major snag, as federal agents have been unable to determine which unmarked van in the Department of Homeland Security parking garage is theirs.
According to one agent who spoke on condition of anonymity, hundreds of agents are currently wandering around the huge D.H.S. garage in Washington, fruitlessly attempting to locate the correct unmarked van.
“It’s like a baggage-claim nightmare,” the agent complained. “Many unmarked vans look alike.”
Although sending unmarked vans to cities “seemed like a really cool idea at first,” the ensuing confusion might be a compelling reason to “maybe think about going with marked vans instead,” the frustrated agent said.
Speaking to reporters, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, said that agents’ inability to locate the correct unmarked vans had been “exaggerated,” and added that he was working with the D.H.S. laundry to insure that agents stop receiving other agents’ unmarked uniforms.


newyorker--2020-07-23--Daily Cartoon: Thursday, July 23rd

Daily Cartoon: Thursday, July 23rd

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newyorker--2020-07-23--After Beating Back the Coronavirus, Jamaica Prioritizes Tourism Over Public Health

In March , as the coronavirus spread rapidly across the world , Jamaica ’ s government closed its borders to prevent a spike in infections and deaths .
The drastic move successfully limited the spread of the virus in the country , but it brought its economy to a standstill .
On June 15th , Jamaica reopened its borders to tourists .
After the arrival of more than thirty-five thousand people , there have been more than a hundred newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 on the island .
The majority of them came from the United States .
Jamaica , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ international movement , had no choice but to reopen .
Without tourism , businesses there stood to lose the equivalent of about three million dollars a day in revenue , which sustains more than twenty per cent of the country ’ s economy .
Delroy Williams , the mayor of Kingston , said that the city ’ s entertainment industry , which ranges from music production to concerts to dance halls , has been shut down as well .
“ Its impact is huge , ” he said .
“ The city would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Edmund Bartlett , the Minister of Tourism , announced a plan to establish a “ resilience corridor ” that runs from west to east , along Jamaica ’ s northern coast , where all travellers would remain .
( There is now a corridor on the southern coast as well . )
Whether the plan will be effective in containing the virus remains to be seen .
The government is currently processing a backlog of ten thousand coronavirus tests .
The health ministry claims that all specimens will be analyzed by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also released an app called JamCOVID19 , which tracks the movements of visitors and can be used for contact tracing .
Unlike elected leaders in the United States , Jamaican politicians acknowledged the scope of the threat , aggressively responded to the virus , and vanquished it .
To date , only ten people have died and eight hundred and ten have been infected in a nation of nearly three million people .
In order to protect itself from American tourists who might be carriers , Jamaica declared that visitors from Florida , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are allowed to enter the country only if they test negative for the virus ten days or fewer before their arrival .
Due to economic pressure , Jamaica has also resumed receiving flights from the United Kingdom , the country from which travellers first brought the virus to the island .
British tourists must also test negative before they arrive .
On March 4th , a Jamaican woman who has dual British-Jamaican citizenship arrived at Norman Manley International , Kingston ’ s main airport .
Six days later , she tested positive for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confirmed case .
Before she began exhibiting symptoms , she attended a funeral and visited at least five public spaces .
Health officials immediately placed the woman in isolation at a hospital and began contact tracing .
Officials discovered that this Patient Zero had infected at least five other people , who were also placed in quarantine .
The immediate use of quarantine reflected the unified approach adopted by Jamaica ’ s two political parties .
After watching the pandemic spread across China and South Korea , elected leaders adopted the strict contact-tracing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countries .
Drawing on Jamaica ’ s past experiences with epidemics such as H1N1 and SARS , the Prime Minister , Andrew Holness , enacted a nationwide pandemic protocol .
The government imposed temperature checks at markets ; a ten-hour curfew for all residents except essential workers , which , if violated , could have resulted in arrest ; and meticulous contact tracing across the country ’ s fourteen parishes .
The strict measures worked .
Jamaican officials kept the country ’ s over-all rate of infection low—about thirty cases per hundred thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the U.S. , which is more than a thousand per hundred thousand .
If the U.S. had been able to contain the virus to the same degree , there would have been about a hundred thousand cases instead of nearly four million to date .
“ Restrictions significantly slowed down the virus and allowed us to manage the spread , ” Christopher Tufton , the Jamaican Minister of Health and Wellness , told me .
The government also closed the borders to thousands of Jamaican citizens who were travelling or working abroad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least mid-May .
A sixty-five-year-old health-care provider named Lin , who asked that her last name not be used , was one of the Jamaicans stranded abroad .
She had travelled to Orlando from Kingston to care for a patient shortly before the pandemic began .
( She has cared for several members of my family in the past . )
In normal circumstances , she would have returned to Jamaica in April , after she was done providing care , but , because the borders were closed , she was stuck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I was terrified , ” she told me .
“ I just wanted to go home .
I was in a strange country , and I was alone.
” Audrey Marks , the Jamaican Ambassador to the United States , supervised the controlled reëntry of four thousand Jamaican nationals who were stranded in the U.S. at the time of the closure .
All returnees were required to wear masks on their flights home , get tested for the virus , and quarantine for fourteen days in hotel rooms obtained by the government before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paid more than a million dollars to feed and quarantine all of the repatriated Jamaicans at hotels in Kingston and St. Ann .
“ It ’ s very expensive , but the government ’ s position was that it is better to take the initial cost , rather than take on the long-term costs of overwhelming the system , ” Marks told me .
The health-care system in Jamaica , like elsewhere in the Caribbean , is fragile .
Seventeen thousand public-health workers care for the country ’ s population of 2.7 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a reputation for administering quality care , are often hired to work in the United States .
As the coronavirus spread , Jamaica recruited Cuban medical workers to aid in caring for patients .
At any given moment , there are about three hundred Cuban doctors and nurses working in Jamaica .
During the COVID-19 pandemic , Cuba sent an additional hundred and forty-four health-care workers .
Trump Administration officials urged Jamaica and other nations not to accept Cuban health-care workers , because of what it claimed were “ labor abuses , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s warnings .
Cuba , which has one of the world ’ s highest ratios of doctors per capita , built a field hospital in Lombardy , Italy , and dispatched more than a thousand health-care workers to eighteen countries , including eight in the Caribbean .
In Cuba , the government has reported that there have been only twenty-four hundred confirmed cases and eighty-six deaths related to the coronavirus , in a nation of eleven million .
Cuban officials credit the country ’ s strict isolation measures and mask guidelines .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ response to the coronavirus has varied .
In the Dominican Republic , which occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispañola and has a population of ten million , there have been more than fifty-six thousand confirmed cases and about a thousand deaths .
Haiti , which occupies the western third of the island and has a population of eleven million , has a weak health-care system and has not been able to test widely ; it has confirmed only seven thousand cases and a hundred and fifty-four deaths .

In March, as the coronavirus spread rapidly across the world, Jamaica’s government closed its borders to prevent a spike in infections and deaths. The drastic move successfully limited the spread of the virus in the country, but it brought its economy to a standstill. On June 15th, Jamaica reopened its borders to tourists. After the arrival of more than thirty-five thousand people, there have been more than a hundred newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 on the island. The majority of them came from the United States. Jamaica, a nation whose economy is dependent on international movement, had no choice but to reopen. Without tourism, businesses there stood to lose the equivalent of about three million dollars a day in revenue, which sustains more than twenty per cent of the country’s economy. Delroy Williams, the mayor of Kingston, said that the city’s entertainment industry, which ranges from music production to concerts to dance halls, has been shut down as well. “Its impact is huge,” he said. “The city would collapse without the industry.”
In June, Edmund Bartlett, the Minister of Tourism, announced a plan to establish a “resilience corridor” that runs from west to east, along Jamaica’s northern coast, where all travellers would remain. (There is now a corridor on the southern coast as well.) Whether the plan will be effective in containing the virus remains to be seen. The government is currently processing a backlog of ten thousand coronavirus tests. The health ministry claims that all specimens will be analyzed by the end of the month. The government also released an app called JamCOVID19, which tracks the movements of visitors and can be used for contact tracing.
Unlike elected leaders in the United States, Jamaican politicians acknowledged the scope of the threat, aggressively responded to the virus, and vanquished it. To date, only ten people have died and eight hundred and ten have been infected in a nation of nearly three million people. In order to protect itself from American tourists who might be carriers, Jamaica declared that visitors from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New York are allowed to enter the country only if they test negative for the virus ten days or fewer before their arrival. Due to economic pressure, Jamaica has also resumed receiving flights from the United Kingdom, the country from which travellers first brought the virus to the island. British tourists must also test negative before they arrive.
On March 4th, a Jamaican woman who has dual British-Jamaican citizenship arrived at Norman Manley International, Kingston’s main airport. Six days later, she tested positive for COVID-19, becoming Jamaica’s first confirmed case. Before she began exhibiting symptoms, she attended a funeral and visited at least five public spaces. Health officials immediately placed the woman in isolation at a hospital and began contact tracing. Officials discovered that this Patient Zero had infected at least five other people, who were also placed in quarantine.
The immediate use of quarantine reflected the unified approach adopted by Jamaica’s two political parties. After watching the pandemic spread across China and South Korea, elected leaders adopted the strict contact-tracing methodology that was used in those two countries. Drawing on Jamaica’s past experiences with epidemics such as H1N1 and SARS, the Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, enacted a nationwide pandemic protocol. The government imposed temperature checks at markets; a ten-hour curfew for all residents except essential workers, which, if violated, could have resulted in arrest; and meticulous contact tracing across the country’s fourteen parishes. The strict measures worked. Jamaican officials kept the country’s over-all rate of infection low—about thirty cases per hundred thousand people, a fraction of the rate in the U.S., which is more than a thousand per hundred thousand. If the U.S. had been able to contain the virus to the same degree, there would have been about a hundred thousand cases instead of nearly four million to date. “Restrictions significantly slowed down the virus and allowed us to manage the spread,” Christopher Tufton, the Jamaican Minister of Health and Wellness, told me.
The government also closed the borders to thousands of Jamaican citizens who were travelling or working abroad, barring them from returning home until at least mid-May. A sixty-five-year-old health-care provider named Lin, who asked that her last name not be used, was one of the Jamaicans stranded abroad. She had travelled to Orlando from Kingston to care for a patient shortly before the pandemic began. (She has cared for several members of my family in the past.) In normal circumstances, she would have returned to Jamaica in April, after she was done providing care, but, because the borders were closed, she was stuck in Florida for six weeks. “I was terrified,” she told me. “I just wanted to go home. I was in a strange country, and I was alone.”
Audrey Marks, the Jamaican Ambassador to the United States, supervised the controlled reëntry of four thousand Jamaican nationals who were stranded in the U.S. at the time of the closure. All returnees were required to wear masks on their flights home, get tested for the virus, and quarantine for fourteen days in hotel rooms obtained by the government before seeing their families. The Jamaican government paid more than a million dollars to feed and quarantine all of the repatriated Jamaicans at hotels in Kingston and St. Ann. “It’s very expensive, but the government’s position was that it is better to take the initial cost, rather than take on the long-term costs of overwhelming the system,” Marks told me.
The health-care system in Jamaica, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, is fragile. Seventeen thousand public-health workers care for the country’s population of 2.7 million people. Jamaican health-care workers, who have a reputation for administering quality care, are often hired to work in the United States. As the coronavirus spread, Jamaica recruited Cuban medical workers to aid in caring for patients. At any given moment, there are about three hundred Cuban doctors and nurses working in Jamaica. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba sent an additional hundred and forty-four health-care workers.
Trump Administration officials urged Jamaica and other nations not to accept Cuban health-care workers, because of what it claimed were “labor abuses,” but several countries ignored the Administration’s warnings. Cuba, which has one of the world’s highest ratios of doctors per capita, built a field hospital in Lombardy, Italy, and dispatched more than a thousand health-care workers to eighteen countries, including eight in the Caribbean. In Cuba, the government has reported that there have been only twenty-four hundred confirmed cases and eighty-six deaths related to the coronavirus, in a nation of eleven million. Cuban officials credit the country’s strict isolation measures and mask guidelines.
Elsewhere in the Caribbean archipelago, the response to the coronavirus has varied. In the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispañola and has a population of ten million, there have been more than fifty-six thousand confirmed cases and about a thousand deaths. Haiti, which occupies the western third of the island and has a population of eleven million, has a weak health-care system and has not been able to test widely; it has confirmed only seven thousand cases and a hundred and fifty-four deaths.
Many smaller countries in the West Indies closed their borders to mitigate the spread of the virus, but now face economic devastation without tourism. The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda recently said that LIAT, a Caribbean airline owned by a consortium of eleven island nations, had seen its passenger traffic collapse during the pandemic. The air carrier plans to liquidate all of its assets and reform as a new company. Countries such as the Bahamas, Dominica, and Jamaica face social, economic, and health challenges that will hamper development and likely lead to what the U.N. predicts will be “the most severe” economic decline in history across the Caribbean and Latin America.


newyorker--2020-07-24--Memo to the Staff of This Paint-and-Sip Establishment

A lot of you have asked me why we ’ ve kept Paintbar open during these trying times .
To be honest , I ’ ve been asking myself the same thing .
Do people really need to unwind with a glass of Pinot Grigio while they re-create classic works of art under expert guidance , now , in these uncertain times ?
Should we really be encouraging people to unleash their inner artist on canvas during these unprecedented times , when it has become all too commonplace for folks to get pancaked by falling Acme anvils whenever they leave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In these extraordinary times , is it really advisable for people to visit Paintbar and put their personal spin on “ The Starry Night , ” when so many of our guests and staff have been unluckily hammered , flattened , blown up , frizzled , miniaturized , kablooey-ed , taffy-stretched , wagon-wheeled , and rocket-launched ?
The truth is people need Paintbar now more than ever .
I know I personally get stressed whenever I have to dodge an Acme piano or flee from a swarm of odorless wasps .
Our customers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have creative inner spirits that yearn to break free , and they , too , do not want to be unexpectedly cookie-cuttered and baked to a crisp in an Acme PrestoMatic 3000 .
Well , we can ’ t always get what we want .
But what we can do , at Paintbar , is offer customers a refreshing adult beverage and an artistically welcoming environment where they can “ toss some gloss ” and take their minds off the numbers , which , although we are no longer tracking them , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ideal that Paintbar is technically situated within a Level 5 High-Grade Hijinks Hangar , home to a fully operational Acme manufacturing plant and testing facility ?
No , of course it is not ideal .
But it ’ s the way things are .
Let ’ s not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good .
Instead , let ’ s look on the bright side .
For example , I have not been punched directly in the kisser by the novelty boxing glove that springs out of Paintbar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sign for months , because I have not had to go near it , because it has stayed at zero .
Also , we have a lot of customers who have made it out of Paintbar alive .
Doesn ’ t it feel good to be positive for once , instead of complaining/crying/desponding about the latest Acme bug-spray/human-spray mixup that has caused customers and co-workers to literally drop like flies ?
I hear you when you scream at me to “ temporarily close Paintbar , ” or to “ permanently relocate Paintbar , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s hours to off-peak times when the Acme Electricity Laboratory is not handing out high-voltage breath mints that light up your skeleton like a cartoon cat when you suck on them.
” Did I think about closing Paintbar when that Frosé Friday class got smithereened by an Acme decoy pie cooling on the windowsill , or when our Watercolor Wednesday instructor got flapjacked by a train that shot out of a freshly painted black circle on the wall , or when an entire Sexy Saturday Bachelorette Blowout got buried alive by an avalanche-in-a-can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
But then I asked myself , Would closing Paintbar change anything ?
After all , you don ’ t have to be at a Pinot-and-Picasso night inside an Acme factory to get cartoonishly spiralized by a puff of instant-razor-blade powder , do you ?
No , you do not .
It can happen anywhere , anytime .
Here ’ s the bottom line : if our customers are brave enough to sip a citrus I.P.A .
and paint their hearts out to the carefree rhythms of Bruno Mars , knowing that at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find out that they ’ ve been standing on an Acme disappearing floor , which has in fact just disappeared , so that now they are actually hanging in midair , legs spinning like egg beaters , poised to drop as soon as they remember that gravity exists , then we should be brave enough to keep the damn doors open !
P.S .
Many of you have been asking why Paintbar has not yet provided Acme all-in-one disaster-resistance armor to our staff or guests .
I ’ m sorry , but have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
It is not comfortable .
It is itchy .
It is hot .
It chafes .
Not to mention , it looks bad .
It is for chumps .
I would rather fire an Acme double-ended back-bending bunny-hunter gun than wear Acme all-in-one disaster-resistance armor .
End of discussion .

Photograph from Alamy
ATTN: Paintbar Staff
A lot of you have asked me why we’ve kept Paintbar open during these trying times. To be honest, I’ve been asking myself the same thing.
Do people really need to unwind with a glass of Pinot Grigio while they re-create classic works of art under expert guidance, now, in these uncertain times?
Should we really be encouraging people to unleash their inner artist on canvas during these unprecedented times, when it has become all too commonplace for folks to get pancaked by falling Acme anvils whenever they leave the safety of their own home?
In these extraordinary times, is it really advisable for people to visit Paintbar and put their personal spin on “The Starry Night,” when so many of our guests and staff have been unluckily hammered, flattened, blown up, frizzled, miniaturized, kablooey-ed, taffy-stretched, wagon-wheeled, and rocket-launched?
Yes. Emphatically, yes!
The truth is people need Paintbar now more than ever.
I know I personally get stressed whenever I have to dodge an Acme piano or flee from a swarm of odorless wasps. Our customers are no different. They, too, have creative inner spirits that yearn to break free, and they, too, do not want to be unexpectedly cookie-cuttered and baked to a crisp in an Acme PrestoMatic 3000.
Well, we can’t always get what we want.
But what we can do, at Paintbar, is offer customers a refreshing adult beverage and an artistically welcoming environment where they can “toss some gloss” and take their minds off the numbers, which, although we are no longer tracking them, seem to be getting worse.
Is it ideal that Paintbar is technically situated within a Level 5 High-Grade Hijinks Hangar, home to a fully operational Acme manufacturing plant and testing facility? No, of course it is not ideal. But it’s the way things are. Let’s not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
Instead, let’s look on the bright side. For example, I have not been punched directly in the kisser by the novelty boxing glove that springs out of Paintbar’s “Days Since Incident” sign for months, because I have not had to go near it, because it has stayed at zero.
Also, we have a lot of customers who have made it out of Paintbar alive.
Doesn’t it feel good to be positive for once, instead of complaining/crying/desponding about the latest Acme bug-spray/human-spray mixup that has caused customers and co-workers to literally drop like flies?
Listen—I hear you.
I hear you when you scream at me to “temporarily close Paintbar,” or to “permanently relocate Paintbar,” or to “restrict Paintbar’s hours to off-peak times when the Acme Electricity Laboratory is not handing out high-voltage breath mints that light up your skeleton like a cartoon cat when you suck on them.”
I absolutely hear you.
Did I think about closing Paintbar when that Frosé Friday class got smithereened by an Acme decoy pie cooling on the windowsill, or when our Watercolor Wednesday instructor got flapjacked by a train that shot out of a freshly painted black circle on the wall, or when an entire Sexy Saturday Bachelorette Blowout got buried alive by an avalanche-in-a-can?
Of course I thought about it!
But then I asked myself, Would closing Paintbar change anything? After all, you don’t have to be at a Pinot-and-Picasso night inside an Acme factory to get cartoonishly spiralized by a puff of instant-razor-blade powder, do you?
No, you do not. It can happen anywhere, anytime.
Here’s the bottom line: if our customers are brave enough to sip a citrus I.P.A. and paint their hearts out to the carefree rhythms of Bruno Mars, knowing that at any moment they could look down and find out that they’ve been standing on an Acme disappearing floor, which has in fact just disappeared, so that now they are actually hanging in midair, legs spinning like egg beaters, poised to drop as soon as they remember that gravity exists, then we should be brave enough to keep the damn doors open!
Period!
—Paintbar Management
P.S. Many of you have been asking why Paintbar has not yet provided Acme all-in-one disaster-resistance armor to our staff or guests. I’m sorry, but have you ever worn Acme all-in-one disaster-resistance armor? It is not comfortable. It is itchy. It is hot. It chafes. Not to mention, it looks bad. It is for chumps. I would rather fire an Acme double-ended back-bending bunny-hunter gun than wear Acme all-in-one disaster-resistance armor. End of discussion.


newyorker--2020-07-24--Radical Imagination: Tracy K. Smith, Marilyn Nelson, and Terrance Hayes on Poetry in Our Times

In a special episode of the Poetry Podcast , Tracy K. Smith , Marilyn Nelson , and Terrance Hayes join Kevin Young to read their work , and to discuss its relationship to protest and liberation .
Tracy K. Smith served two terms as the U.S .
Poet Laureate , and has won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize .
Her latest collection is “ Wade in the Water.
” Marilyn Nelson writes poetry for adults , young adults , and children .
Her honors include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize , an N. S. K. Neustadt Prize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America .
Her new books , “ Papa ’ s Free Day Party ” and “ Lubaya ’ s Quiet Roar , ” are forthcoming .
Terrance Hayes , a MacArthur Fellow , has won a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism , a Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry , and a National Book Award for Poetry .
His most recent publications include “ To Float in the Space Between : A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Future Assassin .
”

Download a transcript.
Photographs by (left to right) Beowulf Sheehan / ZUMA; James Estrin / NYT / Redux; Peter Wynn Thompson / AP / Shutterstock
In a special episode of the Poetry Podcast, Tracy K. Smith, Marilyn Nelson, and Terrance Hayes join Kevin Young to read their work, and to discuss its relationship to protest and liberation.
Tracy K. Smith served two terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate, and has won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Her latest collection is “Wade in the Water.” Marilyn Nelson writes poetry for adults, young adults, and children. Her honors include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an N. S. K. Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Her new books, “Papa’s Free Day Party” and “Lubaya’s Quiet Roar,” are forthcoming. Terrance Hayes, a MacArthur Fellow, has won a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, a Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, and a National Book Award for Poetry. His most recent publications include “To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight” and “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.”


newyorker--2020-07-24--The Return of the Drive-In

The Return of the Drive-In

With New York movie theatres closed to maintain social distancing , the big-screen experience has been thriving at drive-ins , @ @ @ @ @ throughout the region—whether upstate ( as at the Warwick Drive-In , pictured above ) , @ @ @ @ @ Demarest Farms , in Hillsdale ) , or within the city limits ( at the @ @ @ @ @ .
Offerings tend toward familiar fare , such as “ The Goonies , ” “ @ @ @ @ @ “ Mamma Mia !
, ” but also include such new releases as “ Relic @ @ @ @ @ Tomorrow .
”

With New York movie theatres closed to maintain social distancing, the big-screen experience has been thriving at drive-ins, which are making a comeback throughout the region—whether upstate (as at the Warwick Drive-In, pictured above), in New Jersey (at Demarest Farms, in Hillsdale), or within the city limits (at the Skyline, in Greenpoint). Offerings tend toward familiar fare, such as “The Goonies,” “Iron Man,” and “Mamma Mia!,” but also include such new releases as “Relic” and “She Dies Tomorrow.”


newyorker--2020-07-24--Perfecting Roast Chicken, the French Way

It is often said that the best test of both the professional and the home cook is a roasted chicken , that , if nothing else , a good cook should always be able to serve up a beautiful bird—crispy , appetizingly fragrant , the skin deeply golden , with meat so moist that you ’ re tempted to tear it off the bone with your fingers .
Roasted chicken is a Sunday lunch you can count on ; or a bistro dinner , with hot fries and mayonnaise ; or a don ’ t-think-twice homey meal , with potatoes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ showed up in town and want to come over this evening .
In fact , it is almost impossible to get consistently right .
The difficulty , of course , is that the chicken , like many birds , consists not of one type of meat but of two—one white , the other dark .
White meat ( the breast ) likes to cook quickly ; dark meat ( the legs ) needs long and slow .
The former tastes of nothing if cooked too long ; the latter is impossible to chew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fix is to respect the science of the fowl ’ s anatomy—remove the breasts , snap off the thighs , and cook them separately .
This approach is a no-brainer with other birds , especially duck , whose breast is exquisite when rare and whose legs are scrumptious beyond belief when simmered for several hours in barely bubbling fat , for duck confit ( from the French verb confire , meaning to conserve : traditionally , the legs are stored in the fat they ’ re cooked in ) .
But the whole @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has properties that you don ’ t want to lose by breaking it into bits : for instance , the three surprisingly satisfying segments of the wing , which you can eat with your fingers ( you ’ d never bother with , say , the delicate little flappers of a tiny quail ) , or the wedge of yumminess surrounding the wishbone , or , possibly best of all , the “ oyster , ” that teaspoon of tender meat residing near each thigh .
In French , it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ —i.e.
, only an idiot leaves it behind .
Of the many strategies devised to surmount the challenges of whole-roasting a chicken , some now seem like fads .
The practice of brining ( soaking the bird overnight in a salty liquid before cooking ) is based on an assumption that a wet bloated breast won ’ t dry out , and it usually doesn ’ t—but , being wet and bloated , it isn ’ t exactly a flavor bomb .
Dry brining—a curiously contradictory concept , made popular by the late @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s Zuni Café—involves salting the chicken first , then drying it out ( as Helen Rosner has noted , a hair dryer is a perfectly acceptable kitchen tool ) , so that when it goes into the oven ( a very hot one ) , its fat renders immediately .
The result is often delicious , but the timing is tricky ; unless you get it exactly right , the legs will be perfect but the breast , once again , will suffer .
Some of the most effective techniques take place on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to originate in Louisiana , my birthplace , involving a beer can : the can—I empty mine first ; hardcore aficionados leave most of the brew inside—goes up the bum of the bird , which is cooked , in effect , on its haunches , with the thighs getting the most intense heat .
Another is spatchcocking , a term originating in eighteenth-century Ireland and said to be an abbreviation of “ dispatch the cock.
” In its original sense , it described cleaving the bird in half to make it easier to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the French phrase en crapaudine , which means in the style of a toad , because a spatchcocked bird now means a flattened bird—the wings and legs splayed—which , viewed from above , looks remarkably like your common amphibious croaker .
With all respect to chicken à la toad , which is a preparation of ancient provenance , a charcoal-blackened two-dimensional frog-like creature seems to me limited in its aesthetic appeal ( it calls to mind unlucky amphibians crushed on hot summer asphalt ) as well as in the range of its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that one gets from a whole bird .
For me , the best roasted bird is scarcely roasted at all .
It is poached until it is almost cooked through , and finished , as fleetingly as possible , in a hot oven or on a rotisserie , if you ’ re lucky enough to have one .
The method—you could call it poach-and-roast—was traditionally used in French preparations of larger fowl , like geese and turkeys , to shorten the time they spent in the oven and thus to protect the breasts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it has become popular for cooking just about all birds and , in France , at least , is regarded as the best way to ensure a moist and not-ruined chicken .
( This is the method preferred by the Alsatian chef Antoine Westermann , the proprietor of Le Coq Rico , who is widely regarded as the authority on poultry cooking . )
In Lyon , a city renowned for its bird preparations—especially the poulet de Bresse , a local celebrity breed—poaching was the method favored by les mères , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the nineteenth century .
The cooking of one of the most famous , la Mère Fillioux ( 1865–1925 ) , is memorialized in two grainy black-and-white photographs : in one , she stands proudly in front of a veritable bounty of birds , about to be readied for poaching ; in the other , she is tableside , carving up a chicken with what appears to be a butter knife—such is the moist tenderness of her preparation .
How long have people been poaching their chickens ?
Not as long as they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ date to the discovery of fire .
But it ’ s still an ancient preparation , probably as old as the invention of the pot .
To my mind , both methods produce a fine dinner , but if you ’ re lucky enough to score a good chicken—maybe not an actual chicken from the famous poultry town of Bresse ( which is pretty hard to come by in the United States ) but a healthy , outdoor-living , insect-eating , half-wild bird with good color and flavor—then the gentleness of poaching produces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re committed to the grill , go ahead , place your bird over a bed of hot coals , but do so with extreme care and not for long : the chicken is already cooked , beautifully ; you ’ re really just browning the skin .
• A medium-sized pot , higher than it is wide—it should be big enough to submerge the bird but not so big that you need vast quantities of liquid to cover it • A large , slotted spoon or kitchen spider ( not tongs—you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ skin when removing the bird ) 1 .
Remove the chicken ’ s wishbone .
This is an essential first step in all bird preparations , including Thanksgiving turkeys ; it makes it easier to keep the breast intact when carving .
To find the bone , pull back the skin around the front of the bird and look for the inverted “ V ” above the neck .
Slide your knife down one stem of the “ V ” and then turn it sharply inward .
The stem should snap free .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the top of the “ V ” loose with your fingers or ( very carefully ) with a knife .
Save the bone for a wish tug-of-war after dinner .

It is often said that the best test of both the professional and the home cook is a roasted chicken, that, if nothing else, a good cook should always be able to serve up a beautiful bird—crispy, appetizingly fragrant, the skin deeply golden, with meat so moist that you’re tempted to tear it off the bone with your fingers. Roasted chicken is a Sunday lunch you can count on; or a bistro dinner, with hot fries and mayonnaise; or a don’t-think-twice homey meal, with potatoes and gravy, for friends who just showed up in town and want to come over this evening.
In fact, it is almost impossible to get consistently right. The difficulty, of course, is that the chicken, like many birds, consists not of one type of meat but of two—one white, the other dark. White meat (the breast) likes to cook quickly; dark meat (the legs) needs long and slow. The former tastes of nothing if cooked too long; the latter is impossible to chew if cooked too fast. The simplest fix is to respect the science of the fowl’s anatomy—remove the breasts, snap off the thighs, and cook them separately. This approach is a no-brainer with other birds, especially duck, whose breast is exquisite when rare and whose legs are scrumptious beyond belief when simmered for several hours in barely bubbling fat, for duck confit (from the French verb confire, meaning to conserve: traditionally, the legs are stored in the fat they’re cooked in). But the whole, intact chicken, especially when roasted, has properties that you don’t want to lose by breaking it into bits: for instance, the three surprisingly satisfying segments of the wing, which you can eat with your fingers (you’d never bother with, say, the delicate little flappers of a tiny quail), or the wedge of yumminess surrounding the wishbone, or, possibly best of all, the “oyster,” that teaspoon of tender meat residing near each thigh. In French, it’s called “un sot-l’y-laisse”—i.e., only an idiot leaves it behind.
Of the many strategies devised to surmount the challenges of whole-roasting a chicken, some now seem like fads. The practice of brining (soaking the bird overnight in a salty liquid before cooking) is based on an assumption that a wet bloated breast won’t dry out, and it usually doesn’t—but, being wet and bloated, it isn’t exactly a flavor bomb. Dry brining—a curiously contradictory concept, made popular by the late Judy Rodgers, of San Francisco’s Zuni Café—involves salting the chicken first, then drying it out (as Helen Rosner has noted, a hair dryer is a perfectly acceptable kitchen tool), so that when it goes into the oven (a very hot one), its fat renders immediately. The result is often delicious, but the timing is tricky; unless you get it exactly right, the legs will be perfect but the breast, once again, will suffer. Some of the most effective techniques take place on the grill, like the one said to originate in Louisiana, my birthplace, involving a beer can: the can—I empty mine first; hardcore aficionados leave most of the brew inside—goes up the bum of the bird, which is cooked, in effect, on its haunches, with the thighs getting the most intense heat. Another is spatchcocking, a term originating in eighteenth-century Ireland and said to be an abbreviation of “dispatch the cock.” In its original sense, it described cleaving the bird in half to make it easier to grill. Its modern meaning is captured by the French phrase en crapaudine, which means in the style of a toad, because a spatchcocked bird now means a flattened bird—the wings and legs splayed—which, viewed from above, looks remarkably like your common amphibious croaker. With all respect to chicken à la toad, which is a preparation of ancient provenance, a charcoal-blackened two-dimensional frog-like creature seems to me limited in its aesthetic appeal (it calls to mind unlucky amphibians crushed on hot summer asphalt) as well as in the range of its flavors, which lack the subtle surprises that one gets from a whole bird.
Bill Buford makes poached-and-roasted chicken.
For me, the best roasted bird is scarcely roasted at all. It is poached until it is almost cooked through, and finished, as fleetingly as possible, in a hot oven or on a rotisserie, if you’re lucky enough to have one. The method—you could call it poach-and-roast—was traditionally used in French preparations of larger fowl, like geese and turkeys, to shorten the time they spent in the oven and thus to protect the breasts from drying out. In recent years, it has become popular for cooking just about all birds and, at least in France, is regarded as the best way to insure a moist and not-ruined chicken. (This is the method preferred by the Alsatian chef Antoine Westermann, the proprietor of Le Coq Rico, who is widely regarded as the authority on poultry cooking.) In Lyon, a city renowned for its bird preparations—especially the poulet de Bresse, a local celebrity breed—poaching was the method favored by les mères, the famously accomplished, no-nonsense women chefs of the nineteenth century. The cooking of one of the most famous, la Mère Fillioux (1865–1925), is memorialized in two grainy black-and-white photographs: in one, she stands proudly in front of a veritable bounty of birds, about to be readied for poaching; in the other, she is tableside, carving up a chicken with what appears to be a butter knife—such is the moist tenderness of her preparation.
How long have people been poaching their chickens? Not as long as they have been spatchcocking, a method that must date to the discovery of fire. But it’s still an ancient preparation, probably as old as the invention of the pot. To my mind, both methods produce a fine dinner, but if you’re lucky enough to score a good chicken—maybe not an actual chicken from the famous poultry town of Bresse (which is pretty hard to come by in the United States) but a healthy, outdoor-living, insect-eating, half-wild bird with good color and flavor—then the gentleness of poaching produces the better result. And, if you’re committed to the grill, go ahead, place your bird over a bed of hot coals, but do so with extreme care and not for long: the chicken is already cooked, beautifully; you’re really just browning the skin.
Poached-and-Roasted Chicken
Serves 2–4
Ingredients
1 large chicken, about 4 lbs.
2 whole garlic heads
1 bunch rosemary
1 bunch thyme
3 qts. chicken stock
Sea salt and coarsely ground pepper
4 oz. butter, melted
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. white-wine vinegar
Equipment
A medium-sized pot, higher than it is wide—it should be big enough to submerge the bird but not so big that you need vast quantities of liquid to cover it
A large, slotted spoon or kitchen spider (not tongs—you don’t want to tear the skin when removing the bird)
String, for trussing (optional)
An instant-read thermometer
A basting brush
A roasting tray
Directions
1. Remove the chicken’s wishbone. This is an essential first step in all bird preparations, including Thanksgiving turkeys; it makes it easier to keep the breast intact when carving. To find the bone, pull back the skin around the front of the bird and look for the inverted “V” above the neck. Slide your knife down one stem of the “V” and then turn it sharply inward. The stem should snap free. Repeat on the other side. Work the top of the “V” loose with your fingers or (very carefully) with a knife. Save the bone for a wish tug-of-war after dinner.


newyorker--2020-07-24--The Picnic Baskets of the Pandemic

The Picnic Baskets of the Pandemic

The past few months have been , you could say , no picnic .
Might I suggest .
.
.
a picnic ?
Picnicking—on a sandy beach , a verdant meadow , or even a tar-sticky rooftop , with a blanket for both table and cloth—is , as the idiom implies , the height of earthly pleasure .
Think of Henri Cartier-Bresson ’ s iconic nineteen-thirties photograph “ Sunday on the Banks of the Marne ” ( the English word comes from the French pique-nique ) , in which four people in repose on a grassy slope pour wine and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ across their laps , in view of a boat equipped with folding chairs and fishing rods , or of Fernando Botero ’ s paintings of rotund figures reclining among fruit baskets , bottles , and loaves of bread atop a surrealist mountain range or lawn .
As the summer unfolds and the pandemic rages on , as New Yorkers resign to dining only en plein air , a handful of restaurants have seized on picnic potential .
Sami & Susu , a self-described “ modern-Mediterranean pickup and delivery restaurant , ” which opened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is offering several sizes of mix-and-match , meze-style “ picnic sets , ” paired with a bottle or two of wine ( sets $ 48- $ 110 ) .
On a recent balmy Saturday , sitting cross-legged on a sun-dappled bedsheet , mask affixed to my chin , I alternated bites of pastrami-spiced roasted cauliflower , slathered in citrus-scented nectarine mustard , with swigs of cold rosé from the Luberon , and swiped plush pita through a luscious baba ghanoush .
I brought , to a socially distanced salon in the waning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ House , Café Kitsuné ’ s pricey picnic for two ( $ 150 ) , a canvas tote packed with what I imagine the luckiest French children eat for lunch : folds of frilly ham and sliced Gruyère on a chewy baguette ; plump and plummy olives , marinated in lemon zest and thyme ; house-made yam chips ; and crisp , buttery , fox-shaped sables with a satisfying snap .
( Plus a bottle of natural Riesling , complete with a branded wine key and paper cups . )
Basically any variety @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as good if not better at room temperature as it is hot , insures a divine feast outdoors ; Bubby ’ s , in Tribeca , makes it especially easy with its fried-chicken picnic package ( $ 100 ) , featuring eight craggy pieces accompanied by flaky buttermilk biscuits , coleslaw , and four slices of pie , with fillings such as chocolate peanut butter and local blueberry .
( If there were a suggestion box , I ’ d submit that mashed potatoes with gravy , also included , are as wrong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right , but it ’ s a forgivable offense . )
I found the pinnacle of picnic , though , at Otaku Katsu , a tiny basement shop on the Lower East Side that never fit many people , anyhow .
I ’ d eat the Sando Picnic Set ( $ 50 ) in the pouring rain , so enticing is its array ; as it happens , I enjoyed it beneath the shade of a leafy tree on an idyllic afternoon when the humidity had temporarily lifted .
Two cobs of sweet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into sturdy handles—were charred and slathered in an irresistible combination of miso butter and Kewpie mayo scented with yuzu , which served as an adherent for zesty togarashi and fluttery bonito flakes ( though a few were carried off by a gentle breeze ) .
Five half-sandwiches , on perfect rectangles of squishy , crustless white bread , were nestled neatly into cardboard containers , not a dud among the bunch , from a classic , creamy egg salad to a panko-crusted salmon fillet , layered with silky shreds of white cabbage and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as the Jews say— “ that would have been enough ” —and yet there were also nori-dusted crinkle-cut potato chips ; a trio of onigiri , or rice balls , stuffed with salted sour-plum paste , yuzu-marinated salmon belly , or kani salad ; a tub of densely crunchy , wrinkled Japanese pickles ( coins of cucumber , half-moons of daikon , matchsticks of eggplant dyed magenta with red shiso ) ; and a hijiki salad with edamame , crumbled tofu , and tender nubs of shiitake mushroom .
Yes , picnic @ @

The past few months have been, you could say, no picnic. Might I suggest . . . a picnic? Picnicking—on a sandy beach, a verdant meadow, or even a tar-sticky rooftop, with a blanket for both table and cloth—is, as the idiom implies, the height of earthly pleasure. Think of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s iconic nineteen-thirties photograph “Sunday on the Banks of the Marne” (the English word comes from the French pique-nique), in which four people in repose on a grassy slope pour wine and eat with their hands, napkins spread across their laps, in view of a boat equipped with folding chairs and fishing rods, or of Fernando Botero’s paintings of rotund figures reclining among fruit baskets, bottles, and loaves of bread atop a surrealist mountain range or lawn.
The fifty-dollar set, which is meant to feed two to three people, is rounded out by a trio of onigiri, or rice balls, and a hijiki salad. Photograph by Kyoko Hamada for The New Yorker
As the summer unfolds and the pandemic rages on, as New Yorkers resign to dining only en plein air, a handful of restaurants have seized on picnic potential. Sami & Susu, a self-described “modern-Mediterranean pickup and delivery restaurant,” which opened last month out of a Williamsburg bar, is offering several sizes of mix-and-match, meze-style “picnic sets,” paired with a bottle or two of wine (sets $48-$110). On a recent balmy Saturday, sitting cross-legged on a sun-dappled bedsheet, mask affixed to my chin, I alternated bites of pastrami-spiced roasted cauliflower, slathered in citrus-scented nectarine mustard, with swigs of cold rosé from the Luberon, and swiped plush pita through a luscious baba ghanoush.
Among the crunchy pickles are half-moons of daikon and wrinkled coins of Japanese cucumber. One of the onigiri is filled with kani salad. Photograph by Kyoko Hamada for The New Yorker
I brought, to a socially distanced salon in the waning shadow of Prospect Park’s Picnic House, Café Kitsuné’s pricey picnic for two ($150), a canvas tote packed with what I imagine the luckiest French children eat for lunch: folds of frilly ham and sliced Gruyère on a chewy baguette; plump and plummy olives, marinated in lemon zest and thyme; house-made yam chips; and crisp, buttery, fox-shaped sables with a satisfying snap. (Plus a bottle of natural Riesling, complete with a branded wine key and paper cups.)
Basically any variety of fried chicken, which is generally as good if not better at room temperature as it is hot, insures a divine feast outdoors; Bubby’s, in Tribeca, makes it especially easy with its fried-chicken picnic package ($100), featuring eight craggy pieces accompanied by flaky buttermilk biscuits, coleslaw, and four slices of pie, with fillings such as chocolate peanut butter and local blueberry. (If there were a suggestion box, I’d submit that mashed potatoes with gravy, also included, are as wrong for a picnic as fried chicken is right, but it’s a forgivable offense.)
From left to right: egg-salad sando; onigiri filled with kani salad; onigiri filled with yuzu-marinated salmon belly; onigiri filled with umeboshi, or sour salted plum. Photograph by Kyoko Hamada for The New Yorker
I found the pinnacle of picnic, though, at Otaku Katsu, a tiny basement shop on the Lower East Side that never fit many people, anyhow. I’d eat the Sando Picnic Set ($50) in the pouring rain, so enticing is its array; as it happens, I enjoyed it beneath the shade of a leafy tree on an idyllic afternoon when the humidity had temporarily lifted. Two cobs of sweet corn—their husks peeled back and braided beautifully into sturdy handles—were charred and slathered in an irresistible combination of miso butter and Kewpie mayo scented with yuzu, which served as an adherent for zesty togarashi and fluttery bonito flakes (though a few were carried off by a gentle breeze).
Five half-sandwiches, on perfect rectangles of squishy, crustless white bread, were nestled neatly into cardboard containers, not a dud among the bunch, from a classic, creamy egg salad to a panko-crusted salmon fillet, layered with silky shreds of white cabbage and slicks of salty-sweet katsu sauce. Dayenu, as the Jews say—“that would have been enough”—and yet there were also nori-dusted crinkle-cut potato chips; a trio of onigiri, or rice balls, stuffed with salted sour-plum paste, yuzu-marinated salmon belly, or kani salad; a tub of densely crunchy, wrinkled Japanese pickles (coins of cucumber, half-moons of daikon, matchsticks of eggplant dyed magenta with red shiso); and a hijiki salad with edamame, crumbled tofu, and tender nubs of shiitake mushroom. Yes, picnic. ♦
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-07-25--What to Stream: “St. Louis Blues,” a Thrilling Showcase for Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Other Lu

What to Stream: “St. Louis Blues,” a Thrilling Showcase for Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Other Luminaries

Hollywood-studio bio-pics , whether classic or modern , can not be counted on for fidelity to history , but they may offer alternative pleasures , and “ St .
Louis Blues , ” the 1958 film about the composer W. C. Handy , provides them amply .
( It ’ s streaming , free , on Crackle . )
Its distortions of Handy ’ s life are laughably extreme ; it ’ s directed with mere efficiency by Allen Reisner , whose long career was spent mainly directing serial television .
But the movie ’ s cast is among the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ King Cole stars as Handy , and his co-stars and supporting cast include Eartha Kitt , Ruby Dee , Pearl Bailey , Juano Hernandez , and Cab Calloway .
The film ’ s musical performances ( with a bit of drama ) are provided by Mahalia Jackson , Ella Fitzgerald ( playing herself ) , and such notable jazz musicians as the clarinetist Barney Bigard and the drummer Lee Young .
What ’ s more , Reisner gives the impression of recognizing his good fortune .
Though Reisner isn ’ t a great @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he worked sensitively—whether collaboratively , empathetically , or deferentially—with these extraordinary and venerated performers .
As a result , the screenwriters ’ simplistic and melodramatic take on Handy ’ s life nonetheless gains vitality and immediacy from the frank intimacy and the hushed urgency that the actors bring to their roles .
Handy lived from 1873 to 1958 .
The movie ( written by Ted Sherdeman and Robert Smith ) boils the entire story of his life down to one central conflict—the one between secular and sacred music , and the corresponding life-style @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earliest childhood , Handy loves the songs that Black laborers sing , and joins them in performing .
His father , Charles ( Hernandez ) , a stern minister , considers popular music the devil ’ s work—and publicly reproaches Will , a child organist in his church , for his musical taste .
( The child Will is played by young Billy Preston , later a crucial rock keyboard player . )
As an adult college graduate , Will writes and performs popular music and is forced to choose between his career @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Meanwhile , Will ’ s fiancée , Elizabeth ( Dee ) , expects him to take a “ respectable ” job as a schoolteacher and rejects him when she sees him associating with Gogo Germaine ( Kitt ) , the local singer with big-time talent and ambitions who recognizes Will ’ s ability and plans to make her own name and fame by singing his songs .
Some of the film ’ s general ideas and plot points are conceived with no respect for chronology or , for that matter , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inner experience .
The real-life Handy did , in fact , clash with his minister father over secular music .
But Handy was an itinerant performer for many years—as well as a professor—and the movie only suggests , in a couple of brief moments of action and a tossed-off line of dialogue , his experience , as an educated urban musician travelling through the rural South , hearing the Delta blues and distilling its elements into his compositions .
The real-life Handy married his wife , Elizabeth , in 1898 , long before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was also a businessman , moving to New York soon after his first successes and becoming a music publisher .
The real-life Handy suffered temporary blindness from an infection in 1921 , when he was living in New York .
The movie makes this into a major plot point , depicting his blindness as a psychosomatic condition arising from his conflict with his father .
Above all , the movie absurdly suggests that relations between Black and white people in turn-of-the-century Memphis were pleasant and untroubled—yet it also tries to skirt this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relations to a minimum .
The few white characters in the film pop in for a line or two , fulfill their functions in the plot , and are never seen again .
The night club where Gogo , Will , and his band perform is owned by a Black man named Blade ( Calloway ) , who is indeed a sharp businessman ( and he exploits Will no less than any white manipulator ) ; all of the club ’ s customers , meanwhile , are white and inconsequential ; they ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ music in the film isn ’ t historically accurate , either—no effort was made to replicate the styles in vogue during the early twentieth century—but the performances are radiant and thrilling nonetheless .
( The musicians all perform in their own styles , joined with some suave and substantial updating of traditional New Orleans jazz . )
Moreover , the workmanlike Reisner films these performances in plain and simple extended takes that highlight the artists ’ intricately expressive presence , along with their musical artistry .
( There may be a technical basis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ filmed in the widescreen VistaVision format , which , in Hollywood at the time , dictated the use of long takes ; the copy of the film that Crackle offers , however , cuts the image down to a nearly square screen . )
The intimate , conversational singing styles of Cole and Kitt ( solo and duet ) , along with the piano artistry of Cole ( he was also a major jazz pianist ) , set the movie ’ s tone , which the acting matches throughout .
There ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bring to their synthetic tale : in a movie era when commanding and worldly women were usually either rendered operatically extravagant or victimized , the character of Gogo is presented as the keen , grounded , self-aware , and unconflicted boss of it all—and Kitt ’ s performance is as central to the film ’ s drama , and to its musical spectrum , as Cole ’ s .
Gogo picks up on Will ’ s talent , knowing that she can put his songs over and that they will , in turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Blade to hire Will and his band , she shores up Will ’ s confidence when circumstances are tough , and she makes clear to Will , up front , and to Elizabeth—that their relationship , however warm and friendly , is strictly platonic .
( Early on , she warns Will , with coolly rhetorical flair , not to fall in love with her . )
She is , and remains throughout , a consummate professional as well as a consummate artist , a calm leader of musical life and an empathetic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Louis Blues ” is a rare instance of when the constraints of the Hays Code ( in which extramarital relations were either taboo or catastrophic ) converged with dramatic principle .

Hollywood-studio bio-pics, whether classic or modern, cannot be counted on for fidelity to history, but they may offer alternative pleasures, and “St. Louis Blues,” the 1958 film about the composer W. C. Handy, provides them amply. (It’s streaming, free, on Crackle.) Its distortions of Handy’s life are laughably extreme; it’s directed with mere efficiency by Allen Reisner, whose long career was spent mainly directing serial television. But the movie’s cast is among the most distinguished in the history of cinema—Nat King Cole stars as Handy, and his co-stars and supporting cast include Eartha Kitt, Ruby Dee, Pearl Bailey, Juano Hernandez, and Cab Calloway. The film’s musical performances (with a bit of drama) are provided by Mahalia Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald (playing herself), and such notable jazz musicians as the clarinetist Barney Bigard and the drummer Lee Young. What’s more, Reisner gives the impression of recognizing his good fortune. Though Reisner isn’t a great director in a more comprehensive sense, he worked sensitively—whether collaboratively, empathetically, or deferentially—with these extraordinary and venerated performers. As a result, the screenwriters’ simplistic and melodramatic take on Handy’s life nonetheless gains vitality and immediacy from the frank intimacy and the hushed urgency that the actors bring to their roles.
Handy lived from 1873 to 1958. The movie (written by Ted Sherdeman and Robert Smith) boils the entire story of his life down to one central conflict—the one between secular and sacred music, and the corresponding life-style choices that the division implied. From earliest childhood, Handy loves the songs that Black laborers sing, and joins them in performing. His father, Charles (Hernandez), a stern minister, considers popular music the devil’s work—and publicly reproaches Will, a child organist in his church, for his musical taste. (The child Will is played by young Billy Preston, later a crucial rock keyboard player.) As an adult college graduate, Will writes and performs popular music and is forced to choose between his career and his father’s good graces. Meanwhile, Will’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Dee), expects him to take a “respectable” job as a schoolteacher and rejects him when she sees him associating with Gogo Germaine (Kitt), the local singer with big-time talent and ambitions who recognizes Will’s ability and plans to make her own name and fame by singing his songs.
Some of the film’s general ideas and plot points are conceived with no respect for chronology or, for that matter, the complexity of Handy’s outer and inner experience. The real-life Handy did, in fact, clash with his minister father over secular music. But Handy was an itinerant performer for many years—as well as a professor—and the movie only suggests, in a couple of brief moments of action and a tossed-off line of dialogue, his experience, as an educated urban musician travelling through the rural South, hearing the Delta blues and distilling its elements into his compositions. The real-life Handy married his wife, Elizabeth, in 1898, long before he became known as a songwriter; he was also a businessman, moving to New York soon after his first successes and becoming a music publisher. The real-life Handy suffered temporary blindness from an infection in 1921, when he was living in New York. The movie makes this into a major plot point, depicting his blindness as a psychosomatic condition arising from his conflict with his father.
Above all, the movie absurdly suggests that relations between Black and white people in turn-of-the-century Memphis were pleasant and untroubled—yet it also tries to skirt this fabrication by keeping its depiction of those relations to a minimum. The few white characters in the film pop in for a line or two, fulfill their functions in the plot, and are never seen again. The night club where Gogo, Will, and his band perform is owned by a Black man named Blade (Calloway), who is indeed a sharp businessman (and he exploits Will no less than any white manipulator); all of the club’s customers, meanwhile, are white and inconsequential; they’re all extras—basically human wallpaper.
The music in the film isn’t historically accurate, either—no effort was made to replicate the styles in vogue during the early twentieth century—but the performances are radiant and thrilling nonetheless. (The musicians all perform in their own styles, joined with some suave and substantial updating of traditional New Orleans jazz.) Moreover, the workmanlike Reisner films these performances in plain and simple extended takes that highlight the artists’ intricately expressive presence, along with their musical artistry. (There may be a technical basis for this approach: the movie was filmed in the widescreen VistaVision format, which, in Hollywood at the time, dictated the use of long takes; the copy of the film that Crackle offers, however, cuts the image down to a nearly square screen.) The intimate, conversational singing styles of Cole and Kitt (solo and duet), along with the piano artistry of Cole (he was also a major jazz pianist), set the movie’s tone, which the acting matches throughout.
There’s one true dramatic inspiration that the screenwriters bring to their synthetic tale: in a movie era when commanding and worldly women were usually either rendered operatically extravagant or victimized, the character of Gogo is presented as the keen, grounded, self-aware, and unconflicted boss of it all—and Kitt’s performance is as central to the film’s drama, and to its musical spectrum, as Cole’s. Gogo picks up on Will’s talent, knowing that she can put his songs over and that they will, in turn, put her over; she forces Blade to hire Will and his band, she shores up Will’s confidence when circumstances are tough, and she makes clear to Will, up front, and to Elizabeth—that their relationship, however warm and friendly, is strictly platonic. (Early on, she warns Will, with coolly rhetorical flair, not to fall in love with her.) She is, and remains throughout, a consummate professional as well as a consummate artist, a calm leader of musical life and an empathetic fixer of personal affairs. “St. Louis Blues” is a rare instance of when the constraints of the Hays Code (in which extramarital relations were either taboo or catastrophic) converged with dramatic principle.


newyorker--2020-07-24--In Portland, Oregon, Trump Cracks Down on Protests

Since the police killing of George Floyd , in May , protests have continued around the country .
The demonstrations @ @ @ @ @ but the Trump Administration and its allies have seized on isolated incidents of violence and @ @ @ @ @ “ anarchists ” who “ hate our country.
” Trump sent federal law-enforcement officers to @ @ @ @ @ where the agents have been accused of inflaming the violence and illegally detaining demonstrators .
@ @ @ @ @ has covered the Portland protests for The New Yorker , joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss @ @ @ @ @ about the protests , and what the demonstrations illustrate about Trump ’ s “ law @ @ @ @ @ .

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Photograph by Nathan Howard / Getty
Since the police killing of George Floyd, in May, protests have continued around the country. The demonstrations have been largely peaceful, but the Trump Administration and its allies have seized on isolated incidents of violence and looting to describe protesters as “anarchists” who “hate our country.” Trump sent federal law-enforcement officers to the city of Portland, where the agents have been accused of inflaming the violence and illegally detaining demonstrators. James Ross Gardner, who has covered the Portland protests for The New Yorker, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what the public might misunderstand about the protests, and what the demonstrations illustrate about Trump’s “law and order” reëlection campaign.