newyorker--2020-08-08--Can Minneapolis Dismantle Its Police Department?

Early in the afternoon of Sunday , June 7th , nine members of the Minneapolis City Council appeared together on a stage in Powderhorn Park , masked and socially distanced .
Demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd had been unfurling for nearly two weeks , and though the police commissioner had fired all four of the officers present during his death , and though the district attorney had indicted the police officer Derek Chauvin for murder , the protests had only grown more urgent .
The Powderhorn Park rally had been organized by two local activist groups , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and their slogan was written on a banner at the foot of the stage : “ Defund the police.
” They had also been negotiating with the members of the city council , who control the budget of the Minneapolis police , to get them to commit to defunding as a policy .
Now the nine council members , a veto-proof majority , had come to the activists ’ event to say that they wanted what the activists and the people at the protests wanted .
“ Our commitment , ” Lisa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a former city planner , said , “ is to end policing as we know it.
” Bender ’ s words did not reflect as specific a program as the activists might have wanted .
To “ abolish ” the police , as the Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison said he favored , was not exactly the same as “ defunding ” it , which could mean anything from a dramatic to a slight change to its budget .
To “ end policing as we know it ” was vaguer still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else some pilot programs and a rebranding .
Taken together , though , the council members ’ words did suggest radical intent .
“ This is brave , ” the executive director of the Black Visions Collective , Kandace Montgomery , said .
Watching the event from lockdown , streaming a bright Midwestern afternoon into a gray home office , I couldn ’ t help but be interested in how the Minneapolis City Council had reached this point , and what would happen next .
Black Lives Matter has been the most effective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least when it comes to shifting public opinion .
Four years ago , roughly forty per cent of Americans said that they supported the movement .
Now that number is close to seventy per cent , which means that hundreds of millions of Americans , many of them white and moderate or conservative , have changed their points of view .
Will that consensus be diverted into itineraries of private consciousness-changing—of antiracist book clubs , and corporate awareness seminars , and conversations between parents and children—or will it lead to the policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of protesters around the country : to defund the police ?
This is an idea that , until recently , even the most progressive Democrats have generally dismissed .
Bernie Sanders has said he does not support it .
Karen Bass , the progressive congresswoman from California who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus , has said , of “ defund the police , ” “ that ’ s probably one of the worst slogans ever.
” In Minneapolis , here were nine people willing to edge a bit further along the diving board @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It raised some obvious questions .
Why them ?
And what did this commitment actually mean ?
Minneapolis has long had a reputation for liberalism , but over the past decade it has become one of the most left-leaning constituencies in the country .
“ People think of Minneapolis as flyover country , but I ’ ve lived all over , including in the Bay Area , and this is the most progressive city in the country , ” Phillipe Cunningham , the councilman for the Fourth Ward , told me .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ by perhaps the country ’ s most obviously progressive city council : Cunningham , a former special-education teacher , and Andrea Jenkins , a former city council policy aide and now its vice-president , are two of the first transgender people to hold public office .
Jeremiah Ellison , the son of the Minnesota attorney general , Keith Ellison , and a prominent local activist , first came to public attention after a photo showed a police officer pointing a grenade launcher at him at a Black Lives Matter protest .
Alondra Cano @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chairs the public-safety committee , is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and campaigned as an immigrants ’ -rights activist .
These politicians , I was told repeatedly , were elected by a new-left coalition that has largely displaced the ward politics of the past , consisting of the growing Latino and East African immigrant communities , a young Black population that was organized by the Black Lives Matter movement , and white liberals increasingly willing to back certain progressive causes .
“ They didn ’ t come up the traditional way—they didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so on , ” Larry Jacobs , a political scientist at the University of Minnesota , said , of the new council members .
“ It ’ s a city council of activists.
” This made the council a bit more likely to see the police as activists do .
From the perspective of many of the activists , and some academic allies , the essential position of the police has not changed in modern American history .
As Montgomery , who has been perhaps the most influential activist in Minneapolis in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put it to me , “ What I know as a Black person whose family is from the South is that police started off as slave patrols , to capture and utilize people in my family who were seeking freedom , and police continue to do the exact same thing.
” If well-intentioned efforts to reform the police keep seeming to fail , this camp believed , then maybe that was because policing was fundamentally illiberal , in a way that did not have much to do with who the cops were as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You could take a group of Buddhist monks , organize them into military-style squads , arm and outfit them like soldiers , tell them that they were heading into dangerous neighborhoods filled with criminals and hidden guns , and ask them to intervene in human dramas ( mental illness , infidelity , rivalry ) , and things would inevitably go awry .
As Alex Vitale , a sociologist at CUNY and a leading academic advocate of police abolition , put it to me , “ The problem is the mission.
” But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until recently was dominant among mayors and city councils , the character of the police has changed many times .
Some of these changes were broad and generational .
In the nineteen-eighties , as the number of inner-city murders spiked , police departments grew far larger , and patrols grew more frequent and militaristic .
In the nineties , politicians began to press the leaders of these suddenly massive departments to adopt the friendlier posture of community policing , which eventually became the default way that police chiefs spoke about their jobs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two-thousands , the focus was on precision policing : more tactical gear , leftover from the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , yes , but more precise targets , too , in hotspot programs built from Boston and New York ’ s COMPSTAT model .
Police would pinpoint not just the west side of town but six particular corners , and not all young men who lived there but those with prior gun arrests , a focus which led to some reductions in crime , as in Baltimore , but also excessive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Question , and Frisk , which , before it became a byword for constant harassment , was a program for taking guns off the street .
The era of precision policing reflected a confidence , among politicians , that new policies could change the police .
If a city wanted a more progressive police department , it could hire a new chief and new consultants , retrain its officers , and implement less permissive use-of-force policies .
Crime was by that point so thoroughly measured that the public could see the effect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on a graph and displayed on a municipal Web site .
Change—which is to say control of the police—was possible .

Early in the afternoon of Sunday, June 7th, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council appeared together on a stage in Powderhorn Park, masked and socially distanced. Demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd had been unfurling for nearly two weeks, and though the police commissioner had fired all four of the officers present during his death, and though the district attorney had indicted the police officer Derek Chauvin for murder, the protests had only grown more urgent. The Powderhorn Park rally had been organized by two local activist groups, the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, and their slogan was written on a banner at the foot of the stage: “Defund the police.” They had also been negotiating with the members of the city council, who control the budget of the Minneapolis police, to get them to commit to defunding as a policy. Now the nine council members, a veto-proof majority, had come to the activists’ event to say that they wanted what the activists and the people at the protests wanted. “Our commitment,” Lisa Bender, the council’s president and a former city planner, said, “is to end policing as we know it.”
Bender’s words did not reflect as specific a program as the activists might have wanted. To “abolish” the police, as the Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison said he favored, was not exactly the same as “defunding” it, which could mean anything from a dramatic to a slight change to its budget. To “end policing as we know it” was vaguer still; it could mean significant defunding or else some pilot programs and a rebranding. Taken together, though, the council members’ words did suggest radical intent. “This is brave,” the executive director of the Black Visions Collective, Kandace Montgomery, said.
Watching the event from lockdown, streaming a bright Midwestern afternoon into a gray home office, I couldn’t help but be interested in how the Minneapolis City Council had reached this point, and what would happen next. Black Lives Matter has been the most effective protest movement in half a century, at least when it comes to shifting public opinion. Four years ago, roughly forty per cent of Americans said that they supported the movement. Now that number is close to seventy per cent, which means that hundreds of millions of Americans, many of them white and moderate or conservative, have changed their points of view. Will that consensus be diverted into itineraries of private consciousness-changing—of antiracist book clubs, and corporate awareness seminars, and conversations between parents and children—or will it lead to the policy change that has become the rallying cry of protesters around the country: to defund the police? This is an idea that, until recently, even the most progressive Democrats have generally dismissed. Bernie Sanders has said he does not support it. Karen Bass, the progressive congresswoman from California who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, has said, of “defund the police,” “that’s probably one of the worst slogans ever.” In Minneapolis, here were nine people willing to edge a bit further along the diving board, and to promise a specific change. It raised some obvious questions. Why them? And what did this commitment actually mean?
Minneapolis has long had a reputation for liberalism, but over the past decade it has become one of the most left-leaning constituencies in the country. “People think of Minneapolis as flyover country, but I’ve lived all over, including in the Bay Area, and this is the most progressive city in the country,” Phillipe Cunningham, the councilman for the Fourth Ward, told me. It is, at least, represented by perhaps the country’s most obviously progressive city council: Cunningham, a former special-education teacher, and Andrea Jenkins, a former city council policy aide and now its vice-president, are two of the first transgender people to hold public office. Jeremiah Ellison, the son of the Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, and a prominent local activist, first came to public attention after a photo showed a police officer pointing a grenade launcher at him at a Black Lives Matter protest. Alondra Cano, who represents the Ninth Ward and chairs the public-safety committee, is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and campaigned as an immigrants’-rights activist. These politicians, I was told repeatedly, were elected by a new-left coalition that has largely displaced the ward politics of the past, consisting of the growing Latino and East African immigrant communities, a young Black population that was organized by the Black Lives Matter movement, and white liberals increasingly willing to back certain progressive causes. “They didn’t come up the traditional way—they didn’t serve on school boards and so on,” Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, said, of the new council members. “It’s a city council of activists.”
This made the council a bit more likely to see the police as activists do. From the perspective of many of the activists, and some academic allies, the essential position of the police has not changed in modern American history. As Montgomery, who has been perhaps the most influential activist in Minneapolis in the months after Floyd’s death, put it to me, “What I know as a Black person whose family is from the South is that police started off as slave patrols, to capture and utilize people in my family who were seeking freedom, and police continue to do the exact same thing.” If well-intentioned efforts to reform the police keep seeming to fail, this camp believed, then maybe that was because policing was fundamentally illiberal, in a way that did not have much to do with who the cops were as individuals or how they had been trained. You could take a group of Buddhist monks, organize them into military-style squads, arm and outfit them like soldiers, tell them that they were heading into dangerous neighborhoods filled with criminals and hidden guns, and ask them to intervene in human dramas (mental illness, infidelity, rivalry), and things would inevitably go awry. As Alex Vitale, a sociologist at CUNY and a leading academic advocate of police abolition, put it to me, “The problem is the mission.”
But, from another perspective, one that until recently was dominant among mayors and city councils, the character of the police has changed many times. Some of these changes were broad and generational. In the nineteen-eighties, as the number of inner-city murders spiked, police departments grew far larger, and patrols grew more frequent and militaristic. In the nineties, politicians began to press the leaders of these suddenly massive departments to adopt the friendlier posture of community policing, which eventually became the default way that police chiefs spoke about their jobs, at least in public. In the two-thousands, the focus was on precision policing: more tactical gear, leftover from the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, but more precise targets, too, in hotspot programs built from Boston and New York’s COMPSTAT model. Police would pinpoint not just the west side of town but six particular corners, and not all young men who lived there but those with prior gun arrests, a focus which led to some reductions in crime, as in Baltimore, but also excessive policies like New York’s Stop, Question, and Frisk, which, before it became a byword for constant harassment, was a program for taking guns off the street. The era of precision policing reflected a confidence, among politicians, that new policies could change the police. If a city wanted a more progressive police department, it could hire a new chief and new consultants, retrain its officers, and implement less permissive use-of-force policies. Crime was by that point so thoroughly measured that the public could see the effect of new policies, neatly laid out on a graph and displayed on a municipal Web site. Change—which is to say control of the police—was possible.
At the beginning of the Trump years, these two left-of-center positions—the liberal conviction that the police could be reformed and the radical one that they could not—generally occupied separate spheres. The idea that the police needed to be abolished, their funding stripped away, was a slogan for protest, not a call taken up by even the most progressive elected officials, who tended to advocate for alternative-intervention programs instead. In Minneapolis, the Black Visions Collective has been campaigning to defund the police since 2018—Montgomery told me that the group’s volunteers have placed sixty thousand calls and e-mails to city-council officials. But even when a new, very progressive city council was elected, in 2017, this campaign barely dented its consciousness. Cano said that, although activists had appeared at several council hearings demanding defunding, there had not been serious discussion among the members of anything like police abolition. The city had not yet tried clearing a neighborhood of police, to experiment with a different model of public safety. No city anywhere had done that. The most prominent example of police disbanding took place in Camden, New Jersey, in 2013, but once the city department was dissolved and the union abolished, the state of New Jersey hired a replacement force that was not only a recognizable police department but a larger and more expensive one, which managed to reduce civilian complaints but did so while patrolling the city of Camden more, not less.
Violent crime is now far lower than it was during the eighties and nineties, when mass policing was instituted. Policing scholars tend to see the movement to defund the police in this context. “Questioning the police could not have happened without low crime,” Tom Tyler, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, said. But in Minneapolis, and other cities, it also reflects growing mistrust between an increasingly progressive population and police unions whose leaders have only grown more outspoken, and have built alliances with Republicans. In Minneapolis, the longtime president of the police union, Bob Kroll, who last year introduced President Trump at a campaign rally and complained about the Obama Administration’s “handcuffing and oppression of police,” has been an especially powerful figure, able at crucial moments to defy the municipal chain of command. In 2012, Kroll’s union successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass a law functionally repealing the city’s police-review board, an organization that the city council had created and that had existed for a quarter century. In 2019, when the mayor of Minneapolis banned “warrior-style” training for police officers, Kroll announced that the union would offer the training sessions itself.
During the next several years, there were several high-profile police killings of civilians in Minneapolis. Local Black Lives Matter activists often point to the death of Jamar Clark, an unarmed twenty-four-year-old Black man who was killed, in 2015, by police officers who had arrived to break up a fight at a party. The officers were not criminally tried and remained on the force. But political insiders also cite the killing, in 2017, of an unarmed white yoga instructor named Justine Damond by a Somali-American officer named Mohamed Noor. “That really was something that shifted the attitude of white middle-class voters towards the police,” Gary Cunningham, a former city official who helped create the civilian-review board, told me. “In fact, I had white people who came to me and said, ‘Oh, now I realize, I can be killed by the police.’ It really shifted the psyche.”
In the wake of those killings, and the protests that followed, Minneapolis’s then-mayor, Betsy Hodges (who is married to Cunningham), appointed the city’s first Black police chief, Medaria Arradondo. Both pledged to put Minneapolis at the forefront of police reform. “We had not just national experts but global experts in police reform coming in,” Phillipe Cunningham told me. “We had de-escalation training, procedural-justice training. Every one of the four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd had received this training.” Cunningham added, “No one could say that we didn’t try reform. We tried every kind of reform. And we still paid twenty-two million dollars last year in civil settlements for the police. We still have rape kits that no one is investigating. George Floyd was still killed. It just didn’t work.”
But when the members of the city council in Minneapolis described their decisions to support the defund movement, I found that they talked much less about a sense that reform had run its course than about a recent collapse of their trust in the Minneapolis police. In many cases, this turn happened during the week after Floyd’s death, when riots spread through the city, forcing the governor to call in the National Guard. At about 1:30 A.M. on Friday, May 29th, Steve Fletcher, a council member who represents the Third Ward, downtown, left his home on his bike to see what was happening at a small protest. “It was mostly kids—kids of color from our city—and it was small, compared to what was happening in other places,” Fletcher said. Then he rode by the First Precinct building, a few blocks away. “They had like two shifts of officers just guarding the precinct building,” Fletcher said.
Not long after, Fletcher started getting calls to his cell phone from businesses in his district. “They’d all been robbed,” Fletcher said. One business owner who called said that he had been robbed at midnight, and then robbed again around 1:30 A.M. “because they saw that no one was coming,” and then robbed again an hour later, while the owner was on the phone with Fletcher. “I was realizing, Oh, my God, people are calling me because they can’t get through to 911, and nobody is responding even if they do get through to the police. No one is coming,” Fletcher said. “At a certain point, you say, they were only defending the precinct, and they left the rest of the community to fend for ourselves.”


newyorker--2020-08-08--The New Yorker’s “Sell Out” Becomes “An American Pickle”

Imagine falling asleep in Brooklyn and waking up a hundred years later to find the borough completely changed .
How would you survive ?
What artisanal profession would you pursue ?
And , most important , what would you think of your modern-day descendants ?
That is the premise of Simon Rich ’ s comic novella “ Sell Out , ” which appeared in four installments in The New Yorker at the beginning of 2013 .
The series has now been adapted into a film , “ An American Pickle , ” which was released Friday and features both Seth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The novella centers on Herschel Greenbaum , an immigrant worker at a pickle factory who one day falls into a giant vat and is miraculously preserved in brine .
The twist is not the time travel but the fact that , once Herschel awakens , he encounters his great-great-grandson , who personifies all of the bourgeois hipster qualities that would be anathema , one imagines , to an earnest immigrant from the early nineteen-hundreds .
( “ How about Thai fusion ?
” the younger man suggests , during their first meeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gluten-free ginger thingies.
” ) It is the interactions between Herschel and his offspring that provide the novella and movie their off-center humor .
Rich began contributing humor pieces to The New Yorker in 2007 .
He has published thirty pieces in the magazine , including one of my personal favorites , “ Guy Walks Into a Bar.
” Rich was one of the youngest writers ever hired on “ Saturday Night Live , ” where he wrote for four years before joining Pixar as a staff writer .
He has published nine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and is the creator of the TV comedies “ Man Seeking Woman ” and “ Miracle Workers.
” Rich began writing “ Sell Out ” when he was twenty-seven and working at Pixar .
“ The story was born out of a lot of self-loathing , ” he told me recently .
“ My ancestors were hardscrabble Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States to escape from oppression and poverty .
In contrast , my life has been outrageously privileged and easy .
My great-grandparents probably endured more in one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life.
” When Herschel encounters his great-great-grandson in “ Sell Out , ” he is indeed baffled by his relative ’ s laissez-faire attitude toward life , work , and , especially , faith .
The role of Judaism in daily life is a recurring theme in Rich ’ s work .
“ I ’ ve lost touch with so many aspects of my heritage , ” he said .
“ I always imagined that if my ancestors could meet me , they would find my life frivolous , immoral.
” Part of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is how Rich subverts expectations so that the reader begins to identify with the old-fashioned Herschel rather than his modern descendant ( who , it must be said , is a bit of a nightmare ) .
Screenwriting , of course , is quite different from writing fiction .
When he was starting out as a humor writer and began pitching to The New Yorker , Rich was surprised that his esoteric subjects found an audience .
“ My stories are usually totally irrelevant , ” he said .
“ The fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a story about a talking condom or a lovesick caveman is incredible to me.
” The magazine has a long history of publishing unconventional , idiosyncratic humor , going back to James Thurber , in its early days .
But the New Yorker humorist whom Rich most reminds me of is Frank Sullivan , whose satirical pieces expertly punctured Manhattan ’ s social landscape .
There ’ s an offbeat , almost unsettling quality to Rich ’ s humor—akin to taking a leisurely walk only to find yourself in unfamiliar territory .
With @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rich remains interested in the contrasts between writing fiction and writing for film .
“ A premise can translate well from page to screen , ” he notes .
“ But , other than the hook , you pretty much have to start from scratch .
You can ’ t be too precious about the source material , even if you were the one who wrote it .
”

Imagine falling asleep in Brooklyn and waking up a hundred years later to find the borough completely changed. How would you survive? What artisanal profession would you pursue? And, most important, what would you think of your modern-day descendants? That is the premise of Simon Rich’s comic novella “Sell Out,” which appeared in four installments in The New Yorker at the beginning of 2013. The series has now been adapted into a film, “An American Pickle,” which was released Friday and features both Seth Rogen and a screenplay adapted by Rich. The novella centers on Herschel Greenbaum, an immigrant worker at a pickle factory who one day falls into a giant vat and is miraculously preserved in brine. The twist is not the time travel but the fact that, once Herschel awakens, he encounters his great-great-grandson, who personifies all of the bourgeois hipster qualities that would be anathema, one imagines, to an earnest immigrant from the early nineteen-hundreds. (“How about Thai fusion?” the younger man suggests, during their first meeting. “This place has these amazing gluten-free ginger thingies.”) It is the interactions between Herschel and his offspring that provide the novella and movie their off-center humor.
Rich began contributing humor pieces to The New Yorker in 2007. He has published thirty pieces in the magazine, including one of my personal favorites, “Guy Walks Into a Bar.” Rich was one of the youngest writers ever hired on “Saturday Night Live,” where he wrote for four years before joining Pixar as a staff writer. He has published nine books, including “Spoiled Brats,” and is the creator of the TV comedies “Man Seeking Woman” and “Miracle Workers.”
Rich began writing “Sell Out” when he was twenty-seven and working at Pixar. “The story was born out of a lot of self-loathing,” he told me recently. “My ancestors were hardscrabble Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States to escape from oppression and poverty. In contrast, my life has been outrageously privileged and easy. My great-grandparents probably endured more in one day than I have in my entire life.” When Herschel encounters his great-great-grandson in “Sell Out,” he is indeed baffled by his relative’s laissez-faire attitude toward life, work, and, especially, faith. The role of Judaism in daily life is a recurring theme in Rich’s work. “I’ve lost touch with so many aspects of my heritage,” he said. “I always imagined that if my ancestors could meet me, they would find my life frivolous, immoral.” Part of the appeal of “Sell Out” is how Rich subverts expectations so that the reader begins to identify with the old-fashioned Herschel rather than his modern descendant (who, it must be said, is a bit of a nightmare).
Screenwriting, of course, is quite different from writing fiction. When he was starting out as a humor writer and began pitching to The New Yorker, Rich was surprised that his esoteric subjects found an audience. “My stories are usually totally irrelevant,” he said. “The fact that The New Yorker would let me publish a story about a talking condom or a lovesick caveman is incredible to me.” The magazine has a long history of publishing unconventional, idiosyncratic humor, going back to James Thurber, in its early days. But the New Yorker humorist whom Rich most reminds me of is Frank Sullivan, whose satirical pieces expertly punctured Manhattan’s social landscape. There’s an offbeat, almost unsettling quality to Rich’s humor—akin to taking a leisurely walk only to find yourself in unfamiliar territory.
With “American Pickle” now streaming, Rich remains interested in the contrasts between writing fiction and writing for film. “A premise can translate well from page to screen,” he notes. “But, other than the hook, you pretty much have to start from scratch. You can’t be too precious about the source material, even if you were the one who wrote it.”


newyorker--2020-08-08--The Return of Kathleen Edwards

The Return of Kathleen Edwards

“ ‘ Total Freedom ’ will be my fifth album .
Part of me loves the idea that I can put out a record during this time and get my music out there but also stay home and be part of people ’ s confidence rebuild.
” “ I opened Quitters Coffee in my hometown of Ottawa , in a neighborhood where there really was nothing going on .
I ’ ve spent the last few years really rooting myself in this community.
” “ There are sweet , older customers who ask , ‘ Oh , are you the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ younger , I probably would have said , ‘ You ’ re not using the right word to describe me !
’ Now I ’ m , like , ‘ Yes , I ’ m the country singer , nice to meet you , no problem.
’ ” “ There ’ s definitely a performance aspect to running the café .
Sometimes I sense that people want me to act like I know them as intimately as they think they know me , because they ’ re familiar with my work.
” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then .
People change .
”

“ ‘Total Freedom’ will be my fifth album. Part of me loves the idea that I can put out a record during this time and get my music out there but also stay home and be part of people’s confidence rebuild.”
“I opened Quitters Coffee in my hometown of Ottawa, in a neighborhood where there really was nothing going on. I’ve spent the last few years really rooting myself in this community.”
“There are sweet, older customers who ask, ‘Oh, are you the country singer?’ When I was younger, I probably would have said, ‘You’re not using the right word to describe me!’ Now I’m, like, ‘Yes, I’m the country singer, nice to meet you, no problem.’ ”


Sunday Reading: Baseball

One of the small mercies of our pandemic year has been the resumption of baseball : crowdless , silent , but baseball all the same .
This week , perhaps to make up for being kept away from the stadium , we ’ re bringing you a selection of some great baseball pieces from our archive .
On September 28 , 1960 , the last day of his career , Ted Williams stepped up to the plate and hit a home run .
He descended into the dugout and never returned to the field , not even to tip his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the stands that day at Fenway Park and soon wrote “ Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu , ” his valedictory to the great Red Sox hitter and outfielder .
In “ Distance , ” Roger Angell , the greatest of all baseball writers and an honoree of the Hall of Fame , profiles Bob Gibson , the pitching master of the St. Louis Cardinals .
In “ Baseball ’ s Bumpy Return and the Gap Between Hope and Hubris , ” Louisa Thomas describes the difficulties inherent in commencing a new baseball season @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Big Heinie , ” Louis Menand examines how Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig helped to reinvent our notion of star athletes .
Finally , in “ The Professor of Baseball , ” Ben McGrath reports on the statistician Bill James , the brains behind the “ moneyball ” approach to the game .
Here ’ s to seeing you at the ballpark sometime soon .
The season ’ s opening weekend felt almost ordinary , which was extraordinary .
Then more players started testing positive for the coronavirus .
Lou Gehrig and Babe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ becoming a new kind of star .
Can the master of statistics help the Red Sox beat the Yankees ?

One of the small mercies of our pandemic year has been the resumption of baseball: crowdless, silent, but baseball all the same. This week, perhaps to make up for being kept away from the stadium, we’re bringing you a selection of some great baseball pieces from our archive. On September 28, 1960, the last day of his career, Ted Williams stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. He descended into the dugout and never returned to the field, not even to tip his cap. John Updike was sitting in the stands that day at Fenway Park and soon wrote “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” his valedictory to the great Red Sox hitter and outfielder. In “Distance,” Roger Angell, the greatest of all baseball writers and an honoree of the Hall of Fame, profiles Bob Gibson, the pitching master of the St. Louis Cardinals. In “Baseball’s Bumpy Return and the Gap Between Hope and Hubris,” Louisa Thomas describes the difficulties inherent in commencing a new baseball season during an epidemic. In “The Big Heinie,” Louis Menand examines how Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig helped to reinvent our notion of star athletes. Finally, in “The Professor of Baseball,” Ben McGrath reports on the statistician Bill James, the brains behind the “moneyball” approach to the game. Here’s to seeing you at the ballpark sometime soon.
—David Remnick
Photograph from Getty
Ted Williams’s last game at Fenway Park.
Photograph from AP
The game belongs to Bob Gibson.
The season’s opening weekend felt almost ordinary, which was extraordinary. Then more players started testing positive for the coronavirus.
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth transformed America’s pastime by becoming a new kind of star.
Illustration by Ben Katchor
Can the master of statistics help the Red Sox beat the Yankees?


newyorker--2020-08-09--The Cryptic Crossword: No. 70

The Cryptic Crossword: No. 70

Some clues have been edited for clarity .
Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle ’ s answers in @ @ @

Some clues have been edited for clarity. Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle’s answers in our archive.


newyorker--2020-08-09--The Woeful Inadequacy of School-Reopening Plans

School isn ’ t due to start in New York City until after Labor Day , but in Georgia some districts began opening last week , even though the state is averaging upward of three thousand new cases of COVID-19 a day—more than France , Germany , and the United Kingdom combined .
Schools opened in Paulding County , outside Atlanta , despite there being an outbreak among members of a high-school football team .
Students posted photographs of the first days of the term at the high school , showing teen-agers jammed in two-way corridor traffic , most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the county ’ s school superintendent , said that the crowding did not violate its “ protocols ” and that “ wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.
” School administrators did , however , warn students that they would be disciplined if they kept posting “ negative ” images .
Otott ’ s statement exhibited defiance , denialism , and a peculiar sort of defeatism—all factors that have contributed to what it is now clear are woefully inadequate preparations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as the number of new cases in much of the country was declining , it might have been possible to believe that , by the fall , it would be high time and easy , as President Trump tweeted , to “ OPEN THE SCHOOLS !
!
!
” Indeed , many people who care deeply about vulnerable populations in ways that he has never shown are desperate to open schools .
Children can be less safe at home than they are at school ; families can face a crisis if a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) has to stay with a child rather than go to work .
But as Lori Lightfoot , the mayor of Chicago , put it last week , when she announced that all school instruction in her city will be remote at least until November , we have now moved to “ a very different place in the arc of the pandemic.
” Los Angeles , San Diego , Miami-Dade , Philadelphia , and Houston made similar decisions .
In some places , sufficient groundwork simply hasn ’ t been done .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a million students , the virus has ebbed , but Mayor Bill de Blasio has offered an inept plan that relies on staff and equipment that don ’ t exist and that the city has no plans to pay for , all to give children in-person instruction only one to three days a week .
Michael Mulgrew , the head of the United Federation of Teachers , has said that the city ’ s safety standards are “ not enough.
” It remains true , thankfully , that the number of children @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but they can become quite ill and have high viral loads .
( A video of Trump claiming , last week , that children were “ almost immune ” was taken down by Facebook for violating its policy on dangerous COVID-19 misinformation . )
And children , particularly older ones , can spread the virus ; in Israel , the reopening of middle schools and high schools with relaxed social distancing preceded outbreaks in the wider community .
A study by the Centers for Disease Control of a summer camp in Georgia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confirmed cases among the some six hundred children and staff members ; half the children aged six to ten tested positive , the highest rate of any age group present .
Staff had been required to wear masks ; campers were not .
The focus on teachers ’ safety , and the stand taken by their unions , has provoked some anger—this is , after all , a country willing to mandate that a teacher endanger her life but not that a teen-ager wear a mask .
The most thoughtless voices , exemplified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week entitled “ School-Opening Extortion , ” dismiss teachers ’ fears and accuse them of being little more than pandemic shakedown artists looking to “ squeeze more money from taxpayers.
” Others argue that teachers are “ essential workers , ” and need to take the risks that come with the job , just as health-care or transit or food-industry workers do .
But essential workers have every right to insist that sensible measures be taken for their safety .
Teachers , because their unions are organized and politically influential , can stand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ immigrant meatpacking workers can not ; in a sense , that power confers an obligation to speak out and set standards for what any worker in this long pandemic deserves .
Where does all this leave children , parents , and employers ?
Some families are forming at-home “ pod schools ” with friends ; others are turning to private schools .
The public-policy challenge is what will happen to students whose families do not have such resources .
California is exploring a kind of triage , in which some elementary schools open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there are inventive proposals , such as holding classes outdoors , but that still requires space , staffing , and funding .
As grim as it is to say , though , the most practical thing that districts can do may be to improve remote learning , which will be part of the equation in all scenarios .
This spring , “ remote instruction ” was often a euphemism for “ no instruction.
” For some children , it involved little more than intermittently watching a screen .
Others didn ’ t even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Los Angeles alone , a quarter of a million households with school-age children lacked a computer with broadband .
Even if a home has a digital device , it may be shared by more than one student and by parents working remotely .
Attempts to insure that students have what they need to learn have been patchy ; as with so many things related to the pandemic , the money isn ’ t there .
Many school systems , including New York City ’ s , have had their budgets cut .
Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundred billion dollars in aid to public schools as part of the second pandemic relief bill , while Republicans have sought only a fraction of that .
If there is to be any hope for in-person schooling not only in the fall but in the spring—when a safe vaccine , even if one exists , might not be fully available—a rapid change in course is necessary .
This might include targeted lockdowns , or trading closed restaurants and shops for open schools .
It certainly demands a greater financial , political , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Germany and South Korea , have done the work both to beat back the virus and to allow schools to reopen in a reasonably safe manner , with measures such as mandatory masks , small classes , broad testing , and strict distancing .
The United States accomplished neither ; as a nation , we wasted the summer , while Trump sowed distrust and promoted heedlessness .
What ’ s left now is to see what can be salvaged .
We ’ re already late for school .
♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
School isn’t due to start in New York City until after Labor Day, but in Georgia some districts began opening last week, even though the state is averaging upward of three thousand new cases of COVID-19 a day—more than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. Schools opened in Paulding County, outside Atlanta, despite there being an outbreak among members of a high-school football team. Students posted photographs of the first days of the term at the high school, showing teen-agers jammed in two-way corridor traffic, most of them without masks. Brian Otott, the county’s school superintendent, said that the crowding did not violate its “protocols” and that “wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.” School administrators did, however, warn students that they would be disciplined if they kept posting “negative” images.
Otott’s statement exhibited defiance, denialism, and a peculiar sort of defeatism—all factors that have contributed to what it is now clear are woefully inadequate preparations to open schools nationwide. In May, as the number of new cases in much of the country was declining, it might have been possible to believe that, by the fall, it would be high time and easy, as President Trump tweeted, to “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” Indeed, many people who care deeply about vulnerable populations in ways that he has never shown are desperate to open schools. Children can be less safe at home than they are at school; families can face a crisis if a parent or guardian (often a mother) has to stay with a child rather than go to work.
But as Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, put it last week, when she announced that all school instruction in her city will be remote at least until November, we have now moved to “a very different place in the arc of the pandemic.” Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia, and Houston made similar decisions. In some places, sufficient groundwork simply hasn’t been done. In New York City, which has more than a million students, the virus has ebbed, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has offered an inept plan that relies on staff and equipment that don’t exist and that the city has no plans to pay for, all to give children in-person instruction only one to three days a week. Michael Mulgrew, the head of the United Federation of Teachers, has said that the city’s safety standards are “not enough.”
It remains true, thankfully, that the number of children who die from COVID-19 is very small, but they can become quite ill and have high viral loads. (A video of Trump claiming, last week, that children were “almost immune” was taken down by Facebook for violating its policy on dangerous COVID-19 misinformation.) And children, particularly older ones, can spread the virus; in Israel, the reopening of middle schools and high schools with relaxed social distancing preceded outbreaks in the wider community. A study by the Centers for Disease Control of a summer camp in Georgia found at least two hundred and sixty confirmed cases among the some six hundred children and staff members; half the children aged six to ten tested positive, the highest rate of any age group present. Staff had been required to wear masks; campers were not.
The focus on teachers’ safety, and the stand taken by their unions, has provoked some anger—this is, after all, a country willing to mandate that a teacher endanger her life but not that a teen-ager wear a mask. The most thoughtless voices, exemplified by a Wall Street Journal editorial last week entitled “School-Opening Extortion,” dismiss teachers’ fears and accuse them of being little more than pandemic shakedown artists looking to “squeeze more money from taxpayers.” Others argue that teachers are “essential workers,” and need to take the risks that come with the job, just as health-care or transit or food-industry workers do. But essential workers have every right to insist that sensible measures be taken for their safety. Teachers, because their unions are organized and politically influential, can stand up for themselves in a way that immigrant meatpacking workers cannot; in a sense, that power confers an obligation to speak out and set standards for what any worker in this long pandemic deserves.
Where does all this leave children, parents, and employers? Some families are forming at-home “pod schools” with friends; others are turning to private schools. The public-policy challenge is what will happen to students whose families do not have such resources. California is exploring a kind of triage, in which some elementary schools open, and older students stay home; there are inventive proposals, such as holding classes outdoors, but that still requires space, staffing, and funding. As grim as it is to say, though, the most practical thing that districts can do may be to improve remote learning, which will be part of the equation in all scenarios.
This spring, “remote instruction” was often a euphemism for “no instruction.” For some children, it involved little more than intermittently watching a screen. Others didn’t even have a screen to watch; in Los Angeles alone, a quarter of a million households with school-age children lacked a computer with broadband. Even if a home has a digital device, it may be shared by more than one student and by parents working remotely. Attempts to insure that students have what they need to learn have been patchy; as with so many things related to the pandemic, the money isn’t there. Many school systems, including New York City’s, have had their budgets cut. Democrats in Congress have proposed more than four hundred billion dollars in aid to public schools as part of the second pandemic relief bill, while Republicans have sought only a fraction of that.
If there is to be any hope for in-person schooling not only in the fall but in the spring—when a safe vaccine, even if one exists, might not be fully available—a rapid change in course is necessary. This might include targeted lockdowns, or trading closed restaurants and shops for open schools. It certainly demands a greater financial, political, and community commitment. Several countries, such as Germany and South Korea, have done the work both to beat back the virus and to allow schools to reopen in a reasonably safe manner, with measures such as mandatory masks, small classes, broad testing, and strict distancing.
The United States accomplished neither; as a nation, we wasted the summer, while Trump sowed distrust and promoted heedlessness. What’s left now is to see what can be salvaged. We’re already late for school. ♦
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-08-09--The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins

This August—normally a bountiful month in which tomatoes ripen on the vine , hydrangea bushes sag with extravagant blooms , and the sunsets can be nearly psychedelic—I have found it difficult to hold onto a good feeling .
For a lot of Americans , this particular summer has been a season of fear and concern—or , at best , a kind of endless , anxious boredom .
But one small , pure , reliable pleasure remains : the giddiness of hearing a completely awesome song for the very first time .
For almost a year , Tim and Fred Williams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have made videos of themselves listening to famous songs , and then uploading the videos to their YouTube channel .
They sit in elaborate , side-by-side desk chairs , situated in front of a sometimes-unmade bed .
Posters of the rapper Tupac Shakur and the boxer Deontay Wilder are taped to a wood-panelled wall behind them .
Most of the songs that they choose to play have been suggested by subscribers , and they range from very recent hits to genuine oldies .
When I was a teen-ager , certain songs were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radio , or at the mall , or on boom boxes at the community pool—but now listening has become a far more individual and bespoke experience .
It ’ s not unusual for a young person to have never heard a hit that someone in their thirties or forties might believe to be ubiquitous .
( Earlier this summer , a TikTok video of two young women unable to identify pop singles , mostly from the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands , caused a brief explosion of consternation and pearl-clutching on Twitter .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ videos are bewitching for many reasons : their sweetness and good humor , the way they quickly recontextualize ( and thereby reinvigorate ) songs that I have heard thousands of times , and—perhaps most important—their curiosity and receptivity .
These days , voices loudly espousing some self-declared expertise far outweigh the ones saying , “ Hey , teach me something.
” The way that the twins remain so open to unfamiliar experiences ( they came of age listening to Lil Wayne and Twista but appear genuinely interested in all kinds of music ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and eagerly receiving a recommendation is often a far more generous act than giving one .
Even when the Williams twins do not seem especially worked up about a track , they listen carefully , with a kind of openhearted earnestness .
They recently cued up the country singer Blake Shelton ’ s “ Happy Anywhere , ” a love song featuring backing vocals from his girlfriend , Gwen Stefani .
Part of the song ’ s video appears to have been filmed in a cornfield on Shelton ’ s ranch in Oklahoma @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Fred pauses the video .
“ Grass is really that big ?
” he asks , incredulous .
“ It ’ s as tall as them !
Hold up !
And he ’ s , like , six-something—bro , you would not see me in a cornfield .
For real , bro.
” Usually , by the end , they agree that whatever track they have been listening to is pretty great .
In mid-June , they tried Dolly Parton ’ s “ Jolene.
” Fred has the kind of face that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ baby ’ s expression after he successfully knocks down a tower of wooden blocks .
He pauses the song halfway through .
“ Dolly—you got it .
You got it !
” he announces .
“ This is a banger.
” He and Tim resume the video .
By the end , Tim has grown quiet and vaguely melancholy .
“ Don ’ t take her man , man , ” he says .
There is a whisper of “ Beavis and Butt-Head ” in the twins ’ videos , but instead of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of excitement—the exaltation of apathy was a cornerstone of the nineties gestalt—the twins seem eager to be thrilled by something new .
Which is all to say—if you are feeling especially bummed or burned out , fully exhausted by the contents of your home or your own mind , take a moment to watch the twins listen to Phil Collins ’ s “ In the Air Tonight , ” from 1981 .
( It ’ s their most popular video to date , and on Friday , it briefly caused “ Phil Collins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) If you know the song , you know to wait for the very loud and excellent drum fill that arrives , unexpectedly , a little over three minutes in .
( “ We were playing with psychological things .
The audience is there going along with you , and then suddenly you knock them on the head with this thing : Bvoom-bvoom !
” Collins said in a recent interview . )
The drum fill on “ In the Air Tonight ” is one of the most dependable thrills I know—a very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heady , metaphysical elation .
I wish that I had a video of the first time I heard it—what my face did , whether I made a noise .
Connecting instantaneously with a piece of music can feel like happening upon a different world .
The twins like the song almost immediately .
“ Yeah , ” they say , bobbing their heads .
“ O.K.
” “ Phil Collins , he ’ s killing it , ” Tim declares .
They each periodically pound their hearts , as if to reiterate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the drum fill arrives .
It takes a moment for Fred to process it .
He gasps as if he ’ s seen a ghost and then rolls back in his chair .
Tim ’ s response is more understated , but not by much .
Now they ’ re deep in the pocket , dancing , exhilarated , happy .
They pause the clip to gather their thoughts .
“ That was cold !
I ain ’ t gon na lie , Phil—you got me on that , ” Fred says , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anybody drop a beat three minutes into the song , ” Tim adds .
“ That ’ s unique !
” I have rewound this particular sequence many times , simply to revel in its hope .
What if there is a song you have never heard before that could still topple you ?
Maybe it ’ s out there , waiting , the twins suggest—just keep listening .

This August—normally a bountiful month in which tomatoes ripen on the vine, hydrangea bushes sag with extravagant blooms, and the sunsets can be nearly psychedelic—I have found it difficult to hold on to a good feeling. For a lot of Americans, this particular summer has been a season of fear and concern—or, at best, a kind of endless, anxious boredom. But one small, pure, reliable pleasure remains: the giddiness of hearing a completely awesome song for the very first time.
For almost a year, Tim and Fred Williams, twenty-one-year-old twins from Gary, Indiana, have made videos of themselves listening to famous songs, and then uploading the videos to their YouTube channel. They sit in elaborate, side-by-side desk chairs, situated in front of a sometimes-unmade bed. Posters of the rapper Tupac Shakur and the boxer Deontay Wilder are taped to a wood-panelled wall behind them. Most of the songs that they choose to play have been suggested by subscribers, and they range from very recent hits to genuine oldies. When I was a teen-ager, certain songs were simply inescapable—they were played endlessly on the radio, or at the mall, or on boom boxes at the community pool—but now listening has become a far more individual and bespoke experience. It’s not unusual for a young person never to have heard a hit that people in their thirties or forties might believe to be ubiquitous. (Earlier this summer, a TikTok video of two young women unable to identify pop singles, mostly from the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, caused a brief explosion of consternation and pearl-clutching on Twitter.)
For me, the twins’ videos are bewitching for many reasons: their sweetness and good humor, the way they quickly recontextualize (and thereby reinvigorate) songs that I have heard thousands of times, and—perhaps most important—their curiosity and receptivity. These days, voices loudly espousing some self-declared expertise far outweigh the ones saying, “Hey, teach me something.” The way that the twins remain so open to unfamiliar experiences (they came of age listening to Lil Wayne and Twista but appear genuinely interested in all kinds of music) seems like a rare gift. Graciously and eagerly receiving a recommendation is often a far more generous act than giving one.
Even when the Williams twins do not seem especially worked up about a track, they listen carefully, with a kind of openhearted earnestness. They recently cued up the country singer Blake Shelton’s “Happy Anywhere,” a love song featuring backing vocals from his girlfriend, Gwen Stefani. Part of the song’s video appears to have been filmed in a cornfield on Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma, where the couple have been isolating. Tim pauses the video. “Grass is really that big?” he asks, incredulous. “It’s as tall as them! Hold up! And he’s, like, six-something—bro, you would not see me in a cornfield. For real, bro.” Usually, by the end, they agree that whatever track they have been listening to is pretty great.
In mid-June, they tried Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Tim has the kind of face that collapses fully into happiness, like a baby’s expression after he successfully knocks down a tower of wooden blocks. He pauses the song halfway through. “Dolly—you got it. You got it!” he announces. “This is a banger.” He and Fred resume the video. By the end, Fred has grown quiet and vaguely melancholy. “Don’t take her man, man,” he says. There is a whisper of “Beavis and Butt-Head” in the twins’ videos, but instead of a knee-jerk cynicism and a deep fear of excitement—the exaltation of apathy was a cornerstone of the nineties gestalt—the twins seem eager to be thrilled by something new.
Which is all to say—if you are feeling especially bummed or burned out, fully exhausted by the contents of your home or your own mind, take a moment to watch the twins listen to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” from 1981. (It’s their most popular video to date, and on Friday it briefly caused “Phil Collins” to start trending on Twitter.) If you know the song, you know to wait for the very loud and excellent drum fill that arrives, unexpectedly, a little over three minutes in. (“We were playing with psychological things. The audience is there going along with you, and then suddenly you knock them on the head with this thing: Bvoom-bvoom!” Collins said in a recent interview.) The drum fill on “In the Air Tonight” is one of the most dependable thrills I know—a very quick path to a certain kind of heady, metaphysical elation. I wish that I had a video of the first time I heard it—what my face did, whether I made a noise. Connecting instantaneously with a piece of music can feel like happening upon a different world. The twins like the song almost immediately. “Yeah,” they say, bobbing their heads. “O.K.”
“Phil Collins, he’s killing it,” Fred declares. They each periodically pound their hearts, as if to reiterate, “I feel this.”
Eventually, the drum fill arrives. It takes a moment for Tim to process it. He gasps as if he’s seen a ghost and then rolls back in his chair. Fred’s response is more understated, but not by much. Now they’re deep in the pocket, dancing, exhilarated, happy. They pause the clip to gather their thoughts.
“That was cold! I ain’t gonna lie, Phil—you got me on that,” Tim says, laughing.
“I have never seen anybody drop a beat three minutes into the song,” Fred adds. “That’s unique!”
I have rewound this particular sequence many times, simply to revel in its hope. What if there is a song you have never heard before that could still topple you? Maybe it’s out there, waiting, the twins suggest—just keep listening.


newyorker--2020-08-09--New York City Recovers from the Coronavirus Lockdown

New York is a place that rapidly adopts , and normalizes , change .
Things don ’ t exist one @ @ @ @ @ a week , it feels like they ’ ve been around forever .
Recently , @ @ @ @ @ digital sketchbook for the first time since March , when life in New York halted @ @ @ @ @ noticed the fleet of dine-out boxes , every other restaurant commandeering the parking spaces outside @ @ @ @ @ into a hastily built wooden cube .
Maybe this is the reawakening of going out @ @ @ @ @ like a strange dream .
Construction work was under way , and a woman walked @ @ @ @ @ for sale .
But I missed the reassuring yellow brushstrokes of taxicabs in the landscape @ @ @ @ @ parking lot full of hibernating cabs reminded me of the hordes of people still waiting @ @ @ @ @ .
For now , New York is a city in transition , headed toward a @ @ @

New York is a place that rapidly adopts, and normalizes, change. Things don’t exist one day and then, after a week, it feels like they’ve been around forever. Recently, I walked around with my digital sketchbook for the first time since March, when life in New York halted completely. This time I noticed the fleet of dine-out boxes, every other restaurant commandeering the parking spaces outside to corral a few diners into a hastily built wooden cube. Maybe this is the reawakening of going out, but it still felt like a strange dream. Construction work was under way, and a woman walked by a storefront with flowers for sale. But I missed the reassuring yellow brushstrokes of taxicabs in the landscape. In Greenpoint, a parking lot full of hibernating cabs reminded me of the hordes of people still waiting to return to the streets. For now, New York is a city in transition, headed toward a future unknown.
Outside Key Food, on East Fourth Street and Avenue A.
Leroy and Washington Streets.
Tribeca.
Near East Tenth Street and First Avenue.
Wall Street.


newyorker--2020-08-09--How to Counter Trump’s Attempt to Manipulate the Election and the Census

With the coronavirus pandemic showing no signs of abating before November 3rd , Democrats and civil-rights groups are increasingly concerned that a slew of new mail-in voters will overwhelm states , leading to delayed counts and large numbers of rejected ballots .
They are particularly concerned about the role of the U.S .
Postal Service .
In May , the Republican-majority Postal Service Board of Governors appointed a new Postmaster General , a Trump campaign donor named Louis DeJoy , who made operational changes that appear to have led to slowed delivery .
Meanwhile , the President has repeatedly attacked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claiming that they facilitate voter fraud .
To talk about these issues , I recently spoke by phone with Vanita Gupta , the president and C.E.O .
of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights , an advocacy group founded in 1950 .
Gupta previously served as the head of the Department of Justice ’ s Civil Rights Division , under President Obama .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed whether people should vote in person to alleviate pressure on the mail-in system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arise after November 3rd , and whether social-media companies are doing enough to help insure a fair election .
We subsequently spoke again , to discuss President Trump ’ s attempt to curtail data collection for the census .
What are the crucial things that states should be doing to prepare for holding an election amid a pandemic ?
Several things .
One is they need to create or implement vote-by-mail systems in their state that have prepaid postage and secure collection or drop-off .
States that don ’ t already have this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accept ballots postmarked on Election Day that may arrive after .
And this is especially important in light of the cuts to the United States Postal Service made by the Trump donor who ’ s running the agency .
States also need to expand early voting in order to have socially distanced , public-health-compliant polling places .
They need to extend online voter registration , since so many of the government agencies that people typically register at are shuttered .
And they need to be recruiting and training younger workers who are less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on a pretty massive scale .
These are all the rule changes that need to happen at the state level , but then there ’ s this very significant voter-education effort that states need to be engaging in , too .
It ’ s both affirmative and defensive .
Affirmative because , in 2016 , one in four voters voted by mail .
There is going to be a pretty significant surge in those that are going to do this for the first time .
And clarifying how voters can do this , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , is going to require a lot of voter education .
But then they also have to be willing to fight disinformation .
There ’ s going to be attacks on secretaries of state and local and state officials on November 3rd when they are unable to certify results because they need to count all of the absentee or mail-in ballots .
We obviously need to have mail-in voting so that people don ’ t put their health on the line to go to a polling place , but do you have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is going to create problems ?
There are more states than not that have experience with mail-in ballots .
The primaries were really a test run for states , and the problems that we saw in Wisconsin , Georgia , and Pennsylvania can all be corrected , and secretaries of state have been taking steps .
Many of them , not all , are trying to fix these problems and to be ready to make changes so that what we saw in the primary won ’ t happen in the general .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are providing technical assistance .
This is why the Leadership Conference has been urging Congress to supply the funds that are needed for states to make these changes and make them swiftly .
But am I concerned about the level of preparedness ?
Absolutely .
There has to be funding to support it .
And there has to be political will to make the changes .
And everyone recognizes these are completely unprecedented circumstances , both because of the global pandemic but also in light of a President who is seeking to harm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these things can be done , but has doing them become a partisan issue , with Republicans basically unwilling ?
It is certainly partisan for the President .
But what I have noticed from talking to secretaries of state in both parties is that , actually , outside of Washington , they take a lot of pride in how they run their elections , and they don ’ t want to oversee chaos .
The look from Wisconsin—that was not a good look .
What happened in Pennsylvania was not a good look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ litigation happening around the country that can force the changes .
Sometimes litigation is actually welcomed because it creates the necessary political will in the state among those that appropriate funds to actually put the money behind those changes .
So there are various tactics being deployed .
I would say partisanship is at a pitch in Washington , but outside there are many more Republican and Democratic election officials that are working hard to try to get this right .
I ’ m not ignoring or being naïve about the fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stated that more voting is going to hurt their candidacy or hurt the Republican Party .
They are relying on voter suppression as an electoral tactic .
And we knew that we were going to be battling that long before COVID-19 .
COVID-19 has certainly made this much more challenging , but , in terms of the folks running their elections , there is greater bipartisan appetite to try to get through the elections , even when you ’ ve got representatives of the Republican Party really trying to weaponize COVID-19 for voter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your sense of how seriously the Biden campaign is taking issues of access to voting ?
My impression is that the campaign is taking all of this seriously .
It ’ s going to require a lot of infrastructure .
Obviously , you ’ ve got [ Democratic elections lawyer ] Marc Elias and all the litigation that the Party is doing around the country to set up rules to facilitate voting .
This is also going to be the first general election in decades that the R.N.C .
has been out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerns about what could happen at the polling places , given what we saw in Portland and in other parts of the country , with the weaponization of law enforcement to instill fear .
[ In 2018 , a federal judge allowed a consent decree against the Republican Party to expire ; the decree , from 1982 , prevented the Party from pursuing a range of vote-suppression strategies , including posting off-duty law-enforcement agents at polling places . ]
There ’ s a lot of things that not only the campaign but frankly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and trying to do what we can to plan for , because it ’ s a big deal , and it ’ s very wonky , and people don ’ t realize that the lifting of the consent decree , combined with a President and an Attorney General who are willing every day to defy democratic norms , makes this all an incredibly challenging set of circumstances that people need to be prepared for .

With the coronavirus pandemic showing no signs of abating before November 3rd, Democrats and civil-rights groups are increasingly concerned that a slew of new mail-in voters will overwhelm states, leading to delayed counts and large numbers of rejected ballots. They are particularly concerned about the role of the U.S. Postal Service. In May, the Republican-majority Postal Service Board of Governors appointed a new Postmaster General, a Trump campaign donor named Louis DeJoy, who made operational changes that appear to have led to slowed delivery. Meanwhile, the President has repeatedly attacked the reliability of mail-in ballots, falsely claiming that they facilitate voter fraud.
To talk about these issues, I recently spoke by phone with Vanita Gupta, the president and C.E.O. of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group founded in 1950. Gupta previously served as the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, under President Obama. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether people should vote in person to alleviate pressure on the mail-in system, the biggest legal challenges that may arise after November 3rd, and whether social-media companies are doing enough to help insure a fair election. We subsequently spoke again, to discuss President Trump’s attempt to curtail data collection for the census.
What are the crucial things that states should be doing to prepare for holding an election amid a pandemic?
Several things. One is they need to create or implement vote-by-mail systems in their state that have prepaid postage and secure collection or drop-off. States that don’t already have this have to provide a reasonable window to accept ballots postmarked on Election Day that may arrive after. And this is especially important in light of the cuts to the United States Postal Service made by the Trump donor who’s running the agency.
States also need to expand early voting in order to have socially distanced, public-health-compliant polling places. They need to extend online voter registration, since so many of the government agencies that people typically register at are shuttered. And they need to be recruiting and training younger workers who are less vulnerable to COVID-19, and doing that on a pretty massive scale.
These are all the rule changes that need to happen at the state level, but then there’s this very significant voter-education effort that states need to be engaging in, too. It’s both affirmative and defensive. Affirmative because, in 2016, one in four voters voted by mail. There is going to be a pretty significant surge in those that are going to do this for the first time. And clarifying how voters can do this, what the deadlines are and all of that, is going to require a lot of voter education. But then they also have to be willing to fight disinformation. There’s going to be attacks on secretaries of state and local and state officials on November 3rd when they are unable to certify results because they need to count all of the absentee or mail-in ballots.
We obviously need to have mail-in voting so that people don’t put their health on the line to go to a polling place, but do you have concerns that a ton of mail-in voting is going to create problems?
There are more states than not that have experience with mail-in ballots. The primaries were really a test run for states, and the problems that we saw in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania can all be corrected, and secretaries of state have been taking steps. Many of them, not all, are trying to fix these problems and to be ready to make changes so that what we saw in the primary won’t happen in the general. And there are a lot of groups that are providing technical assistance. This is why the Leadership Conference has been urging Congress to supply the funds that are needed for states to make these changes and make them swiftly.
But am I concerned about the level of preparedness? Absolutely. There has to be funding to support it. And there has to be political will to make the changes. And everyone recognizes these are completely unprecedented circumstances, both because of the global pandemic but also in light of a President who is seeking to harm the democratic process.
You say all these things can be done, but has doing them become a partisan issue, with Republicans basically unwilling?
It is certainly partisan for the President. But what I have noticed from talking to secretaries of state in both parties is that, actually, outside of Washington, they take a lot of pride in how they run their elections, and they don’t want to oversee chaos. The look from Wisconsin—that was not a good look. What happened in Pennsylvania was not a good look. There’s also very robust litigation happening around the country that can force the changes. Sometimes litigation is actually welcomed because it creates the necessary political will in the state among those that appropriate funds to actually put the money behind those changes.
So there are various tactics being deployed. I would say partisanship is at a pitch in Washington, but outside there are many more Republican and Democratic election officials that are working hard to try to get this right. I’m not ignoring or being naïve about the fact that there are candidates who have pretty boldly stated that more voting is going to hurt their candidacy or hurt the Republican Party. They are relying on voter suppression as an electoral tactic. And we knew that we were going to be battling that long before COVID-19. COVID-19 has certainly made this much more challenging, but, in terms of the folks running their elections, there is greater bipartisan appetite to try to get through the elections, even when you’ve got representatives of the Republican Party really trying to weaponize COVID-19 for voter suppression and partisan gain.
What is your sense of how seriously the Biden campaign is taking issues of access to voting?
My impression is that the campaign is taking all of this seriously. It’s going to require a lot of infrastructure. Obviously, you’ve got [Democratic elections lawyer] Marc Elias and all the litigation that the Party is doing around the country to set up rules to facilitate voting. This is also going to be the first general election in decades that the R.N.C. has been out of a consent decree, and there are concerns about what could happen at the polling places, given what we saw in Portland and in other parts of the country, with the weaponization of law enforcement to instill fear. [In 2018, a federal judge allowed a consent decree against the Republican Party to expire; the decree, from 1982, prevented the Party from pursuing a range of vote-suppression strategies, including posting off-duty law-enforcement agents at polling places.]
There’s a lot of things that not only the campaign but frankly civil-rights advocates are gearing up for, and trying to do what we can to plan for, because it’s a big deal, and it’s very wonky, and people don’t realize that the lifting of the consent decree, combined with a President and an Attorney General who are willing every day to defy democratic norms, makes this all an incredibly challenging set of circumstances that people need to be prepared for.


newyorker--2020-08-10--How China Controlled the Coronavirus

How China Controlled the Coronavirus

Afew days before my return to classroom teaching at Sichuan University , I was biking across a deserted stretch of campus when I encountered a robot .
The blocky machine stood about chest-high , on four wheels , not quite as long as a golf cart .
In front was a T-shaped device that appeared to be some kind of sensor .
The robot rolled past me , its electric motor humming .
I turned around and tailed the thing at a distance of fifteen feet .
It was May 27th , and it had been more than three months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Jiang ’ an campus , which is on the outskirts of Chengdu , in southwestern China .
In late February , when the spring semester was about to begin , I had hurried to campus to retrieve some materials from my office .
We were nearly a month into a nationwide lockdown in response to the coronavirus , which had started in Wuhan , a city about seven hundred miles east of Chengdu .
The university had informed the faculty that , at least at the beginning of the term , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those days , it still seemed possible to escape the disease by leaving China , and a number of foreign teachers at the university had departed .
At the U.S. Embassy and consulates , nonessential staff had been evacuated , along with the spouses and children of the diplomats who remained .
Throughout February , I answered e-mails from worried friends and relatives in the U.S .
I reassured them that my family was fine , and told them that we had decided to stay in Chengdu , despite numbers that , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frightening .
On February 20th , when I visited campus , China ’ s official death toll reached 2,236 .
Since then , the semester had crawled along , as everybody ’ s perspective on the disease changed .
During the third week of classes , the epidemic officially became a pandemic ; by week six , the U.S. death toll had exceeded that of China .
That week , China ’ s borders were closed to foreigners , and the evacuations reversed direction—Chinese nationals in America and Europe , many of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home .
China was the first to experience the pandemic , and it was also among the earliest countries to control the spread and enter what would now be considered normal life .
In week eleven , my nine-year-old twin daughters resumed classes ; in week thirteen , I boarded a plane for the first time in the post-coronavirus era .
And now , on May 27th—week fourteen—I was finally back on campus .
I followed the robot until it paused on a street lined with dormitories .
An electronic voice called out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Arriving at the stop !
” The street was empty , because most undergraduates hadn ’ t yet returned .
One new policy was that students couldn ’ t leave after entering campus , unless they received special permission .
Every gate to the university had been equipped with facial-recognition scanners , which were calibrated for face coverings .
Earlier that day , when I arrived , a guard told me to keep my mask on while being scanned .
My name popped up on a screen , along with my body @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As a faculty member , I could go through the gates in both directions , unlike students .
Now I waited with the robot , looking around at the silent dormitories .
Finally , three students approached from different directions , masked and holding cell phones .
Each of them entered a code on a touch screen at the back of the robot , and a compartment popped open , revealing a package inside .
One of the students told me that she had ordered her package through Taobao , China ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ owned by the Alibaba Group .
Before the epidemic , students retrieved their packages at a campus depot managed by Cainiao , another company mostly owned by Alibaba , but now the robot was also making deliveries .
The student said that the machine had telephoned and texted her as it approached her dorm .
For the next half hour , I followed the robot , assuming that eventually it would lead me to its master .
Whenever I biked too close , a horn sounded ; if I swerved in front , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response when I tried shouting at it .
Periodically , the machine pulled over— “ Daoda zhandian !
” —and masked students appeared , clutching phones and making a beeline in my direction .
On the silent campus , it felt like a scene from a horror film : “ Children of the Corona.
” At last , the robot parked in front of a Cainiao depot in a far corner of campus .
A worker in a blue vest came out and started loading it with packages .
“ We have three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He explained that Cainiao workers returned to off-campus houses every evening , so the robot was a way to reduce interactions with students .
I got back on my bike and headed to my office .
Along the way , I passed a series of white tents marked with the words “ China Health , ” in English .
In one , a masked nurse was seated behind a table with two glass thermometers in little boxes .
She told me that , if somebody showed a high temperature at a checkpoint @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tent for a more careful reading .
The next step , if necessary , was a campus clinic for a swab test .
I continued to my office , where a package was waiting on my desk .
It contained some tools that the university had provided for my return to the classroom : five surgical masks , a pair of rubber gloves , a box of Opula alcohol prep pads .
Despite the three-month absence , everything looked fine in the office .
Somebody or something had been watering my plants .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ August , to teach nonfiction writing and freshman composition , in English .
My family and I moved to Chengdu , the capital of Sichuan Province , in part because it ’ s the region where I served as a college instructor in the Peace Corps , from 1996 to 1998 .
In those days , Sichuan was relatively poor , and most of my students came from the countryside .
I hadn ’ t taught since then , an absence that essentially spanned a generation—twenty-one years .
I had returned to Chengdu @ @ @ @ @ @ @ education , and I looked forward to meeting young people in the classroom .
But , when the spring semester began , I found myself shuttered at home , in central Chengdu , trying to figure out how to use an online platform that had been hastily prepared by my department .
Nearly thirty million college students were being educated online , along with an estimated hundred and eighty million Chinese schoolchildren .
Beginning at about eight o ’ clock every morning , these users started logging in to platforms that were sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ online semester .
Many elementary schools didn ’ t attempt interactive classes .
My daughters , Ariel and Natasha , attended third grade at a local public school , and their teacher posted short video lessons that parents could stream whenever their connection made it possible .
The American-style Zoom course , with everybody appearing onscreen , wasn ’ t used by any of the teachers I knew in China .
Our students were invisible : if a camera was turned on , it featured only the instructor , although even that could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ class , I tried to live-stream a lecture , but the system froze and crashed so many times that I gave up .
After that , I avoided video .
Every week , I prepared low-resolution photographs , maps , and documents to share onscreen , and my students and I communicated through audio and text .

And many aspects of the Chinese strategy could never be adopted in America or in any other democracy. The strict policy of isolating individuals who test positive is also applied to children, who are separated from their parents even if they are asymptomatic. In June, a year-old Pakistani arrived on a flight and tested positive. For more than a month, the baby was held for medical observation.
Such dramatic examples tend to distract from more useful elements of the Chinese approach. The Chinese epidemiologist in Shanghai had also worked for many years in the U.S., and I asked if there was anything that Americans could realistically learn from China. “Community engagement,” he said immediately. “We don’t have the neighborhood-committee structure in the U.S., but it’s important to find some alternative.” He noted that public-health services might have served this purpose if the American system had been properly funded. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me that contact tracing is something of a lost art in the U.S. “We did a study of the measles outbreak in 2019, and they were doing minimal contact tracing,” she said. “It’s so incredibly resource-oriented, and public health has been decimated.”
From my perspective, there are also issues of education and effort. Despite the political indoctrination involved in Chinese schooling, the system teaches people to respect science. Hard work is another core value, and somehow society has become more prosperous without losing its edge. Nearly a quarter century ago, I taught young people who were driven by the desire to escape poverty; these days, my middle-class students seem to work at least as hard, because of the extreme competitiveness of their environment. Such qualities are perfect for fighting the pandemic, at least when channelled effectively by government structures. In comparison, the American response often appears passive—even enlightened citizens seem to believe that obeying lockdown orders and wearing masks in public is enough. But any attempt to control the virus requires active, organized effort, and there needs to be strong institutional direction.
Instead, the flailing American leadership seems more interested in finding scapegoats, sometimes with a racial tinge—the Kung Flu and the China Virus. Throughout the spring, the Chinese government periodically responded by lashing out at the U.S. and other foreign countries, but such tensions had little impact on my life in Chengdu. Daily interactions remained friendly, and people often made a point of telling me that the problems between governments had nothing to do with our personal relationships.
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But I worried about my daughters, who were the only Westerners at a school of some two thousand students. Our isolation increased throughout the spring: most of my American acquaintances had left, and it became rare to see a non-Chinese person on the street. At the end of May, the twins told my wife, Leslie, and me that a boy in their class had made some anti-American comments, but we didn’t say anything to the teacher. Virtually all of the girls’ classmates treated them warmly, and, with everything on the news, it seemed inevitable that there would be scattered instances of anti-American sentiment. That week, George Floyd had been killed, and the American death toll from the coronavirus was approaching a hundred thousand.
The teacher, though, responded quickly. The following Monday, she stood before the class and told a story that, in the Chinese way, emphasized science, education, and effort. She talked about Elon Musk, and she described how his California-based company had successfully launched a manned rocket into space the previous weekend. At the end of the story, she said, “Every country has its strong points and its weak points.”
During week sixteen, I finally entered the classroom. For more than a month, there had been rumors that undergraduates would return, as they had in some other provinces. But the final decision was always left to local officials, because, in the Chinese system, they are the ones who would be punished in the event of an outbreak. At Sichuan University, administrators seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth the risk. Senior students were called back to take their final exams, along with others who had made special requests, but most younger undergraduates were encouraged to stay home. I was disappointed—I had hoped to finally meet everybody. None of my first-year students made it back to campus.
In the end, it became another type of theatre: a dress rehearsal. The university introduced the fever tents, the delivery robots, and the facial-recognition scanners, but I sensed that administrators were mostly testing systems in preparation for the fall. Chinese epidemiologists told me that they were concerned about the possibility of a second wave of infections. Despite the country’s current success, they never seemed satisfied. “There’s no long-term plan,” a professor of epidemiology in Shanghai said bluntly. “No country has a long-term plan.” Another epidemiologist expressed concern about the lack of social distancing, believing that China needed to be prepared to use measures that were less aggressive than a lockdown but more effective than mask-wearing. “This is something we need to fix,” he told me. “There are smart people in the Chinese C.D.C. who realize this.”
The first week back, only four students showed up to my nonfiction class: Serena, Emmy, Fenton, and Sisyphos. It was like having a studio audience—the five of us talked back and forth, but we used headphones and microphones to connect with the others, who were still scattered across the country. Each returnee had a reason for coming back. Emmy was the only student who came from the countryside, and, like Serena, she had grown tired of being in a home that was loud and crowded. Fenton needed to get some dental work done at a university hospital. And Sisyphos, as a senior, was required to return for exams.
He arrived wearing a mask, but he took it off when he saw that the others were uncovered. He was tall, with slightly wavy hair, and he said that in the fall he would enter a graduate program in economics, in Shanghai. It seemed that most seniors were going to grad school; the government had expanded academic programs in order to reduce pressure on the job market.
Even online, I had sensed that Sisyphos was shy, and I never put him on the spot by asking about his name. But now I did, and he reddened slightly. He explained that he had chosen it in high school, because he liked the Greek myth.
“So where’s the rock right now?” I asked. “Is it high or low?”
Sisyphos brought his hand level with his chest. “It’s in the middle,” he said.
I often wondered what the spring’s experience would mean to this younger generation: the Children of the Corona. “This is the first time that I feel so close to history, and I was actually reporting on it,” Serena wrote, in one of her last assignments. “I guess I’ll start to keep notes from now on.” She said that spending time with the neighborhood committee, where she saw officials and police fighting the pandemic, had also made her think about the previous term’s research. She realized that in the past such devoted and hardworking neighborhood officials had been turned against groups like the Catholics and the gay community. “All of them are good people,” she wrote. “They just happen to be in different places, and sometimes in conflicting situations.”
Throughout the semester, I had tried to connect with the voices in my headphones, and I knew that such exchanges would become even harder in the future. A number of students had abandoned plans to study abroad or to attend graduate school in America. In July, after the Trump Administration ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the Chinese responded by shutting down the U.S. consulate in Chengdu. Some of the damage in U.S.-China relations was bound to be long-lasting, and, in any case, the national experiences had diverged. By the time I handed in final grades, in early July, the U.S. was recording more cases every two days than the Chinese had reported during the entire pandemic.
And the lessons that a young Chinese drew from the crisis were likely very different from those of a young American. In my students’ last essays, many expressed a renewed faith in their government. Jiang Xilin, the Rhodes scholar who had fled Oxford for Shanghai, told me that he had also noticed a change in his peers from the élite Fudan University. “Even my most anti-government friends began to have trust in the government,” he said. For my last survey, I asked the students to rate their feelings about the future on a scale of one to ten, with one being the most pessimistic. After everything that had happened—the collapse of U.S.-China relations, the explosion of the pandemic, the death of half a million people worldwide—the average rating was 7.1.
Only three students came to the final nonfiction session, in week seventeen. Sisyphos was gone: like all seniors, he had finished early. Somehow, Serena, Emmy, and Fenton had learned that my birthday was the previous day, and they threw a surprise party. The robot had brought them balloons, confetti, and letters for a birthday sign, and they had a cake and a spicy Sichuanese dish called maocai delivered to one of the gates. Serena printed and bound a book with messages and photographs from her long-distance classmates. In the Chinese way, the notes were self-deprecating. “Thank you for reading my rough essay (quite a torment to you),” one student wrote.
For four months, I had known them by their voices, their writing, and their projects. Now, in the pages of the book, I finally saw faces: Cathy, who researched the liquor-milk man in Hebei; Elaine, who spent time at the lesbian bar in Xi’an; Hongyi, who shadowed the Chengdu bank manager. The details mattered, as we had emphasized all semester: Patrick wore glasses, and Dawn had shoulder-length hair, and Meredith stood on a beach with a dog. All of the students were smiling, their poses natural, unlike the photos of old. I wished we had met in person, but it was good to know they were out there somewhere. ♦
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