newyorker--2020-03-12--What Comes After Fossil Fuels?

What Comes After Fossil Fuels?

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Sign up to receive future installments .
The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying .
It ’ s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus , which has temporarily cut demand ; it ’ s secular , as the economists say .
Just last week , Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors , who want to put their money in renewable electricity .
The key question , of course , is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ catch up with the physics of climate change .
But it ’ s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind , beyond a badly overheated planet .
And one answer , apparently , is a huge number of holes in the ground , not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets .
It turns out that , in jurisdictions around the planet , oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim , or even plug , old wells that are no longer producing in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ truly enormous .
Take Alberta , Canada , for example : the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $ 18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned .
But the A.E.R.
’ s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion .
It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability .
Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive , and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the site .
Many of those are “ orphaned ” —the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some , in addition to leaving scars in the landscape , are still leaking greenhouse gases , such as methane , into the atmosphere , making life hard for the farmers who must work around them .
The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “ in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.
” The picture looks much the same around the world .
The Carbon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , published a paper last month pointing out that “ asset retirement obligations , ” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells , are significant , though hard to quantify , since “ companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.
” But , in Europe , for instance , in 2006 , these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies ’ reported debt obligations .
The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new well , and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one .
But that assumption no longer makes sense : since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground , the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear .
“ The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore , ” the report concludes .
“ Moreover , industry ’ s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if the project can not pay for its eventual retirement.
” A good point , and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector , as investors begin to ask more probing questions .
Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes , in the Los Angeles Times , provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week : Los Angeles , it turns out , has nearly a thousand abandoned wells .
“ If not plugged and cleaned up , many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pose rare but serious threats of explosions .
If the state were to tackle the cleanup , it would cost tens of millions of dollars.
” Oh , and the city ’ s fire department has just one full-time well inspector .
If there ’ s a bright spot in all of this , it ’ s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them , allowing them an easier transition to the future .
Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk , a founder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Disclosure Project , and Avi Lewis , the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “ epic opportunity.
” A government “ serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch , ” they write , would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada ’ s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup , creating “ decades of full employment ” in Alberta .
That would be the closest thing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can still provide the planet .
This week , I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk , II , a staff writer at The Atlantic , about his new podcast series “ Floodlines , ” which débuts this week .
It ’ s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina , which means , of course , that it ’ s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans .
Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn ’ t have cars , so they couldn ’ t simply flee .
Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America ?
I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to , say , the Dust Bowl , in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America .
Some of the critiques of white supremacy ( and environmental racism ) that we consider almost standard today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century .
Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora , what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that ?
The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters .
Hurricane Maria , in 2017 , reiterated that point , and state leaders should already be planning for large , permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rethinking what “ home ” means .
But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it ’ s time to also rethink the “ refugee ” framework .
The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn ’ t be motivated solely by altruism or charity .
Rather , those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy , against those who might profit off their displacement , and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road .
I ’ ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans ’ s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions , from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was , at best , a stopgap against a still-rising tide .
What do you feel when you ’ re there , and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel ?
I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ past year around the Lower Ninth Ward and with people who have roots there , and in my mind it ’ s become something like a Black Atlantis .
The depths of pride and nostalgia people have for it feel , somehow , even more powerful than most folks ’ memory of home .
It ’ s a place defined by precariousness but also by the pride of building something of your own , for a community that hasn ’ t often been allowed to have things of their own .
Standing by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their memory and the depths of loss , I ’ ve been overwhelmed at times .
An ominous new report helps us understand the basic math of climate change .
Scientists who , for the past thirty years , have studied three hundred thousand trees in tropical rain forests , in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Amazon , report that the trees ’ ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere is , apparently , flagging .
“ We ’ ve found that one of the most worrying impacts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Simon Lewis , a professor in the school of geography at the University of Leeds , in England , and one of the senior authors of the research , told the Guardian .
“ This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models .
”

Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Just last week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change.
But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous.
Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned. But the A.E.R.’s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion. It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability. Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive, and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting the more expensive part of cleaning up the site. Many of those are “orphaned”—the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some, in addition to leaving scars in the landscape, are still leaking greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere, making life hard for the farmers who must work around them. The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.”
The picture looks much the same around the world. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, published a paper last month pointing out that “asset retirement obligations,” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells, are significant, though hard to quantify, since “companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.” But, in Europe, for instance, in 2006, these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies’ reported debt obligations. The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the proceeds from future operations: drill a new well, and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one. But that assumption no longer makes sense: since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground, the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear.
“The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore,” the report concludes. “Moreover, industry’s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and gas activity in the first place, if the project cannot pay for its eventual retirement.” A good point, and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector, as investors begin to ask more probing questions.
Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes, in the Los Angeles Times, provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week: Los Angeles, it turns out, has nearly a thousand abandoned wells. “If not plugged and cleaned up, many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people to toxic gases, complicate redevelopment and pose rare but serious threats of explosions. If the state were to tackle the cleanup, it would cost tens of millions of dollars.” Oh, and the city’s fire department has just one full-time well inspector.
If there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk, a founder of Reclaim Alberta and the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, and Avi Lewis, the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “epic opportunity.” A government “serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch,” they write, would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada’s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup, creating “decades of full employment” in Alberta. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending the oil industry can still provide the planet.
Passing the Mic
This week, I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk, II, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about his new podcast series “Floodlines,” which débuts this week. It’s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which means, of course, that it’s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans.
Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn’t in our country. I think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t simply flee. Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America?
I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to, say, the Dust Bowl, in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America. Some of the critiques of white supremacy (and environmental racism) that we consider almost standard today were considered fringe or conspiratorial before Katrina.
The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century. Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora, what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that?
The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters. Hurricane Maria, in 2017, reiterated that point, and state leaders should already be planning for large, permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term attrition. Lots of people will be rethinking what “home” means. But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it’s time to also rethink the “refugee” framework. The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn’t be motivated solely by altruism or charity. Rather, those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy, against those who might profit off their displacement, and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle. This was the case during Katrina, and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road.
I’ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions, from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was, at best, a stopgap against a still-rising tide. What do you feel when you’re there, and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel?


newyorker--2020-03-12--Cuqui Cordova, the Dominican Republic’s Immortal Sports Historian

Emilio N. Cordova , who died on Saturday in Santo Domingo , at the age of ninety , used to carry around business cards with his job title printed beneath his name : “ Immortal Sports Historian.
” Cuqui , as he was known to all of his colleagues and friends , was not a historian by training or by profession , at least not in any conventional sense .
Yet “ immortal sports historian ” still seemed to be the closest approximation of who he was , in stature and expertise .
As Rob Ruck , an old friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ University of Pittsburgh , once told me , “ I doubt there ’ s anybody anywhere who knows more about the history of baseball in a country than Cuqui Cordova does about baseball in the Dominican Republic.
” When I first met him , several years ago , he was as much a part of Dominican baseball lore as he was a chronicler of it .
His apartment , in an upscale neighborhood of Santo Domingo , was a museum in its own right , with materials and curios that would be the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ file cabinets brimmed with decades-old newspaper clippings , photographs , and scorecards—in some cases alphabetized by players ’ last names , in others by year .
Photographs of stars posing with him covered the walls , from Hank Aaron to Dave Winfield .
I remember seeing a ball signed by Joe DiMaggio , addressed , “ To Cookie.
” As Cordova once told me , “ I ’ m older than some of the archives in this country.
” A former public-relations executive at Shell Oil Company in the Dominican Republic , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had written about baseball since he was fifteen .
After a brief stint in the U.S.—followed , years later , by a month spent in prison , in the early nineteen-fifties , as a political dissident under the reign of dictator Rafael Trujillo—he began writing a weekly column in the country ’ s paper of record .
The column was called “ The Baseball of Yesterday ” ; the year was 1968 .
Fourteen years later , he added another column to his repertoire , “ The Tuesday Chronicle , ” about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When I last saw him , in 2015 , he was still publishing the columns ( “ That ’ s 2,303 pieces , ” he told me ) , as well as hosting two weekly television shows , mostly about baseball .
In his downtime , he was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-second book , as part of his ongoing collection of unparalleled monographs on Dominican baseball .
The man was obsessed .
We met because of my own smaller-scale obsession .
I was writing a story about a four-month @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 1937 , when the legendary American pitcher Satchel Paige , the crowning star of the segregated Negro Leagues , played professional baseball in the Dominican Republic .
The occasion was a national baseball tournament called the Championship for the Reëlection of Rafael Trujillo .
An enterprising Trujillo loyalist was managing one of the teams , called the Dragons , which was representing the capital , then known as Ciudad Trujillo ; since white players , with much pricier big-league contracts , were too expensive to lure , the man travelled to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Negro Leagues .
Before long , the Dominican teams were in an arms race for black American talent , and some of the most decorated names in baseball—Satchel Paige , Cool Papa Bell , Josh Gibson—left for the Caribbean , effectively ending the Negro League season .
At one point , the U.S. Secretary of State tried to intercede with the Dominican government to halt the exodus .
He failed , and the tournament proceeded—forty-some games over the span of three and a half months .
It is said to be the best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as memorable as the people who remember them .
Early in my research , I received a fateful piece of advice from Rob Ruck , the historian , who ’ d written about the 1937 tournament in a book titled “ The Tropic of Baseball.
” “ You have to find Cuqui , ” he told me .
Like so many writers and researchers before me , I made the pilgrimage to his house , one February morning .
He greeted me there in his trademark style—a light blazer with broad lapels , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to his chest .
“ Let ’ s go have lunch , ” he said .
His wife , Mercedes , and son Emilio joined us at a nearby Italian restaurant , where we were treated like dignitaries .
When we finished , a car whisked us away to a television studio , where Cuqui hosted the live broadcast of one of his weekly shows .
Would I mind coming along with him ?
Of course I didn ’ t mind ; I was in the presence of someone from a bygone era @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who was also , improbably , a man of the people , a keeper of the country ’ s sporting flame .
At the studio , the cameraman greeted him as “ Don Cuqui.
” In front of the cameras , he was as natural and chatty as he ’ d been at lunch .
He had all of the statistics committed to memory .
Without checking notes or pausing to recollect the particulars , he cited Josh Gibson ’ s average , Paige ’ s won-lost record and earned-run average , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stadiums where the tournament ’ s games had been played .
There was literally no one else , anywhere , who had this kind of information , and I later learned that he ’ d amassed it , years before , from newspaper box scores and actual handwritten scorecards from each of the games .
Then , without warning , he called me on as his guest .
I was miked up and given a chair .
“ So , what brings you to Santo Domingo ?
” he asked , with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ account of the 1937 championship series , and described the story I hoped to do on the subject .
The brushback pitch : “ I ’ m not sure you ’ re going to be able to do it , ” he said .
“ I ’ ve seen all the materials there are , and it ’ ll be hard.
” This was the veteran player hazing the wide-eyed rookie ; even that felt right , true to form .
Cuqui ’ s mischief paled beside his generosity .
For the next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to me and let me pore over his materials .
Mercedes would bring me lemonade every couple of hours .
Cuqui sat at his desk , working on his weekly columns , which he did by typewriter .
( He later drove them in to the newspaper office himself , complete with accompanying photographs and captions . )
One day , while I was taking photographs of old scorecards , he announced that he was inviting a friend over to chat .
The man ’ s name was Freddy Gómez .
He was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as a teen-ager during the 1937 championship series , he ’ d attended a number of tournament games .
For an hour , the three of us spoke .
Gomez ’ s memory was sharp , like Cuqui ’ s ; they amicably tussled over details , such as the name of the proprietor of the hotel where most of the ballplayers stayed , or the route the players took each weekend to walk to the local ballpark .
At the end of each of Cuqui ’ s published monographs was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and what he planned to publish next .
By late last year , he ’ d written four more , and there were twenty-five additional books in the offing .
He had decided on the subjects and already assigned full titles .
I remembered seeing , in his home office , the fattening files with accumulated source material for many of them .
After I returned to New York , he called me regularly , around holidays ( to wish me and my family well ) or out of the blue ( to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changed ) .
Every four months or so , for the past five years , a large manila envelope would arrive in the mail .
His business card was taped to the top right corner , in the place reserved for his return address .
Inside was a monograph , inscribed with a dedication , in black marker , that read , “ Your friend , as always .
CUQUI .
”

Emilio N. Cordova, who died on Saturday in Santo Domingo, at the age of ninety, used to carry around business cards with his job title printed beneath his name: “Immortal Sports Historian.” Cuqui, as he was known to all of his colleagues and friends, was not a historian by training or by profession, at least not in any conventional sense. Yet “immortal sports historian” still seemed to be the closest approximation of who he was, in stature and expertise. As Rob Ruck, an old friend of his and a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, once told me, “I doubt there’s anybody anywhere who knows more about the history of baseball in a country than Cuqui Cordova does about baseball in the Dominican Republic.”
When I first met him, several years ago, he was as much a part of Dominican baseball lore as he was a chronicler of it. His apartment, in an upscale neighborhood of Santo Domingo, was a museum in its own right, with materials and curios that would be the envy of any archivist. Dozens of file cabinets brimmed with decades-old newspaper clippings, photographs, and scorecards—in some cases alphabetized by players’ last names, in others by year. Photographs of stars posing with him covered the walls, from Hank Aaron to Dave Winfield. I remember seeing a ball signed by Joe DiMaggio, addressed, “To Cookie.” As Cordova once told me, “I’m older than some of the archives in this country.”
A former public-relations executive at Shell Oil Company in the Dominican Republic, where he was born and raised, Cordova had written about baseball since he was fifteen. After a brief stint in the U.S.—followed, years later, by a month spent in prison, in the early nineteen-fifties, as a political dissident under the reign of dictator Rafael Trujillo—he began writing a weekly column in the country’s paper of record. The column was called “The Baseball of Yesterday”; the year was 1968. Fourteen years later, he added another column to his repertoire, “The Tuesday Chronicle,” about the history of sports in the Dominican Republic. When I last saw him, in 2015, he was still publishing the columns (“That’s 2,303 pieces,” he told me), as well as hosting two weekly television shows, mostly about baseball. In his downtime, he was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-second book, as part of his ongoing collection of unparalleled monographs on Dominican baseball. The man was obsessed.
We met because of my own smaller-scale obsession. I was writing a story about a four-month stretch, in the spring and summer of 1937, when the legendary American pitcher Satchel Paige, the crowning star of the segregated Negro Leagues, played professional baseball in the Dominican Republic. The occasion was a national baseball tournament called the Championship for the Reëlection of Rafael Trujillo. An enterprising Trujillo loyalist was managing one of the teams, called the Dragons, which was representing the capital, then known as Ciudad Trujillo; since white players, with much pricier big-league contracts, were too expensive to lure, the man travelled to the U.S. to recruit players from the American Negro Leagues. Before long, the Dominican teams were in an arms race for black American talent, and some of the most decorated names in baseball—Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson—left for the Caribbean, effectively ending the Negro League season. At one point, the U.S. Secretary of State tried to intercede with the Dominican government to halt the exodus. He failed, and the tournament proceeded—forty-some games over the span of three and a half months. It is said to be the best baseball ever played.
Sports are only as memorable as the people who remember them. Early in my research, I received a fateful piece of advice from Rob Ruck, the historian, who’d written about the 1937 tournament in a book titled “The Tropic of Baseball.” “You have to find Cuqui,” he told me. Like so many writers and researchers before me, I made the pilgrimage to his house, one February morning. He greeted me there in his trademark style—a light blazer with broad lapels, suspenders, and a dress shirt unbuttoned to his chest. “Let’s go have lunch,” he said. His wife, Mercedes, and son Emilio joined us at a nearby Italian restaurant, where we were treated like dignitaries. When we finished, a car whisked us away to a television studio, where Cuqui hosted the live broadcast of one of his weekly shows. Would I mind coming along with him? Of course I didn’t mind; I was in the presence of someone from a bygone era, a gentleman of the old school, who was also, improbably, a man of the people, a keeper of the country’s sporting flame. At the studio, the cameraman greeted him as “Don Cuqui.”
In front of the cameras, he was as natural and chatty as he’d been at lunch. He had all of the statistics committed to memory. Without checking notes or pausing to recollect the particulars, he cited Josh Gibson’s average, Paige’s won-lost record and earned-run average, and the street locations of the three stadiums where the tournament’s games had been played. There was literally no one else, anywhere, who had this kind of information, and I later learned that he’d amassed it, years before, from newspaper box scores and actual handwritten scorecards from each of the games. Then, without warning, he called me on as his guest. I was miked up and given a chair. “So, what brings you to Santo Domingo?” he asked, with a wink. I gave a comparatively paltry account of the 1937 championship series, and described the story I hoped to do on the subject. The brushback pitch: “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to do it,” he said. “I’ve seen all the materials there are, and it’ll be hard.” This was the veteran player hazing the wide-eyed rookie; even that felt right, true to form.
Cuqui’s mischief paled beside his generosity. For the next week, he opened up his house to me and let me pore over his materials. Mercedes would bring me lemonade every couple of hours. Cuqui sat at his desk, working on his weekly columns, which he did by typewriter. (He later drove them in to the newspaper office himself, complete with accompanying photographs and captions.) One day, while I was taking photographs of old scorecards, he announced that he was inviting a friend over to chat. The man’s name was Freddy Gómez. He was several years older than Cuqui, and, as a teen-ager during the 1937 championship series, he’d attended a number of tournament games. For an hour, the three of us spoke. Gomez’s memory was sharp, like Cuqui’s; they amicably tussled over details, such as the name of the proprietor of the hotel where most of the ballplayers stayed, or the route the players took each weekend to walk to the local ballpark.
At the end of each of Cuqui’s published monographs was a running list of what had come before and what he planned to publish next. By late last year, he’d written four more, and there were twenty-five additional books in the offing. He had decided on the subjects and already assigned full titles. I remembered seeing, in his home office, the fattening files with accumulated source material for many of them. After I returned to New York, he called me regularly, around holidays (to wish me and my family well) or out of the blue (to confirm that my address hadn’t changed). Every four months or so, for the past five years, a large manila envelope would arrive in the mail. His business card was taped to the top right corner, in the place reserved for his return address. Inside was a monograph, inscribed with a dedication, in black marker, that read, “Your friend, as always. CUQUI.”


newyorker--2020-03-12--Vladimir Putin Positions Himself to Become Russia’s Eternal Leader

To write about Russia for a living is , to an unavoidable degree , to be in the business of analyzing the thoughts , decisions , and machinations of one man , Vladimir Putin—which , inevitably , means often getting it wrong .
The latest unexpected turn in Russian politics came on Tuesday , when , in a tragicomic bit of political theatre , Valentina Tereshkova , a former Soviet cosmonaut and a member of Russia ’ s parliament , stood to offer an amendment to the country ’ s constitution .
The proposal put forward by Tereshkova , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was simple and brazen : to reset Putin ’ s time as the President to zero , granting him the chance to run again in 2024 , when his current , fourth term is set to end .
“ Given his enormous authority , this would be a stabilizing factor for our society , ” she declared .
The 2024 question has lingered since the moment Putin was most recently reëlected , in 2018 ; Russia ’ s current term limits dictated that he could not run again , and thus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to cook something up .
In January , with no warning , Putin dismissed the government and declared a need to revise the constitution , a process that most observers assumed would lay the groundwork for the next Putin epoch in Russian politics .
Moscow was consumed with talk of a looming “ transit ” period .
In typical Putin style , the particulars were left vague , to be decided later .
Putin himself offered cryptic , contradictory hints about his intentions—too much detail would allow his rivals and foes , whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the streets , to prepare for whatever he had in store .
On Tuesday afternoon , it seemed we would get some clarity—however dispiriting or sadly obvious to those , such as my colleague Masha Gessen , who long ago diagnosed the eternal , immutable aspect to Putin ’ s rule .
After Tereshkova ’ s “ surprise ” proposal , Putin announced that he would make his way to the Duma to respond .
“ In principle , this option would be possible , ” he said , with faux modesty : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it be so .
In the span of a few hours , the next sixteen years of Russian political life appeared to lock into place .
That ’ s where I turned out to be mistaken .
In mid-January , the day after Putin ’ s snap dismissal of the government and his call for constitutional reform , I was in Washington , D.C. , where I told a crowd of think tankers , government officials , and diplomats that , although Putin ’ s call to rejigger the Russian constitution didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it did suggest that Putin saw a different role for himself going forward—not as President but in some to-be-determined position .
It has long been my sense that Putin cares about legitimacy—of a kind—and also his historical legacy , which made me wager that he didn ’ t want to be seen as a rule-breaking dictator-for-life .
So , I figured , even if there wouldn ’ t be a de-facto change in how Russia is governed , then there would at least be a de-jure one .
Putin would still hover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrangement , which might even mean that some new faces and institutions could appear on the scene .
The ruling system would take on a new form , even if its underlying logic would stay similar : Putin would remain as the personification of state power , a figure above politics , and the final arbiter in internecine disputes among the élite .
For the past two months , the political talk in Moscow has centered on how a revised constitution would lay out Putin ’ s likely role and offer a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A referendum on proposed constitutional amendments is scheduled for April 22nd .
The Kremlin formed a stage-managed commission to consider draft amendments , even as everyone knew that the final text would be written by a small circle of Putin advisers walled off from the public .
In the meantime , ministers were fired ; new ones filled their places .
One of the more outlandish scenarios that circulated held that Russia and Belarus would merge to form a new state , which Putin would then lead .
( A rumor followed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own strongman President , didn ’ t go for it . )
As the Times wrote , in January , “ Decoding these clues—and arguing over whether one should even try—has thrown the international cottage industry of Kremlin experts into a contradictory cacophony of prediction and interpretation.
” I was among those who tried to avoid trying , as it were , but , as the speculation intensified , that became a journalistically unsustainable proposition .
For its part , the Russian public , largely dispirited and apathetic about politics , didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or another .
In a move out of the Karl Rove playbook—Rove pushed for state ballot measures prohibiting gay marriage , as a way to increase Republican turnout in the 2004 election—Putin declared that the new Russian constitution should outlaw gay marriage , in a hope that a cheap fob to conservatism might resurrect interest in an otherwise rote process .
I never thought a new constitution would usher in an age of honest or accountable democratic politics , but , like many fellow Russia-watchers , I did think that Putin might formally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the head of the State Council , a once-obscure body that is now poised to take on new significance as part of the constitutional reboot .
Maybe Putin would find new ways to distribute power among different camps within the élite , preserving his authority by carefully parcelling it out in measured doses .
It is now clear that Putin will keep his hold on power not through sleight of hand or constitutional trickery .
Rather , he will do so in the most blunt and straightforward way : by simply staying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s held for twenty years ( not counting the short and ultimately insignificant interregnum led by Dmitry Medvedev ) for another fifteen .
If he stays on as President through 2036 , when he ’ ll be eighty-three , he ’ ll have bested even Joseph Stalin for the number of years in power .
( Stalin ruled for twenty-nine ; Putin has the prospect of thirty-six . )
I first came to Russia as a college sophomore , in what was the second year of Putin ’ s Presidency ; I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and here , still , is Putin , my central—seemingly eternal—reportorial subject .
If Putin sticks around for his new constitutional limit , I ’ ll be writing about him when I ’ m fifty-five .
The preceding is banal and frivolous compared to what Russians my age face : they appear destined to spend the whole of their most healthy and theoretically productive years in Putin ’ s shadow , their families and careers and fates shaped by the urges , fears , and decisions of one man .
No one should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appears trapped by the very system that he created .
Having denuded all other bases of authority and centered all power in his own personality and image , Putin has no way out .
In a self-fulfilling prophecy , Putin convinced himself that the only way to restore and burnish Russian power was through first assembling and then maintaining unitary power for himself .
Now any move to disassemble the latter is seen as a risk to the former .
As one of his advisers , Vyacheslav Volodin , who now leads the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ As long as there is Putin , there is Russia .
Without Putin , there is no Russia.
” At the time , Volodin ’ s comment struck me as both a slip of the tongue and a revealing insight into how Putin and his circle actually imagine his role .

To write about Russia for a living is, to an unavoidable degree, to be in the business of analyzing the thoughts, decisions, and machinations of one man, Vladimir Putin—which, inevitably, means often getting it wrong. The latest unexpected turn in Russian politics came on Tuesday, when, in a tragicomic bit of political theatre, Valentina Tereshkova, a former Soviet cosmonaut and a member of Russia’s parliament, stood to offer an amendment to the country’s constitution. The proposal put forward by Tereshkova, who was clearly put up to the job, was simple and brazen: to reset Putin’s time as the President to zero, granting him the chance to run again in 2024, when his current, fourth term is set to end. “Given his enormous authority, this would be a stabilizing factor for our society,” she declared.
The 2024 question has lingered since the moment Putin was most recently reëlected, in 2018; Russia’s current term limits dictated that he could not run again, and thus, to do so, he would have to cook something up. In January, with no warning, Putin dismissed the government and declared a need to revise the constitution, a process that most observers assumed would lay the groundwork for the next Putin epoch in Russian politics. Moscow was consumed with talk of a looming “transit” period. In typical Putin style, the particulars were left vague, to be decided later. Putin himself offered cryptic, contradictory hints about his intentions—too much detail would allow his rivals and foes, whether inside the palace walls or out on the streets, to prepare for whatever he had in store.
On Tuesday afternoon, it seemed we would get some clarity—however dispiriting or sadly obvious to those, such as my colleague Masha Gessen, who long ago diagnosed the eternal, immutable aspect to Putin’s rule. After Tereshkova’s “surprise” proposal, Putin announced that he would make his way to the Duma to respond. “In principle, this option would be possible,” he said, with faux modesty: if the people demand it, let it be so. In the span of a few hours, the next sixteen years of Russian political life appeared to lock into place.
That’s where I turned out to be mistaken. In mid-January, the day after Putin’s snap dismissal of the government and his call for constitutional reform, I was in Washington, D.C., where I told a crowd of think tankers, government officials, and diplomats that, although Putin’s call to rejigger the Russian constitution didn’t herald anything democratic for the country, it did suggest that Putin saw a different role for himself going forward—not as President but in some to-be-determined position. It has long been my sense that Putin cares about legitimacy—of a kind—and also his historical legacy, which made me wager that he didn’t want to be seen as a rule-breaking dictator-for-life.
So, I figured, even if there wouldn’t be a de-facto change in how Russia is governed, then there would at least be a de-jure one. Putin would still hover over everything, but in a different arrangement, which might even mean that some new faces and institutions could appear on the scene. The ruling system would take on a new form, even if its underlying logic would stay similar: Putin would remain as the personification of state power, a figure above politics, and the final arbiter in internecine disputes among the élite.
For the past two months, the political talk in Moscow has centered on how a revised constitution would lay out Putin’s likely role and offer a new blueprint for the architecture of state power. A referendum on proposed constitutional amendments is scheduled for April 22nd. The Kremlin formed a stage-managed commission to consider draft amendments, even as everyone knew that the final text would be written by a small circle of Putin advisers walled off from the public. In the meantime, ministers were fired; new ones filled their places. One of the more outlandish scenarios that circulated held that Russia and Belarus would merge to form a new state, which Putin would then lead. (A rumor followed that Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s own strongman President, didn’t go for it.)
As the Times wrote, in January, “Decoding these clues—and arguing over whether one should even try—has thrown the international cottage industry of Kremlin experts into a contradictory cacophony of prediction and interpretation.” I was among those who tried to avoid trying, as it were, but, as the speculation intensified, that became a journalistically unsustainable proposition. For its part, the Russian public, largely dispirited and apathetic about politics, didn’t seem that interested, one way or another. In a move out of the Karl Rove playbook—Rove pushed for state ballot measures prohibiting gay marriage, as a way to increase Republican turnout in the 2004 election—Putin declared that the new Russian constitution should outlaw gay marriage, in a hope that a cheap fob to conservatism might resurrect interest in an otherwise rote process.
I never thought a new constitution would usher in an age of honest or accountable democratic politics, but, like many fellow Russia-watchers, I did think that Putin might formally switch positions—say, take up a perch as the head of the State Council, a once-obscure body that is now poised to take on new significance as part of the constitutional reboot. Maybe Putin would find new ways to distribute power among different camps within the élite, preserving his authority by carefully parcelling it out in measured doses.
It is now clear that Putin will keep his hold on power not through sleight of hand or constitutional trickery. Rather, he will do so in the most blunt and straightforward way: by simply staying in the same job that he’s held for twenty years (not counting the short and ultimately insignificant interregnum led by Dmitry Medvedev) for another fifteen. If he stays on as President through 2036, when he’ll be eighty-three, he’ll have bested even Joseph Stalin for the number of years in power. (Stalin ruled for twenty-nine; Putin has the prospect of thirty-six.)
I first came to Russia as a college sophomore, in what was the second year of Putin’s Presidency; I’m now in my late thirties, and here, still, is Putin, my central—seemingly eternal—reportorial subject. If Putin sticks around for his new constitutional limit, I’ll be writing about him when I’m fifty-five. The preceding is banal and frivolous compared to what Russians my age face: they appear destined to spend the whole of their most healthy and theoretically productive years in Putin’s shadow, their families and careers and fates shaped by the urges, fears, and decisions of one man.
No one should feel sorry for Putin, but he appears trapped by the very system that he created. Having denuded all other bases of authority and centered all power in his own personality and image, Putin has no way out. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Putin convinced himself that the only way to restore and burnish Russian power was through first assembling and then maintaining unitary power for himself. Now any move to disassemble the latter is seen as a risk to the former. As one of his advisers, Vyacheslav Volodin, who now leads the Duma, put it in 2014, “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia. Without Putin, there is no Russia.” At the time, Volodin’s comment struck me as both a slip of the tongue and a revealing insight into how Putin and his circle actually imagine his role.
“I’m sure the time will come when the highest, Presidential authority in Russia will not be, as they say, so personified—not so bound up in a single person,” Putin said on Tuesday. “But that is how all of our past history came together, and we cannot, of course, disregard this.” The implicit argument—to the extent Putin feels compelled to make one—is that, sure, cults of personality aren’t ideal, but these are extraordinary times, and we can’t go experimenting just now.


newyorker--2020-03-11--What It Means to Contain and Mitigate the Coronavirus

On Sunday , after a frightening spike in the number of people infected and killed by COVID-19 , the coronavirus disease that the World Health Organization on Wednesday declared a global pandemic , the Italian government enacted a mandatory lockdown in Lombardy and fourteen other northern provinces , including the cities of Milan and Venice , and the tiny nation of San Marino .
In addition to a cordon sanitaire , which halted travel into or out of the affected areas , the lockdown prohibited the sixteen million people living inside the so-called zone rosse from any movement that was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or other “ necessary ” reasons .
The decree also forbade Masses and funerals , closed movie theatres and museums , and required shopping malls and supermarkets to stay closed on weekends .
On Monday , a day after Italian news organizations showed videos of people running to catch the last trains out of Milan , Giuseppe Conte , Italy ’ s Prime Minister , extended the emergency measures to the entire country .
In response to its own COVID-19 outbreak , China had already imposed strict restrictions on the movements and activities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other parts of Hubei province in January , a public-health intervention at a scale that was , in the words of a W.H.O .
official , “ unprecedented in public health history.
” But the quarantine in Italy , whose ingovernabilità is a recurring national joke and occasionally the matter of a rueful pride , was made even more shocking by how quickly it was felt to be necessary .
As recently as February 20th , the country had only three confirmed cases of COVID-19 .
From that date until Monday , when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ all of Italy is a protected zone , ” was just eighteen days .
For Americans watching what was happening in Italy , it was impossible not to wonder whether , in looking across the Atlantic Ocean , we were also peering into our own near future .
In the United States , as of Sunday , the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was five hundred and thirty-nine , or about one and a half cases per million people .
Italy reached that same relative level on February 23rd , which suggests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two weeks to slow the spread of the disease before it reaches the levels that prompted Italy ’ s national lockdown .
( By Wednesday , the number of American cases had topped a thousand . )
But that might be a best-case scenario .
Virtually everyone—with the possible exception of Donald Trump—now recognizes that a persistent shortage of available tests for COVID-19 in the United States means that we are almost certainly undercounting the actual spread of the disease compared to other developed countries .
At present , COVID-19 appears to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases , but the reason for the stringent measures in China , Italy , and elsewhere is that some fifteen per cent of cases are severe , meaning they would likely need hospital care , and the remaining five per cent are critical , meaning that they need treatment in an intensive-care unit .
( Research so far suggests that the populations at greatest risk include the elderly , the immunocompromised , and those with underlying health conditions , such as hypertension , diabetes , and lung disease . )
The W.H.O .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases that prove deadly , known as the case-fatality rate , is 3.4 per cent , but epidemiologists are quick to caution that early estimates of the C.F.R .
often skew high , since the most serious suspected cases are usually tested first , and mild cases sometimes go unreported altogether .
What ’ s more , the C.F.R .
is not a fixed property of the disease : it depends , in no small part , on the ability of the health-care system to provide adequate care to the sickest patients .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ importance of limiting not just the absolute scale of the epidemic but also the speed of its spread .
A country with ten thousand cases of COVID-19 can expect around five hundred of those patients to require intensive care .
But the rate at which those critical cases appear—whether they require intensive care all at once , or show up at a pace the medical system can handle—can have a significant impact on how many sick people eventually die from the disease .
The importance of slowing the rate of new cases , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ epidemiological curve , ” is suggested by a recent W.H.O .
report .
During the early stages of the epidemic in Wuhan , when the hospitals were overwhelmed with new cases , the fatality rate was 5.8 per cent , as compared to 0.7 per cent elsewhere in the country .
At the community level , epidemiologists tend to speak of two different paradigms to limit both the extent and the rate of infection .
The first , known as containment , is used at the start of an outbreak .
It involves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a community , and then using isolation and individual quarantines to keep people who have been infected by or exposed to the disease from spreading it .
According to Caitlin Rivers , an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins , “ the reason that we want to find those people early is so that we can make sure that they stay out of circulation in the community and also to make sure that they get the care that they need as soon as they need it.
” Rosalind Eggo , along with a team of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ & Tropical Medicine , where she works on epidemiological modeling , created a mathematical model to predict the spread of COVID-19 .
She told me that to halt the spread of an outbreak that started with twenty infected people would likely require public-health authorities in a community to trace the contacts of anywhere from forty to a hundred people per week , with a better than eighty per cent success rate .
Contact tracing is time-intensive work : the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control , the European Union ’ s equivalent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would take about a hundred person-hours of work to trace the contacts of each confirmed case of the COVID-19 .
But if done quickly , and at the proper scale , the method can be effective .
Containment , coupled with school closings and some other so-called social-distancing strategies , appears to have limited the spread of COVID-19 in Hong Kong and Singapore .
But those countries started their efforts while the outbreak was still in its infancy .
“ If you act early enough , you can stay in the containment phase @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy fellow at the Center for Global Development , who helped lead the Obama Administration ’ s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 , told me .
“ You still face the threat of reintroductions from abroad , so containment is ongoing , but it saves the most lives , preserves your health system , and ultimately , in the long run , it nets out to the lowest amount of disruption .
But you have to choose that disruption early to get that outcome.
” America is a big country , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a single randomly distributed epidemic but a network of smaller , more intense outbreaks , particularly in places like Seattle , the San Francisco Bay Area , and New York ’ s Westchester County .
In communities where a local outbreak gets out of control , Rivers says , “ there comes a tipping point in epidemics where you ’ re finding a lot more people who are unlinked ” to known cases .
“ That ’ s a sign that contact tracing is not scaling appropriately.
” Though public-health authorities may continue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ begun—in order , for instance , to better understand the particular features of how a disease spreads—epidemiologists generally recommend incorporating the mitigation paradigm .
In practical terms , this means redeploying public-health workers away from contact tracing and disease surveillance and towards efforts with a broader reach , including working with schools to determine when to close and when to reopen , with businesses to protect their employees and their customers , and with hospitals to prepare for a surge of new patients .
Communities typically implement so-called social-distancing measures as well , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and other large gatherings .
This has already occurred in Seattle , where gatherings larger than two hundred and fifty people have been banned and where , starting tomorrow , the public schools will be closed for two weeks .
“ Mitigation starts with the idea that we will probably not drive transmission to zero , ” Rivers said .
“ So then we start thinking about what we can do to prepare our hospitals and communities to reduce transmission .
”

On Sunday, after a frightening spike in the number of people infected and killed by COVID-19, the coronavirus disease that the World Health Organization on Wednesday declared a global pandemic, the Italian government enacted a mandatory lockdown in Lombardy and fourteen other northern provinces, including the cities of Milan and Venice, and the tiny nation of San Marino. In addition to a cordon sanitaire, which halted travel into or out of the affected areas, the lockdown prohibited the sixteen million people living inside the so-called zone rosse from any movement that was not required for work, health, or other “necessary” reasons. The decree also forbade Masses and funerals, closed movie theatres and museums, and required shopping malls and supermarkets to stay closed on weekends. On Monday, a day after Italian news organizations showed videos of people running to catch the last trains out of Milan, Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s Prime Minister, extended the emergency measures to the entire country.
In response to its own COVID-19 outbreak, China had already imposed strict restrictions on the movements and activities of fifty-nine million people in Wuhan and other parts of Hubei province in January, a public-health intervention at a scale that was, in the words of a W.H.O. official, “unprecedented in public health history.” But the quarantine in Italy, whose ingovernabilità is a recurring national joke and occasionally the matter of a rueful pride, was made even more shocking by how quickly it was felt to be necessary. As recently as February 20th, the country had only three confirmed cases of COVID-19. From that date until Monday, when Conte appeared on television to declare that “all of Italy is a protected zone,” was just eighteen days.
For Americans watching what was happening in Italy, it was impossible not to wonder whether, in looking across the Atlantic Ocean, we were also peering into our own near future. In the United States, as of Sunday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was five hundred and thirty-nine, or about one and a half cases per million people. Italy reached that same relative level on February 23rd, which suggests that we could still have at least two weeks to slow the spread of the disease before it reaches the levels that prompted Italy’s national lockdown. (By Wednesday, the number of American cases had topped a thousand.) But that might be a best-case scenario. Virtually everyone—with the possible exception of Donald Trump—now recognizes that a persistent shortage of available tests for COVID-19 in the United States means that we are almost certainly undercounting the actual spread of the disease compared to other developed countries.
At present, COVID-19 appears to be relatively mild in eighty per cent of cases, but the reason for the stringent measures in China, Italy, and elsewhere is that some fifteen per cent of cases are severe, meaning they would likely need hospital care, and the remaining five per cent are critical, meaning that they need treatment in an intensive-care unit. (Research so far suggests that the populations at greatest risk include the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those with underlying health conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and lung disease.) The W.H.O. estimates that the global proportion of COVID-19 cases that prove deadly, known as the case-fatality rate, is 3.4 per cent, but epidemiologists are quick to caution that early estimates of the C.F.R. often skew high, since the most serious suspected cases are usually tested first, and mild cases sometimes go unreported altogether. What’s more, the C.F.R. is not a fixed property of the disease: it depends, in no small part, on the ability of the health-care system to provide adequate care to the sickest patients. This is why epidemiologists insist on the importance of limiting not just the absolute scale of the epidemic but also the speed of its spread. A country with ten thousand cases of COVID-19 can expect around five hundred of those patients to require intensive care. But the rate at which those critical cases appear—whether they require intensive care all at once, or show up at a pace the medical system can handle—can have a significant impact on how many sick people eventually die from the disease. The importance of slowing the rate of new cases, what public-health experts call “flattening the epidemiological curve,” is suggested by a recent W.H.O. report. During the early stages of the epidemic in Wuhan, when the hospitals were overwhelmed with new cases, the fatality rate was 5.8 per cent, as compared to 0.7 per cent elsewhere in the country.
At the community level, epidemiologists tend to speak of two different paradigms to limit both the extent and the rate of infection. The first, known as containment, is used at the start of an outbreak. It involves tracking the dissemination of a disease within a community, and then using isolation and individual quarantines to keep people who have been infected by or exposed to the disease from spreading it. According to Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, “the reason that we want to find those people early is so that we can make sure that they stay out of circulation in the community and also to make sure that they get the care that they need as soon as they need it.”
Rosalind Eggo, along with a team of researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she works on epidemiological modeling, created a mathematical model to predict the spread of COVID-19. She told me that to halt the spread of an outbreak that started with twenty infected people would likely require public-health authorities in a community to trace the contacts of anywhere from forty to a hundred people per week, with a better than eighty per cent success rate. Contact tracing is time-intensive work: the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the European Union’s equivalent of the C.D.C., estimated that it would take about a hundred person-hours of work to trace the contacts of each confirmed case of the COVID-19. But if done quickly, and at the proper scale, the method can be effective. Containment, coupled with school closings and some other so-called social-distancing strategies, appears to have limited the spread of COVID-19 in Hong Kong and Singapore. But those countries started their efforts while the outbreak was still in its infancy. “If you act early enough, you can stay in the containment phase,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, who helped lead the Obama Administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. “You still face the threat of reintroductions from abroad, so containment is ongoing, but it saves the most lives, preserves your health system, and ultimately, in the long run, it nets out to the lowest amount of disruption. But you have to choose that disruption early to get that outcome.”
America is a big country, and what we are seeing is not a single randomly distributed epidemic but a network of smaller, more intense outbreaks, particularly in places like Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York’s Westchester County. In communities where a local outbreak gets out of control, Rivers says, “there comes a tipping point in epidemics where you’re finding a lot more people who are unlinked” to known cases. “That’s a sign that contact tracing is not scaling appropriately.” Though public-health authorities may continue to trace contacts after community spread has begun—in order, for instance, to better understand the particular features of how a disease spreads—epidemiologists generally recommend incorporating the mitigation paradigm. In practical terms, this means redeploying public-health workers away from contact tracing and disease surveillance and towards efforts with a broader reach, including working with schools to determine when to close and when to reopen, with businesses to protect their employees and their customers, and with hospitals to prepare for a surge of new patients. Communities typically implement so-called social-distancing measures as well, such as cancelling conferences, sporting events, and other large gatherings. This has already occurred in Seattle, where gatherings larger than two hundred and fifty people have been banned and where, starting tomorrow, the public schools will be closed for two weeks. “Mitigation starts with the idea that we will probably not drive transmission to zero,” Rivers said. “So then we start thinking about what we can do to prepare our hospitals and communities to reduce transmission.”


newyorker--2020-03-11--The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics

Every plague must have its point .
That ’ s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence , of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk , for as long as we have kept records , literary and narrative , of what happens when these things happen .
The truth that there is a constant , unending , and unpredictable warfare between human and bug , which takes place in a state of moral indifference , at least on the bug ’ s side , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of course , takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth , with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds , parasites and bacteria and viruses .
In the face of that unending and often frightening cycle , we seek not merely material cause but moral purpose—a price paid or a lesson learned from sickness .
When bad things happen to good people , we seek a cause ; when bad things happen to everyone , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ better be a very good reason , on a par with the pain that it inflicts .
The most famous of these efforts , of course , attaches to the first great recorded plague of modern times , the black plague of the fourteenth century , which produced unimaginable devastation throughout Europe .
It was carried by rats , or by infected fleas that travelled on rats , but at the time it seemed utterly mysterious : people would sicken and die in the most horrible ways , and anyone who approached them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be rising from within .
It was a judgment from God , or , perhaps , a poison from the Jews ; modern European anti-Semitism , including mass killings of Jews , is often thought to date from the plague years .
That you couldn ’ t see the cause because it was too small to see—or perhaps because fleas were so common that no one could absorb the idea that something so mundane might be a source of the disaster—was hard to grasp .
The trick was to understand that something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a reason that was , in itself , absurdly small—because of rats and fleas , not gods .
Again and again , in the history of illness , we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe .
Even as late as the nineteenth century , when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage , the idea that a “ miasma ” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people , and with it came a moralizing : the poor and the immigrants died because they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it with them , or kept it inside them .
One of the great revolutions in human thought and consciousness was the realization that microbes are amoral—that they come not to punish or instruct but to live , to reproduce , as living things will , completely indifferent to the terrible results they can wreak .
With this insight came the knowledge that what we needed was not moral reform but public hygiene .
The one great advantage we have over medieval people is not that we worship a better god but that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In this sudden current plague , this desire to find a moral agent to blame has produced an urge to , as they say in the academy , “ other ” the bug .
Representative Kevin McCarthy , the House Minority Leader , called the novel coronavirus , in a tweet , the “ Chinese coronavirus , ” in an apparent effort to other it right out of American responsibility and back to the Mysterious East .
But people on all sides of the political equation make the mistake of seeing pestilence as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our broaching the edges of the environment .
Though some have suggested that the encroachment of urban spaces on rural ones in China is causing novel viral varieties to spring up , there ’ s a plausible case that the spread of this coronavirus was not the result of a sudden descent of one way life upon another but an intersection of snakes and bats and pangolins at a traditional “ wet market , ” where seafood and wild animals are sold .
( These markets , where , it is believed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have now been banned from selling wildlife throughout China , though apparently there is sufficient demand for the animals to create the possibility of a black market . )
Though preventing the “ drivers ” that mix animal viruses together in a toxic brew makes sense , it is also the case that no one prophylactic , however environmentally virtuous , will stop all future plagues .
Life and its enemies seem likely to be , at the least , inflected by more contingency than we can quite bear .
A bug @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if we reform ourselves and our environmental behavior completely , the history of life on the planet suggests that another will rise and bite us all again .
What is now taking the place of moralizing stories are many-pronged efforts , which seem shocking for what is , so far , a limited disaster—one that still counts hundreds of confirmed cases in cities of millions of people .
The cheering news is that in Singapore and South Korea it seems that extreme measures of social isolation and quarantine have produced small but notable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decline “ flattens the curve ” and seems to have begun to turn the pestilence around .
( On Wednesday , though , Seoul reported a new cluster . )
Italy is trying a similar experiment on an unprecedented scale .
How authoritarian a society has to be for such measures to work is what is called in scientific circles “ an interesting question , ” and one of the unknowable consequences of the current crisis may be a shakeup in our understanding of how much rigidity is necessary for a government to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ironies of the moment is that , where it ’ s been the usual path , in modern times , to find small , incremental measures having big effects on public problems , in this case , big , seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities , closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic .
This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes : it turns out that it is possible for something to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while creating , so far , a minimal number of visible , obvious cases of illness .
The sane thing right now is not to hope for a miracle cure but to accept that maximal measures might have usefully minimal effects .
“ Don ’ t other the bug ; flatten the curve !
” is a good motto , and pretty much all the wisdom that science—or simple rationality—offers in this jumpy moment .
What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
How much of the world is likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time of coronavirus .
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available .
We are all irrational panic shoppers .
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

Every plague must have its point. That’s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence, of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk, for as long as we have kept records, literary and narrative, of what happens when these things happen. The truth that there is a constant, unending, and unpredictable warfare between human and bug, which takes place in a state of moral indifference, at least on the bug’s side, is somehow profoundly counterintuitive. This war, of course, takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth, with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds, parasites and bacteria and viruses.
In the face of that unending and often frightening cycle, we seek not merely material cause but moral purpose—a price paid or a lesson learned from sickness. When bad things happen to good people, we seek a cause; when bad things happen to everyone, we seek a reason, and it had better be a very good reason, on a par with the pain that it inflicts.
The most famous of these efforts, of course, attaches to the first great recorded plague of modern times, the black plague of the fourteenth century, which produced unimaginable devastation throughout Europe. It was carried by rats, or by infected fleas that travelled on rats, but at the time it seemed utterly mysterious: people would sicken and die in the most horrible ways, and anyone who approached them would, too. The rot had to be rising from within. It was a judgment from God, or, perhaps, a poison from the Jews; modern European anti-Semitism, including mass killings of Jews, is often thought to date from the plague years. That you couldn’t see the cause because it was too small to see—or perhaps because fleas were so common that no one could absorb the idea that something so mundane might be a source of the disaster—was hard to grasp. The trick was to understand that something on such a huge scale could happen for a reason that was, in itself, absurdly small—because of rats and fleas, not gods.
Again and again, in the history of illness, we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe. Even as late as the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage, the idea that a “miasma” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people, and with it came a moralizing: the poor and the immigrants died because they were always in sickness, or brought it with them, or kept it inside them.
One of the great revolutions in human thought and consciousness was the realization that microbes are amoral—that they come not to punish or instruct but to live, to reproduce, as living things will, completely indifferent to the terrible results they can wreak. With this insight came the knowledge that what we needed was not moral reform but public hygiene. The one great advantage we have over medieval people is not that we worship a better god but that we know to wash our hands.
In this sudden current plague, this desire to find a moral agent to blame has produced an urge to, as they say in the academy, “other” the bug. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, called the novel coronavirus, in a tweet, the “Chinese coronavirus,” in an apparent effort to other it right out of American responsibility and back to the Mysterious East.
But people on all sides of the political equation make the mistake of seeing pestilence as punishment—as, perhaps, a function of our broaching the edges of the environment. Though some have suggested that the encroachment of urban spaces on rural ones in China is causing novel viral varieties to spring up, there’s a plausible case that the spread of this coronavirus was not the result of a sudden descent of one way life upon another but an intersection of snakes and bats and pangolins at a traditional “wet market,” where seafood and wild animals are sold. (These markets, where, it is believed, novel viruses have spread in the past, have now been banned from selling wildlife throughout China, though apparently there is sufficient demand for the animals to create the possibility of a black market.)
Though preventing the “drivers” that mix animal viruses together in a toxic brew makes sense, it is also the case that no one prophylactic, however environmentally virtuous, will stop all future plagues. Life and its enemies seem likely to be, at the least, inflected by more contingency than we can quite bear. A bug will pass, and then, even if we reform ourselves and our environmental behavior completely, the history of life on the planet suggests that another will rise and bite us all again.
What is now taking the place of moralizing stories are many-pronged efforts, which seem shocking for what is, so far, a limited disaster—one that still counts hundreds of confirmed cases in cities of millions of people. The cheering news is that in Singapore and South Korea it seems that extreme measures of social isolation and quarantine have produced small but notable declines in the incidence of infection—the small decline “flattens the curve” and seems to have begun to turn the pestilence around. (On Wednesday, though, Seoul reported a new cluster.) Italy is trying a similar experiment on an unprecedented scale. How authoritarian a society has to be for such measures to work is what is called in scientific circles “an interesting question,” and one of the unknowable consequences of the current crisis may be a shakeup in our understanding of how much rigidity is necessary for a government to flourish in our era.
One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness.
The sane thing right now is not to hope for a miracle cure but to accept that maximal measures might have usefully minimal effects. “Don’t other the bug; flatten the curve!” is a good motto, and pretty much all the wisdom that science—or simple rationality—offers in this jumpy moment.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
We are all irrational panic shoppers.
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
How pandemics change history.


newyorker--2020-03-11--The High-Risk Work of a Cruise-Ship Crew Member Under Coronavirus Quarantine

Outbreaks of the new coronavirus on two Princess Cruises ships , off the coasts of Japan and the United States , have focussed public attention on the dangers faced by the ships ’ roughly five thousand passengers .
The spread of the virus on both vessels also exposed more than two thousand crew members to potential infection .
Nineteen of the twenty-one people who have tested positive for the virus on the Grand Princess cruise ship , which docked in Oakland on Monday , are crew members .
And crew members also account for at least eighty-five of seven hundred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Diamond Princess , which has been sitting in Yokohama Bay since the beginning of February , when the Japanese government placed it under quarantine .
How the outbreak spread among the Grand Princess crew members is not yet known , and U.S. officials are requiring all passengers and crew from the ship to live in off-site quarantine facilities , in various parts of the country .
This comes after the Japanese government has been accused of negligence in the implementation of safety measures on the Diamond Princess .
Last month , news @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the government keeping the passengers and crew on board as the number of confirmed cases steadily increased .
Critics questioned whether crew members received adequate training and safety equipment .
Officials in Japan , and now in the U.S. , have defended their handling of the respective outbreaks .
One Diamond Princess crew member spoke about her experiences , on condition of anonymity , saying that she feared retaliation from the cruise company for describing the events on the ship .
In the first phase of the lockdown , crew members were ordered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enforce restrictions on them .
( A spokesperson for Princess Cruises said that the company followed the orders of government officials , which is required by law in a quarantine situation . )
Over multiple phone conversations and e-mails , the crew member , who is now in an off-site quarantine facility , described how she and other employees acted as watchdogs , served meals , delivered supplies , and provided translation for physicians and officials .
When Japanese government and military officials boarded the ship to assist the crew , medicine shortages @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frustration and anxiety among the passengers .
This account , which has been translated , was edited for length and clarity .
“ On February 5th , the company announced a quarantine to all the passengers .
After that , some people ’ s job became a kind of a security guard who makes sure that passengers don ’ t leave their rooms .
The others , like those who used to work in the restaurant , started delivering meals to all the rooms .
At the beginning , they had such a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delayed .
“ Every single day , I faced passengers .
The first three days , passengers were nervous and confused and so frustrated by being confined to the room .
In the following days , they started understanding the situation that they were in .
They calmed down and became very coöperative .
But I heard the sounds of coughing , frequently , from many of the rooms .
And some of them were mentally unstable .
“ All of the crew were given thermometers .
If your body temperature exceeded 37.5 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you had to call specific numbers that were provided by the company , and then go to see a doctor , and then you would be placed in quarantine .
But , at the beginning , the medical team was very busy with the passengers .
So the crew members got put off , even though some were feeling sick .
The crew was so anxious back then .
[ A company spokesperson said passengers and crew received equal medical treatment . ]
“ Many Japanese doctors were dispatched on board , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have the authority to decide how infected patients should be treated .
They told me that they believed that most of the people on board had already been infected , but , if you were young or had strong immunity , the symptoms would just be similar to the regular flu .
So , because of that , I wasn ’ t as afraid of the coronavirus as other people .
“ We made a specific , restricted route for when we transported infected passengers to the ambulance , but even there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And sometimes there was so much demand that the ambulances couldn ’ t pick up patients on time .
The crew can go anywhere on the ship , with basically no restriction , and I wasn ’ t sure where it was safe to go .
“ Sometimes officials asked crew to help translate Spanish , Chinese , English , etc.
, to Japanese .
Also , they sometimes needed directions , because the ship is huge .
I guided doctors and U.S. , Canadian , and Hong Kong government officials to cabins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wearing only a mask and gloves .
“ We were told to keep at least one metre of distance with people , but , during work , that was impossible .
I stayed with infected passengers to explain to them what was going to happen , escorted them from their cabins to the clinic , delivered medicine and supplies .
“ At the beginning , a few of the crew members were against the order or reluctant to do the jobs that the company gave us .
But , at the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other .
However , the jobs were high-risk , such as transporting the infected people .
“ When I went to passengers ’ rooms to deliver supplies , I saw that many had put cards with messages on their doors , thanking us for our work .
Some of them were beautifully decorated .
We also received many thank-you letters , which motivated us .
“ There were so many infected people with no symptoms on board .
They even surprised themselves .
For example , there were spouses—the husband had a test @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the flu , while the wife , who did not have any symptoms , also had the test , just because she was in the same room with him—he was negative , but she was positive .
We should have done PCR [ polymerase chain reaction ] tests at the very beginning .
“ When it comes to crew members , the situation was worse , partly because the passengers were mostly older people and the crew members are young , so the priority went to the high-risk elderly people .
Some crew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and got tested .
Some had fevers of thirty-eight and thirty-nine degrees and still were not able to get tested .
Many of them were neglected , left in their cabins .
“ But I don ’ t think I am going to change my career .
I want to go back to the cruise ship .
I really love my job ; I can go literally all over the world doing what I want to do .
It was definitely a horrible experience but , being on board the cruise ship , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , such as sinking .
It is very unfortunate that people now have very negative thoughts about cruise ships .
“ Sure , there are so many tough things we had to get through .
I think we just had to do it—we had to work on the duties that the company gave us .
It is what it is .
I don ’ t think it ’ s the company ’ s fault ; I feel more like it ’ s the government ’ s fault , because the company was under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak .
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available .
We are all irrational panic shoppers .
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .

Outbreaks of the new coronavirus on two Princess Cruises ships, off the coasts of Japan and the United States, have focussed public attention on the dangers faced by the ships’ roughly five thousand passengers. The spread of the virus on both vessels also exposed more than two thousand crew members to potential infection. Nineteen of the twenty-one people who have tested positive for the virus on the Grand Princess cruise ship, which docked in Oakland on Monday, are crew members. And crew members also account for at least eighty-five of seven hundred and five people who tested positive from the Diamond Princess, which has been sitting in Yokohama Bay since the beginning of February, when the Japanese government placed it under quarantine.
How the outbreak spread among the Grand Princess crew members is not yet known, and U.S. officials are requiring all passengers and crew from the ship to live in off-site quarantine facilities, in various parts of the country. This comes after the Japanese government has been accused of negligence in the implementation of safety measures on the Diamond Princess. Last month, news reports raised concerns about the ethics of the government keeping the passengers and crew on board as the number of confirmed cases steadily increased. Critics questioned whether crew members received adequate training and safety equipment. Officials in Japan, and now in the U.S., have defended their handling of the respective outbreaks.
One Diamond Princess crew member spoke about her experiences, on condition of anonymity, saying that she feared retaliation from the cruise company for describing the events on the ship. In the first phase of the lockdown, crew members were ordered to assist potentially infected passengers and also enforce restrictions on them. (A spokesperson for Princess Cruises said that the company followed the orders of government officials, which is required by law in a quarantine situation.)
Over multiple phone conversations and e-mails, the crew member, who is now in an off-site quarantine facility, described how she and other employees acted as watchdogs, served meals, delivered supplies, and provided translation for physicians and officials. When Japanese government and military officials boarded the ship to assist the crew, medicine shortages and a lack of information were causing frustration and anxiety among the passengers. This account, which has been translated, was edited for length and clarity.
“On February 5th, the company announced a quarantine to all the passengers. After that, some people’s job became a kind of a security guard who makes sure that passengers don’t leave their rooms. The others, like those who used to work in the restaurant, started delivering meals to all the rooms. At the beginning, they had such a hard time, and meals were regularly delayed.
“Every single day, I faced passengers. The first three days, passengers were nervous and confused and so frustrated by being confined to the room. In the following days, they started understanding the situation that they were in. They calmed down and became very coöperative. But I heard the sounds of coughing, frequently, from many of the rooms. And some of them were mentally unstable.
“All of the crew were given thermometers. If your body temperature exceeded 37.5 degrees Celsius [99.5 degrees Fahrenheit], you had to call specific numbers that were provided by the company, and then go to see a doctor, and then you would be placed in quarantine. But, at the beginning, the medical team was very busy with the passengers. So the crew members got put off, even though some were feeling sick. The crew was so anxious back then. [A company spokesperson said passengers and crew received equal medical treatment.]
“Many Japanese doctors were dispatched on board, but it seemed like they didn’t have the authority to decide how infected patients should be treated. They told me that they believed that most of the people onboard had already been infected, but, if you were young or had strong immunity, the symptoms would just be similar to the regular flu. So, because of that, I wasn’t as afraid of the coronavirus as other people.
“We made a specific, restricted route for when we transported infected passengers to the ambulance, but even there we had so many random people. And sometimes there was so much demand that the ambulances couldn’t pick up patients on time. The crew can go anywhere on the ship, with basically no restriction, and I wasn’t sure where it was safe to go.
“Sometimes officials asked crew to help translate Spanish, Chinese, English, etc., to Japanese. Also, they sometimes needed directions, because the ship is huge. I guided doctors and U.S., Canadian, and Hong Kong government officials to cabins and knocked on the doors for them, wearing only a mask and gloves.
“We were told to keep at least one metre of distance with people, but, during work, that was impossible. I stayed with infected passengers to explain to them what was going to happen, escorted them from their cabins to the clinic, delivered medicine and supplies.
“At the beginning, a few of the crew members were against the order or reluctant to do the jobs that the company gave us. But, at the end of the day, we helped each other. However, the jobs were high-risk, such as transporting the infected people.
“When I went to passengers’ rooms to deliver supplies, I saw that many had put cards with messages on their doors, thanking us for our work. Some of them were beautifully decorated. We also received many thank-you letters, which motivated us.
“There were so many infected people with no symptoms onboard. They even surprised themselves. For example, there were spouses—the husband had a test, due to having the symptoms of the flu, while the wife, who did not have any symptoms, also had the test, just because she was in the same room with him—he was negative, but she was positive. We should have done PCR [polymerase chain reaction] tests at the very beginning.
“When it comes to crew members, the situation was worse, partly because the passengers were mostly older people and the crew members are young, so the priority went to the high-risk elderly people. Some crew members had fevers of 37.5 degrees Celsius and got tested. Some had fevers of thirty-eight and thirty-nine degrees and still were not able to get tested. Many of them were neglected, left in their cabins.
“But I don’t think I am going to change my career. I want to go back to the cruise ship. I really love my job; I can go literally all over the world doing what I want to do. It was definitely a horrible experience but, being on board the cruise ship, I am aware that there are risks, such as sinking. It is very unfortunate that people now have very negative thoughts about cruise ships.
“Sure, there are so many tough things we had to get through. I think we just had to do it—we had to work on the duties that the company gave us. It is what it is. I don’t think it’s the company’s fault; I feel more like it’s the government’s fault, because the company was under the control of the Japanese government.”
Masaki Tanisawa contributed reporting to this story.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
We are all irrational panic shoppers.
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
How pandemics change history.


Lovebirds Take Flight

He adored her .
She treasured him .
But neither could understand what the other saw in them .
Eventually @ @ @ @ @ .
What was he up to ?
What was her game ?
They pointed out @ @ @ @ @ flaws .
They tested each other .
Over time , this brinkmanship eroded their relationship @ @ @ @ @ What had they seen in each other ?

He adored her. She treasured him.
But neither could understand what the other saw in them.
Eventually, this led to mistrust. What was he up to? What was her game?
They pointed out their shortcomings and highlighted their flaws.
They tested each other.
Each committed love-testing acts and transgressions.
Over time, this brinkmanship eroded their relationship, and it ended.
What had they seen in each other?