newyorker--2020-04-20--The War on Coffee

The War on Coffee

The first moral that this new literature brings out—a commodity that was a huge aid to the European Enlightenment was a huge drag on the people who made it—can be found as well in Antony Wild ’ s 2004 book , “ Coffee : A Dark History.
” Even Stewart Allen couldn ’ t conceal the truth that growing and harvesting coffee is luckless and backbreaking work .
A built-in divide separates things we hunt and things we grow : hooking swordfish and netting tuna have been the subject of romances , since the erotic aura of the chase still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s nothing romantic about mass agriculture , no matter how prized its products are .
Virgil ’ s Georgics—a propaganda poem ostensibly in praise of farming—makes plain that frugality , austerity , and repetition are the farmer ’ s civilization-supporting but lamentable lot .
But , far beyond the hardships of farming , the story that Sedgewick details ( and Wild sketches ) identifies a system of exploitation powered by fine-toothed gears .
It is much like the story of sugar told by Sidney Mintz in his epoch-marking “ Sweetness and Power , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ uses of adversity , Shakespeare ’ s Duke says , and adverse are the sources of sweetness , Mintz replies .
What sweetened the cup of Europeans was bitter to the people who produced it .
Extremely wide-ranging and well researched , Sedgewick ’ s story reaches out into American political history , not to mention the history of American breakfast , but it is mostly set in El Salvador , where a large-scale monoculture of coffee began , at the turn of the twentieth century , under the fiendishly brilliant direction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Originally from Manchester , the birthplace of the British industrial revolution , Hill , in the nineteen-twenties , imposed a program of modern serfdom on the indigenous Salvadoran people in order to grow coffee on an unprecedented scale .
Recognizing that wages were of limited value to a peasantry who largely didn ’ t live within the cash economy , Sedgewick writes , Hill “ used food rather than money to attract people ” to work for him , “ offering an extra half-ration , one tortilla and beans , for the completion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were always given as breakfast , which was a double incentive , for only workers who arrived at the plantations before 6 a.m. qualified for breakfast—serving stopped and work started at 6:00 sharp.
” Hill had the Fitzcarraldo-like obsessiveness of the European in Latin America : he wouldn ’ t use child labor , but kids served as messengers between mill and plantation and were treated like something close to hostages , their welfare guaranteed as long as their parents worked ; elderly people were recruited as spies , reporting on slackers among @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this program was less total than it might sound .
Because coffee-growing was booming , peasants could usually find a marginally more humane deal in the next plantation .
But given capitalism ’ s inclination to cancel competition rather than encourage it—a truth known to John Kenneth Galbraith as much as to Karl Marx—coffee was handed over to an oligarchy that had coalesced by the nineteen-thirties .
Eventually , a legendary “ fourteen families ” came to dominate El Salvador ’ s coffee plantations , aided by a complicated program of American investment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ peasants rose in a revolt , led by the Communist revolutionary Farabundo Martí , they were mowed down in the thousands , and their leaders , Martí included , were summarily executed .
( A brigade of guerrillas fighting under Martí ’ s name bedevilled Ronald Reagan ’ s Central American policy fifty years later . )
The originality and ambition of Sedgewick ’ s work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by capitalism .
“ Cravings ” are not natural appetites but carefully created cultural diktats .
Coffee is sold less to provide an individual with pleasure than to support an industry with a skillfully primed audience .
The objective of capitalist coffee production , in Sedgewick ’ s view , was “ the foreclosure of the possibility of unproductive eating , being , doing—ways of living that were not directly convertible into cash on the world market.
” American workers were compelled to drink the stuff as Central American peasants were compelled to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scientific studies to sell American industrialists on the notion that caffeine was the ideal productivity enhancer .
One manufacturer served free coffee , because , according to an industry advertorial , it insured that workers would remain in peak form , keeping “ the standard set by the early morning hours more nearly stable ” for the rest of the day .
If faith is the opiate of the masses , then coffee is their stimulant .
Sedgewick suggests that profit-seeking bosses deliberately addicted American workers to the beverage , in ways that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of opioids to the same masses a century later .
To be sure , Sedgewick recognizes that the actual history of caffeine and capitalist efficiency is more complicated than one might expect .
Famous “ rationalizers ” of industrial work , including Frederick W. Taylor , saw coffee drinking as more distracting than energizing .
Taylor , with his mechanistic take on human physiology , sided with the breakfast-cereal creators John Harvey Kellogg and C. W. Post , who had a dim view of coffee .
At the same time , Sedgewick perhaps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exercises of coffee producers .
Like many radical historians , Sedgewick has a passionate feeling for detail , but lacks a sense of irony .
Ordinary people saw through advertising campaigns then as readily as academic historians see through them now .
No one , hearing that Chock Full o ’ Nuts is the heavenly coffee , has ever thought it actually was .
Sedgewick ’ s approach can seem dutifully leftist , but the evidence suggests that socialist models of production have hardly humanized the demands of agricultural labor .
The problem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planetary enslavement to a monocrop existence .
Agriculture , practiced on a mass scale , is the original sin of modernity .
As Morris ’ s history of coffee emphasizes , Vietnam , after its victory against the United States , made itself one of the world ’ s chief producers of coffee , harvesting vast amounts of cheap robusta , first for the Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe and then for a global market , with peasant labor and horrific environmental degradation of the country ’ s highland coffee farms .
Whatever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not an issuance of capitalist hegemony .
Sedgewick , in a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx , sees mankind chained to a treadmill of obedience leading only to oblivion .
His book is filled with nostalgic glimpses of prelapsarian Central America , the Eden before Columbus and Hill , and he concludes with a vision of a new order in which “ food sovereignty ” will emerge as “ a direct rebuke to the core order of the modern world .
.
.
pulling up the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cutting off the principal mechanism of long distance connection between people who work coffee and people who drink coffee.
” Communities in rural El Salvador will then be left alone to attend to the business of eating and feeding , “ picking wild fruit , tending tomatoes and blackberries , cultivating corn and beans , raising chickens , hunting and fishing , cooking with family , feeding children , sharing with neighbors , welcoming friends , eating anytime , and going back for more , again.
” A milder , milkier case against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pollan ’ s new audiobook , “ Caffeine ” ( Audible ) .
After the evangelical , psychedelic enthusiasms of his last book , “ How to Change Your Mind , ” he proves to be ambivalent about the jumping bean .
Accepting the life-enhancing and surprisingly medicinal effects of coffee , he also relates how , in his own experience , breaking a coffee addiction can be a step toward self-discovery : it was the coffee that was waking up and doing all that writing .
He sees it as a wonder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others have taken the coffeehouses of Europe primarily as seedbeds for the Enlightenment , he , like Sedgewick , focusses on caffeine ’ s role in the regimentation of work .
For all the good it does us , Pollan argues , coffee is also ruining our sleep .
The caffeine addict—king or commoner—must decide whether sleep may be a more powerfully salubrious remedy than the coffee that ends it .

“What would life be without coffee?” King Louis XV of France is said to have asked. “But, then, what is life even with coffee?” he added. Truer, or more apt, words for the present moment were never spoken, now usable as a kind of daily catechism. At a time when coffee remains one of the few things that the anxious sleeper can look forward to in the morning (What is life without it?), giving as it does at least an illusion of recharge and a fresh start, the charge has invariably slipped away by the time the latest grim briefing comes (What is life even with it?). Imagining life without coffee right now is, for many of us, almost impossible, even though the culture of the café that arose in America over the past couple of decades has, for some indefinite period, been shut down.
The growth of coffee as a culture, not just as a drink, can be measured in a unit that might be called the Larry, for the peerless comedy writer Larry David. In “Seinfeld,” which he co-created in 1989, coffee came as a normal beverage in a coffee shop—bad, indistinct stuff that might as well have been tea. (Paul Reiser had a nice bit about the codependency of coffee and tea, with tea as coffee’s pathetic friend.) Then, on “Friends,” the characters gathered in a coffee-specific location, Central Perk, but the very invocation of a percolator, the worst way to brew, suggested that they were there more for the company than for the coffee. Six or so Larrys later, by 2020, the plotline of an entire season of David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm” turned on a competition between Mocha Joe’s and Latte Larry’s—the “spite store” that Larry opens just to avenge an insult over scones, with many details about a specific kind of Mexican coffee bean he means to steal. The audience was expected to accept as an obvious premise the idea that coffee was a culture of devotion and discrimination, not just a passable caffeinated drink.
This change is real, and is reflected in the numbers. As Jonathan Morris documents in his recent book, “Coffee: A Global History” (Reaktion), epicurean coffeehouses in the United States numbered in the hundreds in 1989, and in the tens of thousands by 2013. A lot of that is Starbucks, but not all. Roasters in Italy went from exporting twelve million kilograms of espresso in 1988 to more than a hundred and seventy million in 2015. Not surprisingly, the growth of a coffee culture has been trailed, and sometimes advanced, by a coffee literature, which arrived in predictable waves, each reflecting a thriving genre. First, we got a fan’s literature—“the little bean that changed the world”—with histories of coffee consumption and appreciations of coffee preparations. (The language of wine appreciation was adapted to coffee, especially a fixation on terroir—single origins, single estates, even micro lots.) Then came the gonzo, adventurer approach: the obsessive who gives up normal life to pursue coffee’s mysteries. And, finally, a moralizing literature that rehearsed a familiar lecture on the hidden cost of the addiction.
The most entertaining of the coffee-as-adventure books is Stewart Lee Allen’s “The Devil’s Cup” (1999), which helped establish the wild-man school of gastronomic appreciation. Allen, in a tone that marries Anthony Bourdain with S. J. Perelman, ventures jauntily on a pilgrimage to all coffee’s holy places, from Ethiopia to Turkey, meeting everyone from the keeper of Rimbaud’s house in Harar to someone who still knows how to make coffee from roasted leaves. Searching for the origins of the coffeehouse, Allen supplies much lively anthropological detail, dense with many stalwart sentences: “Everyone had warned me against taking the overnight train from Konya to Istanbul. They said it took twice as long as the bus (nonsense), that it was unsafe (rubbish) and so overheated that passengers’ clothing caught fire (this is actually true).” There is also much lubricious detail:
In the Oromo culture of western Ethiopia, the coffee bean’s resemblance to a woman’s sexual organs has given birth to another bun-qalle ceremony with such heavy sexual significance. . . . After the beans are husked, they are stirred in the butter with a stick called dannaba, the word for penis. . . . As the beans are stirred another prayer is recited until finally the coffee fruits burst open from the heat, making the sound Tass! This bursting of the fruit is likened to both childbirth and the last cry of the dying man.
For all the book’s Hunter S. Thompson curlicues, the essential information is communicated. The coffee bean comes in two basic families, arabica and the inferior (though easier to grow) robusta. It thrives in high terrains, and, like wine grapes, it does best in seemingly inhospitable environments—rocky and volcanic soil on mountainsides. An alternative to alcohol, coffee was central to teetotalling Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages, and spread from Turkey to points west, where the coffeehouse became the cockpit of the Enlightenment, and even up to little Iceland, where it became the national sacrament. Throughout, Allen’s assumption is that everyone craves coffee, and that, while the craving may lead to many superstitions and black-market absurdities, the craving in itself is good. In the spirit of the time, craving was living.
It was fun while it lasted. Now the strictures of a corrective literature have come for coffee. Augustine Sedgewick’s “Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug” (Penguin Press), as the title announces, tells a story not very different from the kind that might be told of Colombian cocaine production and narco-terrorism, with another product that offers simulated energy to money-driven people. Coffee got produced by something like slavery and was then pushed on a pliant proletariat by big business and the Yanqui dollar. Americans, under the pressure of mass marketing and pseudo-scientific propaganda, have been encouraged to drink ever more coffee while the peasants of El Salvador suffer and die in the brutally efficient coffee monoculture promoted by plantation growers. Both North and Central America became “coffeelands”—a peasantry making the drug, a proletariat consuming it.
The first moral that this new literature brings out—a commodity that was a huge aid to the European Enlightenment was a huge drag on the people who made it—can be found as well in Antony Wild’s 2004 book, “Coffee: A Dark History.” Even Stewart Allen couldn’t conceal the truth that growing and harvesting coffee is luckless and backbreaking work. A built-in divide separates things we hunt and things we grow: hooking swordfish and netting tuna have been the subject of romances, since the erotic aura of the chase still attaches to them. But there’s nothing romantic about mass agriculture, no matter how prized its products are. Virgil’s Georgics—a propaganda poem ostensibly in praise of farming—makes plain that frugality, austerity, and repetition are the farmer’s civilization-supporting but lamentable lot.
But, far beyond the hardships of farming, the story that Sedgewick details (and Wild sketches) identifies a system of exploitation powered by fine-toothed gears. It is much like the story of sugar told by Sidney Mintz in his epoch-marking “Sweetness and Power,” from 1985: sweet are the uses of adversity, Shakespeare’s Duke says, and adverse are the sources of sweetness, Mintz replies. What sweetened the cup of Europeans was bitter to the people who produced it.
Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast, but it is mostly set in El Salvador, where a large-scale monoculture of coffee began, at the turn of the twentieth century, under the fiendishly brilliant direction of a British expat named James Hill. Originally from Manchester, the birthplace of the British industrial revolution, Hill, in the nineteen-twenties, imposed a program of modern serfdom on the indigenous Salvadoran people in order to grow coffee on an unprecedented scale. Recognizing that wages were of limited value to a peasantry who largely didn’t live within the cash economy, Sedgewick writes, Hill “used food rather than money to attract people” to work for him, “offering an extra half-ration, one tortilla and beans, for the completion of each task. The extra rations were always given as breakfast, which was a double incentive, for only workers who arrived at the plantations before 6 a.m. qualified for breakfast—serving stopped and work started at 6:00 sharp.” Hill had the Fitzcarraldo-like obsessiveness of the European in Latin America: he wouldn’t use child labor, but kids served as messengers between mill and plantation and were treated like something close to hostages, their welfare guaranteed as long as their parents worked; elderly people were recruited as spies, reporting on slackers among the working peasants.
Cartoon by Carol Lay Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Sedgewick concedes that this program was less total than it might sound. Because coffee-growing was booming, peasants could usually find a marginally more humane deal in the next plantation. But given capitalism’s inclination to cancel competition rather than encourage it—a truth known to John Kenneth Galbraith as much as to Karl Marx—coffee was handed over to an oligarchy that had coalesced by the nineteen-thirties. Eventually, a legendary “fourteen families” came to dominate El Salvador’s coffee plantations, aided by a complicated program of American investment. When, in 1932, the peasants rose in a revolt, led by the Communist revolutionary Farabundo Martí, they were mowed down in the thousands, and their leaders, Martí included, were summarily executed. (A brigade of guerrillas fighting under Martí’s name bedevilled Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy fifty years later.)
The originality and ambition of Sedgewick’s work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism. “Cravings” are not natural appetites but carefully created cultural diktats. Coffee is sold less to provide an individual with pleasure than to support an industry with a skillfully primed audience. The objective of capitalist coffee production, in Sedgewick’s view, was “the foreclosure of the possibility of unproductive eating, being, doing—ways of living that were not directly convertible into cash on the world market.” American workers were compelled to drink the stuff as Central American peasants were compelled to make it. The coffee lobby bought scientific studies to sell American industrialists on the notion that caffeine was the ideal productivity enhancer. One manufacturer served free coffee, because, according to an industry advertorial, it insured that workers would remain in peak form, keeping “the standard set by the early morning hours more nearly stable” for the rest of the day. If faith is the opiate of the masses, then coffee is their stimulant. Sedgewick suggests that profit-seeking bosses deliberately addicted American workers to the beverage, in ways that recall the drug industry’s dissemination of opioids to the same masses a century later.


The Mail

How to See Velázquez Peter Schjeldahl eloquently examines how the world ’ s shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead us to view art and museums differently ( The Art World , April 13th ) .
His discussion of the value of museums reminds me of a comment that Holden Caulfield makes in J. D. Salinger ’ s “ Catcher in the Rye.
” Holden says that the best thing about the Museum of Natural History was that “ everything always stayed right where it was .
Nobody ’ d move .
.
.
.
Nobody ’ d be different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different would be you.
” The museum ’ s static environment is a comfort to Holden as the rest of his life largely evades control .
Let us hope Schjeldahl is right when he says that , once the crisis ends , art “ may even induce us to consider , however briefly , becoming a bit better , too.
” I was disappointed by Schjeldahl ’ s assertion that art in virtual galleries is “ inaccessible , ” and that virtual tours are “ amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience.
” The idea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appreciated in a museum alienates those who , even in non-pandemic times , are unable to visit cultural institutions .
It implies that such groups can not have full aesthetic experiences , and , by extension , that they can not develop artistic taste .
But the virtual museum is a monumental step toward greater cultural accessibility—something that advocates have been trying to achieve for decades .
As Schjeldahl says , the pandemic will cause our relationship with art to change .
That evolution should include a reëvaluation of the place for art @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dismiss cultural institutions that are making a concerted effort to engage people other than those who can literally walk through their doors .
We should instead celebrate virtual art as progress , and demand even more of it .
Reading Jill Lepore ’ s essay on loneliness , I was taken aback by the author ’ s expression of skin-crawling dread at the prospect of being alone ( Books , April 6th ) .
I wouldn ’ t say that I ’ m happy under shelter-in-place orders , but I disagree with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problems .
I myself find deep pleasure and freedom in living alone .
Many women , after a lifetime of unsupported , unpaid , inescapable caregiving , experience relief and self-actualization on their own .
I see Lepore ’ s personal revulsion for aloneness as a condemnation of the efforts of women in this country to break their dependence on others .
In progressing from an account of the increased number of single-person households to a discussion of loneliness , Lepore blurs the line between loneliness and solitude .
There are many literary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
One is from Chekhov , who wrote in his notebook , “ If you are afraid of loneliness , don ’ t marry.
” ( Chekhov spent several of his married years in Yalta , more than a thousand miles from his wife , in Moscow . )
Elizabeth Cady Stanton , a married mother of seven , wrote “ Solitude of Self , ” which is among our most eloquent expressions of every person ’ s fundamental aloneness .
And Marianne Moore perhaps put it best when she wrote that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I have lived alone since my partner died of AIDS , in 1990 .
I enjoy solitude , and feel no more or less lonely than anyone else .
Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s name , address , and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail @ newyorker.com .
Letters may be edited for length and clarity , and may be published in any medium .
We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we can not reply to every letter .

How to See Velázquez
Peter Schjeldahl eloquently examines how the world’s shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead us to view art and museums differently (The Art World, April 13th). His discussion of the value of museums reminds me of a comment that Holden Caulfield makes in J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” Holden says that the best thing about the Museum of Natural History was that “everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” The museum’s static environment is a comfort to Holden as the rest of his life largely evades control. Let us hope Schjeldahl is right when he says that, once the crisis ends, art “may even induce us to consider, however briefly, becoming a bit better, too.”
Olga Polites
Cherry Hill, N.J.
I was disappointed by Schjeldahl’s assertion that art in virtual galleries is “inaccessible,” and that virtual tours are “amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience.” The idea that great art can only be truly appreciated in a museum alienates those who, even in non-pandemic times, are unable to visit cultural institutions. It implies that such groups cannot have full aesthetic experiences, and, by extension, that they cannot develop artistic taste.
But the virtual museum is a monumental step toward greater cultural accessibility—something that advocates have been trying to achieve for decades. As Schjeldahl says, the pandemic will cause our relationship with art to change. That evolution should include a reëvaluation of the place for art in digital space. We should not dismiss cultural institutions that are making a concerted effort to engage people other than those who can literally walk through their doors. We should instead celebrate virtual art as progress, and demand even more of it.
Bethany Tabor
Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Cure for Loneliness
Reading Jill Lepore’s essay on loneliness, I was taken aback by the author’s expression of skin-crawling dread at the prospect of being alone (Books, April 6th). I wouldn’t say that I’m happy under shelter-in-place orders, but I disagree with the assertion that solitude necessarily leads to intractable problems. I myself find deep pleasure and freedom in living alone. Many women, after a lifetime of unsupported, unpaid, inescapable caregiving, experience relief and self-actualization on their own. I see Lepore’s personal revulsion for aloneness as a condemnation of the efforts of women in this country to break their dependence on others.
Anna Sojourner
San Francisco, Calif.
In progressing from an account of the increased number of single-person households to a discussion of loneliness, Lepore blurs the line between loneliness and solitude. There are many literary testimonials to the difference between the two. One is from Chekhov, who wrote in his notebook, “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” (Chekhov spent several of his married years in Yalta, more than a thousand miles from his wife, in Moscow.) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a married mother of seven, wrote “Solitude of Self,” which is among our most eloquent expressions of every person’s fundamental aloneness. And Marianne Moore perhaps put it best when she wrote that “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” I have lived alone since my partner died of AIDS, in 1990. I enjoy solitude, and feel no more or less lonely than anyone else.
Fenton Johnson
Tucson, Ariz.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.


newyorker--2020-04-20--America’s Abandonment of Syria

America’s Abandonment of Syria

By the time Turkey invaded northern Syria , in October , the Ain Issa refugee camp—twenty miles south of the Turkish border—resembled a small city .
In recent years , some fourteen thousand people had moved there , displaced by ISIS , Russian and American air strikes , or the repressive regime of President Bashar al-Assad .
The camp had evolved from a few tents in a muddy field into a sprawling grid complete with shops , cafeterias , falafel stands , schools , clinics , mosques , a full-time administration , and offices of more than two dozen local @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Turkish offensive , Nashat Khairi , a camp mukhtar , or selected representative , urged the roughly thirty families in his section to remain calm .
A fruit vender before the war , Khairi had fled his village , in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour , with his wife and seven children , after ISIS captured it , in 2014 .
They reached Ain Issa three years later .
Since then , the camp had come to feel like home .
Khairi knew everyone in his section , oversaw the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ birth , and seldom missed a wedding or a funeral .
His children received an education and had access to health care .
His wife earned a salary as a cleaner .
They never went hungry .
In cold weather , the camp provided kerosene for their stove , and during the summer they kept their tent cool with a fan powered by a generator .
Outside their entryway , Khairi tended a small garden , with neat rows of radishes and bell peppers .
Most important , they were safe .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the M4 highway , which traverses Syria from the Mediterranean Sea to its border with Iraq .
The town of Ain Issa , less than a mile away , was the headquarters of the Syrian Democratic Forces , a Kurdish-led army that had vanquished ISIS in northern and eastern Syria .
Also nearby were two large U.S. military bases , which housed hundreds of American troops , contractors , and Foreign Service workers , who had supported the S.D.F .
throughout its anti-ISIS campaign .
One of the bases , at the former @ @ @ @ @ @ @ joint-operations center for Kurdish and American commanders .
Khairi assured his fellow-refugees that someone surely had a plan to protect them .
A fenced-off part of the camp held more than eight hundred wives and children of killed or captured ISIS militants : if nothing else , Khairi reasoned , the U.S. forces down the road would never let so many high-value detainees escape .
As the Turkish forces approached , however , an alarming development inside the camp deepened the communal panic .
Without informing anyone , the management staff , armed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disappeared .
In town , meanwhile , about fifteen hundred S.D.F .
members had been frantically organizing a defense .
One of the commanders was a twenty-eight-year-old Kurd from Aleppo Province who went by the nom de guerre Brousque—Lightning , in Kurdish .
Brousque had been fighting ISIS alongside American troops for six years ; his four siblings , including his twenty-one-year-old sister , also served in the S.D.F .
In 2017 , when the S.D.F .
conducted a gruelling urban assault on Raqqa , ISIS ’ s global capital , U.S. Special @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with tactical guidance while keeping a safe distance from the combat .
Two months into the battle , an S.D.F .
fighter a few yards in front of Brousque stepped on a mine and was killed , as was a fighter behind them .
The blast knocked Brousque unconscious .
He woke up in a hospital , blind , his chest , neck , and face burned and lacerated by shrapnel .
By the time he recovered and regained his vision , at the end of 2017 , ISIS had been defeated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Abyad , in the far north , where he was assigned five hundred fighters to secure a fifty-mile stretch of the border with Turkey .
Tensions on the border were already high .
The S.D.F .
had grown out of the P.K.K.
, a Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey that had waged a decades-long insurgency .
The U.S. military ’ s collaboration with the S.D.F .
enraged Turkey ’ s President , Recep Tayyip Erdoğan .
“ A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our border @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Brousque arrived in Tell Abyad .
“ Our mission is to strangle it before it is even born.
” Turkey had twice carried out major cross-border operations to seize Kurdish towns and cities in Syria , and further attacks seemed inevitable .
Then , last August , the U.S. brokered a deal between Turkey and the S.D.F .
A demilitarized buffer zone along the Syrian side of the border required Brousque to dismantle all his fortifications , seal a tunnel system that his fighters had constructed , pull out of Tell Abyad , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
territory .
In exchange , Erdoğan pledged not to invade .
Brousque was skeptical of this promise , but he had faith in the Americans , who , according to the agreement , would act as guarantors .
“ We ’ d become good friends , ” he told me , during a visit I made to Syria this winter .
“ I assumed that the advice they were giving us was in our interest.
” After the S.D.F .
withdrew from the border , Turkish and American forces began conducting patrols @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kurds crossed into Turkey , Erdoğan soon dismissed the buffer zone as inadequate , and insisted on expanding it .
In September , before the United Nations General Assembly , in New York , he announced his intention to annex more than five thousand square miles of Kurdish land , creating a “ peace corridor ” where two million Syrian refugees living in Turkey could be resettled .
The refugees would be overwhelmingly Arab and from other parts of Syria .
The southern edge of the corridor would encompass Ain Issa , Khairi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lafarge Cement Factory .
International observers denounced the scheme as a flagrant attempt at demographic engineering that was certain to produce conflict and humanitarian disaster .
Two weeks later , the White House issued a press release stating that President Donald Trump and Erdoğan had spoken on the phone .
While the details of the conversation have not been made public , it was a triumph for Erdoğan .
“ Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into northern Syria , ” the press release explained , adding that American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the immediate area.
” After the U.S. vacated the buffer zone , Turkish jets , drones , and artillery pummelled Tell Abyad and other border cities .
The S.D.F.
, which has no air assets , petitioned the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone , but the Americans refused .
Turkey ’ s ground forces consisted mostly of Syrian Arab mercenaries , many of whom had previously belonged to jihadist groups with a profound animosity toward the Kurds .
As these militias pushed south , in armored vehicles , nearly two hundred thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of war crimes , such as summary executions , followed the advance .
Later , the senior American diplomat in Syria , William V. Roeback , wrote an internal memo lamenting that U.S. personnel had “ stood by and watched ” an “ intention-laced effort at ethnic cleansing.
” On October 12th , a Turkish-backed militia reached the M4 , where it intercepted an S.U.V .
carrying Hevrin Khalaf , a prominent female Kurdish politician .
She was beaten to death .
Videos posted on Twitter show the militants murdering a second unarmed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pig has been liquidated , ” one of the assailants proclaims .

By the time Turkey invaded northern Syria, in October, the Ain Issa refugee camp—twenty miles south of the Turkish border—resembled a small city. In recent years, some fourteen thousand people had moved there, displaced by ISIS, Russian and American air strikes, or the repressive regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The camp had evolved from a few tents in a muddy field into a sprawling grid complete with shops, cafeterias, falafel stands, schools, clinics, mosques, a full-time administration, and offices of more than two dozen local and international N.G.O.s. As news spread of the Turkish offensive, Nashat Khairi, a camp mukhtar, or selected representative, urged the roughly thirty families in his section to remain calm. A fruit vender before the war, Khairi had fled his village, in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour, with his wife and seven children, after ISIS captured it, in 2014. They reached Ain Issa three years later. Since then, the camp had come to feel like home. Khairi knew everyone in his section, oversaw the distribution of food rations, registered every birth, and seldom missed a wedding or a funeral. His children received an education and had access to health care. His wife earned a salary as a cleaner. They never went hungry. In cold weather, the camp provided kerosene for their stove, and during the summer they kept their tent cool with a fan powered by a generator. Outside their entryway, Khairi tended a small garden, with neat rows of radishes and bell peppers.
This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Most important, they were safe. The camp stood on a strategic intersection of the M4 highway, which traverses Syria from the Mediterranean Sea to its border with Iraq. The town of Ain Issa, less than a mile away, was the headquarters of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led army that had vanquished ISIS in northern and eastern Syria. Also nearby were two large U.S. military bases, which housed hundreds of American troops, contractors, and Foreign Service workers, who had supported the S.D.F. throughout its anti-ISIS campaign. One of the bases, at the former Lafarge Cement Factory, served as the joint-operations center for Kurdish and American commanders.
Khairi assured his fellow-refugees that someone surely had a plan to protect them. A fenced-off part of the camp held more than eight hundred wives and children of killed or captured ISIS militants: if nothing else, Khairi reasoned, the U.S. forces down the road would never let so many high-value detainees escape.
As the Turkish forces approached, however, an alarming development inside the camp deepened the communal panic. Without informing anyone, the management staff, armed guards, and aid workers had all disappeared.
In town, meanwhile, about fifteen hundred S.D.F. members had been frantically organizing a defense. One of the commanders was a twenty-eight-year-old Kurd from Aleppo Province who went by the nom de guerre Brousque—Lightning, in Kurdish. Brousque had been fighting ISIS alongside American troops for six years; his four siblings, including his twenty-one-year-old sister, also served in the S.D.F. In 2017, when the S.D.F. conducted a gruelling urban assault on Raqqa, ISIS’s global capital, U.S. Special Forces provided Brousque and other Kurdish commanders with tactical guidance while keeping a safe distance from the combat. Two months into the battle, an S.D.F. fighter a few yards in front of Brousque stepped on a mine and was killed, as was a fighter behind them. The blast knocked Brousque unconscious. He woke up in a hospital, blind, his chest, neck, and face burned and lacerated by shrapnel. By the time he recovered and regained his vision, at the end of 2017, ISIS had been defeated in Raqqa. Brousque was deployed to Tell Abyad, in the far north, where he was assigned five hundred fighters to secure a fifty-mile stretch of the border with Turkey.
Tensions on the border were already high. The S.D.F. had grown out of the P.K.K., a Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey that had waged a decades-long insurgency. The U.S. military’s collaboration with the S.D.F. enraged Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our border,” Erdoğan declared, shortly after Brousque arrived in Tell Abyad. “Our mission is to strangle it before it is even born.” Turkey had twice carried out major cross-border operations to seize Kurdish towns and cities in Syria, and further attacks seemed inevitable.
Then, last August, the U.S. brokered a deal between Turkey and the S.D.F. A demilitarized buffer zone along the Syrian side of the border required Brousque to dismantle all his fortifications, seal a tunnel system that his fighters had constructed, pull out of Tell Abyad, and move ten miles deeper into S.D.F. territory. In exchange, Erdoğan pledged not to invade. Brousque was skeptical of this promise, but he had faith in the Americans, who, according to the agreement, would act as guarantors. “We’d become good friends,” he told me, during a visit I made to Syria this winter. “I assumed that the advice they were giving us was in our interest.”
“Whenever I’m feeling down, I throw myself a parade.” Cartoon by Farley Katz Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
After the S.D.F. withdrew from the border, Turkish and American forces began conducting patrols and aerial surveillance together. Though no Kurds crossed into Turkey, Erdoğan soon dismissed the buffer zone as inadequate, and insisted on expanding it. In September, before the United Nations General Assembly, in New York, he announced his intention to annex more than five thousand square miles of Kurdish land, creating a “peace corridor” where two million Syrian refugees living in Turkey could be resettled. The refugees would be overwhelmingly Arab and from other parts of Syria. The southern edge of the corridor would encompass Ain Issa, Khairi’s refugee camp, and the Lafarge Cement Factory. International observers denounced the scheme as a flagrant attempt at demographic engineering that was certain to produce conflict and humanitarian disaster.
Two weeks later, the White House issued a press release stating that President Donald Trump and Erdoğan had spoken on the phone. While the details of the conversation have not been made public, it was a triumph for Erdoğan. “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into northern Syria,” the press release explained, adding that American troops “will no longer be in the immediate area.”
After the U.S. vacated the buffer zone, Turkish jets, drones, and artillery pummelled Tell Abyad and other border cities. The S.D.F., which has no air assets, petitioned the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone, but the Americans refused. Turkey’s ground forces consisted mostly of Syrian Arab mercenaries, many of whom had previously belonged to jihadist groups with a profound animosity toward the Kurds. As these militias pushed south, in armored vehicles, nearly two hundred thousand civilians fled from their path. Reports of war crimes, such as summary executions, followed the advance. Later, the senior American diplomat in Syria, William V. Roeback, wrote an internal memo lamenting that U.S. personnel had “stood by and watched” an “intention-laced effort at ethnic cleansing.”
On October 12th, a Turkish-backed militia reached the M4, where it intercepted an S.U.V. carrying Hevrin Khalaf, a prominent female Kurdish politician. She was beaten to death. Videos posted on Twitter show the militants murdering a second unarmed passenger as well. “Another fleeing pig has been liquidated,” one of the assailants proclaims.
The next day, Turkish forces in the open desert north of the highway began shelling Ain Issa, where Brousque was told to hold the line.
“The only thing between us was the camp,” he recalled.
In Nashat Khairi’s section, a troubling rumor had begun to circulate. The Kurds were said to have turned in desperation to the Assad regime, which was now sending reinforcements to Ain Issa. For many of the refugees, who’d come to the camp seeking asylum from the regime, this was as distressing as the Turkish offensive. Still, most people were reluctant to leave without their I.D.s, which were locked in the camp’s administrative offices.
As the sound of shelling and machine-gun fire neared, another danger materialized. The ISIS-affiliated detainees had somehow got out. The S.D.F. later blamed the breach on a riot provoked by Turkish air strikes. But I met multiple witnesses who claimed to have seen S.D.F. fighters arrive in a pickup and release the detainees. This seems plausible. Much of the Western criticism of the Turkish invasion focussed on the possibility that tens of thousands of ISIS militants and relatives might escape Kurdish custody. The S.D.F., realizing that the world cared more about the spectre of terrorists on the loose than about the killing of Kurds, promoted false accounts about Kurdish prison guards being sent to the Turkish border. Although these stories were untrue, an S.D.F. spokesman told me, they “made the international community pay attention.”
From Ain Issa, most of the detainees ran north, toward the Turks. Others stayed in the camp, infiltrating the regular population and adding to its paranoia and confusion. Several people told me that some of the fleeing ISIS wives cried out, “The night is coming!”
Not long after this, a convoy of armored vehicles flying American flags approached on the highway, from the Lafarge Cement Factory. When the convoy stopped in front of the camp, relief washed over Khairi. “We were so happy,” he remembered. “We thought they were coming to save us.” Khairi told his children that everything was going to be O.K. Then the convoy started moving again.
Khairi and the other refugees did not know that Trump had ordered an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, and that the convoy now receding out of sight was headed for Iraq. But they understood that it wasn’t coming back. “Everyone went crazy,” Khairi said. “It was total anarchy.” People swarmed the administrative offices, shattering the windows, breaking down the doors, and lighting them on fire. Fighting persisted between the Turks and the S.D.F., and at some point Khairi’s eight-year-old niece, Amal, was struck by a stray bullet. Her older brother, Ali Mohammad, took her to the hospital in town. The incident aggravated the hysteria, and soon nearly everyone poured out through the camp’s main gate. Unlike the detainees, most of the refugees went south—some in cars, others on foot—unsure where they were going or what they would do. When Ali Mohammad returned to the camp with Amal, she was dead.
Khairi and his relatives stayed to bury her. In a clearing outside a mosque, they dug a grave and marked it with a stone on either end. The sun was setting. No one had eaten in several days. Khairi set out to scavenge for food. It looked as if a tornado had descended on the camp. He marvelled at how quickly everything had changed.
The next day, he hired a truck. “It was very difficult for me to leave,” he told me. “It was the same as when we left our village, in Deir Ezzour.” As the truck headed south—in the same direction from which, five years earlier, they had fled—Khairi and his family found themselves, once again, homeless and running from the war.
The departing Americans, after their brief pause outside the camp, proceeded east on the M4, through the middle of the battle, with Turkish forces on their left and the S.D.F. on their right. Both sides stopped fighting to let them pass, then resumed.
Cartoon by Roz Chast Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In the end, Brousque and the S.D.F. held on to Ain Issa, preventing the Turks from crossing the highway. It took the Americans three days to transport all their equipment and heavy weaponry out of Syria. Locals hurled rocks at them and called them traitors. After the Lafarge Cement Factory was abandoned, two American F-15s launched missiles at it. A U.S. Army spokesman explained that the purpose of the strike was “to reduce the facility’s military usefulness”—a stunning conclusion to what had arguably been America’s most successful military partnership in the post-9/11 era.
That partnership had begun in 2014, when ISIS stormed across northern Syria and the only meaningful armed resistance it encountered was a small band of Kurdish men and women who called themselves the People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G. (The Syrian government had pulled most of its troops out of the region two years earlier, to quell uprisings elsewhere in the country.) Thousands of ISIS militants eventually besieged Kobani, the home town of the Y.P.G.’s commander, Ferhat Abdi Sahin, better known as Mazloum. A massacre appeared at hand. When I met Mazloum, in February, he recalled telling his fighters that under no circumstances were they to let ISIS advance beyond the street where he grew up. ISIS captured his house twice, and, according to Mazloum, both times the Y.P.G. took it back. By then, the U.S. had begun providing air support to the embattled Kurds; Mazloum said that American commanders advised him to surrender Kobani, and offered to cover his retreat. He refused. When ISIS seized his house a third time, he radioed its coördinates to the Americans and asked them to destroy it. “That was when the momentum changed,” Mazloum said. “After they bombed my house, we retook the neighborhood, and from there we kept advancing.” The Kurds eventually pushed ISIS out of Kobani, at which point the U.S. proposed to continue backing them from the air, as long as they pursued ISIS on the ground.
This must have been a strange moment for Mazloum, because the U.S. had once considered him a terrorist. He was born in 1967, shortly after the creation of the Syrian Arab Republic, which institutionalized the repression of Kurds. At the age of thirteen, he was imprisoned for reading a book in Kurdish, and as a student at Aleppo University he was arrested four times, for “political activities.” Meanwhile, in Turkey, whose government had enacted severe anti-Kurd policies of its own, the P.K.K. had launched a guerrilla war against the state. The group’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, was forced to flee to Syria, where Mazloum’s father, a physician, befriended him. Some Turks now refer to Mazloum, derisively, as Ocalan’s “spiritual son.”
After graduating with a degree in architecture, Mazloum joined the P.K.K. He rose through its ranks during the eighties and nineties, while the group carried out kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and suicide attacks in Turkey. The U.S. officially designated the P.K.K. a terrorist organization in 1997, and a year and a half later the C.I.A. helped Turkey capture Ocalan. He was imprisoned on a small island in the Sea of Marmara, where he remains today.


newyorker--2020-04-20--Embracing the Chaotic Side of Zoom

Embracing the Chaotic Side of Zoom

Three years ago , the political analyst and South Korea expert Robert Kelly was giving a live interview on the BBC , via videoconference , from his home office in Busan , when his two young children barged into the room .
The pair—a jauntily assertive , glasses-wearing preschooler and a baby who skittered in , as if propelled by a mysterious force , on a wheeled walker—were pursued and eventually apprehended by their frantic mother , who , on her hands and knees , hustled the saboteurs out and pulled the office door shut .
The video quickly went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it until recently , when the videoconferencing service Zoom , and the circumstances under which I and many others had begun to use it , reminded me of Kelly ’ s thin smile and his wife ’ s desperately grappling arms .
As the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States , forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective , real-world activity , it became obvious that a new era had begun .
With millions of Americans self-quarantining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , seemingly overnight , not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life .
Suddenly , we couldn ’ t see anyone in person , but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom—at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E .
classes , at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates .
Some nights , after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party , one might experience Zoom FOMO .
Other evenings , one navigated conflicting Zoom plans .
“ I have two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party , ” a friend told me .
Being confined to our homes , often with roommates or family members or pets , and having no clear separation between work and leisure , has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible .
Nowadays , we are all Robert Kelly .
In an article in the Times , Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips : “ Our families are more important than anyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes , our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.
” On the Cut , Lizzie Post , Emily Post ’ s great-great-granddaughter , weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior .
Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine , but , she warned , “ avoid slurping ” ; she , too , vetoed bathrobes .
On NPR ’ s “ All Things Considered , ” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said , bluntly , “ If you need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
turn off the video .
Turn off the audio , because sound is louder than you think.
” As I encountered these well-meaning suggestions , I felt a resistance rising within me .
Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality—and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology—makes it inevitable that Zoom , like life itself , will be chaotic .
And , although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hearing a co-worker ’ s surprisingly noisy peeing , I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me .
As long as we ’ re living in a trying time , why pretend otherwise ?
At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious , Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries .
I ’ ve found that even the most subtle shifts that Zoom brings about have the power to jar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ call on the platform—could it have been only in mid-March ?
—my husband and I spoke to our financial adviser .
On the occasions we ’ d seen him in the past , he had been fully suited , sitting in his spare , corporate office in a lower-Manhattan high-rise , where an assistant offered us coffee and half-sized bottles of mineral water .
Working from home , he was dressed in a lightweight button-down shirt .
It happened to be a beautiful day , and the window behind him was open , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that appeared to sway slightly in the breeze .
During the conversation , I felt myself mentally latching onto those curtains , which , as we spoke of the economic crisis and how it might affect my husband ’ s and my retirement plan , seemed to throw the formal discussion we were having into a more leisurely context .
Had the financial adviser absconded to a south-of-the-border resort with our meagre savings , my husband , who had also noticed the lightweight shirt and the swaying curtains , wondered jokingly , once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a salt-rimmed margarita waiting just beyond the view of his computer ’ s camera ?
This was extremely unlikely , but it wasn ’ t totally impossible , and the notion opened up a vista .
Zoom was providing us with more clues than ever before with which to figure out , or at least to imagine , what people might be doing in their more private lives—what they might really be like .
As a young child , in the early nineteen-eighties , I had a board book in which an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the future ” showed a bespectacled , smiling man speaking with a bespectacled , smiling woman , or , rather , with her image , on a TV-like contraption .
The videophone seemed to me a hardly conceivable invention—a thing one might encounter only on space-age shows like “ The Jetsons ” and “ Star Trek.
” Then , suddenly , in the early two-thousands , Skype entered the mass market .
I had recently moved to the U.S. , to attend graduate school , and I used the platform to speak to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Israel , feeling amazed at our ability to see rather than just hear one another , but also resigned to the lo-fi glitchiness of the communication , the lags and distortions that often made the whole endeavor seem not worth the trouble .
In the years that followed , several new services for videoconferencing emerged : Cisco Webex , Google Hangouts , FaceTime , WhatsApp , and , in 2016 , Houseparty , which allows users to join their friends ’ private chats if granted permission—a feature that gives the app a rollicking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ founded in 2011 , by Eric S. Yuan , a Chinese-born engineer who is the company ’ s C.E.O.
, and it has been on the market since 2013 .
In 2017 , Zoom ’ s valuation reached a billion dollars , and it hit sixteen billion when the company went public , in April , 2019 .
The service was a success story , but it was mostly used by remote workers at companies like Uber .
Less than a year later , when the coronavirus pandemic hit , Zoom became the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The number of daily users jumped from ten million last December to two hundred million in late March .
The company is now worth more than forty billion dollars .
On the service ’ s basic plan , a meeting can include up to a hundred people and costs nothing if kept to under forty minutes .
Zoom ’ s plan for educational institutions normally starts at eighteen hundred dollars annually , but , since the outbreak of the virus , Yuan has made the service free to all K-12 schools in countries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Italy—a generous decision that seems to have contributed to the service ’ s skyrocketing popularity .
The estimated number of daily downloads , which averaged fifty-six thousand in January , was 2.13 million on March 23rd alone .

Three years ago, the political analyst and South Korea expert Robert Kelly was giving a live interview on the BBC, via videoconference, from his home office in Busan, when his two young children barged into the room. The pair—a jauntily assertive, glasses-wearing preschooler and a baby who skittered in, as if propelled by a mysterious force, on a wheeled walker—were pursued and eventually apprehended by their frantic mother, who, on her hands and knees, hustled the saboteurs out and pulled the office door shut. The video quickly went viral, but I had forgotten about it until recently, when the videoconferencing service Zoom, and the circumstances under which I and many others had begun to use it, reminded me of Kelly’s thin smile and his wife’s desperately grappling arms.
As the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States, forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective, real-world activity, it became obvious that a new era had begun. With millions of Americans self-quarantining for the foreseeable future, Zoom became, seemingly overnight, not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life. Suddenly, we couldn’t see anyone in person, but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom—at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E. classes, at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Some nights, after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom FOMO. Other evenings, one navigated conflicting Zoom plans. “I have two friends I watch a movie with, and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party,” a friend told me.
Being confined to our homes, often with roommates or family members or pets, and having no clear separation between work and leisure, has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. Nowadays, we are all Robert Kelly. In an article in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips: “Our families are more important than anyone, but that doesn’t mean our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes, our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.” On the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine, but, she warned, “avoid slurping”; she, too, vetoed bathrobes. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the bathroom . . . turn off the video. Turn off the audio, because sound is louder than you think.”
As I encountered these well-meaning suggestions, I felt a resistance rising within me. Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality—and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology—makes it inevitable that Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. And, although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly noisy peeing, I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me. As long as we’re living in a trying time, why pretend otherwise? At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious, Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries.
I’ve found that even the most subtle shifts that Zoom brings about have the power to jar and fascinate. On my first-ever video call on the platform—could it have been only in mid-March?—my husband and I spoke to our financial adviser. On the occasions we’d seen him in the past, he had been fully suited, sitting in his spare, corporate office in a lower-Manhattan high-rise, where an assistant offered us coffee and half-sized bottles of mineral water. Working from home, he was dressed in a lightweight button-down shirt. It happened to be a beautiful day, and the window behind him was open, and framed by soft, cream-colored curtains that appeared to sway slightly in the breeze. During the conversation, I felt myself mentally latching onto those curtains, which, as we spoke of the economic crisis and how it might affect my husband’s and my retirement plan, seemed to throw the formal discussion we were having into a more leisurely context. Had the financial adviser absconded to a south-of-the-border resort with our meagre savings, my husband, who had also noticed the lightweight shirt and the swaying curtains, wondered jokingly, once the call was over? Did he have a salt-rimmed margarita waiting just beyond the view of his computer’s camera? This was extremely unlikely, but it wasn’t totally impossible, and the notion opened up a vista. Zoom was providing us with more clues than ever before with which to figure out, or at least to imagine, what people might be doing in their more private lives—what they might really be like.
As a young child, in the early nineteen-eighties, I had a board book in which an illustration that was meant to signify “the future” showed a bespectacled, smiling man speaking with a bespectacled, smiling woman, or, rather, with her image, on a TV-like contraption. The videophone seemed to me a hardly conceivable invention—a thing one might encounter only on space-age shows like “The Jetsons” and “Star Trek.” Then, suddenly, in the early two-thousands, Skype entered the mass market. I had recently moved to the U.S., to attend graduate school, and I used the platform to speak to family and friends back home, in Israel, feeling amazed at our ability to see rather than just hear one another, but also resigned to the lo-fi glitchiness of the communication, the lags and distortions that often made the whole endeavor seem not worth the trouble. In the years that followed, several new services for videoconferencing emerged: Cisco Webex, Google Hangouts, FaceTime, WhatsApp, and, in 2016, Houseparty, which allows users to join their friends’ private chats if granted permission—a feature that gives the app a rollicking, vaguely louche air.
Zoom was founded in 2011, by Eric S. Yuan, a Chinese-born engineer who is the company’s C.E.O., and it has been on the market since 2013. In 2017, Zoom’s valuation reached a billion dollars, and it hit sixteen billion when the company went public, in April, 2019. The service was a success story, but it was mostly used by remote workers at companies like Uber. Less than a year later, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Zoom became the fastest-growing videoconferencing service in the world. The number of daily users jumped from ten million last December to two hundred million in late March. The company is now worth more than forty billion dollars. On the service’s basic plan, a meeting can include up to a hundred people and costs nothing if kept to under forty minutes. Zoom’s plan for educational institutions normally starts at eighteen hundred dollars annually, but, since the outbreak of the virus, Yuan has made the service free to all K-12 schools in countries including the U.S., Japan, and Italy—a generous decision that seems to have contributed to the service’s skyrocketing popularity. The estimated number of daily downloads, which averaged fifty-six thousand in January, was 2.13 million on March 23rd alone.
Jake Saper, a partner at the venture-capital firm Emergence, Zoom’s first Silicon Valley-based institutional investor, explained, “A videoconferencing application is that rare tool where everyone, from my grandma to my rabbi, can tell immediately how well it’s operating. If it’s lagging by one second, the user notices.” According to Saper, Zoom’s “underlying code makes the user feel like there’s no distance between him and the person he’s talking to.” Zoom’s design is also appealingly basic. The “gallery view” mode, which arranges participants in “Hollywood Squares”-style tiles, has the somewhat dated appeal of graph paper, suggesting a stodgy reliability. The “active speaker view” mode—in which a single enlarged window is given to whoever is currently speaking, granting all users the sense of being poised for a closeup by an unseen cameraman—is only a touch more exciting. There is a mute function—an option that many will likely come to miss once face-to-face meetings resume—and participants can choose a virtual background to block their environment from view. They can also share their screen with other users (whether for the purpose of PowerPoint tutorials or word games, memes or YouTube videos), and a chat box is available for real-time written communication—which, not unlike passing notes in class, feels a little illicit.
Zoom has taken to presenting itself almost as a utility company, akin to National Grid or Con Ed. “In this together,” the tagline on the Zoom Web site now reads. “Keeping you securely connected wherever you are.” Indeed, it has sometimes seemed to me that, in the absence of a quick and coherent governmental intervention in the coronavirus crisis, the dependably achieved, tech-enabled community Zoom promises is one of the only things many Americans feel they have to lean on. Zoom’s user-friendliness, however, has come with some drawbacks. Because the platform does not require that users log in, it is vulnerable to so-called Zoombombing, in which trolls appear in strangers’ meetings, sometimes disseminating graphic content through the shared-screen option. (This troubling practice nevertheless led to the following winning sentence in the Times: “Chipotle was forced to end a public Zoom chat that the brand had co-hosted with the musician Lauv after one participant began broadcasting pornography to hundreds of attendees.”)
Cartoon by Harry Bliss Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
On March 26th, a journalist for Motherboard revealed that Zoom was using software that shared customers’ data with Facebook. (In response, Zoom removed the software.) On March 30th, the Times reported, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, sent a letter to Zoom to ask what measures it was planning to put in place to protect its surging customer base from hacker attacks and malicious third-party users seeking to gain access to people’s Webcams. (Zoom replied in a statement that the company appreciated James’s “engagement,” and noted that it was “happy to provide her with the requested information.”) In April, the New York City Department of Education announced that it would prohibit teachers from using Zoom to communicate with their students, owing to privacy issues. (No immediate timeline has been given. As of this writing, my eight-year-old daughter’s Brooklyn public school is still using Zoom.)
It has yet to be seen whether the service will successfully address its critics’ concerns. In the meantime, I have continued to welcome Zoom’s gentler forms of chaos. In a recent cooking demonstration hosted by the women’s club the Wing, the cookbook author Alison Roman made sardine pasta and lemon tea cake for an audience of three thousand homebound fans. Roman, who was self-quarantining at a friend’s house in Hudson, New York, was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and nattered and cooked as viewers exchanged thoughts and questions in the chat sidebar at a pace that bordered on frenzied. Every now and again, Roman would apologize for fumbling her cell phone as she attempted to move it to focus on a generously buttered cake tin or a simmering pan—her face suddenly disappearing or emerging in extreme closeup, or the floor or a wall unexpectedly coming into view. “This is some relatable blair witch project energy,” one viewer wrote. “We out here just enjoying the realness,” another commented.


newyorker--2020-04-20--On the U.S.N.S. Comfort, the Fight Changes Constantly

The U.S.N.S .
Comfort , the massive hospital ship that has been docked at Pier 90 for the past three weeks , deploys only for major missions : combat ( Persian Gulf , 2002 ) and disaster relief ( Haiti , earthquake , 2010 ) .
Between calls , a small crew primes the equipment and monitors the expiration date on supplies .
The ship maintains a status of “ ready five ” —the capacity to mobilize within five days .
Several weeks ago , as New York ’ s COVID-19 caseload ballooned into the thousands , the city requested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , needed somewhere to treat patients who were suffering from illnesses other than the coronavirus .
The Comfort had a thousand beds , and a large health-care staff and crew .
“ This is like adding a whole other hospital , ” Mayor Bill de Blasio declared , at Pier 90 , shortly after the ship arrived .
Behind him loomed the Comfort , with enormous red crosses painted on its bright-white hull .
The crosses are meant to discourage enemy fire—it ’ s a war crime to attack a hospital ship—but they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ De Blasio said , “ Help has come.
” But had it ?
By April 2nd , the ship ’ s fourth day in port , a mere three patients had been treated .
( The first had boarded on the afternoon of April 1st : an older woman , in acute renal distress . )
The slow start left the ship ’ s wards , blood bank , radiology unit , CAT scanner , and twelve operating rooms largely unused .
A local hospital administrator called the Comfort “ a joke.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ship ’ s captains , said that expectations of immediate “ full capacity ” were unrealistic .
O ’ Brien , a helicopter pilot , who has also commanded humanitarian missions , noted , “ It takes a little bit of time to get a rhythm , to get all the processes in place.
” By April 6th , the Comfort had treated forty-two patients .
Governor Andrew Cuomo asked the federal government to allow the ship to accept COVID cases .
The White House granted the request , and the crew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bed capacity almost in half .
It helped that the Comfort was built as an oil tanker : belowdecks , its highly compartmentalized design benefits the kind of isolation necessary for controlling infection .
The medical staff and crew move among the seven main zones by walking up and over , as opposed to passing through the interior .
Normally , the crew cleans twice a day ; now twelve sailors are disinfecting handrails and doorknobs once an hour .
O ’ Brien said , “ If I see someone standing still , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wipe in their hand.
” Before the Comfort admitted its first COVID patient , a crew member tested positive for the coronavirus .
Most of the medical personnel were moved off the ship and into a nearby hotel .
( They have no shore liberties ; they are bused to and from work . )
O ’ Brien ’ s stateroom had become his office .
He had mounted his Cannondale CAAD10 , the bike that he usually rides to work , in Virginia , onto a stationary computrainer .
The crew—more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put it , to “ live , eat , and breathe ” on board for months .
The last time the Comfort got an S.O.S .
from New York was on 9/11 .
With few survivors at the World Trade Center , the Comfort attended to first responders.For three weeks , the medical staff treated more than a thousand people—cuts , fractures , trouble breathing , emotional distress .
Beds were provided for workers who had been sleeping on the street between shifts at Ground Zero .
Cops and firefighters were invited on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One officer said , “ We don ’ t get treated like this unless it ’ s Thanksgiving or Christmas.
” ) Massage therapists gave more than thirteen hundred massages .
Supply officers replaced ripped clothing and boots .
When the Comfort sailed out of New York , the ship ’ s Navy and Marine Corps crew lined the railings , wearing N.Y.P.D .
and F.D.N.Y .
caps .
Nineteen years later , a new crew lined the railings for the voyage in .
Tom Von Essen , the fire commissioner during 9/11 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FEMA working on COVID , said that on his way to greet the Comfort , for the second time , he had a flashback to 9/11 .
“ The grief , of course , was enormous , but the operation seemed to get slightly better every day , ” he recalled .
“ With this , ” he added , “ we ’ re not there yet.
” The Comfort ’ s patient load reached a hundred and forty-six last week , including ninety COVID cases .
Three more of the ship ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( All recovered . )
Nineteen of the ninety-five ventilators on board were in use .
The medical team had performed more than fifty surgical procedures , and had used its dialysis machine for the first time .
The Comfort was learning that the fight changed constantly , a fact the city already knew .
♦

The U.S.N.S. Comfort, the massive hospital ship that has been docked at Pier 90 for the past three weeks, deploys only for major missions: combat (Persian Gulf, 2002) and disaster relief (Haiti, earthquake, 2010). Between calls, a small crew primes the equipment and monitors the expiration date on supplies. The ship maintains a status of “ready five”—the capacity to mobilize within five days. Several weeks ago, as New York’s COVID-19 caseload ballooned into the thousands, the city requested backup: the hospitals, increasingly overwhelmed, needed somewhere to treat patients who were suffering from illnesses other than the coronavirus. The Comfort had a thousand beds, and a large health-care staff and crew. “This is like adding a whole other hospital,” Mayor Bill de Blasio declared, at Pier 90, shortly after the ship arrived. Behind him loomed the Comfort, with enormous red crosses painted on its bright-white hull. The crosses are meant to discourage enemy fire—it’s a war crime to attack a hospital ship—but they are also a symbol of rescue. De Blasio said, “Help has come.”
But had it? By April 2nd, the ship’s fourth day in port, a mere three patients had been treated. (The first had boarded on the afternoon of April 1st: an older woman, in acute renal distress.) The slow start left the ship’s wards, blood bank, radiology unit, CAT scanner, and twelve operating rooms largely unused. A local hospital administrator called the Comfort “a joke.” Joseph O’Brien, one of the ship’s captains, said that expectations of immediate “full capacity” were unrealistic. O’Brien, a helicopter pilot, who has also commanded humanitarian missions, noted, “It takes a little bit of time to get a rhythm, to get all the processes in place.” By April 6th, the Comfort had treated forty-two patients. Governor Andrew Cuomo asked the federal government to allow the ship to accept COVID cases. The White House granted the request, and the crew quickly reconfigured the space, cutting the bed capacity almost in half. It helped that the Comfort was built as an oil tanker: belowdecks, its highly compartmentalized design benefits the kind of isolation necessary for controlling infection. The medical staff and crew move among the seven main zones by walking up and over, as opposed to passing through the interior.
Normally, the crew cleans twice a day; now twelve sailors are disinfecting handrails and doorknobs once an hour. O’Brien said, “If I see someone standing still, they’d better have a Clorox wipe in their hand.” Before the Comfort admitted its first COVID patient, a crew member tested positive for the coronavirus. Most of the medical personnel were moved off the ship and into a nearby hotel. (They have no shore liberties; they are bused to and from work.) O’Brien’s stateroom had become his office. He had mounted his Cannondale CAAD10, the bike that he usually rides to work, in Virginia, onto a stationary computrainer. The crew—more than twelve hundred people—had expected, as he put it, to “live, eat, and breathe” on board for months.
The last time the Comfort got an S.O.S. from New York was on 9/11. With few survivors at the World Trade Center, the Comfort attended to first responders.For three weeks, the medical staff treated more than a thousand people—cuts, fractures, trouble breathing, emotional distress. Beds were provided for workers who had been sleeping on the street between shifts at Ground Zero. Cops and firefighters were invited on board for a hot breakfast. (One officer said, “We don’t get treated like this unless it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas.”) Massage therapists gave more than thirteen hundred massages. Supply officers replaced ripped clothing and boots. When the Comfort sailed out of New York, the ship’s Navy and Marine Corps crew lined the railings, wearing N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. caps.
Nineteen years later, a new crew lined the railings for the voyage in. Tom Von Essen, the fire commissioner during 9/11, who is now an administrator for FEMA working on COVID, said that on his way to greet the Comfort, for the second time, he had a flashback to 9/11. “The grief, of course, was enormous, but the operation seemed to get slightly better every day,” he recalled. “With this,” he added, “we’re not there yet.”
The Comfort’s patient load reached a hundred and forty-six last week, including ninety COVID cases. Three more of the ship’s personnel had contracted the virus. (All recovered.) Nineteen of the ninety-five ventilators on board were in use. The medical team had performed more than fifty surgical procedures, and had used its dialysis machine for the first time. The Comfort was learning that the fight changed constantly, a fact the city already knew. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-20--A New Doctor Faces the Coronavirus in Queens

Early in the coronavirus crisis , before New York shut down and the schools closed , when people still shared opinions about Marie Kondo and the timing of the Iowa caucuses , Elmhurst Hospital , in Queens , began rearranging its emergency room .
The section for less acutely ill patients became a screening room for patients with symptoms of COVID-19 .
Within days , a new wall had been built .
The critical-care area was doubled , then tripled .
A triage tent soon went up outside .
And the family room—where doctors and families can have difficult conversations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the distribution of personal protective equipment , a transition from a “ cold zone ” to a “ hot zone.
” “ You walk into your shift and are handed a bag with your P.P.E .
for the day , like it ’ s your lunch box when you show up to school , ” Hashem Zikry , an E.R .
doctor , told me , adding , “ It ’ s a little bit surreal .
We all have perspective for a moment on how truly insane what ’ s going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ picking up this P.P.E .
and changing into it , and that everyone out there is so sick.
” At the beginning of a recent shift at Elmhurst , Zikry took over the care of a forty-five-year-old man who had a wife and four children .
Although the man was on high levels of oxygen , he was short of breath .
He had written out several paragraphs in Spanish specifying that he did not want to be intubated or resuscitated .
“ Normally , I don ’ t push back on that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t understand the futility of those efforts in most cases , ” Zikry said .
“ I pushed back on him , though .
Because he was only forty-five.
” The man reiterated his wishes .
“ When he came in , he was well enough to speak in full sentences , ” Zikry said .
“ Two hours later , when he was at the point where we would have intubated him , I asked him again.
” Too breathless to speak , the patient shook his head ; he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s wife , who said that she trusted her husband to decide .
“ It was a horrendous shift , ” Zikry said .
“ So many people were dying.
” The man was visibly in agony , as is every patient struggling for air .
Zikry and other doctors tried to help him find positions that might let more air into his lungs .
The man rolled and bucked ; eventually , he was still .
By the end of the shift , he was dead .
Zikry called the wife @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; she thanked him and the other doctors and nurses .
“ It was very hard to hear someone thank you for standing there and watching her husband die , ” Zikry said .
“ I felt very helpless.
” Zikry has been working as a doctor for nine months .
He is twenty-nine years old , an intern in the emergency-medicine residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital .
As part of his training , he rotates through different hospitals and specialties .
In late February , he began a six-week rotation in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a place he loves and describes as the soul of medicine .
The neighborhood around the hospital is one of the most diverse on the planet .
Nearby blocks are crowded with Thai noodle shops , Colombian bakeries , and groceries that sell lotus and taro root .
The neighborhood , which has a large working-class immigrant population , was hit earlier and harder by the pandemic than most of the rest of the city .
“ It ’ s become very clear to me what a socioeconomic disease this is , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that term ‘ essential workers.
’ Short-order cooks , doormen , cleaners , deli workers—that is the patient population here .
Other people were at home , but my patients were still working .
A few weeks ago , when they were told to socially isolate , they still had to go back to an apartment with ten other people .
Now they are in our cardiac room dying.
” Zikry , whom I have spoken to regularly in the past month , has extraordinary resilience and good humor ; on this day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my shift , I went for a run in Central Park , and I see these two women out in , like , full hazmat suits , basically , and gloves , screaming at people to keep six feet away while they ’ re power walking .
And I ’ m thinking , You know what , you ’ re not the ones who are at risk.
” Before Zikry went to medical school , he had been in an E.R .
only once .
When he was thirteen , he shut his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There was so much blood that his mother almost fainted , and Zikry remembers going to the E.R .
with his younger brother .
An orthopedic surgeon said that there was nothing to be done—he would lose the finger .
By then , his mom had arrived , “ like a mother on a mission , ” and she said , “ My son is a pianist , don ’ t tell me there ’ s nothing to be done !
” A plastic surgeon was brought in—Jess Ting , who had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never played piano in his life .
He told Ting that his parents were the worst people in the world , and liars .
( “ I was very .
.
.
hormonal.
” ) Zikry recalled , “ Then Ting said to me—and he became my mentor , he ’ s the one who kept encouraging me to go to medical school over the years— ‘ Well , I ’ m here now , let ’ s see if I can help.
’ ” Zikry went to Hamilton College , where he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to Mount Sinai ’ s Icahn Medical School .
He loves Jane Austen .
He still reads before bed , and trains for and runs marathons—his favorite is Grandma ’ s Marathon , in Minnesota .
Through the majority of the pandemic , Zikry worked an average of six days a week at Elmhurst .
His shifts often lasted thirteen hours , an exhausting schedule that is typical for a first-year physician .
Even after New York ’ s schools were closed , on March 16th , many hospitals in the city @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and waiting for a surge in COVID patients .
“ I would say our E.R .
looks , well , more orderly than usual , ” Jolion McGreevy , who directs Mount Sinai Hospital ’ s E.R.
, told me , on March 18th .
Elaine Rabin , the head of the hospital ’ s emergency-medicine residency program , recalled being an intern during 9/11 , and said , “ This is different from that .
It very much feels like a tsunami is about to hit us.
” But , for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sinai was down .
The non-corona cases—the broken bones , the belly pains , even the chest pains—were not turning up in their usual numbers .
( Telemedicine had off-loaded some of those patients , but people were also afraid of the hospital , as evidenced later in the dramatic increase of deaths at home . )
Elmhurst Hospital , however , was already four people deep into its sick-call list for staffing .
It had many COVID patients , but they were accompanied by the usual load of “ normal ” cases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chest pains—those numbers have been inelastic here , ” Zikry told me , in late March .
The P.P.E .
bags that Elmhurst doctors received at the start of their shifts contained a papery yellow gown , blue gloves , a face shield , and an N95 mask .
The mask had to suffice for a whole day , although as recently as February the C.D.C .
recommended putting on a new one for each patient .
An N95 mask fits the face more tightly than a regular surgical mask , and has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in place .
“ The bridge of my nose is bleeding from wearing it all day , ” Zikry told me .
“ I tried to MacGyver it with a Band-Aid , but it ’ s not working.
” The P.P.E .
that E.R .
doctors in New York have been wearing more closely resembles a poor man ’ s welding gear than the astronaut-like outfits seen in photos of medical workers in South Korea .

Zikry took an Uber home from his shift that day, instead of running. That was unusual for him, but he was unusually tired. His residency program was paying for rides for residents, as a gesture of support. It was around 7:45 a.m., the beginning of a kind of day off. Interns call this a DOMA—day off, my ass. He would get home around eight-thirty, have breakfast with his brother, try to rest, and then be back at work by 7 a.m. the next day.
Throughout the crisis, doctors have made clear their dismay at the lack of proper supplies—both for their own protection and for the health of their patients. “The systemic frustrations are the most exhausting,” Zikry told me. “Today, we ran out of oxygen masks for the patients to use. So much work goes into trying to locate and obtain more. We had a shortage of oxygen tanks, so we connected more than one patient to larger tanks—stuff we normally wouldn’t do. Will we run out of masks entirely? People can give you answers, but they are not witnessing what is happening in front of you. People can tell you it will be O.K., and it is solvable, but this has never happened before.”
Physicians in other cities watched New York for a sense of what was headed their way. David DiBardino, a pulmonologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, described how the process of entering his hospital had changed for employees. “We’re funnelled through an entrance that hasn’t been open for years,” he said. “It has this black metal gate that looks so gothic. It’s like a near-future dystopian scene, like something you would watch on Netflix. Some people are trying to distance in line, but also it’s a line, you can’t be that far away—so distance, but not wanting to get cut.” On March 26th, the third day of the new entrance policy, the line was three blocks long. “Three city blocks of people in scrubs panicking. This anesthesiologist who is older saw the line and started screaming—he was anxious about how close people were standing in the line.”
As at Elmhurst, doctors receive only one set of P.P.E. for the day. “The P.P.E. has actually been put under lock and key,” DiBardino said, and laughed. “I have to deal with these things with humor, because it’s all so weird and scary.” In subsequent days, the line to enter the hospital grew short, then long again; instructions for hand hygiene, temperature taking, and mask distribution kept shifting. “What has really been startling is this gap between the protocols—between how we used to throw the mask away after every procedure and the really difficult practical challenge of, how do you avoid contaminating yourself with the new conservation protocol,” he said. “It’s hilarious how tedious it is. You touch the back of your neck, and then you’re, like, Is the back of my neck contaminated now?”
DiBardino, who with his wife has three children—fifteen-month-old twins and a three-year-old—does not typically work in the I.C.U. “As interventional pulmonologists, we are board certified in critical-care medicine, but it’s not something we do on a daily basis.”On April 6th, that changed. “It’s really, personally, scary,” he said. “There’s a really good chance that I will contract COVID-19—and I think, you know, you and I should be fine if we catch it, but whether to bring that home to my family? Should I just stay at work and not come home?”
DiBardino was asked to lead a team at a neurology ward that was transformed into an I.C.U. for COVID care—a seven-day tour of duty. An anesthesiologist was assigned to head one half of the ward, and DiBardino the other. “The rooms have this pretty loud hum to them,” he said, because negative pressure is used to keep the COVID air from escaping. The doors to the patients’ rooms are kept shut, and typically only one medical worker goes in at a time, while the rest watch through the glass. “It’s like a fishbowl,” DiBardino said. He described his first day of training there: “So the nurse goes into the room with a wipeboard. She’ll write, ‘B.P. is super low. Max norepi?’ Or she’ll write, ‘I need a new I.V. bag,’ and so someone runs to get it.” Coming in and out of the room is slowed by the donning and doffing of gloves, a gown, the N95 mask, and a face shield.
Emergencies occur all the time in an I.C.U. “An alarm seems to go off every five minutes, but then only one person goes into the room for the response—it’s so weird,” DiBardino said. “It’s almost like we’re running as fast as we can, but with one foot nailed to the ground.” Since the doors of the rooms are glass, doctors standing outside sometimes direct the provider inside by writing backward on the glass doors, so that the person inside can read it. “I know this is stupid,” DiBardino said, “but one of the first thoughts I had was: I can’t write backward!”
By early April, funeral homes in New York were overwhelmed, and the city had deployed forty-five mobile morgues. The Javits Center switched from serving only non-covid patients to serving exclusively covid patients. More than six million Americans filed for unemployment in one week. A midlife-crisis film called “Phoenix, Oregon” topped the box-office, making $2,903 from showings on twenty-seven screens. Half the planet was under lockdown orders. People mixed quarantinis, didn’t quite educate their children. Guidance on masks was still changing. My mom wrote to my brother and me about ordering tonic water, because she had read that it had quinine, which was getting talked about as a remedy.
At Elmhurst, as at many publicly funded hospitals in poor communities throughout the country, the situation was deteriorating. In the best of times, these hospitals are underfunded and overwhelmed. Yaagnik Kosuri, a general-surgery intern at Mount Sinai Hospital, who has been working at Elmhurst during the pandemic, described much of his work as a “hundred-per-cent Sisyphean task. That is the situation at baseline. It just wasn’t set up for success in the setting of something so catastrophic.”
So many patients were in the E.R. that a resident was assigned to walk around checking their oxygen levels, to make sure that they weren’t crashing. This job had never existed before. “I thought the volume could not be worse,” Zikry said. “I thought we had reached an asymptote. We have superseded that. The other day, we had thirty-one intubated patients in our E.R., which is twenty-eight to thirty-one more than normal.” Now when he left the hospital each day a dozen reporters were there to ask questions, as if the doctors were some dark version of Broadway actors exiting the stage door. “I just show up to work,” Zikry said. “I am very scared to do it. I am scared something is going to happen. On my way over, I say to myself, I’m going to show up. If I just keep showing up, something good will come of it compounded over time.”
It had been Bassel’s birthday, so Zikry decided to try to cook spicy fish tacos, one of his brother’s favorite meals. At Citarella, Zikry had walked past the mustard he wanted, then taken a few steps backward to get it, and in the process bumped into someone, who started shouting at him: How could he be walking backward at a time like this? “I had to let that one go,” Zikry said.
In the E.R., the work had become “sadly algorithmic.” Typically, the glory of working in an E.R. is that you never know who will come in the door, what kinds of problems they will have. “We now presume they all have COVID,” Zikry said. “You don’t have to be Dr. House to figure it out.” He said that he tries to tell a patient early in the conversation, “ ‘I think you have coronavirus and you need to be admitted to the hospital.’ I think it’s a shocking conversation for them. Especially if they’ve been waiting for eight hours and I’ve been seeing them for thirty seconds.”
In normal times, a nurse or a technician draws blood for lab tests, a task that doctors tend to be not that good at, but now, because of staff shortages, it’s part of the job. Zikry described drawing labs from a patient, then taking the patient to get a chest X-ray. Hospital stretchers drive worse than grocery carts. “I hit his bed against a corner,” Zikry said. “And this guy, who hadn’t spoken any English up to that point, turned and said, ‘Is this your first fucking day?’ ” Zikry has a youthful face. “I have the same questions he does. I don’t know how I ended up in this situation.”
To contain the spread of the virus, family members are not allowed in the E.R. or on I.C.U. floors. People are in distress alone. E.R.s, which are often in basements, sometimes don’t have good cell-phone reception, and worried families have no choice but to call doctors. When I spoke with Dan Egan at the end of March, he was coming off two consecutive night shifts. Over the weeks, more staff arrived—Egan worked with a pediatrician and with an orthopedic physician assistant—but the work remained overwhelming. Egan said, “I have never put more patients on a ventilator in one shift in my life, and of course I was thinking, If this is how it is now, and with what the models are predicting for a week or two from now—it makes me really scared.”
He described the barring of visitors as a secondary trauma. “Families are calling me all night for updates,” he said. As an E.R. doctor in New York, he’s accustomed to being yelled at. The current situation is not like that: “Instead, they are, like, Doctor, I know how busy you are, I just want an update on how he’s doing.” One young patient struck him as the sickest person he had seen that night. “And I’m trying to relay that over the phone to the family, who thinks he’s at the hospital with, like, ‘a little coronavirus.’ ” The patient was on a ventilator. “I wanted to be honest about how sick he was, but I didn’t want to take away hope. They’re asking me, ‘Will I be able to talk to him tomorrow?’ And, because they’re not here, it’s so much more difficult to explain what it means to be on a ventilator—that a machine is breathing for him.” Egan wants to be empathetic, but he’s taking care of many patients at once. “Multiple times last night, I had to say, ‘I am so sorry, but I have to get off the phone, because someone really sick is coming in right now.’ ”
The medicine is the medicine, Egan explained. Everyone is on oxygen, and everyone is there for the same thing. “But people are dying, and the family is not there.” That night, he had an older patient who was critically ill, on a ventilator. He was not expected to live much longer. Egan had had multiple phone conversations with the man’s daughter about how sick he was, and what the family’s goals of care were—they wanted him to be free of pain. The daughter got off the phone to contact her siblings. “Then she called me back and asked me if I could do her a favor. I say, ‘Yes, of course.’ She says to me, ‘Would you go in and put the phone to his ear so we can all say goodbye?’ ”
He put on his gown and gloves and full P.P.E., and went into the patient’s room. “I had the phone on speaker, because I couldn’t really hold it to his ear with all of the equipment. I felt like I was intruding, but that’s what it was.” The words were mostly Spanish. Six or seven family members, all telling the man how much they loved him. “I thought, My God, this is real. This is what everyone is doing now.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus