thenation--2020-08-20--The Radical Afterlives of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

In 1980 , when she was 29 , the South Korean–born artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha moved from the Bay Area to New York .
She hated the city .
After two years there , she wrote that achieving success would require her to accept the “ dregs of morals , money , parasitic existence.
” To her , the thought of making that ethical bargain was “ in all honesty , disgusting.
” The release of her experimental novel Dictée ( 1982 ) that fall , though , gave Cha reason to hope .
Published by Tanam @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of mythological and historical women—the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone , Joan of Arc , the Korean revolutionary Yu Gwan-sun , and Cha ’ s mother , as well as herself .
Some pages are in French , others in English .
A few are blank .
There are occasional anatomical drawings of the human larynx and vocal cords .
A resolutely avant-garde book , Dictée liberated Cha from her malaise .
“ It is hard to say what I feel , how I feel , except that I feel freed , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrote her brother John Cha just months before the book ’ s publication .
The book signaled a step forward for her .
It was , instead , her final act .
On November 5 , 1982 , mere days after the book ’ s release , she traveled to Manhattan ’ s Puck Building to meet her husband , the photographer Richard Barnes , who was working on a project documenting the building ’ s renovations .
A security guard there named Joey Sanza raped and strangled Cha .
She was 31 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of rapes in Florida before relocating to New York , dumped her body in a parking lot blocks from the building .
An initial police report described her as an “ Oriental Jane Doe.
” The public barely eulogized her .
“ A woman who was found slain in a Chinatown parking lot was identified yesterday as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha , 31 , of 247 Elizabeth St. , ” read a short item in the New York Daily News two days later .
The paper made no mention of her art or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dictée went out of print .
The impulse to skim over the grisly details of Cha ’ s murder is tempting , and this has been the preferred tactic for critics who grapple with her art .
In focusing on her death , after all , one risks diverting attention from her life and the thrilling body of work she left behind , which spans performance , video , and the written word .
The desire to dignify her death through silence may have been well intentioned .
The quiet , however , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dictée was neglected by a broader audience .
The literary establishment ’ s fixation on white talent—and its disregard for talent of color , especially the kind of writers who care little about pleasing the masses—may have sidelined Cha .
The book ’ s formal disobedience did not lend itself to popular embrace , either .
Perhaps it ’ s no surprise , then , that Dictée has spent decades as a cult classic , becoming a fixture of Asian American and feminist studies syllabi across the country .
Yet the general public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than the writers Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath or the performance artist Ana Mendieta , women who met similarly tragic ends .
Cha was an Asian immigrant .
She lived in an America that casually diminished women who looked like her .
Passersby would call her Yoko Ono when she walked down the street .
The writer Cathy Park Hong brought greater attention to Cha ’ s work with her recent essay collection Minor Feelings : An Asian American Reckoning ( 2020 ) .
In the book ’ s penultimate chapter , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ puts Cha ’ s work and death in conversation , a necessary if morally thorny task .
The careful avoidance of discussion of Cha ’ s death has stripped her art of agency , Hong argues , turning her into a symbol for aborted artistic promise .
To rectify this , Hong pores over court records and speaks to John Cha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ’ s friend Sandy Flitterman-Lewis , who posits that Cha certainly would have been idolized more widely after her death if she had been a young white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hong ’ s critical exercise ultimately illuminates Dictée , which , Hong writes , “ made the immigrant ’ s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.
” How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America ?
Since her death , Cha ’ s work has quietly encouraged a more radical strain of Asian American literature .
The writers Elaine Castillo , Alexander Chee , and R.O .
Kwon are but a few of the artists working today who have cited Dictée as a source of inspiration , admiring the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bravery .
These writers carry Cha ’ s legacy forward with work that refuses stylistic or political assimilation .
For too long , though , the most sustained considerations of her work were confined to the academy .
Minor Feelings may very well free her from the long shadow her death has cast .
Cha was keenly aware of how the powerless found their voices suppressed .
The persistence of this dispossession—across generations , across borders—became integral to her work .
The cycle of violence she wrote of in Dictée continued with her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one must confront the full arc of her life , including how it ended .
Her ghost has hovered on the fringes of the canon of literary genius .
It ’ s time to welcome her in .
Cha ’ s family moved often when she was a child .
She was born in Busan , South Korea , in 1951 , the third of her Catholic parents ’ five children .
Soon after her birth , the family left for Seoul and then for the village of Songdo , a temporary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parents became used to this peripatetic existence : Her father , Hyung Sang Cha , and mother , Hyung Soon Cha , grew up in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation of China and Korea .
Their migration coincided with the theft of language : They could not speak Korean in their new home .
Such violations of language became a defining part of her parents ’ lives and , by extension , Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ’ s .
In 1963 the family emigrated to the United States to free themselves from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Cha was 12 .
They settled in San Francisco .
She was a lonely , quiet kid in her home country , but in the United States , she blossomed .
She took to English with ease ; she also studied and became fluent in French .
At 14 , she won a poetry contest at her Catholic high school .
That Cha would pursue the arts seemed only natural .
The compulsion ran in her blood : Her mother wanted to be a writer , and her father aspired to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Both became teachers instead .
Cha was close to her mother , who nurtured her daughter ’ s ambition .
She had a more conflicted relationship with her father , who discouraged her from becoming an artist , knowing that path was filled with hard work and disappointment .
Cha defied him .
She enrolled at the University of California , Berkeley , in 1969 , getting two bachelor ’ s and master ’ s degrees in comparative literature and the visual arts over the next decade .
This was a time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The year before she enrolled saw the emergence of the Asian American Political Alliance on campus and , with it , the term “ Asian American.
” In the decade when it first gained traction , “ Asian American ” was a more radical form of self-identification than the term typically connotes today , taking cues from the Black power and anti-imperial movements of the era to establish solidarity among Asians regardless of national origin .
The 1960s saw the flourishing of sister stirrings like the Chicano movement as well .
Berkeley was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with sit-ins and riots .
Meanwhile , multimedia and performance art were nascent fields , and the university established its ethnic studies department the year Cha enrolled .
This environment allowed her to discover her artistic voice .
She found mentors in teachers such as Bertrand Augst and James Melchert .
She fell in love with Barnes , and they wed in 1982 .
She was drawn to the films of French directors like Alain Resnais and Chris Marker , the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé , and the plays of Samuel Beckett .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cobbled together a form of expression that danced among genres .
She wrote Earth ( 1973 ) , an artist ’ s book of English and French poetry .
She staged performances like Barren Cave Mute ( 1974 ) , which involved the flame from a single candle burning waxed paper to gradually reveal a series of cryptic , poetic phrases scrawled on them .
She made videos like Mouth to Mouth ( 1975 ) , her camera fixed on a mouth inaudibly uttering syllables while words in Korean and English flashed on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Dictée , which questioned the need for categorical distinctions among genres .
As a result , Dictée presents a dilemma : How do you categorize a book that defies such an impulse ?
Was it an autobiography ?
A novel ?
Cha cared little for such labels .
She bends the rules of language without apology .
The book announces its nonconformity from the opening page , which is in French and English .
She openly mocks the idea of punctuation : “ Open paragraph It was the first day period She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks.
” The paragraph goes on , and a blank page follows .
“ She mimicks the speaking , ” she writes a page later .
“ That might resemble speech .
( Anything at all . )
Bared noise , groan , bits torn from words.
” That Cha presents such choices without any explanation may confuse and alienate readers , yet the tactic reveals how much trust she placed in her audience .
She makes them work .
She divides the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the Greek Muses who represented the arts and sciences , such as astronomy , comedy , and tragedy .
She studs sentences with periods , draining the English language of its rhythm : “ Dead words .
Dead tongue .
From disuse .
Buried in Time ’ s memory.
” These staccato fragments are purposeful means to an end , collecting to convey the gravity of historical trauma , particularly the kind inflicted on Koreans like her .
Fundamentally , the book concerns how easily people can lose the ability to express @ @ @ @ @ @ @ injustice in her mother , the subject of the book ’ s most arresting passages .
“ Mother , you are eighteen years old , ” Cha writes .
“ You were born in Yong Jung , Manchuria and this is where you now live .
You are not Chinese .
You are Korean .
But your family moved here to escape the Japanese occupation.
” Trauma manifests as loss of language , which is the direct result of violence against the less powerful—immigrants , refugees , exiles .
“ Still , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the others , ” Cha writes to her mother .
“ It is not your own.
” In another passage , it is 1962 , and Cha is an 11-year-old girl writing to her mother about her older brother , who wants to join a demonstration against authoritarian rule in South Korea .
Again , the threat of silencing looms large , and the state is the aggressor .
“ They fall they bleed they die , ” Cha writes of the protesters at the hands of the police .
“ They are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be squelched.
” The pain of being unable to speak lived inside Cha .
It made her who she was .
One then begins to understand why she invents her own language in Dictée .
Reliance on the written word to communicate is futile ; a dominant power can easily strip the marginalized of their voices .
Cha ’ s virtual vanishing from cultural memory feels both unfair and unsurprising .
Dictée ’ s artistic rebellion may have prevented wider audiences from flocking to the work .
Her unruliness , however , has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number of Asian American writers she inspired who have achieved more mainstream prominence than she did in life or in death .
This cruel dissonance speaks to her work ’ s foresight .
She imagined a form of expression that was situated along the uncomfortable fault lines between modes of art .
Elaine Castillo , a Filipinx American and the author of the acclaimed novel America Is Not the Heart ( 2018 ) , first came to Cha ’ s work in her mid-20s through Exilée / Temps Morts : Selected Works ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Cha ’ s poems , journal entries , and film stills .
“ At its heart are the subjects that formed so much of Dictée , too , ” Castillo said of the book in an e-mail .
“ Historical and familial trauma , her ambivalence around speech and writing , her razor-sharp awareness of the limitations of language , the things that can ’ t be put into words , the things that exceed their names.
” In early 2011 , Castillo was part of a guerrilla filmmaking crew that called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of women of color .
Though her primary medium is the written word , she realized that she didn ’ t have to limit herself to novels or essays ; she could make essay films as Cha did .
“ Cha ’ s work showed me how you could be that kind of artist , ” Castillo said .
“ It was a kind of blueprint for how to expand the shapes that ‘ writing ’ could take.
” Cha ’ s writing cast a similar spell over Cathy Park Hong .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sophomore at Oberlin studying under the poet Myung Mi Kim , who taught the book alongside the poems of William Carlos Williams .
Cha ’ s work reached out to Hong directly because of its difficulty .
“ It wasn ’ t just about formal innovation for her , ” Hong said .
“ It was like using formal innovation to get at what was silenced , what hasn ’ t been written about .
She was using formal innovation as a way to kind of write about historical atrocities that have happened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was especially vulnerable to cultural oversight : She died young .
She was a woman .
She was Korean American .
Her art , however , provided the greatest challenge of all .
She did not write for everyone .
“ She was someone who was not doing accessible memoiristic work that would appeal to a white audience , ” Hong said .
Today the inventiveness of Cha ’ s writing may still strike readers as daring .
“ Dictée was ahead of its time , ” Hong observed .
“ It was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of cross-genre memoir-poetry book that no one was doing at the time , and so people weren ’ t ready for it.
” Cha wrote to unchain herself from the commercialism imposed on too many artists in New York .
Unlike with Plath or even Mendieta , Cha ’ s early death may have minimized her impact rather than expanded it .
The acknowledgment of her genius has long been limited to the Asian American writers who followed her , writers who may have also escaped the gaze of literary gatekeepers in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a different time , though .
The very fact that those same writers have found devoted audiences signals that America may finally be ready to accept all that Cha ’ s writing had to offer and to swallow the bitterness of her truths .

In 1980, when she was 29, the South Korean–born artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha moved from the Bay Area to New York. She hated the city. After two years there, she wrote that achieving success would require her to accept the “dregs of morals, money, parasitic existence.” To her, the thought of making that ethical bargain was “in all honesty, disgusting.” Books in Review Dictée By Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Buy this book
The release of her experimental novel Dictée (1982) that fall, though, gave Cha reason to hope. Published by Tanam Press, the book offered fragmented portraits of mythological and historical women—the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone, Joan of Arc, the Korean revolutionary Yu Gwan-sun, and Cha’s mother, as well as herself. Some pages are in French, others in English. A few are blank. There are occasional anatomical drawings of the human larynx and vocal cords.
A resolutely avant-garde book, Dictée liberated Cha from her malaise. “It is hard to say what I feel, how I feel, except that I feel freed, and I also feel naked,” she wrote her brother John Cha just months before the book’s publication. The book signaled a step forward for her. It was, instead, her final act.
On November 5, 1982, mere days after the book’s release, she traveled to Manhattan’s Puck Building to meet her husband, the photographer Richard Barnes, who was working on a project documenting the building’s renovations. A security guard there named Joey Sanza raped and strangled Cha. She was 31. Sanza, who committed a series of rapes in Florida before relocating to New York, dumped her body in a parking lot blocks from the building. An initial police report described her as an “Oriental Jane Doe.” The public barely eulogized her. “A woman who was found slain in a Chinatown parking lot was identified yesterday as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 31, of 247 Elizabeth St.,” read a short item in the New York Daily News two days later. The paper made no mention of her art or writing. Shortly after her death, Dictée went out of print.
The impulse to skim over the grisly details of Cha’s murder is tempting, and this has been the preferred tactic for critics who grapple with her art. In focusing on her death, after all, one risks diverting attention from her life and the thrilling body of work she left behind, which spans performance, video, and the written word. The desire to dignify her death through silence may have been well intentioned. The quiet, however, is possibly just one of many reasons Dictée was neglected by a broader audience. The literary establishment’s fixation on white talent—and its disregard for talent of color, especially the kind of writers who care little about pleasing the masses—may have sidelined Cha. The book’s formal disobedience did not lend itself to popular embrace, either.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Dictée has spent decades as a cult classic, becoming a fixture of Asian American and feminist studies syllabi across the country. Yet the general public is less likely to know of her than the writers Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath or the performance artist Ana Mendieta, women who met similarly tragic ends. Cha was an Asian immigrant. She lived in an America that casually diminished women who looked like her. Passersby would call her Yoko Ono when she walked down the street. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The writer Cathy Park Hong brought greater attention to Cha’s work with her recent essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020). In the book’s penultimate chapter, “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong puts Cha’s work and death in conversation, a necessary if morally thorny task. The careful avoidance of discussion of Cha’s death has stripped her art of agency, Hong argues, turning her into a symbol for aborted artistic promise. To rectify this, Hong pores over court records and speaks to John Cha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s friend Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, who posits that Cha certainly would have been idolized more widely after her death if she had been a young white artist on the Upper West Side. Hong’s critical exercise ultimately illuminates Dictée, which, Hong writes, “made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.” Related Article How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America? Jane Hu
Since her death, Cha’s work has quietly encouraged a more radical strain of Asian American literature. The writers Elaine Castillo, Alexander Chee, and R.O. Kwon are but a few of the artists working today who have cited Dictée as a source of inspiration, admiring the book for its structural invention and thematic bravery. These writers carry Cha’s legacy forward with work that refuses stylistic or political assimilation. For too long, though, the most sustained considerations of her work were confined to the academy. Minor Feelings may very well free her from the long shadow her death has cast.
Cha was keenly aware of how the powerless found their voices suppressed. The persistence of this dispossession—across generations, across borders—became integral to her work. The cycle of violence she wrote of in Dictée continued with her death. To appreciate her work fully, one must confront the full arc of her life, including how it ended. Her ghost has hovered on the fringes of the canon of literary genius. It’s time to welcome her in.
Cha’s family moved often when she was a child. She was born in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, the third of her Catholic parents’ five children. Soon after her birth, the family left for Seoul and then for the village of Songdo, a temporary haven from the Korean War. Her parents became used to this peripatetic existence: Her father, Hyung Sang Cha, and mother, Hyung Soon Cha, grew up in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation of China and Korea. Their migration coincided with the theft of language: They could not speak Korean in their new home. Such violations of language became a defining part of her parents’ lives and, by extension, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s.
In 1963 the family emigrated to the United States to free themselves from the South Korean military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. Cha was 12. They settled in San Francisco. She was a lonely, quiet kid in her home country, but in the United States, she blossomed. She took to English with ease; she also studied and became fluent in French. At 14, she won a poetry contest at her Catholic high school.
That Cha would pursue the arts seemed only natural. The compulsion ran in her blood: Her mother wanted to be a writer, and her father aspired to be a painter, but neither dream materialized. Both became teachers instead. Cha was close to her mother, who nurtured her daughter’s ambition. She had a more conflicted relationship with her father, who discouraged her from becoming an artist, knowing that path was filled with hard work and disappointment.
Cha defied him. She enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969, getting two bachelor’s and master’s degrees in comparative literature and the visual arts over the next decade. This was a time of seismic change in the city. The year before she enrolled saw the emergence of the Asian American Political Alliance on campus and, with it, the term “Asian American.” In the decade when it first gained traction, “Asian American” was a more radical form of self-identification than the term typically connotes today, taking cues from the Black power and anti-imperial movements of the era to establish solidarity among Asians regardless of national origin. The 1960s saw the flourishing of sister stirrings like the Chicano movement as well. Berkeley was a hotbed of countercultural political engagement, with sit-ins and riots. Meanwhile, multimedia and performance art were nascent fields, and the university established its ethnic studies department the year Cha enrolled. Related Article Mary McCarthy’s Unsparing Honesty Maggie Doherty
This environment allowed her to discover her artistic voice. She found mentors in teachers such as Bertrand Augst and James Melchert. She fell in love with Barnes, and they wed in 1982. She was drawn to the films of French directors like Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and the plays of Samuel Beckett.
By absorbing these varied influences, Cha cobbled together a form of expression that danced among genres. She wrote Earth (1973), an artist’s book of English and French poetry. She staged performances like Barren Cave Mute (1974), which involved the flame from a single candle burning waxed paper to gradually reveal a series of cryptic, poetic phrases scrawled on them. She made videos like Mouth to Mouth (1975), her camera fixed on a mouth inaudibly uttering syllables while words in Korean and English flashed on the screen.
These works were preambles to Dictée, which questioned the need for categorical distinctions among genres. As a result, Dictée presents a dilemma: How do you categorize a book that defies such an impulse? Was it an autobiography? A novel? Cha cared little for such labels. She bends the rules of language without apology. The book announces its nonconformity from the opening page, which is in French and English. She openly mocks the idea of punctuation: “Open paragraph It was the first day period She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks.” The paragraph goes on, and a blank page follows. “She mimicks the speaking,” she writes a page later. “That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words.”
That Cha presents such choices without any explanation may confuse and alienate readers, yet the tactic reveals how much trust she placed in her audience. She makes them work. She divides the book into nine chapters, each named for the Greek Muses who represented the arts and sciences, such as astronomy, comedy, and tragedy. She studs sentences with periods, draining the English language of its rhythm: “Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in Time’s memory.”
These staccato fragments are purposeful means to an end, collecting to convey the gravity of historical trauma, particularly the kind inflicted on Koreans like her. Fundamentally, the book concerns how easily people can lose the ability to express themselves through language. She saw this injustice in her mother, the subject of the book’s most arresting passages. “Mother, you are eighteen years old,” Cha writes. “You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria and this is where you now live. You are not Chinese. You are Korean. But your family moved here to escape the Japanese occupation.”
Trauma manifests as loss of language, which is the direct result of violence against the less powerful—immigrants, refugees, exiles. “Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory language like the others,” Cha writes to her mother. “It is not your own.”
In another passage, it is 1962, and Cha is an 11-year-old girl writing to her mother about her older brother, who wants to join a demonstration against authoritarian rule in South Korea. Again, the threat of silencing looms large, and the state is the aggressor. “They fall they bleed they die,” Cha writes of the protesters at the hands of the police. “They are thrown into gas into the crowd to be squelched.”
The pain of being unable to speak lived inside Cha. It made her who she was. One then begins to understand why she invents her own language in Dictée. Reliance on the written word to communicate is futile; a dominant power can easily strip the marginalized of their voices.
Cha’s virtual vanishing from cultural memory feels both unfair and unsurprising. Dictée’s artistic rebellion may have prevented wider audiences from flocking to the work. Her unruliness, however, has been the point of entry for a number of Asian American writers she inspired who have achieved more mainstream prominence than she did in life or in death. This cruel dissonance speaks to her work’s foresight. She imagined a form of expression that was situated along the uncomfortable fault lines between modes of art.
Elaine Castillo, a Filipinx American and the author of the acclaimed novel America Is Not the Heart (2018), first came to Cha’s work in her mid-20s through Exilée / Temps Morts: Selected Works (2009), a posthumously published assortment of Cha’s poems, journal entries, and film stills. “At its heart are the subjects that formed so much of Dictée, too,” Castillo said of the book in an e-mail. “Historical and familial trauma, her ambivalence around speech and writing, her razor-sharp awareness of the limitations of language, the things that can’t be put into words, the things that exceed their names.”
In early 2011, Castillo was part of a guerrilla filmmaking crew that called itself the Digital Desperados, composed entirely of women of color. Though her primary medium is the written word, she realized that she didn’t have to limit herself to novels or essays; she could make essay films as Cha did. “Cha’s work showed me how you could be that kind of artist,” Castillo said. “It was a kind of blueprint for how to expand the shapes that ‘writing’ could take.”
Cha’s writing cast a similar spell over Cathy Park Hong. She first encountered Dictée in 1996 as a sophomore at Oberlin studying under the poet Myung Mi Kim, who taught the book alongside the poems of William Carlos Williams. Cha’s work reached out to Hong directly because of its difficulty.
“It wasn’t just about formal innovation for her,” Hong said. “It was like using formal innovation to get at what was silenced, what hasn’t been written about. She was using formal innovation as a way to kind of write about historical atrocities that have happened in Korea.”
Hong noted that Cha was especially vulnerable to cultural oversight: She died young. She was a woman. She was Korean American. Her art, however, provided the greatest challenge of all. She did not write for everyone. “She was someone who was not doing accessible memoiristic work that would appeal to a white audience,” Hong said.
Today the inventiveness of Cha’s writing may still strike readers as daring. “Dictée was ahead of its time,” Hong observed. “It was really dense, and it was this kind of cross-genre memoir-poetry book that no one was doing at the time, and so people weren’t ready for it.” Cha wrote to unchain herself from the commercialism imposed on too many artists in New York.
Unlike with Plath or even Mendieta, Cha’s early death may have minimized her impact rather than expanded it. The acknowledgment of her genius has long been limited to the Asian American writers who followed her, writers who may have also escaped the gaze of literary gatekeepers in an earlier era. They work in a different time, though. The very fact that those same writers have found devoted audiences signals that America may finally be ready to accept all that Cha’s writing had to offer and to swallow the bitterness of her truths.


thenation--2020-08-20--If Republicans Want a Fight Over the Post Office, Give it to Them

Donald Trump ’ s attack on the United States Postal Service is by design but not merely his design .
Republicans and their corporate allies have been after the post office for years , undermining its ability to function and mocking its more than 600,000 workers in hopes of clearing the way for the privatization of an agency that has , since the founding of the nation , provided essential infrastructure for American democracy .
It is the role that the Postal Service will play in the 2020 elections that has Trump and his allies agitated now , but their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What could be new , however , is the opening that Trump has created not just for the defense of the post office at this critical moment but for its expansion to address the challenges of the 21st century .
Democrats should seize that opening and make the promise of the post office ’ s renewal central to their fall campaign .
Trump ’ s jarring pattern of saying out loud what others in his partisan cabal have been thinking was on full display August 13 , when he revealed why he and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Service as an immediate threat .
The president trails in the polls , and the Republican hold on the Senate looks shaky .
A fairly conducted election with a high turnout could upend their political power .
They ’ ve sent plenty of signals that they ’ d prefer to make it hard for voters who are disinclined toward the GOP to cast ballots in fall elections that could be disrupted by Covid-19 outbreaks—and that are likely to see unprecedented levels of voting by mail .
Explaining why he objected to emergency funding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been stretched to the limit by the demands of this pandemic moment , he bluntly acknowledged , “ They want $ 25 billion—billion—for the post office .
Now they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.
” The blowback was so intense that Trump walked his remarks back a few steps that same evening , including suggesting that he might be open to negotiation .
But that didn ’ t change Republican antipathy .
While Democrats in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 25 billion in emergency funding to the Postal Service , Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell continued to block action .
And Trump ’ s new postmaster general , Louis DeJoy , was busy slowing down—and physically dismembering—the agency .
The crisis came to a head a day after Trump talked about holding up the money .
The Washington Post revealed that the Postal Service had warned 46 states and the District of Columbia it could not guarantee that all ballots cast by mail for the November elections would arrive in time to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reports from across the country that curbside mail collection boxes and sorting machines in postal facilities were being removed .
Elizabeth Warren Is Prepared to Prosecute Trump in 2020 , and 2021 Milwaukee Has a Lot to Teach Joe Biden and the Democrats Dissenting Delegates Send a Medicare for All Message to Joe Biden House Oversight Committee members demanded that DeJoy , a major GOP donor and fundraiser , explain himself .
Speaker Nancy Pelosi called members back from vacation to address the issue , and state attorneys general prepared to take action @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there must also be a big-picture response that addresses the roots of the Postal Service ’ s fiscal problems : a draconian congressional mandate that it fund pensions 75 years into the future and severe restrictions on how it can operate in competitive markets .
Democrats have begun to embrace proposals to ease the burden on this enormously popular and vital agency .
This fall they should go all in , with robust support for visionary reforms such as postal banking , which would allow post offices to provide basic financial services in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Postmaster General Are Sabotaging Democracy in Plain Sight If it is a fight over the future of the Postal Service that Trump and the Republicans want , give it to them .
People in rural towns and urban neighborhoods don ’ t just want to vote by mail .
They want to vote for a future that will keep the mail moving for generations to come .

This article appears in the September 7/14, 2020 issue.
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Donald Trump’s attack on the United States Postal Service is by design but not merely his design. Republicans and their corporate allies have been after the post office for years, undermining its ability to function and mocking its more than 600,000 workers in hopes of clearing the way for the privatization of an agency that has, since the founding of the nation, provided essential infrastructure for American democracy. It is the role that the Postal Service will play in the 2020 elections that has Trump and his allies agitated now, but their targeting of it is nothing new.
What could be new, however, is the opening that Trump has created not just for the defense of the post office at this critical moment but for its expansion to address the challenges of the 21st century. Democrats should seize that opening and make the promise of the post office’s renewal central to their fall campaign.
Trump’s jarring pattern of saying out loud what others in his partisan cabal have been thinking was on full display August 13, when he revealed why he and so many other Republicans see the Postal Service as an immediate threat. The president trails in the polls, and the Republican hold on the Senate looks shaky. A fairly conducted election with a high turnout could upend their political power. They’ve sent plenty of signals that they’d prefer to make it hard for voters who are disinclined toward the GOP to cast ballots in fall elections that could be disrupted by Covid-19 outbreaks—and that are likely to see unprecedented levels of voting by mail. Explaining why he objected to emergency funding for the Postal Service, which has been stretched to the limit by the demands of this pandemic moment, he bluntly acknowledged, “They want $25 billion—billion—for the post office. Now they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
The blowback was so intense that Trump walked his remarks back a few steps that same evening, including suggesting that he might be open to negotiation. But that didn’t change Republican antipathy. While Democrats in the House voted in May to get $25 billion in emergency funding to the Postal Service, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell continued to block action. And Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, was busy slowing down—and physically dismembering—the agency. The crisis came to a head a day after Trump talked about holding up the money. The Washington Post revealed that the Postal Service had warned 46 states and the District of Columbia it could not guarantee that all ballots cast by mail for the November elections would arrive in time to be counted. Meanwhile, there were reports from across the country that curbside mail collection boxes and sorting machines in postal facilities were being removed. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
House Oversight Committee members demanded that DeJoy, a major GOP donor and fundraiser, explain himself. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called members back from vacation to address the issue, and state attorneys general prepared to take action. These are necessary reactions, but there must also be a big-picture response that addresses the roots of the Postal Service’s fiscal problems: a draconian congressional mandate that it fund pensions 75 years into the future and severe restrictions on how it can operate in competitive markets. Democrats have begun to embrace proposals to ease the burden on this enormously popular and vital agency. This fall they should go all in, with robust support for visionary reforms such as postal banking, which would allow post offices to provide basic financial services in underserved communities. Protect USPS Donald Trump and His Postmaster General Are Sabotaging Democracy in Plain Sight John Nichols
If it is a fight over the future of the Postal Service that Trump and the Republicans want, give it to them. People in rural towns and urban neighborhoods don’t just want to vote by mail. They want to vote for a future that will keep the mail moving for generations to come.


thenation--2020-08-20--So Far, 2020 Has Been Our Year of Magical Thinking

So many of us , including me , have been focused on the failure of the federal response to Covid-19 , watching President Trump ’ s catastrophe-by-public-policy roll out day after day since late February .
I ’ ve written a lot about it in these pages .
In a misplaced triumphalism , some people in states that have managed to have a relatively quiet summer with low rates of Covid-19 cases have chastised those in states with renewed outbreaks as being foolish or unheeding of scientific advice , as governors still slow-walk the response to the disease and ordinary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gatherings .
We all like to think of ourselves as different , doing the right thing , doing our part .
However , it ’ s not just in red states that wishful thinking has led us astray .
In the early days of the epidemic in New York City , Health and Hospitals President and CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz told Mayor Bill de Blasio not to shut down the city , even as officials in NYC ’ s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene were warning him not to wait any longer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days ticked on .
I remember receiving a series of phone calls from activist colleagues—and some politicians from the city—who painted a picture of a mayor who wanted the rose-colored glasses handed to him , rather than seeing the truth of what was about to hit us .
By the beginning of August , the health commissioner Oxiris Barbot quit , with Katz and his acolytes from Health and Hospitals taking over the Covid response , sidelining one of the world ’ s great municipal public health departments .
But political intrigue aside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ further this summer , perhaps as a coping mechanism .
Many of us have grasped at tidbits of scientific information to conjure a bridge to the future through the imminent arrival of a vaccine , or the fantasy that perhaps herd immunity can be achieved more quickly than we thought .
Last month I wrote about the difficulties in developing a vaccine , which are about the nature of serendipity in science—hard to overcome despite our best and most determined efforts .
This month , I ’ ve watched some colleagues suggest that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small to moderate fraction ( 10–50 percent ) of the population is exposed to the virus .
How tantalizing is it to think that places like New York City might already be over the worst of the pandemic , with community-wide protection already in existence in some pockets of the city—and with similar protection just around the corner for other neighborhoods in cities and towns hard hit by the virus ?
The New York Times article I linked to above includes caveats , but the headline “ What if ‘ Herd Immunity ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traffics in hope .
Putting these hypotheses to the test entails giving in to a temptation we all feel right now : Let ’ s just go back to normal and see what happens .
But that ’ s a dangerous game .
Relaxing social distancing even further on a quest to step into the promised land of herd immunity risks the lives of our families , friends , and neighbors .
As my colleague Virginia Pitzer , a mathematical epidemiologist here at the Yale School of Public Health , told The New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nowhere near back to normal in our daily behavior .
To think that we can just stop doing all that and go back to normal and not see a rise in cases I think is wrong , is incorrect.
” The New Lysenkoism in Washington ‘ We Are Not Even Beginning to Be Over This Pandemic ’ Yet we are all testing the waters .
This spring I wouldn ’ t have considered seeing friends in an indoor setting .
But I ’ ve done it twice now , knowing the risks .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and I don ’ t want to pretend to be the poster boy for public health absolutism—I ’ m trying to minimize risk in my daily life , and it ’ s getting harder and harder to do .
As my colleague Julia Marcus has suggested , borrowing a term from the movement for the rights of people who use drugs , we ’ re all harm reductionists now .
But managing risk means trying to weigh the evidence , trying to avoid what you know is a potential high-risk exposure , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might be lower risk so they don ’ t cumulatively add up over time to trouble .
This has to be an active , deliberative process—not just throwing caution to the wind and making post-hoc rationalizations for what you wanted to do all along .
This virus is here for a while—we have to find a way to live with it safely .
As with HIV , it ’ s hard to ask people to say no to sex and drugs , but we can help each other learn safer sex and injection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 1980s and ’ 90s during the AIDS epidemic , but now having to build tools for safer living overall .
One of the places in which I am seeing caution thrown to the wind , post-hoc rationalizations aplenty , and lots of magical thinking is on university campuses .
Millions of students will return to colleges and graduate and professional schools in the next few days .
Doing this safely , minimizing harms , means looking the facts in the face .
If a school is in a red zone—where community-wide infection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one can stop infections on campus .
The University of North Carolina rushed headlong into classes last week and now has at least four Covid-19 clusters on campus .
They ’ ve moved to remote learning as of Wednesday .
My colleagues David Paltiel at Yale and Rochelle Walensky at Massachusetts General Hospital have shown that universities need to test two or three times a week to keep an outbreak from getting out of control .
In a survey of over 500 colleges and universities , less than 20 percent plan on such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plan to do any testing at all .
Even with frequent testing—my own university , Yale , plans to test twice a week—everything else has to go right to prevent the virus from spreading across campus .
Last month , Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos—who is also the head of one of Yale ’ s residential colleges—warned : “ We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections—and possibly deaths—in our community…You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exposition of the impact we may see in the weeks ahead .
Yet university presidents are saying they can keep students safe despite this , with some saying even if they had access to testing , they wouldn ’ t use it .
The most egregious case I ’ ve seen so far is University of Michigan President Dr. Mark Schissel , who suggested that students would use testing as an excuse to behave badly , as in : I got a negative test today , so I can party tonight .
Grasping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ open up one of the largest campuses in the country without proper safeguards , Schlissel ended up telling a whopper of a lie , too , claiming this is what happened with gay men in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s : that on receiving an HIV-negative test , we were going out and having unsafe sex galore .
It ’ s a fabricated tale , stigmatizing gay men all over again as vectors of disease and infection .
We ’ re going to see a whole lot of this panic-blaming , deflection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ begins , as colleges and universities , and even primary and secondary schools reopen without the kind of active , deliberative process I described above to manage risk in the context of the evidence ( acknowledging that in some cases the risk will be just too high to do what we ’ d like to do . )
Yes , our government has exposed us to this risk , and hasn ’ t given us what we need to keep safe .
But wishful thinking can make things a whole lot worse .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Students ’ Health Winter is coming .
As the great science reporter Helen Branswell from STAT News wrote last week , we squandered our summer , the last best chance to quash Covid-19 in our country before we all head inside to riskier environments as the cold weather starts and our seasonal influenza epidemic gears up for a collision with a resurgence of Covid-19 all over the nation .
Yes , our president , our governors , our mayors have all failed us in myriad ways .
But we ’ ve got to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hardship of vanquishing this epidemic even as it falls on us falls even harder on others with far fewer resources than most of us have .
There is no easy out for us—any of us .
This is a multiyear event unlike any we ’ ve ever experienced in our lifetimes in the United States .
We ’ ve got to find a clearheadedness , one that tries to keep focused on what we know from the science , the data , to guide us .
Grasping for straws of hope and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we have seen over the past few weeks .
But they ’ re supremely unhelpful given what we need to do now .
We ’ re going to have to find a new solidarity to make it through the next few months , to face the prospect together of more lockdowns , and muster support for our leaders to do this with less pain than we ’ ve seen to date .
If 2020 was the year of magical thinking , 2021 could be the year of living dangerously , unless we get @ @ @ @ @

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So many of us, including me, have been focused on the failure of the federal response to Covid-19, watching President Trump’s catastrophe-by-public-policy roll out day after day since late February. I’ve written a lot about it in these pages. In a misplaced triumphalism, some people in states that have managed to have a relatively quiet summer with low rates of Covid-19 cases have chastised those in states with renewed outbreaks as being foolish or unheeding of scientific advice, as governors still slow-walk the response to the disease and ordinary people shun masks and flock to social gatherings. We all like to think of ourselves as different, doing the right thing, doing our part.
However, it’s not just in red states that wishful thinking has led us astray. In the early days of the epidemic in New York City, Health and Hospitals President and CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz told Mayor Bill de Blasio not to shut down the city, even as officials in NYC’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene were warning him not to wait any longer, growing exasperated and frantic as the days ticked on. I remember receiving a series of phone calls from activist colleagues—and some politicians from the city—who painted a picture of a mayor who wanted the rose-colored glasses handed to him, rather than seeing the truth of what was about to hit us. By the beginning of August, the health commissioner Oxiris Barbot quit, with Katz and his acolytes from Health and Hospitals taking over the Covid response, sidelining one of the world’s great municipal public health departments.
But political intrigue aside, magical thinking has been elevated even further this summer, perhaps as a coping mechanism. Many of us have grasped at tidbits of scientific information to conjure a bridge to the future through the imminent arrival of a vaccine, or the fantasy that perhaps herd immunity can be achieved more quickly than we thought. Last month I wrote about the difficulties in developing a vaccine, which are about the nature of serendipity in science—hard to overcome despite our best and most determined efforts. This month, I’ve watched some colleagues suggest that herd immunity could be achieved after a small to moderate fraction (10–50 percent) of the population is exposed to the virus.
How tantalizing is it to think that places like New York City might already be over the worst of the pandemic, with community-wide protection already in existence in some pockets of the city—and with similar protection just around the corner for other neighborhoods in cities and towns hard hit by the virus? The New York Times article I linked to above includes caveats, but the headline “What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?” traffics in hope. Putting these hypotheses to the test entails giving in to a temptation we all feel right now: Let’s just go back to normal and see what happens. But that’s a dangerous game. Relaxing social distancing even further on a quest to step into the promised land of herd immunity risks the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. As my colleague Virginia Pitzer, a mathematical epidemiologist here at the Yale School of Public Health, told The New York Times: “We are still nowhere near back to normal in our daily behavior. To think that we can just stop doing all that and go back to normal and not see a rise in cases I think is wrong, is incorrect.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann More From Gregg Gonsalves These New Alzheimer’s Drugs Are a Travesty July 27, 2023 It's Not “Unreasonable” to Want to Change Our Rotten Health Care System June 1, 2023 Now More Than Ever, We Need to Fight, Not Despair May 11, 2023
Yet we are all testing the waters. This spring I wouldn’t have considered seeing friends in an indoor setting. But I’ve done it twice now, knowing the risks. Maintaining social distancing is so difficult, and I don’t want to pretend to be the poster boy for public health absolutism—I’m trying to minimize risk in my daily life, and it’s getting harder and harder to do. As my colleague Julia Marcus has suggested, borrowing a term from the movement for the rights of people who use drugs, we’re all harm reductionists now.
But managing risk means trying to weigh the evidence, trying to avoid what you know is a potential high-risk exposure, while keeping track of even those activities that might be lower risk so they don’t cumulatively add up over time to trouble. This has to be an active, deliberative process—not just throwing caution to the wind and making post-hoc rationalizations for what you wanted to do all along. This virus is here for a while—we have to find a way to live with it safely. As with HIV, it’s hard to ask people to say no to sex and drugs, but we can help each other learn safer sex and injection practices, just as we did in the 1980s and ’90s during the AIDS epidemic, but now having to build tools for safer living overall.
One of the places in which I am seeing caution thrown to the wind, post-hoc rationalizations aplenty, and lots of magical thinking is on university campuses. Millions of students will return to colleges and graduate and professional schools in the next few days. Doing this safely, minimizing harms, means looking the facts in the face. If a school is in a red zone—where community-wide infection is high—it’s hard to believe one can stop infections on campus. The University of North Carolina rushed headlong into classes last week and now has at least four Covid-19 clusters on campus. They’ve moved to remote learning as of Wednesday. Current Issue View our current issue
My colleagues David Paltiel at Yale and Rochelle Walensky at Massachusetts General Hospital have shown that universities need to test two or three times a week to keep an outbreak from getting out of control. In a survey of over 500 colleges and universities, less than 20 percent plan on such regular testing—and only slightly more than half plan to do any testing at all. Even with frequent testing—my own university, Yale, plans to test twice a week—everything else has to go right to prevent the virus from spreading across campus. Last month, Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos—who is also the head of one of Yale’s residential colleges—warned: “We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections—and possibly deaths—in our community…You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.” This is the most clear-headed exposition of the impact we may see in the weeks ahead. Yet university presidents are saying they can keep students safe despite this, with some saying even if they had access to testing, they wouldn’t use it.
The most egregious case I’ve seen so far is University of Michigan President Dr. Mark Schissel, who suggested that students would use testing as an excuse to behave badly, as in: I got a negative test today, so I can party tonight. Grasping for straws to justify his decision to open up one of the largest campuses in the country without proper safeguards, Schlissel ended up telling a whopper of a lie, too, claiming this is what happened with gay men in the ’80s and ’90s: that on receiving an HIV-negative test, we were going out and having unsafe sex galore. It’s a fabricated tale, stigmatizing gay men all over again as vectors of disease and infection. We’re going to see a whole lot of this panic-blaming, deflection, and outright lies as the fall begins, as colleges and universities, and even primary and secondary schools reopen without the kind of active, deliberative process I described above to manage risk in the context of the evidence (acknowledging that in some cases the risk will be just too high to do what we’d like to do.) Yes, our government has exposed us to this risk, and hasn’t given us what we need to keep safe. But wishful thinking can make things a whole lot worse. Related Article Universities Are Playing Fast and Loose With Students’ Health Cynthia Greenlee
Winter is coming. As the great science reporter Helen Branswell from STAT News wrote last week, we squandered our summer, the last best chance to quash Covid-19 in our country before we all head inside to riskier environments as the cold weather starts and our seasonal influenza epidemic gears up for a collision with a resurgence of Covid-19 all over the nation. Yes, our president, our governors, our mayors have all failed us in myriad ways. But we’ve got to put aside magical thinking and admit that the hardship of vanquishing this epidemic even as it falls on us falls even harder on others with far fewer resources than most of us have. There is no easy out for us—any of us. This is a multiyear event unlike any we’ve ever experienced in our lifetimes in the United States. We’ve got to find a clearheadedness, one that tries to keep focused on what we know from the science, the data, to guide us.
Grasping for straws of hope and casting blame may both be natural reactions—as we have seen over the past few weeks. But they’re supremely unhelpful given what we need to do now. We’re going to have to find a new solidarity to make it through the next few months, to face the prospect together of more lockdowns, and muster support for our leaders to do this with less pain than we’ve seen to date. If 2020 was the year of magical thinking, 2021 could be the year of living dangerously, unless we get ourselves back on track.


thenation--2020-08-20--As Democrats Leave Cities, Rural Areas See an Uptick in Voter Registration

reene ounty , —Maybe Republicans in Greene County should be careful what they wish for .
In a new marketing campaign , the county is doing its best to convince people who are looking for “ solace in a more secluded setting ” —polite code for city dwellers looking to escape Covid-19—that our small , rural county is the right place to be .
Realtors say they don ’ t have enough houses to meet the demand , and sales prices are up .
I wonder how many Republicans are aware of the political implications of what is going on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the heavily Democratic New York metro area to relocate here , or even just to buy a second home here—which entitles owners to vote here if they choose—the more quickly the Republican Party is apt to find itself losing its grip on power .
Right now , that may seem hard to believe .
The County Legislature is overwhelmingly Republican , as are the vast majority of officeholders at the town level .
But underneath , even before the virus , Democrats were quietly making gains .
Where I Live , Hostility @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rural New York Is in the Streets , Marching for Black Lives In Rural America , Opioids Kill Many More Than Covid-19 More in this series “ In the last two or three years , we ’ ve had many more registered Democrats than we ’ ve ever had before , ” the head of the local Democratic Committee told me .
Our Durham town board is still all Republican , but last year , two Democrats ran for seats and , while neither of them won , they made sufficiently respectable showings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s the same story elsewhere .
In nearby Windham , whose ski resort is a draw for affluent New Yorkers , Democratic registration jumped 40 percent between 2014 and 2019 , according to Crane Davis , who for years has studied data patterns for the Democratic County Committee .
In Catskill , the county seat , the jump was 30 percent .
He says he used to tell his wife ( Doreen Davis , the former Catskill town supervisor ) that Democrats “ will run this town by 2040.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looks like it ’ s going to be sooner.
” In the town of Lexington , Crane Davis ’ s analysis of New York State Board of Elections figures shows , Democratic registration grew by 15 percent in five years and now outstrips the combined Republican and Conservative total .
“ We started three or four years ago , at farmers ’ markets and similar places , to get weekenders to switch their registration , ” says Bennett Wine , a first-term Democratic town board member .
“ I have to assume that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Paull and Tom Kalin , two Democratic neighbors of mine , originally switched their registration from New York City to Durham in 2018 after learning that such a thing was possible .
Over several months , they convinced a dozen other local second-home owners to do the same , helping to raise the number of registered Democrats by 10 percent over five years .
Getting involved “ was like a coping mechanism ” to deal with the Trump era , says Kalin .
“ It seemed that urgent.
” The most dramatic indicator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the election of Representative Antonio Delgado in the 19th district two years ago .
His victory over a Republican incumbent was the result of many factors , but the increasing number of registered Democrats was certainly a key one .
In 2012 , the first year of existence for the then-new 19th district , registered Republicans and Conservatives together outnumbered Democrats by about 15,000 .
But by early this year , Democrats had taken the lead .
To be sure , the path to Democratic dominance may not always be smooth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ registration gap .
Doreen Davis was narrowly defeated for reelection in Catskill last year by her Republican opponent , a loss that Crane Davis blames on a lack of support from younger Democratic newcomers who have a more “ radical ” agenda .
In a situation in which Republicans are still in the majority , he says , “ the only way to win is crossover votes.
” And Bennett Wine cautions that it ’ s important not to make too much of the virus-induced surge of new residents .
“ There was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after the attacks in 2001 , ” he says .
“ But that lasted only a year or so and then petered out.
” There ’ s also the matter of broadband , which is sorely lacking in many rural areas , including my own .
Craig Paull and Tom Kalin say they and three neighbors have just agreed to pay a total of $ 28,000 to bring cable to their stretch of country road , thus enabling them to live here full-time and work from home .
Despite this and other problems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to think that the Democratic political gains will continue no matter what the course of the virus .
Last year , two researchers reported in an article for the US Department of Agriculture that the decline in the US rural population had been reversing in rural areas “ with attractive scenic qualities , or those near large cities.
” Since 2011 , the article said , “ fewer people have been moving out of rural areas and more people have been moving in.
” I ’ m certainly not saying that Greene County @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But after living through several elections here , I ’ ve come to the conclusion that if the Democratic Party is going to start winning races in rural areas like mine , it ’ s not going to be because it can convince enough existing voters to change their allegiance .
Rather , it will be the result of new voters who choose to be Democrats from the start .
Greene County , by all means , put out the welcome mat !

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G reene C ounty, N.Y. —Maybe Republicans in Greene County should be careful what they wish for.
In a new marketing campaign, the county is doing its best to convince people who are looking for “solace in a more secluded setting”—polite code for city dwellers looking to escape Covid-19—that our small, rural county is the right place to be. Realtors say they don’t have enough houses to meet the demand, and sales prices are up.
I wonder how many Republicans are aware of the political implications of what is going on: The more the county encourages people from the heavily Democratic New York metro area to relocate here, or even just to buy a second home here—which entitles owners to vote here if they choose—the more quickly the Republican Party is apt to find itself losing its grip on power.
Right now, that may seem hard to believe. The County Legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, as are the vast majority of officeholders at the town level. But underneath, even before the virus, Democrats were quietly making gains. All Politics Is Local My Neighbors Certainly Didn’t Celebrate Biden’s Win, but They Also Didn’t Publicly Mourn Trump’s Loss Karen Rothmyer Trump’s Response to Losing the Vote Calvin Trillin One Black Lives Matter Protest in Rural New York Opens the Door to Change Karen Rothmyer
“In the last two or three years, we’ve had many more registered Democrats than we’ve ever had before,” the head of the local Democratic Committee told me. Our Durham town board is still all Republican, but last year, two Democrats ran for seats and, while neither of them won, they made sufficiently respectable showings that one is planning to try again.
It’s the same story elsewhere. In nearby Windham, whose ski resort is a draw for affluent New Yorkers, Democratic registration jumped 40 percent between 2014 and 2019, according to Crane Davis, who for years has studied data patterns for the Democratic County Committee. In Catskill, the county seat, the jump was 30 percent. He says he used to tell his wife (Doreen Davis, the former Catskill town supervisor) that Democrats “will run this town by 2040.” Now, he says, “it looks like it’s going to be sooner.”
In the town of Lexington, Crane Davis’s analysis of New York State Board of Elections figures shows, Democratic registration grew by 15 percent in five years and now outstrips the combined Republican and Conservative total. “We started three or four years ago, at farmers’ markets and similar places, to get weekenders to switch their registration,” says Bennett Wine, a first-term Democratic town board member. “I have to assume that’s part of it.” Current Issue View our current issue
Craig Paull and Tom Kalin, two Democratic neighbors of mine, originally switched their registration from New York City to Durham in 2018 after learning that such a thing was possible. Over several months, they convinced a dozen other local second-home owners to do the same, helping to raise the number of registered Democrats by 10 percent over five years. Getting involved “was like a coping mechanism” to deal with the Trump era, says Kalin. “It seemed that urgent.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The most dramatic indicator of growing Democratic power in this area was the election of Representative Antonio Delgado in the 19th district two years ago. His victory over a Republican incumbent was the result of many factors, but the increasing number of registered Democrats was certainly a key one. In 2012, the first year of existence for the then-new 19th district, registered Republicans and Conservatives together outnumbered Democrats by about 15,000. But by early this year, Democrats had taken the lead.
To be sure, the path to Democratic dominance may not always be smooth, at least until Democrats further close the registration gap. Doreen Davis was narrowly defeated for reelection in Catskill last year by her Republican opponent, a loss that Crane Davis blames on a lack of support from younger Democratic newcomers who have a more “radical” agenda. In a situation in which Republicans are still in the majority, he says, “the only way to win is crossover votes.”
And Bennett Wine cautions that it’s important not to make too much of the virus-induced surge of new residents. “There was a huge interest in buying homes here after the attacks in 2001,” he says. “But that lasted only a year or so and then petered out.”
There’s also the matter of broadband, which is sorely lacking in many rural areas, including my own. Craig Paull and Tom Kalin say they and three neighbors have just agreed to pay a total of $28,000 to bring cable to their stretch of country road, thus enabling them to live here full-time and work from home.
Despite this and other problems, however, there are strong reasons to think that the Democratic political gains will continue no matter what the course of the virus. Last year, two researchers reported in an article for the US Department of Agriculture that the decline in the US rural population had been reversing in rural areas “with attractive scenic qualities, or those near large cities.” Since 2011, the article said, “fewer people have been moving out of rural areas and more people have been moving in.”
I’m certainly not saying that Greene County is going to turn blue overnight. But after living through several elections here, I’ve come to the conclusion that if the Democratic Party is going to start winning races in rural areas like mine, it’s not going to be because it can convince enough existing voters to change their allegiance. Rather, it will be the result of new voters who choose to be Democrats from the start.
Greene County, by all means, put out the welcome mat!


thenation--2020-08-20--School Reopenings Are Only Going to Get More Chaotic

On the second day of the new school year , a high school sophomore named Hannah Watters snapped a photo of the hallway at her school in the suburbs of Atlanta .
Kids in backpacks were standing shoulder to shoulder .
Few were wearing masks .
“ This is not ok , ” she tweeted .
Within four days , six students and three staff members reported new cases of Covid-19 , and classes were moved online for the following Monday and Tuesday .
Brian Otott , the superintendent of the county school district , maintained that it wasn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Watters , meanwhile , received a five-day suspension— since rescinded—for sharing her photo online.1 The story of school reopenings is a study in skewed priorities .
For weeks , Donald Trump ’ s administration and Republican officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have insisted on the necessity of in-classroom learning .
But as the summer ticked by , the White House did little to ensure that in-person instruction would be safe ; Trump ’ s leadership on the matter amounted to an all-caps demand issued via tweet in July : “ SCHOOLS MUST @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Instead , his administration fixated on loosening restrictions on businesses , which meant giving up on controlling the coronavirus ’ s spread .
As restaurants and hair salons began to bring back customers , cases in the South and Southwest surged , making school reopenings increasingly dangerous.2 Within weeks of the school year beginning , more than 1,000 students and school staffers were quarantined in Georgia ’ s Cherokee County .
So were more than 80 students in Tennessee ’ s Putnam County and over a dozen at an elementary school in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had to put students in quarantine just hours into the first day of school .
In Mississippi , which started to reopen schools the same week the state led the country in per capita Covid deaths , more than 120 students and staffers in the Corinth School District had to be quarantined , as well as more than 100 students in Gulfport .
Cases have been confirmed in at least 22 schools across the state.3 What ’ s happening in America ’ s schools , as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it in late @ @ @ @ @ @ @ While the extent to which children and teenagers transmit Covid-19 is not fully known , it is clear that they are not immune to the virus : Cases among children jumped 90 percent between July 9 and August 6 , according to the American Academy of Pediatrics .
And although Trump has argued that other countries have reopened schools with “ no problems , ” the state of the pandemic is far worse here .
Of 13 countries analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation—including Germany , South Korea , and Israel—all but two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they resumed classes .
In the US the rate was approaching 8 percent as school began to reopen , with some states—including Georgia , Florida , and Arizona—topping 10 and even 15 percent.4 Given these conditions , many teachers and some parents are balking .
The American Federation of Teachers gave its 1.7 million members permission to go on “ safety strikes ” if they believe that their schools ’ reopening plans put them in danger , and teachers in Michigan , Arizona , and other states are considering or have moved forward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response , critics of teachers ’ unions have accused teachers of extortion .
Others say teachers should willingly put themselves in harm ’ s way just like nurses , transit employees , and other essential workers .
But no worker should be forced to accept needlessly unsafe conditions .
The fact that teachers ’ unions appear powerful says less about their members than it does about the abysmal state of labor rights in other essential industries.5 Why Portland Became the Test Case for Trump ’ s Secret Police Black Lives Matter Protests Are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Will Covid-19 Be a Turning Point in the Fight Against Racial Disparities in Health Care ?
Teachers are regularly asked to cover gaping holes in America ’ s social safety net .
In addition to education , the public school system provides meals for nearly 30 million kids , counseling and other forms of developmental support , and as we ’ ve recently been reminded , free child care .
Now schools are also being asked to absorb the fallout from the Trump administration ’ s botched response to the pandemic .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reopening in person because education is valued .
Our leaders are turning to education to get people back to work in an economy collapsing by the minute , ” one teacher wrote .
The kinds of questions that cloud reopening are dizzying , from how best to control crowding in hallways and on buses to what to do about shared bathrooms and lunchrooms to how to properly ventilate buildings .
“ Do I keep my classroom door open to improve air circulation or close it to protect my students from an active shooter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of these questions is not impossible , but it ’ s expensive .
Smaller classes mean more teachers , more space , and staggered schedules .
Equipping schools with enough hand sanitizer alone will cost the average district $ 39,517 a year , according to one analysis .
Necessary protective measures for a district with 3,600 students will cost nearly $ 1.8 million for the year—no small sum , considering that public schools are often so underfunded that many teachers purchase their own classroom supplies.7 Congress allocated $ 13.2 billion for K–12 schools @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Now Democrats in Congress have asked for $ 430 billion for public education , including $ 175 billion for K–12 schools and $ 50 billion for child care .
Senate Republicans included $ 70 billion in funding for K–12 schools in their $ 1 trillion relief package released in late July .
But the bulk of the money in the GOP proposal is contingent on schools reopening at least partially , which some education experts have described as a punishment for schools that decide they can ’ t do so safely .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ districts are starting the school year with remote learning , according to Education Week . )
A separate bill from Washington Senator Patty Murray that would provide $ 175 billion has yet to been taken up by committee .
Meanwhile , Trump , DeSantis , and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have threatened to withhold funding from schools that don ’ t reopen.8 None of this is to dismiss the horrors of remote learning , which widens existing economic and racial chasms and is burdensome in the best of circumstances .
While wealthier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pods or microschools , other families are struggling just to get online .
Nearly 17 million children did not have high-speed Internet at home in 2018 , and more than 7 million didn ’ t have a computer in their household .
Many of the families most burdened by online instruction are also among those most at risk from the virus.9 The chaos of early reopenings suggests that the most urgent question may not be how to safely resume in-person instruction for everyone but rather how to get families the services and support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vacuum of national leadership , many districts are making their own plans .
Some schools in Massachusetts and California are offering in-classroom instruction only to targeted groups of students for whom remote learning might be particularly challenging , such as young children , those with special needs , kids from low-income families , and those who are learning English as a second language .
Indianapolis is opening learning hubs specifically for homeless students .
Many cities and nonprofits like the YMCA are trying to fill the child care gap , offering students space @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reimagine instruction are not sufficient , but they could be expanded with an infusion of federal funds.10 For schools , Covid-19 is a new crisis stacked on top of a very old one .
Funding for public education has dropped precipitously since the Great Recession : In 2015 more than half of states were spending less per student than they did in 2008 .
Many of the equity issues that Trump and DeVos cite in their push to reopen schools are long- standing , exacerbated by funding schemes that tie school resources to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Both are political choices ; neither will be resolved simply by reopening schools this fall .
Other choices loom on the horizon as the virus decimates state revenues .
The pandemic may have reminded Americans of how much they need schools and teachers .
It ’ s also made it clear that the country is a long way from making them a priority.11

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
This article appears in the September 7/14, 2020 issue.
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On the second day of the new school year, a high school sophomore named Hannah Watters snapped a photo of the hallway at her school in the suburbs of Atlanta. Kids in backpacks were standing shoulder to shoulder. Few were wearing masks. “This is not ok,” she tweeted. Within four days, six students and three staff members reported new cases of Covid-19, and classes were moved online for the following Monday and Tuesday. Brian Otott, the superintendent of the county school district, maintained that it wasn’t possible to require mask wearing. Watters, meanwhile, received a five-day suspension—since rescinded—for sharing her photo online.1
The story of school reopenings is a study in skewed priorities. For weeks, Donald Trump’s administration and Republican officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have insisted on the necessity of in-classroom learning. But as the summer ticked by, the White House did little to ensure that in-person instruction would be safe; Trump’s leadership on the matter amounted to an all-caps demand issued via tweet in July: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Instead, his administration fixated on loosening restrictions on businesses, which meant giving up on controlling the coronavirus’s spread. As restaurants and hair salons began to bring back customers, cases in the South and Southwest surged, making school reopenings increasingly dangerous.2
Within weeks of the school year beginning, more than 1,000 students and school staffers were quarantined in Georgia’s Cherokee County. So were more than 80 students in Tennessee’s Putnam County and over a dozen at an elementary school in Florida. A junior high in Indiana had to put students in quarantine just hours into the first day of school. In Mississippi, which started to reopen schools the same week the state led the country in per capita Covid deaths, more than 120 students and staffers in the Corinth School District had to be quarantined, as well as more than 100 students in Gulfport. Cases have been confirmed in at least 22 schools across the state.3
What’s happening in America’s schools, as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it in late July, is an “experiment.” While the extent to which children and teenagers transmit Covid-19 is not fully known, it is clear that they are not immune to the virus: Cases among children jumped 90 percent between July 9 and August 6, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. And although Trump has argued that other countries have reopened schools with “no problems,” the state of the pandemic is far worse here. Of 13 countries analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation—including Germany, South Korea, and Israel—all but two had positivity rates below 4 percent when they resumed classes. In the US the rate was approaching 8 percent as school began to reopen, with some states—including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona—topping 10 and even 15 percent.4 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Given these conditions, many teachers and some parents are balking. The American Federation of Teachers gave its 1.7 million members permission to go on “safety strikes” if they believe that their schools’ reopening plans put them in danger, and teachers in Michigan, Arizona, and other states are considering or have moved forward with plans to do so. In response, critics of teachers’ unions have accused teachers of extortion. Others say teachers should willingly put themselves in harm’s way just like nurses, transit employees, and other essential workers. But no worker should be forced to accept needlessly unsafe conditions. The fact that teachers’ unions appear powerful says less about their members than it does about the abysmal state of labor rights in other essential industries.5 More From Zoë Carpenter The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next? October 5, 2021 Sexual Assault in the Military Is Still Going Unchecked. Will Congress Finally Act? July 27, 2021 Extreme Heat in Portland Is an ‘Acute Disaster on Chronic Disaster’ June 30, 2021
Teachers are regularly asked to cover gaping holes in America’s social safety net. In addition to education, the public school system provides meals for nearly 30 million kids, counseling and other forms of developmental support, and as we’ve recently been reminded, free child care. Now schools are also being asked to absorb the fallout from the Trump administration’s botched response to the pandemic. “The truth is that schools are not reopening in person because education is valued. Our leaders are turning to education to get people back to work in an economy collapsing by the minute,” one teacher wrote. The kinds of questions that cloud reopening are dizzying, from how best to control crowding in hallways and on buses to what to do about shared bathrooms and lunchrooms to how to properly ventilate buildings. “Do I keep my classroom door open to improve air circulation or close it to protect my students from an active shooter?” another teacher asked.6
Resolving many of these questions is not impossible, but it’s expensive. Smaller classes mean more teachers, more space, and staggered schedules. Equipping schools with enough hand sanitizer alone will cost the average district $39,517 a year, according to one analysis. Necessary protective measures for a district with 3,600 students will cost nearly $1.8 million for the year—no small sum, considering that public schools are often so underfunded that many teachers purchase their own classroom supplies.7 Current Issue View our current issue
Congress allocated $13.2 billion for K–12 schools in a relief bill passed in April. Now Democrats in Congress have asked for $430 billion for public education, including $175 billion for K–12 schools and $50 billion for child care. Senate Republicans included $70 billion in funding for K–12 schools in their $1 trillion relief package released in late July. But the bulk of the money in the GOP proposal is contingent on schools reopening at least partially, which some education experts have described as a punishment for schools that decide they can’t do so safely. (Twenty of the largest 25 school districts are starting the school year with remote learning, according to Education Week.) A separate bill from Washington Senator Patty Murray that would provide $175 billion has yet to been taken up by committee. Meanwhile, Trump, DeSantis, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have threatened to withhold funding from schools that don’t reopen.8
None of this is to dismiss the horrors of remote learning, which widens existing economic and racial chasms and is burdensome in the best of circumstances. While wealthier parents are hiring tutors for at-home learning pods or microschools, other families are struggling just to get online. Nearly 17 million children did not have high-speed Internet at home in 2018, and more than 7 million didn’t have a computer in their household. Many of the families most burdened by online instruction are also among those most at risk from the virus.9
The chaos of early reopenings suggests that the most urgent question may not be how to safely resume in-person instruction for everyone but rather how to get families the services and support normally provided by schools. In the vacuum of national leadership, many districts are making their own plans. Some schools in Massachusetts and California are offering in-classroom instruction only to targeted groups of students for whom remote learning might be particularly challenging, such as young children, those with special needs, kids from low-income families, and those who are learning English as a second language. Indianapolis is opening learning hubs specifically for homeless students. Many cities and nonprofits like the YMCA are trying to fill the child care gap, offering students space for remote schoolwork. These efforts to reimagine instruction are not sufficient, but they could be expanded with an infusion of federal funds.10
For schools, Covid-19 is a new crisis stacked on top of a very old one. Funding for public education has dropped precipitously since the Great Recession: In 2015 more than half of states were spending less per student than they did in 2008. Many of the equity issues that Trump and DeVos cite in their push to reopen schools are long-standing, exacerbated by funding schemes that tie school resources to the local tax base and by segregation. Both are political choices; neither will be resolved simply by reopening schools this fall. Other choices loom on the horizon as the virus decimates state revenues. The pandemic may have reminded Americans of how much they need schools and teachers. It’s also made it clear that the country is a long way from making them a priority.11


thenation--2020-08-20--Live Chat: Join ‘The Nation’ for the Democratic National Convention

Too much has happened since last we chatted .
The pace at which the crises facing our nation keep unfolding @ @ @ @ @ the pain of our collective and individual losses is too enormous to put into words @ @ @ @ @ .
We are , on this last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention , @ @ @ @ @ November 3 general election in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate @ @ @ @ @ take on President Donald Trump and—unless something truly wild happens next week—his VP Mike Pence @ @ @ @ @ Democratic convention , we ’ re joined by The Nation ’ s national affairs correspondents @ @ @ @ @ Nichols , and Jeet Heer ; our justice correspondent , Elie Mystal , and strikes @ @ @ @ @ columnist Katha Pollitt ; and our editor in chief , D.D .
Guttenplan .
Log @ @ @ @ @ for commentary , quips , and analysis .
Just because we ’ re physically distanced @ @ @ @ @ have to be socially apart .

Too much has happened since last we chatted. The pace at which the crises facing our nation keep unfolding has been exhausting, and the pain of our collective and individual losses is too enormous to put into words. But there is hope. We are, on this last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, just 75 days from the November 3 general election in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, will take on President Donald Trump and—unless something truly wild happens next week—his VP, Mike Pence.
To wrap up the Democratic convention, we’re joined by The Nation’s national affairs correspondents, Joan Walsh, John Nichols, and Jeet Heer; our justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, and strikes correspondent, Jane McAlevey; columnist Katha Pollitt; and our editor, D.D. Guttenplan. Log on at 8:45 ET tonight for commentary, quips, and analysis. Just because we’re physically distanced doesn’t mean we have to be socially apart.
—Anna Hiatt, executive digital editor