PRICE $8.99 M AY 4, 2 0 20

QQ group:1067583220 Books Fuel the Future for Children

But when your family has to choose between books and your next meal – and your school is closed due to COVID-19 — hope fades.

It doesn’t have to be a choice. Get books and critical resources to kids in need. Make their futures bright.

Support First Book.

fi rstbook.org fi rstbookcanada.org MAY 4, 2020 英文杂志首发qq群 1067583220

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Steve Coll on the politics of COVID-19; Tom Sachs; hospital workers at the Four Seasons; Stephen Malkmus; a farewell to handshakes. Not all our ANNALS OF EPIDEMIOLOGY Charles Duhigg 16 The Pandemic Protocol award-winning Listening to the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

SHOUTS & MURMURS writing can Nick Hornby 23 What to Watch During the Lockdown: Month 28 be found CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLES in these pages. Siddhartha Mukherjee 24 After the Storm The flaws of our health-care system revealed.

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS 32 April 15, 2020 Twenty-four hours in New York’s struggle.

PORTFOLIO Karen Cunningham 48 A City Nurse with David Remnick Faces of the I.C.U.

FICTION Allan Gurganus 62 “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor”

THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE The New Yorker Today app Jill Lepore 70 Why the Kent State shootings still matter. is the best way to stay on top of BOOKS news and culture every day, as Anthony Gottlieb 76 The remarkable mind of Frank Ramsey. well as the magazine each week. 79 Briefly Noted Get a daily blend of reporting,

ON TELEVISION commentary, humor, and cartoons Doreen St. Félix 80 “#blackAF.” from the Web site, and browse magazine issues back to 2008. MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 82 Streaming Víkingur Ólafsson and Liza Lim. newyorker.com/go/today

POEMS Eavan Boland 28 “Eviction” Ada Limón 67 “The End of Poetry”

COVER Chris Ware “Still Life”

DRAWINGS Liza Donnelly, Robert Leighton, Amy Hwang, Available on iPad and iPhone Roz Chast, Mick Stevens, Liana Finck, Julia Suits, Frank Cotham, Lars Kenseth, Peter Steiner, Karl Stevens, Edward Steed, Elisabeth McNair, Ali Solomon SPOTS Pablo Amargo

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 4, 2020 1 PROMOTION

CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Duhigg (“The Pandemic Pro- Karen Cunningham (Portfolio, p. 88), tocol,” p. 16), the author of “The Power a photographer and a printmaker, is a of Habit” and “Smarter Faster Better,” nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. was a member of the Times team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explan- Allan Gurganus (Fiction, p. 62) is the atory reporting. author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” and “Local Souls.” Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 80), He will publish “The Uncollected a staff writer since 2017, is The New Stories of Allan Gurganus” next year. Yorker’s television critic. Ada Limón (Poem, p. 67), a current Gug- Siddhartha Mukherjee (“After the Storm,” genheim Fellow, is the author of five p. 28) won a Pulitzer Prize for his book poetry collections, including “The “The Emperor of All Maladies.” His Carrying,” which won the National most recent book is “The Gene.” Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Jill Lepore (A Critic at Large, p. 70) is Nick Hornby (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 23) a professor of history at Harvard and has written numerous books, including the host of the podcast “The Last “High Fidelity,” “About a Boy,” and Archive.” Her fourteenth book, “If “Fever Pitch.” His next novel, “Just Like Then,” will be published in September. You,” will come out later this year.

Chris Ware (Cover) has contributed Micah Hauser (The Talk of the Town, comic strips and covers since 1999. This p. 15) is a member of the magazine’s is his twenty-seventh cover. editorial staff.

Eavan Boland (Poem, p. 28) will publish Anthony Gottlieb (Books, p. 76) is the a new poetry collection, “The Histori- author of, most recently, “The Dream ans,” in the fall. of Enlightenment.”

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW Jonathan Blitzer on how New York Amanda Petrusich talks to Tori Amos City funeral-home workers are about politics, life on the road, and responding to the coronavirus crisis. the songwriter’s new memoir.

Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,

and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. YORKER; THE NEW SINNA NASSERI FOR LEFT: YORKER THE NEW FOR IVORY DEUN RIGHT:

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 4, 2020 THE MAIL PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

A HIGHER LOVE bereft at his loss, you have enlarged our comprehension of what is happening Casey Cep’s sophisticated analysis of behind the numbers. Truly, the only that quintessential New Yorker Dorothy thing spreading more rapidly than the Day made me forget the virus, at least virus is grief. for a few minutes, and look forward to Elizabeth M. Swift The New Yorker reading John Loughery and Blythe Ran­ Sylva, N.C. dolph’s biography of the would­be saint 1 Crossword: (Books, April 13th). But it also made me MISSION IN UGANDA want to put in a good word for Forster Introducing Batterham, who is sometimes miscon­ We, as the No White Saviors team, are strued as the villain of Day’s story. The writing in response to Ariel Levy’s arti­ Partner Mode usual understanding is that Batterham cle about Renée Bach, whose organiza­ was an atheist cad who “did not believe tion operated a dangerous, unregistered in marriage,” as Cep notes. But Robert medical clinic in Jinja, Uganda (“The Ellsberg, in his collection of Day’s let­ Mission,” April 13th). A core tenet of ters, reveals that the emotional relation­ our work is holding missionary and de­ ship between the two persisted for years. velopment organizations, such as the Why didn’t Batterham marry Day, de­ one run by Bach, accountable for their spite her entreaties? Surely their uncon­ unethical actions in local communities. ventionality as a couple was a signifi­ It is unfortunate that The New Yorker cant roadblock, as were their religious seems to feel that Bach, who is cur­ disagreements. (Batterham’s relatives, rently under investigation for her role whom I know through my academic in the deaths of multiple children, is endeavors, have told me that he lamented, more worthy of a sympathetic profile wryly, that Day “left me for another than those Ugandans whose lives were man—God.”) Perhaps a third factor irreversibly affected by her choices. The was that Day had already been married article represents a missed opportunity once, to Berkeley Tobey, whom she wed for the magazine to show how the hor­ You can now solve shortly after her abortion, and whom rific actions of Bach, like those of oth­ she abandoned a year later, in Europe. ers who abuse their power and privi­ our online crossword Nevertheless, the letters between Day lege, harmed the very people she was puzzles with a friend and Batterham show that they remained claiming to help. connected, if at a distance, for the rest We hope to make it clear that this who’s across the room of their lives. case should never be boiled down to a or halfway around Jack Selzer personal issue between N.W.S. and the world. 1State College, Penn. Bach. Our organization was formed out of a collective desire to put justice first THE DIMENSIONS OF GRIEF and to insure that human rights are up­ Start playing at held. Levy’s piece seems to privilege Thank you for publishing Jonathan Bach’s feelings over the lives of Ugan­ newyorker.com/crossword Blitzer’s beautiful eulogy for Juan Sana­ dans. This is a disservice not only to bria, a New York City doorman who your readers but to those whose voices passed away from COVID­19 (Postscript, are so often ignored. April 20th). During this time of con­ Alaso Olivia Patience, Kelsey Nielsen, stant statistical updates about numbers and Lubega Wendy of cases, I.C.U. admissions, available Kampala, Uganda ventilators, and deaths owing to the pandemic, it is easy to lose sight of the • magnitude of the human tragedy. By Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, telling the story of one man who be­ address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited came ill, and of the people—his family, for length and clarity, and may be published in his colleagues, and the residents of the any medium. We regret that owing to the volume building where he worked—who are of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 4, 2020 3 In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming.

APRIL 29 – M AY 5, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The century-old West Village piano bar Marie’s Crisis has shut its doors amid the pandemic, but the Broadway sing-along continues every night via Facebook Live. The bar’s crooning waitstaff is there, too. “It’s been an amazing experience to create this online community,” Yvette Monique Clark (above), who has worked at Marie’s Crisis for five years, says. (Her signature number: “When You’re Good to Mama,” from “Chicago.”) Catch her on Sundays and Thursdays, belting from her Flatbush apartment.

PHOTOGRAPH BY RYAN DUFFIN 1 production of the work, starring Edward Wat- frogs in Hilo, Hawaii; people in Rome singing DANCE son—the company’s resident antihero—and “Volare” during self-quarantine. McDowall con- Lauren Cuthbertson, on its YouTube chan- ceived of the series two years ago, at a time when nel.—M.H. (youtube.com/royaloperahouse) she was feeling burned out and “just wanted to “The Bright Stream” 1 stand still and listen to the birds”; its timeliness In 2005, the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York is unintentional and welcome as it transports under the direction of a young, little-known listeners with the quotidian joys of wandering choreographer—Alexei Ratmansky. Amid a PODCASTS around somewhere new.—Sarah Larson parade of blockbuster ballets, the company per- 1 formed one of his works, “The Bright Stream.” This spoof of Soviet-era propaganda—a happy Field Recordings farce set on a collective farm—turned out to A key part of the art of radio, as any narra- A RT be a total delight. The score, by Shostakovich, tive-audio producer will attest, is making field was infectious (who knew his music could be recordings: pure diegetic sound, recorded on lo- so jolly?), and the plot was worthy of Beau- cation, that conveys the aural texture of a place. “Judd” marchais. It put Ratmansky, now one of the In this new podcast from Eleanor McDowall, Donald Judd was the last great revolutionary world’s leading ballet choreographers, on the the series producer of BBC Radio 4’s “Short of modern art. The gorgeous boxy objects— map. Besides the wit of the choreography and Cuts,” field recordings become the art itself. he refused to call them sculptures—that the the appealing clarity of the storytelling, “The There’s the rumbling “Backyard Storm, Darwin, American artist constructed between the early Bright Stream” perfectly captures the exuberant Australia,” with sounds of a rapt, whispering nineteen-sixties and his death, from cancer, dancing style of the Bolshoi. On May 3, the five-year-old and a tropical storm rolling in; the in 1994, irreversibly altered the character of company will broadcast a 2012 performance barking dogs and twittering birds of “Hough Western aesthetic experience. They displaced of the piece on its YouTube channel.—Marina End Clough, Manchester, U.K.,” with the rough traditional contemplation with newfangled Harss (youtube.com/user/bolshoi) urban charm of wild land “between a main road confrontation. That’s the key trope of Min- and a police-dog kennel”; workaday construction imalism, a term that Judd despised but one Fisher Center “Upstreaming” and traffic in the Gaza Strip, in 2017; teeny, noisy that will tag him until the end of time. His In recent years, the Fisher Center at Bard Col- lege has grown into a major player in dance, with an impressive track record of aesthetic successes. PODCAST DEPT. Rather than replacing its new online offerings each week, as many institutions are doing, the Fisher Center has been adding to the pile. So far, its archive includes a terrific 2015 program by Pam Tanowitz Dance, accompanied by the Flux Quartet; a 2016 rethinking of Beth Gill’s surreal and cinematic “Catacomb”; and a 2017 performance of Tere O’Connor’s formally intri- cate, agitated, and ambiguous “Long Run.” The latest addition: “Chambre,” Jack Ferver’s campy 2014 take on Genet’s “The Maids.”—Brian Seibert (fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming)

SF Ballet @ Home For audiences stuck at home, San Francisco Ballet, a world-class troupe with sophisticated dancers and a commitment to expanding its rep- ertory, has been sharing pieces from its ultra-am- bitious 2018 Unbound festival, which unveiled a dozen new works by leading choreographers. This week’s selection, Edwaard Liang’s “The Infinite Ocean,” isn’t the most exciting or origi- nal, but it’s a handsome, death-haunted vision of letting go, and it shows off the dancers. If rights agreements can be reached, Unbound works of greater distinction—by Alonzo King, Justin Peck, and Trey McIntyre—may be scheduled The California-based producers Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who work soon.—B.S. (sfballet.org/sf-ballet-home) together as the Kitchen Sisters, have been producing immersive, beautifully observed, historically relevant stories for public radio since 1979. Their “The Winter’s Tale” style is both distinctive and invisible: rich in audio delights but minimally In this ballet, the choreographer Christopher hosted, narrated largely by interviewees. “The Kitchen Sisters Present,” from Wheeldon—the man who brought “An Amer- ican in Paris” to Broadway—manages to turn Radiotopia, is a treasure trove of the duo’s recent and earlier work. “Waiting one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays into a for Joe DiMaggio,” from 1993, about the retired ballplayer’s attempt to visit taut piece of dance theatre. Jealousy, brutality, the Sicilian village of his family’s origin, tells a quiet story that amazes, as exile, false identity, death, and a return to life are depicted through stylized choreography does “Tupperware,” an influential early piece, from 1980, that takes us to— that captures, with bracing clarity, the mental and far beyond—a Tupperware party. Other classic episodes feature Studs state of each character. Even Shakespeare’s Terkel’s “Working” interviews; Charles Aznavour reminiscing about nights language—for example, his description of the spiderlike poison of jealousy—finds its way with Edith Piaf; and, in “Shirley,” a Vietnamese-American nail salon and into the fabric of the dancing. This darkness the legacy of Shirley Temple. For quarantined listeners wistful for another is leavened by a second act full of ecstatic faux- New York, the 2001-02 “Sonic Memorial” series, about the World Trade folk dances, set to music performed onstage by a Balkan-influenced band. Starting on May 1, Center area, and a recent foray into the New York Public Library’s Lou —Sarah Larson ILLUSTRATION BY ELENA XAUSA BY ILLUSTRATION London’s Royal Ballet will broadcast a 2014 Reed Archive are particularly striking, warm, and powerful.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 5 A RT FOR RELIEF Allan McCollum “Everything will be O.K.”—so say hundreds of fictional characters (and President Barack Obama) in this veteran conceptual artist’s online slide show, which he began in 2015. Straightfor- wardly titled “An Ongoing Collection of Screen- grabs with Reassuring Subtitles,” its archive now numbers twelve hundred closed-captioned im- ages lifted from movies and TV. Slight variations on those comforting words—“Look, it’s all gonna be fine”; “It’s okay, alright”; “You’re safe”—are spoken to frowning children, frightened patients, skeptical participants in risky plots, and stunned witnesses of crimes or supernatural events. Mc- Collum is interested in the tension between repetition and uniqueness in the age of mass production; here, he considers minor variations in an assembly-line cliché used in scripts from “The X-Files” to “The Irishman.” The relentless consolations are amusing and, cumulatively, even improbably reassuring. (McCollum is also the subject of a career retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which can be viewed virtually on the museum’s Web site.)—Johanna Fateman (allanmccollum.net/1/ everythingsok/ok/ok.html and icamiami.org)

Timothy Washington On March 30, An-My Lê took her wooden, large-format Deardorff cam- This seventy-four-year-old American artist grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, era—the same make favored by Ansel Adams—to the Brooklyn waterfront, not far from Simon Rodia’s towers, and his own to witness the U.S.N.S. Comfort sailing under the Verrazzano-Narrows intriguing assemblages suggest anthropomor- Bridge. The sweeping view in the resulting picture (above) offers no hint phic offspring of those famous steel-and-mosaic spires. Washington’s first show in New York, of the complications surrounding the floating hospital’s time in New York, “Pucker Up,” was installed at the Salon 94 gal- unless you count the drama of a red windbreaker echoing the red crosses lery in March, but it never opened to the public; on the Comfort’s hull. (Lê, who is a MacArthur “genius,” is an artist, not a happily, the photogenic six-decade survey can be viewed online. The heart of the show is a photojournalist, but an observer’s detachment is one of her trademarks.) This procession of elongated figures on a turquoise isn’t the first time that the Vietnamese-American artist has photographed platform, exuding both totemic power and per- naval vessels. From 2005 to 2014, she travelled to more than twenty countries sonal charm. “Love Thy Neighbor,” from 1968, is an outlier made of metal and nails (Christian for her series “Events Ashore,” which, like all her projects, is entwined with themes mingle with Afrofuturism in Washing- her personal history: in 1975, when she was fifteen, Lê and her family were ton’s work); most of the other pieces are made of evacuated from Saigon by the U.S. military. A hundred per cent of the pro- glue-soaked cotton on wire armatures, encrusted with ceramic fragments, jewelry, coins, buttons, ceeds from this limited-edition photograph (available through the Marian beads, toys, and even clock faces. Washington’s Goodman gallery) will benefit the nonprofit NYC Health + Hospitals, which heartwarming straw-into-gold ingenuity is es- supports medical workers at the front lines of the pandemic.—Andrea K. Scott pecially evident in a colorful character with a transparent, bauble-filled torso, whose title is 1“I Love You.”—J.F. (salon94.com) works register as material propositions of cer- due respect to Sister Wendy) that artists are the tain principles—chiefly, openness and clarity. best guides to their own work. Maya Lin, Sally They aren’t about anything. They afford no Mann, and Kerry James Marshall were among TELEVISION traction for analysis while making you more those who welcomed cameras into their studios or less conscious of your physical relation to for the first season. So did the sculptor Andrea them, and to the space that you and they share. Zittel, whose functional sleeping pods in the Killing Eve As installed by the curator Ann Temkin, with California desert now look like enviable spots This espionage thriller arrived as a bewitch- perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major mo- to shelter in place. Today, after nine broadcast ing oddity: a Euro-chic slash-’em-up that tifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling “stacks” of seasons—a tenth arrives later this year—two decorated scenes of inventive slaughter and shelflike units, mostly of metal-framed, tinted Peabody Awards, an Emmy nomination, and sweaty investigation with blots of macabre Plexiglas, which expose and flavor the space many digital shorts produced for its Web site, wit, and grounded them in personal frustra- they occupy—the second of the show’s four big Art 21 is streaming more than five hundred films tion. The plot maneuvered a cop and a killer rooms amounts to a Monument Valley of the at art21.org. Subjects range from household into a codependent romance; last season left minimalist sublime. (MOMA is temporarily names (Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei) to off with the delicious villain (Jodie Comer, as closed; tour the virtual exhibition and listen to young painters on the rise (Aliza Nisenbaum, a soignée assassin) shooting and leaving for twenty-one artists and writers respond to Judd’s Avery Singer) to the Bay Area-based social-prac- dead the humble hero (Sandra Oh, as an M.I.6 art on its Web site.)—Peter Schjeldahl (moma.org) tice artist Stephanie Syjuco, whose latest project officer). For its next trick, “Killing Eve,” now is sewing COVID-19 masks for food-bank vol- in its third season, cracks apart the genre it unteers, the families of medical workers, and invented. Eve, alive but spinning in a spiritual Art 21 others in need. Art 21 also bundles its films limbo, is pulled back into a spy game that plays, Ten days after 9/11, when people’s spirits desper- into visual “playlists,” with running times of almost cohesively, as a moody subversion of its ately needed a lift, PBS aired the first episode one to two hours; to combat cabin fever, watch sui-generis formula. Oh’s erstwhile agent col- of “Art in the Twenty-first Century,” a fly-on- fourteen artists take to the open road in “En laborates with the editor of an investigative Web

the-wall documentary series that bet (with all Route.”—Andrea K. Scott (art21.org) site; Comer’s assassin, chipperly psychopathic, AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY ARTIST THE COURTESY

6 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 advances through the ranks of her shadowy Beth Morrison Projects: to techno. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of crime syndicate. The show accommodates a the venue’s label, Ostgut Ton, the British techno grim meditation on guilt, a sentimental gloss “Angel’s Bone” producer and d.j. Luke Slater mixed the two- on parenthood, and a camp-tinged nightmare OPERA Beth Morrison Projects, the tiny, feisty hour “Berghain Fünfzehn.” (It’s available as a about the managerial challenges of running hit production company responsible for a sizable free download from Berghain’s Web site and as men and overseeing detectives.—Troy Patterson portion of the strongest new opera mounted in a SoundCloud stream.) The set’s composition is 1 the twenty-first century, saw its characteristi- particularly notable: Slater carved out his favorite cally ambitious schedule of live performances sections from more than a hundred and fifty re- evaporate as the COVID-19 pandemic took leases in Ostgut’s catalogue to create twenty-three MUSIC hold. Like other institutions shuttered by the new tracks. If you want to hear what the past de- crisis, Morrison & Co. turned to the Web: a new cade and a half of techno sounded like in one go, Fiona Apple: “Opera of the Week,” drawn from the company’s it’s a great place to start.—Michaelangelo Matos archive of past triumphs, is posted each Thurs- “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” day at bethmorrisonprojects.org. This week’s Solal & Liebman: INDIE The title of Fiona Apple’s fifth album, offering is Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” conveys the prickling, Bone,” in a production directed by Michael “Masters in Paris” sweat-soaked urgency of someone stifled for too Joseph McQuilken. The Pulitzer Prize-winning JAZZ Devotees of foreign film have heard Martial long. The music, with its swells of crashing pia- work—which was scheduled to play this month Solal even if they aren’t familiar with the bril- nos and jaunty melodies turned upside down, tin- at L.A. Opera—is a fantastical allegory about liant jazz pianist and composer—his few original gles with hot desperation: Apple lets out a fever- child trafficking, set to an explosive cocktail of themes, brief but apposite, enliven Jean-Luc ish squeal on “I Want You to Love Me,” and her Renaissance polyphony, musical theatre, and Godard’s 1960 New Wave classic, “Breathless.” breath runs ragged on the album’s eponymous punk rock.—S.S. (April 30-May 7.) Solal’s contribution to cinema history, momen- track, which closes on a frenzied chorus of bark- tous though it is, is just a footnote to his remark- ing dogs. But at the center of it all sits her quiet able seventy-plus-year career. “Masters in Paris,” meticulousness as an auteur. Since the nineties, DaBaby: “Blame It on Baby” the second volume of his 2016 encounter with she’s been so steely-eyed an observer of the world HIP-HOP DaBaby’s surprise release, “Blame It on the formidable American saxophonist Dave that it can be terrifying to dive into her depths. Baby,” could have gone any number of ways. Is Liebman, is predictably stupendous—even more On songs such as “Relay,” she persuades her the Dirty South rapper, who’s photographed in a so when Solal’s age (eighty-nine at the time) is listeners to sit with her intimacies and inspires face mask on the cover, experiencing a pandem- taken into account. Romping through a bundle their own self-reckonings, which can feel as ic-facilitated epiphany about life, or is he suiting of standards, the Algerian-born virtuoso dis- alarming and as revelatory as suddenly noticing up to hurtle into the world? The intro, “Can’t plays the technical acuity and unself-conscious a cut that’s been gushing blood.—Julyssa Lopez Stop,” makes the answer clear: DaBaby lingers idiosyncrasy that have always brightened his just long enough on recent assault allegations to playing, and Liebman, nineteen years Solal’s dismiss them, and his insatiable cockalorum is junior, demonstrates why he’s among the most Bang on a Can Marathon now layered with defensiveness and self-pity over respected of post-bop stylists on both his tenor CHAMBER MUSIC The annual marathon concert beats that, admittedly, still bop. Thick reverb, and his soprano horns.—Steve Futterman mounted by Bang on a Can, the imaginative two-bar loops, and gravity-free synths propel his 1 collaborative formed, in 1987, by the composers brawly rhymes. Nowadays, though, there’s lim- Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, ited entertainment in a charismatic barker tying has always been about rubbing elbows: disparate himself in knots to deflect blame.—Oussama Zahr MOVIES musical styles share the same stage, and large, di- verse audiences pack the hall. Bang on a Can had intended to stake out even more elbow room this Luke Slater: “Berghain Fünfzehn” Cedar Rapids month with the début of Long Play, a three-day TECHNO The Berlin night club Berghain—shut The director Miguel Arteta brings energy and festival in Brooklyn. Instead, the collective is down for now, of course—has become synon- substance to this clever, tender comedy, from responding to the present crisis and its required ymous with a hard, neo-psychedelic approach 2011, about an innocent out of his depth. Ed distancing with a new kind of creative feat—a six-hour, all-live Webcast, comprising four world premières and twenty-six solo performances CLASSICAL LIVE STREAMING by artists such as Meredith Monk, Vijay Iyer, Claire Chase, Zoë Keating, and Moor Mother. As classical-music companies get their The event streams for free at marathon2020. bangonacan.org.—Steve Smith (May 3 at 3.) bearings in these uncertain times, they’re realizing that their artists are Brendan Benson: “Dear Life” better positioned than many to con- ROCK As a co-pilot of the Raconteurs, Brendan tinue entertaining audiences: all they Benson has the unenviable task of sharing the need to put on a show is their instru- stage with Jack White, an undertaking akin ment and a sturdy Internet connection. to duetting with a box of firecrackers. Rare is the rock singer who dreams of life as a group’s Carnegie Hall, the principal way station straight man, but the role has its perks: it’s for international soloists and ensembles provided Benson with an audience beyond visiting New York City, has pivoted to the reach of most power-pop veterans. On his solo album “Dear Life,” Benson’s charmed a schedule of free live streams, hosted melodies continue to pour forth, hitched to on its Web site, carnegiehall.org, on subjects familiar to songwriters of a certain Tuesdays and Thursdays. Joshua Bell, age—emotional fragility, mortality, and, most pointedly, redemption through fatherhood. a violinist who launches bold arcs of Like his Raconteurs sparring partner, Benson sound from his bow without sacrificing approaches rock and roll with reverence, yet, nuance, plays sonatas by Eugène Ysaÿe on “Dear Life,” he takes determined baby steps away from a formalist approach. The comput- on April 30 at 2. Two regular collab- erized drums may not qualify as hip-hop or orators, the pianist Jeremy Denk and pop, but they exist in a world ruled by those the cellist Steven Isserlis, join him for genres. The production tactic yokes his album to the present: “It’s good,” Benson sings, “to be excerpts from Mendelssohn’s churning —Oussama Zahr ILLUSTRATION BY CHIARA LANZIERI BY ILLUSTRATION alive.”—Jay Ruttenberg Piano Trio in D Minor.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 7 Helms stars as Tim Lippe (rhymes with “hip- matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling mor- picts—with surprisingly jubilant yet unflinching pie”), a woefully unworldly insurance salesman als. Cybill Shepherd stars as the free-spirited visual and dramatic imagination—the ordeals in small-town Wisconsin who is having an affair young American in Europe, who adapts easily faced by women, from childhood to old age, in with Macy Vanderwei (Sigourney Weaver), his to the romantic airs of European society and Iranian society. The first part involves a girl former middle-school teacher. Sent to a con- whose relationship with the expatriate Ameri- who’s banned from playing with her best friend, vention to deliver a speech, he’s forced into can Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is a boy, with whom she nonetheless manages—in an uneasy intimacy with colleagues who try to spoiled by her uninhibited ways. Bogdanovich a scene of vast allusive implications—to share a break him out of his shell but accidentally put replicates the sinuous psychological intricacies snack through the jail-like bars of his window. his career at risk. The screenwriter, Phil John- of James’s sentences with florid long takes that In the second story, a married woman defies ston, invents gleefully crunchy names for his follow Shepherd through the filigreed opulence clergymen and her husband to join a large group characters, and Arteta breezily exalts the actors of the period décor and capture the spontaneous of female cyclists who are pedalling urgently who play them. Isiah Whitlock, Jr., is the nerdy choreography of her performance. The light along a narrow seaside road—a passionate ride Ronald Wilkes (the Ronimal); John C. Reilly and the settings are reminiscent of paintings by of freedom with a funereal tone, a spectacular plays the rowdy blowhard Dean Ziegler (Dean- Renoir—though the narrow American mores of fusion of kinetic ecstasy and tragedy. The third zie), and Anne Heche brings pathos and whimsy the time lead to comedic absurdities that have part features an elderly woman who spends her to the role of Joan Ostrowski-Fox (O-Fox), a no place in Impressionism. Brown (who died in savings on a wide array of household goods that randy mom-on-a-spree. Despite a pat takeaway, 1978, at the age of twenty-seven) displays a deft, she had been denied all her life—especially a the film delights in the comic round of venial coruscating irony that’s both befitting of the bedroom set, including a big bed and a wedding and mortal sins that keep America’s heartland drama and altogether modern; Bogdanovich’s gown. Throughout, Meshkini creates indelible beating.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon, bravura display of directorial style is as insight- images of mighty symbolic and psychological Vudu, and other services.) ful as it is thrilling.—R.B. (Streaming on Vudu, power.—R.B. (Streaming on Vimeo.) YouTube, and other services.) Daisy Miller The Mule Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 adaptation of Henry The Day I Became a Woman Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this hard- James’s 1878 novella is one of the few great Marzieh Meshkini’s three-part feature, from nosed, tenderhearted, rowdy, and anguished films based on a great book; its acerbic humor 2000, set on the Persian Gulf island of Kish, de- crime drama, from 2018, based on a true story. He plays Earl Stone, a Peoria horticulturist who, after losing his house and garden to fore- WHAT TO STREAM closure, accepts an offer to haul loads of drugs from Texas in his pickup truck in exchange for big cash payouts. Earl had alienated his fam- ily—especially his daughter, Iris (played by Eastwood’s daughter, Alison Eastwood)—by putting his career first. Now he both enjoys his underworld adventures and uses his new wealth to mend fences—but federal agents (Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña) are tracking the cartel for which he works. Eastwood shines as a roguish coot who, under his crusty manner, is a master manipulator—albeit a principled one. The expansive, cleverly plotted action has the romantic resonance of a regretful self-retrospec- tive, for both Earl and Eastwood; it plays like a summing up of a life’s work and pain. With Dianne Wiest.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon, HBO Now, and other services.)

Stories We Tell Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary is a startling mixture of private memoir, public inquiry, and conjuring trick. On camera, she quizzes a long list of relatives and friends, beginning with her father, Michael, and her siblings. The subject is Polley’s late mother, Diane, an effervescent soul, as we see from old home movies; as the story This year’s edition of the Maryland Film Festival, a prime showcase for unfolds, however, the footage seems to be so American independent films, scheduled to run April 29-May 3, has been profuse, and so oddly convenient, that we start to question our own assumptions about her— postponed because of the coronavirus. The Baltimore-based event has which is exactly what Polley had in mind. (She is launched many daring and accomplished low-budget films by young film- an actor, as both of her parents were; clearly, an makers, including Anna Biller’s second feature, “The Love Witch,” which had acute strain of make-believe runs in the blood.) The main secret that is dug up by Polley’s in- its U.S. première there in 2016. (It’s streaming on Kanopy, YouTube, and other vestigations is somehow more invigorating than services.) Biller did more than write and direct the movie; she also made, traumatic, although there are hints of collateral by hand, its elaborate costumes, sets, and props, re-creating the flamboyant anxiety among her brothers and sisters; the very ordinariness of the saga, however, becomes its styles of late-sixties melodramas and horror films—and those of pagan rites strength, and, if viewers leave feeling destabi- and a giddy Renaissance fair. Amid these splashy tones, the mysterious title lized, determined to chip away at the appar- character, a Wiccan named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), glides into a small ently fixed narratives that sustain their own families, then the movie’s job is done.—Anthony California town, in a red convertible that matches her dress and luggage, and Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/27/13.) (Stream- unleashes her seductive enticements and hallucinogenic potions on its male ing on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.) population. Biller, pulling Elaine between desire and revenge, calculating 1 control and ecstatic abandon, brilliantly symbolizes the bitter paradoxes of For more reviews, visit

women’s lives and struggles—both romantic and political.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town / EVERETT OSCILLOSCOPE

8 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 series of bad investments and sleeping York’s dining rooms were forced to close. in a friend’s warehouse in the Brook- By the end of March, he said, “I was lyn Navy Yard—he decided to try constantly getting phone calls from my making a living from his newfound customers—‘Can you cook for us?’” He hobby. He persuaded the organizers of was happy to oblige; the Middle Eastern 1 the Union Square Holiday Market to markets near his home in New Jersey give him a stall rent-free: he’d sell Ira- were open, which meant he had access TABLES FOR TWO nian food and pay them retroactively, to all the ingredients he needed. QQ group:1067583220 at the end of the season. The owners Every week since, Pourkay has posted Taste of Persia of a nearby pizzeria let him use their a short menu on his Facebook and Insta- kitchen after hours to do the cooking. gram accounts (@tasteofpersianyc): three According to one school of culinary The experiment worked, and the piz- or so dishes, sold in quart containers, with thought, the best way to prepare vege- zeria owners agreed to let him stay be- a side of saffron-laced basmati rice, to be tables is barely at all; they should be yond the holidays and even to rent him ordered via e-mail for weekend delivery. eaten as fresh and as close to raw as pos- a stretch of their counter. Taste of Persia On a recent Saturday, he delivered sixty sible. Lately, I’ve been appreciating the was born, a restaurant within a restau- orders throughout Manhattan himself; opposite: the power of a long, slow cook. rant, beloved especially for Pourkay’s ash couriers made drop-offs in Brooklyn, The other night, I marvelled at the way reshteh, a dense soup packed with lentils, Queens, and the Bronx. The family print- pods of okra split open into silky star- split peas, noodles, onions, and herbs, shop, Print Icon, is closed to customers, bursts when simmered as long as the chef topped with caramelized garlic, mint, but Pourkay’s brothers have adapted Saeed Pourkay does for his khoresht bam- and fermented whey. quickly, too: they’re using the shop’s laser ieh, a traditional Iranian dish. The stew, All was well until a few months ago, cutters to produce protective face shields, which I ordered for delivery, was thick when the pizzeria changed hands. Ac- available to hospitals at a discount. with the okra’s perfectly round, yellowish cording to Pourkay, the new owners In addition to the khoresht bamieh, my seeds; every few bites yielded a tender asked that he pay half their monthly haul included two other slow-cooked morsel of shaggy beef, too. rent, instead of the quarter he had been stews that use vegetables to stretch a bit The fact that Pourkay, who is sixty- contributing. He declined, and so they of beef: khoresht aloo esfenaj, a luscious seven, is managing to make and deliver asked him to leave. They were on good mix of spinach and prunes brightened large quantities of food on his own during terms, he thought, until he learned that with lemon and pomegranate juice, and a pandemic will come as no surprise to Taste of Persia had been replaced with khoresht karafs, with slippery, parsley- anyone familiar with his life story, which a knockoff—Tasty Persia. and-mint-flecked segments of celery he himself describes, rather matter-of- After protests and press coverage, and artichoke that had nearly dissolved, factly, as “very inspirational.” For decades, the pizzeria quickly closed Tasty Persia, yet still tasted of spring. Persian food is he and his four brothers, émigrés from and, in February, Pourkay began mak- perfect for these times because it “doesn’t Tehran, ran a printshop in Manhattan. In ing plans to reopen Taste of Persia in a go bad that fast,” Pourkay noted when we 2010, Pourkay sold his share and returned home of its own, with the help of tens spoke on the phone. “You keep it in your to Iran for a visit, where he rediscovered of thousands of dollars raised from loyal refrigerator, three or four days—tastes a latent childhood interest in cooking. customers via GoFundMe. But, just as even better.” (Dishes $17-$25.)

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN ANSELM / REDUX FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW FOR / REDUX ANSELM BRYAN BY PHOTOGRAPH Back in New York—broke after a he was preparing to sign a lease, New —Hannah Goldfield

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 9

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT erate a hundred and eighty polling places aligned with the policy of the Trump PANDEMIC POLITICS but opened only five, owing to a dearth Administration and the advice of its of volunteers, and more than ten thousand public-health experts. J. B. Pritzker, the n late March, it became evident in mail-in ballots requested by voters across governor of Illinois, said that Trump, Ithe states holding Democratic pri- the state never reached them, according by urging his Twitter following to “LIB- maries and other elections in April that, to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Last ERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and because of the coronavirus, it could be week, the city’s health commissioner an- Virginia, and by persisting with such irresponsible to have voters cast ballots nounced that seven people had appar- incitement, has been “fomenting some in person. Some states announced that ently contracted the coronavirus while violence.” The right-wing Michigan they would postpone their elections, participating in the vote. Freedom Fund, supported in part by while Ohio (which had already done The 2020 election is the first Presi- the family of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Ed- so) joined Alaska and Wyoming in mov- dential campaign in U.S. history to be ucation Secretary, promoted a protest ing to vote almost entirely by mail. Tony upended by a deadly virus, and this in Lansing that attracted several thou- Evers, the Democratic governor of Wis- comes on top of the burdens created by sand people, including some toting as- consin, sought to expand the use of the divisive, reckless candidacy of Don- sault-style rifles. Trump’s political aims mail-in ballots, but Republicans con- ald Trump. There are days when Trump seem apparent: with the economy in trolling the state legislature blocked him, and his backers seem to welcome the free fall, and his approval numbers soft, arguing that the plan was unworkable, pandemic’s strains on our democratic he is rousing his loyalists, particularly might foster fraud, and was, in any event, institutions. On April 12th, the Presi- in swing states, counting on them—and unnecessary. “You are incredibly safe to dent surpassed himself in cynical oppor- a hoped-for economic rebound—to de- go out,” the Assembly speaker, Robin tunism and self-contradiction when he liver a victory come November. Vos, assured the electorate. tweeted out support for incipient pro- Americans love a good revolt, and the The standoff inspired lawsuits, and, tests against stay-at-home orders issued protests stoked by conservative networks on April 6th, the day before the vote, the by Democratic governors—orders that and incendiary talk-radio hosts, such U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, not to as Alex Jones, of Infowars, may appeal allow Wisconsin voters extra time to mail to some peaceable citizens fed up with their ballots. (All the conservative Jus- confinement or chafing at the encroach- tices opposed giving extra time; all the ments on civil liberties required by the liberal Justices supported it.) Ruth Bader quasi-quarantines. But, if Trump con- Ginsburg wrote, in a dissent, that the tinues to run a populist campaign pre- majority’s belief that an election staged mised on jump-starting the economy in amid a pandemic would not be much defiance of the advice of scientists and different from an ordinary one “boggles doctors, he will be fighting uphill—seven the mind.” The images from Election out of ten Americans say that it is more Day are indelible: Vos turned up as a vol- important to stay home to thwart the unteer poll worker, swathed in a protec- coronavirus than it is to return to work. tive gown, mask, and gloves, as citizens Last week, Brian Kemp, the Republican in homemade masks or with no protec- governor of Georgia, took Trump’s cue tion at all lined up for blocks in some and announced a plan to reopen hair sa- precincts, separated by the requisite two lons, bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, movie yards. The election’s implementation was theatres, and restaurants, even though

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATIONS a fiasco. Milwaukee had planned to op- public-health specialists believe that such

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 11 a move would be premature, because cures—on Thursday, he speculated about incumbent whom Trump had endorsed COVID-19 cases in Georgia haven’t de- injecting disinfectant—doesn’t play so and narrowing the court’s conservative clined sufficiently. When experts de- well. The President’s inconsistency and majority to one. The justices are sched- nounced Kemp’s plan, Trump flummoxed unreliability may at last be catching up uled to decide before November whether Republicans by joining them. Still, sup- with him: only a quarter of Americans, to sanction a Republican-backed plan to port for opening businesses quickly re- and just half of Republicans, say that purge two hundred thousand people from mains greater among Republicans than they trust what he says about the pan- Wisconsin’s voter rolls because they failed among Democrats or independents, and demic. But polls also indicate that he to respond to a letter inquiring about there is a danger that, in response, Re- remains ahead or competitive in the their addresses. (Trump won the state in publican governors and mayors may jeop- states he won in 2016. The Democratic 2016 by fewer than twenty-three thou- ardize the nation’s recovery by lifting re- Party leadership has unified swiftly sand votes.) The proposed purge is part strictions too soon. The Administration around Joe Biden, and yet on many days of a long-standing effort by conservative has also failed abjectly to provide enough he barely surfaces in the news cycle, while lawyers and activists to establish voting tests to map the spread of the virus and Trump vacuums up attention. restrictions that disproportionately hurt the rates of recovery among those in- Right now, voters are the Democratic Democrats. Trump recently called mail-in fected, depriving all governors and may- Party’s greatest asset; they have been voting “a terrible thing.” Perhaps the pan- ors of a vital means to manage risk while turning out in droves and knocking off demic will have receded by November, trying to revive jobs and businesses. Republican incumbents with impressive but, if it hasn’t, there is little reason to Unable to stage his trademark rallies, regularity since 2018, even when their think that the President or his allies will Trump has been forced to relocate his candidates are uninspiring. In Wiscon- surrender their positions. If homebound, reëlection campaign to the White House sin, on April 7th, Democrats chose Biden frustrated Americans want a cause to press room, where, in the absence of fer- over Bernie Sanders, as had been ex- rally around, they might consider de- vent fans, his mixtape of sober reflec- pected. But the voters stunned forecast- manding the right to vote without hav- tions, false boasts, rants against report- ers by electing a liberal justice to the ing to risk their lives. ers, and irresponsible touts of miracle Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating an —Steve Coll

ODDS AND ENDS DEPT. a “coven” (“I take the word from the ma- utilization”), a term meant to gauge how MAKE DO triarchy—we’re actually about sixty per astronauts can best use their limited on- cent women”), labor side by side to pro- site materials in space. Sachs’s version, duce sculptures and installations for similarly, urges people to discover how major museums, scheduled years into much they can do with what they have the future, as well as collaborations at hand. On March 31st, he called on with Nike. his quarter-million Instagram followers Still, Sachs is more ready than most to watch a weekly video of his I.S.R.U. he last time the artist Tom Sachs to take on the challenges of a suddenly practice and submit their own. In one Twas at his SoHo studio before he constricted work environment. His sculp- episode, Sachs showed how he rescued began quarantining with his wife and tures—which have ranged from cheeky an AirPod that had fallen down a drain- young son at their house in Queens, he takes on consumer culture, such as a age hole by repurposing odds and ends. had only thirty minutes to grab what- Chanel-logo chainsaw or a Prada toilet, ever he might need in order to work re- to gussied-up reimaginings of street-cul- motely. “I thought it was just going to ture avatars, such as boom boxes—look be for a long weekend,” he said, on a deliberately handmade, and are built out video call from his basement studio in of everyday materials such as plywood, Rockaway. “I brought my laptop and an foam core, and duct tape. (“I can never extra phone charger. I brought a Cup make something as perfect as an iPhone, O’Noodles cardboard box filled with but Apple could never make something the scraps that were on the table that as flawed as what I do.”) And his stu- were really disorganized. I only brought dio work has always involved a make-do one pencil, so I’m shaving my pencil ethos that would not be out of place on perfectly.” Sachs, who is in his early a Great Plains homestead—or during a fifties, has the wavy swept-back locks New York City quarantine. of a nineteen-thirties leading man, and For years, he modelled his team’s work the seductively rounded speech patterns on that of NASA, creating large-scale in- and strong eye contact of a very good stallations that provide a Sachs-made pitchman. Pre-virus, he was used to a twist on a space camp or a Mars mis- more elaborate work setup. Sachs’s stu- sion. With the arrival of the coronavi- dio is typically a bustling operation; his rus, he decided to reinterpret another team of assistants, which he refers to as NASA tenet, I.S.R.U. (“in-situ resource Tom Sachs

12 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 (No spoilers, but the mission involved dar. So that means going to sleep early, University Medical Center, speaking on double-sided tape.) and getting up early, with the sun.” His the phone from her eighth-floor room. On a recent Monday, on Instagram eyes wandered toward the screen. The “You know why you’re here when you Live, he held the first of a series of questions were still coming. walk into the building,” she said, de- I.S.R.U. “office hours,” a conversation 1—Naomi Fry scribing the lobby’s vibe as “purpose- with his followers which, he felt, had ful.” But, she added, “the bed itself is philosophical potential. “The shiny part FREE ROOM DEPT. still a Four Seasons bed.” Like many of this time is that it’s allowing me to AT YOUR SERVICE guests, she was keeping away from home take a little pause and confront the ex- so as not to expose her family to the istential abyss and see what I want to do virus; Kass has a son with a compro- with my life,” he said. “The dark side is mised immune system due to a liver that I have all this time to confront the transplant. “This room was really a god- existential abyss and think about what send,” she said. “I have so many doctor I’m going to do with my life.” Wearing friends who are living in their base- a faded blue chore coat, AirPods now he New York Four Seasons is not ments, or a closet. I have friends who tucked securely in ears, he scanned que- Tthe most welcoming hotel, archi- have rented Airbnbs. I have a friend ries on a laptop. “How can I intern for tecturally speaking. Designed by I. M. who rented an R.V. She and her hus- you?” he read aloud. “Great question.” Pei and situated on East Fifty-seventh band are both E.R. doctors, and their He pushed his glasses up and hesitated, Street, between Madison and Park, it daughter had a liver transplant like my his gaze drifting toward the scroll of greets visitors with an intimidating slab son did, so they moved to the R.V. in real-time comments bubbling up on his of limestone façade and a metal aw- the driveway and their au pair is living iPhone screen. (From @naseba._: “Do ning that seems to want to clobber you. with the children inside the house.” you need to be talented to make art?”; Reviewing the building in the Times Another hotel guest is Hallie Bur- from @jaypooleyjay: “If you ever moved when it opened, in 1993, Paul Gold- nett, a nurse from Houston who had to Canada would you adopt the superior berger was taken by “a reception desk volunteered for New York duty. She Robertson screw system?”) Sachs re- that looks like a Judgment Day plat- flew in without knowing how she’d be turned to the question: “How do you form.” Rooms now start at twelve hun- accommodated, so it was a nice surprise, join the studio? The best way to join us dred and ninety-five dollars. Or they she said, when she heard, upon land- is right now. Immediately. Do the re- did, two months ago. ing, that the Four Seasons had a room search. Read the books we all read in the Like so many businesses, the Four for her. She found many of the usual studio. The one I’d recommend this week Seasons closed in March. On April 2nd amenities—fancy shampoo, body wash, is ‘Endurance,’ by Alfred Lansing. It’s it reopened, transformed into the city’s zillion-thread-count sheets—but also appropriate for this time. Required read- cheapest and most civic-minded hotel— some more of-the-moment ones: “Big ing.” (@e_fish007: “I’m on it!”) the first to host health-care workers free things of hand sanitizer, paper towels, Sachs read another: “What’s your of charge. As of last week, there were a disinfectant, gloves, biohazard bags to go-to brand of spray paint?” Easy: “I’m hundred and sixty such guests, sleep- put our scrubs in as we walk in the door.” really frustrated with Krylon, because ing, showering, and enjoying grab- There is no housekeeping, let alone you can’t change the tips, but Montana and-go meals between long shifts of at- turndown service, but Burnett said that has some great colors,” he said. Then, tempting to save the lives of Covid-19 guests can leave bags of dirty towels and “What’s the museum with the best cura- patients. All are screened each time they linens out in the hallway for pickup, re- tion of contemporary art?” He paused. enter the hotel, which is now using its ducing the number of interactions be- “I would highly recommend the Donald more human-scaled entrance on East tween guests and staff. (According to a Judd show at the Museum of Modern Fifty-eighth Street. Nurses take tem- spokesperson, the hotel has roughly a Art, curated by Ann Temkin,” he finally peratures and run through checklists of hundred employees still on the job, down said. (@cooper_clementine: “Do you symptoms before people are admitted from its usual five hundred.) smoke weed?”) “I hope it stays open for to the “green zone” (or banished to the The New York Four Seasons took a little longer after the apocalypse, be- “red zone” for possible off-site treat- this mission on at the prompting of its cause then we can all go and see it and ment). Videos provided by the Four owner, Ty Warner, the Beanie Baby have a session about it.” (@cooper_clem- Seasons show that the lobby’s usual mogul. Rudy Tauscher, the hotel’s gen- entine: “Are you microdosing rn?”) cadre of super-attentive valets, bellhops, eral manager, organized the operational Next: “Is it advised to maintain a and concierges has been replaced by im- changes—effected in a mere five days— schedule or routine during an isolated passive metal stanchions, green direc- with the help of International SOS, a creation?” He rubbed his head. “You can tional arrows, and yellow crime-scene medical and travel-security consultancy. go as hard as you can, but life’s a mara- tape to enforce social distancing, al- A German native, Tauscher has been thon. Schedule in some fun, schedule rec- though the onyx, marble, and soaring working in New York hospitality for reation, observe weekends.” (@cooper_ ceilings remain. more than twenty years. On 9/11, he clementine: “Mushrooms? Acid? DMT?”) “It’s basically hospital housing, but was managing the Trump International Sachs went on, “I don’t believe in alarm Four Seasons-style,” explained Dr. Dara Hotel and Tower, which took in guests clocks, but I live and die by the calen- Kass, an E.R. physician at Columbia who had been working in the World

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 13 1 Trade Center. He remembers hosting POSTCARD FROM BEFORE where the musicians look like math teach- people from Cantor Fitzgerald. “It was BASKETBALL BALM ers,” he said. “They wear total normie terrible,” he said. He added that the outfits. It’s normie radicalism.” Though coronavirus pandemic poses a differ- it has since been corrected, “Traditional” ent kind of challenge, and not only be- was briefly misspelled on the album’s cause of the health risks to his staff: cover. “Trad atonal,” Malkmus said. “It “We’re very service-driven. The human kind of worked.” touch and connecting with humans Sharlene’s is a few blocks southeast is in our DNA, as with most of the of Barclays Center, where the Brooklyn luxury industry. But we are eliminat- n a Monday evening, back when Nets were scheduled to play the Phoe- ing as much of that as possible.” He Osuch places were still open, the singer nix Suns that night. (Weeks later, the sounded a bit rueful, or maybe just and guitarist Stephen Malkmus took a N.B.A. suspended the season, because sleep-deprived. He, too, is self-isolat- seat at Sharlene’s, a dive bar on Flatbush of the coronavirus outbreak, and four ing from family and friends—as well Avenue, in Brooklyn, where happy hour Nets players tested positive for covid-19.) as from guests and staff. “No more min- runs from 1 to 7 p.m. It was just before In the mid-nineties, when alternative gling,” he said. “It’s all very abstract at the release of “Traditional Techniques,” culture was reaching a sarcastic apex, this point.” the second album that Malkmus, who is indie rock and athletics felt fundamen- Several other city hotels, with Gov- fifty-three, has made without the Jicks, tally at odds. (Skateboarding was cool, ernor Andrew Cuomo’s encouragement, his longtime backing band, or as a mem- but professional, uniform-requiring sports have followed in the Four Seasons’ wake, ber of Pavement, the indie-rock group were too earnest and all-American to be including the InterContinental Times he fronted during the nineteen-nineties. taken seriously.) As the guitarist and vo- Square, Room Mate Grace, Yotel, and He described the album’s title as “a little calist in Pavement, a group that has been the Hudson Hotel. (Not the Trump bit ironic.” The phrase was borrowed credibly dubbed the greatest indie-rock International, however; as Tauscher from the German philosopher Theodor band of all time, Malkmus became the pointed out, it is in a different category, Adorno, who, in 1965, characterized the central avatar of the vaguely aloof slacker owing to its many floors of residential Beatles’ music as “no more than tradi- aesthetic. Pavement’s music was stylishly condominiums.) Wythe Hotel, in Wil- tional techniques in a degraded form.” disaffected; its most ardent fans were liamsburg, has partnered with N.Y.U. “I was a little stoned that day,” Malk- bookish outsiders. (The writer Chuck Langone to house some of that hospi- mus said. “I thought, I’d like to attach Klosterman once noted that the band tal’s staff. Like Tauscher, Peter Law- myself to the Frankfurt School. That has “a lot of abstract credibility among rence, Wythe’s owner, expressed a kind makes me seem smart.” The record people who get mad at the radio.”) Yet of existential hotelier’s regret at pres- features non-Western instrumentation Malkmus has always been a sports fan. ent circumstances. “Hospitality people (rabab, kaval, udu, daf ) and borrows from He is an avid tennis player—he’s two solve issues with empathy and kind- contemporary African artists, such as the years away from qualifying for the se- ness, by gathering people together and Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar and the nior team in his club league—and speaks cooking for them and caring for them. desert-rock band Tinariwen. The results about various N.B.A. franchises and And none of our skills are relevant at are rich, dynamic, and pleasantly warm. players with casual fluency. the moment; some are even dangerous,” Besides Adorno, the title also alludes to As he headed to the arena, he de- he wrote in an e-mail. “But we are start- the folk LPs put out by niche labels such scribed himself as “post-team.” He wore ing to do our small part now.” as Vanguard and Folkways in the eight- a blue sweater, a terry-cloth wristband, —Bruce Handy ies. “There’s this cottage industry of labels and a Milwaukee Bucks hat. “I started as a college-basketball fan, because my father was really into U.C.L.A. They were a pretty progressive team in terms of the type of basketball they played. They dominated the early seventies,” he said. “Now I come and go. In the last fifteen years, I realized that if I have to like a pro sport—well, I don’t have to—I relate to basketball.” He lives in Port- land, Oregon, but he does not consider himself a serious Trail Blazers fan. “I feel like a person without roots. I’m from central California, so I used to go to Sacramento games.” The city’s team, the Kings, had just moved there. “They came from Kansas City, and they were not particularly good. I’m not going to throw “I got you a rat to remind you of the subway.” my allegiance down,” he said, laughing. alone last month, in quarantine. It was a co-author of “Help! Was That a Ca- at least two thousand eight hundred years reer Limiting Move?,” has advised, “Go old. (An early appearance: a limestone in, thumb up, at a right angle. Make sure dais, carved in the mid-ninth century you make the full contact, web to web. B.C.E., depicting the Assyrian king Shal- Two to three pumps, then drop. It’s a lit- maneser III hand in hand with a Baby- tle like a kiss: You’ll know when it’s over.” lonian ally.) A lot can go wrong. There are arm-twist- The cause of death? Sudden aware- ers, bone-crushers, yankers, dead fish. ness by the general population that every “Some people are totally unsophisti- surface on earth—and, especially, the cated,” Johnson said. Like who? She de- appendages we use to touch said sur- murred. She once shook hands with faces—are misted with an invisible, po- Trump, a known handshake hater, but tentially lethal cocktail of viral droplets. decorum held. “Not soft, not hard,” she The shake had been on life support since recalled. “It was brief. He is very adept early March. After declaring a national at moving on.” emergency at a Rose Garden press con- It is often said that handshakes evolved Stephen Malkmus ference, President Trump shook hands as a way to show that you weren’t hold- with assorted executives. Then Bruce ing a weapon. (The up-and-down mo- “We’re transient people in California.” Greenstein, the chief strategy-and-in- tion would dislodge a dagger that had While the players warmed up on the novation officer of LHC Group, ex- been hidden up a sleeve.) The Greeks court, Malkmus cracked open a tallboy tended an elbow. The dominoes were put an image of the shake on gravestones, of Brooklyn Lager. “I would like to be falling. Mercado Libre, a Latin-American using it to link the living and the dead. one of those guys more than any other e-commerce platform, moved to replace Romans, who put it on coins, used it to athlete,” he said, as they stretched and the handshake in its logo with an elbow link the living and the stuff they wanted shot baskets. “I know it takes an in- bump. The director general of the World to buy. The Quakers popularized it; they credible amount of work, and travel, Health Organization tweeted that he considered it to be more egalitarian than and boring nights, and airplane flights. would now be greeting people with a bowing. And yet the history of hand- But I would like to be hanging with “hand-on-heart” gesture. Others found shaking is riddled with conscientious ob- James Harden and LeBron at some the habit hard to shake. On March 9th, jectors, ahead of their time. In 2015, a cool after-party in L.A. with secret bot- the Dutch Prime Minister announced U.C.L.A. hospital established a “hand- tle service.” a national no-shake policy, then turned shake-free zone” in its neonatal inten- Barclays Center contains a window- and shook hands with a health official. sive-care unit. (Research suggests that less cinder-block room with the words “Oh, sorry!” he said. “We can’t do that substituting fist bumps cuts germ trans- “Love” and “JOY” posted on the wall. It anymore. Sorry, sorry.” mission by ninety per cent.) But the is known as the Meditation Room. Dorothea Johnson, the founder of U.C.L.A. policy lasted just six months. Though the door is often locked, it is the Protocol School of Washington and In France, an Algerian woman was re- intended as a place for hysterical fans a co-author of “The Power of Hand- cently denied citizenship for refusing to to pause and gather themselves. Malk- shaking,” couldn’t bear the news. Reached shake an official’s hand at her natural- mus said that sports have never made by telephone, in Maine, she said, “It’s ization ceremony. She appealed on reli- him cry. At his most worked up, he might how we connect to someone when we gious grounds; her petition was denied. curse at the TV, but even that’s unusual. first meet them. Touching someone, it Sanda and Florin Dolcos, psychol- He keeps his cool. That evening, the helps you create a friendship, a relation- ogy researchers at the University of Il- Nets won, 119–97. “Another great night ship. It’s so important.” linois, have conducted a series of stud- for the city of Brooklyn,” he said dryly. In “Primary Colors,” the author, Joe ies on the ritual’s longevity. Their con- 1—Amanda Petrusich Klein, calls the handshake “the thresh- clusion: it’s a little like sex. “Handshake old act, the beginning of politics.” Rabin activity activates a part of the brain that POSTSCRIPT and Arafat, Reagan and Gorbachev, also processes other types of reward THE HANDSHAKE Nixon and the King of Rock and Roll, stimulus: good food, or drinks, or some- all went palm-to-palm. The U.S. Pres- thing related to, um, closer physical in- ident, according to one estimate, shakes teractions,” Florin said. hands with sixty-five thousand people The handshake is survived by the per year. In 1907, President Teddy Roo- elbow bump, the foot shake, the peace sevelt, known for his “pump handling,” sign, and the wave. “These customs do shook more than eight thousand hands evolve,” Sanda Dolcos said. “The replace- he handshake, a widespread social in a single afternoon. Afterward, his bi- ments might seem awkward at first, be- Tcustom that has forged political al- ographer wrote, he went upstairs to “scrub cause the handshake is so natural, so auto- liances, sealed multibillion-dollar busi- himself clean.” matic, so ingrained. But people will find ness deals, and taught fathers “a thing or A solid shake relies on a combination a new way.” In lieu of flowers, send Purell. two” about prospective sons-in-law, died of grip and intuition. Pamela Holland, —Micah Hauser

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 15 network, they’ll drop everything to help.” ANNALS OF EPIDEMIOLOGY Riedo is the medical director for in­ fectious disease at EvergreenHealth, a hospital in Kirkland, just east of Seat­ THE PANDEMIC PROTOCOL tle. Upon learning of the first domestic diagnosis, he told his staff—from emer­ The Epidemic Intelligence Service knows what to tell the public in an outbreak. gency­room nurses to receptionists— that, from then on, everything they said BY CHARLES DUHIGG was just as important as what they did. One of the E.I.S.’s core principles is that jxs a pandemic is a communications emer­ gency as much as a medical crisis. Mem­ bers of the public entering the hospital, Riedo told his staff, must be asked if they had travelled out of the country; if someone had respiratory trouble, staff needed to collect as much information as possible about the patient’s recent in­ teractions with other people, including where they had taken place. You never know, Riedo explained, which chance encounter will shape a catastrophe. There are so many terrifying possibilities in a pandemic; information brings relief. A national shortage of diagnostic kits for the new coronavirus meant that only people who had recently visited China were eligible for testing. Even as Ever­ greenHealth’s beds began filling with cases of flulike symptoms—including a patient from Life Care, a nursing home two miles away—the hospital’s doctors were unable to test them for the new disease, because none of the sufferers had been to China or been in contact with anyone who had. For nearly a month, as the hospital’s patients com­ plained of aches, fevers, and breathing problems—and exhibited symptoms as­ sociated with COVID­19, such as “glassy” he first diagnosis of the corona­ as hundreds of epidemiologists from patches in X­rays of their lungs—none Tvirus in the United States occurred around the country; many of them, like of them were evaluated for the disease. in mid­January, in a Seattle suburb not Riedo, had trained at the Centers for Riedo wanted to start warning people far from the hospital where Dr. Fran­ Disease Control and Prevention, in At­ that evidence of an outbreak was grow­ cis Riedo, an infectious­disease spe­ lanta, in a program known as the Epi­ ing, but he had only suspicions, not facts. cialist, works. When he heard the pa­ demic Intelligence Service. Alumni of At the end of February, the C.D.C. tient’s details—a thirty­five­year­old the E.I.S. are considered America’s shock began allowing the testing of patients man had walked into an urgent­care troops in combatting disease outbreaks. with unexplained respiratory­tract in­ clinic with a cough and a slight fever, The program has more than three thou­ fections or “fever and/or symptoms of and told doctors that he’d just returned sand graduates, and many now work in acute respiratory illness.” Riedo called from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to state and local governments across the a friend—an E.I.S. alum at the local de­ himself, “It’s begun.” country. “It’s kind of like a secret soci­ partment of health. If he sent her swabs For more than a week, Riedo had ety, but for saving people,” Riedo told from two patients who had needed been e­mailing with a group of col­ me. “If you have a question, or need ventilators but had tested negative for leagues who included Seattle’s top to understand the local politics some­ influenza and other common respira­ doctor for public health and Washing­ where, or need a hand during an out­ tory diseases, would she test them for ton State’s senior health officer, as well break—if you reach out to the E.I.S. COVID­19? At that point, there had been only sixteen detections of the corona­

Seattle’s approach to COVID-19 mirrored E.I.S.’s guidelines. New York’s did not. virus in the U.S., and only the one in GETTY / GETTY; IMAGES RANTA BOTTOM): TO TOP (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

16 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN Washington State. “I can’t remember iting restaurants and shaking people’s jective, or SOHCO (pronounced sock-O),” why we picked those two patients,” hands, inadvertently exposing them- which should be repeated at the begin- Riedo told me. “I was sure they’d be selves and others to COVID-19. ning and the end of any communica- negative. But we thought it would be At that moment, there were no known tion with the public. After the opening good to start collecting data, and it was U.S. coronavirus fatalities. Schools, res- SOHCO, the spokesperson should “ac- a way to make sure the testing lab was taurants, and workplaces were open. knowledge concerns and express under- working.” The health official told him Stock markets were near all-time highs. standing of how those affected by the to send the samples to her lab. But when Riedo stopped to calculate illnesses or injuries are probably feeling.” Riedo remembered that other local how many of his hospital employees had Such a gesture of empathy establishes researchers had been conducting a proj- been exposed to the coronavirus he had common ground with scared and dubi- ect called the Seattle Flu Study. For to quit when his list surpassed two hun- ous citizens—who, because of their mis- months, they had collected nasal swabs dred people. “If we sent all of those work- trust, can be at the highest risk for trans- from volunteers, to better understand ers home for two weeks, which is what mission. The spokesperson should make how influenza spread through the com- the C.D.C. was recommending, we’d special efforts to explain both what is munity. During the previous few weeks, have to shut down the entire hospital,” known and what is unknown. Transpar- the researchers, in quiet violation of he told me. He felt like a man who, hav- ency is essential, the field manual says, C.D.C. guidance, had jury-rigged a ing casually swatted at a buzzing insect, and officials must “not over-reassure or coronavirus test in their lab and had suddenly realized that he was beneath overpromise.” started using it on their samples. They a beehive. The lead spokesperson should be a had just found a positive hit: a high- The next day, the man with all the scientist. Dr. Richard Besser, a former school student in a suburb twenty-eight family visitors died. It was America’s acting C.D.C. director and an E.I.S. miles from Seattle, with no recent his- first known COVID-19 death. Riedo called alumnus, explained to me, “If you have tory of foreign travel and no known in- his wife. “I told her I didn’t know when a politician on the stage, there’s a very teractions with anyone from China. The I would be coming home,” he said to real risk that half the nation is going to boy wasn’t seriously ill; if the research- me. “And then I started e-mailing ev- do the opposite of what they say.” During ers hadn’t done the test, the infection eryone I knew to say we were past con- the H1N1 outbreak of 2009—which probably never would have been de- tainment. It had already escaped.” caused some twelve thousand Ameri- tected. The genetic sequence of the boy’s can deaths, infections in every state, and virus was unnervingly similar to that of pidemiology is a science of pos- seven hundred school closings—Besser the man with the first known case, even Esibilities and persuasion, not of and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom though the researchers couldn’t find any certainties or hard proof. “Being ap- Frieden, gave more than a hundred press connections between them. The fright- proximately right most of the time is briefings. President Barack Obama spoke ening implication was that the corona- better than being precisely right occa- publicly about the outbreak only a few virus was already so widespread that sionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist times, and generally limited himself to contagion was passing invisibly among John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can telling people to heed scientific experts community members. only be sure when to act in retrospect.” and promising not to let politics distort At seven-forty that evening, Riedo Epidemiologists must persuade people the government’s response. “The Bush got a call from his friend at the public- to upend their lives—to forgo travel and Administration did a good job of creat- health lab. Both of the samples he had socializing, to submit themselves to ing the infrastructure so that we can re- sent were positive. Riedo sent over swabs blood draws and immunization shots— spond,” Obama said at the start of the from nine other EvergreenHealth pa- even when there’s scant evidence that pandemic, and then echoed the SOHCO tients. Eight were positive. Riedo grabbed they’re directly at risk. by urging families, “Wash your hands the patients’ charts and saw that seven Epidemiologists also must learn how when you shake hands. Cover your of them had come from the Life Care to maintain their persuasiveness even as mouth when you cough. I know it sounds nursing home. It didn’t make any sense: their advice shifts. The recommenda- trivial, but it makes a huge difference.” nursing-home residents don’t travel, tions that public-health professionals At no time did Obama recommend par- and interact mainly with just family make at the beginning of an emer- ticular medical treatments, nor did he members and staff. gency—there’s no need to wear masks; forecast specifics about when the pan- Riedo sent in more samples. Most children can’t become seriously ill—often demic would end. of the patients tested positive, includ- change as hypotheses are disproved, new Whereas the C.D.C. protocol en- ing a woman who had been told that experiments occur, and a virus mutates. courages politicians to practice restraint, she had pneumonia, another woman The C.D.C.’s Field Epidemiology Man- it invites the lead scientific spokesper- who had complained of sweating and ual, which devotes an entire chapter to son to demonstrate his or her advice os- clammy hands, and a man in his fifties communication during a health emer- tentatiously, and to be a living example with serious respiratory problems. For gency, indicates that there should be a of the importance of, say, wearing a mask three days, dozens of that man’s family lead spokesperson whom the public gets or getting a shot. When polio inocula- members had sat at his bedside in the to know—familiarity breeds trust. The tions began, in the nineteen-fifties, many hospital, coming in and out of the build- spokesperson should have a “Single people worried that they were unsafe, ing and going from home to work, vis- Overriding Health Communication Ob- so New York City’s commissioner of

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 17 health—who happened to be married This advice struck Constantine as pos- something really serious happens,” Con- to the E.I.S.’s founder—invited report- sibly crazy. There were only two dozen stantine told me. “It was a way to speed ers to watch schoolchildren getting in- COVID-19 diagnoses in the entire na- up people’s perceptions—to send a mes- jections. She also enlisted Elvis to pub- tion. Life looked normal. How could sage they could understand.” licly get his shot. people be persuaded to stop going to While the logistics of classroom E.I.S. personnel in the field have car- bars, much less to work, just because a closures were being worked out, Con- ried boxes of masks and gloves to dis- handful of old people were sick? stantine contacted Brad Smith, the pres- tribute to pilots, flight attendants, jour- Constantine told me, “Jeff recognized ident of Microsoft—which is headquar- nalists, and health workers—supplies what he was asking for was impracti- tered in Redmond, east of Seattle—and that may not be needed by the recipi- cal. He said if we advised social distanc- asked him to consider ordering employ- ents but emphasize how important uni- ing right away there would be zero ac- ees to work from home. “Microsoft is a versal compliance is. When Besser gave ceptance. And so the question was: What big deal here,” Constantine told me. “I briefings during the H1N1 pandemic, can we say today so that people will be thought if they told everyone to stay he sometimes started by describing how ready to hear what we need to say to- home it could shift how the state was he had recently soaped up his fingers, morrow?” In e-mails and phone calls, thinking—make the pandemic real.” Mi- or pointedly waited until everyone was the men began playing a game: What crosoft, as a tech company, was poised away from the microphone before tak- was the most extreme advice they could to switch quickly to remote work, and ing the stage. At the time, there was give that people wouldn’t scoff at? Con- could demonstrate to other businesses almost no chance that Besser and his sidering what would likely be happen- that the transition could occur smoothly. colleagues were at immediate risk of ing four days from then, what would On March 4th, with only twelve known contracting H1N1. “To maintain trust, they regret not having said? COVID-19 fatalities across the nation and you have to be as honest as possible, and Even for public-health profession- no diagnoses among Microsoft work- make damn sure that everyone walks als, the trade-offs were painful to con- ers, the company told employees to stay the walk,” Besser told me. “If we order template. At a meeting of public-health home if they could. Smith told me, “King people to wear masks, then every C.D.C. supervisors and E.I.S. officials in Seat- County has a strong reputation for ex- official must wear a mask in public. If tle, an analyst became emotional when cellent public-health experts, and the we order hand washing, then we let the describing the likely consequences of worst thing we could have done is sub- cameras see us washing our hands. We’re shutting Seattle’s schools. Thousands of stitute our judgment for the expertise of trying to do something nearly impossi- kids relied on schools for breakfast and people who have devoted their lives to ble, which is get people to take an out- lunch, or received medicine like insulin serving the public.” Amazon, which is break seriously when, for most Ameri- from school nurses. If schools closed, also headquartered in the area, told many cans, they don’t know anyone who’s sick some of those students would likely go of its local employees to work from home and, if the plan works, they’ll never meet hungry; others might get sick, or even as well. “That’s a hundred thousand peo- anyone who’s sick.” die. Everyone also knew that, if the city ple suddenly staying home,” one Seat- Public-health officials say that Amer- shut down, domestic-violence incidents tle resident told me. “From commute ican culture poses special challenges. would rise. And what about the medi- traffic alone, you knew something big Our freedoms to assemble, to speak our cal providers who would have to stop had happened.” minds, to ignore good advice, and to working, because they had to stay home On February 29th, Constantine held second-guess authority can facilitate the with young kids? “It was overwhelm- a press conference. He had asked Riedo, spread of a virus. “We’re not China—we ing,” one E.I.S. official told me. “Every Duchin, and Kathy Lofy—another E.I.S. can’t order people to stay inside,” Besser single decision had a million ripples.” alum and the state’s top health officer— said. “Democracy is a great thing, but it Yet the burdens caused by closing to play prominent roles. Duchin spoke means, for something like COVID-19, we the schools could make an enormous first, and it was as if he had prepared his have to persuade people to coöperate if difference in curtailing the spread of the remarks with the Field Epidemiology we want to save their lives.” virus: all kinds of parents would have to Manual in hand. “I want to just start by stay home. In 2019, Seattle had closed expressing our deep and sincere condo- n February 28th, around the time schools for five days after a series of lences to the family members and loved Othat Riedo learned of the COVID-19 snowstorms. Afterward, the Seattle Flu ones of the person who died,” he said. cluster at the Life Care nursing home, Study discovered that traffic in some He explained what scientists knew and the news was also relayed to another areas had nearly disappeared, public- did not know about the coronavirus, and E.I.S. alum, Dr. Jeff Duchin, the top transit use had tumbled, and the trans- noted, “We’re in the beginning stages of public-health physician for Seattle and mission of influenza had dropped. our investigation, and new details and surrounding King County. To Duchin, Constantine thought that announc- information will emerge over the next the cluster suggested that there was al- ing school closings was a potent com- days and weeks.” He predicted that “tele- ready an area-wide outbreak. He told munication strategy for reaching even commuting” was likely to become man- Dow Constantine, the King County people who weren’t parents, because it datory for many residents, and repeated Executive, that it was time to start con- forced the community to see the corona- several times an easy-to-remember sidering restrictions on public gather- virus crisis in a different light. “We’re SOHCO: “more hand washing, less face ings and telling residents to stay home. accustomed to schools closing when touching.” Duchin told me that his words

18 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 had been chosen carefully: “You have to think about managing the public’s emo- tions, perceptions, trust. You have to bring them along the path with you.” Since then, Washington State politicians have largely ceded health communica- tions to the scientists, making them unlikely celebrities. “Hey people!! Jeff Duchin is the real deal,” one fan tweeted. A newspaper hailed him as “a bespec- tacled, calming presence.” Constantine told me that he under- stands why politicians “want to be front and center and take the credit.” And he noted that Seattle has many of “the same problems here you see in Con- gress, with the partisanship and toxic- ity.” But, he said, “everyone, Republicans and Democrats, came together behind one message and agreed to let the sci- “Tell me about that thing under it.” entists take the lead.” By the time Seattle’s schools were formally closed, on March 11th, students •• and teachers were already abandoning their classrooms. The messaging had rules—and we need to show everyone feces. In later conflicts, generals were in- worked: parents were voluntarily keep- there are consequences.” structed to use thicker food-storage bags ing their kids home. Cell-phone track- Today, Washington State has less than and to set more rat traps. ing data showed that, in the preceding two per cent of coronavirus cases in the E.I.S. o2cers became known as “dis- week, the number of people going to U.S. At EvergreenHealth, hospital ad- ease detectives.” In 1952, one of them work had dropped by a quarter. Within ministrators have stopped daily crisis studied a group of children in a Chi- days, even before Washington’s gover- meetings, because the rate of incoming cago slum who had all developed simi- nor, Jay Inslee, issued o2cial work-from- patients has slowed. They have empty lar symptoms—muscle weakness, spasms, home orders, almost half of Seattle’s work- beds and extra ventilators. The admin- joint pain—but had tested negative for ers were voluntarily staying away from istrators remain worried, but are cau- likely diseases. When the E.I.S. o2cer their o2ces. When bars and restaurants tiously optimistic. “It feels like we might visited one of the children’s homes, he were o2cially closed, on March 15th, have stopped the tsunami before it hit,” noticed a toddler chewing on chips of many of them were already empty. Con- Riedo told me. “I don’t want to tempt paint that had flaked off a windowsill. stantine himself had been working from fate, but it seems like it’s working. Which The paint chips were soft because they home for a week. He was giving inter- is what makes it so much harder when contained lead, which is toxic. A year views all day, and always underscored I look at places like New York.” later, that E.I.S. o2cer helped found the to reporters that he was speaking from country’s first poison-control program, his bedroom, and that the noises in the he Epidemic Intelligence Service which taught parents that the first prin- background were coming from his chil- Twas founded in 1951, when Ameri- ciple of safety was communication. The dren, who were home from school. After can troops in Korea began experiencing program advised parents to tell their he heard that the county’s basketball fevers, aches, vomiting, and fatal hem- children not to put paint chips in their courts were still being heavily used, he orrhages. Some three thousand soldiers mouths, and to signal the dangers of ordered them closed. fell ill, leading military leaders to con- bleach, insecticide, and cleaning chem- The county had bought a motel to clude that Chinese-backed Communists icals by storing them on high shelves. house homeless residents who tested had weaponized bacteria. “The planning E.I.S. alumni went on to take pow- positive for the coronavirus. When one of appropriate defensive measures must erful health-care jobs across the coun- homeless man at the motel, who was not be delayed,” an epidemiologist at a try. “Nearly ninety per cent of E.I.S. asymptomatic, left to buy a beer, Con- new federal agency, the Communicable graduates embark on public-health ca- stantine immediately went to court, so Disease Center, declared. He proposed reers at the local, state, federal or inter- that police could arrest him the next a new division, named to evoke the Cen- national level,” a 2001 study found. Four time he went out. The man’s actions had tral Intelligence Agency. But when the former C.D.C. directors are E.I.S. alumni; posed little risk: he had gone to a gas first class of E.I.S. o2cers landed in Korea half a dozen graduates have served as station across the street, then returned. they found that the fevers were not caused the U.S. Surgeon General. But, Constantine told me, “the fact is by a crafty enemy. Soldiers, it turned out, When the coronavirus pandemic some people are not going to follow the had been accidentally consuming rodent started, E.I.S. alumni began working

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 19 non-stop, with some setting up cots in- you are making recommendations based demic. “Right now, everyone is so con- side their offices. While the virus re- on science or politics, and so there’s the fused by all the conflicting messages that, mained overseas, the C.D.C. led commu- risk they’ll start to tune out.” each time the guidance evolves, fewer nications, scrupulously following E.I.S. Already, it’s clear that some confu- and fewer people might follow it,” Besser, protocols. But soon after the coronavirus sion has taken hold. Though the C.D.C. the former C.D.C. director, said. “We’re landed on American shores the White formally recommended, in mid-March, going backward in our sophistication.” House took over. E.I.S. officers were dis- that Americans practice social distanc- Morale at the C.D.C. has plummeted. mayed to see the communication prin- ing, governors in five states have refused “For all the responses that I was involved ciples that the C.D.C. had honed over to order residents to stay home. (One of in, there was always this feeling of ca- the years being disregarded, and some- those states, South Dakota, is now con- maraderie, that you were part of some- times turned on their head. A Corona- tending with a major outbreak.) Federal thing bigger than yourself,” another for- virus Task Force, led by Vice-President leaders have given shifting advice—ini- mer high-ranking C.D.C. official told Mike Pence, was formed, excluding ev- tially, Americans were told that they did me. “Now everyone I talk to is so dispir- eryone from the C.D.C. except its direc- not need to wear masks in public, but ited. They’re working sixteen-hour days, tor, Dr. Robert Redfield. “The C.D.C. on April 3rd, at a White House press but they feel ignored. I’ve never seen so was ordered into lockdown,” a former briefing, masks were recommended— many people so frustrated and upset and senior official at the agency told me. and this has risked undermining pub- sad. We could have saved so many more “They can’t speak to the media. These lic confidence. Trump announced the lives. We have the best public-health are people who have trained their entire change by saying, “You don’t have to do agency in the world, and we know how lives for epidemics—the finest public- it. I’m choosing not to do it.” Had the to persuade people to do what they need health army in history—and they’ve been C.D.C. been in charge of communicat- to do. Instead, we’re ignoring everything told to shut up!” ing about masks, the agency surely would we’ve learned over the last century.” Since then, the primary spokesperson have used the change in guidance as a during the pandemic has been not a sci- teaching opportunity, explaining that he initial coronavirus outbreaks in entist but President Donald Trump— scientists had come to understand that TNew York City emerged at roughly a politician notoriously hostile to sci- people infected with the coronavirus can the same time as those in Seattle. But ence. Further complicating matters, be contagious but asymptomatic for lon- the cities’ experiences with the disease Trump has highlighted a rotating cast ger than originally thought—which have markedly differed. By the second of supporting characters, including means that we need to be more careful week of April, Washington State had Pence; Dr. Anthony Fauci, from the Na- when we cough, even if we feel healthy roughly one recorded fatality per four- tional Institutes of Health; Dr. Debo- or just have seasonal allergies. Trump’s teen thousand residents. New York’s rate rah Birx, from the State Department; daily briefings, however, are chaotic and of death was nearly six times higher. and the President’s son-in-law, Jared contradictory. Within the span of a few There are many explanations for this Kushner. “When there are so many days, Trump threatened to quarantine divergence. New York is denser than different figures, it can cause real con- New York City, then reversed himself; Seattle and relies more heavily on public fusion about whom to listen to, or who’s soon after declaring that he intended to transportation, which forces commuters in charge of what,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, “reopen” the U.S. economy within two into close contact. In Seattle, efforts at the director of the Center for Health weeks, he called for thirty additional social distancing may have been aided by Security, at Johns Hopkins, said. “And, days of social distancing. Such incon- local attitudes—newcomers are warned if the response becomes political, it’s a stancy from a leader is distracting in the of the Seattle Freeze, which one local disaster, because people won’t know if best of times. It is dangerous in a pan- columnist compared to the popular girl in high school who “always smiles and says hello” but “doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to.” New Yorkers are in your face, whether you like it or not. (“Stand back at least six feet, playa,” a sign in the window of a Bronx bodega cautioned. “COVID-19 is some real shit!”) New York also has more poverty and in- equality than Seattle, and more inter- national travellers. Moreover, as Mike Famulare, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling, put it to me, “There’s always some element of good luck and bad luck in a pandemic.” It’s also true, however, that the cit- ies’ leaders acted and communicated very differently in the early stages of the “Of course he’s home. He’s a snail.” pandemic. Seattle’s leaders moved fast to persuade people to stay home and the pandemic, even as the city was an- had been tremendously useful in guid- follow the scientists’ advice; New York’s nouncing its first official cases. De Bla- ing governmental responses—and this leaders, despite having a highly esteemed sio initially voiced caution, saying that spring Los Angeles effectively deployed public-health department, moved more “no one should take the coronavirus sit- the strategy, as did Santa Clara County, slowly, offered more muddied messages, uation lightly,” but soon told residents in California, and the state of Hawaii. and let politicians’ voices dominate. to keep helping the city’s economy. “Go In New York City, the Health Depart- New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has on with your lives + get out on the town ment began collecting swabs, but the ini- long had a fraught relationship with the despite Coronavirus,” he tweeted on tiative met swift resistance. Under fed- city’s Department of Health and Men- March 2nd—one day after the first eral health laws, such swabs have to be tal Hygiene, which, though technically COVID-19 diagnosis in New York. He anonymized for patients who haven’t under his control, seeks to function in- urged people to see a movie consented to a coronavirus dependently and avoid political fights. at Lincoln Center. On the test. This meant that, even “There’s always a bit of a split between day that Seattle schools if city officials learned that the political appointees, whose jobs are closed, de Blasio said at a many people were infected, to make a mayor look good, and public- press conference that “if you officials wouldn’t be able to health professionals, who sometimes have are not sick, if you are not identify, let alone warn, any to make unpopular recommendations,” in the vulnerable category, of them. The Mayor’s office a former head of the Department of you should be going about refused to authorize testing Health told me. “But, with the de Bla- your life.” Cuomo, mean- the swabs. “They didn’t want sio people, that antagonism is ten times while, had told reporters to have to say, ‘There are worse. They are so much more impos- that “we should relax.” He hundreds, maybe thousands, sible to work with than other adminis- said that most infected peo- of you who are positive for trations.” In 2015, when Legionnaires’ ple would recover with few problems, coronavirus, but we don’t know who,’ ” a disease sickened at least a hundred and adding, “We don’t even think it’s going Department of Health official told me, thirty New Yorkers and killed at least to be as bad as it was in other countries.” adding, “It was a real opportunity to com- twelve, tensions between de Blasio and De Blasio’s and Cuomo’s instincts municate to New Yorkers that this is the Health Department came to a head. are understandable. A political leader’s serious—you have to stay home.” The After de Blasio ordered health officials job, in most situations, is to ease citi- effort was blocked over fears that it might to force their way into buildings in the zens’ fears and buoy the economy. During create a panic, but such alarm might have Bronx to test cooling towers for contam- a pandemic, however, all those impera- proved useful. After all, the official told ination, even though the outbreak’s source tives are reversed: a politician’s job is to me, panic is pretty effective at getting had already been identified, the officials inflame our paranoia, because waiting people to change their behavior. Instead, complained that the Mayor was wasting until we can see the danger means hold- the Mayor’s office informed the Health their time in order to brag to reporters ing off until it’s too late. The city’s ep- Department that the city would sponsor that he’d done everything possible to idemiologists were horrified by the com- a job fair to find a few new “disease de- stamp out the disease. When the deputy forting messages that de Blasio and tectives.” That event was held on March commissioner for environmental health, Cuomo kept giving. Jeffrey Shaman, a 12th, in Long Island City. The Depart- Daniel Kass, refused City Hall’s demands, disease modeller at Columbia, said, “All ment of Health official said, “We’re in one of the city’s deputy mayors urged you had to do was look at the West the middle of a catastrophe, and their the commissioner of health, Mary Bas- Coast, and you knew it was coming for solution is to make us waste time inter- sett, to fire Kass. She ignored the sug- us. That’s why Seattle and San Fran- viewing and onboarding people!” (The gestion, but Kass eventually resigned. He cisco and Portland were shutting things Mayor’s office eventually relented on the later told colleagues he felt that his re- down.” But New York “dithered instead sentinel-surveillance samples, and testing bellion had made coöperation with City of telling people to stay home.” began on March 23rd—almost a month Hall impossible. By early March, the city’s Depart- after samples were first collected. By then, “Dan Kass is one of the best envi- ment of Health had sent the Mayor nu- the outbreak was well under way.) ronmental-health experts in the coun- merous proposals on fighting the virus’s As New York City schools, bars, and try,” Bassett, who now teaches at Har- spread. Since there weren’t enough di- restaurants remained open, relations be- vard, said. “New York has one of the agnostic kits to conduct extensive test- tween the Department of Health and best health departments in the United ing, public-health officials proposed “sen- City Hall devolved. Health supervi- States, possibly the world. We’d all be tinel surveillance”: asking local hospitals sors were “very, very angry,” one official better off if we were listening really to provide the Department of Health told me. In particular, health officials closely to them right now.” with swabs collected from people who were furious that de Blasio kept telling In early March, as Dow Constantine had flulike symptoms and had tested New Yorkers to go out and get a test if was asking Microsoft to close its offices negative for influenza. By testing a se- they suspected they were infected. On and putting scientists in front of news lection of those swabs, the department March 4th, he tweeted, “If you feel flu- cameras, de Blasio and New York’s gov- could estimate how rapidly and widely like symptoms (fever, cough and short- ernor, Andrew Cuomo, were giving the coronavirus was moving through the ness of breath), and recently traveled to speeches that deëmphasized the risks of city. In previous outbreaks, such studies an area affected by coronavirus .. . go to

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 21 your doctor.” This was the opposite of that if the Mayor didn’t act promptly as they worry about the threat of an what city health supervisors were advis- they would resign. (The next day, Lay- emerging disease. “That’s why E.I.S. ing: people needed to stay inside and ton’s staff greeted her with applause, and training is so important,” Sonja Rasmus- call their doctor if they felt sick. Mak- at least one employee offered to give her sen, a former C.D.C. official, told me. ing trips to doctors’ offices or emergency some money if she had to make good on In a pandemic, “the old ways of think- rooms only increased the odds that the the ultimatum.) De Blasio was in a cor- ing get flipped around.” She added, “You virus would spread, and the city’s lim- ner: he had long positioned himself as a have to make the kinds of choices that, ited supply of tests needed to be saved champion of the underclass, and closing if you aren’t trained for them, are really for people with life-threatening condi- schools would disproportionately hurt hard to make. And there’s no time to tions. De Blasio’s staff, however, had the poor and vulnerable. What’s more, learn from your mistakes.” started micromanaging the department’s unions representing health-care workers communications, including on Twitter. had threatened that nurses, orderlies, and oday, New York City has the same Finally, on March 15th, the Department others might stay home unless there was Tsocial-distancing policies and busi- of Health was allowed to post a thread: a plan to provide child care. ness-closure rules as Seattle. But because “If you are sick, STAY HOME. If you do Nevertheless, de Blasio finally acceded New York’s recommendations came later not feel better in 3 to 4 days, consult to the health officials’ demands. On than Seattle’s—and because communi- with your health care provider”; “Test- March 16th, after a compromise was cation was less consistent—it took lon- ing should only be used for people who reached with the health-care unions, city ger to influence how people behaved. need to be hospitalized”; “Everyone in schools were closed, and Cuomo ordered According to data collected by Google NYC should act as if they have been ex- all gyms and similar facilities to shut from cell phones, nearly a quarter of Se- posed to coronavirus. .. . New Yorkers down. The messaging remained jum- attleites were avoiding their workplaces who are not sick should also stay home bled, however. Right before the gym clo- by March 6th. In New York City, an- as much as possible.” One City Coun- sure was set to take effect, de Blasio asked other week passed until an equivalent cil member told me that health officials his driver to take him to the Y.M.C.A. percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, “had been trying to say that publicly for in Park Slope, near his old home, for the former C.D.C. director, has esti- weeks, but this mayor refuses to trust a final workout. Even de Blasio’s allies mated that, if New York had started the experts—it’s mind-boggling.” were outraged. A former adviser tweeted, implementing stay-at-home orders ten As the city’s scientists offered plans “The mayor’s actions today are inexcus- days earlier than it did, it might have for more aggressive action and provided able and reckless.” Another former con- reduced COVID-19 deaths by fifty to data showing that time was running out, sultant tweeted that the gym visit was eighty per cent. Another former New the Mayor’s staff responded that the “Pathetic. Self-involved. Inexcusable.” York City health commissioner told me health officials were politically naïve. At De Blasio and Cuomo kept bickering. that “de Blasio was just horrible,” adding, one point, Dr. Marcelle Layton, the city’s On March 17th, de Blasio told residents “Maybe it was unintentional, maybe it assistant commissioner of communica- to “be prepared right now for the possi- was his arrogance. But, if you tell peo- ble diseases, and an E.I.S. alum who is bility of a shelter-in-place order.” The ple to stay home and then you go to the revered by health officials across the na- same day, Cuomo told a reporter, “There’s gym, you can’t really be surprised when tion for her inventiveness and dedica- not going to be any ‘you must stay in people keep going outside.” tion, was ordered to City Hall, in case your house’ rule.” Cuomo’s staff quietly More than fifteen thousand people she was needed to help the Mayor answer told reporters that de Blasio was acting in New York are believed to have died questions from the press. She sat on a “psychotic.” Three days later, though, from COVID-19. Last week in Washing- bench in a hallway for three hours, away Cuomo announced an executive order ton State, the estimate was fewer than from her team, while politicians spoke putting the state on “pause”—which was seven hundred people. New Yorkers to the media. (Layton declined interview essentially indistinguishable from stay- now hear constant ambulance sirens, requests.) At press conferences, Layton at-home orders issued by cities in Wash- which remind them of the invisible viral and other physicians played minimal ington State, California, and elsewhere. threat; residents are currently staying roles while de Blasio and Cuomo, long- (A spokesperson for de Blasio said that home at even higher rates than in Se- time rivals, each attempted to take cen- City Hall’s “messaging changed as the attle. And de Blasio and Cuomo—even ter stage. The two men even began pub- situation and the science changed” and as they continue to squabble over, say, licly feuding—arguing in the press, and that there was “no dithering.” A spokes- who gets to reopen schools—have be- through aides, about who had authority person for Cuomo said that “the Gov- come more forceful in their warnings. over schools and workplace closures. ernor communicated clearly the serious- Rasmussen said, “It seems silly, but all Eventually, three of the top leaders of ness of this pandemic” and that “the these rules and SOHCOs and telling the city’s Department of Health met Governor has been laser focused on com- people again and again to wash their with de Blasio and demanded that he municating his actions in a way that hands—they make a huge difference. quickly instate social-distancing rules doesn’t scare people.”) That’s why we study it and teach it.” and begin sending clear messages to the To a certain extent, de Blasio’s and She continued, “It’s really easy, with the public to stay indoors. Layton and a dep- Cuomo’s tortured delays make sense. best of intentions, to say the wrong thing uty health commissioner, Dr. Demetre Good politicians should worry about or send the wrong message. And then Daskalakis, indicated to de Blasio’s staff poor children missing school just as much more people die.” 

22 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 Where to go for your posh Brit fix? Try SHOUTS & MURMURS this nativity play put on by the exclusive St. Swithin’s primary school, in south­ west London, filmed on a shaky but pass­ able camcorder by a proud front­row parent. Harry Smith­Walker plays Jo­ seph with youthful enthusiasm, although he tends to shout his lines, and his reac­ tion to the flatulence of a Wise Man does break the fourth wall momentarily. St. Swithin’s didn’t accept girls until 2002, so Nigel Parker­Lawrence plays Mary, with a rather winning modesty, although, as was true in so many pre­twenty­first­ century productions, the part is under­ written, and Mary the woman is ob­ scured by Mary the mother. Politics buffs WHAT TO WATCH DURING will be excited to know that Smith­ Walker is now a Junior Minister for Work THE LOCKDOWN: MONTH 38 and Pensions in Boris Johnson’s Cabi­ net. (Twenty-one minutes. YouTube.) BY NICK HORNBY DARLINGTON V. GAINSBOROUGH TRINITY, OC- “BOILED HAM AND PARSNIPS” When Sight & (Mr. B.), and set out to watch every sin­ TOBER, 2016 You’ve probably seen every Sound reviewed the film on its release, in gle McCalman performance I could find. highlights package in every field of sport­ 1972, it conceded that Kasimir Kaschom­ Some of them are hard to come by, cer­ ing endeavor by now, so why not watch ski’s five­hour black­and­white account tainly, and, if anyone has access to the full games between teams you’ve never of a Ukrainian peasant woman’s strug­ 1977 TV series “Carter County,” I’m look­ heard of? Darlington, from County Dur­ gle to prepare the eponymous meal “might ing for the episode titled, with an omi­ ham, is in the sixth division of English not be for everyone,” but we’re long past nous inelegance, “By the Light of the football; Gainsborough Trinity is from that. The film, presented in four chap­ Moonlight,” in which McCalman plays Lincolnshire. Their clash a few years back ters, titled “Walk to the Market,” “The Drunk. But he was Goodspeed in an was uploaded to YouTube, where it has Haggle,” “The Walk Home Again,” and episode of “Wonder Woman,” Dr. Harry been viewed by eighteen hundred people. “The Preparation of the Ham,” culmi­ Capello in “Hart to Hart,” and Ned Prepare for the match by finding out a nates in scum­flecked bubbles in the pan, Avery in “Barnaby Jones.” Chances are, little bit about the history of the two which exert a weirdly hypnotic hold on if you watched TV in the seventies or clubs—Darlington formed in 1883 and the viewer. Ulnyano Melnik had never the eighties, you ignored him—up to turned pro in 1908, and very little has appeared before a camera until “Boiled now. He had the enviable ability to play happened to the team since. Gainsborough Ham,” and she never appeared before different characters in the same series Trinity, ten years older than Darlington, one again. But you’ll believe every step without anyone noticing: he was both was originally called Trinity Recreation­ of the two­hour walk, and every obsti­ Dolph Masterson and Kibbee in “Lou ists. It reached the giddy heights of the nate syllable of the haggle. She’s not in Grant,” Mark Duncan and Wendall English second division in 1896, but it’s the kitchen scenes much; Kaschomski Glendale in “Maude” (both episodes been mostly downhill ever since. Jordan lets the ham take center stage, a breath­ filmed in 1977), Dr. Kalsa and George Adebayo­Smith, a nineteen­year­old taking piece of cinematic bravery that Endicott in “Diff ’rent Strokes.” The born in California, is on loan to Gains­ pays off. Try not to binge! My family and pandemic gives us a chance to celebrate borough from Lincoln City, so Ameri­ I made this last for two nights. (Five his work. There was so much of it that cans can keep an eye on one of their own. hours and twenty-one minutes. Netflix you’ll be watching forever, unless you (Two hours and seven minutes, including Ukraine—you can change the settings on shoot yourself first. (Eighty-one hours, a blank screen during halftime. YouTube.) your account.) approx. Mostly YouTube, but check any old VHS tapes you have in the garage.) “CATS” Cats was widely derided at the MACON MCCALMAN RETROSPECTIVE You time of its release, in 2019, but, if you are, I’m guessing, unfamiliar with the 1997 NATIVITY PLAY, ST. SWITHIN’S SCHOOL have literally seen everything else on work of Macon McCalman, who died You’ve seen “Downton Abbey” three every streaming service, then perhaps it’s in 2005, with a hundred and fifteen movie times. You’ve even seen the movie. You’ve worth .. . Actually, I hate this job, and I and television credits to his name. I was watched “Poldark,” “The Forsyte Saga,” quit. Read “Ulysses” or the Bible. Talk unfamiliar with it, too, until I picked a “Grantchester,” “Victoria,” “Upstairs, to your family. Try to make a replica of random film on IMDb (“Smokey and Downstairs,” and everything Jane Aus­ the old Ebbets Field out of used chew­

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI the Bandit”) and a random character ten so much as thought about writing. ing gum. There will be a vaccine soon. 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 23 ing year, in a case study of the episode. CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLES Toyota’s response was extraordinary: by six-thirty that morning, while the factory was still smoldering, executives AFTER THE STORM huddled to organize the production of P-valves at other factories. It was a “war The pandemic has revealed dire flaws in American medicine. Can we fix them? room,” one official recalled. The next day, a Sunday, small and large factories, BY SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE some with no direct connection to Toy- ota, or even to the automotive industry, 361667513 received detailed instructions for man- ufacturing the P-valves. By February 4th, three days after the fire, many of these factories had repurposed their machines to make the valves. Brother Industries, a Japanese company best known for its sewing machines and typewriters, adapted a computerized milling device that made typewriter parts to start mak- ing P-valves. The ad-hoc work-around was inefficient—it took fifteen minutes to complete each valve, its general man- ager admitted—but the country’s larg- est company was in trouble, and so the crisis had become a test of national sol- idarity. All in all, Toyota lost some sev- enty thousand vehicles—an astonish- ingly small number, given the millions of orders it fulfilled that year. By the end of the week, it had increased shifts and lengthened hours. Within the month, the company had rebounded. Every enterprise learns its strengths and weaknesses from an Aisin-fire mo- ment—from a disaster that spirals out of control. What those of us in the med- ical profession have learned from the COVID-19 crisis has been dismaying, and on several fronts. Medicine isn’t a doc- tor with a black bag, after all; it’s a com- t 4:18 a.m. on February 1, 1997, a loss was evident to Toyota. The com- plex web of systems and processes. It is Afire broke out in the Aisin Seiki pany had adopted “just in time” (J.I.T.) a health-care delivery system—provid- company’s Factory No. 1, in Kariya, a production: parts, such as P-valves, ing antibiotics to a child with strep throat hundred and sixty miles southwest of were produced according to immediate or a new kidney to a patient with renal Tokyo. Soon, flames had engulfed the needs—to precisely match the number failure. It is a research program, guid- plant and incinerated the production of vehicles ready for assembly—rather ing discoveries from the lab bench to line that made a part called a P-valve—a than sitting around in stockpiles. But the bedside. It is a set of protocols for device used in vehicles to modulate brake the fire had now put the whole enter- quality control—from clinical-practice pressure and prevent skidding. The valve prise at risk: with no inventory in the guidelines to drug and device approv- was small and cheap—about the size of warehouse, there were only enough valves als. And it is a forum for exchanging a fist, and roughly ten dollars apiece— to last a single day. The production of information, allowing for continuous but indispensable. The Aisin factory all Toyota vehicles was about to grind improvement in patient care. In each normally produced almost thirty-three to a halt. “Such is the fragility of JIT: a arena, the pandemic has revealed some thousand valves a day, and was, at the surprise event can paralyze entire net- strengths—including frank heroism and time, the exclusive supplier of the part works and even industries,” the manage- ingenuity—but it has also exposed hid- for the Toyota Motor Corporation. ment scholars Toshihiro Nishiguchi and den fractures, silent aneurysms, points Within hours, the magnitude of the Alexandre Beaudet observed the follow- of fragility. Systems that we thought were homeostatic—self-regulating, Efficiency at the cost of resilience is like a silent aneurysm waiting to rupture. self-correcting, like a human body in

24 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXANDER GLANDIEN good health—turned out to be exqui- tubations and bronchoscopies—proce- flu.” But promises are not contracts. “We sitely sensitive to turbulence, like the dures that can send viral particles air- were just naïve,” he said. body during critical illness. Everyone borne, and pose the highest risk of Bowen kept thinking about the next now asks: When will things get back to infection. He recalled seeing a patient pandemic, when the supply of masks from normal? But, as a physician and re- with symptoms that could have signalled China might plummet and the demand searcher, I fear that the resumption of COVID-19: “When I went to examine for domestic masks might surge again. normality would signal a failure to learn. him, I had a surgical mask”—a simple He sent letters warning about a poten- We need to think not about resump- clothlike cover, leaky at the sides—“and tial supply-chain problem to President tion but about revision. a face shield I had been cleaning and re- Obama in 2010, and to President Trump using for a month.” in 2017; he wrote to the Defense Secre- tart with health care as a delivery We’ve all heard stories about the ab- tary; to hospital-safety associations; to Ssystem. In this state of emergency, sence of masks in hospitals; we know officials at the Centers for Disease Con- delivering care has required both per- that their production was typically out- trol—hundreds of letters in all. He must sonal protective equipment (masks, sourced to suppliers in China, which have seemed, at times, like an obsessive gowns, gloves) for medical personnel were buffeted by the very contagion that crank. “I got a form letter from the White and devices (including supplemental ox- made these devices so necessary. Mean- House, thanking me for my concerns,” ygen and ventilators) for patients. In the while, the shortage of these mass-man- he said. “Everybody ignored it.” absence of effective drugs, care is mainly ufactured fifty-cent items has imper- When COVID-19 hit, China shut supportive. As the pandemic advanced, illed the safety of our medical personnel. down many of its factories, and retained the delivery of these goods to hospitals The question is: Why? Days after the most of its diminished production of and clinics should have been akin to a Aisin fire, a typewriter factory was put- masks for its own use. For a while, ex- soldierly deployment, a meticulous, coör- ting out brake-system components. Why ports declined to a trickle. Today, Bow- dinated response—Toyota reassembling weren’t our suppliers responding with en’s company has increased its manu- a supply chain within a matter of days. the same urgency and resilience? facturing almost fourfold, producing at Instead, the medical infrastructure of The story of Mike Bowen, a manu- least a million masks a day. But that’s one of the world’s wealthiest nations facturer in North Richland Hills, Texas, only a fraction of the demand; he has fell apart, like a slapdash house built by offers some clues. His company, Pres- had to turn away orders for hundreds one of the three little pigs. tige Ameritech, which he and his part- of millions a day. N95 respirators, those heavy-duty ners started fifteen years ago, is among There’s another place that hospitals face masks with two straps and a metal the country’s largest domestic manufac- and clinics could have looked to for nose bridge, are a case in point. Before turers of surgical and N95 masks. Be- masks, gloves, and gowns: the Strategic the pandemic, each cost between fifty cause companies that moved manufac- National Stockpile—a repository of cents and a dollar or so. They come in turing abroad—including Bowen’s old emergency equipment that can be de- various sizes and styles, and every year employer, Kimberly-Clark—would un- ployed on short notice during a crisis. health-care workers have their size “fit dercut him on price, he often had a hard On March 4th, six weeks after the first tested,” to make sure that air can’t get time landing orders. “Hospitals typically case of COVID-19 had been reported in in around the edges. (A puff of aerosol- don’t order masks as individual buyers,” America, the S.N.S. announced its in- ized saccharin might be sprayed near he told me. He spoke deliberately, with tention to buy six hundred million N95 your face; if you can detect the sweet- the slightest Texan drawl. Instead, they respirators in the next eighteen months. ness, the mask isn’t fitting properly.) The negotiate contracts as members of a Even if private-sector orders were can- N95, meant for a single use, is designed Group Purchasing Organization—rep- celled when the pandemic subsided, the to filter particulates as small as 0.3 mi- resenting hundreds or thousands of hos- contracted companies—Honeywell, crons in diameter. In the pre-pandemic pitals—and, as Bowen explained, the Dräger, 3M, Moldex, and O&M Hal- world, when I encountered a patient G.P.O. always “chooses the cheapest yard—would thus have a guaranteed suspected of having influenza or TB, bid.” His business struggled. In 2009, buyer. But pandemics don’t go on hiatus say, I would put one on, and discard it though, preparations were made for the for eighteen months, patiently waiting in the biohazard trash after each use. H1N1 influenza pandemic, and Bowen for medical supplies to accumulate. The But mid-crisis, when the need for was asked to ramp up his production of day after the S.N.S. announcement, the these masks in hospitals and clinics was face masks to meet the anticipated de- state of Massachusetts requested seven most acute, doctors and nurses ran short. mand. “We bought the old Kimberly- hundred and fifty thousand N95 masks An anesthesiologist from New Jersey Clark factory,” he recalled. “We outfit- (and a similar number of surgical gowns told me that he was forced to reuse his ted it with new machines. We hired an and gloves) to protect its doctors and mask for the whole day: “We get one, extra hundred and fifty people. And then, nurses. Two weeks passed—each bring- per shift, per day.” His nursing staff, he when it ended, the whole thing fell apart. ing grim news of viral spread—before said, initially got none. A resident in Bos- The people that we helped went back the state received a tenth of that number. ton who worked in an E.R. told me that to the foreign-made masks. So we had When I e-mailed the Strategic Na- he had no N95 mask until the end of to lay off all of those people.” Bowen al- tional Stockpile, a spokesperson empha- March; the few that were available were most went bankrupt. “Hospitals prom- sized that the role of the S.N.S. was “to reserved for medical staff performing in- ised to retain us as suppliers after the supplement ”—her emphasis—“state and

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 25 local supplies during public-health emer- kit. When labs at American hospitals by commercial clinical labs or academic gencies,” not to fulfill everyone’s needs. and elsewhere devised detection assays labs, and the C.D.C. initially distributed But how many N95s were there in the of their own, the agency prohibited their its kits only to “C.D.C.-authorized” mil- stockpile to start with? The answer was use until an “Emergency Use Authori- itary and state and county public-health thirteen million. New York and Cali- zation” had been applied for and granted. labs, which do a fraction of over-all test- fornia, between them, have about three The “Emergency Use Authorization” ing. Meanwhile, the infection spread on million health-care workers. If a fifth protocol, less demanding than the or- flights and in movie theatres and during of that workforce were involved in some dinary approval process, was designed visits to grandparents, seeding itself in contact with virus-infected patients, and to make the agency nimbler, while pre- other cities and states: New York, New if no more than two N95 masks were venting people from peddling useless Jersey, Louisiana, Connecticut. Yet, by used per worker each day, the entire tests, drugs, or devices during an emer- the last week of February, only a few S.N.S. supply would last eleven days. gency. Yet, for some researchers, it would hundred tests per day were being per- prove to be a roadblock in itself. formed. On February 28th, Greninger ur delivery mechanisms have also I spoke to Alex Greninger, the assis- and colleagues sent a letter to Congress, Obroken down for the people trying tant director of the virology lab at the noting, “No test manufacturer or clinical to measure and manage the crisis. In this University of Washington. It’s one of the laboratory has successfully navigated the effort, the most important tool is the largest virology labs in the country, and E.U.A. process for SARS-CoV-2 to date.” detection kit. At a population level, de- researchers there began developing a test The next day, the F.D.A. relaxed its tection enables mapmaking: quantify- just days after the first case of covid-19 position, allowing “high complexity” clin- ing the size and the sources of an infec- was detected on American soil—a thirty- ical labs to test for virus infection in ad- tion and tracking its movements. For an five-year-old man who appeared at a vance of agency review and approval. A individual patient, it enables plan-mak- clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, simplified E.U.A. form was soon made ing: assessing whether you’ve been in- on January 19th, coughing and feverish. available. Greninger e-mailed me two fected and should be isolated, and trac- Greninger, a square-jawed athletic versions of the E.U.A. application. The ing whom you’ve put at risk. In the later figure who favors hoodies over suits, original one, from January 19th, was thirty stages of a pandemic, the ability to test didn’t blame anyone at the C.D.C. or pages and filled with dense boilerplate. on a wide scale allows agencies to con- the F.D.A.; in fact, he told me that he “In the first version,” Greninger told me, centrate on hot spots and contain them found the officials “extremely respon- “they suggested the lab test twenty-five with limited, local lockdowns. sive and easy to work with.” As he de- positive cases. But when we were look- The C.D.C., which had known about scribed the situation, it was the process ing at this, in mid-February, there were the Wuhan outbreak since December, that failed. For Greninger’s team, de- only fourteen confirmed cases in the started making detection kits in January. vising a lab test for the new coronavirus, U.S.” This posed a metaphysical ques- According to reporting from the Wash- SARS-CoV-2, wasn’t particularly diffi- tion: How can one validate an emer- ington Post, on February 8th, one of the cult: its genomic sequence was already gency test before an emergency occurs? first C.D.C.-made detection kits for the available, which made it possible to de- The F.D.A. duly worked with the C.D.C. new coronavirus, freshly approved by the sign the right probe for detecting the and the N.I.H. to make more viral sam- Food and Drug Administration, arrived viral material. Securing samples of that ples available, lowering the hurdles for at a public-health lab in Manhattan; it material to validate the test wasn’t easy, test validation without compromising the contained a set of chemicals, or reagents, but Greninger found a way. The next quality of the test. A later version of the meant to isolate the virus’s genetic ma- step was getting the F.D.A. to permit E.U.A. form, from March 7th, was just terial, and a set of three “probes” to am- its use. He and his colleagues spent al- seven pages. Between February 28th and plify the material and then determine most a hundred hours filling out a ba- March 1st, Greninger’s team worked whether it was from the coronavirus. roque, thirty-page form, filing the au- around the clock to prepare the virology Time and again, technicians in New York thorization request on February 19th. lab for testing hundreds of patient sam- found, one of the probes—probe N3— Still no dice: he had e-mailed the ma- ples. By Monday, March 2nd, the lab had registered false positives: even distilled terial, and the F.D.A. insisted that he begun its first tests. A full forty-three water triggered a positive result. print it out and mail a hard copy, along days had passed since that covid-19 pa- As the days dragged by, researchers with the digital file in physical form, tient turned up in Snohomish County. at the C.D.C. tried to rejigger the test such as a thumb drive or a CD, to a sep- This is hardly the first time that the and make sure that its results were re- arate “documentation” office. (This re- F.D.A. has faced the challenge of find- liable. (The F.D.A. says that the origi- quirement was later withdrawn.) ing the right balance between safety and nal design it approved had performed “They worked as efficiently as they speed. In October of 1988, fifteen hundred well; the trouble arose when additional could,” Greninger said, “but the hard aids protesters from the direct-action lots of the kit were manufactured.) Al- copies probably increased the turnaround group ACT UP arrived at the agency to though the World Health Organiza- by several additional days.” (The F.D.A. stage a “takeover.” While agency scien- tion had distributed a quarter of a mil- says that, on the contrary, it reviewed tists, horrified and confused, peered out lion tests, manufactured by a German the electronic application immediately.) of their windows, activists draped ban- lab and widely used elsewhere, the What gave the matter particular urgency ners and put out tombstone-shaped signs. F.D.A. had authorized only the C.D.C. is that the bulk of patient testing is done (“RIP: killed by the f.d.a.”) As the

26 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 H.I.V./aids researcher and activist Mark Harrington recounted, it was part of act up’s “Drugs Into Bodies” agenda, pro- pelled by an urgent logic: aids was nearly always fatal, and time-consuming pre- cautions seemed the opposite of cau- tious—patients were being protected to death. The logic sank in. One way that the F.D.A. eventually responded was by developing an “accelerated approval” pro- cess. It would permit the use of “surro- gate” metrics to judge the success of a medicine; that is, rather than waiting to measure patient survival rate over some period of time, researchers could estab- lish effectiveness simply by document- ing a decrease in viral loads, or the re- covery of the immune system. Trials became leaner and swifter, expediting the development and approval of the antiviral “cocktail” therapies that are now used to treat patients with H.I.V. For COVID-19, in turn, the F.D.A. has •• sought to fast-forward trials by means of its Coronavirus Treatment Accelera- tion Program, working with developers divisive, ethically fraught approach to But this flurry of attention was pre- of treatments and vaccines. Still, the begin with. Add in diagnostic errors, ceded by a long period of neglect. “Just speedier approach has its own pitfalls: it and it could be a lethal one. a few decades ago, we were on the pe- makes it easier for products that are mar- riphery, even among virologists,” Weiss ginally effective—or outright ineffec- ests, drugs, devices, procedures: all told me. The first coronavirus confer- tive—to slip into the system. “Drugs Into Tthese draw on medicine as a re- ence was organized in 1980, in Würz- Bodies” too easily devolves into bad drugs search program. Major innovations in burg, Germany. There were sixty peo- delivered into vulnerable bodies. The clinical care are often driven by scien- ple at the conference—“virtually the same applies to devices and detection as- tists working with cell cultures, animal entire coronavirus group at that time.” says. A recent fiasco in the U.K. illus- models, and even computational mod- Federal grants were scarce, and her lab, trates the point: the government spent els—work done in vitro, in vivo, in sil- along with the small band of research- twenty million dollars on COVID-19 tests, ico. Lifesaving treatments found in I.V. ers, struggled for decades with minimal peddled by two Chinese companies, that bags and pill bottles generally had their funding. Then, in 2003, SARS hit. “And, proved unreliable. origins in petri dishes and microarrays. of course, suddenly everyone was inter- As Greninger was quick to point out, Scant the lab research, and a patient will ested,” Weiss recalled. without some F.D.A. approval process, pay the price. That September, the National Insti- testing could become a free-for-all. And “I am busier than I have ever been,” tutes of Health put out a “Request for in the aftermath of the testing debacle Susan Weiss, a professor of microbiol- Applications” to study SARS. The N.I.H. we’re seeing a pendulum shift toward ogy at the University of Pennsylvania, organized workshops featuring “inter- underregulation. The F.D.A. has allowed told me. Instantly recognizable in the national experts in the fields of corona- more than ninety companies to offer long passageways of the lab by her nim- virus biology,” and blue-ribbon panels antibody tests meant to determine bus of curly brown hair, she has spent on topics like “priority pathogens,” bio- whether someone has already been in- her career working on coronaviruses. defense, and vaccines. fected and possibly acquired immunity. While other labs at the university are “We were suddenly in the middle But it has reviewed and authorized only under lockdown, hers is now in hyper- of all attention,” Weiss said. Then four. In short, the F.D.A. has essentially drive: she is studying coronavirus pro- SARS stopped spreading, and the inter- recused itself from evaluating these tests teins and their interaction with the est evaporated. before they come on the market. Poorly human immune system—a topic she But surely, I asked Weiss, someone regulated and unreliable tests, could, un- has pursued for forty years. Her work should have anticipated that another fortunately, complicate recovery. Some has helped that of other Penn scientists, similar pandemic might arise? nations, such as Italy and the U.K., are including the virologist Sara Cherry, “You would think so, wouldn’t considering giving return-to-work “im- who are searching for drugs that might you?” Weiss said, her voice tightening munity passports” to those who have block coronaviruses from entering cells in indignation. “You would think so.” If antibodies against the virus. This is a and replicating. the research on coronaviruses had kept

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 27 pace, we might have had an array of treatment options, even a vaccine plat­ form that could be adapted for the EVICTION coronavirus now circulating, a cousin of the one that causes SARS. Back from Dublin, my grandmother I searched a database called Grant­ finds an eviction notice on her door. ome to confirm Weiss’s observations. Now she is in court for rent arrears. The plot of federal grants awarded for The lawyers are amused. coronavirus research in the past few These are the Petty Sessions, decades looks like a bell­shaped curve. this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday. In the nineteen­nineties and early two­ Their comments fill a column in the newspaper. thousands, there were typically between Was the notice well served? twenty and thirty such grants a year; Was it served at all? these were the lean decades that Weiss Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant? had referred to. Predictably, the number In which one of the plaintiffs’ rent books surged after 2003, when SARS arrived, is she registered? reaching its peak of a hundred and three The case comes to an end, is dismissed. in 2008. And then came the decline. This Leaving behind the autumn evening. year, no doubt, the line will rise again. Leaving behind the room she entered. “The investigators came and then Leaving behind the reason I have always they left,” Stanley Perlman, a microbi­ resisted history. ologist at the University of Iowa, told A woman leaves a courtroom in tears. me. He’s another veteran coronavirus A nation is rising to the light. researcher who has watched labs drift History notes the second, not the first. away from his field of concern. Nor does it know the answer as to why To be fair, the N.I.H. awards most of on a winter evening its grants based on unsolicited applica­ in a modern Ireland tions it receives from scientists, and it I linger over the page of the Drogheda must balance national priorities. “Look, Argus and Leinster Journal, 1904, we live in uncertain times,” Michael Lauer, knowing as I do that my attention has a senior administrator at the N.I.H., said. no agency, none at all. Nor my rage. “The N.I.H. cannot predict pandemics any more than anyone else can.” And, he —Eavan Boland stressed, “there’s already an internal effort to maintain a diverse portfolio within the Institutes. The whole of the N.I.H. eval­ to humans. Disease modellers had de­ ers are also seeing unexpected throm­ uates its entire portfolio every five years. termined that a respiratory virus with boembolic events in young, healthy And some of the grants build the infra­ modes of transmission similar to SARS­ patients with COVID­19. Neurologists structure to pay for clinical trials that CoV­2 was a likely culprit in a future getting consulted for stroke, cardiolo­ can be rapidly deployed during a pan­ pandemic. Why wasn’t our research in­ gists finding large clots on echocardio­ demic”—a network of clinicians who can vestment remotely commensurate with grams, nephrologists noticing dialysis move as a body when needed. our threat assessments? catheters clotting, radiologists finding Still, the bell­shaped curve of corona­ PEs on scans. I think there is a slow virus funding nagged at me. Boom­and­ n Sunday, April 4th, Tatiana Prow­ collective awakening to the fact that this bust cycles in research have consequences: Oell, a doctor at Johns Hopkins, mes­ is not an isolated phenomenon.” lab technicians are skilled workers who saged me on Twitter. She forwarded an In fact, the “slow collective” awaken­ are laid off or retrained as priorities shift. e­mail from a radiologist in Los Ange­ ing was already well under way—else­ When I worked in a viral immunology les, along with a CT scan of a young where. Chinese doctors had apparently lab as a grad student at Oxford, our re­ patient’s lung, with a golf­ball­size clot. seen such blood clots, and started giving search infrastructure was supported by An unusual finding was cropping up in patients blood thinners to prevent them. dozens of technicians, each trained one­ patients with severe SARS­CoV­2 infec­ (“Why are American doctors so resistant on­one by yet another layer of skilled tions: blood clots in the lung, called to learning from excellent Chinese doc­ technicians. It was a product of time and pulmonary emboli (P.E.s), and strokes tors who . . . have been on the front line the accretion of expertise. A well­run, fo­ caused by clots in the brain. Some were longer,” someone admonished me on cussed lab is like a village, not a Quon­ tiny, nearly undetectable, and some were Twitter.) One patient—a man in his twen­ set hut you can put up overnight. huge. “I think this is a major unrecog­ ties—texted me a picture of bluish spots What’s more, it was known that SARS nized cause of mortality,” Prowell wrote. on his thighs, evidently a scattering of and MERS were deadly coronaviruses “My phone is full of msgs from physi­ minuscule clots in the skin. I e­mailed a with animal reservoirs that could hop cians from every specialty asking if oth­ doctor in London; in autopsies, he told

28 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 me, “we are finding micro-emboli, small broken. Patient records that once were derstand what’s happening to patient clots, in the lungs.” During the next few scribbled on clipboards now sit in elec- during hospital course?” Another doc- days, my in-box and my Twitter feed tronic medical-record (E.M.R.) systems, tor’s reply: “Because notes are used to bill, brimmed with notes from doctors and many of them provided by the Wisconsin- determine level of service, and document researchers remarking on these findings, based software company Epic. A stan- it rather than their intended purpose, and wondering about trials for virus- dardized digital database of patient-care which was to convey our observations, infected patients and blood thinners. records, searchable across hospital and assessment, and plan. Our important Is this loose, informal transmission of medical-care systems, could be an in- work has been co-opted by billing.” anecdotal findings—call it chatter, call it valuable way of identifying effective ap- The promise of bringing medical rumor—part of medicine? It isn’t what proaches to a novel disease—like mov- recordkeeping into the digital age was anyone is taught in medical school; it ing from a patchwork meteorological to maintain a live record of a live pa- doesn’t fit in with the professional’s image system where towns keep their own rec- tient, enabling clinicians to track pa- as a purveyor of rigorously tested inter- ords of wind and rainfall to a national tient care across hospital systems and ventions. But continuous, iterative clin- weather-tracking grid. A putative ad- over time. Instead, we’ve been saddled ical knowledge—the kind that can be vantage of digital hospital records is to with systems that cut into patient care updated minute by minute—is invalu- enable on-the-fly searches—not the kind (clinicians typically spend an hour feed- able during this tumult, when time is of of data project that the N.I.H. might ing documentation into a computer for the essence and there’s scant research to fund (its grants take weeks to process every hour they spend with patients) fall back on. Such updates are like weather even on an accelerated schedule) but the and, often, are too fragmented to allow reports in the middle of a storm. They kind that might be completed in an hour. a patient’s file to follow her from one matter in the moment; once the storm Perhaps, I thought, we should be advis- medical center to another. The E.M.R., passes, they’re yesterday’s news. COVID-19 ing COVID-19 patients to call us if they as a colleague of mine put it, is “elec- has similarities to familiar conditions, suspected clots—if their breathing rate tronic in the same sense that your grand- but it is a new condition and, like all new and heart rate increased suddenly, for father’s radio is electronic.” The ener- conditions, it has its peculiarities. When instance. Perhaps our hospital system’s gized, improvisatory role of medical doctors exchange notes on their experi- emergency department should be alerted. Twitter inevitably draws attention to ences—about an odd incidence of blood Because clotting is a frequent issue what our balky, billion-dollar systems clots, about a ventilator setting that seems among patients with cancers, I called should have been providing—to the easier on the lungs, about the results of my colleague Azra Raza, the director of cost, in dollars and lives, of the rapid putting patients in a prone position in Columbia’s Myelodysplastic Syndrome clinical learning that we’ve forgone. order to ease breathing—they can adjust Center, to ask if we could search through It’s hardly news that our E.M.R. treatments and improve patient outcomes. the database of her patients for any who systems have failed medicine, and yet Not every provisional finding will pan had reported being infected, and, if so, an executive order from New York State, out. Medical chatter can prove misguided, had experienced blood clots. She sighed. issued at the end of March by Governor just as there’s plenty of bunk in open re- “I can’t think of a simple way to do this,” Andrew Cuomo, amounted to a grim search archives. Still, anecdotal patterns she told me. “And in any case, because epitaph: “Health care providers are can lay the groundwork for a case series, of all the concerns around relieved of recordkeeping and then a case-control study, and, ulti- privacy, if you wanted to re- requirements to the extent mately, a randomized, controlled trial of port the findings you would necessary for health care a clinical approach. Already, observations have to file with the insti- providers to perform tasks that began as scattered tweets about em- tutional review board.” as may be necessary to re- boli in COVID-19 cases have migrated into “But that would take a spond to the COVID-19 out- preprint journal articles, Webinars, and month, at least,” I protested. break. .. . Any person act- official recommendations from profes- (In recent weeks, many hos- ing reasonably and in good sional bodies. pitals have accelerated their faith under this provision The way clinicians have made use of review process to deal with shall be afforded absolute Twitter and Facebook during this cri- the pace of the pandemic.) immunity from liability.” sis has been a heartening development. “It’s the way the system A system designed to ex- We’ve cobbled together an informal is,” she said. “If you want to report the pedite and improve the delivery of medical bulletin board for the pandemic; number of times a patient has cut her health care was officially recognized as even as we wade through the muddy nails in the last week, you would need an obstacle. slop of fake news, we have a forum of approval. And it’s not easy at all to search exchange that is flexible, versatile, and the E.M.R. for any of this information. “ hen the tide goes out,” Warren timely. This is a story of something that’s You’d have to hire someone specifically WBuffett once said, “you discover gone right—and of something that’s to look through it.” who has been swimming naked.” The gone very wrong. A cardiologist at Massachusetts Gen- pandemic has been merciless in what it That’s because clinical medicine is, eral Hospital, in Boston, echoed this frus- has exposed. In many cases, the weak- among other things, an information sys- tration on Twitter: “Why are nearly all nesses in our medical system were ones tem, and a central part of that system is notes in Epic ... basically *useless* to un- that had already been the subject of

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 29 widespread attention, such as the na- gen at home, the resultant logjam de- generation-defining joblessness that tional scandal of health-care coverage lays the treatment of other patients who has shifted so many from precarity to that leaves millions of Americans unin- need those beds for acute care. outright peril. To what extent did the sured. In others, they should have been The pharmaceutical system was market-driven, efficiency-obsessed cul- the subject of widespread attention, be- clearly fraying as well. Vincristine, which ture of hospital administration contrib- cause we had plenty of warning. Again I use to treat blood cancers, was among ute to the crisis? Questions about “best and again, in the past several weeks, a hundred important drugs that have practices” in management have become we’ve heard of shortages—shortages of been in critically short supply in recent questions about best practices in public protective gear, of ventilators, of phar- years. Even bags of sterile saline solu- health. The numbers in the bean counter’s maceuticals. Yet, even before the crisis, tion—the most basic I.V. fluid, nothing ledger are now body counts in a morgue. medicine was dealing with troubling more than salt and water—were hard For decades, consultants had taught scarcities of needed drugs and support to source. (Many American hospitals the virtues of taut business practices. systems. Last summer, long before the used bags made by a single manufac- “Slack”—underutilized resources, in- pandemic, pulmonologists were raising turer, in Puerto Rico, which was devas- ventory waiting to be put to use—was concerns about a lack of oxygen sup- tated by Hurricane Maria.) An F.D.A. shunned. I spoke to David Simchi-Levi, plies—the result of cost-cutting measures report published in October noted that an M.I.T. professor who studies sup- by suppliers of durable medical equip- manufacturers had little incentive to ply-chain economics and how enter- ment. Competitive-bidding programs produce less profitable drugs; that the prises respond to disasters. “Cost is easy drove margins down so low that more market failed to reward “ ‘mature qual- to measure,” he told me. “But resilience than forty per cent of such companies— ity systems’ that focus on continuous is much harder.” So we reward manag- responsible for the supply of portable improvement and early detection of sup- ers for efficiencies—and overlook any oxygen tanks and concentrators—went ply chain issues”; and that “logistical attendant fragilities. His view can be out of business. Inventory diminished; and regulatory challenges make it diffi- summarized simply: we’ve been over- delivery times increased. Patients suffered. cult for the market to recover from a taught to be overtaut. Neeta Thakur, a pulmonologist and re- disruption.” If one factory went offline, “We’ve been teaching these finance searcher at the University of California the entire nation’s supply of a critical guys how to squeeze,” Willy Shih, an in San Francisco, told me about the byz- drug could be imperilled. operations expert at Harvard Business antine process (involving “ten to fifteen As such pre-pandemic stories pro- School, told me, emphasizing the word. disconnected steps”) that was required liferate, they point toward more fun- “Squeeze more efficiency, squeeze cost, in order for a patient to receive oxygen damental reckonings. Leave aside the squeeze more products out at the same at home—a patient who is then at the tragedies of those who died alone in iso- cost, squeeze out storage costs, squeeze mercy of the intermittent delivery sched- lation rooms in hospitals, or of the dis- out inventory. We really need to edu- ules of understocked venders. The prob- proportionate disease burden borne by cate them about the value of slack.” lem builds into a failure cascade: if pa- African-Americans and working-class Simchi-Levi is particularly interested tients cannot be discharged from the immigrants. Leave aside the windblown in two variables that could serve as met- hospital because they cannot have oxy- avenues of an empty, joyless city, the rics for resilience. The first is the “time to survive”; that is, how long can an en- terprise endure when there’s a sudden shortage of some critical good? The sec- ond is the “time to recover”: how much time will it take to restore adequate sup- plies of some critical good? By quanti- fying each variable under different sce- narios, a business can model its ability to recover from a disaster. He told me about floods in Thailand that shut down factories responsible for critical com- puter and automotive parts. Afterward, some companies expanded their supply lines to other parts of Asia. Having seen the fragility of a tight chain, those com- panies had now established a network with some spring in it. In the future, their “time to survive” would exceed the suppliers’ “time to recover.” Toyota’s recovery from the Aisin fac- tory fire in 1997 can sound like a story of triumph, as, in many respects, it was. “Could we cut it short today? I need a little me time.” But the company’s executives realized that it was also a story of failure. The zation, rather than closing itself off, work- our E.M.R. systems are worse than an company shouldn’t have been so vulner- ing chiefly with state and military labs, infuriating time sink; in times of crisis, able to such an event. The fire, along could fortify lines of communication with they actively obstruct patient care. We with a later disaster—the 2011 earthquake, the commercial and clinical labs that ac- should reimagine the continuous medi- which cut off its supply of a crucial mi- tually serve the vast majority of patients. cal record as its founders first envisaged crochip—taught Toyota the value of re- The F.D.A. could have had a streamlined it: as an open, searchable library of a pa- dundancy and risk assessment. It mod- E.U.A. form already in hand—prefera- tient’s medical life. Think of it as a kind ified its just-in-time system to allow for bly without a requirement that it be sent of intranet: flexible, programmable, easy at least a month’s worth of specialized by pigeon post—rather than having labs to use. Right now, its potential as a re- components, building strategic slack waste critical time placating its bureau- source is blocked, not least by the owners into its operation. It created a database, cracy. Before the next public- of the proprietary software, called Rescue, with dozens of compa- health crisis emerges, the who maintain it as a closed nies organized into tiers, their risks reg- F.D.A. must think hard system, and by complex rules ularly evaluated under conditions of ad- about how to balance speed and regulations designed versity, and information on sixty-eight and oversight, adjusting the to protect patient privacy. It hundred parts continually updated. The ratio to meet the moment should be a simple task to company maintains constant commu- but abandoning neither. encrypt or remove a patient’s nication with its suppliers under “ordi- Slack can be costly. As identifying details while en- nary operating conditions.” But it also Greninger put it, “Right listing his or her medical in- trains employees to operate during disas- now, I have machines and re- formation for the common ters, and evaluates the risk to the entire agents to test tens of thou- good. A storm-forecasting company if nodes in the network should sands of patients for SARS- system that warns us after falter. No enterprise is truly disaster- CoV-2. That’s basically all the clinical the storm has passed is useless. What we proof, but in cultivating networks of virology lab is doing. What will happen want is an E.M.R. system that’s versatile mutual loyalties the company has engi- when the epidemic is over?” Once the in- enough to serve as a tool for everyday use neered resilience. cidence of COVID-19 subsides, so will the but also as a research application during Yet resilience isn’t simply a matter of sense of urgency when it comes to build- a crisis, identifying techniques that im- having supplies at hand. In Shih’s view, ing infrastructure, or stockpiling equip- prove medical outcomes, and dissemi- the most critical kind of slack doesn’t ment—masks, ventilators, reagents—that nating that information to physicians take the form of a stockpile. Rather, he might sit unused in warehouses for a de- across the country in real time. told me, “I think of slack as capacity and cade or more. We need purchasing proce- No set of reforms will deal with every capabilities.” What you really want to dures that control costs without creating problem, such as a President who, bick- measure, model, and establish is the ca- conditions in which critical supplies van- ering with scientists, equivocated and pacity to build something when a cri- ish during a crisis. We need a Strategic delayed what could have been a lifesav- sis arises. And this involves human as National Stockpile that has sufficient in- ing, economy-protecting, coördinated well as physical capital. We need to mea- ventory to ease temporary shortages. But, response. Given the resolve and the re- sure talent, versatility, and flexibility. most of all, we need an identified capac- sources, however, much is within our Overtaut strings inevitably break. ity—a network that can be activated on grasp: a supply chain with adequate, ac- Resilience in our medical system will demand, repurposing manufacturing lines, cordioning capacity; a C.D.C. that can involve more than considerations of phys- recalibrating agency protocols. launch pandemic surveillance within ical supplies. Take the debacle of the In research, too, we need strategic re- days, not months; research priorities that C.D.C. detection kit. Here’s where at- serves and cultivated capacities: a scien- don’t erase recent history; an F.D.A. that tention to “mature quality systems” mat- tific infrastructure directed at our exis- serves as a checkpoint but not as a road- ters. South Korea has so many test kits tential threats—categories of pathogens block; a digital system of medical rec- that it’s now exporting them for use in with the potential to disrupt human com- ords that provides an aperture to real- the United States. What was its ap- munities en masse. This may require reg- time, practice-guiding information. proach? The government identified more ular “Requests for Applications,” deter- “Recovery” is the word of the mo- than twenty reputable venders, certified mined by an advisory panel, that will ment; it connotes a return to a previous their products through a sound evalua- encourage researchers both to advance state of well-being. For many patients tion process, and set their factories loose our microbiological understanding of with chronic conditions, though, treat- to meet the demand. That’s what the such agents and to develop interventions ment aims not to restore a baseline of C.D.C. should have done, long before and therapeutic platforms. The N.I.H. precarious health but to reach a higher the pandemic arrived on these shores. In has many funding priorities; this agenda baseline. Some of medicine’s frailties are preparation for a future pandemic, the must take its place among others. Yet it new; some are of long standing. But C.D.C. could run the equivalent of fire cannot be allowed to slip to the margins what the pandemic has exposed—call drills, identifying the capacity, almost on as ambitious researchers move toward new the experience a stress test, a biopsy, or the model of Toyota’s Rescue database, areas of excitement. Research does not a full-body CT scan—is painfully clear. to create and mass-manufacture such benefit from a feast-or-famine ecology. Medicine needs to do more than re- kits during a time of crisis. The organi- Finally, we need to acknowledge that cover; it needs to get better. 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 31 Astoria, Queens.

32 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS APRIL 15, 2020 Twenty-four hours at the epicenter.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARVIN ORELLANA THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 33 he novel coronavirus is not the was relieved to be back in the city. account. It showed a total of $1,200.73. first pandemic of the global “This is my home,” Vargas said, and Thank God, she thought. She took a T age, but it is easily the most shuffled toward the exit. screenshot of her balance and posted it, relentless. In just a matter of months, with the one-word caption “Stimulated.” from the first appearance of respira- • tory illnesses in a cluster of people as- In Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, Jo- • sociated with the Huanan Seafood siah Charles lay in bed, after midnight, Around three o’clock in the morning, Wholesale Market, in the Chinese city watching the movie “Midsommar” and Bradley Hayward, a critical-care phy- of Wuhan, the virus infected millions logging in and out of her bank ac- sician at Weill Cornell Medicine, in of human hosts, killing tens of thou- count. She’d worked at a party store Manhattan, led a team of doctors to a sands. The disease it causes, Covid-19, called Balloon Saloon, but it had patient’s room on an upper floor. The has come to every corner of the earth, closed. “It might be on pause for a patient, a middle-aged man, had come except Antarctica. How it first reached while,” she said recently. “I don’t think off a ventilator the day before, and was New York City, which by late March that anyone wants to celebrate any- now in cardiac arrest. Hayward, as- had become known as the epicenter of thing anymore.” Six hundred dollars sisted by a critical-care fellow, two res- the pandemic, is not hard to imagine. in unemployment funds had disap- idents, and a nurse, stripped the man John F. Kennedy Airport is the busi- peared fast; for more than a week, her naked and rolled him onto a backboard. est point of arrival for international account balance had been less than Hayward placed his hands on the pa- passengers in North America. Infected seventy-five cents. tient’s chest—the skin was cold, which people arrived in New York from Italy, Charles had read online that the suggested that the man did not have from the U.K. and Spain. And, while federal government was about to send a fever when his heart stopped—and travel to the city has slowed, the planes out twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus pushed until he felt the ribs cracking. keep coming, the travellers disembark- checks to millions of Americans. Those In two-minute shifts, pressing faster ing, around the clock. who were signed up for direct deposit than once per second, Hayward and Soon after midnight on April 15th, with the I.R.S. would receive them the fellow used manual compressions the passengers of Delta Flight 1888, first—presumably, she reasoned, at in an attempt to circulate blood from Atlanta, filed into Terminal 4. 1:30 A.M., which is when her biweekly throughout the patient’s body. A ma- Hours earlier, Governor Andrew paychecks had once hit her account. chine monitored their pressure; if it Cuomo had said that the city was at At 1:28 a.m., she logged back in. slackened, a mechanical voice said, “the apex of the plateau” of the epi- Nothing. She opened up a new tab and “Push harder.” demiological curve. The first passen- went on Reddit. Hundreds of other The cardiac complications of COVID ger to reach the baggage claim wore people were doing the same thing: wait- can be a mystery. In Hayward’s expe- a respirator mask. Three military ing for the I.R.S. to send them money rience, running a code, as the process nurses from Pensacola followed with on what would have been Tax Day. of attempted resuscitation is known, a quick step. They were heading to “WHERE MY CHASE BROS typically doesn’t last much longer than work on the U.S.N.S. Comfort, afloat AT?” a user named brewsnob asked on twenty minutes. But, without know- in the Hudson River and operating “THE FINAL COUNTDOWN ing what caused the patient’s heart to as a vast supplementary hospital. A MEGATHREAD.” stop, Hayward could not be certain man named Henry Vargas paused to “I got all my notifications turned how to start it again, or how long it catch his breath. He lives in the Lit- on,” kburchdmv wrote, “and I’m logged might take to do so. After eight min- tle Italy section of the Bronx and has in to Wells Fargo.” utes, an airway team, led by an anes- been suffering from lymphoma. When At 1:33, xI-Red-Ix wrote, “CITI bank thesiologist, entered the room to per- the first COVID-19 case in the United deposited.” form an intubation. The procedure, States was confirmed, on January 20th, Sadxtortion: “Wow I checked and which is necessary for the use of a ven- in the state of Washington, Vargas mine hasn’t come through. I wonder tilator, releases a spray of particles from was in Seattle, undergoing a three- if maybe I’m just not part of the first a patient’s lungs, and is one of the risk- month-long stem-cell treatment, round.” iest for health-care providers treating which had laid waste to his immune Charles checked her account again. COVID patients. Hayward kept up com- system. “You have nothing left,” he Zilch. Maybe she wasn’t part of the pressions until the moment before the said. “They have to reintroduce you first round, either. She paused the ventilator tube slid down the patient’s to all the vaccinations, as if you were movie—it was the first sacrifice scene— throat. A few minutes later, a triangu- a newborn.” He waited for weeks be- and continued to scroll through Red- lar contraption called a LUCAS, which fore it was safe for him to travel. When dit. 1:36 a.m. automates the work of compression, his doctors finally cleared him, the “Ugh I can’t sleep,” bossladyfaithdg was delivered. By then, both Hayward best ticket he could find required two wrote. “My husband just got into a car and the fellow were sweating and out connections—some eleven hours air- accident today. totaled and not covered of breath. borne. It was a nerve-racking trip: by insurance. I need this stimulus.” After half an hour, the door to the “The person sitting next to me could At 1:37, Charles logged back in to patient’s room opened. Someone sug- sneeze, and that could kill me.” He her Advantage SafeBalance Banking gested that it was time to call the code.

34 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 Hayward called back, “It’s not up to you.” But, when it became clear that the man was not reviving, Hayward went around the room and asked if anyone objected. No one did. Hayward switched off the LUCAS and checked for a pulse. Seventy-five minutes after the code had started, he looked at the clock.

he sun rose at 6:16 A.M., but it was Thard to tell. Gray clouds that had arrived from the North Atlantic packed the sky. On Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where the benches on the boardwalk face the sea, almost nobody was out. Circles of light under the boardwalk’s long rows of street lamps, and the lamps themselves, receded to a vanishing point. Set back from the beachfront, Brighton’s high-rise apartment build- ings stretched up into the darkness. Now and then on the nearby Belt Park- way, E.M.S. trucks went by, flashing. If you got close enough to the build- ings, you could hear various things at- “But what will we name the baby after it becomes an adult?” tached to them humming. Hundreds of yards away, the waves were coming in quietly. As the sun came up, dully •• brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of food, sat next to a list of guests. Springs, Rikers “weren’t given stretch limos.”) the ordinary at the same time. Figures wearing a sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, The men stayed there for two nights, appeared far apart on the boardwalk, Timberland boots, and a face mask, then were told to find their way to the each one alone, each making a differ- scanned the list for his name, scribbled Holiday Inn Express. On Tuesday, April ent exercise motion. One was using a his signature, and took a bag. 14th, Springs, who suffers from chronic jump rope, another had two small Springs spent much of the nineteen- inflammation of the lungs, visited the dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. eighties and nineties in prison, where Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hos- Many wore masks. On the horizon to he wrote and published five pulp-fic- pital to get a new albuterol pump. the left lay the narrow sand spit of the tion novels. In more recent years, he There, he tested positive for COVID-19. Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown had been a fixture on Broadway and He had no symptoms and returned to beach below a gray-green line of bushes 110th Street, where he sold used books the hotel, where he self-quarantined, and trees. To the right loomed the gray- on the sidewalk. On March 27th, leaving his room that morning only to ish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jer- Springs was serving a ninety-day sen- pick up his food bag. sey. In between, a small boat motored tence on Rikers Island for failing to He unpacked the food, item by item, slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal report to his parole officer, when Gov- into the mini-fridge—a small marble train. The ordinary-extraordinary day ernor Cuomo announced that he was cake, a boiled egg, a peach yogurt— settled in and locked itself into place. going to release several hundred “pa- and got back in bed to read. On a desk The labyrinthine streets of Brighton role violators” early; inside the jail, the was a stack of used books, which he Beach were so unbusy you could for- rate of COVID-19 infection had surged, had picked up recently from a recy- get the sidewalks and wander in the turning the island into the epicenter cling bin on the Upper West Side: “Liv- middle of them anywhere. The whole of the epicenter. Springs and dozens ing Language: Italian,” “Dating Sucks,” city had become a waiting room. of other men were placed on a bus, by Joanne Kimes, Voltaire’s “Candide, which took them across the Rikers Is- or Optimism.” • land bridge to a hotel in Harlem. It • At a Holiday Inn Express in Corona, had been thirty years since Springs had Queens, John Springs left his room stayed in a hotel. When he walked into At eight o’clock, when Derrick Palmer and rode the elevator down to the lobby. the lobby, he said to himself, “Have we arrived at the Amazon fulfillment cen- It was around 6:30 a.m. On a table all died and gone to Heaven?” (In the ter on Staten Island for his morning near the front desk, dozens of white Post, a “disgusted source” said that he shift, there was a new sign at the en- paper bags, filled with a day’s worth of was surprised that the men leaving trance: “Please walk slowly through the

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 35 the Hudson Theatre, walked into the Millennium Hotel, with which the the- atre shares a rear entrance, said hello to a familiar security guard, and took a series of hallways to the management office, where, on a normal day, he would have already been at work. He grabbed his keys and a flashlight, and went into the theatre. He took an elevator from the base- ment to the dress circle, then walked up several flights to the highest bal- cony. A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage. Each Broadway theatre has one: a ghost light, which goes on as soon as the house clears out after a per- formance. Every theatre, it’s said, is in- habited by a ghost. The light keeps the ghost company, or acts as an offering to keep away curses, or illuminates the stage as the spectral performer plays all night. The upshot of the superstition is that, real bodies be damned, some im- plicit spiritual theatrical event is always “Tell the messenger I’m almost done with my sext.” under way, wherever there’s a stage. The ghost lights on Broadway have been shining uninterrupted since March. •• Using his flashlight, King inspected the emergency exits on the balcony, lane and the camera will detect your auditing the inventory in storage units making sure they hadn’t been blocked temperature.” Previously, masked em- known as “pods.” Walking past work- or jimmied open, and then he did the ployees wielding thermometer guns had ers standing at intervals of twelve feet same on the dress-circle level. In the taken co-workers’ temperatures as they alongside a fenced-in area where shelv- Ambassador Lounge, used for recep- entered the four-story building; now ing units borne by robots pivoted and tions and toasts, King peered through an automated system was in place. Since zoomed, he noticed that a co-worker the windows, which face the street, at the outbreak of the pandemic, Palmer who had tested positive for the corona- the unlit marquee outside. The last and a small group of his fellow-workers virus and a manager who had been quar- show to finish its run at the Hudson had organized demonstrations for haz- antined for possible exposure were back was David Byrne’s “American Utopia.” ard pay, paid sick leave, and more thor- on the job, apparently cleared for re- In the show, Byrne sings a song whose ough cleaning of the center. In the same turn. He picked up a scanning gun and lyrics now seemed a fantasia: period, Palmer, who has worked at Am- began counting products that would azon for four and a half years almost soon be shipped: Brickell Purifying Imagine driving in a car Imagine rolling down the window without incident, received a disciplinary Charcoal Face Wash for Men, Gogo Imagine opening the door warning, ostensibly for violating social- Squeeze applesauce pouches, Cascade Everybody’s coming to my house distancing measures; another warning dishwasher pods with OxyClean . . . Everybody’s coming to my house and he could be fired. In the lobby, a Shortly after 9 a.m., he was visited at “Voice of Associates Board” displayed his station by a manager, who was con- • comments from workers. One named ducting a survey of employees about At 9:15 a.m., Soraya Ribeiro—who Elijah had written, “In all honesty we their ability to maintain social distance was born in Goiânia, a planned city in need to close this warehouse. . . . Some while on the job. Worried that what he central Brazil, but who has long been a of us have big families to return to when said might be used against him, he de- resident of Astoria—arrived at a town we clock out of work.” clined to participate. house on the Upper East Side. Waiting Palmer put his coat in a locker and on the second floor were two wheaten stepped into the roar of spinning con- • terriers, Gio Ponti and Pippa, that she veyor belts on the fulfillment center’s In Times Square at 8:30 a.m., the dig- takes on walks. Unlike the rest of Ri- floor. The work of an Amazon associ- ital billboard ads blared, beaming their beiro’s clients, the dogs’ owners, mem- ate is organized by task. That morning, enticements down on nobody. John bers of the Zabar grocery dynasty, had Palmer was assigned to be a “counter,” King, the deputy general manager of not left the city. Gio Ponti and Pippa

36 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 bounded downstairs to meet Ribeiro bered a time like this in ever,” he said. Meyers has had to get used to doing in the front alcove, and leaped to kiss His travel time was cut in half and the comedy in a void, recording on an iPad her through her mask—the “wheaten parking was “seamless.” For social-dis- and using a teleprompter app. He was greetin’.” Ribeiro leashed her charges tancing reasons, he usually dropped sitting in his attic crawl space, a famil- and set off past the façades of Fifth Av- the weed in his clients’ mailboxes; when iar scene by now to his viewers: a green enue, entering Central Park at Nine- he met the lawyer, though, he stopped desk, a sliver of chimney, a copy of “The tieth Street and walking south. The to chat—about friends they knew who Thorn Birds.” He’s been filming his cherry trees were in blossom and the were sick and others whose trips had show there since the beginning of April, skyscrapers of Billionaires’ Row stood been cancelled. The lawyer was leav- after experimenting in an upstairs hall- out against a startlingly clear sky. ing town for two months. His wife way (too echoey) and a neighbor’s ga- Usually, Ribeiro walks a bouquet of called from a window, telling the men rage (too cold). purebreds, and kids swarm her. Now, to keep their masks on. El complied, “All right, let’s go,” Meyers said. As she noticed, passersby looked a little to keep the peace, but the coronavirus he read through a script, the staffers scared. She was scared, too. Ribeiro doesn’t particularly frighten him. He took notes. The show’s producer, Mike charges by the hour, about thirty dol- worked in health care before getting Shoemaker, calling in from Westches- lars per dog. Some of her clients had into the marijuana business. “I’ve been ter, sat in a chair in front of a circular Venmoed cash gifts after heading to exposed to everything over the years,” painting of a cloudy sky. The script under their country houses, but her usual he said. The men kicked feet goodbye. discussion was for “A Closer Look,” a pack—Tinker Bell, Kiki, Chouquie, segment in which Meyers reviews the Teddy, Gilda, and many more—had • news. The day before, President Trump shrunk to just the two wheatens. Still, At ten-thirty, outside the PATH Fam- had announced from the Rose Garden she was content to be in the fresh air, ily Center, on 151st Street in the Bronx, that he was pulling funding from the which gave her the feeling that every- there was a smell of disinfectant and World Health Organization, and a Har- thing would return to normal soon. marijuana. A bearded employee was vard study warned that some social-dis- Near the Alexander Hamilton statue, sweeping litter from the sidewalk. The tancing measures might be necessary Gio Ponti and Pippa spotted a squir- center, run by the Department of Home- through 2022. “So, yeah,” Meyers read, rel. Ribeiro dropped the leashes and less Services, admits families with chil- “we’re going to need, like, six thousand the dogs ran off to chase it. They treed dren into the shelter system. It also tries more episodes of ‘Tiger King,’ stat. And the squirrel—a moment of unbridled to help them find alternatives; PATH you know what? Fine. I’m gonna watch bliss. Then it was time to go home. stands for Prevention Assistance and every episode of ‘Fuck Island,’ too.” “Over here, guys,” she called out to Temporary Housing. In ordinary times, He stopped and said, “Maybe go them, across an empty field. “Vem cá!” the ramp outside is crowded with stroll- with ‘Fine, I’m going to re-watch’?” ers, bumper to bumper. Not now. The Sal Gentile, who had written the • hotels are empty, so some of them have script, was calling in from Park Slope. At 9:55 a.m., El pulled up in his 2007 contracted with the city to provide six- “Yeah,” he said, making a note. Acura MDX right in front of an apart- teen thousand rooms for temporary Meyers sped through the rest of the ment building in the East Seventies. shelter. Just as after 9/11 and monologue, which ended Waiting for him was a man in a but- Hurricane Sandy, attention without comedy. “When the ton-down shirt, a corporate lawyer at and federal funds, provided time for a political account- a tech company. El, who has a beard by FEMA, are focussed on the ing comes,” he said, “we and a receding hairline, wore a hoodie city. As happened after those must remember that this and a leather jacket. He handed over disasters, one day the money was not inevitable, that it the lawyer’s order: some edibles, sativa, and the attention will end. could have been prevented, and indica for the night. The bill was “It’s quiet now,” the employee and that a long sequence of six hundred dollars. After the lawyer, said, as he used his broom failures led to this moment.” he was delivering to a finance guy in to flip a cigarette butt out of Gentile said that he Tribeca, a nurse in Bushwick, and a a tree pit and into his dust- would make some trims. film director in Ridgewood. El had pan. “But I will tell you one “ ‘Fuck Island’ will stay,” he been dealing for ten years, but he’d thing—when this coronavirus is over, said with a smile. never been on a run like this. Instead and the people start coming back, it will “Throw it in a couple more times,” of an eighth, people were buying a get crazy around here.” Meyers said. “I feel like it’ll get real whole ounce; El’s gross was up almost traction.” • fifty per cent. “It’s multi-reason,” he • said. “Fear of drought and the fact peo- At 11:02 A.M., Seth Meyers logged on ple are consuming more because they’re to a Zoom call with a half-dozen At 11:30 a.m., at Montefiore Medical working from home.” staffers from “Late Night with Seth Center, in the Bronx, Joselyn Baez, a The nicer the work conditions, the Meyers,” to discuss a segment for that thirty-one-year-old emergency-room happier El is. By these terms, these evening’s show. In the absence of a stu- nurse, was working in the E.R.’s greeting were halcyon days. “I haven’t remem- dio audience at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, station: a tent made from blue plastic

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 37 tarp and furnished with computer carts, Tuesday, which the Dutch master florist working ten-to-ten shifts every day which had been set up in the hospital’s Remco van Vliet shapes into towering since she arrived. It was her first time ambulance bay. It was cold, and Baez arrangements up to twelve feet tall. in the city. “It’s crazy,” she said. “There’s wore a hospital sheet wrapped around But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed no traffic here.” her neck as a scarf, an accessory to her and cherry trees shed pink petals onto An elderly woman met Wetterhall layers of personal protective gear. sidewalks all over the city, the urns and her partner at the door, and ex- Patients drifted in, usually accom- stood empty. plained that her husband, who has panied by friends or family members. Riccardelli wore a face mask deco- severe memory problems, had been Baez assessed how sick they looked rated with cartoon owls, and round- acting strangely for several days, not and asked a round of COVID-specific framed glasses that made her look a eating, not responding when spoken questions: “Any fever, chills, or cough?” little like an owl herself. For the past to. The woman led the E.M.T.s into (Or, if they spoke Spanish, “Tiene fiebre? month, she has come in every few days a back bedroom. The shades were Escalofríos? Tos?”) Then she gave them as a member of the collections moni- drawn. When Wetterhall’s eyes ad- a wristband—orange for suspected toring team, a volunteer unit of cura- justed to the dark, she could see that COVID, green for non-COVID—and tors, conservators, and collections man- the man was lying in bed, fully dressed, directed them to another station, for agers who take turns checking on the with his arms crossed over his chest triage. People sometimes arrived in dormant galleries and storerooms. From and his eyes closed. A framed, black- such bad shape that Baez had to drop a human point of view, the pandemic and-white picture of the couple at their what she was doing and rush them into has been disastrous beyond measure, wedding was hanging above the bed. the E.R. to be intubated. but, from the perspective of the paint- “We’ve been married for over sixty On the worst days, patients had died ings and sculptures and pottery and years,” the woman said. by the dozen—in the I.C.U., which tapestry and all manner of other pre- The team brought the man down- had tripled its capacity; in the hospi- cious objects that make their home at stairs and guided him toward the am- tal beds outside the emergency depart- the Met, it’s had a weirdly salutary effect. bulance. Wetterhall noticed that the ment; and on stretchers in the E.R. No people means no lights and no dust. woman called her husband Buddy: Baez once counted five white morgue The Astor Chinese Garden Court “She goes, ‘O.K., Buddy, they’re going trucks parked by the hospital’s loading features a pond full of koi, which Ric- to help you.’” Because of the risks as- dock. Urgent codes rang out on the cardelli fed with a scooper of orange sociated with the coronavirus, the man’s P.A. system: “Rapid response,” for when pellets. Next, she stopped by the Vene- wife couldn’t accompany him to the a patient can’t breathe; “C.A.C.,” for tian Sculpture Gallery to visit Tullio hospital. Before handing him off to the cardiac arrest. One day, there were four Lombardo’s lissome Adam, the first life- E.M.T.s, she gave Wetterhall a note or five codes by 10 a.m. She had turned size marble nude in the classical style with her phone number and a list of to her best friend, also a nurse, and made during the Renaissance. In 2002, his medications and dosages. “That’s said, “They’re dropping like flies.” the pedestal supporting it collapsed, and a super important piece of paper,” the Recently, though, a new tradition the sculpture shattered on the ground. woman said. Her husband was anxious had begun. Whenever a COVID patient Riccardelli spent the better part of a and disoriented, rocking back and forth was taken off a ventilator or was dis- decade leading the team that put it— in the stair chair. Wetterhall used a charged, hospital staff played a snip- “him,” she’d say—back together, so go-to calming strategy. “You explain pet of “Empire State of Mind,” by Jay-Z seamlessly that you’d never be able to everything to the patient as you’re doing and Alicia Keys. This was known as tell there had been significant damage. it,” she said. “It’s a way you can get a the “happy code.” Shortly after Baez His manhood modestly covered with a better connection with them.” She used arrived at work, she heard the song. fig leaf, he stands as he once did in Ven- his nickname: “This is an ambulance, “Well, maybe some people are making ice, in a niche, unbitten apple in hand, Buddy. We’re going to see the doctors, it out of here,” she thought. “Maybe as if he had never fallen. so you can feel better. Buddy, we’re COVID’s loosening its grip a little bit.” going to get you help.” • • At 11:46 a.m., a call came over the • It’s not unusual for Carolyn Riccar- radio. “O.K.,” Maddy Wetterhall, a In Flatbush, at around midday, the rap- delli, a conservator at the Metropoli- twenty-four-year-old emergency med- per known as 22Gz, who had recently tan Museum of Art, to see the build- ical technician, told the dispatcher. rolled out of bed, was shooting his lat- ing’s vast limestone entrance hall devoid “We’re clear and we’re en route.” A est music video. 22Gz is twenty-two, of visitors; witnessing the museum’s few weeks earlier, Wetterhall, who although he looks younger: skinny, private life is one of the privileges of works for a private ambulance com- with a bright smile and strikingly big being on staff. What’s strange is to see pany based in Atlanta, had driven to eyes. Raised in the neighborhood, he it without flowers. Lila Acheson Wal- New York City in her ambulance, grew up playing basketball in the parks lace, the co-founder of the Reader’s Di- with a caravan of out-of-state E.M.S. and sometimes dancing on subway gest, permanently endowed the hall’s workers sent by FEMA to help with trains for tips. He is a big name in his stone urns in 1967; since then, the Met the crisis there. She’d been respond- home town and far beyond, but his has received a delivery of flowers every ing to 911 calls, “running Brooklyn,” videos tend not to require extravagant

38 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 The Upper East Side.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEROME STRAUSS THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 39 budgets. A few months earlier, to pro- trucks up to Fourteenth Street with windowsill, a dozen large garden spi- mote a track called “Suburban, Pt. 2,” store staff to meet their delivery drivers, ders sat in their webs. Four Western he had invited some friends to the BP keeping their counter open and stocked. black widows hunched, nearby, in small gas station across from the Kings In March, the cousins began to plastic boxes. Everyone but Hayashi County Hospital Center. A few dozen worry about how to adapt the cramped, had abandoned the lab on March 13th, people showed up, dancing and mean- tenement-style store to the demands when the museum shut down. Hayashi, mugging for the camera; the resulting of social distancing. On the thirtieth, who studies the tensile properties of video accrued about ten million views they decided to close, shifting orders spider silks, now leaves her apartment on YouTube. to their Brooklyn production facil- only to feed her animals. For years, one of the harshest in- ity. The shop was shuttered for two She carried one of the containers sults in the hip-hop lexicon was “In- weeks. It didn’t feel right. On Tuesday, to a lab table. The occupant, a Pacific ternet gangsta”—to describe someone April 14th, the store reopened, though garden spider, a type of orb weaver who acted tough online but was never no customers were allowed inside— with spindly legs and a neon-yellow seen on the streets. Now most rappers phone orders only. The next day, the back, didn’t move. Near at hand, scores were staying inside, like everybody else. air was perfumed with a familiar of tiny brown crickets were crawling 22Gz recently had to return twenty smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet— around inside a clear plastic box with thousand dollars in deposits for can- tinged with a jagged note of surface a slotted lid. Hayashi lifted the lid and celled concerts. cleaner. The wire baskets lining the reached inside with long tweezers. She The music for his new video came walls were bare; the bagels were in the plucked out a cricket, placed it in a lab from a track called “308,” which be- back, ready to be packed up for deliv- dish, and cut off its legs with a straight gins in the first-person plural: “When eries. The usually bustling store felt razor. When she offered the cricket to we spin through, it’s a D.O.A.” The almost spacious: three employees the spider, the spider crawled off, ig- video, like many in this era, was first- worked at set-apart stations, and a pri- noring its food. Hayashi placed the person singular. 22Gz, wearing a tur- vate courier stood waiting to get an cricket at the center of its web and said, quoise “Paid in Full” sweatshirt, used order into a backpack. “She’ll find it.” his iPhone to record himself, first do- A man in orange safety gloves ap- Spiders are natural self-isolators, ex- ing a little arm-waving dance in the peared at the door, pleading his case. cept when they mate. In the wild, they shower, then walking down the hall, “It’s not a big order,” he said. Call-in occupy separate bushes, separate trees. then pouring syrup on a Styrofoam orders only, Tupper said. Next, a cou- Hayashi was about to prepare another plate stacked with waffles. At one point, ple, masked, arms linked: no luck. An cricket when the yellow-backed spider he pointed a can of Lysol at the lens, older woman appeared, thin and gray- suddenly lunged for its lunch. “There as if to dissolve viral membranes haired, swaddled in a brown shearling we go! ” Hayashi said. Orb weavers are through the phone. There is an art to coat. “I’m picking up an order,” she the type of predator whose survival de- projecting this much hip-hop swag- said. One of the employees put to- pends on strategic patience: “They have ger while stuck at home, he reflected: gether her bag: a bit of smoked fish, a to remain motionless and just wait.” “It’s kinda boring, but you’ve got to bit of cream cheese, some babka, a vibe yourself up.” bagel or two. Tupper regarded the as- • semblage as it came together on the Shortly after two o’clock, Germaine ust before 2 p.m., a man in a BMW counter. “This is a small little order,” Jackson, a group station manager for Jpulled into an empty parking space the subway system, was wrangling sta- in front of Russ & Daughters, the ven- tion cleaners. “Mr. Williams, are you erated smoked-fish purveyor on East able to do four hours?” She was talking Houston Street. Josh Russ Tupper, the on the phone, a company-issued beast fourth-generation co-owner of the of a cell. “O.K., do Spring Street on business, playing an ad-hoc bouncer, the Charlie, then Canal Street on the unlocked the door and opened it. “Did C.” She wore a high-visibility vest, you call in an order?” he said. The man and her eyes danced brightly above a hadn’t, and drove away. The store has blue mask. been around since 1914; in the past All subway passengers these days three decades, it has not been closed he said. “But you know, right now, if are supposed to be essential workers, for more than a day or two. “During someone wants a quarter pound of as defined by the statewide stay-at- Sandy, we were open—a friend of mine whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever home order. A sign you see on plat- brought a generator,” Tupper said from we can.” forms makes it simple. “ESSENTIAL his post at the glass-fronted door. “And • WORKER,” it says across the top, with the blackout—we were open as well.” one arrow pointing left, to “YES,” and In the days after September 11, 2001, On the fifth floor of the American then down, to “OKAY TO RIDE.” A when downtown Manhattan was closed Museum of Natural History, Cheryl second arrow points right, to “NO,” to traffic, Tupper’s co-owner and cousin, Hayashi unlocked her laboratory door. and then “WHY ARE YOU EVEN here Niki Russ Federman, walked hand In individual containers on a sunny READING THIS?,” and then “GO

40 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 HOME.” In the Herald Square station, which has eight subway lines running through it, plus a PATH-train termi- nal, every concession was closed. An elderly woman dozed behind a phone- charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shop- ping cart, her head nodding. Jackson’s office is a windowless box on the lower mezzanine level. There was a map of the subway system taped on her wall, a tall black metal bookcase with stacks of forms on the shelves, and, in the corner, a large orange heavy- duty flashlight. The headway was a little extended— subway language for fewer trains run- ning than usual. The system had been plagued by staff shortages. To date, sixty-seven transit workers had died from the coronavirus. Twenty-five hun- dred had tested positive, and more than four thousand were in quarantine. The Metropolitan Transportation Author- ity has a workforce of around seventy thousand. It had been accused of ne- glecting the safety of its workers, a charge the M.T.A. leadership denies. “We have a lot of fallen soldiers, but we’re hanging in there,” Jackson said, into the phone. “You stay blessed.” She “Unfortunately, my evil deeds attracted media attention.” hung up. She was giving overtime to the cleaners. She manages thirteen stations, from •• midtown to SoHo and the Lower East Side, and disinfecting them had be- need to call,” she said. “We’ll never tell Liu sat in her apartment on a small come a high priority: the handrails, the you no.” As she spoke, she typed data couch next to a mini-fridge, drinking garbage cans, the MetroCard vending into a spreadsheet on a computer mon- a glass of white wine. She and her class- machines, the turnstiles, the elevator itor. Her energy seemed unlimited. But mates were graduating a month early in buttons—“everywhere a customer maybe she was exhausted. It was hard order to provide a wave of reinforcements touches.” That morning, she had car- to tell with the mask. for New York City’s hospitals. The cer- ried bags of personal protective equip- emony lasted an hour. At the end, the ment with her as she rode the train to • faculty invited each student to offer a Delancey Street–Essex Street, hand- Around three o’clock, Megan Liu stared five-word salutation. One by one, the ing out supplies to employees who at her screen as Lee Goldman, the head faces of the city’s newest doctors popped needed them. Although passenger of the Columbia University Medical up on Liu’s screen, along with their mes- traffic has plummeted, the subway still Center, addressed her graduating class sages: “Please don and doff carefully.” carries four hundred thousand people from his office desk: “I just want to say “Healthcare is a human right.” And a day, and, Jackson had noticed, cus- how proud we are of all of you . . .” A “We’re coming for you, coronavirus!” tomers were very appreciative, saying, pixelated audience looked on as a few “Thank you so much for running,” and other speakers made their remarks. • “I don’t know how I’d get to work with- Goldman cut back in. “I apologize,” he Seven people on the line. “Do we have out the train.” said. “I’m going to have to get off for Ginnie or Robert yet?” Robert York, Back on the phone: “Did Delancey another call.” More than six hundred the editor-in-chief of the Daily News, call for comfort?” (Sotto voce: “That COVID patients had been admitted to asked. means leaving the booth to go to the NewYork-Presbyterian, where Gold- “I’ll Slack ’em,” Ginger Adams Otis, bathroom.”) Above her mask, her brows man is a cardiologist—he was in the the metro editor, said. A few minutes knitted. She listened, and nodded. process of “doing some redeployment,” later, at 3:03 p.m., Ginnie Teo, the na- “Whenever you leave the booth, you he said, and left the Zoom meeting. tional editor, and Robert Dominguez,

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 41 a senior editor, joined the call. Nine Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. people on the line. He was sitting on the sidewalk, in a “I’ll get the party started,” Otis patch of waning sun. The officers knew said. She came to the Daily News in the man as Michael, and his story 2012, from the Post. “If we wanted to was always the same: he was waiting do only a tangentially corona story, the there for a car, which would take him best one we’ve got going today is ‘BK home, to California. “I have it on order,” SHOT,’” she said, using the story’s slug. Michael told the officers, Joseph Shamar Davis, a twenty-one-year-old Musquez and Erik Bunze, who are who lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, members of the Citywide Mobile Cri- had been taking care of his quarantined sis Outreach Team. aunt when he noticed a fight going on The officers were accompanied by outside her apartment building. Davis Courtney Cruise, a big guy with a faint tried to break up the fight, which led Jamaican accent, wearing cargo pants, to his getting shot and killed. “We don’t an N95 mask, and purple nitrile gloves. have a picture of the shooter,” Otis Cruise is one of twelve nurses that the said. “But we’ve got an interview with N.Y.P.D. recently brought in to help the aunt. And it’s a very strong, emo- officers connect the thirty-five hun- tional story. dred or so people who live on the city’s “On the political side, you’ve got streets to hospital care, shelter, and the big mask order from Governor other services. COVID-19 was com- Cuomo. The enforcement of this is a plicating these efforts. Homeless peo- little bit up in the air.” She went on, ple are particularly vulnerable to the “It’s leading the Web site. And it’s the coronavirus: many have unaddressed big talker.” health problems, and self-isolating is “Have we talked to the police about difficult to maintain on the streets. The what they’re going to do to avoid ar- officers were handing out masks, but bitrary enforcement?” York asked. “It the recipients usually refused to wear has the risk of being a little stop-and- them, saying that they were uncom- frisk-ish.” fortable or looked weird. Cruise tried “We have questions in to them,” hard to overcome this resistance. “The Otis replied. “I’ll make sure that’s on homeless, they’re not stupid,” he said. the list.” “They can talk.” “I want to make sure that we under- Michael sat beneath a blanket, with stand what it means whenever Cuomo an empty McDonald’s coffee cup and comes forward with an order like this,” a box of Goya crackers. Cruise re- York said. “It starts to put some teeth minded him that the coronavirus is behind it—even if they’re little teeth.” highly contagious and damages the “So,” Eddie Glazarev, the director lungs, adding, “Everybody’s wearing a of print operations, said. “Do we want mask now—you see?” Michael, who to do something like a ‘No Shoes, No has alert blue eyes and a full beard, Mask, No Service’ kind of front page thought that it was 2005, and said that Chinatown. tomorrow?” After the call, it would be he was fifty-two (he’s sixty-two), but up to Glazarev’s team to create a he wasn’t coughing. His breathing Cruise joined her: “I wanna get high, mockup of a front page—“the wood,” seemed fine. Cruise checked his pulse. so high.” Eleanor and Kelvin finally in tabloid-speak. Michael amiably followed Cruise’s in- agreed to sleep inside—the team found “I think that’s the place to start,” structions to remove his Nikes, expos- them beds, in separate locations. El- York said. “Or you can do something ing his bare feet. Cruise, feeling the eanor refused a mask. “I don’t have the with Cuomo, some masked-man Lone skin, detected no sign of fever. Officer AIDS virus,” she told them. Ranger thing.” Musquez handed him a ziplock bag As Eleanor and Kelvin left, in “Who would be Tonto?” Otis asked. containing hand sanitizer and masks. N.Y.P.D. vans, team members suddenly “De Blasio,” Glazarev said. “Actu- Michael tucked it away and said, sprinted across the street—a man’s coat ally, de Blasio could be Tonto’s horse.” “Thanks for dropping by.” was on fire. He had stuck a lit pipe into Laughter. “That horse was the worst.” In Union Square, the team met Kel- the pocket of his parka and now stood vin and Eleanor, who had become in a swirl of feathers. • friends only the previous night. Elea- The temperature was dropping when, nor was bare-legged; she wore a long • in the late afternoon, N.Y.P.D. officers black skirt and a furry coat. When she At around 5 p.m., two doctors, a nurse, approached a man on the corner of began singing a Rita Marley song, and a respiratory therapist met in a

42 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 corridor of an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell gloved hand to open the man’s lips. oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Medicine, then opened a door and Using a narrow suction wand, he The man’s breathing eased. Everyone walked into a room. Bright fluores- slowly drew mucus and saliva into a looked at one another, and exhaled. cent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man cannister mounted on the wall, al- with paper-white hair, age seventy- ready half full of brownish-green de- s the workday ended, Max Rose, five. Intubated. His skin was nearly bris. The man looked into the thera- Aan Afghanistan-war veteran who translucent. He’d been improving, pist’s eyes; the therapist covered the represents Staten Island and southern and was breathing almost entirely on man’s face with a blue absorbent pad, Brooklyn in Congress, was tying up his own through a ventilator’s tube, to prevent aerosolized virus from loose ends. For a few weeks, he had de- which snaked between his lips and spraying into the room. ployed with the National Guard and down his throat. “One, two, three,” the therapist said. led a contingent of troops from the 69th The group gathered silently at the He pulled the tube out in a quick, sin- Infantry Regiment. Their mission was bedside. The man lay still and uous motion. The man coughed and to help turn a psychiatric facility on watched. He seemed to understand gasped. His eyes bulged. He took a Staten Island’s southeast shore into a what was about to happen. The re- deep breath, loud in the quiet room. two-hundred-and-sixty-two-bed emer-

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEROME STRAUSS FOR THE NEW YORKER THE NEW FOR JEROME STRAUSS BY PHOTOGRAPH spiratory therapist reached with a A nurse stepped forward, placing an gency CDVID-19 hospital. The hospital,

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 43 designed for patients who don’t require “strictly operational.” At one point, he apart rock-paper-scissors competitions intensive care, had been put together had driven to Pennsylvania to pick up that morning, and six-feet-apart speed- in six days, its five floors filled with a supply of garbage cans. “That’s not walking relay races (no baton passing) equipment and staffed with doctors, normally the way a member of Con- that afternoon. nurses, soldiers, contractors, and clean- gress thinks,” he said. “It’d be nice if Schneider, who has shoulder-length ers. Every bed needed an I.V. pole. Every Congress were thinking a little more black hair, was standing in a marble ro- room needed a surge protector. Every like that. Operational intensity.” tunda, just inside the school’s main en- pod of rooms needed five shower chairs. trance, holding a walkie-talkie. Two of There were access cards, computers, • the borough’s major hospitals—North and Internet to set up, operating pro- Between five and six-thirty in the eve- Central and Montefiore—are within cedures to establish. A new hundred- ning, parents arrived to pick up their walking distance. One mother had just car parking lot had been paved outside. kids at Bronx Collaborative High got off a ten-hour shift administer- Rose is short, with a shaved head, School, on the southern edge of Van ing non-stop dialysis in an acute-care square shoulders, and a drill sergeant’s Cortlandt Park. Brett Schneider, the unit. “Lots of young people that had voice. From the windows of the new founding principal, had been there since no previous kidney issues are needing facility, he could see Staten Island Uni- seven that morning. Although his dialysis now,” she told Schneider. “The versity Hospital, which had been over- school is closed, the Department of problem is these folks, if they survive, whelmed by COVID-19 patients. Staten Education had chosen the building to are going to have kidney damage for Island is a borough of essential work- be one of its fifty-seven Regional En- the rest of their lives.” A woman ar- ers: nurses, bus drivers, cops, firemen, richment Centers. The sites, which rived who was working a night shift in sanitation workers. Rose lives nearby, serve three meals and function as a the emergency room in two hours. She but had been spending his nights in a kind of quarantine day camp, are for had used the day to get some sleep— hotel, to protect his wife from expo- students whose parents are essential “so I can go to my shift energized,” she sure. National Guard soldiers were on workers. Schneider had volunteered said. Her son handed her a gift from duty at the ambulance station, coördi- immediately to supervise his school’s his crafts class—a paper rose. nating food deliveries and distributing program. He knew how to get the class- equipment. It was Rose’s last day of de- rooms ready for social distancing: “It’s • ployment before returning to politics. a natural extension of prepping for the In Central Park, the runners along the He still had to do a clothes drop in the SATs.” At both ends of the day, a nurse cinder track on the perimeter of what parking garage of his apartment build- takes every kid’s temperature. One of is officially called the Jacqueline Ken- ing. His work with the “Fighting 69th,” the site’s volunteers had been teaching nedy Onassis Reservoir—Mrs. Onas- as Robert E. Lee supposedly dubbed step dance, emphasizing the distance sis lived not far from it, on Fifth Ave- the unit during the Civil War, had been between each child. They had six-feet- nue, and jogged around it, too—formed a single file of dread-in-motion, appro- priately watchful and spaced. Early on in the pandemic, they had moved with an almost infuriating disregard for the new reality, running, most of them maskless, in that eternal clockwork way of city runners, seeming to believe that, once started, they were on an unbreak- able internal drive, like so many windup mechanical bunnies, unable to slow down, much less stop. Some small effort at social distancing had gone on, but, when a runner ahead had been going too slowly, the others, rather than ad- just their pace to maintain the spacing, still tended to come zooming along, as though their legs were self-governing. This, runners will tell you, is essential to sustaining the aerobic benefits, and, generally, to being a runner. Over time, the pace slowed. They began self-organizing, finding an en- tirely new way to run. The runners still wore their usual garb—the tight-fitting lower half and the loose-fitting upper “It’s my weekend with the kids.” half, the ugly, expensive sneakers—but masks and bandannas appeared. Now, evening, and counting—half of them been at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, from a distance, they looked less like from house calls at apartments across in Park Slope, for two days after visit- racers and more like a frieze, a proces- the borough and the rest from the hos- ing her ob-gyn on Monday morning, sion moving in a stately way across the pital morgues. In the parking lot, next wondering if her amniotic sac was leak- beautiful screen of the West Side tow- to Zambito’s van, which held the body ing. It was not, but her blood pressure ers beyond. They were moping more of an eighty-three-year-old man, two had been high. Since she was close to than moving, just like the rest of us. hearses already contained caskets for her due date, and there was an open the following day. slot at the hospital, her doctor sched- • In the main lobby, Chris Kasler, who uled an induction for Monday night. At 6:55 p.m., on the top floor of an East is fifty-four, the son and grandson of The process was slow. Cintron spent Village walkup, John Fredericks, a funeral directors, sat at a plastic fold- hours dilating, sucking on ice chips and restaurant beverage director, was set- ing table covered in death trying to nap. She had tested ting up cables and an amp on the fire certificates. He checked the negative for COVID, which escape of the apartment he shares with master calendar, with his was a relief: she was an op- his wife, Karly, a designer, and their rat mask pulled down below his erating-room I.T. specialist terrier, Mudd. Their building is near nostrils. Dozens of burials for Memorial Sloan Ketter- St. Stanislaus, a Polish church, and were scheduled in the com- ing Cancer Center, and she Trash and Vaudeville, the punk-rock ing days, each annotated in knew how common it was leather-pants-and-studded-jacket em- a dense, inky hand listing to be asymptomatic. She’d porium, whose legendary longtime the name of the deceased been working from home, manager, Jimmy Webb, had died the and the cemetery: twenty- taking breaks to wash and day before, of cancer. Near the win- two interments on Thurs- fold baby clothes and set up dow, Fredericks tuned his electric gui- day, twenty on Friday. But the nursery—dove gray, with tar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stra- no bodies had gone out for funerals darker gray trim, and a baseball decal tocaster neck. For the past three weeks, that day—it was the end of Passover, with the baby’s name, Christopher, on during the city’s nightly cheer for and most of the cemeteries were closed. the wall. But for the first day and a half health-care workers, he had been play- “It causes a backup, because the re- at the hospital she’d hardly slept, and ing a Jimi Hendrix-style “Star-Span- mains are still coming in,” he said. she hadn’t eaten anything. It was hard gled Banner,” good and loud, for the Kasler and Zambito walked down to relax with a mask on. neighborhood. He’d wanted to cele- the hallway to a door with a sign that “Just think about the big picture,” brate medical professionals; Freder- read “No Admittance.” Usually, the her husband kept telling her. “We’re icks’s two brothers and his father are room was reserved for embalming; they going to have so many stories to tell E.R. doctors, and Karly is pregnant. were looking for someone with an up- this kid.” Cintron’s mother walked to When he began the new tradition, coming funeral to put into a casket the hospital and stood outside, waving Fredericks said, the claps were just start- and move to a different room, freeing to her through the window. Her sister, ing in the East Village. “The first night, up space for the latest arrival. Inside, who’d had five children at the same hos- somebody yelled, ‘Do it again tomor- four tables held eight bodies, some of pital, told her, on the phone, that she row!’” So he did, and then he kept doing them in scuffed orange pouches from was in good hands. The nurses were at- it. When he skipped a night, “people the hospital, others in clear sleeves no tentive and cheerful. Dr. Jones, too, her were looking up at our fire escape, and thicker than garbage bags. dark eyes peeking out behind a face they were, like, pissed.” As the hour “Nothing here,” Kasler said, check- shield, was kind as she explained that approached, he climbed out the win- ing the schedule. In the storage room Cintron was still not sufficiently dilated. dow. Golden light from the west illu- next door, Sherman’s refrigeration unit, Cintron was wheeled into an operat- minated his hair and his teal guitar. which held nine more bodies, was also ing room and hooked up to monitors— He clapped, and others cheered from full. They had better luck in the chapel, she heard how fast her heart was racing windows, fire escapes, balconies, the a large carpeted space with wooden in the skitter of beeps. She was given an sidewalk. Two cars had stopped on the pews, where one of the bodies was epidural. Her husband was allowed in, street below, the passengers looking swaddled in a white sheet. Kasler and wearing a mask and gloves and a hair- up. At 7:01, Fredericks began to play. Zambito brought in a casket on an net. Cintron was shaking uncontrol- aluminum dolly, and bent over the lably, and numb from the neck down. • corpse, lifting it delicately at both ends. Then she felt a hard tug, and heard cry- As the sun set, Kim Zambito, a funeral Kasler rolled the casket to another ing. She still couldn’t open her eyes. Her director at Sherman’s Flatbush Me- room, while Zambito returned to the teeth were chattering. Shortly after 9:18, morial Chapel, in Midwood, Brook- van for the stretcher. she heard her husband taking the baby, lyn, entered through the mortuary’s saying that he was a miracle. back door, wearing jeans and a base- • ball cap. “I’m back,” she said. “Where At 8:30 p.m., Dr. Heather Jones and • are we going to put this one?” Bodies her patient Lisa Cintron decided to go As the evening shoved on, and all the kept coming in—a dozen by the early ahead with a C-section. Cintron had surfaces were Lysoled, all the dishes

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 45 washed, dried, and stowed, and it became in bed. Rae got in, and started texting. Benton rarely left his boat. Tugs were too hard to watch another cycle of cable A man whom Rae had met at the strip social-distancing before it was cool, he news or binge-watch the latest stream- club Pumps, in Williamsburg, where liked to say. ing phenomenon, an apartment-bound Rae had worked as a dancer until A month had passed since he’d been man on the back end of middle age con- March, now wanted a constant stream home with his family, on the Gulf fronted a stack of books that were being of nude photographs. Another client Coast of Mississippi, and the only mentioned all the time these days: Defoe, wanted Rae to verbally humiliate and people he’d seen in that time were his Boccaccio, Camus, the whole syllabus then coddle him. Since self-quaran- first mate, his engineer, and his deck- of plague literature. He couldn’t. Instead, tine had begun in the city, Rae had no- hand. Benton, who is forty-four years he picked up “The Zoo of the New,” a ticed clients becoming more “emotion- old, with a mop of brown hair and a grab-bag anthology of poems (“from ally hungry.” “They’re saying things swampy drawl, has worked on boats Sappho to Paul Muldoon”) edited by like ‘Hey, you didn’t text me all day,’ since he was eighteen. His grandfa- Nick Laird and Don Paterson. He and ‘Why don’t you want to talk to ther was a tugboat captain, his father opened it and, uncannily, within a few me?’” Rae said. “Everyone’s on their a tugboat engineer. He has spent al- pages, landed on these lines of Auden: phones right now, but they might not most a third of his life confined to realize you’re texting thirty other peo- less than two thousand square feet: .. . Unendowed with wealth or pity, ple.” Clients were also “ten times thirst- wheelhouse, galley, and cabin. If all Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, ier,” asking more directly for the ex- those years on tugs have taught him Eye each flu-infected city. plicit sex acts they wanted to watch. anything, it’s the blessing of a well- Others had ghosted Rae. “A lot of adjusted crew. Misery spreads faster He snapped the book shut and set people I was talking with before the than happiness. it aside. He sent a few texts to family. virus—a lot of them are quarantined Benton’s tug, the Captain Brian A. He checked the refrigerator and closed with their wives,” they said. “I’ve mes- McAllister, is one of the most powerful it. He washed his hands. saged them, and they’d be, like, ‘I can’t ships in the McAllister fleet, and also Finally, wanting a moment that talk for quarantine. It’s too danger- the nimblest. With its nearly seven- was not flu-infected, he thought about ous.’” Some of Rae’s clients just wanted thousand-horsepower engines and watching ESPN, which in the absence to commiserate about their financial azimuth propeller, it can go forward, of actual sports had contrived a very ex- woes. “But I’m, like, ‘Listen, if you’re backward, and sideways, or spin like a citing event: pro ballplayers, some young gonna gripe and moan about the state top on the water. On the morning of and bored, others retired and thicken- of the world to me, please pay me— March 30th, Benton had used it to help ing, playing games of H-O-R-S-E in because, same.’” escort the U.S.N.S. Comfort to Man- their respective back yards, often thou- • hattan. Almost nine hundred feet long, sands of miles apart. That would be the Comfort could barely squeeze into more like it. Captain Jackie Benton was back where its berth, at Pier 90. The Brian pulled • he’d started at dawn: in a tugboat on the stern one way while another tug the north shore of Staten Island. It pushed the bow in the other, pivoting After ten, in an apartment in Green- was nearly eleven o’clock and a half- the ship ninety degrees. Then the tugs point, Rae Haas, a twenty-four-year- moon hung over Newark Bay. Its light nudged the Comfort forward, pulling old sex worker, set up a cam- skimmed over the empty back on their tethers as it eased into era on a tripod, pressed waters of the Kill Van Kull, place. It was, Benton thought, a defi- Record, and stepped naked past the shores of Coney Is- ning moment in the country’s history. into the shower. Rae, who land and Sandy Hook to Bringing a hospital ship in for a pan- uses the pronouns “they” and the vast and unquarantined demic—he didn’t believe anybody had “them,” massaged purple dye Atlantic. Benton had spent ever seen that before. into the roots of their al- the day escorting container ready violet hair and let the ships bearing supplies for • dye run down their body. New York—from the Nar- Laura Kolbe, an internist, was work- After several minutes, they rows between Brooklyn and ing the night shift at Lower Manhat- got out of the shower and Staten Island, around Ber- tan Hospital with Anna Dill, a doc- took some nude selfies, and gen Point to Port Elizabeth tor who had come to the city the week washed the dye off their hands in the and back. Now he was docked at the before. Dill and some fifty colleagues sink. Later, on OnlyFans, a platform McAllister yard with five other tugs. from Cayuga Medical Center, in where sex workers and artists can pub- Through the windows of the wheel- Ithaca, had taken school buses to Man- lish content to paid subscribers, Rae house, Benton could see them rocking hattan, to help. Kolbe and Dill bonded would release the video. In March, the in their private berths, their cabins over the discomforts of the N95 mask, Web site saw a seventy-five-per-cent aglow. At least two crew members which seemed, they concluded, to have increase in new accounts. would be awake on each one—check- been designed for the face of a man. Rae’s partner was watching “The ing engines, listening for dispatches, The day before, New York State had Return of Godzilla” and eating sushi doing paperwork. Even in better times, reported its first decline in hospital-

46 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 izations since the pandemic began, but Kolbe and Dill worried that it was just a plateau, not a true de- scent.“There’s a lot of weather meta- phors,” Dill said. “People are saying, ‘This is just a breather before the sec- ond wave comes,’ or ‘Maybe we are in the eye of the hurricane, and that’s why it’s calm.’” While relief felt premature, end- less hyperarousal no longer felt sus- tainable. In the past few weeks, Kolbe had been reading the poetry of Zbig- niew Herbert. “He had this alter ego, Mr. Cogito, who was this sort of hap- less Everyman trying to navigate the bureaucracy of mid-century Poland,” she said. “I’ve found odd comfort in poetry about various kinds of laby- rinths and roadblocks. How can you continue to play the game when the rules keep changing?” The internists were looking over a list of “watchers”—patients at risk of imminent death. All of them had Covid-19. One of the patients was homeless and had already been hos- pitalized; he had improved enough to be discharged to a hotel converted into a makeshift shelter, but he returned to the hospital when hotel staff found him passed out on the floor. Another watcher had been working on Wall Street on 9/11, and his lungs were fail- “Could we talk about something else?” ing. After arriving at the hospital, he had expressed so much anxiety that he was given an iPad to keep in his •• room, so that he could have virtual sessions with a psychologist. Kolbe sible to the woman’s face, to allow a crossed at the ankle. Her chest was ris- imagined that he was thinking, “What conversation with the interpreter, on ing and falling at an easy pace. Doc- are the chances that, for a second time, speakerphone. Sometimes all the in- tors love epithets: Murphy’s sign, Bat- the worst will have happened and I terpreter could hear was the sound of tle’s sign, Homans’ sign. Kolbe thought will still pull through and walk out of rustling fabric. about coining a new one: the Ankle this situation?” The woman had managed to grasp sign. “Anyone with their legs crossed The watcher who concerned her the thrust of the interpreter’s message: so neatly at the ankles must be faring the most was a woman who spoke Can- she should not lie on her back all the reasonably well,” she observed. She tonese. Every time the woman moved time. When a person is supine for too shut the door.  even slightly, her oxygen levels dipped. long, lung tissue may start to collapse, When Kolbe needed to communicate and blood may pool. Every few hours, Written by Rachel Aviv, Robert P. Baird, with her, she would walk to a part of nurses turned her from her left side to Burkhard Bilger, Jonathan Blitzer, Vinson the hospital corridor marked with green her stomach, then to her right side, Cunningham, William Finnegan, Tyler tape, indicating that it was free of bio- then to her back. When Kolbe walked Foggatt, Ian Frazier, Jennifer Gonner- hazards, dial an interpreter phone-bank into the woman’s room, she said, she man, Adam Gopnik, Zach Helfand, Dhruv service from her cell phone, place the was touched to see her in an “odalisque Khullar, Carolyn Kormann, Eric Lach, phone in the pocket of her scrubs, put position,” as if she were sunbathing. A Sarah Larson, D. T. Max, Alexis Okeowo, on her protective gown, and cross to few hours later, just before midnight, Helen Rosner, Kelefa Sanneh, Michael the part of the hallway demarcated by she peeked into the woman’s room. Schulman, Alexandra Schwartz, Jia To- red tape, the “dirty” zone. Kolbe would The woman had been rotated again. lentino, Lizzie Widdicombe, Paige Wil- try to get her pocket as close as pos- Now she was on her back, her legs liams, and Emily Witt.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 47 PORTFOLIO A CITY NURSE

Healing in the I.C.U. during COVID-19.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAREN CUNNINGHAM

48 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 49

QQ group:1067583220

ady Chaplin is an intensive-care nurse at though, the Beatles are interrupted by an an- Lenox Hill Hospital. She just turned thirty. nouncement of a Code Blue: an emergency call C Her closest friend at work is Karen Cun- for C.P.R. The death toll is relentless, and older ningham, who is twenty years older and made a doctors and nurses have told Chaplin that the mid-career turn from photography to nursing. only thing comparable to COVID-19 was the height When they met, five years ago, Chaplin and Cun- of the AIDS crisis. But nothing ever equals any- ningham hit it off immediately. They live in the thing else. In those days, no one was “sheltering same neighborhood—South Park Slope, in Brook- in place.” Now every patient, every colleague, every lyn—and often take the subway together to the surface, every friend is a potential threat. Chap- hospital, which is on East Seventy-seventh Street, lin, whose roommate left for the relative safety of in Manhattan. Along the way, the two I.C.U. New Jersey weeks ago, comes home to solitude. nurses talk about everything from the latest Tilda “Sometimes, after my shift, I walk in my apart- Swinton movie to the intricate and dangerous ment, slide down the door, and cry,” she says. “After procedure of intubation. I take a shower, I can’t quite figure out what it is These days, the days of COVID-19, Chaplin and I am supposed to be doing. Coming down from Cunningham inhabit a twilight world that is cel- these shifts, hearing codes all day on the inter- ebrated by their fellow New Yorkers but only com, it’s hard to get out of that fight-or-flight re- faintly seen. Cunningham, an admirer of the sponse. I’ve been eating a lot of salted black lico- “Country Doctor” photographs that W. Eugene rice.” She calls friends and paces the apartment. Smith took for Life, in 1948, wanted to document For exercise, she shadowboxes while holding cans what was going on in the intensive-care units and of chickpeas in each hand and listening to Lizzo, got permission from the hospital to bring her Lil’ Kim, and Tierra Whack. Recently, Chaplin’s camera to work. She photographed her friend over parents drove in from Long Island and dropped two long shifts in mid-April. off Lucy, the family’s French bulldog, to keep her Lenox Hill normally has four I.C.U.s; now, company. “It will be good to have another heart- with the coronavirus raging through the city, nearly beat here,” she says. the entire hospital is a critical-care unit. Chaplin Many evenings, at seven, Chaplin can hear the and Cunningham’s twelve-hour shifts are a blur cheering and honking, the nightly tribute to the of sickness, urgency, risk, and loss. Trapped by ne- “essential workers” who are keeping the city alive. cessity behind their masks and face shields, in- The sound often makes her tear up with grati- haling their own exhalations, they experience fe- tude, but she is wary when she hears platitudes rocious headaches. Moments of relief are rare and about the “heroic” work of health-care profession- fleeting. The hospital P.A. system plays “Here als. She doesn’t want to be glorified all of a sud- Comes the Sun” when a COVID-19 patient is being den. “This is what we trained to do,” she says. discharged, and the staff cheers as the gurney car- “This is what we do. That was true a year ago, rying the lucky person rolls by. All too often, and it will be true a year from now.”

—David Remnick

“When I wear a uniform, I put it on and take on my nurse self,” Cady Chaplin says. “But you lose your personal eccentricities, so I like to wear weird T-shirts underneath my scrubs, even if it’s just for myself.” THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 51 Orthopedic residents and a physical therapist, recruited to work in intensive care during the pandemic, turn a COVID-19 patient

52 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 jixiansheng

jixiansheng

jixiansheng

on his stomach so that he can breathe more easily. Patients are flipped every sixteen hours, by a team of five people.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 53 54 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 Above: A patient receives oxygen after being taken off a ventilator. Left: Nurse anesthetists intubate a patient, risking exposure to aerosolized virus particles. Dr. David Butler performs an ultrasound on the lungs of a patient with acute respiratory distress, to assess the risks of intubation.

56 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 57 Chaplin cares for an intubated and sedated patient, who wears restraints to prevent the removal of the endotracheal tube.

58 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 59 Above: Unable to drink while wearing P.P.E., Chaplin takes a water break. Right: Chaplin leaves the hospital. She feels “most acutely sad or anxious” at home alone. THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 61 FICTION

62 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY CARSON ELLIS ost kids lose or break their hucksters out to pillage the second-flight less salmon-orange. In one farmyard, a toys. I curated mine. antique shops of eastern Iowa, western tractor tire on its side—painted white— M In 4976, the University of Illinois. The odder our finds, the brain- had been filled with soil, then white ge- Iowa renamed an existing history-and- ier we felt. Uncover some handwrought raniums. Dusk now turned these all the literature program America Studies. It gimcrack, write an article about it, read colors of a campfire. Tidied fields shad- drafted me and some other merry hip- it aloud in class, then seek publication owed toward something sinister. And pie Ivy graduates to blanket the state in some journal suitably obscure. Our should that huge rooster be crowing and gather “existing folk manifestations.” Roman professor stressed the long view, right at sundown? I sped through a pretty We plundered far-flung Salvation Army advising us, “Sapete sempre che voi siete little town called La Verne. And, just as thrift stores and rural junk shops. We stranieri .. . in un Paese molto più strano.” its propane gasworks and beauty parlor hunted the simple tools and dolls that And, this being a state school, he im- (itchily called LuAnn’s House o’ Hair) our essays overinterpreted. Those startup mediately translated, “Always know you gave way to corn-green countryside, I treasures helped found my folk collec- are strangers .. . in a land far stranger.” spied a dangling Colonial sign whose tion, one that’s not unknown today. We clocked many country miles dur- girlish freehand promised: Handwrought nineteenth-century ing a long Friday’s “picking.” Toward the artifacts were criminally cheap then. end of such a trek, my classmates were Theodosia’s Antiques (real and imagined) “Midwesterners don’t know what they heading back from the western edge of Only Thing Reasonable Here? have, or had,” we Easterners gloated after Illinois, bound for Iowa City, in a bor- Our Prices country raids. rowed Ford wagon; I followed in my Prior to radio, before television, overloaded Jeep. We stopped for gas and “Well, hell. Somebody’s thinking,” I savage winters spent indoors turned bathrooms. Then the others waved good- said aloud. many German-Americans into excel- bye. I’d spent eighty of my allotted hun- I aimed my Jeep toward the unlit lent wood-carvers. Unable to afford child dred. My haul? A rural mailbox, made store, which, up close, looked out of whimsies (even from the Sears cata- in a 4946 shop class and shaped like not business. I’d already popped my clutch logue), a farmer just whittled his brood’s one or two but three Scottish terriers, two to find reverse when I flicked on my amusements. Those things sure lasted! white, the middle one black, whose con- headlights, then my high beams, then Here we have a horse-drawn-farm-cart joined mouths accepted letters, parcels. A braked. That cigar-store-Indian thing toy, scaled for one specific kid. You can pink chintz hostess smock edged with so bent in the window? With jewelry all still feel the father’s February yearning much nineteen-forties rickrack it looked over it? It appeared to be either some for a warm harvest, his love for the mis- all but Aztec. And my hands-down most dressmaker’s dummy or perhaps a human matched horses hand-portrayed and for ironic iconic Find of the Week: a hand- being. Oosh, it’d definitely moved. his boy, born to inherit Dobbin, Paint, somely lettered five-foot-long sign ex- “Evening,” I said, smiling through the and the family acreage. plaining, “You’ve Got to Be a Football door chimes’ sweet-and-sour tinkling. These days, I’m sometimes interviewed Hero to Get Along with the Beautiful “You must be the eponymous The-o ...” about my collection. Lazier reporters ask Girls. THEREFORE, GO TECH!” “Herself.” I warranted one courtly, me to name my most valuable find. It This kind of joke was then thought bitter nod. was actually a gift. I divide my career into “smart.” And no one was more enslaved Caught hovering at her window, wor- two rough phases: “Toys” and “Post-Child- to fashionable smartness than a hy- ried this might seem invitational, the ish Things.” And this—hung right over per-educated boy of twenty-six with a owner must’ve made a fast crablike re- my rolltop desk—still marks the turning twenty-nine-inch waist and, so Mother treat to a high stool. The climb still had point between the two. always hinted, a colossal I.Q. I look back her panting. She presided behind an on him with a curatorial mixture of pride, outmoded silver cash register that itself e cheerful avid youngsters, lured amusement, and pity. I think he conde- looked like a costly toy, circa 4923. Wto Iowa City, were given five scended to the very loot he intended to What had bent her so? Fever? Birth twenties a month to spend on outsider save then praise. (But surely that prob- defect? Her spine showed the exact angle art. Our professor, born in Rome, jok- lem’s built into the notion of taking a of an opened safety pin; its clasp, her ingly called this “ethnographic colonial- graduate degree in “self-taught artists”!) hooded face. Theodosia, weighing less ism within one’s native land.” His lec- Though tired and hungry, I felt greedy than ninety pounds, seemed to wear her tures were persuasive and dynamic; he for one more twenty-dollar prize. Proud best stuff. A county’s worth of timepieces was callous in the pan-gender bedding as I was of my football pep-squad board, were pinned to her otherwise concave of his students, yet sensitive to how all I knew I’d not yet found this outing’s chest. Ladies’ watches, some with clock empires fall. He’d grown up amid artis- “it.” I imagined discovering, in every faces visible, others locketed away, a few tic beauty that was broken to pieces but dairy barn I passed, some primitive oil on pulleys that allowed easy consulting, left in place. portrait of Lincoln, painted when he quick return. Their metals glinted across We set off every Friday full of caffeine was yet a beardless state legislator here. her front like military decorations. and an acquisitive sleekness that some- My friends swore they’d save me a It was the day’s last stop, so I quickly times passed for sexy. Wearing thrift- stool at Hamburg Inn No. 4. The blue- scanned, nose wrinkling. I sometimes shop moose-motif sweaters, driving plate special, this being Friday, was imagined I could smell the hidden trea- borrowed jalopies, we were cerebral surely fried fish. Sunset offered a limit- sure. Where was “it”? Maybe lurking

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 63 within reach of this “it” girl. Her back- feeling as irked as stubborn, I squatted seemed able, even affectionate, if con- bone might’ve been cruelly bowed, but before the clear vitrine in front of her ventional; the background, solid black. her deep-set eyes gleamed my way, briar- stool. Four minutes of silence hadn’t But what held me was the boy’s expres- sharp. Theodosia seemed one of those thawed her. She still emitted the nun- sion. Not just an invitation, almost a plea maimed or homely people who—feel- nish hauteur of some impoverished old for help. I felt first approached, then nearly ing themselves unimprovable—make a countess out of Chekhov. summoned. Didn’t understand quite what militant point of glaring you down. Sunset, gold as egg yolk, now scored I’d found, but, seeing him, I recognized Seated on high, she flaunted her un- with value many otherwise half-worth- some calibre of longing or emergency. assets as a form of deficit flirting. less things. Pot lids, cufflinks, rims of “Just want information, lady! But, At that age, I still likely looked my chipped Venetian claret glasses. why’m I even bothering you? As if you best. (I remained ignorant of my face “Hope I’m not holding up your eve- knew the slightest thing about him!” This value, even while trading on the bargains ning plans, right here at six and all, ma’am,” is how one avid story “picker,” holding it brought. You really notice so ran me in faux-farmboy only twenty bucks, challenges another. your looks only once you’ve mode. No reply. With brooch She snorted finally: amused at any- lost them.) Now barging to- clocks dragging down her body’s thinking Theodosia might not ward the poorest-lit corner blouse, she just sat ticking keep total narrative lock on every cellu- of her two-room shop, I felt like a knitting class. loid buttonhook in her place. (Since she “it,” hiding. Ballroom chairs Only now—as I squat- belonged to my grandmother’s flapper stacked to the ceiling. Nar- ted before the glass, peer- generation, I’d maybe gauged her partly row pathways corkscrewed ing over Grover Cleveland right: such ladies were most charming tributes to her bent spine. campaign buttons and crys- when provoked.) When Theodosia’s Theodosia offered no chat, tal bulldog inkwells—I felt voice at last emerged, it sounded ade- none of the usual jolly pry- observed from floor level. noidal, dry, so “local” I felt disappointed. ing: “So, where’d you folks Beside her white shin, a “You look to be one of those ones I say you’re from? You with the Depression- face—a force—stared back at me. A get in here from the grad school over glass convention in Moline, betcha.” head-and-shoulders portrait rested on to Iowa City. Printmaking department’s Nothing but her alum gaze, her arms the floor. The man depicted must’ve pretty good, they say. But why would crossed over six pounds of locket clocks. been about my age. Dark eyes above a anybody waste time doing prints when Things here did look finer than in beginner’s goatee—he’d posed fastened you could just paint? Yeah, real artistes, most shops out this way. And—a good in a black tie and a high starched collar. you kids! You all look alike. Come out sign—her place smelled not of euphem- His face was handsome, if both blank here huntin’ somethin’ for nothin’. From izing potpourri but of the proper musk and sad, hound-earnest. the parking lot, I knew ye. Expensive peculiar to some dry attic’s last few cen- “So what’d be his story?” My index haircut wanting to play like it just grew turies. And yet the major Gothic grand- finger touched cold glass. I felt then, in wild that way. Wearing clothes the peo- father clock lacked one finial; three beau- the knots of my stiff neck and impres- ple in New York City wore three years tiful nineteenth-century pumpkin-colored sionable groin, a collector’s sense that back. Nosing out this far from Moline, paisley shawls had been moth dessert de- he might be today’s it. hoping and trick us natives. You’d prob- cades back. Nothing displayed justified Silent, she studied her fingernails. ably make a funny story out of me, my her full snootiness. I did stop before a Sales technique? Orneriness? Both? shop, this poor boy painted here.” pile of Harper’s Weekly magazines from “I asked, Can you tell me about this Now some test would be required. the eighteen-sixties. Hating knowing that sweet guy in the painting near your left Proof that I was not just another trust- she knew, I stood scouting for Winslow foot?” Why did her not answering mount fund tinhorn, condescending. Homer’s war illustrations. Nothing. up so? Unlike in the last three shops, And, as I leaned nearer the glass, I Her voice scratched me from a room there was no radio playing Cham- could “read” her bony torso. Most of the away. “The toys are in that half-timbered paign-Urbana’s classical FM. No noise watches clamped there told roughly the neo-Tudor sideboard to your right.” out here but wind crossing her roof or same time (within fifty minutes). But, I asked the stale air before me, “How’d the odd twist of carved wood popping when I scouted from left to right, four you know?” in her far room. I felt foolish at the din lines, top to bottom, her system started “I’ve got it pretty much down to a sys- my voice made. becoming clearer: the rows began with tem. Can identify all you migrating birds, But I kept staring through the glass austere Federal design, chaste and “clas- boy-o. I get three of you a day in here.” box at this young gent’s melancholy mes- sical,” until Ionic geometry blossomed, “Thanks,” I said, for spite. sage of a face. Maybe he looked a bit like enlarging to certain manufactured over- Theodosia’s toys proved overpriced, me and—being painted actual size, given elaborations of the eighteen-fifties, missing wheels, made in Munich or New the glass between us—became some sort sprouting roses and leaves and fat gilt York circa 1915, just before war claimed of mirror? Maybe all bright young men, tendrils of prosperity toward a silver all such metal. I found nothing local, seriously questing, look a bit alike. Nouveau calla lily, then onward to a handmade, or heartfelt enough for my The picture tipped half out of its eigh- watch mitred with onyx swallows and advanced urban taste. teen-fifties rosewood frame. The canvas the chopped fan lines of the Eastlake Last thing, as I headed for the Jeep, showed its age. The oil-paint execution moment, slimming again into industrial

64 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 edginess as a Deco locket put an end to it, she hoisted a goodly leather satchel. little worlds inside other little worlds time’s weird progression across her chest. Brown, it was bigger than the doctors’ and all shaped from one hunk of tusk? “So,” I tilted up and spoke over the black bags seen in movies and pharma- I have that in back, though it’s not cheap.” glass. “Today you’ve come to work ceutical ads. Clanking it atop her glass “I’ve seen plenty of those. Please, dressed as 1830 to 1930?” counter, she expertly opened its silver go on.” She gave me her hardest look. “Wrong. latch. Her eyes never abandoning mine, Now we seemed in this together, se- Eighteen-thirty-four to nineteen-thirty- she now slid toward me one small saw. rious evening drawing down hard around four! Still, for graduate work .. . You’re at Ash-wood handle, a fine blue Sheffield us. Opening a box of kitchen matches, least the first today to ‘get’ my latest try.” blade. Amputation-worthy, that heavy Theodosia lit one candle. I laughed. She smirked, and then, in to the touch. And, along its cutting edge, “Pretty soon,” she continued, “ ‘a lit- her piping oboe voice, conceded in a one price tag still dangled from string. tle feverish’ turns more toward ‘diarrhea.’ hurry, half-mechanical, “About this pic- “Dollar-fifty,” she read aloud. “Then.” And then their bringing another basin ture you’re so dead set to blunder into This implement she whisked from becomes ‘Maybe too much for us. Send the story of: Around 1849, no, in 1849, me and shoved back, as the satchel for Doc Eaton.’ But old Eaton, he’d just June 4th, a sailor named Sanders Wool- dropped to the floor just beneath her retired, see? And there was only that re- sey came home to La Verne from an stool. “Doctor’s name was Frederick cent graduate, so new he yet boarded eight-month voyage to the Far East. Markus Petrie. He’d just turned thirty. with Hester Brinsley, and was still out Sandy’s ship, the John Gray, brought Had been in town less than three weeks looking for some rental of his own. back tea, Canton ware, and ginger. He’d when Ordinary Seaman Sandy Wool- “They say the eldest Woolsey girl, sailed into Chicago, which was then a sey, twenty-one, brought sickness out which’d be Dorothea, found the boy going port, thanks to their dredging here to us. Morning after his homecom- doctor out this way, having just paid his Canada’s waterways. You can imagine ing feast, the boy begged to stay in bed first month’s rent on a little house not the meal his mother and sisters fixed till nine. By noon, admitted he was pretty an eighth of a mile back toward the his first night home. Baked chicken, be sickly. First, the sailor’s older sisters tried Coal Valley turnoff. Dorothea rushes in, my guess. And Sandy, mostlike, so full treating him. They were proud girls, says, ‘We’ve got something. At home, of tales: the monkeys, the pagodas, what skilled in home arts. Glad, I guess, to we tried and take care of it, but Sandy’s have you. They ate that dinner at their finally lay eyes on the boy who’d been having something bad to where we .. .’ farm three miles due east of here, more so far away so long. and fainted. She had raced out here so toward Matherville. And it was Sandy “Before the Civil War, we were even fast, see. Her horse, a nag, was lathered. Woolsey who pretty well ruined us out more backward a little place, being out So there stands our young Dr. Markus this way. Was Sandy brought us the this far from Kewanee. And just the idea Petrie. He’d best get prepared. Him not cholera. His poor mother and sisters of a local boy getting to sail clear to China even all-the-way unpacked. And hav- would be dead in six days, along with and home without being drowned, well, ing to replace old Doc Eaton that ev- most of three households, their nearest a certain kind of fame must’ve hooked erybody loved. Because Eaton’d do ev- neighbors. Two of those homes still onto that fellow. And hadn’t he brought erything you wanted and never tell stand, back by the propane distributor- his mother, to dress up her plain farm another living soul about it. Girls in ship you passed but never noticed. A mantel, one of those ivory carvings with trouble used to troop out here on the new doctor’d just arrived in town. Boy so recent to practicing medicine he had price tags still strung on his best surgi- cal tools. .. . You think I’m exaggerat- ing what all I got in here, do you? Think I made that up about his tools?” “No, you clearly know your stuff. So the fellow in this picture isn’t the sailor but the new town doctor, right? My only question is whether you’ll need to stand up to run and fetch that doctor’s bag, or have you maybe got it tucked some- where close?” “Look harder at me, son. I’ve never ‘run’ toward—or, comes to that, from— anything in my whole life. However, you’re not totally stupid.” She bent, first with a broken-backed degree of inconvenience, then with vis- ible pain. From beneath the cash regis- ter, Theodosia lifted a cardboard box intended for canned green beans. From “But I don’t want our marriage to be featuring Pitbull.” train clear from Chicago, stay in Hes- and here’s the cholera part: it’s only clear ing. Old Eaton, see, people still tipped ter Brinsley’s pretty rooms, and she’d broth but with little white bits of dis- a hat to him downtown. Hadn’t he de- look in on them for the day before and solving intestines that look like rice and livered most of the folks in sight? But after, till they appeared strong enough float just like rice.” they knew about his serving those fam- to climb back on that train alone. (Eaton “A trip home from the Orient with ily-way city girls, and about certain other did his little operations right at Brins- rice stools.” mistakes he’d buried. Plus, there was a ley’s boarding house after dark, leaving “That’s it. But, of course, what hap- drug habit he got into real bad at the his buggy out of sight in Hester’s barn, pened, the sailor was already near to end. Strange, somebody like that wait- we heard, with her getting a small cut, dead, and his sisters and mother went ing so late to find a vice. Like some de- so to speak, out of every lost child.) soon after, and then it was the two neigh- layed vacation for him to retire into. Old “But Eaton had lately grown too boring farms downhill of their ground- Eaton soon drifted into falling asleep shaky to even fake acting able, being so water and all that scrubbing and suds while standing there mid-operation, up in years. And here’s this new boy, the brave Woolsey women loosed on hands’d fly up all of a sudden palsied, so Petrie. They’d advised all the young fel- that poor boy’s leavings, then let seep the mayor and a committee had sent, lows graduating from state med school into the soil and stream downhill. Back just in time, for Petrie, fresh as paint out to grow facial hair—that’d make a kid in Chicago, the disease was going wild, of university. Fourth in his class, too. look older, so’s people would trust him folks falling by the hundreds. Eigh- “But, even if Doc Petrie had come more. Important, trust. Anyways, young teen-forty-nine, nobody knew the word during a normal healthy season around Petrie, mustache and silly new goatee, ‘bacteria.’ Pasteur still hardly more than here, he woulda been quite a standout. helps the sailor’s sister rise up. He ties a student, if my dates are right. Their I mean, unmarried, fine-looking as still her horse behind his new-leased pha- sad idea of a cure? Mustard plasters, hot shows here, if in a darker-than-Swed- eton and a rental bay from Brinsley’s as you could stand, then ‘bleed’ the pa- ish kind of way—but that would’ve been stable. Petrie walks in, and here is the tient to calm him good. No, up Chicago romantic to all these towheaded braided Woolseys’ parlor strewn with fine red- way? The panic eventually got so bad, girls for miles hereabouts. and-gold silks that Sandy’s just brought town fathers voted to pump in drinking “He kept asking locals to please, please home, cloth still tossed everywhere water, not from that little latrine Chi- just call him Mark, but ‘doctor’ was a and . . . no, I don’t have those in back, cago River downtown but from clear godly word by then. And those folks of since somebody careless left them in cold Lake Michigan. Officials were that ours that hadn’t yet come down with the direct sun and they pretty much fell to desperate, and, for once, the bigwigs got cholera? Instead of hiding from Petrie, pieces. But Petrie goes in the room, and it right. But they had money and city they took to bringing him fresh-dug there are basins set all round the iron ways. Out here? Our folks, well, we only beets from out their gardens and send- bed, and the poor mother, burning up just had Petrie. ing their daughters over with the food. herself, is working hard, washing a naked “That young doctor was so new Matchmaking! And here it was the mid- boy, who’s embarrassed and, you can see among us he’d not made arrangements dle of our terrible epidemic year. I guess he knows it, losing his life at both ends. to get his laundry done. And yet already it was superstition. Because the more This going to be too much for you?” Markus was giving us whatever we were folks got sick the healthier and taller did “Nothing is too much going to get of hope. All of that boy look. He’d turn up at church, for me. Yet, I mean. And us were strangers to him, and, my mother’s mother told me, they this? Is the .. . portrait of all. Looking after mortally clapped. Dr. Petrie, white shirt, black tie, that very doctor, you say?” sick people you love, that is black suit like you see here, he walked “Didn’t say. Getting hard enough. (I should into the Lutheran chapel and the whole to that. But answer me know.) But to get some ad- place, choir and sourpuss preacher and this—you think you’re so dress in writing that’s on a all, applauded. .. . It made him stay away, smart—how did young street you don’t know how of course. Man never set foot in there Markus Petrie know it was to find, even in a town as again. And he’d only come into their cholera and from halfway tiny as La Verne, and to sanctuary hoping to find a little support cross the room? Hmm?” walk in there and discover from On High, a little quiet, relief from I shook my head one another whole family puk- farm folks that were turning gray and sideways swipe. (Never contradict or ing and voiding in plain view? becoming a puddle at both ends. See, upstage your teller. Besides, I hadn’t “They were so grateful there was that’s what the cholera bug does to you, a clue.) somebody to send for. And, when he did I guess. Liquefies. It’s awful catching. “Because in the bowls, mixing bowls turn up, Markus was a fine looker, with And the doctor was soon the only per- and pans pressed into service to spare a deep voice. Sober and polite and right son brave or fool enough to duck under the home’s one good mattress, the doc- out of an accredited Illinois school— the orange quarantine ropes, ignoring tor saw ‘rice stool.’” well, it reassured. Little beard, such dark warning signs he himself had nailed to “Which is .. .” eyes. And with a plain way that out the doors of those farmhouses worst hit. “Which is where the person has al- this far means real skill. No wonder the “Locals were real glad Doc Petrie ready been so emptied of food that noth- worship started! Even old Doc Eaton was up on the techniques of 1849 from ing but what’s clear is left to come out, couldn’t have got such a sudden follow- our best state school. Taxpayer money

66 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 “Petrie would be home in his rental, hurting his hands with carbolic acid, try- THE END OF POETRY ing to burn the infection off them, wash- ing up, and shucking off his pants and Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower throwing hot water and soap even over and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot, his good shoes, standing there alone wear- enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy ing nothing but his shirttails, and more and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis girls would come in. Folks swear that for of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god weeks there were virgins turning up at not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds, all hours of the night. And their parents enough of the will to go on and not go on or how right aware of where the daughters’d gone a certain light does a certain thing, enough and what for at this ungodly hour. Guess of the kneeling and the rising and the looking I can still hear them: ‘Now, daughter, inward and the looking up, enough of the gun, don’t you be letting that Grace Cunning- the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost ham get a jump on Doc ahead of you. letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and Why, sister, when this is over, after all the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough he’s done to help our county, he can stand of the mother and the child and the father and the child for governor, sure. They say Boss Brins- and enough of the pointing to the world, weary ley alone gave him two hundred-dollar and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border, gold pieces when their spoiled littlest girl enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough pulled through. But brush back your hair I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate, off your face, why don’t you. Show those enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high features. Grace Cunningham is not a water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, patch on anybody pretty as you.’ Oh, but I am asking you to touch me. it was a pagan time, 1849, I swear to God. “Now, this,” and here she awkwardly —Ada Limón angled off the stool, finally scooping up the painting and clamping its lower edge against the glass counter between us. well spent. But, listen, there were no important it was that people stick by “This portrait of Petrie came to me, it’d techniques, except don’t wash your ricey each other through the worst. The doc- be just five weeks back. Been hanging basins in the river, where the poisons tor wrote how civilization depends on up in the public library on the square will drift, which was exactly what they nobody going untended. since our town fathers commissioned went out and did, poor fools. And too “And then Petrie ‘strongly suggested’ his portrait, eighteen and fifty.” soon the Mengers and the Hurleys, then that families gather into bands to in- Theodosia finally placed into my the Hopwoods and the Mortensens, sure that no matter how bad it got some- hands the oil painting. His image was they all come down with it. ‘Come down,’ body’d stay put and tend those left alive. pulling away from old yellow pine you hear me? Going back like this, I fall And local tribes, especially those with stretchers still marked as coming from right into my grandmother’s voice. Now, farmland adjoining, they went along a shop in Cedar Rapids. after suchlike buildup, you might think with him on this. And, oh, but that sure “This painting, see, was done from there’s not much of a story to the rest saved many a local. Later, they gave Doc a daguerreotype they got his mother to of it. But what’s mainly inter-resting is Petrie all the credit. His idea: the Health send. Talented local lady painted it, one such madness as grew up around him Alliances, they were called, and that still Miss Beech, a teacher who’d been at the during the worst part of our plague. All holds. Nowadays, they’re mainly used church the few times he set foot in there La Verne left enough bread puddings for tornado-watch and swapping Christ- before they applauded him off. He still and bushelled fruit outside his house to mas gifts. Community granges, like, but kept introducing himself as Mark— where he couldn’t open the front door they’re still called the Petrie Alliances. maybe it was what his mother called of a morning. Had to go out around the “Was a real warm June, that June, him. But he’d got too important to ever back to see what gifts had him so locked which was bad for spreading the chol- be that casual around. in. Doc kept busy, writing off for help, era but good, you know, for how stuff “Well, one day ’bout four weeks into him so new to the practice and out here grows in soil this black. Young girls the worst of it, he was out at the Brins- in this throwback sickness. But most brought him masses of zinnias, and they leys’ again (mighty demanding, the doctors elsewhere had their own hands got into his house, and folks heard tell Brinsleys), and their little daughter they full. Still, Petrie made newspaper sug- that more than one threw herself at him. thought he’d saved and had paid him gestions that the Bugle printed and What he did, who knows. And yet you so well for saving, she was down and passed along. He listed do’s and don’ts, kind of hope he at least tried something looking but poorly again. Petrie bends most of them a scared boy’s purest guess- with a few of our better-looking ones over her asleep, and shakes his head and work. Mainly meant to keep folks’ panic that were spunky. They weren’t all says to her rich parents, ‘I just don’t like down. And, at the end, he added how peaches, trust me. her color.’ And instead of agreeing or

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 67 mumbling thanks, instead, both the ing for Petrie. Which meant, since he within the sight and sound of other Brinsleys point. Just point at him, say- lived out here most of three miles from folks. Don’t you? ing, ‘What—her color? Pot comin’ in here town and so alone, nobody knew what “So, once the local sick either started callin’ our dear little kettle black!’ Folks all exactly was happening to him. Might improving or went to white ash on the claim he walked toward a mirror was could be getting stronger? Or going down pyres they’d put out past the fairground hanging in her room, and when he saw toward worse? Did he have sufficient to contain it—once the farm folks’ worst it plain, him already sweating bad, they food, so forth, what with his being a bach- fear ended, and they’d unpinned his say young Markus threw up across the elor and all? Well, let’s say the interest in Petrie Alliance newspaper rules off their new rose-patterned wallpaper, like he’d him tapered right off. Even as the num- kitchen walls—they did what they’ll al- been waiting for the permission of oth- ber of cases did. People said more than ways do when they’ve forsaken some- ers’ noticing. Boy must’ve guessed al- ever that he’d been the agent of it, spread- body who dies helping them, someone ready. He apologized for making a mess ing it amongst us, then trying to take they failed to honor while he was still and at once excused himself and stepped credit for being so kind. New here, after alive. Why, the doctor looked different, into the hall so’s he could buggy home, all, and, in the end, what’d we really know now that their health was back. Boss clean up. At their fine front door with about strangers? Coming in here like a Brinsley’s pet daughter had recovered, stained glass cut in it, those Brinsleys rooster among our fine local white hens after all. And the child, if no one else gave him a mighty wide berth and and turning girls’ heads. did, recalled how the handsome doc’s wouldn’t shake Petrie’s acid-black hand. “Finally, with no word, no sight of house calls had saved her. So the Brins- Oh, no, not now. His mistake was in ever him, about ten days in, they found his leys held a late ceremony and put up the letting people see him sick. Especially the horse broken loose and chewing the oil-portrait money, and in two months, Brinsleys, born talking, every one. neighbor lady’s roses. That’s when our why, they’d made a hero out of our aban- “Soon, people said as how a native son mayor that’d helped hire Petrie, he orga- doned Frederick Markus Petrie, M.D. so fine as Sandy Woolsey could not have nized a ‘fact-finding expedition,’ the local Hung his picture in the library. And he brought this much badness down on us. paper called it. One of the wives packed became the new country doctor, the boy No, more likely Petrie had. Look at your a few sandwiches as a false reason for that’d singlehandedly saved most of 1849’s calendar. Didn’t it all turn up about a their visit. Petrie had at least put together La Verne! That is who-all’s face you got week or two after this standoffish young the Health Alliances. You had to give the ahold of there, young man.” doctor did? And aren’t you always read- boy that. They found him in the back ing in the papers about certain firemen room of his house. He’d tied himself into t’d grown so dark—even with her that set the fires themselves so they’ll get his own bed with the last of his orange Icandle guttering—that I had to clutch the headlines and the bonuses? Well? quarantine rope, hog-tied himself, owing his picture nearer. Canvas all but touched Local rumor added as how young Markus to the shakes, maybe. Or could be just to my nose. So I sniffed it then, front and Petrie’s own case of the cholera—what keep himself from rushing off in search back. Though the photographic image with his having been around those many of others, at the end. All La Verne had that had inspired the painting had per- others—his degree of sick, it had to run hoped for a good young country doctor, haps been taken during graduation, you twelve to fifty times worse, way more and maybe that was his last wish, too. young Petrie’s features already seemed potent than others’. Some said his ran up “My guess is he’d tied himself not so to foresee some complex fate ahead. to seventy-five times more catching! And much to keep from going for help, be- And yet his eyes looked half-willing to that’s why they, one by one, stopped leav- cause who could have helped him? No, accept whatever medieval destiny ing food, and now the girls were nowhere more because, even if you’ve lived your awaited his modern medicine out here to be seen. And even the dying quit send- life alone, you want to at least perish in these godforsaken wheat fields. “But,” I asked a little too loud, “who authorized taking his portrait down? After what? A hundred and twenty-odd years? Why’d your town park him out here and order you to sell him?” “ ’Cause nobody remembers anymore! Nobody but me and the daughter of the youngest of those Mortensens he saved. And even she claimed the library just couldn’t keep him, since that last re- model made the place real ‘contem- porary.’ The young hotshot librarian phoned. Calls me Teddy, which is all they’ve ever thought to call me here- abouts. She explained how, with their new yellow walls and mirrors, young Petrie here, he sure looks ‘kinda gloomy.’ Her very words, son. Besides, his pic- ture needs some restoring. So, well, here “Most my customers come ringing I found a better frame for him. As I was he is, on consignment-like. ‘For what- through that door like elephant herds transferring the painting, an old calling ever he brings.’ Brings! hunting Depression glass. Right name card slid out from under the wooden “Funny, I’m out here near the little for the stuff, the way it gets me down. stretcher. Some librarian’s fine penman- house Doc paid his first two months’ Take him. In La Verne, if you act too ship attested, “Dr. Frederick M. Petrie, rent on. They’ve shipped him right back kind or smart or interested in much, b. 1819–d. 1899, saved town, cholera. to his old neighborhood where he hardly they’ll make you pay. And pay. Yeah, Caught it.” even got unpacked. But what does it take him quick. ’Fore I need to hold him I’d never thought to Google him. But smell like? ’Cause I admire you thought back behind the counter with me. Get, what first came alive onscreen? His orig- to nose that out. See, my sense of smell, or else I’ll change my mind, boy. And inal 1899 La Verne Bugle proposal for I lost most of it to childhood scarlet not to worry—I’ve saved enough to surviving a plague. Those neighborhood fever. Was six months old, just so much where, in six months, there’ll be no more organizations he helped found are still cartilage. Those fever spikes rolled winters for Theodosia, who tends to fall in use, his bulletins yet considered a model through me, messed me up pretty good, on ice. Moving to San Diego. Seventy- of improvised public health. So I gladly as you can see. So, not too much of a two degrees year-round, they tell me. give good young Petrie the last word: sniffer left. One sense shy of a load.” Now, skedaddle. Get him finally clear I held it near my nose again. “The of us. Misery loves company, but help Fulfilling the duties assigned by fellow- picture and Petrie, I guess, smell of tar me not be selfish at the end! Go!” citizens in acknowledgment of the Epidemic Cholera now being so sadly among us, I, the and maybe day-old bacon grease, likely So I lifted it and, flinching through Committee’s newest member, submit the fol- cooked over a wood fire. Dust and maybe her door chimes, yelled my thanks and lowing Report, June 11, 18 and 49. Grateful linseed oil. Also, I swear, of Bactine! ran it to the Jeep. Felt like a hostage res- that, after being somewhat modified, it was Funny, there’s something medicinal cue. With his frame propped in my pas- unanimously adopted. To wit: about it. Though this was surely painted senger seat, I snapped the safety belt I recommend to my neighbors the following program intended as defensive and preparatory: months after they buried him.” across him at a kindly angle that’d leave —Please undertake a strict course of tem- “Burned him, you mean. And all those his dark eyes free. perance and regularity in diet, drink, and ex- odors still in there, huh? You don’t say.” And then, around midnight, in a Jeep ercise. I urge on you, friends, the spare use of Theodosia finally fell silent. Slouching full of junk from earlier, we achieved es- meats, vegetables, and fruit, and, more particu- as if exhausted by some marathon. cape velocity. The night country smelled larly, if the bowels be to any degree disordered, avoid fresh pork, spiritous liquors, green corn, Then I risked it. Told her I didn’t sup- of growing corn. It seemed as though I cucumbers, and melons. pose she’d willingly part with him, even was saving him from the town he’d saved, —Should any sickness of the stomach occur considering his slightly flaking condi- then paid for saving. Once we passed the while the disease be locally prevailing, con- tion. But I did vow, hand in the air, that Iowa line, we had moonlight all the way. sider it the commencement of a disease that no caretaker would ever hold onto him may easily be cured but, if neglected, might kill infants and our elderly. longer or be surer not to let Markus and ntil that night, toys had been my —Go to bed between blankets and be his story get lost the next time around. Uspecialty. But, as I started guarding warmly covered. This course has, in other com- I admitted, “All I have is twenty dol- Petrie, I somehow put aside childish munities, proved sufficient to heal in almost lars cash. But, if you’ll trust me to send things. The homemade treasures that’ve all cases when commenced in time. you a personal check, it won’t bounce, attracted me since? They’re more about —Be assured, my new friends, all such steps, if administered early, prevent death in most I swear.” work than play. They are what my small known cases. The singular symptom likeliest “Now you know his story, don’t you?” collection is best known for. It now boasts to undo us is an interfering terror. I nodded. six hundred and ten portraits of anon- —I further observe, with Committee sup- “And after my giving you that? You ymous working American citizens, from port, that our La Verne citizens will be ex- figure I could take a penny for him? 1718 to 1937. They are all shown on the posed to less danger by calmly remaining in their homes than by flying from them. I there- Why, that’d be like .. . like sellin’ some job, in their aprons or welding goggles, fore urge families to take care in securing Good other human. No, it’s yours. He is. Was manning their forges, minding their Help, attending to each other’s arising needs. hoping you might notice it when you pharmacies, curating their pyramids of Friends will, in their hour of need, stand fast, come in here hunting toys. Toys aren’t wholesale pumpkins. Some of these are not flee. the half of it. They’re the way we want masterpieces. Most were painted by art- —Stay we must, however strong be our sinful urge to solely save ourselves. Certainly, it to be, not how things turn out. And, ists just as unknown as their subjects. our very notion of civilization depends on well, you found it. But your smelling it’s His portrait still presides over my our group determination that not one among what put you over the top, boy. Made desk here. Even a hundred and seventy us, even the most solitary and least loved, be me know you’d guard him pretty good. years after he died alone, the doctor’s left untended. Might could you’ll someday even re- presence feels half-healing. It seems In this and all things, looking toward our healthier future, I remain your most respect- member to talk about him. La Verne we’ve recognized and befriended each ful neighbor, never deserved fine young Petrie here. other across time. Frederick Markus Petrie, M.D. Did not deserve him, alive or dead.” Money-wise, of course, he’s far from —Mark  I stared at his picture, then again at the collection’s most valuable item. But, the lady armored in cricket-clicking in case of fire, I’d save him first. NEWYORKER.COM watches. “You saw him,” she nodded. Four decades into our cohabitation, The author on his interest in epidemics.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 69 THE CRITICS

A CRITIC AT LARGE BLOOD ON THE GREEN Kent State and the war that never ended.

BY JILL LEPORE

hillip Lafayette Gibbs met Dale family with a decent apartment. “I really four students and wounded nine more. Adams when they were in high don’t want to go to the air force but I They fired as many as sixty-seven shots P school, in Ripley, Mississippi, a want you and my man to be staying with in thirteen seconds. “Four dead in Ohio,” town best known as the home of Wil- me,” he wrote to Dale, after she and the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young would sing, liam Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who baby had moved back home to Ripley in a ballad that became an anthem. “Shot ran a slave plantation, fought in the Mex- to save money. some more in Jackson,” the Steve Miller ican-American War, raised troops that The Jackson State campus was di- Band sang, in 1970, in the “Jackson-Kent joined the Confederate Army, wrote a vided by a four-lane road called Lynch Blues.” In the days between the shoot- best-selling mystery about a murder on Street, named for Mississippi’s first black ings at Kent State and Jackson State, po- a steamboat, shot a man to death and got congressman, John Roy Lynch, who was lice in Augusta, Georgia, killed six un- away with it, and was elected to the Mis- elected during Reconstruction, in 1872, armed black men, shot in the back, during sissippi legislature. He was killed before though a lot of people thought that the riots triggered by the death of a teen- he could take his seat, but that seat would street honored another Lynch, the slave- ager who had been tortured while in po- have been two hundred miles away in the holding judge whose name became a lice custody. At a march, on May 19th, state capitol, in Jackson, a city named for verb. It was on Lynch Street, just after protesters decorated coffins with signs: Andrew Jackson, who ran a slave plan- midnight, on May 15, 1970, that police- 2 Killed in Jackson, 4 Killed in Kent, 6 tation, fought in the War of 1812, was men in riot gear shot and killed Phillip Killed in Augusta. famous for killing Indians, shot a man Gibbs. He was twenty-one. In a bar- Two, plus four, plus six, plus more. In to death and got away with it, and was rage—they fired more than a hundred 1967, near Jackson State, police killed elected President of the United States. and fifty rounds in twenty-eight sec- a twenty-two-year-old civil-rights ac- Phillip Gibbs’s father and Dale Adams’s onds—they also fatally shot a seventeen- tivist—shot him in the back and in the father had both been sharecroppers: they year-old high-school student named back of the head—after the Mississippi came from families who had been held James Earl Green, who was walking down National Guard had been called in to as slaves by families like the Jacksons and the street on his way home from work. quell student demonstrations over con- the Faulkners, by force of arms. Buckshot and broken glass wounded a cerns that ranged from police brutality In 1967, after Gibbs and Adams started dozen more students, including women to the Vietnam War. And, in 1968, at dating, he’d take her out to the movies watching from the windows of their dor- South Carolina State, police fatally shot in a car that he borrowed from his uncle, mitory, Alexander Hall. Phillip Gibbs’s three students and wounded dozens a car with no key; he had to jam a screw- sister lived in that dormitory. more, in the first mass police shooting driver into the ignition to start it up. That night, as the historian Nancy K. to take place on an American college After Dale got pregnant, they were mar- Bristow recounts in “Steeped in the Blood campus. Four dead in Ohio? It’s time ried, at his sister’s house. They named of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, for a new tally. the baby Phillip, Jr.; Gibbs called him and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State his little man. Gibbs went to Jackson College” (Oxford), students at Jackson his spring marks the fiftieth anni- State, a historically black college, and State had been out on Lynch Street pro- Tversary of the Kent State shootings, majored in political science. In 1970, his testing, and young men from the neigh- an occasion explored in Derf Backderf ’s junior year, Gibbs decided that he’d like borhood had been throwing rocks and deeply researched and gut-wrenching to study law at Howard when he grad- setting a truck on fire, partly because graphic nonfiction novel, “Kent State: uated. He was opposed to the war in of something that had happened ten Four Dead in Ohio” (forthcoming from Vietnam, but he was also giving some days before and more than nine hundred Abrams ComicArts). Backderf was ten thought to joining the Air Force, because miles away: at Kent State University, the years old in 1970, growing up outside that way, at least, he could provide his Ohio National Guard had shot and killed Kent; the book opens with him riding

70 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 BETTMANN / GETTY; OPPOSITE: OPPOSITE: SERGE BLOCH / GETTY; BETTMANN Ten days after the Kent State shootings, policemen killed two young black men on the campus of Jackson State, in Mississippi.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 71 in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, Cleveland Plain Dealer, both of whom Before introducing them, the host, Hugh reading Mad, and then watching Rich- had reported from Vietnam, reached Downs, gave a grave, concise, newsman’s ard Nixon on television. “Kent State” campus within forty-five minutes of the account of the sequence of events: reads, in the beginning, like a very clever first shot—they rushed in to cover the On Thursday, April 30th, 1970, President college-newspaper comic strip—not un- growing campus unrest—and stayed for Richard Nixon announced that American forces like early “Doonesbury,” which débuted three months to report “Thirteen Sec- were moving into Cambodia. On Friday, that same year—featuring the ordinary onds: Confrontation at Kent State,” their May 1st, students at Kent State University in lives of four undergraduates, Allison swiftly published book. Eszterhas went Kent, Ohio, expressed their displeasure at the President’s announcement. That night, there Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, and on to become a prominent screenwriter. was violence in the streets of Kent. On Satur- Bill Schroeder, their roommate prob- Philip Caputo, a twenty-eight-year-old day, May 2nd, the R.O.T.C. building was lems, their love lives, their stressy phone Chicago Tribune reporter who later won burned, National Guardsmen moved onto the calls with their parents, and their fury a Pulitzer Prize and wrote a best-selling campus. On Sunday, May 3rd, students and about the war. As the violence intensifies, memoir about his service in Vietnam, Guardsmen traded insults, rocks, and tear gas. On Monday, May 4th, the confrontations con- Backderf ’s drawings grow darker and was driving to Kent State, from the tinued. There was marching and counter-march- more cinematic: the intimate, moody Cleveland airport, when the news about ing. Students hurled rocks and Guardsmen panels of smart, young, good people, mud- the shots came over the radio. “I remem- chased students, firing tear gas. The Guards- dling through the inanity and ferocity ber stepping on the gas,” he writes, in men pursued the students up an area called of American politics yield to black- the introduction to “13 Seconds: A Look Blanket Hill. Some Guardsmen pointed their rifles menacingly. And suddenly, it happened. backed panels of institutional buildings, Back at the Kent State Shootings,” a se- with the people around them saying com- ries of reflections on his earlier report- Nearly all accounts of what happened pletely crazy things, then to explosive ing. “I entered the picture late,” the at Kent State begin the way the “Today” splash pages of soldiers, their guns locked best-selling novelist James A. Michener show did, on April 30, 1970, when, in a and loaded, and, finally, to a two-page wrote. “I arrived by car in early August.” televised address, Nixon announced that spread of those fateful thirteen seconds: He stayed for months. The Reader’s Di- the United States had sent troops into “BOOM!” “BANG!” “BANG! BANG! POW!” gest had hired him to write “Kent State: Cambodia, even though, only ten days Backderf ’s publisher has billed his What Happened and Why,” providing earlier, he had announced the withdrawal book as telling “the untold story of the him with reams of research from on-the- of a hundred and fifty thousand troops Kent State shootings,” but the terrible spot reporters. The political commenta- from Vietnam. Students on college cam- story of what happened at Kent State tor I. F. Stone cranked out a short book— puses had been protesting the war since on May 4, 1970, has been told many times really, a long essay—titled “The Killings 1965, beginning with teach-ins at the Uni- before, including by an extraordinary at Kent State: How Murder Went Un- versity of Michigan. By 1970, it had fleet of reporters and writers who turned punished.” So many books were pub- seemed as though U.S. involvement in up on campus while the blood was still lished about the shooting, so fast, that the war in Vietnam was finally winding wet on the pavement. Joe Eszterhas and when NBC’s “Today” show featured their down; now, with the news of the inva- Michael Roberts, staff writers for the authors the result was a screaming match. sion of Cambodia, it was winding back up. Nixon, who had campaigned on a promise to restore law and order, warned Americans to brace for protest. “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he said. “Even here in the United States, great univer- sities are being systematically destroyed.” Nixon’s Cambodia speech led to anti- war protests at hundreds of colleges across the country. Campus leaders called for a National Student Strike. Borrowing from the Black Power movement, they used a black fist as its symbol. The number of campuses involved grew by twenty a day. Most demonstrations were peaceful, but others were violent, even terrifying. In some places, including Kent, students rioted, smashing shop windows, pelting cars, setting fires, and throwing firebombs. In Ohio, the mayor of Kent asked the governor to send in the National Guard. Nixon hated the student protesters as much in private as he did in public. “I was not huffing and puffing—it’s just allergies.” “You see these bums, you know, blow- ing up the campuses,” he said the day wrote at the end of the exam: “I don’t bone spurs; Biden got five student de- after the Cambodia speech. He had long take the books as ‘the law’ anymore.” Her ferments and later cited asthma.) urged a hard line on student protesters: professor wrote back, “A happy thing— On May 7th, three days after the antiwar protesters, civil-rights activists, that.” She had gone out to protest the shooting at Kent State, as many as five all of them. So had Ronald Reagan, who invasion of Cambodia. thousand students thronged the Man- ran for governor of California in 1966 Thirteen seconds later, with four hattan funeral service of Jeff Miller. As on a promise to bring law and order to students on the ground, the shooting the mourners marched through the city, Berkeley, a campus he described as “a seemed likely to start up again, until scattered groups of construction work- rallying point for communists and a cen- Glenn Frank, a middle-aged geology ers, up on girders, threw beer cans at ter for sexual misconduct.” In 1969, he professor, grabbed a megaphone. “Sit them. The mayor, John Lindsay, had ordered the California Highway Patrol down, please!” he shouted at the students, declared May 8th a “day of reflection,” to clear out a vacant lot near the Berke- his voice frantic, desperate. “I and closed the city’s pub- ley campus which student and local vol- am begging you right now. lic schools. A thousand col- unteers had turned into a park. Patrol- If you don’t disperse right lege students turned up for men fired shots, killing one student, and now, they’re going to move in, an antiwar rally, hoping to injuring more than a hundred. Reagan and it can only be a slaugh- shut down Wall Street: “One- called in the National Guard. Weeks be- ter. Would you please listen two-three-four. We don’t want fore Nixon’s Cambodia speech stirred to me? Jesus Christ, I don’t your fuckin’ war! Two-four- up still more protest, Reagan, running want to be a part of this!” Fi- six-eight. We don’t want for reëlection, said that he was ready for nally, the students sat down. your fascist state!” They were a fight. “If it takes a bloodbath,” he said, Students elsewhere stood met by construction workers, “let’s get it over with.” up. Campuses across the coun- many of whom had come May 4, 1970, the day of that blood- try erupted. Demonstrations down from the Twin Towers bath, fell on a Monday. The Guardsmen took place in four out of every five colleges and not a few of whom had buried their at Kent State started firing not long after and universities. One in five simply shut soldier sons, or their neighbors’ sons, in noon, while students were crossing cam- down, including the entire University of flag-draped coffins. pus; there seems to be some chance that California system, and sent their stu- Joe Kelly, six feet four and from Staten they mistook the students spilling out of dents home. Students marched on ad- Island, was working on building the el- buildings for an act of aggression, when, ministration buildings, they burned more evators at the World Trade Center. He actually, they were leaving classes. Bill buildings, they firebombed, they threw said he’d reached his “boiling point,” Schroeder, a sophomore, was an R.O.T.C. Molotov cocktails. And they marched and headed over to the protest during student. “He didn’t like Vietnam and on Washington. This magazine declared his lunch hour, joining hundreds of Cambodia but if he had to go to Viet- it “the most critical week this nation has workers in yellow, red, and blue hard nam,” his roommate said later, “he would endured in more than a century.” hats, some carrying American flags, have gone.” Schroeder was walking to many chanting, “Hey, hey, whaddya say? class when he was shot in the back. Jeff ut one of the most violent protests We support the U.S.A.!” and “Love it Miller, a junior from Plainview, Long Is- Bwas a counterprotest, as David Paul or leave it!” Kelly thought the students land, hated the war, and went out to join Kuhn points out in his riveting book looked “un-American.” The students the protest; he was shot in the mouth. “The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York called the hardhats “motherfucking fas- Sandy Scheuer had been training to be- City, and the Dawn of the White Work- cists.” Kelly punched a kid who, he said, come a speech therapist. Shot in the ing-Class Revolution” (Oxford). For all swung at him and knocked the kid down. neck, she bled to death. Allison Krause, the talk of tragedy in the nation’s news- While police officers looked on, more a freshman honor student from outside papers and magazines, a majority of or less approvingly, the workers attacked Pittsburgh, was about to transfer. She’d Americans blamed the students. They’d the protesters, clubbing them with tools, refused to join groups like Students for had it with those protests: the destruc- kicking them as they lay on the ground. a Democratic Society, which, by 1969, tion of property, the squandering of an Some of the policemen dragged hippies had become increasingly violent. (Her education. Hundreds of thousands of out of the fight by their hair. Even some father told a reporter that she had called U.S. servicemen were fighting in Viet- Wall Street guys, in suits and ties, joined them “a bunch of finks.”) But she be- nam, young people who hadn’t dodged the hardhats. Lindsay had called for came outraged when the National Guard the draft; most of them came from white, the flag at City Hall to be lowered to occupied the campus. On a final exam, blue-collar families. Kent State students half-mast. The construction workers she had tried to answer the question were shattering shop windows and bury- swarmed the building and forced city “What is the point of history?” “Dates ing the Constitution and telling Na- workers to raise the flag back up. Other and facts are not enough to show what tional Guardsmen to go fuck themselves? workers chased undergraduates from happened in the past,” she wrote. “It is Four dead in Ohio? Fifty thousand ser- Pace University back to campus, break- necessary to analyze and delve into the vicemen had already died in Vietnam, ing into a building on which students human side of history to come up with and more were dying every day. (It’s had draped a white banner that read the truth.” She had lost her naïveté, she worth noting that both Trump and Biden “VIETNAM? CAMBODIA? KENT STATE? told her professor, in a reflection that she avoided the draft: Trump said he had WHAT NEXT?” Pace was next. Students

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 73 tried to barricade the buildings while son State had never been a particularly Street overnight; the police chief ini- construction workers broke windows political campus. But Jackson had in tially refused. and leaped inside, shouting, “Kill those fact been very much in the fray of the That night, a rumor spread that long-haired bastards!” civil-rights, antiwar, and Black Power Charles Evers, who was now the mayor Two weeks later, at the White House, movements. In 1961, students at Mis- of Fayette, Mississippi, and who had a Nixon received a memo from his aide sissippi’s Tougaloo College—another daughter at Jackson State, had been shot. Patrick Buchanan. “A group of construc- historically black school—had held a As the National Guard had done at Kent tion workers came up Wall Street and sit-in in an attempt to desegregate the State, the authorities at Jackson State beat the living hell out of some demon- Municipal Library, in nearby Jackson. insisted that the police and patrolmen strators who were desecrating the Amer- After the Tougaloo students were ar- had identified a sniper. (No evidence has ican flag,” Buchanan reported. “The most rested, students at Jackson State marched ever corroborated these claims.) A few insane suggestion I have heard about down Lynch Street, toward the jail where minutes after midnight, law-enforce- here in recent days was to the effect that the Tougaloo protesters were being held; ment officers began firing. In the morn- we should somehow go prosecute the they were stopped by police with tear ing, the college president closed the cam- hardhats to win favor with the kiddies.” gas, billy clubs, and attack dogs. Two pus and sent the students home. He advised the opposite tack: abandon years later, the civil-rights activist Med- Time called what happened in Mis- the kiddies, and court the hardhats. The gar Evers was assassinated at his home sissippi “Kent State II.” After Phillip day before, a hundred and fifty thousand in Jackson. The next year, his brother, Gibbs’s wife, Dale, learned that her hus- New York construction workers, team- Charles Evers, who had replaced Med- band had been killed, she found out she sters, and longshoremen marched through gar as head of the state’s N.A.A.C.P., was pregnant, with her second child. This the streets of the city. The Daily News tried to calm campus protesters after a one, Demetrius, graduated from Jackson called it a “PARADE FOR NIXON.” They female student was nearly killed by a State in 1995, and has had a hard time were trying to make America great again. hit-and-run as she crossed Lynch Street. explaining what happened to the father Nixon invited the march’s leaders to the Police came and shot at the students, he never knew. “If I try to tell people White House, where they gave hard hats wounding three. The local press was not about the shootings at Jackson State, as a gift. Nixon was well on his way to inclined to support the protesters. “Did they don’t know about it,” he has said. becoming the hero of the white work- you hear about the new NAACP doll?” “They don’t know until I say, ‘Kent State.’” ing class, men and women, but especially a columnist for the Jackson Daily News In “Steeped in the Blood of Racism,” men, who left the Democratic Party for had asked. “You wind it up and it Bristow insists, “Jackson State was not the G.O.P. “These, quite candidly, are screams, ‘police brutality.’” another Kent State.” Bristow blames our people now,” Buchanan told Nixon. A lot of students at Jackson State white liberals for failing to understand They were Nixon’s, and they were Rea- couldn’t afford to get involved. In the the shootings at Jackson State as a leg- gan’s, and they are Trump’s. wake of the 1970 shootings, one student acy of the Jim Crow South’s brutal re- said, “Mothers are out scrubbing floors gime of state violence, and for deciding, n May 7th, the day of Jeff Miller’s for white folks and sending these kids instead, that what happened at Jackson Ofuneral in New York, signs were to Jackson State. ‘You’re doin’ better State was just like what happened at posted all over the Jackson State campus: than I ever did,’ they tell the kids. ‘You Kent State. She faults the Beach Boys, Be Concerned better stay outta that mess.’” for instance, for a track on their 1971 Meet in Front The Dining Hall Still, by May 13, 1970, five days after album, “Surf ’s Up”; even though they At 2:00 P.M. Today the Hardhat Riot in New York, there had noted the specific racial nature of To Discuss Cambodia. were plans, or at least rumors about plans, the events at Jackson State (“The vio- A small crowd showed up. Two days to burn the Jackson State R.O.T.C. lence spread down South to where Jack- later, only about a dozen Jackson State building. That night, students threw son State brothers/Learned not to say students went to a rally in downtown rocks at cars driving down Lynch Street. nasty things about Southern policemen’s Jackson. One student leader recalled, “Havin’ nigger trouble on Lynch Street?” mothers”), these lines appeared in a song “The kids at Kent State had become one squad car asked over the police radio. called “Student Demonstration Time,” second-class niggers, so they had to go.” When students started setting fires, the which, Bristow laments, “told listeners They had found out what he and his governor called in the Mississippi Na- the Jackson State shootings belonged in classmates had known their whole lives: tional Guard, but, before they could ar- a litany of crises on college campuses.” what happens when the police think of rive, the all-white Mississippi Highway That was more or less the verdict of you as black. Patrol turned up. Jackson State’s presi- the President’s Commission on Campus It’s not clear that Phillip Gibbs went dent, an alumnus, met with students the Unrest, appointed by Nixon in June, 1970. to any of those rallies, but, in high school, next morning; they told him that they It wasn’t a bunch of whitewashers. The in Ripley, he’d joined sit-ins aiming to were angry about Cambodia, the draft, nine-person commission, chaired by Wil- integrate the town swimming pool, an and Kent State, and also about the cur- liam Scranton, the former Republican ice-cream shop, and the Dixie Theatre. few for students in the women’s dormi- governor of Pennsylvania, included the In “Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slay- tory and the lack of a pedestrian bridge president of Howard University; the first ings at Jackson State College,” published over Lynch Street. He called the police African-American justice to sit on the in 1988, Tim Spofford argued that Jack- chief and asked him to close Lynch Louisiana Supreme Court; a black mem-

74 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ber of the Harvard Society of Fellows studying the history of racism; and, as its only active military member, the first African-American Air Force general, a former commander of the Tuskegee Air- men. After holding public hearings in Kent and Jackson, the Scranton Com- mission concluded that most campus unrest had been peaceful, that it was a response to racial inequality and the war in Vietnam, that it wasn’t mayhem, and, also, that it wasn’t unusual. “It is not so much the unrest of the past half-dozen years that is exceptional as it is the quiet of the 20 years which preceded them,” the report asserted, noting that Ameri- cans who attended college from the nine- teen-forties to the early nineteen-sixties had formed a “silent generation.” As far as the commission was concerned, the modern era of campus unrest began on “So we’ll film the show without an audience, February 1, 1960, when four students and edit in the gasps of wonder later.” from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a “Whites Only” lunch counter in Greensboro. •• Nixon rejected the report. It’s this argument—that white and Michael Roberts called Michener’s book State a Year After,” by Stephan black student protesters can be understood “a Magical Mystery Tour of innuendo, Lesher, a legal-affairs correspondent. Al- to have been involved in a single move- half-truth, carefully-structured quotation exander Hall was still pockmarked with ment, for racial justice, free speech, and and anonymous attribution.” They con- bullet holes. Lynch Street had been closed peace, led by the fight for civil rights— cluded that the National Guardsmen, ex- to traffic, but with a tall chain-link fence, that Bristow, bizarrely, rejects as a white- hausted, poorly trained, and badly led, which made the campus feel like a prison. liberal fantasy. If it was a fantasy, it was had committed murder. “There was death, “No one has been punished,” Lesher also Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s fantasy. but not murder,” Michener insisted. wrote. “No one is going to be”: In 1967, after King first spoke out against A week short of the first anniversary No one—least of all Jackson’s blacks—ex- the war in Vietnam, people asked him of the shootings at Kent State, Michener, pected a different outcome. . . . Yet, there is a why, saying, “Peace and civil rights don’t Eszterhas, Roberts, and I. F. Stone ap- barely perceptible chance that the Jackson State mix.” Their response saddened him, he peared on that panel on the “Today” show. violence will be remembered as more than sim- said, because it suggested that “they do “Hugh—obviously, this will be a free- ply another brutal chapter in Mississippi’s dis- regard for black humanity. not know the world in which they live.” swinging affair,” Downs’s producer noted, in the show overview. By the end of the No one has been punished, and no question, lately, is: Which world do hour, the guests had nearly come to blows. one is going to be. Except everyone’s A Americans remember? The Scran- “Jim, don’t you believe in American jus- been punished, the whole nation has ton Commission concluded that the tice?” Eszterhas asked, after Michener suffered, and will keep on suffering, until shootings at both Kent State and Jack- continued to insist that a federal grand- the shooting stops. That will take a po- son State had been unjustified. It did not, jury investigation would be a waste of litical settlement, a peace, that the na- however, urge the prosecution of the time, because no jury would convict the tion has needed for a half century. And shooters, something that a lot of people Guardsmen. “How do you know that?” it will require a history that can account who wrote books about Kent State urged Roberts asked. Michener: “Because it for Greensboro, and Berkeley, and Kent but that James Michener opposed. “It has been the history throughout our State, and the Hardhats, and Jackson would be an exercise in futility,” he said country. The law doesn’t run its course.” State, all at once. King made a predic- during his commencement address at At this point, even Downs jumped in: tion: “If we do not act, we shall surely Kent State, in December, 1970. In his “Aren’t you in effect indicting the Amer- be dragged down the long, dark, and five-hundred-page book, “Kent State: ican system of justice?” Stone tried to shameful corridors of time reserved for What Happened and Why,” Michener read out loud from a statement by Kent those who possess power without com- blamed the protesters and, especially, out- students. Michener shouted him down: passion, might without morality, and side radical agitators, who, like the snip- “I won’t let you read that.” strength without sight.” It turns out that ers, seem to have been mostly an inven- That spring, the New York Times ran the corridor of time is longer than he tion of the authorities. Joe Eszterhas and a long investigative piece, “Jackson could have known. 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 75 cleverer than I was.” John Maynard BOOKS Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the un- dergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and THE THINKER’S THINKER intellectual prowess. When Ramsey later published a We’re still catching up with one of the greatest minds of the last century. paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable BY ANTHONY GOTTLIEB contributions to mathematical eco- nomics ever made.” Its most contro- versial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically in- defensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” In the wake of the Great Depression, econ- omists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enor- mous impact arrive. And so it went with most of Ramsey’s work. His con- tribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on some- thing else. It consisted of two theo- rems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the valid- ity of logical formulas. More than forty years after they were published, these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey the- ory, which analyzes order and disor- der. (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.) Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He “ he world will never know what vel in their midst: Ramsey made his did little to advertise the importance Thas happened—what a light has mark soon after his arrival as an un- of his ideas, and his modesty did not gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Stra- dergraduate at Newton’s old college, help. He was not particularly impressed chey, a member of London’s Blooms- Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the with himself—he thought he was rather bury literary set, wrote to a friend on age of eighteen to produce the English lazy. At the same time, the speed with January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lec- translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s which his mind worked sometimes left turer in mathematics at Cambridge “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the a blur on the page. The prominent University, had died that day at the most talked-about philosophy book of American philosopher Donald David- age of twenty-six, probably from a the time; two years later, he published son was one of several thinkers to ex- liver infection that he may have picked a critique of it in the leading philoso- perience what he dubbed “the Ram- up during a swim in the River Cam. phy journal in English, Mind. G. E. sey effect.” You’d make a thrilling “There was something of Newton Moore, the journal’s editor, who had breakthrough only to find that Ram- about him,” Strachey continued. “The been lecturing at Cambridge for a de- sey had got there first. ease and majesty of the thought—the cade before Ramsey turned up, con- There was also the problem of Witt- gentleness of the temperament.” fessed that he was “distinctly nervous” genstein, whose looming example and Dons at Cambridge had known for when this first-year student was in the cultlike following distracted attention a while that there was a sort of mar- audience, because he was “very much from Ramsey’s ideas for decades. But Ramsey rose again. Economists now Frank Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians

76 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers his academic work than for his sulki- tial paradoxes. (One famous example talk about Ramsey sentences, Ram- ness, quarrels, and rigidity. An obitu- concerns a barber who shaves all those, seyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not ary notice in the records of Magda- and only those, who do not shave them- a few scholars believe that there are lene College, where Arthur Ramsey selves. Does he shave himself?) Ramseyan seams still to mine. was second-in-command for twenty- Ramsey was also an enthusiastic, two years, described his rule as “aus- though not uncritical, admirer of Witt- hilosophers sometimes play the tere.” In childhood, Frank’s way of deal- genstein’s “Tractatus”—a book that Pgame of imagining how twentieth- ing with his father’s foul moods was Wittgenstein, who first arrived in Cam- century thought might have been dif- to slip calmly out of the room when- bridge to work with Russell in 1911, ferent if Ramsey had survived and his ever the going got rough. Perhaps it completed seven years later, as a sol- ideas had caught on earlier. That ex- was this pacific ease that, later in life, dier in the Austro-Hungarian Army ercise has become more entertaining enabled Ramsey to cope better than interned in an Italian P.O.W. camp. with the publication of the first full most with Wittgenstein’s frequent fits The “Tractatus” argued that philosoph- biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A of tormented umbrage. ical problems are the result of misun- Sheer Excess of Powers” (Oxford), by At a time when few women went derstanding the logic of language. By Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor to university, Agnes Ramsey studied revealing its real logic, Wittgenstein at the University of Toronto. Drawing history at Oxford, and also attended believed, he had solved them all. His on family papers and records of inter- the logic lectures of Charles Dodgson account of logic enthralled Ramsey, views conducted four decades ago for (better known as Lewis Carroll). She who, in 1921, was recruited to translate a biography that was never written, had been among the little girls whom the book into English. Misak tells a more colorful story than Dodgson liked to take boating. More A few months after his graduation, one might have thought possible so progressive than her husband, Agnes in 1923, Ramsey spent a fortnight long after such a short life ended. was an activist for left-wing and fem- in Austria, and grilled Wittgenstein Ramsey’s father, Arthur, claimed inist causes. Frank was similarly in- about the “Tractatus.” The next year, that Frank, his eldest child, learned clined; at school, he was seen as an in March, Ramsey returned and spent to read almost as soon as he could “ardent Bolshevik.” At university, he six months in Vienna. Wittgenstein’s talk. His political sense was preco- became involved in local politics and youngest sister, Gretl Stonborough, cious, too. One day, little Frank told was a keen, though undoctrinaire, took Ramsey under her wing, and he his mother, Agnes, that his younger member of the Socialist Society. dined every week in her “baroque pal- brother, Michael, was, unfortunately, The Ramseys were part of an in- ace,” with its “vast staircase and innu- a conservative: tellectual aristocracy, in which Frank merable reception rooms,” as he excit- You see, I asked him, “Michael are you a was comfortable from a young age. edly wrote home. They went to parties liberal or a conservative?” And he said “What After his first meeting with Keynes, and to the opera. Ramsey had not does that mean?” And I said “Do you want to in Cambridge, Ramsey recorded that known how immensely rich the fam- make things better by changing them or do he found him “very pleasant”; on a ily was. (Ludwig lived very simply: he you want to keep things as they are?” And he walk, they had talked about the his- had given all his money to some of his said—“I want to keep things.” So he must be a conservative. tory of economics, the lamentable siblings after their father died.) Ston- state of probability theory, and the borough’s elder son, Tommy, who was The two brothers later diverged in re- difficulty of writing. Ramsey was sev- studying mathematics at Cambridge, ligious matters as well. Frank was an enteen at the time; Keynes was ad- once said that it seemed as if mathe- atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael vising the League of Nations and the matics were a part of Ramsey’s body, entered the Anglican Church and be- Bank of England, and lunching with which he used without thinking, like came the Archbishop of Canterbury. Winston Churchill. his hands. By the last year of Frank’s school In his final year of secondary school, Ramsey was eager to discuss phi- days, he was apparently consuming Ramsey decided to focus on pure math- losophy with Wittgenstein, but this books about economics, politics, phys- ematics, which is what he would earn time there was another reason for his ics, logic, and other subjects at a rate his degree in, teach, and use as a tool. visit, too. Ramsey wanted to be psy- of almost one a day. On the holidays, But philosophy was always what choanalyzed: he was anxious about sex he learned German, so that he could gripped him most. At school, he had and had been suffering from an “un- read some volumes of mathematics read Bertrand Russell’s “The Princi- happy passion for a married woman,” and philosophy in their original lan- ples of Mathematics,” which argued as he put it in a letter to Wittgenstein. guage. In his aptitude for math, he for the “logicist” view that mathemat- Keynes once observed that Ramsey’s followed his father, a Cambridge math- ical truths and concepts can be derived simplicity and directness could be al- ematician and the author of textbooks from logical ones. Much of Ramsey’s most alarming. Ramsey, in his jour- in math and physics. But Frank’s tem- early technical work in philosophy built nals, noted down an exchange with the perament—he became known for on Russell’s logicist ideas and sorted woman concerned, who was a close his jovial spirits and loud, infectious through their ramifications. For one family friend: “Margaret, will you fuck laugh—was in marked contrast to that thing, he improved a theory of Rus- with me?” he asked one day. She re- of his father, who was less notable for sell’s that had dealt with self-referen- plied, “Do you think once would make

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 77 any difference?” Ramsey seems to have In love and full of ideas, Ramsey twenties, but during this time he also believed that it would, and the matter said in early 1925, “I find, just now at produced two articles for The Eco- depressed him, on and off, for two years. least, the world a pleasant and excit- nomic Journal, which was edited by In Vienna, he was treated by The- ing place.” This was in a talk he gave Keynes. One was the article on sav- odor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils. to the Apostles, a select and venerable ings—Ramsey mentioned to Keynes Initially, Ramsey found the sessions Cambridge discussion club. Ramsey’s that it was “much easier to concen- unpleasant and he was sometimes bored main topic that evening was whether trate on than philosophy”—and the by so much talk about himself. He lent there was anything left for such clubs other was about tax, and ultimately Reik a copy of the “Tractatus,” and was to talk about. The rise of science and no less consequential. Its key proposal annoyed when Reik declared that its the fading of religion meant that the is that, given certain conditions, the author must have some sort of com- old questions were becoming “either rates of sales taxes should be set in pulsion neurosis. But after six months technical or ridiculous,” or so Ramsey such a way that the production of each he told his parents that he found Reik argued. He half seriously suggested taxed commodity falls by the same “jolly clever,” and that being analyzed that conversation, except among ex- proportion. The tax article, like the was likely to improve his work. Even perts, was now just a matter of saying savings one, eventually became the the foundations of mathematics could how one felt and comparing notes with basis of a subfield of economics con- be illuminated by psychoanalysis, Ram- others. But he ended with a twist. Some cerned with “optimal taxation,” and sey thought: guarding against one’s might find the world an unpleasant changed the way economists thought emotional biases would make it easier place, yet he had reason on his side— about public finance. to get a clearer view of the truth. Ram- not because any facts supported him sey returned to Cambridge in Octo- but because a sunny attitude did one hen Wittgenstein returned to ber, 1924, and evidently considered him- more good. “It is pleasanter to be WCambridge, early in 1929, Ram- self cured. Meanwhile, Reik told a thrilled than to be depressed, and not sey was eager to resume their philo- friend of Ramsey’s that there had never merely pleasanter but better for all sophical talks, and it seems that Witt- been much wrong with him. one’s activities.” genstein was as well. He moved in Ramsey, taking up a fellowship at There was a broader philosophical with Ramsey and Lettice until he Keynes’s college, King’s, began lectur- picture behind his humor. He was at- found his own place, and the two men ing on mathematics. Tall and increas- tracted by the idea that beliefs of all had intensive discussions throughout ingly round, he had a lumbering grace, sorts were best understood in terms of Ramsey’s last year. In a letter from and acquitted himself well at lawn ten- their consequences. He called this this time, Keynes wrote to his wife nis; a friend, writing in her diary, de- “pragmatism,” following the Ameri- that Wittgenstein had come to din- scribed a broad face that “always seems can philosopher C. S. Peirce, who died ner and was “more ‘normal’ in every ready to break into a wide smile.” He in 1914. Ramsey took the essence of way than I have ever known him. One fell in love with Lettice Baker, a spir- pragmatism to be that “the meaning woman at last has succeeded in sooth- ited woman five years his senior, who of a sentence is to be defined by ref- ing the fierceness of the savage brute: had excelled in science and philoso- erence to the actions to which assert- Lettice Ramsey.” phy as a Cambridge undergraduate ing it would lead, or, more vaguely still, Misak thinks that Frank Ramsey and was working at the university’s by its possible causes and effects. Of had a transformative effect on Witt- psychology laboratories. They were this I feel certain.” Part of “the essence genstein at this time, too. She argues married in 1925, just after an odd epi- of any belief,” he later wrote, is that that it was Ramsey’s talks with him in sode during a summer party at Keynes’s “we deduce from it, and act on it in a 1929 that turned the Wittgenstein of country place. certain way.” the “Tractatus” into the Wittgenstein Several Bloomsbury figures were In 1926, Ramsey composed a long of the “Philosophical Investigations,” there, including Virginia Woolf and paper about truth and probability a summation of his mature work that Keynes’s new wife, a Russian ballerina, which looked at the effects of what he was published, posthumously, in 1953. Lydia Lopokova. Unfortunately, Witt- called “partial beliefs”—that is, of peo- In the thirties, Wittgenstein moved genstein was, too. Lydia made the mis- ple’s judgments of probability. This away from the formal logical system take of remarking, “What a beautiful may have been his most influential of his “Tractatus” and toward mean- tree,” presumably too casually, where- work. It ingeniously used the bets one dering explorations of the purposes to upon Wittgenstein glared and de- would make in hypothetical situations which language is put—the meaning manded, “What do you mean?” and to measure how firmly one believes a of a word is, as he argued in his later she burst into tears. Wittgenstein also proposition and how much one wants work, often just its use. He was, in Mi- became annoyed with Ramsey, who something, and thus laid the founda- sak’s account, adopting the sort of prag- took issue when Wittgenstein declared tions of what are now known as de- matism that Ramsey had taken up. In Freud “morally deficient.” Although cision theory and the subjective the- the preface to his “Investigations,” Ramsey didn’t bear grudges, the two ory of probability. Wittgenstein certainly credited Ram- men had no contact for four years, ex- Ramsey hoped to turn his essay sey for helping him to realize “grave cept for a distinctly cool exchange of about truth and probability into a mistakes” in the “Tractatus.” But he letters in 1927 about the logic of “=.” book, which he worked on in the late claimed to be even more indebted to

78 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 Piero Sraffa, a Cambridge economist. Too little is known about Wittgen- stein’s conversations with either man BRIEFLY NOTED to shed much light on his later thought. Besides, Wittgenstein always devel- A Thousand Moons, by Sebastian Barry (Viking). This spare, oped his own idiosyncratic take on the lyrical sequel to “Days Without End” takes place in the influences he absorbed: if Ramsey’s backwoods of Tennessee, a state scarred by the Civil War. views went in, you can be sure that Winona, a young Lakota woman, lives in a community that they would not be Ramsey’s when they is prejudiced against her race and her sex, yet she finds came out. fulfilling work and a besotted fiancé. However, after she is After Ramsey’s death, Lettice brutally attacked, she is forced to reckon with her past trau- earned money as a photographer, mas, and with the cruelties faced by Native Americans. which led to audacious adventures in Barry’s atmospheric prose captures the mid-nineteenth cen- Cambodia and up the scaffolding of tury’s language and hardscrabble spirit. “Be wise,” Winona King’s College Chapel. She once told tells herself. “Trouble always comes and no use wishing it a friend that she had been tempted didn’t. Thing is, to get through it—and out the other side.” to have an affair with the impossible Wittgenstein, which would have been How Much of These Hills Is Gold, by C Pam Zhang (River- her biggest jape of all. Lettice and head). In this stylized and complex début novel, two chil- Wittgenstein stayed on friendly terms dren, born near the end of the gold rush, wander through after Ramsey died, until one day she harsh Western landscapes searching for a place to bury threw out his old bathmat and, out- their father, a failed prospector. (Their mother, shipped raged, he cut her off. As she remarked, from China to work on the railroads, died years before.) he made “a moral issue out of abso- The story is narrated by the soft, scholastic twelve-year- lutely everything.” old Lucy, as she journeys with her younger sibling, Sam, Ramsey’s temperament could not who struts in imitation of their father, and of the cowboys have been more different. Keynes wrote of their time. While the book presents a counter-narrative that Ramsey’s common sense and prac- to conventional tales of America’s origins, it also interro- ticality reminded him of the eigh- gates the more intimate dimensions of belonging and mem- teenth-century Scottish philosopher ory, asking, over and over, “What makes a home a home?” David Hume. And, like Hume, he was plump, jolly, and fond of cards. One The Hot Hand, by Ben Cohen (Custom House). In 1985, a group member of the Bloomsbury set re- of cognitive scientists released a study in which they con- counted a poker night with Ramsey: cluded that hot streaks—one of the most avidly contested “Frank, with the guffaws of a hippo- phenomena in sports—were a myth. Cohen, a sportswriter, potamus and terrible mathematical cal- begins his exploration of the subject with basketball, but culations, got all our money from us.” soon broadens his scope to consider Einstein’s annus mi- It was not just a matter of girth and rabilis, in 1905 (his output: special relativity, the photoelec- 2 gaiety: there were philosophical par- tric effect, and E=mc ), and Shakespeare’s, which occurred allels with Hume, too. The Scotsman during the plague year of 1606. Sports statistics offer some wrote that the human mind “has a answers as to whether streaks indeed reflect heightened great propensity to spread itself on ex- abilities rather than chance and circumstance, but, as Cohen ternal objects”—that is, to mistake its notes, the belief in them has its own value, because it im- own activities for features of reality. plies that people can “transcend their places in the world.” This was a theme of Ramsey’s work. Hume’s idea is what Ramsey was get- What Is the Grass, by Mark Doty (Norton). The author of ting at when he wrote, in his last year, this appreciation of “Leaves of Grass” animates Walt that there are many kinds of sentences Whitman’s joyful proclamation that everything is con- that we think state facts about the world nected. Doty interweaves an account of his own coming but that are really just expressions of of age as a gay man with passionate close readings of our attitudes. Whitman that probe the poet’s multitudes, showing him Nobody will know how far Ram- to be lustful and wise, sure and self-doubting, and to draw sey might have taken this idea, or any on both Biblical language and the rough yawps of slang other, if he had survived. Statements to create a new style. In the eighteen-fifties, before the about what would have happened if Civil War, Whitman evoked a country in which the kind things had been different are what of affinity Doty practices here might bind us—in which Ramsey called “unfulfilled” condition- “democracy might be founded in the body, on the affec- als. They express an attitude, he said, tion between bodies”—and called out to his compatriots but do not correspond to any reality.  in that imagined future.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 79 will get the most out of “#blackAF,” which ON TELEVISION is like its rawer, foulmouthed twin. As the Hollywood producer Tim Story, play- ing himself, puts it, in a brutal rib midway BLACK LIKE ME through the season, “ ‘black-ish’ seems to tap into the hearts and minds of fifty- “#blackAF,” on Netflix. five-year-old white women.” “#blackAF” has alienated some black BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX critics, who have argued that it simply re- treads passé conversations about race and authenticity. The trap of seeking to be representative is one of the show’s sub- jects; still, Kenya’s personal dysphoria in- evitably says something about the state of the black race. Non-critics seem to have a higher tolerance for the show’s flaws, perhaps because it’s funny. Barris isn’t try- ing to make his magnum opus—he just wants to blow off some steam. One of the show’s strengths is its filleting of stale network-sitcom character silhouettes. The Barris family is a picture of caustic dys- function. One son is a “pathological fuck- ing liar”; Kenya berates another for being “soft.” The youngest, a baby, toddles into the expansive kitchen and declares, “I shit my diaper, Mommy.” It’s nothing for Kenya to call his daughter a “thot,” or for her to retort that he is a “dick.” Kenya’s garish Balenciaga tracksuits cloak a miser who worries that, in mov- ing on up, from Inglewood to Encino, he’s become a fraud, artistic and other- wise, and that he’s passed the trait on to his privileged children. In “black-ish,” Barris sublimated his creative fear—that he was a glorified barrow boy who had benefitted from the hunger of the “black wave” in Hollywood—into the character hink of the hashtag #blackAF as a The forty-five-year-old showrunner, of Dre, the head of the “urban division” Tmillennial remix of mantras of self- producer, and writer Kenya Barris wants at an advertising agency. In “#blackAF,” love—“Black is beautiful,” “I’m black to be the commercial auteur of this iden- you wonder, and worry more than a bit, and I’m proud.” The phrase, printed on tity paranoia. He is best known for the about whether Barris is acting at all. T-shirts and stamped on skin, has be- show “black-ish,” which débuted on ABC The obvious corollary to “#blackAF” come a kind of shorthand for a politics in 2012, garnered a wave of hosannas is “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but Barris is of affirmation. But does it also veil a from critics, and spawned two spinoffs. no Larry David, not yet—his writing prickly insecurity? “Black as fuck” is the In 2018, he signed a potentially hundred- doesn’t do enough to distinguish the view- kind of thing an artist or a businessman million-dollar deal with Netflix, a boon point of the show from that of its repel- might say about his work or his behav- to his long-term project to make risky lent protagonist. “#blackAF” also con- ior in order to foreclose critique. After television about the black bourgeoisie. tains shades of “The Bernie Mac Show” all, who is anyone to question anyone In “#blackAF,” Barris’s inaugural Net- and “Real Husbands of Hollywood,” else’s blackness? Employed earnestly, flix series, he stars as Kenya, the filthy- Kevin Hart’s prescient, self-skewering the phrase makes some people wary: rich creator of a successful show, called series for BET. But Kenya’s nouveau-riche Why the fuck do you feel that you have “black-ish,” who lives in a McMansion in anxieties belong most clearly to a broader to proclaim your blackness? On the other Los Angeles with his six children and his tradition of black-male complaint: his hand: Why the fuck is it such big deal lawyer wife, Joya (a very funny and lib- wild swings from pomposity to soul-dead- to you if I do? erated Rashida Jones). “black-ish” fans ness and self-doubt recall comedians like Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, and rap- Kenya Barris plays Kenya, the filthy-rich creator of a successful TV show. pers from Future to Jay-Z. His identity

80 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLOT KRISTENSEN Mother’s Day order by 5/6! Your crisis is represented by a fat gold chain, to analyze the performance of blackness Children’s Names Sterling Silver with Swarovski® which he makes plans to sell—“am I a was immediately deemed resonant. On Branded Crystals set in gold coon?” he asks himself—but which stays each episode of “black-ish,” Barris used from $390 on his neck all season long, an albatross. a trademark monologue to link a char- JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM acter’s personal crisis to structural rac- 888-646-6466 was raised by nineties black televi- ism. In “#blackAF,” he parodies the spe- Ision. UPN, Fox, and the WB were ciousness of that device. “Being dripped flush with sitcoms that featured black is literally part of who we are,” Kenya characters living in all-black worlds says, unironically invoking slavery to jus- ADVERTISEMENT who didn’t seem to emit a whiff of self- tify his Mr. Porter addiction. The show’s consciousness: “Martin,” “The Wayans treatment of Juneteenth performs a sim- Bros.,” “Sister, Sister,” “Living Single,” ilar function, reminding us of the way “A Different World.” It’s said that only in which “black-ish” commemorated the now are we living in the golden age of holiday with a soaring piece of edutain- black film and TV, but that judgment ment. In this series, perhaps truer to life, hinges on a thirst for universal appeal. Juneteenth is just an excuse to drink WHAT’S THE The rupture between nineties sitcoms brown liquor and bake a “freedom cake.” and the current mode of autobiograph- In the fifth episode, which stands out BIG IDEA? ical black television reflects the fact that for its surge of contained conflict, Kenya Small space has big rewards. black artists have joined the ranks of TV is asked to speak on a panel about a film, producers, showrunners, and writers. It which he loathes, made by an up-and- also owes something to the investment of coming black director. Everyone else, the white critical establishment in black white and black, seems to love it. In ad- culture. Today’s satirical series can feel vance of the event, he assembles a black- like extravagant forms of therapy made Hollywood counsel, including Tim Story, TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159 by power brokers who are dealing with Will Packer, Ava DuVernay, and Issa [email protected] the fact that they are no longer broke or Rae—who play themselves—over Face- powerless. Issa Rae has “Insecure”; Lena Time. “We do it all the time with white Waithe has “Twenties,” a fictionaliza- stuff,” Kenya says, after he realizes that his tion of her early life as a screenwriter. peers are holding back from giving their Hattie, Waithe’s avatar, wants to work true opinion of the film. “Why can’t we for the showrunner of “My Bae,” a se- do it with our stuff?” He is roundly dis- ries that she considers pandering and missed by everyone except Waithe, who cynical. Her boss, folding her arms—a agrees to sit on the panel with him and gesture of encouragement disguised as to back him up on his critiques of the one of contempt—suggests that Hattie movie. But, when the time comes, she make her own show. sells him out onstage, praising the film Wear our new Whereas “black-ish” was shot like a and babbling on about the power of rep- official hat to show mockumentary, the framing device of resentation. Barris and Waithe are im- your love. “#blackAF” comes from Drea (Iman pressively willing to parody themselves, Benson), Kenya’s second-oldest daugh- but the result feels like self-defense mas- ter and his intellectual rival. She is mak- querading as satire. ing a documentary about her family for The other seven episodes blur into her application to the film program at one another, lacking story or situation. N.Y.U., and Kenya outfits her with a I couldn’t get enough of Jones as a lov- film crew. (“They shot ‘The Revenant’ ing, self-absorbed, rich-bitch mom, and with less than this, O.K.?” she says.) I will never complain about a Nia Long “#blackAF” is a messy show about the cameo, especially one in which she’s play- mess of making television; Barris’s cast- ing a hustler publicist. But “#blackAF” ing of some of the “black-ish” actors, and desperately needs fewer riffs and an ex- his recycling of the Greek-chorus motif panded character universe to leaven its (in the earlier show, a team of demo- atmosphere of crushing self-indulgence. 100% cotton twill. graphically diverse people at the ad- At the end of the season, Kenya has a pat, Available in white and black. vertising company; in the new one, a sitcom-style epiphany while watching a TV writers’ room) gives “#blackAF” a rerun of “black-ish” on a family vacation television-for-television-writers appeal. to Fiji. “Such a good show,” he says to Barris is responding, in part, to the cur- himself. One kind of innocence allowed newyorkerstore.com/hats dling of the Zeitgeist since the Obama Barris to make “black-ish.” It was another era, a period in which any art that seemed kind that led to “#blackAF.” 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 4, 2020 81 vaguely medieval quality, as if this MUSICAL EVENTS torch song of the future were being performed in a cold room in an an- cient castle. RALLY OF THE BIRDS I’d heard “La Damoiselle Élue” several times over the years, but a New recordings, by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and by the composer Liza Lim. recent rendition of the prelude, by the young Icelandic pianist Víkingur BY ALEX ROSS Ólafsson, made me listen anew. It ap- pears on an album titled “Debussy E23G671 Rameau,” on the Deutsche Grammo- phon label. Ólafsson plays Debussy’s own transcription of the work for piano, and it sounds more modern than the orchestral version, which has traces of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” The pianist’s technique is astonishingly exact and clear, almost translucent. He avoids ostentatiously rolled chords, misty articulation, blurry pedalling, and other atmospherics in which De- bussy is too often smothered. There is a gentle sway to the rhythm, as though a steady breeze were pushing the music forward. Even more wonderful is what hap- pens next. Ólafsson segues from the prelude’s final, inconclusive E octave to “Le Rappel des Oiseaux,” or “The Rally of the Birds,” a delicately swirl- ing piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was written more than a hundred and sixty years before “La Damoi- selle Élue,” but there is little sense of a sharp stylistic break—a sign both of Rameau’s forward-thinking, free- wheeling imagination and of Debussy’s acute consciousness of the French past. Ólafsson inevitably modernizes Rameau’s music by transferring it from the harpsichord, for which it Ólafsson’s playing of Debussy is astonishingly exact and clear, almost translucent. was written, but the dancing delicacy of his touch prevents any encroach- “ he blessed damozel leaned out/ der through various adjacent tonali- ment of Romantic heaviness. TFrom the gold bar of Heaven.” ties and ambiguous zones, in a nar- Debussy once said of Rameau’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lines caught cotizing haze. opera “Castor et Pollux” that it is “so the attention of Claude Debussy in Finally, at the beginning of a pas- personal in tone, so new in construc- 1887, when the composer was twenty- sage marked “Un peu animé,” or “A tion, that space and time are defeated five. His setting of “The Blessed Da- bit animated,” C major arrives—but and Rameau seems to be a contempo- mozel,” in the form of the orchestral it, too, feels new. The music could not rary.” The same sense of historical col- cantata “La Damoiselle Élue,” is be simpler, with a lilting, rising-and- lapse takes hold as one listens to Ólafs- among his first fully characteristic falling melody over block chords, but son’s recital, which switches back and works, opening a door to a landscape the addition of B’s and A’s to the har- forth between Rameau’s “Pièces de of unearthly radiance. The prelude mony, flavorings tart and sweet, con- Clavecin”—among them “The Rally begins with a spare procession of iso- jures the café and the cabaret, not of the Birds”—and selections from lated harmonies: E minor, D minor, to mention jazz clubs and lounges Debussy: the Préludes, “Estampes,” C major, D minor. The key of C is that had yet to come into existence. “Children’s Corner,” “Images.” The id- the apparent home ground of the Four bars later, Debussy falls back on iomatic brilliance of the playing and piece, but for some thirty bars we wan- a stark E-minor chord that has a the ingenuity of the programming com-

82 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY SIGGI EGGERTSSON bine to make “Debussy Rameau” one cellophane. Birdlike calls periodically pressed music of nature has swelled of the most entrancing piano records ring out, but they are confined, des­ in volume as humanity goes into tem­ of recent years. perate, strangulated. porary retreat. This tumultuous soundscape never f Ólafsson’s disk offers a refuge of feels needlessly assaultive or brutal—a uring the weeks of quarantine, Iotherworldly beauty, “Extinction tribute to Lim’s keen ear for instru­ Dhomebound music lovers have Events and Dawn Chorus,” a 2018 mental writing and to her knack for been depending more than usual on work by the Australian composer Liza tracing musical gestures that have the recordings and streaming music. The Lim, confronts us with the cata­ fluid shape of organic life. She seems likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and You­ strophic reality of the world as it is. to adopt the point of view of the Tube have doubtless profited from the The piece can be heard on a new re­ suffering earth, or even of the lifeless surge, as have major labels and super­ cording by Klangforum Wien, on Kai­ objects that we have ejected into the star artists. But the paltry royalties doled ros. It is scored for twelve musicians— environment. “There is broken gran­ out by the streaming services will not four winds, three brass, three strings, deur,” she writes, “and there are at­ save the working musicians who have piano, percussion—and it is domi­ tempts to sing.” The phrase “broken lost income during the shutdown. The nated by seething, roiling, corrosive grandeur” captures the music’s mes­ virus has exposed more clearly than textures. At the same time, it echoes merizing impact. Ruin is ennobled ever the vicious economic logic of the the fragmentary melodies of animal without being prettified, aestheticized, streaming era, which favors monopo­ voices that have yet to be crushed by pushed into the mental distance. listic consolidation and consumer con­ the anthropogenic apocalypse. The The final section of the piece, venience over an equitable distribution composer cites Shakespeare’s Sonnet “Dawn Chorus,” takes a turn toward of profits across the musical ecosystem. 65 in her program note: “How with the hopeful, though it is a low, muted An extinction event is looming over this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” kind of hope. It is a chorus not of the performing arts, and it calls for a Lim also makes mention of the birds but of fish—various “chatter­ change of practices. When we take music “vast conglomerations of plastic trash” box” species that inhabit Australian for free off the Internet, we should seek that float in the oceans and disinte­ coral reefs and make grunting, hoot­ ways to give concrete support to the grate into toxic particles. She alludes ing, and droning noises as the sun people who made it. Sites such as Band­ to the awful image of albatross chicks rises. To approximate these ritual calls, camp have a far more generous way of choking on plastic fragments that Lim has her performers set aside their sharing revenue, though nothing equals their mothers have mistaken for food. instruments and twirl wind wands the impact of paying for a recording di­ The extinction of species is likened (resonators with stretched rubber rectly: the income from a single CD to the passing away of cultural forms: bands) and operate waldteufels (small sale is equivalent to that of more than musical styles, languages, maps. In the drums that make a croaking sound as a thousand streams. Streaming also ex­ score, these processes of obliteration a cord is drawn through the mem­ acts a hidden environmental toll, in the are mimicked in distortions of instru­ brane). Brass tones emerge from those form of increased carbon emissions gen­ mental voices: coarse attacks, under­ textures and build to a majestic roar erated by electricity­consuming servers. blown and overblown notes, tongue before fading to a subterranean mur­ If the performing arts are to retain a slaps, glissandos, all manner of scrap­ mur, with the contrabassoonist using place in our society, we will have to re­ ing and scrubbing sounds in the per­ a tube extension to produce tones think how we value them—economi­ cussion. Sonic eddies form, with a below the range of human hearing. cally, culturally, politically. For now, we motif getting caught in a repeating As I listened to “Extinction Events” can try to repay artists for the immense pattern before breaking free. At one during the coronavirus shutdown, I library of music that we have been given, point, we hear the noise of crinkling was reminded of how the long­sup­ or, more precisely, that we have taken. 

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

VOLUME XCVI, NO. 11, May 4, 2020. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 8 & 15, July 6 & 13, and August 3 & 10) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business officer; Piper Goodspeed, head of brand revenue strategy; James Guilfoyle, executive director of finance and business operations; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch, chief executive officer; Wolfgang Blau, chief operating officer and president, international; Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer and president, U.S. revenue; Anna Wintour, U.S. artis- tic director and global content advisor; Mike Goss, chief financial officer; Samantha Morgan, chief of staff. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, call (800) 825-2510, or e-mail [email protected]. Give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscription term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are dissatisfied with your subscription, you may receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For advertising inquiries, e-mail [email protected]. For submission guidelines, visit www.newyorker.com. For cover reprints, call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail [email protected]. For permissions and reprint requests, call (212) 630-5656, or e-mail [email protected]. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines, visit www.condenast.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, or call (800) 825-2510.

THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 4, 2020 83 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Sofia Warren, must be received by Sunday, May 3rd. The finalists in the April 20th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the May 18th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ” ......

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Of course—we wait forever, then two come at the same time.” Elizabeth Novick, Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Of all the things we packed, “No, you come in on four.” I didn’t think to bring my MetroCard.” Colin Mills, Boston, Mass. Scott Muller, Montclair, N.J.

“Apparently, they wouldn’t ask for directions, either.” John Glenn, Tyler, Texas

EVERY LITTLE THING IS EVERYTHING.

10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor The new XPS 13. Call a Dell Technologies Advisor at 855-341-5261 or learn more at Dell.com/SB/XPS

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. 350308