"We were trying to change the normal before the crisis – we don’t want to return to that normal”
Why The Pandemic Has Seen Shakespeare Popping Up Everywhere Online
Speech droplets generated by asymptomatic carriers of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are increasingly considered to be a likely mode of disease transmission. Highly sensitive laser light scattering observations have revealed that loud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second. In a closed, stagnant air environment, they disappear from the window of view with time constants in the range of 8 to 14 min, which corresponds to droplet nuclei of ca. 4 μm diameter, or 12- to 21-μm droplets prior to dehydration. These observations confirm that there is a substantial probability that normal speaking causes airborne virus transmission in confined environments.
EEG by Daša Drndić, tr. Celia Hawkesworth
The Memory Police by Ogawa Yoko, tr. Stephen Snyder
Don’t Blame Econ 101 for the Plight of Essential WorkersAnnie Lowry, The Atlantic. Opinion-haver and sentence-maker concludes: “
We made these essential jobs bad jobs. The burden is on
us to make them good ones.” No, it isn’t, Lady Bountiful.
Much about the case is without precedent. Oral arguments will be publicly broadcast on live audio. The nine justices and opposing lawyers will debate the issues remotely, from their offices and homes. And the central question is extraordinary: Is the president of the United States immune from congressional — and even criminal — investigation?
Next week’s arguments concern whether Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, must hand over his tax returns and other records to a House committee and the Manhattan district attorney, which have separately subpoenaed them. (There will also be arguments on congressional subpoenas to two of Trump’s banks.) Trump, who promised while running for president to make his tax returns public, has sued to block the documents’ release. The questions apply beyond this case. Trump has repeatedly resisted congressional scrutiny, most recently by vowing to ignore oversight requirements included in the trillion-dollar pandemic-bailout legislation. “I’ll be the oversight,” he declared.
The president’s accounting firm has found itself at the center of this high-stakes fight. The American arm of a global firm, Mazars has portrayed itself as an innocent bystander in the war between Trump and his pursuers, dragged into the conflict merely for possessing the trove of subpoenaed records. It’s the firm’s first burst into the media glare apart from an unfortunate moment of tabloid coverage in 2016 after one of its New York partners stabbed his wife to death in the shower of their suburban home. (He pleaded guilty to manslaughter.) Mazars has said it will abide by whatever decision the court makes in the Trump matter.
But Trump’s accountants are far from bystanders in the matters under scrutiny — or in the rise of Trump. Over a span of decades, they have played two critical, but discordant, roles for Trump. One is common for an accounting firm: to help him pay the smallest amount of taxes possible. The second is not common at all: to help him appear to the world to be rich beyond imagining. That sometimes requires creating precisely the opposite impression of what’s in his tax filings.
Time and again, from press interviews in the 1980s to the launch of his 2016 campaign, Trump has trotted out evermore outsized claims of his wealth, frequently brandishing papers prepared by members of his accounting team, who have sometimes been called on to appear in person when they were presented, offering a sort of mute testimony in support of the findings. The accountants’ written disclaimers — that the calculations rely on Trump’s own numbers, rendering them essentially meaningless — are rarely mentioned.
Trump’s accountants have been crucial enablers in his remarkable rise. And like their marquee client, they have a surprisingly colorful and tangled story of their own. It’s dramatically at odds with the image Trump has presented of his accountants as “one of the most highly respected” big firms, solemnly confirming his numbers after months of careful scrutiny. For starters, it’s only technically true to say Trump’s accounting work is handled by a large firm.
In fact, Trump entrusts his taxes and planning to a tiny, secretive team of CPAs who have operated at various times from humble quarters in Queens and two Long Island office parks. That team, which has had two leaders with back-to-back multidecade terms, has been working for the Trumps since Fred Trump began using the firm back in the 1950s. It was eventually subsumed into Mazars USA, the American arm of a large international firm, through a series of mergers over decades.
One theme has been consistent: partners and sometimes the firm itself have faced accusations of fraud, misconduct and malpractice on multiple occasions, an investigation by ProPublica and WNYC has found.
77 by Guillermo Saccomanno, tr. Andrea G. Labinger
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the first in Julien Green's 'Dixie'-trilogy, The Distant Lands. (For some reason the Amazon listing also describes this as: "The second volume of Julian Green's autobiography"; please note that it is not.)
A long review of a long book -- and quite an odd one. Green apparently began this in the 1930s -- he was born in 1900 -- but then pulled back after learning of Gone with the Wind; he returned to it in the 1980s --yes, as an octogenarian -- and this was published in 1987, with The Stars of the Southfollowing in 1989 and (the confusingly titled) Dixie in 1994. It was incredibly popular in France -- the jacket copy of the US/UK edition notes 650,000 copies were sold in France alone, something also noted by many of the reviewers, who wondered how on earth that was possible ... -- but doesn't seem to have really found an audience in the US (or UK); the sequel was also published in translation, but the final volume still hasn't been .....
Not the worst book for readers looking for long leisurely read in lockdown times -- and I definitely will be taking on the next volume in the trilogy. Just not right away .....
The Problem With Pulitzers
Where’s Dr. Deborah Birx? Dr. Anthony Fauci? And U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams?
As CNN’s Oliver Darcy points out, they (along with two other health members of the White House coronavirus task force) are appearing less and less on TV talk shows of late.
The last time Birx was on TV was a CNN town hall on May 7. Fauci gave a high-profile testimony before the Senate this week, but hasn’t done a TV interview since May 4. And Adams hasn’t been on TV in nearly a month, his last appearance being April 17 on “Fox & Friends.”
To be fair, some of the health experts have been interviewed by publications, but they aren’t on TV much after being on TV all the time, it seemed, earlier in the coronavirus crisis.
Darcy writes, “A White House official cautioned to CNN that the recent absences from television interviews doesn’t mean the American public won’t see health officials appear with an anchor in the future.”
These are the health experts specifically selected by the White House, which is in charge of their TV appearances. Hopefully, the White House isn’t purposely keeping those experts in the background out of fear that their health advice might contradict the goal of reopening the country.
‘Gross’
One of the more troubling trends in recent times is seeing members of the media attacked for doing their jobs — which is reporting the facts. The latest high-profile attack came when one of Joe Biden’s top campaign officials slammed a CBS reporter for doing her job.
CBS’s Catherine Herridge tweeted that she had a scoop along with photos of the list of people who received notification that Michael Flynn’s identity had been unmasked. Andrew Bates, the Biden campaign’s director of rapid response, rapidly gave an awful response. In a since-deleted tweet, Bates wrote, “SCOOP: Catherine Herridge is a partisan, rightwing hack who is a regular conduit for conservative manipulation plays because she agrees to publicize things before contacting the target to ask for comment.”
The backlash was immediate, including from CNN’s Jake Tapper, who called Bates’ attack “gross.” Tapper tweeted: “Gross. Personal attacks on journalists for sharing facts is obnoxious and indecent. @JoeBiden approves this message?”
Language matters
In her latest NPR public editor newsletter, my Poynter colleague, Kelly McBride, received a letter from an NPR listener criticizing NPR’s description of Ahmaud Arbery as an “unarmed black man.” Arbery was shot and killed by two white men in Brunswick, Georgia, in late February.
The listener wrote, “This implies to me that if he was armed, then the killing would be justified. It also implies to me, that you’re giving the public permission to have compassion for said black man.”
Twice this week, in writing about the Arbery shooting, I have used the phrase “unarmed black man.” The reason that phrase has been used, I believe, is to emphasize the outrageousness of the killing. And it is, one could argue, a newsworthy fact.
But, after thinking about the NPR listener, one can’t help but ask: Would the same description of “unarmed” be used if a white person was shot? Ultimately, the listener is right, and using the phrase “unarmed black man” conveys a message that suggests that the killing was wrong because he was unarmed.
The world has changed
A scene from an upcoming
segment about coronavirus on Sunday’s “60 Minutes” on CBS. (Courtesy: CBS News)
What will the world look like after the coronavirus?
That’s the topic of a Jon Wertheim segment on Sunday night’s “60
Minutes” (7 p.m. Eastern on CBS). “60 Minutes” reports on what the future might
look like by looking back to past plagues.
Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus of history at Yale and author of “Epidemics
and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” tells Wertheim, “They had
quarantine. They had social distancing, lockdowns. Doctors actually wore PPE.
And what they had was a mask. We know about that. Theirs was differently
shaped. It had a long beak. And they put sweet-smelling herbs in it to keep the
foul odors away.”
Past plagues led to big changes in society — things like sewer systems, toilets and many of today’s hygiene practices. The biggest change we might see moving forward is health care initiations to prepare for future viruses.
Arundhati Roy, a renowned Indian novelist who has written about COVID-19, says in the “60 Minutes” piece, “Right now it feels as though we have no present. We have a past. And we have a future. And right now we’re in some sort of transit lounge. We should not be trying to stitch them together without thinking about that rupture. I think the most profound thing is the rupture of the idea of touch, the idea of proximity. All these things will become so laden with risk and fear for a long, long time.”
It’s a fascinating segment, well worth your time.
The one realm of free expression
One night this week I dreamt I went to a party. It was in something like a gallery space. I was only there because a man I have a crush on (but who is off limits) was in attendance. But I wouldn't leave the ground level because I refused to take the elevator, which I assumed would be virus-infested. Which meant I was essentially acting as greeter for people I didn't know at a party I didn't really want to be at. I stepped back from all the air kisses, puzzled that no one was talking about the elephant of the plague, as if it had never existed.
Charlotte Beradt collected dreams in Nazi Germany, which were finally published in 1966.
The links between waking life and dreams are indisputable, even evidentiary. In an afterword, the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim notes the collection's many prophetic dreams, in which, as early as 1933, "the dreamer can recognise deep down, what the system is really like."See also Sharon Sliwinski's discussion, adapted from Dreaming in Dark Times.
Beradt's dreamers "grappled with collaboration and compliance, paranoia and self-disgust, even as, in waking life, they hid these struggles from others and themselves." I suspect we are also dreaming about compliance and paranoia. I don't mean to suggest that our quarantined lives are in any way comparable to the terror of the morally repugnant Third Reich. But pandemic means health and economic crises, with everyday stresses to cope with and moral imperatives to contemplate.
Surely the collective psyche of our society is in turmoil. Are we dreaming of life under lockdown, or after lockdown? Of our old life, or a better life?
At times, The Third Reich of Dreams also echoes Hannah Arendt, who saw totalitarian rule as "truly total the moment it closes the iron vice of terror on its subjects' private social lives." Beradt seems to agree with this premise — she understood dreams as continuous with the culture in which they occur — but she also presents dreams as the one realm of free expression that endures when private life falls under state control. Under such conditions, the dreamer can clarify what might be too risky to describe in waking life.How does the stress of physical distancing with its associated enhanced need for emotional connectedness present in dreams?
Yesterday, there was a puff of a bee outside on the stairs up to my apartment, dead I thought, but when I went back down to bring up another load of bags, I noticed it was still moving. When we went out for a walk later in the day it was gone. That must be how the bees got into this morning's dream. There was a bee on my mother's kitchen counter, it was slow, like it was drunk, but I managed to wave it through the front door. Then there was another that emerged from between the fruit on the counter, it looked bright and young, but it struggled to fly at all, I trapped it under a glass and took it outside. I started turning over everything in my mother's kitchen. I knew the bees were back from wherever they'd disappeared to, but they are all sick and dying.
What are you dreaming these days?
(Deborah Levy dreamt a pangolin walked into her bathroom.)