We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
They were scientists and thinkers in love with the challenge of understanding other human beings. The deepest science of humanity, they believed, was not one that taught us what was rooted and unchangeable about human nature. Rather, it was one that revealed the wide variation in human societies--the immense and diverse vocabulary of propriety, custom, morals, and rectitude. Our most cherished traditions, they insisted, are only a tiny fraction of the many ways humans have devised for solving basic problems, from how to order society to how to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood. Just as the cure for a fatal disease might lie in an undiscovered plant in some remote jungle, so too the solution to social problems might be found in how other people in other places have worked out humanity's common challenges. And there is urgency in this work: as countries change and the world becomes ever more connected, the catalog of human solutions necessarily gets thinner and thinner (11). -- King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Doubleday, 2019.
"Coronavirus."Issues in Science and Technology (Ongoing archive of articles)
"Forty years on, Edward Said's 'Orientalism' still groundbreaking."Ideas (October 23, 2019) ["Edward Said's seminal book, Orientalism (1978), proposed one of the most influential and enduring analyses of the relationship between the West and the Middle East. In many ways, his ideas seem uncontroversial, perhaps even obvious today. But four decades ago, what Said proposed was radical. It still is."]
Shambu, Girish. "Cold Water: Dancing on the Ruins."Current (September 11, 2018) ["Like the makers of these movies, Assayas has his own personal, signature style, one that owes much to the unencumbered shooting methods he was afforded on Cold Water; central to this style is the idea of movement. Critic Kent Jones has written that it is “hard to recall anyone in a state of repose” in Assayas’s work. The restless bodies in his films are captured by a visual style to match: a lyrical camera, often moving, that is preternaturally sensitive to tiny details of facial expression, nonverbal gesture, clothing, hair, and body movement. Meanwhile, this camera is forever reframing, recomposing the image from one moment to the next, almost miraculously uncovering elements of visual interest. In describing this effect, Jones memorably writes that Assayas “makes an event out of every shape and spatial configuration that crosses his camera’s field of vision.” The director’s style has an analogue in Situationist practice: that of the dérive, which is a drift, an exploratory movement through an urban environment in which the wanderer remains poetically aware of each moment, each small discovery."]
Haiven, Max. "The Fight When Spring Comes."This is Hell! #1150 (March 25, 2020) ["Writer Max Haiven on the world mid-crisis, the struggle to come, and his essay "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" for ROAR Magazine."]
"A Force Outside Myself: Citizens Over 60 Speak."McSweeney's (April 6, 2020) ["In the past few weeks, the voices and even the lives of older people have been marginalized, scapegoated, written off. Most recently, certain politicians have presented a false and horrifying choice — either we protect citizens over 60 or we save the economy. We thought it was time to hear their voices. They are living this anxious, troubled moment like no one else. Every day we will add more stories to this mosaic — some tragic, some wistful, some full of levity and hope. They will be at the top of this page every morning. Please add your voice. If you want to share your thoughts, or if you know a family member, neighbor, or friend who should be heard."]
Ali, Wajahat and Sarah Kureshi. "COVID-19 Q & A."In the Thick (March 25, 2020) ["Maria and Julio are joined by power couple husband and wife: ITT All-Star, Wajahat Ali, contributing Op-Ed writer with The New York Times and CNN commentator, and Dr. Sarah Kureshi, physician at Georgetown Family Medicine. They talk about the medical and economic impacts of COVID-19, how their family is approaching social distancing, and what we can do to play our part in containing this outbreak."]
Anderson, Warwick and Jim Yong Kim. "Public Health Across the Pacific."Open Source (April 30, 2020) ["There’s a shocking big truth in those coronavirus numbers – hidden in plain sight, as the saying goes. It comes down to this: China and various neighbors in East Asia beat the lethal virus to its knees months ago. It’s Europe and the US for the most part that inadvertently or not are pushing death tolls higher. Tabulate deaths per capita, and you see the new big picture: The New York State score so far would be 900 deaths per million New Yorkers; the Malaysia score would be 3. Massachusetts has lost 460 people per million; New Zealand 4. Connecticut has lost 600 people per million population. China: 3. First question to East Asia might be: why is your death-rate running roughly one percent of ours?"]
Baker, Michael. "As New Zealand Eliminates COVID, Epidemiologist Says 'We Look at Trump’s Behavior & We’re Horrified.'"Democracy Now (March 26, 2020) ["To learn how New Zealand has largely eliminated COVID-19, we continue our extended interview with Michael Baker, an epidemiologist who is a member of the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s Technical Advisory Group and advising the government on its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes how the country’s response compares to the government actions in the United States and worldwide."]
Barker, Tim. "It Doesn't Have to Be a War."Dissent (March 20, 2020) ["The Trump administration appears ready to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed manufacture of essential goods like face masks. What if we didn’t have to resort to the analog of war?"]
Bliss, Laura. "When the World Stops Moving."City Lab (March 19, 2020) ["Jarringly quiet highways and empty rail cars are signs of Covid-19’s profound economic and public health impacts. Perhaps leaders can also learn from them."]
Brown, Wendy. "A Neoliberal Pandemic."Economics & Beyond (June 18, 2020) ["UC Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown talks to Rob Johnson about how the pandemic and protests against police brutality lay bare a crisis of neoliberalism."]
Butler, Judith. "Capitalism Has Its Limits."Verso (March 20, 2020) ["One reason I voted for Sanders in the California primary along with a majority of registered Democrats is that he, along with Warren, opened up a way to re-imagine our world as if it were ordered by a collective desire for radical equality, a world in which we came together to insist that the materials that are required for life, including medical care, would be equally available no matter who we are or whether we have financial means. That policy would have established solidarity with other countries that are committed to universal health care, and so would have established a transnational health care policy committed to realizing the ideals of equality. The new polls emerge that narrow the national choice to Trump and Biden precisely as the pandemic shuts down everyday life, intensifying the precarity of the homeless, the uninsured, and the poor. The idea that we might become a people who wishes to see a world in which health policy is equally committed to all lives, to dismantling the market’s hold on health care that distinguishes among the worthy and those who can be easily abandoned to illness and death, was briefly alive. We came to understand ourselves differently as Sanders and Warren held out this other possibility. We understood that we might start to think and value outside the terms that capitalism sets for us. Even though Warren is no longer a candidate, and Sanders is unlikely to recover his momentum, we must still ask, especially now, why are we as a people still opposed to treating all lives as if they were of equal value? Why do some still thrill at the idea that Trump would seek to secure a vaccine that would safeguard American lives (as he defines them) before all others? The proposition of universal and public health reinvigorated a socialist imaginary in the US, one that must now wait to become realized as social policy and public commitment in this country. Unfortunately, in the time of the pandemic, none of us can wait. The ideal must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted less on the presidential campaign than the long term struggle that lies ahead of us. These courageous and compassionate visions mocked and rejected by capitalist “realists” had enough air time, compelled enough attention, to let increasing numbers – some for the first time – desire a changed world. Hopefully we can keep that desire alive, especially now when Trump proposes on Easter to lift constraints on public life and businesses and set the virus free. He wagers that the potential financial gains for the few will compensate for the increase in the number of deaths that are clearly predicted, which he accepts, and refuses to stop – in the name of national health. So now those with a social vision of universal health care have to struggle against both a moral and viral illness working in lethal tandem with one another."]
Chomsky, Noam. "On Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response, Bernie Sanders & What Gives Him Hope."Democracy Now (April 10, 2020) ["How did the United States — the richest country in the world — become the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds? We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, discussing this unprecedented moment in history, and its political implications, as Senator Bernie Sanders announces he is suspending his campaign for the presidency. Chomsky also describes how frontline medical workers and progressive organizing are giving him hope."]
Colón-Ramos, Daniel. "This Is Nothing We’ve Ever Seen Before."Latino Rebels (March 22, 2020) ["The COVID-19 outbreak is unprecedented. How do we begin to process what we are all experiencing? On this episode of Latino Rebels Radio, we welcome Daniel Colón-Ramos, professor of cellular neuroscience at Yale and co-founder of Ciencia PR, to talk about what the science is saying and what we can learn about the pandemic."]
Coppins, McKay. "Pandemic Propaganda."On the Media (March 13, 2020) ["After weeks of downplaying the COVID-19 outbreak and overstating his administration's response, President Trump shifted to a more serious tone in Wednesday's national address. Over the past week, the president claimed that health officials were prepared to deploy millions of tests, and that his White House wasted no time in slowing the spread of the virus. If only. South Korea, which discovered its first COVID-19 patient around the same time as the US, is testing 10,000 people a day, roughly the same number of people tested in the US total since mid-January. Meanwhile, there are widespread reports of tests delayed and denied because of shortages of kits and personnel. And, accounts by unnamed sources close to the President say he resisted offers by domestic labs to produce virus tests — because he didn’t like the “optics” of "national emergency" that steeply rising numbers would imply. These discrepancies and contradictions between what the president, his media allies, critical journalists, and other high-ranking officials say is a tiresome pattern that has defined Trump's time in office. According to McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, our current state of information overload is called "censorship through noise": a propaganda strategy that has largely protected the president from accountability, but one that leaves us deeply vulnerable during our current public health crisis. Coppins and Brooke discuss the partisan distrust in COVID-19 news and the empty rhetoric from the White House."]
"Coronavirus."Issues in Science and Technology (Ongoing archive of articles)
Cullen, Art. "Editorial."Storm Lake Times (April 17, 2020) [On the desperate conditions of exploited workers in the meat processing plants in Iowa during the Coronavirus/COVID-19 epidemic.]
Davis, Mike. "On Coronavirus in a Plague Year."Jacobin (March 14, 2020) ["As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure."]
Dowd, Sarah. "One Mask for Five 12-Hour Shifts: Harlem Hospital Nurses Demand Better Protection Amid Pandemic."Democracy Now (April 6, 2020) ["As New York state’s death toll from coronavirus passes 4,000, nurses and medical workers on the frontlines in New York City are protesting for better protections. We go to a demonstration outside Harlem Hospital to speak with Sarah Dowd, a registered nurse who works in its medical/surgical unit and has been treating COVID-19-positive patients. She is a member of the New York State Nurses Association union. “This is not a time for people to be sitting on the sidelines,” Dowd says. “We need to make big demands of the system.”"]
Duhigg, Charles. "A Tale of Two Cities."On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["Opacity, we know, is antithetical to public health in a pandemic. But there are more ways to undermine public trust and cooperation than suppressing bad news. Because when news is bad — or simply uncertain — human behavior can go in all the wrong directions. Fortunately, public health authorities have been through this before. From polio in the 1950s through H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola from 2014 to 2016, their experience has coalesced into a compendium of best practices for informing the public: a literal playbook published by the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. It’s dedicated to the dos — and the please, please, please don’ts — of pandemic communications. In a recent New Yorker article, Charles Duhigg, host of the podcast How To! With Charles Duhigg, wrote the tale of two cities, Seattle and New York, struck back to back with coronavirus outbreaks. One city’s leaders followed the CDC guidelines to the letter. The other’s... did not. Duhigg and Bob discuss the cities' experiences, and the lessons they offer as the virus continues to spread."]
Estes, Nick. "Indigenous Historian Nick Estes on Toppling Statues, Racist Team Names & COVID-19 in Indian Country."Democracy Now (July 6, 2020) ["President Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore comes after months of escalating coronavirus infections in Native communities, but Indigenous scholar and activist Nick Estes says South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, like many of her Republican counterparts across the U.S., has taken a “hallucination-based approach to the COVID-19 pandemic,” and notes she refused to enforce social distancing at this weekend’s event that attracted thousands of people. He also reacts to growing pressure on the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians to change their racist names." Part 1: "'He Wasn’t Invited': How Trump’s Racist Mt. Rushmore Celebration Violated Indigenous Sovereignty.".]
Finnegan, William, et al. "A City at the Peak of Crisis."The New Yorker Radio Hour (April 24, 2020) ["Experts predicted that Wednesday, April 15th would be a peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, its epicenter. On that day, a crew of New Yorker writers talked with people all over the city, in every circumstance and walk of life, to form a portrait of a city in crisis. A group-station manager for the subway talks about keeping the transit system running for those who can’t live without it; a respiratory therapist copes with break-time conversations about death and dying; a graduating class of medical students get up the courage to confront the worst crisis in generations; and a new mother talks about giving birth on a day marked by tragedy for so many families. The hour includes contributions from writers including William Finnegan, Helen Rosner, Jia Tolentino, Kelefa Sanneh, and Adam Gopnik, who says, “One never knows whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life, or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life. That's the mystery of the pandemic.”"]
Freeman, Chas and Jeffrey Sachs. "COVID's Cold War."Open Source (May 7, 2020) ["The coronavirus may have arrived just in time to punctuate a 50 year turn in the grand tide of events. It could mark, that is, a fresh fixation in American minds on an external enemy. It could become the opening round even of a new Cold War, with China this time. But at what price? The hybrid giant “Chi-Merica” was the name of a partnership as well as a rivalry that grew out of Richard Nixon’s first visit to China in 1972. It was the combination that made China the workshop of the world, for better and worse. In the last decade Chi-Merica has driven a huge portion of global growth. But it’s at risk suddenly in the poisoned fallout of a pandemic. Between the pandemic still spreading, and the presidential campaign taking shape, this is tryout time in the blame game. President Trump’s contentious diplomat, Mike Pompeo, has walked back his accusation that the killer virus came out of a Chinese lab at Wuhan. Probably because US intelligence wouldn’t back him up, the Secretary of State now says there’s evidence on the point, but no certainty. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is still the point man among “Blame China” Republicans. This week, he said the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg cracked by COVID-19, and he said that Xi Jinping and his comrades must be made to pay the price. Between Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, meantime, the campaign videos for both sides argue the same point: that the Other Guy was chummier with China and said sweeter things about the Chinese leadership in happier times."]
Gaffney, Adam. "Bill of Health: How Market Logic Hobbles Our Nation's Hospitals."The Baffler #52 (July 2020) ["The consequences of this profit-oriented financing system is a combination of deprivation and excess. That kind of inequality of health care supply has a name. In 1971, the British general practitioner Julian Tudor Hart coined a phrase, the “inverse care law,” that describes it well. “The availability of good medical care,” he wrote in The Lancet, “tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served.” Those who need care the most, that is to say, have the least access to it. ... As Hart noted, the “inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.” As such, the inverse care law is today in operation in the United States like no other high-income nation. But we can change that. We could fund new hospitals and new health infrastructure not from profits, but from the public purse, something that the Medicare for All bills now in Congress, particularly the House version, would achieve. Hospital expansion would then be premised on the basis of health needs, not market logic."]
---. "As U.S. Faces Out-of-Control Pandemic, Pfizer Raises Hope for Vaccine, But Many Questions Remain."Democracy Now (November 10, 2020) ["Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has announced that a Phase 3, late-stage study found their potential COVID-19 vaccine showed more than 90% effectiveness. The two-dose vaccine still faces several challenges, including how to store and transport it, since it must be refrigerated at subzero temperatures. Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett says the news is hopeful, but urges caution. “There’s been no scientific release. There’s no published data,” she says. “We don’t have anything to go with except what the lawyers at Pfizer massaged carefully into a single-page press release. So, we have to take that with a big caveat.”"]
Glasser, Susan B. "The Coronavirus Election."The New Yorker Radio Hour (March 27, 2020) ["It’s been just over a month since Donald Trump tweeted for the first time about the coronavirus—saying, in essence, that the virus did not pose a substantial threat to the United States. Why did he so dramatically underplay the risks of COVID-19? “With Trump, sometimes the answer is pretty transparent,” The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, Susan B. Glasser, told David Remnick, “and, in this case, I think the answer is pretty transparent. He didn’t want anything to interrupt his reëlection campaign plan, which entirely hinged on the strength of the U.S. economy.” Even as the virus spreads, Trump has criticized widespread self-isolation orders and made overtures toward reopening businesses to revitalize the economy. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, Trump’s likely Democratic Presidential opponent, has refrained from openly antagonizing the President. Glasser weighs this tactic: “Do you attack Trump right now, or do you just sort of stand out of the way and let him shoot himself in the foot?”"]
Gonzalez, Juan. “'Make No Mistake: This Country Is Edging Closer to Neo-Fascist Authoritarianism.'”Democracy Now (March 21, 2020) ["We get an update from Democracy Now! co-host Juan González about his mother and wife, who were infected with COVID-19, and discuss how right-wing Trump supporters are brandishing automatic weapons at protests to demand an end to coronavirus shutdowns and are being egged on by the president. “We should make no mistake, that this country is edging closer and closer to neo-fascist authoritarianism,” says González, expressing concern these actions will become normalized in the lead-up to a bitter national election in November."]
Gostin, Lawrence. "WHO Adviser on Meat Plants: If We’re at War, the Weapons We Need Are Tests and PPE, Not Pork." Democracy Now (April 30, 2020) ["As President Trump invokes the Defense Production Act to bar local governments from closing meatpacking plants around the United States, we get response from a longtime adviser to the World Health Organization. “When Congress passed that act, it certainly did not have in mind that the president has the power or the right to put workers’ lives and health at risk,” says Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Center on National and Global Health Law. Gostin also discusses why he joined 40 leading center directors in a declaration this week that urges Trump and Congress to restore and increase WHO funding."]
Gottlieb, Scott. "On how, and when, to end social distancing."The Ezra Klein Show (April 14, 2020) ["The former FDA commissioner doesn’t think the US is going to return to normal anytime soon."]
Greenberg, Michael, George Packer and Nathan Robinson. "Questions of Leadership."Open Source (April 23, 2020) ["The Andrew Cuomo Daily Show has become the high ground of coronavirus talk: all kinds of numbers, trend lines, and family feeling, too. The Donald Trump Show has typically been a carnival of rage, boasting, and misinformation: some of his own people want to shut it down. Where else for light and truth? The Congress, you’d expect. But the people’s branch of government has turned its own lights out for the duration. The members have gone home. Joe Biden has a TV studio at home, but the lustre has faded some around the last Democrat standing in the presidential race when it got rained out, virused out, after Super Tuesday."]
Haiven, Max. "The Fight When Spring Comes."This is Hell! #1150 (March 25, 2020) ["Writer Max Haiven on the world mid-crisis, the struggle to come, and his essay "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" for ROAR Magazine."]
Head, Billy, Claire Perkins and Julia Vassilieva. "Tuning into COVID-19: How the pandemic has changed screen content and viewing practices."Lens (July 8, 2020) ["Our experience of the coronavirus pandemic has been filtered through screens of various sizes – TV screens, computer screens, mobile phone screens. Working alongside each other, broadcast media, social media, citizen science and individually-produced footage rapidly established a distinctive "visual economy" for screen representations of COVID-19 – a set of representational norms that has blurred the boundaries between documentary, news, amateur filmmaking, and surveillance and automated images. These norms will be instrumental in how the pandemic is archived and remembered in the future. It includes a vocabulary of iconic images on our screens, the circulation of which has imbued them with highly charged affective and symbolic values."]
Hudson, David. "Coping."Current (July 14, 2020) ["Kaufman sees mental well-being “as a site of sanctity that must be tended to and preserved,” especially when the news is “an infinite scroll of death, devastation, and disappointing leadership, while our ongoing state of social distancing means there are scant opportunities ‘for the simple harbor of a hug’ (words from the poet Grace Nichols). The temptation can be to languish in hysterical despair and to deny the opportunity for relief because it feels like a gross indulgence, but who does it serve when you make yourself an invisible martyr to the ills of the world?” Art “valorizes the quiet stirrings we have to live by bolder instincts.”"]
Jayaraman, Saru and Damani Varnado."Facing Mass Layoffs, Restaurant Workers Living 'Tip to Mouth' Demand Living Wage & Paid Sick Leave."Democracy Now (March 18, 2020) ["Mass shutdowns and layoffs due to the spread of COVID-19 are affecting millions of restaurant workers across the U.S., with bars and restaurants closing for the foreseeable future. Servers, bartenders, kitchen staff and more have been left in the lurch, many without paid sick leave, paid time off or benefits. One study estimated 4 million restaurant workers in the U.S. are at risk of losing their jobs in a matter of weeks. For more on the impacts on service workers, we speak with Saru Jayaraman, the co-founder of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of One Fair Wage, which has launched an emergency fund to support workers during this time. We also speak with Damani Varnado, a restaurant worker who has worked in catering, fine dining and cocktailing for the past 20 years in New York City. He was working at the restaurant Tiny’s & The Bar Upstairs when the whole staff was let go during the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak is a “devastating” blow to an industry that had “severe structural inequality problems that existed long before this crisis,” Saru Jayaraman."]
Karaan, Abraar and Martin Kulldorf. "Herd Immunity: Is It a More Compassionate Approach or Will It Lead to Death or Illness for Millions?"Democracy Now (October 15, 2020) ["As coronavirus cases increase across much of the United States, the Trump administration has reportedly adopted a policy of deliberately letting the virus infect much of the U.S. population in order to attain “herd immunity” — despite warnings from the World Health Organization against such an approach. We host a debate on the contentious issue of herd immunity and how best to confront the virus with two Harvard medical experts: epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and one of the lead signatories of the controversial Great Barrington Declaration arguing for an easing of lockdowns, and Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Harvard Medical School who has worked on the COVID-19 public health response in Massachusetts since February."]
Klein, Naomi. "'Coronavirus Capitalism': Naomi Klein’s Case for Transformative Change Amid Coronavirus Pandemic."Democracy Now (March 19, 2020) ["Author, activist and journalist Naomi Klein says the coronavirus crisis, like earlier ones, could be a catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to most workers and small businesses. In 2007, Klein wrote “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Now she argues President Trump’s plan is a pandemic shock doctrine. In a new video for The Intercept, where she is a senior correspondent, Klein argues it’s vital for people to fight for the kind of transformative change that can not only curb the worst effects of the current crisis but also set society on a more just path."]
Levey, Noam. "Keeping Eyes on the Supply Chain."On the Media (April 10, 2020) ["Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the agencies and organizations tasked with facing decisions between expediency and transparency have sometimes chosen the former. Cities in California, and now Chicago, have asked their states for relief from sunshine law deadlines. Hospitals have instructed their employees to refrain from speaking to the media; some have even recommended avoiding social media altogether. And as FEMA ferries medical supplies to hot spots across the country, journalists such as Los Angeles Times national healthcare reporter Noam Levey are having a hard time getting answers to questions about its plans and practices. On April 2nd, White House advisor Peter Navarro — standing on a podium with the president, the president's son-in-law, the vice president, and others — assured Americans: "These guys up here are doing a heckuva job organizing the supply chain." But as Levey explains to Brooke in this segment, that would be news to many of the medical providers and producers that he's spoken with in recent weeks. "]
Mallett, Kandist. "The Coronavirus Pandemic Demonstrates the Failures of Capitalism."Teen Vogue (March 24, 2020) ["This op-ed argues that the coronavirus outbreak has shown us how little capitalism has done for so many people in the U.S. — and that other ways of living and working are possible."]
McCausland, Phil. "Mixed Messages in the Heartland."On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["During Monday's White House press briefing, President Trump asserted that, "All throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly." However, the White House's own data, collected by the Coronavirus Task Force's Data and Analytics Unit, paints a drastically different picture. According to an unreleased May 7 report obtained by NBC News, infections and deaths are skyrocketing around the United States, particularly in areas of the American heartland. But the keyword here is "unreleased" — the task force has been keeping its data close to the vest, releasing it in dribs and drabs. Consequently, it's up to often under-resourced state and municipal leaders to draw their own conclusions. Phil McCausland, an NBC News reporter covering rural issues, was one of the journalists who broke the hidden-data story. He tells Bob that, absent federal data and directives, civilians in rural communities are left largely in the dark about the severity of their circumstances."]
McCrimmon, Ryan and Catherine Boudreau. "No need to hoard: There’s plenty of food in the system."Politico (March 18, 2020) ["Industries adjust to pared-back hours and shoppers cause unexpected surges, but numbers point to plenty of supply."]
Moss, Candida. "Trump and the Christian Persecution Complex."On the Media (June 3, 2020) ["On Monday, President Trump stood outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which had caught fire the day prior in protests for racial justice. When he brandished a Bible before photographers, Trump knew exactly what message he was sending: Christianity is under siege and the president is the defender of the faith. Never mind the fact that peaceful protesters, clergy among them, were driven from the area minutes before with tear gas to make way for the photoshoot. The narrative of Christianity under attack is a familiar one. Just a few weeks ago, Trump declared that houses of worship should open amid the pandemic on the grounds of religious liberty — despite the public health risk. But it turns out, the myth of Christian persecution can be traced far further back than the Culture Wars. In fact, according to Candida Moss, Christian historians coined the idea that to be persecuted was to be righteous in the 4th Century and they exaggerated claims that Christians were persecuted in the first place. Moss is a professor of theology and religion at Birmingham University in the U.K., and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. Moss spoke to Bob just after Trump has announced his call for churches to open. In this week's Pod Extra she explains how Christian history has been revised for political means, from the early church to present day."]
Mull, Amanda. "The Art of Disastertising."On the Media (April 29, 2020) ["Want to do your part in this pandemic? Why don't you try becoming a Couch Potatotriot, someone who stays home to save lives, but also eats Burger King? It's part of the company's brand pivot — one of many that companies have performed in order to keep their goods and services relevant. Another trend? Lots of somber piano music. Despite the fact that most people are stuck at home watching Netflix, advertisers are still vying for their bucks — promising that consumers can buy what they’re selling without winding up on a ventilator. This stark change in tone and approach is what Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, dubbed "disaster-tising" in her recent piece, "How to Advertise In a Pandemic.""]
Neumann, Ann. "Family Care for All."The Baffler #51 (April 2020) ["Supporting the work that makes all other work possible"]
Packer, George. "We Are Living in a Failed State."The Atlantic (June 2020) ["The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken."]
Patel, Raj. "As Hunger Soars Across Nation, U.S. Trade & Foreign Policy Is Also Causing Hunger Across the Globe."Democracy Now (November 24, 2020) ["As the U.S. enters the holiday season, millions of people across the country are struggling to find enough to eat, with the hunger relief group Feeding America warning that some 54 million U.S. residents currently face food insecurity amid a massive public health and economic crisis. Food insecurity in the U.S. has intensified after the expiration of federal assistance programs in the CARES Act, and the United Nations World Food Programme predicts acute hunger could affect 270 million people worldwide by the end of 2020 — an 82% increase since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. We speak with author and filmmaker Raj Patel, host of the food politics podcast “The Secret Ingredient,” who says hunger was already at alarming levels in the U.S. before the pandemic, and it’s only gotten worse. “The long story here is the continuing war on the American working class,” Patel says."]
Pinsker, Joe and Kelly Weill. "What to Say When a Loved One Spreads Disinfo."On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["Last month, law enforcement across Western Europe reported a slew of arson attacks on 5G towers. The vandalization spree is likely tied to a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims the enormous uptick in deaths has been caused by nascent 5G technology, not the Covid-19 virus. Meanwhile, Americans have been exposed to a flurry of pandemic disinformation. According to a recent Pew study, nearly one third of Americans believe an unsubstantiated theory that the virus was concocted in a lab, a claim repeated by President Trump himself. Earlier this month, a highly-produced anti-vax video called "Plandemic" found an unusually high degree of traction on the internet. According to Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill, this video and other forms of Covid-19 disinformation may be leading some Americans to other dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon. She and Bob discuss what makes such outlandish fake media so effective. Then, Bob speaks with Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker, who crafted a set of guidelines for cautiously confronting friends and family who may be in the early stages of a conspiracy theory kick."]
Robinson, Nathan J. "Where is Joe?"Current Affairs (March 22, 2020) ["Biden has failed completely to show leadership during a crisis. There is no excuse for it."]
Salas, Angelica and John Sandweg. "Former ICE Director: Release Immigrants from Detention or COVID-19 Will Spread Like Wildfire Inside."Democracy Now (March 23, 2020) ["Alarm is growing about the safety of more than 37,000 people held in immigrant detention centers and private jails that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, where it is nearly impossible for them to avoid close contact to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Nearly half of those detained by ICE are accused of no crime other than civil immigration violations. Immigrants at three jails in New Jersey are now on hunger strikes over unsanitary conditions that put them at high risk during the pandemic. We hear from a detained person on hunger strike and speak with John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, who is calling for ICE to release thousands from detention, and Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA, which just led a national effort to stop immigration enforcement actions."]
Scahill, Jeremy. "Trump’s 'Homicidal' Pandemic Response & What’s at Stake in November Election."Democracy Now (October 19, 2020) ["As President Trump campaigns in swing states that are also coronavirus hot spots, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill argues he is directly responsible for the poor U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed almost 220,000 people in the country so far and sickened millions. “I don’t know how else to describe what Trump has done except homicidal,” says Scahill, host of a new seven-part audio series that examines the Trump era."]
Seller, Bakari. "'My Vanishing Country': Mass Protests Rise from 400 Years of Systemic Racism."Democracy Now (June 1, 2020) ["As mass unrest engulfs the U.S., we speak with attorney and political commentator Bakari Sellers, whose new memoir “My Vanishing Country” was just published. One of the central moments in the book is the Orangeburg massacre of 1968, when police opened fire on a crowd of students gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University to protest segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. When the shooting stopped, three Black students were dead, 28 students were wounded. The nine officers who opened fire that day were all acquitted. The only person convicted of wrongdoing was Bakari Sellers’s father, Cleveland Sellers, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC. He was convicted of a riot charge and spent seven months behind bars. He was pardoned in 1993. We speak with Bakari Sellers about Orangeburg, 2020 and “400 years of systemic racism” in the U.S."]
Sturgeon, Jonathon. "Care Package."The Baffler #51 (April 2020) ["Our fear now in social isolation, the alienation and frustration that comes from being unable to touch someone or care for them, is an accelerated version of the selfsame alienation so often written about in modern life."]
Suarez, Francis. "Miami Mayor Francis Suarez on his Approach to Flattening the Curve."The Takeaway (July 2, 2020) ["Today, we go to one of the hardest-hit states for the virus, Florida, where differences between Governor Ron DeSantis and local leaders are leaving Floridians stuck in the middle. On Wednesday, Florida recorded 6,500 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the state’s total to nearly 160,000 since the pandemic began. More than 3,500 people have died. But Governor DeSantis has refused to take any more steps to close businesses or put in place any stay-at-home orders to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The City of Miami has begun taking emergency measures to slow the spread of the virus, by requiring all residents to wear masks, or face coverings. The City of Miami also enacted a mandatory 10-day closure for businesses that don’t comply with the emergency guidelines. As part of our series with local leaders, we speak to Mayor Francis Suarez about the recent uptick and his plans to contain the virus further, as well as his own experience with the coronavirus: he had it in March."]
"Syndicalist unions and Covid-era resistance: A CIT roundup."Freedom (April 22, 2020) ["The anarcho-syndicalist international, founded in 2018, looks at workplace struggle in its branches worldwide and calls for the building of new forms of solidarity amid the lockdowns.]
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. "A Class Rebellion: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on How Racism & Racial Terrorism Fueled Nationwide Anger."Democracy Now (June 1, 2020) ["In the largest nationwide uprising since the 1960s, protesters shut down cities across the United States over the weekend following the police killing of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis. “These are not just repeats of past events,” says scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “These are the consequences of the failures of this government and the political establishment … to resolve these crises.”"]
Thompson, Derek. "America is Acting Like a Failed State."The Atlantic (March 14, 2020) ["Many businesses, local governments, and individuals are doing what is necessary to beat back the coronavirus—with little help from the White House."]
---. "The Post-Pandemic American Marketplace."On the Media (May 1, 2020) ["Coronavirus has prompted the shutdown of the American marketplace as we know it. Shops are boarded up, restaurants have shifted to a take-out only model, and tens of millions have been laid off. Eventually, some semblance of our economy will return — but what kind of economy will it be? Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, expects that the pandemic will radically reshape American consumption — from the components of our diets to the composition of our cities."]
Wen, Leanna. "'Hope is Not a Strategy': Emergency Doctor Asks, Where Are COVID-19 Tests? Where Is Protective Gear?"Democracy Now (December 23, 2020) ["As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. rises to more than 35,000, doctors are facing a desperate lack of supplies, and tests continue to lag. We speak with Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University. She previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner. She says healthcare workers are “putting their lives on the line every day” as they work in hazardous conditions with inadequate supplies, including N95 respirator masks. “First we’re going to run out of masks, and then we’re going to run out of doctors and nurses, because they’ll become sick,” Dr. Wen warns."]
Yong, Ed. "How the Pandemic Defeated America: Ed Yong on How COVID-19 Humiliated Planet’s Most Powerful Nation."Democracy Now (August 11, 2020) ["As the world passes a grim milestone of 20 million coronavirus cases, we look at how the pandemic humbled and humiliated the world’s most powerful country. Over a quarter of the confirmed infections and deaths have been in the United States, which has less than 5% of the world’s population. Ed Yong, a science writer at The Atlantic who has been covering the pandemic extensively since March, says existing gaps in the U.S. social safety net and the Trump administration’s “devastatingly inept response” made for a deadly combination."]
Last Sunday our president, Donald Trump, in a tweet threatened the chief scientist, Dr. Fauci, involved in the national sort-of-effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. In the tweet he gives thanks to relatively obscure One America News Network (OAN). You should familiarize yourself with this propaganda channel - here is Mr. Oliver, properly physical distancing, providing a look at the president's new, favorite fluffer, non-news network.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bourbon County, KY, USA notes during a time of Coronavirus (I started physical distancing on March 13th and became very serious about it on March 17th):
March 22, 2020:
Things are quiet around here. It is in the 40s so that is cutting down on the walkers.
I've been trying to walk outside at least once a day (I'm an avid walker/hiker). As I left to head to the Paris cemetery yesterday I got near the entrance and a very sick looking (I would have thought junkie - and not being a bourgy asshole, I know what junkies actually look like), but these days who knows what was afflicting him. As I was walking toward him and was going to at least say hi (while keeping my distance) he spit on the ground........ I went home shortly after that.
Some rumors from the right libertarians in local social media that the military, national guard, lizard people, whatever, are poised to take over. Trying to talk some sense, but luckily they are a minority (of course my friend list is self-selective and there is really no way to tell).
Haven't been to a regular store in a week, but when I did I went to Costco they were still fairly full of essentials (except TP and sanitizers) and I appreciated they were putting limits to stop hoarders (for instance - I got two packages of bottled water in case we have water problems, that was all you were allowed to buy at a time).
I went to the neighborhood liquor store to get a six pack Friday night to accompany a fire in the backyard. The owner down talked concerns, while sanitizing his hands frequently, so I think I'm going to stop visiting that place. Probably better for me. Lots of hot tea for awhile. Clear heads need to prevail!
Over and out ;)
PS Grateful for Andy Beshear, it is a refreshing change to have such a clear communicator and intelligent person as our governor... how one acts as in a time of crisis says a lot about them. Of course his predecessor Bevin left a very low bar....
Barker, Tim. "It Doesn't Have to Be a War."Dissent (March 20, 2020) ["The Trump administration appears ready to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed manufacture of essential goods like face masks. What if we didn’t have to resort to the analog of war?"]
Bliss, Laura. "When the World Stops Moving."City Lab (March 19, 2020) ["Jarringly quiet highways and empty rail cars are signs of Covid-19’s profound economic and public health impacts. Perhaps leaders can also learn from them."]
Klein, Naomi. "'Coronavirus Capitalism': Naomi Klein’s Case for Transformative Change Amid Coronavirus Pandemic."Democracy Now (March 19, 2020) ["Author, activist and journalist Naomi Klein says the coronavirus crisis, like earlier ones, could be a catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to most workers and small businesses. In 2007, Klein wrote “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Now she argues President Trump’s plan is a pandemic shock doctrine. In a new video for The Intercept, where she is a senior correspondent, Klein argues it’s vital for people to fight for the kind of transformative change that can not only curb the worst effects of the current crisis but also set society on a more just path."]
Raup, Jordan. "Celebrate Women's History Month With Masterclasses From Female Filmmakers."Film at Lincoln Center (March 18, 2020) [Free: "In this moment of uncertainty, the unfailing wisdom of cinema’s rule-breaking, boundary-pushing, pioneering women is something we can always count on. Hear from such influential figures as Agnès Varda, Mati Diop, Claire Denis, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Juliette Binoche, Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Isabelle Huppert, Lucrecia Martel, Céline Sciamma, Elaine May, Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, Alice Rohrwacher, Kate Winslet, and more as they share their storytelling tips and distinct approaches to filmmaking in discussions with our programmers and special guests."]
On board Samoa was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square-built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless. She had left behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman. In her steamer trunk she carried reporters' notebooks, a typewriter, evening dresses, a photograph of an aging, wild-haired man she called Papa Franz, his face sliced by saber cuts and melted from the nerve damage of a botched surgery. He was the reason for Margaret Mead's journey. -- King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Doubleday, 2019: 1.
Coppins, McKay. "Pandemic Propaganda."On the Media (March 13, 2020) ["After weeks of downplaying the COVID-19 outbreak and overstating his administration's response, President Trump shifted to a more serious tone in Wednesday's national address. Over the past week, the president claimed that health officials were prepared to deploy millions of tests, and that his White House wasted no time in slowing the spread of the virus. If only. South Korea, which discovered its first COVID-19 patient around the same time as the US, is testing 10,000 people a day, roughly the same number of people tested in the US total since mid-January. Meanwhile, there are widespread reports of tests delayed and denied because of shortages of kits and personnel. And, accounts by unnamed sources close to the President say he resisted offers by domestic labs to produce virus tests — because he didn’t like the “optics” of "national emergency" that steeply rising numbers would imply. These discrepancies and contradictions between what the president, his media allies, critical journalists, and other high-ranking officials say is a tiresome pattern that has defined Trump's time in office. According to McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, our current state of information overload is called "censorship through noise": a propaganda strategy that has largely protected the president from accountability, but one that leaves us deeply vulnerable during our current public health crisis. Coppins and Brooke discuss the partisan distrust in COVID-19 news and the empty rhetoric from the White House."]
Davis, Mike. "On Coronavirus in a Plague Year."Jacobin (March 14, 2020) ["As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure."]
Jayaraman, Saru and Damani Varnado."Facing Mass Layoffs, Restaurant Workers Living 'Tip to Mouth' Demand Living Wage & Paid Sick Leave."Democracy Now (March 18, 2020) ["Mass shutdowns and layoffs due to the spread of COVID-19 are affecting millions of restaurant workers across the U.S., with bars and restaurants closing for the foreseeable future. Servers, bartenders, kitchen staff and more have been left in the lurch, many without paid sick leave, paid time off or benefits. One study estimated 4 million restaurant workers in the U.S. are at risk of losing their jobs in a matter of weeks. For more on the impacts on service workers, we speak with Saru Jayaraman, the co-founder of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of One Fair Wage, which has launched an emergency fund to support workers during this time. We also speak with Damani Varnado, a restaurant worker who has worked in catering, fine dining and cocktailing for the past 20 years in New York City. He was working at the restaurant Tiny’s & The Bar Upstairs when the whole staff was let go during the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak is a “devastating” blow to an industry that had “severe structural inequality problems that existed long before this crisis,” Saru Jayaraman."]
McCrimmon, Ryan and Catherine Boudreau. "No need to hoard: There’s plenty of food in the system."Politico (March 18, 2020) ["Industries adjust to pared-back hours and shoppers cause unexpected surges, but numbers point to plenty of supply."]
Koresky, Michael, Sheila O'Malley and Nicolas Rapold. "Joanna Hogg and The Souvenir."Film Comment Podcast (June 5, 2019) ["In her feature on Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir in the May-June issue of Film Comment, Sheila O’Malley writes,“The autobiographical origins of The Souvenir are obvious (Hogg doesn’t try to hide them), yet she allows for free-floating associations, creating a kind of space where connections are possible, where there can be a wincing kind of recognition, a remembrance of first love and first heartbreak. The response is a not always comfortable: ‘Yes. My God, I know that. That is so true.’’’ The film, a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, is a complex and multi-layered exploration of first love, heartbreak, creativity, family, and class. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with O’Malley (also author of the FC column Present Tense) and FC contributor and columnist Michael Koresky to discuss the The Souvenir and how Hogg’s previous films Unrelated (2008), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013) inform her latest."]
Gessen, Masha. "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage."The New Yorker (February 9, 2020) ["You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point? "In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life. Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well. ... Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.""]
Haider, Asad. "Way more is possible: On depoliticization, resurgent radicalism and seeing the revolutionary horizon."This is Hell! #1137 (March 2, 2020) ["Writer Asad Haider examines the problems of depoliticization in modern politics - as the dominant ideological frame blinds us to the limits of our present politics and the possibilities of future alignments, the left must confront the failures of past revolutions and realize that another world is not just possible, it's necessary."]
Miller, Jonathan. "24 Lies Per Second: an Auteurist Analysis of the Documentary Films of Errol Morris."Digital Window @ Vasseur (2011) ["My aim in these pages is to examine the work of Errol Morris, a film, television, and commercial director best known for his feature-length documentaries. For this analysis, I will use the framework of auteur theory, which premises that a director has a personal, creative vision evident across his or her body of work. Though auteur theory often pervades popular film criticism, it has never been a unified doctrine, as it lacks a single progenitor or foundational text.1 Critics have interpreted (and misinterpreted) the theory in many distinct ways, and it has been irregularly, often only implicitly, extended to the producers and directors of documentary films. Thus, I will begin by laying out my specific approach to the auteur theory, my assumptions in applying this theory to documentary film, and the ways in which I hope this analysis can illuminate Morris’s work."]
1st Round: warm-up question followed by a word 2nd Round: 3 words in succession for each contestant 3rd Round: Round-robin until we have a winner (keep track of last three - the order they come in) 3 mispelled words and a contestant is out
Pronouncer Information 1. Read carefully the Judges, Recorders, Spellers and Audiences information that is included in the Scripps pronouncers’ guide. 2. Familiarize yourself with all words on the confidential word list. Pronunciation is important. A meeting with the judges to insure pronunciation of words and procedures will be scheduled prior to the Bee beginning. 3. Speak clearly for contestants, judges and audience alike. Grant all requests to repeat a word until the judges agree that the word has been made reasonably clear to the speller. You may request the speller to speak more clearly or louder. 4. “Pace” yourself. You need time to focus attention on the pronunciation of the new word and the judges need a few moments between each contestant to do their tasks.
Speller’s Information 1. Each speller needs to focus on the Pronouncer, to aid his or her hearing and understanding of the context of the word. A speller may ask for the word to be repeated, for its use in a sentence, for a definition, for the part of speech, and for the language of origin. 2. Each speller should pronounce the word before and after spelling it. If the speller fails to pronounce the word after spelling it, the judge may ask if they are finished. If they say yes, the judge will remind the speller to remember to repeat the word the next time. (No speller will be eliminated for failing to pronounce a word correctly.) 3. When a speller is at the podium spelling, the next speller should be standing at a marked location ready to proceed to the podium.
;)