That is the present version in a working sequence of dispatches by New York Overview writers that’s documenting the coronavirus outbreak with updates from world wide that started March 17–22 and has continued by March 23–29, March 30–April 5, and April 6–12.
—The Editors
Dan Chiasson in Wellesley • Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on Hearth Island • Miranda Popkey in Watertown • Reed Lindsay in Havana • Jonathan Mingle in Lincoln • Carina del Valle Schorske in Manhattan • Nellie Hermann in Wellfleet • Stuart Lewis in Brooklyn • Jeet Thayil in Bangalore
Jeet Thayil
April 24, 2020
BANGALORE, INDIA—Right here, on the planet’s most congested metropolis, there’s a midnight quiet always of day. On the streets, the place the occasional two-wheeler or pedestrian could be seen, there are not any vans or public transport. Police checkpoints have been arrange alongside the primary arteries. Automobiles are confiscated if drivers take them out for no good cause. Some hospitals are open, and groceries, and ATMs. Every thing else is shut; and every time the lockdown reaches its endpoint, it’s prolonged.
In India, the pandemic got here as a bounty to the ruling BJP get together: profiting from the chaos the virus introduced, the Indian authorities consolidated powers it will have been unimaginable to think about even half a dozen years in the past. It has enacted measures that performed on the concept that Muslims have been knowingly spreading the virus, ensuing within the additional persecution of India’s 200 million Muslims, in addition to its Dalit minorities. It has used the police and the military to implement the nationwide lockdown. It has penalized political dissent, utilizing archaic legal guidelines towards sedition to arrest its critics.
Indians as a rule take delight in being a part of an experiment routinely described as “the world’s largest democracy.” When that description has been examined, as an illustration throughout Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, journalists took it upon themselves to withstand. Some went to jail. Others used clean, black-bordered editorials within the nationwide newspapers to register their protest. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, the impartial press has all however vanished. Journalists exit of their method to reward the get together line; those that don’t are handled summarily.
Violence towards journalists, intellectuals, and opposition figures has been a part of the technique towards the get together’s critics for some years now. Earlier, shadowy assassins carried out right-wing vendettas towards plenty of writers and activists: Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi. Of late, the total equipment of the state has been introduced into play, as if the federal government now not wanted to disguise its intent.
On April 10, within the midst of the lockdown, a black police SUV drove 400 miles from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi to ship a authorized discover towards Siddharth Varadarajan, the editor of the impartial information portal The Wire. His crime: The Wire had revealed an article associated to a gathering in Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood of the Tablighi Jamaat, a gaggle of Islamic missionaries just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The federal government had condemned the assembly as a “super-spreader” of the virus, instantly adopted by a wave of pretend information and propaganda disseminated by textual content messaging. The unfold of the illness was deliberate, the messages stated, a approach for Muslims to destabilize the nation and kill Hindus. In response, The Wire stated “Indian believers” had additionally been late to undertake social distancing practices, citing a spiritual honest deliberate for the holy metropolis of Ayodhya by Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, Ajay Bisht, a saffron-robed autocrat who calls himself Yogi Adityanath. In retaliation, Bisht’s BJP authorities registered a grievance towards Varadarajan with the police.
4 days later, whereas the remainder of the nation was distracted by the rising charges of an infection and dying, Indian authorities invoked the Illegal Actions (Prevention) Act to arrest two human rights activists, Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha. The boys are at present in jail, at a time when convicted criminals are being launched to ease India’s notoriously overcrowded jail system threatened by the virus. In an open letter, Teltumbde, a Dalit mental and activist, wrote:
As I see my India being ruined, it’s with a feeble hope that I write to you at such a grim second… I earnestly hope that you’ll converse out earlier than your flip comes.
That little-known statute permits the federal government to detain people by branding them as “terrorists.” On Saturday, it was used to cost a twenty-six-year-old Kashmiri photojournalist named Masrat Zahra with “importing anti-national posts [on Facebook] with legal intentions to induce the youth” and “inflicting disaffection towards the nation.” Zahra, a freelancer whose topics are ladies and kids, has been joined in latest days by a number of others booked below the identical act: the scholar chief Umar Khalid, scholar activists Safoora Zargar and Meeran Haidar, the journalists Gowhar Geelani and Peerzada Ashiq. All of them occur to be Muslim—the place does coincidence finish and non secular persecution start?
Because the arrival of the virus in India, the prime minister has addressed the nation twice. On each televised events, he requested residents to enact an odd set of rituals at specified occasions of day, as a approach of defeating the virus. Advisable have been neighborhood actions such because the blowing of conch shells, the lighting of diyas (lamps), and the beating of thalis (platters), every of those customs and rites appearing as a dog-whistle to upper-caste Hindus supposed to isolate the nation’s beleaguered minorities. Quickly sufficient, neighborhoods in Delhi posted notices saying Muslims guests have been unwelcome, vegetable distributors have been requested for proof of their spiritual affiliation, and, elsewhere within the nation, hospitals denied care to Muslim sufferers.
In rather less than a month, we realized that the virus is just not the leveler we thought it was. If it is a struggle, it’s, in reality, a category struggle. The upper-caste and upper-class residents of seafront Worli, in Bombay, are faring higher than those that neighbors their high-rises, the residents of slums the place complete households share a room and social distancing is just not an possibility.
For the brand new populists, and the companies that fund them, the one rule is to maintain the wheels of trade turning: these low-paid staff—hospital workers, grocery and pharmacy retailer staff, safety personnel, municipal staff, meals supply contractors—have turn into the entrance line of the pandemic, as a result of they’re simply replaceable and basically disposable.
Within the days following the lockdown, a whole lot of hundreds of informal staff in Indian cities discovered they have been abruptly with out cash, and even the hope of incomes cash. They set off on foot for his or her hometowns in rural areas and distant provinces, strolling for days, complete households carrying kids on their backs, their belongings stuffed into material sacks carried on their heads. Lots of them, notably the aged, died alongside the way in which. The selection was stark and non-negotiable: keep within the metropolis and die of starvation or take to the street and hope for one of the best.
In a final twist, if and once they managed to succeed in their properties, they discovered they have been unwelcome, ostracized as attainable carriers of the virus. In a single haunting picture from these days, a household took shelter in a tree, squatting on its branches like migratory birds, staring on the digital camera, of their eyes not defeat however defiance.
That is the value paid by the poor of the world to those that wield the ability and the status. It’s the identical in all places. The algebra of want and exploitation is not going to change from one society to the subsequent.
In India, as in the remainder of the world, the pandemic is educating us to be vigilant towards the outdated males whose greed for cash and energy is wielded on the expense of the folks they’ve been entrusted to guard. They’re the brand new elites, the enemies of democracy, inclusion, ladies’s rights, science, all types of experience, and each type of mental singularity. We have to be as on our guard towards them as we’re towards the virus. ■
Stuart Lewis
April 22, 2020
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—Fourteen days after March 11, when the World Well being Group declared the pandemic, I transformed from telemedicine skeptic to telemedicine evangelist. Like most major care physicians, I used to do my job face-to-face: sufferers got here to my workplace, have been greeted by workers, pocketed magazines nobody admits to liking, and have been lastly ushered in to see me in my white coat. Now, workers do business from home, non-urgent visits are cancelled, these magazines are piling up, and my day by day “rounds” are both by video chat or cellphone.
There’s no scarcity of labor. I “see” greater than twenty Covid-19 sufferers day by day. Most have delicate to reasonable signs, so the therapy is relaxation, fluids, acetaminophen for fevers, and fixed reminders to clean arms, clear surfaces, and maintain meals, utensils, and telephones to themselves.
Early morning rounds are nothing like these in my favourite TV present throughout med college, St. Elsewhere. Nobody solutions their cellphone, I discover, earlier than 9 AM. I’m both in my workplace or calling from the relative security of my house, an residence within the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital Advanced.
It’s the “Jewish Hospital” in my household’s shorthand but it surely was based for all of the “folks of the town of New York with none discrimination of race, shade, or creed”—a decency formalized twenty-five years later, when, in 1928, the hospital’s founder, Nathan Jonas, pressured its board to rescind a movement to rename the hospital after him. And it stayed the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital till 1982, when impending chapter pressured a merger to create Interfaith Medical. Within the early 2000s, the constructing was transformed into the rental flats the place I reside.
Exterior the same old medical environment, sufferers are relaxed and “visits” have a conversational feeling, with interruptions from kids or attention-seeking cats. By now, everybody’s hair appears somewhat shaggy, mine included. There are surprising advantages for me, too. It’s a chance to see how my sufferers reside with and of their sicknesses. A guitar-filled room, a Tibetan tapestry, a plain white room shadowed by window bars and cluttered with empty Gatorade bottles. I see one couple, the husband already recovered, collectively in mattress like John and Yoko. That is terra incognita for major care drugs.
With out the same old crutches of lab checks and diagnostic imaging, telemedicine is doctoring lowered to necessities. I hear extra carefully, observe extra attentively, particularly when sufferers are in respiratory misery. Many are alone, eyes mounted on the precariousness of life.
Sufferers with the illness are afraid that any new symptom spells disaster. All of us are. I consider Thucydides’s description of the “dejection” that adopted the primary emotions of illness in the course of the plague in Athens in 430 BC. Imposed self-isolation solely makes the anxiousness and distress worse. I can’t show telemedicine lessens the consequences of isolation, however my sufferers say these “house visits” are a consolation.
After signs are checked and questions answered, I’ll shut with “Is there one thing else?” However then I’m typically requested, “Are you okay?” The care goes each methods. I’ve struggled with burn out, however the expertise of caring, of constructing a distinction on this very troublesome second is replenishing me.
Conversion requires revelation. My Damascene second with telemedicine got here from inside an assisted residing facility. A relative of mine rushed to take care of her dying mom simply earlier than all of the doorways have been locked. Fears of Covid-19 then stored them each cloistered within the mom’s studio residence. Nursing and hospice have been obtainable, however my having the ability to be current through FaceTime, generally minute by minute, to reassure my relative that it was proper to make use of the morphine obtainable or that her mom was resting peacefully made an agonizing time rather less so.
My relative was fortunate—now households in all places are barred from caring for his or her family members in hospitals, nursing properties, and assisted residing communities. Lots of our most weak are dying alone, some are merely deserted. Athenians additionally perished from neglect, however their plague devolved into “lawless extravagance.” They spent fast, did as they happy, “concerning their lives and riches as alike issues of a day.” Ours is exposing a unique lawlessness: the well being inequities that outline who lives and who dies.
Expertise that connects sufferers, households, medical doctors and nurses can assist us grapple along with the heartaches and uncertainties of end-of-life selections which are extra pressing now than ever. Knowledgeable decisions imply fewer regrets and griefs much less burdened by “what if” and “if solely.”
Telemedicine is bringing drugs the place it’s wanted. For me, there’s no going again. I feel my sufferers would say the identical. ■
Nellie Hermann
April 21, 2020
WELLFLEET, MASSACHUSETTS—My mom is eighty-one. For the previous three years, since her reminiscence loss turned extreme sufficient that it now not appeared protected for her to reside alone, she has lived in an assisted residing facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It’s a good looking day outdoors my window,” she says to me over the cellphone once I inform her once more in regards to the virus, and why my brother and I can’t come to go to her. “You’d do not know there’s something on the market you could possibly catch.”
On Monday, April 13, we realized by e mail that Mother’s facility has thirty-one constructive circumstances of Covid-19. Once I discuss to her now—on a video cellphone that my tech-savvy brother arrange and had a workers member plug in for her—I’ve the impression that I’m chatting with her in a bunker, the virus an invisible risk simply outdoors the door I can see behind her. It’s a blessing that she doesn’t really feel imprisoned, however the identical obliviousness that will shield her from concern can also be a hazard to her, as she continues to exit that door searching for firm and distraction.
We have been knowledgeable of the primary two circumstances within the constructing on April 7. The complete facility was examined a couple of days later, together with all assisted residing services in Cambridge, as a part of a pilot program run by the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard’s joint biomedical analysis heart. I had anticipated the quantity to rise, however the sudden soar from two to thirty-one was breathtaking. I had already been questioning about taking Mother out of the ability and bringing her to be with me right here, in the home on Cape Cod she purchased eleven years in the past, after promoting the house my siblings and I grew up in. Now, immediately, the query was pressing.
What wouldn’t it imply to take Mother out? Final summer season, I introduced her to Cape Cod only for one night time, and she or he was utterly disoriented: she didn’t keep in mind the home, regardless of its being crammed completely along with her issues (in her bed room, she stated dreamily, “I feel I used to have a dresser like that”). Within the midst of this pandemic, there are solely unanswerable questions: If I take her out, how lengthy will it’s earlier than I can convey her again? What if I take her out and she or he will get sick right here? What if I get sick and am unable to take care of her? What if she is confused and wanders off, or falls and breaks her hip?
I frantically name round to see what my choices are if I need to rent assist. Shift aides coming and going from the home appear not rather more virus-safe than her present scenario, whereas in a single day assist—ought to this show to be a scenario that continues for months—shall be prohibitively costly.
Being with Mother at this stage of her sickness is just not straightforward below any circumstance. She was my closest buddy for a lot of my life, and it’s excruciating to confront—time and again, even within the span of ten minutes—that she is in entrance of me and on the identical time already gone. I’m not positive that my concern of Covid-19 is stronger than the concern of being within the presence of Mother’s situation all day lengthy for an indefinite interval. However one in every of many cruelties is that she remains to be current sufficient—she remains to be sufficient herself—that it seems like a betrayal to do something aside from leap within the automotive to rescue her.
Whereas I work on a attainable plan, there’s a wind storm. The Cape Cod home, constructed within the 1700s, actually howls. I stroll the canine whereas crying to a buddy on the cellphone; I can really feel my resistance to the plan I’m making, one other storm coursing by my physique. My buddy asks, “What do you suppose your mother would inform you to do, if she have been capable of?”
I’m grateful for his query. I keep in mind Mother saying repeatedly that what she most wished for her future was to not be a “burden.” It’s fairly attainable that she would inform me to depart her there, within the assisted residing facility; not solely that, however I feel it would objectively be one of the best plan of action. The very fact is that she will’t be rescued from the situation she already has, which has already reached the purpose the place transferring her could also be little or no safety.
I determine to attempt to rent somebody who could be there with Mother in the course of the day, ensuring she is staying as protected as attainable. This looks like the precise plan, however nonetheless I really feel responsible and anxious. All over the place within the information are haunting tales of services elsewhere which have misplaced management, complete communities was apocalyptic landscapes of horror and dying. What occurs once we get the subsequent e mail, possible any day, that claims exponentially extra circumstances have been recognized within the constructing? What occurs once we begin to hear of individuals dying?
One of many issues this virus is forcing all of us to acknowledge is that we reside within the current second. Plans, now, are actually simply hopes. However isn’t this all the time true? Wasn’t it all the time folly to suppose in any other case? ■
Carina del Valle Schorske
April 20, 2020
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK—A number of years in the past, once I stormed out of psychoanalysis with Dr. S., I made a decision to journal at my little desk as a substitute, however I couldn’t get previous the try to explain my view to the road. I’m nonetheless making an attempt.
The window by my desk is the one place in my studio residence the place I can see a phase of sky above the alternative constructing moderately than the secondhand solar that’s dispatched from it. It’s a front-loaded, precarious feeling—to lean out towards a wider world that received’t arrive—like hoping for capturing stars on a brilliant moonlit night time, or ready for a married man to depart his spouse. Now, the road I used to be all the time making an attempt to see higher is scraped clear of life. One block east, Mt. Sinai has arrange a tent hospital behind police barricades. The white peacocks that wander the gardens of St. John the Divine have been corralled and the cathedral has assembled a silent congregation of two hundred sickbeds.
It’s my home / And I reside right here. Once I first moved in to school housing to start a PhD 5 years in the past, I performed Diana Ross on loop, intoxicated by the dream-come-true of security and safety—one huge “room of 1’s personal,” which, as Virginia Woolf states clearly in her feminist manifesto, is a mindset solely cash can purchase. However my journal from these early years simply registers the romance of it: “If I say the love of my life in New York is my residence, is that like a toddler saying the love of her life is a doll? A me outdoors me that may maintain me if I take care of it when the primary me can’t?”
I will need to have already been studying the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who writes of dolls as “transitional objects,” the kid’s first “not-me object.” Dolls assist kids each droop and deal with the excellence between their very own fantasy life and the (typically brutal) disappointments that start to self-discipline it. “Transitional objects,” Winnicott writes, assemble a “transitional house” that may come to function “a resting-place” from “the perpetual human process of holding interior and outer actuality separate but interrelated.”
I generally really feel ashamed about how “perpetual” this process stays, how fragile I really feel as I reprise the acquainted efficiency of company: There’s my chair / I put it there. Extra exactly, I really feel ashamed about my starvation for full management over my surroundings. There’s a manic frenzy to it even below regular circumstances, as if I unconsciously expertise the world as an impending catastrophe. As if I nonetheless can’t afford “a resting-place,” materially or morally.
Perhaps this ambivalence explains the rock and pitch I really feel up towards the north-facing home windows—working-class neural programming gone haywire over middle-class comforts. In looking for to really feel safer, am I reducing myself off from the world I so badly need to reside in? There’s the a part of me that wishes to stay inside perpetually, and the opposite a part of me pacing restlessly, urgent my nostril towards the glass—the identical a part of me that left evaluation exasperated by the entire elite airtight enterprise, uncertain I’d ever return to these rationed hours behind the double-locked door on the Higher West Facet. I grew protecting of this different impulse to be absorbed by the troublesome crowd, to violate the foundations I’ve been advised exist to guard me, to betray the privilege of privateness, even my very own. Diana Ross has all the time had a couple of track for me: If there’s a treatment for this, I don’t need it / If there’s a treatment, I’ll run from it.
I ran again finally—to Dr. S. The pandemic institutionalizes and exacerbates all preexisting circumstances, and I can really feel the outdated safety anxiousness flaring up once more in quarantine. However now, neither her deserted workplace nor my studio residence really feel so stridently set aside from the remainder of the world. I startle at daybreak, mistaking passing sirens for the alarm I set myself—a much less and fewer related distinction. Bodily, the partitions between us matter greater than ever, however psychically they really feel thinner. On Twitter, the artist and activist Hannah Black writes: “I maintain telling my analyst that my transference isn’t working rn bc she looks like an equally weak and singular physique, I can’t summary her into being my mom or no matter.”
Dr. S. is old-school, so I’ve by no means recognized if she lives alone or has a household, and we’ve performed on that treasured shore of uncertainty for 5 years. Once I ask, she responds, classically, along with her personal questions: “How do you suppose I reside?” and “What wouldn’t it imply to you if I have been married? To a person? To a girl?” How abruptly these questions have been answered the opposite day, on FaceTime, by the chaotic rustle previous the door of the room she’s commandeered at house, the tripping rhythm that would solely be a toddler’s. We heard the sound on the identical time, and immediately my eyes full of tears.
I see, now, how I’ve wished her to be like me: single, childless, somewhat bit queer. Not as a result of I’ve wished her to be lonely, however as a result of I really like the little I’ve seen of her life, and if the remainder of it resembles mine, then mine may additionally be sufficient. I’ve typically felt myself straining in the direction of the bourgeois consolation of her profession, however a wedding plot threatens to put her past the vary of my ambition to belong. I need to get higher whereas remaining unreconciled to the established order—can she be trusted, now, to indicate me how? “I’m not unhappy,” I advised her, as we processed the unintended revelation, and it’s true—it’s candy, a aid virtually, to really feel her actual life, how impervious it’s to my fantasies for it.
Within the subsequent session, I ponder if the loss isn’t solely mine, if it means one thing to her sense of non-public freedom to have the information of her life suspended in my presence. She doesn’t actually reply, in fact. As a substitute, she talks about how lengthy we’ve been working collectively, how these fantasies aren’t meant to final perpetually. I consider Winnicott once more: “The mom’s eventual process is progressively to disillusion the toddler, however she has no hope of success except at first she has been capable of give ample alternative for phantasm.”
Within the FaceTime periods, we discuss extra casually than common, like pals—I discover the stack of books in her windowsill, a quantity on the talk between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. “Oh, I received’t learn it,” she says. Her focus is shot, like everybody’s. “However I like having it right here.” A transitional object? I do know I’m not alone in how fervently I scrutinize this new, semi-private realm. The journalist Rachel Syme, on Twitter: “I’ve seen my therapist’s house now and it has modified me!” Piercingly, the poet Lara Mimosa Montes: “In the present day my therapist confirmed me what was outdoors his house workplace window on zoom. There was a pond, a fence. I stated, ‘it appears like an enormous home.’ What I meant: I didn’t like the concept that my struggling sustains his stunning residing.”
I learn the tweets aloud to Dr. S. “Is that how my stunning residing feels to you?” I inform her no, that I’m liberated from resentment by the truth that my insurance coverage reimburses her for my periods and she or he lately determined to forgive my copay, making an allowance for my longstanding monetary constraints. I resent her much less as a result of she’s brown. I resent her much less as a result of I’ve seen, in her ready room, the vary of sufferers she treats—my overactive eye for race and sophistication consistently scrutinizing the corporate she retains.
And but, even when I don’t resent her, I resent the privilege of my freedom from resentment. The way it all will depend on my college. I typically inform folks I’m in a doctoral program as a result of it was essentially the most financially viable selection for me at twenty-seven, an aspiring author and not using a actual security internet. However in quarantine, the fateful prudence of that selection—my assured scholar housing, my sturdy protection—doesn’t make me grateful. It makes me offended. I really feel how rigorously my mom educated me to hunt safety, to take shelter within the college’s bootleg socialist state within the absence of an actual one. By no means thoughts that my college additionally makes a speciality of busting unions, in displacing folks like my grandmother, who nonetheless lives one neighborhood north of the establishment’s implacable shadow. My grandmother, as soon as an “important employee” herself, put my mom by Catholic college as a grocery checkout lady, and now depends on different “important staff”—house well being aides—to remain alive.
“Why can’t you get pleasure from what you have got?” Dr. S. requested, as I watched my vegetation flip in the direction of the afternoon’s excessive lemonade mild. “Are you afraid you’ll lose it? Or is it the guilt?” “It’s each,” I advised her, and she or he nodded gravely, as if my emotions are information, which on this case they’re. “In fact,” she stated, “in fact it’s each.” I ought to really feel afraid, I ought to really feel responsible. I can not shut myself off from these sincere assessments of the world past my doorstep. Later, I strive studying Winnicott once more. Perhaps “the duty of actuality acceptance isn’t full” as a result of actuality isn’t acceptable. It’s like Angela Davis says: “I’m now not accepting the issues I can not change. I’m altering the issues I can not settle for.” Making an attempt to.
Within the lengthy meantime—lifetimes of meantime—a automotive idles in entrance of my constructing taking part in Drake’s “Controlla.” I can hear it as clearly as if I queued it up myself. I stand within the open, lighted window and dance in plain view. Tonight, the transitional house we would occupy collectively dilates briefly, then disappears. Winnicott’s “perpetual human process of holding interior and outer actuality separate but interrelated” has by no means appeared a sweeter, extra sacred labor. ■
Jonathan Mingle
April 18, 2020
LINCOLN, VERMONT—Our city assembly was on March 2. A lot of it, as all the time, was dedicated to deploring the state of the roads. “I’ve lived right here for greater than seventy-five years,” growled one gentleman, “and I by no means seen it so dangerous on that stretch by the dump.” It’s true: the roads have been worse than common this winter. That stretch particularly was a frost-heaved, axle-bending rollercoaster trip.
Once I consider that night now—greater than 100 townspeople packed into one toasty room, shoulder to shoulder—it appears a really very long time in the past. Our lives listed below are paced by well-defined seasons. There’s ski season, lower quick in mid-March by social-distancing pointers. Maple sugaring season, following its pure course, has simply ended. Now we’re hip deep in mud season, when the snowmelt and showers churn the filth roads into one thing simply this aspect of liquid. All have flowed into an vague new one: lockdown season.
Vermonters are socially distanced at one of the best of occasions—which explains why native roads all the time appear to dominate city assembly deliberations. The roads allow us to reside our spread-out lives, however once they’re tough or impassable, we abruptly register our isolation, our distance from what we want and people we miss.
My household lives on a really quiet street that peters out on the foot of a mountain and turns into an outdated logging monitor. It’s straightforward right here to go days with out seeing a soul. Recently, although, my neighbors have taken to the rutted roads en masse. It’s my quarantine coping technique, too, on sluggish ambles with my almost-three-year-old daughter. Everybody appears relieved, reassured in some way, once we encounter each other (with the street’s width safely between us), our canine straining at their leashes, making an attempt to drag us collectively.
We’re removed from the pandemic’s entrance traces. However nobody, in fact, is immune. Final week, I walked down our driveway and located our lately retired mailman pulling faucets out of the sugar maples. He collects sap from neighbors’ timber up and down our street.
“The season’s just about completed,” he stated, and as he labored, he talked about his daughter, a nurse in a neighborhood hospital, and his spouse, a most cancers survivor and so at excessive threat. He worries about their potential publicity. His daughter had had a fever final month, however examined detrimental. I requested if she was anxious about going again to work. “It’s the job,” he stated with a shrug.
He carried the mail alongside these filth roads for 3 a long time. Particularly for the aged of us residing alone in these hills, his day by day arrival was a lifeline. Final summer season, on his final day, folks got here out of their properties to ship him off with muffins and playing cards. A few gruff outdated guys even requested permission to present him a hug
A number of days after we spoke, I learn that the president is rejecting calls to rescue the Postal Service—with its income stream evaporating, it may go bankrupt by this fall—and resisting efforts to make sure we are able to all vote by mail in November. I can’t say whom my former mailman voted for. He has a outstanding NRA sticker on his truck; I do know that he detests authorities rules. However I learn these stories and surprise what—after greater than half a lifetime threading this muddy route, weaving folks collectively on these lonely roads—he makes of all of it.
Strolling the sodden woods and roads with my daughter, I strive however principally fail to beat the compulsion to maintain checking my cellphone. Nonetheless, I’ve set myself the mission of coaching my consideration the way in which she does, downward and throughout. On a stroll to the mailbox, she loses herself for a number of blissful minutes, stepping out and in of a superbly round, coffee-colored puddle on our street. She notices spring’s dependable indicators of life: a brilliant crimson partridgeberry coming out of the chilly floor, buds poking out of birch saplings. She has turn into knowledgeable at recognizing the rope-shaped droppings of coyotes and foxes.
Not way back, within the woods above our home, we discovered a basketball-sized gap within the floor with a heap of recent filth piled close by: a fox den. We arrange a path digital camera and waited. The grainy photographs inform a story of domesticity and hazard: the male with a recent catch, the feminine peering from atop the filth mound. She has possible had her kits by now. They may emerge in a month. Till then, they’ll keep quarantined, and with good cause: most nights, two massive coyotes come to prowl, sniffing across the den for a meal, or asserting their territorial rights.
I examine the pictures, ponder the poor odds dealing with the hidden kits, and consider a passage from Robert Frost’s Notebooks: “Darkish as it’s that there are these sorrows and darker nonetheless that we are able to accomplish that little to do away with them… the darkest is that maybe we ought to not need to do away with them. What life… craves most is indicators of life.”
Final week, the wooden frogs awoke. I alerted my daughter to their track. The frogs spend the winter in suspended animation. A lot of the water of their our bodies freezes stable. Then, one night time in April, they arrive again to life. They make their method to swimming pools and ponds, calling out searching for mates. Their egg-laying window is temporary.
The seasons march on, for frogs and foxes, at the same time as our personal interval of suspended animation stretches out earlier than us, indefinitely. ■
Reed Lindsay
April 17, 2020
HAVANA, CUBA—Each night time at 9 PM, applause erupts throughout Havana, filling the town’s darkish, empty streets. It’s onerous to see the place the clapping is coming from, however for those who search for, you’ll be able to spot folks leaning out home windows and over balconies.
I’m at present in Cuba with Belly of the Beast, a media group that stories on the island by journalism and cinematography.
On most nights, after the applause for the medical doctors, I name my mom to examine in. She lives in Blaine County, Idaho, which lately had one of many highest an infection charges within the US. As of Thursday, there have been 467 circumstances among the many county’s 23,000 residents.
As a journalist, I’ve lined struggle, political violence, and pure disasters, and it’s sometimes my mom who’s frightened about my security. She nonetheless is. Although, unusual as it could appear, I really feel I’m safer in Cuba than she is within the US.
Cuba’s medical doctors, who’re revered like servicemen and girls are within the US, additionally combat, like troopers, on the entrance traces in far-off locations towards lethal enemies. Within the final month, greater than a thousand Cuban medical doctors and nurses have traveled to twenty international locations to affix the worldwide battle towards Covid-19. There’s historic priority for this. In 2011, Cuba was the primary nation to ship medical doctors to Haiti to combat a cholera epidemic. In 2016, then US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Energy known as Cuba’s efforts to fight Ebola in West Africa “awe-inspiring.”
However whereas Cuban medical doctors have been welcomed from Andorra to Togo, the nation’s medical internationalism has been condemned by the Trump administration. US officers declare the 30,000 Cuban medical doctors at present serving in medical missions in sixty international locations are victims of “trendy slavery.” Final month, shortly after fifty Cuban medical doctors arrived in Lombardy, Italy, the State Division tweeted that international locations ought to “scrutinize agreements” with Cuba to “finish labor abuses.”
I met a number of the Italy-bound medical doctors at a small ceremony on the outskirts of Havana hours earlier than they left on buses for the airport.
“No one is forcing me to be right here,” stated Dr. Graciliano Díaz Bartolo, a veteran of medical missions to Bolivia, Haiti, and Guinea. “Being humane is what’s most essential, to share what now we have with those that are in want. And proper now, Italy wants us.”
My confidence in Cuba is just not rooted in numbers. Cuba has 862 circumstances, giving it an incidence price 265 occasions decrease than that of Blaine County, Idaho. (Cuba is at an earlier stage of contagion and circumstances are anticipated to extend at a extra fast tempo within the coming weeks.) As a substitute, my assurance is predicated on the nation’s public well being system and its in depth community of devoted, community-based medical doctors. Even with so many medical doctors overseas, 70,000 physicians stay in Cuba, giving the nation one of many highest doctor-to-patient ratios on the planet—greater than double that of the US.
On March 31, I adopted one in every of these medical doctors, Liz Caballero, as she went door-to-door with two second-year medical college students within the El Carmelo municipality of Havana. Dr. Liz, as she introduces herself, and her college students hustled down alleys and up slim stairways, knocking on dozens of doorways, polling and educating residents on signs and finest practices to keep away from contagion. Throughout dengue outbreaks, a small military of well being professionals and college students knock on each door throughout the nation. This has turn into a day by day routine in latest weeks—I acquired a check-in the opposite day from a pair of scholars whereas a health care provider examined my ninety-five-year-old neighbor.
“They arrive each day round this time,” one resident advised me. “I’m so grateful for what they’re doing,” stated one other.
Even in regular occasions, home calls are widespread in Cuba, the place “household medical doctors” residing in the identical communities as their sufferers are the lynchpin of the nation’s free healthcare system.
“The household physician is taking part in a vital function in combating coronavirus as a result of now we have the neighborhood in our arms,” stated Dr. Liz. “We’re working onerous not simply to keep away from the worst-case situation, however to change the course of the illness.”
Three days after my go to to El Carmelo, it turned the primary neighborhood in Havana to be quarantined, after registering its eighth case of the coronavirus.
Regardless of its inspiring public well being system, Cuba remains to be dealing with immense challenges because it makes an attempt to sluggish the unfold of Covid-19. Within the final three years, Trump has tightened the close to sixty-year-old embargo towards the island, devastating its already fragile financial system. Shortages of meals and drugs have been widespread earlier than the pandemic. They’re worse now.
Traces for rooster, bathroom paper, and detergent are lengthy, and the availability typically disappears earlier than the road does. Earlier this month, Cuban officers stated {that a} donation of facemasks, diagnostic kits, ventilators, and gloves was blocked when Avianca Airways, a Colombian firm, refused to ship the help from China as a result of its main shareholder was topic to US sanctions.
And nonetheless, the best useful resource of Cuba’s well being system is undoubtedly human.
In El Carmelo, I requested the 2 medical college students following Dr. Liz in the event that they have been optimistic about the potential of Cuba’s containing the virus. They laughed as if I’d posed a silly query.
“All the time,” stated nineteen-year-old Talía González. “What sort of medical doctors would we be if we have been pessimistic?” ■
Miranda Popkey
April 15, 2020
WATERTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS—Tuesday morning and, as common, I’m watching a head bob earlier than a verdant if patchily rendered digital panorama. I’m on Zoom, in fact, together with 100 and twenty or so different anti-hunger advocates from throughout the state of Massachusetts.
For the previous yr and a half, I’ve labored part-time at a small nonprofit embedded inside a a lot bigger nonprofit, first in knowledge entry and now in childcare options and case administration. Our focus is workforce growth: we match shoppers with and pay for job coaching. Now that coaching facilities are closed by a minimum of Might 4, our college students examine from house, or attempt to. We lend them laptops, level them within the route of low- or (briefly) no-cost wifi, and in any other case attempt to join them and their households to related assets. By assets I imply the fundamentals: meals and cash.
My first few months within the nonprofit human providers subject have been a crash course in acronyms and euphemisms: DTA (Division of Transitional Help); TAFDC (Transitional Help for Households with Dependent Kids); SNAP (Supplemental Dietary Help Program). The households we serve are sometimes described as “in transition,” their scenario, like the help the federal government provides, by definition (if not in reality) short-term.
Final Tuesday, April 7, we acquired some numbers. The Massachusetts DTA normally will get about 900 SNAP functions a day; that has jumped to three,000. Its statewide help line normally will get about 2,700 calls a day; now it’s getting roughly 12,000. A follow-up e mail clarified that the excessive name quantity means many callers are getting mechanically disconnected.
Among the many lately and unexpectedly unemployed, there was a lot confusion about whether or not and the way to apply for federal advantages. I’m sympathetic; I’ve walked shoppers by any variety of profit functions and skilled this confusion myself. It strikes me that this second is serving, for these whose earlier brushes with state forms have been confined to traces on the DMV, as a painful lesson within the necessity of a strong and readily accessible social security internet. Not less than in Massachusetts, it’s simpler now than it was two months in the past to use for unemployment advantages, for money advantages, for SNAP. Nonetheless, the onus is on the person to show that they deserve the aid the federal government is providing.
I spent the remainder of final week calling the twenty-eight shoppers in my caseload to see how they have been doing. Two months in the past, I might have been capable of meet with these shoppers in particular person. I might have provided them water, or tea, and a chair; I might have, with their permission, closed the door to my workplace. We would have known as one or one other overworked division collectively, on speakerphone, and the minor authority my affiliation affords might need allowed me to press tougher for a solution than a consumer alone would really feel snug doing. If, nonetheless, no reply was forthcoming, I might a minimum of have been capable of make eye contact with my consumer as we spoke about what to do subsequent.
Now, after I get off the cellphone, I ship follow-up emails full of hyperlinks: a hyperlink to an inventory of emergency childcare facilities; a hyperlink to a searchable map of meals pantries; a hyperlink to a PDF map of meals pantries; a hyperlink to the appliance for Residential Help for Households in Transition (RAFT); a hyperlink to an utility for a Visa present card whose wait listing is now a number of thousand hopeful candidates lengthy. I name neighborhood facilities throughout the town in search of child provides, and discover one with diapers available, however in a neighborhood removed from most of our shoppers’ properties. I distribute rideshare codes. I stroll a consumer by IRS Free File choices over Google Hangouts. I evaluation a PDF from the Girls, Infants, & Kids (WIC) Vitamin Program; resulting from Covid-19, WIC recipients can now buy 20 oz. breads with their “16 oz. Bread/Entire Grains” advantages. I ask a consumer to say hello to her child for me.
“Don’t hesitate to succeed in out for those who want any help,” I write on the backside of an e mail. “We’re right here to assist!” ■
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
April 14, 2020
FIRE ISLAND, NEW YORK—We acquired out early. We packed the automotive the day that NYU, the place I educate, moved courses on-line. We wished to remain within the metropolis, our metropolis. However my mother-in-law, who helps care for our toddler, is eighty-four. My son is 2. Within the elevator in our constructing, as on the road outdoors, the anxiousness was rising. So was the prospect of getting to surprise, quickly, whether or not taking our toddler to the park would threat his grandma’s life. We drove over the Triborough Bridge, the 4 of us, and handed the the massive tennis stadium, in Queens, the place they play the US Open however whose courts at the moment are a hospital. We parked by the clam place, and acquired on the boat. We acquired off on the cease close to the place we’ve now been socked in, with a few house heaters and a variety of beans, for occurring 5 weeks.
The home we’re fortunate to have isn’t insulated. It’s a summer season place, from the period when that phrase connoted not membership within the 1 %, however moderately that temporary epoch of American capitalism, after the struggle, when folks like my mother-in-law—an immigrant from the Caribbean with a superb profession, however not a financier’s one—may thinkably purchase a bungalow by the ocean, inside driving distance of New York, for her household. Now this place is dotted with homes, with plenty of glass, from our new gilded age: monuments to the inventory market’s positive factors since 2009. However most of these homes, once we turned up, have been empty. There are not any providers right here within the low season, or grocery shops. (Getting backup Cheerios and beans requires a visit off-island, or having them despatched by boat.) The authorities and scant year-rounders, pointing to these lacks ought to anybody right here fall ailing, did a superb job of urging folks, within the days following our arrival, to not come.
It’s acquainted by now: folks on islands shouting that mainlanders—New Yorkers, within the northeast—ought to keep away. Even an island that’s not one—Rhode Island—acquired in on the development. From Maine to the Carolinas, many islands the place second properties and summer season denizens abound have pronounced themselves, this spring, closed to guests. The extra everlasting residents and choose boards of such locations, with ample cause and lack of hospitals, not to mention ventilators, have requested folks from the surface world to not convey the virus.
Many vacation spot islands world wide, locations whose sustenance as soon as got here from the ocean or the soil however is now by attracting vacationers, have completed the identical. In Barbados, the place my spouse’s household’s from, there’s a compulsory two-week quarantine in place for anybody coming from overseas. Prince Edward Island in Canada, the place mine is from, has shut its bridge. (Barbados has seventy-one confirmed circumstances and 4 deaths; Prince Edward Island, twenty-five and 0.) In Cuba (726 confirmed circumstances, twenty-one deaths), pals say their lives are on pause: lower off, by the lockdown there, from their cousins throughout city, they’re additionally lower off from the world. With all flights into or out of Havana halted, they really feel like they’re again, after the temporary opening of latest years, to the place they have been within the 1990s: no money or vacationers coming in, no method to depart. One factor Cuba doesn’t lack, ought to its outbreak worsen, is health-care staff.
Among the many world’s final island nations to stay formally virus-free is the Pacific archipelago, Vanuatu, that was simply savaged by a cyclone. Now Vanuatu’s leaders are praying, as they reopen the airport they shut to holiday-makers a couple of weeks in the past, that the meals and help they want within the storm’s wake received’t additionally convey undesirable germs. Arduous to not ponder, as they do, the vectors of a virus that whipped across the planet because of individuals who take long-haul flights, from Wuhan to Milan to New York and wherever else, however that almost all menaces these caught in place—whether or not within the densely vibrant immigrant neighborhoods of Queens or on distant islands which are most weak, too, to the worsening storms of a warming planet.
Hearth Island is not any exception to the latter hazard. There’s a cause we’ve been urging my mother-in-law, for years, to promote this place. However for now, a minimum of, we’re glad she hasn’t. A barrier island that rising seas need to reclaim, and shall, is an apt place to ponder the world’s tumbling into a brand new epoch. Lengthy Island’s Suffolk County, the place we’re, is now among the many globe’s hottest hotspots. (Present rely: 22,462 circumstances, 608 deaths.) The ferry firm right here, having warned anybody who’s ailing or weak from boarding their vessels, has stored to its winter schedule: one boat a day. However each day, because the climate warms, extra folks come.
The quiet, nonetheless, is one thing. Normally, a number of planes per hour go overhead, en path to JFK. Nowadays, we hear none. My spouse and I are studying to fish. Striped bass, our neighbors say, are working within the Nice South Bay. The way in which to catch them from the dock, or so we’re advised, is with a buck-tail lure at night time.
Is the virus right here? In fact it’s. We stand ten toes from anybody we meet. No man, the poet stated, is an island. However no island is an island, both. ■
Dan Chiasson
April 13, 2020
WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS—Through the early days of quarantine, again once I was nonetheless making an attempt to maintain straight which Tolstoy princess had the mole and which had the mustache, and was nonetheless forcing my household to assemble earlier than the fireplace each night, as our forebears had, to listen to the patriarch learn poems aloud; earlier than, that’s, the concern of turning into very ailing, or of dropping our house, had actually kicked in, I opened The New York Overview of Books and turned to the classifieds. Twentieth-century artifacts nonetheless gamely chugging alongside, these notices provide all types of enticements: a farmhouse within the Dordogne or Tuscany, a package for establishing a geodesic dome, a therapeutic massage of unsure propriety. I learn the next advert:
A CHARISMATIC, AGING FRENCH rock star will compose and report an authentic track for you, your mother, your lover, or your pet in French, English or Franglais (really useful). US$200. Contact: lodbrogsagent@gmail.com; imrelodbrog.com
The classifieds within the Overview are usually written to a excessive normal, however there was one thing uncommon about this one which I couldn’t fairly describe—since, in reality, I didn’t but absolutely detect it. I’d seen provides for commissioned inventive work over time; this advert appeared fairly consciously to supply not solely the product itself, however an irresistible narrative. I wouldn’t have bit if I’d encountered it on-line, or if the singer hadn’t been French, or growing old, or charismatic. Imagining that I would want tales to inform after the pandemic handed, I made a decision that $200 was a small value to pay for one. The track can be virtually further—it will be acquired as I suspected it was provided, as a type of prop.
That morning I wrote to the e-mail tackle listed within the advert:
Bonjour Monsieur,
I’m a US professor and I ponder for those who would report a track for my two courses which have been suspended, English 120 and English 357? One thing sentimental, utilizing these names? I simply posted your advert to Twitter and hope you get plenty of enterprise!!
Inside an hour or so, the rock star’s agent—who recognized herself solely as “Lodbrog’s Agent”—wrote again from New York Metropolis, the place the 2 of them have been holed up. Imre Lodbrog can be delighted to compose a track for my courses, if I might ship some extra directions. So I despatched a poem, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m No one,” and made only one request: that he use my course numbers within the chorus. I used to be amused by the thought of asking a charismatic French rock star to sing a heartbroken tune to a very unlikely amant: the catalog numbers of my courses. I proposed that Lodbrog—whose moody, gravelly songs I had, by that time, found on-line—additionally report a video, for an extra $200. Lodbrog’s Agent accepted my pitch, and we have been off to the races.
By this level, I had begun to suspect that, in orchestrating my stunt, I had additionally turn into entangled in a single. This wasn’t the story I imagined; it was not even, apparently, mine to inform. On Lodbrog’s web site, below the part labeled “The Man,” I discovered, as a substitute of a brief bio, a mirror picture of my curiosity, barely intensified as if I’d arrived there after a years-long quest: “Who the hell is Imre Lodbrog,” it learn: “Any individual stated, ‘He’s like Serge Gainsbourg on ’shrooms.’” It appeared that the development “Imre Lodbrog” had been designed, partially, as a ruse. However by whom, and why? An extended model of his categorized seems below the part “Employed Gun,” describing him as “a softy and a socialist,” and providing his providers on a sliding charge scale—as if $200 weren’t already an insane discount. Past these scant particulars, nothing—aside from a hyperlink to a ebook about Lodbrog that “we wrote.”
Final week the track arrived, a twangy, jangly quantity, totally infectious, known as “Cyrano”; at the moment, the video appeared in my inbox, filmed in a New York desolated by the pandemic. Pictures of what regarded to me like an intersection within the East Village—empty aside from a couple of masked pedestrians—fade to archival footage of the identical spot full of dancers and revelers. The a number of fades of the video counsel the ghost lives we at the moment are residing. Each track and video give off a faint whiff of serioludere, with their deliberately broad gestures towards rock-star preening. And but each are, to me, indescribably stunning. Lodbrog’s Agent had written to ask if I used to be OK along with his incorporating the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, as a result of, as she put it, “he’s French.” I fortunately consented. It was a lark. However once I listened to the lyrics, I spotted that Lodbrog had assumed the mantle of professor, educating his personal lesson to a gaggle of captivated strangers, my college students:
ENGLISH 120 ENGLISH 357
I AM NOBODY WHO ARE YOU?
NOBODY TOO AH PLEASED TO MEET YOUDO YOU KNOW CYRANO
WHO SPOKE SOMEBODY’S LOVE THROUGH HIS HEART
OH MAN HOW DREARY TO BE
SOMEBODYI AM HERE YOU ARE THERE
SO LET ME SING THIS LITTLE TUNE TO YA ALL
AND KEEP IT WARM UNTIL THE LIVELONG JUNE
The track continues on this vein for a number of extra verses, adapting Dickinson’s existentially amiable little poem to this new situation, the place Lodbrog—a “no person”—greets his fellow nobodies, me and my college students. The fantastically open-hearted query, “Have you learnt Cyrano,” is Lodbrog’s personal second of pedagogy. If you happen to don’t know him, I advised my college students, you need to get to know him.
Lodbrog and his agent—whom I’ve found to be none aside from Barbara Browning, the distinguished scholar of Brazilian music, and a dancer and efficiency artist who teaches at NYU—co-authored their fairly fantastic ebook, Who the Hell Is Imre Lodbrog. I wouldn’t dare spoil their story, because it’s such a superb one. As for this story, I do not know the way to inform it: Am I its writer or its protagonist? Who the hell is Dan Chiasson?
“Cyrano” ends with a beautiful conjuring of our present, scary hiatus, and of a number of the methods human connection could be reconceived within the time of Covid-19. Let’s hope Lodbrog is correct about “the sunny livelong June”:
I AM THERE YOU ARE HERE
AND THAT’S THE MAGIC OF THE TRICK
A FEW WORDS AND A LITTLE TUNE
A TINY FLAME TO LIGHT UP THE GLOOM
UNTIL THE SUNNY LIVELONG JUNE
TO KEEP US ALL TOGETHER IN THIS EMPTY
CLASSROOM
From April 6–12: Arthur Longworth in Monroe • Mira Kamdar in Videlles • Christopher Benfey in Amherst • Nathaniel Rich in New Orleans • Ariel Dorfman in Durham • Zoé Samudzi in Windhoek • Dalia Hatuqa in Amman • Hugh Eakin in Minneapolis–St. Paul • Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham
From March 30–April 5: Ian Johnson in Beijing and London • Tim Flannery in Sydney • Liza Batkin in Rhinebeck • Carl Elliott in Auckland • Edward Stephens in Athens • Jamie Quatro in Chattanooga • Ali Bhutto in Karachi • Nicole Rudick in South Orange • Andrew McGee in New York • Danny Lyon in Bernalillo
From March 23–29: Sylvia Poggioli in Rome 🔊 • Jenny Uglow in Cumbria • Minae Mizumura in Tokyo 🔊 • Hari Kunzru in Brooklyn 🔊 • Rachael Bedard in Brooklyn • Lucy Jakub in Northampton 🔊 • Alma Guillermoprieto in Bogotá 🔊 • Nick Laird in Kerhonkson • Caitlin L. Chandler in Berlin • Yiyun Li in Princeton • Lucy McKeon in Brooklyn • Dominique Eddé in Beirut • Zoë Schlanger in Brooklyn • Ursula Lindsey in Amman • Nilanjana Roy in New Delhi • George Weld in Brooklyn • Richard Ford in East Boothbay • Eula Biss in Evanston • Martin Filler in Southampton • Ben Mauk in Penang • Michael S. Roth in Middletown 🔊 • Sue Halpern in Ripton • Ivan Sršen in Zagreb • Tom Bachtell in Chicago • Adam Foulds in Toronto 🔊 • E. Tammy Kim in Brooklyn • Keija Parssinen in Granville • Yasmine El Rashidi in Cairo • Merve Emre in Oxford • Tolu Ogunlesi in Lagos • Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham • Rahmane Idrissa in Naimey • Aida Alami in Paris • Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan • Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn
From March 17–22: Madeleine Schwartz in Brooklyn 🔊 • Anne Enright in Dublin 🔊 • Joshua Hunt in Busan 🔊 • Anna Badkhen in Lalibela • Lauren Groff in Gainesville 🔊 • Christopher Robbins in New York • Elisa Gabbert in Denver 🔊 • Ian Jack in London • Vanessa Barbara in São Paolo • Rachel Pearson in San Antonio • A.E. Stallings in Athens • Simon Callow in London 🔊 • Mark Gevisser in Cape City 🔊 • Sarah Manguso in Los Angeles • Ruth Margalit in Tel Aviv 🔊 • Miguel-Anxo Murado in Madrid 🔊 • Tim Parks in Milan • Eduardo Halfon in Paris 🔊 • Anastasia Edel in Oakland 🔊