Innholdsfortegnelse for July 20, 2020 i The New Yorker

Great crises tend to bring profound social change, for good or ill. The consequences of wars and economic depressions have been amply studied; the consequences of pandemics, less so. This spring, in order to understand our possible future, I decided to look at the past through the eyes of Gianna Pomata, a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University. When we first talked, on Skype, she immediately compared COVID-19 to the bubonic plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century—“not in the number of dead but in terms of shaking up the way people think.” She went on, “The Black Death really marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of something else.” That something else was the Renaissance. Since retiring,…

On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles in-land from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard…

I wonder if my dead mother still thinks of me.I know I don’t know her new name. I don’t know her, not now. I don’t know if “her” is the wordburning in a stranger’s mind when he sees my dead mother walking down the street in her bright blackdress. I wonder if he inhales the cigarette smoke that will eventually kill him and thinks “I wish I knewa woman who was both the light and every shadow the light pierces.” I wonder if a passing glance at my deadmother is enough to make a poet out of anyone. I wonder if I’m the song she hums as she waits for the light to changeor if I’m just the traffic signal holding her up.…

Stranger in the Shogun’s City, by Amy Stanley (Scribner). This history of nineteenth-century Japan follows Tsuneno, the daughter of a village priest, who learns that “to be a woman is to grow up and leave for another household.” But, after three failed marriages, she departs for the great city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Tsuneno’s rebellious trajectory, preserved in her family’s archive, was unusual, yet even her most commonplace steps are absorbing. Although her squabbles and triumphs (a dispute about a kimono, a new job as maid of all work to a samurai family) can only be glimpsed, Stanley’s careful speculation fills the lacunae, evoking Edo’s back alleys and law courts, its fashion and food. Tsuneno, with her world in flux—the shogun will soon fall—becomes just one person in the teeming…

COVERING MINNEAPOLIS Reading Luke Mogelson’s impeccably reported account of the Minneapolis protests following George Floyd’s death was cathartic (“The Uprising,” June 22nd). I’m a reporter for WCCO-TV, the CBS station in Minneapolis, and was there with Mogelson during many of the events that occurred in the Third and Fifth Precincts. His piece crystallized for me, a white man, the “fundamentally unknowable” fear that Black protesters have of law enforcement. I will always remember the officer in riot gear who sprinted toward my photographer and me, rifle pointed, screaming repeatedly, “Get the fuck back!” After we turned a corner in a frightened retreat, the officer pursued us down half a block, and I wondered why he couldn’t treat us like human beings. Mogelson makes clear that what I felt in that…

With so many people homebound these past few months, indoors has become the new outdoors. It is where you exercise, digitally chat with friends, and, of course, work. But it is also still the indoors, where you sleep, eat, and putter. This can make for frequent wardrobe changes. Or you can give up and wear the same shredded sweatpants day after day. In April, a Florida circuit judge named Dennis Bailey sent a letter to local lawyers about proper attire during Zoom court hearings. “It is remarkable how many ATTORNEYS appear inappropriately on camera,” he wrote. “We’ve seen many lawyers in casual shirts and blouses, with no concern for ill-grooming, in bedrooms with the master bed in the background, etc. One male lawyer appeared shirtless and one female attorney appeared…

Two people are asleep in a field.The light is not yet up. The air is cold, even though it is summer.I cannot get closer than where I am. I know only so muchabout them. I know they are not dead.I know they are asleep because one of them has moved, just enoughto show it is a movement you make in sleep, an adjustmentof resting weight. I don’t know if it is romanticthat they are in this field. Or if it is drunkenness or despair.From this distance their clothes are black.They are two men, or a man and a woman,or two women. I am not near enough to learn what their bodies are,or how proximate or distant from each other.It is the corner of my eye that has seen them,walking quickly…

His father would say, “You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying—these things matter to those around you. So there is good you can do and can always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.” He said this from the pulpit, but he was saying it to Jack, who, to distract him from the parsing of some recent mischief, had almost confided to his father that he had certain doubts about his soul. This near-confession was probably meant to stir his father to the kind of…

JULY 15 – 21, 2020 With live dance performances mostly on pause, dancemakers have been pivoting to video in a hurry. This makes the Dance on Camera festival, now in its forty-eighth year, especially relevant. Streaming online July 17-20 (at dancefilms.org), it showcases short films, including Susan Misner’s powerful and timely “Bend,” and feature documentaries, such as Khadifa Wong’s “Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance” (above), which illuminates an often disrespected genre and a history as complex as that of race in America. MUSIC 6lack: “6pc Hot” R. & B. The singer-rapper 6lack often roots his minimal R. & B. in the sights and sounds of Atlanta, where he grew up. His new EP, “6pc Hot,” is a subtle ode to his city: its title is a nod to Atlanta…

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin became concerned about the novel coronavirus toward the end of January, while attending the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. COVID-19 was spreading rapidly in China, and authorities had closed off Wuhan, the city where the outbreak started. The theme at Davos was sustainability, but Mnuchin was surprised that no one was talking about the eleven million people under lockdown. “I was at a C.E.O. dinner, and I actually brought it up,” he recalled recently. “But, at the time I raised this as a risk, I did not see it travelling around the world.” On January 31st, the Trump Administration announced that it would limit flights from China but did not implement either widespread contact tracing or testing for the coronavirus. (Many early cases of…

The best time to read a book by Frank B. Wilderson III, it turns out, is during a hot summer of uneasy isolation, social heartbreak, and racial uprising. I read his latest, “Afropessimism” (Liveright), twice: once before the world crawled to a halt under the horror of covid-19, and again after anger about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis—Wilderson’s home town—erupted into a righteous spectacle of fire and glass. Since then, Wilderson’s work has received notice in unlikely places. In mid-June, the temperamentally soft and sunny conservative Times columnist David Brooks—who, five years ago, lamented that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-seller “Between the World and Me” would “trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future”—suggested that readers who wished to understand…

In late June, the Dixie Chicks dropped the word “Dixie” from its name. The band’s statement was brief and elegant: “We want to meet this moment.” The Dixie Chicks were founded in Texas, in 1989. Back then, the band was a fourpiece. (The sisters Martie and Emily Erwin, now Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, are the remaining original members; since 1995, the band has been fronted by the singer and guitarist Natalie Maines.) They wore prairie skirts and fringed blouses, and played a mixture of bluegrass and traditional country—cowgirls with chops. The band’s name was a riff on “Dixie Chicken,” a 1973 album by the chooglin’ rock band Little Feat. Sifting through early press coverage of the group, I couldn’t find a single critic who thought the name was repugnant.…