[kenberg]

These are serious times and I do not at all mean to minimize. But we, and many, are staying home and it just seemed some low impact chat could be useful.

Yesterday I downloaded the Zoom app. Like many of my age, I hear of a new app and my first reaction is "Do I have to?". I keep thinking someday I will do it. Those interested in math (aka fellow weirdos) might be interested in how I got around to it: https://www.yu.edu/u...loquia-seminars notes a talk to be given over Zoom tomorrow, I thought I would download it and see how it works (hopefully in English but of course there is no reason that it need be). Becky beat me to it installing Zoom, she watched a yoga class on Zoom yesterday.

We have previously used FB to chat with grandchildren but I get the idea Zoom might enlarge the possibilities.

A friend of Becky's works for the school system, her specialty is special needs. The schools are shut down, they are attempting to do online stuff, they want her involved for special needs kids, coping with technology presents a challenge for her. And the whole thing seems seriously challenging. Possibly I could help, but anyone depending on me for tech help is in a truly tough spot. Hopefully the school system will be able to provide guidance. As of 5 PM yesterday we are all (in Maryland) supposed to stay home unless the need is substantial so any help will probably be done remotely.

Before my next comment I want to repeat that I really don't want to minimize the real problems people have. But yesterday, after the announcement that we are to stay home after 5PM, we had time to first get to the wine store and then to Starbucks for some coffee beans. We kept the purchases to modest size. We also stopped by the hardware store. We have a well, and the water treatment requires salt crystals. None to be had. Fortunately I anticipated this a few days ago and we have enough for a month or so. That's my usual sized purchase.

Nothing I said above is important, that's my point with this thread. Becky and I chat, and I do phone friends and family, but it seemed that maybe some would just like to say a few words of no great consequence. If so, feel free to add a comment or two. Sort of like sitting at a bar with a beer and some other drop-ins.

[pilowsky]

Absolutely. If you can't laugh a little. What's the point anyway? I use skype, line is also popular, WhatsApp works well. I think you're on to something Ken. Now you can choose your friends with great care 😊.

[y66]

My wife started using Zoom, in Brady-Bunch mode aka gallery view, when her choral group stopped meeting. I tested using Zoom for reading stories to grandkids which I signed up to do next week. I can share a browser window (web Kindle app) so they can see the pictures while I read which works better than trying to film the pages myself.

My librarian highly recommends https://www.storylineonline.net/. I watched a few. Wow.

My neighborhood grocery store is opening an hour early for people over 60 only.

I'm supposed to be working on my will, trust, power of attorney and advanced medical directive documents. I suspect this is straightforward if you have a family lawyer that you trust which I don't. Very high legalese-boilerplate to goals/wishes ratio.

My wife has a good friend who teaches at the university level in France. Teaching classes online and interacting with students online is a huge additional demand on her time.

Favorite line from "Love in the Time of Cholera": There was soap.

[FelicityR]

y66, on 2020-March-24, 12:30, said:

Favorite line from "Love in the Time of Cholera": There was soap.

When I read Ken's header "Chatting in the time of covid" I also immediately thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, too. Though I personally found the book a bit sexist for my liking. 100 Years of Solitude is, in my opinion, a better book.
Though 100 days of isolation, or lockdown, is a distinct possibility given our current circumstances

Some major stores in the UK are also operating a shopping hour for elderly and disabled or key workers, and limiting the number of people in the store at any one time. About time too.

As for chatting in the time of covid, well that's a good start as in this age of all these communicative mediums that we can use, people seem, to me, less interested in chatting generally, but maybe a positive factor about the current pandemic is that people will actually start to communicate with each other more. Time will tell...

[Winstonm]

I feel fortunate to be part of the Bridgebase community because bridge players by and large are interesting people and quite bright. Dr. Berg is a prime example (there are many, many more) of the type of mind and expertise that is only available to me via the internet. One of the earliest attractions I had to the game of bridge was learning that if I played in tournaments I would get to play every so often against world-class opponents, Bob Hamman and Bobby Wolff come to mind playing in the Dallas regional.

It would be like a golfer getting to tee it up with Nicklaus or Woods or a tennis player drawing Rod Laver or Serena Williams at the local club matches.

Bridge is a wonderful game, made even more so by the worldwide community that shares a passion for it. I am thankful I was able to share that passion. And still do.

[johnu]

kenberg, on 2020-March-24, 10:01, said:

But yesterday, after the announcement that we are to stay home after 5PM, we had time to first get to the wine store and then to Starbucks for some coffee beans. We kept the purchases to modest size.

There was this:

Grocery Stores Taking Drastic Measures to Prevent Hoarding

Quote

Amid scattered reports of fights breaking out in wine and toilet paper aisles, CNN reports:

ShopRite, Stop&Shop and Kroger (KR) are three major chains beefing up their security, according to the companies. Kroger has increased its off-duty police and uniformed presence in Columbus, Ohio, said a spokesperson for the city police department.Walmart (WMT)is using a mix of off-duty law enforcement and third-party security, a spokesperson said. "The big difference is that everything is at a much broader scale because it's all happening nationally."

I think everybody has heard about the toilet paper hoarding, but this is the first time I have heard about wine hoarding.

Now you have to worry about being assaulted in your local stores

[pescetom]

johnu, on 2020-March-24, 14:02, said:

I think everybody has heard about the toilet paper hoarding, but this is the first time I have heard about wine hoarding.

Take it as comic relief, but one of the most frequent motives for Italians violating the shutdown (potential 3000 euro fine or jail sentence) is travelling to purchase wine directly from producers, as supermarket alternatives are scorned and one has to bottle wine when the moon commands

[Cyberyeti]

My 82 year old dad has just suggested I get zoom, might mean I have to be careful what I wear which I so don't otherwise while self isolating

[pilowsky]

johnu, on 2020-March-24, 14:02, said:

There was this:

Grocery Stores Taking Drastic Measures to Prevent Hoarding


I think everybody has heard about the toilet paper hoarding, but this is the first time I have heard about wine hoarding.

Now you have to worry about being assaulted in your local stores

Well, here is a picture of Angela Merkel to show you how to do it - presumably at an Aldi

[Chas_P]

kenberg, on 2020-March-24, 10:01, said:

But yesterday, after the announcement that we are to stay home after 5PM, we had time to first get to the wine store

Maybe we should change the name of this place from The Water Cooler to The Wine Cooler.

On a more serious note, you may want to look into Portal. We've had one for awhile and it's pretty cool. We have friends in Methuen, MA who just got back from Mexico by the hair of their chinnychinchins. We spent over an hour with them tonight on Portal seeing them sitting in their den and hearing about their experience. The internet is a wonderful thing. I will be forever grateful to Al Gore.

https://www.google.c...iw=1920&bih=937

[pilowsky]

On a less serious note can we have a place in the forum where people that know what humour is can make posts? Humour is an extremely powerful coping mechanism in times of crisis. See life is beautiful.

[y66]

My wife is Zooming with her choral group.  I enjoy listening to them sing and seeing all of them in gallery view on her monitor.

I wonder if they take requests?

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-April-02, 18:45, said:

My wife is Zooming with her choral group.  I enjoy listening to them sing and seeing all of them in gallery view on her monitor.

I wonder if they take requests?

Does Moira sing with them?

[y66]

Winstonm, on 2020-April-02, 19:29, said:

Does Moira sing with them?

There's some "off book" talk about teaming up with Moira and the Jazzagals on a remake of Starlight Express. I don't know if they've got buy in from Andy Webber.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-April-03, 00:20, said:

There's some "off book" talk about teaming up with Moira and the Jazzagals on a remake of Starlight Express. I don't know if they've got buy in from Andy Webber.

Be careful. I hear she demands a diamond tennis bracelet to participate. But maybe that applies only to reboots.

[y66]

From Maureen Dowd's story about Larry David (Seinfeld co-creator) at NYT:

Quote

We’re FaceTiming — something Mr. David has grown to like in quarantine — and he picks up his iPad to walk me around and show me the view of the deserted golf course from his bedroom window.

It’s my first FaceTime, and I’m nervous, having watched all week as even the glossiest cable news shows have downshifted into low-tech “Wayne’s World” basement productions. To shore up confidence beforehand I asked my lighting sensei, Tom Ford, for some tips and he kindly sent these instructions, which you all are welcome to use:

“Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!”

The crane-like Mr. David, in a dark blue Zegna pullover, rust-colored pants and sneakers, is sporting a scruffy beard. “Any facial hair is very beneficial for the bald man,” he said. “It really enhances the bald man’s appearance.” He looked snug in a blue wing chair in a corner of his house. I was less comfortable.

“I’m only seeing half your face,” he complained. “Do you know that?”

When I ask if he is hoarding anything, he is outraged. “Not a hoarder,” he said. “In fact, in a few months, if I walk into someone’s house and stumble onto 50 rolls of toilet paper in a closet somewhere, I will end the friendship. It’s tantamount to being a horse thief in the Old West.”

“I never could have lived in the Old West,” he added parenthetically. “I would have been completely paranoid about someone stealing my horse. No locks. You tie them to a post! How could you go into a saloon and enjoy yourself knowing your horse could get taken any moment? I would be so distracted. Constantly checking to see if he was still there.”

Jerry Seinfeld has observed that Larry David is the greatest proof that “you are what you are,” given the fact that he remained a curmudgeon even once he got rich and popular.

Though, at 72, Mr. David does seem more comfortable in his skin. His outlook used to be so dark that Mr. Charles, one of the original writers of “Seinfeld,” said that if he thought he could get away with it, Mr. David would have put out contracts to kill people.

Now, however, he is contentedly holed up with the older of his two daughters, Cazzie, 25; an Australian shepherd puppy named Bernie (after Sanders, whom Mr. David embodies with uncanny likeness on “Saturday Night Live”); a cat; and his girlfriend, Ashley Underwood, who worked as a producer of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime satire, “Who Is America?” Ms. Underwood is friends with Isla Fisher, Mr. Cohen’s wife, who had a hilarious role in this season’s “Curb” as a professional crier who manipulates Larry into handing over his mother’s mink stole.

Mr. David met Ms. Underwood at Mr. Cohen’s birthday party in 2017. “We were seated next to each other, I think with that in mind,” he said of the fix-up. “Much to her surprise I left before dessert. I was doing so well, banter-wise, I didn’t want to risk staying too long and blowing the good impression.”

Mr. David and Cazzie, who writes wry columns for Graydon Carter’s digital weekly, Air Mail, are both lifelong germophobes. “This might be the only thing I’ve ever agreed with Trump about, we should put an end to the shake,” Mr. David said. “You know, we might as well end intercourse while we’re at it. That’s always been a lot of trouble.”

[y66]

From Arundhati Roy at FT:

Arundhati Roy’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

Quote

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

[y66]

From Sam Sifton at NYT:

Quote

Good morning. My friend Ashley Merriman fashioned a Ping-Pong table out of her dining room table recently, because, as her wife, Gabrielle Hamilton, wrote for The Times this week, they had to close their restaurant, they’re both out of work and renting movies for the family at $4.99 a throw seemed irresponsible. Then Gabrielle went out and spent $56 on a pound of fresh crab meat, to make crab toast.



Gabrielle: “Maybe it was a fit of optimism, but more likely a belligerent, hissy-fit rejection of chickpeas on yet another unbearable day. I laid a bottle of Bisson rosé in the fridge, browned some butter and piled a whole pound of jumbo lump crab meat — that fresh, sweet, saline manna of the sea gods — onto slices of nutty, lemony, brown-butter toast, and boiled an entire bunch of asparagus to accompany it. We ate the light spring supper of our freaking dreams.”

That tracks. It’s not savvy financial stewardship, no doubt. But there comes a time when you’ve been cooped up so long (maybe that time has come already for you, maybe it’s going to come in an hour) when it suddenly seems as if the best thing you can do for yourself and those around you is to splurge even though you’re broke or worried about becoming broke. It needn’t be a pound of crab meat. It might be a bar of chocolate, a pizza ordered for curbside pickup, that bottle of wine you’ve saved for years, a box of Cap’n Crunch. The extravagance, however small, sends a message: We’re good here.

[y66]

From Frank Bruni's chat with Louise Garrett at NYT:

Quote

I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.

She and I were Zooming — that’s a verb now, right? — and she pulled out a 2017 book, “Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.” It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of H.I.V. but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens.

“I’m a double Cassandra,” Garrett said.

She’s also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about “the Coronavirus Cassandras.”

Cassandra, of course, was the prophetess of Greek mythology who was doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about — in her 1994 best seller, “The Coming Plague,” and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks — is a pandemic like the current one.

She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.

Despite the stock market’s swoon for it, remdesivir probably isn’t our ticket out, she told me. “It’s not curative,” she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of Covid-19 patients. “We need either a cure or a vaccine.”

But she can’t envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while Covid-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that.

“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.

“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.

So, I asked, is “back to normal,” a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?

“This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”

Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.

Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.

If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”

“Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”

Garrett has been on my radar since the early 1990s, when she worked for Newsday and did some of the best reporting anywhere on AIDS. Her Pulitzer, in 1996, was for coverage of Ebola in Zaire. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and consulted on the 2011 movie “Contagion.”

Her expertise, in other words, has long been in demand. But not like now.

Each morning when she opens her email, “there’s the Argentina request, Hong Kong request, Taiwan request, South Africa request, Morocco, Turkey,” she told me. “Not to mention all of the American requests.” It made me feel bad about taking more than an hour of her time on Monday. But not so bad that I didn’t cadge another 30 minutes on Thursday.

She said she wasn’t surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. She’s Cassandra, after all.

But there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.

“I never imagined that,” she said. “Ever.”

The highlights — or, rather, lowlights — include President Trump’s initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well, his scandalous complacency from late January through early March, his cheerleading for unproven treatments, his musings about cockamamie ones, his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

And she’s shocked that America isn’t in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.

Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me: “I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?”

The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”

“That’s America?” I asked.

“That’s America,” she said.

And what America needs most right now, she said, isn’t this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, super-reliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.

America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president’s tender ego.

“I can sit here with you for three hours listing — boom, boom, boom — what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and it’s just incredibly upsetting.” Garrett said. “I feel like I’m just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that there’s not a whisper of it.”

Instead of that whisper she hears wailing: the sirens of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients to hospitals near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she has been home alone, in lockdown, since early March. “If I don’t get hugged soon, I’m going to go bananas,” she told me. “I’m desperate to be hugged.”

Me, too. Especially after her omens.

[y66]

From Adam Liptak at NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — A few months ago, a coalition of news organizations asked the Supreme Court to allow live audio coverage of major arguments on gay rights and immigration. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. rejected the request within hours, in keeping with longstanding practice at an institution that almost never departs from tradition.

But on Monday, the court will break with history twice: hearing the first of 10 cases that will be argued in a telephone conference call, and letting the public listen in. It is a momentous step for a cautious and secretive institution and yet another way in which the coronavirus pandemic has forced American society to adjust to a new reality.

“It’s a remarkable development and completely unexpected,” said Bruce Collins, the general counsel of C-SPAN, which will offer live coverage of the arguments.

Among the cases the justices will hear by phone over the next two weeks are three on May 12 about subpoenas from prosecutors and Congress seeking President Trump’s financial records, which could yield a politically explosive decision this summer as the presidential campaign enters high gear.

The court has never before heard a case by phone, a move that some lawyers fear will degrade the quality of the arguments and the spirited give-and-take of the courtroom. Nor has it allowed live audio coverage of its arguments, on rare occasions releasing same-day audio, but usually waiting until the end of the week to do so.

Now that those barriers have been broken, the question is whether at least some of the changes may last far beyond the coming two weeks.

The justices may not return to the bench in October if the virus is still a threat, as several of them are in the demographic group thought to be most at risk. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 87, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer is 81. Four additional members of the court — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor — are 65 or older.

Courts around the nation and the world routinely allow not only audio but camera coverage of their arguments.

The justices have offered various explanations for their resistance to live access to their work. Some have said they feared showboating from the lawyers. Others have worried that their questions, some including colorful hypotheticals, would be taken out of context.

Justice Sotomayor has said she feared the public would not understand the arguments. “I don’t think most viewers take the time to actually delve into either the briefs or the legal arguments to appreciate what the court is doing,” she said in 2013.

Lawyers who argue before the court and experts on its history and procedures said that arguments conducted by telephone are likely to be more stilted and less valuable than ones in the courtroom.

“It’s better than nothing, but it’s no substitute for the real thing,” said Kannon K. Shanmugam, an experienced Supreme Court lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. “It’s hard to have the back-and-forth that you have in open court. And it’s that much harder without videoconferencing, where you can at least see each other.”

Instead of the unruly but productive commotion that characterizes the modern Supreme Court argument, the court has announced that the justices will ask questions one by one, in order of seniority.

That seemingly small adjustment will have important consequences, notably in diminishing the ability of the justices to use their questions to talk to one another by jumping in to build on or respond to their colleagues’ concerns. The court will mute the lines of lawyers before and after they argue, but it has not said whether or how the justices themselves will be muted when it is not their turn to ask questions.

Other courts that have heard arguments by conference call have experienced hiccups, including dropped calls and background noise. The Supreme Court is unlikely to be immune to such glitches.

Even if the technical aspects of the arguments are seamless, the new format will impose problematic constraints.

“The justices will find these arguments materially less useful,” said Tom Goldstein, a lawyer who argues frequently before the court and is the publisher of Scotusblog.

Chief Justice Roberts, who was an accomplished Supreme Court lawyer before he took the bench, has explained that oral arguments are largely a way for justices to begin their deliberations.

“Quite often the judges are debating among themselves and just using the lawyers as a backboard,” he told students at Columbia Law School in 2008.

Those interactions will largely disappear in the new format, which may take on the disjointed quality of questioning at a congressional hearing.

Lawyers may also lose the ability to respond to a hostile question by pivoting to a different point in the hope of engaging a more friendly justice.

Indeed, the court has issued new instructions to the lawyers who will be arguing by phone. “Please be concise and responsive to each question so that each justice will have adequate time for questioning,” Scott Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court, wrote to the lawyers.

It is hardly clear that there will be enough time even so. When the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit adopted one-by-one questioning in recent cases heard by nine judges by teleconference, the session lasted for hours. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has in the past tried very hard to keep most arguments to an hour.

In the ordinary Supreme Court argument, most justices ask questions largely or solely of the lawyer for the side they will vote against.

In remarks in 2004 to the Supreme Court Historical Society, Chief Justice Roberts, then an appeals court judge, made a playful point grounded in widely accepted statistics: “The secret to successful advocacy is simply to get the court to ask your opponent more questions.”

But the forced march of serial questions is likely to put pressure on the justices to ask questions of both sides, whether they would ordinarily be inclined to or not. (The exception may be Justice Thomas, who very seldom asks questions of either side.)

“When your side is up, instead of remaining silent you’re going to be handed the microphone,” said Irv Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. “Are you going to use that opportunity to throw softballs? I don’t know.”

The institute, which has a widely admired moot court program that lets lawyers test-drive their arguments before appearing in front of the justices, has a new menu of options.

“We’re going to offer the traditional free-for-all, and we’re now offering judge by judge,” Mr. Gornstein said. “And then we’re going to offer a combination.”

Roman Martinez, a lawyer with Latham & Watkins who is getting ready to argue a First Amendment case on Wednesday, said he had doubled his usual number of moot courts, from two to four. “What I’ve been trying to do is to set up the moot courts to mirror, as best as possible, what the real-life argument experience will be like,” he said.

That means arguing from his office, alone, sitting in front of a fancy new speakerphone bought for the occasion. He is not planning to wear a suit. (The court has not said whether the justices will be wearing robes, though it seems unlikely.)

“I think an argument like this can be extraordinarily substantive and can be very helpful to the justices even though it’s not in person,” Mr. Martinez said. “It’s a second-best solution. Obviously, we would all prefer to be there live in person.”

There are some advantages. It will be possible to consult with colleagues, though that may be distracting.

“It does make it easier to look down at notes or look at particular, say, statutory language,” Mr. Martinez said. “But on balance, that minor advantage is outweighed by the disadvantage of not being able to see the justices.”

The court’s initial reaction to the pandemic was to postpone some 20 arguments that had been scheduled for March and April, ordinarily the last sittings of the term. Last month, it announced it would hear half of them in May and defer the rest to its next term, starting in October.

Scheduling arguments for May means that the court may not finish its work by late June, when its term ordinarily ends and the justices leave for their summer break.

Monday’s argument is a sort of dry run, concerning as it does a minor trademark dispute. But other cases to be argued in the next two weeks are important.

In addition to the cases on Mr. Trump’s financial records, a major test of presidential power, the court will hear arguments on whether members of the Electoral College may cast their votes for presidential candidates other than the ones they had pledged to support.

The court will also hear arguments in two cases involving religion. One concerns how broadly federal employment discrimination laws apply to schools run by churches. In the other, the court will decide whether the Trump administration may allow employers to limit women’s access to free birth control under the Affordable Care Act.

There will still be elements of ceremony in the telephone arguments, some of them a little comic. “At 10 a.m.,” a news release describing the court’s new procedures said, “the justices will enter the main conference call.”