Image: Retailers
[ed. Surreal... just surreal.]Monday, June 8, 2020
How We Drink Now
In my apartment in Brooklyn is a blue-and-white china vase. It once held a geranium but is now a receptacle for my wine corks, which overflow onto the lightly worn oak of my kitchen table. I assume it is still there, anyway, the corks lying scattered as they fell, as I haven’t been in that apartment since the beginning of February. For four months, I’ve been on a long and unanticipated hiatus at my mother’s home in Maryland. I came here to help her through cancer treatments, a bag of laundry in the car, anticipating months of back and forth during her long battle. But she was hospitalized three days after I arrived and I had to go on immediate leave from work. The laundry was done and packed in my trunk, where it has been ever since; the pancreatic cancer claimed her life in six short and vicious weeks. When we buried her on March 10th, the country was beginning to shutter. So I stayed, confined to and quarantining in my childhood home, forced to use my time to go through her things, our things, my family’s things, room by room, with many tears. In some ways it’s been helpful, confronting all that grief head-on. In others, it is a hell I can’t escape. (...)
Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.
But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.
There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.
I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.
I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.
— Mickie Meinhardt
It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.
Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.
There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.
I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.
I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.
— Mickie Meinhardt
It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.
--- Helen Schulman
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Liza
via: Aeon
Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey
I met that elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot-springs town in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. It was a rustic or, more precisely, decrepit inn, barely hanging on, where I just happened to spend a night.
I was travelling around, wherever the spirit led me, and it was already past 7 p.m. when I arrived at the hot-springs town and got off the train. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness particular to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-size leaves rustling along the street.
I walked through the center of the town in search of a place to stay, but none of the decent inns would take in guests after the dinner hour had passed. I stopped at five or six places, but they all turned me down flat. Finally, in a deserted area outside town, I came across an inn that would take me. It was a desolate-looking, ramshackle place, almost a flophouse. It had seen a lot of years go by, but it had none of the quaint appeal you might expect in an old inn. Fittings here and there were ever so slightly slanted, as if slapdash repairs had been made that didn’t mesh with the rest of the place. I doubted it would make it through the next earthquake, and I could only hope that no temblor would hit while I was there.
The inn didn’t serve dinner, but breakfast was included, and the rate for one night was incredibly cheap. Inside the entrance was a plain reception desk, behind which sat a completely hairless old man—devoid of even eyebrows—who took my payment for one night in advance. The lack of eyebrows made the old man’s largish eyes seem to glisten bizarrely, glaringly. On a cushion on the floor beside him, a big brown cat, equally ancient, was sacked out, sound asleep. Something must have been wrong with its nose, for it snored louder than any cat I’d ever heard. Occasionally the rhythm of its snores fitfully missed a beat. Everything in this inn seemed to be old and falling apart.
The room I was shown to was cramped, like the storage area where one keeps futon bedding; the ceiling light was dim, and the flooring under the tatami creaked ominously with each step. But it was too late to be particular. I told myself I should be happy to have a roof over my head and a futon to sleep on.
I put my one piece of luggage, a large shoulder bag, down on the floor and set off back to town. (This wasn’t exactly the type of room I wanted to lounge around in.) I went into a nearby soba-noodle shop and had a simple dinner. It was that or nothing, since there were no other restaurants open. I had a beer, some bar snacks, and some hot soba. The soba was mediocre, the soup lukewarm, but, again, I wasn’t about to complain. It beat going to bed on an empty stomach. After I left the soba shop, I thought I’d buy some snacks and a small bottle of whiskey, but I couldn’t find a convenience store. It was after eight, and the only places open were the shooting-gallery game centers typically found in hot-springs towns. So I hoofed it back to the inn, changed into a yukata robe, and went downstairs to take a bath.
Compared with the shabby building and facilities, the hot-springs bath at the inn was surprisingly wonderful. The steaming water was a thick green color, not diluted, the sulfur odor more pungent than anything I’d ever experienced, and I soaked there, warming myself to the bone. There were no other bathers (I had no idea if there were even any other guests at the inn), and I was able to enjoy a long, leisurely bath. After a while, I felt a little light-headed and got out to cool off, then got back into the tub. Maybe this decrepit-looking inn was a good choice after all, I thought. It was certainly more peaceful than bathing with some noisy tour group, the way you do in the larger inns.
Iwas soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid the glass door open with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that he was a monkey. All the thick hot water had left me a bit dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t immediately make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. The monkey closed the door behind him, straightened out the little buckets that lay strewn about, and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, for all the world like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.
“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. It sounded almost mythological, not like my own voice but, rather, like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was . . . hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?
“Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice still low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a baritone in a doo-wop group. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice: if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.
“Yes, thanks,” I replied. It wasn’t as if I’d been sitting there hoping that someone would come and scrub my back, but if I turned him down I was afraid he might think I was opposed to having a monkey do it. I figured it was a kind offer on his part, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So I slowly got up out of the tub and plunked myself down on a little wooden platform, with my back to the monkey.
The monkey didn’t have any clothes on. Which, of course, is usually the case for a monkey, so it didn’t strike me as odd. He seemed to be fairly old; he had a lot of white in his hair. He brought over a small towel, rubbed soap on it, and with a practiced hand gave my back a good scrubbing.
“It’s got very cold these days, hasn’t it?” the monkey remarked.
“That it has.”
“Before long this place will be covered in snow. And then they’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs, which is no easy task, believe me.”
There was a brief pause, and I jumped in. “So you can speak human language?”
“I can indeed,” the monkey replied briskly. He was probably asked that a lot. “I was raised by humans from an early age, and before I knew it I was able to speak. I lived for quite a long time in Tokyo, in Shinagawa.”
“What part of Shinagawa?”
“Around Gotenyama.”
“That’s a nice area.”
“Yes, as you know, it’s a very pleasant place to live. Nearby is the Gotenyama Garden, and I enjoyed the natural scenery there.”
Our conversation paused at this point. The monkey continued firmly scrubbing my back (which felt great), and all the while I tried to puzzle things out rationally. A monkey raised in Shinagawa? The Gotenyama Garden? And such a fluent speaker? How was that possible? This was a monkey, for goodness’ sake. A monkey, and nothing else.
“I live in Minato-ku,” I said, a basically meaningless statement.
“We were almost neighbors, then,” the monkey said in a friendly tone.
“What kind of person raised you in Shinagawa?” I asked.
“My master was a college professor. He specialized in physics, and held a chair at Tokyo Gakugei University.”
“Quite an intellectual, then.”
“He certainly was. He loved music more than anything, particularly the music of Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Thanks to which, I developed a fondness for that music myself. I heard it all the time. Picked up a knowledge of it without even realizing it, you could say.”
“You enjoy Bruckner?”
“Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”
“I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.
“Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.
“So that professor taught you language?”
“He did. He didn’t have any children, and, perhaps to compensate for that, he trained me fairly strictly whenever he had time. He was very patient, a person who valued order and regularity above all. He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom. His wife was a quiet, sweet person, always kind to me. They got along well, and I hesitate to mention this to an outsider, but, believe me, their nighttime activities could be quite intense.”
“Really,” I said.
The monkey finally finished scrubbing my back. “Thanks for your patience,” he said, and bowed his head.
“Thank you,” I said. “It really felt good. So, do you work here at this inn?”
“I do. They’ve been kind enough to let me work here. The larger, more upscale inns would never hire a monkey. But they’re always shorthanded around here and, if you can make yourself useful, they don’t care if you’re a monkey or whatever. For a monkey, the pay is minimal, and they let me work only where I can stay mostly out of sight. Straightening up the bath area, cleaning, things of that sort. Most guests would be shocked if a monkey served them tea and so on. Working in the kitchen is out, too, since I’d run into issues with the food-sanitation law.”
“Have you been working here for a long time?” I asked.
“It’s been about three years.”
“But you must have gone through all sorts of things before you settled down here?”
The monkey gave a quick nod. “Very true.”
I hesitated, but then came out and asked him, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about your background?”
The monkey considered this, and then said, “Yes, that would be fine. It might not be as interesting as you expect, but I’m off work at ten and I could stop by your room after that. Would that be convenient?”
“Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be grateful if you could bring some beer then.”
“Understood. Some cold beers it is. Would Sapporo be all right?”
“That would be fine. So, you drink beer?”
“A little bit, yes.”
“Then please bring two large bottles.”
“Of course. If I understand correctly, you are staying in the Araiso Suite, on the second floor?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“It’s a little strange, though, don’t you think?” the monkey said. “An inn in the mountains with a room named araiso—‘rugged shore.’ ” He chuckled. I’d never in my life heard a monkey laugh. But I guess monkeys do laugh, and even cry, at times. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was talking.
“By the way, do you have a name?” I asked.
“No, no name, per se. But everyone calls me the Shinagawa Monkey.”
The monkey slid open the glass door, turned, and gave a polite bow, then slowly closed the door.
I was travelling around, wherever the spirit led me, and it was already past 7 p.m. when I arrived at the hot-springs town and got off the train. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness particular to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-size leaves rustling along the street.
I walked through the center of the town in search of a place to stay, but none of the decent inns would take in guests after the dinner hour had passed. I stopped at five or six places, but they all turned me down flat. Finally, in a deserted area outside town, I came across an inn that would take me. It was a desolate-looking, ramshackle place, almost a flophouse. It had seen a lot of years go by, but it had none of the quaint appeal you might expect in an old inn. Fittings here and there were ever so slightly slanted, as if slapdash repairs had been made that didn’t mesh with the rest of the place. I doubted it would make it through the next earthquake, and I could only hope that no temblor would hit while I was there.
The inn didn’t serve dinner, but breakfast was included, and the rate for one night was incredibly cheap. Inside the entrance was a plain reception desk, behind which sat a completely hairless old man—devoid of even eyebrows—who took my payment for one night in advance. The lack of eyebrows made the old man’s largish eyes seem to glisten bizarrely, glaringly. On a cushion on the floor beside him, a big brown cat, equally ancient, was sacked out, sound asleep. Something must have been wrong with its nose, for it snored louder than any cat I’d ever heard. Occasionally the rhythm of its snores fitfully missed a beat. Everything in this inn seemed to be old and falling apart.The room I was shown to was cramped, like the storage area where one keeps futon bedding; the ceiling light was dim, and the flooring under the tatami creaked ominously with each step. But it was too late to be particular. I told myself I should be happy to have a roof over my head and a futon to sleep on.
I put my one piece of luggage, a large shoulder bag, down on the floor and set off back to town. (This wasn’t exactly the type of room I wanted to lounge around in.) I went into a nearby soba-noodle shop and had a simple dinner. It was that or nothing, since there were no other restaurants open. I had a beer, some bar snacks, and some hot soba. The soba was mediocre, the soup lukewarm, but, again, I wasn’t about to complain. It beat going to bed on an empty stomach. After I left the soba shop, I thought I’d buy some snacks and a small bottle of whiskey, but I couldn’t find a convenience store. It was after eight, and the only places open were the shooting-gallery game centers typically found in hot-springs towns. So I hoofed it back to the inn, changed into a yukata robe, and went downstairs to take a bath.
Compared with the shabby building and facilities, the hot-springs bath at the inn was surprisingly wonderful. The steaming water was a thick green color, not diluted, the sulfur odor more pungent than anything I’d ever experienced, and I soaked there, warming myself to the bone. There were no other bathers (I had no idea if there were even any other guests at the inn), and I was able to enjoy a long, leisurely bath. After a while, I felt a little light-headed and got out to cool off, then got back into the tub. Maybe this decrepit-looking inn was a good choice after all, I thought. It was certainly more peaceful than bathing with some noisy tour group, the way you do in the larger inns.
Iwas soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid the glass door open with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that he was a monkey. All the thick hot water had left me a bit dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t immediately make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. The monkey closed the door behind him, straightened out the little buckets that lay strewn about, and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, for all the world like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.
“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. It sounded almost mythological, not like my own voice but, rather, like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was . . . hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?
“Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice still low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a baritone in a doo-wop group. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice: if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.
“Yes, thanks,” I replied. It wasn’t as if I’d been sitting there hoping that someone would come and scrub my back, but if I turned him down I was afraid he might think I was opposed to having a monkey do it. I figured it was a kind offer on his part, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So I slowly got up out of the tub and plunked myself down on a little wooden platform, with my back to the monkey.
The monkey didn’t have any clothes on. Which, of course, is usually the case for a monkey, so it didn’t strike me as odd. He seemed to be fairly old; he had a lot of white in his hair. He brought over a small towel, rubbed soap on it, and with a practiced hand gave my back a good scrubbing.
“It’s got very cold these days, hasn’t it?” the monkey remarked.
“That it has.”
“Before long this place will be covered in snow. And then they’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs, which is no easy task, believe me.”
There was a brief pause, and I jumped in. “So you can speak human language?”
“I can indeed,” the monkey replied briskly. He was probably asked that a lot. “I was raised by humans from an early age, and before I knew it I was able to speak. I lived for quite a long time in Tokyo, in Shinagawa.”
“What part of Shinagawa?”
“Around Gotenyama.”
“That’s a nice area.”
“Yes, as you know, it’s a very pleasant place to live. Nearby is the Gotenyama Garden, and I enjoyed the natural scenery there.”
Our conversation paused at this point. The monkey continued firmly scrubbing my back (which felt great), and all the while I tried to puzzle things out rationally. A monkey raised in Shinagawa? The Gotenyama Garden? And such a fluent speaker? How was that possible? This was a monkey, for goodness’ sake. A monkey, and nothing else.
“I live in Minato-ku,” I said, a basically meaningless statement.
“We were almost neighbors, then,” the monkey said in a friendly tone.
“What kind of person raised you in Shinagawa?” I asked.
“My master was a college professor. He specialized in physics, and held a chair at Tokyo Gakugei University.”
“Quite an intellectual, then.”
“He certainly was. He loved music more than anything, particularly the music of Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Thanks to which, I developed a fondness for that music myself. I heard it all the time. Picked up a knowledge of it without even realizing it, you could say.”
“You enjoy Bruckner?”
“Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”
“I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.
“Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.
“So that professor taught you language?”
“He did. He didn’t have any children, and, perhaps to compensate for that, he trained me fairly strictly whenever he had time. He was very patient, a person who valued order and regularity above all. He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom. His wife was a quiet, sweet person, always kind to me. They got along well, and I hesitate to mention this to an outsider, but, believe me, their nighttime activities could be quite intense.”
“Really,” I said.
The monkey finally finished scrubbing my back. “Thanks for your patience,” he said, and bowed his head.
“Thank you,” I said. “It really felt good. So, do you work here at this inn?”
“I do. They’ve been kind enough to let me work here. The larger, more upscale inns would never hire a monkey. But they’re always shorthanded around here and, if you can make yourself useful, they don’t care if you’re a monkey or whatever. For a monkey, the pay is minimal, and they let me work only where I can stay mostly out of sight. Straightening up the bath area, cleaning, things of that sort. Most guests would be shocked if a monkey served them tea and so on. Working in the kitchen is out, too, since I’d run into issues with the food-sanitation law.”
“Have you been working here for a long time?” I asked.
“It’s been about three years.”
“But you must have gone through all sorts of things before you settled down here?”
The monkey gave a quick nod. “Very true.”
I hesitated, but then came out and asked him, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about your background?”
The monkey considered this, and then said, “Yes, that would be fine. It might not be as interesting as you expect, but I’m off work at ten and I could stop by your room after that. Would that be convenient?”
“Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be grateful if you could bring some beer then.”
“Understood. Some cold beers it is. Would Sapporo be all right?”
“That would be fine. So, you drink beer?”
“A little bit, yes.”
“Then please bring two large bottles.”
“Of course. If I understand correctly, you are staying in the Araiso Suite, on the second floor?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“It’s a little strange, though, don’t you think?” the monkey said. “An inn in the mountains with a room named araiso—‘rugged shore.’ ” He chuckled. I’d never in my life heard a monkey laugh. But I guess monkeys do laugh, and even cry, at times. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was talking.
“By the way, do you have a name?” I asked.
“No, no name, per se. But everyone calls me the Shinagawa Monkey.”
The monkey slid open the glass door, turned, and gave a polite bow, then slowly closed the door.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Hisashi Okawa
What Kind of Country Do We Want?
Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.
Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.
No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)
Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.
The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.
In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.
Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.
Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.
All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.
The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.
Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.
How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.
Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.
No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress.(...)Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.
The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.
In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.
Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.
Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.
All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.
The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.
Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislators—out of an association between political courage and parsimony—respond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.
How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.
by Marilynne Robinson, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Doña Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black/Magnum
Friday, June 5, 2020
Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty
Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is one of Tyler’s favorites of the year. The book, the result of eighteen months of field research, describes how young women exchange “bodily capital” for free drinks and access to glamorous events, boosting the status of the big-spending men they accompany.
Ashley joined Tyler to discuss her book and experience as a model, including the economics of bottle service, which kinds of men seek the club experience (and which can’t get in), why Tyler is right to be suspicious of restaurants filled with beautiful women, why club music is so loud, the surprising reason party girls don’t want to be paid, what it’s like to be scouted, why fashion models don’t smile, the truths contained in Zoolander, how her own beauty and glamour have influenced her academic career, how Barbara Ehrenreich inspired her work, her unique tip for staying focused while writing, and more.
COWEN: Let’s just jump right in. When wealthy men are in clubs, why do they want other wealthy men to see them surrounded by beautiful women?
MEARS: [laughs] I feel like you don’t really need a sociologist to answer that question. Beautiful women are a sign of status, of high status. Wealthy men like to surround themselves in the same way that you would see a curated entourage in lots of different historical forms.
Beautiful women in the VIP clubland are a sign of status. And it’s a certain kind of beauty. That’s the interesting thing about beauty, right? It’s always in the eye of the beholder. But in the VIP world, which caters to these rich men, the kind of beauty is the kind that’s defined as very rare according to the fashion modeling industry: very tall, very thin, predominantly — although not exclusively — white, and with a look that you would see in a high-end fashion magazine.
COWEN: But I know, for instance, a lot of CEOs from the Midwest, and they are not seeking to see themselves surrounded by beautiful women. They hang out with their wives, whom they seem to love. Their wives are more or less the same age. What accounts for that cross-sectional variation?
MEARS: Very Important People is not about all economic elites. It’s about this subsection of economic elites who are predominantly young. They’re affluent tourists or businesspeople who are coming through places like New York, or on this global jet-set calendar in, for instance, Saint-Tropez or St. Barts or the Hamptons. It’s a certain type of predominantly young, economically powerful man that goes to these spaces and can purchase, over the course of the night, that feeling of being high status, that this feeling, this temporary feeling of being the big man in anthropological terms. (...)
COWEN: Let’s say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women, thinking that the food will be worse. Is that a good rule or a bad rule?
MEARS: I know this rule, because I was reading that when you published that book. It was when I was doing the field work in 2012, 2013. And I remember reading it and laughing, because you were saying avoid trendy restaurants with beautiful women. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m one of those people that’s actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this scene and producing status.” So yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
The thing that maybe is interesting for you about my book that helps explain your book is that the beautiful women that are inside these restaurants, giving off status — that there’s this whole organized system to bring them there. The restaurants and the clubs hire, on a contract basis, this group of people called promoters, party promoters. Their job is to go out and find a bunch of beautiful women and then bring them to the restaurant.
Then the women get dinner for free, so the food comes out family style, and they eat for free. That sets up the obligation that then she’ll go with him to the nightclub, which is usually upstairs or attached in some way, or the managers are connected. They’re both profiting on having beautiful women in there and selling the experience of being around beautiful women. But indeed, the food’s not that great.
COWEN: In this whole arrangement, how happy are the club girls? But relative to their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar.
MEARS: Well, it’s an interesting question. I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP — they’re motivated by a range of things. For many of them, because they’re recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry — and that was one thing that I found in my first book, that most models don’t make very much money — they actually need to eat. They don’t have very much money. So the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks, like expenses paid, wining and dining, and these experiences that models otherwise can’t afford.
Which is ironic because, for you, Tyler, you’re looking for a good restaurant, and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people. The reality is, most of them probably can’t afford to eat in those places on their own. Or maybe they’re actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal. So in that sense, there’s a tradeoff that’s clear. And I think that the promoters in this VIP clubland do subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry.
But the other question is, what else would a woman that’s, say, 20, of limited financial means, be doing in the city? Well, there’s lots of other things. In some ways it appeals to a woman’s taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous, high-end world and participate in it even for a short while. Definitely there’s a tradeoff. And people talked about it as being a win-win.
There are downsides, clearly, that they recognize — that when the beautiful women go to these restaurants, the food comes out, but you don’t get to choose what you want off of the menu. It comes out family style, and usually it’s the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that’s cheaper. If it’s a sushi restaurant, it’s never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to. It’s the cucumber rolls. [laughs]
So there’s some downside to it, in that the women don’t get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they’re going to sit and what exactly they get to do, but they do get a piece of this affluent city that they would otherwise be excluded from.
Ashley joined Tyler to discuss her book and experience as a model, including the economics of bottle service, which kinds of men seek the club experience (and which can’t get in), why Tyler is right to be suspicious of restaurants filled with beautiful women, why club music is so loud, the surprising reason party girls don’t want to be paid, what it’s like to be scouted, why fashion models don’t smile, the truths contained in Zoolander, how her own beauty and glamour have influenced her academic career, how Barbara Ehrenreich inspired her work, her unique tip for staying focused while writing, and more.
COWEN: Let’s just jump right in. When wealthy men are in clubs, why do they want other wealthy men to see them surrounded by beautiful women?
MEARS: [laughs] I feel like you don’t really need a sociologist to answer that question. Beautiful women are a sign of status, of high status. Wealthy men like to surround themselves in the same way that you would see a curated entourage in lots of different historical forms.Beautiful women in the VIP clubland are a sign of status. And it’s a certain kind of beauty. That’s the interesting thing about beauty, right? It’s always in the eye of the beholder. But in the VIP world, which caters to these rich men, the kind of beauty is the kind that’s defined as very rare according to the fashion modeling industry: very tall, very thin, predominantly — although not exclusively — white, and with a look that you would see in a high-end fashion magazine.
COWEN: But I know, for instance, a lot of CEOs from the Midwest, and they are not seeking to see themselves surrounded by beautiful women. They hang out with their wives, whom they seem to love. Their wives are more or less the same age. What accounts for that cross-sectional variation?
MEARS: Very Important People is not about all economic elites. It’s about this subsection of economic elites who are predominantly young. They’re affluent tourists or businesspeople who are coming through places like New York, or on this global jet-set calendar in, for instance, Saint-Tropez or St. Barts or the Hamptons. It’s a certain type of predominantly young, economically powerful man that goes to these spaces and can purchase, over the course of the night, that feeling of being high status, that this feeling, this temporary feeling of being the big man in anthropological terms. (...)
COWEN: Let’s say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women, thinking that the food will be worse. Is that a good rule or a bad rule?
MEARS: I know this rule, because I was reading that when you published that book. It was when I was doing the field work in 2012, 2013. And I remember reading it and laughing, because you were saying avoid trendy restaurants with beautiful women. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m one of those people that’s actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this scene and producing status.” So yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct.
The thing that maybe is interesting for you about my book that helps explain your book is that the beautiful women that are inside these restaurants, giving off status — that there’s this whole organized system to bring them there. The restaurants and the clubs hire, on a contract basis, this group of people called promoters, party promoters. Their job is to go out and find a bunch of beautiful women and then bring them to the restaurant.
Then the women get dinner for free, so the food comes out family style, and they eat for free. That sets up the obligation that then she’ll go with him to the nightclub, which is usually upstairs or attached in some way, or the managers are connected. They’re both profiting on having beautiful women in there and selling the experience of being around beautiful women. But indeed, the food’s not that great.
COWEN: In this whole arrangement, how happy are the club girls? But relative to their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar.
MEARS: Well, it’s an interesting question. I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP — they’re motivated by a range of things. For many of them, because they’re recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry — and that was one thing that I found in my first book, that most models don’t make very much money — they actually need to eat. They don’t have very much money. So the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks, like expenses paid, wining and dining, and these experiences that models otherwise can’t afford.
Which is ironic because, for you, Tyler, you’re looking for a good restaurant, and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people. The reality is, most of them probably can’t afford to eat in those places on their own. Or maybe they’re actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal. So in that sense, there’s a tradeoff that’s clear. And I think that the promoters in this VIP clubland do subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry.
But the other question is, what else would a woman that’s, say, 20, of limited financial means, be doing in the city? Well, there’s lots of other things. In some ways it appeals to a woman’s taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous, high-end world and participate in it even for a short while. Definitely there’s a tradeoff. And people talked about it as being a win-win.
There are downsides, clearly, that they recognize — that when the beautiful women go to these restaurants, the food comes out, but you don’t get to choose what you want off of the menu. It comes out family style, and usually it’s the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that’s cheaper. If it’s a sushi restaurant, it’s never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to. It’s the cucumber rolls. [laughs]
So there’s some downside to it, in that the women don’t get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they’re going to sit and what exactly they get to do, but they do get a piece of this affluent city that they would otherwise be excluded from.
by Ashley Mearns and Tyler Cowan, Marginal Utility | Read more:
Image: Mercatus Center
Thursday, June 4, 2020
As the Country Burns, Trump Gives Up
A more comprehensive abdication of leadership could scarcely be imagined.
America has now lost more than 105,000 people to a still-uncontrolled virus. Some 40 million are out of work, with the economy in free fall. From coast to coast, cities are burning, protests raging and chaos spiraling in an immense outpouring of pain and anger over police violence that seems only to intensify by the day. Not since the Vietnam War has the country been gripped with such unrest, or faced with so many serious crises at once.
And what is the president of the United States doing amid all this? Tweeting, mostly.
In addition to his usual mix of insults and grievances, Donald Trump has lately used his Twitter feed to air baffling conspiracy theories, express lurid fantasies and offer idle observations on the headlines of the day, as though someone else runs the government. He has scarcely even acknowledged the source of the national turmoil — the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer — let alone effectively addressed it. He betrays no urgency, offers no ideas, and shows no inclination to rise to the moment or heed the voice of the people protesting at his doorstep.
On Monday, after an unnerving speech in the Rose Garden, Trump had police officers clear out mostly peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House — aggressively using smoke canisters, flash grenades and batons, and risking their safety in the process — so he could stage a photo at a nearby church, thereby infuriating the local bishop, the mayor of Washington and a neighboring police department requisitioned for the stunt. It nearly defied belief.
To ask this president to get serious seems almost comically futile at this late date. Except it isn’t funny. The total absence of executive leadership has exacted an appalling price. A coherent national strategy for combating Covid-19 is still nowhere in evidence, even as the president’s coronavirus task force winds itself down. Faced with an economic calamity, the White House offers only blithe optimism and self-congratulation. Amid the worst civil unrest in a generation, an expression of empathy or an exhortation to better angels might palliate the national mood. Yet even these basic steps seem to be utterly beyond Trump’s capacity.
A normal president would recognize the horror of Floyd’s death and all it represents. He or she would insist that riots accomplish nothing productive, while still conceding that the frustrations they express come from centuries of discrimination. And any occupant of the Oval Office should understand that helping unite and repair the country in a time like this is part of the job description, something Trump entirely fails to grasp.
Rarely in American history has a president been so ill-suited for a moment or so decisively overmatched by events. In a crisis demanding resolve and competence, the commander in chief sits at home, feebly tapping on his phone. It’s a potent metaphor — and a national shame.
America has now lost more than 105,000 people to a still-uncontrolled virus. Some 40 million are out of work, with the economy in free fall. From coast to coast, cities are burning, protests raging and chaos spiraling in an immense outpouring of pain and anger over police violence that seems only to intensify by the day. Not since the Vietnam War has the country been gripped with such unrest, or faced with so many serious crises at once.
And what is the president of the United States doing amid all this? Tweeting, mostly.
In addition to his usual mix of insults and grievances, Donald Trump has lately used his Twitter feed to air baffling conspiracy theories, express lurid fantasies and offer idle observations on the headlines of the day, as though someone else runs the government. He has scarcely even acknowledged the source of the national turmoil — the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer — let alone effectively addressed it. He betrays no urgency, offers no ideas, and shows no inclination to rise to the moment or heed the voice of the people protesting at his doorstep.
On Monday, after an unnerving speech in the Rose Garden, Trump had police officers clear out mostly peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House — aggressively using smoke canisters, flash grenades and batons, and risking their safety in the process — so he could stage a photo at a nearby church, thereby infuriating the local bishop, the mayor of Washington and a neighboring police department requisitioned for the stunt. It nearly defied belief.To ask this president to get serious seems almost comically futile at this late date. Except it isn’t funny. The total absence of executive leadership has exacted an appalling price. A coherent national strategy for combating Covid-19 is still nowhere in evidence, even as the president’s coronavirus task force winds itself down. Faced with an economic calamity, the White House offers only blithe optimism and self-congratulation. Amid the worst civil unrest in a generation, an expression of empathy or an exhortation to better angels might palliate the national mood. Yet even these basic steps seem to be utterly beyond Trump’s capacity.
A normal president would recognize the horror of Floyd’s death and all it represents. He or she would insist that riots accomplish nothing productive, while still conceding that the frustrations they express come from centuries of discrimination. And any occupant of the Oval Office should understand that helping unite and repair the country in a time like this is part of the job description, something Trump entirely fails to grasp.
Rarely in American history has a president been so ill-suited for a moment or so decisively overmatched by events. In a crisis demanding resolve and competence, the commander in chief sits at home, feebly tapping on his phone. It’s a potent metaphor — and a national shame.
by Editorial Board, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. Reprinted in full (and taken down if requested by the authors).]
Sports Have Never Felt More Meaningless Than Right Now
One of the many frustrations people have had with the ongoing battles between Major League Baseball owners and the players union about how to get the sport going in 2020 — currently, neither party can even get the other to review their proposals, let alone negotiate on them — is that the two sides are blowing an incredible opportunity to return on July 4. The idea that baseball — a sport whose best players left at the height of their careers to fight in World War II, whose New York teams were a balm after September 11 — is inextricably tied to trying moments in American history is ingrained in the romanticism of the game. Surely owners had that in mind when they proposed Independence Day as a resumption point in the first place. July 4! America! Hot dogs! Apple pie! How could baseball miss such a fastball right down the middle?
But suddenly, after the last week of American history, the idea of a glorious return of the game on the nation’s birthday seems less triumphant than almost unseemly. After two months inside, the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?
This is not baseball’s fault, of course. It has felt inappropriate to talk about any sort of diversion in the wake of this tumult, the president’s rapid public meltdown, the gassing of peaceful American citizens for a photo op, and the sense that everything might just be falling apart; I haven’t noticed people having heated debates about the Dakota Johnson romantic comedy that came out last weekend either, after all. But it sure does make the rush to get back in time for an artificial, rally-together-America deadline seem awfully unnecessary, and maybe even actively ill-advised. Sports, like much of entertainment, exist as a distraction. But, boy, does it seem irresponsible to be distracted right now. (...)
The NBA, typically, has been better than other leagues about this — Spurs coach Gregg Popovich cut loose on Trump and police violence to The Nation’s Dave Zirin — but again, these were issues that Popovich (and his fellow coach Steve Kerr, who said “this is why racists shouldn’t be allowed to be President” on Twitter) had already spoken up about, and ones that have little to do with the sport itself. And while the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver have been ahead of the curve on issues of race and power, eventually they have to get back to the business of playing games. Doing so has been heralded as a “return to normal” since the beginning of this pandemic. But that idea, and that phrasing, looks reactionary, even retrograde and damaging, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the demonstrations across the country. “Return to normal” stops sounding like a plea for reopening the economy and the world of sports and more like something we should be actively fighting against. The whole argument for getting sports back quickly — other than the financial argument — was to give us all some way to get away from our troubles and fears. But maybe we should be facing those troubles and fears. Maybe that’s what this is all about.
There is still a long way to go for sports to return. The NBA has to figure out its format and health procedures; MLB and the MLS have to figure out their financial issues; college sports has to figure out how in the world to justify unpaid college students smashing into each other during a public-health crisis. There is much work to be done. Perhaps it is best if this work is done in private. On Sunday night, the union-management battles of both MLB and MLS splashed into public view — the MLB players gave their seemingly reasonable response to the owners’ proposal but were reportedly met with even more contention (though there might be at last a small sliver of negotiating room in that regard), and the MLS owners threatened to lock out their players before a summer tournament in Orlando began. Regardless of your thoughts on the merits of each side’s viewpoints, when you looked around at America burning, it was hard not to think, Honestly, who gives a shit about any of this right now? Eventually sports are going to return, and we will all cheer. But maybe it’s okay if, in this particular moment, they take their time.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Five Ideas for How Sports TV Could Adapt to a Fanless Universe (The Ringer).]
But suddenly, after the last week of American history, the idea of a glorious return of the game on the nation’s birthday seems less triumphant than almost unseemly. After two months inside, the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?
This is not baseball’s fault, of course. It has felt inappropriate to talk about any sort of diversion in the wake of this tumult, the president’s rapid public meltdown, the gassing of peaceful American citizens for a photo op, and the sense that everything might just be falling apart; I haven’t noticed people having heated debates about the Dakota Johnson romantic comedy that came out last weekend either, after all. But it sure does make the rush to get back in time for an artificial, rally-together-America deadline seem awfully unnecessary, and maybe even actively ill-advised. Sports, like much of entertainment, exist as a distraction. But, boy, does it seem irresponsible to be distracted right now. (...)The NBA, typically, has been better than other leagues about this — Spurs coach Gregg Popovich cut loose on Trump and police violence to The Nation’s Dave Zirin — but again, these were issues that Popovich (and his fellow coach Steve Kerr, who said “this is why racists shouldn’t be allowed to be President” on Twitter) had already spoken up about, and ones that have little to do with the sport itself. And while the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver have been ahead of the curve on issues of race and power, eventually they have to get back to the business of playing games. Doing so has been heralded as a “return to normal” since the beginning of this pandemic. But that idea, and that phrasing, looks reactionary, even retrograde and damaging, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the demonstrations across the country. “Return to normal” stops sounding like a plea for reopening the economy and the world of sports and more like something we should be actively fighting against. The whole argument for getting sports back quickly — other than the financial argument — was to give us all some way to get away from our troubles and fears. But maybe we should be facing those troubles and fears. Maybe that’s what this is all about.
There is still a long way to go for sports to return. The NBA has to figure out its format and health procedures; MLB and the MLS have to figure out their financial issues; college sports has to figure out how in the world to justify unpaid college students smashing into each other during a public-health crisis. There is much work to be done. Perhaps it is best if this work is done in private. On Sunday night, the union-management battles of both MLB and MLS splashed into public view — the MLB players gave their seemingly reasonable response to the owners’ proposal but were reportedly met with even more contention (though there might be at last a small sliver of negotiating room in that regard), and the MLS owners threatened to lock out their players before a summer tournament in Orlando began. Regardless of your thoughts on the merits of each side’s viewpoints, when you looked around at America burning, it was hard not to think, Honestly, who gives a shit about any of this right now? Eventually sports are going to return, and we will all cheer. But maybe it’s okay if, in this particular moment, they take their time.
by Will Leitch, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Five Ideas for How Sports TV Could Adapt to a Fanless Universe (The Ringer).]
Why Everything Feels So Surreal
Maybe it was when you were standing in line at the grocery store—not at the checkout stand, but in front of the grocery store, neatly arranged 6 feet apart from your fellow shoppers.
Maybe it was when you visited your grandma at the nursing home but had to stand outside her window, talking to her on your phone.
Maybe it was when you heard a New York City doctor talk about how her hospital got so overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, they had to bring in a refrigerated semi trailer to hold the dead.
Maybe it was when you saw that in the space of a week, jobless claims in the US went from 282,000 to 3.3 million, as the restaurant and bar and hospitality industries have imploded.
Maybe it was when you realized that toilet paper doesn’t grow on trees after all.
This is surreal, you said to yourself. Maybe over and over. You’ve heard your friends and family say it: just surreal. We in the media call it surreal all the time. Because it is surreal, “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” so says Merriam-Webster. (...)
Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated. We can’t go to happy hour, we can’t get toilet paper when we want it, we can’t plan our annual trip. “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says.
The upending of our normal lives also obliterated the routines, however mundane, that keep us levelheaded: getting up, putting on pants, making breakfast and coffee, commuting to work. “Research does show that when you take people away from the things that are familiar to them, it's surprisingly easy for people to lose track of themselves—their identity, the things that are important to them,” says Susan Clayton, a psychologist at the College of Wooster. “This is one thing that you see happening in cults. And that may sound like a stretch, but when people try and recruit other people into cults, one of the strategies is to take them away from what's normal.” When the recruits are no longer surrounded by their usual physical surroundings and social interactions, it's easier to convince them to adopt new practices and reconsider what’s important to them.
“Our routine is the scaffolding of life,” says Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at the Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD. “It's how we organize information and our time. And without it, we can feel really lost.”
With that comes tremendous stress. The lonely and isolated are now more lonely and isolated. Existing conflicts and stressors, like substance abuse and abusive relationships, can resurface or worsen. “I'm also really worried about families,” says Heinz. “I'm worried about increases in alcohol use. I'm worried about domestic violence. I'm worried about child abuse, because parents are under-resourced.” (...)
If we’d been through this kind of thing before, in the absence of cohesive guidance from the top maybe we could have calmly guided ourselves. But without clear advice for how to handle an unprecedented crisis, we feel helpless. “I think it conveys a sort of dreamlike quality,” says Clayton. “It doesn't feel real because we have no points of reference.”
[ed. See also: All This Chaos Might Be Giving You 'Crisis Fatigue' (Wired).]
Maybe it was when you visited your grandma at the nursing home but had to stand outside her window, talking to her on your phone.
Maybe it was when you heard a New York City doctor talk about how her hospital got so overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, they had to bring in a refrigerated semi trailer to hold the dead.
Maybe it was when you saw that in the space of a week, jobless claims in the US went from 282,000 to 3.3 million, as the restaurant and bar and hospitality industries have imploded.
Maybe it was when you realized that toilet paper doesn’t grow on trees after all.This is surreal, you said to yourself. Maybe over and over. You’ve heard your friends and family say it: just surreal. We in the media call it surreal all the time. Because it is surreal, “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” so says Merriam-Webster. (...)
Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated. We can’t go to happy hour, we can’t get toilet paper when we want it, we can’t plan our annual trip. “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says.
The upending of our normal lives also obliterated the routines, however mundane, that keep us levelheaded: getting up, putting on pants, making breakfast and coffee, commuting to work. “Research does show that when you take people away from the things that are familiar to them, it's surprisingly easy for people to lose track of themselves—their identity, the things that are important to them,” says Susan Clayton, a psychologist at the College of Wooster. “This is one thing that you see happening in cults. And that may sound like a stretch, but when people try and recruit other people into cults, one of the strategies is to take them away from what's normal.” When the recruits are no longer surrounded by their usual physical surroundings and social interactions, it's easier to convince them to adopt new practices and reconsider what’s important to them.
“Our routine is the scaffolding of life,” says Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at the Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD. “It's how we organize information and our time. And without it, we can feel really lost.”
With that comes tremendous stress. The lonely and isolated are now more lonely and isolated. Existing conflicts and stressors, like substance abuse and abusive relationships, can resurface or worsen. “I'm also really worried about families,” says Heinz. “I'm worried about increases in alcohol use. I'm worried about domestic violence. I'm worried about child abuse, because parents are under-resourced.” (...)
If we’d been through this kind of thing before, in the absence of cohesive guidance from the top maybe we could have calmly guided ourselves. But without clear advice for how to handle an unprecedented crisis, we feel helpless. “I think it conveys a sort of dreamlike quality,” says Clayton. “It doesn't feel real because we have no points of reference.”
[ed. See also: All This Chaos Might Be Giving You 'Crisis Fatigue' (Wired).]
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
With Precautions, Golf Is Back. So Are Scoring Squabbles.
The culture of golf is swathed in a code of honor, with players compelled to call penalties on themselves. Golf during a pandemic, however, has introduced quirks to test the game’s noble protocols.
New safety regulations, adopted by golf courses to adhere to coronavirus guidelines, have altered certain game fundamentals and left some golfers quibbling over artificially low scores — which can in turn upend the hierarchy, and gambling outcomes, of a regular golfing foursome. Even the hole in one, golf’s holy grail, is prompting disputes over what constitutes a holed tee shot.
“There’s definitely been a little change in attitudes,” Howie Friday, the head golf professional at the Stanley Golf Course in New Britain, Conn., said with a chuckle last week. In April, Friday had grown accustomed to scores of golfers thanking him for the opportunity to play.
“A month ago, it was nurses, doctors and golf pros and we couldn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Not so much anymore — back to normal.”
The principal source of consternation, a concern shared mostly by serious not casual golfers, is new health guidelines that have affected the golf hole itself. In an effort to reduce high-touch surfaces from golfers reaching into holes to retrieve their balls or removing the flagstick, course operators have tried various solutions, including raising the white liner cup, which is normally inserted in the hole, to about two inches above the green surface. An approaching ball bounces off the cup liner instead of falling into the hole.
The United States Golf Association, a national governing body, issued a temporary rule amendment in March that qualified such a situation as a holed shot — with caveats (more on that later).
Other golf courses have instead inserted into the hole a small piece of foam, similar to noodle-shaped flotation devices used in swimming pools. It allows the ball to descend into the hole, but only slightly, so a player can easily retrieve it without touching anything else.
Golfers, however, have universally found that aiming at the raised hole liner is easier than putting in normal conditions, in part because sometimes the ball barely skims its edge. The same shot, without the modification, would likely lip out or scoot past the hole. Golfers have also appeared to putt more confidently, knowing that an overly aggressive putt would just bang into the cup liner and still be counted as a holed shot.
The pool-noodle option has its complexities, too, since some well-struck putts seem to descend into the hole only to rebound and keep going.
“Every day, we have that question over and over,” Friday said. “Was this putt in or was it out?”
New safety regulations, adopted by golf courses to adhere to coronavirus guidelines, have altered certain game fundamentals and left some golfers quibbling over artificially low scores — which can in turn upend the hierarchy, and gambling outcomes, of a regular golfing foursome. Even the hole in one, golf’s holy grail, is prompting disputes over what constitutes a holed tee shot.
“There’s definitely been a little change in attitudes,” Howie Friday, the head golf professional at the Stanley Golf Course in New Britain, Conn., said with a chuckle last week. In April, Friday had grown accustomed to scores of golfers thanking him for the opportunity to play.“A month ago, it was nurses, doctors and golf pros and we couldn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Not so much anymore — back to normal.”
The principal source of consternation, a concern shared mostly by serious not casual golfers, is new health guidelines that have affected the golf hole itself. In an effort to reduce high-touch surfaces from golfers reaching into holes to retrieve their balls or removing the flagstick, course operators have tried various solutions, including raising the white liner cup, which is normally inserted in the hole, to about two inches above the green surface. An approaching ball bounces off the cup liner instead of falling into the hole.
The United States Golf Association, a national governing body, issued a temporary rule amendment in March that qualified such a situation as a holed shot — with caveats (more on that later).
Other golf courses have instead inserted into the hole a small piece of foam, similar to noodle-shaped flotation devices used in swimming pools. It allows the ball to descend into the hole, but only slightly, so a player can easily retrieve it without touching anything else.
Golfers, however, have universally found that aiming at the raised hole liner is easier than putting in normal conditions, in part because sometimes the ball barely skims its edge. The same shot, without the modification, would likely lip out or scoot past the hole. Golfers have also appeared to putt more confidently, knowing that an overly aggressive putt would just bang into the cup liner and still be counted as a holed shot.
The pool-noodle option has its complexities, too, since some well-struck putts seem to descend into the hole only to rebound and keep going.
“Every day, we have that question over and over,” Friday said. “Was this putt in or was it out?”
by Bill Pennington, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michael Hanson for The New York Times
[ed. See also: As Golf Courses Reopen, New Players Take Up the Long Walk (NYT).]
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Monday, June 1, 2020
The Next Pandemic: Homesickness
When will we be able to fly again, like we did in the Before Times? Earlier this month, James Fallows offered a grim answer to that question in the Atlantic, surveying experts who thought a return to normalcy might come anywhere between four years and “never.” And for a Slate roundtable, Andrés Martinez asked three experts the same question: One thought maybe 2022 or 2023, and another thought that in the course of the industry’s contractions, airlines might solve their many problems by raising prices, making safe air travel inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy.
To wonder about travel is to mourn lost pleasures—when will I ever see London again?—but also to contemplate matters much more intimate and heartbreaking. My immediate family lives in New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. My extended family is in Vermont, New Hampshire, California, Indiana, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, and Idaho. (Did I miss anyone?) We usually get together at least once a year, at a family camp on a lake in New Hampshire; this year’s outing has just been officially canceled. Will I get to see my longtime friends at our annual retreat in New York? I seriously doubt it. Will I even get to New Hampshire to see my parents—a trip I used to see as the bare minimum when it comes to summer travel? (We could possibly drive, but with a germ-spreading preschooler in tow, our uncertainty about the safety of hotels and rest stops feels acute.) The question fills me with a flood of nostalgia—for the loons on the lake, the crickets in the fields, and the lilies in my mom’s garden.
For those living across borders and oceans from their family, the situation is even worse. A friend who moved to Australia two years ago—and now has an 8-month-old baby—was planning to visit her family in the States multiple times this year; that will have to wait. “Hands down, the hardest part of having a baby right now is feeling so far away from my family,” she wrote to me. Another, stuck across the U.S.-Canada border from his elderly parents, is unsure whether and when he and his family can get across to see them, and feels “sadness and fear” when he thinks about the separation: “The future has become a zone of mystery, and it’s often easier to avoid talking about it.”
I asked readers in our Slate Parenting Facebook group about their own feelings on this question and got a flood of sadness. Children change fast, and older people have fewer years left than the rest of us have. For parents in the middle, trying to make sure that grandparents get to enjoy as much of their grandchildren’s lives as possible, the situation seems particularly cruel.
“Our trip to see my father in Spain in June was canceled, and his trip here for my son’s bar mitzvah in November may also be canceled,” one person wrote. “We normally see him twice a year, and it’s really hard. I can take a year, a year and a half, but I have to think we will be able to see him again regularly in the future.” Another admitted feeling new resentment toward a parent who had chosen, for reasons of joy, to live far away in a beautiful place, relatively inaccessible to family. (As the sibling of a dear someone who adopted Alaska as his home, I see you.) A third was contemplating leaving the Midwest to move to the East Coast, in order to be near family. “It is an extremely difficult decision,” she wrote, “to choose staying and not seeing family for the next year, or moving and risking long-term unemployment in the event we can’t find a job in the new state.”
Of course—as other respondents to my post reminded us—the world is full of people who have moved very far away from family and don’t get to see them for years due to a lack of money. American history is also replete with examples of people who, for various reasons, found themselves separated from family by huge distances. Many suffered for it. In Homesickness: An American History, Susan Matt found that homesickness and its companion, nostalgia, were omnipresent in American life before the 20th century. Despite any impression we might have that the pioneers sported stiff upper lips out there in their little houses on the prairie, the historical record is full of people weeping for the homes they left behind. During the Civil War, doctors for the Union Army diagnosed thousands of soldiers as suffering from “nostalgia”; some military bands were warned not to play the popular song “Home, Sweet Home,” lest their listeners reflect too much on what they were missing.
Perhaps we will look back at the decades before the pandemic as a historical aberration: a singular time, when a certain, privileged group of Americans could expect to use air travel to sustain their family ties and choose their homes accordingly.
To wonder about travel is to mourn lost pleasures—when will I ever see London again?—but also to contemplate matters much more intimate and heartbreaking. My immediate family lives in New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. My extended family is in Vermont, New Hampshire, California, Indiana, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, and Idaho. (Did I miss anyone?) We usually get together at least once a year, at a family camp on a lake in New Hampshire; this year’s outing has just been officially canceled. Will I get to see my longtime friends at our annual retreat in New York? I seriously doubt it. Will I even get to New Hampshire to see my parents—a trip I used to see as the bare minimum when it comes to summer travel? (We could possibly drive, but with a germ-spreading preschooler in tow, our uncertainty about the safety of hotels and rest stops feels acute.) The question fills me with a flood of nostalgia—for the loons on the lake, the crickets in the fields, and the lilies in my mom’s garden.
For those living across borders and oceans from their family, the situation is even worse. A friend who moved to Australia two years ago—and now has an 8-month-old baby—was planning to visit her family in the States multiple times this year; that will have to wait. “Hands down, the hardest part of having a baby right now is feeling so far away from my family,” she wrote to me. Another, stuck across the U.S.-Canada border from his elderly parents, is unsure whether and when he and his family can get across to see them, and feels “sadness and fear” when he thinks about the separation: “The future has become a zone of mystery, and it’s often easier to avoid talking about it.”I asked readers in our Slate Parenting Facebook group about their own feelings on this question and got a flood of sadness. Children change fast, and older people have fewer years left than the rest of us have. For parents in the middle, trying to make sure that grandparents get to enjoy as much of their grandchildren’s lives as possible, the situation seems particularly cruel.
“Our trip to see my father in Spain in June was canceled, and his trip here for my son’s bar mitzvah in November may also be canceled,” one person wrote. “We normally see him twice a year, and it’s really hard. I can take a year, a year and a half, but I have to think we will be able to see him again regularly in the future.” Another admitted feeling new resentment toward a parent who had chosen, for reasons of joy, to live far away in a beautiful place, relatively inaccessible to family. (As the sibling of a dear someone who adopted Alaska as his home, I see you.) A third was contemplating leaving the Midwest to move to the East Coast, in order to be near family. “It is an extremely difficult decision,” she wrote, “to choose staying and not seeing family for the next year, or moving and risking long-term unemployment in the event we can’t find a job in the new state.”
Of course—as other respondents to my post reminded us—the world is full of people who have moved very far away from family and don’t get to see them for years due to a lack of money. American history is also replete with examples of people who, for various reasons, found themselves separated from family by huge distances. Many suffered for it. In Homesickness: An American History, Susan Matt found that homesickness and its companion, nostalgia, were omnipresent in American life before the 20th century. Despite any impression we might have that the pioneers sported stiff upper lips out there in their little houses on the prairie, the historical record is full of people weeping for the homes they left behind. During the Civil War, doctors for the Union Army diagnosed thousands of soldiers as suffering from “nostalgia”; some military bands were warned not to play the popular song “Home, Sweet Home,” lest their listeners reflect too much on what they were missing.
Perhaps we will look back at the decades before the pandemic as a historical aberration: a singular time, when a certain, privileged group of Americans could expect to use air travel to sustain their family ties and choose their homes accordingly.
by Rebecca Onion, Slate | Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photos by Nataly-Nete/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and AlxeyPnferov/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Image: Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photos by Nataly-Nete/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and AlxeyPnferov/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Minneapolis Police Now Requiring Officers To Undergo Ergonomics Training To Better Protect Knees
MINNEAPOLIS - Apologizing for a lack of oversight following the death of George Floyd after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned him to the ground, Minneapolis Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they are now requiring all officers to undergo ergonomics training to better protect their knees. “After reviewing video of the incident, we are disturbed by the officer repeatedly placing excessive stress on the knee joint, and will immediately implement stretching protocols to ensure this never happens again,” said a spokesperson for the Minneapolis police, noting that the officer’s actions were completely antithetical to the department’s standards for long-term joint health. “Frankly, the officer could have done permanent damage to his ACL while crushing a suspect’s windpipe like that. If our officers are going to be out in the field kneeing people in the neck over and over again, that’s a repeat-use injury just waiting to happen, and we must address it. We need to ensure all of our officers know how to act in a more dangerous situation where they may be required to lift with their backs.” The Minneapolis Police Department added that normally they would place the involved officer on desk duty, but in this case they didn’t want to risk causing further damage to his knees.
The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First (The Onion).]
Amazon’s Big Breakdown
In the middle of March, as Americans faced down a terrifying pandemic caused by a novel and poorly understood virus, only one choice felt certain, or at least safe. It was time for America’s all-purpose disaster response; it was time to stock up. But this time-honored routine was newly challenging. The broad, sterile, fluorescent aisles of supermarkets and big-box retailers suddenly felt more like viral gantlets. In some cities, lines stretched out the doors, suggesting chaos and barren shelves inside. In many states, whole categories of brickand-mortar retail were shut down, either voluntarily or by edict. It was, at perhaps more than any moment in its history, Amazon’s time to shine.
At the online retailer, however, things were not going well. For many shoppers, it was the first place to turn, but demand for certain items was overwhelming the company’s ability to fulfill orders, not just for panic buyers but in general. By March 17, Amazon had suspended shipments to its warehouses of items that were not in ‘‘high demand,’’ scrambling, and often failing, to keep up with orders for soap, sanitizers and face masks, as well as a wide range of household staples, including food. By then, customers looking for these items were, for the first time, experiencing an Amazon that was conspicuously broken. Empty shelves in a supermarket are self-explanatory. But on Amazon, customers were confronted with failures that were much weirder and harder to understand, with, of course, nobody around to explain them.
Searches for antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer turned up page after page of irrelevant products, scams and overpriced items with shipping times weeks or months in the future. (By the end of March, the company said it had removed over 3,900 seller accounts and half a million products in the U.S. for price-gouging alone.) As time went on, widening shortages told the story of customers’ evolving attitudes, lifestyles and needs in the time of Covid-19: webcams, exercise equipment, video-game consoles, diapers, bleach. (By April, hair clippers.) In categories under high demand, well-known brands appeared to be sold out, as were direct competitors, also-rans and half-related items. By May, some customers searching for hand sanitizer were still being presented, on the first page of search results, with Kindle e-books about how to mix it at home.
Here, in a time of crisis, Amazon’s vaunted e-commerce machinery was failing, and at the very tasks for which its millions of customers flocked to it. All of a sudden, the Everything Store wasn’t even as well stocked as, say, an urban corner store, or a gas station, or a smaller online retailer. To customers trying to place orders, it didn’t just seem overwhelmed — the site seemed broken, more like a sprawling, malfunctioning machine than a retailer under unusual stress. More than just failing them, it seemed to be exposing them to scams and exploitation, a peculiar sort of store that seemed to have lost control of its own shelves. There were signs of distress in Amazon’s vast network of fulfillment centers, too. Employees were falling ill. Some workers were staying home out of fear for their own health; others staged walkouts.
In so many ways, this was the future Amazon had been planning for: Brick-and-mortar stores were closed, consumers were eager to order all manner of things online and the brand was all but synonymous, already, with e-commerce. And yet in a statement released with Amazon’s first-quarter earnings, the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, braced investors for a rocky period. ‘‘If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,’’ he said. About $4 billion in expected operating profit for the next quarter — ‘‘and perhaps a bit more’’ — would instead be absorbed into Covid-related expenses. The company had experienced a surge in demand, but quarterly operating income had fallen by 43 percent in North America year over year. Internationally, it had lost money. In the statement, Bezos praised his company’s ‘‘adaptability and durability’’ but said the Covid crisis had been ‘‘the hardest time we’ve ever faced.’’
In April, however, Amazon announced that it had hired 175,000 workers in its fulfillment-anddelivery network — a sign of supreme confidence. Wall Street, too, has proved to be more confident in the company than ever; after a brief dip at the height of Amazon’s Covid-related troubles, the company’s stock price is hovering near a record high, assuring Bezos’s status as the richest person in the world by a large margin. Indeed, few doubt that Amazon will overcome this ‘‘hardest time.’’ To customers and investors alike, the company has long been the alternative to modes of shopping that may now be in accelerated and terminal decline. But for a few weeks, Amazon — the borderline-magic website that makes things appear on your doorstep — showed us what it was really made of, revealing something more complicated and delicate than its seamless surface usually lets on: machinery half-built and already straining under its own success, supported by an army of invisible middlemen and kept running by hundreds of thousands of workers.
As of its most recent disclosure, Amazon employed 840,400 workers around the world. More than 150 million people subscribed to Prime, paying an annual fee in exchange for, among other things, access to free, fast shipping. In recent years, Amazon has been scaling up aggressively in virtually every dimension that matters: Each year, its systems are bolstered to handle more people, more demand, more volume, more stress. Since 2014, its revenue has tripled.
Entering 2020, well into its third decade of ruthless expansion, Amazon was operating with a powerful tailwind. More Americans were doing more shopping online; its biggest online competitors were still hopelessly behind; the collapse of American brick-and-mortar retail — Amazon’s true competition — was accelerating, and its acquisition of Whole Foods had successfully given the company a way into another industry on which it had ambitious designs. For regular customers, ordering from Amazon is less an experience than a routine — a repetitive, second-nature interaction with a machine that brings you things; a faint but recognizable consumer version of the processes that repeat, ever faster, in Amazon’s warehouses.
It benefits Amazon to be understood as an online store because it leads to underestimation. Amazon competes with Walmart, but Walmart isn’t its competition — at least not in the way that Target was to Walmart, or Walmart was to Kmart. Rather than a retail operation with a website, Amazon is better understood as a set of far more ambitious commerce-related systems overseen by a single company. This arrangement might be easiest to see in Amazon Web Services. Through A.W.S., Amazon rents hosting and computing infrastructure to companies big and small. Instead of buying, operating and updating their own data centers, clients including Netflix, Apple and the United States government rent space and computing power from Amazon. Where possible, Amazon engages with this infrastructure as something like a customer. Netflix runs on A.W.S. — but so does Amazon’s Netflix competitor, Prime Video.
Beneath the surface, Amazon’s retail operation works in much the same way. It is not a unified retail company through which Amazon sells products it has sourced or manufactured itself. It’s a platform connecting millions of customers with millions of sellers — none, of course, as large as Amazon itself. In exchange for a fee, Amazon lets a wide variety of parties sell goods through Amazon, right alongside those sold by Amazon. In exchange for more fees, Amazon will let you advertise those items against others, and its own. In accordance with another fee structure, Amazon will receive your products into its warehouses, process your orders and ship them to customers with the urgency associated with Amazon Prime, with which your listings will be badged. More than half of the products sold through Amazon are sold by third parties, many of which are effectively leasing floor space and logistics capacity — not computer servers but an actual work force — from the company. For brands and manufacturers, not entirely unlike regular users, Amazon is a thing you sign up for and give money to and then live inside, and with, for better or for worse.
Amazon’s systems are designed to scale up without clear limits. ‘‘On the internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs,’’ Bezos told Businessweek in 2001. ‘‘You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small.’’ Amazon, two decades later, is a collection of systems that are either already big or that Bezos believes might one day become big: its stores, including Amazon, Zappos and Whole Foods; Amazon Web Services; its media platforms, Prime Video and Music, the Kindle store and Audible; its newer acquisitions and platforms, like the streaming site Twitch, or Ring, the home-security-camera company. Most Amazon investments are engineered for the possibility, at least, of category supremacy. Some have already achieved it.
[ed. Recommended: Cookie Remover (Chrome) if you're having problems viewing NYT articles.]
At the online retailer, however, things were not going well. For many shoppers, it was the first place to turn, but demand for certain items was overwhelming the company’s ability to fulfill orders, not just for panic buyers but in general. By March 17, Amazon had suspended shipments to its warehouses of items that were not in ‘‘high demand,’’ scrambling, and often failing, to keep up with orders for soap, sanitizers and face masks, as well as a wide range of household staples, including food. By then, customers looking for these items were, for the first time, experiencing an Amazon that was conspicuously broken. Empty shelves in a supermarket are self-explanatory. But on Amazon, customers were confronted with failures that were much weirder and harder to understand, with, of course, nobody around to explain them.
Searches for antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer turned up page after page of irrelevant products, scams and overpriced items with shipping times weeks or months in the future. (By the end of March, the company said it had removed over 3,900 seller accounts and half a million products in the U.S. for price-gouging alone.) As time went on, widening shortages told the story of customers’ evolving attitudes, lifestyles and needs in the time of Covid-19: webcams, exercise equipment, video-game consoles, diapers, bleach. (By April, hair clippers.) In categories under high demand, well-known brands appeared to be sold out, as were direct competitors, also-rans and half-related items. By May, some customers searching for hand sanitizer were still being presented, on the first page of search results, with Kindle e-books about how to mix it at home.Here, in a time of crisis, Amazon’s vaunted e-commerce machinery was failing, and at the very tasks for which its millions of customers flocked to it. All of a sudden, the Everything Store wasn’t even as well stocked as, say, an urban corner store, or a gas station, or a smaller online retailer. To customers trying to place orders, it didn’t just seem overwhelmed — the site seemed broken, more like a sprawling, malfunctioning machine than a retailer under unusual stress. More than just failing them, it seemed to be exposing them to scams and exploitation, a peculiar sort of store that seemed to have lost control of its own shelves. There were signs of distress in Amazon’s vast network of fulfillment centers, too. Employees were falling ill. Some workers were staying home out of fear for their own health; others staged walkouts.
In so many ways, this was the future Amazon had been planning for: Brick-and-mortar stores were closed, consumers were eager to order all manner of things online and the brand was all but synonymous, already, with e-commerce. And yet in a statement released with Amazon’s first-quarter earnings, the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, braced investors for a rocky period. ‘‘If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,’’ he said. About $4 billion in expected operating profit for the next quarter — ‘‘and perhaps a bit more’’ — would instead be absorbed into Covid-related expenses. The company had experienced a surge in demand, but quarterly operating income had fallen by 43 percent in North America year over year. Internationally, it had lost money. In the statement, Bezos praised his company’s ‘‘adaptability and durability’’ but said the Covid crisis had been ‘‘the hardest time we’ve ever faced.’’
In April, however, Amazon announced that it had hired 175,000 workers in its fulfillment-anddelivery network — a sign of supreme confidence. Wall Street, too, has proved to be more confident in the company than ever; after a brief dip at the height of Amazon’s Covid-related troubles, the company’s stock price is hovering near a record high, assuring Bezos’s status as the richest person in the world by a large margin. Indeed, few doubt that Amazon will overcome this ‘‘hardest time.’’ To customers and investors alike, the company has long been the alternative to modes of shopping that may now be in accelerated and terminal decline. But for a few weeks, Amazon — the borderline-magic website that makes things appear on your doorstep — showed us what it was really made of, revealing something more complicated and delicate than its seamless surface usually lets on: machinery half-built and already straining under its own success, supported by an army of invisible middlemen and kept running by hundreds of thousands of workers.
As of its most recent disclosure, Amazon employed 840,400 workers around the world. More than 150 million people subscribed to Prime, paying an annual fee in exchange for, among other things, access to free, fast shipping. In recent years, Amazon has been scaling up aggressively in virtually every dimension that matters: Each year, its systems are bolstered to handle more people, more demand, more volume, more stress. Since 2014, its revenue has tripled.
Entering 2020, well into its third decade of ruthless expansion, Amazon was operating with a powerful tailwind. More Americans were doing more shopping online; its biggest online competitors were still hopelessly behind; the collapse of American brick-and-mortar retail — Amazon’s true competition — was accelerating, and its acquisition of Whole Foods had successfully given the company a way into another industry on which it had ambitious designs. For regular customers, ordering from Amazon is less an experience than a routine — a repetitive, second-nature interaction with a machine that brings you things; a faint but recognizable consumer version of the processes that repeat, ever faster, in Amazon’s warehouses.
It benefits Amazon to be understood as an online store because it leads to underestimation. Amazon competes with Walmart, but Walmart isn’t its competition — at least not in the way that Target was to Walmart, or Walmart was to Kmart. Rather than a retail operation with a website, Amazon is better understood as a set of far more ambitious commerce-related systems overseen by a single company. This arrangement might be easiest to see in Amazon Web Services. Through A.W.S., Amazon rents hosting and computing infrastructure to companies big and small. Instead of buying, operating and updating their own data centers, clients including Netflix, Apple and the United States government rent space and computing power from Amazon. Where possible, Amazon engages with this infrastructure as something like a customer. Netflix runs on A.W.S. — but so does Amazon’s Netflix competitor, Prime Video.
Beneath the surface, Amazon’s retail operation works in much the same way. It is not a unified retail company through which Amazon sells products it has sourced or manufactured itself. It’s a platform connecting millions of customers with millions of sellers — none, of course, as large as Amazon itself. In exchange for a fee, Amazon lets a wide variety of parties sell goods through Amazon, right alongside those sold by Amazon. In exchange for more fees, Amazon will let you advertise those items against others, and its own. In accordance with another fee structure, Amazon will receive your products into its warehouses, process your orders and ship them to customers with the urgency associated with Amazon Prime, with which your listings will be badged. More than half of the products sold through Amazon are sold by third parties, many of which are effectively leasing floor space and logistics capacity — not computer servers but an actual work force — from the company. For brands and manufacturers, not entirely unlike regular users, Amazon is a thing you sign up for and give money to and then live inside, and with, for better or for worse.
Amazon’s systems are designed to scale up without clear limits. ‘‘On the internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs,’’ Bezos told Businessweek in 2001. ‘‘You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small.’’ Amazon, two decades later, is a collection of systems that are either already big or that Bezos believes might one day become big: its stores, including Amazon, Zappos and Whole Foods; Amazon Web Services; its media platforms, Prime Video and Music, the Kindle store and Audible; its newer acquisitions and platforms, like the streaming site Twitch, or Ring, the home-security-camera company. Most Amazon investments are engineered for the possibility, at least, of category supremacy. Some have already achieved it.
by John Herrman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie
Over It
We’re over it. The masks, the kids, the Lysol. Over it. The tragic hair, the diminished hygiene, the endless construction next door, the Zoom meetings from hell, the mind games with the unemployment office, the celibacy, the short tempers and long evenings, the looking forward to the mail, the feeling guilty about the mail carrier working double time, the corporate compassion pushing products we didn’t need even before the world went funky and febrile. The now-more-than-everness, the president-said-whatness. Over it. Does 99.1 count as a fever? Over it. Some of us have reached the outskirts of Netflix, and we’re over it. Some of us can’t make rent; over it. And so we are deciding to have a summer after all, it seems. A summer of playing freely, of living dangerously. One hundred thousand dead, 40.8 million jobless claims. Not past it, but over it.
"We can't keep fighting the virus from our living room," Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R, clearly over it, said Wednesday.
"There is a pent-up demand" to resume normal life, said President Donald Trump, also over it, in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "And you're going to see it more and more."
"I think everybody is kind of over it, you know what I mean?" says a Realtor named Toni Mock, on the phone from Jacksonville, Fla.
Her 2019 was better than any of her 25 years in the business. She wants that roaring Trump economy back. One thing that helped her get over it was the "boaters for Trump" flotilla May 16. She hopped in a friend's 40-foot sportfishing boat with some chicken wings and Corona beers (lol) and joined a fleet of vessels in the Intracoastal Waterway. The sun, the breeze, the "Trump 2020" and "Stop the Bulls---" flags, the kayaks and jetskis, the boats dubbed with carefree puns like "Knot to Worry" - it was "almost biblical," according to Mock.
"It's all a part of getting out there and letting everybody know we're not going to die from this."
And what if the coronavirus surges back, because we’re all over it and having a summer, and we do die from this?
"I have God in my heart, so God could take me out any day," Mock says. "He can take me out in any way he wants to. And if it's my time to go, it's my time to go. I don't think anyone I know is personally concerned. None of us are afraid, because we have God in our souls and God in our hearts. And we don't watch CNN." (...)
"Because everything has changed, everything will change," Mendoza says. "I have friends that planned out their life for the next few years, and now they have to do a whole new thing. I think a lot of students, myself included, are trying to release ourselves from expectations of what might have been, and grapple with reality."
Reality means grappling with the idea that the coronavirus might stalk us for years, even if scientists come up with a vaccine. Reality means wondering how much more we can take. Who wouldn't want to be over it? Beats being under it.
The percentage of American adults experiencing depressed moods has doubled during the pandemic, according to an emergency weekly survey conducted in April by the Census Bureau. Nearly half of adults in Mississippi reported symptoms of anxiety or depression; no state had a higher percentage.
This makes sense to Michael W. Preston, a marriage and family therapist in Jackson, Miss.: The lower your socioeconomic class, the higher your anxiety and susceptibility to mental illness. Preston, whose sessions are exclusively online for now, finds that his patients are frustrated either because others are not taking the pandemic seriously enough, or because they're taking it too seriously. Over the past three months he has seen the balm of togetherness replaced by the irritant of politics, made worse by the fact that there's nothing to do but sit in it.
"There's been a spike not necessarily in anxiety related to covid, but related to being stuck," Preston says. "People are just at the end of their wits. 'Michael, I cannot stay home for another day.' They will and they do, but I think most people are talking about being stuck."
byDan Zak, The Washington Post via ADN | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
"We can't keep fighting the virus from our living room," Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R, clearly over it, said Wednesday.
"There is a pent-up demand" to resume normal life, said President Donald Trump, also over it, in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "And you're going to see it more and more.""I think everybody is kind of over it, you know what I mean?" says a Realtor named Toni Mock, on the phone from Jacksonville, Fla.
Her 2019 was better than any of her 25 years in the business. She wants that roaring Trump economy back. One thing that helped her get over it was the "boaters for Trump" flotilla May 16. She hopped in a friend's 40-foot sportfishing boat with some chicken wings and Corona beers (lol) and joined a fleet of vessels in the Intracoastal Waterway. The sun, the breeze, the "Trump 2020" and "Stop the Bulls---" flags, the kayaks and jetskis, the boats dubbed with carefree puns like "Knot to Worry" - it was "almost biblical," according to Mock.
"It's all a part of getting out there and letting everybody know we're not going to die from this."
And what if the coronavirus surges back, because we’re all over it and having a summer, and we do die from this?
"I have God in my heart, so God could take me out any day," Mock says. "He can take me out in any way he wants to. And if it's my time to go, it's my time to go. I don't think anyone I know is personally concerned. None of us are afraid, because we have God in our souls and God in our hearts. And we don't watch CNN." (...)
"Because everything has changed, everything will change," Mendoza says. "I have friends that planned out their life for the next few years, and now they have to do a whole new thing. I think a lot of students, myself included, are trying to release ourselves from expectations of what might have been, and grapple with reality."
Reality means grappling with the idea that the coronavirus might stalk us for years, even if scientists come up with a vaccine. Reality means wondering how much more we can take. Who wouldn't want to be over it? Beats being under it.
The percentage of American adults experiencing depressed moods has doubled during the pandemic, according to an emergency weekly survey conducted in April by the Census Bureau. Nearly half of adults in Mississippi reported symptoms of anxiety or depression; no state had a higher percentage.
This makes sense to Michael W. Preston, a marriage and family therapist in Jackson, Miss.: The lower your socioeconomic class, the higher your anxiety and susceptibility to mental illness. Preston, whose sessions are exclusively online for now, finds that his patients are frustrated either because others are not taking the pandemic seriously enough, or because they're taking it too seriously. Over the past three months he has seen the balm of togetherness replaced by the irritant of politics, made worse by the fact that there's nothing to do but sit in it.
"There's been a spike not necessarily in anxiety related to covid, but related to being stuck," Preston says. "People are just at the end of their wits. 'Michael, I cannot stay home for another day.' They will and they do, but I think most people are talking about being stuck."
byDan Zak, The Washington Post via ADN | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
[ed. Such a disorienting state of being. A mixture of fear, uncertainty, loss, unreality, anger, hopelessness, helplessness, depression, desperation, etc. etc. A whole range of disquieting emotions, even after so-called 'openings' occur. Trying to be normal, but actually not, psychologically.]
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