I hate to encourage anybody to visit a social media site. But unless you’ve completely given up on Twitter, I believe you ought to unroll a thread posted there on May 4 by a virologist working in Scotland. Dr. Muge Cevik’s twenty-two tweets apply preliminary contact tracing results to the dynamics of transmission in an […]
Category Archives: News
A civics lesson
Absolution is a powerful intoxicant. Those addicted to its thrills will go to great lengths to get it. In America, where absolution has been made artificially cheap and plentiful, we’ve lately been forgiving ourselves for our role in the global health crisis, and sometimes pretending that we didn’t have one at all. In this view, […]
Vitamin D
Hilary thinks I’ve been misleading about the size and poshness of our flat. It’s neither big nor posh. In these dispatches, I’ve referred to our “deck” a few times, but we don’t really have a deck. We’ve got a fire escape attached to a kitchen door and ten feet of metal runway before the steps […]
Into the rapids
Hilary notes a change in the tone and content of the mainstream news. No longer do the networks foreground warnings about behavior that might accelerate the transmission of the coronavirus, or stories about exhausted medical workers, or supply shortages. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to costs of reopening — and reopening is now treated as […]
The show that never ends
If we ever had to subsist on the money I’ve made as a musician, we wouldn’t be living in a pretty little jewel box of an apartment in Downtown Jersey City. We wouldn’t be in an apartment at all. We’d be dodging raindrops in an alley behind the Pathmark. This does not distinguish me. Musicians […]
Roll the bones
Yesterday the lockdown lifted. The state government helped. But even if they had chosen not to reopen the parks, that decision would’ve been overridden by the authority of the spring sun. If local greenspaces had been barricaded, people would have been out on sidewalks, in intersections, in vacant lots. Some traditions go too deep to […]
Gates of delirium
Modern life makes skeptics out of us all. No doubt you were skeptical about a hundred things before breakfast, and a hundred more since; if you put on the news, you can double that count. So many official stories feel inadequate, or messily manipulated for popular consumption, or just downright implausible. When you hear them, […]
The fog and the sunshine
Yesterday began our seventh week of isolation. This I know because we’ve been keeping a record of the days on the back of the door, and for no other reason. March moved deliberately, with each moment loaded with significance, and slow-burning questions: how am I feeling?, where am I standing?, am I a transmitter or […]
Staggering to the wire
Like you, I have made it to the last day of a difficult month. Seven hundred and fifty eight of my Hudson County neighbors did not. Unlike more than a hundred thousand fellow Jerseyans, I am not an active case. I may be infected, or I may be virus-free; I may have developed antibodies, I […]
Mixed messages
Yesterday we walked to Berry Lane Park. I’d been looking forward to a little time on the grass, or just a seat on a park bench. But familiar comforts were tough to find at Berry Lane. We took a tour of the perimeter and, without stopping, walked home. Berry Lane is a park with a […]