RICH

April 27–May 10, 2020

®

CORONA
POOR
Who lives, who dies, who thrives. p.16

CORONA
 TRUST NO ONE

SUNDAYS
©2020 Showtime Networks Inc., a ViacomCBS Company. SHOWTIME and related marks are trademarks of Showtime Networks Inc.
Individual programs, devices and marks are the property of their respective owners. All Rights Reserved.

SUNDAYS
Douglas Elliman Real Estate, a Licensed Real Estate Broker, is the Exclusive Sales Agent. The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Miami Beach are not owned, developed or sold by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C. or its affiliates (“Ritz-Carlton”). 4701 North Meridian, L.L.C. uses The Ritz-Carlton marks un
STATEMENT SHOULD BE RELIED UPON IF NOT MADE IN THE OFFERING DOCUMENTS. THIS IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL, OR SOLICITATION OF OFFERS TO BUY, THE CONDOMINIUM UNITS IN STATES WHERE SUCH OFFER OR SOLICITATION CANNOT BE MADE. PRICES, PLANS AND SPECIFIC
718.503, FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEVELOPER TO A BUYER OR LESSEE. Additionally, for New York offerees, the complete offering terms are available in an offering plan available from Sponsor. CD16-0120.
 ON THE
PRIVATE SIDE
OF MIAMI
BEACH
LIVE HERE NOW
FROM $2 MILLION

Visit the Sales Gallery or Schedule a Virtual Tour Today

Designed by Master Italian Architect Piero Lissoni
4701 Meridian Avenue, Miami Beach
TheResidencesMiamiBeach.com | 305.953.9500

nder a license from Ritz-Carlton, which has not confirmed the accuracy of any of the statements or representations made herein. This graphic is an “artist’s rendering” and is for conceptual purposes only. THIS OFFERING IS MADE ONLY BY THE OFFERING DOCUMENTS FOR THE CONDOMINIUM AND NO
CATIONS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED UPON AS CORRECTLY STATING THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, REFERENCE SHOULD BE MADE TO THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION
 Are authoritarians better
at fighting the pandemic?
How long will it last?
How
long will we have to live with social distancing?

How far can the coronavirus travel in the air?

How
does th

How do scientists create a Covid-19 vaccine?

What would
another economic crisis mean for the United
States?
The mistake that doomed
the US response to COVID-19. Vox’s essential
guide to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only on Quibi.
 a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0

An Upper West
Side doorman
walks up
Broadway on
April 23.
Photograph by
David Williams
for New York
Magazine.
features

Are You Rich Enough to Survive This Pandemic?

Even Naked, American Sheltering The Spaces In Conversation:
America Winner With Your Boss Between Us Thomas Piketty
Cannot See How Steven “They don’t seem to Wealth among The scholar
Itself Mnuchin leveraged be worried, even friends. of inequality
The vulnerable the 2008 meltdown though when By Lisa Miller knew this was
and the virus. to become the I started coming into 34 coming.
By Zak Cheney-Rice most powerful the Hamptons, By David
Treasury secretary in I had a cough.” Wallace-Wells
16
U.S. history. As told to 36
By Eric Levitz Anna Silman
24 28

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 5
 a p r i l 2 7 m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0

intelligencer the culture pages

10 63
The National Interest Yes, Really?
The economists Middleditch &
steering our Schwartz makes
public health improv funny, for once
By Jonathan Chait By Jesse David Fox

12 67
Extremely Online The Rarest Air
Cameo’s personalized How the producers of
celebrity shout-outs The Last Dance gained
By Madison Michael Jordan’s trust
Malone Kircher By Jake Malooley

14 68
The Isolation Read Like the Wind
Handbook Books for two types
Poetry as a party of sad people
trick and a balm By Molly Young
By Matthew Schneier
70
strategist Fiona Apple
Explains Every
Track on ‘Fetch
43
the Bolt Cutters’
Best Bets The heartache
Better than beans: and hope behind
The canned foods chefs all 13 new songs
keep in their pantries
72
45
Freeze Frame
Look Book Postcards from
NYU’s freshman filmmakers across
class, back at home the globe
48 74
Biography of a Building Critics
Exploring Graham tv by Matt Zoller
Court, a time capsule Seitz Sisterhood
of Gilded Age Harlem is powerful (and
By Matthew Sedacca complicated) in
Mrs. America
58 movies by David
Food Edelstein Our
The Park Slope Food Mothers digs up a
Coop’s pandemic prep; country’s painful past
the Underground classical music
Gourmet on simple by Justin Davidson
comforts; Revisiting Franz
talking with Schubert, a poet
restaurateur of solitude
Danny Meyer
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F F I O N A A P P L E

78
To Do
Twenty-five
picks for the next
8 Comments two weeks (stuck
82 New York Crossword, at home)
by Matt Gaffney
84 The Approval Matrix

thi e
pho home
for New York Magazine.

6 n e w y o r k | nymag.com For customer service, call 800-678-0900.

EVERY LIT TLE THING
IS EVERY THING.

10th Gen Intel®

Core™ i7 processor

The new XPS 13.

Call a Dell Technologies Advisor at 855-341-5261 or learn more at
Dell.com/SB/XPS
Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.
All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. 347260
 Comments

April 13 26 2020

NEW
YORK
FOUR
WEEKS
IN
The City by justin davidson
A Doctor by lisa miller
A Teacher by molly fischer

Covid Capital A Chef by benjamin wallace

A Minister by lila shapiro

of the World
The city is reeling, grieving, and eerily calm p.20
Portfolio by a l e x e i h ay
The Metropolitan Museum of rt

March 24 1 p m
21

1 New York’s latest cover featured Alexei lic health, added, “Davidson’s elegant piece cases “the feelings of many in the restaurant
Hay’s photograph of a hushed and on the relationship of New Yorkers and industry.” And fans of Mattos’s around the
nearly empty Times Square (“Covid Capi- disaster posits that we can learn from his- world voiced support for the restaurateur.
tal of the World,” April 13–26). NY1’s Ja- tory and take heart that we will emerge From Copenhagen, Lasse Kyed Rasmussen
mie Stelter said of Hay’s portfolio, “They stronger and perhaps more united. I urge a wrote, “Estela is probably one of my favorite
look like scenes from a movie. We keep say- small measure of caution. The social ineq- restaurants, and this article provides a fas-
ing that. But they’re beautiful. It’s impor- uities that led to an uneven distribution of cinating but also alarming insight into
tant to see this. It’s important to remember suffering—between the wealthy and the what happens when a pandemic suddenly
these images.” Pat Kiernan added, “These poor, the white and the black, the native- forces restaurants to close.” In England,
are the things we will remember 20 years born and the immigrant, the large number Stevie Mackenzie Smith tweeted, “This, on
from now—50 years from now. When we of disproportionately minority hospital and Ignacio Mattos and his restaurants, is beau-
look back at this time, some of those im- delivery men and women and the rest of tiful and includes a kind of mind-blowing
ages will be the most powerful.” On Insta- us—continue to scar our city and country.” breakdown of the real cost of a fancy meal
gram, @musiconlyus commented, “This (and the wafer-thin profit margin).”
picture is so devastating, it’s the contrast 3 Lisa Miller profiled an emergency-
between the reality and the memories of room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital as 5 After receiving her copy of New York’s
whom ever visited, lived or loved NYC.” part of a series on the New Yorkers at the guidebook to sheltering in place
Many readers noticed one Times Square front lines of this pandemic (“Two Hours (“How to Survive This Plague,” March 30–
fixture that hasn’t disappeared since the Daily to Sanitize, Two Hours to Cry,” April April 12), Amy Pizarro of San Jose wrote to
pandemic: @amandalambdalambda 13–26). sherrybb1 called it “wonderful, ter- the magazine’s staff: “TikTok for my
joked, “Who knew The Naked Cowboy rifying, encouraging, and sad … all at once.” 10-year-old, Minecraft for my 8-year-old,
was an essential worker?” Mario Sundar wrote, “Thanks … for making and five crosswords for my husband?
me tear up again! But what a piece. It is a Thank you for providing a shelter-in-place
2 In “The Return of Fear” (April 13–26), responsibility to read in-depth articles like bright spot for the whole family. Thought
Justin Davidson mined New York this to put ourselves in the shoes of doctors, you’d enjoy this pic of my kids poring over
City’s history of disasters and recoveries to like Emily Wolfe … who are fighting our the Minecraft article below as they hatch
shed light on our current crisis. Urban his- war.” Laziguezon reflected, “While Wolfe a plan to build their elementary school
torian Kenneth T. Jackson, the author of may not like the term, she and her col- this afternoon.”
several books on New York City, wrote, leagues are heroes. I wish they, like so
“Justin Davidson’s ‘The Return of Fear’ is a many other critical workers, had been
succinct and perceptive analysis of why properly supported with the necessary
covid-19 is different from previous disas- PPE items and medical supplies. We are
ters in New York’s 400-year history. lucky to have such talented and dedicated
Whether fires (as in 1776, 1778, or 1835), workers … and I hope they continue to be
riots (as in 1863), cholera, aids (as in the supported post-pandemic.”
1980s), depressions (as in many years but
especially 1893 and 1929–1939) or terror 4 Elsewhere in the issue, Benjamin Wal-
attacks (as in 1993 or 2001), the great me- lace talked to Estela’s Ignacio Mattos
tropolis has so far endured and even about the headwinds his industry is facing
thrived. So it will survive this latest chal- (“When the Restaurants Closed, They
lenge.” David K. Rosner, a Columbia Uni- Cooked for Each Other,” April 13–26).
L Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.
versity history professor and expert in pub- Grace Stetson wrote that the article show- Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

8 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 inside: The celebrity-selfie gold rush / The joys of learning a poetic party trick

Arthur Laffer in 1981.

The National Interest: one night in late march, President Trump, seized by one
of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials,

Jonathan Chait sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus
pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s
first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the
two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious
Fatal Calculations conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “we cannot
let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
The enduring influence
P H OTO G R A P H : A P / S H U T T E R S TO C K

Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is

again lurching toward the opposite pole—one anchored by Laf-

of men who have been fer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Law-
rence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have

wrong about everything seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administra-
tion’s public-health wing because they have a particular compe-

for decades. tence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican
officials to ignore experts.

10 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 Even before his current role, Laffer was
perhaps the most successful policy entre-
preneur in modern American history, at
least if measured by political influence. In
the 1970s, as an economics professor who
had served in Nixon’s Office of Manage-
ment and Budget, Laffer developed a
friendship with Wall Street Journal edito-
rial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had
previously included defending Richard
Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal.
The two came to believe that Laffer had
developed a blinding insight with world-
historical ramifications. A tax rate of either
zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at
all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, side-
ways curve between those points, he fur-
ther hypothesized that reducing tax rates
might increase revenue.
The “Laffer curve,” which at one point
Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an
impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian
now claims to display the original),
formed the basis of what became known
as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine
held not only that tax cuts could increase
tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates
were the primary driver of all economic
events. Republican economist Herb Stein
coined the name as a term of derision,
intending to highlight the absurdity of
building a model entirely on one side of
the economy instead of considering both
supply and demand. Economic experts
mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in
tax rates at existing levels could produce
anywhere close to enough new economic
growth to pay for itself.
And the experts … were completely
right. After supply-siders converted Ron-
ald Reagan and promised his tax cuts
would pay for themselves, revenue hemor-
rhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers
prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax
increases for the purpose of “reducing the
size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his bud-
get director later admitted. When Bill
Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 per-
cent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted
he would kill the recovery and reduce tax
revenue. Instead, revenue soared far
higher than anybody had forecast.
Kudlow and Moore began ascending in
the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing
think tanks and media—especially the
Journal editorial page, which remained
the high temple of the supply-side cult. I
first came across Moore when he was writ-
ing Journal columns arguing that the
supply-siders had been right to predict Bill
Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue.
(A hallmark of supply-side thought has
been to refuse to concede any error or com-
plication in its analysis.) The supply-siders
went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax Trump’s optimism that the virus would
cuts would produce untold prosperity. never spread. On February 25, Kudlow
Moore wrote a book called Bullish on said it had been “contained … pretty close
Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was
The Bush Boom and a series of columns insisting, “I would still argue to you that
dismissing “pessimistas” who detected this thing is contained.”
economic turmoil. “There’s no recession When public-health officials persuaded
coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he Trump to abandon his denialism, the
wrote in December 2007. supply-siders formed the resistance.
In the spring of 2016, just after Trump Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All eco-
had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kud- nomic problems are about removing imped-
low, and Moore set out to meet the candi- iments to supply, not demand,” they rea-
date at Trump Tower. Like many members soned that the problem facing the economy
of the conservative elite, they initially har- was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad
bored reservations. But unlike foreign- incentives imposed by government—in this
policy hawks or social traditionalists, their case, restrictions on business and excessively
concerns were devoid of any moral compo- generous unemployment benefits that “dis-
nent, like a suspicion of dictators courage work.” If the government
or philanderers. Their sole misgiv- just stopped suppressing incen-
The Audacity
ing concerned Trump’s populist of Hope tives, the economy would spring
rhetoric and occasional campaign back to life.
vows to raise his own taxes. The The Journal editorial page pub-
troika wanted to find out if he “We’ll come lished some of the first pushback
out of this
really meant it. To their relief, he soon, the against the wisdom of lockdowns.
didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He economy will As early as mid-March, Moore
wanted to deregulate, he wanted reopen, the denounced on Fox News the first
economy will
to get the government out of the restart. It will, closings, in California, as “a very
way,” Kudlow recounted in the I hope, take dangerous, almost Orwellian situa-
foreword to Laffer and Moore’s care of itself. tion.” Trump began repeating the
Markets will
laudatory book, Trumponomics. take care of supply-siders’ warnings that he had
“The three of us saw Trump in a themselves ceded too much authority to scien-
whole new light.” over time.” tists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he
—Larry
Kudlow joined the administra- Kudlow,
mused, “they might say shut down
tion as Trump’s chief economic optimistic as the entire world”). Trump relented
adviser. Trump announced he oil prices to his public-health experts but, by
would nominate Moore for the tanked, on
April 22
early April, was again listening to
Federal Reserve Board, but the the supply-siders. Moore began
Senate killed Moore’s bid over a proposing May 1 as a deadline to
combination of embarrassing ignorance of reopen the economy, a timeline Trump
the subject—just two years before, he’d endorsed soon thereafter.
admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on The supply-siders’ struggle to tug
monetary policy”—and years of sexist com- Trump away from his medical experts has
ments, including an obsessive hatred of both public and private facets. Laffer and
women working as play-by-play commen- Moore promoted a new administration
tators on basketball games. He and Laffer task force to focus on economic reopen-
instead served as outside advisers and allies ing, a counterweight to the coronavirus
to Trump, who last summer bestowed a task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci
Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer. and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged
Trump rewarded their confidence by anti-shutdown protests in several states to
implementing a large corporate tax cut, pressure governors to speed up their time-
which was intended to encourage more tables for reopening businesses. “I call
corporate investment and therefore “would these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,”
yield about the same revenue—and possi- he explained, “They are protesting against
bly more—than the current system,” Laffer injustice and a loss of liberties.”
and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Natu- In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly
rally, it failed. Business owners got a wind- recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to
fall, but there was no corporate-investment ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would
boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by
more than a third. Just as naturally, they the phony numbers of Washington’s bean
acted as if events had proved them right. counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.”
And so, when the coronavirus struck, The message today is largely unchanged.
Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists The main difference is that the experts they
who would not hesitate to question legiti- are urging the president to dismiss are
mate experts. Kudlow forcefully endorsed counting lives. We’re the beans. ■
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 11
 intelligencer

mandy moore is at home recording fan greetings on Cameo, the social platform where, for a fee, you can request
Extre ely Online: personalized video shout-outs from your favorite celebrities, athletes, and viral stars. Tomi Lahren, Flavor Flav, Snoop
Dogg (priced at $420, naturally), The Bachelor’s Chris Harrison, and Survivor’s Jeff Probst are doing it too. For $200,
Let th Stars you can hire Lindsay Lohan to film herself wishing your brother or mom or boss a happy birthday. Lohan signed on at
the beginning of March; Moore joined a week later.
Come o You In an unexpected side effect of stay-at-home orders, Cameo is booming, resulting in three of the company’s best weeks
The shout-out app Cameo had since it launched in 2016. “Our business was almost tailor-made for the social-distancing era. The whole idea of Cameo is
how do you get a selfie with someone without physically being there with them?” says CEO Steven Galanis. “We’re seeing
its biggest month ever thanks people booking Cameos to thank their friends that are first responders or ER nurses, people booking Cameos to send to
to the coronavirus lockdown. their friends that are sick or quarantining.” Some creators, like Moore and Probst, joined solely to raise money for relief
By Madison Malone Kircher efforts. Of course, plenty of celebrities still use Cameo as it was initially designed—as a fund-raiser for themselves. ■

12 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
E S S I N G, AC T
B S AGET, ACTO R AM RE
BO R EB S
S

O G G, R A P
O OP D P ER
“Epic!,”
SN
said one satisfied customer:
begins one
“Bob, you went above and beyond! review. “I played it at
You’re invited to the wedding if it ever our national sales
happens. Monarch Beach meeting, and it will
in Dana Point. Hope you have a kurta be talked about
(it’s an Indian wedding).” for years!”

,S INGER A Charges $250 per video. “I can

Charges $249 per video. ORE ND only imagine how hard it is to
He joined Cameo in April to be cut off from your loved
raise money for food
MO AC ones,” she told residents and
Y

D
T
banks and other causes staff of one nursing home.

N
related to COVID-19.

RE
S

MA
S
SG RAC E D F O R ME
RI
, DI L
CH
LI

I
N

JEV
OIS
G

AGO
OVER

The actresses have

$
ROD BL
NOR

per
together raised over 420 video

$70,000
for charity since the
beginning “Governor: Amazing job!” said one
of the pandemic. reviewer. “We are so happy
President Trump put an end to Charges $75 per video,
your sentence.” benefiting himself.
 O H A N, AC OMAS, A
HI L I P P S, ACT S AY L TR R Y TH CT
YP RE ND ES L AR OR

S
B US SS LI
$
per
Lohan suggests
video fans “request your
favorite Mean
Girls line, hear
350 some business
advice or love
from Lindsay!”

EALIT Y-T
E R, R VP
NN ER

J
E

SO

YN
L
NA
Charges $80 per video to

LI
Charges $150 per video to benefit What $200 buys you:

AIT
benefit the Actors Fund. For

C
TY
America’s Food Fund. “I want to approximately 16 seconds of
$200, he’ll put on a chef ’s coat
record personal STAY THE her time, plus a reminder that
like the one he wore as the
FUCK HOME videos,” she says. Lohan has recently adopted
Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.
a strange Pan-European accent.

Jerry Harris, O UT STAR O

Chris Hansen
, H O ST O F ‘S
B ST U EAK FN
RO RV (Dateline NBC), and BR ET
P
S

I
David & Annie ,
I
FL

FF
VO
(90-Day Fiancé) have
RR
IX

JE
’

Charges $2,500—not for been Cameo’s most

’
A
S

charity—for a 30-second video.

H

requested members
‘ C

Instead of using a job title

Y

in 2020. Videos from

like “actor” or “athlete,” she calls
R

each of them have

HE

herself an “icon.” been called for over

JE
E R’

ON,
H EAVY WEIG
2,000
S HT times this year.
TY C

HA

KE
“What Harris is 2020’s

MI
surprised me was MP most popular
the number of member, requested
requests for friends or by users over
family members who
are on the front
lines,” he says. 2,500
times.

$
per
video Charges $500 per video. Not everyone likes
Reportedly made $20,000 in
Probst says he’ll film only
20 Mike. “Very short
$
videos dedicated to essential his first six hours on the site. for the money per
workers and kids. charged,” wrote one video
reviewer.
150

13
P H OTO G R A P H S : A A R O N P O O L E / E ! E N T E R TA I N M E N T ( S AG E T ) ; DAV I D C R OT T Y / PAT R I C K M C M U L L A N ( M O O R E , D O G G , P H I L I P P S, J E N N E R ) ; PA U L
B R U I N O O G E / PAT R I C K M C M U L L A N ( M E S S I N G ) ; T I M OT H Y K U R AT E K / C B S ( P R O B S T ) ; R A N DY H O L M E S / WA LT D I S N E Y T E L E V I S I O N ( T Y S O N )
intelligencer

W. H. Auden, ca. 1946.

P H OTO G R A P H : J E R RY CO O K E / T H E L I F E P I C T U R E CO L L E C T I O N V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

The Isolation Handbook: one of my enduring party tricks—not terribly well loved,
though forever delightful to me—is my habit, when drunk, of

Matthew Schneier reciting the opening 18 lines of the prologue to The Canterbury
Tales. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte
of March hath perced to the roote”: the beginnings of the pil-
grimage to Canterbury, when April showers bring the spring
Now Is the Perfect Time after March’s drought. I don’t know if the practice remains, but
when I was in high school, it was taught to us by rote, the better
to e orize a Poem for us to get a feel for the cotton-mouth cadence of Chaucer’s
Middle English, a language that is legible and incomprehensible
Give yourself over at once. Shakespeare’s English, 200 years later, was thorny and
gorgeous, riddled with unfamiliar vocabulary, but with the help

to a rhythm that is not of endnotes and patience, you could find your footing on the
balance beam of its enjambed passages. Middle English was a

your own. step further into the shadows. You could sound it out, and trip
gratefully over cognates half buried throughout, but it was head-

14 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
achy to parse. Our red-bordered paper-
back edition, with its burghers on the
march, offered a side-by-side translation
into modern English.
After learning a chunk of the prologue
by heart in the original Middle English,
we read most of the actual Tales in the
modern. I remember fragments of it: that
the Wife of Bath had a gap between her
teeth like I do, and it is a sign of lustiness;
that the comic potential of kissing some-
one’s ass is timeless, ageless, and eternal
(someone sticks her “nether ye” out a win-
dow to receive). But mostly, it is gone,
passed out of my mind like a pilgrim
picked up and headed to the next town.
The prologue in Middle English, syllable
by syllable, line by line, remains. Get me a
drink and I’ll show you.
It’s no great mystery why. Poetry is
sticky. Prose slips. Barbed and spurred,
poems catch in your chest; they get stuck
in your head like songs. Still, to admit to
liking poetry is faintly embarrassing. The
familiar stereotypes cling: The old stuff is
out of touch; the new is pretentious,
mawkish, or insincere. If you charm your
beloved with poetry, you’re a troubadour,
ridiculous; you might even be a cad.
(Poetry can be used and abused. Robert
Lowell chopped up his devastated ex-wife
Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters and served
them forth in his own poetry collection,
The Dolphin.) “Poetry makes nothing hap-
pen,” W. H. Auden, one of our greatest
poets, famously wrote. “I, too, dislike it,”
added Marianne Moore in a poem called
“Poetry.” But wait! “Reading it, however,
with a perfect contempt for it, one / dis-
covers that there is in / it after all, a place
for the genuine.”
Your results may vary, but I have always
found the place for the genuine in poetry
to be unlocked not by just reading it but by
memorizing it. And it’s a good exercise, in
the midst of chaos, to give yourself over to
a sound and a rhythm that is not your
own. It takes time—you probably have
plenty—and effort. But you feel poems dif-
ferently when you get them by heart and
say them out loud. You have to chew them,
and their rhythms overpower yours. It
frees you up, to submit to them: It’s self-
abnegation by incantation, your very own
ventriloquist’s act.
The poems I know follow me whether
I want them to or not. My repertoire is not
wide, and most of it dates back more than
a decade. At 15, I played Puck in A Mid-
summer Nig he pink
hair and a p narl have
since left me, but I still know Puck’s “Now
the Hungry Lion Roars” song from the
fifth act. At least I know why I know that
one. I don’t remember at all how I came to
know Ben Jonson’s lovely, tripping little
17th-century ode “To Celia,” the plaint of a
lover looking for favor, with several very
good pickup lines (“Might I of Jove’s nec-
tar sup, / I would not change for thine”).
Jonson sends flowers; Celia returns them.
But who could mind! Now they smell like
her. You might think that sentiment seems
dated until you stumble on “At Baia,” by
H.D., the pen name of Hilda Doolittle, a
very modern Modernist—radical, bisex-
ual, championed by Ezra Pound, a patient
of Dr. Freud. The idea blooms again: a gift
of orchids, “flower sent to flower,” “I send
you this, / who left the blue veins / of your
throat unkissed.”
There’s no sure guide for how or where
to start. Reading aloud helps; what’s
The hiss of “this”
and “kissed”:
hypnotic, to me.
daunting on the page unclenches and
reveals itself. (A revelation: Start at the
beginning and read to the end, like any
other sentence.) The music that you like
will grab you. The hiss of “this” and
“kissed”: hypnotic, to me. So are the tum-
bling cadences of Wallace Stevens’s “The
Idea of Order at Key West” (bonus: You
get to bellow, “Oh! Blessed rage for order,
pale Ramon”!) and the pseudo-Stevensian
“Jane Awake” by my favorite poet, Frank
O’Hara, about his friend, the great painter
Jane Freilicher. “Only by chance tripping
on stairs / do you repeat the dance” is
O’Hara’s windup to his big finish, but, of
is the dance, diving to
conclusion. Maybe you
want something steadier. I love May
Swenson’s “Question,” an existential med-
itation on the body, its life and afterlife.
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
“Body my house / my horse my hound / what
will I do / when you are fallen,” Swenson
begins, and the poem clip-clops to its
end—it is the sound of horse trot. You
could miss that on the page. You learn it
by learning it.
For the past few weeks, I have been trying
to learn “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy,” by
Donald Justice. It’s a creepy poem, a horny
love song to an old dress form that ends up
wrestling with some mommy issues, too. It’s
not right for right now in any rational way—
but nothing is. More than ever, I am leaning
into poetry’s sound. Lately, life is quieter
and louder, unnervingly so. The streets are
emptier, the constant sirens shriller. Ambu-
lances scream past my window day and
night—the kind that carted my mother to
the hospital, and my father. Each one star-
tles and enrages me. There is no way to shut
them off.
Right now, a machine is breathing for
my father, buying time in a ward I can nei-
ther visit nor see. The doctors talk a lot
about time: How fast or slow he breathes—
covid comes for your breath—and how
quick or sluggish his blood pressure, the
beat of his heart. There is almost nothing
I can do but call his carers, wait, and hope.
In that morass of powerlessness, I’ve found
myself reciting the snippets of poems I’ve
picked up along the way. If nothing else,
their meter overtakes the racing of mine.
Each one is an occasion, and the good ones
are wise. I return a lot to the final stanza of
James Merrill’s “In Nine Sleep Valley,”
which seems suddenly to speak directly to
our impotent quarantine:
Take these verses, call them today’s flower,
Cluster a rained-in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realms of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.
Here in our realms of hazard, we—I—
need these talismans. They push us for-
ward, years or centuries later, on toward
Canterbury, past the dry, brittle drought of
March. Once, I learned Carl Phillips’s
“Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm” for
the pleasure of it. “There are those / whom
no amount of patience looks likely / to
improve ever, I always said,” and I said it
out loud as Phillips had. Then, I was a
senior in college, pushing off uncertainly
into the world. Now, I hope and believe in
it, as a charm, as a balm. The poem is
grim, but it turns. We are all, in our pres-
ent cataclysm, me and Dad and all the rest
of us, “like a building for a time con-
demned, / then deemed historic.” I count
on its final promise, held dangling over a
line break’s edge. “Yes,” Phillips ends.
“You / will be saved.” ■
15
Are You Rich Enou
ough

a tale of
two covids.

The food pantry at First

Baptist Church in East
Elmhurst, which is serving
hundreds more people than it
did before the pandemic.

Photograph by Pari Dukovic

 Even Naked,
America Cannot See Itself
in a time of plague, willful blindness
is a coping mechanism.
By Zak Cheney-Rice

WA S T H E PA N D E M I C , then there was the

Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend them-
the most to being read as Providence. Like hurri-
and wildfires, they can level everything in their
path, but those paths can also be narrow enough, f g ing enough, to gr nd one ouse into debris while leaving the neighboring structure
untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often,
what it already is. But when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to
more familiar terms, even primordial ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to ascribe our misfortunes
to some grand plan makes it hard not to look for cosmic significance in the tornadoes that ripped through the American South on Easter
Sunday, months after the novel coronavirus made itself known on U.S. shores and several weeks after any of us had left the house.
If you’ve never experienced a tornado, you nado’s damage is impossible to forecast. But perishing and his family imperiled, Cuomo
might follow local guidelines, probably if recent months have proved anything, it’s sent a supportive message to his brother on
some combination of the sober advice you that most disasters we otherwise under- Twitter. “This virus is the great equalizer,” he
get from government-run meteorology stand as “natural” have an uncanny way of wrote on March 31. “Stay strong little
websites—avoid windows, move to the low- reflecting human design. Randomness isn’t brother.”
est level of your building—and the shrill justice, even a perverse form, distributed The wrong lesson, of impartial vulnera-
alarmism peddled on message boards advis- equitably. It is a test of vulnerability—of your bility, will always be there, tempting. As,
ing that if a tornado hits while you’re at wherewithal to prepare, escape, recover. understandably, will be metaphysical ratio-
home, there’s not much you can do besides nales for physical phenomena—faith, myth.
climb under a heavy blanket, cover your the coronavirus was giving Ameri- These have been instrumental in helping
head, and pray. You might reassure yourself cans a crash course in this lesson for weeks people navigate the otherwise unspeakable.
that since the storm is approaching from before the tornadoes came. In late March, But alongside them an insidious form of
Mississippi, to the southwest, it’ll have sev- New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s self-deception can take root: the lies we tell
eral walls to chew through before it reaches brother, Chris, a CNN anchor, got sick with to reconcile our behavior, good and bad,
your bedroom and your toddler’s nursery, at the coronavirus. The governor watched with our idealized conceptions of who we
the opposite corner of your home in Geor- from afar, helpless. He was worried, but he are as individuals and as Americans. Faced
gia. You’ll keep flashlights by your bedside, had problems of his own in Albany, not the with horrors so vast they make us feel impo-
weigh down your curtains—feeble gestures, least of which was New York’s newly minted tent, we tell ourselves that crises invariably
by and large, to persuade yours ou’re status as the American epicenter of a pan- bring out our best; there’s no shortage of
doing all you can to prepare event demic that has, to date, killed more than heroic anecdotes to reinforce this narrative,
whose toll is largely beyond human control. 190,000 people and infected upwards of 2 encompassing emergency response, provi-
You accept that the precise extent of a tor- million worldwide. With his constituents sion of health care, neighborliness. But more

18 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
Luxury Lockdowns:
How the one percent
are coping during
the coronavirus.
–is like
“[Being in quarantine]
being in jail.
It’s mostly because I’ve been
wearing the same clothes
for ten days and everyone
in here is gay.”
—Ellen DeGeneres,
broadcasting from her
multimillion-dollar
Southern California home
–EastAtHampton
1:22 p.m. on March 14,
real-estate
agent Joseph Kazickas sends
out the following email:
“Dear Homeowners, Virus
fears are driving an early
start to the rental season.”
The response was immedi-
ate. “Quite a large number
of homeowners responded,”
he says. “I would say the
email was well received.”
– Blade (Uber, but for
helicopters) in late March
begins offering delivery
of supplies from the city,
including prescriptions,
food for specialized diets,
and school notebooks.
–of packages.
“It’s a lot of mail and a lot
It’s a lot of
groceries, too, and luggage.
Some of it’s more odd. One
dude had us transport a
bicycle. If it keeps going well,
we’ll probably keep doing it
after things get better.”
—Mark Vigliante, whose
limo company runs items
from Manhattan
apartments to his clients’
Hamptons homes
–I call
“We have three detainees,
them. It’s against their
will, but if they want their
jobs, and they want to not get
sick, they’re staying here.”
—Martha Stewart,
describing to Seth Meyers
her gardener, driver,
and cleaner
– “Isolated in the
Grenadines avoiding
the virus. I’m hoping
everybody is staying safe.”
—David Geffen, posting
via Instagram from his
$590 million 450-foot-long
superyacht →
often, these displays are too diffuse, too rene-
gade, to overcome the scale of the disaster itself.
The long list of crises that have taken America’s
most brutal inequalities and enhanced them
suggests the opposite conclusion, that a moti-
vating shame should be our main takeaway
from hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the 2008
economic crisis, the forever wars in which we’re
now ensnared. For elected officials, in particu-
lar, pressure is high to sell a more flattering
vision of U.S. culture—one defined by an
unshakable belief that America, as a project, is
singularly good, noble, and ripe with opportu-
nity even in the toughest of times.
This vision regularly finds itself at odds with
reality. Governor Cuomo knows as well as any
that the coronavirus isn’t really “the great equal-
izer,” that generations of inequality cannot be
erased simply by giving two people of differing
economic backgrounds the same disease. You’d
have to bury your head in the sand to ignore the
obvious: By almost every metric, those getting
the sickest and dying most frequently and being
plunged into dire financial straits at dispropor-
tionate rates are the same people who were vul-
nerable and marginalized before the World
Health Organization declared a pandemic.
Cuomo was spouting platitudes when he called
the coronavirus an equalizer, not making a rig-
orous assessment of American life as it really is.
But what pain has to be overlooked, whose suf-
fering has to be trivialized, to make it such an
appealing bromide?
A brief accounting: Hungry people have been
stuck in traffic jams at the Forum in Inglewood,
California, as thousands of motorists wend
their way through the parking lot to pick up free
groceries. Twenty-six million Americans have
filed for unemployment since the middle of
March, and a nationwide strain on food-bank
capacity has resulted, with demand increasing
by an average of 40 percent. “Lower-income
workers, minority communities, communities
of color, folks working in service jobs, folks liv-
ing in public housing, folks with kids who are
on the free, reduced lunch programs”—Kyle
Waide, president and CEO of the Atlanta Com-
munity Food Bank, told me over the phone—
“those are the folks who are really feeling the
pain on this. And they were already in pain
before.” They’re also often your neighbors. On a
Lyft ride home some months ago, the driver
nodded to a church up the street from where
I live, all brick spires and blue stained glass. He
said that, almost 50 years ago, his father had
founded the city’s oldest food pantry there,
where time has done nothing to diminish its
necessity. In April, the pantry had to double its
allotted pickup days to meet demand.
In recent weeks, one could drive by the Cook
County Jail, in southwest Chicago, and see a
handwritten sign pressed against a cell window
that read, help we matter 2. Upwards of
4,000 prisoners remain trapped inside what
was, for several days running, the largest known
source of traceable coronavirus infections in the
U.S., with over 400 cases. At Rikers Island,
where infection rates soared to seven times the
New York average, men were packed 50 to a
room and slept on cots less than 15 inches apart.
“It’s like The Walking Dead in here,” one pris-
oner told me on a phone call from jail. “We’re all
trying to survive right now.” To date, more than
370 Rikers prisoners and 870 Department of
Correction staff have tested positive for the
virus, and ten have died.
One could drive just off the Las Vegas Strip
and see dozens of homeless people asleep in a
taped-off parking lot while empty but still gaud-
ily lit luxury hotels loomed above them. County
officials have been unable to reach a deal with
casino owners to house the houseless in their
unused hotel rooms, where they might enjoy a
modicum of safety and hygiene. Recent actions
by the Vegas city council had already criminal-
ized resting on sidewalks for even brief stretches
of time; pressed for lodging options, many
people were forced into cramped shelters that
have since become hotbeds of infection. This is
a national problem: An April outbreak at San
Francisco’s largest homeless shelter single-
handedly caused a 12 percent spike in the city’s
confirmed coronavirus cases. An outbreak at a
Vegas shelter forced it to shut down temporar-
ily, resulting in the emergency outdoor replace-
ment being set up, a handful of parking spots
recast as beds in an immediately infamous tab-
leau of cruelty. Older people have been espe-
cially imperiled: for instance, the outbreak at
the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington,
which killed 43 people and vivified covid’s lop-
sided threat to the elderly. In nursing homes
across the country, 11,000 have already died.
But the suffering is larger still than the dying.
Recent polls indicate that as many as two-thirds
of Latino adults have lost their jobs or seen their
incomes reduced as a result of the economic
downturn. Much of this is attributable to Latino
workers’ high representation among wage
laborers in service and hospitality industries,
which have been decimated. Even as American
life retreats indoors, ice raids continue, bring-
ing armed agents into people’s homes and risk-
ing the spread of infection, then transporting
those they capture to detention facilities known
for incubating diseases. In a cruel twist of irony,
many undocumented agricultural workers,
demonized for years by nativists, have been
deemed “essential” for their role in maintaining
the food-supply chain. Grocery employees,
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 19
above: 10 a.m. on the Upper West Side. → right: 10 a.m. at Grand Central Terminal.
→

Photograph by David Williams

Photograph by Pari Dukovic
home health aides, social workers—the essen-
tial economy under the coronavirus is rife with
traditionally undercompensated professions
staffed largely by people of color, especially
women; employers have responded to their pri-
macy by punishing as dissidents those seeking
better conditions and protections.
Preliminary data points to some of the
bleakest outcomes for black Americans, as
anyone might have predicted even before that
data began rolling in. Homeless, imprisoned,
and impoverished people in the U.S. have and
continue to be disproportionately black, with
the accompanying health risks: higher rates of
diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all
reliable indicators of whether an otherwise
manageable case of covid could turn fatal.
Black victims compose 40 percent of Michi-
gan’s infected dead but 14 percent of the state’s
population, for instance. They’re 70 percent of
the dead in Louisiana, one of the country’s big-
gest epicenters outside New York, but just 33
percent of the population. In Chicago and Mil-
waukee—where, in the latter case, the average
life expectancy for black people was 14 years
shorter than for white people before the pan-
demic hit—black covid deaths compose 55
percent and 81 percent of the totals, respec-
tively, despite black people being less than 40
percent of the population in either city.
These are the people whose suffering is
neglected when terms like equalizer are reduced
to platitudes. But neglecting it in practice, as
manyofficialshave,alsoshapesourexpectations
of what returning to normal looks like. Social
conditions that seemed intolerable six months
ago have since acquired the sheen of an idyllic
recovery. Getting back to work, earning wages
again—these are broad improvements over
what we have now that, nevertheless, won’t
repair the long-standing circumstances of
millions whose bigger problems were always
structural. That many of us can’t even begin to
expect or even conceptualize this—in a moment
so desperate, so damning to the notion that
America’s best feature is its ability to
manufacture prosperity, a reopening where
black doesn’t mean sicker, Latino doesn’t mean
lower wages, and poor doesn’t mean unreliable
food or housing—reaffirms that for millions,
normality is cruel enough. Those of us with our
heads above water are left to set our horizons of
possibility at what we know: a world where such
suffering is at our heels, rather than consuming
us, or far enough out of sight to spare us disquiet.
It makes bearable the prospect of a post-
pandemic America where the best outcome
might be worse than what we had before.
This is where the history that produced
America’s undercastes is hardest to escape,
22 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
where the flattering delusions that neglect suf- – Mahler Private Staffing,
fering look less like personal coping mecha- an elite private-staffing
nisms than a national inheritance. When agency, reports that “about
Trump’s surrogates urge people to sacrifice their 40 percent of [its] clients
lives to resuscitate the economy, they aren’t just have made the decision to
protecting his reelection prospects; they’re quarantine with a couple
advancing a culture war fueled by resentment of staff members.”
toward people who’ve long been understood as
unworthy. It’s why Trumpist protesters bran-
–this“[Everyone] is waiting for
to be over, and I suppose
dishing the Confederate flag can storm the knowing that a million-dollar
Michigan capitol calling on the governor to piece of jewelry is waiting for
you is a fulfillment of when
rescind her stay-at-home orders and have the things return to the new
emblem not seem incongruous. It diminishes normal.” —Catharine Becket,
the capacity for dissonance felt by Wisconsin “magnificent jewels”
State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who, in a specialist for Sotheby’s, on the
bid to reduce voter turnout and boost partisan company’s uptick in sales
advantage, forced April’s only in-person elec-
tion; standing before TV cameras on Election –itsJust before the virus hits
peak, Jesse Kamm offers
Day, draped in biohazard protective gear, in a a discount on its $400 pants:
state whose pandemic experience is distin- “Dear friends, for the first
guished by its rate of black death, Vos lied to his time ever, we are offering
constituents, “You are incredibly safe to go out.” 20% off all Kamm Pants.
It goes without saying we are
Deception that obscures inequality isn’t just collectively experiencing
expedient. It infuses tragedy with a tacit moral something surreal, filled with
dimension, where the worst suffering is pre- uncertainty, and perhaps more
sumed to be reserved for those who deserve than ever a sense of solidarity
it—whether by being too poor, too black, too in believing we will come
proximate to either. When Hurricane Katrina out stronger than ever.”
decimated sections of New Orleans in 2005, it
seamlessly merged this sentiment with the
– “Get a discounted private
bunker from just $17,500.
region’s racist social structure, which, as else- Financing available.
where, held that black people were owed little (Pricing for a Class ‘C’
more than the bottom of almost every social bunker requiring repairs.)”
indicator. This was evident in the images that —Vivos advertisement
emerged of black residents’ suffering and the
numbers that gave them context. In the Lower –a depression
“Businesses started during
or economic
Ninth Ward, black people screamed for salva- crisis: FedEx: the oil crisis of
tion from rooftops, floodwaters rising about 1973; Ups: the panic of 1907;
them, as black corpses floated down water- Hewlett-Packard: Great
logged avenues and black prisoners were left in Depression 1935 ... How are
you choosing to spend your
their cells to drown. President George W. Bush,
time?” —Brendan Fallis, the
who would later describe Katrina as “one of the DJ husband of heiress Hannah
worst national disasters in our nation’s history,” Bronfman, on Instagram
couldn’t be bothered to cut his vacation short
and return to Washington to address it, to say –a gourmet
At Red Horse Market,
food shop in
nothing of the city itself.
Polling showed that the racist neglect this East Hampton, customers
have called in to ask
behavior signaled was recognized widely by for personal shoppers.
black Americans but denied by white ones—
66 percent of black people felt the govern- – “The damages of keeping
ment’s response would’ve been more urgent the economy closed as it is
had the victims been mostly white, compared could be worse than losing
to 17 percent of whites, according to the Pew a few more people.”
—Tom Golisano,
Research Center. The evidence kept mount- founder of Paychex, Inc.
ing. As mostly black residents were displaced
to every corner of the country, avaricious – “This is a great
developers swooped in to remake New Orleans opportunity for a cleanse.”
in the whiter, wealthier image that local politi- —A woman at Provisions
cos and business leaders had long desired but Natural Foods in Sag Harbor
were now starting to articulate in more explicit collected by matt stieb
 terms. By 2010, the city had lost 175,000 black
residents, 75,000 of whom never came back, Keeping the Lights On
and elected its first white mayor in three Hakim Mubarez, 23, works at his father’s
decades. By 2013, four of the city’s biggest
public-housing complexes had been torn down
bodega near Times Square. Once the
and replaced by rental units, the city’s black coronavirus hit New York, Mubarez took over,
middle class had been gutted, and New fearing that his father would get sick.
Orleans more closely resembled the demo-
graphic vision fomented in Katrina’s wake:
from 66 percent black to 59 percent.
What happens when this magnitude of crisis
befalls the entire country? There’s a liberal
impulse to treat these disasters as emancipa-
tory, freeing us from the illusion of an equitable
status quo, the better to pursue the real thing
with our vision unclouded. This might be true
for some, though whether their awakening
produces the requisite policy response is less
clear. I’d say, in fact, it’s doubtful. The reality
thus far, rather than solidarity, has overwhelm-
ingly been individuals left to manage the fall-
out alone, in many cases owing to the absence
of infrastructure whereby they might help one
another. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin dump
thousands of gallons of milk a day, citing less
need from schools and restaurants, while food-
pantry lines in San Antonio and Dallas stretch
for blocks, and there’s no public entity to con-
nect the two. People died in the Easter torna-
does—dozens, mostly in Mississippi and Geor-
gia—but for those who survived, prospects for Times Square is really empty. My customers used to be 20 or 30 percent
a full recovery remain allocated along familiar tourists but mostly people who worked in offices, hotels, theaters. But
and predictable lines. right now everything is shut down. There used to be ten of us employees
I was asleep when one of the tornadoes working, but now it’s down to four. My sales have gone down by two-
missed our house by a handful of miles. That it thirds, but the landlords don’t care. They just call, asking, “Where’s the
charted its particular path, sparing my family rent?” It’s almost $50,000 a month.
but killing others, and leaving others still with There are a lot of homeless people out here, and they used to be able
spoiled food stockpiles and home damage they to ask tourists for money. But now I’m seeing a lot of robberies in my
might never recoup, taught me little about tor- store. People come into the deli and they spit, they have arguments, they
nadoes except that they behave like tornadoes— threaten me, they want free stuff. When they grab food and run, I’ve been
that is, they function in ways that are neither letting them go. Then there’s other people, who are selling drugs outside,
malicious nor cosmically edifying on their own yelling, “I got sour [marijuana], I got coco [heroin] ...” But the cops say
terms, even as they cause tremendous damage they can’t do anything about it because they need to do social distancing.
to humans. It’s not personal for them. How soci- All they can do is try to de-escalate the problem. If it continues like this,
eties mitigate the pain they cause at the margins I’m going to have to shut down.
is far more revealing—how much we invest, as I still have some paying customers, mostly people who live in the
Americans, in catching the vulnerable when the buildings nearby. They come in looking stressed. I’m selling a lot
of cigarettes—some of them buy three or four packs. Some customers,
floor is ripped from beneath them. We may tell
when they see that there’s another customer already shopping, say it’s
ourselves the pandemic is asking this question
P H OTO G R A P H : M I C H A E L S C H WA R Z / R E D U X

of us, but if we had the courage to look clearly,
the answer was evident long before this crisis: in
how our society distributes suffering, the stories
we tell to make it compatible with our national
self-regard; how aggressively so many insist on
overlooking the foreseeable. The depth of havoc
that the coronavirus wreaks on its inevitable
victims was, and is, within America’s capacity to
determine. We have few insights into the path
it’s cutting today that we haven’t had for years
and that we weren’t already ignoring. ■ As told to Jane Starr Drinkard
too crowded and leave. Others come in with a bottle of disinfectant and
spray everything they touch. I try my best to change my mask every six
hours and my gloves more often than that. If a customer who looks sick
hands me money, once they leave I take off my gloves, wash my hands,
and come back to the front of the store. And I try to say to my men, “You
need to wear masks and gloves as much as possible”—but masks are
sold out everywhere. I have begged regular customers to give me masks,
and there are some nice ones who have come in with a pack for me.
I also wish I had more disinfectant spray. I buy alcohol and mix it up with
Windex. I spray the door. I spray the door handles. I try to take care
of the customers. I don’t want them to get sick.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 23

American
Winner
treasury secretary steven
mnuchin embodies the plutocratic
principle that a crisis is
a terrible thing to waste.
By Eric Levitz
S
teve mnuchin knows his
way around a crisis. Twelve
years ago, the Treasury sec­
retary was still a middling
multimillionaire of little
renown or historical import.
But whenever God closes a
door on an underwater
homeowner, he opens a window to an
unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the
Big Man began closing a lot of doors.
Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may
have been just a humble Goldman Sachs
nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier
back then, but he had a few million dollars
to play with and a few friends with many
millions more. Together, they up a
failing mortgage lender, rapi losed
on thousands of borrowers, and resold the
homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his
24 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned
himself the title “Foreclosure King”—and a
return of $200 million. That’s the kind of
money that can buy you entrance into the
good graces of a Republican nominee, espe­
cially if he’s already alienating a lot of the
party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s
walking distance to the White House.
Thus far, the covid­19 crash has been as
kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession
once was. If the last global economic crisis
made him rich enough to purchase a lofty
perch in our government, this one is mak­
ing the Treasury secretary powerful enough
to claim a prominent place in U.S. history.
Before the novel coronavirus made its pres­
ence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable
achievement as a public servant may have
been commandeering a government plane
for a solar­eclipse­themed day trip. Since
the pandemic sickened global markets, he
has brokered the largest stimulus legisla­
tion ever passed and won control of a multi­
trillion­dollar bailout fund.
Which is to say: We’ve put one of the
primary beneficiaries of America’s
inequitable response to the last economic
crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s
response to this one.
O
f course, it wasn’t really God
who opened the window to
Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering
or the profiteering of all the well­heeled
investors who bought low during the fi­
nancial crisis, then sold high amid the
bailout­buoyed recovery (the Almighty
contracts out those jobs to protect his
brand integrity). Rather, it was an eco­
nomic system that keeps a wide swath of
Americans one bad break from financial
ruin—and another tiny class draped in
gold­plated armor.
From the first capital­gains­tax cut of
the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to
the supply­side bonanza of Donald
Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale
has remained the same: If capitalists can­
not reap big rewards from their winning
bets, they will have no incentive to take the
great personal risks that fuel collective
prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic
response he has overseen belie most of
that sentence’s premises. In truth, the
Treasury secretary owes his success to a
series of low­risk, high­reward bets of
little­to­negative social value. Which
makes sense. After all, if America’s brand
of capitalism actually required the super­
rich to assume great personal risk in order
to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be
so invested in it.
P H OTO G R A P H : A N D R E W H A R R E R / B LO O M B E R G V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S
S
teve mnuchin wasn’t born on
third base so much as a few inches to
the left of home plate. His grandfa­
ther co­founded a yacht club in the Hamp­
tons. His father was a Yale­educated part­
ner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name
didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission,
its wealth certainly covered his tuition,
books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at
New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch,
it would have been harder for Mnuchin to
tumble down America’s class ladder than
to climb higher still. The former would
have required prodigious acts of self­
destruction; the latter mere fluency in
ruling­class social mores and the art of
Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow

strategic sycophancy—and the wallflower
cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did
not consider him “especially book smart.”
And some have suggested that his steady
ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit
than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to part-
ner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin
Ingram, an African-American trader who’d
risen from a working-class childhood up
through MIT’s engineering school, then
Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one col-
league as both “much smarter than Steven”
and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid his dues at Gold-
man, he founded a hedge fund called Dune
Capital and a motion-picture-financing
company called Dune Entertainment
(both named after a stretch of beach near
his house in the Hamptons). He helped
bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise,
hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded
his investment profits in a tax haven. He
had everything America’s “temporarily
embarrassed millionaires” imagine a per-
son could want. But Mnuchin longed for
higher things. And when the housing mar-
ket collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career, Mnuchin had
watched his superiors turn America’s
savings-and-loan crisis into their own
buying-and-selling bonanza. In the sum-
mer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching tele-
vision in his New York office when an
invitation to emulate his old mentors
flashed across the screen: Out in Califor-
nia, frightened depositors were lined up
outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s larg-
est mortgage lenders, waiting to with-
draw their cash. “This bank is going to
end up failing, and we need to figure out
how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague.
“I’ve seen this game before.”
He played it like a natural. Mnuchin
reached out to George Soros, John Paul-
son, and other billionaires whose trust
he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 bil-
lion bid. Eager to unload the bank—whose
balance sheet was chock-full of toxic
assets—the FDIC agreed to cover any
losses that might accrue to the investors
above a certain threshold. Which is to say,
the government agreed to partially social-
ize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This
public aid came with one major condition:
The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed
OneW o ood-
faith e eo void
foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately
pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough to buy Steve
Mnuchin’s good faith.
P
urchasing IndyMac secured One-
West a claim on a lot of undervalued
housing. The catch, of course, was
that much of it was full of broke people.
And California’s foreclosure laws make the
process of separating low-net-worth hu-
mans from high-value housing stock long
and arduous. But this was nothing a little
entrepreneurship couldn’ t solve:
Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could
get away with “robo signing” and backdat-
ing documents to expedite foreclosures.
OneWest got caught red-handed on the
first count but emerged with a slap on the
wrist. Investigators at the California attor-
ney general’s office concluded the bank
was guilty on the second and requested
authorization to pursue an enforcement
action. It’s unclear exactly why then–
Attorney General Kamala Harris denied
this request. But as the investigators them-
selves noted, to pursue legal action against
an entity with OneWest’s resources would
mean investing years of time—and large
sums of the public’s money—in a deeply
uncertain enterprise. The government
could afford to take only so many risks,
which meant the idea that the state could
hold all its superrich residents accountable
to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.
I
n the spring of 2016, another
promising investment opportunity
caught the eye of the now-former
OneWest CEO. Mnuchin had crossed
paths with Trump several times over the
years; his hedge fund had invested in (at
least) two of the mogul’s projects. So
when Donald invited Steve to swing by
his tower on the night he won the New
York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozen-
ish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-
branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to
become the finance chairman of the fu-
ture GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s
Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The
LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as
a political animal, let alone a Trumpist.
But his motives weren’t mysterious. For
someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic
position, Trump’s presidential campaign
was just another low-risk, high-reward
bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an
interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going
to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I
end up in the administration.”
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
M
nuchin is the last of the
“adults in the room”—that cabal of
semi-credentialed advisers whose
presence in the West Wing eased the trou-
bled minds of Never Trump pundits circa
2017. None of the others—not Rex
Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R.
McMaster, or John Kelly—could marshal
the requisite combination of unscrupulous
sycophancy and patient politicking to
weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous
moods. Only the former Foreclosure King
has what it takes to unequivocally defend
the president’s kind words for alt-right
marchers in Charlottesville or echo his at-
tacks on NFL players who dared to protest
police abuse. So when the biggest econom-
ic crisis since the Great Depression hit,
Mnuchin became—in The Wall Street
Journal’s appellation—“Washington’s in-
dispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened
by ideological conviction or economic lit-
eracy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s
most able dealmaker. Working out of a
temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon
Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the
closing weeks of March running (and mas-
saging) messages between the Senate’s
Democratic and Republican camps as they
sought consensus on a gargantuan corona-
virus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the mid-
dleman, and he must have been in my of-
fice 20 times in three days,” Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the
Journal, going on to praise the reliability
of the Treasury secretary’s word. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and
Mnuchin can communicate through a
“shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “nice-
ties or anything like that.”
The soft skills Mnuchin had once
deployed to ink billion-dollar investment
deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion
economic-relief package. And there was
much to admire in the legislation’s headline
provisions: an unprecedented expansion in
federal unemployment benefits that would
leave many laid-off workers with as much—
if not more—income than they’d earned at
their old jobs, forgivable loans for small
businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs dur-
ing the crisis, and onetime cash payments to
all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a Republican stimulus,
however much schmoozing Steve has done
with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Con-
gress’s persistent underfunding of the small-
business aid has kept America’s most
vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold.
And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-
25
insurance offices have struggled to
administer benefits as the ranks of the
jobless grow millions stronger every
week. The Treasury Department has
allowed debt collectors to garnish the
relief checks of cash-strapped Ameri-
cans, and Congress has essentially
refused to bail out hospitals whose
budgets have suddenly been destroyed
by covid-driven shortfalls, meaning
that over the next few years, whole
essential health systems and services
could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the legislation’s largest
appropriation—$454 billion to back-
stop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve
lending program to large corpora-
tions—gives Mnuchin significant per-
sonal discretion over which firms will
have access to low-cost credit and on
what terms, thereby leaving a con-
noisseur in the art of subverting fed-
eral crisis management for personal
profit in charge of preventing Ameri-
ca’s corporate titans from subverting
federal crisis management for per-
sonal profit.
The White House’s next big idea for
promoting economic recovery is,
reportedly, to formally suspend the
enforcement of labor and environ-
mental regulations on small busi-
nesses, a measure that would enable
petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all
pretense of concern for their workers’
health and well-being in the midst of
a pandemic.
Nevertheless, could we have reason-
ably expected anything better, all things
considered? A GOP president and Sen-
ate majority were always going to com-
fort the comfortable and toss crumbs
to the afflicted. And when Congress
approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus
relief funds last month, nurses were
intubating patients without proper PPE,
grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing
their health to keep others fed, and
delivery drivers were forfeiting the secu-
rity of social distancing so others could
more comfortably enjoy it. The legisla-
tion included zero dollars in hazard-pay
benefits for those workers. It did, how-
ever, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to
the owners of pass-through businesses,
such as, for instance, the Trump Organi-
zation. Such “relief” was necessary, the
American Enterprise Institute later
explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on
economic risk-takers. ■ orange snot.
26 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
Pandemic Wellness
So many people I know were doing yoga,
juicing, colonics. What difference did it make?
By Amy Larocca
As this year began, I was deep in
revisions for a draft of a book
I’m writing about the burgeoning
consumer-spirituality industry of
supplements, pulsating colonics, silent
retreats—the entire intermittent–juice–
fasting–sleep–hygiene–SoulCycle–
Moon Juice–Ashwagandha
Gesamtkunstwerk of trying to feel okay,
which had taken over the lives of many
people I know. I called it the “wellness
epidemic.” At my last face-to-face
meeting with my editor in February,
I sort of flapped my hand before
her furrowed brow and said “Eh,
a global pandemic is not where my
anxieties live.” And it wasn’t, then.
As news of COVID became more
ominous, my in-box and
Instagram feed were flooded
with opportunities to buy my
way out of my fear. Was this
what the wellness world had
been preparing for all along?
Superpowers to survive a
scary new world? What an opportunity
for self-care! It had never been easier
to find recipes for immune-boosting
teas and tinctures, breathing
techniques, and mantras to recite.
I got an email from the Well, the fancy
membership club announcing that
I could purchase a box of its yet-to-
launch proprietary “immunity
boosting” supplements. And I spent
$90 on … I don’t know what, exactly.
Some of the ingredients are listed
(vitamin B, vitamin D), others are just
described as an “herbal formulation to
support a healthy immune response.”
Whatever! As much as my research
has led me to believe (strongly believe)
that the vast majority of supplements
on the market are bogus, this time
I was panicked and susceptible.
So why not at least try? I reasoned.
I kept outrageously hydrated and
took expensive little shots of a lypo-
spheric vitamin-C supplement
that resembles, in texture, a clot of
It all felt like attempts to control an
out-of-control situation. The corona-
celebrity Chris Cuomo is married
to a wellness entrepreneur, Cristina
Greeven Cuomo, the founder of
The Purist. Flushed and furious, he’s
been broadcasting from their
Hamptons basement. Greeven
Cuomo, meanwhile, was consulting
with alternative practitioners and
therapists to treat him, which she
documented on Instagram.
Example: “Today is day 18 of a very
slow, skittish recovery … to build up
his strength, I gave him more good
foods, dr. Linda’s herbs + homeopathy,
and lots of vitamins necessary for this
time + non-toxic quinine (Cinchona
Officialis—Peruvian Bark) to combat
this oxygen-eating virus. He had a
stress-free diet this past week (that
isn’t taxing on the liver and doesn’t
consume energy) consisting of
cooked foods like soups, lentil,
chicken, legumes + vegetables.
It takes a lot of energy to break down
raw foods, especially when you’re sick.
Food is medicine!
#corona #naturalremedies.” Just
as he got better, she got sick and used
the same protocols on herself.
My husband was struck by COVID,
too: He couldn’t come out of the spare
room for 15 days. We were—we are—
really, really fortunate. His fever and
shortness of breath never progressed
to a point where we even considered
visiting an ER. But it made me think,
Is this wellness or just being well-off?
Is there really even a difference?
Certainly, statistically, it is obvious that
the most prevalent comorbidities of
COVID-19—diabetes, lung disease, and
heart disease—disproportionately
affect the poor. I wrote my book out of
P H OTO G R A P H : R E TA I L E R
some sense of skepticism at the FOMO
consumerization of the industry. But it
made me realize that while privilege—
the Cuomos, Gwyneth’s, mine—is not
the same as immunity, it has become
grimly clear that it’s certainly a help.
Photograph by David Williams
A single apartment
is illuminated at
200 Eleventh
Avenue in Chelsea.
 Sheltering With Your Boss
five nannies tell all.
“We are like items to them;
they can’t go without us.”
i’m a live-in nanny for an ultra-
high-net-worth Manhattan family. I have a
degree in early-childhood education and
decades of professional nanny experience.
The family I work for is pretty high profile.
These people could afford to keep a full
staff on furlough for months on end with
benefits, but they choose not to. They’ve
had people quit on them because of safety
reasons. They told them, “Okay. Well, then,
you’re not getting a reference. How dare
you let us down.” But most of the people
who they employ are foreign-born like me
and would have a hard time sticking up
for themselves.
28 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
During the week, I stay with them at
their outrageously large Hamptons house,
so of course they need an outrageously large
staff. There wasn’t really a conversation
about moving up to the Hamptons with
them; it was basically just “This is how it’s
going to be.” For the first time since working
there, I had a sort of Are you kidding me?
reaction. Normally, I’m a “yes, ma’am” type
of person. And that quickly escalated to her
screaming that I had better come in or else.
But then she was like, “I’ll make it worth
your while.” I don’t know if that’s going to
come to fruition.
There’s so many people coming in and
out of the house. There’s a sports coach for
the kids, and he goes to other people’s
houses and works with their kids, too. And
then they have the chef that goes to the gro-
cery store every day. There’s people who
come in to do hair blow-dries a few days
a week, a manicurist, a personal trainer.
The other housekeepers and nannies are
like, This is really ridiculous. They
haven’t asked any of the workers to stop
coming in. Why don’t they care? One of my
co-workers, she has just been washing the
clothes of the kids nonstop every time they
come in contact with a new person. And if
I’ve ordered anything on Amazon, like
school supplies, I quarantine the boxes in
the pool house for two days. I get met with
a lot of rolled eyes from my employers.
They don’t seem to be worried, even
though when I started coming into the
Hamptons, I had a cough. The dad seems
to be a germophobe. He’s freaking out all
the time about my kids washing their
hands, but if we’re FaceTiming someone
and I’m coughing in the background, he’ll
say, “Oh, it’s just the nanny.”
They have been sending me and my co-
Illustrations by Patrick Leger
workers back to Manhattan on weekends in
a private car together. But the driver doesn’t
work exclusively with them, so there’s other
people that go in this car at other times.
One of my co-workers has a big family,
they’re elderly, and also one of my co-work-
ers’ husbands is really sick and is one of the
delicate people that should not be exposed
at all. Our employers probably don’t even
know she has a family. It’s not one of the
things they would wonder about.
The dad sits on the couch all day on the
phone doing business. But then he has the
gall to tell people, “Oh, it’s so hard being with
my kids. They’re doing all this homeschool-
ing.” And I’m like, You haven’t done one
thing with that! It’s me! They’ve never taken
care of their own kids for more than an hour.
One of my colleagues, whenever she is in
the city, has to shop around for specialty
items for them: things the chef needs that
they can’t find in the Hamptons, and obvi-
ously they can’t use any old kind of toilet
paper; they have to use their nice toilet
paper, so she has to go to a few different
shops to try and find it. There’s lots of spe-
cific items that they have become accus-
tomed to and that they can’t go without. Just
like the people. We are like items to them;
they can’t go without us.
“A lot of them had to go into
work, and that’s one of the
reasons why I think so many of
them lost their lives.”
i’m from st. vincent. I came to this
country about 14 years ago. Before the coro-
navirus, I was taking care of a 5-year-old and
a 7-year-old. Then when I went in on a Mon-
day morning, the bosses, who are both law-
yers, said they were going to stay home and
they would contact me to let me know
what’s going on. I took it for granted because
a lot of other nannies, their bosses are send-
ing their money to their homes. But then
they paid me the first week, and that’s it.
I had to file unemployment.
I put my everything into taking care of
these kids. So at least parents should see
that and appreciate it without having to
remind them. This is a crisis. And if it
wasn’t for this crisis, I would be at work.
Still, I’m not going to reach out to them,
because why did other employers find it
in their heart to pay me? I cook for an old
guy in Manhattan, just two days a week,
and he has sent money to me three times
right now. So why should I have to call
them and ask them to pay me? I will never
do that, believe me. They aren’t stupid.
I have a 14-year-old son. I have to pay
rent. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. Now
I just try and follow instructions and stay
home. Everybody wants to live, so you just
have to comply with the rules.
My very good friend of about 35 years,
Jenna Layne, passed away from the coro-
navirus. She was working as a nanny on the
East Side of Manhattan. We were really,
really close. She was one of the most beauti-
ful people you could ever meet. A lot of
nannies from the Caribbean have died. We
have a nannies group, and they would post
the people. It’s about ten to 15 from the
Caribbean. A lot of them had to go into
work, and that’s one of the reasons why
I think so many of them lost their lives. We
know that money is important, but I would
have really not gone into work. Because if
you have the money and you lose your life,
what sense does it make?
“Now I’m seeing them
be real people.”
i grew up in chicago and got a bach-
elor’s degree in child development. I was a
nanny there for three years after college
before moving to New York. The family
I work with now has a beach house in New
Jersey, so they decided to go there. They of-
fered for me to bring my fiancé and dog and
cat and stay with them because they have
the space. But my fiancé has to work in the
city, so he stayed home.
It turns out my employers actually own
multiple houses next to each other, and they
have their college friends staying in the other
houses, as well as the kid’s aunt and uncle, so
there’s about eight of us in this little com-
plex. I knew they were very well off—they
live in a very fancy building that has celebri-
ties in it. When they said they had a beach
house, it’s like, Okay, lots of people in their
neighborhood have beach houses. But then
they’ll be like, “Oh, our family also owns
houses all over the country.”
I feel like a lot of times, they’ll ask my
opinion about things, like, “What do you
think: Should we open up the pool?” The
uncle really wanted to and then everyone
else was like, “It’s kind of early.” And I was
like, “I’ve never had a pool. I would have
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
opened up the pool three days ago, and
I would swim every day.” They just laughed.
They’re buying me everything I need to
be here, food and toiletries, because it’s
nothing to them. Sometimes we’ll all go
online shopping together, and they’ll be
like, “Let’s all buy Lululemon pants
together.” But other times they’re like, “Let’s
see if Rolex is having a sale.” And I’m like,
Oh, okay, I’m out of the conversation now.
It’s a bit awkward because we wouldn’t
normally see each other in this light. Like,
it’s Friday night—is it weird if we all drink
wine together? I’ve been kind of looking at
the line of what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Because they’re still my bosses. I’m defi-
nitely more weird about it than they are.
One night they were making margaritas,
and they were like, “Come drink with us.
You can have 100 margaritas if you want!”
But I don’t want to have 100 margaritas
with my bosses. Them and their college
friends are always like, “Let’s play drinking
games!” It’s nice that they included me, but
I feel so uncomfortable. What if I get drunk
and embarrass myself?
Now I’m seeing them be real people.
They’ll be telling college stories, and it
never even occurred to me that they, like,
got drunk off boxed wine in college, because
I just thought they were fancy rich people.
I just assume if your parents have money,
you don’t have to work in college, but they
are like, “No, we all used to be bartenders.
That’s why we love service people.”
They’re very aware of not infecting other
people. They’re not going out and stuff like
that, but that is their only worry. Other
people are worried that they’re going to be
homeless or they’re going to starve. It kind
of makes me upset because I feel like a lot
of people are about to be homeless when it
would take $1,000 to pay their rent and
then there are people that are like, “I’m
really bored. I should get the boats out of
storage.” If you have money, you have no
fear. You’re not afraid of anything.
“Some people, in difficult times,
they want to abuse you.”
i’ve been a nanny for 17 years. In 2018,
I started with a family with a baby. Then the
coronavirus came. I take the train, and
when I see the situation is very bad, I say to
myself, I’m not going to take the train any-
more because it’s dangerous. I can’t get sick.
29
I’m 53 years old—I have to stay home. I live
in the Bronx, and they live in Battery Park.
I told her I don’t want to take the train be-
cause it’s dangerous. I told her I’m afraid.
My children’s grandma on the other side
passed away from the coronavirus. My
daughter, in my country, had the corona-
virus. She’s good now, thank God. I’m from
the Dominican Republic, though I’ve been
in America for 22 years. I don’t have work
documentation. I don’t have health insur-
ance. She told me, “If you’re not working,
you can’t get paid.” I said, “It’s okay. I prefer
to be healthy and not sick, because then
I can find someone else to hire me.” She
ended up paying me half because she said
she felt bad, though I told her she didn’t
have to.
Then last week she called me and offered,
“Oh, we’re going to rent a house in upstate
New York. You can come stay with us.”
I said, “I can’t because I have my grandchild
living with me.” She said, “Oh, we can bring
him. He can have his own room.” So we
packed food and clothes, and her husband
came and picked us up and drove us there.
Once I was there, I asked her, since I’m
30 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
live-in now, how much you want to pay
me? I normally make $800 a week. She
said she wanted to charge me $300 a week
out of my paycheck because my grandson
was with me, because she said “we’re going
to give your grandson food.” And I said,
“I don’t want you giving nothing to my
grandson. I told you I’d buy him food. I’d
never think you’d want to charge me $300
a week.”
Then on Sunday last week, they said now
we’re going to go to the Poconos, because
they had bad internet at the first house.
I thought about it and I said, “I’m not going
to go. Because you want to squeeze me.”
I told them, “Please take me home.” She
said, “You don’t want to work anymore?”
I said, “No, I just want to go home.”
I was working hard. When I went down-
stairs at night, I had to cook because I had
to feed my grandchild. Yet everyone ate the
food that I made. I did the dishes. She
treated me like her housekeeper when I’m
supposed to be her nanny. I want to explain
this to you, because some people, in difficult
times, they want to abuse you.
I told her she had to be careful about how
she talks to me, because her child is crazy
about me, she loves me. And I said, “You
know how I treat your kids? I want you to
treat me like that.”
“In this profession, other
peoples’ needs and wants come
before your own.”
myself and the parents, we have ex-
cellent communication. We are very trans-
parent with one another, and we’ve always
said if anybody in the house does not feel
well, we will let each other know. So a few
weeks ago, I found out that the friends that
I had close contact with had tested positive.
I told the parents and got in touch with my
doctor and quarantined myself.
I’m living on the property. I have a bed-
room, bathroom, closets, and a kitchen
area to myself, and lots of windows with
sunshine and fresh air. They have a very
large home in a suburb of Connecticut.
We made sure I had fresh linens and toilet
paper and fresh meals and my strong cup
of coffee in the morning. They really went
above and beyond.
Now that I’m out of isolation, I’m taking
care of the whole family unit, where before
it was primarily the children. So making
sure everybody has what they need, what
they want. Is everybody getting a workout
in the gym? Do I need to make sure the chil-
dren are out of the house if the parents need
to work? I’m cooking for the whole family.
In this profession, other peoples’ needs
and wants come before your own. I think to
have that mind-set doesn’t come naturally
for a lot of people in the service profession.
But for me, I have to put them first. It’s my
responsibility. I actually initiated the con-
versation earlier this week to see if I need to
adjust anything I’m doing since we’re going
to be there for the long haul. We discussed
the other workers who come into the
home—if there’s a point where they can
come in, what that will look like. And I said,
“Look, I can pick up a mop.” I need to main-
tain flexibility in this job role.
The other night, the mom said, “I’m clos-
ing up the kitchen for the night. Do you need
a cup of tea?” I said, “Yeah, that would be
great.” And then I texted back and said,
“I really feel guilty. I’m supposed to be taking
care of you.” And she replied back, “Now it’s
my turn to take care of you.” ■
as told to anna silman
 Eight People, 900 Square Feet
Since the middle of March, four generations of Shawn Davis’s
family have been quarantining together in her apartment in
Hunts Point, the Bronx. There
are six people living full time in
the three-bedroom apartment,
and Davis’s two young
grandchildren come over to
be watched during the day.
It makes for tight quarters,
especially since Davis’s
husband and son were laid off.
→ Shawn Davis: I’m sheltering → Lauren Ramos [Shawn’s
with my 80-year-old mother daughter]: The goal is simple:
and my 20-year-old daughter try not to go insane. I go to City
and her boyfriend—they’re College, and I’m an intern for
both college students. There’s the City, so Tuesday, Thursday,
my 32-year-old son and my Friday, I’m in my bedroom,
husband, who’s 46. I’m 55, working online, and Monday,
and normally I love having my Wednesday, Sunday, I do
house packed. But I can tell schoolwork. I was studying
you that being trapped in psychology, but after seeing
with these people … I’m like, how understaffed hospitals are,
You all gotta get the hell out I’m going to transfer to nursing.
of my house! I just want to help.
My husband was working
→ Shawn: We’ll get up in the
at a food warehouse up here
morning, and first thing
in Hunts Point for about four
I do is disinfect. My son gets
years. Before we got to the
up, and we’ll chat at the dining-
apex [of the virus], they made
room table. Everybody has a
them come to work. My mom
cup of coffee. I’m making the
is 80, and I have lupus. We
breakfast, and I make it so it’ll
worried about him, and us.
stretch: definitely a lot of
You’re coming back from the
oatmeal or scrambled eggs and
front lines to bring it into my
farina. We’re trying to get
house? He’d come home from
through to unemployment—
work and take everything off
my son’s been trying for four
outside in the hallway, shoes
weeks, and my husband’s been
and everything, then put it
trying, and nobody’s gotten
in a bag. Then, after about a
a check. I had to buy a landline
week and a half, they said,
phone just so we can press
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E DAV I S FA M I LY
come get your grandkids!”
So they’ll come over, and we’ll
play Scrabble or Life. My
grandson gets to play the PS4
after his school and chores are
done, but only for two hours:
I’m trying to keep the electricity
bill down. My daughter and I do
our workout together on our
bikes. And everybody sits on
their phone trying to look for
work. Right now, they’re only
hiring temp people who are
replacing the COVID people
who are out. When these
people come back from their
furlough, they’re going to
throw you out.
→ Shane: My grandmother,
I think she’s disappointed.
Because you say to yourself,
This is America. America
should be prepared for
something like this. She saw
WWII, Vietnam, stuff like that.
For her, I’m pretty sure it’s
a sense that the world’s coming
to an end.
→ Lauren: Sometimes in
Trump; my brother hates
Trump; I hate Trump. That’s
not a debate.
→ Shawn: The personalities
in the house, it’s getting to be
a little chaotic. I’m talking to
you in the shower. Listen,
I raised three kids in the one-
bedroom I used to live in—
I know what it’s like to be in an
even tighter space. But even
so, right now, I wish I would
have bought a tiny little house
up in White Plains.
→ Lauren: We’re about three
weeks in. I can tell we’re
getting antsy. My boyfriend
and I didn’t used to cook that
much, but we’re trying to learn,
to take advantage of saving
money. We’ve mastered tacos,
but we’re still trying to learn
baked ziti.
→ Shawn: All I see is dollar
signs when somebody’s in the
kitchen. I get $62 of food
stamps a month. That is
nothing. What the hell can I do
with $62 a month? My
daughter’s always in the
kitchen cooking, and I’m like,
“Guys, you’ve got to stretch
the essentials.” You have a loaf
of bread here in this part of the
Bronx that’s $3, where it used
to be $1.89. I paid last month’s
rent, but this month’s going to
be a little iffy. They’re going to
get half, maybe, if they’re lucky.
Not to mention our utility bills.
How can anybody chip in if
they’re all waiting for
unemployment to come
through? The brunt of it comes
from my disability check and
my mom’s Social Security.
→ Shane: I think about what

I’m going to do when this is

“You know what? We’re just
going to let people go.” So they
laid them all off. My son is
a commercial plumber, and his
job site in Staten Island was
shut down.
→ Shane Campos
[Shawn’s son]: I always wanted
to take a vacation, and I never
could take one. At first, I was
like, Maybe this is my vacation,
just without pay. But being
home is driving me crazy.
the redial button.
→ Lauren: Thankfully, I still
have my internship. But I really
miss talking to people who
have the same college trouble,
those random conversations:
“I failed a test. You failed a test.”
→ Shawn: My oldest
daughter lives in the building
next to me, and she’ll call me
up and say, “Bathe them in
Lysol—do what you want—just
the morning, me and my
brother and my grandma will
have a debate about politics,
whatever’s on the news. Funny
enough, I enjoy those moments
because we’re all into
something together. My brother
is like, “Oh, Cuomo took too
long. He’s just doing things
because he doesn’t want to get
bashed.” My grandma’s like,
“Cuomo, that’s my man!” But
Trump—my grandma hates
all over. The new normal that
they’re talking about is just
going to be really bad for
people like us. You’re either
poor or you’re rich. I only make
$50,000 a year. In New York,
that is still not enough to
survive. I was just getting
above water. I don’t have
schooling like a lot of people
I know. I have my GED and
my hands and my brain.
As told to Amelia Schonbek

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 31
 above: A man with PPE exits his sports car on Main Street in East Hampton at 10 a.m.
→

→ right: On the 5-train platform at 149th Street in the Bronx at 8 a.m., where recently police have been sent to enforce social distancing.

Photograph by David Williams

Photograph by Pari Dukovic
 The Spaces Between Us
when friends and neighbors run for the hills,
small differences in wealth suddenly loom large .
S
ome of my best friends own
country houses. This is not a new
discovery. One of the things I have
loved best about my life in New
York is exactly this, the wide diver-
sity in the affluence of my friends—if you
can call a group of mostly white, mostly
college-educated, striving people living in
Brooklyn and Manhattan “diverse.” Some of
my best friends own country houses and
some don’t have a pot to piss in, and before
this pandemic, we all hung out together—
sometimes at those country houses and
sometimes at the precious restaurants we all
love or at shitty bars—because even though
we could observe the income discrepancies
between us, we mostly pretended they did
not exist. Our affinity (in taste, politics,
humor, parenting concerns) superseded
what we told ourselves were superficial dis-
tinctions. That was our silent agreement.
So what is this grief I feel when I encoun-
ter those same friends ensconced in the
country now on Zoom? The peaceful woods,
the backyard deck, the cute wallpaper, the
wainscoting—all this makes my anxiety
surge like a blood-sugar rush. I love my
friends and understand that they are suffer-
ing too; out of town, cut off from us, their
isolation is perhaps even more intense. But
this fact is hard to deny: When the going got
tough, they ran for the lifeboats, hoping to
save themselves from whatever unknown
was about to be visited upon this city-home
we all share. My most ungenerous self
blames them for this and for somehow
betraying our pact.
What I have adored about New York from
the outset—the human crush—is now the
problem. Crammed together in elevators
and at bars, we all breathe the same poten-
tially infected air. That density used to mean
proximity to everything and everyone, that
I might walk into a party and meet an heir-
ess or a drummer or a television anchor and
that I might date an astrophysicist or a cop.
The jumble, the subway, the orner
mix—all this made me feel we e and
unafraid, the exact opposite of the dark,
empty streets of my childhood in Connecti-
34 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
By Lisa Miller
cut. My appetite for hyperbole and seren-
dipitous encounters was fed by my ambi-
tion: I have an excuse to promiscuously
phone and meet strangers, cultivate even
more intimacy, and call it a job.
The New York of the 1990s, when my
friends and I settled here, was grungy and
glittering and glaringly racist in ways we
weren’t looking at. (There was a lot of look-
ing away back then in the interest of getting
ahead or along, a habit that is hard to break.)
Some of us chased partnerships at banks or
worked nights as paralegals or went to grad-
uate school, while others, like me, pursued
our muses and mentors at book parties and
nightclubs and fashion shows. At office par-
ties, we rubbed up against the writers and
editors we most admired, hoping they
would admire us back. Afterward, we went
downtown and did shots in bars that
smelled rank, like sex. Money was always an
unspoken part of this—our bosses had
much more than we did; their bosses, of the
proprietor class, much more than they—and
these distinctions were measured not just in
real estate but in handmade shoes and in
car-service vouchers, and we noticed these
things but none of it mattered very deeply to
us. What mattered was being recognized as
smart, surprising, and funny (also a little
wounded and bleak) and recognizing those
qualities in others, no matter how rich or
poor they were. That was the ecstasy. We
found each other. We were the same.
A preference for fulfillment and excite-
ment over a fat brokerage account is easy
to defend when you’re young and self-
centered. In youth, no one is keeping too
close an eye on the relative fragility of indi-
vidual friends’ financial health; everyone
knows a whopping bill hurts different din-
ner guests differently, but that isn’t enough
to ruin the party. Even before this pandemic,
I was sometimes surprised to notice that not
all my friends were as determined to be
heedless of the more conventional trappings
of wealth as I. Occasionally, a person at work,
younger or lower on the pecking order,
would turn out to own some charming place
in the Village, the gift of an investment-
minded parent, and I would feel astonished
and betrayed, as if they were cheating some-
how, but also curious about how such
cushiony entitlement might feel. While I was
failing to delve into the fine print of my ben-
efits package, a friend up and bought the
shitty summer house we used to share; in a
stroke, what was “ours” became his, and it
felt like a slap. Didn’t we contribute equally
to the cooking and debauchery there?
Parenthood changed my naïve aversion to
noticing money; there was no way to avoid
comparisons now. We finally bought our flat
in Brooklyn after 18 months of the baby in
the closet. (It’s big enough with beautiful
light on a beautiful block; it needed work
when we first moved in and needs the same
work today.) But the ostentatious stratifica-
tion that choked the city had begun in ear-
nest. With children, in rich Brooklyn, there
was no pretending about wealth. There
were too many things to have that others
could see. Nannies, architects, decorators,
trainers, tutors, private school, coaches—we
all partook of these amenities, some a lot
and some hardly at all. There was some
shame in these comparisons, also self-doubt
and defensiveness, but these were undercur-
rents. The feeling we had about each other
after a couple of glasses of wine at the pre-
school potluck was the same thrill of recog-
nition as when we were young. You’re hilari-
ous. You’re gorgeous. You know all the words
to that song. Thank you for dinner, for that
book, for looking after my kid, for helping
me celebrate my birthday.
There is so much quarantine judgment
right now, as if there were one single right
way to respond to an unprecedented catas-
trophe or to assess and calculate real and
imagined risk. A recent thread on Twitter,
brimming with resentment, seemed to
imply that every single person who left New
York for any reason was a turncoat, includ-
ing young adults who went home to their
parents and the parents of young children
who left when confronted with the prospect
of months cooped up or trying to keep small
hands off playground equipment. It is so
tempting, in the face of this volume of
The View From Your Lockdown
In mid-April, hundreds of readers
told us about their anxieties, shame, and
resentment around money.
“Am I judging people? Maybe … just a little. I am appalled at some of my
friends whose wealth insulates them from it all. They like to tell me about
their recent call with their broker or financial adviser: ‘He said I should be
fine, maybe even better off, when this is over.’ They fill conversations with
talk of what their gardener wants to do to their rose garden or how the
–
painter messed up (again!) on the sunroom woodwork.” “I’ve dropped
every ‘luxury’ I can think of. I’m terrified of getting sick, not for my
health but because of the costs.” – “All my friends are losing their jobs,
and I feel this insane survivor’s guilt. I’m trying to buy my way out by Venmo-
–
ing [them] like I’m buying indulgences.” “I mentioned to my friends
I was trying to figure out how best to spend the $1,200 stimulus, and they
both said, ‘Oh, you’re getting that check?,’ which made me realize my
friends make a lot more money than me.” – “It has been interesting to see
who has left town to quarantine upstate or in the Hamptons. We’re fortunate,
but we’re not rich. And I’m always surprised just by how much money some
–
people have.” “I’m ashamed of my apartment on my multiple daily
video meetings. I place my head to cover a dark-brown leak spot on the
ceiling.” – “I am one of the few black people that can work from home.
I luckily have a white-collar job, but my 60-year-old mother does not. She’s
had to lose her wages by staying home from one of her jobs. I feel like this is
–
Katrina. I’m so scared for my people, black people.” “I lost my job as a
chef and line cook, and there are no resources. The unemployment
website has not worked for me in three weeks.” – “The transit authority
(my employer) is majority ‘minorities,’ and that directly has to do with how
workers are perceived and treated. The governor’s cute TV speeches make
non–New Yorkers think that MTA employees are valued, but his regular
disdain for us is well known in the transit authority. It is no surprise that we
–
haven’t received hazard pay.” “I’m totally judging people who have it
–
easier than I do, even though I have it pretty easy.” “I thought I would
be willing to do anything for money. But I stopped being a gig worker for
Postmates and Instacart. My fears that I might get sick or die won over my
–
desperate need for money to pay my bills.” “I’m thinking about how to
profit off the market downturn in ways I never would have. As an older
millennial, I lived through the recession in 2008 but didn’t have the
income or the cash to properly capitalize off the upswing. I don’t want
to miss that opportunity again.” – “Now I’m almost painfully aware of
how privileged I am. For me, this whole situation is a significant
inconvenience. For millions of workers and millions of families, it’s much
–
more serious.” “My grandmother lives paycheck to paycheck in NYC
and still had to be working through the pandemic. She couldn’t afford to
stay home, because her landlord has wanted to kick her out for over a
year now. I tried to tell her about all the government relief there is, but
she doesn’t trust that it will help her.” – “We have little-to-no savings,
we’re renting, and our landlord is refusing to offer any relief; my partner lost
his job, no one in his field is hiring, and I’m furloughed. My partner can’t
afford Obamacare, let alone COBRA, so he’s uninsured. And if he gets sick
–
(he has asthma), I’m terrified of what the medical bill will look like.” “I’m
checking the stock market all day long. I have checked my bank account
at least five times a day for the past three weeks.” – “After grinding
down my credit-card debt and student loans for 11 years, I was a few months
from feeling freedom and thinking I could maybe start saving money by the
time I got to my 40s. Now I’ve lost employment, don’t know how to pay the
bills, and figure it’s going to be paycheck to paycheck, at best, until I die.”
stress, to scrutinize others for their failure to hew
to some moral line. Where is your mask? You call
that a mask? You consider that six feet apart? Sup-
port local businesses, but don’t leave that contami-
nated pizza box in the hall. Is there virtue in staying
when reducing human density is the point? Or in
leaving, if you might just be bringing infection with
you? I remind myself that all the judgment is grief,
as a cleric friend once said, and grief isn’t pretty or
rational or kind.
A whole layer of New York just up and left,
including some of my friends. That is shocking, as
they say, but not very surprising. The rich have
always holed up in the country to wait for historic
unpleasantness to pass. Yes, this virus amplifies the
differences between us, but the gaps have never
been wider, forcing millions to the terrifying edges
of the bottom tier. What’s excruciating to watch is
the flagrant, hard-nosed, sometimes petty asser-
tions of self-interest by some of the haves, the
refusal of co-op boards to allow ER doctors to stay
in their buildings or the lobbying for refunds by par-
ents at certain preschools. Layoffs, price gouging,
the hoarding of square footage—all this has always
gone on but is now layered with the self-justification
of survival (a rationale that may or may not be hon-
est). Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were
right: It is not crazy or paranoid to imagine the
waters rising and being left to drown. In preserving
their safety and controlling their risk, the very rich
control risk and safety for everyone else.
That said, all the creatures inhabiting our apart-
ment (three humans, a cat, and a dog) are physically
healthy and relatively sane. There are places we
could have gone, but so far, I am glad we stayed. It’s
weird, but I still feel safer here than anywhere else,
and the Brooklyn I fell in love with is Brooklyn still.
My friend around the corner goes to the butcher
and buys me steaks; when I bake a cake, I give
him some. We see other friends on six-feet-apart
walks, meeting up in Green-Wood Cemetery to visit
Basquiat’s grave, and in Prospect Park we jog past a
father teaching himself the banjo while his baby
sleeps in the sun. But when I fail at maintaining my
mental balance, what I’m left with is grief—for my
city and perhaps for the loss of a dream that never
was true. What I want more than anything (other
than the resumption of my kid’s school) is to see my
friends, all of them, to squeeze around a too-small
table in a bustling restaurant in front of an obnox-
ious smorgasbord of overpriced share plates, eating
straight off the serving dishes, shoulder to shoulder,
laughing our asses off over a self-deprecating story
one of us told. To go back to not caring or calculat-
ing who has more or less, who has lost or gained,
and how this cataclysm will change each one of us
long term. What I want is for my friends to come
back from all the different places they’ve gone, for
all their reasons, and to stay, so there will be restau-
rants we can go to again. ■
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 35
 In Conversation:

as Piketty
he warned us.
By David Wallace-Wells

36 Photograph by Pari Dukovic

I
f bernie sanders is the politician Occupy Wall down in a very small apartment with five
Street dreamed of, Thomas Piketty is the closest thing people or ten people is completely different
from being locked down in a place like this.
we’ve gotten to the great theoretician of our era of And you have a big part of the Paris popula-
inequality (and the populism and political dysfunc- tion that has gone to the countryside.
tion it has produced). Capital in the Twenty-First Everywhere you look—inequalities.
In the rest of the world, in India or in
Century, which came out in France in 2013 and in the West Africa, for instance, I’m very con-
U.S. six months later, was the biggest best seller Har- cerned. There, the way the lockdown has
vard University Press had ever published (despite been designed is that in practice it’s mostly
being nearly 700 dense pages long); it managed to a way to get rid of the migrants and rural
population working in the cities, who are
smuggle an abstract equation into quasi-pop dis- just pushed out. In some cases, it led to huge
course (r>g, Piketty’s shorthand for the fact that the mass movement of population going back
returns to capital have been greater than the growth of the econ- to the countryside, which doesn’t seem to be
the best way to avoid the spread of the virus.
omy as a whole) and is now the subject of a surprisingly light docu- When you don’t have a proper safety-net
mentary of the same name (in which Piketty stars). It’s not every system, income system, the violence of
day an academic economist gets a turn like this. Back in 2014, inequality is very clear. At the same time,
former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called Piketty a “rock yes, you are right that people feel there is a
collective political will to take control of our
star,” then spent most of the rest of the decade arguing with him. destiny and take control of economic forces
If Capital was diagnostic, Piketty’s follow-up, Capital and and markets. It’s a complex mixture.
Ideology, mixes history and polemic—case studies from modern We’ve heard about Denmark covering
75 percent of unemployed workers’ sala-
Sweden and Soviet Russia alongside a genuine political program ries. When you look around the spectrum
to help mitigate, at least, the cruelest inequities highlighted in his of responses, from the American response
first book. It was published on March 10, just as the coronavirus to the French, British, or Danish response,
crisis was reaching a full blaze, offering all its own lessons, all over who is doing the best there?
Well, it’s difficult to say. But certainly the
the world, in pandemic inequality. U.S. is probably doing the worst.
Where are you? That apartment looks like two realities at once—a frozen domestic It sounds like you’re saying that essen-
it’s in Paris. experience in which we spend a lot of our tially no nation has done what you would
Yeah, I’m in Paris right now. time just trying to catch up with an accel- consider a satisfactory job so far.
What’s it like there? erating reality we can follow only on our In every country, there are gaps in protec-
I’ve been here with my wife, Julia, for the phones and televisions. And the world I do tion, big gaps. The most extreme case is all
past six consecutive weeks. We have a pretty see on that screen is terrifying. But I also the homeless people and illegal immigrants.
nice apartment, so we’re not people who are find myself thinking about the incredible Some countries in Europe really have tried
suffering from this. The people who are suf- solidarity being demonstrated in this lock- to correct for these, at least on a temporary
fering are people in small apartments, peo- down. Is any part of you encouraged by basis. Like Portugal, where they introduced
ple who have to go and work. this response? a temporary regularization of all illegal
The U.S. media is so focused on the I’m not so sure I would say that. People immigrants until the summer, so at least
American experience, it almost makes it care about each other and are happy to they have access to basic services.
feel like the rest of the world isn’t going celebrate the caregivers, that’s true. At In the U.S., a lot of media attention has
through the same thing. 8 p.m. in Paris, we have this little ritual, focused on what I think are quite small-
We stay at home most of the time, so we but in the end, what we see with this crisis scale protests 2 against the shutdowns.
really don’t see much. When we go and is in many ways the violence of inequality. Given the story of the gilets jaunes,3 do
walk around in the city, we don’t see so The unemployment-benefit system in you fear that might happen in France?
many people, but we see a lot of homeless France has been extended, but this is basi- So far, we don’t see this kind of protest,
who have, of course, no place to go, and cally for people who are on regular perma- but of course I think the government is
they clearly have fewer people than usual nent contracts.1 If you are on an Uber-type going to be very careful not to go too far in
to give them money so they’re really asking delivery contract or self-entrepreneur, you terms of how long the lockdown continues.
a lot. There are some places where there is have very little income support. Again, the people who are most in need,
some distribution of food going on, but Many of these people just have to go and they can’t afford really protesting. They just
basically it’s like in this stupid end-of-the- work. They could get sick. The area of Paris need to work and get money and get food.
world movie where the normal people that is the most strongly hit is Seine-Saint- These are issues you’ve raised for a
have disappeared and all you have left are Denis, which is north of Paris and by far the while—the continued impoverishment of
the homeless. poorest suburb. Typically lots of people who the poor and the enrichment of the
It’s strange here, too. Those of us in work in supermarkets or in delivery jobs or wealthy, with a widening chasm between
effective quarantine, we’re sort of living in whatever. Also, of course, being locked them. How do you see the pandemic

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 37
changing those long-term trajectories?
Does it have the potential to change things
dramatically?
I can see so many other trajectories
where it does not. I think there will be a
shift toward more social transfer 4 and
more investment in public-health care,
and probably a more comprehensive safety
net because more people will realize how
useful this is. But then there could also be
a shift toward more what I described in my
book as a social nationalism—a richer sort
of social policy but restricted to a particu-
lar group of people that you feel are like
you or that certain politicians want to
describe as like you.
Whether this could reinforce socialism or
nationalism, just to take two broad possible
outcomes, is very unclear at this stage.
There’s a possibility that, in fact, after the
crisis, we go back to business as usual in
terms of how we organize the economy,
together with the strengthening of nation-
alist ideology, and we turn to strengthening
the borders and strengthening the identity
conflict. I think it’s a serious risk.
Broadly speaking, “social nationalism”
is the approach of Boris Johnson and, at
least during his first campaign, of Donald
Trump here. When I look at the U.K., it
seems to me that Johnson has managed
to do well politically by moving his party
somewhat to the left on economics while
embracing right-wing nationalism. The
polling suggests that combination has
been quite popular. And in the U.S., I think
you see something similar in the primary
between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. In
both cases, a moderate centrist or conser-
vative figure triumphed over a clearer pre-
sentation of left-wing principles. I wonder
how you assess those two races and how
problematic you see the results for your
own goals, since Jeremy Corbyn and
Sanders both lost.
I’m trying to contribute to the thinking
about what kind of economic and social
model we want to have in the long run. I’m
not too concerned with the specifics of each
country. Corbyn and Sanders, there were
lots of problems with them for different rea-
sons in both cases.
They’re not perfect spokespeople, you
mean.
Yeah. They’re not supposed to be perfect
spokesmen in any way, and in particular, it’s
clear that Corbyn did not manage to send a
message of transformation of Europe. But
what you’re saying about Johnson is inter-
esting. In some way, what Trump tried to
38 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
“When you don’t
have a proper
safety-net system,
income system,
the violence of
inequality
is very clear.”
put in the new version of the nafta treaty,5
although it’s mostly gesticulation, there is
some interesting potential. The idea that
you want a certain fraction of the produc-
tion to be paid under a certain level of mini-
mum wage, basically to put some discus-
sion about wages in a trade agreement, is
not necessarily stupid. I remember talking
to friends, economists, academics in the
U.S. They didn’t want even to hear a discus-
sion about this kind of thing.
In the case of Trump, the way he did it,
you sense that he just wanted to make a
point. It’s actually not well done at all. Most
important, as we all know, when it comes to
real money, [Trump’s] policy choice was to
have a huge tax cut. We’ll see with Johnson,
but I think when things go back to normal,
he’ll do the same. You can always try to pre-
tend, by going for more public debt and
more public deficit, that you can do social
policy without progressive taxation. At
some point, though, you have to pay for
what you do.
What happens if the pandemic gets big
enough that it’s not possible to respond
without just generating massive debt?
We’ll see. The response by governments
at this stage is insufficient even in Europe,
but if you look at what we know from the
Spanish flu of 1918, there has been some
study looking at the death rate by country,
and the numbers are really incredible. The
average mortality rate in the U.S. or Europe
was between 0.5 and one percent of the
population, which is already an awful
amount, but in India it was 5 percent, in
Indonesia or South Africa it was also high.
Applied to today’s population, there will be
hundreds of millions of people killed at the
world level. Nobody knows whether we’ll go
so far, but I’m very concerned about lock-
down policies in India, in Africa, where
there isn’t a proper safety net.
What can be done about that?
What rich countries can do is first post-
pone poor countries’ debt. That’s for sure.
Also I think it’s important to say very clearly
that we need to go toward a system of finan-
cial transparency that will allow poor coun-
tries to collect taxes in a way that’s equitable,
acceptable. It’s already very difficult for rich
countries’ governments to cope with finan-
cial opacity, but for poor countries, tax
administration is impossible. How can you
pay for a welfare state and a safety net if
you’re not able to develop an equitable tax
system? I think there’s a huge collective
responsibility, and so far, I don’t see the
political move in this direction. So far, we
are really concentrated on the lockdown.
To the extent that we’re thinking about
policy beyond that, it seems to me almost
exclusively at the national level. There’s
very little talk about international issues.
Very little. There’s been some talk about
debt relief for poor countries, but it was
mostly the French president suggesting
basically China should suspend the debt for
Africa, so everybody’s asking other people to
make gifts. We just published a new study
P H OTO G R A P H : J E R E M Y H O G A N / S O PA I M AG E S / L I G H T R O C K E T V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S
at the World Inequality Lab suggesting that
France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium should
move in the direction of corona bonds, a
neutralization of the interest rate of the
public debt—ideally, of course, with Ger-
many and the Netherlands. I think you can-
not wait for unanimity in order to move in
this direction. Even a coalition of two or
three countries is better than nothing at all.
The economist William Nordhaus
recently proposed a similar approach to
climate—ditching the U.N. and going to
a WTO-model “climate club.”
I think we really need to rethink very
deeply the very notion of internationalism.
It’s very difficult today to say anything posi-
tive about internationalism. To most peo-
ple, this has become a bad term.
What would rethinking it mean?
The bottom line is that we cannot con-
tinue having free circulation of goods, ser-
vices, capital without common taxation.
 How would that work?
I think any two countries or any group of
countries who today have a trade agree-
ment or an economic agreement with free
capital flow, in effect we negotiate that we
will not follow this treaty unless we have
verifiable targets in terms of carbon emis-
sions, economic justice, or minimum tax
rates. I think the pure trade treaties are
dead, basically. In the long run, nobody will
want to have pure trade treaties without any
common objectives in terms of sustainable
and equitable development.
But short of that, nationalism is likely to
win the day, especially among the middle
class and lower socioeconomic groups. To
me, the biggest risk in all of this discussion
is that many people who have good inten-
tions about the world and good intentions
about the environment and world poverty
don’t sufficiently invest time to reappro-
priate economic and financial issues for
citizens and, in the end, leave a small
group of experts, government bureau-
crats, and economists to design very con-
servative solutions.
In your new book, you call your pre-
ferred approach to these issues “participa-
tory socialism.” 6 What would a participa-
tory socialist response to this crisis be?
Less inequality and more access to eco-
nomic opportunities, economic participa-
tion, economic power, and participation in
decision-making.
How?
The bottom 50 percent of the population
in the U.S. owns less than 2 percent of total
wealth. It used to be 3 or 4 percent 20 years
ago; now it’s less than 2 percent. It’s always
been very small, in any case, but it’s not
going in the right direction. This has all
sorts of bad consequences in terms of how
you can plan your own life. These conse-
quences are particularly clear at a time
when you don’t have a job and basically
when you have no wealth. You need to
accept any job, any wage that comes, any
working condition, because you have to eat,
you have to feed your family. So this puts
you in a very weak bargaining position vis-
à-vis society in general and vis-à-vis your
own life. So the question is: Is 2 percent of
total wealth for the bottom 50 percent the
best we can do? Or is it possible to think of
another economic system, keeping the
good aspects of the current system, but try-
ing to do better?
The very basic idea of participatory
socialism is to say, “Well, look, if we want
to improve that, one way is to have a more
progressive tax system. So lower tax on
people who are trying to access properties.
People who have a lot of debt should pay
less taxes. And people who are not in debt
should pay more taxes.” What I’m propos-
ing under the label of participatory social-
ism is to use the proceeds from this pro-
gressive tax to finance something. The
people who now make zero, who are basi-
cally the bottom 60 percent of population,
will receive €120,000, or $150,000. In
order to pay for that, people who now
make $1 million would receive $600,000
or $650,000. So you will still have a lot of
inequality between children—and if you
want my opinion, I think we could go fur-
ther than that—but this already will make
a huge difference because this could put
everybody roughly at the median wealth.
Basically, it’s an extension of what has been
done in terms of progressive taxation.
The other big pillar of participatory
socialism is to provide more opportunities
for workers to participate in the governance
of their companies through more voting
rights in the boards of companies. There are
many countries, including Germany, Swe-
den, very successful countries, where up to
50 percent of voting rights in the boards of
large companies go to worker representa-
tives. I think this should become the norm.
If this system were in place in the future,
during a crisis like this one, you wouldn’t
see these poor people in the street searching
for food, searching for work. The majority
would be in a position to not have to accept
everything. You can make plans. You can
have better control over your own life.
That’s the purpose. It’s much more than
money. It’s really more in terms of power
about your own existence.
The idea of voting power, that particu-
lar pillar was a big part of Elizabeth War-
ren’s plan to remake the American econ-
omy. When you published your last book,
you were already a public intellectual in
France, but your status has been ele-
vated since. You seem to be playing a
more explicit policy role now. Have you
had any direct contact with the current
wave of left-wing figures—Warren and
Sanders in the U.S., Corbyn in England?
What’s your role on the policy level with
political leaders?
I have exchanges with many of these
people. With Warren, we organized a public
debate back in 2014 in Boston. At the time,
she was very cautious about the wealth tax.
I was already advocating the wealth tax; we
start the tax right on billionaires. I was say-
ing between 5 and 10 percent per billion-
aire. And she was like, “Ooh.” And it’s inter-
esting that four years later—well, actually
she started with a lower tax rate on billion-
aires, only 3 percent, then Bernie came with
8 percent on billionaires and then she came
to 6 percent, 7 which maybe that was the
problem. She looked sometimes as if she
was sort of running behind Bernie, also on
public health care.
I’m not saying they proposed that
because I was proposing it to their staffs.
These people, they don’t need me. There are
many people in the U.S., in Britain, who
have changed their mind about progressive
taxation, about workers’ rights. We are not
at the time of Tony Blair.
It has been an amazing couple of
decades in that respect. How do you see
what’s happened in particular in the after-
math of the Great Recession—there was

1. France’s chômage 2. Many recent protests calling 3. France’s grassroots “yellow vest”
partiel system for the end of coronavirus movement emerged in late 2018 to
provides funding shelter-in-place orders and the protest President Macron’s proposed
for employers to keep reopening of the economy fuel-tax increase. The movement
Footnotes:

paying furloughed have been tied to organizations saw it as disproportionately burdening

workers at 70 to such as the Betsy DeVos–linked the middle and working classes with
100 percent of their Michigan Freedom Fund, the the costs of a green transition, even
net salary during Mercer-funded Convention of as Macron cut taxes on the wealthy.
exceptional States, the Koch-backed PR firm Weekly yellow-vest demonstrations
circumstances such In Pursuit Of, and a Wisconsin were still being held at the start of
as a pandemic. law firm that counts France’s lockdown in March.
President Trump as a client.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 39
the explosion of concern over inequality,
with Occupy and later Bernie, but there
was also a bit of an explosion of inequality
itself, in part because of the way that
recovery was designed.
Things could have turned out differently.
In Europe, at the time of the great crisis, the
German and French governments could
have taken a different route, but in the end,
they were more afraid of the extreme left
than the extreme right. I think this was a
mistake. And maybe today they realize that
they should be more afraid of the extreme
right than the extreme left, because at least
the extreme left, even though they don’t
always have a perfect plan or perfect solu-
tion, at least they are internationalists. With
immigrants and the Greek Islands today,
first book in a fairly pessimistic manner,
saying, “If you don’t have this big world
shock, you won’t have any change,” which
was not really what I thought at the time.
But maybe I did not express myself well.
One of the main responses to the last
book, at least among the American audi-
ence, was to treat r > g as though it were a
law of nature that could be modified only
very occasionally through exceptional
political change. But actually, the fact that
a rich person’s bank account grows faster
than the national GDP, that’s just a phe-
nomenon created by a particular political
structure too. It’s a creation of politics.
It is. Probably I was not sufficiently clear
about that. I must say in general I have
learned a lot from all the discussion from
But of course it’s also true that those
people can help design the system and
how it evolves, especially in the case of
something like the Great Recession. How
much did that recovery worsen inequality,
in your view? A layman might look at the
history and say, “It’s those who have
access to capital who can buy distressed
assets, and, as a result, unless there is
really dramatic intervention, it will always
be the forces of capital that benefit from
the crisis.” Is that a fair read of how we
emerged from the recession?
You’re right that the people at the top
have done better once again than average.
How do you explain this? I think it’s
because if you take the whole compact of
fiscal, social, legal, competition policy,

you can see the difference between an inter-
nationalism and nationalism.8 Leaders in
the center right or center left should
remember that and try to build coalitions.
But I guess today I’m maybe even more
convinced than I was six or seven years ago
that we really need to think about the next
economic system. The 2008 financial cri-
sis took the world by surprise at a time
when we were still in the sort of free-
market-competition mood of the 1990s
and early 2000s. In a way, there was no
real political-intellectual work to try to
think of the next economic model. I think
we’ve suffered from that.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
mostly covered material from before the
financial crisis. You’ve devoted a fair
amount of the new book to recent history.
I guess my new book is … first, I think
it’s much better than the previous one. For
those who only read one of them, I think
they should really read this one. I think it’s
much more lively, it’s less technical, it
covers many more countries and historical
contexts. The previous book was too much
Western centered, too much centered on
the shock due to World War I, World War
II, so much that many people interpret the
my previous book. I have learned a lot by
traveling to many countries to which I had
not traveled sufficiently before. I think by
broadening the scope of countries and his-
torical trajectories I look at, it also made me
realize this incredible diversity of human
ideologies and human imagination to
restructure all the time the societies. And
that’s probably the main lesson of history,
that the idea that there is only one way and
there is no alternative is just wrong.
You heard that a lot starting in the 1990s
and all through 2008: There’s only one
way.
It’s wrong.
Since the crash, there has been a sort
of acknowledgment from places like the
IMF, World Bank, Financial Times, The
Economist, all these voices of elite glo-
balized neoliberalism saying, “Okay,
there are some real problems here.” But
they still aren’t thinking much about alter-
native models.
If you look at how things happen, you’ll
see a potential for political mobilization and
historical change through social and eco-
nomic and political processes, which always
happen much faster than what the domi-
nant discourse tends to imagine.
P H OTO G R A P H S : D R E W A N G E R E R / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( T R U M P ) ; J O S E P H P R E Z I O S O / A F P / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( WA R R E N )
there has been insufficient change. In the
end, probably the only lesson from the
1929 crisis both from the right and the left,
if you look at economist Milton Friedman,
monetary economists, everybody agreed
that the Federal Reserve and the central
banks in Europe made a huge mistake in
the 1930s by letting banks fall one after the
other. The only lesson from history in a
way was “We are going to do whatever it
takes, we are going to print whatever
money needs to be printed, in order to save
the financial sector.” Indeed, it allowed us
to avoid the worst, which is a complete fall
in economic activity of the kind we had in
the 1930s. It’s good news in a way. We have
learned something from history.
The problem, of course, is that we are not
going to solve everything with central
banks. There was nothing else, really, in
store. What I’m a bit concerned with today
is that even though there’s a lot of motiva-
tion to address structural problems, in par-
ticular the climate crisis or today’s pan-
demic crisis, I think there’s insufficient
thinking about how to change the economic
rules, the organization of property relations
in particular, how much private property
we want. We need to take seriously the fact

4. A government payment 5. The updated 6. What Piketty calls a

given without direct
exchange for goods or
services, usually in the
form of wealth-
redistribution
programs such as
welfare, social security,
financial aid, or other
subsidies.
NAFTA, known as “universalist egalitarian
USMCA, requires perspective based on social
that, by 2023, ownership, education, and
40 to 45 percent of shared knowledge and
automobile parts be power.” The approach
produced by workers involves progressive taxation
making at least $16 of wealth and capital
an hour. endowments for all citizens.

40 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
that the distribution of the burden has to be
discussed from a democratic viewpoint, has
to be distributed across income groups.
Sometimes, the climate activists, environ-
mental activists, are so convinced that the
No. 1 problem is the climate that they don’t
want to hear about anything that sounds
like income or wages.
Some climate activists think the solu-
tion is to shrink our economies. They call
it “degrowth.”
Which has to be discussed very precisely
because then you need to be very careful
about what exactly you are proposing to the
bottom 50 percent in societies. I think it’s
possible to design a plan, but we have to be
very careful. In France, we had the yellow-
vest movement. The government said that
it was going to raise the energy tax and car-
bon tax for the good of the climate, but then
people realized that it was using the money
to cut the wealth tax on the rich and then
people went crazy. Now nobody wants to
hear about carbon taxation anymore in
France. This government basically
destroyed the idea of carbon taxation in
France at least for some time. We’ll have to
return to it because we know that’s part of
the solution.
If you don’t do it in a way that comes
with a very ambitious reduction of inequal-
ity and a very ambitious change in capital-
ist economic structure, this is counterpro-
ductive. Many people coming from the
Green Party in France have been with
Macron, have been elected members of
Parliament with Macron, and voted to
repeal the wealth tax. And I want to ask
them, “Okay. Is this your plan? Is this what
you have?” In Germany, there’s a possibil-
ity that the Greens will govern with the so-
called center right. I think the environ-
mental movement has to think harder
about what’s economic doctrine.
I agree. But I also think there’s some
basic confusion about the structural con-
ditions we’re working with. Since 2009, it
seems the sort of conventional view of
economists has moved quite a bit about
deficit spending and debt. At what point
should that level of deficit spending
become worrying? Or is there a point? In
the U.S., the stimulus for the pandemic
has already been twice the size of the
stimulus in 2009.
I think we need to show the people in the
U.S., in Europe, that central banks can do
things for the people, broadly speaking,
and not only to save banks. For instance,
I will be very much in favor of using money
creation to directly pay for some basic-
income transfer in the middle of a reces-
sion, directly transfer to everybody. It could
be 5 percent of GDP, it could be 10 percent
of GDP. I think also people realize that, of
course, this is not going to be the magic bul-
let to solve all problems. At some point, if
you want to pay for a welfare state that
costs 40 or 50 percent of GDP each year,
you have to have progressive taxation.
My view is dominated by the American
experience, but I see more aggressive
movement by our central banks, which are
operating at a further distance from the
democratic impulses, than I do from the
legislatures and governments, which are
theoretically more responsive to demo-
cratic pressures. Why?
It’s easier to print money than to agree
about new tax code, new labor law, new
corporate governance. But in the end,
there are limits to what you can do with
this. Over the past ten years, we’ve been
saving banks, but have we solved our
problem with rising inequality, with global
warming? No. If anything, all this money
creation has contributed to enriching
those who were already rich, has contrib-
uted to finance investment that has kept
emitting huge quantities of carbon. Again,
all that this money creation has done so
far is to prevent a complete collapse of the
financial system, but this is not setting the
bar very high.
What this shows is that we should all be
concerned about how we rewrite the sys-
tem. Many people find this very boring,
and I can tell you when you try to talk
about the transformation and the democ-
ratization of European institutions, most
people stop listening after five minutes.
But it’s very important because, if a major-
ity could adopt a budget, could set a deficit,
an investment plan, especially on the
climate—European public opinion today,
it’s so much in favor of solving the climate
crisis—if the parliament with a simple
majority could decide to pay for an enor-
mous investment plan, I think it would.
There are many obstacles to dramatic
change, including that one. But if it’s truly
the case that American GDP could fall
by 30 percent this quarter,9 and by who
knows how much by the rest of the year,
and those impacts are distributed around
the globe, isn’t that too big a shock not to
remake the global economy?
Yeah. I would not bet on that. Again, I
believe in collective intelligence and collec-
tive mobilization. I think the more mobili-
zation we have about how we want to
change our economic system, the better.
Just waiting for the crisis to become deeper
and deeper is not going to solve anything.
What’s happening right now with this lock-
down is terrible for many people. We should
do first everything we can to limit the casu-
alties. Right now, that’s the biggest concern.
Then we should try to use this time to think
about the economic system we want. I think
this is an issue not only for economists or
bankers or government officials. This is
really an issue for everyone. We all really
need to be concerned about how we’re
going to organize our public debt, our legal
system, how we want to share power in cor-
porations. All these are concrete and com-
plicated issues, but these are issues in which
we need to collectively make progress if we
want to make this crisis a useful opportu-
nity to change the world. ■

7. In September, Sanders proposed a 8. In 2015, Greece elected a leftist 9. U.S. GDP is likely to
wealth tax on millionaires and government that oversaw the arrival of be down 30 percent
billionaires that included a over a million new migrants in 2015 for April through
5 percent tax on wealth over and 2016. Last year, a center-right June as a result of
$1 billion and gradually government took power, and in the coronavirus,
increased to an 8 percent tax for March, it suspended all asylum according to a
$ on and over. Warren had applications and deployed its military to recent estimate by
in roposed a 3 percent tax the Turkish border. Several Greek Morgan Stanley
fo alth over $1 billion but in islands have seen a rise in xenophobia, economists.
November upped it to 6 percent and last month, a refugee center on
as part of a revised tax package. Lesbos was burned down. footnotes by
jack denton

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 41
Highbrow.
Lowbrow.
Despicable.
Brilliant.

nymag.com/subscribe
 . . . . a biography of a buil .........................
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . slope f ood coop . . . . .

best bets

Beyond
Beans
The canned calamari
and creamed corn chefs
keep in their pantries.

canned tuna has

➸ shelf-stable shifted from the back of
food items have, the pantry to the front.
needless to say, never Not to mention the fact
been more popular. that there’s something
The bean business, in specifically delightful about
particular, is booming— eating a perfectly salty, spicy,
according to recent reports, or sweet item (whether it’s a
sales on some of Goya’s smoked oyster or a stuffed olive)
products have increased nearly plucked straight from a completely
400 percent. But for those whose contained package. To find out what
STYLING BY JAMIE KIMM

legume repertoires are beginning to chefs and home cooks are stocking
feel a tad stale, it might be worth their cabinets with, we asked everyone
considering other areas of the canned and from Ernesto’s Ryan Bartlow, who suggested
tinned universe, many of which are also quickly a tin of splurgy white asparagus , to Nom
gaining traction. Anchovies, long the topping “held” Wah’s Julie Cole, who recommended Campbell’s
from a dish, are taking center stage on Instagram (in Cream of Celery—which she calls “the Ferrari
sandwiches, on heaps of linguine), and humble of canned soups.”

Photograph by Bobby Doherty a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 43


1. Underwood
Deviled Ham Spread,
$5 at walmart.com
“One of my favorite
sandwiches as a child was
this stuff on Pepperidge
Farm bread with butter.
If you close your eyes, the
deviled-ham spread is like
a ‘poor man’s jambon-
beurre.’ ” —phoebe cole-
smith, chef and farmer
2. Whole Artichoke
Hearts, $6 at
cucinaandamore.com
“All Cucina & Amore
products are good, but my
favorite is the grilled and
marinated artichoke
hearts. They’re briny and
gorgeously charred and
make a great addition to
omelets.” —leah koenig,
food writer
3. Campbell’s Cream of
Celery, $2 at walmart.com
“It’s the Ferrari of canned
soups, since you can use it
anywhere that you’d use
heavy cream: casseroles,
gratins, pasta, sauces.
It’s a big part of my life.”
—julie cole, chef
at Nom Wah Nolita
4. Matiz Piparras, $9 at
formaggiokitchen.com
“These peppers are so
spicy and briny. They add
a nice bite to a lot of
dishes. I just like to nibble
on them plain, too.”
—laila gohar, chef
and food artist
5. Eden Organic Black Eyed
Peas, $3 at edenfoods.com
“For years, I’ve loved
to make Hoppin’ John,
a delicious southern dish
involving ham hocks,
long-grain rice, tomatoes,
and black-eyed peas, on
New Year’s Day to bring
luck in the New Year.
Eden’s organic black-eyed
peas work well.” —p.c.s.
6. Zallo White
Tuna Belly, $16 at
tasteofspainfoods.com
“The best tuna. It’s from
Vizc d is
perfe e or
doused with onions, salt,
olive oil, and espelette.”
—ryan bartlow,
chef-owner at Ernesto’s
44 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
best bets: canned food By
Hilary Reid
10. Lazzaroni
Amaretti di Saronno
Consider Tinned Cod Liver Tin, $20 at
supermarketitaly.com
“For years, we had
these beautiful Italian
1 3 4 5
cookies only at
Christmastime, but ever
since I found Alice Waters’s
recipe for rhubarb galette,
I’ve been using them
in the spring as well for
the crust.” —p.c.s.
2
11. Belarra Green
6 Piquillo Peppers, $9 at
tasteofspainfoods.com
“These green piquillo
peppers are from
Navarre, Spain, and are
less sweet than the red
piquillo peppers.” —r.b.
8 12. La Tienda
7
Peregrino Brand
Anchovy Stuffed Olives,
$5 at amazon.com
“These buttery,
extra-large Manzanilla
olives are an ideal vessel
11
for carrying bites
of (quite mild) white
Spanish anchovies into
your mouth.”
—ashley mason,
food writer
9 10
13. Cream Style Sweet
Corn, $2 at walmart.com
“It’s perfect for
an Asian-style creamy
corn egg-drop soup with
shredded chicken.”
15 —andy xu, executive
chef at the Odeon
12
14. J. Vela Extra
Thick Primera White
Asparagus, $30 at
13 14 tasteofspainfoods.com
“We use this at
Ernesto’s in two different
dishes—our salad
as well as in our
white-asparagus pintxo
in the pintxo bar.” —r.b.
15. Jose Gourmet
Spiced Calamari
7. Threeline Imports Cod 8. Habanero Ekone 9. Dole Canned Pineapple in Ragù Sauce, $14 at
Liver, $21 at amazon.com Smoked Oysters, $9 at buy Chunks, $2 at walmart.com spanishtable.com
P H OTO G R A P H S : R E TA I L E R S
“These cod livers are so soft .taylorshellfishfarms.com “Canned pineapple is great “They remove the squid’s
and elegant—I like to serve “You can have these as for making cocktails— tentacles, stuff them with
th h re range a beer. They’re especially if you don’t want chopped squid and rice,
ju ed e y, and smoky, to bother with a whole then hand-pack them with
and sesame oil, sprinkled and really good with pineapple when you’re a rich tomato ragù sauce.
with pink peppercorn.” mayo or cream cheese on cooking three meals a day.” They’re smoky and meaty
—bart van olphen, a cracker.” —nialls —chris crowley, in flavor and texture.
food writer fallon, partner at Cervo’s Grub Street writer Really delicious.” —n.f.
the look book goes to

Freshmen’s
Bedrooms
We asked NYU students,
all of whom are online learning
for the rest of the semester, to
take self-portraits on their beds.
interviews by
katy schneider and
jane starr drinkard

AUGUST
KING ACKLEY
Studying visual arts
and creative writing,
San Francisco
How did you feel
when you found out
you’d be home the
rest of the year?
Well, I was having
a really good first
semester, but second
semester I was
starting to feel pretty
overwhelmed
socially. I felt all
this pressure
to be complex and
interesting and I
don’t know—I guess
what I’m saying is
I felt a little relief.
What’s it like
being back? I’m
reverting to a bit of a
high-school dynamic.
It’s obviously not
true, but I sort of feel
like I’m grounded:
I can’t see my friends,
can’t hang out
with my girlfriend.
Actually, when I first
got home, me and
my girlfriend were
seeing each other.
But then our moms
talked and decided
we couldn’t do that
anymore.
Like, they had
a phone call? Yes.
It was a whole thing.
I dramatically
stormed out of the
house after.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 45
 the look book: freshmen’s bedrooms

You’re from
New York? Yes.
And, ironically,
when I got into
NYU, I said I only
wanted to go if
I could live in the
dorms. People
keep saying this
crisis has given
them time to
connect with their
families. Not me.
My mom works
DIANNEY MASCARY at a retirement LAILA JANE ROSEN
Studying politics, rights, and development, Harlem home, so she Studying dance, Seattle
spends most of her Did you have
time cleaning, not time to make
wanting to close friends?
interact with us I did. We made
physically. art. We got
into these crazy
philosophical
conversations.
They got me, who
I am as a person.
It was a breath
of fresh air. And
now I’m here,
and I don’t want
to be here,
but I’m forced
to be.

RUBY RANKIN NICO LOVE

Are classes Studying psychology, London Studying film and television, Boston
awkward? It’s hard
to have meaningful
discourse. Like,
I have this one
literature class, and
we’ll be having
a discussion, and
then someone
raises their hand,
and then the
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E S U B J E C T S

professor has to say,

“Okay, you can
unmute yourself”—
by the time you get
to speak, you’ve
forgotten the point
you’re trying to
make.

KATE STAHLMAN KEARNS JUSTIN JIN

Studying neural science, Philadelphia Studying music and photography, Potomac, Maryland

46 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 How are
you keeping
busy? Lately,
my friends and
I have been
playing a lot of
Zoom poker.
People are
buying in $60,
$70 at once—
we play until two
in the morning.
I made $200
the other night.

BRANDON BIEN KALLIOPI MAGNIS

Studying English literature, Amsterdam Studying business and film, Los Angeles

SAMANTHA MOLINA SAM SMITH

Studying global fashion history, Rancho Cucamonga, California Studying art and fashion, Houston

Where do
you work in your
house? In my
room. But it’s a
small apartment,
and my parents can
hear everything.
Sometimes I’ll be in
one of my night
acting classes, and
they’ll poke their
heads in and be
like, “What are you
talking about?” And
I’m like, “Mom, it’s
a character.”

SHELBY DWYER DAVID KYLE ANDERSON

Studying on the premed track, Wantagh, New York Studying drama, Sunnyside, Queens

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 47
 real estate

Graham Court:
BIOGRAPHY
of a

Building

THE TOP-FLOOR APARTMENTS

“Let’s be realistic—if this
Every New York apartment building place ever went co-op, ours is
is its own mini-fiefdom. This new probably at least a $6 million
apartment, with the square
series goes inside them, starting with footage, the seven windows
Graham Court. Known as “Harlem’s facing Central Park.”
—jonathan solars,
Dakota,” it was built to house New York’s rare-violin dealer
upper echelon but fell into disarray.
Still, its sprawling apartments have kept
families in place for generations.
by matthew sedacca William Waldorf Astor’s
monogram is still
etched into the
exterior.
his past february, those trawling

T StreetEasy for a Harlem apartment may

have scrolled straight past a listing for a
three-bedroom in Graham Court. The
unit, 5G, has all the trappings of an unin-
spired 21st-century gut—jet-black bathroom-floor
tiles; cheap-looking, stark-white kitchen cabinets. It
would be impossible to tell from the pictures that
The Wrought-Iron
Gates
almost all the other units in the building are time cap- Topped with a
sules of early-20th-century Harlem—with original Palladian arch, the
high ceilings, claw-foot tubs, oak pocket doors, and gates were allegedly
once the site of a
brass sconces.
shooting in the early
Graham Court is an eight-story apartment building 2010s that prompted
that takes over the entire east side of Adam Clayton Pow- the building’s real-
ell Jr. Boulevard between 116th and 117th Streets. It was estate agent, Ignazio
completed in 1901 for the real-estate tycoon William Leone, to quit.
Waldorf Astor by the architectural firm Clinton and Rus- “After that, I gave up
the exclusive,”
sell, which also built the Apthorp on a full block in the
says Leone.
West 70s. Both were constructed in the Italian Renais-
sance style, and both fea-
ture lush interior court- A VERY SUSPICIOUS DENTIST
yards, arched entryways, In 1947, a 39-year-old
and iron gates. (Graham Bronx man died in the
Court also shares a spiritual dentist office of Dr. Subbeal
connection to another S. Anderson during
a run-of-the-mill molar
Upper West Side land- extraction. Anderson left
Courtyard
through
mark; in 1987, the New town within two days.
here.

York Times called it Har-

Graham Court, 1920. lem’s equivalent to the
Dakota, which has stuck as
a nickname.) The Apthorp, though, announced a $95
million renovation in 2007 and, in 2008, went condo THE GRAND INTERIOR COURTYARD

(with a handful of $10 million four-bedrooms for sale). “The landlords put barely any money into
Some two and a half miles uptown, Graham Court the courtyard. About ten years ago, when
remained—and rem de n l. I noticed it started looking like a jungle,
I started weeding, pruning. I put in drought-
In the very beginn ea n x- tolerant perennials that don’t take a lot of
to-11 rooms fitted with servants’ chambers—were home maintenance—rhododendrons, hostas, a
nice Japanese maple tree.” —duane harper
grant, filmmaker and photographer
48 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
The Gilded Age Rental
THE
ELEVATOR CLASH
During an elevator- THE SMOKESTACK
service strike in the ’30s, It was damaged in 1977,
there was a tussle between which forced management
the strikers and service MOVIE BLOOD
to shut down the heating
operators. Two men were “Jungle Fever was
system. Laconia Smedley
shot. One was bashed filmed in my apartment.
says his apartment got so
in the head. When I moved in, there was
cold that winter that he had
blood on the floor from the
to wear his friend’s fur
scene where Samuel L.
coat to sleep.
Jackson was shot.” —sheila
bridges, interior
designer
LANDMARK STATUS
The outside was landmarked in 1984;
the inside never was. “So the apartment below
me has the same layout but looks wholly
different,” says tenant Yvonne Stafford.
“Sheetrock walls, a drop ceiling. And it’s
$5,500 a month. Mine is nowhere near that.”

The
Apthorp’s
weathered
copper
cornice.

The Case of the

Missing Copper
Cornice
Apparently, the
top story of the
building once had
a copper cornice,
just like the
Apthorp. “At some
point before 1987,
it was removed,”
says long-term
tenant Terry
Williams. “And
it was never
replaced. Why
didn’t they do that
to the Apthorp?”

FRAUGHT WINDOW FRAMES

TONI MORRISON READ HERE
“We’ve been running an arts salon out
of our apartment since the ’80s. It’s a
private event. We get artists, writers,
musicians in our home for conversation—
Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Will Calhoun, Ishmael Reed.”
—margaret porter troupe, executive
director of the gloster arts project
Around 2001, the
wooden frames were
replaced with aluminum.
Said architectural
historian John Tauranac:
“It’s contrary to all the
preservation movement
holds dear.”
The Fire Hydrant on 116th Street
“In the ’70s, elevator service and running
water were fickle. We’d have the kids run
down the stairs to the fire hydrant,
fill up the buckets, and hoist them up via
a makeshift pulley system.” —m.p.t.
 real estate: graham court

to oil-company presidents and other types reclaimed the building—a sharp blow for
one might have found in the New-York Tri- long-term tenants. The People
Who Live There
bune’s society pages. But then the real-estate It wasn’t until the early ’90s (as fleets of
bubble burst. Between 1910 and 1930, Cen- young African-American lawyers, doctors,
tral Harlem’s black population surged from and bankers began moving to Harlem and
10 percent to 70 percent. The Astor estate other historically black neighborhoods), Inside nine apartments.
cut ties to its investment, and the new man- when a group of 11 Ivy League graduates
agement decided to open the building to moved in, that it began slowly transform-
black residents (many of whom, some ten- ing into the more prosperous place it is
ants say, were the maids of the previous today. The state of the building was MOVED IN: 1960
wealthy white tenants). Decreased services another story—one of the 11, Kathy Fra-
followed. Graham Court’s ownership was zier, then a trader on Wall Street, describes
Lucius
passed from person to person, including the stepping over passed-out bodies on her Laconia Smedley
heir to a clothing fortune, then to a group of way to get to work—but most stayed, Former music teacher
real-estate investors who let the building fall entranced with the space. And by the early
into receivership. aughts, the neighborhood began to gen- through the choirmaster
The tenants were treated negligently. trify in earnest. A handful of yoga studios of Metropolitan Baptist
Besides the crime, which was by all accounts opened. So did a Whole Foods. Church, who I accompanied
rampant—everything from hallway drug A rapidly gentrifying Harlem gave Gra- on piano for years, I met Pearl
deals to numbers rackets to, supposedly, ham Court’s ownership financial incentive Thornwell, who lived in Graham
apartment-run brothels—the to renovate its vacant apart- Court. She was an old lady, a cook-
condition of the building con- ments to rent at market rates. maid, and she asked me to give her
tinued to spiral. A handful of This has created what some piano lessons in her home. She was
apartments were chopped up by residents see as a two-class sys- renting out rooms, and I asked if
management to further squeeze tem: New renters speak of I could move into one. My rent was
rent, the elevator was constantly hearing back swiftly from the about $203 then; I’ve been here
broken, water often stopped management company when since. Renting out rooms to folks
running, and heat was unpre- they voice concerns, while leg- in the neighborhood is how people
dictable. By the mid-’70s, the Building Basics acy tenants in rent-controlled who had these big apartments
neighborhood was in a similar units say their problems go survived through the years.
ADDRESS
state of disrepair. “Junkies lining 1921 Adam Clayton
unchecked. Others feel that
the street, burned-out buildings, Powell Jr. Boulevard management is not interested MOVED IN: 1979
vacant lots,” long-term tenant in renting to black people.
Margaret Porter Troupe recalls. APARTMENTS
There are 100 in the
“I have friends who’ve applied Quincy Troupe and
Before the crack epidemic building, spread out
who would have been qualified Margaret Porter Troupe
and the national Carter-era over eight floors and financially and otherwise who
Poet and executive director
recession, though, Harlem in four distinct structures. weren’t allowed in,” says Sheila of the Gloster Arts Project
the early ’80s seemed on the Likely a few dozen Bridges, an interior designer
verge of major change. Redevel- are rent controlled and long-term tenant. (Man- Q.T.: We were living on West
opment ramped up, and a crop and rent stabilized. agement claims, “We have End Avenue at the time, and
of black artists and actors— PRICES never denied an application my friend told me about Graham
Marcella Lowery, Danny Glover, $3,094 a month is the based on color.”) Court. When I came to see it, the
Hugh Masekela—moved into average current rate for Regardless of who you are, courtyard was full of drug dealers.
Graham Court. But most of an apartment. ($400 getting one of the apartments I went to meet Laconia Smedley;
a month was the typical
them left soon after, unable to rent-stabilized cost
that maintain the charm of when he came to the door, I saw his
tolerate the lack of services and for a tenant in the ’90s, Gilded Age Graham Court, if place had fireplaces. I asked him
the relative unsteadiness of the per one resident, and you don’t have a family member if all the apartments had fireplaces,
neighborhood. $900 a year was the already living there, is a fairly and he told me some had four.
In 1987, with the city set to starting rental price for epic undertaking. New tenants I said, ‘If an apartment with eight
foreclose on the building for an apartment with who succeeded in doing so dedi- rooms comes up, call me up.’
six-to-11 rooms when it
delinquent taxes, tenants opened in 1901.) cated at least a year to their Eventually, he did.
finally had the opportunity to hunts, relying on insider con- M.P.T.: When I visited, my knees
purchase their apartments for NOTABLE RESIDENTS, tacts. And many of the tenants were knocking: The area was very,
PAST AND PRESENT
$250. But mere hours before Zora Neale Hurston,
promise that the only way very scary. But once I got inside,
the foreclosure was to become Danny Glover, they’re leaving is on a stretcher. the apartment was so beautifully
final, the building’s owner Hu ekela, Earl “My grandmother came in, in restored, and you couldn’t hear
(Mohammed Siddiqui, a phar- “t ” Monroe, 1929, and she lived and died anything from outside—it was like
macist whose license was later Lowery here, and my father lived and being in Europe.
suspended for “negligence in CURRENT OWNER died here,” says Pat Knox Horne,
handling prescription drugs”) Graham Court a former assistant fashion buyer.
paid the outstanding taxes and Owners Corp. “And I’ll live and die here.” ■ BUILDING BLIND ITEMS Anonymous tidbits

50 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 P H OTO G R A P H S, P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : M AT T H E W X . K I E R N A N ( E X T E R I O R ) ; T H A D D E U S W I L K E R S O N . M U S E U M O F T H E C I T Y O F N E W YO R K F 2 0 1 1 . 3 3 . 2 7 9 ( V I N TAG E E X T E R I O R ) ; TA B U L A R I U S /
W I K I M E D I A ( A S TO R ) ; V E R O N I C A T Y S O N -S T R A I T (CO U R T YA R D) ; F R A N K I E A L D U I N O ( A R C H WAY ) ; A N G E L A R A D U L E S C U / W I K I M E D I A ( M O R R I S O N ) ; T E M O O R . A H M A D / I N S TAG R A M ( A P T H O R P )

Photographs by Frankie Alduino

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
from the tenants. ➸ Of the new families flooding Graham Court in recent years, one tenant says, “They don’t have money for Westchester, so this is the new place.”

51
 CONCEIVED IN THE BUILDING CIRCA 1940,
MOVED IN AFTER HER FATHER DIED IN 1995

Pat Knox Horne

Former assistant fashion buyer

my grandmother ethel
came in 1929—she had a friend
who knew the Astors, and the building
was almost entirely white. They were
probably the second black family to
move in. I was conceived right here,
in my office. It was my father’s room—
he and my mother were only 16, but
they were in love. I found that out when
I was 39; they took me to dinner, and
I said, ‘Was I a love child?’ They told me
they were in love, sneaking around
when my grandmother wasn’t home.
It’s my charge to take care of this home,
and that’s what I’ve been doing. There
were no amenities around here when
I moved back in—you couldn’t even buy
a newspaper in Harlem. When my
grandmother was here, it was grand.
The elevator used to have a sliding gate
door with a guy there turning
the wheel. We had claw-foot benches
in each building in the lobby, and
they took those out. We had glass
chandeliers in the hallway; I kept one
until I decided, What am doing?

Another Seven
Spectacular Fireplaces
Many apartments have one—if not four.
And some are fully functional.

52 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
53
BUILDING BLIND ITEMS ➸ According to court records, former Knicks player Melvyn Davis is embroiled in a long-lasting litigation with the landlord and his own subtenants.
 real estate: graham court

From MOVED IN: DECEMBER 1991

a Crack William Allen

Den to an National crisis and service
director of National Action Network,
Oboist’s Democratic district leader for
Apartment 1 2
70th Assembly District

Graham Court’s in 1990, I was living in

many onscreen New Jersey. I was in a
cameos.
meeting with my pastor and my
friend, [former Graham Court
tenants-association president]
1. Jungle Fever, 1991
Greg Watson. I was telling the
2. New Jack City, 1991 pastor, ‘My sister’s driving me
3. Sugar Hill, 1994 crazy. I’ve got to get my own
4. Mozart in the 3 4 place.’ He said, ‘You’ve had family
Jungle, 2015
and friends in Graham Court.
Maybe somebody will rent.’ It’s
true: I had relatives who lived
there dating back to my great-

How toGet an Apartment Here grandmother; we’ve been in

Harlem seven generations. Next
thing you know, I’m moving in
myself. Historically, southern
➸ the last available unit was apartment 5g—a $4,850 three-bedroom (with
two fireplaces), which was temporarily taken off the market on March 13. The real- blacks came to Harlem and
estate agent who has rented many of the recently available apartments is Jason Lax, who families in Graham Court would
posts them on StreetEasy. The more coveted apartments—the ones that retain their full host them until they could find
Gilded Age charm—rarely make it on there. For access to those, you’ll have to be more their own place. The whole
resourceful. Clyde Williams, who moved into a three-bedroom in 2010, “called everybody community knows about this
under the sun: the property manager, the owners. Finally, somebody called us back.” Kevin
Harter, the VP of integrated marketing and fashion direction for Bloomingdale’s, describes a
place, and the whole community
similar process when he started trying to move in, in 2016. “I had to work it,” he says. “I gave is in love with this place. Still,
gifts. There are people in the building wearing Bloomingdale’s cashmere who weren’t before.” today, it’s Old World here. It’s one
of the most neighborly places you
could ever want to live. When
And the Last Four on the Market you walk inside the gate, people
say ‘Good morning,’ ‘Good
afternoon,’ ‘Good evening.’
If you ignore them, they inquire
if you’re okay.

MOVED IN: 1993

Apt. 5G
listed mar 2020
Apt. 4C2
listed dec 2019
Apt. 2I1
listed sept 2019
Apt. 4C
listed jun 2019 Duane
Three-bedroom, one-
bathroom, $4,850
One-bedroom, one-
bathroom, $2,100
Studio, $1,995 Three-bedroom, two-
bathroom, $4,295
Harper Grant
Filmmaker and photographer

i took over my mother’s

lease; she moved in in the
The Ivy Sheila Bridges, interior designer and author: “A friend of mine from
Brown lived in Graham Court, and he was able to convince the owners of the
late ’70s. Luckily, the tenants
League building to rent a number of apartments that they were warehousing for
association has had some very
good representation, because
Eleven photo shoots and film production to all these young black professionals who
would be willing to pay market rent. That’s how I got here.” about 15 years ago, the landlords
They came in Kathy Frazier, wealth adviser: “Our friend from Brown organized it. Eleven started trying to get rid of me.
1993 and set the of us moved in with Ivy League degrees—five of us still live here today—and They tried to bully me and work
gentrification the change probably began then. I don’t want to sound with attrition. They didn’t think
wheels in motion. savi y League graduates I’d put up a fight, and I did.
mo me time, it denotes
something. We hoped to purchase our apartments once
I’m still here.
the building went co-op—our goal wasn’t to be lifetime
renters. What we’ve missed out on is the price
appreciation; when we leave, there’s no payout.” BUILDING BLIND ITEMS ➸ When tenants need

54 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 P H OTO G R A P H S : P I C T U R E LU X / T H E H O L LY W O O D A R C H I V E / A L A M Y ( J U N G L E F E V E R ) ; WA R N E R B R O S. ( N E W J AC K C I T Y ) ; T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY F OX ( S U G A R H I L L ) ;
A M A ZO N S T U D I O S ( M OZ A R T I N T H E J U N G L E ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F S T R E E T E A S Y V I A H F F R E A LT Y L LC ( A PA R T M E N T S ) ; K AT H Y F R A Z I E R ( I V Y L E AG U E )

“someone with power to get anything done in the neighborhood,” they’ll go, says one, to Clyde Williams, the former national policy director of the DNC.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
55
 real estate: graham court
BUILDING BLIND ITEMS ➸ One resident lives down the hall from what he believes to be the apartment of an heir to the Cabot Creamery fortune. “He got his

MOVED IN: 2002

Marita
Green Monroe
Sports marketer

in 2000, me and my
husband, Earl, were
living in New Jersey, and my
college roommate, who lived in
Graham Court and knew I’d
always loved the building, told
me an apartment had opened
up. Earl said, ‘I’m not moving
there.’ But I wanted it. Every
day, still, Earl says, ‘I’m getting
out of here.’ We’ve had floods,
fires, mice. But where else am
I gonna get a place like this? We
have a house in an apartment,
and people are living in a box
and paying thousands in rent.

MOVED IN: 2010

Clyde Williams
and Mona Sutphen
Public-affairs adviser and senior
adviser at an investment firm

C.W.: icame to
Harlem to work for
Bill Clinton. Someone had a
party at their place in Graham
Court—I walked in and was
like, Holy crap. When my
wife and I went to D.C. to work
for President Obama, we said if
we came back, we’d live here.
Soon after we moved in, I was
blown away when I turned my
head in the elevator and
saw Earl ‘the Pearl’ Monroe,
a Knicks Hall of Famer—
turns out he lives right under
us. My mind was blown.

GrahamCourt “Many of the drug addicts in the park across the street, which was
closed because of COVID-19, were camping out in front of our gate—then
Since March the drug pushers joined them and were using it as a drug-selling station.
It was like the Harlem of the ’70s and ’80s on steroids. The pushers and
the addicts were not distancing, many were sickly. In mid-April, it got a
How the tenants are faring. bit better—we think people got word that the city was fining.” william allen

56 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
lease for next to nothing,” the tenant says, “then did a massive renovation.” Plus: “He has parties, and I haven’t been to one, but I hear they’re amazing.”
“I’ve been inside for about two
months—my niece is incarcerating
me here. She brings me food from
a Spanish restaurant—yellow rice,
beans. The tenants seem all right.
One woman’s in the hospital.
You can’t help but run into people,
but they’re sensible, so they follow
the rules.” laconia smedley
MOVED IN: NOVEMBER 2012
Jonathan Solars
and Katie Thomas
Rare-violin dealers
J.S: when i brought
my contractor to the
apartment, he was shocked
I wanted to put so much into
a rental. He had never seen
a rental client do that, he
said. But I have customers
coming in for multimillion-
dollar instruments, and
I intend to be here for the
long haul. I mean, there are
three Strads in this house.
So it can’t be shabby.
MOVED IN: 2016
Kevin Harter
and Jangir Sultan
VP of integrated marketing
and fashion direction for
Bloomingdale’s and founder
of Patient Advocates of NY
K.H.: we were living
in Dumbo and were
looking for a new place. Our
twin boys were getting bigger.
The apartment we took
over was in awful condition,
but between the fireplaces and
the floors, I knew there was
something spectacular. The
sense of community in this
place is crazy. Not only does
everyone know everyone’s
kids’ names—everyone knows
everyone’s dogs’ names.
“You don’t see the neighbors [as
“Some folks from the building have been much]. We do have a tenants’ page
calling the police on the people that have come on Facebook. Yvonne posted to ask
if anybody needed anything, and
over from the park, who are maybe doing we have extra gloves that we’ve
drugs. I’m not one to participate. I saw someone been sharing with our neighbors.
The courtyard lets us get some sun
out front, ready to sit down. I didn’t yell at him. on our face. It gives a sense of
I told him, ‘I know you’re tired.’” yvonne stafford security.” jonathan solars
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 57
 food
With no revenue coming in, how did
you handle payroll expenses? We laid off
q&a about 80 percent of our whole company.
That was the worst day of my entire life.

Danny Meyer Misses

I shifted my mind-set from trying to be an
excellent employer to trying to be as good
of an unemployer as possible. I cut my sal-

Bumping Into People ary to zero and set up a 501(c)(3) called

ushg hugs. We sold gift cards, we held an
auction; as of last night, we had granted
Life during lockdown, and still in the spotlight. out $721,000 to our colleagues.
The Paycheck Protection Program of
by robin raisfeld the CARES Act was meant to keep workers
and rob patronite employed or to hire them back, but it was
touted as a measure for small, indepen-
dent businesses. You applied on behalf
of Union Square Hospitality Group res-

S
taurants, but when multiunit, publicly
ince mid-march, Danny Meyer, the Union Square Hos- traded Shake Shack received a $10 mil-
pitality Group CEO and Shake Shack founder, has closed lion loan, many on social media lashed
19 restaurants, laid off 2,000 employees, and felt the wrath out at the company and at you personally.
of the Twitterverse after the burger chain was granted a There should be frustration, and I under-
stand it. The anger is completely legiti-
$10 million small-business government loan (which, the day after mate. But I think it’s misdirected to pit
we conducted this interview, it returned). We spoke with him about restaurant size against restaurant size,
sheltering in place en famille in Connecticut, structural flaws in the because an employee is an employee.
government’s stimulus plan, and senior shopping hour. That’s what this program is about. I think
that there’s a branding problem calling
You were one of the first to close all your running. Why did you decide against it? this a small-business loan. I don’t know
restaurants days before the city lock- On March 25, I woke up and the first call too many restaurants that have more than
down. Can you walk us through that I got was one that [chef] Floyd Cardoz 500 employees.
timeline? In February, we started to see a had died [of covid-19]. It sent our whole You’re referring to a provision in the
huge number of private parties canceling. organization into shock. He had been a PPP allowing multiunit operators to con-
Then, on March 5, we hosted an annual cherished colleague at two different res- sider each branch its own business if it
breakfast at the Modern, and the Monday taurants: Tabla and North End Grill. We employed fewer than 500 people. To
after that, there was a report that said the had just been together three weeks before. make it seem like the size of the restaurant
head of the Port Authority of New York He was great. I spoke with his wife after has anything to do with the value of the
had tested positive for the virus. He had he died, and she said he’d been in great employee is completely wrongheaded.
attended the breakfast, and while the shape and had no underlying health Every restaurant, whether a bakery, a bar,
Department of Health said he could not issues whatsoever. He had been in India a beer hall, a three-star Michelin restau-
have possibly transmitted it before the before this, and there had been lots of rant, or a fast-food chain has workers, and
6th, we brought in a company to disinfect gatherings because it was the fifth anni- if those workers were laid off, it would be
the kitchen, the dining room, and all the versary for one of his restaurants there. irresponsible for that business not to
kitchens within the cafés at the museum. They were opening a new sweetshop. She apply for a loan to be used for the purpose
Then, on Tuesday the 10th, I got a call was confident that he had not gotten it in of bringing people back to work. I wasn’t
from the GM at Union Square Cafe say- any of those settings because there had personally involved with Shake Shack’s
ing they had sent home a sous-chef on been zero reported cases of anyone having decision, but if I had heard that they
Monday who had expressed flulike symp- the virus. He did wear a mask on the flight weren’t applying, I would have objected.
toms. So we closed Union Square Cafe home, but she’s pretty convinced that he You weren’t involved with the decision
and Daily Provisions, again out of an must have picked it up on the airplane, because as chairman of the board, you
abundance of caution, and we threw out because it was two days after that that his aren’t on the management team? Yeah,
all the food. So the sous-chef gets the test symptoms began. that’s correct.
results back, and they were negative. But At that point, I said, “We’re not doing Do you think the PPP is inherently
I knew we had done the right thing. I anything. No more cooking. No more ask- flawed? Yeah, you needed 18 user manuals
called all our leaders: “You know, guys, ing people to go anywhere for any reason to try to figure it out, and even if you did,
thi p happening. Let’s w e it so real. And at the it was changing day by day. The amount of
jus sa as in the hospital, so confusion and misinformation is breath-
That’s when peo re to al e colleague and partner, taking. I would have made it industry by
make delivery and ta w ich er Square Cafe chef] Michael industry, and I would have funded it ade-
you might have done through your Romano, who had also contracted the quately. And they put in a stipulation that
events kitchen, which was still up and virus. He came out of it, but it was enough. you must hire back your team by June 30.

58 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0

I don’t know how it’s going to be in Mon-
tana, but in New York City I will be
shocked if any of us is able to hire back our
workers by June. So what the plan should
have said is that the loan is forgivable if
you hire back your team three months
P H OTO G R A P H : K A R S T E N M O R A N / T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S / R E D U X
after you’re back in full swing.
What’s a typical day like working
remotely to figure out how and when
operations will resume? I’m up in north-
western Connecticut with my family. I get
to my computer first thing in the morning,
and it’s just an intense ten hours every day.
The thing that I really miss is bumping
into people, literally, either at the restau-
rants or at the office. Generally, a good
idea gets sparked that way. Right now,
every me d.
How i g in place going?
I’ve never had five consecutive weeks of
family dinner in my life. There’s seven of
us here, including my daughter Hallie’s
boyfriend, who’s finishing his senior year
at Yale Law School. So just doing all the
cooking and cleaning and being with each
other and learning to live with the same
people under the same roof, that’s … that’s
a job. But I enjoy it. We had a family talent
show last night.
What was your contribution? I played
piano and harmonica at the same time to
“American Pie”; one of our daughters sang
along and turned the pages of the music.
Really? The whole meandering Don
McLean song and not the abbreviated
Madonna version? Was there a winner?
No, no, no. Not a competition. But there
were some pretty cool things.
Who’s in charge of the kitchen? Hallie’s
doing most of the cooking. She started
ma pas y day—pasta is like
the al the Meyer family—
and she’s always baking cookies and coffee
cakes. Our youngest son is baking bread
every day; he also makes pizza dough.
Audrey, my wife, makes amazing soup.
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
The original Shake Shack, pre-pandemic.
And one of our sons always makes the sal-
ads. My contribution is pasta and meat.
What do you do for groceries? There’s
a couple of stores within a 15-minute
drive, and we go basically once a week.
Since I’m north of 60, I qualify for senior
hour. You stand in line in a tent that’s six
feet away from the next tent, and when it’s
time, they wave you in. We stock up on
basics: lots of lettuce, broccoli, broccoli
rabe, Brussels sprouts—things that are
going to live through the whole week.
A lot of people say they’re eating more
than usual. Are you? Yes, we are. What
I love is that lunch becomes leftovers. One
night this week, Hallie made mushroom
risotto. We had a fair amount left over. The
next night, Audrey made her roast chicken,
that then led to making a big chicken soup,
that then led to making chicken soup with
risotto in it. We don’t waste anything. The
refrigerator speaks to you. ■
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
59

shelf life
Can the Park Slope
Food Coop Survive?
Long lines, slashed revenues, and
hard-to-enforce social distancing have
members and management worried.
by leah koenig
L
ike most things these days, the
quotidian act of going out for
groceries suddenly feels like
uncharted territory. Nowhere is
this change more apparent than
at the Park Slope Food Coop. Over its
47-year history, brownstone Brooklyn’s
bastion of 1970s idealism has stayed
60 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
food
A map posted to
Instagram in late March to
help shoppers navigate Park
Slope Food Coop’s aisles.
remarkably resilient. But the coronavi-
rus has shaken the community-minded
store to its very foundation.
The most obvious change? The day
after Governor Cuomo mandated that
nonessential workers stay home, the
co-op’s leadership suspended members’
mandatory work shifts for the first time
ever, hiring 55 temporary employees to
manage stocking, checkout, bulk-food
packaging, and maintenance.
“We didn’t think the governor was sug-
gesting that all of our 17,000 member-
workers were essential,” said Ann Herpel,
one of the co-op’s general coordinators.
“And it wasn’t safe to expose our staff to so
many extra people throughout the day.”
For a collectively run entity, where a
decision as basic as whether to accept
debit cards took seven years to pass
through committees, the shift away from
member labor was uncharacteristically
swift and top down. Other changes feel
equally drastic: A maximum of 35 shop-
pers at a time are now allowed in the
6,000-square-foot store, resulting in a
socially distanced line outside that rou-
tinely snakes around the block. As at
other stores, some hours have been lim-
ited to seniors and high-risk individuals
(all day Thursday, in this case), plexiglass
barriers have been erected at checkout
stations, and the total number of shop-
pers in most aisles is capped at four. Still,
members used to edging around one
another to reach a bunch of organic bok
choy or a bottle of Vermont maple syrup
continue to drift closer than six feet
despite best intentions. “It is only a jar of
peanut butter,” Herpel said. “You can
P H OTO G R A P H S : F O O D CO O P / I N S TAG R A M ( PA R K S LO P E F O O D CO O P ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F P U B L I S H E R ( E AT M E )
stand and wait a minute.”
But members of the Park Slope Food
Coop (myself included), perhaps even
more than most New Yorkers, are preter-
naturally disposed to closeness. In non-
pandemic times, the place serves as a
social hub as much as a grocery store:
Friends hug and catch up, shoppers and
workers swap recipe ideas, and the occa-
sional passive-aggressive squabble breaks
out in the checkout line. Unlike most gro-
cery stores, where customers maintain a
head-down, shop-buy-leave mentality,
the coronavirus’s enforced physical sepa-
ration threatens the co-op’s entire gestalt.
The biggest disruption has been finan-
cial. In the panic-stricken weeks leading
up to New York’s stay-at-home measures,
Herpel said sales were “extraordinarily
high as members began to prepare.” The
crowding conditions approached packed-
subway-car-level severe even by cozy
co-op standards.
But in a recent emergency memo to
members, general manager and co-
founder Joe Holtz wrote that since March
23, when the reduced-shopper rule went
into effect, transactions have gone down
by 80 percent (from approximately 2,400
daily transactions to just 380) and sales by
45 percent. This has resulted in a
$500,000 loss in weekly sales revenue,
which typically averaged over $1.1 million.
At the same time, the temporary hires
have increased overhead. “This is not a
sustainable amount for running a coop-
erative that is this size,” Holtz wrote. “I
have to expect that the social-distancing
protocols will go on through mid-August.
This means a significant drop in our
financial liquidity … But what if it goes
beyond mid-August?”
The fear of losing what for many
members is both a communal and culi-
nary lifeline has inspired a number of
armchair recommendations on social
media. Some have called for implement-
ing delivery or curbside pickup, but Her-
pel said neither option is realistic. “If
companies like FreshDirect are having
trouble fulfilling increased customer
orders, and delivery is their entire busi-
ness model, why do people think the
co-op could do it?” she said. “And where
would all of those curbside groceries be
stored until they were picked up? We are
not miracle workers.”
Others have recommended that the
co-op set up a GoFundMe or similar
donation campaign. According to Her-
pel, the co-op is working with one of its
cooperative banks on an online donation
system. Until then, she said, members
can mail in a check. “I know it is old-
fashioned!” she said. On the more tech-
savvy side, one member is developing
software that allows people to schedule
appointments to shop. This would ide-
ally decrease wait times and (safely)
maximize the number of shoppers
cycling through during the currently
curtailed operating hours. Meanwhile,
members have taken to Instagram to
report their waits in real time—an act
that, in typical cooperative fashion,
simultaneously allows them to air griev-
ances and help others.
Herpel has plenty of hope the co-op
can weather this most recent storm. “I
don’t know what it will look like yet for
people to feel comfortable coming back
to do their work shifts. And I don’t know
if we will ever be as crowded as before,”
she said. “But there are a tremendous
number of people for whom the co-op is
essential to their lives, and there is a tre-
mendous amount of loyalty. Our mem-
bers will come through.” ■ yogurt or ice cream. Or warm it up and spoon it over morning oatmeal.
special
Quarantine-
Kitchen Edit
ion
home cooking
The Underground
Gourmet Digest
➽ with restaurants still closed and our regular ranking of the best new
things to eat and drink on hiatus, the Underground Gourmet has been spend-
ing a lot of time in the kitchen, thumbing through cookbooks and brooding over
restaurant dishes we have known and loved. Here, a few attempts at conjuring up
those fading memories with an emphasis on comfort and ease of cleanup. r.r. & r.p.
1 Jersey
Omelet Eggs
If ever there were a time to perfect your classic French-omelet
technique, it would be now, right? But after a few messy attempts at
channeling our inner Jacques Pépin, we said screw it and made
Kenny Shopsin’s Jersey Omelet Eggs (Eat Me; Knopf). All you do is
beat three eggs in a bowl, pour them into a hot pan with a knob of
butter, and, in the words of the inimitable auteur, “cook the hell out
of them.” If you’re feeling crazy-ambitious, add American cheese and
fold the thing up like an envelope. Pancake-flat, pan-browned,
and squeaky-textured, it’s a greasy-spoon metro-area madeleine.
2 Japanese
Sweet Potatoes
The strange-but-delicious signature spud at Hero’s, a long-gone
Greenwich Village baked-potato specialist that championed
With Peanut the pale-fleshed, dryer-textured Japanese variety. Cook
Butter a few in the oven until the kitchen smells like Thanksgiving,
split them in half, then spackle liberally with Koeze Cream-Nut,
Michigan’s pinnacle of peanut butter.
3 Canned
Mackerel With
A slight variation on the first unforgettable bite of food
we ever took at Prune in 1999. Crunchy, briny, and spicy, it makes
Triscuits, the perfect cocktail-hour mouthful, despite (or maybe because of)
Dijon Mustard, the lift-no-fingers prep. Prune uses sardines, but Cole’s-brand
Cornichons mackerel works nicely too.
4 Spaghetti
Cacio e Pepe
Pre-pandemic, we’d been finishing our c.e.p. in a colossal skillet with
a boatload of butter. Motivated by a profound desire to cut
back on colossal-skillet washing, we switched our method to the
traditional butterless recipe favored by that master of the pasta pot,
Sandro Fioriti of Sandro’s on the Upper East Side. Just drain the
spaghetti and return it to the off-the-burner pot it was cooked in,
stirring vigorously with reserved pasta-cooking water only, sprinkling
in the cheese and pepper as you go. Now, having come to our
senses, we actually prefer this version to the butter-enhanced one:
The sauce is sharper, purer, and just as silky if you get it right.
5 Tunisian Tuna
Sandwich
Housebound or not, we don’t need an excuse to haul out the
Ortiz Bonito del Norte and assemble this spicy riff on pan bagnat:
canned tuna, hard-cooked eggs, boiled fingerling potatoes, olives,
and parsley on a roll. The recipe also calls for preserved lemon
and harissa, but a jar of New York Shuk’s harissa with preserved
lemon is a handy shortcut.
6 h
Dried fruit, cinnamon, sugar, whatever bottle of red you’ve got
open—these unfussy ingredients combine to make a surprisingly
e sophisticated dessert (The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion &
Cooking Manual; Artisan). If you don’t have mascarpone, try it with
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 61
michael j / read like the wind / ritics / to do

Th LTUR ES

Yes,
Really?
Thomas Middleditch and
Ben Schwartz want to make
you love improv, the world’s
least-respected comic genre.
With a little help from Netflix,
they just might succeed.
By Jesse David Fox

Photographs by Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

buddy-buddy feeling that it’s more for the

performers onstage than the audience.
Previously, I’ve been frustrated by all of
this too, to the point that I stopped going
to see improv years before a pandemic
made it impossible for me to do so. But
that day of quarantine, whichever it was, it
was nice. And there’s a lot riding on that
niceness. Sporting a sizable investment
from Netflix and surprisingly high produc-
tion values, Middleditch & Schwartz is the

I
most major effort to present a longform
improv show to the masses. Nothing less
than the future of improv depends on it.

wait, some of you might be thinking.

Who the hell are these people? Middleditch
and Schwartz are famous in their niche
(comedy nerds) but only vaguely recogniz-
t was the 28th day of quarantine in New York City. Or was able to the population at large. Middleditch
it the 16th? Or the 43rd? On my daily ration of one “going outside,” I saw is probably best known for starring in
HBO’s Silicon Valley. Some might also rec-
a squat, grumpy dog—one of those dogs that look like a guy who played
ognize him as the Verizon guy or as the awk-
football in high school but wasn’t tall enough to play in college and is now ward agent in the NBA 2K20 video game.
a personal trainer at a Gold’s Gym in the town you grew up in—try to bite Schwartz was a star on the Showtime con-
a couple on their daily walk. At the last second, the owner pulled her dog sulting satire House of Lies, though most
back. There was a pause. And then the owner looked at the couple … and people probably know him from playing
Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation. But
screamed at them for not wearing masks. At this point, I decided I was if I were to put my money on where most of
done with the world for the day. Home, I turned on Netflix to watch the their live-show fans came from, it’s their
second of three Middleditch & Schwartz specials, and something funny popular guest appearances on the podcast
happened. Not funny haha—though there is a ton of haha—but funny Comedy Bang! Bang! Seriously. Comedy
fame is a weird thing.
unusual. Or, to use a word that is déclassé, something nice happened. I first met both of them separately
Middleditch & Schwartz, named after different genders and accents. In the big around the end of the aughts. I was work-
its stars—Thomas Middleditch, who climax, Nigel (played by Middleditch) ing in the New York mailroom of the Wil-
looks like Seth Meyers if he didn’t have to asks Emily (played by Schwartz) to give liam Morris talent agency (now WME),
be presentable every night, and Ben one of her kids to an alien who demands where one of our few responsibilities was
Schwartz, who looks like Andrew Garfield a friend. To which Schwartz responds, taping auditions. I vividly remember one
if he were 100 percent Jewish—is a two- with a smirk, “You want me to … abandon taping when Schwartz auditioned to play
man longform improv show in which my boy?” Middleditch doubles over an assistant. He thought it would be
every part is improvised by the perform- laughing, seemingly to the point of tears. funny to, over the course of the scene,
ers, including the structure of the show I use their names and not the charac- wrap Scotch tape around his finger. By
and the scenarios within it. At the start of ters because, in this moment, the charac- the end of an hour or so (these things
the program, instead of just asking for ters have dropped away and the two per- were supposed to take 15 minutes),
suggestions from the audience, they formers are themselves up there, as this Schwartz had said “Yes, and” to this idea
interview one randomly selected member is an inside joke. Schwartz knows that so much that he found himself with a
about “something coming up in the future Middleditch used to do an impression of giant ball of tape around his hand.
that [they] are either excited for or dread- Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Around that time, he started working
ing.” In this case, it was a story about a Blood, a character known for screaming, with Middleditch, who had moved to
working mother going to law school in “I abandoned my boy.” Not only that, but New York after years of training and per-
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a town in back when they first started performing forming in Chicago. Schwartz saw an
which some believe aliens exist (a detail at the famed L.A. comedy and music the- opportunity to work with a really funny,
that delights Schwartz, knowing he’ll get ater Largo, they’d open shows by pretend- talented improviser, and while Middle-
to bring it up in the set). ing to save a seat for Daniel Day-Lewis, ditch saw the same in Schwartz, he also
Bear with me, as explaining what hap- who played Plainview in Paul Thomas saw a way to get to perform at the Upright
pens on an improv set tends to make one Anderson’s film. Later, when I ask the Citizens Brigade (UCB) Theatre while cir-
sound like either a little kid retelling a guys about it over Zoom, Middleditch cumventing the unwritten rule that house
story or a stoner remembering a dream: explains that while he lives off the audi- team members had to go through the the-
While the other Middleditch & Schwartz ence’s laughter, “I consider it a little pip ater’s training program. The two of them
specials are made up of many intercon- of achievement in any given show when got pizza. When they first performed as a
necting scenes, this particular show took I can make Ben laugh.” duo at UCB, it was for eight minutes at
place entirely in a law-school classroom Of course, this is also the shit that people 11 p.m. on a Wednesday. “Really fast,
filled with a hodgepodge of students of hate about improv—the looseness, the insane stuff, and we both just had a ton of

64 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 fun,” Middleditch recalls. They have per-
formed dozens of much longer shows
together since.
The path that led to their getting the
first longform improv special on Netflix
began in early 2016 when they started
performing at Largo. Playing a space not
traditionally used for improv put an idea
in Middleditch’s head. “I don’t think this
paints it in a weird light, but to quote
Daniel Plainview, ‘I have a competition in
me,’ ” he tells me. “The notion that
wormed its way into my brain was: What’s
it going to take to pull improv—an improv
show, improv in general, whatever, my
form of comedy—out of a 120-seat the-
ater on a Sunday night at 11?” The goal
was theaters with lots of seats and expec-
tations from the people who fill them.
That seems simple enough, but why
hadn’t it happened before? Because of one
peculiar, and telling, truth about improv:
By the time someone starts gaining fame
as a comic, they pretty much stop perform-
ing improv. Slowly, what a person spent
every second of their day thinking about
and/or doing is reduced to a way to hang
out with their old buddies once a week,
then once a month, then once a year, then
not at all. Schwartz and Middleditch, by
contrast, had quixotically prioritized
improv and, I’m sure, were made fun of
behind their backs by their peers for it.
While there are thousands of exam-
ples of filmed stand-up, from five-minute
late-night sets to hour-long specials,
longform improv has not really had any
meaningful filmed representations.
(Essentially all improvised comedy on
television is in the form of semi-scripted
sitcoms, like Curb Your Enthusiasm.)
Agents, managers, and executives tend
to look down on it. The main reasoning
is always the same: It would be impos-
sible to re-create the audience experi-
ence. “Live improv works … in very large
part, on the very idea that everything
may go off the rails at any moment,” says
development executive Evan Shapiro,
who originally oversaw IFC’s move to
being a home for comedy. Live improv is
like watching a tightrope walker operate
without a net; watching it after the fact
P H OTO G R A P H B Y J E F F E RY N E I R A / N E T F L I X
would be like watching a person walk a
tightrope that’s lying on the ground.
“It wasn’t an easy sell,” Schwartz tells
me. “When we tried to pitch this thing, we
would go to places, and they’d be inter-
ested in working with the two of us in
some way, but when a network or a studio
can’t grab it, they’re like, ‘Great. What is
the show going to be about, though?’ ”
Schwartz says they’d respond, “We have
no idea. It could be about anything.”
From left, Schwartz and Middleditch.
Understandably, this was a hard thing to
blindly agree to. A lot of networks wanted
a framing device. Some executives pitched
special guests as a possible solution. Net-
flix, however, had been looking to try
improv for some time. “Apart from being
true masters of the art form, they have
this unique friendship—you might even
say love—which I found such a joy to
experience,” Netflix’s director of original
comedy programming, Ben Cavey, tells
me over email. “It’s like spending a night
with the two best friends you ever had.”
But how would you film the show to
capture at least some of the live energy?
Mike Birbiglia, stand-up comedian and
director of Don’t Think Twice, a 2016 film
about the interpersonal struggle of an
improv team, tells me that “there’s some-
thing boring about shooting improv
straight on without movement. It doesn’t
do justice to what it feels like to be in a
room watching an improv show.” Middle-
ditch and Schwartz, who move a lot dur-
ing their performance, decided to shoot
the hell out of it with nine cameras, then
to edit very carefully and deliberately,
essentially trading the feeling of risk for
something richer, more cinematic. “The
goal for us was to try and remove the fact
that you have to take a class to really
appreciate this show and just make it a
thing and just say it’s made up,” Middle-
ditch says.
all of what is good and annoying
about American improv was there at the
very beginning. It started not at a theater
but at a community center, and it was cre-
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
ated not by a comedian but by a social
worker. In the 1920s, Viola Spolin, an aco-
lyte of play theorist Neva Boyd, planted
the seeds of improv as a way of helping
immigrant children of different back-
grounds learn to get out of their heads and
communicate with each other. To this day,
improvisers don’t call it performing; they
call it “playing.” In turn, her son, Paul Sills,
became improv’s first true believer and co-
founded the Compass, the country’s first
improv theater company, and eventually
the Second City, one of the world’s most
famous. The Compass Players had a num-
ber of noteworthy members, none more so
than Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who in
the 1950s and ’60s popularized improv on
a national stage. They also pioneered the
complex, symbiotic relationship improv
has with its famous alumni: Up-and-
coming comic actors use it to find their
voice and gain attention in the industry,
only to dismiss it once they get a break,
while the theaters trade off the names of
their past students. Another noteworthy
Compass Player was future guru–slash–
all-around maniac Del Close, who in the
early 1980s, after a decades-long on-and-
off love affair with the Second City, opened
the ImprovOlympic (now iO) with Charna
Halpern and helped create the cult of
longform improv, defining many of the
early rules. Considering whom they
taught, their influence on modern comedy
is undeniable and tremendous. Improv-
Olympic was the breeding ground for
the UCB, which in the late ’90s moved to
New York and created an improv theater
of its own.
65
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
Then improv exploded. In 2003, the
New York Times reported the UCB taught
“some 500 students.” By the time I was
reporting on it, in 2015, that number had
grown to nearly 12,000 students between
both coasts. In the past 20 years, the
country went from a handful of improv
theaters to nearly 200. Reno has two, Sac-
ramento has three, and the state of Flor-
ida has 16. You would be hard-pressed to
find a college that doesn’t have one, if not
more than that. Add some touring groups,
cruise ships, and corporate training
wings, and national exposure to improv is
at a maximum. People love improv!
But you’d never know by the way they
talk about it. Just look at how it’s portrayed
in media. In the first season of The Good
Place, improv is listed as something you
are forced to watch in hell. BoJack Horse-
man had a multiple-episode takedown in
which it compared improv culture unfa-
vorably to Scientology. In nice-guy come-
dian John Mulaney’s 2018 special Kid Gor-
geous, he reads an email he wrote in college
offering to murder someone bothering a
friend, then says, “Of all the sentences in
that email I’d be ashamed to have read out
loud in a court of law, I think the top one
is, ‘See you at improv practice.’ ” Many of
these jokes were written in rooms with
improvisers in them, giving this backlash
the lilt of self-hatred.
At the core of this shame is the cynicism
adults feel toward the naïveté of youth.
Improv joins hobbies like a cappella, slam
poetry, magic, and ultimate Frisbee as the
indulgence of a person not in the real
world. Or, to put it another way: Improv
doesn’t make money, and this is America,
where if it doesn’t make dollars it doesn’t
make sense, or cents for that matter. While
the lives of struggling stand-ups have got-
ten mythologized over and over and over
and over and over and over and over with
all the extreme reverence of a war movie,
improvisers are generally portrayed either
as brainwashed cult members or out-of-
work losers dreaming of getting their shot.
Since the individual can’t make money
off it, the final piece of this negative per-
ception of improv stems from the people
who are—the big theaters, with their
expensive classes and lucrative corporate
training sessions, their unwillingness to
pay performers, and their disregard for
the people who allow them to exist. There
are plenty of examples of this, but none
more yucky than a recent viral Twitter
thread of people telling stories about
missing UCB classes because of their fam-
ily members dying and having the theater
demand to see the obituaries before giv-
ing a full refund. For a lot of people,
66 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
myself included, the camel’s back broke
right after the pandemic hit, when the
UCB laid off the entire theater staff—
roughly 40 to 60 people—without any
notice. On April 21, it announced it would
close its last New York theater, like an ex
finally taking a last box from the apart-
ment. The message to the community had
been clear for some time: There shouldn’t
have been a community at all, as improv
is just something you do for a time before
moving on. And it’s not just the UCB.
Other recent improv-theater scandals
include iO closing its L.A. location after
poor financial management and terrible
handling of sexual-misconduct issues at
the New Orleans and Austin New Move-
ment theaters.
This is what’s at stake with Middleditch
and Schwartz’s success. The duo offer a
glimpse of what it might mean to divorce
Improv joins
hobbies like
a cappella, slam
poetry, magic,
and ultimate
Frisbee as the
indulgence of a
person not in the
real world.
improv from its institutions. For years,
the biggest names in improv were the the-
aters, which lorded their power (stage
time) over people, demanding broke
aspiring comedians essentially pay to per-
form. But Middleditch and Schwartz sug-
gest a future where the means of perfor-
mance belongs to the improvisers.
so how is the show? Good! Very silly,
but good, if you like silly things. Watching
Middleditch & Schwartz, I was reminded
of that M&M’s commercial in which the
anthropomorphic M&M’s see Santa and
are like, “He does exist,” and Santa is like,
“They do exist?” That was kind of like me
watching the special: It (improv) can
exist (as a special).
In their act, which Middleditch has
called part improv and part vaudeville,
the duo break fourth walls with the fre-
quency and glee of two Kool-Aid Men.
Multiple times, they pause the action to
try to remember all the characters’ names
and story lines. At one point, they play
best friends who want each other’s lives
and are told they can swap bodies if they
pretend to be gazelles (a callback to ear-
lier events) and have sex with each other
(though, eventually, it is revealed that it
actually wasn’t about sex at all and these
friends were worried about nothing).
Quickly, it goes from the characters say-
ing they should play rock-paper-scissors
to decide who plays the giving and receiv-
ing gazelle to Middleditch and Schwartz
as themselves, with Schwartz very confi-
dently telling Middleditch he’s going to
win the game. “I’m 100 percent certain
I’m going to beat you,” Schwartz says. “In
real life.” Middleditch, visibly nervous,
concurs he thinks he’ll lose as well, add-
ing, “I don’t know why I’m scared. It
doesn’t matter.” “This has no conse-
quence,” Schwartz says, laughing, before
adding, “It will be recorded forever, so if
you lose, everyone will know.” In improv,
you are supposed to react as you would in
real life and to acknowledge the unusual
thing, and in this moment, the most
unusual thing is that their improv, which
was always meant just for the people in
front of them, will now be saved forever.
Two-person improv, more than other
formats, is really rooted in the friendship
of the performers. In Middleditch and
Schwartz’s case, at this point in their busy
careers, essentially the only time they get
to hang out for any extended period of
time is onstage. But to watch these two
skinny nerds hug and kiss and sit on each
other’s laps and try to make the other per-
son laugh and play freaking rock-paper-
scissors feels like an escape.
It’s a feeling I didn’t know I missed, and,
in the days since first watching the special,
I found myself looking for all the improv
I could find online. Talking to people
through Twitter, I learned a lot of them are
performing over Zoom. I watched one
show on Instagram Live by the Brooklyn
comedy group Ladies Who Ranch. By the
end, when I was one of maybe 11 people
left watching, I wasn’t sure if I was watch-
ing it as I would a comedy show so much
as vicariously getting to live through a
group of friends playing.
The most clichéd observation about this
century is that we’ve never been so con-
nected and so disconnected at the same
time. This was true before we were all
forced to stay at least six feet from each
other, and it will be true after, too. Improv,
rooted in such old-fashioned virtues as
friendship, trust, and community, feels like
something we can all use. We’ve all heard
“Yes, and” before, but it’s not just a trick to
keep a scene going. It’s about acknowledg-
ing a shared reality. ■
 How The Last Dance unearthed the holy grail of buried
Michael Jordan footage. By Jake Malooley

the last dance airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on ESPN.

a ten-part documentary centered on the final season of Michael

Jordan’s Chicago Bulls dynasty, The Last Dance, presents something
many of us never thought we’d see—acres of unguarded, behind-the-scenes
footage of the press-shy (and usually quite controlling) Jordan and his team-
mates at a momentous time in their lives. That raw footage had been sitting
virtually unseen in the NBA’s vaults for two decades. How did the documentary
happen, and why is it finally seeing the light of day? Producers Andy Thompson
and Gregg Winik walk us through the project.
How did you gain Michael Jordan’s trust? andy thompson: I first met
Michael Jordan when I produced a feature on him with NBA Inside Stuff host
Ahmad Rashad. While I was setting up for the shoot, Ahmad turned to
Michael and said, “Hey, do you know who he is? That’s Mychal Thompson’s
brother.” I was known most of my life as [two-time NBA champion] Mychal
Thompson’s little brother; now people say I’m [Golden State Warriors all-
star] Klay Thompson’s uncle. And Michael was like, “Man, I used to love
your brother.” Jordan said he wrote my brother’s name on his school text-
books. So our bond started with his respect for my brother. Through all the
Bulls championship years, we would get tighter.
How did you begin negotiating access to Jordan and the Bulls for this
project? a.t.: When Adam Silver was appointed president of NBA Enter-
tainment in 1997, he met with all of the senior producers. In the meeting,
I said, “Adam, Michael Jordan might retire on your watch. You don’t want
to let the greatest athlete of our generation retire before we’ve filmed him
for a full season during the last run of this Bulls team.” I didn’t even use the
word documentary. I simply said, “We just need to get it in the can.”
How much footage did you shoot? gregg winik: We shot the team,
full access, with multiple film crews for more than a hundred days, total-
ing about 500 hours.
Was there ever a moment when you thought you might be kicked out
because you were filming something that the Bulls didn’t want you to
film? a.t.: There was one scene before game six [of the NBA Finals, Jordan’s
last game in a Bulls uniform]. Michael was always gregarious pregame. He
was always doing something to joke with the security guards. He was loud
and boisterous. But when we walk into the locker room that day, my camera-
man notices Michael lying on the training table, eyes closed, nobody around
him. There isn’t a trainer working on him. He is just lying there. I look at
[cameraman] Michael Winik, and I say, “Mike, you gotta shoot that.”
Why did it take 22 years for an audience to see this film? g.w.: Adam
Silver’s promise to Michael Jordan in 1997 was, “Let us shoot this, give
us access. One day we’ll have a great video, or if you’re not ready for it to
be released, you’ll have the best home video anybody has ever had.” So
there was an understanding that we wouldn’t release anything unless it
was the right time for the NBA and for Michael. The 500 hours went
P H OTO G R A P H : A N D R E W D. B E R N S T E I N / N E T F L I X

under lock and key in the vaults of the various offices of NBA Entertain-
ment. On the 3,200 reels of film that were shot, we put an X to denote
that they were not to be used.
Why does this archival footage look so much better than other archi-
val sports footage? g.w.: At the time, Betacam video was the industry
standard. We said, “We have to shoot this on film. It will preserve better
over time.” It was a significantly greater financial commitment—and I
heard about it for years after while it just sat there. There were millions
of dollars invested to capture the season on film, and it ultimately proved
to be a huge benefit 20 years later that we could now transfer the old film
to 4K versus having to deal with old videotape that was standard defini-
tion that would look fuzzy now if it was presented on ESPN or Netflix.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 67
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

Brain-electrifyingly good BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS,

by New York literary critic MOLLY YOUNG

WTRN*

LaBrava
BY ELMORE LEONARD
(FICTION, 1983)

➽ The local library is

closed, of course, but it’s
got a no-contact book
sale going on that works
like this: There’s a shelf
of books that vary ex-
travagantly in quality
and condition. You ap-
proach the shelf, browse,
select your books, pick a
few more because who
knows how long you’ll
be indoors, and shove your total (25 cents per title)
into the book-return slot. This isn’t a covid-19-
specific innovation; the system has been in place
for at least a decade. Perhaps your local library runs
a similar operation. At any rate, I zeroed in on this
Elmore Leonard book
but didn’t have money ✔ recommended
with me, so I decided to if you like :
walk home, fetch a coin, ❏ David Mamet
and return. On my way, it movies
started raining. Long ❏ suntan oil
story short, I didn’t re- ❏ suspecting
turn to the library for foul play
three days—until the ❏ hoaxes
guilt over owing a quar- ❏ a well-timed
ter overwhelmed my re- saxophone solo
luctance to get rained on. in a pop song
Happily, the book was ❏ motel blankets
well worth 72 hours of (the flammable
trivial turmoil. It’s a kind)
louche Miami tale of a
call me a fascist, but I love statements that start fallen movie star whose life begins to imitate the
plots of her noir films—complete with scams,
➽ with, “There are two types of people …” Someone once goons, seduction, treachery, and sunglasses. If you
told me, “There are two types of people: those who run want to submerse yourself in a masterful mystery
with atmosphere for days, Leonard is your doctor
out of toilet paper and those who never do.” (These days: not and LaBrava your medicine.
much of a choice.) Another person hit me with, “There are two
types of people: people who lose things and people who break
things.” Here’s a third that I’ve personally observed to be true: A Children’s Bible
BY LYDIA MILLET
There is one kind of person who, when she is in (FICTION, MAY 12)

a sad mood, will listen to sad music as a way of sign up

➽ If either of the words in this book’s title turn
ratifying her emotion, while others will listen to for the
newsletter
you off, as they did me (I mean, only mildly),
happy music fo counte eq es. at vulture simply flip to the author photo of Millet. She
. com /read . is depicted mid-sentence, as though yelling
There are boo re for b ypes d peo- “Hey!” at the reader. Who could resist? Now
ple. If you want verification of your gloom— that you’re in, you’ll be glad to know we have
a prime example of that rare and precious
assuming, and I do, that you’re gloomy—consider A Children’s thing: a funny dystopia. A group of wealthy par-
Bible. If you want escapism, consider all the rest. I am here to serve. ents rent a robber baron’s mansion for the sum-

68 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 *What to Read Now.

 mer. They spend their
time drinking and
idling and contributing WHY DON’T YOU …
to society ’s decline
while their collective
children roam in feral
splendor. The kids
hate the adults with an … GIVE YOURSELF
untrammeled and cre- THE CREEPS
atively expressed ven-
geance. When a hurri- with some help from
cane hits, they escape Shirley Jackson’s We Have
their summer enclosure. This is not a normal Always Lived in the Castle?
hurricane but one endowed with fearsome pow-
ers by climate change.
Cell service goes down, ✔ riyl:
roads wash out, shops ❏ A Visit From the
are looted, markets Goon Squad, by
crash, gas stations run Jennifer Egan … EXPERIENCE
dry, diseases proliferate, ❏ Lydia Davis CATHARSIS
violence erupts. The ❏ Using novels
price of tampons sky- as a template
the old-fashioned
rockets to $40 per box. for living way—with
It doesn’t precisely echo ❏ Cautious Shakespeare?
our moment, but there optimism Macbeth did it for
are recognizable events ❏ The Martian (Matt me. Something
and possibilities. Some- Damon movie)
times it feels good to … FROLIC I discovered while
have your anxieties re- rereading it is that
flected back at you in an artful format. Now is one
among the hautboys doesn’t mean
of those times. chintzy what you hope it means.
furnishings and
knotty mind of
The Burnt Orange Heresy Iris Murdoch beginning
BY CHARLES WILLEFORD with Under the Net?
(FICTION, 1971)

➽ You can’t judge a

book by its blurbs, but
let’s nonetheless take a … TRY
look at these two printed Read Me, by Leo
on the back cover of The Benedictus, a novel
Burnt Orange Heresy:
“You will enjoy it
that replicates the
[even if ] you have feeling of going to bed
never bought anything at 8 p.m. because you
more original than a can no longer bear to
van Gogh print.” —New be conscious?
York Times
“Nabokov would smile and approve.” —Nash-
ville Tennessean
How could any novel possibly be the hypote-
nuse of those two statements? The first is calling … DIP INTO
me a philistine and the other is guaranteeing a
beyond-the-grave stamp of approval from Nabo- Devils in Daylight, … INDULGE IN
kov. I had no choice but to complete the triangu- by Junichiro Tapping the Source,
lation by reading it. It Tanizaki, a by Kem Nunn, the
marks the first—and I ✔ riyl: suspenseful tale 1980s surf thriller
hope last—time I’ve about the
❏ Thomas McGuane that Point Break,
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F N E T F L I X ( E XOT I C )

been negged into start- underbelly of

❏ The Gene the classic Keanu
ing a book. The narrator
is a sociopathic art critic
Hackman film Tokyo? Reeves movie, was
Night Moves
who hunts down an elu-
❏ Invading people’s inspired by?
sive painter in deep
privacy
Florida and does un-
❏ Roald Dahl
speakable things. I sup-
pose the idea of a “socio-
pathic a d the Like Tiger King? I’ll see

+
Times re en” a your Joe Exotic and raise you
person u an even stranger and
this book. Her SUGGESTED
PAIRING more sinister character in
swamp beyon Ian McEwan’s Nutshell.
tor roared erotically.” If that’s not enough to ignite
your appetite, I don’t know what would.

a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k 69
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
Fiona Apple
Explains
Every Track
on ‘Fetch the
Bolt Cutters’
On her first album in eight years,
the artist reached into the past to
confront her rapist, middle-school
bullies, and herself.
track 1
“I Want You to Love Me”
This started as a love song
to somebody I hadn’t met
yet. Then I got back together
with Jonathan [Ames] in
2015, and it became about
him for a while. We broke up
about a year later, so it wasn’t
about him anymore. The line
about the pulse—“And I know
when I go all my particles
disband and disperse/And
I’ll be back in the pulse”—was
an experience I’d had one day
after six days of meditating
at Spirit Rock in Woodacre,
California, in a group of
about 75 women in 2010.
I had this throbbing in my
head. Then I remembered
this advice someone had
given me, which was to just
surrender—stop trying to do
anything. For some reason,
I was able to do that, and
the throbbing in my head
left. But then everybody was
throbbing—everything.
I’d never had an experience
like that, and it’s hard for
me to remember what it
felt like now, but it’s the
biggest thing that’s ever
happened to me in my life.
70 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
track 2
“Shameika”
Shameika is real.
I was probably 11 or so.
I remember being in the
cafeteria, a bunch of girls at
one end of the table. I came
over to sit with them, and
they started laughing at me.
So I sat one seat away but
still tried to be close to them.
Shameika came up, and she
was like, “Why are you trying
to sit with those girls?
You have potential.” That
was all she said to me.
track 3
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters”
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is
probably the theme of the
album. It’s about breaking
out of whatever prison
you’ve allowed yourself to
live in, whether you built
that prison for yourself or
whether it was built around
you and you just accepted it.
track 4
“Under the Table”
This was inspired by a
particular dinner where there
was lots of expensive wine and
bragging about things
I wouldn’t brag about. I won’t
say too much about it, but
somebody said something
I thought was offensive.
It was not the kind of dinner
where you’re supposed to
call somebody out. But
I didn’t want to be there in the
first place. So I called the guy
out. And may have messed
the dinner up a little bit.
track 5
“Relay”
The assault when I was 12
[Apple was raped in the
corridor of her mother’s
apartment building] made
me think about innocence
and guilt and forgiveness.
The first thing I did after
it happened was pray for
him. But you can’t stop at
praying for them. You have to
hold them responsible. The
Kavanaugh hearings in 2018
brought on a lot of shit to deal
with. I don’t know what it is,
that guy. There are so many
of them out there, but it was
the externalized version of
what you know a lot of them
are feeling inside. Just this
indignant “How could you
be mad at me? Don’t make
me suffer. But I have kids, so
I can’t be a bad guy.” Thank
you, fucking Brett Kavanaugh,
for letting my anger see
the light of day. Thank you
for being so horrible.
track 6
“Rack of His”
This song is about at least
two relationships. I started
writing it years ago, and I did
a couple versions. I just didn’t
like it. So I deconstructed it
and put it back together.
It was very piano driven, and
I had written it on the piano
when I was very young. It just
didn’t fit how I felt anymore. It
was a little too bouncy. It was
probably fine, but, as my friend
Bella would say, “It was not
wearing the dress that
I wanted it to go to the party
in.” So I needed to redress it.
track 7
“Newspaper”
This is also about two specific
people. I don’t think they
will be aware of it. A lot of
times when I write songs, it’s
because I can’t get through to
the person in real life. I would
write letters to my parents
because they wouldn’t listen
to me. I would write letters so
they’d have to be quiet until
the letter was over, so they
wouldn’t interrupt me. If I try
to get in touch with somebody
and talk through things and
they won’t talk to me, then,
sorry, I’ve got to write a song.
When I say, “I don’t think that
they’ll be aware of it,” that’s me
not getting my hopes up.
I don’t expect anything
to come from it. I have
to express it somehow.
track 8
“Ladies”
This album is a lot of not
letting men pit us against
each other so they can
control the message. My
grandmother used to talk
about my grandfather
and his mistress. And his
mistress actually was his wife
for the rest of his life. But
to her, she was always mad
at this mistress. And it was
always like, “Man, she didn’t
do it. Our grandfather did
it. She fell in love with some
guy. They were together
forever afterward and had
a family.” Later on in life,
I’m with a guy. I found
out he’s seeing some other
woman. I meet that other
woman—I’m nice to that
other woman. She didn’t do
it. She didn’t cheat on me.
track 9
“Heavy Balloon”
The imagery came to me years
ago. A boyfriend of mine was
talking about his father’s
depression. The way he was
describing his father moving
around the house weighed
down by something made
me think, We’re always trying
to keep it up; this is not
staying off me long enough.
I just can’t really move around.
It’s this hindrance, this
obligation, this constant
thing to be taken care of.
Photograph by Zelda Hallman
track 10
“Cosmonauts”
I wrote [this] for Judd
Apatow’s 2012 movie This
Is 40, but he didn’t use it.
We rerecorded it for this
album. It was a challenge
because [Apatow] wanted
me to write a song about two
people who were going to be
together forever, and that’s
not a song I’m equipped to
write because I don’t know
if I want to be together with
anybody forever. My first
line is “Your face ignites
a fuse to my patience.”
track 11
“For Her”
It’s partly inspired by
conversations I had with
this woman I knew years
ago, when she had been an
intern for a film-production
company. It’s one of those
situations where she didn’t
consider it rape because
of the relationship she
had with this person. They
didn’t know they had done
this to her. She spent years
protecting him from the
knowledge of that and, in so
doing, really hurt herself.
track 12
“Drumset”
Jonathan had broken up
with me, and I was expecting
everybody to break up with
me. [The band and I] had this
little argument, and they took
some of their instruments
away; I misinterpreted it
as that they were pissed at
me and they weren’t going
to come back. I picked up
my phone and I sang into
it, “The drum set is gone,
and the rug it was on is still
here, screaming at me.” We
recorded it in one take.
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
track 13
“On I Go”
This was my version of a
Vipassana chant. It means
feelings arise and fall away,
and it’s all impermanent.
To be at peace with this
concept is to be happy. What
I wanted it to be about was,
there doesn’t have to be any
meaning or reward of the
things I’m doing. I’m going
to make music for myself, get
myself through things, and
not think about what other
people think. I don’t want to
prove anything anymore.
71

t h e v i e w f r om hom e
MEHRDAD OSKOUEI ➽ After
two weeks in quarantine,
I drove to my office in the east of
Tehran to pick up some stuff and
found the streets so crowded.
They were buying things for the
Nowruz holiday—New Year in
Iran, which begins on the first
drug trafficking and their wives
and children who live in a large
village without a man. I’m always
worried about these prisoners’
lives. My father and grandfather
were imprisoned for political
reasons. I also have a one-year
prison sentence hanging over

Freeze
day of spring. So the authorities’
message was not taken seriously.
An important part of my new
film is about male inmates who
me for making the film; the
result will be known in three
months. Sometimes I wonder,
If I was in prison at this time,

Frame
are sentenced to life in prison for how would I spend my time?

N
RA
TEH

Filmmakers from across the world

on what they’re seeing, and how they’re
coping in this pandemic.

AN
LUCA GUADAGNINO realize it takes
MIL ➽ We’re in a very IA
a lot of effort to make SUR
MA
unpredictable and sure that extreme
unprecedented measures do not
unraveling. I’m in the derange us. To see,

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F F I L M M A K E R S ; A L E S S I O B O L ZO N I (G U A DAG N I N O) ; B A LTA S A R B R E K I S A M P E R ( KO R M Á K U R )

CORALIE FARGEAT ➽ What was
very disturbing from the beginning
is that the virus really brings into
light the oldest social inequalities.
In France, I think two years ago,
there was an inauguration of a
big train station, and President
Macron said, “This train station
is a place where everybody
meets—people who succeeded
and people who are nothing.” He
meant all the different classes
of society, but he said it in a way
that was really shocking. Now,
when you have this virus, you see
that people who are “nothing” are
everything, because it’s thanks
to them that the whole country
doesn’t collapse—people who go
to collect the garbage, the cashiers
at the supermarkets, the people in
the hospitals. And they have to go
to work without any protection.
center of Milan. It’s
sort of slo-mo here,
like everywhere in the
world. Spring is
blooming. Usually in
spring, you start to go
out; you start to
experience nature and
social life. The city is
very empty. I see it
from my window. You
IS
PAR
somehow, that all of
us are doing our job to
make sure everything
is managed without
derangement, it’s
quite touching. It
makes you feel
probably less alone,
being that now it is a
shared experience. MAŁGORZATA SZUMOWSKA
➽ The first week, I had a
lot of doubts about all these
cancellations and restrictions in
Poland. Now people are dying.
I started to take it really seriously
when I saw how huge an impact
it had on me personally. For
example, the cinemas are locked
down. They are not paying
distributors. Distributors are not
paying producers. Producers are
not paying artists. My husband
is an actor and a writer. I am a
film director and writer. I now see
that it could be, economically, a
nightmare—something
I never expected before because
I thought, Ah, I am a value. I’m
an economical value because
I have a talent. Everyone wants
me! I can do whatever I want
because I can always find a job
anywhere! We are egoists. We
think that it’s always going to
be something behind us, that
nothing will happen to us. And
now we realize that’s bullshit.

72 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
 S ISSA LÓPEZ ➽ Unlike
ELE IFE
S AN
G most Americans, I’ve R EC
LO
had this experience
before because I was in
Mexico City during the
swine flu. It’s very weird
because now me and all
my Mexican friends, we
call each other and we go,
“Hey, do you remember
2009?” Yeah, I do. It was
very strict. Coming from
the experience,
I was talking to my
friends in L.A. and saying,
“Well, when they lock
us down”—just because
I know it’s happening— KLEBER MENDONÇA Brazilian government, it’s
and everybody was FILHO ➽ I’m based in astonishing and maddening
saying, “No, that’s not the northeast of Brazil, a because all ideas of
going to happen.” It took city called Recife—about common sense are thrown
a while for the U.S. to 2 million people. I live out the window. It feels like
respond, and I have to in an apartment in one we have a biological crisis,
say, I’m both Mexican of the central areas and which is the coronavirus,
and American, and I’m can see a lot of the city and then we have a human
very proud of how the from my window. It’s disaster, which is caused
state of California has very quiet. There’s no by a politician on top
been responding. law enforcement on the of that: Bolsonaro. I’m
streets asking people, very concerned about
“Why are you here?,” but what’s going to happen
like with everything in in this country. It’s like
Brazil, I can see a class a comic-book-villain
LES DAVID LYNCH ➽ I love being at home. Right now I’m
AN
GE divide. The way that some kind of situation that
LO
S in the woodshop, and I’m working on these small lamps. governments are dealing we’re observing here,
It’s so much fun to dream up a different kind of lamp and with this, particularly the and it’s quite insane.
have the tools and the materials to realize these things.
I like working with resin, I like working with wood, and
I like working with electricity. So the lamps encompass
these three things in a beautiful way. It’s just a great thing
N
to be in the woodshop working away. N DO
LO

VÍK
K JA
REY

EDGAR WRIGHT ➽ I have been disappearing into a lot

of movies. I’m definitely not a doomsday prepper in terms
BALTASAR KORMÁKUR Iceland, we’re used to is so much bigger than of having important things like batteries and light bulbs
➽ We’re an island, so we volcano eruptions and ourselves. Sometimes and toilet rolls and food, but I feel like I’ve been doomsday
have one border. A lot of terrible weather, so we tend to forget that. prepping with Blu-rays. I had that Criterion Ingmar Bergman
this was m pe lm But hese t boxed set and had not cracked into it. So in the space of
skiing r ope. in co —wh one weekend, I watched Cries and Whispers, Fanny and
The pro l si ke it’s o er Alexander, Shame, Scenes From a Marriage, and also the
travel, s v d is documentary Bergman: A Year in the Life. You would think
of virus comin vi ng. that in a time of uncertainty and crisis, you would go for
but they could th lace s escapism and stuff, but I’ve found the existential dread in both
control most of it. In called planet Earth that something. Ingmar Bergman and Roy Andersson quite soothing.

interviews by jordan crucchiola, bilge ebiri, patrick flanary, hunter harris, and alison willmore.
 tv / movies / classical music

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

CRITICS
Matt Zoller Seitz on Mrs. America … David Edelstein on Our Mothers …
Justin Davidson on Franz Schubert.

Mrs. America

T V / MATT ZOLLER SEITZ best, the series gives you the contact high
of a heist picture. The vault is patriarchy,
Libber’s Last Stand the locked-up fortune is equal rights and
equal wages, and the recurring strategic
Mrs. America’s stylish history of the rise question is whether to keep gently turning
of the counter-counterculture. the lock back and forth until the right com-
bination reveals itself or just blow the
bloody doors off.
mrs. america’s smartest move was deciding to be a TV show first and a history During the first couple of hours, you can
lesson second, although it takes a while for that distinction to emerge. Created feel the burden of obligation weighing the
and mostly written by Mad Men screenwriter-producer Dahvi Waller, and co-produced production down. There has never been a
and frequently co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel), the FX on high-profile drama series on this subject,
Hulu limited series brings many leaders of mid-century American feminism into one story made with a high budget and an all-star
line, and it rarely passes up a chance to pack four or five of them into the same room, the cast, and there are times when the result
better to showcase how different they all were. feels like one of those history miniseries that
The inevitable flood of fact-checking pieces will determine whether particular conver- used to air on broadcast networks in the
sations are historically “realistic” in terms of what was said and where. What matters ’90s. Some of the dialogue suffers from “I’m
more is the complexity and generosity of the show’s vision of American life and the so happy that I can finally spend time with
P H OTO G R A P H : S A B R I N A L A N TO S / F X

crackling ensemble of its famous heroines—including Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Shir- my only sister in her beautiful home” syn-
ley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ull- drome. Mad Men—a series to which this
man), and Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks)—jammed into Abzug’s project invites comparison for the creator’s
D.C. office to envision the future. Over the course of nine briskly résumé, the mid-century accoutrements,
paced hours, the group strategizes about how to empower the newly MRS. AMERICA
and the casting of John Slattery as Schlafly’s
founded National Women’s Political Caucus, lobby mostly male FX ON HULU. adoring husband, John—mostly avoided
WEDNESDAYS.
Democratic and Republican leaders to make abortion legal, to try to such traps. But the more Mrs. America
pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and to neutralize pushback from commits to being a TV show whose charac-
charismatic reactionaries like Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett). At its ters just happen to be real people with

74 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
famous names, the less of a drag its obliga-
tions become. By the time you hit hour
three, the actors have settled into their char-
acters and internalized their co-stars’
rhythms and the story is on rails. The addic-
tive energy of the ensemble infuses every
scene, and you laugh when characters say
the sorts of things you would expect them
to say based on the time you’ve spent with
them, as when Schlafly dryly corrects the
mispronunciation of her last name for the
zillionth time, or when Steinem, walking
home with her boyfriend after suffering
through a boringly didactic satirical play
about marriage and heterosexuality, mut-
ters, “This is why they hate us.”
In the end, Mrs. America is a show about
both a certain time and place and the politi-
cal currents that have driven progressive
and reactionary tendencies in American life
for decades. When Schlafly rails against
“the libbers” and gripes about “a small elitist
group of northeastern Establishment liber-
als putting down the homemakers,” her lan-
guage echoes not just Richard Nixon’s
White House pre-Watergate tapes but also
press speeches and press briefings by Rea-
gan, both Bushes, Trump, and the entirety
of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, and
Breitbart. The outward-facing unity of the
show’s progressive protagonists—a Justice
League of liberal feminists, each with her
own fabulous look—contrasts with internal
disagreement based largely on life experi-
ence. The series doesn’t flinch when show-
ing how the entitled or simply oblivious
behavior of white feminists alienates their
African-American sisters, whether it’s Mar-
garet Sloan (Bria Henderson), an openly
lesbian editor at Steinem’s revolutionary
Ms. (founded in the offices of New York
Magazine) enduring Steinem’s rejection of
her proposed article on racial discrimina-
tion in the workplace or Chisholm digging
in her heels when Abzug pressures her to
end her trailblazing but numerically
doomed presidential candidacy.
Byrne’s assured physicality as Steinem is
complicated by the character’s knowledge
that she ascended so fast thanks partly to
her youthful good looks. Abzug—portrayed
by Martindale as a bawdy, fearless truth-
teller, reminiscent of Thelma Ritter’s hard-
case sidekick characters—frankly tells
Steinem that she’s feminism’s ideal spokes-
person because of her “pretty face.” “Is that
my only value to the movement?” “No,”
Abzug replies, “we need your tits and ass,
too.” This state of affairs justifiably annoys
Friedan. She respects Steinem but has been
a star much longer and struggles to repress
her irritation at Steinem’s comparatively
frictionless rise. At certain moments, we
also gather that Friedan wouldn’t have
minded having a long-term boyfriend—she
got divorced two years before the start of grind progressive momentum to a halt.
the story line, escaping an abusive Unafraid to put hard truths in the mouth of
marriage—but can’t say that publicly for a “bad guy,” the series has Schlafly predict
fear of being branded a hypocrite or sellout. that if progressive women succeed in mak-
She also worries that her pioneering efforts ing it socially acceptable for wives and
were taken for granted by younger women, mothers to work, most adult women will
a concern that Steinem addresses in a gut- have two full-time jobs: whatever they do
punch conversation that occurs just when for a paycheck and the domestic duties that
Friedan needs to hear it most. their lazy husbands refuse to perform. At
Mrs. America’s animating power source one point, Schlafly and her allies—includ-
is the intersection of psychology and activ- ing Banks’s Ruckelshaus, often the lone
ism. It lets us watch eccentric, fascinating conservative at ERA strategy meetings,
characters bounce off each other as they try and Schlafly’s pal Alice, a fictionalized
to figure out what populist buttons to push composite character played by Sarah Paul-
to inspire voters and legislators to produce son—figure out that the best way to appeal
the results they and their supporters desire. to the status quo, including centrist and
Schlafly occupies roughly the same role conservative women, is by pampering and
here that Thanos did in the last two Aveng- flattering them, rather than, in Friedan’s
ers films: She’s the antagonist whose cautionary words, “telling them marriage is
motives you understand and appreciate prostitution and alimony is war repara-
intellectually, even as a band of heroes on tions.” Thus is the Illinois State Legislature
the other side of the political fence fights enticed to reject the ERA, based in part on
tooth and nail to defeat her. The series is set conservative women delivering loaves of
in the 1970s, when the flame of leftist ideal- fresh bread to politicians, embracing the
ism dimmed to embers and Me Decade “happy homemaker” stereotype that
narcissism erupted into ’80s-style scorched- Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique sug-
earth selfishness. The boldest storytelling gested was a cover for dissatisfaction. Ron-
choice is zeroing in on Schlafly in the pilot, ald Reagan, whose presidency rolled back
making it seem as if she’ll be the star of the gains that women, racial minorities,
whole thing. LGBTQ activists, and unions had made in
But this gambit makes dramatic as well as preceding decades, is a looming though
political sense when you realize that, unseen presence throughout the first few
through the ’80s and ’90s, Schlafly’s allies episodes—the human equivalent of that
found ways to undermine abortion rights, place described by Hunter S. Thompson’s
stifle the ERA’s progress, and—in concert Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where the
with Evangelical Christians, sexist male leg- “wave” of the counterculture “finally broke
islators, and conservative homemakers— and rolled back.” ■
M O V I E S / DAVID EDELSTEIN
Even Under Torture
Our Mothers disturbs Guatemala’s
terrible ghosts.
the guatemala of the grim drama Our Mothers (Nuestras
Madres) sits on top of a boneyard, its buildings crumbling into
the earth as if to merge with their former, murdered inhabitants. The
bones date back to the country’s 36-year civil war and, in particular, the
carnage of the early 1980s, when army and paramilitary units escalated
the torture, rape, and “extrajudicial” execution of civilians (many of them
indigenous Mayans) suspected of aiding left-wing guerrillas. It didn’t take
much, evidently, to get the men of a village shot or beaten to death and
the women used as sex slaves or—in an especially
sick game—made to dance on the ground over their
husbands’ bodies. The film is set long after the war, OUR MOTHERS
DIRECTED BY
in 2018, when the current government began—better CESAR DIAZ.
OUTSIDER PICTURES.
late than never—to hold former soldiers to account; MAY 1.
and as the trial is broadcast on radio and TV, a young
forensic archaeologist, Ernesto (Armando Espitia),

Our Mothers
emerges from sundry desolate excavation
sites and begins the task of connecting hip
bones to thigh bones, etc. In a prologue, he
assembles a particular skeleton with great
tenderness, setting the skull atop a small
cushion as if it had belonged to a king. The
image lingers through the movie, a talisman
both eerie and exalted.
Clocking in at under 80 minutes, Our
Mothers feels a little incomplete, like shards
from a larger mosaic, but that somehow fits
its subject and protagonist. The 41-year-
old director, César Diaz, comes from
documentaries and approaches his task
like a forensic archaeologist himself, stick-
ing to what he finds in the material world,
declining to fill in or embellish. We get no
flashbacks—nothing beyond the hard, aged
faces of survivors. And bones, of course.
One of Ernesto’s tasks is to present boxes
of them—post-identification—to families
who want to take their loved ones home,
decades after the disappearances. When
an indigenous woman, Nicolasa (Aurelia
Caal), pressures Ernesto to return with her
to her village to help dig up her husband’s
remains (“I want him to be in a place where
I can speak to him,” she says), he demurs.
He’s very busy these days. Plus his boss has
maintained that most of the women who
trudge into the city to testify have come for
the government’s newly publicized financial
compensation. Yes, he says, many of them
look as if they’ve been scorched in hell. But
“suffering is not synonymous with truth.”
Thank Heaven that guy isn’t the pro-
tagonist, or Our Mothers would be even
more depressing. Ever in search of
answers, Ernesto—whose own father was a
guerrillero who went missing—drives along
the misty mountain roads with a sardonic
buddy who says things like, “To live in this
shitty country you have to be mad or drunk,”
before taking another belt. In the jungle, he
finds a group of aged wives and mothers
much like Nicolasa, with the kinds of stories
that keep war-crimes tribunals in business
76 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
private land guarded by men who grew up
in the village but whose hearts seem to have
been hardened at their employer’s behest.
The most surprising moments in Our
Mothers are between Ernesto and his own
madre (Emma Dib), who is reluctant to
discuss what happened to her at the war’s
height. “You ask me some things I’d never
say, even under torture,” she says to her
son—a formulation that’s odd and tell-
ing and suggests there are things buried
far down. We’re not supposed to like her
much at first, and we don’t. She withholds
too much. She’s closed. The actress saves it
all up for her final scenes—the first in the
courtroom, the next while clinging to her
son in semi-darkness. Ernesto has been
floating through life, unconnected from his
for years. Amid Ernesto’s interviews, the roots. Now, his own past is exhumed. It feels
director delivers his one cinematic flourish: ghastly, and it feels right.
He presents each woman (in indigenous Our Mothers (which won the Caméra
dress) in close-up against a planked wall. d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and
The faces carry traces of grief and anger, is available to watch on demand beginning
but the women are largely stoic. We stare May 1) is the sort of movie that gets lost in
at them, trying to extrapolate the details the U.S. when life is normal. It’s a good one
of their lives, but they resist us. They turn to see when you’re anxious, in pain, hyper-
out to be real survivors of that village, not sensitized, uncertain of the ground beneath
actors. This forensic archaeologist can only you, and thinking—maybe for the first
dig so deep. The burial site turns out to be on time—that you ought to start digging. ■
C L A S S I C A L M U S I C / JUSTIN DAVIDSON
The Promise of Joy
Franz Schubert, in this time of
gloom and uncertainty.
for years, CDs have arrived each week by the dozen, their
styles, careers, and time periods all competing for my attention.
I would get to them all eventually, I told myself—when I was idled or sick
or housebound. But in these past weeks, I’ve found I have no appetite for
exploration, no urge to be shaken by novel sonorities or huge orchestral
dramas. Lighthearted distractions don’t distract. Instead, my musical
desires have narrowed to a tiny illuminated point: a handful of Schubert’s
last pieces. In the piano sonatas and chamber works he wrote a little less
than 200 years ago, I hear a distillation of the world we’re all suddenly
trapped in, vast and sad and radically confining.
Franz Schubert led a short but sociable life in Vienna, where he was
born. He spent his 20s barhopping with friends, conducting vigorous,
meandering discussions into the night. Music was the social medium of his
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F C A N N E S
day. Musicians and sympathetic listeners huddled around the piano, where
Schubert often stationed himself for hours, unspooling that week’s output.
Those who wanted to reproduce what they’d heard—or who couldn’t get
entrée—could buy the sheet music, thereby supporting Vienna’s emerging
gig economy of music.
But Schubert was also a poet of solitude. Few composers have ever ren-
dered loneliness as lovingly as he did or surrounded it in such a halo of
compassion. Especially in the music from his last years, he developed a lan-
guage of isolation. Among the last tasks that absorbed him was reviewing
the proofs of his song cycle Winterreise, composed the previous year and
ending with a number of crushing melan-
choly. “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy
Man”) opens with a musical image: a bass
drone of open fifths, blemished by a grace
note, a fleck of grit. Above that, a minor-
mode ditty can’t quite get going and hits a
glitch, as if made by a musical gizmo with a
broken flywheel. The lyrics describe the old
musician staggering barefoot on the ice, dis-
oriented, destitute, and utterly alone. Bleak
as it is, the song draws a mesmerizing beauty
from the consciousness of better times.
Any moment in music gets its meaning
from the memory of what’s come before
and the expectation of what will follow. A
melody moves us because it contains nos-
talgia, hope, and the possibility that it will
tragically peter out. Schubert slips from
tense to tense. He grips us in a “now” that
appears to be without change or escape,
then exits without warning into another
key, an altered state, a new harmonic cos-
tume. Winterreise, especially, is drenched in
memories—of joy and disappointment, of
a summer that, from this gelid landscape,
seems unimaginably far away.
He never got the chance to grow old,
which means that all his memories were
recent and vivid. He contracted syphilis
sometime around early 1823 and spent his
most productive years in physical distress.
The intermingling of pain, doom, uncer-
tainty, and depression that dogged him
has a familiar cast. His symptoms waxed
and waned, so that he could never be sure
whether he was dying or getting better. In
October 1828, when he was 31, he felt strong
enough to go on a three-day hiking trip. He
died a few weeks later.
Those last months were feverish, and not
just because of illness. He used them to pro-
duce work that is panoramic in scope and
emotional range. The string quintet alone,
which he finished just weeks before the
end, lasts nearly an hour and sweeps from
a mournful second movement to the imp-
ish delight of the fourth. But while some
composers paint landscapes in music—
Mahler’s mountain meadows, Sibelius’s
Nordic forests, Ives’s rugged New England
turf—Schubert explores interiors. Some
years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
mounted a show of 19th-century paintings
that focused on views through a window. In
those cluttered studios and muted cells, I
heard the same music as I now watch from
my own window.
The final piano sonata, in B-flat major,
opens with a tune of Zenlike serenity. It’s
a vestibule into a grand palace of a piece,
full of unsuspected rooms, some sunny and
springlike, others sepulchral. The pianist
who would do justice to this score needs
to have a floor plan of the whole structure
in mind, and at the same time preserve the
surprise of stepping through each door. The
first hint that something stirs beneath the
floorboards comes eight bars in: a low trill
that lands on a short, sharp eighth note, like
a stone that’s rolled down a hill and landed
with a quiet thud.
In the movies, a strange off-screen bump
is never just a noise; here, too, ominous
signs proliferate. The left-hand accompani-
ment grows more urgent, the volume inches
up to forte, the chords grow volatile, and
when the familiar melody starts up again,
insistent, hammering triplets disrupt the
calm. Those simple ingredients—song, trill,
pulse, and harmonic turbulence—cycle and
recombine through the long movement,
stretching out into the kind of 4 a.m. interior
monologue that has become a part of our
covid life. Later, having gone through the
lengthy exposition twice, at the point where
listeners of his social circle were trained to
expect a stroke of drama, Schubert throws
open a window and gives us the main
tune again, now transformed and hazed in
C-sharp-minor moonlight.
Schubert, a year before his
death at 31, by Franz Eybl.
A classic sonata-form movement like this
recounts a tale of traumatic change: We are
led into a richly detailed scene, then take
pleasure in its destruction. Convention tells
us it will be restored, but Schubert doesn’t
give it back to us whole. Instead, the music
we recall from the beginning is scarred, hesi-
tant, prone to erratic outbursts. What was
normal no longer is.
The piece denies catharsis. It does no
good to erupt into wrath. Schubert doles
out fortissimos, then nips them off, restor-
ing a mood of quietude. Terrors subside, but
don’t disappear. In our world, the epidemic
and its consequences have radically dis-
torted time, making last year seem antedi-
luvian, the week a string of undifferentiated
todays, and next fall practically inconceiv-
a p r i l 2 7– m ay 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 | n e w y o r k
able. In the sonata, Schubert often performs
a similar manipulation. A few minutes into
the G-major quartet, he takes up a shuffling
dance, then repeats it while the first violin
flits quietly around in the upper register
like a sparrow trapped in a greenhouse. The
quivering goes on, but the harmony slips
into a momentary coma, until it suddenly
jerks forward in a quick-cut sequence of
new keys and piquant chords.
The biographical record is stingy with
clues to Schubert’s personality, but his
music suggests an obsessional streak, some-
one constantly erecting buffers against the
encroachments of chaos. Dotted rhythms
settle into their troubled groove; obstinate
repetitions of a single note or an entire sec-
tion keep change temporarily at bay. I rec-
ognize that state of mind now, better than
I used to. As I pace and wonder, my mind
goes clattering around the confines of my
home, or else grabs hold of one anxious
thought, gripping it until it loses strength.
You can hear the same febrile brooding in
the G-major quartet.
Schubert’s gift to us is he never abandons
us in his predawn disquiet, but rather finds
pools of daylit beauty. In the B-flat sonata,
the G-major quartet, and the C-major
string quintet, the slow second movement
is the heart, and a sublimely cherubic song
lofts above the tremors. What makes those
passages hopeful, and not crushing, is that
Schubert weaves his tunes into ornate tap-
estries of sound. In the second movement
of the B-flat sonata, the melody unfurls in
the center of the piano, while C-sharps roll
across the keyboard from low to high, gently
thudding and tolling like the noises of a dis-
tant city. Often, the accompaniment grows
busier even as the tune repeats, because one
voice of sadness isn’t enough to still life’s
bustle. Schubert, like W. H. Auden, under-
stood that suffering takes place “while some-
one else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along.”
If all Schubert had to offer me just now
were a reflection of my inchoate gloom, or a
way of organizing it into poignant drama, I
wouldn’t want to keep listening. What draws
me through these pieces is the promise of
joy. By the close of each of these multi-act
dramas, the dance has returned, in endor-
phin-drenched spasms of outdoorsy vigor.
The quintet rushes to its close in a gallop so
vivid you can smell the upturned earth. The
B-flat sonata recovers its equanimity in the
scherzo, twirling around in triple time, like
a hobbyhorse performing a frenzied minuet.
These movements are not placid or blithe—
the finale of the G-major quartet has lost
none of its wounded determination—but
they restore us to the world outside our-
selves, reassuring us that we will one day
have something to celebrate. ■
77
 11. 6. 1.
19.

For more culture works-on-paper are childlike and improvisational.

coverage and Not much color, but when it comes to peppering
streaming space in ways at once representational and non-
recommendations, representational, they amaze. jerry saltz
see vulture.com. THEATER

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S 8. See Category: Other

To For your ears only.
category-other.com.
Sound designer and poetry enthusiast Ben Wil-
liams had already been working on experimental
theater works for your headphones since before the
Pause; he now releases his platform category-
other.com, a curated sound-installation gallery for
ultra-downtown artists. There, you can listen for
free to beautifully designed and immersive works
like Greg Mehrten performing from the cult James
Strahs novel Queer and Alone; the angel-voiced Jil-
lian Walker’s black feminist musical lecture, Songs
of Speculation; or Black-Eyed Susan (of Charles
Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company) per-
forming a Saint Joan written for her by the late
drag legend Ethyl Eichelberger. helen shaw
Twenty-five POP MUSIC
things to see,
hear, watch, 9. Listen to
and read from
home. The K Is Silent
No joke.
APRIL 29 MAY 13
Capitol Nashville.
TV popular Sexographies with a spirited exploration Dierks Bentley’s Hot Country Knights is a little bit

of human reproduction that navigates her unex-
1. Watch Normal People pected pregnancy at 30. She watches trash TV and
Secret lovers. dreams she’s going to give birth to a monkey. “Her
mind is a beautiful and unique organ,” writes New
Hulu, April 29.
York literary critic Molly Young. “It’s the sort of
This Irish coming-of-age love story, based on Sally book you will read and pass on to your friends with
Rooney’s novel, is refreshingly low-key and buoyed a note that says trust me taped to the cover.”
by charming performances from leads Daisy
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. jen chaney
MOVIES
5. Hear Bang on
2. See Sea Fever a Can Marathon
“Natural terror.” A six-hour stream.
VOD. bangonacan.org, May 3.
An Irish fishing trawler runs headlong into a ter- The pause in concerts has most organizations
rifying creature that deposits its parasitic larvae, plundering their attics for recorded performances
infecting the crew members with a mysterious ill- to stream, so it’s refreshing that this celebration
ness that gradually kills them. Neasa Hardiman’s will go ahead: six hours of new music livestreamed
thriller may sound like a typical menace-at-sea from the homes of 41 musicians and composers
horror flick, but it has a fully realized quality: You around the world. justin davidson
can smell the sweat and salt and hear the grind of TV
motors and murmur of sailors. bilge ebiri
POP MUSIC 6. Watch Betty
New York teens.
3. Listen to Invisible HBO, May 1.
People Crystal Moselle directs this series based on her
movie Skate Kitchen, about young female skate-
Soulful with a twist.
boarders asserting their place in a male-dominated
ATO, May 1. milieu. The shots of a bustling NYC are sure to
L.A.’s Chicano Batman mixes psych-rock, soul, make some misty for pre-corona times. j.c.
funk, cumbia, and bossa nova into an enticing ART
brew. Their fourth set adds a dash of hip-hop; the
result is a ray of sunlight. craig jenkins 7. See Hans Hofmann
BOOKS Postwar abstraction.
4. Read Nine Moons Bookstein Projects, booksteinprojects.com.
A brilliant show of the Abstract Expressionist mas-
Fierce and funny and true. ter’s lesser-known drawings shows us even the
Restless Books, May 5 (on Kindle/e-readers). most hard-core practitioners of pure abstraction
Peruvian essayist Gabriela Wiener follows her have active figurative DNA. Hans Hofmann’s small
P H OTO G R A P H S : N E T F L I X ( D E A D TO M E ) ; LO U FA U LO N / N E T F L I X ( T H E E D DY ) ; A L I S O N R O S A / H B O ( B E T T Y ) ; H U LU ( N O R M A L P E O P L E ) .
country, a little bit Weird Al. The music salutes the
sounds of ’90s chart-toppers, like Garth Brooks,
often deliberately poking fun at them. But on cuts
like “Moose Knuckle Shuffle,” silly lyrics turn gor-
geous productions into whimsical parodies evok-
ing wry humorists like Jonny Fritz and risqué com-
ics like Wheeler Walker Jr. c.j.
ART
10. See Sarah Sze
An artist spotlight.
Gagosian, gagosian.com.
The MacArthur-winning sculptor talks about her
recent work in an intriguing, engaging short video
as a part of Gagosian’s new online art space. She
says, “Art is a timekeeper; it endows breath into
materials.” Interested yet? She adds these things
are a “traveling message between humans across
centuries.” Add millennia and I’m in. j.s.
TV
11. Watch Dead to Me
Poor James Marsden.
Netflix, May 8.
The last time we saw Jen Harding (Christina
Applegate) and Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) in the
season-one finale of this series, they were standing
over the corpse of a key character. Season two picks
up from there, and—spoiler alert—introduces
even more secrets and lies. j.c.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
12. See New York
Philharmonic
Gustav Mahler’s tenure.
medici.tv, April 30.
The Philharmonic closes its “Mahler’s New York:
A Digital Festival” with a free livestream of a 1963

78 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
broadcast, with Leonard Bernstein conducting
Mahler’s Resurrection in tribute to JFK. j.d.
MOVIES
13. Visit Film Forum’s
Virtual Cinema
A new screening room.
filmforum.org.
Film Forum has made its premier indie slate avail-
able on demand. Among the offerings: the superb
Russian WWII drama Beanpole, Ken Loach’s gig-
economy saga Sorry We Missed You, Jan Komasa’s
tragi-farce Corpus Christi, and Rob Garver’s doc
on the great film critic Pauline Kael, What She
Said. david edelstein
BOOKS
14. Read The End
of October
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist.
Knopf, April 28.
Set in the spring of 2020, Lawrence Wright’s
thriller tells the story of a fictional virus—the Kon-
goli flu, even more deadly illness than COVID-19—
that sweeps the world and unleashes a chain of
dystopian horrors. Vulture’s Lila Shapiro writes, “It
would be easier to write off the book’s eerie verisi-
militude as a function of pure coincidence if Wright
hadn’t done something like this once before”—his
screenplay for The Siege (1998) depicted a series of
terrorist attacks on New York.
DANCE/THEATER
15. See HERE@HOME
One show is inspired by European surrealism.
here.org, May 6.
Small-scale contemporary opera, dance, and
theater performances are getting deserved atten-
tion: HERE is unrolling a contemporary cross-
genre festival with new streams each Wednesday
evening. The Reception, by Sean Donovan and
Sebastián Calderón Bentin, about a party gone
wrong, may now read as a parable of the dangers
of standing too close together. j.d.
MOVIES
16. See The Decline
Suspense and survivalism, Québécois style.
Netflix.
A traumatizing French Canadian thriller with a
timely message: Preppers might be prescient but
also super-paranoid and enjoy inflicting violence.
The setting is a survivalist training camp in which
a guy accidentally blows himself up, after which one
set of characters wants to burn his body and the
other wants to call the police. The disagreement is
not settled amicably. Well done—but select the
“original language” option with English subtitles, as
the dubbing is crap. d.e.
BOOKS
17. See Julia Alvarez
The National Medal of Arts honoree is back.
centerforfiction.org, April 29, 7:30 p.m.
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival and the
Center for Fiction host Julia Alvarez, who will dis-
cuss Afterlife (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill),
her bold new novel for grown-ups.
ART
18. See 82nd & Fifth
During the Met’s 150th anniversary.
82nd-and-fifth.metmuseum.org.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic
video series “82nd & Fifth,” curators and historians
choose their favorite artwork or objet d’art from
the museum’s collections and give a succinct and
passionate argument for the work’s beauty, histori-
cal relevance, and craftsmanship.
TV
19. Watch The Eddy
All that jazz.
Netflix, May 8.
Oscar winner Damien Chazelle brings his kinetic
camerawork to streaming TV in this limited series
Start
about the owner (André Holland) of a Paris jazz
club (yeah, a jazz club), his financial problems, and
the struggles of the musicians who play there.
Grammy-winning songwriter-producer Glen Bal-
lard composed the original songs. j.c.
POP MUSIC
20. Listen to
To Love Is to Live
Jehnny Beth goes solo.
Playing
Caroline International.
In her solo debut, Jehnny Beth, lead singer of the
Test your pop-culture
caustic British post-punk quartet Savages, ditches knowledge and everyday
lacerating guitars for stark piano and voice compo-
sitions and chilly electronics aided by Nine Inch
wit with the New York
Nails’ Atticus Ross, Flood, and Johnny Hostile, her
partner in indie-rock duo John & Jehn. c.j.
Crossword, now online.
Solve new and past
puzzles with our digital
crossword game.
nymag.com/crossword
So, Veronica Roth,
What Culture Are You
Consuming Lately?
The author of Chosen Ones (John Joseph
Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)—and
the Divergent series—shares.
i’ve been listening to You’reWrong
About, a podcast that challenges our
commonly held cultural narratives, par-
ticularly about maligned women of the
recent past. The Tonya Harding episodes
are particularly engaging. If the grounded
magic of Chosen Ones appeals to you, I
also recommend Vita Nostra, by Marina
and Sergey Dyachenko (Harper Voyager),
about a young woman attending a dark,
weird philosophical magic school. And
what I’m looking forward to on the YA
side: Court of Lions, by Somaiya Daud
(Flatiron Books, August 4), a tale of politi-
cal intrigue (and romance) in a unique
sci-fi Moroccan setting. It’s a sequel, so
you can get started with the first install-
ment, Mirage, while you wait.
 World’s Finest Eye Cream
AIRBRUSH
a “selections” product in Oprah magazine
Eye Refining Treatment
Airbrush Eye Cream reduces
puffiness right away, especially when
cold. Promotes new collagen which
reduces fine lines and wrinkles. Reduces
dark circles, is soothing, hydrating and
promotes a youthful healthy glow!
Reg $68
Now only $54.40 Hypo-allergenic and natural containing
emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera,
Compare to: collagen and elastin.
La Mer Eye Balm @ $200
Shiseido Solution LX @ $130 Use am & pm for best results and the jar will
La Prairie Swiss @ $240 last about 3 months!
Use 20% discount code: APPLE28 at
www.dremu.com
or call 800-542-0026 and get free shipping.
Open 7 Days
SOLUTION TO LAST ISSUE’S PUZZLE
80 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
CLASSICAL MUSIC
21. Listen to
Bach Cello Suites
Performed by a MacArthur “genius.”
Pentatone.
We’ve learned a lot about solitude recently, and
there is no wiser guide than Bach. What a moment,
then, for cellist Alisa Weilerstein to release her
intense exploration of the solo cello suites, which
throws open windows on the vast emotional hori-
zons one can experience even alone in a room. j.d.
MOVIES
22. See Dau
The “Stalinist Truman Show.”
dau.movie/en.
In 2005, Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky set
out to make a biopic of Soviet scientist and libertine
Lev Landau. The project grew to Charlie Kaufman–
esque dimensions: His immaculate re-creation of
the USSR inside an enormous set became its own
community, as actors stuck around, sometimes for
years, living as if they were suspended in Soviet time
while the cameras kept rolling. The result is the
most ambitious film project of all time, currently
consisting of 13 features. See for yourself if Khrzha-
novsky is a visionary, a madman, or both. b.e.
POP MUSIC
23. Listen to
Petals for Armor
Worth the 15-year wait.
Atlantic, May 8.
Paramore’s singer-songwriter Hayley Williams sets
her incisive lyrics and soaring vocals loose in her
solo debut, trading the breezy tunes and bright
production of her group’s albums for murky moods
and somber but still catchy melodies. c.j.
ART
24. See Time Share
New visual-arts performance.
performa-arts.org/radical-broadcast,
through May 15.
Performa, now in its 16th year, is well versed in
broadcasting live performance online. “Time
Share,” part of its Radical Broadcast programming,
features videos that explore the second life of per-
formance art through documentation and, in select
pieces, imagine how social media might mediate
our experience of iconic artworks. Works by Judy
Chicago, Robert Rauschenberg, and more.
PODCASTS
25. Listen to Floodlines
An unnatural disaster.
theatlantic.com/floodlines.
This outstanding new audio documentary about
Hurricane Katrina and its fallout was released in
March. As one would expect, Floodlines is a heavy
listen, writes Vulture’s Nicholas Quah, but it’s pre-
cisely the right story for this moment. Floodlines,
writes Quah, “doesn’t just provide a guide to the
likely struggles, inequities, and deep dysfunctions
that will come once we get over the hump with this
pandemic … it’s also a key that can help process the
nature of the crisis we’re currently living in.”
 ADVERTISEMENT

MotherÕs Day
20 GIFT
TM

20 GUIDE Brilliantly, GemSpa makes cleaning and

sanitizing your jewelry simple and easy,
Feels like an Everyday Spa! keeping it safe, while your dishwasher
OctoVie Skincare Brush is a does the work.
multi-use beauty tool to exfoliate www.mygemspa.com/newyorkermoms
impurities, and soften lines +
pores for youthful-looking skin.
Use to plump and infuse serums
for glowing makeup. A skin
brush for home and travel Pixi Spa Night In Kit,
your skin will love. $74 ($92 value)
www.octovieskinbrush.com Treat mom to a spa night in with Pixi’s
Try CBD during limited edition kit that has all the at-home
Stay at Home! pampering essentials she needs including
Beginners Bundle includes: In-Shower Steam Facial, Hydrating Milky
Apple Kiwi Bliss Oil, Peel, Glow Mud Mask and DetoxifEYE.
Relax Bears, and CBD Tea. www.pixibeauty.com
25% OFF Use Code:
HOCUSFOCUS25 on
www.greenroads.com/new-to-cbd
Or shop www.hempmeh.shop
and receive BONUS. FREE SHIPPING.

Mama’s Healthy Snack

Keetz plant based energy bites boosted
Wooden Spice and all things nice! with spirulina. Healthy & delicious. Gluten
free,vegan, and made without soy, added
Fresca Natural’s Wooden Spice with
sugars, and preservatives.
Australian sandalwood. All-natural
Shareable with kids!
ingredients. No aluminum, no triclosan.
www.keetzco.com
Exclusive free gift offer to USA
customers. www.frescanatural.com.au

This delicious new wellness

tonic from New Zealand will
get you and your mother back
to gorgeous in no time.
Children can design their own T-shirts &
kers, instantly, with clever, reusable, www.nougly.us
alk of the Town craft kits. Simply,
w, wear, erase & repeat!
ww.chalktshirt.com

STAYING
IN NEVER
SOUNDED
Make Mom’s SO GOOD
Skin Glow! Stay happy and healthy at home with
Young Glow Duo™ brightens & rejuvenates plant-based meals delivered right to
with a mix of key oils and botanical AHA’s. your door.
Use Glow30 for 30% off | DUCALM.com Enjoy 25% OFF, use code: EATPLANTS
Order Now at www.VEESTRO.com

ArtSugar at Home
Both practical and eye-catching,
ArtSugar’s at home line elevates
and enlivens. Featuring acrylic
Elevated UPF 50+ sun protective trays, cutting boards, and yoga
clothing sustainably and lovingly mats, they donate to charity with
made in Los Angeles. Buttery soft every purchase you make on
fabrics with a fabulous fit. artsugar.co.
Shop Sun50.co | 888.507.8650 Follow their journey @artsugar.co
H2O Media inc. | h2omediainc.com | info@h2omediainc.com
 Solve This crossword
Online!

assistance, write to New York Magazine Subscription Department, P.O. Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306, or call 800-678-0900. Printed in the U.S.A. Copyright © 2020 by New York Media LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Founding chairman, Bruce Wasserstein; chief executive officer,
April 27–May 10, 2020. VOL. 53, NO. 9. New York Magazine (ISSN 0028-7369) is published biweekly by Vox Media, 250 Vesey Street, New York, N.Y., 10281. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. Editorial and business offices: 212-508-0700. Postmaster: Send address changes to New York, P.O.
visit
nymag.com/crossword

Kinda Sorta

Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40612608. Canada returns to be sent to The Mail Group, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON, N6C 6B2. Subscription rates in the United States and possessions: 26 issues, $59.97. For subscription
Sunday nights for 6 2018 drama set in Mexico City
new and vintage 7 Parisian pal
puzzles.
New York Crossword by Matt Gaffney 8 Become one with
9 Like Sweden and Denmark
10 Get cozy
11 City next to Ciudad Juárez
12 Bell’s Two Hearted, e.g.
13 Agitate
14 About half the people on eBay
15 “You’re probably bluffing”
follow-up
16 Urban biker, often
17 Enthusiastic about
18 Time that can go backward?
24 Appear to be
25 New Orleans pronoun
31 Milk, in Marseille
33 Eater of worms and slugs
34 Karaoke-night shout
35 Supporting evidence
38 Make fit
39 Fastest woman of all time,
for short
40 “Have it your way”
41 Total, as silence
42 PlayStation maker
43 Horse rider’s protection
44 Try again on, as a bow
49 Pitch in
51 1997 movie with the tagline
“Failure is not an option”
52 What Adele and Beyoncé go by
53 Societal troubles
54 Christian in movies
57 Lengthy period
58 Musical Morissette

Jim Bankoff. New York Magazine is not responsible for the return or loss of unsolicited manuscripts. Any submission of a manuscript must be accompanied by an SASE.
59 “Stan & ___” (2018 dramedy)
60 Shows the way
66 “Why don’t we ...”
67 It may get stuffy
68 “Curb Your Enthusiasm” role
69 Like information on boxes
of food
Across 53 Charged particle 93 “I couldn’t find the sorority 70 Tire feature
1 Cards that come with letters 54 Word with coffee and jelly house” or “Everyone was so 71 Ends, as a winning streak
5 Shrimp’s big cousin 55 City of CNN and Coke overdressed”? 73 Third-stringers
10 Approaches 56 Being two sets down in the 100 See 88-Across 74 Cleans the floor
15 “Sounds like fun!” sixth round at Wimbledon? 101 Cherishes 76 Doctrines
19 Cold and wet 61 Sweet slice 102 Montreal university 77 One of a pair on the floor
20 Casanova 62 Skewer 105 “Tommy Boy” actress 78 The internet in the 1990s, e.g.
21 She’s Kimmy on 63 Brand with a hyphen 108 “Will do” 79 Short form, for short
“Unbreakable Kimmy 64 Alternative to :) 109 Mimic 80 Sea-foam
Schmidt” 65 Cutie with flippers 110 Opposite of “non” 86 Orange drink
22 City near Carson City 67 Grandmas 111 Stage number 88 In the distance
23 Stop drinking anything but 68 Users of services 112 Entirely removing a piece of 89 Aster-family perennial
sweet wine? 72 Emergency key punctuation from your article? 91 Free food
26 Regarding 73 Feuder with Jay 117 Creator of the Tin Man 94 Strong girders
27 Rock in a refinery 74 Tibia’s place 118 Weaken 95 Tries not to see
28 It runs the WaterSense 75 Hot-water holder 119 2004 title role for Jude Law 96 Long weapons
program 76 Response to “This appears to 120 Cartoonist Groening 97 Advertising award
29 Numbers be baker’s chocolate”? 121 “Desire Under the ___” 98 Posse’s quarry
30 “Invisible Man” novelist 81 Starbucks purchase (O’Neill play) 99 Drink with a polar-bear logo
32 Pupil’s cover 82 Brad Paisley’s “Love Her Like 122 Lock of hair 103 ___ after (desires)
34 Kitchen mishaps ___ Leavin’ ” 123 Joins, as pieces of metal 104 Deceive
36 Relaxation 83 Buzzing danger 124 “One other thing ...” 105 “Darling”
37 All your besties gathered on 84 Defense secretary since 2019 106 Verbalized
the three-point line? 85 Purse part Down 107 Grant’s co-star in “An Affair to
43 Stick in one’s ___ (rankle) 87 Do the yard 1 Created for an unexpected Remember”
45 1958 Ian Fleming novel 88 With 100-Across, Israeli situation 109 Boric or hydrochloric, e.g.
46 Rattle off statesman who wrote 2 Largest Arabic-speaking city 113 Stooge with a bowl cut
47 Prefix for thermal “Personal Witness” 3 Says “Guilty,” say 114 “Wonderful job!”
48 One more than hexa- 90 180-degree turns 4 Jamaican music genre 115 The Brady bunch?
50 Galore 92 Helps out 5 Not needing an invoice 116 Org. for docs

82 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0 The solution to last week’s puzzle appears on page 80.

Help feed NYC’s children
and families now.

With the COVID-19 crisis forcing schools and many

businesses to close, NYC’s children and their families
urgently need help getting food now. You can help keep
City Harvest’s trucks on the road and full of food for
our city’s youngest New Yorkers and their families.

Donate at
cityharvest.org/feednyckids
#WeAreCityHarvest
 THE APPROVAL MATRIX Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.

high brow

B R OA D WAYCO M / YO U T U B E ( U R E ) ; S E T H A B R A M S O N / T W T T E R ( P R OT E S T E R S ) ; V S U A LC A P / N S TAG R A M ( LO N G V E W ) ; P B S ( M U C H A D O A B O U T N OT H N G ) ; A P P S TO R E ( B A N A N A , A S M R S L C N G ) ; PAT R C K M C M U L L A N (A L L E N , E LG O R T, J O H N ) ; J O E Y S K L A DA N Y / N S TAG R A M ( P R D E ) ; A P P L E + ( B E A S T E B OY S ) ; A 24 (C H A R T Y P R O P S ) ;

P H OTO G R A P H S : R C K A B R G H T / T W T T E R ( P OT E N T A L LY DA N G E R O U S D R U G S ) ; T H E T E L E G R A P H / YO U T U B E ( W L D A N M A L S ) ; AYA B R O W N ( E S S E N T A L W O R K E R S ) ; WA L K E R E VA N S, L A U R A M N N E L E E T E N G L E , H A L E CO U N T Y, A L A B A M A , 1 9 3 6 CO U R T E S Y O F H O WA R D G R E E N B E R G G A L L E RY ( FA R M S E C U R T Y A D M N S T R AT O N ) ;
Aya Brown’s
President Cartman.

M O N T Y B R N TO N / C B S ( P R N C E ) ; P R E E T B H A R A R A / T W T T E R ( D R P H L ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F B A R B E, E S TAT E O F J E A N - M C H E L B A S Q U AT L C E N S E D B Y A R T E S TA R , N E W YO R K ( B A S Q U AT B A R B E ) ; K AT. 0 2 7/ T K TO K ( B G B A BY ) ; LU G N O V / W K M E D A ( U C B T H E AT R E ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F F R E E F O R M / © 2 0 1 9 D S N E Y E N T E R P R S E S, N C .
portraits of black and
With people out of the brown female
Blame the media! way at last, wild animals essential workers.
Blame the WHO! try to reclaim our towns.
Blame the … green- Happy Earth Day!
“I also resisted efforts
card holders? to fund potentially
dangerous drugs
promoted by those with Michael Urie’s
political connections.” David Rohde’s spelunks delightful DIY
Las Vegas: into the “deep state” Buyer & Cellar is
Come gamble for his not-quite- proof that streaming
with your life! an-exposé, In Deep. theater can work.

( M OT H E R L A N D) ; M S S Y E L L OT / YO U T U B E ( M S S Y E L L OT ) ; R O M M E L D E M A N O ( DJ M A Z U R B AT E ) ; W D B O ( A L L A M E R C A N G ATO R ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F N E T F L X ( TO O H OT TO H A N D L E ) ; TA M A R A A R R A N Z / N E T F L X ( M O N E Y H E S T ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F LU C K Y S T R K E ( LU C K Y S T R K E ) .
The last gasp of Small-business
the department loans go to big
store? business—and big Teachers, valiantly
banks get trying to keep your
$10 billion in fees. kids focused during
remote classes.
National conservative
groups coordinate
“grassroots” Howard Greenberg
lockdown protests … Gallery’s online exhibit Shakespeare on Your
“One Third of a Nation: Sofa! Much Ado About
The Photographs Nothing from last
… While corona-truther of the Farm Security
rabble-rousers keep season’s Shakespeare in
Administration.” the Park—livestreamed.
dying of the very
disease they were told
was not a big deal.
Millions of chickens Attempts to take Artists Nicole Eisenman
are slaughtered, the “long view” of this and Sam Roeck make
and $5 billion in fruits pandemic by corona-safety banana
and vegetables are comparing it to long- stickers for Apple.
thrown out, while ago death tolls.
people go hungry.
Turns out reading David Sax’s The Soul of Ben Hecht’s bizarre,
Woody Allen’s an Entrepreneur, essential digressive (and horny)
de sp icabl e

memoir will make you reading before we all autobiography,

bril liant
think worse of him as get laid off and have to A Child of the Century,
a filmmaker … restart our careers. is back in print.

… Oh, and probably

even worse of him A24 is auctioning for
as a person. charity props from
the lighthearted
romps Midsommar
No Pride Parade. and Uncut Gems.
No Puerto Rican Let’s Go Crazy: The
Day Parade … Shouldn’t Spike Jonze’s Grammy Salute to Prince on
Beastie Boys Story CBS, broadcast to us
party a little harder? The bonkers Freeform from the Before Time.
show Motherland:
Fort Salem, in which teen
Dr. Phil is not witches fight terrorists.
actually an
immunologist.
The Basquiat
Barbie. Does she Missy Elliott’s “Cool Off”
date Madonna? video is … chill.
UCB NYC, RIP.

Big Baby has DJ Mazurbate’s

Pandemic recession
salary cuts …
… But making less is
the new getting
ahead (at least you
still have a job).
Shark Tank star
Daymond John
reportedly tried to be
a PPE profiteer.
The president muses
about the Lysol-
injection treatment
for COVID-19.
84 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 2 7 – m a y 1 0 , 2 0 2 0
Pour one out for the IG dance parties
Shutdown Fullcast, the earned his
meme fame. outside his
internet’s only college- window in Soho.
football podcast.
With Too Hot to Handle,
Netflix gives us
All American Gator quarantine supertrash …
Products in Dania
Beach is selling … With Money Heist
alligator face masks. as a Spanish-language
Teeth not included. runner-up.
ASMR Slicing,
Lucky Strike—like so an anti-existential-
many of the city’s terror app that Ansel Elgort posted a
simulates cutting nude to encourage
storied restaurants—
runs out of luck. colored cakes of sand. philanthropy and thirst.
lowbrow
 Polygon’s essen
guide to gaming
entertainment cu

New Episodes Dail

Only on Quibi

Download Quibi Now

Hosted by
Jimmy Mondal