The New York Stock Exchange. The largest stock exchange in the world is being tested, along with world markets, as the coronavirus, and the initially tardy response to it, turn a medical crisis into an existential one.

New York in the time of corona

March 9, 2020

Not long after 9/11, I went to Manhattan to do a story on the Chrysler Building. There was a burning smell in the air and something else — the smell of fear, hurt, dread. But New Yorkers being New Yorkers, they did then what they always have done: They went about their business.

There was something of that in the air when I visited last Friday. Now as then, the city seemed quieter, less bustling. There was the same sense of uncertainty among waiters and clerks. And yet people remain grimly determined to carry on. Perhaps more than anywhere else, in New York you are what you do.

An illustration of the coronavirus, created for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Courtesy CDC.

Bugged: Trump, the coronavirus and the politics of narrative

March 1, 2020

In the fall of 2009, I was caring for my beloved Aunt Mary, who raised me and who was dying of the effects of her dementia, exacerbated by disastrous hip revision surgery at a local hospital. Around that time, the medical establishment had released new guidelines for breast cancer screening, stating that women who were young and healthy did not have to have a mammogram every year. The reaction was swift and merciless, with women’s groups denouncing the shift as jeopardizing women’s health.

I remember talking then to a nurse who was upset at the public outcry. Didn’t people understand this was a good thing? she wondered. I told her something I’ve often thought about: To win public opinion, you have to get out in front of a story. He who controls the narrative has the power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and wife Eleanor with Joseph Robinson on Inauguration Day March 4, 1933. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

Fear itself

February 24, 2020

This is the right moment to talk about fear.

It was fear of the coronavirus spreading in countries like Iran and Italy that sent the Dow Jones Industrials plummeting 1,000 points today, even though the virus has seemed to plateau in China, the country of origin.

It was the Chinese leadership’s fear of losing face, power and money that prevented prompt action on the virus in the first place.

Chinese one-child policy propaganda from 1982. Photograph by Robert Schedwy.

Sex and the determinedly single girl

February 19, 2020

I have to laugh at the Chinese government pressuring unmarried women to get hitched. A little background: In 1979, the government instituted a one-child policy to curb the population. Because Chinese tradition dictates that the oldest son cares for the parents in old age — and we wouldn’t want to mess with tradition, now would we? — couples opted to abort girl babies or put them up for overseas adoption. And now the policy, which ended in 2015, has bitten the government in its considerable butt. The gender selection chicken has come home to roost as the fewer females of marriageable age have the pick of the crop.

Brexit Day, Jan. 31, in Kinsbury, England. Photograph by David Howard.

A world lit by fire

February 4, 2020

The wildfires in Australia are a poignant metaphor for our time — a world out of control, untold collateral damage.

The Iowa Caucuses are in meltdown due to “inconsistencies in reporting data,” whatever that means. Results are due later today, Feb. 4. (Gee, they missed Groundhog Day just by two days. It would’ve been so appropriate.) Remember when we had voting machines that worked?

Meanwhile, President Donald J. “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City (Kansas)” Trump will be acquitted in his witness-less impeachment trial. The Republicans say they voted against witnesses for the good of the country, which would be torn apart if Trump’s presidency were declared illegitimate. There’s nothing that lends an air of ease to a non-choice quite like one whose expediency is couched in faux nobility.

John R. Bolton (fourth from right) joins Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (second from right) in negotiating with the Russians, Nov. 3, 2001. Photograph by R.D. Ward/Department of Defense

The impeachment plot thickens

January 26, 2020

Why impeach President Donald J. Trump only to have the Senate acquit him? What’s the point?

You can’t help but be nagged by this question as the trial churns on, despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s politically savvy and Representative Adam Schiff’s sharp prosecutorial skills. But just when you’re about to despair, a light or two. There are the tapes by Lev Parnas, the Rudolph Giuliani goon who was in on muscling Ukraine for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was in office.

And now there is the leaked unpublished manuscript of former National Security Adviser and perpetual loose canon John R. Bolton, which establishes a link, once again, between the withholding of $391 million in American aid to Ukraine and the quest for damning information on the Bidens, thus undercutting Trump’s argument that there was no quid pro quo….

Cartoonist Lalo Alcarez’s poignant statement about the Trump Administration’s treatment of children at the southern border sadly rings as true today as it did last Christmas. Copyright Lalo Alcarez.

Still no room at the inn -- for Baby Jesus or immigrants

December 23, 2019

Still trending this Christmas – caged Baby Jesus. You’ll remember last Christmas’ cartoon by Mexican-American cartoonist Lalo Alcarez of a wide-eyed Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes further constrained by a cage secured by a lock with an American flag on it. The theme, echoing children and families confined indefinitely at the southern border by the Trump Administration, continues with coast-to-coast Nativity displays of Jesus, Mary and Joseph either in separate cages or Baby Jesus set off alone.