Then New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo in 2010. Ten years later, he’s the man of the hour in the coronavirus fight. Photograph by Pat Arnow.

The economics of illness

March 25, 2020

About the only thing keeping pace with the coronavirus in the United States is the argument raging over whether or not we’ve overreacted. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has advanced an idea fostered by Dr. David L. Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s C.D.C.-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine, that would isolate the physically vulnerable while keeping the rest of the population in circulation, much as we do with the flu.

Yo-Yo Ma is offering “Songs of Comfort,” like Johan Sebastian Bach’s Sarabande. Facebook/Yo-Yo Ma.

Of COVID and character

March 21, 2020

Well, where to begin? Should we begin at the beginning — with the overpopulation, poverty, lack of education, filth and communist secrecy that produces diseases like COVID-19 in China? I’m no fan of President Donald J. Trump, but I have no problem with him calling this the Chinese disease, particularly as Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks nothing of kicking American journalists out of China in a further attempt to mask the severity of the virus there and his own negligence in his delayed response and sharing of information. (If Xi is helping the world now with masks and respirators, as Christiane Amanpour of Amanpour & Co. keeps going on about, really, it’s the least he can do, given that his country created the crisis. Praising the Chinese for “helping” is like thanking an arsonist who burned your house down for offering you a place to live. I mean, honestly.

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.

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.

Temple I at Tikal (in modern-day Guatemala), one of the most powerful cities of the Classic Maya period (250-900). It was a funerary temple in honor of King Jasaw Chan K’asill I.

The gang that couldn't shoot straight

February 4, 2020

The Iowa Caucuses debacle has had posters straining for sporting metaphors. The Democrats in disarray are down 10-1 to President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans in the first inning, some say. The Dems are the San Francisco 49ers down to the Kansas City Chiefs in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, which has a nice Blue State-Red State ring to it since the Niners play in California and the Chiefs in Kan, er, Missouri. (Just thought everyone needed a musical break with the great band Kansas’ surprisingly fitting “Carry On Wayward Son.”)

I, however, have a more apt sports analogy. The Iowa Caucuses are like the figure skater billed as the next Peggy Fleming who after four years of Winter Olympics prep falls on the first jump in the short program.

I think that sums things up perfectly — the Iowa Caucuses, a triple toe loop away from unmitigated disaster.

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.