The Great Empty nytimes.com

DURING THE 1950S, New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized a famous photo exhibition called “The Family of Man.” In the wake of a world war, the show, chockablock with pictures of people, celebrated humanity’s cacophony, resilience and common bond. Today a different global calamity has made scarcity the necessary condition of humanity’s survival. Cafes along the Navigli in Milan hunker behind shutters along with the Milanese who used to sip aperos beside the canal. Times Square is a ghost town, as are the City of London and the Place de la Concorde in Paris during what used to be the morning rush.

Keep Paddling erickarjaluoto.com

Have you ever canoed into big waves? If so, you know that stopping is not the answer (unless you want to flip the canoe). If you want to stay afloat, you keep paddling, just like you did before. If you run a small business, you must act prudently. That might mean cutting any costs that don’t generate revenue. Beyond that, though, I’d ask you to act with the same clear-headedness that you did before this crisis. Don’t panic. Don’t go into the fetal position. Don’t do anything rash. Pause for a moment, take a breath, and assess the situation.

What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus's The Plague lithub.com

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus writes. “Yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

Coronavirus Response: Americans Will Come to Rely on Big Business bloomberg.com

Larger businesses are also easier to assist if necessary. Whatever you think of the forthcoming bailout of the major U.S. airlines, logistically it will not be very difficult to pull off, since the targets are large and obvious and relatively easy to monitor. Banks are willing to lend to them, because they know the government does not contemplate a world without major airlines. It is much more difficult to bail out the millions of small and medium-sized enterprises around the world that will demand assistance. How do you find and track them? How can you tell which have no chance of bouncing back? Government bureaucracies cannot easily deal with those problems, and in turn private banks do not perceive governments to be making credible commitments to these small businesses. By contrast, there are numerous precedents for governmental aid or loans to airlines or other major businesses.

The End Is Coming thepointmag.com

For a long time, philosophy and the other humanistic disciplines have been concerned with how to achieve advances that might mirror those of the sciences. But it will not be through science that we come to reconcile ourselves to the fact that unlimited scientific progress is impossible. The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when the infertility scenario should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy.

Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide seriouseats.com

Let’s say a food worker coughs while preparing my food, how could I not pick up the virus from eating it? This confused me as well, which is why I specifically inquired about it. According to Chapman, the risk is minimal. Even if a worker sneezes directly into a bowl of raw salad greens before packing it in a take-out container for you to take home, as gross as it is, it's unlikely to get you sick. This 2018 overview of both experimental and observational study of respiratory viruses from the scientific journal Current Opion in Virology (COVIRO) explains that respiratory viruses reproduce along the respiratory tract—a different pathway than the digestive tract food follows when you swallow it.

10 Days That Changed Britain: "Heated" Debate Between Scientists Forced Boris Johnson To Act On Coronavirus buzzfeed.com

"If you want to know how much we underestimated this, last Wednesday Rishi's budget gave a £30 billion stimulus for the economy, six days later he had to spend another £330 billion," said a Whitehall official.

Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired nytimes.com

Third, of course masks work — maybe not perfectly and not all to the same degree, but they provide some protection. Their use has always been advised as part of the standard response to being around infected people, especially for people who may be vulnerable.

I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire theguardian.com

There might well be a second wave, I honestly don’t know. But vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future.

I Work from Home newyorker.com

911 OPERATOR: 911—what’s your emergency? ROBERT: Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home.

Extraordinary Decisions For Italian Doctors theatlantic.com

Two weeks ago, Italy had 322 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could lavish significant attention on each stricken patient. One week ago, Italy had 2,502 cases of the virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could still perform the most lifesaving functions by artificially ventilating patients who experienced acute breathing difficulties. Today, Italy has 10,149 cases of the coronavirus. There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care. Doctors and nurses are unable to tend to everybody. They lack machines to ventilate all those gasping for air.

COVID-19 reduces economic activity, which reduces pollution, which saves lives g-feed.com

Putting these numbers together yields some very large reductions in premature mortality.  Using the He et al 2016 estimates of the impact of changes in PM on mortality, I calculate that having 2 months of 10ug/m3 reductions in PM2.5 likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China.  Using even more conservative estimates of 10% reduction in mortality per 10ug change, I estimate 1400 under-5 lives saved and 51700 over-70 lives saved.  Even under these more conservative assumptions, the lives saved due to the pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of lives that have been directly lost to the virus (based on March 8 estimates of 3100 Chinese COVID-19 deaths, taken from here).  What's the lesson here? It seems clearly incorrect and foolhardy to conclude that pandemics are good for health. Again I emphasize that the effects calculated above are just the health benefits of the air pollution changes, and do not account for the many other short- or long-term negative consequences of social and economic disruption on health or other outcomes; these harms could exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution.  But the calculation is perhaps a useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo, i.e. the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods.

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now medium.com

Countries that are prepared will see a fatality rate of ~0.5% (South Korea) to 0.9% (rest of China). Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%. Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by ten.

How Taiwan and Singapore have contained the coronavirus slate.com

Part of Taiwan’s success has been due to its early response, says a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While other countries waffled on acknowledging the danger of the outbreak, Taiwan took action immediately under the guidance of its National Health Command Center, which the country established after the deadly SARS outbreak in 2003 that killed 73 people there. In early January, in response to the then-new outbreak, the NHCC set up Taiwan’s new Central Epidemic Command Center. Taiwan “rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health,” said Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, a co-author of the article. “The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn’t enough.”

Cancel everything theatlantic.com

This suggests that anyone in a position of power or authority, instead of downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, should ask people to stay away from public places, cancel big gatherings, and restrict most forms of nonessential travel.

Da Milano wittgenstein.it

Questo scenario sta dentro alla cosa più generalmente spaesante di questa crisi senza precedenti: ovvero che non si manifesti visibilmente e drammaticamente se non nel ristretto degli ospedali o nell’astratto dei numeri quotidiani del contagio. Le cose che si fanno, i gesti, i modi di vivere, sono molto “normali” e molto poco ansiosi. Ci si lavano le mani, si sta molto a casa, si sta distanti nelle code in attesa. Ma niente di tutto questo è inaudito, mai visto. C’è insomma un’emergenza enorme “intorno” e non la si vede, non si riesce a vederla nelle singole cose: se scendo a fare la spesa e risalgo, nel percorso e nelle cose che faccio non c’è niente di diverso da un anno fa. A differenza delle emergenze mondiali che hanno occupato i media negli ultimi decenni, questa non ha le immagini, per esempio: è tutto mascherine, per la disperazione dei foto editor. Sta succedendo una cosa enorme, planetaria, senza precedenti dalla fine della Guerra Mondiale: e intanto andiamo a fare il bancomat, e ci facciamo il caffè.

Plot Economics ribbonfarm.com

During narrative collapse, everyone temporarily abandons attempts to reach narrative consensus even within their smallest default groups, such as family. Even people who normally avoid math start to do math with raw, noisy facts. Pantry stocks math. Alcohol percentage math. Infection risk math. Toilet paper math. Math is the backstop log-level activity. The average human only goes data-driven when narratives fail.

Keeping our employees and partners safe during blog.twitter.com

Twitter: Beginning today, we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they’re able.

What it's like in China 03.06 reddit.com

Third major measures were focused on case discovery and treatment. Upon discovery of a confirmed case, quick and effective contact tracing measures were put into place. Public areas would take your name and phone number before allowing you to enter, in the event someone there later was determined positive, they could contact you and find you quickly. This moved digitally in QR code based systems, were you would scan various locations, buses, taxis, subways, etc. and be able to be contacted and located quickly. To enter any public area, your temperature is taken. Residential communities issued passes for healthy residents when they would leave their homes, and would only be allowed back in by returning their pass and being checked for temperature again.

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 medium.com

Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”

Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus arstechnica.com

You should be concerned and take this seriously. But you should not panic

Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus nytimes.com

China is really good at keeping people alive. Its hospitals looked better than some I see here in Switzerland. We’d ask, “How many ventilators do you have?” They’d say “50.” Wow! We’d say, “How many ECMOs?” They’d say “five.” The team member from the Robert Koch Institute said, “Five? In Germany, you get three, maybe. And just in Berlin.”

The man who refused to freeze to death bbc.com

It would appear that our brains are much better at coping in the cold than dealing with being too hot. This is because our bodies’ survival strategies centre around keeping our vital organs running at the expense of less essential body parts. The most essential of all, of course, is our brain. By the time that Shatayeva and her fellow climbers were experiencing cognitive issues, they were probably already experiencing other organ failures elsewhere in their bodies.

The Word from Wuhan lrb.co.uk

There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’.

Stand By Your Man newyorker.com

Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis.

Estote parati it.wikipedia.org

Locuzione in latino per "siate pronti" o "siate preparati"

The WHO sent 25 international experts to China and here are their main findings after 9 days reddit.com

Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans.

Milano non è un criceto ilpost.it

Due o tre giorni dopo, il 26 di febbraio, emanò il sindaco una grida, in cui ordinava pubbliche feste, per la prima edizione  dell’Apericena Week, senza sospettare o senza curare il pericolo d’un gran concorso, in tali circostanze: tutto come in tempi ordinari, come se non gli fosse stato parlato di nulla.

If you could go to the moon for free, would you do it theoutline.com

Earlier this week, the billionaire Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa won the long-running “saddest rich person” contest by announcing that he was looking for a girlfriend go to to the moon with him.

What the coronavirus forcing me in lockdown's taught me about cooking; plus, how to make Mantou reddit.com

Which brings us to the other great culinary mystery our time: why does fusion suck so hard? Because I mean, if you look at cuisines around the world… the cultures at the intersection of great migrations or trade routes seem to have some pretty damn interesting food. Situated in the middle of the silk road, Uighur cuisine is an awesome mix between Northwestern Han Chinese and other central Asian foods. Sichuanese food, meanwhile, was the product of one of the most massive internal migrations of human history, when the province was repopulated by people from Hunan and Shandong after a devasting war (the Qing government kinda killed… everyone). The food in the Malacca straights, with the mix of Southeast Asian, Indian and Chinese flavors is aggressively awesome. Istanbul – at the crossroads of Occident and Orient - is one of the world’s great food cities. So why, despite all of our best efforts in the past forty years, have our culinary mashups seemed to go basically nowhere? Like, seriously. With a touch of digging, you can have an entire globe’s worth of ingredients available to you.

‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York nytimes.com

To this generation of newcomers, moving to New York is quite different than it was in the past. As you arrive in the outer ­reaches of Brooklyn gentrification, you and everyone you know find yourselves spread thin geographically, specks of dust in distant orbit around Lower Manhattan, pressing up against communities that feel threatened by your presence. New York is as safe as it has ever been; if anyone’s the bad guy, it’s probably you. Of course, you hope that you aren’t, that you’re the kind of person who appreciates the city for its polyphony of voices, unlike some other newcomers, but in the end it won’t matter. And besides, after a long subway commute home, it’s easier than ever to not leave your apartment again: to order Seamless even though you told yourself you wouldn’t and pop on some streaming television, because there’s always something new to catch up on. And there, on the screen, is the New York you’d dreamed of, the one that challenges your perspective, the one that forces you to become a better version of yourself, the one where strangers come together and connect — even if it’s only for an instant.

Quindi entro in classe e scrivo alla lavagna facebook.com

Perché - dico - la tradizione e la cultura di un popolo sono la selezione di quelle tradizioni e di quella cultura che sono utili al popolo oggi, rimuovendo quelle cose che il popolo ha fatto e che sarebbe pesante ricordare

How to sleep on a plane: 18 illustrated positions for in-flight snoozing washingtonpost.com

There’s no best way to sleep on a plane. There’s no right way, either. There are, however, many ways.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel joshworth.com

A tediously accurate map of the solar system

"It's All Downhill from Here": Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story hyperallergic.com

As cinema and culture at large present the wedding as the high-point of a relationship there’s often an underlying subtext that “it’s all downhill from here.” The focus devoted to a single day and a party is disconnected from the reality of marriage. If we were to move beyond the “happily ever after,” what would the marriages of films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding look like? Happy and eternal, or would they be doomed to fall into the same implosive patterns of Marriage Story and Scenes from a Marriage? 

Cloud Appreciation Society cloudappreciationsociety.org

We love clouds.

Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019: Clouds nytimes.com

Clouds, their manifesto says, are not signs of negativity and gloom, but rather “nature’s poetry” and “the most egalitarian of her displays.”

Irony hedgehogreview.com

We are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that we are always showing everyone who and what we are on the basis of what we love. Irony seems to offer an alternative. But if Lear—and Plato—are right, then this moment of distancing should serve as a prelude to deepening my relationship to the world and how I understand myself.

Bright Leaf nplusonemag.com

To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with. It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.

The evolution of reality iai.tv

Hoffman offers what he calls the ‘interface theory’ of perception: the idea that the world as we perceive it is like the user interface of a computer, a simplified representation of what we can do in the world and what might happen as a result.  As in a computer, what is really going on in the world – the quantum fields and so on – is far too complicated for us to understand, and would take far too long to understand even were we capable. Fortunately we don’t have to.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius paulgraham.com

What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.

You're almost definitely more of a Jerk than you think you are lithub.com

Think of the aggressively rumpled scholar who can’t bear the thought that someone would waste her time getting a manicure. Or think of the manicured socialite who can’t see the value of dedicating one’s life to dusty Latin manuscripts. What-ever he’s into, the moralizing jerk exudes a continuous aura of disdain for everything else.

The efficiency-destroying magic of tidying up florentcrivello.com

This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together.

The Age of Instagram Face newyorker.com

Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.

Sunshine, robots and 23 varieties: how to farm 150m brussels sprouts theguardian.com

Ian McLachlan is the farming director of Drysdales, the UK’s biggest grower of brussels sprouts – and sprouts supplier to Tesco for 30 years. McLachlan puts the boom in popularity down to, essentially, good breeding; farmers have bred out a compound called glucosinolates, responsible for the bitter flavour. This, coupled with better culinary knowledge, has transformed the diminutive green’s reputation.

Fridge light: a metaphor for subjective social reality twitter.com

Metaphor for subjective social reality: fridge light. Every time I open my fridge, there's light. Therefore, the fridge light is always on.

radicalcartography radicalcartography.net

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.

I'm going to tell you about the voice at Embankment Tube station twitter.com

And that is why today, even in 2019, if you go down to Embankment station in London, and sit on the northbound platform on Northern Line, you will here a COMPLETELY different voice say Mind the Gap to ANYWHERE else on the Underground.

All the Foreign Bodies That Got Stuck flowingdata.com

Below is a sample of all the things people get stuck, based on data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle foreignpolicy.com

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued.

Solutions to waste and the problem of scalar mismatches discardstudies.com

Scale is not about being big or small. At different scales, different relationships matter.

Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning discardstudies.com

The commodity-sign shifts values from the social realm onto commodities, or in this case, onto the practice of recycling. Through recycling campaigns, “the original totality of the signified slips from view” and recycling becomes, first and foremost, a type of environmental activism rather than a form of waste management or an industrial process.

Modern Waste is an Economic Strategy discardstudies.com

Recycling is a far greater benefit to industry than to the environment. Recycling is an industrial process that produces waste, uses energy, requires virgin (non-recyclable) materials, and often results in down-cycling, where created products are less robust than their predecessors.

The what and the why of Discard Studies discardstudies.com

Structures, not behaviours, uphold norms and practices of waste and wasting. In sociology and other fields, there is a constant tension between agency–what individuals and groups of people are able and want to do– and structure, the cultural norms and values, institutions, infrastructures, and power relations that constrain and even determine that agency. Because of this, we’ve argued against awareness as an ideal method for creating changes around waste and wasting, instead arguing for changes in infrastructure and other scaled up systems. To help understand this tension, we use concepts of scale and scalar mismatch to argue that waste occurs differently within different structures at different scales, and that action must match up with these scales. For example, if we want to address pollution and waste, then focusing 90% of our activist efforts on household waste that makes up less than 3% of a nation’s waste is not going to be effective. Consumer and citizen behaviour cannot impact 97% of the waste that’s out there

The Politics of Measurement: Per Capita Waste and Previous Sewage Contamination discardstudies.com

The reason to take measurements seriously is that quantitative work creates things. Per capita waste creates wasteful individuals and naturalizes an impotent course of action, while Previous Sewage Contamination creates pollution where before there was none. Activism is all about intervening in material conditions, and Franklin knew his judgement, expressed as a measurement, would be extrapolated off the page to make things happen in the world of things.  Advocacy via measurement is not unique to activism–I would argue that per capita measurement is in the interest of industry, and it is not surprising to find that industry works to keep it as the measurement of choice in governance.

Salary and Occupation flowingdata.com

Salaries vary across occupations. The charts below show by how much for 800 of them.

The Weirdos of Russian Literature lithub.com

Tolstoy had to eat boiled pears to ease his digestive troubles. Bulgakov was obsessed with having enough pairs of socks. And Chekhov made his own creosote vapor inhalations.

Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? aeon.co

Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters in conflict – as we find in The Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise, flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good, or he belongs to Team Evil. [...] The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win. [...] When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals.

A million people are jailed at China's gulags haaretz.com

Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant and did not eat pork.

The Idler (1993) en.wikipedia.org

The Idler is a bi-monthly magazine, devoted to its ethos of 'idling'. Founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the publication's intention is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.

My Obsession With the Bon Appétit Cinematic Universe jezebel.com

There are these chefs who work at Bon Appétit, a legacy food publication you’ve probably flipped through in the checkout line of a grocery store that always features a single delicious-looking dish on the cover surrounded by headlines that can, for a few moments, convince you that your kitchen could get a Michelin star if only you start preparing your chicken breasts exactly like this and also if you embrace the bean this season.

Our Economic Problems Are in Sectors, Not the System nytimes.com

There is in fact a problem with stagnant wages in today’s developed economies. But in the United States for instance much of the problem lies in our low productivity health and education sectors, which raise the cost of living for everybody, plus the high cost of renting or buying in desirable urban areas and in good school districts.