Good morning from south Florida, where I'm vacationing with my family. For a couple years, we didn't fly anywhere, due to Covid-19, and I still feel like I'm making up for lost time. That's what this special Friday edition is about: Covid and time.
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Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images |
Many Americans have tried to forget the pandemic – the deaths, the disruptions, the disturbances to every aspect of life. But many others believe it's important to remember, and major news outlets have published a raft of excellent five-year anniversary stories (and charts and photo slideshows) to help.
This column by Washington Post contributor Kate Cohen is a great place to start. Here is a gift link. Cohen says "study after study after study has confirmed what everyone I know has expressed: that the pandemic altered our sense of time, which has in turn warped our memory." She theorizes that the pandemic was "almost perfectly designed to be forgotten" because "it had two modes," one horrific and the other mundane, "both of which resist memory."
Plus, there was no agreed-upon narrative and no specific ending. Cohen says it was "traumatic and tedious, cyclical and endless, an experience we universally wish to forget, with a meaning we collectively dispute." |
'How Covid remade America' |
This David Wallace-Wells essay for The New York Times is the definitive five-years-later look at "how Covid remade America." Here is a gift link.
Among his many points: It "destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere," "broke our faith in public health," "scarred children," "shattered our cities and disordered society," "inaugurated a new age of social Darwinism," "changed the geography of work, probably forever," and "may have doomed Biden's presidency."
We're all different people now as a result.
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Covid and the free speech fight |
I want to highlight one of Wallace-Wells' takeaways that talks about the media. Here's how he says Covid "reshaped the right-wing media echo chamber:"
"Before Covid, free speech activists were primarily concerned with noxious conservatives getting accosted on or disinvited from college campuses. But the cone of complaint quickly expanded — to suppression of debate over ivermectin and mRNA, fatality rate and death tolls, school closures and masking. And so did the list of villains: from social-justice warriors and their faculty enablers to public health officials and federal institutions, broadcast media and print media and, ultimately, social media as well. It led Elon Musk to buy Twitter..."
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An explosion of conspiracy thinking |
"In the five years since the Covid pandemic began, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes of society to the centers of power," Samira Shackle writes in this excellent Guardian package of essays about how Covid changed our world.
Shackle says many of the people she interviewed during the pandemic "started with reasonable concerns" – "they were isolated, angry, and suffering financially and emotionally" – and as they "became more immersed in the online world of conspiracies, their initial views became more extreme."
In short: Our current info-environment is a consequence of the pandemic. As National Review's Jack Butler put it, Covid "made skeptics of us all."
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"Instead of coming together, we deepened our divisions," Arizona Republic media critic Bill Goodykoontz observes in a column about how "the pandemic broke our brains." He describes weakened trust in media and "a victory of 'do my own research' ignorance over real science for millions" and asks:
"How else does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, for just one example? How is his history of vaccine denial not so big a story every day that it becomes disqualifying? Reporters cover the hearings and the propaganda-filled media briefings almost like it were normal. It's not, and it shouldn't be covered as such."
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"Looking back, nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (72%) say the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together," according to a recent Pew study. The findings are, frankly, really dispiriting, but worth scrutinizing. Fully 54% of Americans say the news media exaggerated the risks of Covid at least slightly (65% of Republicans, 12% of Democrats).
>> In a recent Gallup poll, only 47% of Americans said "their life is completely back to normal. Another 13% say their life has not yet returned to pre-pandemic normalcy but expect it will, while 40% do not anticipate it ever getting back to normal."
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Remembering the start of the shutdown |
"We didn't know it then, but March 2020 marked a huge inflection point for the television business," Variety's Cynthia Littleton writes. The amount of work that it took to keep TV networks on the air when almost everyone was isolating is underappreciated to this day.
"The first few weeks of the pandemic," Littleton writes, "spurred more seat-of-the-pants innovation to broadcast operations and engineering than had been done since the days of Sid Caesar and Milton Berle in the early 1950s. In media and entertainment, the show-must-go-on ethos is real. The last thing TV pros wanted to do was serve America dead air."
To document some of what happened, Littleton interviewed ten execs, producers and hosts for Variety's "Strictly Business" podcast; check it out here...
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Now: Audiences are returning |
Here's a great NYT feature about how movie theaters, concert halls, Broadway theaters, and other entertainment venues are faring, five years after suddenly shutting down. In summary: "Broadway is almost back, and pop music tours and sports events are booming. But Hollywood, museums and other cultural sectors have yet to bounce back."
Consider this data point in Bob Mondello's NPR column about Covid's impact on the movies: "This year's first nine weeks of ticket sales in North America ($1.09 billion) are an improvement over last year, but they're still running well behind the pre-COVID weeks of 2020 ($1.67 billion)."
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>> "Don't be fooled by some social-media revisionist historians who would have us believe that COVID-19 was 'mild' — it was one of the most lethal infectious disease outbreaks in human history," Simon Williams writes in an essay about the need to prepare for the next one. (TIME)
>> In China, "the government has worked to squelch any discussion about its response to the pandemic, let alone attempts to reckon with it," Vivian Wang reports. "Art exhibits about the lockdowns have been shut down. Even today, many social media users use code words like 'face mask era' to avoid censorship." (NYT)
>> Back in the U.S., there has been lots of "literature of the pandemic," but Lily Meyer says there has yet to be a truly great Covid novel. (The Atlantic)
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'America could use some Covid memorial' |
I think Yello newsletter publisher Hunter Schwarz is right about this: "Covid-19 reshaped our lives in ways we can see and in ways we can't, but our response to its memory remains incomplete. Grief without acknowledgment festers, and a country that refuses to remember cannot fully heal. Memorials — whether in the form of art, public spaces, or shared rituals — aren’t just about the past, they shape how we move forward. America could use some COVID memorial, now more than ever."
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