Essays Archive - Page 92 of 131

5 Charts that Explain COVID-19 Impacts in NYC

Social Vulnerability Indicators Predict Inequity in NYC COVID-19 Cases

May 4, 2020 • by Timon McPhearson, Ahmed Mustafa, Luis Ortiz, Zbigniew Grabowski, Pablo Herreros Cantis, Christopher Kennedy and Claudia Tomateo Chang

Once again frontline, low income and communities of color are most impacted. At the time of this writing, there have been 147,297 confirmed cases and 15,869 deaths in New York City, with the City on mandatory “P.A.U.S.E” until May 15, 2020. In early March, the Urban Systems Lab team asked the question, ...

Imaginal Politics

We Are Straw Dogs

Reimagining compassion, merit, and Dao in the time of coronavirus

May 2, 2020 • by Austin Burke

I write this with a heavy heart. Amid pervasive confrontation with the floods of data regarding the coronavirus, we each prepare for this abstraction to take more determinate shape in personal encounters—and yet, I was not prepared for my friend, a veteran of the Stonewall riots and a decades-long survivor ...

Corporations

Is the Covid-19 Small Business Loan Program a Boondoggle?

Yes…and no

April 28, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

Some of the criticisms are totally legit. Others, though, are a bit overblown or end up misplacing the true blame for what went wrong. I’m going to try to untangle it all in seven points below: 1. What are we talking about? The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), as the major small business ...

Is the Covid-19 Small Business Loan Program a Boondoggle?

Public Health

The Rebirth of Tragedy

We are all existentialists now, knowing only that we must try to carry on

April 28, 2020 • by Arthur Goldhammer

Today we find ourselves in the midst of another great calamity. Once again we are compelled to ask whether our rational faculties are capable of coping with a virus about which we know far too little. The measures we think we need to take to keep untold numbers from dying are themselves so painful ...

Migration

Letter from Athens

Liberal democratic institutions have regained their footing, even as Greece faces a fresh refugee crisis amid a global pandemic

April 28, 2020 • by Stan Draenos

At migrant camps on Greek islands facing Turkey, the pandemic could not have hit at a worse time. Beginning last summer, a surge in refugees arriving in wobbly rubber dinghies swelled occupancy at the camps to an alarming 42,000 by the start of 2020. The latest surge was part of Turkish President Tayyip ...

Democracy

Mitch McConnell’s Betrayal of Democracy

McConnell is happy to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals

April 28, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Nearly 50,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (both Democrats and Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from ...

Activism

Hong Kong Under Lockdown

From the masks of protesters to the mask of public health

April 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

The mask ban, based on a century-old colonial emergency ordinance, was largely upheld earlier this month in a controversial ruling by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. By then, the Covid-19 crisis had stopped the mass protests, accomplishing what Carrie Lam and her officers could not during much of 2019. ...

Public Health

A Jesuit Went to Milan to Learn Italian

Covid-19 taught him something more

April 28, 2020 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

After sunset each night teenagers gather in the piazza below the windows of my fifth-floor room. They are not rowdy, not really. They are just young. And here, apparently, that means they talk and sing a bit, and then drink a bit and sing a bit more. Then they sit and laugh and ...

Interviews

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

April 28, 2020 • by Rachel Louise Snyder and LaVonne Elaine Roberts

LaVonne Roberts [LR]: You point out that most (54 percent) of mass shootings intersect with domestic violence. As a Texan, I grew up hearing about Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, after fatally stabbing his mother and his wife, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others. Is there any hope that convicted domestic ...

Capitalism

The Financial Literacy Delusion

We need honest narratives about the distribution of wealth

April 27, 2020 • by Agata Soroko

But it’s already happening. The old financial literacy refrains are already here. “The monetary fallout of COVID-19 — business closures, job losses, declines in tax revenue — still is being determined. To recover, we need financial literacy more than ever,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorialized earlier this month. Others are already ...

Democracy

Why Egypt Didn’t Get the Revolution it Needed

An interview with Peter Hessler

April 27, 2020 • by Peter Hessler and Michael Schmale

For American expatriates living in China in the first decade of the 2000s, Peter Hessler was already something of a household name, not just as the New Yorker’s China correspondent, but as a public intellectual. His books became fixtures of laowai bookshelves almost as soon as they were published. His ...

Why Egypt Didn’t Get the Revolution it Needed

Democracy

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

It’s classic neoliberalism — with a Schmittian face

April 24, 2020 • by William E. Scheuerman

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.” President Donald Trump, April 13, 2020 Carl Schmitt, Germany’s most influential authoritarian jurist, has long played a major role in political and legal debates around the world. Because of ...

Essays

5 Charts that Explain COVID-19 Impacts in NYC

Social Vulnerability Indicators Predict Inequity in NYC COVID-19 Cases

We Are Straw Dogs

Reimagining compassion, merit, and Dao in the time of coronavirus

Is the Covid-19 Small Business Loan Program a Boondoggle?

Yes…and no

The Rebirth of Tragedy

We are all existentialists now, knowing only that we must try to carry on

Letter from Athens

Liberal democratic institutions have regained their footing, even as Greece faces a fresh refugee crisis amid a global pandemic

Mitch McConnell’s Betrayal of Democracy

McConnell is happy to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals

Hong Kong Under Lockdown

From the masks of protesters to the mask of public health

A Jesuit Went to Milan to Learn Italian

Covid-19 taught him something more

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

The Financial Literacy Delusion

We need honest narratives about the distribution of wealth

Why Egypt Didn’t Get the Revolution it Needed

An interview with Peter Hessler

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

It’s classic neoliberalism — with a Schmittian face

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