Queens was hit first. Elmhurst Hospital Center, in particular, was deluged. This might have been expected, both for geographic reasons and for demographic ones.

— Inside the Public Hospitals Trying to Save New York, Jonathan Mahler and Philip Montgomery in The New York Times Magazine

One thing seems certain: It will be awhile for duets to regain their place in dance culture. (After the world rights itself again, I predict years of solo dances, just as after Sept. 11, choreography was full of dancers gazing upward.) But in real life, duets have cropped up everywhere. Your partner is a stranger; the stage is the sidewalk.

— How We Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic, Gia Kourlas in The New Yorker

In November 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a short sci-fi story called So Much Cooking. It was published in Clarkesworld, a science fiction and fantasy magazine. The story is told in the form of a cooking blog written by a woman living through a global pandemic of a flu-like virus. This week, Kritzer posted on another sci-fi blog to acknowledge how prescient she’d been in some aspects of her story. Of course being the author she mostly focused on where she got it wrong.

Another thing I didn’t think through back in 2015: the fact that if the death rate is 34% when people have access to treatment, you’ll see a much higher death rate if you start running out of hospital beds. The narrator doesn’t once mention the concept of “flattening the curve,” because the articles I found didn’t talk about it.

Check this out from her story, on social distancing:

Probably wherever you live you’re hearing about “social distancing,” which in most places means “we’re going to shut down the schools and movie theaters and other places where folks might gather, stagger work hours to minimize crowding, and instruct everyone to wear face masks and not stand too close to each other when they’re waiting in lines.

On running out of things more than usual, and on the guilt of complaining about healthy people problems:

I kind of want to tell you all the things we’re out of. Like, AA batteries. (I had to track down a corded mouse from the closet where we shove all the electronic stuff we don’t use anymore, because my cordless mouse uses AA batteries.) Dishwasher detergent. (We still have dish soap, but you can’t put that in a dishwasher. So we’re washing everything by hand.) But you remember when we used to say, “first-world problems” about petty complaints? These are healthy-person problems.

On what carries on:

Jo did get presents, despite my cluelessness. The mail is still coming—some days—and her father remembered. A big box full of presents ordered from online showed up late in the day, signed “with love from Mom and Dad,” which made her cry.

On the interminability of it:

Some days it’s hard to imagine that this will ever be over, that we’ll ever be able to get things back to normal at all. When everyone is sniping at each other it feels like you’ve always been trapped in the middle of a half-dozen bickering children and always will be. When you’re in the midst of grief, it’s hard to imagine spring ever coming.

Found via Waxy.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. is slowing hiring for the remainder of the year, the most drastic action by the web search giant since the Covid-19 pandemic began battering its advertising business several weeks ago.

— Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020, CEO Tells Staff, Mark Bergen in Bloomberg

I’m writing this from home, because a few days into my work at the ED I developed upper respiratory symptoms. This wasn’t a surprise. Despite modest improvements in PPE availability over the past couple weeks, it’s likely that I’ve contracted the virus, as have so many other health workers. Though I spent my days in the ED swabbing others for the virus and will soon resume this work, I couldn’t get tested there myself. For that I had to travel forty minutes on the subway to another site, putting myself and other commuters at risk. But even that seems better than the ever-worsening status quo: a shortage of viral media containers is putting a stop to worker testing. In any case, broad testing with epidemiology to guide quarantine is no longer an available public-health intervention at this point, though we still need broad testing and the roll-out of a serology test (blood tests to look for immunity, rather than the nasal test to look for the virus) to guide us in the coming months. The test itself has significantly reduced clinical usefulness right now. It’s obvious to anyone in any hospital in New York that all of us are just walking through the smog. There is no outside.

— There Is No Outside, Karim Sariahmed in n+1

Each puzzle piece must be uniquely shaped, to avoid one accidentally fitting into the wrong place. That means 1,000 different shapes for a 1,000-piece puzzle, each drawn by hand by workers. Before a puzzle is cut for the first time, each piece is sketched on a sheet of paper draped over the finished image.

— Here’s How Those Hot Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made, Amie Tsang in The New York Times

MK: That brings me to another question about the women in your novels. Something that comes up rather often when talking about your work. I’m thinking of the way that women are depicted, the roles they’re assigned.

It’s common for my female friends to say to me, ‘If you love Haruki Murakami’s work so much, how do you justify his portrayal of women?’ The notion being that there’s something disconcerting about the depiction of women in your stories. It irks some people, men and women alike. A common reading is that your male characters are fighting their battles unconsciously, on the inside, leaving the women to do the fighting in the real world.

HM: Really? How so?

MK: It goes beyond whether they’re realistic, or come across as ‘real-life women.’ It has more to do with the roles they play. For example, as we were saying earlier, the woman functions as a kind oracle, in that she’s made to act as a medium of fate.

HM: She takes you by the hand and leads you off somewhere.

— A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself, Mieko Kawakami in LitHub

Du Coudray knew many of her students were illiterate, so she created her book in a way that could be understood whether or not you could read. The colorful images depict the mother’s pelvis and some associated soft tissues and the descending infant, presented as if you were looking through the skin and fat and seeing only the necessary bones and reproductive parts. Also illustrated are the midwife’s hands and how they should be positioned. After being trained by du Coudray and practicing on her machine, the illiterate midwife could consult the book’s illustrations as a reminder of what to do in a particular case. As Schiebinger noted:

— How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis

I don’t wish you any hard luck Old Man but do wish you were here for a while at least. It’s more comfortable when one has a friend about. The men here are all good fellows, but I get so damned sick of Pneumonia that when I eat I want to find some fellow who will not ‘Talk Shop’ but there aint none nohow. We eat it, live it, sleep it, and dream it, to say nothing of breathing it 16 hours a day. I would be very grateful indeed it you would drop me a line or two once in a while, and I will promise you that if you ever get into a fix like this, I will do the same for you.

— Letters of Note: God be with you till we meet again

If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static. I’m thinking here of sites for places like health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering, and I’m sure there are more that haven’t occurred to me. As much as you possibly can, get it down to static HTML and CSS and maybe a tiny bit of enhancing JS, and pare away every byte you can.

— Get Static, Eric Meyer on his blog