The message is clear: The storage of empty vehicles is more important than the neighborhood’s fundamental mode of transport. Which is why some of the tensions that have flared during the coronavirus crisis-over runners using the sidewalk, or pedestrians using the bike lane-are particularly tragic. These confrontations are often ascribed to some personality flaw of the runner or pedestrian herself-she’s rude or entitled-rather than seen as an indictment of the misguided system that pits two people on a narrow sidewalk against each other in the first place. No one yells at a parked car, and the driver who scuttles by in the road gets a free pass, even as his driving imposes noise, pollution, and elevated climate risk upon those around him.

— The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars, Tom Vanderbilt in The Atlantic

As many users pointed out online, the much lower interest rate means that the most effective way of making money is now to gamble on the game’s internal ‘stalk’ market - a bourse in which the only commodity is turnips, sold to investors during a single session on Sundays. The root vegetables rot and their value drops to zero after a week.

— Virtual rate cut forces Nintendo gamers into riskier assets, Leo Lewis in FT

But with coronavirus deaths soaring and the real economy tanking, Animal Crossing might inspire Americans to reclaim structure and routine, and to motivate it toward modest rather than remarkable ends. Nobody really wants to live a pastoral-capitalist equilibrium of humdrum labor-unless that’s what everyone wants, actually, and not even so secretly. Civic life, after all, coheres not in abstract fantasies about politician-heroes, but in habitual practices that take place in real communities. All video games aestheticize busywork. But few make it feel like freedom.

— Animal Crossing Isn’t Escapist; It’s Political - The Atlantic, Ian Bogost in The Atlantic

These are interesting excerpts I’ve clipped from articles online.I also have a directory of links (not necessarily articles) that are worth returning to.

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