#usa
You did your best
Paris, France
The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your head off your own four walls. Live more energetically and spontaneously (while you still can). Soon, travel is back on. Head out of the city and see your parents. Dare...
Local power and the social order
— American Genry, Patrick Wyman in Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Evicted in the pandemic
— His Landlord Evicted Him During The Pandemic And Then Demanded $1,100 For Him To Get His Belongings, Vanessa Wong in BuzzFeed News
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
— You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument, Caroline Randall Williams in The New York Times
George Floyd march
The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It made the fact that people were shouting in one voice even more striking. A man stood over the crowd with a megaphone and thanked them for assembling, spoke about the...
Floyd protests from afar
We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way. Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests against police violence in response to the murder of a man named George Floyd by a policeman in Minnesota. All over the country the authorities have responded with a police...
George Floyd Protester Relief Resources
I've been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who've been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I'm throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I've donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. There's now an even easier way to donate to a wider range of organisations fighting for this cause. Just make one larger donation on this page and it will be split...
USNS Comfort
The hospital ship the USNS Comfort docked in New York Harbour a few hours ago. From the news images it looks like something from the Second World War: a long, narrow, white thing covered in lifeboats and bearing the red cross. Presumably it’s painted like that to stop enemy bombers from firing at it in wartime. Everybody keeps comparing this to wartime. I’m filling my time with exercise, reading, and work — and to some extent it’s working. I’m taking pleasure in the small things. I don’t have it the worst out of anyone. Lots of people, thought they’d never...
145.0 - there's in-groups and there's out-groups and i believe in making distinctions
Flatiron District, NYC
