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By Mitch Polstein Jr. As a tennis bum, the pandemic has made it hell trying to find a place in Manhattan to play. By play, I mean hitting balls over an imaginary net in an unlocked schoolyard or over a clothesline strung between two poles of a repurposed volleyball court. Players have also snuck in to hit against forbidden walls on handball courts, on paved and unpaved paths and in the empty plaza in front of the bandshell in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. One would think social distancing would be easy on a tennis court, but the Powers That Be thought otherwise. Most public courts are finally now open with a host of new rules, depending upon the facility, such as no doubles, singles only. Well, I never liked my doubles partner much anyway. Players are also requested to enter and exit the court socially distanced. The Central Park courts. the crown jewel, have not yet opened due to technical difficulties. Which is to say that technically, they don’t know what they’re doing. The clubhouse and locker rooms will remain closed. The pro shop might sell merchandise online. I have visions of someone tossing cans of tennis balls off their roof, à la Trump and the paper towel debacle in Puerto Rico. In the end, tennis isn’t really that important, except for the fact that it is the only true test of one’s worth as a human being. Tennis, anyone? Mitch Polstein Jr., a native Manhattanite, was the men’s tennis coach at Hunter College in New York City.

By John Rolfe “You grow your own vegetables? Smart move! You won’t starve if the food supply is disrupted.” So I’ve been told since the pandemic hit, but starvation is still a distinct possibility, thanks to the critters that dine in our 35-foot by 70-foot patch of produce. Animals are encroaching on mankind’s territory while humans spend more time sheltering indoors. Monkeys, goats, wild pigs, pumas and more have been roaming towns and cities around the world. I’ve yet to spot a rhinoceros in our backyard here in New York’s Hudson Valley, but there is a great abundance of the customary deer, chipmunks, skunks, raccoons, possums, foxes and the most dreaded varmint of all: the wily whistlepig (aka groundhog or woodchuck). A type of large ground squirrel, Marmota monaxis also called a “whistlepig” because it whistles to alert its henchmen to danger, such as the approach of an irate gardener. Each day, it consumes one-third of its body weight (as much as five pounds of veggies) and stuffs itself all summer in order to survive the winter without eating. “The woodchuck, despite its deformities both of mind and body, possesses some of the amenities of a higher civilization,” the New Hampshire Legislative Woodchuck Committee declared in 1883. Nature’s excavator, it can displace up to six cubic feet (or 640 pounds) of soil while creating its living quarters (as far down as three feet, and up to 24 feet long), undermining the foundations of small buildings in the process. Miraculously, my family’s garden remained untouched by groundhogs for 18 years, invaded only by deer, chipmunks, cucumber beetles, squash bugs, flea beetles, cabbage worms and other insects that enjoy a salad. But last summer, we noticed our peas, cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts and tomatoes were being ravaged despite applications of my wife’s homemade repellent spray (egg, garlic and cayenne pepper) that keeps even neighbors and unwanted relatives away. Then we discovered the telltale hole under our garden shed. We erected barriers around the garden and covered the critter’s favored veggies with netting and cayenne powder. Yet, the fiendish pest continued to feast, even on the bait in the trap I set. Whenever we spotted it stuffing its face, I swore it smiled and waved before scampering off. I eventually contemplated using explosives as Bill Murray’s groundskeeper character did in the film Caddy Shack. Yes, the wily whistlepig is a defiant cuss. I don’t know if this tale is true, but I read about a frustrated man who, while locked in battle with a groundhog, peed in the opening of its burrow, chortling in the knowledge that whistlepigs are fastidious creatures repelled by urine. A day or so later, while working in his garage, the man sensed something behind him and turned. The groundhog was sauntering in. It stopped, stared at him, and relieved itself on the floor before casually sauntering out. Again, I don’t know if this actually happened, but it sounds about right. We finally brought our marauder to justice after I discovered I’d been setting the trap incorrectly, which allowed it to escape. The plump thief was then remanded to the Whistlepig Protection Program. Supposedly capable of returning to its turf from as far as 20 miles, it was relocated in a remote area on the other side of the Hudson River. I’m sure it will eventually discover and use the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to get back here. This summer, we’ve already trapped four groundhogs. When we try to make friends fully understand the menace to their gardens, we sound like Science Officer Ash in Alien telling the doomed crew, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with … I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.” A master gardener, my wife is helping one local gentleman with his horticultural pursuits. After explaining that the only choices are to kill the groundhog, trap it, or let it ingest his garden, she sadly shook her head when the gentleman insisted he’s OK with letting the munching machine “have some of the kale.” “Good luck,” she said. “That thing will make short work of all those little plants and move on to everything else.” Blessedly, all’s quiet on our whistlepig front at the moment, though a family of deer is helping itself to our carrots and green beans at every opportunity. Each day, we see them out there eyeing the goods. Between the critters and the pandemic, I can see us foraging in the woods for wild berries, starchy roots and tubers before long. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

How to Reason with a Trumpie By Mary Coombs A couple of days ago, I was sitting at an outdoor table of a favorite cafe with a coffee and a pastry. I struck up a conversation with a man (6 feet away) at the next table. I was unmasked (allowed while you were eating), as was he--involved with his iPad. I’m not sure how the topic of masks came up. (The governor has issued an order requiring them when indoors; this café had required them even before that.) He lectured me that he used to own restaurants; germs were transmitted by hands. Masks were useless since the spaces in the fabric of a cloth mask were larger than the size of a virus. In any event, it was his constitutional right not to wear a mask. And if the owner tried to exclude him for not wearing a mask, he was ready to sue her. You can fill in my side of this conversation. Even if a mask didn’t prevent every particle from getting through, it could drastically reduce how much virus you were exposed to. The purpose of masks is largely to protect others from us, and we can’t know for sure that we’re not contagious, since we can infect others when we are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic. What provision of the Constitution are you thinking of? (You can imagine my getting on my high horse in a debate between a restaurant owner and a retired law professor over the meaning of the Constitution!) If a business owner refuses to serve you because you are not wearing a mask – or not wearing shoes – or, if she wants, because she isn’t admitting anyone today wearing purple, that is her legal right. But as I thought later about this conversation, I wondered why I had engaged with him. Each step was quite predictable. I wasn’t going to move him one inch; he wasn’t going to move me one centimeter. I realized that the answer lay in the pandemic. For over four months, I haven’t touched another human being. Even live conversations are rare. When I go out walking, I sometimes wave to another walker, or exchange a few words in passing, or maybe admire and pet a dog if it’s on a long enough leash. An argument isn’t a conversation. But it’s a verbal interchange, live and in-person, with another human being. I guess I need to try harder to sit 6-plus feet away from someone with whom I can talk about anodyne topics like the weather! But if after all of this, you do decide to engage with a Trumpie, here are ten legal arguments you can make if someone tells you, “I have a right not to wear a mask!” 1. Let’s think of what kind of “rights” claims people are making and how to respond more precisely and accurately than just “no, you don’t, you idiot.” (Not that I haven’t been tempted.) If all they say is “I have a right,” the answer is that this is unanswerable because it is meaningless. A claimed right must come from somewhere, or it’s just a cry of a two-year-old. 2. If they say “I have a God-given right,” that’s a little trickier. I’m not aware of anything in the Old or New Testament that seems to support this, but I am not deeply grounded in these texts. I suspect some of this is not based in a text but more of a “God told me,” or “God told my pastor who announced it.” So we are back in the unanswerable, although religious freedom rights in the U.S. do not allow you to do anything you claim is allowed by your religion, in contradiction to public laws. 3. Some say “I have a civil-law right.” This is profoundly silly since the United States (apart from some aspects of Louisiana law, carried over from its French history) has never had civil law, but is rooted in common law with a thick overlay of statute and Constitution. 4. What about “I have a constitutional right to not wear a mask anywhere I don’t want to wear a mask”? The Constitution is a text, so if there is such a right it must show up somewhere in the text. The original Constitution talks only about government structure and powers. But this “constitutional right” must come from some limit on government power. 5. What about the “Bill of Rights” (the first 10 Amendments)? None of the “enumerated” rights – freedom of speech, right to a jury trial, etc. -- are relevant. Admittedly, Amendments IX (“The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) and X (“The powers not delegated to the United States . . are reserved …to the people.) might include the right to go maskless. But it might include anything – and the courts have basically decided that these Amendments don’t have any real “bite” (even without a mask on), apart from a recognition of a right of personal privacy grounded in part on these provisions. But the right of privacy doesn’t apply to actions taken in public spaces which can impact directly on the interests of others. 6. The likeliest constitutional provision they might be thinking of is the Fourteenth Amendment: “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The last part is irrelevant since all the laws and regulations regarding masking apply equally to everyone (except for recognizing relevant differences, such as excusing very young children or people with proof of health conditions that make wearing a mask dangerous – these are rare). 7. As to the “due process clause,” note that it doesn’t prevent people from being deprived of a “liberty,” only that the deprivation must be done following due process of law. It is possible that some mask mandates are issued by an executive in a state where its laws and constitution reserve this power to the legislature, or by a county or municipality in a state where only the state itself can do this. But the claims I’ve seen of “I have a constitutional right not to wear a mask,” are broad-brush and thus simply wrong. 8. Maybe they mean “I have a right under civil-rights law not to wear a mask.” Nope. Our civil-rights laws are all about categories of people being treated differently– not that I have a right to rent a house or go to a college or go in a restaurant, but that the landlord or college or restaurant owner can’t exclude me for certain specified reasons. Not because of my race, color or previous condition of servitude; not because of my sex/gender (now determined in at least some circumstances to include not because I am gay, or lesbian, or transgender). There’s no civil-rights law protection for denying you some benefit you might want because you are putting others at risk or because you are stupid, or just because the landlord or restaurant owner doesn’t like you. 9. And that brings us to the last claim I have heard: “I have a right not to wear a mask, and the management of X store or Y restaurant has no right to prevent me. If they try to throw me out, I’ll have a temper tantrum (obnoxious, but not asserting a “right”) or I will sue them.” WRONG. Go back to the civil-rights laws: they were designed to say that property owners can’t exercise their freedom to decide who they will hire, rent to, or serve if – but only if -- they can be shown to have done so based on the would-be employee, tenant, or customer’s race, sex or other specifically protected category. 10. Absent such a law, the restaurant or store owner retains the right to decide who to serve. Think of the “no shoes, no shirt, no service” sign one would sometimes see in a store window. When I mentioned writing this little screed, a friend told me a story (perhaps apocryphal) of a restaurant with such a sign. The would-be customer entered wearing a shirt, socks and shoes, and no pants or underpants. (I wondered, if it were true, if the waitress was especially careful when refilling said customer’s coffee cup!) Mary I. Coombs earned a B.A. in 1965, an M.A. in sociology in 1967, an M.A. in library science in 1970, and a J.D. in 1978, all from the University of Michigan. Following graduation from law school, she served as law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She was in private practice until she joined the University of Miami School of Law faculty in 1983. She was a professor at the law school for 31 years, until retiring in 2014

FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile inThe New York Timeson August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

July 15, 2020 Jeffrey D. Sachs | Project Syndicate As the world’s largest economies, the G20’s members have one overriding responsibility at their finance ministers' upcoming meeting: to agree on actions to suppress the pandemic. Ensuring effective public-health measures is today’s essential economic policy. NEW YORK – The G20 ministers of finance meet this week under the auspices of Saudi Arabia, which holds the group’s presidency this year. But it is hard to imagine the G20 countries leading the world, as they like to pretend that they do. Most of them can’t effectively lead themselves through the current COVID-19 crisis. As the world’s largest economies, the G20’s members have one overriding responsibility at the upcoming meeting: to agree on actions to suppress the pandemic. A few G20 countries are doing well; the laggard countries need to take urgent measures to stop the spread of the virus. All G20 countries need to cooperate on global-scale policies to overcome the health crisis. An overview of the G20 countries is sobering. Many are so poorly governed that they have been utterly ineffective in containing the pandemic. Judging by data from the past two weeks, the biggest G20 failure, at 176 new cases per day per million population, is Brazil, led by the reckless populist Jair Bolsonaro, who has himself now contracted the virus. The second-biggest failure is the United States, led by the Bolsonaro of the north, Donald Trump, with 137 new cases per day per million population. The two other G20 countries with more than 100 new cases per day per million population are South Africa (129) and Saudi Arabia (112). The next tier of countries, reporting 10-100 new cases per day per million population, includes Russia (47), Mexico (43), Turkey (16), India (15), and the United Kingdom (11). These countries are all at risk of a significant rise in transmission, with Mexico and India appearing to be at the greatest risk. Six of the G20 countries currently report 1-10 new cases per day per million population – reasonably low rates that make possible decisive suppression of the virus in the near future: Canada (8), France (8), Germany (5), Indonesia (5), Italy (4), and Australia (3). Only three of the G20 countries report under one new case per day per million population: South Korea (0.96), Japan (0.9), and China (0.01). These three northeast Asian countries have displayed the necessary combination of political leadership, public-health professionalism, and responsible behavior (wearing face masks, maintaining physical distancing, and enhancing personal hygiene). An epidemic is a social phenomenon and needs a social response. As South Korea, Japan, and China have shown, the virus can be suppressed – that is, new cases can be brought to near zero – if a basic logic is followed. Those who are infected with the virus need to protect those who are not infected. They can do this in four ways during the two weeks while infectious: keep their physical distance; wear face masks; stay at home and away from others; and remain in a public quarantine if the home is not safe. This protection does not have to be perfect; indeed, it won’t be. It has to be good enough, however, to ensure that on average an infected individual infects less than one other. All people must be cautious until the pandemic is suppressed. That means wearing face masks in public places, keeping a prudent distance from others, and monitoring ourselves and our close contacts for symptoms. Officials must make available testing sites and support services for the isolation of infected individuals, whether at home or in public facilities. Managers of workplaces must take precautionary measures, including remote work or safe physical distancing on site. The egregious G20 failures have in most cases started at the top. The likes of Bolsonaro and Trump are braggarts, bullies, dividers, and sociopaths. Their countries’ massive death tolls have moved them neither to expressions of sympathy nor to effective public-health policies. One sees similar perverse behavior among other G20 strongmen. Whereas women leaders (in New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, and elsewhere) have a superior track record on the pandemic, the G20, alas, has no woman leader. Trump is a special case, because he governs the world’s greatest military power. The sociopathy of a US president is a worldwide tragedy, unlike that of a Brazilian president (though Bolsonaro’s sociopathy affects the world through an anti-environmental agenda that fuels the wanton and deliberate destruction of the Amazon). Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization in the midst of the pandemic battle has immediate global repercussions. The same is true of his efforts to launch a new cold war with China, instead of saving his own country and cooperating with China to help the rest of the world fight the pandemic. In this, China obviously has much to offer. It has used the world’s most decisive measures to suppress a fulminant pandemic (after the first outbreak in Wuhan) and may well be on the way to producing the first useful vaccine. Yet societal outcomes are not just the result of political leadership. They also depend on culture and social responsibility. The Confucian culture of northeast Asia emphasizes social cooperation and pro-social personal behavior such as wearing face masks. American hotheads, stoked by Trump, loudly proclaim the freedom to reject face masks – that is, the freedom to infect other Americans. One would rarely hear such a claim in northeast Asia. What is also notable is the failure of US business leaders to take measures to contain the epidemic. One of America’s leading entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, demanded the reopening of the economy (and his business), rather than using his engineering genius to help contain the virus. Other top business leaders, too, have contributed little or nothing to suppressing the epidemic. This, too, is part of American culture: money over lives, personal wealth over the social good. The G20 finance ministers will no doubt talk of money – budgets, stimulus, monetary policy – and so they should, but only after they have spoken about stopping the virus itself. There is no way to save the economy without stopping the pandemic. Ensuring effective public-health measures is today’s essential economic policy.

By Andy Borowitz July 15, 2020 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Trying out a new line of attack against the former Vice-President, Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Joe Biden could never have a pandemic as big as his. “Biden was Vice-President for eight years and had all the time in the world to have a pandemic,” Trump said. “Where was his pandemic?” By contrast, Trump asserted, “In just a few months, I’ve built the biggest pandemic this country has seen in a hundred years.” “People are going to be talking about my pandemic for generations to come,” Trump said. “What did Biden ever have? Swine flu? What a joke.” Trump said that Biden’s failure to have “any pandemic worth writing home about” makes him a “terrible choice” to be President. “I’ve worked hard and built an amazing pandemic, but if Biden gets in, all that goes away,” he warned. Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

A Poem by Dr. Barry Lubetkin “It is 7 p.m., and the city is already clapping, a nightly outpouring of support for health care workers that has taken place for weeks.” New York Times, May 1, 2020 Every night she fussed at the grill Why alone? No husband. No son. No brother. Her dress (the same one every time), blue And gauzed by the illegal smoke. And I, just across the street Separated by an ocean of unforgiving concrete But quiet now, the few cars indifferent to our existence And now she dines, and the smoke is a cloud above her building The napkin lightly touches her lips And signals an end to her daily delight, And, as if we both studied at the Bolshoi, We together slide to our terrace railings She waves at me, it’s 6:58 I never waved back at a stranger so hard! I call out and point to my watch She nods and I think her mouth curls to a smile It’s 6:59, and the connection that I feel with her Embarrasses me The same awkwardness that engulfs me every night As blue dress and I prepare A car siren 16 floors below screams Somewhere near the avenue a trumpet pierces Wild yelling from windows I’ll never see It’s 7:00 p.m. Blue dress and I clap, and clap, and clap No health care worker hears us We clap while locking eyes And each is deaf to the other’s sounds We don’t hear our own noise above the din Will she stop first? Will I? When will the street clamor end? Each aware of the other’s commitment to the moment Who is she really? I turn away. Our moment of closeness blends with the smoke. Barry Lubetkin, Ph.D. is the co-director and co-founder of the Institute for Behavior Therapy in New York City. He is the author of numerous academic and popular articles, as well as two popular self-help books, Bailing Out and Why Do I Need You to Love Me in Order to Like Myself. The Institute for Behavior Therapy is the oldest private cognitive behavior center in the United States.

One film journalist’s stream-of-consciousness cinematic journey through the pandemic and quarantine, Part 10 By Laurence Lerman Alright, I’m gonna pass on the Italian cinema this week, as there are those who pointed out that my previous column was published on Independence Day weekend, and I could have skewed a little more American. (Or even mentioned anything American.) I shall attempt to make things right—while continuing to mine HBO Max’s sprawling library of 2,000-plus titles—by filling in one of the empty slots on my Clint Eastwood dance card. Is that American enough for you?! Between the films he’s directed, the ones he’s starred in and the balance where he’s done both, Clint has been part of at least a half-dozen bona fide classics and another dozen truly great ones. But over the course of more than six decades, he’s also had his share of misses. Back in the late Nineties moving into the 2000s, Clint went on a tear, buying up the rights to hot novels and quickly putting them on the screen while their bestselling embers still glowed. Some of them worked (Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County in 1995) and others didn’t (John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in 1997), but that didn’t slow the superstar down. Of the quartet of popular crime novels Clint adapted during those years, 2003’s Mystic River by Dennis Lehane was the big winner, with David Baldacci’s Absolute Power (1997) and Andrew Klavan’s True Crime (1997) tying for a distant second. For my first stream, I decided to go “hemoglobular” with the fourth of the bunch, Clint’s 2002 adaptation of Michael Connelly’s Blood Work, where he plays a retired F.B.I. profiler recovering from a heart transplant who tracks down a serial killer whose latest victim happens to be the provider of the heart that’s beating inside his chest. Directed with his customary efficiency and linear storytelling style, Blood Work is serviceable if not very memorable—a straightforward procedural involving ballistics and blood types, spiked with a couple of brief action sequences and a climactic showdown that hearkens back to the finales of Clint’s Dirty Harry films of the Seventies. Surrounded by such notable—and younger!—costars as Anjelica Huston, Jeff Daniels and Paul Rodriguez, Clint was in his early seventies when he made Blood Work, marking the beginning of his remarkably fertile codger period. All in, he has directed, produced and frequently starred in a staggering 17 films since 2000, including, more recently, the wildly popular American Sniper (2014), Sully (2016) and 2018’s The Mule (2018), which Clint also starred in. Scanning Clint’s filmography, I noted 2000’s unexpectedly enjoyable Space Cowboys and remembered that Jack Nicholson was initially slated to be its star. It made sense as he had played a washed-up astronaut in Terms of Endearment opposite Shirley MacLaine. That was a good one, though I preferred Jack going mano-a-mano with Meryl Streep in Heartburn, Mike Nichols’s 1986 comedy-drama based on Nora Ephron’s semi-autobiographical account of her failed marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein. Along with the 1989’s darkly comic War of the Roses, Heartburn is my favorite to take a seethingly acidic look at an unhappily married couple—and, as usual, one that never should have gotten married in the first place. The day-to-day lives and ultimate unraveling of the union between Streep (a food writer) and Nicholson (a political columnist) deliver primarily because of the pair’s heavyweight performances (which include a few dazzling improvisatory scenes, led by a sequence where the two are eating pizza by candlelight and singing songs with “baby” in the title.). Heartburn opens with Nicholson and Streep meeting each other at a wedding, which they portentously ditch to get a drink by themselves. Strolling the Upper East Side, they share their first kiss beneath the marquee of the Cinema 1 at 60th and Third, which reads, “Best Foreign Film – Mephisto.” More portentousness, right? But even better, a prompt for me to eagerly queue up Mephisto, the 1981 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Film, my only knowledge of which was the passionate embrace enjoyed by the film’s director, Hungary’s István Szabó, and its star, Klaus Maria Brandauer, when it won the Oscar nearly 40 years ago. (You can still see it on YouTube.) Mephisto puts a modern spin on the Faust legend by making its central character an intense German stage actor in late-Thirties Berlin who finds unexpected success among the Nazis when he portrays Mephistopheles in an adaption of Goethe’s Faust. His performance is so embraced and admired by the Party that they elevate his career and put him in charge of the national theatre. Reveling in his popularity and rising social position, “Mephisto” abandons his conscience and turns his back on the cultural restrictions, moral compromises and sheer brutality of his Nazi patrons. By the final act, his Mephisto’s soul and very life have become compromised in ways he never could have imagined. Based on the book by Klaus Mann and modeled after German actor Gustaf Gründgens (whose collaborative relationship with the Nazis continues to be disputed), Mephisto makes for two hours of rich, engaging European cinema—its outstanding story, fine acting and superlative production values and period detail answering the question of how a savage Fascist regime could seem appealing to a hungry actor seeking glory. I was familiar with Szabó and Brandauer from some of their post-Oscar English-language work (particularly Brandaeur in 1985s Out of Africa and the Connery-starring Bond reboot Never Say Never Again from 1983), but Mephisto persuaded me to schedule their two other European collaborations, 1985’s Colonel Redl and 1988’s Hanussen, both of which earned Oscar nominations. I returned Stateside for another American stream from the oh-so-American Woody Allen. Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story is a curio from 1971—a short film produced for PBS that profiles a fictional political advisor to Richard Nixon, Harvey Wallinger (played by Woody). Incorporating archival material and newsreel footage with new voiceover à la Woody’s later Zelig (1983) and Carl Reiner and Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), this mock documentary is hysterical, filled with great zingers like, “I want you to get an injunction against the Times. Yes, it’s a New York, Jewish, Communist, left-wing, homosexual newspaper. And that’s just the sports section.” Real funny stuff…created by Woody just as he was beginning to roll out his greatest work. It also features cute little bits from Woody’s go-to ladies Diane Keaton as his Wallinger’s cross-eyed wife, a blacksmith major from Vassar ("If you are ashamed, it's American sex.”) and Louise Lasser as his ex-girlfriend, who announces to the press how lousy he was in bed and then wakes up to find herself drafted. As the story goes, PBS asked Woody to cut some scenes that they thought were a bit much—it was 1971 and the station didn’t want to jeopardize its funding from Washington. Woody refused and though PBS reportedly offered it to member stations to broadcast at their own risk, the program was ultimately never aired. But in the spirit of America—of anarchic, rebellious, uncensored America—a tape of a scratchy work-print leaked out of WNET’s New York offices and made it onto YouTube (among other places), where many people, including me, have enjoyed it over the years. Wallinger was to be Woody’s final television project until his 2016 six-episode series Crisis in Six Scenes for Amazon Studios. I would have loved to have seen Woody embark on more television work—it’s where he got his start—but I’m assuming the artistic control he’s had over his feature films for decades was considerably more appealing. Can you blame him? Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile inThe New York Timeson August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

By Andy Borowitz July 9, 2020 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Amid the debate over reopening the nation’s schools, a new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans would like Donald J. Trump to go back to school in the fall. Due to social-distancing requirements, those surveyed agreed that there should be limits on class size when Trump returns to school, but that his class should be large enough to accommodate other education-starved students such as Jared Kushner, Rand Paul, and Betsy DeVos. Although Americans acknowledge that the logistics of sending Trump back to school could be complicated and expensive, the cost of his continuing lack of education is far greater, the poll indicates. Americans were split on which school subjects they would like to see Trump focus on most when he returns to the classroom. Science and math received the strongest support, but a substantial number of respondents also favored history, geography, and English. Finally, if Trump is ordered back to school in the fall, a vast majority of respondents urged that steps be taken to insure that he does not send someone else in his place. Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.