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By John Rolfe Unless you’ve been working from home during the lockdown, job-related rust and cobwebs have probably accumulated in your cranium. This inconvenient truth hit me like a ton of apples when I returned for my first day of toil after a long hiatus. Now, I should mention that fruits (and vegetables) are not my stock in trade. I’m a professional writer, editor and website producer, but industry-wide downsizing has moved me to lay down the fat beets at a farmer’s market and work as a child trafficker. (I drive a school bus.) School may not resume in my district until January, but the farmer’s market recently opened. Because words come to my mind more naturally than produce, the challenge of getting back on the farm stand ball was compounded by the fact that I’m woeful at identifying apples and greens. I have terrible trouble telling a Mutzu from a Macoun from a Winesap, and I feel like a Winesap when I keep confusing Tuscan kale with broccoli rabe. If you have a gig outside of your main interest area, you’ve probably discovered that staying sharp is mostly a matter of mental muscle memory built by sheer repetition. But mental muscles atrophy from disuse, so I arrived for work intent on leaning on my two college-age assistants, who had already handled a market or two. Old details and procedures were waiting to trip me. I took a cash bag designated for another market and forgot to double-check the inventory against the invoice. To my relief, the entire operation was still creaking back to life. For one thing, the truck hadn’t been fully loaded. After locating a large pallet’s-worth of stuff in a storage refrigerator, we got the hand-truck’s wheels wedged between the loading dock and the back of the truck, forcing us to pull 30 crates off and re-stack them. An auspicious start. Setting up at the market, my colleagues (I’ll call them Beulah and Titus) deferred to my years and alleged wisdom — to their regret. Arranging the tables based on my vaguely-remembered display principles, we ended up with no space for the apples and washed greens, so the second cash station I insisted on setting up had to be taken down. I added decorative insult to injury by using old, ratty tablecloths from last year. Beulah discreetly removed them before the public’s senses were affronted. I was on a roll and so were my colleagues’ eyes when they discovered I put bok choy among the spinach and bok choy and spinach among the lettuce. Having consigned the rhubarb to a far-off corner with the pompously confident pronouncement that it rarely sells, I was quickly proved wrong as it became one of our most popular items. It was soon politely suggested that I make myself scarce and fetch things from the truck when requested. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hide from customers when my colleagues were busy. “Excuse me,” a lady asked, holding up an apple I could not identify. “Are these good for baking?” “Maybe,” I helpfully replied. “I know they’re good for throwing, but perhaps Titus here can speak to their efficacy in pies …” “What’s the difference between wild arugula and mild?” another woman asked while staring directly at me. “Um, the mild has been sprayed with sedatives,” I replied to her bemusement. “But Beulah here can probably clear that up for you …” “What are these?” a gentleman asked. “Parsnips, I believe,” I replied, feeling reasonably certain. “Oh, really? What do you do with them?” “Well, they make great stocking stuffers,” I blurted in another pathetic attempt to mask my ignorance. “They’ll keep until Christmas and all the little children love parsnips!” Suffice it to say I have valid concerns about resuming my bus driving several months from now. While doing my end-of-the-school-year bus cleaning two days after my triumphant return to the market, I vowed to run through my pre-trip inspection routine in my mind several times a week so I’ll at least be able to tell one end of the vehicle from the other when I finally go back. Hopefully my cautionary example will help you better prepare for your own return to the workplace. Good luck and Godspeed. 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.

A Weekly Roundup of Fiction Recommendations By Gwen Cooper “Of Riots and Revolutions” Edition We here at The Insider pride ourselves on being zeitgeist-y, so this week “What’s the Story?” looks at a very (very!) small sampling of novels that take riots, uprisings, and revolts as at least a portion of their plot and/or backdrop. This list is by no means exhaustive and simply represents a few of the novels on this theme that I’ve enjoyed over the years, presented in chronological order. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – In some ways, Tale is the least Dickenesque novel in the Dickens oeuvre. It’s comparatively slim, for one thing, at a mere 340ish pages, and it takes Dickens’s roving authorial eye from England—to which he was otherwise as devoted in his work as Woody Allen once was to Manhattan—to France for roughly half the book’s action. And it’s a work of historical fiction, to boot. (Most, although not all, of Dickens’s novels were set in his own present day.) Nevertheless, it remains his bestselling novel, and one of the bestselling novels of all times. Tale does an excellent job of both making the causes of the French revolution explicable—the grinding poverty, the ruthless exploitation of the poor by the wealthy—while also making it clear that the Reign of Terror was…well…pretty terrifying. It’s also a grandly sweeping novel of love, honor, and redemption, and it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll be openly sobbing by the time you get to that famous ending: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Les Misérables, Victor Hugo – Once again we visit revolutionary France, this time against the backdrop of the 1848 Paris Insurrection (also known as the February Revolution). Les Mis is a great whopping doorstop of a novel—one of the longest ever written, in point of fact (my Penguin Classics edition weighs in at more than 1,300 pages)—but still every bit as captivating as one would expect from the beloved musical adaptation, and well worth every second of the time it will take you to read it. Catch up once again with Cosette, Marius, Eponine, the doomed Fantine, the villainous Thénardiers, the dogged Javert, and the eminently humane Jean Valjean—plus hundreds of pages of digressions on politics, justice, the monarchy, moral philosophy, history, human nature, and more. Trust me, it reads a lot better than it sounds. Futility, William Gerhardie – Gerhardie, a Russian-born Brit, gets somewhat lost in the shuffle among his more well-known contemporaries (Waugh, Wharton, Mansfield, et cetera), who nevertheless admired him greatly. And Futility, his first great comic novel (actually his first novel, period) serves as an excellent introduction to his work. Its protagonist and narrator is Andre Andreich—also a young Russian-born Brit—who becomes an intimate in the household of one Nikolai Vasilievich Bursanov and his Chekhovian three daughters: Sonia, Nina, and Vera. Nikolai’s sprawling family—and list of financial dependents—includes not only his daughters (now in their late teens/early twenties), but also the estranged wife who left him years ago for a dentist yet refuses to divorce him; the German-born retired actress Fanny Ivanova who’s been living with him and helping to raise his daughters ever since; and the seventeen-year-old Zina who’s recently caught his eye—plus her sprawling clan of parents, siblings, and cousins holding their hands out to the perpetually cash-strapped Nikolai, who’s waiting for some gold mines in Siberia to finally pay off. And all this is before the Russian Revolution arrives to make the family’s life even more complicated. Through it all, our narrator pursues Nina, who is also being pursued by an American naval officer. That all this—and more!—is packed into a mere 220ish-page novel is further testament to Gerhardie’s underappreciated gifts. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison – One of the greatest novels of all times, and certainly one of the greatest protest novels ever committed to paper. It’s also gorgeously written and a compulsive read, which is all just icing on the cake. I won’t take up too much space with this one, as so much has been written about it by others who’ve done a far better job than I could ever do. Suffice it to say that the unnamed black narrator’s journey from the Jim Crow South to riotous Harlem to self-imposed exile—and the rogue’s gallery of segregationists, lackeys, rabble rousers, revolutionaries, and limousine liberals (not to mention the occasional horny housewife) he encounters along the way—feels as urgent and timely now as it did in 1952, when the book was first released. This was a novel that completely blew my mind when I first read it back in college and, revisiting it a year or two ago, I found its effects no less incendiary. Bodily Harm, Margaret Atwood – This is the novel that immediately preceded The Handmaid’s Tale, which may be why it’s one of Atwood’s lesser-discussed novels today. Nevertheless, it’s a canny examination of the overlaps between economic exploitation, racial exploitation, and gender exploitation—all wrapped up in a slender book that’s both an exquisitely observed character study and a taut, propulsive thriller. Travel reporter Rennie Wilford is recovering from breast cancer, a mastectomy, and the recent demise of a long-term romantic relationship when she’s assigned to cover the fictional Caribbean island of St. Antoine—where amenities for well-heeled tourists are anemic as compared to other “luxury” island retreats, but still worlds better than the miserable conditions locals are forced to live under. Rennie ends up being drawn further into island politics than she’d like by her fling with a local bootlegger named Paul—and further still when the island finally erupts into violence and revolution. The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud – Hailed as an instant classic upon its 2013 publication, Meursault is both companion and retort to Albert Camus’ 1942 existentialist novel, The Stranger. Narrated by Harun (Aaron), younger brother of the Arab man killed by Meursault in the original novel—nameless in Sartre’s book, but here named Musa (Moses)—Daoud’s novel is a searing portrayal of the long-term effects on a family when one of their number becomes famous for having been murdered senselessly in an act of racist violence. Jumping back and forth in time (and beginning with the perhaps inevitable first line: “Mama’s still alive today.”), Meursault also covers the chaotic and bloody 1954 – 1962 Algerian War—which began as street-level protests and ultimately concluded with Algeria’s independence from France. Gwen Cooper is the New York Times bestselling author of Homer's Odyssey and My Life in a Cat House, among numerous other titles. Her latest book, The Book of Pawsome: Head Bonks, Raspy Tongues, and 101 Reasons Why Cats Make Us So, So Happy, is now available for purchase on Amazon.com. Gwen will donate 50% of the first week's proceeds to Meals on Wheels.

One film journalist’s stream-of-consciousness cinematic journey through the pandemic and quarantine, Part 6 By Laurence Lerman I was reading an article on doubles and doppelcängers in the cinema, highlighting movies like Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and a large chunk of Brian De Palma’s filmography (beginning with 1972’s Sisters), and I noted one I wasn’t familiar with—a European production by Italy’s Lucio Fulci that was partially shot at Rome’s renowned Cinecittà Studios, which I wrote about last week. With dozens of writing and directing credits to his name, Fulci, over one two-year period in the late Sixties, banged out a comedy (Operation Saint Peters, 1967), a spaghetti western (Massacre Time, 1967), a crime thriller (Double Face, 1969) and a historical drama (The Conspiracy of Torture, 1969). Into this mix came the 1969 mystery tale One on Top of the Other, Fulci’s first giallo, that uniquely Italian thriller-horror-mystery genre hybrid he later became strongly identified with (along with such genre stalwarts as Mario Bava and Dario Argento). Set in San Francisco, One on Top of the Other (also known on these shores by the considerably more lurid title Perversion Story) concerns a not-so-scrupulous doctor (Jean Sorel of Belle du Jour fame) who may be behind the death of his asthmatic wife (lusty genre queen Marisa Mel) in an insurance scam that will set him up for the rest of his increasingly good life. It’s when the good doctor’s dead wife reappears in the form of a blonde-tressed stripper and working gal that things really get tricky… A not-bad mystery with a satisfying resolution, the Italian import is feathered with a healthy dollop of nudity and erotica set to a seductive San Francisco vibe that’s reminiscent of Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo, the ultimate in doppelgänger films. As my cinematic stream aimed Italian—and Cinecittà—I decided to sample something from one of the country’s bigger hitters. Allowing for the wave of tension and anger everyone’s going through, I swung for the fences with something even more potentially upsetting than our current reality: Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. Made the same year as Fulci’s considerably lower-budgeted effort, writer/director Visconti’s The Damned chronicles the downfall of Germany’s Essenbeck family, a wealthy industrialist clan that has begun doing business with the Nazi Party in the early Thirties. (They’re fictionalized stand-ins for the country’s Essen-based Krupp family.) The film opens with a large gathering in the family’s baronial mansion on the night of the 1933 Reichstag fire, and it all goes downhill from there, with two more hours of family backstabbing, murder, suicide, child molestation, incest and—let’s not forget—the rise of the Nazis. Most of the action is set in a mansion, which despite its sprawling luxuriousness, increasingly feels like a claustrophobic deathtrap. At the film’s center—and away from the residence—is an extended sequence of the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” purge, which is here depicted as an SA officer homosexual orgy ending in a machine-gun massacre. Serious stuff, yes, but coming from operatic stylist Visconti, it all looks rich, handsome and lascivious, as do stars Dirk Bogarde and Ingrid Thulin. The decadence of The Damned gave me a hankering for a little bit of the Weimar Republic by a homegrown film and filmmaker who needed only to walk down the street to pick up the flavor. I passed on the era’s most popular actresses in their signature roles—Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929) and Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930)—and decided to lighten up the mood with 1933’s Victor and Victoria. A German musical comedy written and directed by Reinhold Schünzel (a prolific Jewish filmmaker who worked for some 20 years in Germany until leaving in 1937 when things turned really ugly), Victor and Victoria begat the simultaneously shot French-language version George and Georgette (1934), the 1935 English version First a Girl, a 1957 West German remake and, of course, the beloved 1982 Victor/Victoria and subsequent 1995 stage musical, both directed by Blake Edwards and starring his wife, Julie Andrews. Schünzel’s Victor and Victoria is a lot of fun, with superstar German actress Renate Müller starring as the lovely Berlin cabaret singer whose circumstances inspire her to pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman. As I grinned at how many sequences in the film were directly lifted by Edwards for his Victor/Victoria (particularly the flavorful musical numbers), I remembered that my wife had told me she’d wanted to check out the 1989 Sylvester Stallone/Kurt Russell buddy-cop movie Tango & Cash, which contains a scene in which Russell disguises himself as a woman—an exotic dancer, no less—to avoid getting busted. Perfect. I could synch up my stream with V and V’s cross-dressing storyline. We were only about five minutes into Tango & Cash when my wife realized that, oops, she had actually been thinking of 1988’s Tequila Sunrise. Well, they both came out around the same time, they both starred Kurt Russell, they both had “T” in the title—it could happen, I reasoned. So, we zapped Tango & Cash—which is filled with the kind of homophobic cracks that today’s screenwriters wouldn’t be caught dead writing, alongside its frenzied gunfights and chases—and poured ourselves a Tequila (literally and cinematically). Tequila Sunrise’s “childhood friends on opposite sides of the law” story is tried and true—it probably goes even further back than James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in 1938’s Angels with Dirty Faces, an early favorite. This time around, Russell is a Los Angeles police detective, his high school buddy Mel Gibson is a former coke dealer keen to go straight, and Michelle Pfeiffer is the stylish restauranteur who digs them both. This very cool, very good-looking L.A. neo-noir about a trio of very cool, very good-looking L.A. people was written and directed by Robert Towne and gorgeously shot by Conrad L. Hall. The challenge to the boys’ friendship and the ensuing romantic triangle works better than the film’s law and order angle, which brings co-stars J.T. Walsh and Raul Julia into the fray. What works best are the three leads savoring some of Towne’s most crackling dialogue this side of his screenplay for Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown. (“Just looking at you hurts,” Russell admits to Pfeiffer at one sexy juncture.) Well, my wife liked Tequila Sunrise. The same battling buddies theme—and one that has a similar Eighties drug wars backdrop—features in my next choice, 1987’s Extreme Prejudice. Walter Hill’s rugged action thriller stars a lean Nick Nolte as a tough Texas Ranger and a slithery Powers Boothe as his childhood friend, a former police informer who’s crossed into Mexico and become a major cocaine trafficker. Though it’s not without its complexities—there’s a parallel plot involving a black ops operation run by a rogue Army major plotting to snatch some drug cash—Extreme Prejudice is more of a meat-and-potatoes affair than the sleekly restrained Tequila Sunrise, ending with a climactic showdown in a Mexican village filled with more automatic weapon, rifles, pistols, coke and casualties that you could shake a kilo at. Mounted for maximum mayhem, director Hill, who penned Peckinpah’s 1972 favorite The Getaway, does an admirable job of updating the explosive finale of his one-time mentor’s classic 1969 The Wild Bunch for the Eighties. An aside: Years back, I was at an industry party and had a drink with the fine character actor William Forsythe, one of Extreme Prejudice’s featured badasses. I asked him about the film and distinctly recall him ordering another bourbon before responding. “Are you kidding? Shooting a Walter Hill film in El Paso? With heavyweights like Nolte, Boothe, [co-stars] Rip Torn, Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown?” He laughed. “I can tell you we drank a helluva lot more at the end of the day than we’re drinking now.” He was right—I must have been kidding. Come to think of it, I think I’ll have another drink, too. 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.

By Andy Borowitz June 7, 2020 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Vladimir Putin has rejected Donald J. Trump’s request for ten thousand active-duty Russian Army troops to guard the perimeter around the White House, Administration and Kremlin sources have confirmed. After Trump’s call for U.S. troops was rebuffed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, Trump reportedly snapped, “I’ll call Vlad,” and stormed out of the meeting with the two men. Much to Trump’s disappointment, however, his request for Russian troops met with a chilly response. “The optics would be terrible,” Putin reportedly told him. “Worse than that crazy thing you did with the Bible. Really, you need to get a grip.” According to White House sources, Trump has subsequently phoned the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, but his calls have gone straight to voice mail. 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.

Geography, Technology and Institutions New book by Jeffrey D. Sachs https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-ages-of-globalization/9780231193740 Preface: The COVID­19 epidemic hit as this book was going to press. A most global phenomenon—a pandemic disease—was suddenly provoking the most local of responses: quarantines, lockdowns of neighborhoods, and the closure of borders and trade. In just three months, the virus spread from Wuhan, China, to more than 140 other countries. In the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague spread the Black Death from China to Italy in the course of some sixteen years, 1331 to 1347. In our time, the pathogen arrived within days by nonstop flight from Wuhan to Rome. This book is about complexities of globalization, including the powerful capacity of globalization to improve the human condition while bringing undoubted threats as well. The interconnections of humanity across the globe enable the sharing of ideas, the enjoyment of diverse cultures, and the exchanges of diverse and distinctive goods across vast geographies. I savor my morning coffee, which arrives not from the coffee shop across the street but from the sloping tropical hillsides of Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Colombia, thousands of miles away. I delight in having visited these places as well, and have enjoyed their rich cultures and great natural beauty. I have learned from such visits and my work that human kindness, our aspirations for our children, and our enjoyments of life are common to all humanity, no matter how diverse our backgrounds and our material conditions. The new coronavirus reminds us yet again that the benefits of global trade and travel have always been accompanied by the global spread of disease and other ills. In this book, I will discuss how Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, viewed the voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. He wrote that the discoveries of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and to Asia were the most important events of human history, because they linked all parts of the world in a web of transport and commerce, with vast potential benefits. Smith also wrote, with dismay, that the new sea routes occasioned a massive repression of native societies by European conquerors and colonizers. Because Smith lived a century before Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Giovanni Grassi, Ronald Ross, Martinus Beijerinck, and others who elaborated the bacterial and viral transmission of disease, he did not realize the key role that Old World pathogens played in devastating the Native American societies. Columbus brought to the Americas not only conquerors but also a massive biological exchange. The Europeans brought horses, cattle, and other plants and animals to the Americas for farming, and also many new infectious diseases, including smallpox, measles, and malaria, while bringing back to Europe the cultivation of the potato, maize, tomatoes, and other crops and farm animals. This “Columbian Exchange” united the world in trade while dividing the world in new kinds of inequalities of wealth and power. The excess mortality of Native Americans caused by Old World diseases was devastating. The native populations were “naïve” to the Old World pathogens, and hence unprotected immunologically. In the same way, the world population today is immunologically naïve, and hence vulnerable, to the new coronavirus sweeping the planet. It is highly likely, thank goodness, that the illnesses and deaths caused by COVID-19 will be far less severe than the epidemics that ravaged Native American societies in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, the current pandemic will influence global politics and society as other diseases have in the past. In fact, we don’t have to go back to the fourteenth-century Black Death or the sixteenth-century Columbian Exchange to recognize the profound role of diseases in shaping societies and economies. Until late in the nineteenth century, Africa’s heavy burden of malaria created a kind of protective barrier against European imperial conquest. West Africa was known as the “white man’s grave,” since European soldiers succumbed in such high proportions to malaria. This barrier fell when the British learned to extract an antimalarial treatment, quinine, from the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. Gin and tonic (containing quinine) thereby became the beverage of British imperial conquest. Since then, Africa’s malaria burden has stood as an obstacle to child survival and economic development, though new drugs and preventative measures are enabling humanity to fight back against this age-­old scourge. More recently, another killer pathogen circled the globe and caused devastation and havoc: the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, the cause of AIDS. HIV, like COVID­19, is a zoonosis, that is, a pathogen of animal populations that jumps to human populations through some kind of inter­ action and perhaps genetic mutation. AIDS entered the  human  population most likely from West African apes that were killed for bushmeat. COVID­19 entered the human population most likely from bats. In the case of AIDS, the virus apparently spread among Africans for decades in the middle of the twentieth century, then was transmitted internationally in the 1970s and early 1980s. HIV/AIDS was diagnosed for the first time in San Francisco in the early 1980s, decades after its first introduction into the human population. By that time, many millions of Africans were already infected by, and dying from, the HIV virus. AIDS marked another major event of globalization, at both its most devastating and its most inspiring. The deaths from AIDS quickly mounted into the tens of millions, with vast attendant suffering. Many of those with HIV infection were from socially marginalized groups: the very poor, ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, intravenous drug users, and others. This delayed the response of many governments, but civil society groups, led first and foremost by people infected with HIV, demanded action and step by step moved the world’s governments, although after costly delays. Impressively, the scientific community sprang quickly into action, making rapid and fundamental discoveries about the nature of the virus, the causes of disease, and the ways to fight both. Within roughly a decade of the identification of HIV as a new zoonotic disease, scientists discovered a number of antiviral medicines that could turn the HIV infection from a nearly certain deadly ailment to a chronic and controlled infection. In these breakthroughs and the subsequent distribution of the new medicines, globalization played a huge role. The science of discovery was global, with new scientific knowledge moving rapidly across all continents. The distribution of the new medicines was also a coordinated global effort. A notable initiative was the launch of a new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, in which I was thrilled and honored to play a role during its early formulation and development. The speed of policy implementation and health interventions was greatly spurred by rising public awareness and the crucial activist leadership of civil society. COVID­19 similarly provokes the reckoning of the balance sheet of globalization, and the policy challenge of promoting the positive sides while limiting the negative consequences. The early steps in fighting COVID­ 19 have involved closing down international trade and travel, and even restricting the movements of people between and within cities of single nations. Quarantines are back, the word itself referring to the forty days (quarantagiorniin Italian) that Venetians held ships away from the port when the ships were suspected of carrying plague. The policy of quarantine dates back to the late fourteenth century. As did the AIDS crisis, the COVID­19 pandemic will require great attention and sensitivity to social justice in implementing measures to confront the disease. Some concerns are being raised once again in our own time: that open trade is simply too dangerous, that we should revert to closed borders and national autarky (self­-sufficiency). This is an illusion. While quarantines may indeed limit the spread of disease, they rarely stop the spread of the pathogens entirely. And their successes surely come at very high cost. Closures of trade bring their own kinds of miseries, starting with the massive losses of economic output and livelihoods. Throughout history, it has been important to understand the threats arising from globalization (disease, conquest, war, financial crises, and others) and to face them head on, not by ending the benefits of globalization, but by using the means of inter­ national cooperation to control the negative consequences of global­-scale interconnectedness. This has entailed the invention of new forms of global cooperation, one of the most important themes of this book. From the late eighteenth century onward, philosophers, statesmen, politicians, and activists have sought new ways to govern globalization in order to promote its benefits while controlling its many potential harms. The fight against pandemic disease has loomed large in the efforts at cooperation. Indeed, the International Sanitary Conferences that began in 1851 and continued until 1938 were among the first modern efforts at intensive global scientific and policy cooperation. These efforts at disease control gave rise to the World Health Organization in 1948, one of the first major agencies of the new United Nations, which was founded at the end of World War II in 1945. WHO, of course, is currently at the center of the global fight against COVID­19. WHO has helped to coordinate scientific information about the pathogen and how to control it, and to coordinate and monitor the global push to contain and end the pandemic. Globalization enables one part of the world to learn from others. When one country shows successes in containing the spread of COVID­19, other parts of the world quickly aim to learn of the new methods and whether they can be applied in a local context. The development of new drugs and vaccines to fight COVID­19 is also a global effort, as was the case with HIV. The clinical trials to test the new candidate drugs and vaccines will involve researchers spanning the world. The distribution and uses of the new drugs and vaccines will also require cooperation on a global scale. Disease control is not the only area where global cooperation is vital today. The case for global cooperation and institutions extends to many urgent concerns, including the control of human­-induced climate change; the conservation of biodiversity; the control and reversal of the massive pollution of the air, soils, and oceans; the proper uses and governance of the internet; the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; the avoidance of mass forced migrations; and the ever-­present challenge of avoiding or ending violent conflicts. All of these challenges must be confronted in a world that is too often divided, distrustful, and distracted, and now, preoccupied with a new zoonosis that has suddenly become a new pandemic. This book will not provide simple answers or antidotes to these ills and threats. The history of globalization is a history of humanity’s glorious achievements, cruelties, and self­-inflicted harms, and of the great complexities of achieving progress in the midst of crisis. Globalization, we shall see, involves the intricate interplay of physical geography, human institutions, and technical know­how. COVID­19 is at once a physical phenomenon, a sudden intruder into our politics and social life, and a target of scientific discovery. It is, therefore, the kind of phenomenon of globalization that has been part of human experience from the very start of our species. I hope this book will shed light on that long experience of global interconnected­ness, and on the role of globalization in shaping our humanity and lives. Excerpted from The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions Copyright (c) 2020 Jeffrey D. Sachs.  Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

From Mary Coombs/Ashland, Oregon (Photo credits: Mary Coombs) So, what could drive a pandemic off the front pages of the paper? Racial disturbances reminiscent of the 1960s. The trigger, of course, was the appalling behavior of a Minneapolis cop leading to the death of George Floyd – and, likely, the series of other racial incidents, mostly involving the police killing African-Americans, around the country in the last several weeks. How to respond? Here in Ashland, an almost all-white city, the response was protest rallies and marches. Entirely peaceful, if often angry. And – our local police chief came to the rally in uniform not to patrol but to join us on his knee. The really hard question for me is how to respond to the events elsewhere – often a similar mix of protest marches and violence: burning a police station, breaking windows and looting big box stores. (Fortunately Ashland doesn’t have a Target or CVS or Walmart to loot.) If I were just to go with my gut, I’d be concerned about the looting/burning as counter-productive for any change. But it also feels like I should look to the responses of engaged, thoughtful African-Americans. The refrain of one of the great songs from Hamilton is “who lives, who dies, who tells the story.” I want the perspective of people who are closer to the story; who can more easily understand the experiences and emotions of the young black men who appear to be most of the violent demonstrators. On the other hand, I’m a retired law professor. So my instinct may be to recognize the emotional charge, but to come down on the side of “what is most likely to lead to public policy changes that we (should) want?” And my race and gender and age incline me to see violence as counter-productive, while recognizing that peaceful marches and protests haven’t exactly led to serious wide-spread change that makes life safe for African-Americans from racist violence by cops and others. Anyway, again as a law professor, I end up saying that my “job” is to raise questions and inspire thoughtful discussion, not to provide (or even have) the “right” answer. From Patsy Swartz/Seattle, Washington I was in downtown Seattle on Saturday (5/30), participating in the 3:00 p.m. protest. It was a very peaceful, respectful protest march with people of all colors and ages, including families. It was an extremely rare sight to see anyone without a mask. My friend and I decided to leave the march that had stopped at the Municipal Court House on 5th & Cherry around 4:30 p.m. to walk down to 3rd & Union to catch the bus back to the Northgate Park & Ride. It was shortly after our departure from the group that destruction and chaos took over. We waited at the bus stop for over an hour but there were no buses or traffic whatsoever except police cars flying by. We finally realized that we were stuck downtown but eventually we did make it back home by a stroke of luck and a circuitous journey. This is the short version. I am so appalled that this very peaceful expression of injustice ended in desecration and looting of our community. Seems to me this has nothing to do with justice!

May 29, 2020 Greetings from Minneapolis, Minnesota where summer has blissfully descended upon us and….. wait, WTF?!?! Minnesota not-so-nice is suddenly on full display and I struggle to find words to fully describe what is happening here and how we are feeling about the murder of George Floyd. Undeniable, straight-up, homicide and yet the killer and his accomplices remain uncharged and at large. “Sickened” and “horrified” come to mind. What the hell were these cops thinking?! How could they possibly have thought what they were doing was okay?! As our mayor, Jacob Frey, said, if it were him or me who had been filmed with our knees on the neck of a man who died we would be behind bars. Why are there still no charges? The subsequent rioting is now taking our attention away from the murder of yet another unarmed, subdued, black man. What is happening is horrible. It is unfortunate that the story has become the reaction to the murder. The story is now about the rioting, the destruction of small businesses and “their community.” It is really hard to watch the fires and the looting and to make sense of what is going on. And here is where I will propose that perspective is everything. I am a privileged white woman; safe, with a home, food and my own security net. I am horrified by the murder, sickened every time I see the footage and hear Mr. Floyd calling for his mama. My heart breaks. I do wish that the protests had remained peaceful. But I also wonder: what have peaceful protests done to change the narrative? People of color are still seen as "less than" by many. Many lack food security, home security, job security, health security, protection from their local law enforcement, respect, opportunity and equality. Peacefully talking has garnered promises to do better and commissions to look into solutions. A part of me understands how we have gotten here. Interestingly, who knew there could be anything that would push the horrors of the coronavirus pandemic from the front page of our newspapers and from the top spot of our news reports? Minnesota is poised to top 1,000 deaths by this weekend; a small number for more populated states, perhaps, but pretty significant for us. Masks are actually being handed out to protestors who do not come wearing their own. Also worth noting: many of the cracks and fissures that have been exposed in our society by the virus are the same as those being amplified by this senseless murder. Bottom line: riots or no riots, these cops murdered George Floyd and should be behind bars. My heart is heavy. I wish I could leave you with something enlightening or uplifting but I’ve got nothing. Be safe everyone. Stephi Tikalsky/Minneapolis, MN

By Evelyn Renold Where are you getting your groceries? and What are you watching? That’s what friends most want to know these days (apart from your health status). Actually, there’s quite a bit to watch, though with movie and TV production almost at a standstill, the pickings may get slimmer as time goes on. (On the plus side, filming on Season 4 of “The Crown” wrapped just before lockdown, so we may get to see that later this year.) Below, some Insider recommendations: From “Downton Abby” mastermind Julian Fellows, Belgravia begins in Belgium, just before the battle of Waterloo, then flashes forward 26 years to London’s tonier precincts. Though the miniseries touches on the rise of the merchant class and the acceptance of rich tradesmen in polite society, “Belgravia” is really a genteel, highbrow soap. Which means lots of twisty plot turns, exposing deep, dark family secrets, and spot-on performances from an array of top-notch actors (Tom Wilkerson and Harriet Walter are perhaps best-known to American audiences). With only six one-hour episodes, “Belgravia” proceeds at a much brisker clip than “Downton,” and requires more of the viewer’s attention. Continuity problems and loose ends do surface, but it’s a satisfying experience overall. On Epix; you’ll need to subscribe, but can cancel after you binge. Also from the prolific Fellows: The English Game, about the beginnings of professional soccer in the U.K .of the late 1800s, and its transformation from an aristocratic amusement to a money-making sport. If that makes it sound male-centric and boring, rest assured it is not. “Game” also features a soapy narrative—filled with romance, intrigue and something akin to class warfare--in addition to a number of appealing performances. On Netflix. Bad Education is a made-for-HBO movie based on the true story of a high school superintendent on Long Island (Roslyn, to be precise) who embezzled millions from the district and lived the high life until he was brought down by a student journalist. “Bad” stars Hugh Jackman as the perpetrator and Allison Janey as his assistant/partner in crime. You may wonder how he got away with it all for so long and, more to the point, why there was so much money around for him to pinch. No matter. Jackman is a revelation here: sly and—yes—funny as the unctuous, overconfident administrator. (Janey, alas, overacts.) The real perp, who served four years in prison (and now gets a $170,000-a-year pension from the school district), is nowhere near as dashing as Jackman, but that’s hardly a surprise. There’s too much hysteria in the second season of Dead to Me, the Netflix comedy-drama-mystery, and the ending is limp. Still, there’s fun to be had along the way. The dialogue can be crisp and clever, and the jaw-dropping surprises and reversals keep you absorbed. In fact, most episodes end with a jolt, which is to say “Dead” was born to be binged--good luck trying to watch one at a time. Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini play Jen and Judy, unlikely friends who get into a heap of trouble in scenic Laguna Beach, CA. Cardellini, in particular, is a hoot—totally believable as a good-hearted but disaster-prone airhead. Niagara is a movie-movie, released in 1953. I saw it on TCM the other day, but you can also find it on platforms ranging from YouTube to Amazon. Though shot in color, it’s almost a classic film noir. Marilyn Monroe plays a shameless hussy, married to the long-suffering Joseph Cotten. Jean Peters and her husband (Max Showalter) meet the couple at a Niagara lodge, and murder ensues. Monroe, only 26 when the film was shot, gives a mature performance: nothing innocent about this beautiful blonde. And yet it’s Peters’ movie in a way. She’s the anti-Monroe—a down-to-earth, sensible brunette; attractive, but in a wiry, athletic way—and the story pivots around her. Director Henry Hathaway, though mostly known for Westerns, had a long and varied Hollywood career; here, he packs plenty of action and suspense into an economical 91 minutes. Niagara’s famous falls play a key role in this atmospheric film, and the stunning bell tower sequence prefigures Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Evelyn Renold is a longtime editor with a special interest in arts and entertainment. Her wide-ranging career has included stints at Newsday, The New York Daily News, Lear’s and Good Housekeeping. She currently reviews literary fiction for Kirkus and works with authors at evelynrenold.com

By Merrill Hansen I miss my dad! I miss my aunts, uncles and close friends who have left us over the years. I miss the noise! Sheltering at home has been too quiet for me, even though I talk to my children, my relatives and my friends by phone almost daily. I miss the ruckus of everyday life, I guess it’s predictable under the circumstances: I came down with COVID-19 five days after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order, and have only left the house twice, for short periods of time, with my mask and gloves. I suspect that the other people in my life feel the same way. My discussions with my relatives and lifelong friends over the phone are becoming more nostalgic, because the coronavirus is creating a new world for us that's unlike anything we've ever experienced, or expected, and we don't know what's coming next. When I talk with the adult children of my mom’s two sisters, whose mothers, like mine, are in their 90s, we talk about how small our mothers’ worlds are getting due to health issues, and how vulnerable they are because of the virus. They're the last of a generation in our family that taught my cousins and close family friends how to appreciate noise at our dinner tables. These conversations, which turned into debates and arguments that sometimes got angry and overheated, frightened guests who'd never heard noise at the dinner table. But our noise usually included laughter. Likewise, our goodbyes were always noisy, because as people were putting on their coats, there was always someone who wanted to "get the last word in.” My parents and their families all wanted their children to enjoy being a part of conversations, so they encouraged us, from a very early age, to be comfortable communicating our thoughts and opinions. They taught us the importance of learning about current events, asking questions, having opinions, and being able to explain why we felt the way we did. When we were very young, the conversations were usually age-appropriate, and we could be age-appropriately silly. But what I remember most is that these adults never made us feel uncomfortable. We were nurtured during family discussions. When a cousin and I recently were reminiscing, we agreed that we never felt embarrassed if we answered a question incorrectly. Instead, we were encouraged to continue to be part of the discussion. The only time I recall crying during a conversation was when an uncle didn’t realize how traumatic it was for me to hear him ask my mother a question that apparently was common at the time. He turned to my mother and said, "Ruthie, if there was a fire, and you could only save one person, would you save Phil (my dad), or would you save Marilynn (me)?" When my mother responded that she would save me, I started to cry. I knew I wanted to be saved, but I didn't want my father left behind in a fire. By the time I was ten, conversations included such topics as political campaigns, the Eichmann trial, and the news stories about a woman from Arizona who made the difficult decision to have an abortion in Sweden after learning that a drug she took during her pregnancy contained Thalidomide, which caused babies to be born without limbs. When I was in my teens, typical dinner conversations were about SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the Detroit Riot, Kent State and the Vietnam War. Occasionally, those conversations got raucous. Years later, my father apologized to me, and told me he was wrong to have defended the Vietnam War. As I began to broaden my social horizons, I learned that there were people who were raised in families that considered certain subjects inappropriate to discuss at the dinner table, if at all. Unfortunately, they were often boyfriends, or young men I hoped to date, or whose friendship I enjoyed. One young man who I was interested in told me that the “deepest” dinner conversations his family had were at Thanksgiving, when his father would go around the dinner table and ask everyone what they were thankful for that year. I couldn't bring myself to tell him that at our last Thanksgiving dinner, we were asked whether or not we would have "named names" during the McCarthy Hearings, to keep from being blacklisted or going to jail. I suggested leaving after dinner. The first time I invited a date to a family dinner, I knew he would be comfortable because the guests included other family friends our age. At some point during dinner, though, my father brought up the subject of marijuana, which I had not expected. He didn't directly ask any of us whether or not we had ever smoked marijuana; instead, he asked whether or not we thought smoking marijuana could lead to experimenting with other drugs, and eventually heroin addiction. After a few seconds of awkward silence, the daughter of close family friends, who was several years older than my date and I, proudly announced that she not only smoked marijuana, she sold it. She followed that with, "I am a single mother and need the money to make ends meet.” My head almost hit the table. Her own father, who was sitting with her mother, was livid, and yelled, "How can you need money, when your mother and I pay for everything, and we know damn well that "JERRY" and his bookie friends pay you to let them use your house so people can call there and place bets?" I couldn't bring myself to look at my date's face, because I knew what was coming next, "MARILYNN, DID YOU KNOW THAT SHE SELLS MARIJUANA? “No,” I answered truthfully. I didn't mention that I knew about Jerry and his unsavory friends. My father believed that everyone is entitled to a fair trial, deserves a rigorous defense, and should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty. But, when my cousin informed him during a family dinner that her husband had been asked to assist Angela Davis' defense team, it became apparent that my father did not presume Angela Davis, a controversial political activist who was charged with murder, to be innocent. The conversation ended with my father pounding his fist on the table, and everybody else grabbing their water glasses so they didn't break. I don't recall the young man, whose friendship I enjoyed, asking to be invited again. As a memorial to my father, on the Thanksgiving following his death, my cousins and I reenacted that discussion, with me pounding my fist on the table. On another occasion, a cousin and I each invited a boyfriend to a big family dinner. Both young men were very intelligent and pleasant, and assured us that they never felt uncomfortable discussing current events. That may have been true, until my father and uncle began the dinner conversation by asking everyone what they thought about Vanessa Redgrave having referred to the Jewish Defense League as "Zionist hoodlums" in her acceptance speech during the Academy Awards. And what did we think of Paddy Chayefsky's response to her comments, saying that he was sick and tired of “people” (referring to Redgrave), exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards to propagate their personal political propaganda? (“I would like to suggest to Ms. Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not an epic moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple thank-you would have sufficed.") My cousin and I couldn't help but laugh when we saw the looks on our boyfriends' faces and realized that they had no idea who Vanessa Redgrave was. But I also learned during one holiday dinner that there was a subject that was never to be discussed. As my sister and my young niece sat down at the dinner table, one of my aunts asked, “Where’s Leslie?’ referring to my sister's husband. My sister looked surprised and replied, "Why would Leslie be here? We've been divorced for over a year. You talk to my mother every week; didn't she tell you?" Then, like a scene in a movie, my mother said, "Nobody ever asked.” I miss the noise. Merrill Hansen is a legal assistant, living in West Bloomfield, Michigan. She describes herself as a frustrated writer, who wishes she could be Nora Ephron (when she was alive), if only for a day. She is a news-, political- and FB-junkie, a combination that requires a constant reminder that she needs to take deep cleansing breaths when responding to people who don't agree with her.

By Amy Lennard Goehner I had just finished writing a story for a children’s magazine on the NCAA basketball tournament known as March Madness when the actual March Madness took hold. I rewrote my story using the now ubiquitous catchphrases “contain the spread,” “shelter in place” and of course, the dreaded “cancelled.” Three days before filing my story, my 26-year-old son Nate was scheduled to come home for the weekend, as he does every other month. He has autism and lives on a seed-to-table farm which is part of a school-residence in the Catskills. It is a place that is the stuff special needs parents dream of. Nate’s March trip was cancelled. So, instead, Nate learned how to FaceTime, and those calls now replace our regular phone calls. They’ve also increased from 15 minutes to say, three hours. And from three times a week to daily. I am blessed that Nate is verbal, unlike many other individuals with autism, so I can hear him tell me he’s happy. I can’t complain because I have it a lot easier than parents who work at home and have young kids, but may I please kvetch just a little? I work from home too, and while I can do some things while FaceTiming, working is not one of them. Yesterday Nate called to FaceTime. And we did. For three hours. Our conversation went something like this: Me: Hi Natey, what’s up? Nate: I fed the donkeys and sheeps and goats and gathered eggs this morning and worked in the herb garden and ran on the treadmill. I can’t believe May is flying by! [A phrase he heard from a staff member a year ago and now repeats nearly every time I speak with him.] Me: “Yup” I said, while thinking “Flying by about as fast as a root canal.” After our conversation (pretty much the same conversation every day), we will sing together. Before Nate could talk, I sang to him—Gershwin, Cole Porter, the songs from the Great American Songbook. And one day he began to sing those songs, verbatim. He has a photographic memory and had been storing them all up. But he adds a twist to every song. He changes lyrics to include his favorite name “Andrea.” So listening to Nate sing along to Elvis Presley goes “But I can’t help falling in love with . . . Andrea.” On FaceTime we always sing “Baby Face, “My Dear,” (his name for “Our Love is Here to Stay” which contains the line, “But oh my dear”), and “Cheek to Cheek.” Or I point the phone to the digital photos on my desktop, even though I’ve sent him most of them. There must be 400 photos, so that’s good for an hour or so. Or he accompanies me on my walk around the apartment, which replaced my walk in Central Park when it started getting too crowded. He will always mention the name of every relative and friend he’s ever known, where they live, and arcane bits of data no one without a photographic memory could recall. And then sometimes he will say something for the first time. Like when he asked about an elderly friend of mine whom I told him had died. I asked Nate, “do you know where people go when they die?” Nate’s response? “Florida.” Gotta run. The phone is ringing with the words “FaceTime” flashing across the screen. I need my daily reminder of how May is just flying by! I’m a third-generation Brooklynite (when Brooklyn was a place to come from, not go to) but grew up in Newton, Mass. I spent most of my career at Time Inc. as deputy chief of reporters at Sports Illustrated, senior editor at Sports Illustrated Kids, and senior arts reporter at Time. I wrote a lot about autism for Time, as my oldest son has autism. I currently freelance for AARP and the wonderful new kids’ magazine, The Week Junior. I’m in my element ghostwriting online dating profiles or shooting pool and drinking a vodka martini — while listening to Ella, Dinah or Sarah.