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A Weekly Roundup of Fiction Recommendations By Gwen Cooper “Hello to All That” Edition Between the boarded-up restaurants, shuttered theaters, abandoned storefronts, and once-bustling thoroughfares now eerily devoid of traffic—not to mention the upper-crust denizens scrambling for their beachside second homes—it would seem as if Manhattan has been brought to her knees, at least temporarily. But the Big Apple has always been as much an idea as a place, which makes it all but inevitable that she’ll rise again. In the meantime, here’s a collection of novels that remind us there’s very little as exhilarating, terrifying, heartbreaking, eye-opening, and downright ecstatic as being young and fresh off the boat (bus/train/plane/et cetera) in New York City. Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann – “New York was steaming—an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable heat spell.” The opening line of Valley of the Dolls is a gloriously incoherent metaphor that every New Yorker nevertheless intuitively understands—and one that strikes me as oddly comforting in these, the days of New York City’s great distress. Via the characters of Anne, Jennifer, and Neely—three starry-eyed young ingénues striking out for fame and fortune in the big city—Dolls will take you in, out, and around the deliciously seedy underworld of Manhattan show biz in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and it’ll keep you thoroughly entertained every step of the way. But when you’re having this much fun, arguments over literary merit seem churlish and entirely beside the point. The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe – Here we have another mid-century triad of fresh-faced girls new to the city: Caroline, April, and Gregg. Everything, however, takes us behind the scenes in the publishing industry—although it’s every bit as tempestuous, sudsy, and sharply observed as Dolls. The barn-burner of a plot is both titillating and candid as it delves into issues of sex, dating, abortion, and career advancement. The result is a fascinating and canny portrait of female ambition that nevertheless never strays far from its pulpy roots. Everything takes us from Manhattan’s high-rise office towers to its low-rent rooming houses, and brings to vivid life all the dreams, schemes, and heartaches that pave the path from the latter to the former. A thoroughly un-put-down-able read—and far better than the movie it inspired (although Joan Crawford’s performance is priceless). The Group, Mary McCarthy – Norman Mailer famously dismissed this novel in The New York Review of Books as “a trivial lady writer’s novel”—which tells you nothing insightful about The Group, but tells you something very insightful about Norman Mailer (and makes watching Germaine Greer’s public trouncing of him in the 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall that much more gratifying). This time around we’re following eight, not three, recent college graduates through the Manhattan of the 1930s. Once again we have the kind of frank depictions of sex, contraception, the female orgasm, and lesbianism that caused the book, published in 1963, to be dismissed by “serious” critics as a mere “potboiler”—although it became a runaway bestseller, which would seem to indicate that it struck a resonant chord with a wide swath of the female reading public. The Group turns its gimlet eye on the ins and outs of romance and the inevitable renegotiating of college friendships as the characters move into adult life, yet spends equal time examining the pursuit of career ambitions with razor-sharp wit. Through it all, New York City’s glass-and-steel skyscrapers gleam in the background, as cool and self-contained as the prose itself. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill – It’s a decidedly seedier and more feral Manhattan that we enter with Gaitskill’s collection of nine short stories, which caused a minor literary sensation when first published in 1988. Emphatically leaving behind the comparatively glamorous worlds of theater and publishing, Gaitskill takes us into an Alphabet City populated by prostitutes, addicts, and the nightlife habitués who enjoy taking a walk on the wild side in their company. Through it all, however, Gaitskill maintains a wit and wide-eyed wonder that make her stories feel droll rather than dreary. It’s exactly the kind of book to send shivers up the spines of teenaged girls reading under the covers late at night—in far-flung suburbs from Altoona to Albuquerque—as they half fearfully, half hopefully imagine where their own New York adventures might take them someday. Which is to say that this book is gritty and grungy, and also an absolutely essential New York read. Open City, Teju Cole – Lest you labor under the misapprehension that I consider only female novelists’ takes on New York to be worth reading, I’ll conclude with the most-recent entry on this list: newcomer Teju Cole’s impressionistic, diary-esque recounting of a series of long walks taken over the course of a year by Julius, a half-Nigerian, half-German first-year med student. Julius’s late-night perambulations take us from Central Park to Ground Zero, from Penn Station to Harlem, and introduce us to a kaleidoscope of Manhattanites—most of whom are also recent immigrants, living the 21st Century version of that great and ageless story of New York and newcomers. It’s a heartening reminder now, in what can sometimes feel like New York City’s end of days, that the more things change, the more they stay the same—even in a city as intractable, improbable, and irrepressible as New York. 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.

By Alan Resnick It all happened so suddenly. My wife and I were having dinner last week and she asked me: “Do you miss sports on TV?” I immediately blurted out: “No, not really.” And now I’m feeling a little sheepish and slightly unpatriotic about admitting this in such a public forum, especially after reading the recent beautiful essays by Bruce Shlain and Amy Lennard Goehner in this publication on the importance of sports in their lives and in the broader American society. But, upon deeper reflection, it remains my feeling that I’ll survive and find other things to occupy my time. I grew up loving sports and actually have some pretty solid bona fides as both a fan and an athlete. My prized possession as a kid was a Detroit Tigers uniform with Al Kaline’s number 6 on the back. This was not one of the modern polyester uniforms; mine was made of wool, and I’d begin to sweat immediately as soon as I put it on. And it usually left me with rashes. But I loved that thing. My father took me to my first Tiger game when I was six years old. We were playing the New York Yankees. Tiger Stadium was constructed in such a way that all you could see was foul territory when walking though the main concourses underneath the stands. But when you began walking up the corridor to your seating area, the field would emerge, and it was absolutely stunning, a sea of emerald green with a giant scoreboard in the background. Our seats were located along the first base line, a little past the Yankee dugout. The usher seated us, and I looked up and saw Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra, Hall of Famers all, standing at the rail chatting and laughing. Not a bad first game at all. I was there when Mark “The Bird” Fidrych pitched against the Yankees on June 28, 1976, a game broadcast on ABC’s “Monday Night Baseball.” That game remains the most electric atmosphere that I have ever experienced. I was at the Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game on November 25, 1976, when O.J. Simpson set the then single game rushing record of 273 yards. And I was in the stands on Sunday, October 24, 1971, the day that Chuck Hughes, a receiver for the Detroit Lions, died on the football field in a game against the Chicago Bears. I can still visualize Dick Butkus, the terrifying middle linebacker for the Bears, frantically waving for medical support to come onto to the field as he stood over the fallen Hughes. I would watch any sporting event on television growing up. It didn’t matter who was playing, home team or not. I wanted to see it. And my interest wasn’t limited to baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Back in the day, the CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation) used to broadcast sports such as curling and snooker on Saturday afternoons. Some would label these arcane, but they were absolutely must-see TV for me. Baseball was my game of choice to play. I was a dead fastball hitter, and I could rake, if I do say so myself. In fact, Reno Bertoia, a former third baseman for the Tigers who became a scout for them, came out to watch me play one evening. (Truth be told, he was actually there to scout the pitcher on the other team, but my coach walked over to him and asked him to take a look at me, so it counts in my book.) My hardball career ended when my peers learned to throw the curveball, and I went on to play softball for another ten years. So, I’m a fan, but not a true fanatic. Fantasy sports hold no interest for me, nor does sports trivia. Frankly, I could not care less about the player on the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics World Series team with an undescended testicle who had a root canal before Game 3 and hit a triple in the sixth inning. Part of my current indifference is that I simply don’t consume sports in person or on television like I did when I was younger. I go to a couple of baseball games a year, haven’t attended a football or basketball game in a few years, and last attended a hockey game several years ago. And that was more out of curiosity about the new arena than the game itself. Going to a game is expensive, and my backside begins to ache by the sixth inning or halftime; on the other hand, watching on television provides great viewing angles and, if something spills on me, it’s my own fault, A second reason for my apathy is that my home teams are miserable. The Tigers and Lions both finished last in their divisions in 2019, and the Red Wings had the worst record in all the NHL at the time the current season was suspended. Relatively speaking, the Pistons are the crown jewel of the local sports teams, in that they were one game out of last place in their division when the NBA shut down. So, I don’t watch much regular season action, and only turn into the playoffs as they move toward the finals. I’m struggling mightily with the idea of watching sports in empty arenas, golf courses, or tennis courts. I understand the economics and the athletes’ desire to compete, but so much of the thrill of watching a sporting event is the atmosphere, the cheering, the booing, the chants, and the groans of anguish. I’d much prefer listening to a baseball game announced by Mel Allen, Ernie Harwell, Harry Caray, or Vin Scully to watching a game with no crowd. And I worry about the health of the athletes and the support staff needed to produce and broadcast an event. Of the four major sports, baseball seems to be the one that poses the least health risk, especially since the Tigers get so few men on base. I just don’t see how basketball, hockey, and particularly football can be played in the midst of the pandemic, even with no fans. And, if the sport has to suspend action again when athletes test positive--and I believe that is a when, not an if--it will be for much longer. If pressed, I would say that the Masters is the one sporting event that I’ve truly missed so far. There is something about the beauty of the course, the tradition, and the overall stodginess that I look forward to every year. But another large part of why I enjoy the Masters is that I used to watch it with my daughter and now, since we reside in different states, we text back and forth with each other during the broadcast. I miss that interaction as much as the golf itself. Maybe I’m in denial or just fooling myself about how much I miss sports. Or perhaps the time away from sports has resulted in a form of withdrawal. I do know that I did not relapse yesterday when the skins game charity golf even was broadcast on TV. I worked on a jigsaw puzzle instead. Alan Resnick is an industrial psychologist with over 40 years of professional experience. He and his wife are sheltering at home in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He is passing the time by cooking, exercising, catching up on friends’ recommendations of must-see TV and writing.

By Sandy Adler (Phoenix) It was a real sign of the times. This week, I was out showing a few homes to my buyers. A vacant home we looked at, staged with furniture, had signs around the house asking us to touch as little as possible while we were viewing the home. My buyers and I drove in separate cars and wore face masks. I had wipes with me so that I didn't have to touch surfaces. And I used hand sanitizer after leaving each property. Wearing a mask while showing a home and talking to my buyers is uncomfortable and hot. Being in a separate vehicle while showing my buyers neighborhoods is inconvenient. We sometimes talk on the phone while we are driving, so I can point out things to them about the area. All in all, it is a more time-consuming process than it was pre-COVID-19. And it is more exhausting than usual! But if we want to work with a modicum of safety, it is necessary. Here in Arizona, real estate services were considered “essential” from the beginning. Maricopa County (metro Phoenix) is the fastest growing county in the country with a very robust job market. Many realtors have continued to work, albeit with extra precautions that were not in place before the pandemic. We have continued to show and sell homes. New home builders have changed how they do business as well. Agents and buyers must have appointments to look at models. Buyer demand dropped, especially from mid-March to mid-April, but it is picking up now. What has the pandemic done to real estate overall? Property showings have started to increase again but have not yet reached the pre-shutdown level. I'm sure this will happen as states open up more. Most interestingly, most homeowners have at least 60% equity in their homes. While home appreciation is predicted to slow because of the pandemic, there is no prediction that it will go negative. Two strong reasons for this is that inventory of resale properties is low and mortgage interest rates for home purchases are at all-time lows. So the real estate business continues. Like other industries, we are finding ways to continue our business using technology that is easily available to us. I “met” with some new clients the other day via Zoom, doing an introductory meeting remotely instead of in my office as was usual before. We have done Zoom or FaceTime calls to show property to buyers who cannot come to see the property in person (we had done this occasionally and successfully before). I think these extra precautions will stay in place in the real estate industry until there is a vaccine for COVID-19 or a much greater comfort with reduced infection levels. That being said, I’m sure there are agents and buyers who do not follow these protocols just as there are people who are already happy to congregate in restaurants here without social distancing. Sandy Adler has been a residential real estate agent in Arizona for 19 years, working throughout metro Phoenix. She works with many buyers who are relocating from other parts of the country often, so she has helped many families move to the Valley of the Sun over the years. Adler’s son, Rob, and daughter-in-law, Michelle, are her business partners. They are very active agents, helping buyers and sellers with all sorts of residential real estate transactions. Says Adler, “We make a great family team supporting our clients and each other.” www.bestarizonahomes.com

How One Tech Star’s Ingenuity is Helping Pandemic Parents Cope By Andrea Sachs Once upon a time, there was a pandemic that made mincemeat out of parents’ work schedules and childcare plans, and left millions of squirmy locked-down kids in its wake. Across the country, an impassioned refrain could be heard: “I’m on the phone with my boss! I can’t play right now!” With schools closed and restless kids at home, what were stressed-out parents to do? Enter Miral Sattar, a busy New York City mother of two and tech entrepreneur. Sattar is the founder and CEO of Bibliocrunch, a literary services marketplace that connects would-be and current authors with other book publishing professionals. Sattar was born in Karachi, Pakistan, “loving classic fairy tales.” When her two children, Zara and Reza, were old enough, Sattar began to read those stories to her children. But she became alarmed that many of the fairy tales were “sexist and archaic,” not to mention overly violent. Recalls Sattar, “reading these tales of passive princesses, damsels in distress and torturous witches made me realize how woefully out of sync they were with modern times.” So she set out to rewrite and update them, and merchandise them as audio stories. Sattar’s kids were the first guinea pigs, er, beta users. In pre-pandemic times, recalls Sattar, her kids resisted staying put after bedtime: “My daughter would be thirsty for her third glass of milk. My son would be “super, super hungry.” But she found that both children loved listening to stories and as part of their bedtime routines she would stream the audio stories to each one’s bedroom. After nearly two years of planning, Sattar was ready in February to raise money to develop, manufacture and distribute the Bearily Bear Audio Stories; with them, she planned to offer a plush stuffed bear. But then came the pandemic, the ultimate Big Bad Wolf. It was clearly the wrong time to introduce a new product in the marketplace. Instead, Sattar and her husband Haider Akmal, who is in finance, found themselves working at home and homeschooling their daughter, six-year-old Zara, and their four-year-old son, Reza, What to do with the Bearily Bear project? From her own experience, Sattar could see the need for keeping kids stuck at home busy. Zara, a kindergartner, was engaged by remote learning. But Reza was more fidgety: “I love Mommy school,” he told her, “but when can I go back to my real school?” So for the sake of homebound parents and kids everywhere, Sattar decided to give away her library of stories as a gift to other parents. The whole collection of stories is available free at https://bearilybear.com. Sattar is a champion multi-tasker: as well as working at home and home-schooling her kids, she is seven months pregnant. She admits to being pooped at times: “I often want to take a nap after home schooling.” And after their third child arrives and the health crisis abates? Miral and Haider’s pandemic fantasy is to “move to a less densely populated area, where we could live in a house with a yard.” Where they could live, pandemic-free, happily ever after. Andrea Sachs is the editor of The Insider.

By Jeffrey Sachs (China Television Global Network) Editor's note: The United States has a strong economy, first-class healthcare and experts, but it has been the worst performing country in the fight against COVID-19, with one third of the world's infected people living in the United States. Why does the world's most powerful government behave so badly? Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University shares his ideas with CGTN in a Skype interview. The following are some quotes from the interview. They reflect the interviewee's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN. Unfortunately, in my part of the world, we didn't take seriously the threat of the coronavirus. Maybe there wasn't enough experience, because of SARS impacting China and the other countries of Asia and the Pacific more intensively and more psychologically. Europe and the United States were unprepared. But even after it became known how dangerous this is, the United States leadership has been completely incompetent. Trump is unable to have a logical approach to this, and unfortunately his government is filled with corrupt business people, who are in the government not because of their talent or their experience or their expertise, but because they want to make money from the government. And they are professionally what we call lobbyists. They spend their time trying to get money out of government contracts, and our political system became very corrupt. And the experts were either thrown out, or suppressed, or kept away, and then we elected a president who is unfortunately completely incompetent. So, every day the deaths are now rising, 2000 or more a day. We don't have a national policy until this moment. Every day I say in the U.S.: "Look at what China accomplished, look at what Korea accomplished, look at what Vietnam accomplished. Look at what New Zealand and Australia accomplished. They speak English too, they're like us, why don't we learn from them?" But because of our very poor politics and incompetent leadership, we're not learning from the successes of other countries, and the epidemic continues and its very dangerous. And Trump is especially dangerous, because he incites bad behavior. He tells people "go out, don't listen to the warnings of the experts!" It's incredible irresponsibility by a national leader. In my experience, he's the worst president in our history, certainly in my lifetime. So this is a very bad situation. We need countries to learn from each other. China after all did something amazing. Even after the epidemic had spread and was very dangerous, China got it under control, which is a remarkable experience. Some public health experts believed it would not be possible to contain an epidemic once it was out of control, but China proved that it is possible to do it with COVID-19. But we should learn how, rather than just making attacks, or being in the silly season of politics when so many people are dying. I've never seen anything like it in the U.S. experience.

By John Rolfe The husband in Le Chateau Bow-Wow (dog house) is a hoary cliché of marital discord, so for the sake of fresher fare I present the husband in Le Chateau Chickadoodle. The husband is me. Chateau Chickadoodle is our henhouse, the rustic residence of six chickens who found themselves cooped up with your humble narrator one recent afternoon. It’s no secret the COVID-19 lockdown is fueling discord in marriages. Happily, after two months of being underfoot, I remain on reasonably jovial terms with my spouse, though on occasion we have joked – I think she was joking – about her locking me in the henhouse for a respite from my less than endearing behavior. Well, she finally did it. I was busy with my housekeeping duties cleaning the ladies’ nesting quarters. My wife served their afternoon snack and departed. When I tried the door, it wouldn’t open. She’d slid the bolt latch out of habit. I think. There’s no way to unlock it from inside and no other exit. Forlornly gazing at our house, I waved frantically in hope of catching my wife’s eye when she looked out the window. Alas, she did not. So I stood there, a literally henpecked husband as Peggy, one of our Rhode Island Reds, gave my leg the what-for with her beak. Stuck inside indefinitely with a bunch of squabbling chickens. If this wasn’t an apt metaphor for life in America these days, what is? Oh, I’d survive but the novelty would wear off pretty quick. For one thing, the grub leaves something to be desired. I’m not big on a steady diet of raw eggs, pelletized grain and roughage by-products, and water. I’d have to fight the ladies for scraps of bread and the cramped sleeping arrangements would surely be in dispute. As I contemplated my fowl fate it seemed that we aggrieved Americans aren’t much different from my chickens. They are on permanent lockdown due to a permanent pandemic of predators – foxes, hawks, raccoons, coyotes — who will very possibly put a worse crimp in their existence. But if they really think about it, our hens have it pretty darn good with catered treats (served on a platter!), luxe dust bath, maid service, and intellectual stimulation — a “Learn German” DVD on a string they apparently only use only as a pecking toy. (I’ve yet to hear a word of Deutsch out of any of them.) Like it or not, there is a balance between freedom and safety in this world, but the lure of green grass and open space is irresistible to us all. Our ladies try to make a break for it when the door is open but at least they haven’t accused us of tyranny when all we’re doing is looking out for their well-being. After a half hour or so, it occurred to me that I would need to heed the call of nature at some point, the same challenge I faced the time I got trapped on the garage roof, where peeing on such a conspicuous public stage was not an option unless I was willing to accept the indecent exposure arrest that would accompany my rescue. I surely wasn’t about to live by “When in the chicken shack, do as the chickens do” and drop my business wherever it falls. The most logical course of action — caterwauling for help — had failed me on the garage, which is much closer to the house. I eventually got out of that fine mess by creating another — tossing the nearly full paint can I couldn’t set anywhere or hold while perilously climbing onto a rickety ladder. This escape would require breaking the door of the Chateau. What to do? With my Honey-Do list long and nothing getting done, my wife’s attention would surely be drawn in my direction at some point. So I sat on a hard wooden chair and took a little snooze that was finally interrupted by her voice. “How long are you going to sit in there?” “Until you let me out, dear,” I replied. “You locked me in.” “I was wondering why you were still out here. Why didn’t you yell?” “I wasn’t going to shred what’s left of my dignity by yelling,” I explained. “I waved but you didn’t see me. I figured this would be the quickest way to get you out here.” Like chickens, indolence does not fly around here for long and that proved to be my salvation. The experience taught me to be grateful for things like chores and the blessings of sheltering in place, though I’m still working on a taste for chicken feed. 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.

Little pandemic pitchers have big ears. That’s what Insiders Lisa Sachs and Matt Beck, seven-year-old Sienna Beck’s parents, discovered this week. There was a spirited discussion going on in Sienna’s home about the fact that baking the family’s favorite dishes was tricky, since flour is in short supply right now. As the New York Times reported this week: “Baking supplies — yeast, flour, baking powder — have become particularly prized finds as people stuck at home have time to perfect their challah bread or knead out their anxieties. “Everybody’s becoming a mini-Martha Stewart,” said Joseph Viscomi, a supervisor for Morton Williams, which now limits customers to one yeast package each and has waiting lists at many of its 15 New York City supermarkets. Five-pound bags of King Arthur Flour have been so hard to score that they were selling this week on eBay for $26.49, five times the store price. “There’s a black market for flour right now,” said Cristen Kennedy, 38, a college health educator who has scoured a dozen grocery and baking sites since flour disappeared from her grocery store in the Bronx.” Sienna took the culinary bull by the horns. The budding junior scribe surprised her parents by appealing to a higher authority to provide the much-treasured ingredient to her flour-strapped family. Bring on the chocolate chip cookies!

By Marty Barry Dear Insiders: The investment professionals at Tarot Capital Partners hope you are all surviving the Covid-19 lockdown with your health and sanity intact. Remember to wash your hands and wear your masks! Formalities aside, we acknowledge that we faced some uphill challenges in the first four months of 2020. Recent aggressive investments in edgy, disruptive startups imposed rather severe losses on our portfolio, as we encountered unforeseeable downturns due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing measures. For the sake of full transparency and disclosure we will review them here. Handshake Bootcamp Sensing high demand as the country geared up for the 2020 elections, we set out to save the great American handshake with these intensive weekend handshaking bootcamps for up-and-coming politicians and lobbyists. We recruited dozens of award-winning professional hand-shakers from across the country, and locked in great rates by booking six months of nonrefundable event space at top corporate hotels for our seminars. Initial registrations have been softer than expected. Silver lining: we were able to pull the plug on our baby-kissing subsidiary before we had committed much capital to its expansion. Survivor: Subway It seemed like a no-brainer that people were getting bored of the exotic and remote locales featured in this long-running TV franchise. Our pitch to the network bigwigs: we sponsor a season that takes place entirely on a crowded 7 train shuttling back and forth between Manhattan and Queens. We outfitted two subways cars with cameras, lights, fire pits, and outhouses. Taping, originally set to begin in March, is on hold indefinitely. Gesundheit ™ Group Sneeze Therapy This avant-garde emotional relief therapy gained traction in Italy in 2018 and exploded in popularity among people looking to let it all out in a sympathetic group setting without handkerchiefs or social judgment. We immediately grasped the natural synergy with our popular Pop-It-Forward group zit-squeezing therapy, and won a savage bidding war to purchase expensive intellectual rights to expand into the United States. Negotiations with Dr. Anthony Fauci to serve as our spokesperson stalled when he served our Chief Marketing Officer with a restraining order. Wipeout! Free Toilet Paper Our market studies showed that toilet paper was such an abundant commodity we could just give it away for free by printing advertisements on each square. Marketers of natural foods and health supplements lined up to get in on the ground floor of this program. Things looked good until we hit some recent supply chain hiccups, and our advertisers slapped us with millions of dollars in lawsuits for breach of contract. Hot Twister Yoga Studios In retrospect we may have been pushing the envelope a bit when we invested in a national chain of studios where traditional yoga lovers get to mix with fun-loving Twister fanatics for a sweaty contact-yoga experience. Right foot chataranga! Warrior pose on yellow! Unfortunately we bet the farm on exclusive rights for five years from Hasbro. It’s not clear at this time when we can legally open our doors again, or whether interest in the concept will revive among our target audience. The I❤︎NY Tourist Kissing Booths Staffed by attractive twenty-somethings, these kiosks are strategically positioned throughout bustling tourist districts like Times Square and the High Line. Instead of posing with a grubby Elmo or Spiderman, visitors can pay $10 for a wholesome old-fashioned county-fair kiss. Although currently shuttered by the Health Department, we are investigating the possibility of renting the kiosks out to evicted millennials who can’t stand another day of living at home with their parents. CraftMail ® Artisan Envelopes and Stamps A year ago, predicting that technologies like Zoom and FaceTime had peaked and would likely fade into obscurity, our savviest trend analysts foresaw the rise of retro letter writing with the comforting tactile enjoyment of lickable stamps and envelopes. Our stationery is handcrafted by artisan papersmiths in a workshop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, using recycled sandwich wrappers and doctor’s office magazines. Each stamp and envelope has a hand-applied natural adhesive with exciting natural flavors for licking enjoyment. The market for these upscale products has not developed as we hoped, and we have currently renting the workshops out to a company that stores unused tour-guide batons and selfie sticks. Infectious™ Perfume. The the idea began with a tagline: “Your smile is infectious. Your laugh is infectious. Why not your scent? Infectious perfume: spread the fever.” You have to admit it’s catchy. We had just begun taking advance orders from retailers when, well, you know the rest of the story. We plan to re-introduce this product again in a few years, after we convince U.S. Customs to release the first shipment of 50,000 bottles that they confiscated and locked in their secret hazardous materials warehouse. In closing, remember that past performance is no guarantee of future results! We are adjusting to the market conditions, and have already entered discussions with the developers of an app that will calculate estimates of your pasta inventory, hair length, and checking overdraft based on daily news updates of when the lockdowns will end. Marty Barry is a business manager living in Harrison, NY with his wife and children, who all came home for lockdown.

By Andy Borowitz May 13, 2020 WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Sharing helpful health tips with the American people, Senator Rand Paul said on Wednesday that the secret to social distancing is making everyone despise you. “People get all worried about whether other people are staying six feet away from them,” Paul said. “The trick is, if you act like a total jerkwad, people will stay much farther away from you than that.” Paul also questioned whether wearing a mask protects someone as well as saying incredibly asinine things does. “Airborne droplets can spread by people talking to each other,” Paul said. “If no one ever wants to talk to you, problem solved.” He urged places of business in his home state of Kentucky to reopen as soon as possible, a process that he volunteered to help safely facilitate. “If you reopen your restaurant and it gets too crowded, I will walk through the door and immediately clear it out,” he said. 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.

By D’vorah Kost An urban dweller all my life, I have longed, since childhood, to experience country living. As a child, I was dismayed and often bored by the monotonous manicured suburbia where I grew up. I fantasized about living where I could wander winding dirt roads and forests, find rocks and trees to climb and have adventures! After 68 years, I have joyfully arrived in such a place, thanks to this 2020 pandemic urban lockdown, all Seattle obligations cancelled, and my (previously long-distance) partner residing here. It's quite perfect, because when one tends a lot of land, you don't go out much anyway, and now we don't go out even more. Being here day after day is as awesome as I imagined, nestled in the Chuckanut Mountains, with the expanse of land, lake and endless trees that surround us, with no houses or people in view. Lots of birds, squirrels, snakes in the straw, and an occasional bunny or lizard appear instead. I never knew I would find such comfort in being isolated. When we are told that the most helpful thing we can do for our community is to stay home as much as possible we have complete permission, if not encouragement, to embrace our oft-neglected inner introvert. Insider's Introverts out there, stand up and be counted! Dramatic shifts in the movement of sun and clouds change the lighting of the landscape throughout the day. From morning through evening, looking out our western windows, I unwittingly fall into a reverie, which can easily turn into an almost-trance, and then the pull to tend to a garden bed, or the horse that resides on our pasture. That's the magic of Nature--she is a seductress, offering blue-green serenity and simplicity. A real luxury, I NEVER thought i would feel so at ease with this. Rather, I would expect my long-standing guilt about my privilege to rear its ugly head, declaring "That is not the REAL WORLD. What about the suffering masses, the individual stories, the horrors of the daily news?" But honestly, it is true that Nature is also the real world. What better place for me to be, tending land and birds and horse, in deepest gratitude, and learning to live in intimate partnership, after 25 years of deliberate independence? I sheepishly admit that I could live like this for months, coronavirus or no. That said, I still do mentally wrestle, as did e.e. Cummings, who wrote, “Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.” It's not surprising that savoring is far easier for me. As for saving the world, I am reminded, again, of a childhood longing: to end poverty, hunger and injustice. Now, in my "mature wisdom", I just embrace my feelings of overwhelm and helplessness and deep disappointment that human evolution hasn't arrived there YET. For many years now, I have been intermittently nursing a philosophical anticipation that some MAJOR disruption to life-as-we-know-it, is going to occur in my lifetime. Usually this vision would feature either a gradual (obviously begun decades ago) or sudden, cataclysmic catastrophe related to our climate emergency. We in Seattle have been fearing The Big One—an earthquake--which, per geological predictions, is overdue. I didn't foresee a pandemic, but I'm not surprised. Bewildered yes, surprised no. At the same time, all my life, i have been engaging in moments of magical thinking. As a child, i fantasized BEING magic. Since adulthood the vision usually involves a belief that, in my lifetime, Global Transformation shall be upon us, like the arrival of Messiah. (maybe it's too late for me to be discovered as such, but could it be my granddaughter?) Or perhaps the '100th Monkey' phenomenon would occur, in which just one more person learning/doing what is right and good provides the tipping point for real change to happen. Then there is Joanna Macy, environmental activist, teacher, author, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology. She coined the term THE GREAT TURNING, referring to the belief that we are in the throes of the third revolution, (the first being the era of the agricultural revolution, the second the era of the industrial revolution, and this one being the environmental revolution). She points to the choice facing us: we can participate in actions toward healing and sustainability, or continue to promote the 'industrial growth society' which will likely lead to human demise. I desperately want to believe that the majority of human beings prefer cooperation over competition, kindness over brutality, truth over lies, and is willing to make sacrifices for climate justice. Why wouldn't we want equality, freedom, peace and justice for all instead of the violence, abuse of power, and tragic disparity that exists? Am I fooling myself? Because the world is now being shaken up in a way that we've never seen before, doesn't that suggest big change opportunity? How about an economy not based on money, competition, greed and exploitation, but rather a give and take in which no one is a have-not? How about a bottom line not tied to the "holy dollar" but based on the common good? Can we PLEASE not return to the former normal, a system in which it is acceptable that Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has a net worth of $36 billion while his workers are being laid off with two week's lousy pay? Don't get me started on listing how much is unacceptable these days, starting with the current White House. Let us not go back to the way things were. Let us find an equitable economic system, one that cares for the sick and the weak and the old, the young, the parents, the workers and the farmers, the indigenous and the immigrant, the artist and the teacher, the scientist and the spiritual guides, the healers, poets, writers, dancers, musicians, gardeners....the entire human family. In this third chapter of my life, I need to be hopeful about the future, which will require moving beyond the habitual, both personally and societally. I believe it's time for those of us privileged folks to make sacrifices. We must think outside the box in order to realize what is possible. It won't be easy, of course. We will need creative, brilliant, kind and ethical leaders in every field of thought and implementation. Otherwise, this pandemic will turn out to be small potatoes as far as chaos and catastrophe.. "Imagine no possessions, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too...You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..." I like to dream how it could be if, when we come out on the other side of this bizarre yet oddly real phenomenon of pandemapocolypse, we will continue to work towards healing the planet and ourselves like never before, thus ever closer to Global Transformation. The artist, Judy Chicago, offers an interpretation of the Jewish Aleynu prayer that expresses dream quite well. I've excerpted a few lines: "And then all that has divided us will merge And then compassion will be wedded to power... ...And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance..." This is my hope, my wish, my prayer. So may it be. Amen. Ameen. Selah. Ho! Hairy Woodpecker on our birdfeeder, Steller’s Jay waits her turn. "Antibodies don't ensure immunity." Anna's Hummingbird dances by the window. "Unrelenting stress for health care professionals." Cherry blossoms float on wind like snow. "It will take years for the economy to rebound" Now a Flicker is at the feeder Now the darkened clouds reveal some sun, and the lighting changes once again. "A research paper suggests a more contagious strain.....Europe.....experts are skeptical...no scientific consensus." New info, contradictory info, biased info, opportunistic info, fantasy info, fear-mongering info, conspiracy-driven info all occupying, 24/7, the incessant waves of media. Tune in? Or tune out---as i must do regularly, as evidenced above. Just turning my head. Looking out the window. Aaaahhh. But we are all deeply impacted, unless we've been stranded for months on an inaccessible island. Most of us are homebound with an onslaught of news like we've never encountered. This crazy-making info and radical required behavior change may render us all insane before we even get a vaccine, or, God forbid, catch the virus. Some temporary antidotes: step outside, find a tree, flower, rock, anything of the natural world, to deeply appreciate. Breathe deeply, boost your oxygen content, talk to yourself as though you were reassuring a friend who's about to have a meltdown. Find that which makes you laugh, like the cartoons that Andrea publishes here. Or Mel Brooks films. Or or or.... "Change is imminent, and can be a friend" said my hero, Andrew Cuomo, this morning. I've been watching his briefings from the get-go, to confirm Reality, hear a leader I can trust. I'd love to see a write-in campaign, "Cuomo for President, 2020." I know he's declined, but with a little pressure from an adoring public? We are living history in the making during this pandemic of COVID-19, in which a teeny-tiny microscopic organism has forced 21st century human beings to radically change our most basic interactive behaviors, and to suffer the loss of so much that we have been taking for granted. So many lives have been upended through enormous loss, serious and lesser disappointments, unexpected and daunting challenges the world over. Who can fathom these numbers, these personal stories, these life and death and economic repercussions of COViD-19? So much we do not know. It's very humbling. It seems like we are all players in an intriguing and baffling movie, wondering how it will end. What an opportunity to learn the Truth that we are all interconnected.

By Alan Resnick Like millions of Americans, I’m wrestling with the decision of whether or not to return to work as shelter-in-place rules are gradually lifted. Unlike the vast majority of Americans, however, I am remarkably fortunate in that my life situation is such that my calculus does not involve balancing my personal health against the cold realities of paying rent or a mortgage, putting food on the table, maintaining health insurance, or both finding and figuring out how to pay for child care with schools not open. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how excruciating this choice must be for so many people. So I have the luxury of truly being able to choose whether or not to return to work. But the decision is still complex. By way of background, I conduct vocational assessments on a part-time basis for a human services organization. The purpose of these assessments is to identify possible career alternatives for individuals based on their cognitive functioning, occupational interests and aptitudes, and capacity for additional formal education or training. It is the perfect gig at this point in my life (I turn 70 in January). I average about 12 hours a week, so time is also available for volunteering, hobbies, and doing nothing at all. I make my own schedule, come and go as I please, conduct all administrative activities from home, am trusted implicitly by my boss, and attend no meetings. And I enjoy the clients I work with and the intellectual challenge of analyzing interview and test results and converting them into a report that presents a coherent picture of a person. But it’s obvious that the current assessment process is loaded with risks to my personal safety, the safety of co-workers, the safety of clients, and, indirectly, all the people with whom we interact. There are dozens of potential infection risks in our current assessment process that need to be mitigated. Some of these are present for anyone who works outside of the home, such as the need to wear a mask at work. I’m assuming that our organization will mandate that clients wear masks too. And I’m certainly going to be wearing personal protection equipment. But I keep visualizing myself entering our reception area in a mask and gloves and asking: “Mr. Smith?” This seems more like the start of a colonoscopy than a vocational assessment. Our intake process alone, which I barely gave a second thought to in the past, now looks absolutely terrifying. The client enters our facility (!), checks in with the receptionist (!), is handed an intake form (!), completes it, and returns it (!). I then head to the reception area, walk up to the client (!), introduce myself, shake hands (!), and take them back to my office. While walking shoulder to shoulder (!), I engage in some witty and lively verbal banter (“Did you have any trouble finding the facility? How was your weekend?”). We enter my office and sit at a round table that is approximately 42 inches in diameter (!). I explain the assessment process, answer any questions, offer a beverage (!), and then conduct a background interview. This represents just the first 45 minutes of the assessment. If I was in the movie The China Syndrome, I’d already be thrown into a decontamination room and hosed down. Masks, while essential, create a special difficulty. Like any good interviewer, I listen for both what a person says and how they say it, because tone, volume, inflection, gesticulation, and facial expressions are much more reliable indicators of what a person is actually saying than are words. While it’s possible to pick up some cues from looking at the eyes alone, a mask makes it extremely difficult to tell if someone is smiling when sharing something that should make them happy or proud, frowning when disclosing something that should make them sad or angry, or even changing expression at all (and I have assessed people who have sat stone-faced over the course of a four-hour session). Equally important, my wearing a mask limits my ability to communicate nonverbally with my client to establish and maintain rapport. They cannot see me smiling in admiration if they mention a special accomplishment, frowning in sympathy if they reveal a disappointment or personal failing, or grinning in enjoyment of a joke or funny story. (I suppose there is always the appreciative snort.) Work-space risks are the easiest to resolve. A larger office would enable me to maintain appropriate social distance, as would a larger table. But I have no idea how I would administer paper-and-pencil tests when sitting six feet away from a person. Perhaps materials could be put in a Ziploc bag and pushed across the table with a yardstick or broomstick. A return Ziploc bag could be included in the client’s package, like the modern version of enclosing a postage-paid, self-addressed envelope. So, it’s almost a certainty that paper-and-pencil tests will have to be eliminated. But there are certain parts of some tests in the current battery that cannot be completed electronically. This creates problems in both computing scores and interpreting results. And electronic testing, although safer in that it eliminates all face-to-face contact, also eliminates my ability to watch a person’s behavior during test completion, which is another rich source of assessment data. I’ve observed people talking to themselves while completing computerized tests, humming, swearing (either at themselves or at the screen), and displaying anxiety through twirling their hair, repeatedly clicking a ballpoint pen open and closed, cracking their knuckles, or rapidly bouncing a leg up and down. While it’s clear to me that the assessment process can be fine-tuned to avoid health risks, what keeps gnawing at me is the impact of all these necessary modifications. There is very little research on how telepractice affects test scores. Many clients enter the assessment apprehensive about the process and how the results may impact their employment future. Masks, gloves, walking six feet apart from one another and sitting at opposite ends of a large conference room table don’t do much to create a warm and comfortable environment for people. And neither does a teleconference with a bunch of passwords and user names. Clearly, there are employees like barbers and workers in meatpacking plants who face much greater health dangers than I do. But I remain undecided about returning to work and the clock’s ticking. Although I’ve reached the conclusion that I can do my job safely in the new normal, I’m not sure that I want to. Maybe I’m stubborn and resistant to change (I much prefer to think of myself as old school or a traditionalist). Or maybe it’s because the new job doesn’t sound like much fun. Alan Resnick is an industrial psychologist with over 40 years of professional experience. He and his wife are sheltering at home in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He is passing the time by cooking, exercising, catching up on friends’ recommendations of must-see TV and writing.