Quote of the Day (Brilliant, Smolinski, Danzig and Lipkin, on Animal Virus Spillovers and Pandemic Prevention)

“Population growth in both animals and humans, industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have raised the risk that diseases will jump [from animals] to humans and spread. But modern advances have also given the world new tools to prevent, track, and contain infections, allowing us to stop spillover from turning into global chaos.

“In other words, spillover and outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are not. Humanity's greatest task now, therefore, is to do everything possible to sever the link between the former and the latter. It is a task made easier than ever by modern science, yet also one that requires crucial elements sorely lacking in the age of COVID-19—speed, cooperation, and trust.  Without overcoming these deficits, the chain will remain unbroken.”—Larry Brilliant, Mark Smolinski, Lisa Danzig, and W. Ian Lipkin, “Inevitable Outbreaks: How to Stop an Age of Spillovers From Becoming an Age of Pandemics,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023

Song Lyric of the Day (Noel Coward, on ‘This Unkind Familiar Now’)

“Here in the light of this unkind familiar now

Every gesture is clear and cold for us

Even yesterday's growing old for us

Everything's changed somehow.”—English playwright, actor, and songwriter Sir Noel Coward (1899-1973), “Then,” from The Noel Coward Reader, edited by Barry Day (2010)

When Sir Noel Coward wrote these lyrics for the one-act “musical fantasy” “Shadow Play,” as part of his 1936 play cycle Tonight at 8.30, he conceived of a duet between husband and wife, about the initial love in their now-collapsing marriage. Reading the lyrics now, though, I can’t help reinterpreting them in light of COVID-19.

Everything has indeed “changed somehow” now. The longer the crisis lasts, the less likely that any remnants of our past assumptions or way of life will remain. Yesterday has only just passed, but it will feel like a millennium ago before all this is over.

Quote of the Day (Director John Singleton, on ‘Why Films Get Made’)

“This is not rocket science. The reason why films get made is that the filmmaker was persistent in their vision. I’ve seen many people second-guess themselves into nothingness. Your first impulse is usually your best impulse.”—American filmmaker John Singleton (1968-2019), quoted in Dave McNary, “Singleton to Filmmakers: Believe in Your Movie,” Variety, Oct. 20, 2012       

COVID-19 will test Mr. Singleton’s notion of a filmmaker’s persistence as perhaps no other trend or event in recent Hollywood history. Nobody knows what subject matter will interest audiences once a vaccine is developed and the state lockdowns are finally rolled back. Nobody even knows at this point to what extent audiences will come back.

It would be a shame if emerging filmmakers—not just African-Americans like the late Mr. Singleton, but also other minorities and women—are unable to find traction in the post-COVID Hollywood, just at the moment when some show signs of breaking through—and at the moment when America needs to hear these new perspectives.

(Photo of John Singleton taken during a USC football rally, Dec. 30, 2003, by Bobak Ha'Eri.)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Staying at Home)

“Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”— English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Emma (1815)

COVID-19 proves that, in this case as in so many others, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Sorry, Jane!

Quote of the Day (Stephen Crane, on Bicycles’ Mid-1890s Conquest of NYC)

“The bicycle crowd has completely subjugated the street. The glittering wheels dominate it from end to end. The cafes and dining-rooms of the apartment hotels are occupied mainly by people in bicycle clothes. Even the billboards have surrendered. They advertise wheels and lamps and tires and patent saddles with all the flaming vehemence of circus art. Even when they do condescend to still advertise a patent medicine, you are sure to confront a lithograph of a young person in bloomers who is saying in large type: ‘Yes, George, I find that Willow rum always refreshes me after these long rides.…’ There are innumerable repair shops. Everything is bicycle.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist Stephen Crane (1871-1900), “New York’s Bicycle Speedway,” in Crane: Prose and Poetry (Library of America, 1984)

Stephen Crane might be better known for producing such masterpieces of naturalism as The Red Badge of Courage and stories like “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat,” but during the furious decade of writing that preceded his death at age 28, he was also a prolific journalist. This particular charming slice of life was published in McClure’s Magazine in 1896. 

While noting,  as in this passage, the proliferation of the bicycle, Crane also commented on how it was transforming the larger American realm of fashion and mores—specifically, its encouragement of a ladies’ form of apparel that whose practicality now made it all the rage: the bloomer. A citizen, he writes, with something like the literary equivalent of a raised eyebrow, "covenants with himself not to grin and nudge his neighbor when anything particularly amazing passes him on the street.”

(For a longer-term view of women and bicycles, please see Joanna Scutts’ take on “Women on Wheels.”)

I got to thinking about the changing presence of bicycles in American life because of COVID-19. New York area residents are understandably concerned about the spread of the virus through public transportation. It seems, according to this post on Medium by the advocacy group TransAlt (i.e., Transportation Alternatives), that “Across the U.S., bicycle manufacturers have observed an unprecedented rise in demand since the arrival of COVID-19.”

TransAlt faults New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for not more actively encouraging the spread of the bicycle in the city. But the longer the coronavirus lasts without a vaccine, the more likely it is that enduring changes may occur in how Americans get around. Bicycling won’t, of course, be the all-purpose solution to longstanding issues with public transit crowding and safety, but it is an option that thousands are increasingly choosing for themselves.

(The image accompanying this post—The Byron Company’s 1896 photo "The Evening Telegram Bicycle Parade - Riverside Drive”—is part of the collection of The Museum of the City of New York. It was used as part of the museum’s 2019 exhibit, “Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History.))

Quote of the Day (Hubert Butler, on Crises)

“Timid or stupid people often enjoy times of crisis. They can suspend, for the country or the cause, those careful discriminations, which tire the brain and do no good to the career. ‘Now,’ they cry, ‘is not time for academic straw-splitting and parlour theorizing. Close the ranks! He that is not with me is against me!’ And so there is always a drift towards crisis, a gentle, persistent pressure towards some simple alignment of Good and Evil, Friend and Enemy. Even the churches are drifting slothfully towards a crude Manichaeism of Darkness and Light and away from Christ, who said so inscrutably that we should love our enemies.”—Anglo-Irish historian, translator, and essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991), “Crossing the Border,” in Independent Spirit: Essays (1996)

When Butler wrote these lines in 1955, he was talking about the border between the Republic of Ireland and Ulster. (Little did he know that the issue would become considerably more fraught and violent within a generation—or that, by 2020, unrest might raise its head again in this area.)

But he could just as easily have been talking about the post-9/11 atmosphere, or even now in the United States. People who should know better are falling in the social media for fake memes that appeal to their prejudices. It is precisely because an item strikes a chord with you that it should be investigated.

In bewailing “timid” people, Butler was not criticizing people who took reasonably precautions about their physical safety, but those who fell victim to a herd mentality, who followed a party line without thinking.

You would think that a public health crisis would be the one time that partisanship would be put aside. Instead, it has only exacerbated everything that has made these last two decades such rancid ones.

Avoid labels and embrace “careful distinctions.” Those actions have never been more necessary to the survival of this republic, or even the world.

Quote of the Day (Sir Edward Grey, on the Consequences of a Foreign Crisis)

“The consequences of…a foreign crisis do not end with it. They seem to end, but they go underground and reappear later on.”—English statesman Sir Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862-1933), on the prelude to WWI, in Twenty-Five Years: 1892-1916 (1925)

Sir Edward Grey was Britain’s Foreign Secretary in early August 1914, when Germany’s declaration of war on France and invasion of neutral Belgium ensured that the U.K. would join the conflict. As the twilight gathered outside, this normally reticent, even unpoetic diplomat remarked, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time."

But the quote that leads off this particular post of mine, though less memorable, is equally valid. The 2007-2009 recession was not merely a domestic economic setback, but also a “foreign crisis.” Even after economic indicators recovered, many citizens in the West didn’t. Their resentment fueled the rise of far-right elements on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In this new era, many have replaced “Communism” with “globalism” as an all-purpose epithet. But the consequences remain dire. To a large extent, this zenophobia has hampered Western responses to the coronavirus. I am afraid that going forward, as some leaders have looked for convenient scapegoats for their own mishandling of the pandemic, international cooperation will lessen, and matters beginning—but hardly ending with—public health.

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on the Mischief of Sports Stat-Heads in Lockdown Mode)

“The one group that we don't want using this vacation time too creatively is the statisticians. Stats guys have single-handedly wrecked baseball with their ‘launch angles’ and ‘exit velocity’ and gobbledygook like ‘Wins Above Replacement.’ My great fear is that while football, basketball and hockey are in lockdown, statisticians will spend their days developing statistical categories rivaling baseball's maddening facts and figures. Things like ‘puck vortex’ and ‘carom variance.’”—Joe Queenan, “Can the Lockdown Improve Our Sports?”, The Wall Street Journal, May 9-10, 2020