Amid a Pandemic, Catharsis at Seven O’Clock

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Remnick on the hope and catharsis that he finds in New York City’s daily mass cheer, which celebrates all those who are keeping the city alive at their peril. Plus, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the inequality of COVID-19. On the surface, it may seem to be a great leveller—princes and Prime Ministers, musicians and Hollywood A-listers, NBA players, and other prominent people have made headlines for contracting the virus—but the pandemic exacerbates the inequality of the American health-care system. Minorities, and particularly African-Americans, account for a greatly disproportionate number of deaths in places around the country. Taylor explains that the disparity is caused not only by underlying medical conditions that are more prevalent among the poor; even the basic preventative measures urged on Americans by the C.D.C., such as social distancing and sheltering in place, are less accessible in black communities.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.7	In this time of pandemic, the streets of New York City now are so desolate, you have expect tumbleweed to blow along the pavement
0:23.3	where cars and cabs once clustered. You hear the wheeze of an empty bus rounding the corner,
0:30.5	the flutter of pigeons on the fire escape, the wail of an ambulance unnervingly frequent.
0:40.1	For weeks as the pandemic took hold, a sax player who stakes his corner outside a dress shop
0:45.7	on Broadway was still there, playing my favorite things and all the things you are.
0:53.0	Now he's gone, too.
0:57.2	The spectacle of New York without New Yorkers
0:59.7	is the result of a social pact.
1:03.6	We've absented ourselves from the schools and the playgrounds,
1:06.3	the ballparks, and the bars,
1:07.6	the places where we work,
1:09.8	because life now depends on our withdrawal from life.
1:16.2	The vacancy of our public spaces is antithetical to the very purpose of the city, which is defined by its
1:23.5	encounters, their constancy and their poetry. But the vacancy of the city is what's needed
1:30.9	to preserve it. And so you stick your head out the window of an apartment that you have not left
1:37.0	in days. You see a single scurrying soul, her arms full of groceries. She's wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief.
1:47.7	She quickens her step as she crosses Broadway, past Magnolia's blooming on the traffic
1:53.2	divider.
1:54.0	And like all of us, she's trying to outrun a thing that she cannot see.
2:01.7	E.B. White wrote in the summer of 1948,
	...

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