Looking Back at an Unimaginable Year

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

🗓️ 25 December 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s a cliché now, but by no means an overstatement, that the past twelve months have been unimaginable. This week, we’ll hear four short reflections on the events of 2020. Dhruv Khullar describes the early days of the pandemic, when he was taking care of patients in a COVID-19 ward. Anna Wiener visits California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which burned during the catastrophic West Coast fire season that destroyed acreage close to the area of Massachusetts. Simon Parkin waxes nostalgic—already!—for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a video game that occupied untold hours of families at home together. And Kevin Young, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, picks two poems that stand as monuments to what we have lived through: “George Floyd,” by Terrance Hayes, and “The End of Poetry,” by Ada Limón, both of which were read by the authors.

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.
0:12.4	So I'm on Bear Creek Road. It's a really windy road that, you know, feels like it would be a death trap or like a slip and slide in the
0:24.3	rain.
0:27.5	I'm going to Big Basin.
0:29.1	It's a state park.
0:31.1	It's one of, I believe it's one of, if not the oldest state park in California.
0:36.9	It's home to a lot of old growth ancient redwoods.
0:43.7	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Our contributor, Anna Weiner, lives in California
0:49.2	where she writes mostly about the tech industry, and she called us recently on her way up to
0:54.0	Big Basin Redwoods State
0:56.0	Park, where some redwood trees are so old that they predate the fall of Rome. Here at the end of
1:02.9	what's been an unbelievably difficult year in so many ways, Anna went to look at the damage from last
1:08.8	summer's wildfires. Those fires were some of the most destructive on record,
1:13.9	and Big Basin was squarely in their path.
1:17.7	I haven't been to Big Basin in maybe a year or two,
1:21.5	and I certainly haven't been since the fires this summer.
1:24.4	The park has been closed,
1:26.6	and I don't know how long it will remain closed.
1:29.4	I think that they're expecting about 10% of these trees to die.
1:38.8	I just turned around the bend, and it took my breath away.
1:43.9	There are three cars, one of which is totally flipped over and they're all burnt out.
1:51.2	Just like husks of three sedans, I guess.
	...

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