Remembering a City at the Peak of Crisis

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

🗓️ 19 March 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

April 15, 2020, was near the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, which was then its epicenter. On that day, a crew of New Yorker writers talked with people all over the city, in every circumstance and walk of life, to form a portrait of a city in crisis. A group station manager for the subway talks about keeping the transit system running for those who can’t live without it; a respiratory therapist copes with break-time conversations about death and dying; a graduating class of medical students gets up the courage to confront the worst crisis in generations; and a new mother talks about giving birth on a day marked by tragedy for so many families. The hour includes contributions from writers including William Finnegan, Helen Rosner, Jia Tolentino, Kelefa Sanneh, and Adam Gopnik, who says, “One never knows whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life, or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life. That’s the mystery of the pandemic.” This episode originally aired on April 24, 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:10.1	I don't even know if this thing is working.
0:13.1	Well, I guess it is. Seems to be shown my voice there.
0:17.1	Yeah, so it's really quiet, and it is 538 a.m.
0:26.2	A.
0:27.0	A guy rides his bicycle down here and is at a bench and is doing some kind of leg exercises
0:33.0	and he's the only human around on the boardwalk besides me.
0:41.1	On April 15, 2020, the writer Ian Fraser was in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn
0:46.4	to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.
0:50.7	The day that was dawning, like the ones that had preceded it,
0:55.9	was going to be dreadful.
1:01.9	We were suffering, all of us, the first hideous wave of a pandemic that in a year's time would kill more than a half million Americans.
1:06.6	We're in an epicenter of a disease.
1:10.0	The reason that this is an epicenter is that nature made this as a perfect place for things to come together.
1:17.6	I mean, the way the salt water and the fresh water combined, the way, you know, the sound and New York Harbor and the Hudson River coming in and then these islands, this
1:29.3	archipelago.
1:30.3	And it's just such a perfect combination.
1:32.3	I really feel like you just see God here because you see massive things happen.
1:40.3	That's, I think, Rockaway Point, and that is Sandy Hook.
1:49.0	And those two points funneled the surge during the hurricane, during Sandy, and it just sent water like just blasting over to Staten Island.
1:59.0	I mean, it's like God just saying,
2:03.2	pay attention, you know?
	...

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