Gene Smirnov
“I m just hoping to create those good memories, so she won t remember all this, so it won t be at the forefront for her,” Latrish Oseko told me. She was planning a fifth-birthday party for her daughter, Ka’laya, and some of her friends. They were going to Sky Zone, a trampoline-park franchise, near their home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a birthday celebration, but also a moment to rejoice that they’d made it through a terrible year and that they had a home again.
Oseko knew she was in trouble as soon as the pandemic hit. “I was a contract worker, so I thought I would probably be one of the first people to be laid off,” she said of her job as an administrative assistant. Sure enough, her employer cut her hours in half at the beginning of April 2020. A month later, they dropped her entirely. Her boyfriend, Keith, was able to hold onto his job at a local university, though he was furloughed for a period. “But I was glad he was able to stay employed,”
Drew AngererGetty Images
Somehow, after everything, there remain creatures in Washington, D.C. obsessed with bipartisan compromise. One of our two major political parties has lined up in opposition to renewing what s left of the Voting Rights Act, which swept through Congress on a strong bipartisan basis in the Bush years, when it actually still had some teeth. The same party s Arizona affiliate is engaged in a circus audit of that state s election results because they didn t like who won. They ve also responded to the 2020 election, which many Republicans continue to Just Ask Questions about, by passing hundreds of restrictive voter laws in state legislatures across the country. Through this and gerrymandering and court-packing and the undemocratic features of the Senate and the Electoral College, the party has devoted itself, root and branch, to clinging to power without crafting an agenda that actually appeals to a majority of citizens.
Ada Calhoun s
St. Marks Is Deadtells the story of St. Marks Place in Manhattan s East Village, which went from part of Peter Stuyvesant s farm to a hub of new-immigrant life to a kaleidoscopic catalyst for the Beat Generation and the psychedelic counterculture that followed. Along the way, Calhoun traces how every generation considered each change in the neighborhood to be the death of St. Marks Place. Because St. Marks was, for many years, the beating heart of eccentric, omnificent New York, it might as well have been the death of the city itself. It was dead when Andy Warhol s Electric Circus nightclub closed. (The house band was a group called The Velvet Underground. ) It was dead when the Flower Power free love of the 60s gave way to the rough darkness of the 70s and 80s. Everybody always thinks they re alive for the moment when it s really dead, when it s all over and everybody moved to Connecticut. Or, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, Miami.
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