New York City Covid cases are jumping with the positivity rate doubling over the past three days. The surge is creating testing shortages and canceling shows. #nyccovid #newyorkcity
On these steps, playing Where’s Chris on the poster, the same steps he shuffled down for the first time thirty-seven years ago, you think about how a comedian, an actor, a writer any serious artist, which is what he is must resist the temptation to marvel too long at what they’ve made, must instead meet the constant challenge of equaling if not surpassing it. Must answer again and again the crucial questions echoing evermore in the mind:
Does what I make matter?
And, by extension, do I?
Will I be remembered the next century?
Here’s a little secret: Part of Rock’s productivity has been keeping a journal handy for more than thirty-five years. “You read it over, and you’re like,
Kyle Marian Viterbo had made it a point to get regularly tested for the coronavirus, even after getting vaccinated. That’s how, a little more than a month after her first Moderna jab, she discovered she had COVID-19. She traced it back to an uncomfortably crowded outdoor comedy show she’d attended the week before testing positive.
Viterbo, a science communicator, understood this was possible given that the Moderna vaccine is 94 percent effective around two weeks after the second shot and is around 80 percent after the first shot, though experts have cautioned that it’s not clear how long protection from the first shot lasts. Still, she said, it was “hard to think what all those percentages mean for everyday life, especially for the consequences beyond my own body. It felt like a gut-punch.” Fearing for the elderly relatives she lived with, she checked into a New York City Covid isolation hotel, where she rode out her asymptomatic infection and shared her experience o
The Supreme Court’s Religious Persecution Complex
Under the guise of “religious liberty,” the conservative justices are privileging certain Americans at the expense of the rest of us.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Democracies depend on law; authoritarian systems prefer legal theater. In recent cases having to do with religion, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has shown a distinct preference for the latter. This unsubtle turn in the direction of performative justice is among the more disturbing developments in American politics over the past decade. It is evidence of the drift in America’s right flank toward a new authoritarian religious nationalism.