Category Archives: Transhuman News

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Before Weird Al Yankovic parodies a song, he asks the artist for permission. He wants the subjects to be in on the joke, not exploited by it Michael Jackson loved the takeoff Eat It. So when the staff of The Times Magazine envisioned a photograph full of Weird Al fans dressed like the singer, it likewise sought approval from Mr. Yankovic.

He agreed, and the result was a group shot that was just as much of a sendup as any Weird Al song: the singer and 232 of his biggest fans (and one dog) in Los Angeles in January, well before the world got a whole lot weirder.

The idea emerged months earlier while the writer Sam Anderson was working on his profile, which examined the unexpected longevity of Mr. Yankovics career and its impact on fans. Through various genres of music, the artists changed, but Weird Al stayed the same. He has parodied artists including Madonna and Iggy Azalea. He never went away, Mr. Anderson said of the singers body of work.

On Halloween, Mr. Yankovic posted an Instagram slide show of people dressed like classic 80s Weird Al curly hair, mustache, Hawaiian shirt, oversize aviator glasses. When Amy Kellner, a senior photo editor for the magazine, saw the slide show, she knew immediately what she wanted to try. I thought, Oh my God, what if we got a giant group of people, all dressed like Weird Al, and then we could do the Wide World of Weird Al?

When Ms. Kellner brought the idea to Kathy Ryan, the magazines director of photography, and Gail Bichler, the magazines design director, the response was positive. I loved the idea, but the reality of it was daunting, Ms. Bichler said.

In early January, the magazine issued a call for participants through Mr. Yankovics Twitter, Facebook and newsletter. The photo staff didnt reach out until two weeks before the shoot because editors wanted to avoid being overwhelmed with interested fans looking to come from all over the world. Given enough time, they surely would have, Ms. Kellner said. In 2018, when Mr. Yankovic received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 1,500 people showed up.

The short notice did not prevent Weird Als from Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas and even Canada from flying to Los Angeles.

The staff held extensive discussions about how many should be in the photo, and who should be included. We wanted to make sure we got a diverse group of people, and I needed to have a dog dressed up as Al for my own personal satisfaction, Ms. Kellner said. The staff also realized it couldnt afford to buy costumes for everyone, so fans would have to provide them, narrowing the pool.

As the magazine sifted through responses to the callout, the photographer Art Streiber, who is based in Los Angeles, researched photos of large groups of people and sent Ms. Kellner and Ms. Ryan examples of what 100 people looked like, then 200, then 250, 350, etc.

We made a cover mock-up, and it seemed like 250 was about the right number, Ms. Kellner said. In the end we got 232 human Als, and one dog Al.

The photo staff instructed the participants who were selected to bring four items: a curly wig, aviator glasses, a mustache and a Hawaiian shirt. If you can put on four things and people know who you are, thats an icon, Ms. Kellner said. Weird Al himself went clean shaven a few years ago.

On Jan. 18, the Weird Als, ranging from 6 months to 70 years old, gathered for the shoot though the baby Al had to wear a pacifier in addition to the costume, since the accordion music playing in the background was upsetting her. (The form that fans had completed beforehand playfully requested that they check a box if they were going to bring a real accordion, a toy accordion or no accordion.)

While everyone was waiting for the shoot to begin, there were singalongs to Weird Al songs, and of course everyone knew all the words. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and the vibe was happy and fun, Ms. Kellner said. I think everyone had a great time. Al came out to say hi to everyone and got a super enthusiastic standing ovation. I brought my own cassette of Weird Al in 3-D that Ive kept since 1984, and he so kindly signed it for me. I was beaming.

During the shoot, individual portraits of Weird Als were taken along with the group shot. After everything was completed by late afternoon, Mr. Yankovic, true to form, stayed to sign autographs.

The photograph was planned as a cover. But as the coronavirus outbreak intensified, the editors changed course. That didnt seem right anymore the crowds of people during social distancing, Ms. Bichler said.

The final cover of Sundays magazine features a story on emergency medical workers fighting the coronavirus in Italy. But the group shot from January is now part of the opening spread of the article on Mr. Yankovic.

Im disappointed that its not the cover, but Im hopeful that it will bring joy to the nerds of the world, Ms. Kellner said.

Its what Weird Al would want.

Follow the @ReaderCenter on Twitter for more coverage highlighting your perspectives and experiences and for insight into how we work.

Read the original:
A Group Picture That Just Had to Be Weird - The New York Times

Publish dateApril 09, 2020

Actor Stacy Keach has been entertaining us for more than five decades, and for the last four of those, hes been a fixture on Matt LeBlancs CBS comedy Man with a Plan, playing Joe Burns, father of the characters played by LeBlanc and co-star Kevin Nealon. The series, which returned for a fourth season last Thursday, is providing some much-needed levity during our extended Coronavirus staycations, and Keach is thrilled to oblige. We were lucky that we wrapped [this] season before Christmas, he told MediaVillage during an exclusive chat. We were originally disappointed to learn wed be airing much later in the season, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise! Its great to be able to provide a little bit of a distraction for people, and right now we all need some laughs as a lot of people are having hard times. We all need to come together and share a few laughs.

See original here:
Man with a Plan Dad Stacy Keach on Matt LeBlanc, Career Longevity and The Exorcist - MediaVillage

Does anyone else feel like they are watching a science fiction movie? The streets show few signs of life, school buses are parked, and empty commercial aircrafts sit idle on runways. Rush hour traffic does not exist in most places while shopping malls, fitness centers, schools, colleges, and most businesses are closed until further notice. It is surreal, isnt it?

And, as if that was not epic enough, we have been told to shelter-in-place and isolate ourselves in our homes with no outside human to human contact. The result of all of this is an emotional toll like nothing we have experienced in our lifetimes! We are left with a roller coaster of emotions to deal with, from super ramped up anxiety to a connection-void the size of a lunar crater.

So, where do we go from here, and how do we survive this new normal that has descended upon our world with little warning to turn our mindset into a war zone mentality? Our biggest defense, plain and simple, is to stay connected to others!

We have been designed and wired as social creatures, and connection to others is key to our survival. Studies continue to show that we need others, it is not optional. It is more important to our state of wellness than being fit, eating healthy, and exercising, according to research on longevity.

Now more than ever as we self-quarantine in our homes, we must make a deliberate effort to connect with our family, friends, and neighbors. We are fortunate to live in an era where this is possible with the gift of modern technology. From Facetime to Skype, and from social media to cell phones, there are many methods available to assist us to see and talk to our loved ones today! My husband and I have instituted a weekly Skype family meeting so we can see our kids and their families, especially our precious grands. It helps so much to fill that deep void that has crept into our daily lives as we hunker down. Last week we also added in my husbands brother and sister to the Skype call. It was fun and festive, as we laughed about some of us showing obvious changes of hair color and length, with the closing of our hair salons. Humor is good for the soul.

We know in lifes darkest moments we benefit the most from leaning on the special connections of our loved ones, those who connect us to joy, peace and most importantly, hope. Reach out today through a text, call, or social media to someone who you have not spoken to recently. We are in very unusual times which calls for very intentional actions. The key to our survival individually and collectively, is connection. Together we will help each other get through this, and together we will rise up stronger, more resilient, and forever changed for the better!

Read more from the original source:
Connection The Isolation Buster! - Thrive Global

SOLON, Ohio -- Tracy Sullivan has worked 29 years for the city, but she had never been a director -- until now.

On Monday (April 6), City Council confirmed Mayor Ed Kraus appointment of Sullivan to the newly created position of director of community and cultural enrichment.

She also will continue in her role as manager of the Solon Center for the Arts, a position she has held since December 2014.

Sullivans salary is $79,000, plus 5 percent for longevity in service to the city, according to Nancy Stolarsky, the citys director of human resources.

For years, Tracy has managed the Solon Center for the Arts, but under the recreation department, Kraus said. Now this elevates the position to a directors level.

Kraus said the Solon Center for the Arts is returning to a stand-alone entity -- a status it held in the past -- as opposed to being under the umbrella of the recreation department.

The arts center is just bursting at the seams, and Tracy has been instrumental in the growth of the center, Kraus said. Our programming in terms of music, dance and art has been outstanding throughout the years under Tracys leadership.

Arts and culture is such a critical component to a community. This deserves to be a high-level director position.

Sullivan, a 1993 graduate of Solon High School who lives in the city, said shes excited about the promotion.

Its our chance to keep developing the arts center and branching out to some new programming and offerings for the community, she said.

For her entire career -- including 22 years as a full-time employee -- Sullivan has worked under Donald Holub, who retired March 31 after 31 years as the citys director of recreation.

She said in addition to continuing to oversee the arts center, she anticipates shell be working hand in hand with the recreation department, as well.

Sullivan served as a program coordinator at the Solon Community Center from 1997 until she was named manager of the arts center. In that role, she managed the citys summer camp, co-coordinated the Solon Home Days festival and supervised the after-school program, among other duties.

I still help out with programs at the Solon Community Center, even though Im no longer a program coordinator, she said. I still do Home Days and Fall Fest (the citys fall festival) and help with the summer camp.

Sullivan, 44, got her start with the city at age 15, working in concessions at the Solon Community Park and the outdoor swimming pool in 1991. She went on to work at the summer camp as a camp counselor and eventually as camp director.

I fell in love with the job and ended up changing my (college) major to the recreation field, said Sullivan, noting that she earned a bachelors degree in leisure service management from Kent State University in 1997.

It was perfect timing, because a spot opened up as a programmer (at the Solon Community Center), and I was hired as program coordinator for youth programs with the (recreation) department in 1997.

Sullivan said dealing with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been challenging for the Solon Center for the Arts. As a result of the outbreak of COVID-19, the arts center has been closed since March 14, along with the Solon Community Center and the Solon Senior Center.

We have gone virtual with a lot of our programming, she said, and we continue to keep adding weekly, turning more programs into virtual offerings for students and families.

Sullivan said the arts center offers a wide range of programs, mostly geared toward youth.

We offer a lot of things that the kids love, like dance and music, she said. But one of our goals is to continue to offer more programs and classes for adults and families and also seniors.

The arts are just a special thing, and its important to offer arts to a community, especially one like ours that is so culturally diverse.

Another goal for Sullivan in her new position is to increase community awareness of the arts center, to let everybody know were here and this is what we offer.

Some people in Solon might not even be aware that we exist, she said. We work side by side with the (recreation) department in a lot of community events, and I would like to continue that.

A Cleveland native, Sullivan grew up in Twinsburg and Solon. She and her husband, Dan, moved to Solon from Lakewood six years ago with their daughter, Mackenzie, 6.

Clearly, the Solon Schools were a big reason why I pushed to move back to Solon, she said. I wanted my daughter to have the same experience I had growing up -- the parks, the offerings of the (recreation) department, the summer camp.

Sullivan noted that her parents, Denise and Ken Hejduk, are both Solon High School graduates and still live in Solon.

My family is here, and Solon is still my hometown, she said. The community, the diversity, the schools -- all of it is important.

Read more from the Chagrin Solon Sun.

Go here to read the rest:
Sullivan earns promotion; will continue as manager of Solon Center for the Arts - cleveland.com

Scientists have shown to be true what JRR Tolkien only imagined in the Lord of the Rings: giant, slow-reproducing trees play an outsized role in the growth and health of old forests.

In the 1930s, the writer gave his towering trees the name Ents. Today, a paper in the journal Science says these long-lived pioneers contribute more than previously believed to carbon sequestration and biomass increase.

The authors said their study highlights the importance of forest protection and biodiversity as a strategy to ease global heating. They say it should also encourage global climate modellers to shift away from representing all the trees in a forest as essentially the same.

This analysis shows that that is not good enough for tropical forests and provides a way forward, said Caroline Farrior, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin. We show that the variation in tropical forest species growth, survival and reproduction is important for predicting forest carbon storage.

Long-lived pioneers a term that has been around for decades include species such as mahogany, Brazil nut trees and Ceiba pentandra, which are visible far above the rest of the canopy because they grow fast (at up to twice the speed of plants lower in the canopy) for hundreds of years.

Researchers believe this is the result of a trade-off between stature and reproduction: they are able to put more energy into putting on biomass than into producing offspring.

The study is based on more than 30 years of data collected from old growth and secondary rainforest on Barro Colorado, an island in the middle of the Panama Canal.

The scientists grouped the 282 different species of tree into five categories determined by growth, reproduction and longevity. This showed the relative roles of fast species that grow and die quickly, slow species that grow slowly and reach an old age, infertile giants that live long and reproduce over a long time, and fertile dwarfs and small shrubs and low treelets that grow slowly, die young, but produce a large number of offspring.

By simulating different combinations of these groups, the scientists were able to build a model that reproduced the dynamics of the recovery of nearby young forests.

This knowledge of how quickly trees grow, how long they live and how many offspring they produce could help in the restoration of tropical forests, which are currently being cut down at an alarming rate. It could also dispel a theory that such giant trees disappear once a forest reaches maturity.

Our results show long-lived pioneers are not transient but an important feature in old forests. They represent about 40% of the biomass and there are no signs that this declines over time, said the papers lead author, Nadja Rger of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the University of Leipzig. However, she cautioned that others forest showed different patterns.

Link:
Tolkien was right: giant trees have towering role in protecting forests - The Guardian

Andersen Ross Photography Inc

People once yearned for retirement. They would hope to quit at 65, get a gold watcha dubious gift for someone who no longer has a scheduleand move someplace warm to play golf and eat dinner at an increasingly early hour. During the first tech bubble, young entrepreneurs cashed out and retired before 40, drifting off into travel, philanthropy, and the occasional vanity project. Everyone planned to retire. The contest was who could do it earliest.

Today, a tumbling stock market might have upset the plans of the millennials of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. But the secret weapon for some of the world's most successful people is that retirement was never an option.

When Jayson Adams retired in 1997 at 29, after selling his company Netcode to Netscape for more money than he would ever need, his plan was to spend the rest of his years surfing and playing guitar. When I ran into him a few months back, it was at the Google offices in Santa Monica. Where he was working.

Gary Hershorn

No one chooses to retire anymore if they can help it. Warren Buffett, whose personal net worth is more than $90 billion, is 89 and still working. Henry Kissinger, 96, runs a consulting firm that advises world leaders by drawing on his extensive knowledge of human history, most of which he has lived through. Elaine May, 87, could rest on her beloved-comic laurels but is instead gearing up to direct her first feature film in 32 years. New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, 89, will surely call her when it comes out. Sheldon Adelson, 86, not only runs the Venetian hotels, he also advises our President Trump, who is 73.

This coming November that president is likely to run against a 77-year-old Joe Biden or a 78-year-old Bernie Sanders. Rupert Murdoch, who packages all of this as blood sport, is 88. Robert Caro, 84, is rushing to finish his Lyndon Johnson biography before his own biographer gets to work, and Netflix recently scooped up the rights to a movie starring 85-year-old Sophia Loren. When I had lunch with Carl Reiner, 98, at his house not long ago, he brought me upstairs to a room where he toiled with two employees on several books he was writing.

Graydon Carter, 70, left Vanity Fair in 2017 and started spending part of the year in Provence, but he didnt take up petanque, he started the new weekly publication Air Mail. His advice? First of all, never, ever, actually retireat least not in the not-working, checkered golf pants, Republican-voting, dinner at 5 p.m. sense of the word. Cut back on your workthats a must. And leave plenty of time for reading and mulling a final chapter. When Miuccia Prada, 70, recently announced that Raf Simons was to be her cocreative director, she was adamant that it wasnt a prelude to retirement. Oh no, she said, to do better, to work harderIm very interested in this.

Never, ever, actually retire. Cut back on your workthats a must. And leave plenty of time for reading and mulling a final chapter. Graydon Carter

All of these people have enough money to retire. Which is, oddly, the norm for people who keep working past 70. While the age at which Americans intend to retire has indeed gone up by six years over the last two and a half decades, to 66, according to Gallup polls, most of that change comes among college graduates. Four decades ago people with a BA retired six months later than people who had only a high school diploma. Now theres a three-year disparity.

Retirement has become so uncool that more than a third of the members of AARP are still working. Which is why the lobbying group officially changed its name in 1999 from the American Association of Retired Persons to an acronym that doesnt stand for anything. In fact, when AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins was asked by the Washington Post for her advice about retirement, she said, My first piece of advice is: Dont retire.

Its as if the NRA declared that hunting knives are where its at.

Thats because work isnt merely what successful people do, its who they are. If you ask most people how theyre doing, theyll say fine, but if you ask a member of the cosmopolitan elite, shell say busy. In our brief moments of not working, we are listening to audiobooks while getting our steps in. We dont sit by a pool. We dont play card games. We dont golf. We crush it.

I cannot imagine ever chilling under a mango tree. I get much more joy from my work than from cruising in the South of France, says Arianna Huffington, who is 69 and started a new company, Thrive Global, four years ago. But others may get more fulfillment from cruising or golfing. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Except, of course, that they are losers who are never getting invited to Davos.

Age 89

Warren BuffetOCCUPATION: Omahas oracle is at Berkshire Hathaway dailyand has chicken nuggets for l.

Age 70

Miuccia PradaOCCUPATION: The designer recently took on partner Raf Simons, but not to lighten her workload. Instead, she said, it was to work harder.

Age 98

Carl ReinerOCCUPATION: Comedian, director, and Twitter must-follow Reiner isnt resting on his laurelshes busy writing books.

Age 89

Cindy AdamsOCCUPATION: New Yorks gossip queen not only writes a column four times a week, shes about to be the subject of a Showtime series.

Age 77

Judith SheindlinOCCUPATION: Sheindlin is wrapping up Judge Judy after 25 years, but she isnt ditching her robes. She plans to launch a new series in 2021.

Age 96

Henry KissingerOCCUPATION: The elder statesman of American diplomacy is still active in foreign policy circles and on the New York City society circuit.

Age 85

Sophia LorenOCCUPATION: The 1960 hit Two Women was Lorens breakthrough. This year Netflix will air her latest, The Life Ahead, directed by her son.

Huffington points out that the word retire means to withdraw or retreat. Not only dont the elite retreat, they have nothing to retreat into. Even if theyre wrong, people dont feel as though they have time in life to have avocations, says Laura L. Carstensen, director of Stanford Universitys Center of Longevity. Theres a big drop in how much time we spend with our neighbors. Were less socially engaged in our communities. So people think, What would I do? Because theyve done nothing else for 40 years.

The transition is so tough that the Harvard School of Public Health found that retirees are 40 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during the first year of retirement than people who keep working.

Cavan Images

When 27-year-old Alfonso Cobo sold Unfold, the social media template tool he co-founded, to Squarespace at the end of last year for enough money to last at least a lifetime, he didnt consider so much as a weekend at the beach. Id honestly do it for fun, Cobo says about his job. He swears hell never retire. Id rather work than go clubbing.

Sterling McDavid, a 31-year-old former Goldman Sachs analyst who co-founded the fashion line Burnett New York, tells her employees that shell never retire. It honestly gives me total anxiety, she says. Sitting on the beach with my pia colada? I can barely do that on vacation. Retiring at 65 and thinking I had to do that for 30 years? I cant imagine.

Her dad, David McDavid, a 78-year-old former co-owner of the Dallas Mavericks, retired young. For a month. Then he started a new business. Sterling says that both she and her dad learned a lesson during that time. You have only one life, she says, and shes going to spend as much of it as she can working.

NBC

The privileged members of society have never embraced being idle; knowledge economy workers disgust at idleness is the same thing that every aristocracy has felt. Landed gentry didnt technically work, because paid work was awful: hoeing, manuring, smithing. But they did spend their time productively, doing things that are jobs today. They were naturalists, geographers, historians, writers, artists, harpsichordists, and, from what I remember from The Cherry Orchard, billiard players. To cease to contribute was to concede that you werent important. It meant you werent busy.

I do have one friend who retired at 40 eight years ago and has kept to it. Ive heard about these people who cant seem to walk away from work, fearing irrelevance and boredom, he says. Fortunately, Im not one of them. I guess my career was just a small facet of my identity.

My friend is a throwback to his parents generation. Carstensen points out that the retirement age dropped unnaturally in the second half of the 20th century, back when Goldman partners famously got out young. People kept retiring earlier and earlier. There was a culture of boasting about retiring early, Carstensen says. That has really changed. Some of it is discovering that you can play only so many rounds of golf in a week for so many years without realizing youre bored.

kafl

The most successful non-retirer of all time may be Norman Lear. Last fall, Lear, 97, reupped his first-look deal at Sony for another three years. Hes got a show on Pop TV (One Day at a Time), he won an Emmy last year for Live in Front of a Studio Audience (which ABC renewed for two more specials), and he has several other projects in development. If retirement were a game, it would be one that Lear was never asked to play.

I cant imagine not having a place like this to come to with people I care about to talk about things that interest me, Lear says from his office on the Sony lot. He thinks so little about retirement that a sitcom pilot he created was called Guess Who Died?.

The fallout from this trend could be a more difficult job market. While the likes of Elon Musk and Andrew Yang worry that robots will take our jobs, they will much more likely be taken by dotards who refuse to retire. To keep the unemployment rate from skyrocketing, Stanfords Carstensen advocates that people of every age work fewer, more flexible hours. I could see us going to 30-hour or even 25-hour workweeks without this idea that were going to retire for 25 years, she says.

Carstensen knows firsthand how tight the job market could be if we dont do this, but shes not going anywhere. Shes 66, and shes tenured.

This story appears in the May 2020 issue of Town & Country.

Follow this link:
No One Retires Anymore - TownandCountrymag.com

Executive Summary

The coronavirus crisis has led to new consumer behaviors and sentiments. The author recommends five ways for brands to serve and grow their customers, mitigate risk, and take care of their people during this difficult time: 1) Present with empathy and transparency; 2) Use media in more agile ways; 3) Associate your brand with good; 4) Track trends and build scenarios; 5) Adapt to new ways of working to keep delivering.

Weve made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBRs content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

In times of crisis, it may be hard for marketers to know where to begin. In just a few short weeks, people have shifted into protection mode, focused on themselves, their families, their employees, their customers, and their communities. Social media reflects this, with pleas for fellow citizens to follow government safety guidelines. People have crossed partisan lines to build bridges within their neighborhoods and communities and unify against an invisible force.

With social distancing keeping many people at home, were also seeing major shifts in behavioral trends. Consumers have returned to broadcast and cable television and other premium media sources for credible information. They are also seeking more in the way of escapism and entertainment downloading gaming apps, spending even more time on social media, and streaming more movies and scripted programming. And between remote working arrangements and live-streamed workout classes, college lectures, and social engagements, we are testing the bandwidth of our homes in a largely pre-5G world.

Meanwhile, the need for physical goods is placing pressure on new channels, with demand for e-commerce rising to new levels. For those who do venture out, grocery and convenience stores are the source for essentials, but supply is inconsistent. Health and safety concerns are driving more customers toward frictionless payment systems, such as using mobile phones to pay at check-out without touching a surface or stylus.

Some of these behavior changes may be temporary, but many may be more permanent. As people move beyond the current mode of survival, the momentum behind digital-experience adoption is unlikely to reverse as people are forced by circumstances to try new things. With so much changing so fast during this difficult time, what actions can brands take to serve and grow their customer base, mitigate risk, and take care of their people ?

People feel vulnerable right now. Empathy is critical. Many banks, for example, have moved to waive overdraft fees, recognizing the hardship on their customers. SAP has made its Qualtrics Remote Work Pulse platform free to companies who might be rapidly transitioning to new ways of working. Such instances show humility in the face of a force larger than all of us.

The nuances of brand voice are more delicate than ever. Brands that use this time to be commercially exploitative will not fare well. Better to do as Guinness did in the period surrounding St. Patricks Day, when the company shifted its focus away from celebrations and pub gatherings and instead leaned into a message of longevity and wellbeing. In these moments, we dont have all the answers, and we need to acknowledge that. If you make pledges, even during uncertain times, you have to be able to deliver on what you say.

To quickly pivot creative messages as circumstances change, marketers will want to build more rapid-response operating models internally and with agencies. Access to remote production and creative capacity will become particularly important as the crisis evolves. Nike, for example, immediately moved to adopt a new message: Play inside, play for the world. And in order to promote social distancing and show a commitment to public safety, Chiquita Brands removed Miss Chiquita from their logo. Im already home. Please do the same and protect yourself, its Instagram caption read.

Beyond creative, as the mix of actual media platforms used by consumers changes quickly, marketers should consider modifying their media mix. For example, with digital entertainment spiking, marketers may want to amplify their use of ad-supported premium video streaming and mobile gaming. Similarly, as news consumption peaks while consumers jostle to stay informed, brands should not fear that adjacency, given the level of engagement and relevance. News may simply be an environment that requires more careful monitoring of how frequently ads appear to avoid creative being over-exposed, which can damage brand equity.

People will remember brands for their acts of good in a time of crisis, particularly if done with true heart and generosity. This could take the form of donating to food banks, providing free products for medical personnel, or continuing to pay employees while the companys doors are closed. Adobe, for example, immediately made Creative Cloud available to K-12 institutions, knowing this was a moment to give rather than be purely commercial. Consumers will likely remember how Ford, GE, and 3M partnered to repurpose manufacturing capacity and put people back to work to make respirators and ventilators to fight coronavirus. And people appreciate that many adult beverage companies, from Diageo to AB InBev, repurposed their alcohol-manufacturing capabilities to make hand sanitizer, alleviating short supplies with their Its in our hands to make a difference message.

Feel-good content that alleviates anxiety and promotes positive messaging will go a long way to enhancing the brand. However, companies need to show that their contributions are material and not solely for commercial benefit. Consumers recognize authenticity and true purpose.

Frequent tracking of human behavioral trends will help marketers gain better insights in real time. Marketers will want to measure sentiment and consumption trends on a regular basis to better adapt messaging, closely observing the conversation across social-media platforms, community sites, and e-commerce product pages to look for opportunities and identify looming crises more quickly. Companies should consider quickly building dashboards with this kind of data to fuel the right decisions.

Marketers will also want to consider building deeper connections with their C-suite colleagues to provide insights to executives who, increasingly, will be involved with marketing choices. The marketing team should work closely with finance and operations to forecast different scenarios and potential outcomes, depending on how long the crisis lasts.

Its encouraging how quickly many companies were able to transition to remote working arrangements. Deploying collaboration technologies can seamlessly provide chat, file sharing, meeting and call capabilities, enabling teams to stay connected and remain productive. Already, virtual happy hours are emerging as the new normal to build team morale. Partners are pitching remotely, recognizing that an in-face sales call is unlikely to transpire for weeks to come. Leaders have to do their best to transition each element of the operating modelfrom marketing, to sales, to serviceto this new normal. New sources of innovation and even margin improvement will emerge out of our current discomfort.

We are in the acknowledge-and-adapt phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. But we also have to plan for lifebeyond the crisis. As we navigate what we know, marketing leaders must work externally to keep their brands and customer journeys as whole as possible, while working internally to do three things:

Unquestionably, there is a forced acceleration of the digital transformation agenda as we recognize how quickly customers and employees have embraced digitally enabled journeys and experiences.

Brands are all having to think, operate, and lead in new ways during these uncertain and unprecedented circumstances, and we will all have to learn together with both confidence and humility.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the authors and dont necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

See the original post here:
Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis - Harvard Business Review

I once had a boyfriend with a very sensitive nose. It wasnt that his sense of smell was particularly extraordinary; on the contrary, it was rather bad. It was that his nose could hardly be touched without him emitting a suffering ouch! and immediately protecting his organ from further violation. Needless to say, I often happened to be the involuntary cause of this pain, and of his exclamation no, no, not my nose!

I often remembered this ex-boyfriends nose when I started to have issues with my own nose in the summer of 2016, although my symptoms were different. I also thought often of Nikolai Gogols famous short story The Nose, as well as Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytical conclusions about the naso-genital relationship, the fetishistic allure of the noses shine and phallic character. The latter was developed by Freuds close friend Wilhelm Fliess whounfortunately, and almost fatallyconvinced Freud of its relevance. All if this came back to me last year, when I curated Insurgency of Life, a retrospective exhibition of Goldin+Sennebys work.

As for my nose, it has demanded special attention since I was a child. Being prone to allergies, I blow my nose often, and use nose spray regularly. In 2016, the issues began in May with a simple cold caught on a trip to Singapore, which settled firmly in my snout. Week after week, this fairly prominent organ of mine was blocked, while at the same time continuously running, regardless of how much I cleared it. Now, you might find this too privateother peoples snot can be even more difficult to deal with than ones ownbut it is necessary to outline how relatively common symptoms turned into something quite unexpected.

There was no feverthe rest of my fifty-year-old body felt perfectly fine. There was just this blocked, and simultaneously running, nose of mine. After a month, I went to see a doctor in Stockholm who prescribed a course of antibiotics. But the snot kept running and the nose remained blocked. Two weeks later I went back to the clinic and, as it goes with the medical system in Sweden, I saw another doctor, only to be prescribed another course of the same antibiotics. It was high summer in Sweden and I began to feel out of place with my out-of-the-ordinary nose. I had to organize a special high-volume delivery of tissues to the island in the Stockholm archipelago where I spent vacation. Still no improvement. It was exhausting, and terribly annoying.

There was no other choice than to visit the doctor again. This third doctor determined that the problem was the kind of antibiotics I had been taking, and quickly prescribed another brand which would surely stave off the problem. This was at the end of July, the day before I would leave for South Korea to install and inaugurate the 11th Gwangju Biennale. Temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius and high humidity levels welcomed me there. All the while my nose was running, and still blocked. Then grinding headaches appeared with increasing intensity, which sometimes prevented me from speaking. Finally, my biennial colleagues convinced me to go to the emergency room at the local hospital, where I signed in at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.

By 9 p.m. the same evening I was lying on a surgery table, surrounded by a swarm of people dressed in white. A scan had revealed that the entire sinusfrom the hollow parts around the nose up to the forehead, and further still to the paranasal cavities in the cranial boneswas full. My brain and eyes were threatened. The sinus turned out to be completely stuffed with nasal secretion so thick that it could only be removed mechanically. I was put to sleep, and upon awakening, my nose was sore. Very sore. The anesthetics made me nauseous. Smiling, a friendly doctor reported that the surgery went well: my sinus had been successfully emptied. They had also identified the cause of my peculiar nasal adventure: a creature. To be precise, a fungus. This particular fungus is common in hot and humid areas across the planet, thriving inside human noses, where it is wonderfully warm, damp, and dark.

In other words, for almost three months I had lived with another living entity. But this fellow traveler was different from the kilograms of bacteria we carry around. This fungus had decided that my body, my sinus, was perfect for its development. Expressing my surprise to the doctor, he in turn shocked me when he confessed that while I was under anesthesia, he had taken the liberty of performing a nose job on me. Which he then followed by asking if I enjoyed downhill skiing in that faraway northern homeland of mine. Though downhill skiing always frightened me and I had gone to some lengths to avoid it at school, the news of the nose job frightened me even more. Considering how popular it is for women in South Korea to reshape their noses, which mostly means diminishing them, and not having looked at a mirror after the surgery, I feared the worst. In Korean terms my snout is big, and a nose job would have surely provided me with a smaller one. As I scrambled for my purse containing my pocket mirror, the doctor continued: we discovered that your right nostril was narrow and crooked, so we have widened it and straightened it out.

While this might have amused Freud, who also had issues with his nose, it would probably have been less entertaining to his close friend, the nose, ear, and throat doctor Wilhelm Fliess. Interested in the relationship between the nose and the genitals, Fliess introduced the concept of nasality instead of anality. According to Fliess, the nose is simply a sign of the penis, with the swelling of nasal mucosa leading to a Fliess syndrome. Freuds nose problems were subsequently treated by Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist who experimented with cocaine as an anesthetic. Freud fared better than another of Fliesss patients, Emma Eckstein, who was treated by Freud for hysteria and became a psychoanalyst herself. Fliess almost killed her by forgetting gauze inside her nose while operating on it. This unfortunate event led to one of Freuds most well-known dreams concerning Irmas injection, which became key to The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream is said to deal with Freuds anxiety around allowing Ecksteins mistreatment, through the dream function of displacing the latent contentwhich is connected to wish fulfillmentwith manifest content, i.e., the scenario of the dream. It is noteworthy that the nose has played such a seminal role in the development of the principle of displacementa major trope for todays contemporary art.

Whereas Freuds and Ecksteins noses were given medical treatment, in Nikolai Gogols satirical magical realist story in St. Petersburg, the nose disappears. One morning a barber finds a nose in his breakfast bread, while at the same time a civil servant looking for a pimple discovers that his entire olfactory organ has gone missing. Wild speculation about the disappearance and fate of the nose arise, until one day it comes parading down Nevsky Prospect wearing a full uniform and a plumed hat. The sword-carrying nose continues traveling around the city claiming to be a state councilor until the police return it to its rightful owner, who returns it to its rightful place. Expressing his befuddlement, Gogols civil servant exclaims that authors ought to write about such a strange thing happening.

Goldin+Senneby, Insurgency of Life at e-flux, New York, 2019. Installation view. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

And here I am, attempting to put my own nasal adventure into words. It feels a bit odd as I am not used to writing about myself, and even less about my body. And yet, this adventure was a transformative experience: a close, even intimate, encounter with another creature, a new arrival reminding me of the relentless contingency of the life I live alongside so many others. In Donna Haraways terms, I ended up being-in-encounter with another critter. I had an inner sputnik, a traveling companiona stowaway to be precise. For a moment, our shared material habitat made us companion species, where the one invisible to the naked eye almost knocked out the towering host. Not only did the experience lead to a very situated knowledge, it was indeed a multispecies encounter that surpassed sympoeisis to become making kin. I was forced to coexist with this other creature, and I had to deal with the situation and accept our shared condition. Eventually the kinship did not work out. I had the upper hand and forced the fungus out of my body, with the help of Western medicine practiced by a South Korean doctor.

Insisting on multi-relationality across conventional borders, Haraways writing, and especially her neologisms, practice the worlding that she describes. She hints at this implying the creation of something that goes beyond the status quo: internally and externally, this planet can no longer afford to remain the same. Like artists, she gives form to what is not yet there for us to grasp. She is trying to take response-ability for the condition we are in by using a new vocabulary to emphasize critical points. A new condition inevitably demands other ways of describing and dealing with it. Just as a young revolutionary society like the nascent Soviet state and its hitherto unheard of form of society needed a new human, it also needed new forms of relationships between people. In this way, Haraways Terrapolisa speculative fabulation of a space for multispecies becoming-withcan be compared to the strongest contemporary art projects, or, in her words, art science worldings as sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet.1

The allergic fungal sinusitis I was diagnosed with probably had to do with my allergic sensitivity to pollen and cats, as well as all fresh fruit and most vegetables. As a psychological and social tendency, oversensitivity is familiar in popular culture as well as in the fine arts. We know a lot about high-strung individuals and their inner life, whether male geniuses, hysterical women, or something in between. In comparison, physical oversensitivity is not very well understood in medicine, culture, or society. And yet I share the condition with many other people. The World Allergy Organization states that 10 to 40 percent of the worlds population suffers from allergies. They predict that by 2025, half of the population of Europe will suffer from one allergy or another.2

It is well-known that allergies are the immune systems response to substances it cannot tolerate, treating otherwise harmless material in its environment as threats to be fought. The normal condition for the body should be peacethere is no reason per se to fight pollen, cats, fresh fruit, or even vegetablesyet this condition causes the body to forcefully defend itself, even declare war against enemy invaders. It is a kind of corporeal alarm giving way to a state of exception for the organism. This in turn can easily become a semi-permanent or even permanent state of exception, as with long-term states of emergency in countries like Syria, where it lasted for nearly fifty years (1963 to 2011), or for two years (2015 to 2017) more recently in France.

In reality, this immunological condition is a distant relative to autoimmune diseases such as AIDS and multiple sclerosis. These diseases are markers of our time; where the former carries the burden of a stigmatized new disease signifying an important moment of both solidarity and hostility in Western societies, the latter primarily afflicts the wealthy northern hemisphere. Furthermore, multiple sclerosis is three times more likely to be found in women than in men, which is fitting for a disease first described in 1884 by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who famously researched female hysteria, and who also had considerable influence on Freuds work.

Goldin+Senneby, Insurgency of Life at e-flux, New York, 2019. Installation view. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

Curating Goldin+Sennebys exhibition Insurgency of Life at e-flux in New York last year brought me back to issues of autoimmunity. The exhibition centers on a fungus called Isaria sinclairii, and was introduced by the artists with the following passage:

You remember it as a stressful period.You had started a new job and your relationship was out of balance. Your partner had left for France and communication was difficult. You travelled to Paris so you could talk.Your left foot went stiff.Part of your abdomen went stiff, just around the solar plexus.Actually maybe more numb than stiff.The kind of numb, tingling sensation that you can have when your arm falls asleep. The pins and needles sensation. For a moment you cant locate your arm. You cant move it.Only this time the moment of numbness, of paresthesia, was extended. It went on too long. Your foot was numb. Your solar plexus was numb. And it wouldnt go away.You assumed it was psychological. Related to stress. The emotional stress of your crumbling relationship.

In an elongated clinical space with pale violet walls and bleachers at either end, the Isaria sinclairii fungus was cultivated with vast amounts of nutrient agar in a stainless-steel pool on legs. Contrary to that of my ex-boyfriend, when unblocked my nose is one of my most developed senses. Already before entering the exhibition during install I was worried about the potential smell of this impressive fungal pool, and the prospect of another habitat being made in my nose. As I entered, the smell was distinct but faint, vaguely similar to a forest. Used as a youth elixir in traditional Chinese medicine, this fungus is hyper-selective, or we might say oversensitive, in its choice of habitat. In the wild, it seeks out and exclusively grows on cicada nymphs when they are hatching below ground. After colonizing the cicada, the fungus eventually grows and sprouts from its head. This violent drama, whose visual appearance is not unlike images of the so-called mushroom clouds of atomic bombs, was captured by Goldin+Senneby on a large X-ray photograph hung on the wall facing every visitor entering the exhibition space. Again, I was reminded of my fungus, which similarly threatened my eyes and my brain.

The Isaria sinclairii fungus cultivated in the exhibition is used in a medication called Gilenya, which 50 percent of Goldin+Senneby, Jakob Senneby, used to take for multiple sclerosis. Diagnosed with the nervous system disease in 1999, Senneby participated in a clinical trial for this new medicine developed by the pharmaceutical multinational Novartis as the first ever pill-based MS treatment. As all treatments of autoimmune conditions suppress the immune system, the long-term consequences of such treatments are still largely unknown. In the US, the FDA recently warned that stopping Gilenya could cause severe flush-out effects that can worsen the condition severely and irreversibly. It is well-known that pharmaceutical companies, like insurance companies, are some of the most aggressive data harvesters of our time. Learning from patients posting tutorials on YouTube, the artists had ten Lego robots made, each carrying a smartphone rocking back and forth to making the pedometers tick. The rocking sound became a soundtrack that might have sounded like grown-up cicadas at dusk who, unlike their young counterparts, escaped the cruel fungus.

These DIY cheating machines are meant to trick the insurance companies who monitor physical activity to discount the cost of health care. Similar to the demand that Facebook should pay wages to those who indirectly work for them by providing content through our online activities, the Lego robots restore value to those who are deemed sick. Just as we might demand the restitution of ancient artworks and other objects, we might do the same with the most intimate of things: our body. As a way to reclaim the biological human bodyand prevent the invasion of privacythe Lego robots are a refusal to comply with a wholesale capitalization of very individual experiences, extracting ever more data, presumably indexical data, to most likely be used for marketing or research, the risks of which became apparent to Senneby in the Novartis trial.

As a focal point in the exhibition, the fungus-cultivating pool took as a reference Lucas Cranach the Elders painting Fountain of Youth from 1546. Set in a forest with fantastical mountains in the background, the painting centers on a rectangular pool with steps on each side descending into the water. If the exhibition space at e-flux bore some resemblance to an anatomical theater, the painting offers the image of a stage for a drama of revitalization. Herodotus described how the fountain of youths magic water grants eternal life, and Cranachs painting depicts old, crippled, and feeble women being taken to the pool in carriages and wheelbarrows to receive a rejuvenating bath, from which they emerge on the right side of the painting with smooth and erect bodies and long, wavy ginger hair. Awaiting them on this side are knights and other men with whom the rejuvenated maidens dine, dance, and probably engage in some amorous activities. In our own era, such erotics of longevity and immortality are expressed differently, from Silicon Valley executives receiving transfusions of teenage blood to more general longings for healing, convalescence, and recovery from any and all disease.

In a small room at the back of the exhibition space, a series of surrealistic drawings bore the iconography of the story of Insurgency of Life. Each drawing was made of ten layers stacked on top of each other, with cut-out holes in each layer, and were inspired by Tove Janssons acclaimed 1952 childrens book The Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My.3 As a story about a motley crew of critters imbued with a strong sense of both magic and realism, they could be a distant cousin of Gogols story, giving space to the fantastical while the relationships and feelings of the characters are plausible and realistic. A unique feature of Janssons book is that each spread has a hole allowing the reader to peek onto the following spread. In the story, Moominwho, like all Moomin trolls, has an enormous round nose that would have intrigued both Freud and Fliessis supposed to bring a bottle of milk to his mother. Carrying it through a forest and a rocky landscape, Moomin encounters a mix of scary and friendly creatures, all sharing the harsh weather conditions. When he finally reaches his mothers sunny, blossoming garden, the milk is sour. But rather than the storyline, it is the form of the book that is of interest: the peek onto the next spread underscoring connections and relations, continuity and storytelling.

To work sequentially with a particular project over an extended period of time is characteristic of Goldin+Sennebys work. Each component leads to the next, planting seeds for the sequels. Made up of multiple parts, this long-haul tactic requires a sort of persistence to be able to stay with the trouble (in Haraways words) and tell an incredibly complicated story emphasizing interconnectivity, causality, and a certain kind of feedback. Yet, despite the physical body of the artist being out of sight, it is at the very center of Insurgency of Life. It is the site. Like in Mary Kellys 1976 feminist classic Post-Partum Documenta six-year inquiry into childbirth and the development of the relationship between the mother and the infantthe body itself is nowhere to be seen. Such a displacement is followed by real indexical objects: for Kelly, diapers and parts of blankets, while for Goldin+Senneby the body is displaced by the body of the fungus. Avoiding anthropomorphism without abandoning the materiality of the body becomes a way to make something highly personal without being private. Simultaneously, and in contrast to their previous work, the artists are suddenly present in the flesh, doing a lecture performance at the opening.

Goldin+Senneby with Johan Hjerpe, Illustration in Seven Layers, 2019. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

With Insurgency of Life, life itself has broken into the work of Goldin+Senneby, opening a view onto a situation that has accompanied the duo since they started working together fifteen years ago. However, this situationand its stark medical realityhas not been detectable in their art until now. Between care and extraction, this version of the retrospective traced a physical condition, not a sequence of works. Forming the third and final part of a trilogy of retrospectives, the New York edition quite literally entered a different kind of biopolitics than both their previous work and their retrospectives in Stockholm and Brisbane.4 In New York, the duo relied again on a group of steady collaborators, outsourcing many parts of the work. Compared to their multi-year project Headless, Insurgency of Life is less concerned with neoliberal subterfuge. While they still outsource many tasks, with time, their service providers have become more like collaborators. In this way, they are foregrounding a network of dependencies more than one of anonymities. Accepting this kind of proximity and continuity does appear to become a process of immunization.

The exhibition was also the beginning of a new novel, written incrementally by the acclaimed author Katie Kitamura. As opposed to Headless, Goldin+Sennebys experimental 2015 novel, this new novel has exited the world of offshore finance only to enter the field of gene manipulation and bio-capitalism. During the course of the exhibition, a performance entitled Crying Pine Tree took place at Triple Canopy, where Kitamura read from her first chapter of the new novel. Here, the main character, a gene-manipulated and autoimmune pine tree, encounters an investor and a geneticist who accelerate and exaggerate the immune system of the conifer in order to make it produce more sap. As a source for clean energy, the sap might prove in the long run to be a kind of liquid gold, in addition to being a natural disinfectant used since antiquity to treat wounds. Hovering between science, art, and fiction, the narrative of the novel displaces the immunological concerns of MS onto the flora. For years to come, the writer and the artists will feed each others creative process by allowing each step to infuse the next one.

But what is the body at stake here? It is an artistic double-bodyindividual and singular, yet at the same time collectivewhich already complicates the tradition of retrospective exhibitions. Compared to a lot of performance and body art of earlier decades, the relation of this double-body to the self is already intensely, and differently, politicized. Whereas before, it elaborated the elusive anonymity of offshore finance in Goldin+Sennebys Headless, today it opens onto the absolute situatedness of disease. Now it is springtime again, and as I am blowing my nose in self-imposed quarantine due to Covid-19, I have begun to suspect those of us affected by immune-related conditions to be an involuntary avant-garde. Placed at the forefront of how illnesses develop today, our bodies become the site for a parallel climate change from within. In order to begin to grasp this, we need, among other things, a sequel to Michel Foucaults 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Perhaps it should be called something like Oversensitivity and the Planet: A History of Immunity in the Age of Profit.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin and Stockholm. She is a lecturer at Konstfacks CuratorLab. In 2019 she published Seven Years: The Rematerialisation of Art from 2011 to 2017 with Sternberg Press. She is the coeditor of the recent publications Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai; The New Model: An Inquiry; and Migration: Traces in an Art Collection. On the first of January 2020 she launched the Instagram project 52proposalsforthe20s with fifty-two artists invited to make weekly proposals for the new decade.

2020 e-flux and the author

Continue reading here:
What Is Wrong with My Nose: From Gogol and Freud to Goldin+Senneby (via Haraway) - Journal #108 April 2020 - E-Flux

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

So said Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of the ferment of revolution, but he could just as easily have been talking about the 100 days that have passed since the moment coronavirus officially became a global phenomenon, the day China reported the new contagion to the World Health Organization.

The world has been transformed in that time, perhaps nowhere more so than Britain.

A hundred days ago, on 31 December, the UK prime minister delivered a video message full of hope and promise.

The coming year would, he said, be a fantastic one, the start of an exhilarating decade of growth, prosperity and opportunity. In 2020, he enthused, Britain would brim with confidence.

The early weeks suggested the PM might be right on one count at least. After three and a half years of rancour over Brexit, some of the poison began to drain out of the issue. Of course, it wasnt done, as Johnson promised it would be, but it seemed as if we might dwell on lesser worries.

We saw in 2020 debating Megxit, a country with no greater angst on its mind than whether the Sussexes should carry on royalling.

On 31 January, the UK formally left the European Union. This new coronavirus was low down on the bulletins, safely tagged as foreign news.

Even by early March, it had not quite bared its teeth. People knew the official advice but werent sure quite how seriously they were meant to take it. Those politicians involved in public health messaging might attempt an awkward elbow bump at the start of a meeting, only to end it with a handshake or even a bear hug.

Johnson himself, at a press conference on 3 March, cheerfully boasted that he was still shaking hands with people he met including, he said, people infected with coronavirus.

And yet, after a couple of those weeks in which decades happen, on 23 March Johnson was delivering a TV address to the nation, announcing a lockdown in what might have been a hackneyed scene from dystopian fiction. The pubs were closed, along with the football grounds and the cinemas and the theatres and the schools. Places that normally throb with noise were suddenly quiet and have remained so.

You can jog through Leicester Square, London, a place normally teeming with tourists, and hear nothing more than the flapping of a distant flag.

Two weeks on from that original edict and now the death toll is in the thousands with the prime minister himself in intensive care, a development that shook people who did not expect to be shaken. Decades, in weeks.

This is a story of change so rapid, we can barely absorb it.

People focus on the questions that are human scale and therefore digestible how long is the queue outside the supermarket? Do I need to wash vegetables if theyre wrapped in plastic? Can I walk in a park if everyone else is walking in the same park? perhaps because the larger questions are too big to take in, including the largest of all: is this plague going to kill someone I love? Will it kill me?

This is the greatest UK public health crisis in a century. It threatens a death toll in five figures. It dwarfs any such menace since the Spanish flu afflicted a nation already staggering from the losses of the first world war. Perhaps it will come to seem like an act of God that none of us could have done anything about, a plague on all our houses that could not be averted.

Or maybe a future public inquiry will examine the fact that doctors and nurses were denied basic protective equipment, that care workers were forced to use bin liners for aprons and Marigolds for gloves, along with the paucity of ventilators and, above all, Britains apparent inability to follow the WHOs instruction to test, test, test, and conclude that the UK response to Covid-19 ranks as one of the severest failures of public administration in the countrys long history.

That makes this a political crisis.

They were very slow. They didnt understand the scale of this, says one senior figure, who has witnessed the governments response close up. He says those at the top were blase, that emergency Cobra meetings were nothing like the efficient coordination exercises that have followed terror attacks, but chaotic, lacking decisiveness.

As for the PM, I was surprised at how not in control Johnson appeared to be. There was a lack of comparative data on how other countries were responding, a lack of thinking strategically or several moves ahead. Put simply, he says, the government was winging it.

The cabinet has looked callow in this period, lacking the seasoned faces of cabinets past. Dominic Raab, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock: they dont have that many years on the clock.

Every time a Michael Heseltine or Gordon Brown comes on the radio, social media brims with nostalgia for the heavyweights of yore.

Its one reason why the weekend just gone seemed to calm nerves. On Saturday, Labour elected a new leader who looked competent and capable. That brought one sigh of relief. Sunday brought another, as the country heard from its longest-serving public figure, its head of state.

The Queens ability to reassure rests on her status as monarch, of course, but also on her extraordinary longevity at the centre of our national life. As she reminded viewers of her TV address that night a vanishingly rare event in itself she has been communicating with Britons at moments of distress for an astonishing 80 years.

She recalled broadcasting to child evacuees in 1940, thereby summoning up the mystic power of the event which serves as the foundation story of modern Britain the moment when we stood alone against an evil menace, and prevailed. Her promise that we will meet again, at once a glance back to the wartime past and a glimpse of a more hopeful future, will be remembered as one of the most significant because necessary acts of her 68-year reign.

Had the weekend ended that way, a calm might have settled on the land. As one observer noticed, the Queens message, along with Starmers election, suggested the scaffolding of the British state was being hoisted back into place.

But the calm lasted less than an hour, the nerves jangling once more with the news that the PM had been taken to hospital proof that even the most protected individual in the country, a Falstaffian figure of hale and hearty vigour, was not beyond the claw of this dreaded virus.

Even so, despite the fear and the loneliness and the claustrophobia and the economic hardship of lockdown, few would say the country has sunk into despair.

Privately, our lives have been pared down to their barest essentials: no sport, no live entertainment, no nights out just work, for those who still have it, family and remote contact with friends.

The work has changed all laptops, pyjamas and Zoom for those who once toiled in offices while family life has changed too, becoming much more concentrated and intense.

For some, that has been an unexpected joy; for others, it has been suffocating and even dangerous.

But our public life has also been stripped to its essentials. Weve come to see whats indispensable and what is not.

It turns out that we can function without celebrities or star athletes, but we really cannot function without nurses, doctors, care workers, delivery drivers, the stackers of supermarket shelves or, perhaps unexpectedly, good neighbours.

If you didnt value those people before some of those belatedly recognised as key workers are among the lowest paid you surely value them now. In a new tradition, we emerge from our homes and start clapping every Thursday night at 8pm to make sure they know.

Almost everything the prime minister predicted a hundred days ago has failed to come true: 2020 will not be a year of growth or prosperity, but the very opposite. And yet, on one thing he was right. Somehow, we have left the widest rift of recent years behind.

Leave or remain now feels like an ancient divide, made suddenly irrelevant when the only distinction that matters is alive or dead.

More:
Coronavirus crisis has transformed our view of whats important - The Guardian