H5N1

'Until Proven Safe': Book on quarantine before, after COVID

Via The Los Angeles Times: 'Until Proven Safe': book on quarantine before, after COVID. Excerpt:

“The Coming Quarantine” sounded like a good book title back when Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley sold their idea to publishers. The journalists even had a dramatic opening: a pandemic simulation, Manaugh says, “looking at what might happen if a disease takes hold of the U.S.” 

But, well, you know ... Their new book, retitled “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine,” still explores quarantine through the centuries. But while their initial research involved a mission to find someone who had experienced a quarantine (they found a physician from Doctors Without Borders), the authors wrote the bulk of the book during the lockdown, with abundant evidence close to hand.  

The history lessons in “Until Proven Safe” help illuminate where things went wrong in 2020 and what needs to change before the next lockdown, which they say is definitely coming. Last year’s “shelter in place” mandates were attempts at large-scale quarantine but, according to one expert they quote, if America had introduced stringent lockdowns as a broad-based quarantine early on, it could have saved many lives. “We just didn’t have the grit for it in the United States,” the expert tells them. “It’s quite humbling.”  

The term “quarantine” experienced mission creep in 2020, used for everything from closed-off hospital wards to healthy people working from home. Manaugh and Twilley define it more classically as what happens when someone has been exposed to illness but is not yet confirmed to have it — as opposed to isolation, which comes for the already infected. “Typhoid Mary came up all the time but she was isolated, not quarantined,” Manaugh says. Twilley adds that there are a lot of similarities in how we should handle both during a pandemic.  

The couple, who spoke recently by video from Los Angeles, started thinking about the topic back in 2009 on a picnic in Australia, where they saw a spa and hotel repurposed from an old quarantine station. “Quarantines seemed like a practice from a different age, an obsolete technique,” says Manaugh. “But we quickly realized that was not the case. We chose that original title because we thought quarantine would become more common, not less common.”  

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why were you sure there was going to be a need for a book about quarantine?  

Manaugh: Humans are going into landscapes and encountering microbes and diseases they wouldn’t have previously encountered. They hop on a plane and bring them to Moscow or Los Angeles. We don’t have vaccines for those new diseases. Quarantine will be the one thing that will allow us to control these outbreaks.  

Twilley: And it hadn’t been rethought since earlier eras. We wanted to be the people who warned this was coming. And then it came.  

Who is the reader for this book?  

Twilley: We hope it will reach a popular audience. The way quarantine has shaped the world was fascinating and now that we’ve all been through it, the book is interesting in a different way. But I also want people who make policy to read it so we can redesign quarantine better for next time.

You mention Hoffman and Swinburne Islands in New York, the sites of quarantine for immigrants arriving through Ellis Island. The setup successfully kept diseases out of the city but unfairly crammed people together in unsafe conditions. Have we learned to do better?

Twilley: We have not learned the lessons. The difficulty is really thinking about individual versus mass quarantine. People we spoke to had thought about how to reform quarantine for a few individuals, to make it safe and fair and give them legal rights. What hasn’t happened is thinking through how mass quarantine would work. We toured the new federal facility in Omaha before it opened and it hadn’t crossed their mind that the United States would need to quarantine more than 20 people.

Manaugh: As a society I don’t think we’ve learned to do it any better at all. The hope would be that COVID-19 lets us take a moment and think about quarantine and do it better the next time.

Reading about COVID-19

Early next year, I'll be teaching "Perspectives on Pandemics," a course for Eldercollege here on the North Shore—going back to the Athenian and Justinianic plagues and the Black Death, but focusing on COVID-19. I'm pulling together a suggested reading list for my students, and it occurred to me that others might want to explore some of these titles as well. So here they are. Some include links to my Tyee reviews; others will be mentioned in a long article I'm working on. I'll update this list from time to time.

Peter Baldwin, Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently Across the Globe. Cambridge University Press, 2021. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/03/30/Best-Book-Written-About-COVID-Pandemic/

Alex De Waal, New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and Its Alternatives. Polity Press, 2021. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/07/09/All-Plagues-Are-Political/

Elaine Dewar, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation. Biblioasis, 2021.

Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, translated by Michael Berry. HarperCollins, 2020. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/05/27/Wuhan-Diary-Book/

Richard Horton, The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again. Polity Press, 2020. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/06/22/Only-Newly-Vigilant-Society-Can-Stop-Next-Pandemic/

Colin Kahl & Thomas Wright, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order. St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

Michael Lewis, The Premonition. W.W. Norton, 2021. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/05/18/Hot-Pandemic-Book-Poses-Danger/

Rupa Marya & Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021.

Jon Sternfeld, Unprepared: America in the Time of Coronavirus. Bloomsbury, 2021. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/12/22/Unprepared-America-Time-Coronavirus-Book/

Steven Taylor: The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. My review: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/07/10/Mental-Toll-Covid-Doctors-Saw-Coming/

Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. Viking 2021.

Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

The most important book yet on pandemics and their causes

The Tyee has published my article All Plagues Are Political. It's a long review of a new book that offers a critical perspective on pandemics and their origins. Excerpt:

New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives By Alex de Waal. Polity Books (2021) 

“Anagnorisis” is Greek for “learning upward” — the sudden shock when we finally see and understand what’s really going on. I had such shocks on almost every page of this very important new book. This is a long review because the book raises very many issues rarely mentioned in medical or political history. It calls into question not only our global health system, but the economic and political systems that pretend to support it. 

Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and professorial fellow at the London School of Economics. He is an expert on the politics of Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and the author of seven previous books on Africa, AIDS and famine. He is also writing sharp analysis of the war in Tigray that attracts a lot of critics on Twitter. 

I may believe his critics when they document their charges as well as de Waal documents his case in this book. And that case is that the world system we have built over two centuries of imperial conquest and rule is itself the generator of pandemics; the pandemics emerge from our politics and economics, and we respond to them politically — not medically.

The words that shaped COVID-19

Via The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a book review by Amesh Adalja: The words that shaped COVID-19. I have already downloaded a copy.

As someone who has been immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic since January of 2020, looking back on all that has happened since the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is an extreme challenge. Trying to keep the full context of all the events, the new discoveries, the policies, and the rhetoric is almost a specialty in its own right. That's why a book like Unprepared: America in the Time of Coronavirus by Jon Sternfeld has such value. 

There will be many books written on this pandemic, but I suspect none that provide such a unique service as Unprepared does. This book is not a traditional narrative but more akin to a pandemic scrapbook. Unprepared is entirely comprised of COVID-related quotations from public figures, news outlets, and organisations. These are chronologically ordered beginning with the ominous news of Dec 31, 2019, which heralded what was to come, extending through June 5, 2020. The book is divided into five sections each aptly titled (e.g., “The Arrival”, “The Emergency”, “The Reckoning”). 

In a pandemic response, the early days are the most important. This is when critical actions can be taken that will determine the trajectory of the days, months, and years to come. If a burgeoning emerging infectious disease outbreak can be met with an onslaught of public health resources and leadership to test, trace and isolate the contagious, a very different future emerges than if it is not. 

Unprepared shows you the latter in often stomach-churning detail. Contemporary readers of this book will be provided with a haunting day-by-day recounting of the onslaught of the pandemic and will relive real-time the litany of mistakes made and several pages later see the inevitable results. 

The US response to this outbreak is one that has been characterized by evasion at the highest level of government from the very start and the quotations concretise and memorialise what gave the USA the devastating path we are now in the midst of. Readers in the future will get a glimpse of what US citizens living in the pandemic era were hearing from experts, politicians, and others in a succinct package.

One of the great values to me that I didn’t anticipate was seeing how, reading the book in November of 2020, certain strands that were only hinted upon in early quotations come to fruition. For example, the fact that testing is a facet of pandemic response that has remained flawed throughout this experience can easily be juxtaposed to quotes disdaining testing months ago. The book also provides a method to easily see lies and misinformation, often emanating from President Trump, as such statements are often immediately followed by another statement from a subject matter expert directly contradicting the prior one. The book also allows one to track opposition to certain governors and see the alarming rise in inflammatory rhetoric that, later on, culminated in a horrific kidnapping and murder plot. 

Interspersed throughout the book are official statistics that catalogue the ruinous state of the economy and the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis which give the reader a more complete understanding of the reach of the pandemic and the larger ongoing societal circumstances. 

As someone who studies pandemics, works to prevent them, and enhance resiliency to them, I found the book an invaluable resource. It provides a whirlwind tour of the first 6 months of the pandemic in an easily digestible format that highlights many of the salient events that occurred. So much has happened—and will happen—in this pandemic and it cannot and must not be forgotten. 

The world will undoubtedly face another pandemic threat in the future and the mistakes of this pandemic, which will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA alone, must never be repeated. Those parts of the book that read like a horror file should be revisited from time-to-time and studied in schools. 

Unprepared is a book, I think, that should be on all Americans’ shelves. This is not just a book for experts or pandemic aficionados. Since the book concretises how badly things can go during a pandemic— as well as how the cascading impacts of a pandemic spare no one—it will be a powerful reminder for generations to come of how a tiny virus upended the most powerful and wealthy country in the world, a nation that had been deemed the world's most prepared for an infectious disease emergency.

COVID relief and the misplaced outrage about Rage

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: COVID relief and the misplaced outrage about Rage. Excerpt:

And then there are the natural rhythms of the daily news cycle, which respond more viscerally to shallower outrages than to deeper ones—especially when Trump is central. Yesterday, the cycle exploded after the Washington Post published details from Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, which is out next week. An excerpt concerning Trump’s inaction in the face of an acknowledged threat elicited an especially furious reaction: in February, before the coronavirus was an all-consuming story in the US, Trump told Woodward (on tape) that the virus was very deadly, only to downplay the danger in public. 

Online, many journalists charged that Woodward was wrong to sit on the interview until now; on TV, pundits fumed. “Tonight, I have to tell you the worst thing I ever have about coronavirus,” CNN’s Chris Cuomo said, of the Trump tape. He later called the tape “the most important thing I’ve ever had to tell you,” period. 

The gulf between what Trump told Woodward and what he said publicly is, obviously, despicable, and Woodward’s new book looks likely to be a useful contribution to the historical record. (More so than Michael Cohen’s, at any rate.) 

The idea that Woodward could have saved lives by going public sooner, though, is highly hypothetical. And his revelation doesn’t fundamentally change a fact that we’ve always known—that whatever Trump said in private, he did nothing to stop the coronavirus from ruining American lives and livelihoods. Trump’s motivation for doing nothing matters. But it matters far less than the fact of doing nothing itself.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: Richard Horton's short, angry, and powerful book

The Tyee has published my review of Richard Horton's new book The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again: Only a Newly ‘Vigilant Society’ Can Stop the Next Pandemic. Excerpt:

Feeling a bit under the weather, you go to your doctor. He knows your medical history, he checks your symptoms, he comes up with a diagnosis, and then he chews you out for behaving precisely as you’re not supposed to, thereby making yourself sick. What’s worse, you’re now a menace to the health of everyone around you. If you don’t shape up, you’ll ship out — in a body bag.  

That’s the structure of this short, angry, and powerful book, written while the author was in lockdown in the U.K. Richard Horton is a doctor, but for a quarter-century he has been editor-in-chief of The Lancet, flagship of a fleet of important medical journals. As such, he has monitored global health through outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, cholera, H1N1 influenza, Zika, and the steady, deadly background noise of malaria, measles, and other diseases. 

While locked down and dealing with a flood of incoming reports on COVID-19, Horton has also managed to write a clear, concise account of our own incompetence and folly — both in preparing for a pandemic everyone knew was coming, and in responding to it once it arrived. While politicians and bureaucrats take much of the blame, so do scientists. And so does everyone else. 

 His summary of the emergence of COVID-19 covers the key points and the questions they raise. If the first cases were noted at the beginning of last December, why wasn’t World Health Organization notified until New Year’s Eve? And once notified, why didn’t WHO respond more quickly, and why didn’t it engage health scientists from around the world in learning about the new virus from their Chinese colleagues? 

Slow and confused 

The world’s response to clear signs of impending disaster was woefully slow and confused. Governments, especially those of the U.K. and the U.S., come in for Horton’s condemnation: “The science and politics of COVID-19 became exercises in radical dehumanization.… At press conference after press conference, government ministers and the medical and scientific advisors described the deaths of their neighbours as ‘unfortunate.’ But these were not unfortunate deaths. They were not unlucky, inappropriate, or even regrettable. Every death was evidence of government misconduct — reckless acts of omission that constituted breaches in the duties of public office.… Missed opportunities and appalling misjudgments were leading to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of citizens.”

‘Wuhan Diary’ offers an angry and eerie view from inside quarantine

A review in The New York Times: ‘Wuhan Diary’ Offers an Angry and Eerie View From Inside Quarantine. Excerpt and then a comment:

The next Chinese New Year will begin on Feb. 12, 2021. It will be the year of the Ox. The first real publishing season since the pandemic started will begin at about the same time. In America and elsewhere, I suspect, it will be the year of the Diary. 

Writers in lockdown are, like everyone else, feeling pale and postoperative. The pandemic has thrown a spanner into best-laid plans. A diary, as soldiers, prisoners and invalids have long understood, can be a good way to write oneself out of a bad spot. 

The Chinese novelist Fang Fang lives in downtown Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. After that city went into quarantine in January, she began keeping an online diary about her experience. Wuhan remained shut down for 76 days, and is still struggling to return to anything resembling normalcy.  

In her diary, Fang Fang wrote about quotidian things: food, pets, sleep, friends. She talked about weeping, and about her country’s mental health. Her diary provided a daily catharsis. She monitored newspapers and the internet, keeping tabs on what was happening outside her small housing project.

She told uncomfortable truths about China’s fumbling response to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Censors regularly squelched her. Chinese nationalists mounted a trolling campaign against her, claiming she was besmirching Wuhan’s rosy-cheeked image. Her entries began to seem like samizdat. 

She kept at her task. She gradually became a national hero, read by millions starving for something other than the dissembling and patriotic gruel issued by the government and by Chinese media conglomerates. Her diary has now been published in English as an e-book, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches From a Quarantined City. 

Fang Fang captures the shock and panic at the start of the quarantine; people in Wuhan had been told that the coronavirus was “not contagious between people,” that it was easily controllable and not to worry. The truth hit hard. 

The author is in her mid-60s, and lives alone with her old and increasingly stinky dog. (When she runs out of pet food, she feeds her dog rice instead.) She takes the quarantine seriously. She has diabetes, and is aware the virus could kill her.  

She finds much to admire in people’s response to the shutdown. Neighbors form grocery collectives. When the food arrives, they lower buckets from their apartment windows and reel it up, as if it were minnows in a net. She notes the performance of many small kindnesses.  

She has a fascination with the eerie, empty city, which is “quiet and beautiful, almost majestic,” as long as you aren’t sick. Watching the sanitation workers stoically going about their tasks fills her with emotion. 

At the same time, she writes, “You begin to see things you never imagined humans were capable of.” With hospitals full, the sick wander the streets looking for help. Some of those trapped in Wuhan from elsewhere end up living in tunnels.

I've just bought and downloaded a copy.

In Italy, COVID-19 books rush to publication

Via The New York Times: In Italy, Coronavirus Books Rush to Publication. Excerpt:

MILAN — On Feb. 29, Paolo Giordano went to a dinner party in Rome. He didn’t shake hands or kiss anyone’s cheek, a serious breach in Italian etiquette. 

A week earlier, Covid-19 cases had begun to surge in two of the country’s northern provinces. Giordano, a physicist who became one of Italy’s most prominent writers after the publication of his award-winning debut novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, understood that the epidemic was going to grow exponentially.

"This is the last one,” he told himself. Then he began to write. 

On March 26, Giordano’s new book, an essay chronicling his thoughts and angst about the coronavirus outbreak, was published in Italy. How Contagion Works is slated for release in the U.S. next week, as an audiobook by Penguin Random House and in paperback and e-book by Bloomsbury. It has been already translated in more than 20 languages and released in Britain. 

Italy has been in a nationwide lockdown since March 9, and the coronavirus has already become something of a book genre.  

On March 10, Roberto Burioni, a celebrity doctor and author, published Virus. The Great Challenge, an examination of how epidemics work, shaping and sometimes outsmarting civilizations. In an interview, he said the book was already in progress and scheduled to go on sale in the fall when he learned about the outbreak in China. He asked his publisher to release it as soon as possible, with two quickly written chapters on coronavirus. 

“This book was needed now, not in October,” Burioni said. 

Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s former finance minister, updated a book he wrote on globalization and its weaknesses in light of the pandemic. A major publishing house, Garzanti, earlier this week published an anthology of 26 quarantine short stories and essays by writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, an American novelist who also writes in Italian, and the best-selling children’s author Elisabetta Gnone.  

Some expect other countries to follow. “Italy is a laboratory. Think of the singalongs from the balconies or the celebrities’ concerts on Zoom — they started here and spread to other countries,” said Andrea Minuz, a film and book critic at the newspaper Il Foglio. “We were the first to have coronavirus books and will export that, too.” 

Like many Italians, Giordano is glued to the country’s 6 p.m. civil protection briefings, in which the facts and figures around infections, recoveries and deaths are shared daily. “All we can focus on during this epidemic is numbers,” he writes.  

So it makes sense that math, which he sees as a tool to understand an invisible enemy, plays a key role in his new book. “Epidemics are mathematical emergencies,” he writes. Each outbreak, he explains, has at its heart a basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R-nought”), the number of susceptible individuals that are expected to contract the virus from each infected. When R0 is greater than one, and when most individuals are susceptible, we have an epidemic. 

We have the power to change that number by staying home and practicing social distancing, Giordano adds. “Lowering R0 is the mathematical reason behind our self-sacrifice.” 

Self-sacrifice, or the idea of putting someone else’s needs ahead of our desires, is also a central theme in the book. In times of contagion, the young and healthy must protect the old and the weak, he writes. 

“What we do or don’t do is no longer just about us. This is the one thing I wish for us never to forget, even after this is over.”

BC’s top doctor wrote a book about fighting viruses in 2009

The Tyee has published my article: BC’s Top Doctor Wrote a Book about Fighting Viruses in 2009. Excerpt:

Soap and Water & Common Sense: The Definitive Guide to Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites, and Disease By Dr. Bonnie Henry House of Anansi, 2009. 

Dr. Bonnie Henry’s news conferences have become a part of daily life in B.C. When they attend her briefings, Premier John Horgan, Health Minister Adrian Dix, and Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth fade into the background, at a safe distance from her and one another. They speak chiefly to endorse what their chief medical officer says. The contrast with Trump’s press conferences is impossible to miss. 

It certainly helps that Dr. Henry can deliver alarming news in a calm tone of voice, without relying on technical jargon; we pay attention, we absorb the news, but we don’t freak out. Treated like adults, we respond like adults.  

Those same communication skills are evident throughout her 2009 book Soap and Water & Common Sense, written years before she became B.C.’s provincial health officer. The book is now available with a new introduction, written in March, and the content itself is still very timely: while our healthcare system is fighting COVID-19, other diseases are going to exploit their opportunity.

The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome

Via The New Yorker, a beautiful essay: The Strange Terror of Watching the Coronavirus Take Rome. Excerpt:

Two weeks ago, I sent an e-mail from Rome, where I had been enjoying a sabbatical semester of research and writing, to a Chinese friend who lives in one of those small cities of five or six million inhabitants, very far from Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. In my note, I said that I was sure that she was safely distant from the current crisis, but that, all the same, I was thinking of her and beaming her my warmest wishes. 

She replied politely that she was happy that I was having such a lovely sabbatical. As for her, however, though she was in good health, her life and the lives of everyone around her were turned topsy-turvy. The streets in her city were empty; places of work were all closed; she and her family were confined at home; one of them per day might receive permission to go out, masked, to shop for food and supplies; everyone lived in fear. I was suitably embarrassed by my e-mail’s ridiculous insouciance, but at the time I did not fully grasp the extent of my stupidity. 

I get it now, thanks to the unfolding events in Italy. The initial reports of an outbreak, in a few towns in the north of the country, were alarming enough, but it remained news coming from far away. With astonishing rapidity, the situation worsened: in quick succession, whole communities were quarantined; schools and churches closed their doors; museums, galleries, and palaces were shuttered; concerts were cancelled. 

If anyone hadn’t already taken in the gravity of the situation, two further occurrences made it overwhelmingly apparent: parts of Milan Fashion Week, the crown jewel of one of Italy’s greatest economic successes, were closed to the public, and, still more ominously, the soccer game between Inter Milan and a rival was played before an eerily empty stadium. As any Italian knows, soccer, far more than religion, is sacred; denying fans access to the match was an even more drastic signal than temporarily closing Milan Cathedral to tourists and the faithful. 

In Rome, the virus had not yet surfaced, and there were very few signs of alarm, apart from a run on hand sanitizer. But, as the constant reports in the newspapers and on television accumulated, the mood altered. The news from the north, we began to say to one another, resembled the thud of artillery shells exploding in a battle somewhere across the mountains, out of sight but no longer so far distant as to be inaudible. 

And then steadily the enemy moved across Lombardy and Veneto and south into Tuscany and Umbria. Where were our defenders? If we were to continue the military metaphor, we had to concede that Venice was gravely threatened, then Bergamo, then Florence. Rome would fall soon.  

But, as our conversations about the virus continued—and it was increasingly impossible to talk about anything else—the image of an approaching army gave way to other attempts to understand what was happening. Of course, even in the popular press, there was no end of epidemiological articles, often quite serious and detailed ones written by experts, along with the familiar lists of advice: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, clean all surfaces, keep washing your hands, move away from people who are coughing, avoid crowds, try to stay at least one metre away from everyone else. 

But, however informative all of this is—and we consumed a vast amount of it in only a few days—in situations of stress, it is, as usual, literature that offers the most powerful ways of grasping what is happening or may come to pass, not in the precise biological sense but in its narrative unfolding. So our conversations turned to Saramago’s “Blindness,” Camus’s “The Plague,” Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” and, above all—the greatest of these fictional depictions—the opening chapter of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” 

The problem is that, as brilliant as these accounts are, they depict cultures in the grip of epidemic disease as collapsing into chaos, violence, and the rupturing of social bonds. But this is not at all what we were reading about in the newspapers or experiencing for ourselves. In China, if the accounts are accurate, there is something like the opposite: an extraordinary intensification of social order, figured in the software with which the government tracks many citizens’ health and movement. In Italy, there has been no comparable intensification—quite apart from the technology, such control is quite alien to the national character—but instead the marked presence of the warmth and kindness that make ordinary life here so agreeable, notwithstanding the country’s notorious political dysfunction. 

It is as if people instinctively sense, even as their anxiety levels rise and their economy sinks, that their version of social order rests on good humor, patience, inventiveness, and flexibility. The mother and son who run the fruit and vegetable stand at the outdoor market, the local genius who concocts wildly implausible flavors of gelato, the clerk at the nearby gym who somehow remembered (or pretended to remember) that I had a temporary membership four years ago and waived the initiation fee—all seem, under the pressure of the crisis, somehow to hold onto their innate sweetness.