Following an Oakland tavern and its staff — from the tattooed bartender to the undocumented cleaner — as they weather the economic and emotional fallout of the coronavirus.
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One Bar. Twelve Weeks. Seventeen Lives in Lockdown.
Masks, No Kissing and ‘a Little Kinky’: Dating and Sex in a Pandemic
“Our health department has a really strong record of being very sex positive,†said Dr. Daskalakis. “Abstinence for the duration of the pandemic is not going to work. We tend not to shy away from giving people realistic recommendations. There’s no reason for Covid-19 to be different.â€
Dr. Daskalakis said the updated guidelines are in addition to existing guidelines for safer sex to lower risk for sexually transmitted disease, and they are a response to hundreds of questions New Yorkers are asking. The new rules also advise people who decide to hook up to get tested monthly for coronavirus, or within five to seven days of a hookup. They caution that a confirmed case of Covid-19 or a positive antibody test isn’t definitive proof that you are immune from re-infection. Dr. Daskalakis said the tone of the updated guidelines was inspired by a 1983 pamphlet, written during the start of the AIDS crisis, called “How to Have Sex During an Epidemic,†which pioneered the public health strategy of harm reduction and safer sex.
“You can’t tell people to stop being human,†said David Lauterstein, founder of the Nasty Pig men’s clothing brand in New York and an L.G.B.T. community leader who helped with the concept of the guidelines. “People are going to have sex. When they’re not educated, they’re going to make bad choices.â€
While the new guidelines give people detailed advice about safer sex, many single people say it’s tough to imagine even getting to the point of having sex because of the limits imposed by social distancing and the challenges of trusting other people to take needed precautions.
Wendy Worthington, 45, who lives in St. George, Utah, had hoped to stay connected through online dating during the pandemic. She was excited after meeting someone on a dating app, but after some promising “witty banter†from him, she expressed wariness about meeting in person during the early stages of the crisis. The man immediately blocked her.
“When that happened, it was the tip off that not everyone was going to view what’s going on the way I do or take it as seriously as I was taking it,†she said. “Most people were too nonchalant about it. I realized it was going to be an exercise in futility to try dating.â€
Ms. Worthington says she does not expect to go back to dating any time soon. “Now we’re not even worried about S.T.D.s so much as, I just hope you weren’t around someone who coughed on you,†she said. “Dating is already so hard as it is, and then you don’t think people are taking the necessary precautions. I’m putting all of my energy into D.I.Y. projects instead.â€
Hotels Transformed New York’s Social Life. Now What?
The hotel first opened on Sept. 10, 2001, and catered to the Hamptons Magazine/Ocean Drive set. “Impeccable timing,†he said.
But after the disaster that followed, the enemy was clear, the devastation finite.
Capitalism became a cause, with elected leaders imploring people in 2001 to “get out there, go to restaurants, spend money. The idea was don’t let the terrorists win,†Mr. Pomeranc said. “Now we’re being forced into the opposite reaction. In order to beat this thing, we have to not go out.â€
He thinks travelers will return to New York, but maybe not this summer. And there are an awful lot of people like Mr. Baitz, who said that dining in a clubby restaurant “with everyone in masks feels too close to the Roger Corman version of Edgar Allan Poe for my liking.â€
Before the coronavirus and now, “during our much needed reconsideration of our relationship to law enforcement, so much feels like those horrid people in the big city in ‘The Hunger Games.’â€
And hotel management is a difficult business, highly leveraged with low margins.
“Pretty much every hotel is restructuring their debt,†said Sean Hennessey, who runs Lodging Advisors, a travel consultancy that’s worked for storied names like the St. Regis and the Plaza. “They either need to get more equity pumped in to sustain themselves, or they need to reach an agreement with lenders to get their debt extended.â€
“Unlike office buildings, where leases typically last for five to 10 years, hotels have guests for an average of a night and a half,†he said. “That’s why whenever there’s a downturn they are one of the first industries that gets walloped, along with airlines and cruise ships.â€
As Energy Prices Tumble, Developing Countries Trim Subsidies
But Mr. Gould added that the collapse of energy prices gave governments “a golden opportunity.†Lower prices make it easier to cut subsidies without inflicting much pain on the poor, especially in oil-exporting countries with reduced revenues.
“As you move from the immediate emergency phase into the stimulus and recovery stage, there is a real opportunity to make sure the pricing signals are the right ones,†he said.
The last time oil prices plunged, in 2014 and 2015, countries like India, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reduced subsidies. Some, including India, compensated the poor with direct cash payments.
The moves made fiscal sense, but countries like Kuwait and Oman reversed course after protests. Others, like Russia, which has subsidized fuel since the Soviet era, did not enact proposals to raise energy prices.
Subsidies are just one way governments hand out money to the energy industry. The United States does not directly subsidize the retail price of gasoline or electricity, but it offers tax breaks to fossil-fuel and renewable-energy companies. Gasoline and diesel taxes are also lower at the pump in the United States than in European countries.
More governments may reduce energy subsidies if oil and gas prices stay low.
The biggest test could come in Nigeria, where cheap gasoline and diesel fuel are considered sacrosanct because the country is the biggest oil producer in Africa. When Goodluck Jonathan, the president at the time, scrapped energy subsidies in 2012, he faced two weeks of protests and riots as prices surged before he reinstated half of the previous subsidies.
The current president, Muhammadu Buhari, is calculating that this time will be different. He has deregulated prices at the pump, in a move designed to save his government $2 billion a year. With global oil prices down by roughly 40 percent since the beginning of the year, the decontrolled price at the pump is several cents a gallon below the controlled price Nigerians paid as recently as last month.
Worried About Social Distancing When Traveling? Join the Crowd and Rent an R.V.
Recreational vehicles were gaining in popularity before the pandemic. Now, with travel restrictions loosening, a surge of travelers is drawn to the relative solitude that R.V.s offer.
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Why Do People Love Games?
Why do people love games? As the Game Maker for The New York Times, I grapple with this question every day. The reductively easy answer is simple: They’re fun! But why are they fun? Do they have to be fun? As we dig deeper and deeper, we find more questions. What even is a game? What is fun? My take on the appeal of games is also simple, if paradoxical. Games are a controlled form of freedom. Our brains grab onto them because they are structures that exist to be avoided.
Games occupy a strange place in our cultural consciousness. Nearly everyone has played a game at some point in their lives. Despite that ubiquity, games are rarely discussed with the same reverence as other media like films or books. For most, games are like chocolate: a guilty pleasure consumed secretly. The game designer Sid Meier once remarked that “a game is a series of interesting choices.†Navigating these choices shapes the course of play, revealing who we are and how we think. Playing a game is an act of exposition.
Let’s play one now so you can see what I’m talking about. We’ll play Rock, Paper, Scissors right here in this article. I’ve put my choice in the last paragraph. Hold up a fist, give a “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shoot!†and throw out your choice then go look at mine.
Did you win?
You may not have realized it but we unconsciously made several agreements. We agreed to engage in a voluntary conflict against each other; to perform a specific ritualistic dance (shake our fists, say “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shoot!†and throw a hand sign); to follow a system of rules to govern our conflict (if you throw a fist (ROCK) and I wrote “SCISSORS†you would have won, and so on.); and to accept the outcome of those interactions, declaring one of us the winner and the other a loser.
We adhere to these agreements and rules faithfully, committing to and executing the game with little hesitation. Game designers call this alternate state of being “the magic circle.†Imagine a circle drawn in chalk on a sidewalk. When we are inside the chalk we are “playing†the game. We’ll only do what the rules of the game allow. We will try to win. When the game ends, we leave the circle and return to normal. The magic circle is what separates a game from reality.
I use the metaphor of a chalk line because the magic circle is not an absolute barrier or even a physical one. We can enter and exit the magic circle freely. We bring our bodies, personalities, and life experiences into the game. We take the memories and experience of the game with us when we leave. The chalk line casts a spell on that space of sidewalk and turns it into a space for playing. When we played Rock, Paper, Scissors above, we cast the same spell, turning this article into a space for our game.
Humans have always been drawn to this trick, finding novel ways to play within their environments. In prehistoric times, humans were playing games with sheep ankle bones called Knucklebones. These oddly shaped bones afforded a game similar to jacks. Players balance a few bones on top of their hands, then toss a few in the air, capturing as many as possible on the way down. Go, a strategy game invented in ancient China, is still played, highlighting part of what is so fascinating about games. Although Go’s origin is unclear, many scholars speculate that it was created to teach tactics and strategy. When we enter the magic circle, we give ourselves permission to explore, to fail, to lose. When we stop playing Go, we carry that experience with us. The same is true for Chess, Poker, or any number of analog games.
Digital games take many of the powers of traditional analog games and ramp up both the rate of interaction and the complexity of the underlying systems. A digital game takes input from the player 60 times per second, resolves it with a potentially very complicated rule set, and renders a new image of the game state. This rapid feedback loop engages our proprioception, that is our sense of embodiment and physicality. Digital games are powerfully compelling as a result, but I often find that analog games are a bit more playful. When playing an analog game, the only limitations are the rules you’ve agreed to, you can modify and change them at will, more easily creating playful experiences.
Games sometimes model real-world systems, allowing free exploration of their interlocking processes. The precursor to Monopoly, Elizabeth Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, was created to model and critique capitalism by giving players an opportunity to feel its failings first hand. It was not very fun, but that’s OK. One of the dark secrets of game design is that games don’t need to be fun to be meaningful. The board game Pandemic explores the trials of dealing with a now too-familiar global crisis. News organizations have used games as well: ProPublica’s The Waiting Game captures the experiences of refugees trying to enter the United States, and Bloomberg Media created American Mall, a digital game giving players firsthand experience with the decline of brick-and-mortar malls in the face of growing e-commerce.
As we continue to deal with the stress, trials and restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic, games give us the power to transform our living rooms, backyards, and Zoom calls into different playful realities. (If you’re here for Rock, Paper, Scissors, I pick PAPER.)
With Jobless Benefits Set to Lapse, Congress Is at Odds Over an Extension
But some Republicans have vowed to oppose the move. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, went so far as to ask President Trump to reject any future coronavirus relief package that maintained the benefit. (Mr. Trump made no such agreement.)
Republicans argued that the unexpected news on Friday that the unemployment rate had declined and employers had added 2.5 million jobs in May was evidence that the benefit was no longer needed. Congress should redirect its focus to ensuring people were headed back to work and not remaining on unemployment, they said.
“It’s obvious you’ve got to do something different from what we’re doing,†said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “Right now, I would say that probably, if we legislate in that area, it would not be just continuing it for another six months.â€
Instead, Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, has proposed a “back-to-work†bonus that would give workers a temporary $450 weekly payment once they are again employed. In the House, Representative Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, introduced a similar bill that would allow workers to keep up to two weeks of the supplemental federal unemployment benefits — amounting to a $1,200 bonus — after taking a new job.
The expanded benefit was “well intentioned — to help people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, which we needed to do,†Mr. Portman said. “But we put the numbers so high that it’s really creating a disincentive to work, and so the back-to-work bonus solves that.
Top Democrats, however, maintain that the rebound in hiring is evidence that the benefit is critical to preventing the economy from cratering again. Despite the improvement shown in the report released Friday, the unemployment rate remains worse than in any previous postwar recession, with tens of millions still out of work.
“My view is you don’t take your foot off the gas right now,†Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters on Tuesday. “If millions of Americans lose their supercharged benefits and are unable to pay their bills, the economy is not going to be in a position to rebound.â€
Therapy as a Party Game? Yes, With Fewer Fights Than Monopoly
Guess how many of the three creators spent the rest of their lives making board games? Correct, zero. Now guess how many eventually became actual therapists? Correct again, it’s most. Of the three, only Klein, a humor writer, did not eventually open up his own practice.
Before I became thrice self-actualized (winning Group Therapy three times), I never understood why consenting adults would play Monopoly or Scattergories or Dungeons & Dragons. And the experience of participating in something so shatteringly unfun as Cards Against Humanity is legitimately dehumanizing — cards win every time.
That’s not to say there aren’t games I enjoy — ever play Guess Who? as a drunk, cruel adult?— but as party activities go, I could never get behind them. The entire point of spending time with your friends is to hear about their lives, tell them about yours, and speculate about the lives of others. Why strategize about the most efficient way to Connect Four when you could be having an adult conversation about something real or relevant? Like whether someone you know has a baby who sucks?
Board game enthusiasts would argue that through competition, you do learn about other players. And sure, friends may obliquely reveal themselves to be surprisingly cutthroat or strategic or risk-averse.
But that’s precisely what makes Group Therapy so great: You don’t have to sit around on the off-chance someone incidentally outs himself as a toxic, petty monster. In Group Therapy, you suss out a person’s true nature by the way they respond to prompts like “Talk about your loneliness†or “Why would you not like the whole group to be nude right now? Why would you?â€
It’s a board game without any of the tedious board game stuff, and that is why it is the greatest board game in history. Alas, copies of Group Therapy are hard to come by, although its follow-up, Couples, is currently available on eBay for $49.99 … or rather, it was available until moments ago, when someone bought it. In the spirit of radical honesty, I’m prepared to reveal something deeply intimate and profound: That person was me. Pretty “With It,†right? Now what do I win?
Biden’s Brain Trust on the Economy: Liberal and Sworn to Silence
“I think people are looking for Biden to make some commitments and show that there’s a new generation of progressive economists and thinkers who are surrounding him,†Mr. Shahid said, “and not the usual suspects in the Democratic Party.â€
Kevin Hassett, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump and a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Mr. Biden was allowing economists to hide their ties to him when appearing on television to discuss policy, enabling them to avoid questions about Mr. Biden’s campaign and parrot his talking points without disclosure to viewers.
“It is unethical to formally advise a candidate and publicly advocate the candidate’s views while concealing that relationship,†said Mr. Hassett, who worked on the presidential campaigns of John McCain, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. “If he does have an economic team, then he should identify them. If he doesn’t identify them, then the advisers should, at the very least, identify themselves as Biden supporters when appearing in the media.â€
Mr. Biden’s campaign responded to questions about his economic team and transparency by taking a shot at Mr. Trump’s own record of public disclosure — and management of the economy.
“Dr. Hassett and his boss should both spend less time griping over cable news coverage and more time trying to fix this mess they got us into,†said Andrew Bates, a Biden spokesman. “If they want to talk about transparency, they can feel free to release Donald Trump’s tax returns any day.â€
Mr. Biden is briefed regularly by internal and outside advisers on economic issues, an effort that gained urgency amid the pandemic recession. Mr. Biden, people who have been involved in those briefings say, demands detailed presentations and often pushes back on what he is presented. As the pandemic worsened and businesses shut down in response, he has become more fixated on questions of how to preserve business dynamism and to accelerate job creation in recovery.
Campaign officials have stressed to reporters that Mr. Biden is seeking bolder and more expansive solutions to the challenges now facing a nation just beginning to climb out of a steep and swift recession. That almost certainly means adopting at least some of the more aggressive, and expensive, federal spending programs that progressives have championed.
Where the Money Is for Small Businesses
Check with your mayor’s or governor’s office for resources and updates.
Companies, Crowdfunding and Foundations
Governments are not the only ones helping out. Foundations, websites and other entrepreneurs have jumped in. Here are a few:
Local Chambers of Commerce are also supporting their small-business owners. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has a state-by-state guide that outlines the different loans, grants and funds that state and local governments — as well as private organizations — are offering.
Hello Alice, a platform that helps entrepreneurs connect with other business owners, government resources, potential funders and mentors, is offering $10,000 grants to small businesses, supplied by Silicon Valley Bank, the eBay Foundation, UBS and other partners. The first rounds are complete, but the group will provide more rounds of funding through July 16.
The Red Backpack Fund, which is backed by Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, is donating $5,000 grants to 1,000 female entrepreneurs. The fund is accepting applications in cycles. The most recent started June 1; future cycles will begin on July 6 and Aug. 3.
The LISC Small Business Relief Grants program offers up to $10,000 to small businesses affected by Covid-19, especially entrepreneurs of color, women-owned businesses and other enterprises that don’t have access to flexible, affordable capital. The program is funded by Verizon, Sam’s Club and others. Its next application round is scheduled to open on June 11.
GoFundMe, the fund-raising platform, has started the Small Business Relief Initiative, partnering with Yelp, Intuit QuickBooks, Bill.com and GoDaddy to provide owners with grants and resources. GoFundMe, QuickBooks and Yelp have each donated $500,000 to the Small Business Relief Fund, and it is open for anyone to make a donation. There will also be $500 matching grants to qualifying businesses that raise at least $500 on GoFundMe.
IFundWomen, a crowdfunding platform, is giving microgrants to women-run businesses, issued on a rolling basis. “Start a campaign†to be considered for a Covid-19 relief grant.