James McWilliams

Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

If American society is going to take one major risk in the name of reopening, ideally it should be to send children back to school. This issue is personal for me. I have three kids, one in college and two in a local public high school. It’s now early July, and we still have no idea whether or how they will be returning to classes that, ordinarily, would resume just weeks from now. My children’s summer has been idle. They have no jobs and not much summer programming to keep them busy. I try to convince myself they aren’t missing out on much. Hey, I grew up in the ’80s, I think, and all we did during the summer was hang out at the beach. Most days, I make it to about 10 a.m. before I rouse them.

In private moments, Donald Trump has told aides that he rescued Mike Pence from a potentially embarrassing defeat by pulling him out of a tough reelection bid in the 2016 Indiana governor’s race and putting him on the ticket, a former White House official told me. Now it’s Vice President Pence’s turn to see what, if anything, he can do to rescue Trump from a more momentous loss—and keep alive a long-held ambition to win the presidency in his own right.

Their fates, at this point, are wholly entwined. Pence would have trouble winning in 2024 if voters repudiate Trump in November. Yet even if he runs after a second Trump term, he’d surely be tarnished by the rolling tragedies of 2020. For three years, Pence largely sidestepped Trump’s unending dramas. Not so with the pandemic. Trump pulled Pence from the bubble wrap and plunked him into a crisis, making him the head of the coronavirus task force overwhelmed by COVID-19’s relentless spread. Now Pence is forever tied to the government’s botched response. And that’s something he’ll need to defend and explain as the current campaign ramps up, and if he ever runs for the higher office he’s long prized.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

Reopening is a mess. Photographs of crowds jostling outside bars, patrons returning to casinos, and a tightly packed, largely maskless audience listening to President Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore all show the U.S. careening back to pre-coronavirus norms. Meanwhile, those of us watching at home are like the audience of a horror movie, yelling “Get out of there!” at our screens. As despair rises, the temptation to shame people who fail at social distancing becomes difficult to resist.

But Americans’ disgust should be aimed at governments and institutions, not at one another. Individuals are being asked to decide for themselves what chances they should take, but a century of research on human cognition shows that people are bad at assessing risk in complex situations. During a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open but you would be foolish to visit it, that is a failure of leadership.

It has taken two decades, but I am finally ready to admit that I was the world’s most annoying teenager. My parents are Catholic, and I used to delight in peppering them with trollish questions, preferably several hours into a long car journey. “Why does the Mass service refer to God as ‘he’ and ‘father’?” was a favorite. “Does God have a Y chromosome, then? Does God have, like, testicles?” I was openly dismissive about transubstantiation, by which the host is consecrated, and according to Catholic doctrine, literally turns from mere bread into the body of Christ. “But all the atoms stay the same!” I would insist. “That makes no sense!”

My parents humored me, but predictably, I didn’t find their responses satisfying. Realizing that your omniscient parents are, in fact, just regular, flawed humans is a vital part of growing up. So is learning that their values are different from yours—that they are products of a particular time and place. Ideas and beliefs that they accept without question make no sense to you, and vice versa. As the 20th century ended in the liberal West, the tenets of feminism seemed irrefutable to me: Of course I would go to university and get a job. A family would come later, if at all. (My mother, by contrast, had her first child at 25.) Gay rights were the same: Why on earth couldn’t two men get married? In my 20s, when The God Delusion came out, I bought it immediately. I was proud to call myself an atheist. Religion was nothing but a tool of patriarchal oppression.

The SARS pandemic tore through Hong Kong like a summer thunderstorm. It arrived abruptly, hit hard, and then was gone. Just three months separated the first infection, in March 2003, from the last, in June.

But the suffering did not end when the case count hit zero. Over the next four years, scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong discovered something worrisome. More than 40 percent of SARS survivors had an active psychiatric illness, most commonly PTSD or depression. Some felt frequent psychosomatic pain. Others were obsessive-compulsive. The findings, the researchers said, were “alarming.”

The novel coronavirus’s devastating hopscotch across the United States has long surpassed the three-month mark, and by all indications, it will not end anytime soon. If SARS is any lesson, the secondary health effects will long outlast the pandemic itself.

I returned to Paris with my family three months after President Emmanuel Macron had ordered one of the world’s most aggressive national quarantines, and one month after France had begun to ease itself out of it. When we exited the Gare Montparnasse into the late-spring glare, after a season tucked away in a rural village with more cows than people as neighbors, it was jarring to be thrust back into the world as we’d previously known it, to see those café terraces overflowing again with smiling faces.

My first reaction was one of confused frustration as we drove north across the river to our apartment. The city had been culled of its tourists, though it was bustling with inhabitants basking in their reclaimed freedom. Half at most wore masks; the other half evinced indifference. We were in the midst of a crisis, I complained to my wife. Why were so many people unable to maintain even minimal discipline?

This story was updated on July 7 at 10:17 p.m.

The pandemic is out of control, the economy is in the toilet, and the weather is unpleasant, but at least the schadenfreude is excellent this week.

Yesterday the Small Business Administration released a list of loan recipients under the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the hastily passed CARES Act stimulus. The list is full of targets ripe for naming and shaming. There are plutocrats (country clubs! private-jet companies!), kleptocrats (various Trump associates), and Kanye (whose Yeezy brand received between $2 and $5 million). There are some particularly humorous examples of groups that decry people taking from the government who are, well, taking from the government: the Ayn Rand Institute, Americans for Tax Reform. This is the second round of this process of ridicule. The first also provided lots of red meat, from the literal (Ruth’s Chris Steak House) to the figurative (the crimson crowd at Harvard, which accepted CARES Act funding, though not PPP cash).

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies.