july 1874

The news team found 71-year-old Gabor Radnai wandering around their parking lot, crying and clutching a pile of paperwork.

“Why did you drive your papers here?” Anne McCloy, an anchor at CBS-6 Albany, asked Radnai.

“They can’t help me,” he said. “Maybe you can.”

When the coronavirus outbreak first hit, Radnai was working at a local ski resort. In March, after he lost his job, he applied for unemployment, but a letter from the state unemployment office said he needed to call them to complete his claim. He tried for months but couldn’t get through over the phone. So, in a last-ditch attempt to reach someone in authority, he drove an hour from his home to the CBS-6 station.  

Radnai was the first unemployed American to visit McCloy at her office. But he was not the last. In the months since then, thousands of people have emailed and called her about problems getting through to unemployment agents—and she has been trying to help them all. McCloy is widely cited as a hero by people she has helped, as well as in Facebook unemployment groups, where people urge those seeking help to contact her. But if a news anchor has to step in to ensure that Americans get the benefits they’re entitled to, there may be something wrong with the system.

Here is what we know about the state of COVID-19 as we approach the winter holiday season.

On Thanksgiving Eve, more than 1 million passengers cleared airport security, the highest single-day volume since the coronavirus reshaped American life in March. While airplanes are not likely settings for super-spreader events, everything before and after people step on a plane is somewhat risky. This includes parents shouting at their misbehaving kids in security lines; individuals munching on Auntie Anne’s pretzels, masks dangling from their chins, in departure-terminal crowds; and, most importantly, extended families swapping sweet-potato pie and invisible pathogens over the dinner table in poorly ventilated homes. A holiday surge on top of the calamitous autumn surge could be coming soon.

How well do we know Donald Trump? Pretty well, it would seem. Nobody has ever accused the outgoing president of possessing a complex personality. His behavior in office confirmed the common view, barely disputed even by his allies, that he is a shallow narcissist, blind or indifferent to common decencies, with poor impulse control and a vindictive streak. His futile attempt to litigate away electoral defeat may appall you, but it probably doesn’t surprise you.

Still, just because we know bad things about the 45th president, don’t assume that there’s nothing bad left to find out. Journalists like to pretend that we know everything about a president in real time, but our information is never close to complete. There’s always more to learn, and it’s seldom reassuring.

Americans’ social lifelines are beginning to fray. As the temperature drops and the gray twilight arrives earlier each day, comfortably mingling outside during the pandemic is getting more difficult across much of the country. For many people, it’s already impossible.

To combat the loneliness of winter, some of us might be tempted to turn to pods, otherwise known as bubbles. The basic idea is that people who don’t live together can still spend time together indoors, as long as their pod stays small and exclusive. And pods aren’t just for the winter: Since March, parents have formed child-care bubbles. Third graders have been assigned to learning pods. Some NBA teams were in a bubble for months. A July survey of 1,000 Americans found that 47 percent said they were in a bubble.

My Aunt Ruth won’t watch Hillbilly Elegy, the movie adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir about growing up in and eventually escaping Appalachia and a mother coping with addiction. Practically speaking, my aunt doesn’t have a Netflix account or any of the smart technology she’d need to stream it. But she also has no interest in watching a story of her community that doesn’t reflect what she sees and that she knows will be exploitative, harmful, and not helpful to moving her or her neighbors forward.

Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t show the positive side of Appalachia that my aunt and I know, because that wouldn’t serve the story’s purposes. The film and book need Appalachia to be poor, broken, and dirty, because they depend on us believing that the mountains are somewhere we want Vance to escape. They need to frame poverty as a moral failing of individuals—as opposed to systems—because they have to imply that something about Vance’s character allowed him to get away from his hillbilly roots. Hillbilly Elegy has to simplify the people and problems of Appalachia, because it has decided to tell the same old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative that so many of us reject.