Reporter's Notebook

When you contemplate the end of democracy in America, what kind of person do you think will bring it about? Maybe you picture a sinister billionaire in a bespoke suit, slipping brown envelopes to politicians. Maybe your nightmare is a rogue general, hijacking the nuclear football. Maybe you think of a jackbooted thug leading a horde of men in white sheets, all carrying burning crosses.

Here is what you probably don’t imagine: an affable, self-made midwesterner, one of those goofy businessmen who makes his own infomercials. A recovered crack addict, no less, who laughs good-naturedly when jokes are made at his expense. A man who will talk to anyone willing to listen (and to many who aren’t). A philanthropist. A good boss. A patriot—or so he says—who may well be doing more damage to American democracy than anyone since Jefferson Davis.

The CDC’s color-coded coronavirus case map, if you can find it, is easy enough to read. It’s a county-by-county snapshot of viral transmission—the agency’s new fallback for advising fully vaccinated people on whether they need to don a mask indoors. The parts painted in those scary shades of orange or red are areas of substantial or high transmission, respectively; they’re the places where you should be shielding your face indoors, regardless of how shot-fortified your immune system is. According to the agency, not everyone has to mask up again, so the map is, in theory, something inoculated Americans could check like a weather forecast to decide their face’s fate. Use the map, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky advised in a press briefing this week. It’s updated daily.

For raw emotional content, Tuesday’s hearing of the new House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection was nonpareil. Four police officers who fought to hold back armed hordes seeking to disrupt Congress told stories of physical injury, racist abuse, and post-traumatic distress. Even for Americans who paid close attention to the crisis, these stories added new texture and horror.

But the House Oversight Committee shed more light this week on just how and why January 6 happened, releasing handwritten notes by Richard Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration. The violence of the day has taken center stage, but these notes help put it in context: The angry crowd was just one part of President Donald Trump’s long-running effort to overturn the results of the election in the House of Representatives.

And just like that, it’s Groundhog Day. The news from the CDC is bad. Yes, we have vaccines—and they are miraculously effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. Thank goodness for that. But the CDC now says that when vaccinated people are infected, they may spread the coronavirus just as easily as the unvaccinated do. On top of that, the Delta variant is tremendously contagious, much more so than the original strain of the virus. As federal health officials put it in a document first obtained by The Washington Post, we must now “acknowledge the war has changed.”

To make sense of all this, I called Gary Simon, the Walter G. Ross Professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

In 2019, Steven Spielberg called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that “movie theaters need to be around forever” and that audiences had to be given “the motion picture theatrical experience” for a movie to be a movie. Spielberg’s fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not. Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for “everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time,” and for “giving filmmakers more ways to share art.” Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.

“Just think back to where this nation was a year ago,” an ebullient Joe Biden said on July 4, as he gave remarks billed as a celebration of U.S. independence—and independence from COVID-19. “Think back to where you were a year ago. And think about how far we’ve come.”

You might not have to work very hard to remember. Across the country, summer 2021 is starting to look distressingly like summer 2020. Not everything is the same: Today, roughly half of the population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, a step that (we are learning) does not necessarily prevent infection, but that does provide a good shield against serious illness, hospitalization, and death.

But the highly transmissible Delta variant is ravaging the United States. In many parts of the country, vaccination rates still lag far behind that 50 percent mark, and far behind the 70 percent target that Biden set for mid-summer. Hospitals in hard-hit areas of the country are filling up and sometimes overfilling with Delta patients. Health-care providers who have worked themselves to exhaustion for 16 months are being asked to find a little more energy. Businesses are putting office reopenings on hold. Elected and public-health officials are bringing back restrictions. The CDC said this week that Americans, even those who are vaccinated, should wear masks indoors in public spaces if they live in areas with substantial or high transmission of the virus.

Every striver who ever slipped the rank of their birth to ascend to a higher order has shared the capacity to ingratiate themselves with their betters. What the truly exceptional ones have in common is the ability to connect not only with their superiors but also with their peers and inferiors. And only the rarest talents among them can bond authentically—not just transactionally—with the people who will help them be who they want to be in the world. It’s a preternatural, almost Promethean gift if you have it, and Amy Chua does.

Thus begins the scandal dubbed “dinner-party-gate,” the latest in the annals of Amy Chua, Yale Law’s very own Tiger Mom, whose infamous defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the “dinner-party-gate” of its day approximately three years ago. Then, as now, Chua’s differences with some denizens of her milieu played out in the press, vituperations, allegations, insinuations, and all.

This article was published online on July 29, 2021.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have asked one question more than any other. It’s come up time and again, day and night, as frequently in my post-vaccination spring and summer as it did in the dark moments of the pandemic’s first wave: Are you my booboo?

The question is never answered by Midge, my agoraphobic chihuahua, but the answer is obvious. She’s been my booboo since 2018, when I brought her home from a cat shelter, where she had been stashed by a Long Island dog rescue after her foster family gave her back—she didn’t like them, or anyone, and cats aren’t looking for new friends. At 12 pounds, she is twice as big as the most desirable chihuahuas, and she has a moderately bad personality, which is maybe why the puppy mill where she spent the first year of her life decided it didn’t want any more of her robust and extremely rude babies. Now almost five years old, she has grown to tolerate me. I ask her questions she doesn’t answer—if she’s my booboo (yes), if she’s a big girl (relatively speaking), if she has a kibble tummy (a little bit).

Not long ago, a New York City data analyst who had been laid off shortly after the pandemic hit told me she had filed for unemployment-insurance payments and then spent the next six months calling, emailing, and using social media to try to figure out why the state’s Labor Department would not send her the money she was owed.

A mother in Philadelphia living below the poverty line told me about her struggle to maintain government aid. Disabled herself and caring for a disabled daughter, she had not gotten all of her stimulus checks and, because she does not regularly file taxes or use a computer, needed help from a legal-aid group to make sure she would get the newly expanded child-tax-credit payments.

One big reason HIV/AIDS remains a deadly crisis despite the existence of lifesaving drugs is stigma: Fear of shame and ostracization discourages people from accessing testing, preventive measures, and treatment. In other words, a factor causing needless suffering is people like DaBaby, one of the hottest names in hip-hop. Performing in Miami this past weekend, the rapper asked fans to raise their phones if they didn’t have AIDS or “any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases that’ll make you die in two to three weeks” and also weren’t “fellas … sucking dick in the parking lot.”

The comments were nonsensical—no one dies of any STD in three weeks—and brought backlash from listeners, celebrities, and businesses. On Instagram, DaBaby then made things worse by explaining that he had been trying to show that his gay fans “got class,” unlike the “nasty … junkies on the street” who get AIDS. He also tweeted that he knew his comments were insensitive to people with HIV and AIDS but that he’d meant no offense. He insists, too, that he’s not homophobic. But the reactions he’s kicked up, and some other recent developments in hip-hop, have outed bigots and underlined the cognitive dissonance they live with.