Tips on working in the time of coronavirus
Hello friends,
Hope you and yours are as safe and well as can be under the circumstances.
I've got an announcement! There are going to be some changes around here.
Next week, I'll be trying out a new email service, partially because it has more robust and up-to-date features, and partially because I'd like to try a new look as I finally take long-postponed steps to upgrade this newsletter. It will once again be weekly, I will be offering advertising space, and there will be options to pay for exclusive content.
I've been meaning to do this for a while, but there's nothing like a lil' global pandemic to focus the mind. Being that we're in the midst of what could very well be a media extinction event, I'm inclined to finally try my hand at this thing more seriously. Plus, some of my steady freelance gigs are in jeopardy due to social distancing and massive budget cuts at media outlets, so I've got some extra time on my hands.
So next week, this email will be going out through MailChimp instead of TinyLetter. (I'm not convinced yet that Substack is the move!) You don't have to do anything, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's not going to go into too many of your spam folders because of the new service. The next one will go out next Friday around noon — if you don't see it by the end of that day, I'd suggest checking out your spam folder.
This time around it's a light one with:
(1) Tips on working from home
(2) A quick reader critique of my last post about why Bernie lost
(3) What I'm reading
Life in the time of coronavirus
A few months ago, before I knew what Covid-19 was and how it would transform our world, I would have placed myself extremely low on the list of people who might be able to provide any useful tips on how to cope with a global pandemic. Not only am I ill-informed about science and medicine, I'm a hypochondriac whose mind lingers on disease in ways that are not exactly rational.
But oddly I've found that my lifestyle preceding this crisis has positioned me relatively well for dealing with at least some of its effects on daily life. I wouldn't go so far as to say I've been prepared as much as I can say that some of people's new struggles are ones that I've grappled with in the past as a freelancer who works from home and believes in walks as a cure for almost any ill.
So below, in no particular order, you'll find some tips and guidelines that have helped keep me anchored. There are a million reasons that these personal guidelines won't apply to other people, and some if it is embarrassingly basic, but I figured it's worth sharing given that I know a lot of you are working from home now or have reduced work hours for the first time. I also want to make it clear that it's important to resist the deranged cultural pressure to be ultra-productive or newly creative during a pandemic; my intention is merely to point out things that can help with ordinary functioning.
(1) Routine is a better manager of my time and tasks than willpower or mood. Whether it's getting ready for the day, mapping out work and chores, or winding down and going to bed, I find it easier to rely on set routines than constantly considering what I should do. Routine is useful when you don't have a supervisor or peer pressure keeping you locked into certain behaviors. When tired or unmotivated, I turn off my brain and use routine to help guide what I do. For example, no matter how depleted I feel around 6 pm, I get up and go for for a walk.
(2) Checklists are crucial for building and maintaining routines. I am religious about their usefulness. The physician Atul Gawande wrote a New Yorker article and a book about how even experts in many fields rely on them and find them crucial for functioning and performance. I use written checklists for things like morning routines or new daily habits (timely example: new vitamin intake). The nice thing about checklists is you can fiddle with them constantly, toss them out, or start new ones. You don't have to remember what's on them — only that you should consult them routinely. Sometimes I scribble them on paper, but more often I put them in a google doc I use every day to keep track of tasks. I find them to be a great counterweight to the chaos of daily life.
(3) Tidiness is important, but taken too far it can be a form of escapism. I generally like the apartment to feel orderly and tend to spend a bit of time most days tidying up. Physical clutter creates a sense of mental clutter for me, so it really does affect focus. But there's always something to be swept, wiped down, put away or organized — especially if you're spending all your time at home — so I deliberately try to allocate specific times for it. But be careful: since it feels virtuous — who can fault me for cleaning?! — it's also a sneaky procrastination tactic.
(4) Shower and dress for the outside world. It can be tempting to work in pajamas or stray from typical grooming habits when working from home, especially during a stressful time. But I find that a uniquely high level of self-loathing that surpasses even my normal writerly self-loathing kicks in on the days that I don't make an effort to look presentable (which sometimes happens when I'm on tight morning deadlines). I view the act not so much as a productivity hack as a an act of dignity and self-respect. I think it also nudges you in a more hermetic direction if you feel that you cannot leave the house in your current state without feeling slightly embarrassed.
(5) Meditate daily. I've practiced mindfulness meditation on and off throughout my adult life, but it really sunk in as a true daily habit and as part of my broader consciousness around the time I began freelancing. If you don't have a ton of experience but you're interested I recommend this book co-authored by Oxford University's Mark Williams, which I believe came with guided meditation audio recordings on a CD — how quaint! — back in the day (and can be found online here). I think reading the book, which includes step-by-step guides, is great for explaining some of the "theory" surrounding mindfulness meditation, and for me it was valuable to return to over and over again while developing my regular meditation practice. I also recommend using guided meditations before practicing on your own.
(6) Lunch for an hour. I like giving myself a proper lunch break when possible. It's disturbing that this is considered a decadent act in American life, but here we are. Any opportunity to avoid the indignities of the desk lunch should be happily embraced.
(7) Walk all the time. Walking is something rather sacred for me, and probably how I began to meditate before I ever really know what meditation was. I find walking to be a unique way to get out of my head and into my body (somewhat akin to yoga), commune with nature, observe and interact with the community, explore the world with a friend, solve riddles, or make difficult decisions. I could easily write a 10,000 word manifesto about why I love going for walks, but for now I will have to settle for something more modest, and say that it must not be dismissed as a boring alternative to a proper workout under quarantine. The scientists have told us: walking is a superpower! And even in times like these, the benefits of getting fresh air in a park outweigh the risks of infection.
(8) Phone calls are invigorating. Staying social even while being at home is very much worthwhile. I find phone calls more reliably fulfilling than video chats: they can be more spontaneous and brief; there's total focus on the conversation, and one is not distracted by the uncanny quality of someone's pixellated visage; the quality of audio is consistently good rather than unpredictable and choppy; expectations are more modest; and you can't be Zoom-bombed! Don't get me wrong, a great video chat is a special thing, but a phone call to a friend or family member is a timeless classic and relatively hassle-free. And if you hate talking on the phone and prefer texting, it's nice to install iMessage and WhatsApp on your computer, which is more pleasant than always typing on the phone.
Bernie and the black vote
I received a lot of interesting feedback to my last newsletter reflecting on why Bernie lost. This one, which objects to my skepticism of identifying the black vote as a unified entity, is particularly noteworthy. A reader writes:
"I’d like to make a friendly amendment to section on black voters. Although I agree that it is important to place the “black vote” in its proper geographical, ideological, material context, I do think there are some generalities among black voters that still make it useful to think of the group in broad terms. I say that as well because, while Sanders won younger black voters, his margin of victory among them was lower than his margin among young voters of other groups, which does actually suggest a specific problem with black Democrats.
Here’s my theory of the case: As a group, black voters are not particularly ideological (and the conservatism of black voters in the South is, I think, overstated). What they are — and what much of the Sanders left is not — is transactional. Much of black politics, whether the South or the northern/midwest cities, is based in relationships and patronage. *That* is what gave Biden his critical advantage, and that is the barrier the Sanders left needs to break through."
I think overall this is a fair point. I think the points alluded to in my article about party affiliation hint at that, but it's worth getting specific about what underpins that affiliation.
What I'm reading
Can you beat Covid-19 without a lockdown? Sweden is trying.
Obesity may be one of the most important predictors of severe coronavirus illness — not good news for the US!
Sam Adler-Bell: "The left, of which I am doomed to remain a perpetual partisan, has an intimate relationship with defeat. Defeat is our mother: our sustainer and our burden. “The history of socialism,” writes historian Enzo Traverso, “is a constellation of defeats nourished for almost two centuries.” The affective life of the left is defined by nostalgia, belatedness, memory, and mourning. We cherish a serial history of might-have-beens: if the Communards had stormed Versailles, if the work of Radical Reconstruction had been completed, if the Soviet Union had exorcised its totalitarian demons, if the Spanish Republic had survived the civil war, if the Prague Spring had been allowed to flourish, if Allende had survived the coup, if Mitterand had resisted the call of rigueur, if workers had seized power during this or that general strike, if Bernie had won the primary in 2016, if if if…"
A sharp, affecting account of what it's like to be expecting a baby at the epicenter of coronavirus.
Zak-Cheney Rice chronicles hell on Rikers Island: “We’re at capacity, 50 men a dorm,” Modesto said. “We’re living 15 inches away from each other. You have people coughing, and my fear is that everyone that tested positive didn’t have symptoms. So how do I know if any of these people got anything?”
Early Trump and DNC 2020 messaging indicates a bipartisan consensus on vilifying cooperation with China at a time when cooperation is essential, as Julian Gewirtz and others point out.
The technology that could free America from quarantine: Contact tracing is working in South Korea and Singapore. But it raises privacy issues.
Sean McElwee: "If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. ...Look, one problem with running a campaign as a movement is that movements exist outside public opinion."
"Trump's critics assume this crisis has to take Trump down, whether for the bungled response or the economic collapse. They’re missing something important: He’s been training for this moment his entire life."
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