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What is going on? How can it be that stocks are soaring when the economy is crashing? Link:  Stocks Are Recovering While the Economy Collapses. That Makes More Sense Than You'd Think

Pero la suciedad del Hotel Sagitario es la menor preocupación de Paloma y las mujeres que por necesidad o porque están secuestradas deben trabajar ahí. En marzo, cuando la Organización Mundial de la Salud declaró al COVID-19 como pandemia, vio lo que sus ojos no habían visto en 26 años: los padrotes más famosos de la región, las leyendas que han hecho negocios millonarios en el extranjero con cuerpos ajenos, regresaban masivamente a Tlaxcala para pasar la crisis sanitaria en sus pueblos y con sus familias. Pero no llegaron solos: varios volvieron con las mujeres que mantenían como esclavas sexuales fuera de México para ponerlas “a trabajar” mientras durara la pandemia, seguros de que en Estados Unidos su negocio se paralizaría y que su influencia en los gobiernos municipales de Tlaxcala les pondría a salvo de operativos y les permitiría tener abiertos sus hoteles. La extrañeza se volvió angustia cuando Paloma preguntó a una veterana de la Vía Corta de qué parte del extranjero volvían l

“The world would end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with a push notification,” Mark O’Connell, Notes From An Apocalypse [ Esquire ]

This is against our nature: We are meant to be together. Blending voices in worship and clinking glasses in taverns. Line dancing at weddings and standing in line at wakes. High-fiving at ballgames, applauding shamelessly at school concerts, moving as one in packed subways lurching forward. But a contagious virus, able to transmit death through touch and breath, has forced us to suppress our social tendencies. So we shelter in place — maybe with family or a friend — not knowing when we will breathe freely again. Not knowing when an unmasking will reveal smiles. It can seem as if time itself has been altered. March vanished into April, which is disappearing into May, with not even the day of the week always clear. The rituals by which we normally mark these days — the proms and graduations, the tournaments and parades — have been cancelled or postponed, inviting anxieties to fill the void left by the absence of distraction. Will my family be all right? Will I be all right? When will thi

Nick Cave: “Did you steal ‘Palaces of Montezuma’ from Rising Signs ?” Warren: “Fuck, no!” he says, “I stole it from The Laughing Clowns.” The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation — everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time . It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music — the great artistic experiment of our era.  Plagiarism is an ugly word. Link: Nick Cave on plagiarism  

Tengo la anécdota de que en la preparatoria mi apodo era Pippen. Ya entonces andaba rapado.  Pero antes del apodo, en la secundaria y antes, me parecía excesivo que todos se querían comparar con Jordan al jugar basquet. "Yo soy Jordan". Esa situación la veía (incluso siendo un niño) como demasiado ridícula. No siento lo mismo por los chavos que se identificaban con Kobe.  Scottie Pippen fue un talentosísimo atleta. Lleno de dones. Sin recompensa. Por medio del documental "The Last Dance" me entero que a lo largo de su primera etapa con los Bulls –la más brillante, la mítica— Pippen sólo tuvo un contrato por 18 millones de dólares.  Pero su don iba más allá de las habilidades físicas. El perfil que le dedican en GQ es esclarecedor.  Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals is the mythic Flu Game in which a seriously ill Jordan somehow still managed to drop 38 points. The portrait I have in mind has another cropping, though. Pippen is at its center, Jordan’s arm hanging limp aro

Fuentes: @cathy746books , @mafiasafia

Durante el fin de semana me enteré del fallecimiento de Amparo Dávila.  Called “extraordinary” by Julio Cortazár and revered by Spanish readers, Dávila made her English debut at 90 with her story collection The Houseguest translated by Audrey Harris and Matt Gleeson. To honor her memory, we make available here her story “Oscar” published in The Houseguest in 2018. Link:  Oscar by Amparo Dávila

La paciente de covid-19 había trabajado por alrededor de 30 años en el hospital al que solicitó su ingreso, el cual le fue negado. Gatewood drove herself to the Beaumont Hospital emergency room in Farmington Hills on March 18, where she requested a test and was sent home. “They said she wasn’t severe enough and that they weren’t going to test her,” said Kaila Corrothers, Gatewood’s only child. “They told her to just go home and rest.” Le faltaban sólo dos años para retirarse y recibir su pensión. Link:  Black Woman Dies From Coronavirus After Being Turned Away 4 Times From Hospital She Worked at for Decades

Esta reseña en The AV Club sobre la temporada final de Homeland me recuerda que todavía en el 2020 seguía activa la serie.  Creo que vi sus primeras dos temporadas y fue todo. Intentaré retomarla. Link:  A tense, riveting Homeland series finale concludes with a preposterous coda

Teatros cerrados, chicas cantando en las calles (luego de que los teatros cerraran)... The news is full of“unprecedented” situations, but Billboard is 126 years old, and we’ve seen it all — including the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans and shut down public gatherings in many big cities for weeks or months. A look at the magazine’s archives shows that the issues facing the entertainment business at the time seem frighteningly familiar. (Back then, Billboard covered it all — Broadway to burlesque, circuses to state fairs.) History may not repeat itself, as the saying goes — but it often rhymes. Link: Billboard's Coverage of 1918 Pandemic Reveals Eerie Similarities

In one study, researchers asked hundreds of people to seek advice on an important work project. Surprisingly, the participants didn’t get the most valuable help, solutions and referrals from their current ties. They got it from their dormant ties — people they hadn’t talked to in at least three years. Like our weak ties, our dormant ties have fresh perspectives from meeting different people and learning different things. But like with our strong ties, we have some shared history. When we’re looking for help, it’s easier to ask someone we used to know than someone we hardly know. Link:  We Don’t Just Need to Connect — We Need to Reconnect

Esto más que llamarsa "fatiga por cuarentena", debería expresarse como hartazgo por cuarentena.  Public health experts say any data showing widespread public resolve or cooperation beginning to wane is noteworthy. Because this is the first U.S. pandemic in 100 years, they don’t know how long people are willing to tolerate cabin fever for the greater good. They say they’re not surprised, however, that a slide occurred in a week that saw the first highly publicized challenges to such orders by protesters and President Trump, who tweeted his support to “liberate” states from shutdowns. The White House also released federal guidelines that week for states seeking to reopen their economies. And a growing number of governors, including in Texas, Minnesota and Vermont, set dates for when they planned to gradually lift restrictions. Pienso en un headline: "Rompe cuarentena por hartazgo" Link:  ‘Quarantine fatigue’: Researchers find more Americans venturing out against coron

In a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are "really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism. They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.” Link:  Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future

Esta entrevista con Westside Gunn y Virgil Abloh me hace retomar dos ideas: 1) hacer ropa y 2) el uso del clasicismo. Aunque no necesariamente un retorno a las fuentes clásicas, más algo como Renacimiento o Prerrafaelitas.  Veo esta imagen dentro de la entrevista: Pienso que para un libro que escribí tenía la idea de poner como portada esta pintura.  Había una cierta afinidad. Mi ingenuidad era creer entonce que además de escribir el libro podría estar involucrado en el diseño del mismo. Link:  Westside Gunn and Virgil Abloh Talk About Their Shared History, Coming Back from Coronavirus, and Being the “Best in Class”

Este video muestra a un hombre haciendo lagartijas a lo largo de una hora. Es un récord Guinness. Pero al correrlo por un minuto, te das cuenta que no hace correctamente una sola lagartija con el rango de movimiento requerido para una lagartija. 

Visto en mis Saved de Instagram . El Finsta. 

Aunque es poco probable que lean el libro Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City , en el London Review of Books Erin Maglaque escribió sobre la publicación.  From the point of view of the Sanità, the poor were constitutionally incapable of acting in the greater interests of the city. Tracing early cases to understand the spread of the outbreak, Francesco Rondinelli, a contemporary historian of the plague, placed the blame on poor people who had selfishly visited friends and family despite the risk of contagion. He told the story of the wife of a baker who went to nurse her daughter in Trespiano but returned home sick herself, and then spread the plague among her household, resulting in the deaths of seven others. The wife of a builder went to nurse her sick sister. When her sister died, the woman took the shirt she had been wearing at her death and gave it to her daughter. This ‘loving action had cost her dearly’: she, her husband and their daughter all died. In

  Película vista en abril de 2020.

La entrevista aborda el polémico récord de Eliud Kipchoge al romper con la marca de las dos horas para un maratón.  But before the sweat had even dried, there were detractors. Purists pointed to the pace team, his squad of 41 interchanging runners, noting that, as at Monza, they rendered the performance ineligible for a world record. Others questioned Kipchoge's racing shoe: a prototype of Nike's Alphafly Next%. The pair he wore in Monza was itself a variation of the Vaporfly 4%, a shoe that promised 4 percent more efficiency than the next-fastest Nike model at the time. This new, unreleased version offered benefits unknown. Talk of the shoe being banned grew rampant. Afterward, World Athletics, the sport's governing body, decreed that, going forward, in international competitions athletes would have to compete in shoes that had been available to the public for at least four months, among other regulations. Kipchoge's Nikes were legal, but that became the irony of sub-2

Me ha caído mejor Chris Evans en Knives Out que durante toda su saga como Capitán América. Me gustó mucho la fotografía y el arte en su entrevista con Esquire para la edición de abril/mayo 2020.   Link:  Chris Evans Doesn’t Like to Talk About Himself. But He Did. Sort Of.