U.S. President Donald Trump might be using comments about race and political correctness to try to deflect from the COVID-19 pandemic, but some Republicans say they’re creating more division within the party and could cost him votes.
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After months of social distancing, job losses and other impacts, a surge of new U.S. coronavirus cases has prompted serious questions about how America is coping with the pandemic. Have some states reopened too soon? Have mixed messages from national, state and local leaders muddled our understanding of risk? And how prepared are Americans to continue to adhere to public health recommendations? Layered on this is the continued challenge to understand the virus itself and the race to create a vaccine and treatments to combat it. Harvard Chan epidemiologist William Hanage and The World’s Elana Gordon discussed concerns about the surge as society tries to reopen in a Facebook Live event on July 7, 2020.
Presented jointly by The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and The World from PRX & WGBH
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Amid recent surge in the nation’s coronavirus cases, the Trump administration pledged to share with states “best practices” on reopening schools but has not laid out proposals on how states might mitigate the risks
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Jul 7, 2020
UNC professor Dr. McMillan Cottom on Harvard’s plan for only 40% of students to return to campus in the fall: “When a school has all of the resources available to it, and has the ability to afford the luxury of putting student health and welfare first, they chose to go online.” Aired on 7/7/2020.
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Jul 7, 2020
‘There have been lies told about Black people’s capacities, about our character’ — Eddie Glaude Jr. breaks down James Baldwin’s 1994 essay ‘The White Problem.’
In US news and current events today, the Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd have opened up a new dialogue about systemic racism in America, though these problems have existed for centuries. In conversation with Cornel West, Eddie Glaude Jr. discusses the landmark 1994 essay by James Baldwin, The White Problem, as it affects America today. Speaking to Eddie Glaude, Cornel West evokes one of the greatest Black writers of all time in discussing the sinister lie that lies at the heart of racism and injustice in America, and as the BLM protests and Black Lives Matter movement continues to spread across the globe, Americans must come face to face with their own unjust actions and beliefs.
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President Donald Trump rebuked Dr. Anthony Fauci’s blunt assessment of the US’ coronavirus response, claiming that the country is “in a good place” even as new cases surge. “Well, I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him,” Trump said to Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren, according to a transcript of the interview released Tuesday. “Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks and now he says wear them. And he said numerous things. Don’t close off China. Don’t ban China. I did it anyway. I didn’t listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape.” “We’ve done a good job,” the President said. “I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we’re going to be in very good shape.” The President’s comments come after Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, had said Monday that the status of the coronavirus pandemic in the US is “really not good.”
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The Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, is one of the federal government’s signature efforts to help small businesses weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, there is new data from the Trump administration about how this money was distributed during the past few months, and to whom. Lisa Desjardins joins Judy Woodruff to discuss where PPP funds went and whether the program is likely to be extended.
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In this discussion, the third in a series on the relation between catastrophe and narrative, Homer scholar Dr. James Porter and poet Gillian Conoley will discuss how disaster and catastrophe have found narrative expression from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Unbeknownst to itself, the Western tradition is founded on violent catastrophe, and the wounds of this history are deeply embedded in its cultural memory. Homer’s poems, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” commemorate a war that led to the capture and obliteration of an ancient city called Troy. Looming behind Troy lies a much larger catastrophe, the massive “systems collapse” that swept across the Aegean and Mediterranean East sometime around 1200 BCE and that wiped out Bronze Age palaces on the Greek mainland, on Crete, Cyprus, in the Levant and Asia Minor, and that threw these civilizations back into a prehistoric state, a truly “Dark Age,” for half a millennium. How such massive changes could have come about in so many places at once and in so short a time—seemingly in a blink of the eye, though it probably took less than a century—is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. Warfare was involved, but the evidence points primarily to destruction by natural and not human forces, earthquakes and fires first and foremost, while a host of further factors have been conjectured, from droughts and floods to drastic climate changes.
Homer’s epics preserve a distorted memory of this collapse: they encode this trauma in their narrative form and substance, which complicates their understanding as celebrations of heroic glory. This presentation will unravel some of the mysteries that haunt Homeric Troy, in addition to rereading the poems as an invitation to deep ethical and aesthetic discomfort and reflection, not glorification. A short excerpt from Smoke, Ashes, Fable, a film montage that formed part of an exhibition from 2002 by the South African multi-media artist William Kentridge, will help us think through the broader question of what it means to live with the present and imminent realities of our own massive systems collapse today.
Gillian Conoley received the 2017 Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent collection is A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems, published with Nightboat Books. She is the author of seven previous books, including PEACE, an Academy of American Poets Standout Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Conoley’s translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appeared in 2014 with City Lights. Conoley is poet-in-residence and professor of English at Sonoma State University, where she edits Volt.
In association with Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California Berkeley
Main image: William Kentridge Drawing for ‘Zeno Writing’ (Landscape, text fragments), 2002, Marian Goodman Gallery
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Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is releasing a book criticizing her uncle, his upbringing, family divisions and offering new allegations, such as the claim Trump cheated on his SATs, which the White House denied in an official response. (This interview is from MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber, a news show covering politics, law and culture airing nightly at 6pm ET on MSNBC.
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Coronavirus infections are on the rise in 42 states, with the national total passing the 3 million mark. In the hardest-hit areas, including parts of Florida, intensive care units are filled to the brim with patients, and communities are grappling with testing shortages and delays. But some officials, including President Trump, are downplaying the crisis and pushing to reopen. John Yang reports
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Transition Studies 