Amen! It’s been sort of baffling to me that while the pandemic has highlighted how essential the majority of working class jobs are the media keeps writing articles as if we practically don’t exist. I’ve been hoping that acknowledging service work as essential would help the case for low paid services workers to demand higher wages and better benefits. Worker shortages are starting to do that work instead (shortages which I suspect are in part because working in the service industry through the pandemic has fucking sucked and motivated many people to look for other jobs). There has been an appalling lack of wrestling within the media about how this pandemic has shown how absolutely fucked up our valuation of work is in our country. I don’t get why we don’t have more takes about how the pandemic has made it starkly clear that we are paying high wages to the wrong people. It’s practically self-evident that the workers whose labor we can’t live without are the ones who should have enviable benefits and high compensation. Instead of white collar workers whose contributions to society are inessential. There should be take after take about how this year has taught every parent that teachers need a raise, all of us that grocery store workers and restaurant employees deserve better pay and greater benefits, and that CNAs and nurses should be valued as much as if not more than doctors (since they provide the bulk of care and often catch problems before doctors do.) Instead, the media seems to have their head stuck deeper in the sand than ever.
When was the first time you wrote about the likelihood that covid was airborne. I recall buying HEPA filters for my parents and my sister in December 2020 at your recommendation.
Greetings from Milwaukee. I relate to this piece a lot. A lot of my favorite writers make it seem like they only leave their domiciles to buy groceries or if the fire alarm goes off. I worked remotely from March through July of 2020. The company I work for has very good but very conservative (as in politically) leadership. That means that I frequently went out to lunch indoors. I was felt a little weird about it but felt like the coastal writers that would judge me for it probably didn't have the same pressures I had. The fact is, in the midwest, most people have been meeting up with friends throughout the pandemic, even indoors. That's not necessarily great, but our pandemic experience has been a lot different than a lot of my favorite writers located on the coasts. This is why I try hard not to judge people for their pandemic choices. We all have different professional and social pressures that impact our willingness to accept risk.
WFH is not exclusively high paid professionals; consider, for example customer service/call center workers. Not all, or even most, jobs can be done from home but where it does work might as well save employees the commuting time and employers the office space, not to mention the environmental benefits.
I work from home but my wife is a doctor... most of her colleagues at the hospital are not very interested in the COVID culture war stuff that drove clicks throughout the whole thing. COVID didn't really seem like the main topic of concern for most doctors and nurses after ~ July/August.
And once they got vaccinated in Dec./Jan. there was very little handwringing like you see in the press about "easing back" in to things, people started going out to lunch together and planning trips immediately. So perhaps covering people who were actually putting on pants wouldn't have resulted in the appropriate twitter flame wars.
Anecdotally I have heard a lot more "WE'RE IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC" from my own work from home team than from any doctors and nurses, but maybe that is just a "stiff upper lip" sort of thing. Again, might not make super interesting stories though.
How much of this has to do with the fact that the big publications are all now subscription based, so they basically write for their subscribers? The New York Times has only 5 million subscribers (~4% of US households), every other publication appears to be substantially smaller, the New Yorker and the Washington Post have ~1 million subscribers, the Atlantic probably less than 500k. I think there has already been a lot of pressure on the New York Times, etc. to be more explicitly aligned to their highly educated and liberal base since 2016.
I wonder if covering COVID in this way is also a part of that. The journalists and customers both skew educated/liberal/white/wfh demographic.
Not only does journalism assume people are working from home, but the school districts do, too! Zoom school for small kids (my older one is 6) required constant adult supervision, and now that schools are open again in-person here in Berkeley, an adult has to be available to drop the kid off at 8:15 and pick them up at 12:45. I'm *very* happy to have the schools open, but as far as I can tell, most school districts are still assuming all parents have very flexible WFH schedules (or can hire a nanny, I guess).
Good post, and kudos to you for breaking out of the bubble.
I would just add that insularity in the media and the commanding heights of the culture spread far and wide, well beyond Covid reporting. Thus that minority of people tends to have a very outsized voice generally.
Personally, I'm tired of the "virtual school vs. the teachers' unions" articles. I live in Oklahoma, where the schools have been largely open since last September. (Parents had three options: in-person, blended, and virtual. We chose in-person.) Yep, both my kids had to isolate for awhile because they had come into contact with someone who contracted Covid, but they've been in-school for five days a week for most of the school year. We don't read many stories about schools in Red America, or whether their approach (giving parents options) has been successful.
Even in my mostly urban, blue-state county the schools in the farther-out suburbs are just like what you've described. And in the adjacent counties they've been more open than that
One of the really nice things about being your own boss is that you can wear whatever you like. You can dress like Steve Jobs or wear sweatpants at work. Matthew is of an age where it is about time to have The Talk. It is strictly speaking a male thing and we don't like to discuss such things and even pretend it isn't happening but it does. And it is definitely pants related. Have you noticed that you have to cinch your belt ever tighter in order to keep your pants in place? Are your belts starting to acquire curvature above and below the waistline? Does your abdomen slump when you remove your belt? Time flies and so do waistlines. Sure, you can fool yourself and flip your belt around the other way to put the gut induced curve at the bottom but it is better to face the truth. You need to switch to suspenders as your primary pants support system.
The benefits are manifold. Tasked with actually supporting your gut your abdominal muscles will regain strength. You will avoid looking like the Michelin man. You will eliminate the male equivalent of bra strap marks at the end of the day. Regardless of how your waist expands or contracts you will always have shoulders. You can keep your belts as a fashion accessory without strangling your waist but suspenders will take the load. Suspenders make a fine fashion accessory if you are inclined to make a statement. Which is why I now have more suspenders than I do belts.
The vicissitudes of aging are commonly known, the details not so much. Switch to suspenders and be more comfortable. Make your peace with aging.
Depends on where you are and who you are. I'll tell you a population for whom Zoom fatigue is awfully real: retired people who are tech competent. We correctly evaluated that COVID was a particular danger and acted accordingly in cities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we really did shut down -- twice, once early on and again during the winder surge.
I thought from early on the outside was okay, so I saw the streets empty, boarded up restaurants, empty buses, retail stores closed. Cell phone data confirms that we were the most sheltered in place large urban area in the country. The effect has been devastating among my working class Latino neighbors -- but their families are also those who've done most of the dying.
Of course I always knew that other places were experiencing the pandemic differently. Big country.
Ever since April or so of last year I've found myself intensely curious about what things are like in other places during the pandemic. In the Before Times, I used to travel all the time (mainly for academic conferences, with a few extra days of personal time). Sure, I was always ensconced well within the "air space" of hip urban downtown Airbnbs, international airports, universities, and conference centers, but I still got some sense of some of the remaining behavioral differences (including just the basics of how weather influences behavior) between different American and European cities. But when the stay-at-home orders went into place, I was curious about just how similar or different they were between my part of Texas, and places like California and New York, and the parts of the country that never had them, not to mention the European orders that I hear banned bicycling!
There's always a large amount of lack of knowledge of what other people's lives are like, and the information bubbles of the social media era have reproduced much of that. But during the past year, one of our major safety precautions was literally called "forming a bubble"! Not only do we not know what it's like to live in a different city during this period - we don't even know how other groups within our own city live! The people who are staying home don't see the people who are still going to bars and restaurants; and the people who are still going to bars and restaurants don't see the people who are staying home. So no one has an accurate lived-experience sense of what the numbers are like.
For most of 2020, my partner and I worked from home, and cooked every meal at home (and he started sourdough and developed a cocktail expertise - there are advantages to living with a chemist). In early June we started getting takeout burritos once a week, and went to the gym a few times (but were very annoyed that no one else was wearing masks). At the end of June, we took a road trip to visit family in New Mexico and Nevada, and were just shocked at the sort of behavior we saw everywhere. I think the net result was to make my partner much more cautious than he had been, but made me realize that if we *only* had a few million cases so far with everyone behaving like that, then I could ease up some.
After getting back home from that trip, we mostly stayed home all the time (apart from daily walks/bike rides on the streets that for a few weeks had had plenty of happy families out on their bikes, but had returned to their suburban emptiness by then). But we did get a weeklong Airbnb in Austin to "work-from-home-from-travel", and the experience of eating at an outdoor restaurant was exhilarating - seeing all those people out doing things and living their lives, while wearing masks!
We have now relocated to Austin for six months, and it's been great, living both a pandemic lifestyle, but one that still feels closer to "normal". We eat at outdoor restaurants almost every meal (though we get some delivery when it's rainy, and were lucky enough to be able to cook for a week when the ice storm hit) and we've been seeing a few friends at beer gardens.
But we're still in a bubble - we still don't interact with the people that have been eating and drinking inside bars and restaurants (and there's a lot of those in Austin) or see the people that have been isolating at home the entire time (though I talk to a lot of them on social media). And there are surely all sorts of other aspects of the experience of this past year that any one of us hasn't experienced, because of lack of travel, and the growth of bubbles (both epistemic, and viral).
Oh, and I doubt I will ever wear pants as hard as jeans ever again in the rest of my life - there are some changes where there is no going back. (I'll also keep my long hair, but color it again - my partner may or may not end up keeping his pandemic beard.)
Amen! It’s been sort of baffling to me that while the pandemic has highlighted how essential the majority of working class jobs are the media keeps writing articles as if we practically don’t exist. I’ve been hoping that acknowledging service work as essential would help the case for low paid services workers to demand higher wages and better benefits. Worker shortages are starting to do that work instead (shortages which I suspect are in part because working in the service industry through the pandemic has fucking sucked and motivated many people to look for other jobs). There has been an appalling lack of wrestling within the media about how this pandemic has shown how absolutely fucked up our valuation of work is in our country. I don’t get why we don’t have more takes about how the pandemic has made it starkly clear that we are paying high wages to the wrong people. It’s practically self-evident that the workers whose labor we can’t live without are the ones who should have enviable benefits and high compensation. Instead of white collar workers whose contributions to society are inessential. There should be take after take about how this year has taught every parent that teachers need a raise, all of us that grocery store workers and restaurant employees deserve better pay and greater benefits, and that CNAs and nurses should be valued as much as if not more than doctors (since they provide the bulk of care and often catch problems before doctors do.) Instead, the media seems to have their head stuck deeper in the sand than ever.
>>there are a lot of people driving home after more drinks than the CDC would advise<<
Nice callback to your observation that the CDC might advise a young woman not to consume an entire IPA.
>>there are a lot of people driving home after more drinks than the CDC would advise<<
Nice callback to your observation that the CDC might advise a young woman not to consume an entire IPA.
When was the first time you wrote about the likelihood that covid was airborne. I recall buying HEPA filters for my parents and my sister in December 2020 at your recommendation.
Greetings from Milwaukee. I relate to this piece a lot. A lot of my favorite writers make it seem like they only leave their domiciles to buy groceries or if the fire alarm goes off. I worked remotely from March through July of 2020. The company I work for has very good but very conservative (as in politically) leadership. That means that I frequently went out to lunch indoors. I was felt a little weird about it but felt like the coastal writers that would judge me for it probably didn't have the same pressures I had. The fact is, in the midwest, most people have been meeting up with friends throughout the pandemic, even indoors. That's not necessarily great, but our pandemic experience has been a lot different than a lot of my favorite writers located on the coasts. This is why I try hard not to judge people for their pandemic choices. We all have different professional and social pressures that impact our willingness to accept risk.
WFH is not exclusively high paid professionals; consider, for example customer service/call center workers. Not all, or even most, jobs can be done from home but where it does work might as well save employees the commuting time and employers the office space, not to mention the environmental benefits.
I work from home but my wife is a doctor... most of her colleagues at the hospital are not very interested in the COVID culture war stuff that drove clicks throughout the whole thing. COVID didn't really seem like the main topic of concern for most doctors and nurses after ~ July/August.
And once they got vaccinated in Dec./Jan. there was very little handwringing like you see in the press about "easing back" in to things, people started going out to lunch together and planning trips immediately. So perhaps covering people who were actually putting on pants wouldn't have resulted in the appropriate twitter flame wars.
Anecdotally I have heard a lot more "WE'RE IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC" from my own work from home team than from any doctors and nurses, but maybe that is just a "stiff upper lip" sort of thing. Again, might not make super interesting stories though.
How much of this has to do with the fact that the big publications are all now subscription based, so they basically write for their subscribers? The New York Times has only 5 million subscribers (~4% of US households), every other publication appears to be substantially smaller, the New Yorker and the Washington Post have ~1 million subscribers, the Atlantic probably less than 500k. I think there has already been a lot of pressure on the New York Times, etc. to be more explicitly aligned to their highly educated and liberal base since 2016.
I wonder if covering COVID in this way is also a part of that. The journalists and customers both skew educated/liberal/white/wfh demographic.
A big chunk for the NYT subscribers are probably international readers as well, so their % of the US population is even smaller.
Not only does journalism assume people are working from home, but the school districts do, too! Zoom school for small kids (my older one is 6) required constant adult supervision, and now that schools are open again in-person here in Berkeley, an adult has to be available to drop the kid off at 8:15 and pick them up at 12:45. I'm *very* happy to have the schools open, but as far as I can tell, most school districts are still assuming all parents have very flexible WFH schedules (or can hire a nanny, I guess).
Good post, and kudos to you for breaking out of the bubble.
I would just add that insularity in the media and the commanding heights of the culture spread far and wide, well beyond Covid reporting. Thus that minority of people tends to have a very outsized voice generally.
This is the sort of hard-(pants-)hitting journalism that we subscribers have come to expect.
This June 2020 Stanford study found that 42 percent of the U.S. labor force are now working from home full time (Surveys conducted in May) https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working-home-works-out
Personally, I'm tired of the "virtual school vs. the teachers' unions" articles. I live in Oklahoma, where the schools have been largely open since last September. (Parents had three options: in-person, blended, and virtual. We chose in-person.) Yep, both my kids had to isolate for awhile because they had come into contact with someone who contracted Covid, but they've been in-school for five days a week for most of the school year. We don't read many stories about schools in Red America, or whether their approach (giving parents options) has been successful.
Even in my mostly urban, blue-state county the schools in the farther-out suburbs are just like what you've described. And in the adjacent counties they've been more open than that
One of the really nice things about being your own boss is that you can wear whatever you like. You can dress like Steve Jobs or wear sweatpants at work. Matthew is of an age where it is about time to have The Talk. It is strictly speaking a male thing and we don't like to discuss such things and even pretend it isn't happening but it does. And it is definitely pants related. Have you noticed that you have to cinch your belt ever tighter in order to keep your pants in place? Are your belts starting to acquire curvature above and below the waistline? Does your abdomen slump when you remove your belt? Time flies and so do waistlines. Sure, you can fool yourself and flip your belt around the other way to put the gut induced curve at the bottom but it is better to face the truth. You need to switch to suspenders as your primary pants support system.
The benefits are manifold. Tasked with actually supporting your gut your abdominal muscles will regain strength. You will avoid looking like the Michelin man. You will eliminate the male equivalent of bra strap marks at the end of the day. Regardless of how your waist expands or contracts you will always have shoulders. You can keep your belts as a fashion accessory without strangling your waist but suspenders will take the load. Suspenders make a fine fashion accessory if you are inclined to make a statement. Which is why I now have more suspenders than I do belts.
The vicissitudes of aging are commonly known, the details not so much. Switch to suspenders and be more comfortable. Make your peace with aging.
Depends on where you are and who you are. I'll tell you a population for whom Zoom fatigue is awfully real: retired people who are tech competent. We correctly evaluated that COVID was a particular danger and acted accordingly in cities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we really did shut down -- twice, once early on and again during the winder surge.
I thought from early on the outside was okay, so I saw the streets empty, boarded up restaurants, empty buses, retail stores closed. Cell phone data confirms that we were the most sheltered in place large urban area in the country. The effect has been devastating among my working class Latino neighbors -- but their families are also those who've done most of the dying.
Of course I always knew that other places were experiencing the pandemic differently. Big country.
Ever since April or so of last year I've found myself intensely curious about what things are like in other places during the pandemic. In the Before Times, I used to travel all the time (mainly for academic conferences, with a few extra days of personal time). Sure, I was always ensconced well within the "air space" of hip urban downtown Airbnbs, international airports, universities, and conference centers, but I still got some sense of some of the remaining behavioral differences (including just the basics of how weather influences behavior) between different American and European cities. But when the stay-at-home orders went into place, I was curious about just how similar or different they were between my part of Texas, and places like California and New York, and the parts of the country that never had them, not to mention the European orders that I hear banned bicycling!
There's always a large amount of lack of knowledge of what other people's lives are like, and the information bubbles of the social media era have reproduced much of that. But during the past year, one of our major safety precautions was literally called "forming a bubble"! Not only do we not know what it's like to live in a different city during this period - we don't even know how other groups within our own city live! The people who are staying home don't see the people who are still going to bars and restaurants; and the people who are still going to bars and restaurants don't see the people who are staying home. So no one has an accurate lived-experience sense of what the numbers are like.
For most of 2020, my partner and I worked from home, and cooked every meal at home (and he started sourdough and developed a cocktail expertise - there are advantages to living with a chemist). In early June we started getting takeout burritos once a week, and went to the gym a few times (but were very annoyed that no one else was wearing masks). At the end of June, we took a road trip to visit family in New Mexico and Nevada, and were just shocked at the sort of behavior we saw everywhere. I think the net result was to make my partner much more cautious than he had been, but made me realize that if we *only* had a few million cases so far with everyone behaving like that, then I could ease up some.
After getting back home from that trip, we mostly stayed home all the time (apart from daily walks/bike rides on the streets that for a few weeks had had plenty of happy families out on their bikes, but had returned to their suburban emptiness by then). But we did get a weeklong Airbnb in Austin to "work-from-home-from-travel", and the experience of eating at an outdoor restaurant was exhilarating - seeing all those people out doing things and living their lives, while wearing masks!
We have now relocated to Austin for six months, and it's been great, living both a pandemic lifestyle, but one that still feels closer to "normal". We eat at outdoor restaurants almost every meal (though we get some delivery when it's rainy, and were lucky enough to be able to cook for a week when the ice storm hit) and we've been seeing a few friends at beer gardens.
But we're still in a bubble - we still don't interact with the people that have been eating and drinking inside bars and restaurants (and there's a lot of those in Austin) or see the people that have been isolating at home the entire time (though I talk to a lot of them on social media). And there are surely all sorts of other aspects of the experience of this past year that any one of us hasn't experienced, because of lack of travel, and the growth of bubbles (both epistemic, and viral).
Oh, and I doubt I will ever wear pants as hard as jeans ever again in the rest of my life - there are some changes where there is no going back. (I'll also keep my long hair, but color it again - my partner may or may not end up keeping his pandemic beard.)
I think the rule is that your partner has to keep the beard until either eliminated from the playoffs or hoisting the Stanley Cup
My girlfriend loved my long hair. I felt like I had a sheep growing out of my head. The first thing I did after getting vaccinated was cut it, lol.
My wife started cutting my hair and I may never go back. It felt great being in the sun in the backyard, saving $20, lol