The Washigtnon Post - 03.04.2020

(Joyce) #1
mentored by a man named Pau-
lo, the avatar of the Brazilian city
of são Paolo. Paulo has arrived
downtown to act as cosmic mid-
wife to new York City, which has
reached a sort of celestial critical
mass and is ready to be embod-
ied by the bemused younger
man.
But before new York City can
transition to this next stage, the

BY PAUL FARHI

This time, it was a fairly routine
question that Chanel Rion, a cor-
respondent for one America
news network, posed to Presi-
dent Trump during Tuesday’s
White House news briefing: How
many clinical trials would it take
before a potential coronavirus
drug he has touted could be ap-
proved? Trump wasn’t sure and
turned the question over to An-
thony s. Fauci, his infectious-dis-
eases expert.
But the brief Q&A raised its
own question: What was Rion
doing there in the first place?
Under strict guidelines jointly
imposed last month by White
House officials and the White


House Correspondents’ Associa-
tion, which represents journal-
ists, access to the cramped brief-
ing room is now restricted to
about 15 reporters each day to
enforce social-distancing mea-
sures amid the coronavirus crisis,
and several smaller news organi-
zations can rotate in only once
every several days.
And it wasn’t oAnn’s turn on
Tuesday. nor on Wednesday,
when Rion showed up in the room
again — prompting the corre-
spondents’ association to vote to
remove oAnn from the rotation.
“We did this because a reporter
for this outlet twice attended
press briefings in contravention
of this policy,” the board of the
WHCA said in a statement late

Wednesday. “We do not take this
action lightly. This is a matter of
public safety.”
Rion said Thursday that she
and her employer — a t iny conser-
vative cable outlet known for its
favorable coverage of Trump —
had received special permission
overriding the WHCA guidelines
from White House press secretary
stephanie Grisham — and that
she would continue to attend the
briefings. she was there again
Thursday evening, and the presi-
dent called on her to ask another
question.
Grisham didn’t return a re-
quest for comment on Thursday.
It’s unlikely that Grisham would
have approved such an extraordi-
nary breach of the access rules

without the knowledge or assent
of Trump or other top-level White
House officials.
In her work, Rion has pushed
conspiracy theories that advance
Trump’s political interests, such
as the unfounded allegation that
officials in Ukraine secretly ma-
nipulated the 2016 election to
help Hillary Clinton. Trump, in
turn, has tweeted praise of
oAnn’s reporting dozens of
times.
The White House, in effect,
bent the rules — designed to en-
sure the health of journalists, the
president and the nation’s top
public-health officials — by grant-
ing access and a national spot-
light to a correspondent from an
see oann on C3

Conservative news outlet given special access to briefings by White House


Jabin botsford/the washington Post
Chanel rion, a white house correspondent for one america news
network, a sks a question during a white house briefing in march.

BY SINDYA BHANOO

Up to this point in the coronavirus pandemic, public
health officials in the United states have advised healthy
civilians against wearing face masks, despite a growing
grass-roots masks-for-all movement. B ut Thursday eve-
ning, the White House and the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention were expected to urge all
Americans to wear face coverings in public.
For those interested in making and wearing a nonmed-
ical mask, the choice can be overwhelming. There are
thousands of DIY mask tutorials online, relying on
everything from paper towels t o men’s u nderwear t o bras.
some take a few minutes to make, while others are more
complex. More tutorials are posted daily, and some have
millions of views. Which template should we follow?

What material is best?
A growing number of experts — medical doctors and
virologists among them — say that a homemade mask,
even a bandanna, might provide protection from both
transmitting and getting the coronavirus. And there is
some evidence to validate this. A 2013 study published in
the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Pre-
paredness f ound that well-fitting homemade masks made
of cotton T-shirts provide some protection from droplet
transmission, the method by which the coronavirus is
spread. Another study found that mask use and hand
hygiene reduces cases of respiratory illnesses in college
dormitory settings.
But because there is little research to indicate how well
or what homemade masks work, there is no consensus
see mask on C2

DIY masks: How to, whether to


There is little research about them, and some researchers think they give wearers a false sense of security


illustrations by Junghwa Park for the washington Post

and psychological symbolism
anticipated audiences’ expanding
expectations in the early 2 0th
century, and that the jump cuts
and jittery handheld camera
movements of the French new
Wave both captured and
informed the edgy sociopolitical
impulses of the 1960 s, Zoom is
already promising to both reflect
and infiltrate the visual l anguage
of its era.
Like the aesthetic a dvances
that preceded it, the
Zoomification o f movies will be
the product of what has always
been a dialectical relationship
between technology and creators.
In 2 000, the British d irector Mike
Figgis made “Time Code,”
composed of four separate story
lines f ilmed on digital c ameras
that unspooled simultaneously,
see hornaday on C3

and stacked spatial grid, the
Zoom screen h ews to a
comforting form of classicism,
evoking both Mies van der Rohe-
esque modernism and t he
boomer nostalgia of “Hollywood
squares.” As a metaphor for
contagious times, its aesthetic
couldn’t be more apt, allowing
practitioners to be connected and
self-isolated, in a format that —
however improbably — looks
better as more people add their
faces t o its oddly mesmerizing
mosaic of morphing t iles.
In f act, Zoom has quickly
become so ubiquitous, so
reflexively a ccepted a s How We
Live now (it’s b een real, TikTok),
that it’s o nly a matter of time
before someone makes their first
feature film entirely on the
platform. In t he same way that
D.W. G riffith’s n ovelistic editing

some cinematic
languages are
ahead o f their
eras. others a rrive
just in time.
eons ago — also
known a s January
— Zoom was a
semi-obscure
service k nown m ostly as a
business-based
videoconferencing tool. now, i n
the throes o f the n ovel
coronavirus pandemic — and
serious privacy concerns
notwithstanding — it has become
our instant vernacular, with
toddlers u sing it for play dates,
teenagers using it to learn, wine
o’clockers using it to toast and
families using it for virtual hugs
during a time of enforced
separation.
With its black-box s implicity


The cinematic possibilities of Zoom


Ann
Hornaday


fabric of our world is torn.
Through the rift, an enemy en-
ters, known as the Woman in
White, an avatar from a dimen-
sion other than our own. In her
wake, white fractal beings with
too many eyes and legs pursue
the boy and destroy the Wil-
liamsburg Bridge. The primary
avatar of new York City escapes
but falls into a dream state and
disappears.
As the graffiti artist learned,
“great cities are like any other
living things, being born and
maturing and wearying and dy-
ing in their turn.” Jemisin’s
fictional world may not be
threatened by a virus, but with
rampant gentrification and the
rise of global oligarchies and
see book world on C2

BY ELIZABETH HAND

Considering the turmoil of the
present moment, there could be
no better time to read best-sell-
ing, Hugo Award-winning writer
n.K. Jemisin’s sprawling and
provocative new novel, “The City
We Became,” i n which new York
City and its denizens battle an
alien force intent upon eradicat-
ing them.
Readers familiar with Jemi-
sin’s work may recognize the
novel’s prologue, originally pub-
lished in a slightly different form
as “The City Born Great” by
To r.com in 2016 and later includ-
ed in Jemisin’s 2018 story collec-
tion “How Long ’Til Black Future
Month?” In it, an unnamed
young, black graffiti artist is

Book World

A tale with a heart as big as New York’s


THE CITY WE
BECAME
by n.k. Jemisin
orbit. 448 pp.
$28

KLMNO


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