The New York Times - USA (2020-08-09)

LIFESTYLE RELATIONSHIPS SOCIETY SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020

2 UNCALM WATERS

Poolside in a summer of

restrictions. BY BONNIE TSUI

10 SUPERSPREADER EVENTS

Health concerns hover over

weddings. BY ALYSON KRUEGER

3 INFLUENCER PARTIES

The pandemic isn’t slowing

them down. BY TAYLOR LORENZ

5 MODERN LOVE

Expecting more from married

life. BY KATERINA TSASIS

If Katie Hill were a different person, she

might have gone away and found religion.

Perhaps she would have tearfully apolo-

gized, a dutiful husband by her side, and

vowed to do better. Maybe she would have

checked herself into sex rehab, hiked the

Appalachian Trail or flat-out denied any-

thing untoward had occurred.

But Ms. Hill, the former Democratic con-

gresswoman from California whose

polyamorous affair with a campaign staff

member was exposed after nude photos of

her (taken without her consent, she said)

began circulating online, did none of those

things. She resigned, less than two weeks

after the photos became public and less

than a year into her term.

And so, on a recent afternoon in Washing-

ton, while her former colleague and friend

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

was delivering a rousing speech about sex-

ism and double standards on the House

floor, Ms. Hill was at home alone, with eggs

and Heineken in her fridge, wrestling with

an old Samsung laptop.

“Seriously, this doesn’t make any sense to

me,” Ms. Hill said, exasperated. She was

hunched over the computer, which was

propped on a wobbly kitchen table. “It did-

n’t used to have that problem. Now it does.”

Ms. Hill, 32, was trying to record an inter-

view with Bill Burton, a former deputy

press secretary for President Barack

Obama who had been an adviser to her, for a

new podcast she is hosting. In previous

times, she might have had an aide to help

her, or perhaps a government office to call

for tech support. But these days it’s just her

and Archie, a yellow tabby cat who likes to

walk across her keyboard as she types.

It was decided that Mr. Burton would

Don’t Fence Her In

With a book, a podcast and a political action committee, Katie Hill moves beyond

a scandal that led her to exit Congress less than a year into her term.

Katie Hill, near her home in Washington, on leaving the House of Representatives: “I still have a lot of unreconciled feelings about my decision.”

By JESSICA BENNETT

JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

An anonymous anthropology professor re-
mained outspoken about fairness in acade-
mia even as she suffered for months with
the coronavirus.
“This person was a scientist who got
Covid because they’d been forced to teach,”
said Michael Eisen, a fly geneticist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who had
interacted on Twitter with the professor for
years. “It wasn’t the first person I knew who
got Covid — but for a lot of people it was one
of the first people they knew who got it.”
He said that he had continued to ex-
change messages with the person running
the account through June and that this per-
son frequently discussed a difficult recov-
ery.
Then BethAnn McLaughlin, another
Twitter connection, announced on July 31
that the anonymous professor had died

from complications of the virus.

Just a few days later, both the accounts of

the anonymous professor and of Ms. Mc-

Laughlin were suspended for Twitter poli-

cies that, among other things, bar the co-

ordination of fake accounts.

The same day, Gerardo Gonzalez, a

spokesman for Arizona State University,

where the anonymous Twitter user was

supposedly a professor, described the anon-

ymous account as a “hoax.”

The account had posted inaccurate infor-

mation about the school, he said. “We also

have had no one, such as a family member

or friend, report a death to anyone at the

university,” he added.

Among scientists and academics, the

shock of mourning was already laced with

suspicion. Enough of them had unpleasant

interactions with the combative account

and were troubled by its inconsistencies

and seeming about-turns.

“You have these internal alarms that are

like, ‘Oh, I don’t trust you,’ ” said Julie

Libarkin, the head of the Geocognition Re-

search Laboratory at Michigan State Uni-

Anonymous Professor

Turns Out to Be a Hoax

A combative mystery voice in

the world of Science Twitter

raised suspicions and shock.

By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

and EZRA MARCUS

CONTINUED ON PAGE 8 Five months of grief, release and change in New York. By Dodai Stewart, Page 4.

The City and the Coronavirus

DANIEL ARNOLD