The Washigtnon Post - 03.04.2020

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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