The American Renaissance Has Begun
In 1982, the economist Mancur Olson set out to explain a paradox. West Germany and Japan endured widespread devastation during World War II, yet in the years after the war both countries experienced miraculous economic growth. Britain, on the other hand, emerged victorious from the war, with its institutions more intact, and yet it immediately entered a period of slow economic growth that left it lagging other European democracies. What happened?
In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Olson concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted. The devastation itself, and the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away. The disruption opened space for something new.
Something similar may be happening today. Covid-19 has disrupted daily American life in a way few emergencies have before. But it has also shaken things up and cleared the way for an economic boom and social revival.
Millions of Americans endured grievous loss and anxiety during this pandemic, but many also used this time as a preparation period, so they could burst out of the gate when things opened up. After decades of slowing entrepreneurial dynamism, 4.4 million new businesses were started in 2020, by far a modern record. A report from Udemy, an online course provider, says that 38 percent of workers took some additional training during 2020, up from only 14 percent in 2019.
After decades in which consumption took preference over savings, Americans socked away trillions of dollars in 2020, reducing their debt burdens to lows not seen since 1980 and putting themselves in a position to spend lavishly as things open up.
The biggest shifts, though, may be mental. People have been reminded that life is short. For over a year, many experienced daily routines that were slower paced, more rooted, more domestic. Millions of Americans seem ready to change their lives to be more in touch with their values.
The economy has already taken off. Global economic growth is expected to be north of 6 percent this year, and strong growth is expected to last at least through 2022. In late April, Tom Gimbel, who runs the recruiting and staffing firm LaSalle Network, told The Times: “It’s the best job market I’ve seen in 25 years. We have 50 percent more openings now than we did pre-Covid.” Investors are pouring money into new ventures. During the first quarter of this year U.S. start-ups raised $69 billion, 41 percent more than the previous record, set in 2018.
Already, this era of new creation seems to be rebalancing society in at least three ways:
First, power has begun shifting from employers to workers. In March, U.S. manufacturing, for example, expanded at the fastest pace in nearly four decades. Companies are desperate for new workers. Between April 2020 and March 2021, the number of unemployed people per opening plummeted to 1.2 from 5.
Workers are in the driver’s seat, for now, and they know it. The “quit rate” — the number of workers who quit their jobs because they are confident they can get a better one — is at the highest in two decades. Employers are raising wages and benefits to try to lure workers back.
Second, there seems to be a rebalancing between cities and suburbs. Covid-19 accelerated trends that had been underway for a few years, with people moving out of big cities like New York and San Francisco to suburbs, and to rural places like Idaho and the Hudson Valley in New York. Many are moving to get work or because of economic distress, but others say they moved so they could have more space, lead slower-paced lives, be closer to family or interact more with their neighbors.
Finally, there seems to be a rebalancing between work and domestic life. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom expects that even when the pandemic is over, the number of working days spent at home will increase to 20 percent from 5 percent in the prepandemic era.
While this has increased pressures on many women, millions of Americans who could work remotely found that they liked being home, dining every night with their kids, not hassling with the commute. We are apparently becoming a less work-obsessed and a more domestic society.
In 1910 the educator Henry Van Dyke wrote, “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.” That energy seemed to be fading away in recent years, as Americans came to move less and start new businesses less frequently. But the challenge of Covid-19 has summoned forth great dynamism, movement and innovation. Labor productivity rates have surged upward recently.
Americans are searching for ways to make more money while living more connected lives. Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban studies at Chapman University, points out that as the U.S. population disperses, economic and cultural gaps between coastal cities and inland communities will most likely shrink. And, he says, as more and more immigrants settle in rural areas and small towns, their presence might reduce nativism and increase economic competitiveness.
People are shifting their personal lives to address common problems — loneliness and loss of community. Nobody knows where this national journey of discovery will take us, but the voyage has begun.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Post Pandemic Thinking
Post Pandemic Thinking
Last edited by kmaherali on Fri Aug 13, 2021 9:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Are You Dreading a Return to ‘Normal’? You’re Not Alone.
Featuring Kirsten Imani Kasai, Emily Ladau, Michael Reid
Ms. Kasai is a novelist. Ms. Ladau is a disability rights activist. Mr. Reid is a retired Episcopal priest.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As the pandemic winds down in the United States, people are emerging from their cocoons, all fired up and ready to celebrate in a communal explosion of relief and pent-up desire. The sense of anticipation is so great that some, with lusty hope, have called the coming months “The Summer of Love.”
But in the Opinion video above, we explore how not everyone is feeling this way. Many people across the country are harboring a deep anxiety as the world around them kicks back into gear.
In the video, you will hear from some of these quieter voices. They explain that as much as they want the pandemic to end, it has also provided them with some relief from challenges, inequities and injuries that were all too common in their prepandemic lives.
Kirsten Imani Kasai, 50, a novelist in San Diego and self-described introvert, describes how she found comfort and safety in the relative quietude of the past year — and fears the return of a noisier, more-demanding world. Emily Ladau, 29, a disability rights activist in Long Island, N.Y., says she worries that the shift back to in-person interactions will force her, once again, to navigate environments that weren’t designed for the physically disabled.
And for Michael Reid, 67, a retired Episcopal priest and former professional dancer in Santa Fe, N.M., the shutdowns unexpectedly gave him sanctuary from everyday racist interactions.
As the nation reckons with the collective trauma of the pandemic, they suggest, we should find lessons in it that will help shape a better society for everyone.
Featuring Kirsten Imani Kasai, Emily Ladau, Michael Reid
Ms. Kasai is a novelist. Ms. Ladau is a disability rights activist. Mr. Reid is a retired Episcopal priest.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As the pandemic winds down in the United States, people are emerging from their cocoons, all fired up and ready to celebrate in a communal explosion of relief and pent-up desire. The sense of anticipation is so great that some, with lusty hope, have called the coming months “The Summer of Love.”
But in the Opinion video above, we explore how not everyone is feeling this way. Many people across the country are harboring a deep anxiety as the world around them kicks back into gear.
In the video, you will hear from some of these quieter voices. They explain that as much as they want the pandemic to end, it has also provided them with some relief from challenges, inequities and injuries that were all too common in their prepandemic lives.
Kirsten Imani Kasai, 50, a novelist in San Diego and self-described introvert, describes how she found comfort and safety in the relative quietude of the past year — and fears the return of a noisier, more-demanding world. Emily Ladau, 29, a disability rights activist in Long Island, N.Y., says she worries that the shift back to in-person interactions will force her, once again, to navigate environments that weren’t designed for the physically disabled.
And for Michael Reid, 67, a retired Episcopal priest and former professional dancer in Santa Fe, N.M., the shutdowns unexpectedly gave him sanctuary from everyday racist interactions.
As the nation reckons with the collective trauma of the pandemic, they suggest, we should find lessons in it that will help shape a better society for everyone.
The Developing World Is a Tinderbox
The images flooding out of riot-torn South Africa are horrifying. On Tuesday, a woman in a high-rise building apparently set alight by looters tossed her child to the hoped-for safety of a crowd far below. Emergency workers have been attacked in several places; one medical service began transporting the injured in an armored ambulance. In much of the central district of the port city of Durban, the police were overwhelmed and shopping malls and stores were gutted.
The nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, warned against ethnic conflict, a threat his critics called groundless and that only increased tensions.
But as I swiped through the pictures and videos flying across my South African relatives’ group chats this week, I was struck by the many posts that suggested an even bitterer flavor of doom — a kind of psychological crackup.
What began last week as scattered protests over the jailing of Jacob Zuma, the nation’s former president, has turned into a plunder free of meaning and intention, so indiscriminate that it seems almost cathartic. On Monday, just as Ramaphosa promised in a droning national address to get tough on looters, a split-screen showed a crowd meeting no resistance as they broke into a bank — but not an ordinary bank, a blood bank. All the while nobody seems to know what’s actually happening, as misinformation rockets through a locked-down, screen-dependent population.
South Africa has been a very fragile nation for a very long time — a place of persistent economic struggle and breathtaking inequality, intolerable violence, and racial animus still lurking beneath every national controversy. (Sound familiar?) But until this week I had never seriously entertained the idea that the place might suddenly fall apart. As was evident in the country’s bloodless handover from racist rule, troubled as it has been, there was a fundamental social stability undergirding South African society that I believed would hold.
But now it looks as if something key has been lost. The coronavirus may have dealt South Africa a blow that even AIDS could not, driving the country of my birth down the path of madness, a society slumping into the abyss.
The possibility of such collapse terrifies me — not just as a native South African, but as an American. Thanks to mass vaccination, it’s beginning to feel like morning in wealthy parts of the world, notwithstanding the social and political dislocations the virus has created in the United States. But on much of the rest of the planet it is still dark night.
What is happening in South Africa is different from what’s happening in Haiti, whose president was assassinated last week; or in Cuba, where thousands took to the streets in protest over rising poverty and state indifference; or in Colombia, Brazil, Lebanon and other places where protests and unrest have flared up in recent months. Yet there is an obvious common thread that suggests a systemic failure — a pandemic that refuses to abate is ripping societies apart. The coronavirus has gutted economies, depleted social, medical and security services, corroded trust and created opportunities for rampant violence and political persecution. And in the absence of effective vaccination programs, there isn’t any room for hope, either.
“These are fragile places with many underlying vulnerabilities,” said Masood Ahmed, the president of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit that aims to reduce poverty in developing nations. “That is what we need to worry about — as the months wear on, you’re going to see a lot more countries where trust levels and tolerance will start fraying.”
This isn’t just their problem. Because the virus respects no borders, it’s ours, too. But it’s also important to remember that how we address today’s pandemic will have consequences for the many global threats to come. If the billions of people in the world’s middle- and low-income countries continue to feel hopelessly locked out of any chance at liberation from the virus, what will happen as the world is transformed by climate change?
Global poverty has declined significantly over the last 40 years — but because climate change could pose severe threats to Africa and South Asia, where most of the world’s poorest people live, the World Bank warns that, without swift action, it will be extremely difficult to further reduce extreme poverty. Among scholars of development, there remains a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of international aid to address international problems. But as Ahmed pointed out, in the case of Covid-19, what the wealthy world owes the developing world is not any kind of mystery. The fix for South Africa’s most pressing threat is the same as the solution to ours: a well-organized, well-funded mass vaccination program. What’s missing is global leadership and determination — a serious effort by the international community, with the United States in the lead, to rid the planet of any place where the virus might thrive. Think the Berlin Airlift or the Marshall Plan, but for vaccines.
And things are urgent. The coronavirus has reversed decades of progress on global development. The number of people experiencing hunger shot up by hundreds of millions last year, the most since at least 2006. Global peacefulness declined for the ninth year in a row, with a marked increase in riots and other violent demonstrations.
It sure feels like the world is on the brink. To pull back it needs help from those on more solid ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The images flooding out of riot-torn South Africa are horrifying. On Tuesday, a woman in a high-rise building apparently set alight by looters tossed her child to the hoped-for safety of a crowd far below. Emergency workers have been attacked in several places; one medical service began transporting the injured in an armored ambulance. In much of the central district of the port city of Durban, the police were overwhelmed and shopping malls and stores were gutted.
The nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, warned against ethnic conflict, a threat his critics called groundless and that only increased tensions.
But as I swiped through the pictures and videos flying across my South African relatives’ group chats this week, I was struck by the many posts that suggested an even bitterer flavor of doom — a kind of psychological crackup.
What began last week as scattered protests over the jailing of Jacob Zuma, the nation’s former president, has turned into a plunder free of meaning and intention, so indiscriminate that it seems almost cathartic. On Monday, just as Ramaphosa promised in a droning national address to get tough on looters, a split-screen showed a crowd meeting no resistance as they broke into a bank — but not an ordinary bank, a blood bank. All the while nobody seems to know what’s actually happening, as misinformation rockets through a locked-down, screen-dependent population.
South Africa has been a very fragile nation for a very long time — a place of persistent economic struggle and breathtaking inequality, intolerable violence, and racial animus still lurking beneath every national controversy. (Sound familiar?) But until this week I had never seriously entertained the idea that the place might suddenly fall apart. As was evident in the country’s bloodless handover from racist rule, troubled as it has been, there was a fundamental social stability undergirding South African society that I believed would hold.
But now it looks as if something key has been lost. The coronavirus may have dealt South Africa a blow that even AIDS could not, driving the country of my birth down the path of madness, a society slumping into the abyss.
The possibility of such collapse terrifies me — not just as a native South African, but as an American. Thanks to mass vaccination, it’s beginning to feel like morning in wealthy parts of the world, notwithstanding the social and political dislocations the virus has created in the United States. But on much of the rest of the planet it is still dark night.
What is happening in South Africa is different from what’s happening in Haiti, whose president was assassinated last week; or in Cuba, where thousands took to the streets in protest over rising poverty and state indifference; or in Colombia, Brazil, Lebanon and other places where protests and unrest have flared up in recent months. Yet there is an obvious common thread that suggests a systemic failure — a pandemic that refuses to abate is ripping societies apart. The coronavirus has gutted economies, depleted social, medical and security services, corroded trust and created opportunities for rampant violence and political persecution. And in the absence of effective vaccination programs, there isn’t any room for hope, either.
“These are fragile places with many underlying vulnerabilities,” said Masood Ahmed, the president of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit that aims to reduce poverty in developing nations. “That is what we need to worry about — as the months wear on, you’re going to see a lot more countries where trust levels and tolerance will start fraying.”
This isn’t just their problem. Because the virus respects no borders, it’s ours, too. But it’s also important to remember that how we address today’s pandemic will have consequences for the many global threats to come. If the billions of people in the world’s middle- and low-income countries continue to feel hopelessly locked out of any chance at liberation from the virus, what will happen as the world is transformed by climate change?
Global poverty has declined significantly over the last 40 years — but because climate change could pose severe threats to Africa and South Asia, where most of the world’s poorest people live, the World Bank warns that, without swift action, it will be extremely difficult to further reduce extreme poverty. Among scholars of development, there remains a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of international aid to address international problems. But as Ahmed pointed out, in the case of Covid-19, what the wealthy world owes the developing world is not any kind of mystery. The fix for South Africa’s most pressing threat is the same as the solution to ours: a well-organized, well-funded mass vaccination program. What’s missing is global leadership and determination — a serious effort by the international community, with the United States in the lead, to rid the planet of any place where the virus might thrive. Think the Berlin Airlift or the Marshall Plan, but for vaccines.
And things are urgent. The coronavirus has reversed decades of progress on global development. The number of people experiencing hunger shot up by hundreds of millions last year, the most since at least 2006. Global peacefulness declined for the ninth year in a row, with a marked increase in riots and other violent demonstrations.
It sure feels like the world is on the brink. To pull back it needs help from those on more solid ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive here that runs along the Charles River has been closed to automobiles on Sundays for the warmer half of the year. In the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of other street uses blossom: skateboards, bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, people on feet and on wheels now moving slowly enough to witness the late spring goslings, the ever-present sea gulls or the rarer magic and grace of a heron feeding along the water’s edge. A towering line of stately, centenarian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy over several blocks.
This section of Memorial Drive is formally called “Riverbend Park” during its weekend closures, but it’s not a park in any physical, structural sense. It’s an open public space transformed into a park without any construction. State park employees arrive in trucks in the morning and again in the evening at junctures in the road, placing gates, cones, and signs that cut off traffic. By dusk, the gates disappear, and traffic returns. That’s it — a park that is “found” from what’s already there.
It happens in cities everywhere: design, or redesign, created by time. A weekend clock turns an open street into something else entirely — a time structure organized outside commuter efficiency or traffic flows. Urban planners sometimes call it “temporal zoning.”
In 2020 and 2021, in response to the need for outdoor recreation during the pandemic, the city of Cambridge added Saturday hours for Riverbend Park, doubling its recreational time. Two luxurious weekend days of an open street from April to November — a provisional state of the built environment, like hundreds of other pandemic-led pilot projects happening right now all over the world. Each of these urban innovations carries with it a question: Can this last? Should it?
As cities across the world open up, urban planners and architects — and the rest of us — are looking around, asking whether our streets and buildings will be, or should be, the same again. But whatever we decide, there’s one transformational tool for building the cities that’s right in front of us, calling for more sustained attention: the design of time. We can creatively reorganize our collective hours and days in ways that help more people enjoy our cities and institutions. Time might be our most valuable resource for building the environments we want.
Covid-19 brought about temporal designs of other kinds. Starting in spring 2020, cities from New York to Bethesda to Berkeley repurposed city streets for outdoor dining, allocated by hours of the day. Retail shops everywhere, from grocery stores to booksellers, dedicated “seniors-only” browsing hours to vulnerable customers. In London and other cities, crosswalk signals were extended in length, an accommodation for more pedestrians in a season of fewer transit rides. It took responsiveness under duress to refashion the streets and spaces of our lives. Some of that ingenuity used the invisible tool of the clock.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive here that runs along the Charles River has been closed to automobiles on Sundays for the warmer half of the year. In the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of other street uses blossom: skateboards, bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, people on feet and on wheels now moving slowly enough to witness the late spring goslings, the ever-present sea gulls or the rarer magic and grace of a heron feeding along the water’s edge. A towering line of stately, centenarian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy over several blocks.
This section of Memorial Drive is formally called “Riverbend Park” during its weekend closures, but it’s not a park in any physical, structural sense. It’s an open public space transformed into a park without any construction. State park employees arrive in trucks in the morning and again in the evening at junctures in the road, placing gates, cones, and signs that cut off traffic. By dusk, the gates disappear, and traffic returns. That’s it — a park that is “found” from what’s already there.
It happens in cities everywhere: design, or redesign, created by time. A weekend clock turns an open street into something else entirely — a time structure organized outside commuter efficiency or traffic flows. Urban planners sometimes call it “temporal zoning.”
In 2020 and 2021, in response to the need for outdoor recreation during the pandemic, the city of Cambridge added Saturday hours for Riverbend Park, doubling its recreational time. Two luxurious weekend days of an open street from April to November — a provisional state of the built environment, like hundreds of other pandemic-led pilot projects happening right now all over the world. Each of these urban innovations carries with it a question: Can this last? Should it?
As cities across the world open up, urban planners and architects — and the rest of us — are looking around, asking whether our streets and buildings will be, or should be, the same again. But whatever we decide, there’s one transformational tool for building the cities that’s right in front of us, calling for more sustained attention: the design of time. We can creatively reorganize our collective hours and days in ways that help more people enjoy our cities and institutions. Time might be our most valuable resource for building the environments we want.
Covid-19 brought about temporal designs of other kinds. Starting in spring 2020, cities from New York to Bethesda to Berkeley repurposed city streets for outdoor dining, allocated by hours of the day. Retail shops everywhere, from grocery stores to booksellers, dedicated “seniors-only” browsing hours to vulnerable customers. In London and other cities, crosswalk signals were extended in length, an accommodation for more pedestrians in a season of fewer transit rides. It took responsiveness under duress to refashion the streets and spaces of our lives. Some of that ingenuity used the invisible tool of the clock.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How Nations Are Learning to ‘Let It Go’ and Live With Covid
More officials are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal. But scientists warn that it may be too soon to design exit strategies for the pandemic.
SINGAPORE — England has removed nearly all coronavirus restrictions. Germany is allowing vaccinated people to travel without quarantines. Outdoor mask mandates are mostly gone in Italy. Shopping malls remain open in Singapore.
Eighteen months after the coronavirus first emerged, governments in Asia, Europe and the Americas are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal in which subways, offices, restaurants and airports are once again full. Increasingly, the mantra is the same: We have to learn to live with the virus.
Yet scientists warn that the pandemic exit strategies may be premature. The emergence of more transmissible variants means that even wealthy nations with abundant vaccines, including the United States, remain vulnerable. Places like Australia, which shut down its border, are learning that they cannot keep the virus out.
So rather than abandon their road maps, officials are beginning to accept that rolling lockdowns and restrictions are a necessary part of recovery. People are being encouraged to shift their pandemic perspective and focus on avoiding severe illness and death instead of infections, which are harder to avoid. And countries with zero-Covid ambitions are rethinking those policies.
“You need to tell people: We’re going to get a lot of cases,” said Dale Fisher, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore who heads the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee of Singapore’s Health Ministry. “And that’s part of the plan — we have to let it go.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
More officials are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal. But scientists warn that it may be too soon to design exit strategies for the pandemic.
SINGAPORE — England has removed nearly all coronavirus restrictions. Germany is allowing vaccinated people to travel without quarantines. Outdoor mask mandates are mostly gone in Italy. Shopping malls remain open in Singapore.
Eighteen months after the coronavirus first emerged, governments in Asia, Europe and the Americas are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal in which subways, offices, restaurants and airports are once again full. Increasingly, the mantra is the same: We have to learn to live with the virus.
Yet scientists warn that the pandemic exit strategies may be premature. The emergence of more transmissible variants means that even wealthy nations with abundant vaccines, including the United States, remain vulnerable. Places like Australia, which shut down its border, are learning that they cannot keep the virus out.
So rather than abandon their road maps, officials are beginning to accept that rolling lockdowns and restrictions are a necessary part of recovery. People are being encouraged to shift their pandemic perspective and focus on avoiding severe illness and death instead of infections, which are harder to avoid. And countries with zero-Covid ambitions are rethinking those policies.
“You need to tell people: We’re going to get a lot of cases,” said Dale Fisher, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore who heads the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee of Singapore’s Health Ministry. “And that’s part of the plan — we have to let it go.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The Pandemic Cured Me of My Mindless Shopping Habit
As Covid-19 vaccinations began to open up the world for some of us in pandemic-battered Los Angeles, going back to restaurants, dance clubs, bars or theaters was at the top of many wish lists. But at the top of mine was going back to malls.
I had missed browsing and shopping at will, wandering through favorite stores and boutiques with no real plan, fingering flowy blouses on hangers, rummaging through a table of purses on sale, inhaling the scent of a new body cream at the makeup counter — languidly weighing the decision of whether or not to buy. That lifelong shopping habit went into hibernation during the Covid-19 pandemic, but I figured it would return. While I’ve always been vaguely critical of its indolence, I could never shake it. This was the normal that I figured I’d return to.
But something amazing has happened: I’ve realized that I no longer want to shop. Even though I’m vaccinated and now can stroll the mall corridors again (masked, in accordance with the latest guidance as cases surge again), I have zero motivation to go forth and browse. At first I chalked it up to a lingering reticence to be indoors and among crowds — a hangover from my Covid paranoia (not so paranoid, given the new Delta variant). But that’s not entirely it.
A year-plus without shopping has wrought a whole new perspective on stores, and the nature of my attachment to them. Simply put, the thrill of the hunt that once was so integral to my life is gone. It’s like losing extra weight unexpectedly, without even trying or understanding why you lost it — mystifying, but undeniably liberating. Marie Kondo, the doyenne of declutter, would applaud my evolution. So would J.B. MacKinnon, the anti-overconsumption activist and author of “The Day the World Stops Shopping.” In a recent article, Mr. MacKinnon urges us to resist the calls for a “consumer-driven recovery” from the pandemic downturn, pointing out that overconsumption has “surpassed overpopulation as the greatest driver of our eco-crises.”
Mr. MacKinnon sees some hope in the disruption of our closet-stuffing, flash-sale-hunting habits. “It isn’t only that we know that our consumption comes at a tremendous cost to the environment,” he wrote. “The pandemic also gave us pause to reflect on what we want from consumer culture, and what we can happily live without.”
Looking back, I’m starting to realize how it happened for me. During the pandemic, whenever I was tempted to go to any retailer that wasn’t a grocery store, I asked myself: Is it worth the risk? The answer was always no. As Covid’s danger to me receded, the question has morphed into: Is it worth my time? Still no. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that shopping without any real need for the items I might purchase presents its own kind of cost, in that it saps my most precious commodity — time. Definitely not a price worth paying.
Another experience that brought me to this new enlightened space, ironically, is online shopping. Pre-pandemic, I almost never indulged. Stripped of all the tactile and social stimulation of the in-person consumer experience, filling my online “shopping cart” seemed depressing. But last summer, I succumbed. Online shopping did offer some pleasures. Ordering things via a screen was like sending myself Christmas gifts to look forward to and unwrap. But the satisfaction was fleeting. The process made me keenly aware of how much stuff I was willing to buy just to amuse myself — to pass the time. Every empty UPS box I took out to the recycling bin was weighted with a certain remorse and, though I didn’t know it at the time, each helped me build my resolve to dispense with the enervating cycle of acquisition.
Finding that I can maintain that resolve has been gratifying. But I’m still uneasy. What am I going to do with all the time that shopping used to take up? Where will that dopamine hit of finding the perfect pair of jeans at 75 percent off come from now? Without routinely plunging myself into the marketplaces of my world, will I still be part of the world? What will I do if I’m not preparing my face “to meet the faces that you meet,” as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock put it?
Shopping itself was mindless, true, but the wandering it required was gold. Wandering brought me into random contact with people, attitudes, conversations, trends, feelings in the air. All of this informed me, gave me much to ponder and measure myself against. The price of my new enlightened shopping-free state is that I am feeling less defined. Not quite so sure of who I am.
But maybe that’s appropriate for this moment. The country itself is going through a Big Shift, perilously unsure of what it is, and what it wants. The flux and social upheavals of 2020 have continued into 2021, with more developments virtually every day. This is maybe the biggest reason shopping has lost its luster: The distraction that was so pleasant and rejuvenating — not to mention so quintessentially American — now feels totally superfluous. It feels wrong.
Market analysts say Americans are regaining their comfort with shopping at malls and other retailers. But many of us are also feeling the urgent need to keep tabs on everything going on, to connect the dots of current events from one day to the next, even one hour to the next. With the backdrop of this nation’s existential crisis, shopping looks more and more like an attempt to ignore and forget. That is to say, it looks more and more like what it’s always been.
I still shop for the things I actually need for my survival or comfort. But my shopping is now far more focused and intentional — for example, I patronize Black-owned businesses in my neighborhood more. Instead of drifting in and out of stores for hours looking for bargains or serendipitous finds, I go to specific places knowing exactly why I’m there and what I want to buy. This engagement in the economic life of my community is pleasurable in its own way, and even fun — when I get what I need from a merchant who appreciates the business, I want to spike the ball, do a victory dance.
Still, the uneasiness persists. I am clear that I want progress more than I want stuff, a change that I think will last. But on its own my decision to buy less solves nothing, at least not the big things that need solving.
It’s proof, however, that positive change is doable, even to the activities so fundamental in our lives we don’t think about them. The Big Shifts will keep happening — from racism to antiracism, democracy on autopilot to democracy in peril. In that context, giving up browsing at the mall seems like a small shift. But it’s a start.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As Covid-19 vaccinations began to open up the world for some of us in pandemic-battered Los Angeles, going back to restaurants, dance clubs, bars or theaters was at the top of many wish lists. But at the top of mine was going back to malls.
I had missed browsing and shopping at will, wandering through favorite stores and boutiques with no real plan, fingering flowy blouses on hangers, rummaging through a table of purses on sale, inhaling the scent of a new body cream at the makeup counter — languidly weighing the decision of whether or not to buy. That lifelong shopping habit went into hibernation during the Covid-19 pandemic, but I figured it would return. While I’ve always been vaguely critical of its indolence, I could never shake it. This was the normal that I figured I’d return to.
But something amazing has happened: I’ve realized that I no longer want to shop. Even though I’m vaccinated and now can stroll the mall corridors again (masked, in accordance with the latest guidance as cases surge again), I have zero motivation to go forth and browse. At first I chalked it up to a lingering reticence to be indoors and among crowds — a hangover from my Covid paranoia (not so paranoid, given the new Delta variant). But that’s not entirely it.
A year-plus without shopping has wrought a whole new perspective on stores, and the nature of my attachment to them. Simply put, the thrill of the hunt that once was so integral to my life is gone. It’s like losing extra weight unexpectedly, without even trying or understanding why you lost it — mystifying, but undeniably liberating. Marie Kondo, the doyenne of declutter, would applaud my evolution. So would J.B. MacKinnon, the anti-overconsumption activist and author of “The Day the World Stops Shopping.” In a recent article, Mr. MacKinnon urges us to resist the calls for a “consumer-driven recovery” from the pandemic downturn, pointing out that overconsumption has “surpassed overpopulation as the greatest driver of our eco-crises.”
Mr. MacKinnon sees some hope in the disruption of our closet-stuffing, flash-sale-hunting habits. “It isn’t only that we know that our consumption comes at a tremendous cost to the environment,” he wrote. “The pandemic also gave us pause to reflect on what we want from consumer culture, and what we can happily live without.”
Looking back, I’m starting to realize how it happened for me. During the pandemic, whenever I was tempted to go to any retailer that wasn’t a grocery store, I asked myself: Is it worth the risk? The answer was always no. As Covid’s danger to me receded, the question has morphed into: Is it worth my time? Still no. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that shopping without any real need for the items I might purchase presents its own kind of cost, in that it saps my most precious commodity — time. Definitely not a price worth paying.
Another experience that brought me to this new enlightened space, ironically, is online shopping. Pre-pandemic, I almost never indulged. Stripped of all the tactile and social stimulation of the in-person consumer experience, filling my online “shopping cart” seemed depressing. But last summer, I succumbed. Online shopping did offer some pleasures. Ordering things via a screen was like sending myself Christmas gifts to look forward to and unwrap. But the satisfaction was fleeting. The process made me keenly aware of how much stuff I was willing to buy just to amuse myself — to pass the time. Every empty UPS box I took out to the recycling bin was weighted with a certain remorse and, though I didn’t know it at the time, each helped me build my resolve to dispense with the enervating cycle of acquisition.
Finding that I can maintain that resolve has been gratifying. But I’m still uneasy. What am I going to do with all the time that shopping used to take up? Where will that dopamine hit of finding the perfect pair of jeans at 75 percent off come from now? Without routinely plunging myself into the marketplaces of my world, will I still be part of the world? What will I do if I’m not preparing my face “to meet the faces that you meet,” as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock put it?
Shopping itself was mindless, true, but the wandering it required was gold. Wandering brought me into random contact with people, attitudes, conversations, trends, feelings in the air. All of this informed me, gave me much to ponder and measure myself against. The price of my new enlightened shopping-free state is that I am feeling less defined. Not quite so sure of who I am.
But maybe that’s appropriate for this moment. The country itself is going through a Big Shift, perilously unsure of what it is, and what it wants. The flux and social upheavals of 2020 have continued into 2021, with more developments virtually every day. This is maybe the biggest reason shopping has lost its luster: The distraction that was so pleasant and rejuvenating — not to mention so quintessentially American — now feels totally superfluous. It feels wrong.
Market analysts say Americans are regaining their comfort with shopping at malls and other retailers. But many of us are also feeling the urgent need to keep tabs on everything going on, to connect the dots of current events from one day to the next, even one hour to the next. With the backdrop of this nation’s existential crisis, shopping looks more and more like an attempt to ignore and forget. That is to say, it looks more and more like what it’s always been.
I still shop for the things I actually need for my survival or comfort. But my shopping is now far more focused and intentional — for example, I patronize Black-owned businesses in my neighborhood more. Instead of drifting in and out of stores for hours looking for bargains or serendipitous finds, I go to specific places knowing exactly why I’m there and what I want to buy. This engagement in the economic life of my community is pleasurable in its own way, and even fun — when I get what I need from a merchant who appreciates the business, I want to spike the ball, do a victory dance.
Still, the uneasiness persists. I am clear that I want progress more than I want stuff, a change that I think will last. But on its own my decision to buy less solves nothing, at least not the big things that need solving.
It’s proof, however, that positive change is doable, even to the activities so fundamental in our lives we don’t think about them. The Big Shifts will keep happening — from racism to antiracism, democracy on autopilot to democracy in peril. In that context, giving up browsing at the mall seems like a small shift. But it’s a start.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Book:
UNTIL PROVEN SAFE
The History and Future of Quarantine
Readers will likely come to this far-reaching cultural history of quarantine as a public health tool with more personal knowledge about its subject than Manaugh and Twilley anticipated when they began working on their book, long before our current pandemic.
The architecture and science writers marry the history of outbreaks both distant and modern (bubonic plague, yellow fever, H.I.V.-AIDS, Ebola) with anecdotes about their own research experiences. From traveling to Venice to understand how quarantines were deployed during the Black Death to watching the quarantine behaviors of social spiders with a Los Angeles researcher, the pair are friendly companions on a journey to understand what quarantine has been, and what it will become.
“We need a futurologist of quarantine,” one public health expert observes to the authors early on. If not quite futurologists, Twilley and Manaugh manage to remain forward-looking. The book introduces NASA officials, nuclear waste managers, architects and many others trying to reimagine quarantine. It also wrestles with the human-scale issues of emotion, connection and surveillance that we have become all too familiar with since 2020.
“Real-time infection-mapping and restricted-access technologies promise — or perhaps threaten — to make the whole world into a lazaretto, a virtual quarantine facility defined by regulations that force us to avoid the company of others,” the pair predict. “In the coming quarantine, you will be able to go anywhere — but you will be watched, measured and diagnosed the entire time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/book ... ks_norm_20
UNTIL PROVEN SAFE
The History and Future of Quarantine
Readers will likely come to this far-reaching cultural history of quarantine as a public health tool with more personal knowledge about its subject than Manaugh and Twilley anticipated when they began working on their book, long before our current pandemic.
The architecture and science writers marry the history of outbreaks both distant and modern (bubonic plague, yellow fever, H.I.V.-AIDS, Ebola) with anecdotes about their own research experiences. From traveling to Venice to understand how quarantines were deployed during the Black Death to watching the quarantine behaviors of social spiders with a Los Angeles researcher, the pair are friendly companions on a journey to understand what quarantine has been, and what it will become.
“We need a futurologist of quarantine,” one public health expert observes to the authors early on. If not quite futurologists, Twilley and Manaugh manage to remain forward-looking. The book introduces NASA officials, nuclear waste managers, architects and many others trying to reimagine quarantine. It also wrestles with the human-scale issues of emotion, connection and surveillance that we have become all too familiar with since 2020.
“Real-time infection-mapping and restricted-access technologies promise — or perhaps threaten — to make the whole world into a lazaretto, a virtual quarantine facility defined by regulations that force us to avoid the company of others,” the pair predict. “In the coming quarantine, you will be able to go anywhere — but you will be watched, measured and diagnosed the entire time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/book ... ks_norm_20
On Coronavirus Lockdown? Look for Meaning, Not Happiness
Why cultivating “tragic optimism” will help us weather this crisis — and even grow from it.
The coronavirus pandemic has not just threatened the physical health of millions but also wreaked havoc on the emotional and mental well-being of people around the world. Feelings of anxiety, helplessness and grief are rising as people face an increasingly uncertain future — and nearly everyone has been touched by loss. A nationally representative poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that nearly half of all Americans — 45 percent — feel that the coronavirus has negatively affected their mental health.
Which raises a question: Is there anything people can do to cope with the emotional fallout of this confusing and challenging time?
How people respond to adversity is a topic I’ve investigated for years as a journalist. Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about their experiences of extreme stress and have scoured the academic research in psychology on resilience to understand why some people are broken by crises while others emerge from stressful experiences even stronger than before.
What I’ve learned sheds light on how people can protect their mental health during the pandemic — and it upends some common ideas our culture carries about trauma and well-being. When researchers and clinicians look at who copes well in crisis and even grows through it, it’s not those who focus on pursuing happiness to feel better; it’s those who cultivate an attitude of tragic optimism.
The term was coined by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist from Vienna. Tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering.
To understand how tragic optimism might serve us during the pandemic, it might help to recall how America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People reported increased feelings of fear, anxiety and hopelessness. These emotions were more debilitating for some than for others. To learn why, a group of researchers, led by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied the well-being of young adults in the weeks after the attacks. None of the students had lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but like the population at large, they reported feeling distressed. And yet, some of them were less likely to become depressed than others. What set those resilient students apart was their ability to find the good. Unlike the less resilient students, the resilient reported experiencing more positive emotions, like love and gratitude.
But that didn’t mean they were Pollyannas. They did not deny the tragedy of what happened. In fact, they reported the same levels of sadness and stress as less resilient people. This finding comes up frequently in psychology research: In general, resilient people have intensely negative reactions to trauma. They experience despair and stress, and acknowledge the horror of what’s happening. But even in the darkest of places, they see glimmers of light, and this ultimately sustains them.
But even more than helping them cope, adopting the spirit of tragic optimism enables people to actually grow through adversity.
For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and since then, PTSD has received a lot of attention in the media and among ordinary individuals trying to understand what happens to people in the wake of tragic life events.
Yet psychologists now know that only a small percentage of people develop the full-blown disorder while, on average, anywhere from one half to two-thirds of trauma survivors exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits.
It’s not the adversity itself that leads to growth. It’s how people respond to it. According to the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coined the term “post-traumatic growth” in the 1990s, the people who grow after a crisis spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened and understanding how it changed them. In other words, they search for and find positive meaning.
In modern psychology research, this is known, a bit unfortunately, as “benefit finding.” Mr. Frankl called it “the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.” Of course, some people are naturally more hopeful than others. But the success of psychological interventions like meaning-centered psychotherapy — developed by Dr. William Breitbart at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and his colleagues to help terminal patients cope with death — reveals that even the most despairing individuals have the capacity to find meaning in a crisis.
It may seem inappropriate to call on people to seek the good in a crisis of this magnitude, but in study after study of tragedy and disaster, that’s what resilient people do. In a study of over a 1,000 people, 58 percent of respondents reported finding positive meaning in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, such as a greater appreciation of life and a deeper sense of spirituality. Other research shows that benefit finders grow not only psychologically but also physically. Heart attack survivors, for example, who found meaning in the weeks after their crisis were, eight years later, more likely to be alive and in better health than those who didn’t.
This doesn’t mean that people should endure adversities with a smiling face. In fact, Mr. Frankl specifically said that tragic optimism is not the same thing as happiness. “To the European,” he wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
He was right: In American culture, when people are feeling depressed or anxious, they are often advised to do what makes them happy. Much of the pandemic-related mental-health advice channels that message, encouraging people to distract themselves from bad news and difficult feelings, to limit their time on social media and to exercise.
I’m not suggesting those aren’t worthy activities. But if the goal is coping, they do not penetrate into the psyche as deeply as meaning does. When people do things that make them happy, like playing games or sleeping in, they feel better — but those feelings fade fast, according to research by Veronika Huta of the University of Ottawa and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester.
When people search for meaning, though, they often do not feel happy. The things that make our lives meaningful, like volunteering or working, are stressful and require effort. But months later, the meaning seekers not only reported fewer negative moods but also felt more “enriched,” “inspired” and “part of something greater than myself.”
Though it has been only a few weeks since the pandemic started affecting life in the United States, I see people embracing meaning during this crisis. On my community listservs, people are organizing “help groups” to run errands for immuno-compromised people. They are rallying around struggling small businesses with “virtual tip jars.” Many companies and businesses, nationally and locally, are offering their services free. I’ve noticed people also say they are experiencing deeper connections to others — and feel more grateful to the caregivers, teachers, service workers and health care professionals among us. This certainly won’t be remembered as a happy period in the history of the world, but it may be remembered as a time of redemptive meaning and hope.
Does any of this mean the pandemic is a good thing? Of course not. It would be far better had the pandemic never occurred. But that’s not the world we live in. Life is, as Buddhists say, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering. That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opin ... pe=Article
Why cultivating “tragic optimism” will help us weather this crisis — and even grow from it.
The coronavirus pandemic has not just threatened the physical health of millions but also wreaked havoc on the emotional and mental well-being of people around the world. Feelings of anxiety, helplessness and grief are rising as people face an increasingly uncertain future — and nearly everyone has been touched by loss. A nationally representative poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that nearly half of all Americans — 45 percent — feel that the coronavirus has negatively affected their mental health.
Which raises a question: Is there anything people can do to cope with the emotional fallout of this confusing and challenging time?
How people respond to adversity is a topic I’ve investigated for years as a journalist. Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about their experiences of extreme stress and have scoured the academic research in psychology on resilience to understand why some people are broken by crises while others emerge from stressful experiences even stronger than before.
What I’ve learned sheds light on how people can protect their mental health during the pandemic — and it upends some common ideas our culture carries about trauma and well-being. When researchers and clinicians look at who copes well in crisis and even grows through it, it’s not those who focus on pursuing happiness to feel better; it’s those who cultivate an attitude of tragic optimism.
The term was coined by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist from Vienna. Tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering.
To understand how tragic optimism might serve us during the pandemic, it might help to recall how America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People reported increased feelings of fear, anxiety and hopelessness. These emotions were more debilitating for some than for others. To learn why, a group of researchers, led by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied the well-being of young adults in the weeks after the attacks. None of the students had lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but like the population at large, they reported feeling distressed. And yet, some of them were less likely to become depressed than others. What set those resilient students apart was their ability to find the good. Unlike the less resilient students, the resilient reported experiencing more positive emotions, like love and gratitude.
But that didn’t mean they were Pollyannas. They did not deny the tragedy of what happened. In fact, they reported the same levels of sadness and stress as less resilient people. This finding comes up frequently in psychology research: In general, resilient people have intensely negative reactions to trauma. They experience despair and stress, and acknowledge the horror of what’s happening. But even in the darkest of places, they see glimmers of light, and this ultimately sustains them.
But even more than helping them cope, adopting the spirit of tragic optimism enables people to actually grow through adversity.
For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and since then, PTSD has received a lot of attention in the media and among ordinary individuals trying to understand what happens to people in the wake of tragic life events.
Yet psychologists now know that only a small percentage of people develop the full-blown disorder while, on average, anywhere from one half to two-thirds of trauma survivors exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits.
It’s not the adversity itself that leads to growth. It’s how people respond to it. According to the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coined the term “post-traumatic growth” in the 1990s, the people who grow after a crisis spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened and understanding how it changed them. In other words, they search for and find positive meaning.
In modern psychology research, this is known, a bit unfortunately, as “benefit finding.” Mr. Frankl called it “the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.” Of course, some people are naturally more hopeful than others. But the success of psychological interventions like meaning-centered psychotherapy — developed by Dr. William Breitbart at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and his colleagues to help terminal patients cope with death — reveals that even the most despairing individuals have the capacity to find meaning in a crisis.
It may seem inappropriate to call on people to seek the good in a crisis of this magnitude, but in study after study of tragedy and disaster, that’s what resilient people do. In a study of over a 1,000 people, 58 percent of respondents reported finding positive meaning in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, such as a greater appreciation of life and a deeper sense of spirituality. Other research shows that benefit finders grow not only psychologically but also physically. Heart attack survivors, for example, who found meaning in the weeks after their crisis were, eight years later, more likely to be alive and in better health than those who didn’t.
This doesn’t mean that people should endure adversities with a smiling face. In fact, Mr. Frankl specifically said that tragic optimism is not the same thing as happiness. “To the European,” he wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
He was right: In American culture, when people are feeling depressed or anxious, they are often advised to do what makes them happy. Much of the pandemic-related mental-health advice channels that message, encouraging people to distract themselves from bad news and difficult feelings, to limit their time on social media and to exercise.
I’m not suggesting those aren’t worthy activities. But if the goal is coping, they do not penetrate into the psyche as deeply as meaning does. When people do things that make them happy, like playing games or sleeping in, they feel better — but those feelings fade fast, according to research by Veronika Huta of the University of Ottawa and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester.
When people search for meaning, though, they often do not feel happy. The things that make our lives meaningful, like volunteering or working, are stressful and require effort. But months later, the meaning seekers not only reported fewer negative moods but also felt more “enriched,” “inspired” and “part of something greater than myself.”
Though it has been only a few weeks since the pandemic started affecting life in the United States, I see people embracing meaning during this crisis. On my community listservs, people are organizing “help groups” to run errands for immuno-compromised people. They are rallying around struggling small businesses with “virtual tip jars.” Many companies and businesses, nationally and locally, are offering their services free. I’ve noticed people also say they are experiencing deeper connections to others — and feel more grateful to the caregivers, teachers, service workers and health care professionals among us. This certainly won’t be remembered as a happy period in the history of the world, but it may be remembered as a time of redemptive meaning and hope.
Does any of this mean the pandemic is a good thing? Of course not. It would be far better had the pandemic never occurred. But that’s not the world we live in. Life is, as Buddhists say, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering. That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opin ... pe=Article