America infected: The social (distance) catastrophe

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky… A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.

—Albert Camus, La peste (1947)

The plague that gave Albert Camus’s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times review, a “Social Catastrophe.” In that sense, The Plague is a political allegory with a large cast of quasi-allegorical characters—the perfect prototype for a disaster movie. Camus started writing The Plague under German occupation. The novel was published in 1947 when he was thirty-four and already, thanks to The Stranger as well as his writing for the underground resistance newspaper Combat, a cultural icon—the Humphrey Bogart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

French critics mostly read The Plague, which, after many deaths, ends by defining “plague” as “just life, no more than that,” as a metaphor for the human condition. It was also understood as an allegory of the German occupation, with France separated from the West—although the references to crematoria and concentration camps scattered throughout have intimations of something more.

STILL FROM ELIA KAZAN’S PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

Topical when published, this complex and absorbing account of how a range of men (and only men) cope with the awesome irrationality of pestilence, “a laboratory for studying attitudes,” in Spender’s phrase, now addresses our moment. It not only concerns mass death in an isolated city, but for three years, we have lived with a president obsessed with quarantine and contagion—not to mention a cable news network that two decades ago began warning of leprosy being spread by illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The novel is rich in incident. Camus’s protagonist and secret narrator Dr. Rieux notes the effect of the plague and quarantine on Oran’s residents, including the early holiday atmosphere produced by the closing of shops and offices. Gas rationing had its upside. The enforced idleness produces a city where “traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.” This, however, gives way to a sense of abandonment and isolation.

When not stockpiling toilet paper and keeping their social distance, Americans have been comforting themselves by streaming Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s naturalistic homage to technocratic efficiency in combating an Ebola-like pandemic. The Plague, too, was imagined as a movie, acquired by MGM as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. This was embarrassing for Camus, who cancelled the deal. The designated adapter, Richard Brooks, turned his script into Crisis (1950), in which Cary Grant plays a morally conflicted American doctor compelled to operate on the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country. The specter of a plague, in Crisis, is mutated into a revolution. The real, if unacknowledged, movie version of The Plague would be Elia Kazan’s atmospheric Panic in the Streets, released shortly before Crisis, during the summer of 1950, one month into the Korean War.

Panic in the Streets, officially derived from two stories published in Dime Detective, was an experiment in Hollywood neorealism, shot on location in New Orleans, America’s most racially mixed, exotically Caribbean city, characterized by fluid camerawork, the use of non-actors, and overlapping dialogue. Pneumonic plague—a lung infection not unlike that produced by the coronavirus—comes to America and, for much of the movie, only Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) is willing to call it such: “We have 48 hours! After that we’ll have the makings of a plague!” It’s a movie—all action, no reflection—but at the same time a tale of animated corpses, haplessly running from a sentence of death.

Camus’s Plague and Kazan’s Panic are both set in port cities open to the world and feature dedicated medical protagonists who struggle against apathetic authorities. The Plague evokes the mood of a quarantined town whose citizens realize that “they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment.” In Panic, Dr. Reed aside, the people of New Orleans have no such consciousness. Camus evokes a sense of solidarity: “once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all [were] in the same boat… No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny.” Kazan, following the exigencies of a Hollywood movie, plays to audience fears, which he allays by constructing an individual hero.

Army medic and government activist, Dr. Reed wears a uniform. He also shares a surname and a career path with the nineteenth-century public health hero who instituted quarantines against yellow fever and cholera, officiously informing a skeptical meeting of New Orleans city fathers, “One of the jobs of my department is to keep the plague out of this country.” In telling people that which they don’t want to know, he’s an Ibsen-esque “enemy of the people”—a self-described alarmist who, like the martyred Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, turns out to be right.

In orchestrating a man hunt for the criminal plague carriers, Dr. Reed enlists another professional: the tough New Orleans cop (Paul Douglas). The grumpy (and Trumpy) policeman hates doctors and has irrational dislike of civil servants. Nevertheless, the men bond in battling dithering politicians and nosy reporters for control of the situation. (The Plague has a journalist as well, a visiting Parisian who first tries to escape Oran and later, as the novel’s resident romantic existentialist, comes to embrace his fate. There is also a new newspaper, the Plague Chronicle, which is initially meant to provide information and soon devolves into a vehicle for ads promising new, infallible antidotes.) Kazan, a former Communist but not yet an informer (who two years later would name and effectively blacklist eight former comrades), saw Panic as an allegory: “The Doc was a New Dealer and the policeman a Republican. That was the way we thought, the remnants of my former political training: everybody representing some social political position.”

What then, in this equation, was the pneumonic plague? It is not, as in Camus, spread by rats, but by people—namely foreigners and criminals. As the earth beneath Oran’s houses was “purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails,” diseased undocumented aliens and their gangster sponsors emerge from New Orleans waterfront dives to pollute the nation and more. (Dr. Reed’s authority extends into international waters.) In The Plague, the disease leaves “as unaccountably as it had come.” Panic in the Streets ends with a cathartic ritual cleansing as the infected criminal and major carrier (Jack Palance) is shot down while scrambling, climbing, fighting, running from the police, and demonstrating a will to escape—and, as implacable as any virus, contaminate the free world.

Given this enemy, Dr. Reed’s emphasis on army control, use of professional informers, advocacy of preventive detention, and press management provides an unavoidable metaphor. As J. Edgar Hoover told House Un-American Activities Committee in spring of 1947: Communism “is a way of life—an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the Nation.”

What was in Kazan’s mind? The Internal Security Act of 1950 prohibited entry or settlement of immigrants—like Kazan—who were or had been Communists. Panic in the Streets was released to excellent reviews, albeit not from the Daily Worker, which deemed the director’s “neo-realist” use of locations and actors to be ersatz and his movie’s premise a “mighty cheap” gimmick. The reviewer could hardly miss the movie’s coincidental illustration of Attorney General J. Howard McGrath’s recent warning that in America Communists were “everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”

Although our president was initially paralyzed, perhaps by his own pathological fear of contagion, and thus denied the seriousness—if not the reality—of coronavirus, Panic in the Street’s open xenophobia might provide him with a useful model. It might yet. In the meantime, The Plague furnishes an appropriately absurd scenario for Trump and his audience, which is to say, us: somehow Oran’s municipal opera house is given license for weekly performances of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. In, what for me is the novel’s tragicomic highpoint, Camus describes a performance—just as Eurydice is taken back to Hades, the actor playing Orpheus “chooses this moment to stagger grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out” and, refusing to act in bad faith, collapses on stage in the manner of a plague victim.

The orchestra stops playing. The audience rises and slowly begins to exit (“like worshippers leaving church when the service ends”) then, seized with panic, stampedes for the doors, “pouring out into the street in a confused mass.” This hasn’t yet happened in Mar-a-Lago, but Iran got a taste when Iraj Harirchi, the head of the government task force on the coronavirus, began showing symptoms on TV. In the theater of our mediated lives, our hitherto diffident president’s televised admission that he has taken the test for COVID-19 is the first instance of such authenticity. Trump claimed to have tested negative. In future weeks, however, we may well notice his septuagenarian political rivals coughing into their elbows, if not seeking tests.

As states have begun postponing or canceling their primary elections, it’s only a matter of time before Trump fully realizes that his worst nightmare is a blessing in disguise. Quarantine may be an existential condition in The Plague, but it is a practical weapon in Panic. The movie’s key moment comes when Dr. Reed’s wife gives him justification to take the law into his own hands: “If there’s a plague here, you’re the most important man in town…” He is the leader. No one need vote, no election required.

(Source: The Paris Review)

China supplied faulty coronavirus test kits to Spain, Czech Republic

The majority of rapid test coronavirus test kits supplied by China to Spain and the Czech Republic are faulty, local news outlets reported.

Up to 80 percent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, according to local Czech news site Expats.cz. The tests can produce a result in 10 or 15 minutes but are usually less accurate than other tests. Because of the high error rate, the country will continue to rely on conventional laboratory tests, of which they perform about 900 a day.

The country’s Health Ministry paid $546,000 for 100,000 of the test kits, while the Interior Ministry paid for the other 50,000.

Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Jan Hamacek downplayed the discovery that many of the tests were faulty, blaming it on a possible wrong methodology and saying the kits can still be used “when the disease has been around for some time,” or when “someone returns after quarantine after fourteen days.”

“In my opinion, this is not about some scandalous revelation that it is not working,” Hamacek said.

Meanwhile, Spain, which has more than 56,000 infected people and more than 4,000 coronavirus deaths, the second-highest number of fatalities in the world after Italy, found that the rapid coronavirus test kits it purchased from Chinese company Bioeasy only correctly identified 30 percent of virus cases, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The director Spain’s Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, Fernando Simón, said Spain tested 9,000 of the test kits and will return them based on their high error rate.

Studies performed on the tests which discovered the high error rate caused the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology to recommend officially that the tests not be used.

The Chinese embassy in Spain claimed the Bioeasy products are not included in the products China has been supplying to countries where the virus has broken out.

(Source: Yahoo News)

Coronavirus: 150 Tunisians self-isolate in factory to make masks

Employees at a Tunisian factory are churning out 50,000 face masks a day and other protective medical gear after opting to go into lockdown at work.

The 150 workers, mainly women, have isolated themselves at the Consomed factory for a month.

They were spurred on by patriotism as the country battles coronavirus, their manager Hamza Alouini told the BBC.

Employee Khawla Rebhi said she greatly missed her family, but her colleagues' good cheer provided some compensation.

"My husband and 16-year-old daughter supported and encouraged me to do this," Ms Rebhi, who is in charge of the production line, told the BBC.

The factory workers opted to isolate themselves to better guarantee their ability to keep making protective gear. CONSOMED/AFP

The factory usually exports its protective gear, but its focus now is to produce enough for the health sector at home.

The North African nation, which went into lockdown on Sunday, has 227 confirmed cases of coronavirus and six patients have died in the last week.

Among those who moved into the factory, which is in a rural area south of the capital, Tunis, a week ago are cooks, a doctor and pharmacist.

There are separate dormitories for 110 women and 40 men - and enough stocks to last a month.

"We have a designated area for all kinds of exercise and dancing for the women, and the men have a football and basketball area," Ms Rebhi told me.

"And we all have internet and video chat with our families when we are not working."

She says the factory runs from 06:30 to 22:30 local time every day on two eight-hour shifts, with the men mainly on the later one.

'We need to protect doctors'

On their eighth day of confinement, Mr Alouini said there were still "positive vibes" from everyone.

He said the staff felt the need to isolate at the factory because if the virus spread within the workforce, they would not be able to keep up with the needs of doctors in the country.

"If we don't work our doctors will not be protected against the virus," he told the BBC's Focus on Africa radio programme.

"I'm trying to do my best for all my country - for the hospitals, for the army, for the police, for everybody."

Ms Rebhi says the workforce's sense of mission is giving them all hope, but she cannot deny that they are worried about efforts to contain Covid-19.

"I am looking at how other governments are struggling with it in Europe and elsewhere and I can't help but wonder how a country like Tunisia will handle it."

(Source: BBC)

The everyday device in your home killing hundreds around the globe

When you think of things that might kill you, it’s unlikely that your phone springs to mind. We have bad news for you… your smartphone is killing you.

Perhaps because the Apple iPhone was only released in 2007, a lot of us have not yet grasped the full deleterious effects of ‘the device’, and the many similar not-so-smartphones the now clunky-seeming original spawned.

Countless numbers of people have been killed by their smartphones already, and we’re not talking about the tin-foil-hat brigade’s concerns about the effects of 5G, wi-fi and phone signals in general on our brains.

The most obvious example is all the people who are killed on our roads, not just because they were the ones stupidly looking at their phones while driving – Australians now believe it is the main reason for our rising road toll, with 32% of drivers admitting to reading text messages while driving, according to the Community Attitudes to Road Safety 2013 Survey Report – but because they ambled, zombie-like, into traffic while posting on Instagram.

The number of pedestrians killed on US roads has risen by a staggering 51% since 2009. In 2017, pedestrian fatalities in Australia jumped by 20% in a year, with police blaming the stupidity of smartphones.

If you haven’t noticed the number of people who try to cross roads while ignoring the approach of big heavy vehicles in favour of their tiny screens, it’s probably because you’ve been looking at your phone.

The RACQ would like to see new laws to fine people who cross the road while staring at a device. “We think that sort of offence is on its way. There’s no doubt about it,” spokesman Paul Turner said.

“Stand at an intersection in the CBD for half an hour and you’ll see five or 10 people just being saved or stopping themselves from walking out into traffic because they were looking down at their phone. When you tap them on the shoulder and they look up it’s as though they’ve been in some sort of daze because they are so engrossed in their phone.”

No doubt you’re congratulating yourself for not being like that yourself but, be honest, what is your relationship with your phone like? And even if it’s not getting you run over, how much harm is it doing you?

Dopamine and cortisol

Have you, for example, felt what’s known as ‘phantom vibrations’ from your phone? That sensation where your body is sure it’s detected a new message buzz, but you check and there’s nothing there? That strange and concerning sensation is caused by the state of hyper-vigilance you’ve no doubt found yourself in from time to time, when stressful/vital information is pouring into this now essential-for-life device, which is rarely more than a metre away from you.

The fact is, we are, as a species, becoming addicted to both the dopamine hits of satisfaction that our smartphones give us hundreds of times a day, while being simultaneously assaulted by the dangerous levels of cortisol they send coursing through our bodies.

That combination is affecting everything from the way we sleep to our attention span, our memory, our self-esteem, decision-making skills and our physical health. You’re probably aware that many apps, and phones themselves, are designed to be habit forming. Those Likes on Facebook and Instagram are designed to trigger happy chemicals in our brains, much the way poker machines do, and thus to make us want to keep checking them, endlessly.

No less an authority than Google noted in a report that: “Mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress”.

According to a study by a tracking app called Moment, the average American spends four hours a day staring at their phone. Unfortunately, not all the information our screens give us is positive, and when we’re getting, instead, irate emails from colleagues, for example, or other bad news, our bodies release cortisol, our fight-or-flight hormone.

Cortisol is designed to prime your body to react to physical threats – such as bears, or bullies – and it changes your body physically, upping your heart rate, frizzing your adrenaline and spiking your blood sugar. Unfortunately, your body also responds with cortisol when you’re being stressed emotionally. And smartphones can provide you with these moments, wherever you are, multiple times per hour.

“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, the founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction.

“It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.” Checking the phone, of course, can just provide more bad news and thus you can get into a cycle that leaves you with chronically high levels of cortisol. And this can lead to all kinds of health issues, including heart attacks, dementia, diabetes and depression.

Dr Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of The American Mind recently told The New York Times that “every chronic disease we know of is exacerbated by stress, and our phones are absolutely contributing to this”.

As bad as smartphones are for you, of course, you’ve only had it running your life for the past dozen years. Just think of what it’s doing to your children, and the entirety of the coming generations. Anyone over the age of 10 is already unable to imagine a world without smartphones, and as they grow into adolescence, they are likely to be gifted one of these dangerous yet vital devices by their own parents.

This is “like giving them cocaine or heroin”, according to David Gillespie, the author of Teen Brain – Why Screens Are Making Your Teenager Depressed, Anxious And Prone to Lifelong Addictive Illnesses – And How to Stop it Now.

Teens, addiction and anxiety caused by smartphones

Gillespie’s book is full of shocking insights, and data, which make perfect sense of the behaviour many young teens exhibit today, particularly if you’re brave or foolhardy enough to attempt to take a device off one. He points out that in puberty, as the prefrontal cortex expands, the human body turns off a system called GABA (Gamma aminobutyric acid), a kind of “general purpose braking system that stops us from becoming addicted to things”.

This is why the teen years are a terrible time to start drinking or smoking, or even having sex, and Gillespie points out that society has realised this, and had huge successes in those areas.

“Between 2007 and now, the rates of teenage pregnancy, and alcohol and cigarette use by teens all dropped – they’re all about half of what they were, it’s a huge achievement and I don’t know why we’re not talking more about it,” he says. “The rates of anxiety and depression for teenagers should also be halving but, instead, the rates of those things in teens have actually doubled over the same period.

“That tells us immediately that something is replacing those addictions. And what has replaced it is also addictive, as it has driven up mental illness in this life stage.” The reason, according to Gillespie, is that we are now giving every adolescent “devices that can run simulations of addictive behaviour, all the time”.

As he points out, software for smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive, to have the same “mesmeric effect” that poker machines have on those who are susceptible, only across a wider swathe of society. “There are millions of companies competing to be one of those five apps on your home screen that you click a hundred or a thousand times a day, and they want to find a way to get people to press that button by giving them a hit of dopamine every time they press it,” he says.

Teens are super susceptible, of course, but boys and girls are targeted in different ways. Young women, Gillespie’s research reveals, are rewarded by the drug oxytocin when “they are in a group of girls, and that group approves of them, they feel liked, and that gives them oxytocin, which is more powerful in girls than in boys”.

“A teenage girl is as sensitive as she will ever be to this and that’s why the creation of ‘approval porn’ has been so successful,” Gillespie adds.

“Until now, we’ve never been able to replicate this approval hit of having real people like you, but simulating that is what social media software does. All of the Facebooks, the Instagrams, they’re all high-speed simulators of social approval, and girls, really, really respond to that.”

Boys, however, are gripped by what Gillespie calls ‘danger porn’, because men are stimulated by risk and danger. “Which is why gambling is so popular; it’s that chance of losing, and the relief of surviving something that’s rewarding for boys – it’s also why they love roller-coasters,” he says.

“And a simulation of that is online gaming on your phone; the first-person shooter like Fortnite, those games are all designed around the concept of danger porn. It’s about survival and the relief of survival.”

Throw in the social aspect of being able to chat to your peers while playing, and the mobility of phone-based games, and you’ve got serious addiction on your hands.

As Gillespie says, these devices were designed from day one, by Steve Jobs and company, to be “beautiful, easy to use and hard to give up”. And, knowing how addictive they would become, Jobs famously declared that he wouldn’t let his own children near them.

“The Jobs thing came out by accident in an interview, he was asked how long he let his kids play with iPads and so on and he wasn’t expecting it and just blurted out that he wouldn’t let his children have them – what’s that saying? Don’t get high on your own supply,” Gillespie laughs. “But that’s become the trend in Silicon Valley these days, the executives instruct their nannies not to let their kids anywhere near these devices.

“And the research shows that rich people are less likely to give their devices to kids, because they can afford to pay humans to interact with their children instead. They consider it a low-class thing to give your children a screen.”

Regardless of what health effects you believe 5G networks might have in the coming years, it’s clear that the devices we’re already using, already addicted to, in fact, have had an enormous effect on society, and mortality, and they’ve only been around for little more than a decade. The device may yet prove to be a more potent example of humanity shooting itself in the foot than even the gun.

(Source: CEO)

The return

I’m aiming my camera at a bench on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. The red-brick path is lined with outdoor shops, galleries, and breweries. Boulder Bookstore. The clouds draw their curtain, a gray weight. The Flatirons are weighted, too, diagonal slabs of sandstone towering like three growing spikes on a graph.

Eighteen years ago, I sat on this bench.

I wait for strangers to step out of the frame. They pass or linger in lace-up boots and parkas, jeans and huddled laughter—all intruders, because while I stand on this brick street in winter, it’s really a long-ago afternoon in June.

In “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf asks, “Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?”

Maybe we go back to places not to ask questions, but to realize we don’t have them anymore.

*

That day in June, my father—who’s been gone for three years now—sat next to me on this bench and said something about how it must be hard to leave a place so beautiful. I looked toward the Flatirons: “There’s too much sadness here.”

I’m back in Boulder because I want to show my daughter, now eighteen, where she was born, where she lived as an infant, where she began. I want to try to explain who I was here.

I think we harbor our longings for places we’ve left because we miss who we were in them. I’ve lingered in door frames and driveways, felt the pierce of pulling away from a past self. The hardest part is knowing what I can’t take with me. Because after enough miles and enough passed exits, something dissolves, like light in a room when the sun turns down.

I’ve always thought I realized a place only after I left it. But maybe it’s this, the return.

While I wait to take the photograph, my daughter stands beside me. I have told her the bench’s story. She steps closer to me as the sky grows darker, the air colder.

*

For one summer in my late twenties, I lived in a small, two-story house on the banks of the Eagle River in Colorado. A friend coaxed me there, told me she and her husband needed help with the resort-town rent. I settled into their corner room upstairs. One afternoon, not long after I’d arrived, I pulled into the gravel drive and stepped out—I can still hear the crunch of tires against the stones—toward a very tall, bearded man. The fourth roommate. Later, he told me it felt like he had been standing there waiting for me to come home. The summer unfolded. I waited tables at a bar in Vail, and he wired condominiums in the valley.

Seasons come and go, and that summer ended with a phone call from a university offering me a job. I delayed my departure until late August, when the bearded man and I lingered in the gravel drive. He snapped a photograph—my head thrown back in laughter. After I drove thirty minutes down the mountain, I realized I had forgotten my makeup bag. I turned back and found him standing in the drive, weeping. As I stepped out, he rushed over and picked me up. He thought I had changed my mind. He thought I had come back.

But I left. Again.

A year passed, me in Texas, him in Colorado, by that time Boulder, but we never turned away, our approach toward one another like the pull of a river. One day, I found two letters from him in the mail. I drove back to Colorado.

The bearded man and I lasted four years. Four months after our daughter was born, he woke me one morning to say he was going, for good. His sudden absence loomed like the Flatirons. I’d drive every street, looking for nothing but the blue of his truck. I’d leave questions on his voicemail. He never answered.

*

I should have come back to Boulder years ago. When I left, I left lonely and aching and lost, but when my daughter and I returned, I returned to images I had forgotten, like the photos of her at six months that slipped from a book last week. When I looked up at the balcony of our old apartment, I heard the click click click click of my daughter’s swing in the living room. When I turned down one street, I saw my friend, Charles, in his black coat, sitting across from me on the patio of the Hotel Boulderado. I drove near the trail I used to run along the foothills. Saw myself laughing as I ducked into the Sink for a pint. Setting the infant seat down in the upstairs ballroom of Boulder Bookstore while I pulled paperbacks from shelves. I passed the day care where I picked up my daughter that day in June after the bearded man stepped onto an elevator, after I moved to a window in the courthouse to watch his blue truck pull out of the parking lot. He left town not long after. No idea where he might be now.

*

That June, as I sat on this bench with my father, I studied the graph of my life before me—I would raise my daughter on my own. My father patted my knee. We were looking at the Flatirons when he said the words, “It must be hard to leave such a beautiful place.”

*

Finally, the street empties.

“The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past,” Woolf writes.

I left Boulder a long time ago, and eventually, the sadness left me. I had to come back to see the the beauty, the best part of this place. She huddles against me, so much taller than I, her long blonde hair a swirl in the wind. I snap the photograph.

(Source: The Paris Review)