新冠疫情报道摘录杂烩

Life on Coronavirus Lockdown in ChinaThe New Yorker

何伟(Peter Hesseler)对武汉隔离生活的惟妙惟肖的描述。在新型冠状病毒肺炎在武汉爆发伊始,大家还在争论不休究竟是蝙蝠还是穿山甲把疫情带来华南海鲜市场的时候,我便在李如一的《一天世界》频道上看到了分享的何伟的《汤里的老鼠》(A Rat in My Soup)。然后就对后续关于隔离生活的报道的故事有所期待,果不其然,这一篇终于来了。

After the epidemic began, though, I saw that recurring phrase—“I’m going to the hospital!”—in a new light. The textbook was accurate: if somebody’s ear hurts, often her only option is to go straight to the hospital. In China, there’s no comprehensive primary-care system, which is one reason that the coronavirus spiralled out of control so quickly in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where the epidemic started.

These costumes of the quarantine, along with all the other restrictions, helped turn citizens inward, and people directed their energy toward whatever space was left to them. Among the packages in my lobby, I noticed many home furnishings and cleaning implements: a Pincai-brand storage cabinet for 602, a Deema vacuum cleaner for 2304, a giant carpet, wrapped in tape and plastic, for 303. There was home-office equipment (wireless mouse, 4201; file cabinets, 301). By the forty-fourth day, somebody in 3704 had felt the need to buy an electric footbath machine from Kosaka. (“Powerful by Dreams.”)

There are many types of loneliness in this world, but it’s a unique sensation to feel that you are the only individual in a forty-three-story building who is drinking his way through a quarantine.

That part was easy, because it was rare to have an old-fashioned mask-to-mask conversation with anybody. Apart from home life, my interactions were mostly by e-mail, phone, or WeChat, and often the subject of these exchanges was the isolation itself.

N.Y.C.’s 911 System Is Overwhelmed. ‘I’m Terrified,’ a Paramedic Says.The New York Times

New York City’s soundtrack has always included the sound of ambulance sirens. But now, with many of the city’s businesses closed and its neighborhoods quiet, endless wailing seems to echo through the deserted streets.New York City’s soundtrack has always included the sound of ambulance sirens. But now, with many of the city’s businesses closed and its neighborhoods quiet, endless wailing seems to echo through the deserted streets.

‘We Take the Dead From Morning Till Night’The New York Times

这是纽约时报对意大利 Bergamo 地区疫情中心的图文报道。仿佛曾经看到的关于战争的画报——代入感太强烈,不适感也随之而来。这可能是最直触我心的报道了。

The Coronavirus Crisis Reveals New York at Its Best and WorstThe New Yorker

纽约客的对封城后的纽约的图片纪实。

Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus SpreadersThe New York Times

纽约时报关于无症状患者的报道,终于把无症状患者的大量存在给解释清楚了。

The Coronavirus Patients Betrayed by Their Own Immune SystemsThe New York Times

纽约时报关于「免疫风暴」的报道,用普通人的话讲得很清楚。

Usually, the stronger your immune system, the better. But what if the strength of your immune response is what betrays you? — Apoorva Mandavilli (@apoorva_nyc)

Back from the BrinkThe Daily, The New York Times

这是纽约时报播客的关于 3 月初新泽西第一例病例的经历和他与记者的对话。这个人恰好是个华人,而且是个和中国大陆医生有联系的医疗从业者。从他被确诊到治愈的经历看到的当时美国医疗系统准备之不充足是相当令人震惊的。

One of the things that I’m hearing from doctors is that until you are in this moment and experiencing the onslaught of patients, it is very hard to imagine it. You can’t really know until you’re actually living it. And you know, every hospital in this country is likely to have its James. It’s going to have that first patient who comes in, who is really ill. They’re not exactly sure how to treat it. And you know, every hospital in this country is likely to have its James. It’s going to have that first patient who comes in, who is really ill. They’re not exactly sure how to treat it. We still really don’t know how best to treat this virus. That is the hard, cold truth of it. There are some protocols that we hope will help, that are thought might help. But it’s unclear. It’s so new. And it’s going to be really hard for all those hospitals. And they’re going to have to make difficult choices. They’re going to have to make complicated ethical choices. They’re going to have to make decisions on the fly and build up their clinical experience. And it’s not going to be easy for any of them.

The Return of the GovenorThe Daily, The New York Times

这是纽约时报播客关于「州长」这一角色的回归的节目,从历史上回顾了州长的变迁——将近十年的退隐,和如今州长这个身份在疫情中又如何被迫重新发挥了的作用进行了讨论。这一视角还是蛮独特的,有种脱离事件本身俯瞰的感觉。

生活在纽约市,大多数时候,州政府、市政府的存在感是很弱的;但这一次疫情,现实让我重新认识了市长 Bill de Blasio,又认识了州长 Andrew Cuomo。要不是疫情的爆发,我其实对于州长「govenor」里的「govern」几乎没有什么确实的概念;这次疫情也是对美国政治体制认识的一个绝好机会。

病毒一代

New York Times 的播客 The Daily 3 月 27 日节目 A Kids’ Guide to Coronavirus 结尾谈到这一新型冠状病毒(COVID-19)对一代孩子们的影响时,引用纽约州长 Andrew Cuomo发言

This is going to be transformative and formative for society. I also think this is going to be transformative and formative for society. You think about our children. I have my daughters here with me. This is the first time they faced a real national adversity. You have a whole new generation who have never lived through anything like this. They never went to war. They were never drafted. They never went through a national crisis and this is going to shape them and I can tell you just from having my daughters with me. Yeah, they’re hurt, they’re scared, but they are also learning through this and at the end of the day they’re going to be better people for it and they’re going be better citizens for it. I believe that because they’re rising to the occasion.

深以为然。

这场病毒会是塑造一代人的大事。

有了 9/11,有了 SARS,有了汶川地震,才有了今天的我,和对于新闻、媒体、纪实报道和非虚构写作的关切。

或许会像迷失一代婴儿潮一代千禧年一代一样,原本叫做 Generation Alpha 的他们有一个属于自己的词,可以是是「病毒一代」。

新日常 3/15

在 COVID-19 的每一天都有新事情发生,这是居家也逃不过的压力与身边世界肉眼可见的改变。逐条记载,也能写下好几行,遂动笔。

3 月 15 日,简记如下:

  • 哥伦比亚大学第一例确诊
  • 实验室正式因疫情关闭,收到邮件正式宣布我们不应见面
  • 哥伦比亚大学图书馆实体部门全部关闭
  • 哥伦比亚大学体育馆关闭
  • 纽约市正式宣布礼拜二开始餐厅改为外卖与外送
  • 第一次戴口罩出门
  • 发现学校提供了 The Wire 订阅,边听边看的感觉很棒

以上。

《孤独城市》节选二段

以下两段节选自 Olivia Laing 的 The Lonely City 的第五章 The Realms of the Unreal

Lonely child vs. healthy child

在 20 世纪初的阶段里,为了照顾到婴儿的身体健康,人们忽视了婴儿的心理健康,这反倒让婴儿更脆弱。

这次新型冠状病毒(COVID-2019)在中国肆虐了一个月并逐步得到控制,却又在海外大肆蔓延。算到现在,病毒已经连续轰击我们的精神有两个月之久。在纽约亲历这次 COVID-2019 在席卷于美国大地的阶段,在家中努力做到 social-distancing,但读到这里不免会让我再一次想到关于身体和心理健康的有趣关系。

This sounds like common sense, but at the time of Darger’s childhood the consensus among health care providers of all kinds – from psychoanalysts to hospital doctors – was that all children required in the way of nourishment was a germ-free environment and a ready supply of food. The reigning belief was that tenderness and physical affection were actively detrimental to development and could in fact ruin a child.

To modern ears, this seems insane, but it was driven by a genuine desire to improve child survival. In the nineteenth century, child mortality had been enormously high, especially in institutions like hospitals and orphanages. Once germ transmission was understood, the preferred strategy of care was to maintain hygiene by minimising physical contact, moving beds apart and limiting interactions with parents, staff and other patients as much as possible. While this did indeed successfully reduce the spread of disease, it also had an unexpected consequence, which took decades to be properly understood.

In the newly sterile conditions, children failed to thrive. They were physically more healthy, and yet they wasted away, particularly the infants. Isolated and untouched, they went through paroxysms of grief, rage and despair, before eventually submitting passively to their state. Stiff, polite, apathetic and emotionally withdrawn, their behaviour made them easy to neglect, further entrenching them in acute, unspeakable loneliness and isolation.

The art of collage

拼贴(collage)是我一直以来难以抓住的艺术手法。这一段从「拼合修补精神分裂者的心灵碎片」的角度阐释了「拼贴」这种艺术手法的复杂的、符号化的、脆弱的美。

Loneliness here is a longing not just for acceptance but also for integration. It arises out of an understanding, however deeply buried or defended against, that the self has been broken into fragments, some of which are missing, cast out into the world. But how do you put the broken pieces back together? Isn’t that where art comes in (yes, says Klein), and in particular the art of collage, the repetitive task, day by day and year by year, of soldering torn or sundered images together?

I was thinking a lot at the time about glue, how it functions as a material. Glue is powerful. It holds fragile structures together and stops things getting lost. It allows the depiction of images that are illicit or hard to access, like the homemade pornography David Wojnarowicz used to make as a child from Archie cartoons, taking a razor and turning Jughead’s nose into a penis; that sort of thing. Later, he used to wheatpaste discarded supermarket ads on walls and hoardings in the East Village, on to which he’d spray-painted stencils of his own design, making his visions adhere to the skin of the city, its outward shell. Later still, he worked intensely with collage, bringing together disparate images – fragments of maps, pictures of animals and flowers, scenes from pornographic magazines, scraps of text, the haloed head of Jean Cocteau – to construct the complicated and densely symbolic paintings of his maturity.

Like Wojnarowicz, they understood the rebellious power of glue, the way it lets you reconstruct the world. […]

隐藏烦人的广告

要隐藏烦人的广告,这恰恰是我开始寻找 Chrome 替代品的原因。

去年,Chrome 开发小组在 Manifest V3 中声称出于性能上的考量提议将报废 WebRequest API 并采用声明式的列表(DeclarativeNetRequest)。这一改进对性能的改进被认为是极小的,而如果这项提案通过,将彻底将 uBlock Origin 等反广告插件打残。Google 领导的 Chrome 开发小组的这一举措被认为是为保证自己广告利润的操作。一年之后,尚不知晓这项改进是否会进一步展开。

2020 年 1 月 15 日,微软正式发布基于 Chromium 的新 Edge 浏览器。

2020 年 2 月 10 日,微软在开始菜单中推广新的 Edge 浏览器。

2020 年 2 月 21 日,Google 被发现开始在首页上向 Edge 用户推广自家的 Chrome 浏览器。

以下截图来自 2020 年 3 月 5 日,Google 首页。

Google 首页的 Google Chrome 广告

自我教育

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz 关于嬉皮士运动消亡的 The Death of the Hippies: the photographer Joe Samberg remembers how drugs destroyed the Telegraph Avenue scene 发表于 The Atlantic 的文章提到那个年代 Berkley 校园的状态:

Campuses had been the sources of the counterculture’s boldest ideas, the places where young activists mobilized to fight segregation and the Vietnam War, taking classes in political theory and Eastern philosophy.

虽然嬉皮士几乎已接近消亡,但 60 年代自我教育的能力,似乎也是八九十年代的多样而灿烂的原因之一。这是当代文化需要始终从嬉皮士运动中努力继承的遗产。

为什么硅谷一批创建者总被与嬉皮士运动联系起来,似乎是许多作者努力展示却又没有明确阐明的。因而脑中对嬉皮士运动与当代文化的关联的构建,自己总觉得还欠缺了一环。「自我教育」可能是这缺失的链结之一。

「前天是小兔子,昨天是小鹿,今天,则是你」

2020 年 2 月 26 日,游戏《瘟疫公司》(Plague Inc.)被中国网信办从苹果 App Store 中国区强制下架封杀

Ndemic Creations 工作室在其《关于〈瘟疫公司〉从中国 App Store 下架的声明》中写道:

我们必须同中国玩家们分享一则不幸的消息。昨天傍晚,我公司收到通知称《瘟疫公司》“经中国国家网信办审查存在违反国内法律内容”并从中国 App Store 下架。目前状况已经完全超出我方掌控。

[…]

我们尚不清楚游戏下架是否与中国当下正在应对的冠状病毒疫情有关。然而,《瘟疫公司》在教育领域的重要作用业已屡获 CDC 等组织认可。我们正与世界主要卫健机构开展合作,以期为抗击 COVID-19 贡献力量。

我们正在全力以赴争取游戏重返中国 — 我们不会置亲爱的中国玩家于不顾 — 然而我们作为偏居英国的小型独立游戏工作室,自知面前仍有长路要走。我们的当务之急是尝试联络中国国家互联网信息办公室(www.cac.gov.cn)以了解其关切并共同寻求解决方案。

中国大陆之外的游戏运营如常:我们将持续为《瘟疫公司》及新作《反叛公司》提供全平台更新和支持,并力争使《瘟疫公司》早日回到中国玩家手中。

是封杀,并不是自愿下架。

一个多月前的 1 月 23 日,武汉刚刚封城,Ndemic Creations 工作室第一时间发布了关于此次疫情的声明

坚强

也许对绝大多数人来说,面对困境时人云亦云的抱团取暖足矣;但对知识分子而言,有时还需要以清醒理智为基础的、来自于对人性的坚信的坚强。这是属于我们的坚强。

剩余价值播客在 2020 年的二月,被包括新浪微博、喜马拉雅等平台在内的众多平台审查封杀;包括一份在 Matters 平台上的备份、自己官网上的最新两集对于新冠病毒的探讨的节目《瘟疫、语言和具体的人:与历史学家罗新的聊天 | 剩余价值 051》和《巨大的 shock 后,我们所思考的所做的一切都将与此有关 | 剩余榨值 023》不知因何种原因消失。对此我们不应忘记。

我原本不是她们的粉丝,但她们的节目努力的、大声的思考确确实实吸引到了我。也许他们不全对、不全实际可行,但这是他们付出了真诚、这是他们的所思所想。他们的结论,是理性、理想中得到的结论,这是无论如何都应捍卫的东西。

播客主播张之淇(@Zzzzzhiqi)在她的微博上写道

不是勇敢不勇敢的问题,是对什么能说什么不能说已经失去了判断的问题;也不是后不后悔,值不值得的问题,是所有人、所有事情都不可能再倒回到一个月前的问题;不是节目要怎么做下去的问题,是人(我自己或者所有人)要怎么继续生活下去的问题。

当一组人的存在不许可另一组人的存在、或者哪怕一组人的想法不允许另一组人的想法存在的时候,这便已不是一个「对」的世界。

Behind Machines

电子设备与孤独感是个很大的话题。Olivia Laing 的 The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone 在讲述 Andy Warhol 的第三章 My Heart Open to Your Voice 里描述和机器产生亲密感、躲在机器(或在今天应当是电子设备)后面的事的 Andy 找到了一个独特的视角。她这样写道

The photographer Stephen Shore remembered being struck in the 1960s by the intimate role it played in Warhol’s life, ‘finding it stunning and poignant that he’s Andy Warhol, who’s just come from some all-night party or several of them, and has turned on the television and cried himself to sleep to a Priscilla Lane film, and his mother has come in and turned it off’.

她这样总结道

Becoming a machine; hiding behind machines; employing machines as companions or managers of human communication and connection: Andy was as ever at the vanguard, the breaking wave of a change in culture, abandoning himself to what would soon become the driving obsession of our times.

这对于当代人和机器的亲密关系可以说洞若观火。以及

Over the years, he employed a range of devices, from the stationary 16mm Bolex on which he recorded the Screen Tests of the 1960s to the Polaroid camera that was his permanent companion at parties in the 1980s.

实在太懂了,让我重新回忆起那切肤一般的拍完一场球赛的孤独感嘛。

但其实更希望、或更好奇看到一层是关于自身的回答,或者说某种程度上已经被回答了:如果 Warhol 生在机器可以被更精确地赋予人格的日子里——早些日子只是编程,今天则是加入 AI ——又会怎样。从个人体验来说(可能过于极端),编程这一语言的习得及其思维方式的养成某些程度上进一步地使得社交的欲望萎缩了——

「Turned on the television and cried himself to sleep」就仿佛 60 年代版电影《社交网络》(The Social Network)开头 Zuckerberg 在愤怒当中写出 Face Mesh 的场景了。让我想到了我也曾有过那些个自暴自弃的当下,敲打着键盘写程序控制自己唯一能稳定操作和驯服其输出的东西的日子。

付出者与依付者

在知乎问题最近 ACG 圈里面出现了很多饭圈粉,什么时候才会结束这种状况?中用户浅色回忆讨论了爱好者时代和饭圈时代中社群成员的差异在于「参与者身份和需求的变化」:

在“爱好者站点”时代,社群的身份归属,是“创作者”和“付出者”。 在“饭圈化”时代,社群的身份归属,是“消费者”、“依附者”、“狂热者”和“被误认的个体”。

根本上是因为社群参与者的需求的从「主动的内容获得」到「认同感、优越感和物质利益的被动获得」的改变:

换言之,以往社群的身份归属,“创作者”和“付出者”的职责部分被平台接了过去,剩下的部分就算依旧有社群,在互联网的声音里也成不了主流 […] 被剩下的社群参与者的核心目的,在商业化的推波助澜下,就蜕变成了“认同感”、“优越感”和“获取物质利益”。除了最后那个目的之外,大部分的行为是“被动的”,“被他人组织的”。这样的社群,自然会给人留下“攻击”、“排外”、“无知”等印象,让人感到不舒服。

文章还讨论了商业化在其中起到的作用等,非常值得一读。

曾经曾试图祭奠字幕网站「射手」的倒下,当然字幕网站其实并未从我的生活中彻底消失。但看到这篇文章让我意识到,自己怀念的,实质是以奉献为根基的将要消失的爱好者社群与它所蓬勃生长的时代。

曾经播种下的引以为豪的小众,也一个又一个地来到了它所在领域的成熟、其本体将被迫转型以至于终将消逝的一天。