Link Log Roundup for May 9, 2020
In this edition: zip codes, movie theaters, internet dramas, driving in and through, weekend weather, Mothers’ Day, and calling the neighbors.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
These ZIP Code-Level Maps Show The Places Hit Hardest By COVID-19
While different factors stood out in each city, our analysis found that the ZIP codes with more cases per person tended to be lower income, have more elderly residents, and be communities of color.
Oregon Movie Theaters Struggle For Survival
“There are things that could use some innovation for equity and for other reasons, just to make sure that we know that cinema … can live on the walls, it can live on the floors, it can live on your phone and certainly it can live in a beautiful cinema with beautiful sound and be a communal experience.”
Every weekend we all seem to agree on one bad article or tweet. I wake up to breakfast on Saturday and feel like an ex-pat in a 1950s novel sitting on my Mediterranean verandah, some freshly squeezed orange juice to hand soaking in sun and drawing out furry bees. The foreign edition newspaper, crepe thin but box-fresh crisp, has plenty of room on my table and doesn’t pick up sticky jam wounds. I look for news from abroad. Who is fucking up now? Who is thinking aloud the usually unspeakable? When did editors become just readers? It doesn’t matter that I’m actually in an apartment in Dublin eating porridge which tastes like tacky maple-cured glue blitzed with dried fruit and nuts. That I’m on a laptop. Even when I daydream, I put myself in a fortress.
Drive-throughs and drive-ins were fading. Coronavirus made them a lifeline
Fast food drive-throughs are often powered by poorly remunerated workers who now find themselves attempting to stitch together a living while trying to avoid contagion. Social distancing regulations reveal that our urban design could be more generous with people, in the form of wider sidewalks for pedestrians and narrower streets for cars. And, of course, there are the environmental consequences of all the driving. One of the positive effects of the quarantines have been that cities around the globe now have cleaner air, including Los Angeles.
Oregon Coast and Columbia Gorge officials urge Portlanders to stay away during nice weekend weather
Officials don’t want a repeat of March 21 and March 22 -- the first weekend of spring break, when Oregonians streamed to the state’s beaches, Smith Rock and other popular outdoor areas and didn’t physically distance themselves. That prompted Gov. Kate Brown not to just ask residents to stay-at-home, but to order it.
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
Watch Neighbors Connect in “Shelter in Place”
These conversations invite a sense of communion but also of claustrophobia; there is both too little to talk about and too much. It’s a feeling that Beck mirrors with his cinematography. He shot “Shelter in Place” in portrait orientation, mimicking our limited portals to the outside world in this time: the window and the smartphone screen. He also filmed with a long lens, zooming in tight on his subjects from afar. By pairing this voyeuristic image with the close, confiding voices of his neighbors, he creates a disarming effect, one that captures a central paradox of this experience: that our aloneness is shared.