Longer Looks: Thinking About The Unthinkable; Florida’s No-Rules Vibe; A Virus Cover Up; And More
Each week, KHN finds interesting reads from around the Web.
The New York Times:
How Covid-19 Has Forced Us To Look At The Unthinkable
A few weeks ago, videos surfaced on the internet showing what appeared to be mass burials in New York City. In aerial footage, captured by an Associated Press drone camera on April 9, workers wearing protective gear are seen arranging coffins in a wide, muddy trench. The process appears orderly, efficient and unsentimental. Laborers unload the coffins from forklifts and stack them in neat rows. They place plywood sheets on top of the piles; occasionally, they can be seen treading on the coffins. The bird’s-eye vantage point lends the scene a chilling impersonality. It is, simply, a worksite: When the burial crew shovels dark dirt over the plain wooden boxes, they do so with the unceremonious diligence of a street repair team scooping asphalt into a pothole. (Rosen, 4/29)
Politico:
Florida’s No-Rules Vibe Gets A Coronavirus Reality Check
At the farthest northwest corner of Florida, straddling the border with Alabama, sits a sprawling, ramshackle beach bar called the Flora-Bama Lounge. First opened as a roadhouse in 1964, it’s celebrated in song by Jimmy Buffett, and known as much for its bushwackers (a cocktail like a chocolate piña colada that’s made with five different liquors) as for its beer pennants strung with hundreds of bras. Poet Beth Ann Fennelly once called it the one and only “five-star honky-tonk of the Redneck Riviera.” Nothing captures the slightly trashy, sweetly laid back, anything can happen here vibe of Florida beach culture quite as neatly as the Flora-Bama’s annual Interstate Mullet Toss. Every April, some 30,000 people gather on the beach in front of the Flora-Bama to see who can toss a dead fish the farthest across the state line. They go through about 1,000 pounds of mullet and raise thousands of dollars for charities like the Boys & Girls Clubs. (Pittman, 4/25)
Wired:
Inside The Early Days Of China’s Coronavirus Coverup
Late on the night of February 2, as her insomnia kicked in, a Beijing woman whom I’ll call Yue took out her phone and religiously clicked open WeChat and Weibo. Over the past two fitful weeks, the two Chinese social media platforms had offered practically her only windows into the “purgatory,” as she called it, of Wuhan. At this point, according to official estimates, the novel coronavirus had infected just over 14,000 people in the world—and nearly all of them were in the central Chinese city where Yue had attended university and lived for four years. A number of her friends there had already caught the mysterious virus. (Yuan, 5/1)
FiveThirtyEight:
Switching To A Vote-By-Mail Election Is Tougher Than It Seems
With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many people seem eager to switch to a vote-by-mail system for the general election in November. Elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich looks into why such a switch is more difficult than it seems here in the United States. (Rakich and Chow, 4/30)
The New York Times:
178 Hours In Milan During The Lockdown
A visual diary by the artist Olimpia Zagnoli. (4/30)
