nanushka

Gottlieb is very much a political actor, as his biography makes clear. He was affiliated with the Trump campaign and transition team before his nomination to the FDA, and he is now with the American Enterprise Institute. While his confidence may be well-grounded, his close affiliation with those who have for months been espousing ill-grounded confidence fails to automatically earn him my confidence, and his statements can't easily be viewed as apolitical. Also, note that he specifically says "at best, late-2020, early 2021." I don't think that's quite the same as, "he's very much in the camp that thinks we'll have" it by then.

Mourka, memorialized here.

So we "shelter" 20% of the population away from the 80% who are living freely? That certainly doesn't sound very easy or simple to me. Also, those nursing homes and meat-packing plants all have employees who typically go home between shifts and live amongst the rest of us.

Indeed, and the company recently announced a rather prominent outside hire:

2 percent of the U.S. population is ~6.5M. Have any of the standard projections through summer 2021 gotten anywhere near that (1 in 50)?

Also, though, he doesn't seem to specify that the friend/colleague was male.

I did read the poem and didn't interpret it as holding the key — but your reading of the preceding statement does seem like a good way to make sense of it. Thanks.

Yeah, I would understand if Shayer said his friend and colleague "had that same talk before the fact" yet was eventually promoted anyway.

I'm having a hard time fully understanding part of his statement: What does he mean by, "they had the same talk after the fact"? That his friend and colleague was told the same thing by management after being promoted to soloist? Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is going to be promoted in the near future. Among other factors, management hasn't seen them dancing regularly for months now, and some dancers will weather the current circumstances better and stay in better performance-ready shape than others, for a variety of reasons. It wouldn't make much sense to give promotions based on predictions of who that will be. Also, calling out his employer on social media for race-based discrimination in promotions — however true the charge — is probably not going to be a successful strategy.

I'm sure some choices are. But again, you defined "the race game" as "everything we do to create and maintain our personal notions of race, and everything we do to participate in our society's defining of race and various applications of these same categories/values, etc. in daily life, politics, the Arts, the military, sports, wherever."

Yes, I am indeed familiar with the concept of a game, and I know that not all games are engaged in for fun or for sport. (I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.) But they are engaged in — by choice — as all of your cited definitions emphasize. (Nor would “choice theory” seem to suggest otherwise, though I am less well read on that subject.) I think it might require a perspective of significant (and perhaps unrecognized) privilege to think that "everything we do to create and maintain our personal notions of race, and everything we do to participate in our society's defining of race" is done by choice — i.e. is "playing this race game."

NYCB has cancelled the Fall 2020 and Nutcracker seasons, according to the Times: Unsurprising, but of course disappointing.

Not at all a surprise, but of course this is disappointing, from the Times:

That’s one role where I could really imagine it working. In a lesser role I think it might just be too sad/frustrating.

I guess I don't see that as a game — or as a choice.

There's also currently a Trittico from ROH, available until June 19:

In my experience it's actually quite simple — you ask people how they identify and generally respect their self-definitions. It works with race, gender, sexuality, and plenty of other social categories. I don't think there's really anything to "measure," and I don't think we need to imagine new challenges when this issue is already challenging enough. I'm not sure what "playing this race game" means. It may be "just another way to delineate the pecking order," but it also has a hugely impactful cultural and economic history in this country, with very real effects that continue to need dismantling. Identifying it as "just another" among many forms of inequality doesn't mean we can pass it off as inevitable and ignore the necessity of dealing with it. I think it's a valuable goal (depending on how "the larger society" is defined — and what this looks like will be different for top-tier national companies, smaller regional companies, etc.), and here's just one reason why: Perhaps that's because they don't see themselves onstage. No. This is a straw person. I don't think anyone is advocating this.

So lovely to see all the tributes on social media today from many of Abrera's colleagues. She clearly has very warm relationships with many of them.

I hadn't actually read the AP's article on the Met's plans, but now that I have I see that Peter Gelb offers quite a significant qualification: This is much more in line with what I think is actually feasible and realistic: live performances (of opera at the Met, at least) are likely dependent on significantly better treatment options than now exist. More on why:

I saw that comment on a lot of accounts posting black boxes with the BLM hashtag on Tuesday — individual accounts, not just large accounts. Many of those users responded gratefully to the comment, and deleted the hashtag as suggested. I didn't get the sense that they felt they'd been damned either way. Was there a controversy that I wasn't aware of? I thought it was just people sharing a useful tip. Neither the comments nor the account holders' responses seemed impolite or critical.

I'm not talking about regulations, though. (Perhaps my use of the word "stages" has been confusing; I was not referring to, e.g., the CDC's "stages" or "phases" of reopening.) I'm talking about (non-anecdotal) patterns of social behavior and of broad institutional and industry-wide (in the arts — and most specifically at the Met) adaptations — and about what's likely to happen with those as all things continue to develop over the next 6-12 months, not about what's happened with them over the past 4-8 weeks.

I guess. But also, potentially, for those who are analyzing societal shifts (if their social theories don't prohibit describing change in stages).

I'm curious how exactly the pressure arising from that decision might play out — in the cases of arts audiences in particular. I'm also not so sure public opinion is actually as far ahead as some politicians and protesting citizens on the push for life to "get back to the way it was." Certainly there's beginning to be more of a push; but there are a lot of potential stages between where we are now and "the way it was."

For all three of those, though, I think the greater challenge won't be the audience (who, as @Helene pointed out above, can potentially see and hear performances remotely) but the performers. Singers, dancers and wind players all expel a lot of air, and generally rehearse and perform in close contact with one another. All three groups will likely be very hesitant to put themselves in much danger of contracting a respiratory illness — which for professional opera singers, especially, could quite possibly be career ending (not to mention life threatening). Many of the latter have likely been extremely careful over the past few months (to the extent their personal circumstances allow), and so getting a sufficient number of them who are immune and can put on a series of performances at the Met seems like a tricky task.

Right, definitely. I shouldn't have written "who have had COVID-19" since that's the illness; I should've written "who have had the virus."