Twice in the Fifties, the doctor was arrested for performing abortions (in one case, a woman with a heart condition had died as a result of the anesthetic); but each time, he was acquitted. Sometimes, he closed his clinic on Centre Street for a while and no one knew where he went. But he always came back. His waiting room and office became more and more crowded with the souvenirs of his travels.
As the word about him spread from one woman to another, Dr. Spencer became known up and down the Eastern seaboard as “The Saint” and “the college girl’s friend.” Women from as far away as Hollywood turned up at his clinic, even a few with foreign accents. But in order to find Dr. Spencer, since there was no way to look him up, you had to be lucky enough to be on the right grapevine.
I wasn’t. In the summer of 1956, when I was twenty, I needed Dr. Spencer urgently. But I didn’t have his name, or anyone else’s.
Like a lot of people these days, Coralie Adam has been working from home. On an April morning in the Chicago suburbs where she was quarantining with her in-laws, Adam climbed out of bed, carried her laptop into a small home office, streamed a barre class, then sat down to watch her spacecraft approach a rocky asteroid 140 million miles from Earth.
Adam is the lead optical navigation engineer on NASA’s first asteroid-sampling spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx. In 2016, it blasted off to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, scheduled to return in 2023 laden with asteroid pebbles and dust. Scientists want to study the material to understand how, when, and why the solar system formed. A first “touch-and-go” (TAG) rehearsal of the ship’s asteroid-sampling procedure (approach the asteroid, get within 65 meters, back away to safety) would normally warrant a gathering of its team at Lockheed Martin mission support in Littleton, Colorado. Given the Covid-19 pandemic, NASA, like a lot of scientific groups, had to try a new experiment: mission control from home.
Three miles off the coast of Maine, in a remote area northeast of Acadia National Park, lies a cluster of islands — including Little Nash Island, Big Nash Island and Flat Island — populated only by sheep.
The Wakeman family, who live on the nearby mainland, are the year-round caretakers. Alfie Wakeman works full-time as a pediatric provider in the local clinic. His wife, Eleni, works full-time as a speech-language pathologist and the assistant fire chief for the local volunteer fire department. Their three daughters — Wren, Lilly and Evie — are all college-age or newly graduated.
Each spring, Alfie leaves his medical practice for three weeks to live on Big Nash Island for the lambing season. (In his text messages, Alfie includes smiley faces when he talks about going to the island, or about new lambs; sad faces punctuate his texts when he discusses leaving the island.) The sheep, wild and self-sufficient, are able to thrive off the providence of the island. But every so often a sick lamb needs special care.
Across the world, teams and leagues are exploring ways to make games held in cavernous, empty stadiums easier on the eye, hoping to retain some semblance of the spectacle on which their industries have been built.
Early attempts have included Zoom conferences in Denmark, montages in Germany, robot drummers in Taiwan and unfortunately sourced dolls in South Korea. The Premier League — scheduled to return to action on June 17 — has broached displaying “live reaction” from fans on big screens and cloaking empty seats with giant banners.
But while all of this feels like the first, tentative steps into a new and unwelcome world, it is not new, not exactly. Twenty-eight years ago, Arsenal approached exactly the same problem, albeit from a substantially different angle. The answer the club found might provide some inspiration, nearly three decades on, but it also offers something of a warning.
My clutter, animated by the catastrophe for which it had been waiting, is no longer a moral failing or character deficit. It is, in a thousand unexpected ways, a savior, and it feels bizarre that in the recent past, I regarded my extra jars of on-sale spaghetti sauce and the T-shirts I never parted with as slightly disgraceful. The whole world now lives in the future my family always planned for, where an abundance of spaghetti sauce and cozy old shirts is among the best-case scenarios available to people living regular lives. I fought it for some 30 years, but now I’m willing to admit it: My mom was right, and the slopdinis have a point.
Sonia Shah’s last two books Pandemic, published in 2016, and The Fever, published in 2010, introduced her as a storyteller in a novel genre: travel books that went in search of the spread of disease - cholera in the former, malaria in the latter. That literature of track and trace, part detective story, part reportage, took Shah to remote corners of the world and to distant grid references of history. Her books were also prescient case studies of the way that human progress has been shaped by its love-hate relationship with microbes – how disease has caused empires to rise and fall and economies to stutter and implode.
This book – a wandering narrative about why people wander – is likely to prove equally prophetic in the coming months and years, since it asks two questions that are already shaping our geopolitics: what causes human beings to migrate? And is such mass movement beneficial to more settled communities and nations?
Perhaps it is best that we go away now
bundle up our tyrants, lies and balloons, our screams,
... say we live on, say we’ll forget the masks
that kept us from dying from the invisible,
but say we won’t ever forget the invisible
masks we realized we had been wearing
most our lives, disguising ourselves from
each other. Say we won’t veil ourselves again,