Introducing: Sold Short, a new TNR newsletter on inequality

Quarantine time is strange, but you already knew that. The days are repetitive: I work from my living room now because I am lucky. I prepare meals and try to drink water. I read enough news, but not too much. I call my mom, one of millions of health care workers still showing up to their hospitals every single day, then call my aunts to ask about what she might not be telling me. Take a walk, maybe. The evening passes, time bleeds a little, and then it’s tomorrow.
The pieces we’ve published at TNR in recent weeks feel a little like that, too: strangely borderless. They tell different stories while circling shared themes: forced precarity and structural inequity, death cult capitalism, the desires and vulnerabilities that keep us connected and interdependent. I’m not even sure that there are other stories to tell, since covering the pandemic and its wake first felt like reporting the news but has now come to feel like just plain writing.

The spread of the coronavirus in the United States has thrown millions of people into uncertainty, but in a way that feels familiar enough. There is something surreal and unprecedented about the level of synchronization we’re experiencing—unemployment claims have now reached nearly 30 million, the logic of the rent strike has suddenly come to feel practical for many people who had previously never considered it—but the basic contours of the situation are the same as they’ve always been. We remain unique among countries of this wealth and size for not offering some form of universal health care or requiring any paid time off, and so much suffering needlessly and unequally flows from those gaps. This may sound redundant by now, stripped of some of its visceral punch through hack political sloganeering, but it’s still true. The pandemic is extraordinary in history, but it’s also a crisis map, a bright line connecting the exploitation and violence that already existed.
I am part of the generation that graduated into a war, then into a recession. We narrated these events to each other as moments when everything would change because how could it not? But that scale of upheaval—desperate as it’s been for so many, as long a tail as it’s had—doesn’t move politics on its own, which is a lesson that everyone learns, I guess. I don’t have that sense of inevitability any longer, but I have also come to understand that you don’t really need it. You kind of just have to keep doing everything anyway, which is itself now tired wisdom, cribbed from a slogan somewhere. I thought about all of this again this week when a tenant organizer in Kansas City—asked about how to politicize the millions of people newly thrown into the situation of not being able to afford their housing—told my colleague Nick Martin that rent is one of the bills that “people are most socialized to feel the responsibility to pay. Unraveling that responsibility is a really complicated project.” These struggles we’re in now, the ones that feel new and the ones that have just become worse and more garish, are more of those really complicated projects. But there is time to build, mainly because we have to. Things are bad and the days blend together. It’s somehow always 4 p.m. There’s a lot of time ahead of us, and still a lot to do.
Happy May Day, all.
—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor