Carolyn Wells | Longreads | December 2021 | 11 minutes (3,198 words)

Do you want to come to the Christmas pantomime? I am visiting family in England, and people keep earnestly asking me this question. It is not an invite I ever receive in Canada, where I now live, and upon questioning my American colleagues, I discover none of them are trotting off to see a pantomime this year either. It’s a uniquely British festive tradition. Jane Moody, Professor of Humanities Research at York University, has even proclaimed the pantomime “quintessentially British: as British as Earl Grey tea.” Yes — even on par with tea. 

It is hard to explain a pantomime: middle-aged men prancing about dressed as flamboyant washerwomen, humans playing animals, princesses, dastardly villains, and lots of bawdy jokes. Growing up, I would go and see a panto every Christmas, so this is all normal, but from an outside perspective, I can see it could raise the odd eyebrow. In the words of Sir Ian McKellen, “You can’t start to explain what a pantomime is — it’s like explaining the rules of cricket.” So I turned to a dictionary definition for help: Pantomimes are theatrical entertainment, mainly for children, involving music, topical jokes, and slapstick comedy, based on a fairy tale or nursery story. 

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The range of fables is extensive, with productions at every town theater. This year, I was offered Dick Whittington (a real mayor of London who died in 1423), Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Puss in Boots, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. This is probably where I should admit I have never been a big fan of pantomimes, at least partially because they require a level of audience participation that makes my eyes twitch. When someone on stage shouts, “Oh, no he isn’t!” you are dutifully required to shout back, “Oh, yes he is!”— a frustrating back and forth that goes on for some time without satisfactory resolution. You are also encouraged to aid the hapless hero by shouting “He’s behind you!” when a villain sneaks onto the stage. Personally, my annoyance at the hero’s lack of spatial awareness has always made me reluctant to offer this assistance. 

And then there is the worst part: the constant fear of being brought onto the stage. This prospect makes my nieces and nephews squeal excitedly, while I slide further down into my seat, wishing for better camouflage than red velvet. One year my niece did receive this ultimate pantomime honor — chosen to go on stage to dance — and she still gleefully talks about it. I, on the other hand, cracked at my last panto, leaving halfway through and muttering to myself about the dreadful jokes as I walked home. Very Scrooge of me. However, this year I was determined to be jolly and embrace the Christmas tradition, bravely agreeing to a weekend of back-to-back pantomimes, with an evening performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and a matinee of Dick Whittington.

It is hard to explain a pantomime: middle-aged men prancing about dressed as flamboyant washerwomen, humans playing animals, princesses, dastardly villains, and lots of bawdy jokes.

Ahead of the performances, the auditoriums buzz with excitement. Tiny girls twirl in fairy costumes before turning to whack their brothers with their wands. Mothers bounce wide-eyed toddlers with one arm, clutching paper cups full of wine in the other, and elderly grandparents adorned with Christmas hats stand stoically in rings of lightsaber brandishing 10-year-olds. It is a reminder that pantomimes are an event for the whole family — and the whole community — with both shows opening with a nod to their local town. “Hello, Woking town!” Snow White yells from her castle as delighted kids scream greetings in return. And in a theater one town over, Dick Whittington greets his audience with, “Hello Guildford! Bet you’re glad you’re not in Woking!” 

Woking gets off comparatively lightly compared to Croydon: “I knew I’d reached Croydon because I saw a banner up saying, ‘Happy 30th Birthday Grandma!’” Nods like this to adult humor and sexual innuendo are a big part of the British panto — in Snow White, the Evil Queen invites two henchmen backstage with her, with a knowing wink to the audience, “I’m a cougar!” Meanwhile, her jester bemoans about the size of his privates when “It’s Cold Outside.” In Dick Whittington, his love interest proclaims, “I’m missing Dick!” to knowing chuckles from mothers now grasping their second wine. 

The British are more renowned for being prim and proper than guffawing loudly at the mention of a small penis. So how did these raucous shows become so beloved in this country? Jeff Thompson, a local theater critic and pantomime lover, informed me we can probably blame the Italians: “In the 16th century, Italy had a brand of entertainment known as Commedia dell’arte (comedy of the artists)…a cast of mischievous characters including the Harlequin, Columbine, and Pantaloon, occasionally masked, some with juggling and acrobatic skills, others as musicians…it was rehearsed chaos of knock-about humor, with the players appearing in colorful, outrageous costumes.” 

Different companies toured the Italian states and Principalities, appearing on street corners and market squares, and it is likely that they also came to London. Thompson explains that “an Italian influence was evident in London during the 1500s, hardly surprising because London was a major trading port, and Shakespeare himself…wasn’t slow to exploit this popularity when choosing Italian locations — The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, etc.”

By the 1700s, the Georgians — who loved to make things fancy — had adapted the Commedia dell’arte into the Harlequinade. According to Thompson, “the same characters were there — Harlequin, Columbine, and Pantaloon, but the Harlequinade productions could now be seen on stage with music…the storylines were classical tales and familiar fables. Progressively, domestic stories and political satire were also introduced, and the late 1700s and 1800s saw the introduction of elaborate state scenery and ‘phantasmagorical effects’, which echo into contemporary productions.”

The master of the Harlequinade was a man named John Rich, who managed Lincoln Fields theater in the 1720s. I was rather pleased to learn that Rich introduced the term slapstick into the English language — his harlequin used a wooden bat to knock things down — but he would probably rather be remembered for his incredible shows. His pantomimes fused comedy, music, ballet, and myth into tremendous spectacles, provoking us Brits to have a moan about the death of serious theater. 

Jane Moody notes that although actor/manager David Garrick initially joined in on the whining, he was sensible enough to realize there was money to be had in this tomfoolery — after all, by 1732, John Rich was able to build Covent Garden Theater with his profits. So, presumably after wrestling with his artistic conscience, Garrick decided that “If they won’t come to Lear and Hamlet, I must give them Harlequin.” He compromised by only producing his pantomimes for the Christmas season, associating pantos with the fun of Christmas rather than “proper” theater. The Christmas panto tradition survives to this day. 

Things developed further as Britain entered the Victorian era. The Industrial Revolution made life increasingly difficult for the working class, and the local Music Hall became a means of escape. As Thompson points out, “Beer and laughter went well together…in a time of malnutrition, epidemics, and a cruel penal code. Performers added to their living by moving away from the Harlequinades to the Music Halls and developing new acts, the pantomime as we might now recognize it was emerging.”

Although the issues have changed since the Industrial Revolution, the panto is still a place of release — somewhere to laugh at your problems — with both pantomimes I attended making fun of British politics and COVID-19. Dick Whittington adapted the song “12 Days of Christmas” into “12 Days of Lockdown”: “On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, six lateral flow tests, five toilet rolls, four booster jabs, three hand sanitizers…” Meanwhile, the villain, King Rat, said that he needed a wife “so she could spend inordinate amounts of tax-payer money on renovating his house,” a joke referencing a recent scandal involving Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie Symonds. Jeff Bezos doesn’t escape either: King Rat’s Ratazon exploits its workers and destroys local businesses, and over in Snow White, her engagement to Harry provokes quips that “Prince Harry marrying an actress will never work.”

The key to these jokes is being able to speak freely — not always a given in a traditional monarchy. However, the Theaters Act of 1843 indirectly boosted pantomime by lifting restrictions on the use of the spoken word in performances and limiting the powers of the Lord Chamberlain to only prohibiting plays when “fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do.” Wordplay and audience participation were added to shows shortly thereafter, and the Victorians did not stop there: elaborate sets and live animals added to the theatrical gimmicks. 

And as explained by the Victoria and Albert Museum, if animals were not available, people would do; some actors made careers of dressing in elaborate animal costumes known as skins. One of the most famous Victorian animal impersonators was the actor and acrobat Charles Lauri Jr. He had quite the extensive range, from a poodle to a kangaroo, and a quote attributed to him demonstrates the true method actor he was: “I need hardly say that I am an entire believer in studying from life. When getting my poodle part, I had one always with me at home, and it was from that I learned nearly all my tricks.”

By the end of the century, productions had reached an epic level and could last up to five hours. FIVE HOURS. You could walk across the whole of London, and Lauri Jr would still be dressed as that poodle. The 1900 Drury Lane production of Sleeping Beauty and the Beast was a particularly long, lavish show, as, apparently unable to pick a story, it was a mash-up of both Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty. A critic for the newspaper The Star was not sure what to make of it, even after five hours of consideration: 

The Drury Lane pantomime…is a symbol of our nation. It is the biggest thing of its kind in the world, it is a prodigal of money, of invention, of splendor, of men and women, but it is without the sense of beauty or the restraining influence of taste. It is impossible to sit in the theater for five hours without being filled with weary admiration. Only a great nation could have done such a thing; only an undisciplined nation would have done it. The monstrous, glittering thing of pomp and humor is without order or design; it is a hotch-potch of everything that has been seen on any stage.

Hotch-potch is a good description of pantomime — a bizarre blend of continental and British traditions. Professor Jane Moody describes it as “The raw energy of Music Hall, the sauciness of Burlesque, the acrobatic power of John Rich, and the archetypal plots of Commedia…The story of pantomime is a story of transformation and endless adaptation.” It still is. The pantomimes I saw included singing, dancing, improvisation, impersonation, and acting. At one point, the Evil Queen in Snow White rode a pterodactyl over the audience — an impressive theatrical feat, but not a point I remember the Brothers Grimm dwelling on. A sense of joy radiates off the stage as the cast gets to showcase their talents and tricks, led by the star of the show, the Pantomime Dame. 

Men have played women throughout theater history, with female performers banned from the stage until after the Restoration in 1660. Pantomimes stuck with that convention, and one of the stars is still a man dressed as a careworn mother — the Dame. Dan Leno shaped the Dame in the 1880s, playing roles like the Queen in Humpty Dumpty or Widow Twankey in Aladdin. As Jane Moody tells it, “he began to domesticate the Dame, and to imagine her as a mother, facing problems which he and his audiences knew all too well: poverty, unemployment, and abandonment.” 

Nowadays, Moody considers the Dame to “embody the collective ties which bind us together as families, as neighbors, and as citizens of a particular town or city.” The Dame is often played by a big star: Sir Ian McKellen, Les Dawson, and Christopher Biggins have all taken a turn. In Snow White, the traditional Dame was replaced by Gok Wan as the Mirror, who at one point lost it and just started laughing: “I have an MBE! Two weeks ago I was at Windsor Palace and now I’m on my hands and knees in Woking! Leave it!”

After the performance of Dick Whittington, a Christmas miracle happened (with a little help from the press relations officer), and my sister, niece, and I got to meet both the Dame, Sally the Cook (Peter Gordon), and the baddie, King Rat (Kit Hesketh-Harvey). They arrived still in full makeup and sat with us in the stalls while cleaners vacuumed up the remnants of popcorn and tinsel around us. I felt a little starstruck, but nothing compared to my 14-year-old niece. She has been coming to this pantomime since she was 3 years old — when King Rat scared her so much she was carried out of the theater in floods of tears. Now they were sitting next to each other. 

“Oh, I have warped the minds of a whole generation,” Hesketh-Harvey said with relish. “My record is nine children screaming with fear in the first 45 minutes.” He has been in pantomime for 12 years, Gordon something similar. They are both local and even remember the theater being built. “The theater is a real community hub,” says Gordon, “and panto is its lifeblood. The regional theater would go under without panto — it’s so dependent on the income.” Hesketh-Harvey agrees, “Panto is just so important. It’s a huge tradition — huge. You get these baffled Canadians and Americans coming and they just don’t get it. But it’s the last great variety show… a time to come together and celebrate the joy of community and create family memories. Besides, if it wasn’t for panto we would just be two old farts sitting on a sofa.” 

It was a delight to sit and chat with these two gentlemen — the villain and the Dame — as they highlighted some of the things I had experienced for myself with the panto: the history, the sense of family, the community, and the joy in laughing at life. But after a two-year hiatus, I had forgotten how risqué pantomime jokes could be. The humor is reminiscent of the British Carry On films, but this was a series that ended in 1992. Is it still okay for Snow White to be, “Off cottaging with seven men? We’ve all been there!” Or to joke: “I’m dyslexic, but I’ve read ten out of two people are!” Hesketh-Harvey admits that “Pantomime and woke don’t sit well together. Pantomime gives the finger to the woke generation, but the joy of it outweighs everything else.”

But it does not outweigh everything. In 2017, Irene Ng expressed serious concerns in a panel event hosted by The Stage: “Pantomime makes the dominant culture, or color, feel better about themselves. All the humor was taking the mick out of people in a derogatory way, whether someone is blind, handicapped, ‘ugly’, or of a different race.” Dongshin Chang, an academic who has written on the portrayal of Chinese characters on the London stage, has criticized Aladdin, saying “the character names in Aladdin are rooted in dated attitudes towards Chinese people. Wishee Washee is a clear reference to Chinese business interests…Underneath the fun and entertainment, the association with laundry may also be considered a manifestation of prejudice.” In 2017, a mother named Natalie Wood made an official complaint about Dick Whittington at Manchester Opera House, saying it was too smutty for children. There were also several complaints after a pantomime advertised for a “Chow Mein Slave of the Ring” for a production of Aladdin. 

Pantomime is in a bubble, but it still needs to adapt. Hesketh-Harvey may grumble that “It’s amazing what I can’t say this year,” but I was impressed with some of the changes I noticed. In Snow White, the Prince and Snow White share several kisses, instigated by her, before he finally wakes her from her slumber with an unsolicited kiss. Then, in the end, it is Snow White who proposes to him. (Spoiler: He says yes.) The dwarves have traditionally been played by little people, but in this production, they were a hybrid of puppets and people on their knees (which still felt a little uncomfortable). And in Dick Whittington, the Black female lead was a business owner, who at the end of the production wins Business Woman of the Year. 

These adaptations, although small, are signs that pantomime is changing. “The genre continues to evolve,” Jeff Thompson says. “‘Once Upon a Time’ pantomimes were based around fairy stories such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, but increasingly novels and films are being adapted for the stage. There is also a hint of Disneyfication emerging … and I suspect panto will continue to adapt as opinion influences it.” To survive pantomime needs to keep transforming, but it will — it has been adapting for the last 500 years. 

In a few weeks, the Christmas pantomime season will be drawing to a close. But my season isn’t over just yet — newly invigorated by my experiences, I have now agreed to both a stage performance of Cinderella, as well as a radio show my sister is performing in (playing an Ugly Sister, much to her chagrin). But, rather than begrudge giving yet more time over to panto, I am delighted. For like many a good panto plot, there is a twist — this is a redemption story. In Snow White, when the Queen declares herself the fairest in the land, I shouted, “Oh, no you’re not!” at the top of my lungs, when Prince Harry has a ghost behind him, I lent further lung capacity to yelling “He’s behind you!” In Dick Whittington, I got on my feet with the rest of the audience and sang and danced to “Don’t Stop Believing.” And I enjoyed it. I was Scrooge no longer. 

I now understand the point of a pantomime: It brings people together. Not only does the history of pantomime go back hundreds of years, but it goes back through the history of my family. I came to these shows as a child, and now I go with my nieces and nephews. We have created family memories and continue creating them. Panto provides a sense of belonging — not just to each other, but your local theater and your local town. And after a difficult two years, it is so lovely to laugh. My niece told me she will still want to go to pantos when “she is really old, like 25” (cringe) and I will be right there along with her. I promise I will never walk out of a pantomime again. Oh, no I won’t! 

***

Copy Editors: Peter Rubin / Cheri Lucas Rowlands 

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 115, “The Love Bomb,” by Daniel Kolitz.

Daniel Kolitz| The Atavist | July 2021 | 10 minutes (2,100 words)

Prologue

On Super Bowl Sunday, three weeks into the 1980s, Dave Cherry had the house to himself. The 15-year-old was sprawled out on his parents’ gold bedspread watching the game, but on the list of things he cared about—Led Zeppelin, the possibility of alternate dimensions, acquiring and inhaling tremendous quantities of weed—football barely ranked. Inertia, a sense of having nothing better to do, was the only thing that kept him watching.

When the game ended, the network cut to Dan Rather, his posture as rigid as his hair. Rather introduced the subject of that week’s 60 Minutes episode: the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. “Few people outside of Texas had ever heard of PDAP,” Rather intoned, “until People magazine reported that Carrie Hamilton, the 15-year-old daughter of TV star Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton, had become a drug addict, and that her parents had sent Carrie to PDAP, where she kicked her habit.”

Cherry, who lived in the suburbs of St. Louis, wasn’t familiar with PDAP, nor with Carrie Hamilton’s recovery, despite Burnett and her family making the daytime talk-show rounds—Dinah Shore, Phil Donahue—to praise the program and its founder, a recovering addict and alcoholic named Bob Meehan. “Some see Mr. Meehan as a miracle worker,” Rather said, “bringing God and clean living back into young people’s lives. Others say he gets those youngsters dependent on him and PDAP in place of their former dependence on drugs and alcohol.”

Meehan appeared on screen, looking like someone’s hazy misconception of 1970s cool: wide white sideburns, bushy blond goatee. Fury seemed to flash behind his orange-tinted aviators. Cherry, the son of strict Southern Baptists, was suddenly interested. Meehan was precisely the kind of guy his parents would despise.

“Now, I’m saying, this program works for a group of people. If it doesn’t work for you, try another one!” Meehan told 60 Minutes. “We’re not controlling you in any way, shape, or form. You don’t like it, leave!”

Meehan called his method of treating substance abuse Enthusiastic Sobriety, or ES. It was a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for teenagers; it emphasized community and spirituality, but also insisted that participants needed to have fun. Cherry watched footage of cozy group confessionals and larger meetings that looked like pep rallies. Kids traded shoulder squeezes and looks of fervent understanding. A pretty woman, maybe 20 years old, cradled a younger boy’s head as another woman thanked him for filling a void in her life. “I love you,” she said, prompting claps and cheers from the people gathered around her.

A lonely kid, Cherry felt a stir of longing.

Meehan was so animated that, beside him, Rather looked like an expensive wax statue. When Rather questioned him about his $100,000 annual income, a combination of his PDAP salary and payments from a company that ran hospitals where PDAP referred teenagers for inpatient treatment, Meehan grinned. “If I wasn’t making money, you wouldn’t be here today, partner!” he said. Pressed for evidence of the high success rates PDAP touted in its advertisements, Meehan delivered a wandering monologue on the perils of methadone and the definition of success before telling Rather that if 60 Minutes or its host would like to give him $75,000 to conduct a study, he’d be happy to take it.

“Are you saying to me that you don’t have any data to back up your claim that you’re 75 to 80 percent successful?” Rather asked.

“The data we have is quite different from data anybody else has,” Meehan said.

“But when you boil it down, what you’ve got is a guess,” Rather pressed.

“Oh definitely,” Meehan said, inscrutable. “Definitely a guess.”

Rather presented dissenting opinions, from sources who described an environment that seemed designed to keep PDAP participants in thrall to Meehan. A mustached man in a tan leather jacket said that people were being “led to believe that we can’t make it without the program,” prompting Rather to remark, astonished, that this would make participation “never-ending.” Confronted with the notion that PDAP was manipulative and opportunistic, Meehan became even more energetic. “I’ve been a con all my life,” he told Rather. “Just, now I’m using it in a good way, see?”

The segment was in no uncertain terms a takedown. It aired on the highest-rated news program in the country, directly after the biggest event on TV. It should have been Bob Meehan’s undoing. But it wasn’t.

Over the next 40 years, Meehan proved to be a skilled shapeshifter and profiteer. Enthusiastic Sobriety, which as it turned out was even more destructive than 60 Minutes revealed, spread well beyond PDAP. It evolved, taking various names and forms; when one door closed, Meehan found another to open. Recovery programs that he ran or wielded influence over enrolled thousands of young people across the United States. Today, ES outfits run by members of Meehan’s inner circle still exist in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina.

ES also ensnared staff and some clients in what people who’ve abandoned it now call a cult. Meehan and his closest confidants—a group dubbed the Family—controlled every aspect of members’ lives. The story recounted here draws on interviews with 65 former clients, counselors, and loved ones of people involved with ES from its origins in the 1970s through to the present day. Their experiences echo those described in an active online community of former ES followers, who use Facebook and other social-media platforms to tell their stories. Some subjects spoke to The Atavist Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Flopped on his parents’ bed in 1980, Dave Cherry couldn’t have guessed the outsize role he’d one day play in ES, or the extent to which Meehan would come to dominate his life. Years would pass before the two even met. All Cherry knew on that Super Bowl Sunday was that he liked the guy. He thought Dan Rather had given Bob Meehan a raw deal.

***

Part One

Hard facts about Meehan’s life before PDAP are scarce, but he always told a compelling origin story—how he first shot heroin at 16; how the habit soon compelled him to pawn his parents’ furniture; how they committed him to a psychiatric ward; how he escaped and spent the next ten years on and off the streets, using not only heroin but also codeine, quaaludes, cocaine, speed, and alcohol. During this period, according to several people who knew Meehan, he claimed to have robbed several pharmacies, killed several men, and played drums in several small-time jazz ensembles.

In Meehan’s telling, his luck changed in 1971. Released from a Kentucky prison cell, he wound up in Houston, digging ditches for Rice University. At 27, he was mostly toothless—he wore dentures—and bald, save for a grimy curtain of hair running from the peak of his scalp down to his shoulders. A Fu Manchu mustache drooped past his chin. He’d mostly stopped using drugs but still wrestled with booze, and after another short stint in jail, this time for burglary and public drunkenness, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church.

In Meehan’s telling, his luck changed in 1971. Released from a Kentucky prison cell, he wound up in Houston, digging ditches for Rice University. At 27, he was mostly toothless—he wore dentures—and bald, save for a grimy curtain of hair running from the peak of his scalp down to his shoulders. A Fu Manchu mustache drooped past his chin. He’d mostly stopped using drugs but still wrestled with booze, and after another short stint in jail, this time for burglary and public drunkenness, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church.

The gatherings were presided over by Father Charles Wyatt-Brown, a soft-spoken priest beloved by his community. Wyatt-Brown took a liking to Meehan, who was outspoken in meetings. The two began having lunch together. Wyatt-Brown soon hired Meehan as his church’s janitor.

Teens made regular use of the church in those days, playing Frisbee on the grounds and popping inside to use the bathroom. Some of them were drug users, and Wyatt-Brown encouraged Meehan to befriend them, hoping he might set them on a better path. In fact, Wyatt-Brown said, Meehan’s attention was better spent helping children than vacuuming hallways.

Meehan was singularly charismatic, a perpetual motion machine with a comic’s timing and a gift for connecting with kids. It helped that he chain-smoked, cursed incessantly, and had a vast supply of dirty jokes and prison yarns to keep them entertained. Soon, with Wyatt-Brown’s permission, six young people began meeting regularly with Meehan in the church’s basement. They played cards, complained about teachers, talked about crushes. Sometimes Meehan took to the piano, leading sing-alongs. Within six months, the group’s ranks had expanded to 40, and Meehan was formally promoted to the role of youth counselor. Another six months later, attendance had reached 250, and Wyatt-Brown established the Palmer Drug Abuse Program as a nonprofit, with a board of directors to facilitate the program’s growth. Meehan was made director.

Meehan didn’t have formal qualifications to run a drug-treatment program. What he had was life experience and an eye for demand. White middle-class Americans shaped by the promise and comforts of the postwar era were terrified that substance abuse would steal their children’s future. The war on drugs began in 1971, with Richard Nixon declaring illegal substances “public enemy number one.” Within a few years, the so-called parent movement, which preached zero tolerance of marijuana, narcotics, and alcohol, would spread across the country. But Meehan recognized that a top-down approach wasn’t likely to appeal to kids. What rebellious teenager does what their parents or president tells them to do?

Meehan started developing Enthusiastic Sobriety, which was both a theory and a practice. In order to entice teens, he believed, clean living needed to be just as fun—and just as reckless—as the alternative. If teens wanted to grow their hair long, smoke cigarettes, stay out all night, or even drop out of school, parents should let them—whatever kept them off drugs and alcohol was a good thing. Thus liberated, kids could enter the alternate social world of PDAP, which had its own dances, campouts, and house parties, all of them substance-free.

Spirituality was part of PDAP’s deal; much like AA, the program was rooted in the possibility of redemption. If that didn’t seem cool to teenagers, Meehan would be the first to tell them they were wrong. He believed that peer pressure was what drove young people to experiment with drugs and alcohol, and he aimed to use the same tactic to keep them sober. As soon as they walked in the door of a meeting, PDAP newcomers were smothered in hugs and people saying “I love you.” The tactic, called “love bombing,” is now widely recognized as a method for luring people into cults. One PDAP participant recalled thinking, “These guys are like the Hare Krishna or something. They’re going to try to make me sell flowers at the airport next week.”

In the program’s early days, Meehan met and married Joy DeFord, a diminutive, dark-haired divorcée who ran Palmer Memorial’s Alateen program, for teenagers who had alcoholics in their families. Joy came across as a polished Southern belle, a calm counterpoint to her manic husband, though she had quirks of her own, including an interest in hypnotism and homeopathy. The Meehans had a daughter and informally adopted a PDAP participant named Susan Lowry. Joy began running PDAP’s parent group, which held meetings each week. Hers was an essential role—PDAP’s smooth functioning depended on parents buying into the developing ES methodology.

PDAP could be a tough sell for parents. Beyond the smoking and the late nights, there was the fact that PDAP’s counselors looked like they could have been former drug dealers. Some of them were former drug dealers. One young man showed up for his first PDAP meeting, struck up a conversation with a counselor, and quickly realized that he’d “bought dope from the guy before.” When the adults balked about who was supervising their kids, Joy calmed them down. A common refrain was “Would you rather they were dead?”

PDAP was free, funded entirely by community donations. Participants had to commit to 30 days of sobriety, during which they would attend frequent meetings. They could keep coming to PDAP after that—in fact, they were encouraged to make the program the permanent anchor of their existence. Meehan, a fervent follower of AA, implemented a version of the 12 steps in PDAP. Participants made moral inventories and direct amends to those they’d hurt, and they admitted that substances rendered their lives unmanageable. Meehan put his own spin on other steps. His second one was “We have found it necessary to ‘stick with winners’ in order to grow.” To keep old friends around—especially if they used drugs or alcohol, but often even if they were sober—was to court relapse or worse. Once someone had PDAP, they didn’t need anyone else. In the words of one former participant, PDAP was “a whole group of people who were just like me.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, resources are available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including a 24/7 national helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Additional information on rehab abuse is available via Breaking Code Silence.

On a wet, gray February day in 2012, Abed Salama was plunged into every parent’s worst nightmare. His son Milad had left for kindergarten early that morning, carrying an orange drink, a sleeve of Pringles, and a chocolate Kinder Egg — special treats for a class picnic. When Abed got word that there had been an accident involving one of the school buses carrying Milad’s class, he panicked. Getting to the scene required navigating sluggish traffic, past high walls and fences, then running on foot when soldiers wouldn’t let his vehicle go any farther; he asked for a ride in a military jeep but was refused. Getting answers about Milad — where was he? was he alive? — was even more punishing. Abed didn’t have the right information, the right papers, the right ethnicity. He is Palestinian, and in his world, as writer Nathan Thrall details in an astonishing feat of reporting for the New York Review of Books, every parent’s worst nightmare is compounded by Israel’s decades-long efforts to make Palestinian lives all but unlivable:

For over half a century, Israel’s strategic dilemma has been its inability to erase the Palestinians, on one hand, and its unwillingness to grant them civil and political rights, on the other. Explaining his opposition to giving Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights as Palestinian citizens of Israel, [former foreign minister] Abba Eban said that there was a limit to the amount of arsenic the human body could absorb. Between the two poles of mass expulsion and political inclusion, the unhappy compromise Israel found was to fragment the Palestinian population, ensuring that its scattered pieces could not organize as one national collective.

Administratively, fragmentation was implemented by imposing varying restrictions, decrees, or laws on Palestinian residents of the different sub-units Israel defined for them: Gaza; the West Bank; East Jerusalem; Israel within the Green Line; and refugees outside the state. Nowhere were Palestinians granted rights equal to those of Jews. Physically, fragmentation was achieved through the establishment of Israeli settlements and their surrounding roads, national parks, archaeological sites, and closed military zones, which left Palestinian communities isolated from one another and surrounded by fences, walls, checkpoints, closed gates, roadblocks, trenches, and bypass roads.

In the case of the accident, fragmentation meant that no one placed a call for assistance until 19 minutes after the school bus collided with a tractor trailer, flipped over, and burst into flames. Israeli emergency services were just a minute and a half away — a military checkpoint was even closer — so onlookers assumed help was coming, but it wasn’t. A video shot at the scene shows a tragedy unfolding in real time:

Men rush forward with small fire extinguishers taken from their cars. Others bring plastic bottles, helplessly pouring them onto the blaze. The flames continue to grow. A man paces desperately in a circle, gripping his face with both hands. Another hits himself on the head. A third, his small fire extinguisher emptied, storms away from the bus, yelling, “Where are you people?! Dear God!” as he raises the extinguisher over his head and slams it to the ground. A small blackened corpse lies on its back in the middle of the road. “Cover him, cover him,” one man tells another. “Where are the ambulances?!” someone else yells. “Where are the Jews?”

Fragmentation also meant that, in the aftermath of the crash, which ultimately claimed several lives and left many children injured, it wasn’t possible to hold Israeli institutions accountable. “Left unsaid,” Thrall writes, “were criticisms of the policies the parents and politicians alike were powerless to change.” Abed would eventually learn what happened to his son, but not from Milad himself. The little boy died, and his body was so badly burned that a DNA test was required to identify him:

Several years after the accident, when Abed was working as a taxi driver, he gave a ride to a mother and her children traveling from Ramallah to their home in the Shuafat Refugee Camp. As they approached the accident site on Jaba road, Abed whispered the Fatiha, the opening prayer of the Quran. From the back seat the mother said, “May God protect them.” Abed was surprised. “You know about the accident?” he asked. She said that her son, sitting beside her in the taxi, was among the students on the bus that day. Abed insisted that the family come home with him for lunch right then. They passed Milad’s school, where, on the anniversary of the crash, Abed would bring Kinder Eggs to the students in Milad’s old classroom, and stopped at a store, where Abed bought a toy for Milad’s former schoolmate. At his home, Abed worked up the courage to ask the boy if he remembered anything about Milad that day. The boy said he did: “Milad was in the front of the bus. He was scared, and he crawled under his seat.”

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Blake Bailey’s 900-page biography of Philip Roth had been on shelves a matter of days when women began stepping forward to accuse Bailey of sexual assault, harassment, and grooming. Bailey, who has denied the allegations, was quickly dropped by his literary agency. His publisher, Norton, announced this week that it is permanently putting the Roth biography out of print and donating the equivalent of Bailey’s book advance to “organizations that fight against sexual assault or harassment and work to protect survivors.”

In the case of Bailey’s alleged predations, some of the survivors are his former students.

In a deeply reported piece, three authors at Slate — Josh Levin, Susan Matthews, and Molly Olmstead — describe how, as a middle-school English teacher in New Orleans, Bailey encouraged kids to bear their souls to him in class journals, won their trust, and then exploited it:

The teacher’s massive stack of teenage diaries gave him a kind of classroom omniscience, which he didn’t hesitate to deploy. “If you mentioned a crush in your journal,” Sam says, “there was a chance that Bailey would think it was a good match and drop a note to her.” That worked for Sam. Nothing he could possibly say or do, he felt, carried nearly as much weight as an endorsement from Mr. Bailey.

Some students were not as keen to have their private information shared. “The journals were kind of like emotional blackmail,” says Amelia Ward, who was in eighth grade in 1996 and 1997. “He knew a lot about what was going on with the kids, socially.” Jessie Gelini, who took Mr. Bailey’s class in 1998 and 1999, remembers the teacher publicly airing a negative journal comment—something a male friend of Jessie’s had written about her boyfriend. “Here’s this adult, getting involved, and making it a class discussion,” Jessie says. She was humiliated.

While Mr. Bailey told Sam that he was just like him, Jessie remembers hearing the teacher say something very different to eighth grade girls: “I would have been your boyfriend in high school.” At the time, the casualness of that kind of remark felt thrilling, even though she knew it wasn’t quite right. “I was grossed out by him,” Jessie says now. “But at the same time, I was enamored.”

Bailey kept in touch with former students, and more than one has now alleged that, when they became adults, Bailey initiated sexual relationships with them, or raped them. One of them is Eve Crawford Peyton, whose personal essay accompanies the Slate article:

The one line I keep reading in different news accounts is a line that’s haunted me since the night he raped me in June 2003. As he dropped me off that night, while I was still shaking all over, he looked over at me, his eyes sad and sort of pleading, and said: “You really can’t blame me. I’ve wanted you since the day we met.”

At the time, that line almost broke my heart more than anything else. I couldn’t fathom that he could possibly have actually wanted me since the day we met—because I was 12 the day we met. Instead, I thought, he was just using the line on me that he used on all women.

“I’ve wanted you since the day we met,” I could imagine him slurring as a Tulane frat boy, pulling a young coed into his bedroom. I could hear him saying it to a colleague after weeks of courtship and flirtation. I figured it must be a habit, and the fact that he said it to me—someone he met when I was a child and he was in his 30s—made me feel like he didn’t even know who I was, like I was just some nameless, faceless woman.

That was hurtful. The truth was worse.

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Darayya in Syria was rendered a ghost town by Asaad’s regime after civic resistance — becoming a town of rubble where a mere 12,000 starving survivors clung on. One of these survivors was Ahmad Muaddamani, who spoke to Delphine Minoui from The Guardian about a remarkable thing that he and his friends did to keep life in Darayya bearable — they built a library. In books, the people left in Darayya found a refuge and an “atmosphere of collective intimacy, as well as a sense of ethics, discipline and, oddly enough, normality” that was shared by both civilians and fighters of the Free Syrian Army alike.

Fearing reprisals from the regime, the organisers decided this library would be kept in the greatest of secrecy. It would have neither name nor sign. It would be an underground space, protected from radar and shells, where avid and novice readers alike could gather. Reading as refuge. A page opening to the world when every door is locked. After scouring the city, Muaddamani and his friends uncovered the basement of an abandoned building at the border of the frontline, not far from the snipers, but largely spared rocket fire. Its inhabitants were gone. The volunteers hurriedly constructed wooden shelves. They found paint to freshen the dusty walls. They reassembled two or three couches. Outside, they piled a few sandbags in front of the windows, and they brought a generator to provide electricity. For days, the book collectors busily dusted, glued, sorted, indexed and organised all these volumes. Now arranged by theme and in alphabetical order on overstuffed shelves, the books found a new, harmonious order.

These young Syrians cohabited with death night and day. Most of them had already lost everything – their homes, their friends, their parents. Amid the chaos, they clung to books as if to life, hoping for a better tomorrow, for a better political system. Driven by their thirst for culture, they were quietly developing an idea of what democracy should be. An idea that challenged the regime’s tyranny and Islamic State’s book burners. Muaddamani and his friends were true soldiers for peace.

At ProPublica, reporters David Armstrong and Marshall Allen tell the story of 53-year-old Miguel Fernandez, a Latino man from California who contracted the virus last fall. The center of a tight-knit, multigenerational family, Miguel fought for his life in hospital as his loved ones pushed to get him life-saving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation treatment — a specialized therapy that doctors are now in the horrific position of having to reserve for younger patients with the best chance of surviving, as critically ill COVID-19 patients overwhelm a healthcare system stretched far beyond usual limits.

But starting in early November, the daily number of COVID-19 hospitalizations surged in Los Angeles County, rising eightfold between then and the wave’s crest, which arrived just after New Year’s Day. Within weeks, overflowing hospitals faced exactly the types of care-rationing decisions experts had feared. Hospitals set up tents to increase capacity, and ambulances circled for hours as they waited for beds to open. By early January, Los Angeles County emergency medical personnel were directed to conserve supplemental oxygen by only administering it to the neediest patients, and to stop transporting to hospitals cardiac arrest patients who couldn’t be revived in the field. State officials dispatched refrigerated trucks and thousands of body bags to the region.

Miguel didn’t want to go to the hospital. He knew people like him were dying. Latino Angelenos have suffered the highest COVID-19 death rate in Los Angeles County — almost twice the rate of Blacks and about three times the rate for whites.

The separation was especially difficult for Alejandrina, who had been married to Miguel since 1991. Miguel liked to tease her when she watched her Mexican telenovelas: Why do you watch those shows when you have me? On Mother’s Day earlier in the year, Miguel had surprised her by buying a pair of rings, getting down on one knee and proposing again. The couple made plans to renew their vows on their 30th wedding anniversary this summer. When he became sick with COVID-19, Miguel assured Alejandrina he would get better so they could get married again. She promised she would wait for him.

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Two journalists documented 30 cases of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by an HIV doctor in Germany; many of the testimonials came from vulnerable gay men who were working in the sex trade or who had only recently immigrated to the country when they sought medical care at the doctor’s clinic. A criminal investigation had been launched against the doctor, who had also pledged not to see patients alone for the time being. The journalists published their findings — only to be forced to take them down. They hadn’t made errors, nor had sources recanted. As Caitlin L. Chandler documents in a feature for Columbia Journalism Review, the reason events transpired as they did is because the doctor, Heiko Jessen, and his attorney, Jony Eisenberg, exploited German media law, which is notably different than America’s:

In criminal trials, German law presumes innocence unless a guilty verdict is handed down by a judge. This is similar to the US legal system; however, in Germany, the presumption of innocence is also applied to press coverage. While the media is allowed to report on criminal trials—which are considered to fall within the “social sphere”—the law protects suspects from media coverage deemed to stigmatize them unfairly before a verdict is reached. For example, the media is rarely allowed to publish photos of someone in custody, unlike the “perp walks” commonly publicized in the US.

Before publishing the Jessen story, BuzzFeed and Vice consulted a German legal doctrine on “suspicion reporting” that outlines four criteria journalists must comply with: the article must make the public aware the person could be innocent; the journalists must have substantial material evidence in addition to reporting that a trial is ongoing; the suspect must have ample time to respond to the allegations, and their response must be included so that the story is balanced; and a person’s name can only be printed if there is an overwhelming public interest.

Eisenberg, clad in a leather jacket, railed against the journalists in a court hearing, calling them liars and muckrackers, and he attacked the alleged victims, emphasizing that they were drug users and sex workers. He won over the judges, who made a ruling on the basis of the “suspicion reporting” doctrine:

The judges said that BuzzFeed had met three of the conditions: it had enough evidence to publish; Jessen had been given adequate time to respond to the allegations; and the case was in the public interest. But on the fourth criterion—the obligation to maintain presumption of innocence—the judges said the journalists had failed. Precisely because the articles had presented such a massive amount of detailed evidence against Jessen, the judges said, no reader could come to the conclusion that he was innocent. The reporting was “not balanced.” They dismissed the consistent inclusion of words like “alleged,” calling such phrasing cosmetic, even though it is widely used by journalists both within and outside of Germany. Finally, the judges took issue with the story’s style, calling the level of detail provided about the assaults “voyeuristic.”

As Chandler details, the legal saga took more turns after that ruling, but the question at the heart of it stayed the same: Was the German legal system doing more harm than good?

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CW: suicide

Last year’s investigations into the COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships at the start of the pandemic, including Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess and Holland America’s MS Zaandam, revealed horrific vacations gone wrong for passengers from around the world. But what happened to the tens of thousands of crew members who remained trapped on ships even after all the guests had disembarked and found their way home?

At Bloomberg Businessweek, Austin Carr tells the devastating stories of cruise line employees found dead — in apparent suicides — aboard Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships, including Jozsef Szaller, a shore excursion manager from Hungary on the Carnival Breeze, and Mariah Jocson, a waitress from the Philippines on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.

Interviews with affected crew members and their families suggest that despite assurances from cruise operators that crew were well cared for, their mental health was at times an afterthought. An October 2019 study on the mental well-being of crew, commissioned by a group affiliated with the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the big maritime trade union, found that even before the pandemic about a fifth of mariners surveyed said they had suicidal thoughts. High levels of depression stem from the jobs’ long contract lengths and stressful demands.

On April 29, an electrical engineer from Poland on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas disappeared while the ship was anchored in the Saronic Gulf, south of Athens. Ship security cameras captured him leaping into the water that morning, according to Greek authorities. Two weeks later, on May 10, Evgenia Pankrushyna, a waitress from Ukraine, died after jumping overboard from Carnival’s Regal Princess near Rotterdam. Around this time a Chinese contractor was found dead on Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas. A crew member aboard the ship says many believed it was another suicide, though the company said he’d died of natural causes. Next was a Filipino cook, Kennex Bundaon, who was found dead in his cabin on Carnival’s AIDAblu. Four days later, another worker from the Philippines died in an apparent suicide on Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady.

The details of the deaths of Szaller and Jocson are still not clear, even to their families, who are “desperate for closure.” In Szaller’s case, Carnival has refused to discuss the specific circumstances of his death with his parents, while the father of Jocson, the Royal Caribbean employee, says that his daughter had never shown signs of depression and kept telling him that she wanted to go home. He just wants to know the truth about her death.

It wasn’t just the claustrophobic environment that was distressing. Workers say cruise companies constantly changed repatriation schedules, offering only vague guidance on when or how they’d return home. Without customers on board, Carnival moved many contractors off duty, meaning they could sort of enjoy the amenities of the ocean liners. But that also meant their salaries were eventually cut off—a scary situation for those supporting families on land. The weeks dragged on with limited entertainment options. Internet access was complimentary on some boats, but it could be painfully slow or strong enough only for social media and texting.

Vilmos says communications with Carnival broke down soon after. As the Szallers tried to organize the retrieval of their son’s body, including figuring out which jurisdiction would have to declare him legally deceased, they began to see the cruise company as having had a role in their son’s death. Its labyrinthine corporate structure—a web of international entities designed to lower Carnival’s tax liability—compounded their grief.

Even now, the Szallers have been unable to have Jozsef declared legally deceased. Vilmos says the coroner’s report should move things forward, but it’s been frustrating enough coordinating with U.K. authorities on behalf of his son, a Hungarian citizen. And that’s not even half the headache. As Vilmos frames it, how do you officially process a death that occurred in international waters, on a ship registered in Panama, that’s owned by a company operating in the U.S.?

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As racial justice protests swept across America this summer, a handful of “Karen” videos — footage of white women calling the police on Black people, usually men, for no justifiable reason — went viral. Among them was a video shot in Montclair, New Jersey, a community about 40 minutes outside New York City that prides itself on being diverse and progressive. The people who filmed the scene were a Black husband and wife, both lawyers, whose backyard neighbor, a white woman, claimed they’d “pushed” her off their property for asking questions about the installation of a patio. As Allison P. Davis documents in her nuanced, provocative feature for The Cut, other white neighbors stood in solidarity with the Black couple:

While on the phone, Schulz paced in a circle. She approached a neighbor on the sidewalk, perhaps looking for someone to corroborate her story, perhaps just looking for sympathy. “Did you just see him physically push me?” she yelled.

“Oh, he absolutely didn’t push her,” reported the neighbor who had walked by. “I think she was looking to me — honestly, it did feel like a look of incredulity. Can you believe what he’s saying to me? I understand she was upset, but that’s just an insane trope that goes back so many hundreds of years of white women saying that Black men are assaulting them. And it was just really unbelievable she thought she would get away with that with witnesses.”

Over the phone, Schulz told the police, “I need an officer … the gentleman who is taller than me pushed me off his property.”

Neighbors began to yell things like “Shame on you” and “In this climate, you’re doing this?” while Schulz continued her defense, sometimes to the neighbors, sometimes to Norrinda and Fareed. “He pushed me ten feet … I came over here alone. I should have brought my son … Are you gonna say you didn’t put your hands on me?”

“It was like, Yo, this woman really believes what she’s saying,” Fareed recounted. “I feel like, in her mind, she really did start believing that she was assaulted. Maybe she was affronted by being told no. But for her, that affront was synonymous with me physically assaulting her. There was no difference in her mind.”

But when it came to neighbors supporting neighbors, the fallout of the incident was — in a word — complicated. There was a youth-led protest in front of the woman’s house, demands for a new ordinance about racist 911 calls, and letters that strangers sent to the Black family, apologizing for racism. In these, Davis saw something familiar:

That same summer, every white person I knew offered to march alongside me at rallies. I got texts from “Maybe: Susanna,” a person I didn’t really remember, dredging up a racial transgression I definitely didn’t remember. Borrowing the newly learned language of anti-racism, she apologized for any micro-aggression she had committed and apologized for making it my responsibility to explain HBCUs to her. I wrote back and told her “no sweat.” (It later turned out she had confused me with another Black colleague.) She was one of many who reached out to ask how they could be a good ally and wondered if there were times they hadn’t been. My phone was constantly buzzing with texts from white friends apologizing, checking on my well-being, offering me Venmo reparations and sympathy and empathy. I was appreciative but wary. They said they wanted to know about my experiences, but mostly they wanted to feel they had acknowledged that I’d had experiences with racism that they might have ignored, without exposure to all the grisly details.

In talking to Fareed, I often felt he was holding two opposing thoughts in his mind: relief that he lives in this intentional community that discusses race, that embraces the 24 percent, and loneliness at being at the center of a conversation in which everyone sees you and no one does. There can be an oppressiveness to sympathy, a way in which a newly galvanized community doesn’t let in room for doubt — for wondering whether the community would have been quite so galvanized if it hadn’t been the peak of a summer of racial-justice protests, if you still had locs or a shitty car in your driveway, or didn’t have a law degree, or your wife wasn’t the president of the PTA. When everyone is working so hard, when everyone is so vocally on your side, so apologetic for your experience, it’s easier to accept “Kumbaya” Montclair than to wrestle with those questions and ask other people to wrestle with them too.

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All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors featured many COVID-19 stories from across the web, and below, we’ve narrowed down 11 picks that really resonated with us. This roundup is focused on reported features; we initially included a few pandemic essays in this category, but those will instead appear in the upcoming Best of Essays list. 

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How the Pandemic Defeated America (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)

The Atlantic‘s coverage of COVID-19 was exceptional this year, and Yong’s deep, thoughtful September feature lays it all out. How did the U.S. get here? Everything that went wrong was predictable and preventable, and despite all of its resources and scientific expertise, America’s leaders failed monumentally to control the virus at every turn.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess (Doug Bock Clark, GQ)

The pandemic has exposed the flaws of tourism, and cruise ships are a symbol of the disastrous effects that COVID-19 has had on the travel industry as a whole. Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess, which departed on January 20 this year from Japan’s Port of Yokohama, was the first ship to suffer a major outbreak. Clark’s account of the voyage and subsequent quarantine of the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew is riveting yet terrifying. He weaves stories of numerous people on board, from the more-privileged (a pair of traveling couples called the “Four Amigos”) to the overworked and underprotected (like security crewmember Sonali Thakkar). His reporting of the U.S. government’s response is superb, especially from the perspective of Dr. James Lawler, the infectious-disease expert called in to lead the evacuation of American passengers back to the U.S. We also get a glimpse of what the experience is like for the ship’s captain, Gennaro Arma, who was eventually the last person to disembark.

The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.

As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.

How New Jersey’s First Coronavirus Patient Survived (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine)

This narrative of James Cai, a medical professional and New Jersey’s first COVID-19 patient, is moving and brilliantly reported. We’re introduced to Cai as he experiences symptoms in early March, when doctors on the East Coast still viewed the virus “as an ominous but distant threat.” We’re there alongside him when he realizes, from a tweet he reads on TV about a man at a hospital, that he may be New Jersey’s first COVID-19 patient (“Please, God, don’t let that be me, he thought”). With advice and help from Chinese and Chinese-American doctors, and the use of tools like WeChat and Twitter to share knowledge and call attention to his case, Cai is able to receive the right care. It’s a gripping and touching read with a positive ending, though reveals just how much it takes for a person, even one with a lot of support and resources, to advocate for themselves.

Cai hoped the remdesivir might help. The hospital had made its own request. But he knew that getting approval for compassionate use — which required the manufacturer’s approval as well as F.D.A. approval — could take time, and he was worried that it would be too late. That day, Huang reached out to every Gilead representative he knew and called on all his doctor friends to do the same. His former supervising physician at Mount Sinai, Paul Lee, had already written an unsuccessful email to an associate director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Cai’s behalf to try to get him access to the drug. Huang posted on a large WeChat group for Chinese and Chinese-American cardiologists: “My name is Yili, great to meet everyone, unfortunately on this occasion,” he introduced himself. “I usually don’t post, but my good friend, only 32, health care provider, became this first case in New Jersey. Please help me with some inputs.” With Cai’s permission, he included a photo of Cai’s CT scan. He also forwarded the scans to another friend, Felix Yang, a cardiac electrophysiologist.

What Happened in Room 10? (Katie Engelhart, The California Sunday Magazine)

Engelhart’s investigation into the outbreak at Life Care Center of Kirkland, the nursing home just east of Seattle that became known as the early epicenter of the coronavirus in the U.S., is an essential, emotionally painful read. Forty-six people that lived in or were linked to the facility died, and, at one point during the outbreak, there were 129 cases, including 81 residents and nearly 50 staff and visitors. Engelhart asks: Could these people have been saved? “The debate now,” she writes, “is whether all that death can be explained by biology and demographics — or whether, in spite of biology and demographics, more nursing-home residents could have been spared.” Her reporting, focused on the trajectories of two patients and roommates, Helen and Twilla, is incredibly in-depth, as is her examination of the larger problems in America’s nursing homes, the government’s response to COVID-19 at all levels, and the temporary solution of “sequester[ing] away the old people” and hoping for the best. The illustrated animations by Matt Bollinger and portraits by Jovelle Tamayo add another layer of storytelling.

Montgomery had been shocked to learn that Life Care, of all places, had the virus. The facility was one of the best she had worked with, and she thought its infection-prevention nurse was as good as they come. But when she arrived at the nursing home, she was startled to see that not everyone was wearing a mask. Some nursing aides didn’t even know how to use PPE properly.

Between March 3 and March 5, at the height of the Life Care outbreak, there were no doctors in the nursing home to evaluate and treat the dozens of residents who needed to be assessed — and officials at the county, state, and federal level knew it.

The Body Collectors of the Coronavirus Pandemic (Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker)

In the first six weeks of the outbreak in New York City, 33 people died of COVID-19 every hour, and workers in hospital morgues and funeral homes struggled to keep up with bodies, lacking storage space, supplies, and equipment. For Sherman’s, a funeral home in Brooklyn, a “busy week” in the before times meant handling about 12 funerals, but in the first week of April, they handled and transported more than 120 bodies. Blitzer’s piece is grim and harrowing — hard to read at times, but an important look at the often forgotten work of last responders.

Kasler and his co-workers were also concerned about supplies. They were running low on personal protective equipment—masks, gowns, and gloves. Each house call or hospital visit now required at least three pairs of gloves and two gowns. Zambito and the others needed to shed each item as it came into contact with a contaminated body. A standard pickup, she told me, required one set of P.P.E. to retrieve the body, followed by another set to put the body in the van, and yet another to take the body out of the van and bring it into the mortuary. Sherman had begun contacting funeral homes in other states to see if he could buy supplies from them. He was looking for disinfectant sprays and Clorox wipes. A cousin of his, in California, had ordered some of the items wholesale and arranged for them to be shipped to Sherman in New York. There was also a shortage of caskets. “They can’t make them quick enough,” Sherman told me.

They Depended on Their Parents for Everything. Then the Virus Took Both. (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

About eight years ago, the Ismael siblings — Nash, 20; Nadeen, 18; and Nanssy, 13 — fled Iraq with their parents, eventually settling in Michigan, which has a large Chaldean community. John Woodrow Cox shares their story as they struggle with the loss of their mother, Nada Naisan, and their father, Nameer Ayram, who died 20 days apart from COVID-19. The loss and sorrow that Cox captures in these conversations and scenes are palpable, while Salwan Georges’ dim-lit photographs of both intimate and ordinary moments in these young people’s lives are haunting. (Another story from Cox, about a couple who lost their daughter in the Sandy Hook shooting, is also a poignant read.)

At last, the stone arch over the entrance to White Chapel Memorial Park Cemetery came into view. The girls arrived first, stepping out of a car into a clear-sky morning, just shy of 70 degrees. They walked onto the grass of a long, narrow section of memorial plaques, searching for No. 222 among the oval-shaped metal markers pressed into the ground.

“I’m not sure which one,” Nanssy told her sister.

“Maybe that one over there,” Nadeen replied, looking toward a distant section of unearthed dirt.

“Here it is,” Nanssy said, pointing.

And there before them was not one grave, but two.

The Man in the Iron Lung (Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, The Guardian)

Paul Alexander contracted polio when he was 6 years old and, while he recovered from the initial infection all those years ago, he became paralyzed from the neck down. Now, in his mid-70s, he is one of only two people in the U.S. that still uses an iron lung. McRobbie traces his extraordinary life, from the 18 torturous months he spent in the polio ward — rows and rows of metal canisters, each encasing a child’s limp body — to growing up and working toward an independent life: going to college, getting a law degree, falling in love, self-publishing a memoir. Today, Alexander considers the parallels between the polio and the COVID-19 pandemics, and while he’s scared and knows he’s very vulnerable, he tries to stay positive.

The next 18 months were torture. Although he couldn’t talk because of the tracheotomy, he could hear the cries of other children in pain. He lay for hours in his own waste because he couldn’t tell the staff he needed to be cleaned. He nearly drowned in his own mucus. His parents visited almost every day, but his existence was unrelentingly boring. He and the other children tried to communicate, making faces at each other, but, Paul said: “Every time I’d make a friend, they’d die.”

Though this virus, if he gets it, will likely kill him, life hasn’t changed dramatically for Paul since the start of the pandemic. He hasn’t been able to venture outside of his lung for more than five minutes in years. As one of his friends told me: “It’s not a strain for him, it’s his life. This is Mr Shelter-in-Place.” I asked Paul if he is worried about Covid-19. “Sure, sure,” he said. Then he added: “Well – I don’t sit around and worry about it. I’m dying a lot. It doesn’t make any difference.”

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic (Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic)

Tufekci’s piece is science writing at its best, tackling and explaining dense and technical concepts to a general audience. How does COVID-19 spread? What is R0? What is k? What elements are present for super-spreading events to occur? It’s a fascinating look into overdispersion and clusters.

To return to the mysteries of this pandemic, what did happen early on to cause such drastically different trajectories in otherwise similar places? Why haven’t our usual analytic tools—case studies, multi-country comparisons—given us better answers? It’s not intellectually satisfying, but because of the overdispersion and its stochasticity, there may not be an explanation beyond that the worst-hit regions, at least initially, simply had a few unlucky early super-spreading events. It wasn’t just pure luck: Dense populations, older citizens, and congregate living, for example, made cities around the world more susceptible to outbreaks compared with rural, less dense places and those with younger populations, less mass transit, or healthier citizenry. But why Daegu in February and not Seoul, despite the two cities being in the same country, under the same government, people, weather, and more? As frustrating at it may be, sometimes, the answer is merely where Patient 31 and the megachurch she attended happened to be.

“It’s a National Tragedy”: What a Devastating Covid-19 Outbreak at a California Slaughterhouse Reveals about the Federal Government’s Failed Pandemic Response (Nick Roberts and Rosa Amanda Tuirán; The Counter)

As of December 8, at least 1,231 meatpacking and food-processing plants have confirmed cases of COVID-19, including over 75,000 meatpacking workers. At least 340 have died. But federal and state regulatory agencies like Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have not done much to hold meatpackers, like the One World Beef slaughterhouse in Brawley, California, accountable. This investigation at The Counter exposes the lack of COVID-19-specific safety regulations in these facilities, the culture of fear in these workplaces, and, ultimately, the industry’s focus on profit over people, even during a pandemic.

Providing personal protective equipment and administering temperature screens were important steps taken by One World Beef. But the experts we spoke to for this story detailed numerous other steps that meatpacking facilities can take to make their operations immediately more safe for workers. These include slowing down the trim line, spacing workers out sufficiently, improving ventilation, telling workers when they might have been exposed to the virus, not incentivizing coming to work every single day, and providing routine testing for all workers, especially new hires. One World Beef, according to the workers we interviewed, did not take any of these critical steps and, in some cases, did the opposite.

The company’s approach to testing turned out to be especially problematic.

“We tested between 300 and 400 people from the facility on that first day,” said Dr. Brian Tyson, the owner of All Valley Urgent Care.

Though this was an encouraging step, many employees were confused by the test that was administered. Rather than the widely publicized nasal swab test, employees received a finger pinprick combined with pulmonary X-rays. The employee confusion was justified: As it turned out, the testing method did not measure if employees were actively infected.

The First Shot: Inside the Covid Vaccine Fast Track (Brooke Jarvis, Wired)

“Twenty-five micrograms of fluid, the first and fastest hope for stopping a pandemic that had been officially declared just five days before, diffused into the muscle of his right arm.” This arm belonged to Neal Browning, an engineer in Seattle who was one of the first people in the U.S. to receive a dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Jarvis’ deep-dive into the race for a vaccine and the history of vaccine creation and development is engaging and, at times, unexpectedly entertaining (our innate immune system is compared a number of times to a tantrum-throwing Rambo baby).

Even with the head start, beginning the trials so quickly required a sprint. The news about the virus’s spread, and its effects on those it infected, kept getting scarier. It was soon clear that more was riding on the vaccine than anyone had initially realized. Within two weeks, scientists at Moderna, without being asked, were staying late, working weekends. Corbett’s team started growing spike proteins and stocking freezers with vials. They immunized mice with the vaccine, then tested their blood for antibodies. A clinical batch was ready by February 7, tested and shipped by February 24, and green-lit for human testing by March 4. (It was a coincidence that the human trials began in what had, by March, become the first hot spot in the US; Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute had been selected to conduct them in late January.) There was never a singular moment, says Hoge, when he realized the researchers had begun an 18-month marathon. Instead, “it felt like every day, can you run faster, can you run faster, can you run faster?”

A Pandemic Is Not A War (Eve Fairbanks, HuffPost)

“We’ve never experienced a mass disaster in universal isolation before,” writes Fairbanks. “There is no precedent for it.” This thoughtful piece explores how people compare the pandemic to war (the virus as enemy, health care workers as foot soldiers) as a way to understand or cope with it. Fairbanks talks with four men about their wartime experiences during the Rwandan genocide and civil wars in Somalia, Syria, and Sierra Leone and explains that the reach for metaphors by those who have not experienced war, and the show of bravado and strength, especially from our world’s leaders, sets us up for even greater suffering. One man Fairbanks spoke with, Nuruddin Farah from Somalia, said our use of the war analogy reveals a “‘poverty of the imagination’ about the varieties of pain,” ultimately hindering us from learning new lessons. Fairbanks offers a very wide view, yet makes you contemplate your own personal and individual response to this pandemic.

One of the points of reaching for this analogy is to deflect attention from epic missteps. We should not be experiencing widespread shortages of critical supplies or a total lack of coherent strategy from the U.S. government, as if coronavirus were an ambush, a “Pearl Harbor,” which it wasn’t. “Hindsight is a luxury none of us have in the heat of battle,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday, to excuse his administration’s multiple failures to heed expert warnings and shut down schools and businesses. Nuruddin Farah, a writer from Somalia, lamented that “the only reason nurses and doctors are described as ‘warriors’ right now is because some politicians have failed in providing these doctors and nurses with the equipment that they need.”

But what about ordinary people who reach for the “war” analogy? I told Nuruddin that some friends of mine also sounded relieved to use it. One friend in Seattle told me that he finally felt he could connect to his grandfather’s experience during World War II. He had always suspected that, by comparison, he had led too frivolous and privileged a life; that he’d never been tested, never been forced to be truly courageous or heroic.

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