The Night Before COVID Christmas
I thought about writing a Christmas poem this year as a traditional retake of the Clement Clarke Moore classic and then Apple News and The Atlantic intervened. At this point in the news cycle, I am starting my day by reading many news summaries. I read them in the sequence in which they come in since I am somewhat dogmatic about reading my emails in chronological order. There is probably a whole study that needs to be done about whether reading email inboxes is better done in that order or backwards…or for that matter, randomly. Let’s face it, driving on a road in one direction versus another gives one a very different perspective on the world, so why wouldn’t that be the case with email traffic? That is a topic I will have to explore at a later date. Meanwhile, the news summaries are generally read as first Heather Cox Richardson’s late night email summary of the news (with a wonderful historian’s perspective that is made all that more timely given her historical focus on the American Civil War), then the Wall Street Journal’s Notes on the News, followed closely by the New York Times The Morning. Then, a bit later there is the Apple News followed by the Washington Post’s Post Most. It’s a lot to absorb and there is plenty of redundancy, but I review them all because every once in a while there is an important news article that pops up that teaches me something worthwhile that I didn’t know before. Such was the case today. The headline in Apple News that caught my eye was “the mysterious link between COVID-19 and sleep”.
Yesterday I started my day by sending out copies of a New Yorker article on the subject of “phages”, a form of virus that kills bacteria. It was an entirely new concept to me and yet I learned that it is a field of growing scientific research that has been known in its obscurity for over a century. I sent the article to my sister and her daughter who has two children with Cystic Fibrosis. This research has a direct and potentially dramatic impact on that disease. I sent it to my friend who had a nasty chest/heart infection that almost killed him, since there was an example of the same affliction in the article. And I sent the article to my brother-in-law Jeff, who has been struggling with mysterious health issues this year that might be bacterially impacted. Everyone sent the article was blown away by the “new” information. This was on my mind when I tuned into the Apple News piece, plucked from The Atlantic and focused on the impact and use of melatonin on treatment of COVID-19.
The Atlantic is very much like The New Yorker in my opinion. Both are literary magazines which have adapted to the new world reality over the last five years. They have morphed into prize-winning journalism publications that do what print and online journalism must do to give itself a raison d’etre and get read. They have found interesting reporters that know how to find stories that don’t lend themselves to sound bites and news of the moment. Timeliness is not the primary intent, but it cannot be ignored either. In this case they have taken something that we all as human beings deal with, sleep and sleeplessness. Who among us hasn’t thought to or actually taken melatonin to get through a red eye flight or just soothe ourselves to sleep. It is an non-prescription over-the-counter medicine that is so widely available that many of us probably feel it is not worth bothering with. But when someone tells us that melatonin might be useful in mitigating the harsh effects of COVID-19, we perk up our ears and listen. We all know logically that sleep is one of the most important paliatives that can strengthen us against any number of ailments and similarly bolster our immunities. It all seems so logical and yet an article that delineates the specifics of this is not unlike finding out that simple aspirin can ward off or lessen the impact of a heart attack due to its ability to thin the blood and ward off deadly blood clots.
With all this valuable information floating around in the publications that I trust and admire, it is interesting that I should get a piece of information from my son from a publication that is new to me. It is called The City and it describes itself as “launched in April 2019 as a nonprofit, nonpartisan, digital news platform dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York, producing consistent, high-quality and high-impact accountability reporting.” Sounds good, so I start by wanting to believe what I read in its pages. The article was about the site of the New York Wheel. This was the site I dedicated six years to developing to put up the world’s largest observation wheel (630 feet tall) on the north shore of Staten Island facing the well-known skyline of lower Manhattan with its Wall Street buildings (including the old Bankers Trust building with its recognizable pyramid on top) and the Freedom Tower erected to commemorate the missing twin towers of the World Trade Center that were the victims of 9/11. That site is what caused Kim and me to move to Staten Island for three years of our lives so that I could be close to the project site. We sunk $450 million of the $640 million funded for the project into that site (in reality a good deal of that went to a combination of soft costs, financing costs and wheel parts that were eventually scrapped), but a lot of time and money actually went into the ground on the north shore of Staten Island nonetheless.
This article was ostensibly about the political jockeying going on at the moment on Staten Island among the various contenders for the positions of Borough President and City Council Members. Many of these people I know from the countless meetings over those six years. Well, as you might imagine, there is a great deal of discussion and speculation about what should become of the New York Wheel site, with its 900-car parking garage, 40,000 sf terminal building and four massive embeds ready to hold up the millions of pounds of steel in a 630 foot observation wheel. One of the candidates for Borough President, a woman who was the Chairman of the Community Board that approved the construction of the New York Wheel and who is a Facebook friend with me (for some historic and inexplicable reason) has offered up a suggestion for the use of that site. You see, Staten Island is the only borough of New York City that is fervently Republican and therefore holds a strong preference for Donald Trump and Making America Great Again. This candidate has suggested that this site be transformed into the Donald Trump Presidential Library. Boom! Life is strange with its twists and turns. I can deal with many twists and turns, but I am having all kinds of problems with the thought that something I worked so hard on and walked daily for at least three years will take one of those turns and become a symbol of everything I find abhorrent in today’s political landscape. I imagine all those Confederate General’s statues lined up where the wheel would have stood. I can’t be sure there will be much in the way of documents to put in the library (Trump not being a big reader and all that), but with the hats and other Trump and MAGA paraphernalia, I’m guessing that the place will fill up nonetheless and have the biggest gift shop of any Presidential Library.
Tomorrow is technically Christmas Eve, but I think the Universe has given me this gift to put me in my place and remind me not to take anything I do too seriously. I think of this as my night before COVID Christmas present from Staten Island, the place that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.