You’ve probably noticed that there is a glut of news.
In mid-March, COVID-19 hogged attention. You couldn’t pass people in the street (on your umpteenth walk) without hearing the words “social distancing.” But America always thirsts for what’s new, and by Week 7, both the pandemic and its virtual cocktail parties were getting old. They didn’t disappear entirely, of course, and being cooped up continued to build tension. But 22 million people losing their jobs in April, and other economic catastrophes, took over as the No. 1 topic of interest. When would the economy get back into gear?
Just when commerce began emerging from its government-enforced hibernation, the death of George Floyd and the protests it ignited blew away sheltering at home, social distancing, and many people’s storefronts in a storm of shattered glass. The supposedly urgent need to avoid crowds and spittle was immediately displaced by the urgent need to pack together and shout in each other’s faces. So now, punks and warlord pimps are running little fiefdoms and semi-seceding from the United States while, naturally, excoriating and tearing down statues of the original secessionists of 160 years ago.
It’s a lot. And it’s certainly enough to make one forget that we’re hardly more than four months away from a presidential election. Ah, yes, the little matter of deciding who shall govern the country.
It is to this looming event that we turn our attention in this week’s magazine. We start with the conventions, due to begin in less than two months, and for which both parties are scrambling to produce workable plans. In our cover story, “Conventional Warfare,” Jay Cost looks into the history and future of these evolving events, and also at their politics this year. President Trump characteristically wants a big morning-in-America spectacular bespeaking optimism and his claim that he deserves a second term. Joe Biden, evoking what he will depict as the bleak failure of Trump’s first term, is likely to emphasize masks, caution, foreboding, and a dire need for change for the better.
We have two features about the growing danger that ideological biases are now regularly interfering with decisions about which opinions and news reporting the public is allowed to read. Kyle Sammin posits a middle way to deal with social media’s new role in communications and news, and Grant Addison exposes the deal with the Devil that some media organizations are making to silence those with whom they disagree.
Amber Gibson writes about what it’s like to open a restaurant nowadays, and Sandra Long discusses business opportunities created by virtual whiskey and wine tastings.
Life & Arts takes on Confederate statues, the rise of pickleball, the birth of philosophy, Vietnam veterans, murder mystery, circus monkeys, and today’s lack of protest songs.
This week’s obituary is of the vain, mercurial, ideologically flexible, and sporadically successful Sandinista guerrilla Comandante Zero.
