Tag: public spaces
Milo Rau, the Theater Director Who Likes to Go Too Far
“I would not say that my art is dark,” Milo Rau tells me, and I burst out laughing. We are sitting in the office space of his theater in Ghent, Belgium, surrounded by posters of his work. In the past decade, Rau has directed plays about a homophobic murder (La Reprise), the unexplained suicide of two parents and their children (Familie), and the exploitation of the developing world (The Congo Tribunal). The Swiss-born director’s
America’s Long Campaign to Erase Gay People Is Itself Being Forgotten
In the summer of 1984, after he finished his first U.S. Foreign Service assignment, in Yugoslavia, Jan Krc flew to Washington, D.C., for what he thought would be a couple of weeks’ training en route to his next post, in South Africa. He thought nothing of it when he was called in for a security debriefing early one morning at the U.S. Information Agency headquarters. There, in a nondescript conference room, he was met by two middle-aged men in suits.
Why There Are So Few Places to Hang Out
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Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.
In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction,
What Controlling COVID Actually Means
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols. In many parts of the country, restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters are operating at pre-pandemic capacity, not a face covering to be seen; even grade schools and universities have started to relax testing
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.
California Won’t Just Let Outdoor Dining Be
If outdoor dining can flourish anywhere, surely it can do so in California—where the weather is temperate and a wildly diverse corps of chefs has year-round access to high-quality produce, seafood, and wine. Yet before the pandemic hit, the Golden State had long been outclassed in offering congenial surroundings for alfresco dining. Yes, I’m thinking of Paris and its famous sidewalk cafés. But even smaller cities in France, Spain, and Italy offered a higher density of pleasant outdoor seats than