Abstract

One of the indelible images of Manhattan in late March 2020 was the archive of horror accreting daily on my neighbor’s doormat. Above the fold, the New York Times reported on so many thousand lives lost one day, so many million jobs lost the next. No one who was in New York City in spring 2020 will forget the ambulances wailing nearly nonstop—an awful, inescapable sound that could shatter any numbed state of abstraction in relation to the daily numbers.Yet, after the sheer terror of the first weeks, it became clear that the true horror recorded in the Times lay along the fold: that is, in the stark divide between those most at risk, as reported above the fold, and those able to shelter at home, whose needs were...