Spent the whole day at home, like much of New York City, indeed like many around the world. If we're told to "shelter in place," it won't change much for many people I know. One can get a little twitchy, like these floating gerberas... The news in NYC is not good: over a thousand new cases reported since yesterday, almost doubling our total. (Several cases in the New School community were confirmed too, apparently.) It's cold comfort to realize that these are probably not new infections, but people who couldn't be tested before. As we are able to test even more we'll find even more. It might in fact still be growing exponentially, despite the shutting down of so many big institutions and small interactions, but it's too soon to know.
I spent the day reading about H. T. Tsiang, a wildly eccentric Chinese writer whose path intersected with the New School's in some interesting ways seventy years ago - topic for a Public Seminar piece in the works. (The show must go on!) It feels meaningful to be looking at what Hua Hsu calls a "transpacific" life at a time when so many openings, especially between the US and China, seem to be slamming shut.