2020 was a hard, hard year. Here are the stories of people who lived through it.

But beneath every one of these big stories is a long list of smaller personal ones. Everyone’s experience of 2020 has been different, and everyone’s story has something worth hearing. I went looking for those stories, in hopes of understanding the events of this year from the ground level.

What I found was remarkable. I talked to a woman who nursed an injured baby pig back to health. I talked to a sex worker who very quickly had to figure out how to make his business Covid-19-safe. I discussed opening up a marriage — at a time when nobody can see anybody in person — with someone who did just that. I talked to a woman who fell in love with her mailman, and a postal carrier who grew distressed at how little her rural community seemed to be taking Covid-19 seriously.

I’ll be sharing 14 of those stories over the next few weeks. I think they all underline the fact that no matter how dramatic or mundane your year was, it was that much more fascinating or difficult or compelling because of the times in which it took place.

This year is almost over, and another will follow. I’m so glad we all got through it together.

The Lost Year

A woman, an injured baby pig, and a series of revelations

“It’s easier to believe everything is holy lying under the stars with friends and a pig sleeping in the crook of your arm.”

Non-monogamy, Zoom sex, and the agonizing wait to kiss your partner

“As soon as I started taking non-monogamy seriously, it was like any other coming out.”

A dad, his son, and the bittersweet realization of life’s true priorities

“In America, we say everything we do is for our child, but we spend a lot of time working and accumulating money and stuff that we don’t need.”

Coming out — over the phone, to your mom, and across a language barrier

“I can’t do any of my old standup comedy. And I don’t want to do it. I literally am starting over from scratch.”

Marriage, kids, two jobs, maskless customers, and #BlackLivesMatter in the rural South

A sudden crisis, online sex work, and a better understanding of privilege

“Online sex work has amplified the loneliness for some customers. I’m talking to them because they’re paying.”

A new dress, a new self-acceptance, and a sudden onset of the soul

“That day, for the first time, I saw myself. And I knew I was trans. Holy shit.”

Falling for your mailman in lockdown (but not getting the happy ending you wanted)

“I asked him, ‘How’s everything going? How can we help?’ And I accidentally told him that I loved him.”

Chronic pain, an unusual love story, and reassurance via pickle

“There are certain ways — and maybe it’s not cool to say this — in which quarantine has been helpful.”

A new baby who didn’t know your face for days because you were always wearing a mask

“I love just looking at his face when he sees there are other people in the world!”

Making your workplace Covid-safe — when you’re an escort

“I haven’t contracted Covid yet. I’ve been lucky, because my bubble is probably huge.”

A year in the life of a mail carrier. (The year is 2020.)

“It feels like I’ve never stopped playing Russian roulette because I never stopped working.”

Exercise in quarantine, keeping a small business alive, and the unusual intimacy of Zoom

“It’s been a lifeline. I don’t have very big classes but when we meet up [over Zoom], we check in with each other. We see how we’re doing.”

A quiet year, alone in one’s head

The US started 2020 by “flattening the curve” — and never came up with a plan for what comes next.

In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning to take its awful toll in the United States, three words offered a glimmer of hope: flatten the curve.

That phrase and charts illustrating the concept were everywhere in mid-March, shortly before the New York City outbreak exploded. The city would see 10,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths every day by early April.

Covid-19 cases were spiking, and hospital systems risked being overwhelmed by patients with life-threatening symptoms. If hospitals ran out of beds or ICU units, nurses or doctors, people would die unnecessarily — from Covid-19 and other causes. The way to prevent such a tragedy was to lock down. Flattening the epidemiological curve would keep the caseload manageable for our health system.

“If you look at the curves of outbreaks, they go big peaks, and then come down,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said on March 10. “What we need to do is flatten that down.”

Vox wrote an explainer on the idea. Barack Obama shared it with his tens of millions of Twitter followers. “Flatten the curve” became a public health meme — there was even a Fauci bobblehead that incorporated it — but it was also an urgent call to action.

The US did succeed at flattening the curve — at least at first. Businesses closed and most states issued stay-at-home orders, and later research concluded those lockdown measures helped prevent tens of millions of Covid-19 cases.

But America failed to take advantage of that window to ramp up its testing-and-tracing capabilities, and states quickly faced intense pressure to relax their policies to alleviate the economic costs of the shutdowns. Reopening began earlier than public health experts believed it should. The political will to impose new lockdowns had evaporated by the time cases spiked again.

At the end of 2020, with nearly 20 million Covid-19 cases and more than 340,000 deaths in the US, it is evident that trying to flatten the curve was not sufficient to end the pandemic. That doesn’t mean it failed entirely. Slowing the spread of Covid-19 was meant to buy time to figure out what came next. But the US never did.

America’s political leaders did not establish clear, shared goals for managing the outbreak. And eventually the Covid-19 response became politicized, driving Americans apart on the value of wearing masks or social distancing rather than maintaining the solidarity necessary to stamp out a highly infectious virus.

“The value of ‘flatten that curve’ was in the context of that first surge,” Albert Ko, who leads the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health, told me, “and then it lost its value.”

Flattening the curve worked — at first

Flattening the curve was already a well-understood concept in public health circles. But the Covid-19 pandemic presented the first real opportunity to put it to the test.

“Initially, it really hit home for people when they saw the images of overcrowded hospitals,” Leana Wen, the former Baltimore city health commissioner, told me. “The ‘flattening the curve’ concept made sense when people realized it was about making sure hospitals didn’t get too crowded.”

“There are many millions of Americans who made profound sacrifices, and continue to do it to this day,” she continued. “But it was inconsistently applied.”

It may be difficult to remember now, but back in March, Americans were mostly unified in embracing the strategies necessary to flatten the curve. The vast majority of states closed businesses and schools. Polling showed that people were willing to take social distancing measures.

New York faced plenty of challenges (the virus was likely spreading for weeks in the NYC area before it was detected) and made its share of mistakes (sending infected patients back to nursing homes). But the proof of the strategy’s success was in the curves. Until the recent winter surge, they were flat.

Multiple studies have found that mitigation measures suppressed the virus’s spread and likely prevented millions of cases and with them many deaths. A study published in Health Affairs in May found that social distancing policies, particularly stay-at-home orders as well as closing bars and restaurants, had staved off as many as 35 million cases in the US by the end of April. More recent research published in Science concluded that closing schools and businesses, as well as limiting the size of private gatherings, reduced spread considerably.

“NYC flattened the curve. Other places delayed it,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, told me. “But that ought to provide an opportunity to ramp up testing and health care and prepare people for the long haul. You know that did not happen.”

Experts came up with roadmaps for how to proceed once the initial curve was flattened. A proposal from the American Enterprise Institute set specific thresholds for case numbers, hospital capacity, and testing that were designed to allow states to safely begin relaxing their lockdown measures once the virus had been sufficiently suppressed and the health system’s capacity had been expanded.

But the Trump administration never embraced those plans. Instead, the president often said that the cure (lockdowns) could not be worse than the disease (Covid-19). The White House eventually settled on a message that the US would need to learn to live with the virus.

America’s failures to establish an effective test-trace-isolate program are well documented. Some experts question whether contact tracing could have been as effective in a country like the US as it has been in somewhere like South Korea, which is much smaller and has laws that allow government authorities to intrude on personal privacy in the name of public health. But everybody I spoke to agreed the United States had not made the best use of the time afforded by flattening the initial Covid-19 curve.

Instead, many US states that had avoided the worst of Covid-19 in the spring saw the lack of an outbreak as a sign that they could push ahead with reopening. Once the curve was flat, the political will to keep it that way began to crumble.

America wasn’t the only place to struggle to figure out how to move out of its spring lockdown; many European countries saw their own second waves over the summer. But the missed opportunity still set the course for the rest of the pandemic.

“We never really came up with a plan to transition,” Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who co-authored the AEI roadmap back in March, told me.

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the limits of “flatten the curve”

Hospitals have not — yet — been overwhelmed, as they were in the dire situation in Lombardo, Italy, in the spring. But today, with cases and hospitalizations still rising, US hospitals warn they are again nearing a breaking point.

Slowing the spread of the disease in the spring also gave scientists a chance to learn more and more about the virus.

Among other things, they learned that people were the most infectious before they showed symptoms. They figured out the virus primarily spread through respiratory droplets, not through touch or surfaces. The elevated fatality risk to the elderly became more apparent. Researchers quickly began to figure out which treatments worked (putting patients in a prone position, administering remdesivir and dexamethasone) and which ones didn’t (the Trump-favored hydroxychloroquine).

With this information, the US could have used the time it bought by flattening the curve to figure out whether more targeted interventions would work better than lockdowns, as the Science study suggested, and whether individual cities or counties could best manage their own outbreaks.

“Do we need strong interventions rather than calibrated? Do you have to have regional interventions in order to really make a dent?” Ko said. “I think we’ve been in that kind of limbo. Europe couldn’t calibrate that. They had to go into lockdown.”

The cost of that failure has not been paid equally. The pandemic underscored the many inequities in American life, starting with who contracts the virus and who dies from it. Black and Hispanic Americans have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, both in terms of health and the toll of the year’s economic downturn.

When the curve didn’t stay flattened, the people who had to go into work, who live in intergenerational households, and who have higher rates of chronic disease were the most at risk.

“I don’t think we ever fully appreciated how the messaging around flattening the curve, how the challenges we as a nation face, would affect the most vulnerable,” Utibe Essien, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said. “The people who didn’t have the same access to staying at home, masking up, who didn’t have the same opportunities to do jobs that didn’t increase their exposure.”

And in other ways, flattening the curve still failed to accomplish its goal of preserving health care access. While hospitals have not yet been completely overwhelmed, some people aren’t getting the care they need. ProPublica reported that over the summer in Houston, medical examiners saw a spike in the number of people found dead in their homes. Some of those deaths were from Covid-19; some were from heart attacks, strokes and other conditions. Either way, the news of the virus’s rapid spread in the area may have kept people from seeking medical assistance, with deadly consequences.

Throughout the year, with cases staying stubbornly high, doctors warned about the consequences of non-Covid-19 patients were postponing care for chronic or emergent conditions. Research showed that visits to primary care doctors and specialists dropped precipitously in the spring and summer.

Health care experts fear that patients who may have been experiencing an onset of diabetes or heart disease will face setbacks if they delayed seeing a doctor to get an initial diagnosis. It will take years to fully understand those long-term effects.

The US never pivoted from flattening the curve

Now, with 2020 coming to an end and the US reporting 180,000 new cases and more than 2,000 new deaths on average every day, there is no more hope for flattening the curve.

Luckily, vaccine development has been speedy and people are already being vaccinated against the coronavirus. But public health leaders still expect tens of thousands more deaths in the months between now and widespread protection among the population.

As a public health message, despite the initial success, “flatten the curve” has lost its force and America’s public health leadership failed to adapt and find a new message that would resonate with people.

David Rehkopf, a social epidemiologist at Stanford University, drew a comparison to the anti-smoking campaign. Putting a surgeon general warning on cigarette boxes did have a quick and dramatic effect on smoking rates, but not everybody stopped smoking. Public health leaders had to pivot to new strategies to keep making progress.

“With Covid-19, all of this was compacted into less than a year, not decades,” he said. “Adapting that quickly is tough, but from past public health campaigns, we should have anticipated the need to do this.”

When I reported on Melbourne, Australia’s success in eradicating Covid-19, I learned that the policy experts there worried that slogans like “flatten the curve” or “slow the spread” were too vague. The public health authorities there instead came up with a detailed step-by-step guide for how they would, eventually, get Covid-19 cases down to zero.

Specific thresholds were set: Once we reach X number of cases per day, then we can reopen Y. That strategy, despite some controversy, has been a success.

But in the US, many states, under pressure from businesses losing weeks of revenue and from anxious constituents who saw no immediate emergency in their daily lives, began to quickly lift their social distancing policies in the spring, once the curve seemed to flatten. Texas, which put a fairly toothless stay-at-home order into place at the start of April, lifted it a month later. By the end of June, its number of daily cases had increased 600 percent.

There was not one voice communicating to the public what mitigation measures were necessary, why, and what outcome we were working toward. (New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who held daily briefings in the spring with handy slide presentations to convey the current state of the outbreak and what would be coming next, was largely an exception among his peers.) The CDC was sidelined by the Trump administration throughout the year.

Instead, 330 million Americans were left to make their own risk assessments — or not.

Given the research that shows a small percentage of infected people account for a very large share of the transmission, that was a recipe for disaster. And rather than take proactive measures as infection rates first ticked up, which public health experts say are most important given the pre-symptomatic spread of Covid-19 and its slow gestation, governors seemed to be paralyzed and waited to act until the crisis was already upon them.

“Every American’s personal definition of Covid-caution is completely unique, with some holed up at home for weeks at a time and others traveling the country to visit friends,” Kumi Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me over email. “While the institutional level measures may seem extreme, if they had been more uniformly implemented around the country for longer, we might have been able to achieve low enough community transmission to the point that a careful reopening coupled with other measures like contact tracing and widespread testing and isolation would have been possible.”

The paradoxical lesson of flattening the Covid-19 curve is that the concept proved its worth but it may be more difficult in the future to sell the public on such a strategy.

Nobody disputes the value of slowing transmission in order to relieve pressure on the health system. But it had an expiration date as a motivational tool.

“We know it works. We’ve seen that again and again in this pandemic,” Jen Kates, director of global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “This will be a standard part of pandemic preparedness and response going forward.”

“An open question, though, will be to what extent has the concept been poisoned by the political discourse?” she added. “How successfully can it be used in the future?”

Housebound’s surly protagonist is fed up with her house arrest from day one. It’s the perfect 2020 mood.

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

Recently, someone reminded me of the 2014 New Zealand horror comedy Housebound. It’s a shoestring budget indie about a bratty young woman whose house arrest leads to some very unexpected scares. The film has long flown under the mainstream radar, despite winning a cult following from horror fans.

When I first saw it about five years ago, I loved it — but I haven’t thought about it much since except as a little-known backburner title whenever anyone asks me for horror movie recs. But now, remembering it in 2020, I immediately wanted to see how it held up in a post-pandemic atmosphere.

My hunch was that Housebound, with its fixation on forced intimacy and confinement in too-familiar spaces, would be the perfect aperitif after eight-plus months in quarantine. And I was right: Housebound still slaps — and today, it plays like a wry grace note to a year of living safely.

Housebound’s chief delight is a main character who’s completely over everything

Housebound is writer-director Gerard Johnstone’s only feature film, but its unique tone has the confidence of an established, more experienced screenwriter. It’s one of those films that takes a while to figure out; it’s not immediately clear what the stakes are, how one should watch the movie, or even who to root for. But once you settle into it, like the spooky house at its center, Housebound is full of surprises.

The action kicks off when our impudent main character, a former addict named Kylie, gets sentenced to eight months of house arrest after a failed attempt to rob an ATM. Sent back to live with her mother and stepdad in their creepy rural manse, Kylie is fed up with her forced confinement from day one. Morgana O’Reilly is unforgettably and delightfully unlikeable as Kylie: She’s rebellious and sullen, rude, occasionally violent, and perpetually exasperated. She’s totally over everything and everyone around her. In other words, she’s a walking 2020 mood.

And so is the house around her. An oppressively dark, cluttered, unnavigable wood-paneled disaster, Kylie’s childhood home feels labyrinthine and suffocating, even though it’s hardly the Overlook Hotel. It’s just a dilapidated former bed and breakfast, or so her mom tells her.

It doesn’t help that Kylie’s mother, played by Rima Te Wiata with pitch-perfect comedic timing and well-meaning befuddlement, has always believed the house is haunted. Years ago, she swears that she saw a figure in a sheet. It moved. What’s more, she’s certain that Kylie saw it too. But Kylie no longer remembers what she saw; all Kylie, who’s been living apart from her family for some time, can say for certain is that the moment she moves back home, strange things start happening. Since she’s come home, things go bump in the night, food goes missing, and a demonic Teddy Ruxpin bear keeps activating itself.

While the house may or may not be teeming with ghosts, it is teeming with secrets — secrets that Kylie is only just now starting to learn. With the help of her house arrest officer, Amos, she begins to explore her family secrets, and it doesn’t take long for her to stumble across a big one: the alleged bed and breakfast is actually a former residential asylum, once home to a wayward girl much like herself, whose brutal murder has never been solved.

Is Kylie’s house actually haunted by the murder victim’s spirit? Is the horror all in her head? Or is she experiencing terror from a much more corporeal source?

It’s tempting to spoil more details — particularly to tell you about all the real-life horror stories upon which Housebound draws its wildest twist — but you should experience the story as it unfolds for yourself.

Housebound begins like a fairly straightforward ghost story, but then takes a few turns that keep it tonally interesting. It’s usually billed as a horror comedy or a comedy thriller, but those labels undersell how tense and dark the film gets. What We Do in the Shadows also debuted in 2014, and its ascendence as the reigning New Zealand horror comedy might have both overshadowed Housebound and dictated how audiences approached it. But for me, the movie is a bit too tense, and a bit too serious, to approach as a parody. It’s frequently tongue in cheek, yes, but it takes its terror seriously.

Furthermore, Housebound is serious about the ways in which its surly anti-heroine is subtly undermined by most of the people around her and even her situation itself. If an entire house could gaslight you, Kylie’s house would be doing exactly that, and that makes the movie a perversely relatable treat for anyone feeling like their prolonged confinement is driving them a bit mad.

Housebound is a permanent 2020 mood

Kylie’s time under house arrest soon grows quite eventful, but it starts out with the palpable slow slog of eternity. Kylie seethes under her punishment the way all of us, at some point during a year of retreat from Covid-19, probably have.

Although we don’t get much backstory on Kylie’s relationship with her mom and stepdad, the tension they greet each other with upon her return home lingers for most of the movie. What’s sweet about this, if a movie whose main character once punched her mother in the face can be called sweet, is that Housebound always frames both Kylie and her mother as vulnerable to one another’s unwitting slights and microaggressions. A flatter script could have easily made Kylie the hard-edged instigator of most of the conflict between her and her mother, but O’Reilly always lets us see how much Kylie cares about her family beneath her ongoing frustration with her confinement.

The movie also never lets us forget that Kylie is a recovering addict, and that this one fact frequently defines her to most of society. I rewatched Housebound directly after refreshing myself on a true-crime case in which police repeatedly refused to take a sex worker’s claims seriously because her profession diminished her credibility. So I was particularly attuned to the amount of time that Kylie spends in Housebound fighting to be heard and taken seriously, only to receive the repeated message that her word matters less because of her status as an addict and as a repeat offender.

But if Kylie starts out thoroughly unlikeable, Housebound makes the argument that a rough, rude, defiant, violent 20-something is a good person to have around in a crisis. And sometimes, the film suggests, having to ride out a period of sequestering with your relatives is just the kind of thing that builds character. Well, that and getting the ultimate validation of finding out that everyone who undermined you was wrong all along.

There’s a certain narrative about the pandemic that’s become dominant. It’s one centered on all the plucky bread-makers and Zoom-partiers and amateur interior designers and newfound plant lovers who made the most of a shitty time spent social distancing from most of their communities. But for the rest of us, we who’ve been stuck in a stuffy, claustrophobic environment with people we frequently can’t stand, Housebound is a permanent mood. Kylie wanders through most of the film the way I wandered through most of 2020 — glassy-eyed, openly horrified at everyone else’s bullshit, and desperate to go outside.

At one point her mom scolds Kylie for still being in bed well into the afternoon. “Oh, no, I’m late!” Kylie gasps.

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

One day, aliens make contact to Earth with a message proclaiming they not only come in peace, but confirm they also worshipped Jesus, confirming once and for all that He and religion were real. -

In preparation for their arrival, a huge celebration and welcoming ceremony is planned, and all the Christian sects of the world miraculously come together to receive them.

The first of the aliens' ships touches down, and one alien walks down to greet everyone. The Pope comes out first to shake one of their hands to greet them. The Pope says, "We are forever grateful to learn we are not alone in being Children of God, but that we may also join together as one in order to praise our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

And the alien replies, "Yep. The first time he stopped by we threw him a big party and we gave him a fruit basket before he left. What'd you guys do?"

EDIT: turns out I might've taken a bit of inspiration (i.e. lifted) from this comic I think I saw a few years back, credit where credit is due

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-11-24

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What’s Mitch McConnell’s favorite movie? -

Kill Bill.

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My GF said that if this post gets 1000 up votes we can do anal to celebrate my cake day. -

Please, for the love of God don't up vote, I've seen the size of her strap on!

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PSA do not wear a washington wizards face mask. -

CDC studies have shown they provide no defense

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The Americans and The Japanese -

The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced rowing hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day the Japanese won by a mile.

The American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.

The consultant's finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering.

After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the American team's management structure was completely reorganized.

The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The next year, the Japanese won by two miles!

Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.

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