I am first a fraud or a trick. Or perhaps a blend of the two. Hello pals. This riddle has been rattling in my brain for a solid two days since watching The Batman, starring reformed vampire Robert Pattinson. The movie was pretty good if you’re into darkness and brooding.

Speaking of darkness, Jennifer Finney Boylan writes this week about the start of the most difficult time in recent memory—the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which unimaginably began two years ago on March 11. I still remember those early days when we thought it would last just few weeks; two pandemic puppies later, I’m still working in pajamas, and you may be too. Also in today’s letter, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd recommends some escapism for those of us who still need it.

Thoughts on The Batman (when I say thoughts, I mean please give me the riddle answer), the end of the pandemic or anything else? Send us some Batmail at [email protected].

—Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON (IN UKRAINE)

• A few updates on Ukraine: On Friday a fire broke out at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after Russian troops seized the plant in Ukraine’s southeastern region. The Times reported later that morning that the fire had been extinguished and there are “no immediate signs” of radiation leaks at the plant. Russia’s president, whose name I shall not dignify by typing it out, claims that he will entertain a third round of talks with Ukrainian officials this weekend.

• Lending an unnecessary voice to the situation, Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted out his idea that a “Brutus” in Russia should kill the president because it’s “the only way this ends.” If I thought Graham had two brain cells to rub together I’d explain the history of coups and the power vacuums they produce, but my time on this earth is limited.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• A mosque attack in Peshawar has left 57 dead and over 100 injured after a man entered the mosque and detonated a suicide vest. This is one of the deadliest attacks carried out in Peshawar since 2014.

• Florida has re-entered the anti-abortion chat with a new bill that will ban abortions in the state after 15 weeks. Governor Ron DeSantis, patron of the “Dont Say Gay” bills, is supportive of this latest attack on reproductive rights.

• A Texas judge has temporarily halted a child abuse investigation into one family who was seeking out gender-affirming treatment for their child. The child’s mother, an employee of Texas’s Department of Family and Protective Services, was suspended after a decree in the state made helping a transgender child receive medical care a form of child abuse.
  

• But in Alabama, the legislature is moving forward with a bill that would make it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming hormone treatments to any patient under 18.

• The only good news on the horizon for trans youth? The Biden administration is actually going to defend them and their parents through the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights. Don’t let the children down, Joseph.

AND: 

• Pamela Anderson has decided to tell her own story in her own words with a new Netflix documentary, after Hulu aired Pam and Tommy without Anderson’s blessing or input

• Hope Solo really, really wants everyone to know that she is not happy with the USWNT settlement, which she called “bullshit”

• I believe it was the lyricist Ludacris who said, “it’s going down, basement”—and that’s exactly the direction Trump is heading, after the January 6 Committee found he and his pals may have engaged in “criminal and or fraudulent acts”

• “Sex, drugs and activism: a history of queer resistance”

• Have you seen the new Bad Bunny trailer about a train carrying Bad Bunny?

TWO YEARS LATER

There’s No Vaccine for Stupid

The world we’re returning to is not the one we left

BY JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

NURSES AT THE VA HOSPITAL IN THE BRONX, NEW YORK DEMANDING BETTER PROTECTION AT THE START OF THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC (PHOTO BY SPENCER PLATT VIA GETTY IMAGES)

​It was going to be just like old times. I’d been preparing for a reunion of my best friends from high school, that weekend in March 2020. The four of us—members of the class of 1976—were going to gather at a shore house in Atlantic City. My hope was that all those old faces might make me feel young.

Then I learned that, as of that Sunday night, there had been a total of 31 confirmed deaths from the virus in this country.

Damn, I thought. I guess we need to make another plan.

By Friday the 13th, my classes at Barnard had gone remote, and the reunion with the boys was canceled. I grabbed a ride with my daughter back to our home in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. And there, with a few exceptions, I would stay for the next twenty-two months. There was an election. There was an insurrection. There was an inauguration. I got two Moderna vaccines, and a Pfizer booster. There was Delta, and Omicron.

Finally, in New York at least, the number of cases began to subside. Like so many others, I began, tentatively, nervously, to return to the world.

This January, I found myself back on the Barnard campus, walking down the familiar corridor in my department known as the “English channel,” and trying my key, for the first time in almost two years, in the lock of my office door.

As it swung open, I thought of the description of archeologist Howard Carter opening the burial chamber of King Tutankhamun—100 years ago this November. “At first, I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker,” he later wrote, “but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist.”

A MEMORIAL IN AUGUST OF 2020 FOR THOSE WHO HAD DIED FROM COVID-19 (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

There they were: all the pieces of my life, right where I’d left them.  There was a stack of books I’d borrowed about Zora Neale Hurston, Barnard’s first African-American graduate; I’d been planning on writing a column about her.  There was a stack of graded papers I’d never returned to their authors.  On one wall was a long to-do list of things I had to write, and the deadlines.  There were details for the national book tour I was supposed to go on. That tour, of course, been cancelled, along with so many other things: my son’s in-person graduation from the University of Michigan, my daughter’s wedding.

For a moment I found it hard to remember the person I once had been.

I sat down at my desk, intending to get started with the semester’s business, but instead, I just sat there for a long moment, feeling the tears in my eyes. They were tears of sadness, of course, sadness for everything, and everyone, we’ve lost.  But they were also tears of rage.

This crisis ought to have been a time when we got to see how good people can be. And we did see that, in sacrifices big and small; health care workers, and grocery store employees, especially emerged as heroes. But so many others showed us their cruel and narcissistic sides instead: distrusting and hobbling government, when what we needed was good governance; mocking and questioning medicine, when what we needed was reliable science; and above all, singing the songs of conspiracy and selfishness at a time when what we needed above all was to be looking out for, and caring for, one another.

Like so many others, I began, tentatively, nervously, to return to the world.

The vast majority of people dying from COVID now are unvaccinated. With over 900,000 Americans dead, rather than publicizing the efficacy of vaccines, a whole cohort of frauds and blowhards has instead advocated horse de-wormer. Another genius suggests drinking your own urine. In Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah, laws were put into effect preventing schools from mandating the masks that could hinder the spread of disease. Because freedom, I guess.

I am hopeful that COVID will eventually subside into something like the seasonal flu—an endemic virus that, within reason, we will be able to control and endure.

But how do we live with the knowledge that, at the moment of greatest crisis, so many of our fellow Americans opted for ignorance instead?

In fits and starts, we are slowly returning to our lives. But we are forever changed by what we have been through, and by what was revealed about so many of the people with whom we share this country.

What was revealed to you? Did you find new sources of resilience and hope?

I found some of that, to be sure. But I fear the pandemic has shaken me forever—not because of the disease itself, but because of what it forced me to see.

Omicron may be on the wane, but the virus of heartlessness and ignorance is thriving. It may yet end us all.

THE METEOR RECOMMENDS

Why I’m Binging a Fantasy Show About Druids

Brittania‘s Trippy Escapism

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

SOPHIE OKONEDO AS HEMPLE ON BRITANNIA (IMAGE VIA METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS/EPIX) 

Like a lot of people, the last two years of social distancing has turned me into a voracious television consumer. In the absence of seeing friends or going dancing, I just binged what seems like every show ever made and, thanks to glut and languishing, promptly forgot 95 percent of any given storyline. But one genre of TV has stuck with me: ancient historical fiction in which women are situated as the most powerful, interesting characters.

This week, Netflix released its sequel series to the great Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, which is currently in its top two most-watched shows, and includes great fictional portrayals of real-life heroines Freydís Eiríksdóttir and Queen Emma of Normandy. I binged it, as well as the Netflix show The Last Kingdom (also about Vikings), but my favorite of all these early historical dramas is Britannia on Epix, which is set in 43 AD and concerns the Romans trying to get over on the Celtic Druids, who have a lot of tattoos. Britannia also has a fantastical element, with the Druids getting looped up on psychedelic brews and talking to their gods about prophecies, all to a classic rock soundtrack. (Its theme songs include Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season of the Witch.”)

But the plot mostly hinges on Cait (Eleanor Worthington Cox), a young Celtic girl who embarks on a mystical hero’s journey to discover she is the Chosen One, meant to protect the Druids from the murderous Romans and basically rescue all humanity from war along the way. Season three is airing now and I’m thrilled by it, particularly as it’s added the great Sophie Okonedo to the cast—she’s one of the best actors alive and is brilliant and terrifying as a powerful high priestess. Truly, I will proselytize to anyone about how much I love this show. I’ve been watching all the other stuff, too—ask me about 2020 when I saw approximately 236 episodes of Love Island in nine months—but the immersive and often funny tone of Britannia has hit my perfect escapist sweet spot. (Though, let’s be real: I am also just a sucker for a big budget and a tattoo.)

You can’t spell friends without s-e-n-d! So be a pal and share this newsletter with all of your faves, we’d really appreciate it. 

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Wednesdays and Saturdays.

[email protected]