Even the bastions of good health and sound management were being breached this week, as there seemed to be nowhere on earth that the coronavirus was not spreading, whether creeping or rushing full steam ahead. The United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa continued to drive a global surge in cases, but COVID-19 was also on the rise across the most scrupulous parts of Asia Pacific. Latin America remained the hottest of hotspots, as Brazil surpassed 1.5 million infections and 60,000 fatalities during the course of the week, still not enough to deter residents of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from newly reopened bars and restaurants. Cases climbed in Argentina and across Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Chile laboured under one of the world’s worst per capita caseloads, while Peru looked to reboot the economy in spite of a staggering toll. By the end of the week, the United States had smashed Brazil’s record for new cases, reporting more than 55,000 infections in the span of one day. The major states of Florida, Texas, and California were setting new records at breakneck speeds, but from the Carolinas to Arizona, coronavirus was cutting a swathe across the south.
India strived to unlock more of the economy even as cases swept past 600,000, becoming by Sunday the third worst-hit country in the world. Climbing cases in Bangladesh and Pakistan completed the bleak picture for Southeast Asia, while mounting infections and fatalities in Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia saddled the Middle East. If there was a silver lining, at least spiking cases in Israel and Palestine plus the threat of impending restrictions paused plans for the illegal annexation of the West Bank. South Africa suffered successive days of record cases, and infections remained high in Egypt while Morocco emerged as the latest North African hotspot. Across the Mediterranean, cases jumped in Spain as the country reopened its border with Portugal. While Asturias at the start of the week had become the first region to attain the status of virus-free, by the weekend residents of Lleida in Catalonia were back under lockdown as cases bumped. Turkey maintained a high case tally and infections climbed precariously in the Eastern European states of Serbia and Ukraine, while a safe list of external countries gave Greek tourism a boost.
A resurgent virus in the Australian state of Victoria put ten Melbourne postcodes back into lockdown this week, impacting more than 300,000 people. In New Zealand, the health minister David Clark stepped down amid criticism over recent border mishaps and his own previous lockdown breach. Indonesia endured its deadliest week, still the hardest-hit country in Southeast Asia, while the Philippines also reported record infections. Cases in Tokyo climbed to their highest in months, with the virus hastening its spread among young people, while South Korea continued to battle outbreaks now stretching beyond the Seoul metropolitan area. Low cases in China and Hong Kong were overshadowed by the authoritarian tendencies of the mainland, as Beijing imposed a new security law tough on dissent, carrying maximum penalties of lifetime imprisonment. The swift passage of the law brought protests and international condemnation, sanctions and offers of citizenship, while back on the coronavirus beat China looked at live poultry sales and Hong Kong lost its three-week streak without community infection.
Political strife was also the order of the day in Russia, where cases topped 650,000 as Russians headed to the polls to overwhelmingly back Vladimir Putin’s constitutional amendments. French prime minister Édouard Philippe resigned as Emmanuel Macron prepared to reshuffle his cabinet, general election campaigning was in full swing in Singapore, while coronavirus in the United Arab Emirates prompted a restructured government. As the World Health Organization sent a team to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic, China authorised military use of an experimental vaccine. Soaring cases in Brazil made the country fertile ground for vaccine trials, the WHO discontinued trials of hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir, while the antiviral treatment remdesivir was priced and stockpiled by America. Mexico now possessed the world’s fifth-worst death tally, but this week saw the first reported case at a refugee camp along the Mexico-United States border. Coronavirus was continuing to disproportionately affect Black and Latino people, while contributing towards an increase in domestic abuse and ravaging indigenous communities along the Amazon River.
Whether it was mandatory face masks, nighttime curfews, the closure of parks and beaches, or the cancellation of fireworks displays, the United States celebrated Fourth of July with plenty of trepidation. Only the northeast of the country was spared, as while New York City delayed indoor dining, Massachusetts prepared to move to the next phase and New Jersey opened casinos and amusement parks in time for the holiday. In the meantime Donald Trump squatted below Mount Rushmore to deliver a typically divisive message, recasting Independence Day as a battle against the left. In fact earlier in the week Trump had declared a preference for face masks, which if not quite de rigueur were becoming de jure from Jacksonville and Salem to Toronto and Tehran, although denizens of Prague ditched the coverings as they gathered on Charles Bridge for a farewell dinner. Job losses beset Italy and Spain, but record gains for the month of June saw the White House touting an economic recovery. Broadway dimmed its lights for the rest of the year, and positive tests cast doubt on the Major League Baseball season, so for entertainment to Amsterdam, with clean sheets but no kissing.
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Candice Carty-Williams and Bernardine Evaristo made history on Monday, as they became the first black authors to win the top prizes at the British Book Awards. Carty-Williams won the Book of the Year award for Queenie, the comic account of a young Jamaican Brit navigating the pitfalls and heartaches of life in London, which also picked up the prize for Debut Book of the Year during the online ceremony. Evaristo was named Author of the Year and won Fiction Book of the Year for the polyphonic, decade-spanning Girl, Woman, Other. In the process the two authors staved off competition from Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, which triumphed in the categories for non-fiction narrative, crime and thriller, and audiobook respectively. Last year Evaristo and Atwood flouted convention to share the Booker Prize for Fiction.
The criteria for the Book of the Year Award comprises quality of writing, innovative publishing, and sales. The British Book Awards, administered by The Bookseller magazine and otherwise known as the Nibbies, are now in their thirtieth year. Carty-Williams, who alongside Evaristo and dozens of other authors recently formed the Black Writers’ Guild, calling for greater diversity and equality within the publishing industry, said of her victory:
‘I don’t quite know how I feel about winning book of the year: I’m proud of myself, yes, and grateful to the incredible team that helped me get Queenie out of my head and onto the shelves. I’m also sad and confused that I’m the first black and female author to have won this award since it began. Overall, this win makes me hopeful that although I’m the first, the industry are waking up to the fact that I shouldn’t and won’t be the last.’
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Carl Reiner, the creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show and a foundational figure in the history of on-screen comedy, died on Monday at the age of 98 years old. After working as a machinist and serving during the Second World War in an entertainment unit which toured the Pacific, Reiner parlayed his performances in Broadway revues into a fledgeling career in sketch comedy. In 1950, he was cast as an actor on Your Show of Shows, the popular NBC variety weekly which ran for four seasons starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. When Caesar and Coca spun off into their own shows, on Caesar’s Hour between 1954 and 1957 Reiner became a writer in earnest, continuing to perform while scribing as part of a legendary staff which included Mel Tolkin, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. For Caesar’s Hour Reiner won his first Emmy Awards, in 1957 and 1958 for Outstanding Supporting Actor. Forging a fast friendship with Mel Brooks, borne of an improvisational routine first shared at dinner parties, the 2000 Year Old Man sketch led to five successful comedy records, the last winning the Grammy Award in 1998 for Best Comedy Album.
In the late fifties, Reiner wrote an original pilot for a television sitcom in which he was to star, called Head of the Family. When the pilot was turned down by the networks, Reiner retooled and recast the concept, which in 1961 became The Dick Van Dyke Show. Drawing inspiration from his experiences on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, revelling in the home and work life of a successful New York comedy writer, The Dick Van Dyke Show made household names of its co-stars Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, running for five seasons and winning fifteen Emmys. The lifelong entertainers and comic luminaries Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam played supporting roles, and Reiner himself eventually appeared as the head of the fictitious The Alan Brady Show, whose baldness was memorably revealed in the season five opener ‘Coast to Coast Big Mouth’. Initially the sole writer and producer, by the third season of The Dick Van Dyke Show Reiner had assembled a talented cast who kept the show running while he took the lead role in the 1966 comedy film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
Continuing to appear in front of the camera in bit-part roles and cameos, Reiner turned his attention towards directing. In 1967 he made his directorial debut with Enter Laughing, a farce based on his own semi-autobiographical novel which starred Reni Santoni, José Ferrer, Shelley Winters, and Elaine May, and in 1969 he reunited with Dick Van Dyke for the silent-era dégringolade The Comic. Where’s Poppa? in 1970 played George Segal and Ruth Gordon to darkly comic effect, while Oh, God! in 1977 proved a winning George Burns vehicle. Reiner was the guiding hand as Steve Martin transitioned from the stand-up stage to film comedy, directing the cult classic The Jerk, followed by Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains, and All of Me. As the eighties turned into the nineties, Reiner directed a string of comedies to middling reviews, while in 1995 his return to the role of Alan Brady in an episode of Mad About You won him another Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
In 2000 Reiner became the third recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The following year he made a robust return to the big screen, with the recurring role of the ageing con Saul Bloom in the Ocean’s series of movies. He guest-starred in television shows including Ally McBeal, House, and Parks and Recreation, and had recurring parts in The Bernie Mac Show, Two and a Half Men, plus several animated series. In 2012 Reiner was one of the guests in the first season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, inviting the host Jerry Seinfeld to join him and Mel Brooks as they engaged in their nightly ritual of television dinners and taped Jeopardy! or action movies: according to Reiner, he and Brooks enjoyed any movie which incorporated the line ‘Secure the perimeter!’. In 2017, Reiner fronted the HBO documentary If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast. Engaged and always funny, Reiner wrote books expounding his morning exercise routine and maintained an active following on Twitter. His death brought tributes from his son Rob – one of three children with his wife of sixty-five years Estelle – and from friends and collaborators including Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyke, Carol Burnett, and Steve Martin.
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The laughter keeps coming. The tenth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which aired earlier this year on HBO, proved utterly compelling: flush with a rosy, red-capped, handsy topicality, and boasting an all-star guest list from old favourites like Ted Danson, Kaitlin Olson, and Richard Kind to Vince Vaughn, Laverne Cox, and Jon Hamm, as Larry David brewed up his own special blend of spite coffee in a turf war versus the machinating Mocha Joe. Now Curb Your Enthusiasm has been renewed for an eleventh season, and according to HBO, writing is already well underway. The intricately threaded improvisational comedy, which debuted all the way back in 1999, comes in fits and spurts, with Larry saying of the new season:
‘Believe me, I’m as upset about this as you are. One day I can only hope that HBO will come to their senses and grant me the cancellation I so richly deserve’
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The Louvre reopens on Monday, symbolic beyond its status as the most visited museum in the world for its role in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Back at the beginning of March as the French capital played host to the 45th César Awards and welcomed travelling retinues from Milan for the commencement of Paris Fashion Week, museum staff prompted the preemptive closure of the Louvre following a mass walkout over the health risks posed by coronavirus. At the time infections were beginning to spiral in the Lombardy region of Italy, but while face masks were de rigueur during fashion week and the French government had banned gatherings of more than 5,000, these restrictions did not extend to museums and other tourist sites, with France reporting approximately 130 cases and two deaths. The closure of the Louvre then was one of the first instances of public disruption, a herald for Europe and the rest of the world of the horrors to come. Today France has amassed a tally of more than 200,000 cases, and the country is closing in on 30,000 deaths.
When the Louvre reopens on Monday, visitors will have to wear masks and follow a designated path past all the paintings, sculptures, and other objets d’art, with socially distanced spacing for selfies somewhere in the vicinity of the Mona Lisa. Exhibitions on Italian sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo and the German Renaissance master Albrecht Altdorfer have been postponed until autumn, and thirty percent of the museum space will be out of bounds. In 2018 and again in 2019, the Louvre was the most visited museum in the world with figures of 10.2 and 9.6 million, tourists making up around seventy-five percent of all attendees. Its return comes in the midst of similar gestures across Europe, with the Vatican, the Prado, and other museums in Italy and Spain reopening last month, while the National Gallery will soon lead the way for the United Kingdom and the Hermitage is set for a comeback in Russia.
