A week which began with Brazil racing into fourth place on the global coronavirus infection list ended with the country glancing up towards the United States, as soaring cases and record deaths brought travel restrictions from the White House while Latin America was consolidated as the latest COVID-19 hotspot. By the middle of the week, daily deaths in Brazil were exceeding 1,000 and the country was helping to drive an unprecedented rise in global cases, while come the tail-end the tally of deaths had surpassed 20,000, and hospitals in São Paulo were being overwhelmed. Hospitals in Chile were also feeling the strain as cases approached 70,000, while more than 100,000 infections in Peru prompted an extended nationwide lockdown until the end of June. Completing the picture across the hardest-hit parts of Latin America, Mexico was reporting record deaths and cases in the region of 60,000, even as Mexico City planned to reopen and the country claimed to have ‘avoided a deluge’.
Across America every state was now engaged in the act of reopening, as the country hit the landmark of 100,000 deaths while crowds flocked to beaches for Memorial Day weekend. Deaths and hospitalisations steadily declined in New York and New Jersey, the country’s most affected states to date, with fatalities dropping below 100 by Saturday. Across New York, seven of ten regions were now in the process of reopening, with Mid-Hudson and Long Island to follow suit over the course of the next week, while both states allowed campgrounds and beaches to reopen ahead of the weekend. Stores and restaurants, bars and bowling alleys reopened in Minnesota, Texas, North Carolina, and Connecticut, and in Michigan too, but the state’s stay-at-home order was extended and emergency declarations issued for four counties after dam failure and unprecedented flooding displaced thousands, complicating the coronavirus response. Cases and deaths continued their insidious rise across parts of California, and while Governor Gavin Newsom eased restrictions and enabled more reopenings, he faced assorted challenges from counties wishing to make haste. Meanwhile the White House expressed concern over persistent cases in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Reopening was also the order across Asia Pacific. Dwindling infections in New Zealand allowed for the reopening of bars and schools, while Australia had also managed to squash the death toll as states moved separately to ease distancing measures. The lifting of the state of emergency in the western prefectures of Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo left Tokyo in the lurch, but the Japanese capital pressed ahead anyway expecting a complete end to emergency measures by the beginning of next week. High school seniors returned in South Korea even amid lingering infections tied to the nightlife district of Itaewon. Despite concerns at the start of the week over a cluster in the northeast of the country, by Saturday China was reporting no new cases of COVID-19 for the first time since the pandemic began, as Beijing shifted focus towards a controversial security law which critics and protesters said would erode Hong Kong’s autonomy. Infections stabilised in Singapore, which planned to exit circuit-breaker mode from the beginning of June, though the country drew condemnation for doling out capital punishment virtually. Malaysia similarly struggled with clusters among migrant communities, Indonesia plotted a relaxation of distancing measures despite rising cases, and Thailand extended its emergency decree while shortening the nightly curfew.
India welcomed the new week with cases in excess of 100,000 and eased restrictions as the country entered lockdown 4.0. An already perilous situation across India and neighbouring Bangladesh was worsened upon the arrival of Cyclone Amphan, the most powerful cyclone to strike the region in twenty years, which left at least 88 people dead and devastated the West Bengal capital of Kolkata. Infections continued to spike across India while creeping up steadily in Pakistan. Cases continued to climb in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, while Turkey and Qatar were among the countries to tighten restrictions as Muslims across the world celebrated an unusually distant Eid al-Fitr. Meanwhile Israel mulled the formation of a travel bloc between Greece, Cyprus, the Seychelles, Georgia, and Montenegro, other countries with low infection rates, but if there was some respite from coronavirus the country kept busy as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on trial for corruption while continuing to make moves in the West Bank. Cases climbed beyond 20,000 in South Africa, with the Western Cape and its largest city Cape Town particularly affected, and as infections surpassed 100,000 across the continent local leaders bemoaned a lack of support in terms of aid and debt relief.
The focus across Europe turned towards reopening as after exacting a hefty toll, the virus finally began to retreat. In three of the continent’s hardest-hit countries, Italy, Spain, and France, daily deaths dropped at least momentarily below 100. Italy embraced the new week with the long-awaited reopening of shops, cafes, and restaurants, and as fatalities fell to a low of 48 and cases and hospitalisations continued to decline in Spain, Madrid and Barcelona could finally begin opening up, while by the end of the working week France had done away with a daily death tally, over the weekend allowing religious gatherings to resume. Denmark had led the way as Europe began lifting lockdown measures, and the country continued to reopen while Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland also made moves. On the other hand after an especially deadly April, Sweden was now recording the most deaths per capita across all of Europe, increasingly notorious rather than vaunted for its unusually lax approach. As the tally topped 36,000, deaths began to decline across the United Kingdom. The government touted a ‘world-beating’ trace system and imposed a quarantine on arrivals while reversing course on a surcharge for foreign health workers, before the news cycle over the weekend was dominated by the misdeeds of the prime minister’s chief advisor, who had flouted lockdown regulations and was urged to resign. Across Russia cases had surged past 300,000, but by the end of the week there were signs of a slowdown.
Against a backdrop of internal conflict and funding threats, the member states of the World Health Organization agreed to set up an inquiry into the global response to the pandemic. Jobless rates hit rare highs in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, and another 2.4 million people filed for unemployment in the United States, taking the tally during the crisis to 38.6 million with just over 25 million continuing claims. Responding to the financial fallout in the European Union, France and Germany proposed a €500 billion recovery fund. With Cyprus leading the way, the countries of Europe began eyeing increased tourism, but Sweden risked exclusion from a Nordic travel bubble, while across the Atlantic the border between the United States and Canada would remain closed for another month. College campuses across America contemplated resuming classes and shortening breaks, yet in the United Kingdom, Cambridge announced that lectures would be carried out online until the summer of 2021. Carbon emissions had plunged 17 percent owing to reduced activity during the pandemic, but after leaving lockdown air pollution in China had already began to stack up.
The biotech firm Moderna touted an immune response from an experimental vaccine candidate, more prospective vaccines showed positive results in China and proved to successfully protect macaques, and while hydroxychloroquine was evidently good enough for Brazil and President Donald Trump, who proudly publicised his preventative use of the treatment, studies wavered on the effects of the drug. In a typically tetchy week from the leader of America, Trump railed against voting by mail while trying to force states back to church. Other studies and in-depth journalistic endeavours focused on issues of asymptomatic infection, dwindling vaccinations, unreported fatalities, and high mortality rates. Antibody testing showed limited immunity in Stockholm, while stressing the impact on low-income and minority communities in New York, and there was concern for prison populations in California and over the silent spread among German meatpacking plants. Apple and Google launched their contact tracing software for regional development. And if vaccine hopes and improved contact tracing and beachside cookouts and the wave of reopenings weren’t enough, La Liga in Spain and training camps in New York promised the swift return of more competitive sport.
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The Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, will soon be exclusive to Spotify after signing a multiyear deal reportedly worth in excess of $100 million. Launched in 2009, the podcast has become a catch-all site of male-oriented public discourse, noted for its diverse array of guests, broad political perspectives, and advocacy around issues such as male circumcision and marijuana use while retaining a core following among fans of ultimate fighting and the comedy circuit. Attracting an estimated 286 million total listeners, achieving millions of downloads every week, The Joe Rogan Experience routinely ranks at the top of the Apple podcast chart, aside from the regular litany of sportspeople, entertainers, and scientists attaining a height of political resonance with the appearance of Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders in 2019. The show frequently courts controversy, perhaps most famously when Tesla stock tanked in 2018 following a weed-fuelled appearance from Elon Musk.
Spotify has made bold strides into the podcasting business over the past couple of years, acquiring the Gimlet Media network in 2019 including the acclaimed series Crimetown and Reply All, before earlier this year the streaming service purchased Bill Simmons’ sports-based media company The Ringer. The Joe Rogan Experience has been a free audio download, with full-length video episodes on YouTube helping to create a lucrative podcasting culture. As part of the deal with Spotify, the show will move to the streaming service on 1 September, with audio and video content becoming exclusive to subscribers by the end of 2020. Announcing news of the deal via Instagram, Rogan noted that the show will continue to upload to YouTube in the form of short video clips.
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The return of David Lynch‘s daily weather report after a ten-year hiatus and the creation of an accompanying YouTube channel have given the director an outlet for oddities and offcuts. This week he made available the animated short Fire (Pozar), a collaboration with the Polish-American musician Marek Zebrowski. Lynch and Zebrowski first met ahead of the filming of Inland Empire in Lodz, collaborating the following year on the release of the improvisational studio album Polish Night Music. Fire (Pozar) was written, drawn, and directed by Lynch, with Noriko Miyakawa bringing the drawings to life and Zebrowski given free rein to interpret the visuals. The ten-minute animation premiered in 2015 as part of the Measures & Frames event at the USC Thornton School of Music, where Zebrowski’s composition was performed by the Penderecki String Quartet. Subsequent screenings took place at the Kwadrofonik Festival in Warsaw, the Piccolo Festival Animazione in Trieste, the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, and the Someone Is In My House exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. This week marks the first time that Fire (Pozar) has been widely available. Speaking at the original performance, Zebrowski elaborated on the process of scoring Lynch’s film:
‘I thought it was a very melancholic film in a certain sense and also very poetic. Without trying to be too explicit, I tried to illustrate further what David was doing. For example, there is something that looks like a hailstorm and I used a lot of pizzicato, but I also used a soaring melodic line to add a lyrical element to it.’
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Archaeologists have uncovered the bones of about sixty mammoths at a construction site for a planned airport north of Mexico City. The team from the National Institute of Anthropology and History have been working at the site since construction of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport started last year, discovering dozens of bones every month. Last November, researchers from the institute working in the nearby community of San Antonio Xahuento, part of the municipality of Tultepec, uncovered mammoth remains in two large pits which offered an unprecedented glimpse into prehistoric hunting practises. Previous finds of mammoth carcasses across North America and Eurasia have shown that humans scavenged the remains of the animals, but could not demonstrate whether they had been actively hunted. The discovery of the pits in Tultepec indicate that humans drove mammoths into a planned patchwork of traps, possibly guiding the animals using torches and branches.
Mammoths, with their long curved tusks and a height which could reach up to four metres, emerged during the Pliocene epoch about five million years ago, eventually making their way from southeast Africa to Eurasia and across to the Americas. The woolly mammoth, the last of the species, lived from 400,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago, when a changing climate and increased competition made them extinct. The finds at San Antonio Xahuento and the Felipe Ángeles International Airport in Zumpango cluster upon the shores of an ancient lake, the Xaltocan, at the centre of a shallow lake system which furnished mammoths with grasses and reeds but also made them liable to get stuck. The pits at San Antonio Xahuento were dated at approximately 15,000 years old. The finds at the site of the fledgeling airport – controversial owing to the area’s archaeological import and because it has been pushed through despite environmental risks and indigenous concerns – include the remains of humans, camels, and horses, with the National Institute of Anthropology and History’s coordinator Pedro Sánchez Nava noting that there are almost too many bones to be excavated.
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The Guinean vocalist and kora player Mory Kanté died on Friday at the age of 70. Born in Albadaria, French Guinea to a family of popular griot musicians, Kanté was trained in the kora in Mali before joining the Rail Band, which mined the craze for Afro-Cuban jazz, combining electric guitars and brassy horns with traditional West African rhythms and instruments. Formed in 1970 and originally led by the iconic vocalist Salif Keïta, upon Keïta’s departure Kanté established himself as the group’s lead singer. By the 1980s he had moved to France and forged a successful solo career, achieving international renown in 1987 for the upbeat hit ‘Yé ké yé ké’, whose shimmering kora and balafon riff triumphed in Africa and reached top-five chart positions across Europe.
‘Yé ké yé ké’ became the first African single to sell more than one million copies, and helped the album Akwaba Beach become the best-selling African record of all time, as it claimed the 1988 Victoires de la Musique award for best Francophone album. The song proved an inspiration in Bollywood before a remix by the German techno duo Hardfloor became a perennial club favourite. ‘The electronic griot’ turned towards acoustic and orchestral music as he became an ambassador for West African causes, working with the United Nations, constructing an entertainment complex close to his home in Conakry, and banding together in 2014 for the song ‘Africa Stop Ebola’, which sold 250,000 copies on behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières. Sabou in 2004 and La Guinéenne in 2013 received critical acclaim, before N’diarabi in 2017 proved his final studio album. Kanté had been suffering from chronic illnesses which required regular treatment in France, impossible in light of coronavirus. Commemorated in death, Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour described him as a ‘baobab of African culture’.
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After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship and studying in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, in the late 1960s the composer Philip Glass moved to New York. He formed an ensemble and began performing in the art galleries and studio lofts of SoHo, developing a sparsely experimental approach through pieces from Strung Out and Music in Fifths to Music with Changing Parts, by which time Glass had progressed to the Whitney and Guggenheim, still receiving a warmer response from contemporaries and performance artists than the critics. The culmination of the work of this early ensemble arrived with Music in Twelve Parts in 1974, a monumental cycle of repetition with a final flourish which brought this period of minimalism to a close. Between Music in Fifths and Music with Changing Parts, towards the end of 1969, Glass wrote the piece Music in Eight Parts, which the ensemble performed in January.
Arriving at a pivotal moment in Glass’s development as a composer, nevertheless by the middle of the 1970s Music in Eight Parts was no longer part of the Philip Glass Ensemble’s repertoire. Unrecorded and out of use, the work was presumed lost for the best part of fifty years. Then in late 2017 the final manuscript came up for auction at Christie’s, where it sold for $43,750 and passed into the hands of Glass’s publisher: apparently Glass sold the text alongside other manuscripts when he was low on funds and doubling as a plumber and cab driver following the premiere of his debut opera Einstein on the Beach. Over the past two years Alex Gray, a master’s student at New York University and an assistant at Dunvagen Music Publishers, worked to reconstruct the score, which has now been tweaked for recording by the Philip Glass Ensemble under the auspices of Michael Riesman, the longtime director of the group. Recorded under quarantine after the coronavirus put paid to planned springtime performances, produced by Riesman and Richard Guérin with Lisa Bielawa on vocals, Music in Eight Parts finally arrived as an act of preservation via Orange Mountain Music this week.
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Smashing the lob handily lofted up by her forebears Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, this week the tennis player Naomi Osaka became the highest-paid female athlete in history. On the back of consecutive Grand Slam victories at the US Open and Australian Open which carried her to number one in the WTA rankings, Osaka earned $37.4 million over the past twelve months in combined prize money and endorsements. Born in Japan to a Haitian father and Japanese mother, moving to the United States at the age of three, Osaka’s diverse background, hard-hitting success on the court, and relatable reserve off it carry widespread appeal and led to a place on the TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people.
Setting a new high water mark for female earnings, Osaka broke the previous record of $29.7 million set by Maria Sharapova in 2015, while edging out Serena Williams who made $1.4 million less than Osaka over the past twelve months after four years as the top-ranking female sportsperson. On the annual Forbes list of highest-paid athletes, Osaka came in at twenty-ninth while Williams finished thirty-third, the only two women to make the rankings. Tennis players fared well overall, as at the head of a list otherwise dominated by footballers, basketball stars, and prizefighters stood Roger Federer, with earnings of $106.3 million made mostly from endorsements.
