Joel Mathis

After a year off Facebook, I broke down and went back. Social distancing is tough for me. So far, I'm lucky: I write a regular column for The Week, and -- for now anyway -- they're still using my services. I saw a story today that said one in five Americans had already lost their jobs or seen hours reduced because of the coronavirus crisis. I'm lucky to still have work. But I also have to think about my work a bit differently. I've never wanted to be a hack -- I've worked hard to avoid it -- but we are at a historical moment. To have such a platform is a privilege. To "mail it in" would be sin. Especially if one considers: What if the end of my life is coming soon? The end of my career? What will my final contributions be? How will I want to be remembered? Last night, I wrote a column. 800 words roughly. Sent it to my editors. Then I realized it was inadquate to the moment, focused on small-bore politicking instead of the big concerns that face us all

My son has insisted we start daily family yoga for the duration of the lockdown. He's a bit of a showoff. I'm not much of a praying man. My theological beliefs are fuzzy, at best, and I have long believed in Huckleberry Finn's maxim: "You can't pray a lie." But for the last couple of weeks, as it has become apparent that coronavirus would upend our lives, I've become a praying man again. This is tricky, because I've never wanted to treat God -- or whatever name you have for whatever force there might be in the universe -- as Santa Claus. "Dear God, give me this thing that I want," seems both pointless and selfish. I want to be healthy and not lose my livelihood during this time. But so do a lot of people who have, or are about to, lose either their health or their livelihood. I'm not sure that God, to the extent God exists, works that way. But here's the thing: I'm not in control of what's about to happen.

"It seemed to Thomas, as they sat in the sinking radiance, shucking bits of shell from the meat, dropping the nuts into a dishpan, that he should hold onto this. Whatever was said, he should hold on to. Whatever gestures his father made, hold on to. The peculiar aliveness of things struck by the late afternoon sunlight -- hold on to it." The Night Watchman , pages 66-67 

T and J wait for the water to boil. She is teaching him to make macaroni and cheese. He is going to learn a lot of self-sufficiency in the coming weeks. When President Trump was elected, J and I hosted a brunch for crestfallen friends the following Saturday. The idea was to affirm that though a terrible thing had happened -- and I will not apologize for that sense, nor do I think we were overreacting -- we still had each other, we still had community, we were still together. Now a new crisis has arrived, and if the medical authorities are correct, the worst thing I could do to comfort my friends at this point would be to bring them all together.  Isolation, it seems, is the only thing that can save us.  Or most of us.  Except: It won't. Yes, it will help slow the spread of the virus -- and for that reason, we're obeying the "social distancing" requirements to the extent possible -- but it also creates two new problems: Isolation, and loss of liveliho

In full-blown hobo mode. All I've been able to do this week is stare at Twitter, refresh, and stare some more, until I'm too exhausted to do anything but sleep.  I became a journalist because I wanted to see history with my own eyes. The realization came to me in the summer of 1989, when brave Chinese students were protesting their government at Tiananmen Square, and then paid a dear price for it. Journalists from the west showed us what was happening, live, and I knew watching it on TV that were looking at a critical moment. Being a history buff already, I set my sights on being a journalist. Well, we're living through history now. I don't have to go to China, or New York, or anyplace else to experience it. All I have to do is sit in my home, try to keep my distance from others, and hope that me and my family don't either A) become victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, or B) unwittingly pass the virus on to somebody we love and end up killing them. Just

NYT : Indians consider Gandhi one of the fathers of their nation. But the rise of a Hindu nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has uncorked many extremist beliefs, and admiration for Gandhi’s killer, among some, has become more open. It is a sign of how much India has changed in the five and a half years since Mr. Modi took power.  “Gandhi was a traitor,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, who blames Gandhi for partition and who participated in a recent ceremony worshiping Mr. Godse on the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. “He deserved to be shot in the head.” If your ideological or religious beliefs lead you to admire assassins, your ideological or religious beliefs are evil and and should be discarded. Oh, and: Sound familiar? Prominent Hindu nationalists still invoke Gandhi, but in many cases they are trying to co-opt his legacy — presenting their policies, however divisive, as congruent with his beliefs. One example: a recent citizenship law pushed by Mr.

Seeing a lot of this on Twitter this afternoon: It's probably good to note that 49 percent approval rating is still mediocre -- and, very technically (but barely) means that just more than half of the country is not in the segment that approves of the president. Nitpicking aside, it's difficult to tell Democrats -- politicians all -- that they should ignore the political ramifications of impeaching Trump because they did the right thing. However: They did the right thing. The president did the wrong thing. And if a process meant to expose and cleanse that wrongness from government instead lodges the president more firmly in office, well, that sucks. But it's not a judgement on whether the president was right or wrong to try and subvert the 2020 election. (Again: He was wrong.) That increase in popularity is, instead, ultimately a judgment on the institutions that put and kept Trump in office, as well as the media and voter infrastructure that can look at his wrongd