Lifestyle
'Fourteen Days' is a time capsule of people's efforts to connect during the pandemic
Almost as soon as we’d all gotten “used” to the COVID-19 pandemic — which is to say, when we realized it wouldn’t be as short-lived an event as we’d wished — I was one of many who noticed, at least online, an ambient yet frantic need to be productive. People were baking, growing plants, starting new crafting projects and, of course, writing.
Shakespeare, I kept seeing people proclaim, wrote King Lear during the 1592 plague outbreak in London; the implication being “that if the Bard managed to write a masterpiece during a pandemic, you had best have something to show for yourself before this quarantine is over — and it had better be more impressive than baking sourdough bread!”
It is a professor nicknamed Prospero who utters these ironic remarks in Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel, shortly after gently correcting the popular meme about Willie S. that was spreading like (forgive me) the plague during March and April of 2020. In fact, Prospero tells his neighbors on the roof of 2 Rivington St. in New York City’s Lower East Side, Shakespeare wrote Lear in “the plague-free summer and autumn of 1605.”
Fourteen Days, which is an Authors Guild project and was edited by Margaret Atwood and former guild president Douglas Preston, is a novel written collaboratively by 36 American and Canadian authors — including Emma Donoghue, John Grisham, Celeste Ng, Erica Jong, Luis Alberto Urrea, Charlie Jane Anders, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Tommy Orange. Modeled after collections like Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Fourteen Days has a frame narrative that works as a container for different characters to tell a variety of stories, some thematically linked, others less so.
The novel’s frame narrative in this case is a found manuscript containing the writings of an NYC tenement’s superintendent. She only recently began working in the building, and doesn’t really know anyone when the city’s lockdown begins in March 2020. The tenement’s rooftop is meant to be off-limits, and although the super tries at first to maintain this standard, she quickly gives up; after all, she feels no particular loyalty toward the faceless landlord who has clearly abandoned caring for the crumbling building and its tenants’ needs.
The super begins spending time on the roof herself, and more and more tenants gather there in the evenings to bang pots and cheer for the medical workers putting their lives on the line and attempting to care for the amassing sick. Once the noisemaking ends, the residents remain, drinking or smoking, reading their books or absorbed in their phones, enjoying some fresh air and space after their days cooped up inside their small apartments. And, naturally, they begin to talk to one another, eventually instituting a routine in which several people tell stories each evening: true or imagined, mundane or strange, but always interesting enough to pass the time.
A pleasing quirk of the book is that none of its authors are bylined; only their bios at the very end reveal who wrote each story. Fourteen Days thus achieves a unified voice of sorts despite its disparate authors, as every character narrates their story simply, casually, often allowing themselves digressions and asides.
Some of the characters’ tales have clear endings and takeaways. A man nicknamed Eurovision, for instance, tells a story about how to get two rabbits who hate each other to get along: contain them in a small box together, put it in a car, and drive around for a while. Once they arrive home and are let loose again, the bunnies will be bonded by the fear and trauma they experienced in the shaking car and tiny space. So too, Eurovision posits, might be the case for the tenants in the building — their collective trauma bonding them despite their immense differences of identity, personality, and life experience.
Other stories, though, are vignettes that paint scenes of love or conflict without yielding an obvious “message” or even coming to a real conclusion. A man given the moniker of Wurly, for instance, shares three striking memories of a woman named Bertha who wasn’t related to his family but who was deeply involved in it, welcomed and respected as an honorary matriarch; the story shows Wurly’s affection for her, and its purpose is simply to celebrate the woman’s existence.
There are, too, the odd and eerie stories, such as that of a young woman who shows up on the roof one night claiming to be a transformed spider living in the city as an expert exterminator of bed bugs, her snack of choice. She disappears right after telling her tale, leaving the rooftop gathering nonplussed and a little spooked.
Fourteen Days is an ambitious project, and its proceeds benefit the Authors Guild Foundation, two-thirds of whose members suffered an income decline during the pandemic — which was officially declared to be over by the U.S. government more than months ago, in May 2023, even though as of January 27, the CDC reported 6973 deaths from COVID-19 this year, and as many as 7% of Americans report experiencing symptoms of long COVID.
As a fundraiser, the idea is truly wonderful, and the execution is enjoyable, but the project’s seams show, and the twist ending doesn’t land with the kind of emotional oomph that it should. Still, it’s worth a read and serves as a somewhat romanticized time capsule of the efforts people made to connect with one another even during the bleak and frightening days in which New York City was the pandemic’s epicenter, with all its attendant horrors.
Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, book critic, and author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers.
Mara is a single mother of two in Minnesota. She and her family have depended on SNAP benefits to make ends meet.
Caroline Yang for NPR
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Caroline Yang for NPR
Although Mara is unemployed, she is busier than ever.
When she is not taking care of her two children, Mara is at her desk applying for jobs. She is surveying her belongings to see what she can pawn off to buy toiletries. Or she is sifting through bills, calculating which ones can wait and which need to be paid right away.
Soon, Mara, a single mom in Minnesota, may have another task on her busy schedule: figuring out how to afford food for her and her family.
That’s because of new work requirements for people receiving aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps.
“It would be so beyond hard” to lose SNAP benefits, Mara said. “Without SNAP, there’s no funds for food.” Mara asked for her last name to be withheld given the stigma tied to receiving government assistance. She is also worried that speaking publicly will affect her chances of getting a job.
Previously, SNAP recipients with children under 18 were exempt from work requirements mandating that recipients work, volunteer or participate in job training at least 80 hours a month. But now, under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that exemption only applies to those with children under 14 — which is how old Mara’s youngest child turned in December.
“It would be so beyond hard” to lose SNAP benefits, Mara said.
Caroline Yang for NPR
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Caroline Yang for NPR
The Trump administration has argued that the mission of the nation’s largest anti-hunger program has failed.
“SNAP was intended to be temporary help for those who encounter tough times. Now, it’s become so bloated that it is leaving fewer resources for those who truly need help,” the White House said in a statement in June.
But policy experts say the SNAP changes do not fully take into account the unique challenges faced by single parents like Mara or the sluggish job market in many parts of the country. They argue that losing food assistance will only create more barriers for recipients struggling to find work.
The timeline for implementing the new SNAP policy varies based on state and county. In Mara’s home state of Minnesota, recipients who don’t qualify for an exemption or meet work requirements will be at risk of losing assistance as early as April 1. Others may have more months depending on when they next need to certify they are eligible for benefits.
Over 100 job applications
Mara imagined she would have a job by now.
It was August when she was let go from her part-time administrative assistant role due to her workplace restructuring. Since then, Mara estimates that she has applied for over 100 positions. She has also attended job fairs and taken free workshops on resume writing.
She has been working since high school, she said, but “ I’ve never been out of work for more than one month, so it’s very difficult.”
Mara spends time working at the computer at CareerForce, a resource for job seekers in Minnesota, on March 4.
Caroline Yang for NPR
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Caroline Yang for NPR
Although she misses her old job, Mara said it didn’t pay enough to support her and her kids, so she relied on SNAP benefits.
Many recipients are part of the low-wage labor market, where job security is often unpredictable and turnover tends to be high, according to Lauren Bauer, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who has studied SNAP extensively.
“SNAP is supposed to be there to help people smooth that and not let the bottom fall out when they experience job loss,” she said. “And this policy doesn’t account for that at all.”
Mara’s lowest point came in November when the government shutdown led to disruptions in SNAP benefits. Not only was she searching for a new job, but she was constantly figuring out where to get her family’s next meal.
“I might be looking for food stuff during the day when I should have been looking for a job,” she said. “Then, I’m trying to make up that time in the evening after my kids go to bed.”
During the pause, Mara turned to food banks, which revealed other challenges. First, food pantries do not always provide enough for an adult and two growing teenagers, she said. Second, they often lack gluten-free foods, which is essential for her daughter who has celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes digestive problems if gluten is consumed. Gluten-free products tend to be more expensive.
If Mara loses access to SNAP again because of the new work requirements, she fears another stretch of long days spent looking for the right food and enough to feed her family.
“I would be so reliant on looking for food shelves or food banks,” she said. “There would not be time to even live.”
“We’re going to see increases in poverty. We’re going to see increases in food insecurity”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that roughly 2.4 million people will lose food benefits in a typical month over the next decade as a result of the new SNAP requirements — including 300,000 parents like Mara with children 14 or older.
Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, says many of the affected recipients will be single mothers who make up a majority of single parent households in the U.S. She added that the changes target a group that often lacks or struggles to afford a support system to help care for their children.
“How can they have a full-time job when they need to pick up their children [for] various activities?” she said. “And they are working — just not enough hours because they need to be there present for their children.”
Mara shops for groceries at a local discount grocery store.
Caroline Yang for NPR
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Caroline Yang for NPR
The new law also imposes work requirements on veterans, homeless people, young adults aging out of foster care, and able-bodied adults without dependents from ages 55 to 64.
It also toughened the criteria for waiving work requirements for recipients in areas with high unemployment. Previously, there were multiple ways to determine a weak labor market and secure a waiver. Now, it only applies to places with an unemployment rate above 10%. (Alaska and Hawaii have a different measure.)
For those who fail to meet the work requirement, SNAP provides assistance for up to three months within a three-year span. But Bauer from the Brookings Institution argues that it is not enough and the impact of SNAP changes will be widespread.
“We’re going to see increases in poverty. We’re going to see increases in food insecurity. We’re going to see increasing strain on the charitable food sector,” she said.
Mara holds her favorite anchor ring, which carries the inscription, “God for me provide thee.”
Caroline Yang for NPR
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Caroline Yang for NPR
As anxiety hangs over her head, Mara tries to put on a brave face for her children. She does not want them to worry, explaining that her recent struggles have reminded her how tough life can get as an adult.
“I remind them it’s not their responsibility and they’re not accountable for me or for what’s happening,” she said. “I say, just know you get to be a kid.”
Dylan Dreyer
Savannah Will Likely Come Back … Just Not Sure When
Published
TMZ.com
Dylan Dreyer is giving a small update on her embattled “Today” co-host, Savannah Guthrie, as the search continues for Savannah’s mom, Nancy — telling TMZ she does believe she’ll likely return to the show at some point.
We caught Dylan leaving NBC Tuesday afternoon, and she said while she thinks Savannah will come back, the timing is totally unclear — adding everyone at the show is simply giving her the space she needs because they care about her so much.
TMZ.com
Dylan also reflected on Savannah’s emotional visit to the “TODAY” studio last Thursday, saying the hug they shared was something they both really needed in that moment.
Catch the full clip — Dylan says the visit was incredibly emotional, adding Savannah clearly wants to get back to some sense of normal life … she just doesn’t quite know how yet.
Still, Savannah managed a few smiles during the brief stop by the studio, doing her best to keep moving forward during an incredibly tough time.
TMZ.com
As we reported, Nancy was taken from her Tucson home in the middle of the night on February 1. She was last seen entering the house just before 10 PM on January 31 after dinner with her daughter Annie and Annie’s husband, Tommaso Cioni.
Kevin Kline plays actor Richard Bean, and Laura Linney is his sister-in-law Kristen, in American Classic.
David Giesbrecht/MGM+
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David Giesbrecht/MGM+
American Classic is a hidden gem, in more ways than one. It’s hidden because it’s on MGM+, a stand-alone streaming service that, let’s face it, most people don’t have. But MGM+ is available without subscription for a seven-day free trial, on its website or through Prime Video and Roku. And you should find and watch American Classic, because it’s an absolutely charming and wonderful TV jewel.
Charming, in the way it brings small towns and ordinary people to life, as in Northern Exposure. Wonderful, in the way it reflects the joys of local theater productions, as in Slings & Arrows, and the American Playhouse production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Who Am I This Time?
The creators of American Classic are Michael Hoffman and Bob Martin. Martin co-wrote and co-created Slings & Arrows, so that comparison comes easily. And back in the early 1980s, Who Am I This Time? was about people who transformed onstage from ordinary citizens into extraordinary performers. It’s a conceit that works only if you have brilliant actors to bring it to life convincingly. That American Playhouse production had two young actors — Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon — so yes, it worked. And American Classic, with its mix of veteran and young actors, does, too.
American Classic begins with Kevin Kline, as Shakespearean actor Richard Bean, confronting a New York Times drama critic about his negative opening-night review of Richard’s King Lear. The next day, Richard’s agent, played by Tony Shalhoub, calls Richard in to tell him his tantrum was captured by cellphone and went viral, and that he has to lay low for a while.
Richard returns home to the small town of Millersburg, Pa., where his parents ran a local theater. Almost everyone we meet is a treasure. His father, who has bouts of dementia, is played by Len Cariou, who starred on Broadway in Sweeney Todd. Richard’s brother, Jon, is played by Jon Tenney of The Closer, and his wife, Kristen, is played by the great Laura Linney, from Ozark and John Adams.
Things get even more complicated because the old theater is now a dinner theater, filling its schedule with performances by touring regional companies. Its survival is at risk, so Richard decides to save the theater by mounting a new production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, casting the local small-town residents to play … local small-town residents.
Miranda, Richard’s college-bound niece, continues the family theatrical tradition — and Nell Verlaque, the young actress who plays her, has a breakout role here. She’s terrific — funny, touching, totally natural. And when she takes the stage as Emily in Our Town, she’s heart-wrenching. Playwright Wilder is served magnificently here — and so is William Shakespeare, whose works and words Kline tackles in more than one inspirational scene in this series.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the conflicts, and surprises, in American Classic, but please trust me: The more episodes you watch, the better it gets. The characters evolve, and go in unexpected directions and pairings. Kline’s Richard starts out thinking about only himself, but ends up just the opposite. And if, as Shakespeare wrote, the play’s the thing, the thing here is, the plays we see, and the soliloquies we hear, are spellbinding.
And there’s plenty of fun to be had outside the classics in American Classic. The table reads are the most delightful since the ones in Only Murders in the Building. The dinner-table arguments are the most explosive since the ones in The Bear. Some scenes are take-your-breath-away dramatic. Others are infectiously silly, as when Richard works with a cast member forced upon him by the angel of this new Our Town production.
Take the effort to find, and watch, American Classic. It’ll remind you why, when it’s this good, it’s easy to love the theater. And television.
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