The New Yorker Radio Hour

This week, Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, ignored the advice of his own health minister, and went for a walk in the capitol, declaring “We’ll all die one day.” Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist elected to the Presidency in 2018, is known for flouting conventional wisdom. He is especially cavalier about the environment. Several weeks ago, he introduced a bill to allow commercial mining on protected indigenous lands in the Amazon. Jon Lee Anderson, a New Yorker staff writer, recently returned from Brazil, where he was reporting on the effects of these exploitative practices on one indigenous group in particular, the Kayapo. He says that Bolsonaro’s mining bill, like so many of his more radical policies, will have effects that are almost impossible to predict. “The indigenous people are the last defense for some of the world’s last wilderness areas. Its habitats, its ecosystems, the animals that live within it, the medicinal plants that we have yet to even know exist—the indigenous people turn out to be the final custodians,” Anderson says. “And, in some tragic cases, they are also the handmaidens to their own destruction. And it’s always been that way, and that’s what people like Bolsonaro understand.”   Audio used from the video of the late Chief Mro’o’s was produced by Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist at the Goeldi Museum, in Brazil. Additional music by Filipe Duarte.

Despite the warnings of politicians and health-care professionals, many have failed to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a serious threat: the spring breakers on beaches, the crowds in city parks. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning expert on human behavior, speaks with Maria Konnikova about why the threat posed by COVID-19 defies intuitive comprehension. “There should be clear guidelines and clear instructions. We all ought to know whether we should open our Amazon packages outside the door or bring them in,” Kahneman said. “It’s not a decision individuals should consider making on the basis of what they know, because they don’t know enough to make it.” Plus: the story of a nine-hour virtual party that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees—including Rihanna, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Drake.

An old Alcoholics Anonymous slogan goes, “ Seven days without an A.A. meeting makes one weak.” But COVID -19 has made in-person meetings impossible in many situations, removing the foundation on which many alcoholics build their sobriety. Reagan Reed, the executive director of the New York Intergroup Association of Alcoholics Anonymous and a member of A.A., has watched as nearly a thousand regular meetings across the state have been cancelled. Earlier this month, she made the difficult decision to close the organization’s central office. The Radio Hour’s Rhiannon Corby spoke with Reed about the challenges of staying sober in a tumultuous time, and how A.A. continues to help people in recovery. Plus: social distancing remains the best way to contain the coronavirus, but many are starting to feel the emotional toll of constant isolation. David Remnick called Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker , in search of a few things to help lift our spirits.

Across the country, doctors and nurses are being forced to care for an increasing number of COVID patients with dwindling supplies and no clear end to the outbreak in sight. Two emergency-room doctors, Jessica van Voorhees, in New York City, and Sana Jaffri, in Washington State, describe the scope of the crisis as seen from their hospitals. “It would be typical in a twelve-hour shift to intubate one patient who is critically ill, maybe two,” Dr. Voorhees says. “The last shift I worked, I intubated ten patients in twelve hours.” Plus: it’s been just over a month since Donald Trump gave his first public statement about the coronavirus—saying, in essence, that the virus did not pose a substantial threat to the United States. Why did he so dramatically underplay the risks of COVID -19? “With Trump, sometimes the answer is pretty transparent,” Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, told David Remnick, “and, in this case, I think the answer is pretty transparent. He didn’t want anything to interrupt his reëlection campaign plan, which entirely hinged on the strength of the U.S. economy.”

As the coronavirus pandemic brings the country to a standstill, David Remnick and New Yorker writers examine the scope of the damage—emotional, physical, and economic. Remnick speaks with a medical ethicist about the painful decisions that medical workers must make when ventilators and hospital beds run out; John Cassidy assesses how the economic damage will compare to the Great Depression; and an E.R. doctor describes her fear for her safety in treating the onslaught of COVID -19 without adequate supplies.