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May 6, 2021 - More than 100 national, state, and local advocacy groups will launch a mobilization Saturday to counteract the Republican Party's systematic dismantling of the United States' democracy, calling on supporters to help fight for legislation aimed at protecting the right to vote.

At the John Lewis National Day of Action, groups including Public Citizen, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Common Cause plan to "ignite public support for restoring the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act and address one of the greatest obstacles to the passage of civil and voting rights—and one of the last vestiges of slavery—the filibuster!"

The event will include at least "100 Covid-19 safe votercades in 100 different cities" across the country—presidential-style motorcades of voters aimed at raising awareness "on the urgent need to protect our voting rights and our democracy," the organizers said.

The groups urged supporters to "get into good trouble," by participating in the action, quoting the late voting rights activist Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). Lewis was arrested dozens of times for civil disobedience before his death in 2020—notably while marching for African Americans' voting rights in Alabama in 1965.

Organizations including When We All Vote joined the call for people all over the country to participate in the day of action in their cities. 

The day of action aims to mobilize support for civil rights legislation including:

Advocates also want to address the issue of the filibuster, which was used to block civil rights legislation in the Jim Crow era and which Republicans plan to use to block pro-democracy reforms in the current congressional session.

The day of action comes as Republican legislatures in states across the country are working to dismantle voting protections and suppress the right to vote. Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced 361 voter suppression bills, and at least five restrictive proposals have been signed into law, including Florida's S.B. 90, which was signed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday.  

"Together, we can build a better democracy," said organizers of the day of action. ...Read More

The question that arises objectively is that of the relationship between socio-economic issues of class and the struggles for human rights, solidarity with refugees, democracy, gender equality and the ecological transformation of our civilization. ...Read More

May 2021 - Wesley Barnett was just as surprised as anyone to learn from news reports that the Jan. 6 Trump rally that turned into a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol was funded by Julia Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the fortune of the popular Publix supermarket chain. But Barnett had extra cause for being startled: Fancelli is his aunt.

Barnett said he was at a loss to explain how his aunt — who isn’t on social media, lives part time in Italy and keeps a low profile in their central Florida town — got mixed up with the likes of Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, the right-wing provocateurs who were VIPs at the Jan. 6 rally in front of the White House.

Over the last five years, it has become clear that former President Donald Trump has activated a new set of mega-donors who were not previously big spenders in national politics. Some of the donors appear to share the more extreme views of many Trump supporters, based on social media posts promoting falsehoods about election fraud or masks and vaccines. Whether they will deepen their involvement or step back, and whether their giving will extend to candidates beyond Trump, will have an outsized role in steering the future of the Republican Party and even American democracy.

ProPublica identified 29 people and couples who increased their political contributions at least tenfold since 2015, based on an analysis of Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The donors in the table below gave at least $1 million to Trump and the GOP after previously having spent less than $1 million total. Most of the donations went to super PACs supporting Trump or to the Trump Victory joint fundraising vehicle that spread the money among his campaign and party committees.

These donors each contributed more than $1 million to Trump and other Republicans since 2015, at least a tenfold increase from their prior political giving. The names of both people in a couple are shown if they each donated in their own names; the description applies to the first person named unless otherwise stated.

In the current system of porous campaign finance rules and lax enforcement, a handful of ultra-rich people can have a dramatic influence on national campaigns. Many of Trump’s biggest backers, such as the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, or the Illinois packaging tycoons Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, aren’t shown in ProPublica’s analysis because they gave millions to Republicans even before Trump. But several of the biggest new donors — banking scion Timothy Mellon and his wife, Patricia; Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter and his wife, Laura; and Dallas pipeline billionaire Kelcy Warren and his wife, Amy — now rank among such better-known, longer-running donors as Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, professional wrestling founders Linda and Vince McMahon, and casino mogul Steve Wynn.

For some new donors, the sudden increase in their political contributions may have as much to do with newly acquired wealth as with the ascent of Trump and his grip on the Republican Party. But others inherited fortunes or made them long ago, yet never made a splash in campaign finance records until now. Several of the donors have not spoken publicly about their support for Trump or have not been extensively covered before. ProPublica requested interviews with everyone named in this article and included comments from those who responded.

“Things are diametrically different from when Trump was in office,” Marlyne Sexton, who has given more than $2 million since 2015 after giving less than $115,000 before, said in a phone interview. Sexton, whose husband runs an Indianapolis-based property management company, attended a dinner with Trump in 2019, Politico reported.

“People are afraid to walk down the street, it’s a joke,” Sexton continued. Asked why people were afraid, she said, “You can answer that for yourself, and if you can’t then we probably don’t agree. I can’t help you understand that.”

In addition to pledging $300,000 to fund the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, Julia Fancelli actually had a hotel suite reserved, according to organizers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But in the end she did not attend, according to Caroline Wren, a Trump fundraiser involved in the planning. ...Read More

May 6, 3021 - “The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see,” declares Apollo Robbins, the world’s most famous theatrical pickpocket. “The things you look at every day, that you’re blinded to.”

As he says these words, he’s standing on stage at a TED conference in 2013. He invites the audience to close their eyes, then to try to recall what he’s wearing. It’s not easy. We imagine that we would have filed all those details away, after a couple of minutes of looking at him speaking. And indeed we could have done. But we didn’t. When we open our eyes we see he’s wearing a dark waistcoat and jacket, a striped tie and a dark purple shirt.

Robbins ambles into the audience, finding a volunteer — Joe — and leading him on stage. For the next three minutes, Robbins proceeds to bewilder Joe. He announces that he’s trying to steal Joe’s watch, but then asks Joe to check his pockets. In that instant of distraction, the watch is gone. It reappears a moment later on Robbins’s wrist.

Robbins’s larcenous skills are legendary — he once stole actress Jennifer Garner’s engagement ring, and the badges of Jimmy Carter’s secret service bodyguards. Poor Joe didn’t stand a chance.

But it is the final flourish of this talk that is most intriguing. After sending Joe back to the audience, Robbins asks everyone, this time keeping their eyes open, what he is wearing. He has been in plain view of a thousand people the whole time — quite literally in the spotlight. And yet somehow the shirt is now pale and checked, not plain and dark. The tie and waistcoat have gone.

As he says: often the hardest things to see are right in front of us.

It’s difficult for any of us not to be fascinated by Robbins’s skill and particularly by that final act of stagecraft. But for me, after more than a decade dabbling in the field of factchecking and fighting misinformation, there was an important truth in the disappearance of the waistcoat: we pay less attention than we think.

Why do people — and by “people” I mean “you and I” — accept and spread misinformation? The two obvious explanations are both disheartening.

The first is that we are incapable of telling the difference between truth and lies. In this view, politicians and other opinion-formers are such skilled deceivers that we are helpless, or the issues are so complex that they defy understanding, or we lack basic numeracy and critical-thinking skills.

The second explanation is that we know the difference and we don’t care. In order to stick close to our political tribe, we reach the conclusions we want to reach.

There is truth in both these explanations. But is there a third account of how we think about the claims we see in the news and on social media — an account that, ironically, has received far too little attention? That account centers on attention itself: it suggests that we fail to distinguish truth from lies not because we can’t and not because we won’t, but because — as with Robbins’s waistcoat — we are simply not giving the matter our focus.

What makes the problem worse is our intuitive overconfidence that we will notice what matters, even if we don’t focus closely. If so, the most insidious and underrated problem in our information ecosystem is that we do not give the right kind of attention to the right things at the right time. We are not paying enough attention to what holds our attention.

The art of stage magic allows us to approach this idea from an unusual angle: Gustav Kuhn’s recent book, Experiencing the Impossible, discusses the psychology of magic tricks. “All magic can be explained through misdirection alone,” writes Kuhn, a psychologist who runs the Magic Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Such a strong claim is debatable, but what is beyond debate is that the control and manipulation of attention are central to stage magic. They are also central to understanding misinformation. The Venn diagram of misinformation, misdirection and magic has overlaps with which to conjure.

Consider the following headline, a false claim that circulated online in 2018:

“President Trump Readies Deportation of Melania After Huge Fight At White House”.

It was among 36 headlines which were shown to a thousand experimental participants in a study conducted by psychologists Gordon Pennycook, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh and others, and published recently in the scientific journal Nature. Half of the headlines were true and half false, some favoring narratives from the political right and some from the left. ...Read More

April 12, 2021 - A video clip showing a woman hitting a government official with a mop went viral on Chinese social media Sunday, sparking renewed discussion about the country’s epidemic of workplace sexual harassment.

In the 14-minute video, a woman grabs a mop, rushes into a man’s office, and proceeds to whack him over the head while furiously accusing him of sending her unwanted lewd messages. The man passively accepts the beating, repeatedly apologizing and begging the woman’s forgiveness.

“It was meant to be a joke!” the man says, covering his face with his hands. “Oh my God, I didn’t expect this would happen!”

A GIF shows Wang whacking her abusive boss over the head with a mop. From Weibo

According to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the man in the video, surnamed Wang, works as a district-level deputy director of poverty alleviation in Suihua, a city in the northeastern Heilongjiang province. The woman, surnamed Zhou, reportedly works for the same bureau.

Officials from the district’s publicity department told Xinhua the man had been dismissed for violating Communist Party regulations. The woman had also violated the law but would not be punished due to her “mental illness,” the officials added, without elaborating.

An employee at the district’s poverty alleviation office told Sixth Tone on Monday afternoon that staff were unavailable for interviews as they were attending a meeting. Whether the meeting was related to the video is unclear.

Police in Suihua said they received a sexual harassment report from Zhou four days ago that they were still investigating, according to domestic media.

Online, Zhou has received an outpouring of support for her actions, with some commentators arguing that women should learn from her zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment. On China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo, a hashtag related to the video had been viewed over 14 million times as of Monday evening.

“Girls should learn from this woman’s great fearlessness to fight against the unspoken rules (in the workplace),” one blogger wrote in an article for social platform WeChat. “If you encounter such unspoken rules again, you must bravely raise the mop and hit the boss.”

Workplace sexual harassment is a common problem in China, where few employers have implemented policies to protect victims.

In January, the country implemented a new civil code stating for the first time that schools and workplaces are responsible for curbing sexual harassment, though the law doesn’t specify punishments for perpetrators.

Last month, the southern city of Shenzhen released China’s first guide to preventing sexual harassment in schools and workplaces.

Additional reporting: Chen Qi’an; editor: Dominic Morgan. ...Read More

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May 6, 2021 - Growing up as an African-American kid in Braddock, Ali R. Abdullah didn’t think too much about Islam. He had an Arabic name, and he didn’t eat pork. That was about the extent of it. 

On our Zoom call, Abdullah laughs, but he’s clearly pointing to something serious, something missing from his upbringing. Now 47, he’s the disability compliance administrator for the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh and also the father of six kids. The “R.” in his name is important: it helps distinguish him from his father, also Ali Abdullah, who was Braddock’s first African-American mayor.

By the time Abdullah was an adult, that thin take on his Muslim identity felt less satisfying. 

“Imagine going through your life and only knowing one aspect of yourself,” he said. Learning about Blackness was hard enough. Learning about Islam felt near impossible. “It was like a dark hole to my life.”

As a young adult, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He took a class in Arabic, became a regular at the masjid or mosque and listened to a lot of Black Muslim hip-hop artists. 

He also studied the history of slavery. To his surprise, he realized some 10 to 30% of enslaved Africans in the United States were originally Muslim until nearly all were forced to convert to Christianity.

“It just brought everything home,” he said. The seemingly disparate pieces of his identity — his race, his religion — actually fit together in a coherent story. That story had just been stamped out by racial and religious oppression.

At the same time, Abdullah began uncovering details of a second moment in Black Muslim history — a moment in which Pittsburgh played a key role. 

Abdullah’s introduction to that history began with his own grandfather, Ibrahim Alamed Deen.

Ibrahim Alamed Deen, then Leonard Fluker, was no more than 13 years old when he left Alabama for Pittsburgh with his mother and sister. It was the early 1920s. His father had left them, and, facing the realities of Klan violence and discrimination in the South, his mother decided to move the family north. They became part of the mass movement of Black Americans known as the Great Migration. Soon after they arrived, his mother died, leaving him and his sister to fend for themselves in a city they hardly knew.

Many people would have crumbled under the pressure. But Ibrahim Deen was no ordinary figure. His curiosity was insatiable. Once he set his mind to learning something, not much was going to stop him.

Listen to the From the Source podcast episode: Pittsburgh’s Black Muslim history uncovered

That curiosity may help explain his conversion to Islam, which is otherwise something of a mystery. Possibly he and his sister learned about Islam through an organization like the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which taught pan-African unity and celebrated African history. In any case, by age 14, Deen was dabbling in several pseudo-Muslim sects. Within a decade, he would identify as Sunni Muslim, an orthodox tradition.

Islam wasn’t an easy faith to access at the time. Most Islamic texts of the era were written in Arabic. But Deen was determined. He taught himself the language. He attended lectures when visiting scholars came to town. He began to study under Dr. Yusef Khan, an Ahmadi Muslim scholar from India who took on several Black American students and trained them to be local community leaders and ambassadors to other cities. 

Deen’s advanced learning made him invaluable in Pittsburgh’s growing Muslim community. There had been Black Muslims in Pittsburgh since at least the early 1900s. (Some tombstones of the era bear traditional Black Islamic names, names also scratched on the walls of slave ships from the Middle Passage.) Yet, prior to the 1930s, most Black Muslim activity in Pittsburgh was decentralized: a person here, a small group there. 

Through Deen’s and others’ leadership, these individuals began to organize. 

In the early 1930s, Pittsburghers established one of the first Black-supported mosques in the United States: al-Masjid al-Awwal, or the First Muslim Mosque. Although it wouldn’t acquire its name and charter until 1945, by 1934, the community already had more than 1,000 members.

As for Deen, Islam afforded him opportunities he never would have imagined, growing up in the South. The people in his community came to call him Sheikh Deen, an honorific title usually reserved for Muslim religious scholars. He networked with religious leaders in New York, Cleveland, New Jersey and Chicago. He ate new foods from multiple cultures. In the 1970s, he made the Umrah, a holy pilgrimage to Mecca. 

Through it all, Pittsburgh offered a hub of intellectual, spiritual and social energy.

The city was a refuge, said Sarah Jameela Martin, a local historian of Black Islam. It had a reputation. Black Muslims in the early 1900s would come there looking to be part of its pioneering community.

Years after Ibrahim Deen died, his spouse Maneera Deen wrote a memoir about her family’s experiences.

Born Adelaide Douglas to a conservative Christian household, Maneera Deen had no obvious reason to convert to Islam. It was socially taboo. It would create tension in her family. It would make her a “double minority,” an “other within an other.” 

Yet she still made the decision. In the memoir, she chronicles her own leadership in Pittsburgh’s early Muslim community: her volunteer work with the Red Crescent Club, a Muslim charity, for example, and her role hosting prayer groups in her home. 

Abdullah turns the pages of the handwritten memoir carefully. Perhaps, he speculates, looking at the faded writing, her turn to Islam felt more like a return, a “natural migration” to an ancestral place. 

Then again, he admits, perhaps that’s just a projection of his own convictions.

Today, almost a century after Ibrahim Deen arrived in Pittsburgh, Abdullah is the founder and director of the Islamic Historical Society of North America, an online community dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of Black Islam, especially its orthodox varieties. In the 1950s and 60s, Malcolm X and Muhammed Ali helped popularize the Nation of Islam, a militant Black nationalist movement that has since, sometimes, been designated a supremacist group. Abdullah senses the Nation’s prominence in the public eye overshadows orthodox Black Islam’s longer, more complex history. He wishes to recover that other story.

His current project is a digital archive of family photographs. His dream project? A physical museum dedicated to preserving Pittsburgh’s early Black Muslim history.

He hopes his work as a historian lends visibility to stories that need to be heard.

Knowledge shouldn’t just be theoretical, he said. “Hopefully it can benefit people in a constructive way.”

To learn more about Ali R. Abdullah’s story, check out PublicSource’s podcast From the Source. In the episode “Pittsburgh’s Black Muslim history uncovered,” host Jourdan Hicks and Abdullah discuss his experiences as an African-American Muslim man in Pittsburgh and whose versions of Pittsburgh history get told.

Chris Hedlin is PublicSource’s faith and religion reporter. She can be reached at [email protected]. ...Read More

Tune of the Week: Larkin Poe 'Black Betty'

The start of Joe Biden’s presidency has prompted an unlikely reassessment of the direction of American capitalism. Announcing a “paradigm shift” away from a policy regime that for decades has ruthlessly favored the very wealthy, Biden has invoked the New Deal to capture his vision for activist government. Alongside the expansion of the welfare state, he has promised an ambitious developmental agenda that links together infrastructure, industrial policy, and an energy transition to fight climate change. Though Biden’s resolve to execute his vision remains untested, the prospects for aggressive state intervention now seem far greater than during the Great Recession, when austerity quickly became a transatlantic phenomenon.

A central question for Biden’s new economic agenda is how exactly government can induce capital to work on behalf of public welfare.

The most salient difference between then and now is that Biden has identified long-term investment as critical to the very preservation of democracy. Breaking from the neoliberal economists who held sway over Democratic policymaking for a generation, Biden’s vision is also a quiet disavowal of Hillary Clinton’s boast three years ago that, despite losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, she “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product”—the parts of the country “that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” The pandemic has only further illustrated how even the country’s most prosperous cities, once the drivers of growth in the age of globalization, are in acute need of state-led projects and egalitarian distribution.

A central question for this new era of U.S. political economy is how exactly government can induce capital to work on behalf of public welfare. If capital is predisposed to liquidity, how do political agents steer it toward investment? In his prodigious new book Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy illustrates the historical conditions under which just such direction has been possible, arguing that the long arcs of transformative development in U.S. history have never spontaneously arisen from the market. “What separates the ages of American capitalism . . . are not strictly economic variables but rather political initiatives,” Levy writes. He shows how statesmen have always steered the course of U.S. capitalism, with stark implications for inequality, social mobility, ideas of citizenship, and popular views of the responsibilities of government and business.

The book is divided into four sections: “The Age of Commerce (1660–1860),” “The Age of Capital (1860–1932),” “The Age of Control (1932–1980),” and “The Age of Chaos (1980–).” Across each Levy pursues three theses. First is that capital is not so much a thing, a “physical factor of production,” as a “process”—investment based on expectations of future profit. Second is that the “profit motive” itself “has never been enough to drive economic history, not even the history of capitalism.” And third is that “the history of capitalism is a never-ending conflict between the short-term propensity to hoard and the long-term ability and inducement to invest.” Levy covers a wide range of technical ground—from the tensions between monetary and fiscal policies and the consequences of deflation and inflation, to the growing complexities of globalized finance and the contemporary primacy of the Federal Reserve—but the book also doubles as a vivid social and geopolitical history. Indeed, as he writes in the introduction, “today mainstream economics follows a path of great mathematical rigor that . . . does not make much room for other accounts of economic life.” Instead, Levy argues for “the rightful place of historical analysis in economics, and for a broader vision of what the economy is.”

In his survey of the evolving topographies of economic development and the political coalitions that drove them, Levy foregrounds the country’s two great, yet deeply flawed, developmental coalitions: the industrializing Republican coalition of the nineteenth century and the New Deal coalition in the twentieth. It is through these coalitions that U.S. capital most prioritized illiquid investments, spurring advances in infrastructure and technology that eventually integrated a national, consumerist economy. Though the book is about much more than these coalitions, their example strongly underpins its central argument about the role of political agency in shaping economic affairs.

Levy argues that the long arcs of transformative development in U.S. history have never spontaneously arisen from the market.

Perhaps above all, these coalitions help us think clearly about the historical trajectory of the United States as a developing country, demonstrating that economic progress—sometimes with more democracy, sometimes with much less—has depended on the compromises and cross-class alignments that political actors have brokered in the pursuit of statecraft and national power. Economists and economic historians will have their say about the book’s interventions in technical debates. But given Biden’s efforts to signal a decisive shift away from neoliberalism, it is also instructive to examine the triumphs—and the failures—of these coalitions at the heart of Levy’s history.

Many of the features that would shape these two great periods of U.S. economic expansion—including stark regional divisions and competing interpretations of economic freedom—emerged in the colonial period of preindustrial development, Levy shows. The book begins with the origins of English mercantilism in the late seventeenth century, which for Levy exemplifies “the paradox that state authority should encourage the wealth-generating capacities of private commerce yet still restrain commercial self-interest—a dangerous impulse that threatened moral and political order.” The contest between freedom and social obligation that shapes the long course of U.S. political thought ultimately derives, Levy argues, from this central paradox.

Initially, the English state intended the colonies to serve as “vents” for England’s surplus manufacture and population—creating, in effect, foreign demand while curbing domestic unemployment—and to supply some raw materials to the metropole. But New England colonists defied restrictions on local manufacture, accelerating the growth of an English bureaucracy that tried to keep pace with colonies intent on asserting political control over their own economic development. For a time the metropole assumed a more pragmatic approach, and with the Bank of England propelling commercial investment, the basis for intra-empire free trade was laid. Thus, Levy argues, the intellectual and practical foundations for “exponential capitalist economic growth” were established. At the same time, Levy emphasizes that “in large measure, the Age of Commerce in North America began with the English imperial commitment to black slavery.”

That commitment was not “fated,” Levy writes. Slavery’s dramatic expansion began with a “choice made by England’s rulers” to deter emigration once England’s population began to decline. In place of migration, the work of colonization would now be achieved through slavery. “By the middle of the eighteenth century,” Levy notes, “commodities produced by black slaves accounted for 80 percent of all colonial American commodities exported back to the home country.” After 1689 the slave trade had been opened up to all Englishmen, foreshadowing the Herrenvolk democracy of the early U.S. republic. Yet slavery’s higher concentration in the South also set the stage for divergent paths of regional development that would exacerbate sectionalism in the late antebellum era. ...Read More

APRIL 29, 2021 - After all the accusations, conspiracy theories and general misinformation regarding the origins of the coronavirus in China, the sensitive, humanistic Wuhan Wuhan does a fine job depoliticizing the topic. It shows how the Chinese response to the virus outbreak was very similar to those in hospitals around the world, though its interest for viewers, perhaps, lies in ferreting out some of the minor differences.

Directed by Yung Chang, a Chinese Canadian who is well known on the festival circuit for films like Up the Yangtze and China Heavyweight, and produced by a team that includes Donna Gigliotti, the film is bowing at Hot Docs, where its topicality is bound to stir interest, even though its uncontroversial approach can only take it so far.

The eerily deserted streets and highways of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, set the scene for a series of character sketches that are interlaced throughout the film. The time is February 2020, “two months into lockdown.” Yung Chang and his video crew appear to have had special access to the city’s residents and hospitals at the height of the outbreak, bringing to life a lot of the anecdotal evidence we have seen in news reports. Ignoring the question of whether the virus originated in Wuhan’s wet markets, he focuses on how local medical personnel and selfless volunteers from other provinces came together for a mission as heroic as it is deadly.

Those who have followed the COVID-19 news in this life-changing year — and who hasn’t? — will recognize how utterly typical the hospital scenes are, paralleling similar scenarios from San Francisco to Milan. There are doctors and nurses scrambling for PPE who disappear behind hazmat suits, masks and goggles and write their names and pin pictures of themselves to their chests so the patients can recognize them. There is a former convention center converted into a 2,000-bed “Fangcang” field hospital filled with real, suffering patients whose faces are not blurred out. And there are flowers and prayers on the pavement outside for Dr. Li Wenliang, the medic whose early warnings about the deadly virus were hushed up by the Chinese government until matters were out of control. But this salute to the courageous doctor is a blip in an upbeat doc determined to avoid all manner of controversy.

The most engaging of several personal stories is that of a young couple of out-of-towners, Yin and his nervous wife Xu. She is very pregnant and very fretful, worried about Yin’s job as a volunteer driver ferrying medical personnel to hospitals. (We are worried about how she is ever going to deliver the baby. But she does, in a scene of startling candor.) Although Yin wears full PPE and has no direct contact with his riders in the back seat, the risk he runs is evident. A small crisis arises when he has to hunt for a baby crib and can’t find one. Small stuff, maybe, but it comes across as genuine.

Other characters are too briefly delineated to care much about. A mother and her son count the days until they can go home from the huge field hospital. A stern psychologist is shown offering emotional support to traumatized COVID patients, while back home her own father is dying of cancer. An ER chief and a nurse staying in a special hotel talk to their families every night on video calls; they look like they could use counseling, too. The drama of these situations is never pushed to tragic lengths, making for far fewer tears than some TV news reports provoke.

Without sensationalism, Wuhan Wuhan makes its quiet mark through its natural approach to a culture where people appear not to rebel against the strict government lockdown. On the contrary, the heroism of volunteers like factory worker Yin, who insists he drives long hours in a hazmat suit to stave off boredom, seems motivated by a concern for the collective that far exceeds Western values. The film makes you weigh and ponder such things.

Though it was shot by a team of videographers, the production quality is evident, particularly in the interludes of Yin driving around the vast city of linked highways, past the startling architecture of endless apartment blocks and other snapshots of city life. The Wuhan-based rock band Hualun adds a great deal with its unpredictable modern soundtrack mixed at low volume, which guides without getting in the way. ...Read More