Examining the facts and figures of the coronavirus outbreak, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant evaluates the global response in a candid interview with head of TED Chris Anderson. Brilliant lays out a clear plan to end the pandemic — and shows why, to achieve it, we’ll have to work together across political and geographical divides. “This is not the zombie apocalypse; this is not a mass extinction event,” he says. “We need to be the best version of ourselves.” (Recorded April 22, 2020)
Captain Brett Crozier, former commanding officer of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, addresses the crew in San Diego, California, U.S. January 17, 2020. U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Alexander Williams/Handout via REUTERS
By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters)
In an extraordinary reversal, the U.S. Navy has recommended reinstating the fired captain of the coronavirus-hit aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, whose crew hailed him as their hero for risking his job to safeguard their lives, officials said on Friday.
The Navy’s leadership made the recommendation to reinstate Captain Brett Crozier to Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Friday, just three weeks after Crozier was relieved of command after the leak of a letter he wrote calling on the Navy for stronger measures to protect the crew, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon issued a statement acknowledging Esper received the results of the Navy’s preliminary inquiry into the Roosevelt incident. But it added that Esper wanted to review a written copy of the completed inquiry.
Suggesting no decision was imminent, the statement said Esper then “intends to thoroughly review the report and will meet again with Navy leadership to discuss next steps.” The Navy said in a statement “no final decisions have been made.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, a Democrat, called for Crozier’s immediate reinstatement.
“During this time of crisis, Captain Crozier is exactly what our Sailors need: a leader who inspires confidence,” he said.
A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Esper wanted to be sure that the final Navy report would stand up to public scrutiny before signing off and stressed that the Roosevelt outbreak inquiry went far beyond Crozier.
But Esper’s deliberations raised questions about whether political or other considerations might override the Navy’s recommendations in a case that has seen Democrats vocally critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the matter.
Sources say Crozier is one of the 856 sailors from the Roosevelt’s 4,800-member crew who have tested positive for the coronavirus, effectively taking one of the Navy’s most powerful ships out of operation.
Crozier was fired by the Navy’s top civilian, then-acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, against the recommendations of uniformed leaders, who suggested he wait for an investigation into the letter’s leak.
Modly’s decision backfired badly, as members of the crew hailed their captain as a hero in an emotional sendoff captured on video that went viral on social media.
Embarrassed, Modly then compounded his problems by flying out to the carrier to ridicule Crozier over the leak and question his character in a speech to the Roosevelt’s crew, which also leaked to the media. Modly then resigned.
News of the Navy’s recommendations could boost morale among sailors on the Roosevelt, who were caught between the Navy’s desire to keep the ship operational and its duty to shield them from unnecessary risk in peacetime.
“When you are in the military you sign away a lot of your choices and your (ability) to share your opinions about some things,” one sailor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
“It is nice to see that us standing together for this (shows) that our voices matter.”
The disclosure of the Navy’s recommendation, which was first reported by the New York Times, came just hours after the Pentagon announced that at least 18 sailors aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer – the Kidd – had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
It was another blow to the military as it faces fallout over its handling of the Roosevelt, raising additional questions about whether the revamped safeguards in place to protect U.S. troops are sufficient.
The crisis being triggered by the coronavirus is the biggest facing Navy leadership since two crashes in the Asia Pacific region in 2017 that killed 17 sailors.
Those incidents raised questions about Navy training and the pace of operations, prompting a congressional hearing and the removal of a number of officers.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Daniel Wallis)(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2019.
In pondering whether the coronavirus serves as a rite of initiation, Martin Shaw offers five reflections on the agency that rests within opportunity, the alchemy of experience, and the beautiful learning that is being called forth from this moment.
Here we are, millions of us. Little hermit huts bubbling, all over the planet.
It’s a unique moment in our lives. So I’m sharing five little thoughts here…. More at the Link!
EARTH—In a move astronomers are calling “surprising,” the planet earth violently exploded yesterday, shattering into billions of tiny fragments and killing all life existing on it. “From all indications, the planet just spontaneously combusted,” said James Frye of Stanford’s Palomar Observatory. “We’ll know more after we examine soil samples.”
In Hong Kong, the end of the sars epidemic, in 2003, was accompanied by a curious combination of hope and fatigue.Illustration by Wenkai Mao
In the spring of 2003, my family and I were living in Hong Kong, in a colonial-era flat near Victoria Peak, the mountain that dominates the city’s skyline. The previous year, just to the north, a coronavirus had emerged that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or sars. The virus, called sars-CoV, had jumped the species barrier in a market, travelling from bats to civets to people. Its mortality rate was around ten per cent.
Initially, the Chinese government covered up the epidemic, threatening and silencing the physicians who issued warnings. Then, as the infection spread, it imposed a drastic crackdown on all social interaction. The national May Day holiday, when hundreds of millions of people travel around the country on vacation, was cancelled, and the Rolling Stones called off their concerts. Hong Kongers enacted social isolation even before it was ordered, and many expats departed, including my wife and daughters. By March, the city felt deserted. Night clubs were closed, restaurants abandoned, shopping malls desolate. The drive down Kennedy Road to Gloucester Road and then east along Hong Kong Island to my offices in Quarry Bay, usually a half-hour struggle through some of the densest traffic in the world, was now a fleet five minutes.The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.
For those who remember sars firsthand, the unfolding of the current covid-19 pandemic has been eerily familiar. The new coronavirus appears to have spilled over in Hubei Province, a few hundred miles north of Guangdong Province, where sars emerged; China’s decisions—the initial coverup, the cancellation of Lunar New Year celebrations, the rapid, gigantic mobilization—have echoed the past, too. (Its measures appear to be working; as of this writing, the spread of infection in mainland China has slowed dramatically.) Los Angeles, the city where I live now, looks the way Hong Kong did then. On Saturday night, I walked down to Sunset Boulevard, the city’s iconic thoroughfare, and stood in the middle of the street. The signals went from green to red to green again; no cars came. Happy cities may be happy in their own ways, but cities in the grip of disease share a common emptiness.
Hong Kong had been in crisis even before sars. In 1997, Great Britain had handed the city over to China, in an agreement known as One Country, Two Systems. After reunification, Shanghai threatened to become China’s new financial capital, and people in Hong Kong worried that they would soon be living in “just another Chinese city”; its real-estate markets began a precipitous decline, and restrictions on civil liberties threatened its nominal sovereignty. sars felt like a knockout blow to a city already reeling.
I was in Hong Kong because I edited Time Asia, an international edition of the newsweekly with a staff of sixty-two and bureaus around the region. When sars broke out, we couldn’t work from home—the Internet wasn’t good enough. Instead, we watched from our offices as the green-and-white-roofed Star Ferry boats travelled, empty, across Victoria Harbor. Each afternoon, we waited for the Hong Kong Department of Health to release its numbers. We kept a betting pool, guessing how many new cases there would be. The idea was to get close but not go over; an optimist, I always lowballed.
We were trying to make light of a reality that had become terrifying. Hong Kong’s hospital system had crashed. Hundreds of front-line health workers had been infected, most of them through so-called super-spreader events. In the first, a mainland doctor, Liu Jianlun, had treated a patient in Guangdong who would later become known as the Poison King, because of how many cases could be traced back to him. After meeting the Poison King, Liu, who was in Hong Kong for a wedding, checked into the Metropole Hotel, went shopping on Nathan Road, and then returned to the hotel, where he vomited; the next day, he admitted himself to Kwong Wah Hospital, warned the attending physicians that what he had was highly contagious, and lost consciousness, ultimately infecting a half-dozen doctors and nurses. A larger cluster of cases at Prince of Wales Hospital, originating from an airport worker who had visited the Metropole, resulted in more than a hundred hospital workers falling ill. Some of the standard treatments for patients in respiratory distress—including the use of nebulizers, humidifier-like devices that turn liquid medicine into a breathable mist—ended up spreading the virus through the wards.
These stories and others deepened our dread; the government’s obfuscation compounded it. We learned that officials had been hiding cases, moving patients out the back doors of hospitals while World Health Organization inspectors came in the front. We suspected that what we didn’t know was worse than what we did. We imagined vast wards of the infected, gasping for breath.
The Hang Seng Index, which tracks stocks listed on Hong Kong’s exchange, shed fifteen per cent of its value between January and April. After a prankster falsely suggested that the city was going to be sealed off, some A.T.M.s briefly ran out of cash. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, on the first of April, Leslie Cheung, the openly bisexual Cantopop crooner and actor who had starred in “Happy Together” and “Farewell My Concubine,” leapt from the twenty-fourth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Cheung had always felt like a lucky charm for Hong Kong—a beloved and approachable celebrity we could see drinking in Lan Kwai Fong on any given night. Cheung’s death—he had suffered from depression—darkened our already dour moods.
Barely visible from my office windows was Amoy Gardens, an orange-and-beige housing complex. Nineteen buildings, each about thirty stories tall, housed about nineteen thousand people. The complex had become a notorious epicenter of the virus—the place, it was said, where sars had gone airborne. On March 14th, an infected man visited his brother’s apartment; a week later, the complex had three or four cases; the next day, six or seven more. Soon, more than sixty new cases a day were emerging at Amoy Gardens, until there were nearly three hundred and thirty, many of them in block E, where the brother’s unit was located. What was terrifying about the Amoy Gardens cluster was its banality. It looked exactly like every other housing estate in Hong Kong. As television anchors solemnly intoned over footage of the apartments, with their 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and ParknShop downstairs, one couldn’t help but think that what was happening there could happen anywhere. (Later, it would turn out that the design of the drainage systems in the apartments had facilitated the spread of sars.)
Meanwhile, in our offices, we wore protective gear. Talked about hand washing. Kept our distance. Outside of work, we lived solitary lives. Every social event was postponed into the indefinite future. I ate dinner alone in my flat, its diamond-necklace view of the city eerily dark. My lunch each day consisted of Chicken McNuggets. I had thought it through and concluded that, from slaughter to preparation, the McNugget process was such that no nugget risked contact with potentially virus-bearing human flesh. The industrial workers wore rubber gloves and masks; the nuggets were deep-fried in boiling oil hot enough, I hoped, to render any virus inactive.
At the time, many of us pinned our hopes on the “seasonality” of the virus. Infectious diseases often become more or less potent depending on the time of year; respiratory viruses—influenza in particular—are known to be seasonal. Other coronaviruses, like the ones that cause the common cold, ebb as the days lengthen and the sun rises higher in the sky. If there’s a flu season, we asked, why couldn’t there be a sars season, too?
Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist, has written a widely discussed blog post on the question of whether the new coronavirus—sars-CoV-2—could be seasonal. Lipsitch explains that seasonality depends on four factors: the environment (some viruses survive best in dry, cold air); human behavior (people cluster differently in summer and winter); the human immune system (in general, it’s weaker in the cold months); and the dynamics of disease more generally (an epidemic that begins in one season tends to end in another). Seasonality, in other words, isn’t just about weather. It’s a complex phenomenon, in which environmental, epidemiological, and human elements intertwine.
“Seasonality is a universal driver of almost all of our infectious diseases,” Micaela Martinez, an infectious-disease ecologist at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, told me. Martinez’s research focusses on identifying the causal mechanisms behind seasonality. It’s possible, for instance, that, for certain diseases, circadian rhythms matter: because the location of some immune-system cells in the body varies depending on the time of day, longer days could change how the immune system responds to an infection. (Many of covid-19’s worst symptoms—fever, inflammation, fluid in the lungs—are the result of inappropriate immune-system responses.) Martinez stressed how much is unknown about the biology of seasonality. “I hope for seasonal decline,” she said. But, in the case of sars-CoV-2, seasonal factors could be outweighed by the scale of the outbreak and the ease with which the virus spreads.
Both sars-CoV and sars CoV-2 are RNA coronaviruses. “Fields Virology,” the standard medical-school text on the subject, notes that “coronaviruses mutate at a high frequency because of the high error frequencies of RNA polymerases.” (RNA is a single long strand; unlike double-helixed DNA, it has no second strand to check its errors.) “When you have a mutation, there tends to be a survival disadvantage for the virus,” Charles Prober, a pediatric epidemiologist at Stanford University, told me. It’s possible, therefore, to imagine that sars-CoV-2 could mutate its way into a seasonal decline. As an “optimist,” Prober said, he was hoping for such an outcome. There’s room for luck in an epidemic. It’s also possible, through bad decisions, to squander a lucky break.
We didn’t know it yet, but that week—the week of Leslie Cheung’s death—was the point of maximum hysteria and fear. In early April, while we were betting on the number of new cases and wondering about the extent of the coverup, Hong Kong passed its inflection point, with the number of new infections sinking below that of cleared cases. As April turned to May, and warmer days commenced, we looked around and realized that we were still alive.
What had actually happened? In retrospect, it seems likely that several factors converged. We had all effectively self-quarantined (or, in the case of my wife and daughters, actually departed). Schools had been closed for more than a month. Everyone in the city had been wearing surgical masks, without exception; on television, even government officials appeared in scrubs and full protective gear.
The medical system had adapted, too. Prior to sars, some hospitals had become lax, relying on antibiotics for infection control instead of maintaining disinfection as a steady state. What worked against sars, I wrote later, in my book about the outbreak, “China Syndrome,” were “Florence Nightingale-style proscriptions: protective layers of masks, goggles, gloves, galoshes, and gowns. Sealed wards. Quarantine. Ventilation. This was not Nobel Prize-winning medicine. Yet it was effective.” Modern hospital systems aren’t accustomed to swarms of critical respiratory cases. But Hong Kong’s hospitals, after becoming overwhelmed, had adjusted.
At the time, it also seemed to us that the weather played a role. Hong Kong in April has an average temperature in the seventies, and by May it is in the eighties. And yet our containment efforts were so robust that the virus’s inflection point came before any seasonal trends, if they existed, could show themselves in full.
The end of sars was accompanied by a curious combination of hope and fatigue. We had been living indoors, secluded, behind masks, for so long that at some point it had become normal—even boring. I can remember the first time I saw someone wearing a mask, at the start of the outbreak: I had been taking my three-year-old daughter for a walk around Victoria Peak, and she had pointed him out. But I can’t remember when I first saw someone without one, or when I myself decided to leave mine at home. I suppose that, one day, I must have woken up, got dressed, reached for the N95 as usual, and then thought, Is this really necessary?
The government didn’t tell us to go out—and, in any case, it couldn’t have legislated away our fear. Instead, some internal calculation seemed to show that the benefits of living our lives newly outweighed the risks of catching sars. I know as I write this that it sounds ridiculous, but it felt as though the virus itself had grown weaker—as though it had been wounded. It seemed like a miasma had lifted from the city.
My family members came back from their exile. Restaurants reopened. The viral spell broke; Hong Kong seemed to wake from a fever dream. There were magical spring days when the sun flooded Victoria Harbor. We talked, in person. The virus had reduced everyone’s life to a binary—you either had it or you didn’t. Now, there seemed to be seven million different stories.
One day, I found myself sitting in a steamy chicken-and-rice place full of other customers. Oh, I thought. This is what life is.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
Humanity marks Earth Day’s 50th anniversary on a worldwide lockdown, as nature’s fury asserts itself through one of the smallest known particles of life, the novel coronavirus. Many argue viruses aren’t alive, relying on host organisms to replicate. Whether living or dead, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is driving us inexorably to a “new normal,” forcing us to adjust to its looming presence, at least until treatments and a vaccine become available. There are thousands of coronaviruses, though; defeat one, and another that jumps from bat or bird to human can smite us just as easily. As humans penetrate habitats of other species, decimating forests and other wildlands, zoonotic transmission–the transfer of a virus from animal to human — increases. The onrushing climate catastrophe promises unrelenting extreme weather events, more severe and frequent. This “new normal” demands that we radically realign our relationship with Nature, and that we do it now. Waiting fifty years is not an option.
Rebuilding will require containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global solidarity will be essential. “Stay at home, save a life,” is the prescription. But staying at home is a privilege. The life-saving practice of social distancing is out of reach to hundreds of millions of people.
Take India, for example, the world’s second most populous country. “Millions of workers and migrant workers are under a lockdown, which is supposed to enforce social distancing, but it only enforces physical compression,” Arundhati Roy, renowned writer and dissident, said on the Democracy Now! news hour recently. “People are crammed together. People are separated from their families. In many places, they have no food. They have no access to money even. They’ve sold their phones. You have the sense that you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance.”
Key steps toward containment are testing, tracing, and isolation. Test kits that yield rapid results must be developed, mass produced, and distributed globally, then administered without cost. Those who may have been exposed must be traced, adhering to strict privacy and human rights standards. Finally, safe, humane isolation options must be provided for those infected, until they are well enough to rejoin their community.
Look no farther than the administration of President Donald Trump to see how wrong it all can go. Trump first denied the pandemic, then called it a hoax, then rolled out testing inexcusably slowly, compelling a jumble of federal, state, county and municipal jurisdictions to compete for tests and equipment while asserting U.S. supremacy during his hate-filled propagandistic pandemic anti-press briefings. He calls himself a “war-time president,” but failed to get healthcare providers the gear to wage battle. His delays and lies have caused the deaths of so many thousands of people.
Outbreaks occur from coast to coast, from meat packing plants, where workers have no choice but to show up for work in hazardous, potentially lethal conditions, to prisons and immigrant detention centers, where prisoners are denied early release, or even access to adequate soap, water, protective gear and safe distancing from others.
In the global south, the pandemic and climate disruption are a double-edged sword. “In Africa, people are saying, ‘If we don’t get killed by COVID-19, we’ll get killed by hunger,’” Kumi Naidoo, who formerly headed both Amnesty International and Greenpeace, said on Democracy Now! “Humanity must take a hard look at ourselves about whether we want to build back after corona exactly what we had, or build back a more equitable, more just and a more sustainable world.”
Arundhati Roy echoed those sentiments in a recent essay, writing, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
Donald Trump has pledged U.S. taxpayer money to prop up failing fossil fuel industries like coal and oil. In response, author Naomi Klein tweeted, “Dems need to counter w/ a sweeping plan to cover the full salaries of fossil fuel workers while they retrain for the clean economy. Time to wind down this abusive industry that has always relied on massive public subsidies.”
On the first Earth Day, in 1970, over 20 million people in the United States — fully ten percent of the nation’s population at the time — rallied for an end to pollution, for an ecologically sustainable economy, for a greener future. “Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty,” Earth Day co-founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin said that day. “The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.”
Fifty years later, with the planet’s climate on a human-caused precipice, the numbers demanding change are far greater, the organizing is global, but the time is short.
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American department stores, once all-powerful shopping meccas that anchored malls and Main Streets across the country, have been dealt blow after blow in the past decade. J.C. Penney and Sears were upended by hedge funds. Macy’s has been closing stores and cutting corporate staff. Barneys New York filed for bankruptcy last year.
But nothing compares to the shock the weakened industry has taken from the coronavirus pandemic. The sales of clothing and accessories fell by more than half in March, a trend that is expected to only get worse in April. The entire executive team at Lord & Taylor was let go this month. Nordstrom has canceled orders and put off paying its vendors. The Neiman Marcus Group, the most glittering of the American department store chains, is expected to declare bankruptcy in the coming days, the first major retailer felled during the current crisis.
It is not likely to be the last.
“The department stores, which have been failing slowly for a very long time, really don’t get over this,” said Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Business School. “The genre is toast, and looking at the other side of this, there are very few who are likely to survive.”
At a time when retailers should be putting in orders for the all-important holiday shopping season, stores are furloughing tens of thousands of corporate and store employees, hoarding cash and desperately planning how to survive this crisis. The specter of mass default is being discussed not just behind closed doors but in analysts’ future models. Whether or not that happens, no one doubts that the upheaval caused by the pandemic will permanently alter both the retail landscape and the relationships of brands with the stores that sell them.
At the very least, there is expected to be an enormous reduction in the number of stores in each chain, which once sprawled across the American continent like a pack of many-headed hydras.
Department store chains account for about 30 percent of the total mall square footage in the United States, with 10 percent of that coming from Sears and J.C. Penney, according to a January report from Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm. Even before the pandemic, the firm expected about half of mall-based department stores to close in the next five years.
Even as they have worked to transform themselves for e-commerce with apps, websites and in-store exchanges, the outbreak has laid bare how dependent the department stores have remained on their physical outposts. Macy’s said on March 30 that after closing its stores for nearly two weeks, it had lost the majority of its sales.
The Commerce Department’s retail sales report for March, released last week, was disastrous. Overall retail sales numbers for this month are expected to be even worse, given that some stores were open for at least part of March.
Neiman Marcus has stopped accepting new merchandise.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Retailers have begun taking extreme measures to try to survive. Le Tote, a subscription clothing company that acquired Lord & Taylor last year from Hudson’s Bay, said in a memo on April 2 that the chain’s entire executive team, including the chief executive, would be let go immediately. It also suspended payments of goods to vendors for at least 90 days, citing “immense pressure on our liquidity position.”
Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, extended payment for goods and services to 120 days from 60 days and, according to Reuters, has hired bankers from Lazard to explore new financing. Jeff Gennette, the chief executive, is forgoing any compensation for the duration of the crisis. The company was dropped from the S&P 500 last month based on its valuation.
J.C. Penney has hired Lazard, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and the consultancy AlixPartners to explore restructuring options, according to two people familiar with the matter, and confirmed that it skipped an interest payment on its debt last week. It is expected to make a decision on what to do, including potentially filing for bankruptcy, within a few weeks, one of the people said.
But none of them were in as immediate dire straits as Neiman Marcus, which has both an enormous debt burden — about $4.8 billion, thanks in part to a leveraged buyout in 2013 by the owners Ares Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board — and a raft of expensive rents in the most high-profile shopping destinations, signed during boom times.
In late March, Neiman stopped accepting new merchandise and furloughed a large portion of its approximately 14,000 employees as the rumors of bankruptcy began to swirl. Its chief executive, Geoffroy van Raemdonck, announced that he was waiving his salary for April. The brand denied to vendors and its own employees at its sister brand Bergdorf Goodman that it was engaging advisers to explore a bankruptcy filing, but on April 14, S&P downgraded Neiman’s credit rating. Last week, the retailer did not make an interest payment that was due on April 15, angering bondholders and further fueling suspicions that a bankruptcy filing was imminent. A spokesperson for Neiman Marcus declined to comment.
Barneys offered steep discounts after declaring bankruptcy last year.Credit…Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
Even Nordstrom, widely considered the healthiest department store, said this month that it could be facing a “distressed” situation if its physical locations closed to customers for “an extended period of time.” Erik and Pete Nordstrom, chief executive and chief brand officer, are both receiving no base salary for at least six months. The chain has stunned some vendors with last-minute cancellations via email in recent days.
Across chains, prices for new merchandise sold via e-commerce have already been slashed by 40 percent in some cases. Order cancellations for the pre-fall season — which would normally have started delivering next month — have been increasing. Some brands said shipments have even been turned away upon delivery to warehouses, and extensions of payment terms are cascading through vendors, who are then forced to negotiate with their own manufacturers, marketing agencies, fulfillment centers and landlords.Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the coronavirus outbreak.Sign Up
“I’ve had a showroom for over 30 years, and we have always used the word ‘partnership,’ when talking about our relationship with the department stores,” said Betsee Isenberg of the showroom 10Eleven, which represents numerous brands such as Vince and ATM. “Through 9/11, through 2008, we worked hand in hand with our retailers. This is the first time the onus has been on the brands — many of which are losing millions and millions of dollars because of the canceled orders. It is just not fair that it is survival of the fittest.” In a new report, McKinsey refers to the situation as “wholesale Darwinism.”
The resort season has been canceled entirely, and fall orders have been put on hold, raising questions about what inventory will be left if and when shops reopen and consumers return to stores.
The Neiman Marcus store at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. With stores closed, retailers have seen sales plummet.Credit…Mark Wickens for The New York Times
“Nobody knows what Q4 will be like, but you have to start putting the orders in now,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, said of the holiday season, normally the most lucrative time of the year for the chains. “Some people don’t even have the money to put in Q4 orders, and may have to cancel Q4 orders anyway, and it’s a mess. There’s never been this much uncertainty.”
Robert Burke, the eponymous founder of a luxury consultancy, said he expected brands to move further away from a wholesale business, focusing on direct-to-consumer and a model with department stores where they control their own space and inventory.
Shares of J.C. Penney, which has temporarily shut its more than 800 stores, closed at 23 cents on the dollar last Wednesday after the retailer said it did not make a $12 million interest payment due that day. Brooke Buchanan, a representative, said it was a “strategic decision” in order to take advantage of a 30-day grace period before it was considered in default.
Normally bustling stores like Saks Fifth Avenue are now empty.Credit…Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times
Ms. Buchanan said J.C. Penney had “been engaged in discussions with its lenders since mid-2019 to evaluate options to strengthen its balance sheet, a process that has become even more important as our stores have also closed due to the pandemic.”
Cash flow for all department stores has dropped sharply. In a note on April 13, analysts at Cowen estimated four months of liquidity at Macy’s, six months at Kohl’s and seven months for J.C. Penney. Nordstrom, they predicted, could withstand store closings for 12 months.
“The nature of the mall is if you lose a big anchor like a Macy’s, you have co-tenancy issues and you have more pressure on the mall traffic, which was already a big issue,” said Oliver Chen, an analyst at Cowen. Co-tenancy clauses typically allow other tenants to demand rent reductions if certain key chains depart. Mr. Chen said that could accelerate the ongoing divide between top-tier malls and the second- or third-choice malls in certain areas.
According to a report this month from S&P Global Market Intelligence, department stores were more likely than any other consumer industry to default on their debt in the next year. It estimated the probability at 42 percent.
Nordstrom’s new store in Manhattan. Analysts predicted that it had enough cash to withstand 12 months of stores closures.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
In its April 2 memo, the management of Le Tote and Lord & Taylor said only “key employees” were being retained to preserve the business. A representative for Lord & Taylor and Le Tote declined to comment or disclose the number of employees who were furloughed and laid off.
“It appears to be a virtual certainty that Lord & Taylor will liquidate its business in the near future, either in or out of bankruptcy,” said James Van Horn, a partner at Barnes & Thornburg and a specialist in retail bankruptcy. “They were already one of the most challenged department stores prior to the coronavirus pandemic, and when the majority of the management team is leaving, the vast majority of employees are laid off and a minority of employees furloughed, there does not seem to be any other strategy but to liquidate the inventory.”
Mr. Van Horn said he expected that other chains might strategically employ Chapter 11 reorganizations to legally shed stores, lightening their rent burden.
“It will likely be a domino that falls,” he said. “Whether it is first or 10th, we don’t know.”
Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.
Contact Sapna Maheshwari at sapna@nytimes.com or Vanessa Friedman at vanessa.friedman@nytimes.com.
Sapna Maheshwari covers retail. She has won reporting awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was on Time’s list of “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2014.” @sapna • Facebook
Vanessa Friedman is The Times’s fashion director and chief fashion critic. She was previously the fashion editor of the Financial Times. @VVFriedman
People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. After four decades, Trivers and his colleagues published the first research supporting his idea.
Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. Their research, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first—the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.
In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light.
When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants. (A complementary process occurred for those paid to present Mark as bad.) “What’s so interesting is that we seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it,” says William von Hippel, a psychologist at The University of Queensland, who co-authored the study. “So we process information in a biased fashion, we convince ourselves, and we convince others. The beauty is, those are the steps Trivers outlined—and they all lined up in one study.”
In real life you are not being paid to talk about Mark but you may be selling a used car or debating a tax policy or arguing for a promotion—cases in which you benefit not from gaining and presenting an accurate picture of reality but from convincing someone of a particular point of view.
One of the most common types of self-deception is self-enhancement. Psychologists have traditionally argued we evolved to overestimate our good qualities because it makes us feel good. But feeling good on its own has no bearing on survival or reproduction. Another assertion is self-enhancement boosts motivation, leading to greater accomplishment. But if motivation were the goal, then we would have just evolved to be more motivated, without the costs of reality distortion.
Trivers argues that a glowing self-view makes others see us in the same light, leading to mating and cooperative opportunities. Supporting this argument, Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, showed in 2012 that overconfident people are seen as more competent and have higher social status. “I believe there is a good possibility that self-deception evolved for the purpose of other-deception,” Anderson says.
In another study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, von Hippel and collaborators tested all three arguments together, in a longitudinal fashion. Does overconfidence in one’s self increase mental health? Motivation? Popularity?
Tracking almost 1,000 Australian high school boys for two years, the researchers found that over time, overconfidence about one’s athleticism and intelligence predicted neither better mental health nor better athletic or academic performance. Yet athletic overconfidence did predict greater popularity over time, supporting the idea that self-deception begets social advantage. (Intellectual self-enhancement may not have boosted popularity, the authors suggest, because among the teenage boys, smarts may have mattered less than sports.)
Why did it take so long for experimental evidence for Trivers’ idea to emerge? In part, he says, because he is a theorist and did not test it until he met von Hippel. Other experimental psychologists didn’t test it because the theory was not well known in psychology, von Hippel and Anderson say. Further, they suggest, most psychologists saw self-esteem or motivation as reason enough for self-enhancement to evolve.
Hugo Mercier, a researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France who was not involved in the new studies, is familiar with the theory but questions it. He believes that in the long run overconfidence may backfire. He and others also debate whether motivated biases can strictly be called self-deception. “The whole concept is misleading,” he says. It’s not as though there is one part of us deliberately fooling another part of us that is the “self.” Trivers, von Hippel and Anderson of course disagree with Mercier on self-deception’s functionality and terminology.
Von Hippel offers two pieces of wisdom regarding self-deception: “My Machiavellian advice is this is a tool that works,” he says. “If you need to convince somebody of something, if your career or social success depends on persuasion, then the first person who needs to be [convinced] is yourself.” On the defensive side, he says, whenever anyone tries to convince you of something, think about what might be motivating that person. Even if he is not lying to you, he may be deceiving both you and himself.
This post originally appeared on Scientific American and was published April 3, 2017. This article is republished here with permission.
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