A hit is a hit, but like anything that seeps into the collective memory, the “Oops! ... I Did It Again” shock and awe defined that moment. The single and album—the latter of which was released 20 years ago on Saturday—were the last successful world-conquering acts of the exhausted American century (even if the songwriting and production were already outsourced), the final classic album of the teen-pop era, a goodbye to the gilded years of the record industry. The iPod would enter the world shortly thereafter, followed by social media and forever wars. Britney would go on to produce better songs (“I’m a Slave 4 U,” “Toxic”) and remain essential to the pop culture industrial complex until this day (though her public struggles with mental health have often overshadowed the music). But this was the peak of blood-rush hysteria, the last time the illusion could be sustained. Americans are gratefully duped into believing what they want to believe, and this was the last gasp of willful delusion. Nothing would ever be that innocent again.
It’s still spring, but it’s starting to get hotter each day. Fairly soon it will be full-blast summer—at least here in Louisiana, where I live. But humans like to change the environment around them. When it’s cold, we want to heat things up. When it’s hot, we want to cool things down. Humans are difficult creatures.
What’s kind of weird, if you think about it, is that going one way is much harder than going the other way. Making stuff warm isn’t a problem. Just about anything you do will cause something to increase in temperature, even if you don’t want it to. But making stuff cold is trickier.
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
It develops the premise of Jemisin’s 2016 story “The City Born Great” (which is included as the novel’s prologue). This is that all the world’s great cities, when they reach a certain size, are magically “born” into anthropomorphic form, individuals who live in, and guard, their metropolis. Such figures are at once the “soul” of the city and regular human people, somewhat bewildered to discover their calling. It’s an idea as old as Athena, although Jemisin’s treatment is rather less loftily divine than Greek myth. Her focus is the scuzzy immediacy of street-level city living. New York manifests as five separate figures: Manhattan becomes Manny, a likable young chancer, and other individuals emerge to embody Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. It’s lucky they do, since the city is under supernatural attack and in need of defenders.
Ladies and gents in rows of grim portraits
On a high wall of your town house,