View from your quarantine

How are all of my readers holding up?

Gaby’s guest post here at Claire Berlinski’s Invariably Interesting Thoughts gave my brother a great idea. Remember Andrew Sullivan’s “View from your Window?” Why don’t I run a feature called, “View from your quarantine?”

You’re all learning about me and my life in quarantine, but I’m not learning about you, and you’re not learning about each other. Or from each other. I’m in regular correspondence with a few of you, but most of you are people I’ve never met.

I don’t have a good sense of where you live, what measures your local or national government is taking against the virus, how the virus is affecting you and your families. I don’t know where most of you live—I don’t know what city you’re in, or what country. I don’t know what you do for a living, and I certainly don’t know what your mood is like these days.

My sense of “what people in other places are thinking,” especially in the United States, comes from the media. But around the world, journalists are in lockdown, just like me. I’ve been getting emails from you, but they’re disproportionately from very good friends or from total fruitcakes who want me to know this whole pandemic thing is a TOTAL HOAX!!! I get a little sense of who you are from those, but it’s pretty opaque.

Hence my brother’s idea. Send me an e-mail about your life in quarantine. It can be about anything, but focus on what people probably wouldn’t know unless they live where you live, have the government you have, do the job you do, or face the circumstances you face. Send it to me and put “MY LIFE IN QUARANTINE” in the subject line.

I’ll publish 500-word extracts—the most diverse and interesting ones you send me—until the quarantine ends.

I won’t publish your names, so aim for honesty, not glory. Just tell me and the rest of my readers how this is going for you. Don’t worry about writing an immortal work of literature. Just give us a glimpse of your world.

If this goes well, we’ll find some way of making it into a weekly contest. We’re all stuck indoors and we’ve got to keep our minds occupied, right?

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I’ll send the newsletter I was planning to send before he called me later today. Meanwhile, to my new subscribers, thank you. I’m so glad you’ve been enjoying my newsletter so much that you think it’s worth subscribing. Now that I’ve been confined to my apartment, my cats and my subscribers are my whole world. When I see that I have a new subscriber, I feel as though a rare bird has flown into my apartment: I want to figure out how to make it so happy it never leaves.

Those of you who haven’t yet subscribed are of course also very welcome here, and you always will be. I treasure you, too. I know times are really tough right now for everyone, and if you can’t afford to subscribe, I would never put pressure on you at a moment like this. It would be a lovely gesture though, and much appreciated, if you forwarded this newsletter to ten of your friends. If they don’t like it, no harm done: They never have to read it again. But if they like it, great! You’ve done them a favor and me a favor, and it didn’t cost a thing. So why not?

If, as one reader just wrote to me, you’d like to send money by PayPal, but don’t see the button, here it is:

And if you’d like to unsubscribe, don’t hesitate. The last thing I’d want to do is bother you during a global pandemic. Just scroll down until you see the word “Unsubscribe,” and press it.