ACassel's Pages

Tag: Covid-19

  • Empathy Check

    Empathy Check

    Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” You can decide where 97,000 — roughly the number of deaths from COVID-19 that have been recorded thus far — falls on that spectrum, but it seems clear that we have entered a zone in which the…

  • The Joy(?) of Yiddish

    The Joy(?) of Yiddish

    Yiddish humor, it’s often said, is about laughing to keep the darkness away. I’m sure I’m not the first to make this connection, which is funny (in the classic Yiddish manner) but requires explanation. (How can a joke be funny if you have to explain it? I don’t know; ask a comedian.) First, you need…