2020 is both a social autopsy of the institutions that broke down during the pandemic and the story of seven people who lived through it. Why combine these two approaches?
One of my heroes is C. Wright Mills, a midcentury sociologist. He argues that no sociological research project is complete unless you can connect it with the big picture, social story, and historical forces that worked on our individual lives and stories. In other words, the best sociology puts our personal experiences into a broader context because so many of the things that we experienced as personal problems are, in fact, shared problems that come from our culture. So, in all my work I’ve tried to go back and forth between the personal and the social — or some would say the structural. I’ve never done anything quite as intimate, though, as 2020.
Why focus exclusively on New York?
I’ve lived in New York City for 20 years. Shortly after the pandemic began, I published an article in the New York Times in which I argued that social distance was the wrong strategy for surviving the pandemic, that we needed physical distance but social solidarity. It was clear to me that this fact was going to allow some societies to get through the crisis while others fell apart. My initial idea was that I’d travel around the world and see what was happening in all these different societies. Well, of course, the pandemic lasted years, not weeks, so I never was able to go out and travel around the world. But I was in New York, and New York contains a world of different experiences.
How did growing up in Chicago shape your interests as a sociologist?