What you need to know for Tuesday.
New York City to Workers: Get Vaccinated or Get Tested Weekly |
Weather: Sunny but less humid, with a high around 90. Chance of late-evening thunderstorms. |
Alternate-side parking: In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption). |
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Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday that all New York City municipal workers will be required to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by mid-September or face weekly testing. |
The new requirement will apply to roughly 340,000 city workers, including teachers and police officers. |
The Sept. 13 deadline coincides with when about a million students are expected to return to classrooms; the mayor has signaled that reopening schools is critical to the city's recovery from the pandemic. |
"September is the pivot point of the recovery," Mr. de Blasio said in a Monday news conference. |
City health and hospital employees must be vaccinated or get tested weekly starting Aug. 2, the mayor announced. On Aug. 16, around 45,000 city employees who work in congregate or residential settings, like homeless shelters and senior centers, will have the same requirements. The mandate for the rest of city employees goes into effect on the first day of the school year. |
The city will also reinforce a current rule requiring all unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors at all times. In order to get out of the mask mandate, people will need to show a one-time proof of vaccination. |
The city's rising positivity rates |
Nearly five million New York City residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, but the speed of inoculations has slowed. Two million adult New Yorkers are still unvaccinated. The number of virus cases has risen to more than 800 on average per day, more than triple the daily average in late June. |
Parents and educators have expressed anxiety in recent weeks as the city's average test positivity rate has ticked up. Some parents say they are worried that the new school year will face major disruptions, as schools did last year, and some teachers say they are concerned about returning to classrooms with cases rising. |
Revel will roll out its fleet of Tesla taxis in Manhattan next week after a battle with New York City regulators. [New York Post] |
A truck that overturned on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway spilled boxes of what appeared to be yellow and orange bell peppers on the highway, closing three lanes of traffic. [NBC New York] |
Though positive test rates for the coronavirus are rising in New York City, hospitalization rates have remained relatively low compared with the previous wave last fall. [The City] |
And finally: A rare Arthurian opera returns to the stage |
It took just two words over the loudspeakers for the audience at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on Sunday evening to break into vigorous applause: "Welcome back." |
Welcome back, indeed, to Ernest Chausson's seldom heard opera "Le Roi Arthus," being presented as part of Bard's SummerScape festival. And welcome back to many in the audience, for whom being in a theater for live opera with a full orchestra and chorus, after such a long deprivation, was truly something to cheer. |
"Le Roi Arthus," based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, proved a powerful work for this fraught, polarized moment in American life. It is the story of an idealistic ruler who fails to bring about the era of enlightenment he strives for, but whose principles will endure, as an angelic chorus assures him at the end of an often ravishing score. The production is the latest project in the conductor Leon Botstein's long campaign to break classical music from its fixation on repertory staples and call attention to neglected works. |
This remarkable opera is especially deserving. The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective. And Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece. |
The opera ends with a series of death scenes, one for each of the principal characters. The shaken Arthur, seeking death, is greeted by a group of heavenly maidens who offer to take him away — not to death, but to eternal sleep. Chausson turned this sequence into a shimmering, harmonically lush double chorus, performed here by choristers in celestial white robes. "Your name may perish," they tell Arthur, but "your ideas are immortal." |
Let's hope this production helps Chausson's opera thrive as well. |
It's Tuesday — make some music. |
Metropolitan Diary: Ars Poetica, Bronx |
It was the untold stories |
Irish aunts with fiery tempers |
men with straight lines for mouths |
and eyes that changed like the moon |
slap of a ball on concrete |
bakery boxes tied with string |
the jingle of change in my father's pocket |
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