By Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and Dale Hudson, Associate Professor of Screen Studies, New York University Abu Dhabi and new media curator for FLEFF, were invited by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to contribute to their playlist initiative, where scholars and curators from around the world select media work on themes that can be used for teaching, research, and programming during the COVID-19 pandemic and also protests on racial injustice and inequality.
Zimmermann and Hudson mounted a suite of three playlists entitled First Wave COVID-19 on three different themes: Information, Music, Satire. Nearly 50 projects are featured. All are accessible via the links in the playlists.
1—Introduction
Participatory small media stands online as a constantly expanding archive of COVID-19. It generates a polyphony of memories and actions of global trauma over the ongoing pandemic. Uncritical nostalgia for a pre-COVID-19 era of sociality, contact, embodied togetherness, and freedom of movement wafts through the mediasphere, an old world that cloistered public health among specialist researchers and government officials. Now participatory small media practices recalibrate to help internalize new public-health protocols of mask-wearing, hand-washing, and physical distancing through catchy songs and public service videos from across the globe.
The pandemic dialectics of life and death, presence and non-presence, actual and virtual generate new liminal zones for participatory media. These dialectics permeate the massive amounts of amateur, low-tech, no-budget, no-crew, small media produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This proliferating small media no longer operates on the peripheries of big media. Instead, this work redefines media along a participatory axis. Its poetic and political cinematic imaginary transgresses theatrical and broadcast venues to enter mobile phones and homes virally, informing audiences how to protect from the coronavirus. Participatory small media moves between many networks and actors. It vaccinates against loss, confusion, and fear.
Numerical statistics of rates and volumes of infection, recovery, and death situate the unfathomable vastness of the COVID-19 pandemic yet cannot fully contain it. Numbers flatten the pandemic’s uneven textures from global perspectives. A shift to the local assists in our understanding of transmission, modes of containment, and best public health and medical treatment practices. Participatory small media enhances understanding of abstract data visualizations, localizing the meaning and significance of transmission and spread models. Simultaneously, it combats the viral spread of misinformation.
Participatory small media is a necessary counterpoint to big media. Localized rather than nationalized, internationalized, or globalized, it concentrates on micro-local events. Big media homogenizes news sources. The rapid cable news cycles instill amnesia. In the United States, 90% of the population acquires news from six multinational corporations.[1] Participatory small media practices form an ever-expanding archive of ground-up, semi-public memory of the pandemic.
During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, participatory small media gained urgency and potency. Sensationalist commercial media, such as Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (USA/UAE, 2011), or global news media, such as CNN’s rating-driven Coronavirus Town Halls, obscure what we might really need to know. Small media offers a generative combustion of facts, emotion, analysis, hope. This work produces a horizontal and distributed polyphonic memory from the ground up. Our lecture provisionally maps the vast participatory small media ecology across information, satire, and music. These categories point to participatory media as a practice enacting use value.
The first wave of the pandemic propelled a neoliberal migration of education, business, leisure, news, arts, and personal life online. Corporate software infiltrated domestic spaces. Arthouse cinemas struggled to reinvent themselves as curated streaming platforms. Restaurants partnered with delivery services. Essential workers exposed themselves to ever-increasing risk of infection, so that everyone else could pretend that life might one day return to “normal.”
The shift to remote communication exposes contradictions. Although it reveals corporate control over every part of life, it also facilitates information sharing that official state or professional news agencies ignore or suppress. During the pandemic, information has migrated from corporate and state big media to citizen, community, and participatory small media. However, rumors go viral across social media “infodemics.” Confusions multiply and accelerate. To counter misinformation, citizen, community, and participatory media are critical. Viral media-literacy campaigns fact-check stories.
Big media recognized the imperative to communicate accurate information and ask difficult questions. Yet its scale excises many perspectives. How can participatory small media contribute? We find that big media often suffocates the memories and actions that breathe through participatory small media. CNN runs special two-hour town halls with experts, yet it offers more corporate ads than public service announcements, phantasmatic distractions from recognizing how states fail their citizens and noncitizen residents. Participatory small media wants us to remember. The media that often matters most emerges on a participatory small scale. It contrasts with the pandemic’s enormous scale. While the pandemic is macro, the experience of it and the small media chronicling it are micro. Big media abandons local concerns.
The scale of big media contrasts to short, accessible, nonprofessional iterations across multiple platforms and interfaces. Proprietary technologies developed for front-end communication and back-end surveillance transform into platforms to interrogate official responses, work through understanding scientific information, and present polyphonic perspectives. This work marshals a plethora of forms including animation, data visualizations, archives, interactive graphics, first-person diaries, aerial drone footage, and more. These short-form, informative documentary media practices leverage expository, evidence-based, analytical, deductive, and educational modes.
Before the pandemic, sounds and images intruded into spaces with gigantic screens and projections in urban centers or smaller screens mounted in government buildings, stores, airports, train, and bus stations. Now, the small screens of mobile devices and laptops domesticate the media landscape. Images circulate through social networks dependent upon invisible physical infrastructures of satellites and submarine cables. COVID-19 participatory small media looks and feel different from big media’s broadcast and theatrical models.
Although participatory small media operates across corporate-controlled software and hardware such as Alibaba (Youku, Toduo), Alphabet (YouTube, Google Hangouts, Gmail), Cisco (WebEx), Facebook (Instagram, WhatsApp), Renren, TenCent (WeChat, Weibo, QQ), Skype, and Twitter, they also carve out spaces for semi-public debate. Small media appropriates the technologies of big corporations to enable both local and global connections. The interfaces are mobilized by participatory media to move around solitary modes of production into realms of connected modes of exchange. Short video, audio, and text files circulate on social media, chat groups, messenger apps, microblogs, SMS, listservs, and emails to constitute a multi-author, multi-perspective, ground-up participatory account of what needs to be known. It becomes a media of use value beyond national, international, or global broadcasts and the elite spaces of film festivals, arts centers, and museums.
The platform Corona Diaries: Open Source Audio Stories from around the Globe (Germany/United States, 2020) by Uli Köppen and Fran Panetta, with Tanja Proebstl, James Burke, and Halsey Burgund, aggregates short audio files under two minutes in duration that contain personal stories of the pandemic. The project emphasizes how short audio testimonies lower the barrier to entry for participation to capture nuance and tone lost or hidden in written form. The project “documents the pandemic through personal stories—big and small. All stories are welcome.” The website divides into three sections with single-word titles that simplify addressing the pandemic in all its complexities: About, Listen, Speak. A world map visualizes story locations from Austria, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Nigeria, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere. Corona Diaries makes recordings by artists, journalists, students, mothers, fathers, employees, and employers available to anyone for download under a Creative Commons license. They speak about issues typically overlooked by big media. They mobilize a narrowcasting rather than a broadcasting model—a participatory rather than a proprietary orientation.
Developed by Yu Gao, a graduate of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 1point3acres is a website that initially tracked the spread of COVID-19 in Canada and the United States. It has subsequently expanded into Global COVID-19 Tracker and Interactive Charts (China/United States, 2020). It functions as a global dashboard monitoring the pandemic. It provides real-time updates from cross-referenced credible sources using data crawlers, API calls, and user submissions. Information is updated every five to fifteen minutes through crowdsourcing and teams. Yu is originally from Wuhan. Among his collaborators are first-generation Chinese immigrants in the tech industries and Chinese students. In addition to aggregating data, the site fights against the racist discourses that misidentify COVID-19 as the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus,” or “Kung Flu.” This anti-racism dimension is important given the current U.S. president’s speeches blaming China for his own unwillingness to contain the pandemic’s devastation of the United States.
The website offers information in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, and Spanish. It is organized into six areas: Summary, Map, News and Live Updates, Supplies, Trends, and Videos, with subareas featuring facts and aggregated information. The Work and Life subsection posts information on various companies’ work-from-home policies. The School subsection lists universities moving to remote teaching. The What’s in Stock section lists grocery stores and categories such as “busy,” “fruit and vegetables,” and “meat, fish, and eggs.” The Testing subsection provides real-time data on testing locations as well as pending, positive, and negative cases. The site organizes data for use by average people during the crisis.
Based in Indonesia and Australia with team members in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, EngageMedia is a nonprofit media, technology, and culture organization focused on social change and environmental justice through participant and citizen videos. Independent filmmakers, journalists, technologists, campaigners, and activists create videos for the EngageMedia website, a portal to community media produced in the Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia. Their short videos show the impact of coronavirus in the Philippines, foregrounding how poor communities, street vendors, jeepney drivers, community kitchens, and the homeless confront the pandemic. The organization educates viewers to check sources and to consult the World Health Organization, credible health authorities, and the media for accurate information.
The videos produced in collaboration with Vera Files under the three-part series named #Coronavirus deal with serious public health issues of face masks, hand washing, disinformation, and infodemics. In “#Coronavirus: Infodemic” (EM News, Philippines, 18 March 2020), editor and reporter Celine Isabelle Samson examines racist and Sinophobic confirmation bias affecting Chinese nationals who work in the Philippines. Viewers are encouraged to submit stories for a fact check. “#Coronavirus: Disinformation” (EM News, Philippines, 31 March 2020) examines media stories about wet markets that sell wild animals in Wuhan (represented with images of Indonesian markets), and scientists who linked COVID-19 to bats (still undetermined at this time). “#Coronavirus: Protecting Yourself” (EM News, Philippines, 31 March 2020) instructs on mask wearing and hand washing. “Manila’s Poor Under Lockdown” (EM News, Philippines, 14 April 2020) and “Shooting Covid-19: Media Frontliners in Manila” (EM News, Philippines, 06 May 2020) focus on the concerns of the most vulnerable.
These participatory media platforms fill in some of the gaps left by big media. They consist of short videos or user-friendly data visualizations that allow people to search and select the information that is the most relevant and urgent to their situation.
3—Satire
The ongoing commercialization of news media in combination with populist mistrust or disbelief in science and expertise leaves U.S. populations particularly vulnerable to corporate-generated misinformation and state-generated disinformation. Viral videos circulating on social media offer satirical counterpunches, much like late-night comedy shows satirized US warmongering in the past.[2] During the first wave of COVID-19, public health protocols were politicized in the United States, much to the horror and disbelief of populations around the world who have survived epidemics of SARS and Ebola.
Satire subverts power. Satire politicizes media to oppose the “aestheticization of politics,” which cultural theorist Walter Benjamin described as fascism, that blossomed in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and Yugoslavia during the early twentieth century.[3] As fascist ideologies amplify in Brazil, parts of Europe, Russia, and the United States, Benjamin’s call to politicize that which has been aestheticized accrues pungency. Big media fails to inform citizens. Campaign rallies and MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) paraphernalia aestheticize politics.
Participatory small media satires invite consideration of how social media platforms might enable political critiques despite corporate-controlled media spaces. This small media satirizes politicians in ways that often offer incisive critique of abuses of power and exploitations of willful ignorance. It questions the constantly evolving “new normal.” Yet they also interrogate the “old normal” that facilitated COVID-19’s emergence, global spread, and gross mishandling in the United States.
Microsoft Sam’s four-minute supercut Every Covid-19 Commercial Is Exactly the Same (United States, 2020) satirizes corporate branding that augments the allure of consumer products. Big media re-centered attention from the pandemic as a public health crisis to one about “reopening the economy” without substantive reflection on how this economic model depends on invisible low-paid labor and hyper-visible consumerism. Corporate strategies manipulate emotions and confusion to reassure customers things could return to normal, transporting disaster capitalism into daily life.[4] Coronavirus-washing joins green-washing (appeals to ecologically-inclined) and pink-washing (appeals LBGTQ+ customers) to distract from horrible corporate labor policies and excessive consumption.
The video remixes scenes from advertisements to reveal formulaic appeals for consumer confidence through emotionally manipulative imagery of trite humanistic interactions with products and nondiegetic musical scores. These ads follow Classical Hollywood’s three-act plots and narrative arcs. They appeal to refusals to change, followed by buzzwords like “people” and “family.” At the end, the music tempo accelerates after the mantra of “together.” They conclude with the significance of credit-card purchases: consumerism binds more intensively than applause for healthcare professionals, symbolic rather than structural support. This video shows how normalization of consumerism during a crisis constitutes a vacuous, dangerous distraction.
Comparably, writer and comedian Sarah Cooper uses her TikTok account, @whatchagotforme, (United Sates, 2020) as a platform for satire. Her videos go viral on Twitter and YouTube. She mimes U.S. President Donald Trump as he articulates the least useful and most harmful advice to reporters during White House press conferences. In “How to Medical” (24 April 2020), she appropriates Trump’s audio from an official White House press briefing with the Coronavirus Task Force about whether injecting light or disinfectant into humans could provide coronavirus protection. His curious emphasis on “medical doctor” at the end sounds absurd. Trump’s ramblings pollute big media ecosystems with misinformation, disinformation, and excessive attention to his incompetence, obscuring the work that needs to be done. To deny the U.S. president free publicity, many argue against repostings, but another option is appropriating and deconstructing his logic, as Cooper does.
Cooper describes her performances as satires of corporate executives, who spout nonsense during meetings while obedient underlings nod in agreement. She draws upon her own experiences at Google.[5] In one video (15 April 2020), she satirizes Google’s requirement to have fun at work—with fun measured by business quarter—or be fired. In another video (07 May 2020), Cooper lip-synchs Trump’s efforts to compare loss of “a loved one or even a close friend” with his economic stimulus plan. He admits this loss cannot be replaced. From a silver “love” frame, she removes a couple’s photograph, then swaps out the picture for a 20-dollar bill, as Trump speaks from “purely an economic standpoint” that next year will be “one of the best years we’ve had.” “A Few of My Favorite Companies” (15 April 2020) is a supercut of Trump’s initial task force unveiling, framed as a public-private partnership featuring more corporate figures than medical experts and scientists. During a Friday 13 March 2020 press briefing, Trump thanked Google for developing a national screening website.[6] This website, of course, does not exist, much like the comprehensive plan for address the pandemic which he promises at opportune times yet fails to deliver. Cooper trims the press conference down to the sound bites delineating Trump-branded disaster capitalism.[7] She mocks the corporate strategy of just-in-time-jargon that covers-up Trump’s ignorance of governing strategies.
As an African American woman and an immigrant from Jamaica, Cooper’s satirical performances of a white supremacist assumed new layers of meaning after the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gained new momentum in June 2020. Her satire highlights the incremental aestheticization of politics. Cooper’s “How to the Black People” (30 May 2020) politicizes Trump’s nonresponse to the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Rather than acknowledging systemic racial injustice, Trump pivots—to borrow a big media neoliberal buzz word to dodge a direct answer—to MAGA as nostalgia summoning the alleged greatness of the pre-Civil Rights era. As Cooper mouths his words with electric fans blowing her hair to mimic Trump’s Air Force helicopter, his statement that “MAGA loves the Black People” appears farcical.
The Atlantic and the New York Times have run stories on Cooper’s posts,[8] though big media outlets do not usually recognize a satirist whose work bypasses broadcast media’s narrow circuits by infiltrating the broader ecologies of narrowcasting. She deconstructs Trump’s ramblings as incompetence. Her satires are more effective than big media’s quantitative approaches to document the lies and disinformation that Trump spreads daily. COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) populations, whereas MAGA disproportionately appeals to white rage and grievance, thus framing how the pandemic’s death and infection rates are higher in the United States than any other country in the world.
4—Music
In the pre-COVID-19 world, live music was sensory. People sat close together in concert halls. Community congealed around shared experiences of performance. Sound infiltrated bodies, minds, and hearts before the pandemic stripped liveness and embodiedness away from music. Amidst endless rapid news and social media invocations of logos, evidence, and science, music offers the opposite: pathos. If news depends on words, music explores and opens up that which cannot be said and that for which there are no words at all. In contrast to the news cycle’s rapid temporalities, music offers slow time. As the pandemic removes the sensory connection of touch, music amplifies the aural sensorium and staying in the moment.
Small media emphasizes music that responds to the pandemic, rather than denies it, devising new ways to create participatory music making via software and interfaces. The spectacles of opera and pop concerts shift to the more impressive feat of pulling off a large global collaboration. While some projects represent major cultural institutions or celebrities’ international production, they are in fact small scale participatory distributed events. Musicians perform in their homes wearing everyday clothes rather than costumes. They use computer or mobile phone cameras rather than expensive gear.
These projects experiment with socially distanced collaboration, intermixing professionals and amateurs. solo and chamber music. Musicians in every form and genre broadcast live concerts. Deejays livestream to people dancing all night in their homes in front of laptops. The Metropolitan Opera’s focus on streaming lavish performances, which might seem insensitive and privileged when so many are unemployed, has transitioned into opera stars singing arias in their kitchens and living rooms. On the opposite end, the Ithaca College Choir marshalled free software to offer a newly commissioned world premiere online. Its student members sang into their laptops from their homes.
The Covid Cello Project (United States, 2020) brings cellists from around the world together to play one piece of music remotely after one week of practice. It tests the limits of collaboration during physical distancing and isolation. The project leverages technology and participation, facilitating more cellists playing together than may be pragmatic in the concert hall, given the project’s multinational scope. A performer and composer, Texas-based Tony Rogers had arranged over one-hundred pieces for the Austin Cello Choir. He selects from these arrangements for the Covid Cello Project, convening musicians who play music that can only be made remotely. Rogers does all of the production and editing himself.
The project started when Rogers invited a few cellist friends to play together remotely and to collaborate. The first video circulated through word of mouth and on cello community Facebook groups, bringing more cellists into the project. Each week, the number of participating cellists and social media circulation grows. COVID Cello Project #1, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata in G minor” had seventeen cellists from the United States. COVID Cello Project #6, Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” features 161 cellists from twenty-three countries.
Commissioned by the Vietnamese Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health, “Ghen Cô Vy” or “Jealous Coronavirus” (Vietnamese Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health, Viet Nam, 2020) is a three-minute public health song on handwashing. It became a global viral media phenomenon on TikTok. Pop stars Min and Erik perform music and lyrics by Khac Hung. The song was conceived to encourage social responsibility and to boost morale, especially of COVID-19 frontline healthcare workers. In the video, a representation of the virus comes between a heterosexual couple. The lyrics say “push back this virus, Corona, Corona” to urge people to wash their hands and stay away from crowded places.
Quang Đăng’s TikTok #GhenCoVyChallenge (Viet Nam, 2020) video sets the song to his dance choreography, attracting half a million followers, 8.2 million likes, and 5.8 million views. UNICEF has shared the video. Dressed in bright yellow, Đăng and his dance partner demonstrate the proper handwashing technique while performing a choreographed dance on the street. The video launched a challenge: amateur response videos with the catchy song, dance, and handwashing moves produced by youth, office workers, and Hmong with the hashtag #GhenCoVyChallenge have exploded on the video-sharing platform TikTok. A compilation of challenger videos demonstrates how small media documents a song and dance designed to spread awareness to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Viet Nam took action to communicate public-health protocols, which stands as an important counterpoint to U.S. policy of disinformation wherein the president withheld that the virus is highly contagious and spread by air, actually encouraging people not to wear masks.
Angélique Kidjo’’s “No Pata Pata” (UNICEF, 2020) moves people to dance while also urging them to stay home, wash their hands, and maintain social distancing. Since 2002, Kidjo has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Her energetic performance insists that the necessary public health precautions will not quell community spirit. Between the catchy verses, she explains: “Pata Pata means to touch and feel,” she says, “which we should not do.” After another chorus, she continues: “The virus can be beaten by us, and soon the course will be clear.” The song’s chorus features the refrain “no pata pata.” Rather than the high production values of music videos or concerts, this video locates Kidjo in the small space of her home studio. In a blue dress with a red and white design and a maroon and white headwrap against a pink fabric backdrop printed with a red-and-white pattern, she sings and dances as in any music video. The camera tilts down to show Kidjo’s feet dancing on her carpet. The video then cuts to shots of lights, a piano, and even a bottle of water on music stand, and the camera zooms out to reveal the colorful backdrop is a sheet draped across a window blind. The video foregrounds its production as provisional and timely.
The song covers the legendary South African singer Miriam Makeba’s version of “Pata Pata” (1967), originally recorded by The Skylarks in 1959. This international hit consolidated a close dancing style called Pata Pata. In contrast, Kidjo dances alone—social distancing prevents virus transmission. Her video is part of a project to make public health protocols go viral by inviting viewers to participate in a hashtag challenge: “‘Pata Pata’ makes everyone want to show off their dance moves! So please film yourself dancing tagging @unicefafrica on Instagram or @1unicefafrica on TikTok with #nopatapata please. The best dance clips will make it into a UNICEF music video coming mid-May!” Like the #GhenCoVyChallenge, Kidjo’s “No Pata Pata” went viral. The response videos show ways that small media assembles people across the world to unite against the virus.
During a period marked by a profound sense of loss for pre-COVID-19 life and mourning over the dead whose numbers mount daily, music moves listeners away from fear, paranoia, sadness, and terror. Such pieces assert collectivity from both performers and active listeners. They center productive emotions that spur participation and empathizing with others. They offer a way to fortify and to go somewhere else with others.
5—Provisional conclusions
To conclude provisionally, we return to Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first diagnosed. We look at participatory small media from an emerging genre of drone aerial footage shot over cities under lockdown across the globe. In aerial tracking shots in long takes, the drones fly over empty cities, an elegy for the people who formerly congregated on sidewalks, cars and trucks that once jammed streets. The drones chronicle the excesses of the built environment as the abandoned ruins of global capital in a pandemic. The tension between modern structures built for movement and their stasis when not in use exposes the fragile precarities of human species as a consequence of environmental devastation, carbon emissions, and climate catastrophe.
With its aerial shots and long takes of an empty mega-city, the Wuhan drone video exposes a constant entanglement between representation and participation. Nostalgia for the pre-COVID-19 era becomes ghosts of over-development—and memories of participating in the world with others. This drone footage by ChinaFile shows Wuhan, where citizens first experienced shelter-in-place orders. It circulated virally and ended up on the New York Times site as Drone Footage Shows Wuhan under Lockdown (China, 2020). It moved from big media to small media through viral participation of people sharing as a way to conceptualize grief.
The Wuhan drone video returns to the idea of participatory small media as an urgent and necessary practice to mediate the pandemic crisis through inflections of information, satire, and music. The drone video over the city evokes an unknown, liminal world that is still forming. This new undetermined world will be built from memory, science, public health, community, and participatory media practices. And it will forever dispose of that politically corrupted word: “normal.”
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[1] Anthony Lowenstein, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of a Catastrophe (London: Verso, 2017): 5.
[2] Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (New York: Routledge, 2007).
[3] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arandt (rpt; Boston: Mariner Books, 2019): 166–195.
[4] Anthony Lowenstein, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of a Catastrophe (London: Verso, 2017): 59
[5] Greg Braxton, “Trump Blocked Comedian Sarah Cooper on Twitter. Now She Calls Him Her ‘Head Writer’,” Los Angeles Times (01 June 2020): https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-01/sarah-cooper-donald-trump-impersonator-youtube-twitter-tiktok.
[6] “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Conference,” The White House (13 March 2020): https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-conference-3/.
[7] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
[8] Shirley Li, “Sarah Cooper Has Mastered the Trump Joke,” The Atlantic (08 May 2020): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/05/comedian-behind-viral-trump-pandemic-tiktok-sarah-cooper/611329/. Z.Z. Packer, “Sarah Cooper Doesn’t Mimic Trump—She Exposes Him,” The New York Time Magazine (25 June 2020): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magazine/sarah-cooper-doesnt-mimic-trump-she-exposes-him.html.