When people ask why protests in Memphis have been so different than in most other cities, they’re fishing for a compliment. But there’s one aspect that is never mentioned: They have been smaller than in most other cities. 

The public protests of the past week would seem to violate current health directives against mass gatherings of 50 or more. Given the cause for the gatherings, it would be a mistake for officials to use that as a pretext for breaking them up. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t worry about them.

If there’s a commonality among many who disagree about protest tactics as well as those who by profession are on the other side of a line, maybe it’s a care for the city. Defensive pride in place is a Memphis throughline, and it may be serving us here.  

Protesters distributed a list of “suggested demands” at a weekend rally. Some are easier to achieve than others given the coronavirus-spiked budgeting chaos. All, perhaps, are debatable. But it would do the city great good for the current moment to become a more actionable one.

So, yes, I do not care about whether a college basketball player stands up for an anthem. To complain about such a thing in this moment seems to me pointless, trivial, a kind of profanity.

When the Memphis/Shelby County Joint COVID Task Force moved from daily to twice-weekly briefings this week, I saw it as a sign that living with the virus, and accepting that you’re living with it, means not being gripped by a crisis report day after day after day. 

The general footprint of the plan to renovate the park – three “stages” with separation and a smaller covered venue – mimics the footprint of Memphis in May's Beale Street Music Fest, but in a way that would make a good park even without it. 

The elevation of mask-usage into a kind of political symbol is a drag — it’s flat-out dumb — but it’s happened, and I’d worry that a government requirement, even a loosely enforced one, would increase the political strife around the issue without a commensurate increase in compliance.

It’s hard to imagine many places of Memphis’ size with history and culture so rich and a sense of place so profound.

The operational difference between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2” was always fairly narrow and has grown more so via “phase creep.”

The Forrest statue made the park unusable space for most Memphians. The Sons of Confederate Veterans lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Memphis, thank goodness, long before they lost the legal battle over moving the monuments to Forrest and Jefferson Davis. 

Before the pandemic, the Memphis Zoo was a choose-your-own-adventure endeavor, but for the time being, visitors will be guided in one direction around the exhibits. “If you’re just here to see the giraffes it’s going to take you awhile, because you’re going to have to walk the walk,” says zoo CEO Jim Dean.

The diversity of masks and their origins would be charming if it wasn’t yet another sign of official dysfunction in our collective approach to controlling a pandemic. 

The city and county can loosen restrictions, but a tour of Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods shows businesses and potential customers still have decisions to make. 

The past month has meant navigating a matrix of official restrictions and individual decisions, and so will the many months — maybe years — to come. 

Shelby County's path through coronavirus is a faucet not a switch: We'll gradually loosen the local economy, but will be prepared to restrict the flow of activity again if and when the virus spikes. 

A constant factor of Memphis life seems more pressing now than usual: To paraphrase Texas songwriter Joe Ely, we may walk the streets of Memphis, but we’ll have you understand, Tennessee is not entirely the state we’re in.

From Sam Cooke to Motown, blues to the British Invasion to his own classic songwriting, Otis Redding’s groundbreaking 1965 album turned everything it touched into one man’s soulful sound.  

Impatience was always going to be part of this matrix: There’s a natural urge to get past bad situations without fully dealing with them. But a governmental failure has fed this impatience, and it didn’t come from Nashville.

These are not just places to go to find a thing you know you want. They are places to be. To share space with people who share your affinities. They are at their best when you go in just to browse and a book or record finds you. 

In a month’s time, during the late summer of 1878, the city’s population plummeted from 50,000 to 20,000, with the vast majority of those remaining infected by the fever. Crosby's "The American Plague" takes you to this crucible moment in Memphis history, and helps explain what it meant. 

John Prine was raised in Illinois and settled in Nashville, but he recorded three of his first six albums at different Memphis studios, including his classic debut, “John Prine.”

Shelby County has had deaths in 2.25% of coronavirus cases, compared to 1.61% in the rest of the state and 0.84% in Nashville’s Davidson County. Does this suggest that racial disparities are spiking higher rates locally? For now we can only guess. 

The bootleg T-shirts that inspire Rebecca Fava’s face masks were symbols of a city coming together. Her masks, and other homemade endeavors like them, are perhaps fitting symbols of the city in pandemic times — coming together by staying apart.

At a Chicago church, on the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Mississippi-bred bluesman Otis Spann delivered what arguably remains the most profound musical response to the tragedy.