One drizzly Saturday in December, around a hundred suburbanites gathered in the New Jersey town of Maplewood for a scrupulously rule-abiding protest. “We have extra masks and hand sanitizer and extra wipes for everyone who needs them,” Julie Fry, an organizer, announced through a pink medical mask. Her microphone, which she’d disinfected with an alcohol towelette, was connected to a bullhorn a safe distance away, held by a woman wearing an L.L.Bean windbreaker and a mask that asked “WWRBGD?” They stood together as families, in well-spaced clusters, in front of a stone-faced public building.
Fry, a public defender, describes her political views as “left radical.”
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As a journalist, Andrew Rice’s areas of interest include dictatorship, democracy, New York real estate, African politics, intellectual property, international justice, immigration, Congress, witchcraft, urban planning, evangelical Christianity, baseball, and war. He is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, and has written for numerous other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired and The Paris Review. His first book, The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda, was named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2009. Between 2002 and 2004, he lived in Uganda as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, an American nonprofit foundation. He is a native of Columbia, South Carolina and a graduate of Georgetown University.