By Michael Ames @ NewYorker.com, April 3

On Friday, March 6th, DJ Jazzy Jeff was spinning records for a packed house at Whiskey Jacques bar, in Ketchum, Idaho. The party capped a week of festivities in Ketchum and the neighboring Sun Valley for the annual Black Summit of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (N.B.S.), the largest African-American ski and snowboard association in the world. Nearly seven hundred Brotherhood members had made the journey from their homes across the United States, or in some cases from London, for their forty-seventh annual mountain meet-up. The mayor of Sun Valley welcomed the Brotherhood with pomp and ceremony, including keys to the city and a proclamation of March 6th as National Brotherhood of Skiers Day.

By the following week, upward of a hundred and twenty-six members of the Brotherhood had come down with symptoms of the coronavirus. Twenty tested positive for covid-19, and eight were hospitalized, including three in intensive-care units. On March 30th, DJ Jazzy Jeff announced that he was suffering from pneumonia and associated coronavirus symptoms. In the days since, two longtime N.B.S. members, Nathaniel Jackson, of Pasadena, and Charles Jackson, of Los Angeles, who shared a room while in Sun Valley, have died of the illness [....]