Covid
Story Stream
School’s Out Forever May 20, 2025
‘Five years after the global COVID pandemic was declared, there is widespread agreement that closing classrooms was devastating for children,” read a March 16 article in the New York Times titled “What We’ve Learned About School Closures for the Next...
What Were We Thinking? May 19, 2025
In the early spring of 2020, freelance writer David Zweig was, like most suburban dads, willing to follow the advice of experts. “People were dying from a scary new disease, and my family and my neighbors were readily compliant with the governor’s or...
America’s Puritans Are Back May 15, 2025
Of the many unpleasant truths about humanity that the Covid pandemic brought to light, one of the more astonishing was how many people seemed to have forgotten they were going to die. A more philosophical age might have been grateful for this reminde...
What COVID Did to Fiction June 13, 2024
In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would sometimes comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during plague times, or that Tony Kushner and Lar...
The One-Click Economy June 11, 2024
You’d think that having subscriptions to three online fitness programs would make me the healthiest person in the world.I have: (1) a Zumba subscription, because until recently, I was an instructor at a local gym and I needed choreography to teach; (...
Malika Andrews Plays Through the Pressure June 07, 2024
On March 11, 2020, Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, received word that the Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, who at that moment was in an arena filled with nineteen thousand fans, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Silver cancelled the game ju...
Parents Take Control June 04, 2024
During Covid, America’s public school teachers received full pay to stop doing their jobs, often for over a year. Officially, to be clear, Zoom school was in session. But “teaching” via Zoom was barely better than nothing. Zoom schools offered little...
