Pandemic

Story Stream

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...

Glass Century by Ross Barkan May 05, 2025

It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife ...

A Midsummer Night’s Stream May 02, 2025

There’s no real substitute for live theater, but during the pandemic lockdown, companies across America hastily threw together online performances to keep their audiences engaged and their actors at least partially employed. “Zoom theater” grew incre...

How the WWE Stopped Being Great Again April 17, 2025

WWE has mastered a nifty magic trick. The company simultaneously announces record revenues while its flagship event, WrestleMania 41, struggles to sell tickets for the upcoming Easter weekend. This isn't merely growing pains from a corporate transiti...

How Covid Lies Destroyed Kids’ Lives April 17, 2025

In the span of one week in March 2020, the entire school system in America shut down. The academic year for more than 50 million students was over, blasting a hole in the calendar three months wide. A master switch had been flipped by the governors o...

The State of American Downtowns April 02, 2025

Big city downtowns have taken a beating in the last five years. The great 20–25-year bull run of urban center growth had already been abating prior to the pandemic. Then COVID essentially boarded up downtowns for a year or more, and inaugurated a new...

Lockdown Nostalgia June 28, 2024

It is easy to be nostalgic for all kinds of unpleasant things. We are nostalgic for unhappy childhoods, brutal educational institutions, unhappy relationships, noxious political regimes. Me, I’m nostalgic for the pandemic.Caveat: I was one of the luc...

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...

Shohei Ohtani Is the GOAT June 03, 2024

Just over half a century ago, Major League Baseball introduced the designated hitter rule in the American League, consigning pitchers to the bench for half of each game. This year marks only the third since the National League adopted the still-contr...