The handshake came first. Then the high-five, fist bump and more recently, the elbow touch. Canadian researchers are now working on a new greeting, the CanShake. It is not a mere salutation. The CanShake — which involves people shaking their phones at each other upon meeting to transmit contact information — is one of many…
Welcome. I was talking to my colleague Kim Severson a few days ago about the strange rhythms of our lives before the coronavirus came, weeks cut up by work trips, a lot of nights away from home. “Do you miss hotel life?” she asked. I thought about it for a minute before responding, “I do,…
WASHINGTON — Americans returning from China landed at U.S. airports by the thousands in early February, potential carriers of a deadly virus who had been diverted to a handful of cities for screening by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their arrival prompted a frantic scramble by local and state officials to press the…
VENICE — For a change, it was the Venetians who crowded the square. Days before Italy lifted coronavirus travel restrictions on Wednesday that had prevented the usual crush of international visitors from entering the city, hundreds of locals gathered on chalk asterisks drawn several feet apart. They had come to protest a new dock that…
For all of its attention-sucking, data-mining downsides, the internet has held true to at least one of its original promises: connecting disparate groups of people. There’s hardly a better reminder of this than a global health crisis and a national wave of protests. Online, informal support networks have flourished; people are coordinating services for their…
WASHINGTON — Long considered the world’s premier public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen short in its response to the most urgent public health emergency in its 74-year history — a pathogen that has penetrated much of the nation, killing more than 100,000 people. The agency made early missteps in…
Nikil Saval is a socialist candidate running for State Senate in Pennsylvania’s 1st district, which encompasses a huge swath of Philadelphia. He used to edit the literary and political magazine N+1, which is to say that he is more bookish than your standard elected-office-seeker. This occasionally gets in his way. During a recent forum about…
Good morning. Concentration is hard to come by these days, amid the nation’s strife. We are living through a tough and chaotic and wrenching time, filled with fury and an abiding sadness. We’re unsettled. We’re tense. We’re divided. The emotions arrange themselves in combinations that make it hard to work, to read, to watch, to…
For decades, drug companies have depended on a component in the blood of the horseshoe crab to test injectable medicines, including vaccines, for dangerous bacterial contaminants called endotoxins. Conservationists and some businesses have pushed for wide acceptance of an alternative test, to protect the horseshoe crabs and birds that feed on their eggs. Earlier this…
It’s graduation season — and, understandably, parents, friends, classmates and the graduates themselves are at a loss for how to celebrate. For the 3.7 million expected to graduate high school this year, streaming a commencement address by a prominent politician or celebrity isn’t a substitute for the feeling you get walking across a stage and…