Making things even more complex is the fact that the rules frequently change. In Spain, nighttime curfews banning people from being outside between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. were reintroduced in some spots last week, including Barcelona. “If you’ve come here to party then it could be disappointing, but if you are here for the…
A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding. In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from Covid-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virologist…
When Congress created Supplemental Security Income in 1972, it left no question about its intentions. The program, lawmakers wrote, was “designed to provide a positive assurance that the nation’s aged, blind and disabled people would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.” Today, it helps ensure the opposite. The maximum annual benefit is $9,528,…
In yet another unexpected and unwelcome twist in the pandemic, fully immunized people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant may spread the virus to others just as easily as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report published on Friday. The vaccines remain powerfully effective against severe illness…
This time of year, my diet turns almost completely plant-based. I suppose it’s only natural: Height-of-season summer produce is seductive, with tantalizing shapes and colors, and the kind of sweetness that comes from being freshly picked. This is the magic moment when melons, berries, stone fruit, peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans and squashes collide. This menu…
I was inspired by something I saw on Twitter this week (I know, strange): The podcast host and author Linda Holmes wrote that, after a pandemic stretch of ordering in and PB&Js, she wanted to reset her relationship with her kitchen. She issued herself a cooking challenge, choosing eight New York Times Cooking recipes and…
Even as the more contagious Delta variant drives a surge in infections, the Covid-19 vaccination effort has become so polarized in Missouri that some people are trying to get shots in secret to avoid conflicts with friends and relatives, a doctor there said. In a video circulated by her employer, Dr. Priscilla A. Frase, a…
My sister said she felt as though she had forced Nada’s family to revisit an unresolved trauma, and it weighed on her. Over the next several years, she tried to put the whole experience behind her. The family had given her a few keepsakes: a bracelet, a gold necklace and the picture of Sara. Eventually,…
When Alexis Nikole Nelson was a kindergartner, she counted a honeysuckle tree among her most cherished friends. She named the tree Priscilla, after her great-aunt. “I wasn’t especially adept at climbing trees,” she told me as we walked through the woods near her home in Columbus, Ohio. “But this tree grew in this curved way…
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