LONDON — On April 23, I started work at 8:49 a.m., reading and responding to emails, browsing the news and scrolling Twitter. At 9:14 a.m., I made changes to an upcoming story and read through interview notes. By 10:09 a.m., work momentum lost, I read about the Irish village where Matt Damon was living out…
When we asked readers recently what they wanted to know about the coronavirus and exercise, many parents responded with variations of the question — or in some instances, the cri de coeur — of how do I get my kids to move more and stop sitting all day in front of laptops, phones and televisions?…
“It’s like Christmas on steroids.” That’s how the doorman of one Upper East Side co-op recently described the tidal wave of cartons and boxes spilling out of UPS and FedEx trucks and into his building since New Yorkers began sheltering in place in mid-March and began ordering life’s necessities (and, perhaps, a few nonessential items)…
I had been looking to geese to keep my spirits up during the pandemic lockdown. Silly me. You just can’t depend on geese, if what you are looking for is entertainment. They insist on leading their own troubled lives in the face of human attempts to cast them as comedians. The nerve. I had been…
A few weeks ago, Samuel Logan, a fashion executive, put on a protective mask and took a short subway ride to Greenwich Village for a highly anticipated, clandestine tryst. In the middle of a sunny afternoon, he covertly met his barber on a deserted street to get a haircut and beard trim. The appointment had…
My stuck-at-home 11-year-old spends her off-school hours on the online game platform Roblox. As screen time goes, it’s a pretty safe, kid-friendly and creative option, since with parental controls I’m able to lock down her privacy (that means no chats, ever). But she resists screen time limits, argues about getting off Roblox to do chores…
Ever since the coronavirus became a threat, many of us are doing a lot more cleaning at home, spraying and wiping pretty much everything in sight, especially high-touch surfaces like door knobs and faucet handles. But many of us are used to giving a surface a quick spray, followed by a wipe or two, which…
In March, New York City began moving homeless shelter residents believed to have Covid-19 to “isolation units” within existing facilities. In April, it began using the city’s inventory of empty hotels, which were supposed to be for residents who weren’t yet sick enough to need hospital care. There was plenty of space available; the problem…
This spring, as the United States faced a critical shortage of masks, gloves and other protective equipment to battle the coronavirus pandemic, a South Carolina physician reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency with an offer of help. Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks had longtime manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks…
The human gut microbiota consists of trillions of bacteria, fungi and virus constituting an inner chemical factory producing a multitude of microbial compounds affecting immunity, neurobiology and metabolism of the human host. It has for long been known that imbalances in the composition of gut microbes link with a variety of chronic human disorders spanning…