Even though spring has arrived, with daffodils popping up and trees in blossom, it’s still mostly cold and damp on the East Coast. It makes a person want to head for warmer climes. But, alas, there’s no travel in these blighted times. And the warmer spots I dream about are plagued with worry and grief…
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LOS ANGELES — For over a decade, Jennifer Field Piette has put together boxes of local fruits, vegetables and various pantry staples from California — Koda Farms rice, pale blue pastured eggs, crusty loaves of sourdough — and delivered them to people’s doorsteps in Los Angeles. Three weeks ago, the customer base for her business,…
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One of the largest hospital networks in New York has given its doctors an ultimatum: either help deal with the coronavirus crush, or stay home without pay. At other hospitals, too, all hands are being called to deck. Neurosurgeons and cardiologists, orthopedic, dermatology and plastic surgery residents — all have been pulled into emergency rooms…
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Is it cake time yet? These days, the answer is always yes. Cake is comforting in way that a tart or cookies are not. (Tarts are fancy. Cookies are playful. Cake is just cake.) This is especially true of loaf cakes, which you can convince yourself is just like bread. Slices of it fit in…
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To mask or not to mask? For the past few months, public health officials have advised that healthy people should not wear masks as a way to protect themselves from coronavirus. But now more experts are saying there is probably some benefit to covering our faces in public. The federal Centers for Disease Control and…
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[Sign up here to receive Love Letter, a weekly newsletter about relationship highs, lows and woes, in your inbox every Friday.] As many of us are following stay-at-home orders in the United States and around the world because of the coronavirus pandemic, isolation has become our new normal. Some people may find the forced solitude…
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A month ago, Nick Stone had a $50 million coffee business, with dozens of cafes in bustling downtowns. Now the coronavirus pandemic has eliminated 90 percent of Bluestone Lane’s revenue, and he has laid off some 700 workers. “Everything I’ve put into this, everything all these other people have put into building the company, basically…
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Judging by the pinking of my neighborhood in cherry and magnolia blossoms, Covid-19 can’t stop spring. And this means vegetables like ramps, green garlic and asparagus have been making their way into the markets, bringing a needed relief from those wintry pantry staples we’ve all been relying on. I may have to wait on a…
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This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. After earning a Ph.D. at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, in 1994 while raising two young children, Gita Ramjee was exhausted. Her thesis had been on kidney diseases in children — she had worked in a…
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The coronavirus outbreak has turned many of us into nervous germophobes, seeking to protect ourselves from infection by washing our hands methodically and frequently, avoiding unnecessary contact with so called high-touch surfaces and methodically sanitizing packages, our homes and our bodies. For people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., the worry created by the threat…
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