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For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
With so many destinations of pleasure denied to us now, we may be developing a deeper appreciation of nature, wherever we can get them. And we're lucky that getting outside, even while requiring social distancing, is still available to us during this pandemic.
A century ago in “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair wrote about how the teeming tenements and meatpacking houses where workers lived and labored were perfect breeding grounds for tuberculosis as it swept the country.
Bayer AG is reneging on negotiated settlements with several U.S. law firms representing thousands of plaintiffs who claim exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sources involved in the litigation said on Friday. The reversal comes as U.S. courts are closed to the public because of the spreading coronavirus, eliminating the specter of another Roundup cancer trial in the near future.
In mid-March, as the reality of how COVID-19 would upend daily life became real for people across the U.S. and Europe, Katja Bartholmess went out for provisions in her Berlin neighborhood. At the REWE supermarket, she found long lines and emptied shelves, apart from the odd box of pasta. By contrast, the Boxi (Boxhagener Platz) farmers market was “well visited but well stocked.”
Countless disruptions have come from the coronavirus outbreak. Many office workers are now restricted to electronic communications, and children are home all day. A less noticed disruption is happening to those who are used to regularly working out at gyms that may now be closed.
Companies and governments have plans to launch approximately 50,000 satellites to provide 5G and Wi-Fi services everywhere on Earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is leading these efforts with its planned deployment of 42,000 Starlink satellites and its goal of establishing a global network.
Across our country, millions of people live in sacrifice zones — the places that get stuck with the polluting industries, coal-fired power plants, and coal-ash pits that no one wants to live near. Now, under cover of a global pandemic, the Trump administration is suspending enforcement of environmental laws, sacrificing even more vulnerable places and the people who call them home.
Last weekend, Kristin Davey received an unexpected shock upon entering her local nursery in Sebastopol, California, north of San Francisco. “The shelves were picked over. The vegetable starts were almost gone. And the seed racks were completely bare,” she said, “I’ve been going to nurseries for 15 years and I have never seen them so empty."
Tenzing Chime now has one job to do at the vegetable stand where he works, a measure of how much the coronavirus has changed the simplest rituals of neighborhood life. He only touches the cash. Like him, all his co-workers wear masks, plastic eye shields and gloves.
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