Pandemic
Story Stream
Did the Pandemic Ever End? May 29, 2025
I’M TRYING TO remember the time of day I started reading Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s new book The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir. I know I was in Houston. I know there was no sun in the sky. I remember my fe...
Cannes 2025: Out of Breath May 26, 2025
As I write these words, it’s day six of Cannes and I, like many other overstuffed and underslept critics, am feeling like the vagabond in the opening shot of Ari Aster’s Eddington: unkempt and muttering nonsense under my breath between coughs and cac...
Millennial Malaise May 21, 2025
During the height of the pandemic, the Spanish priest Julian Carron published a book posing the simple yet loaded question: “Is there hope?” “The pandemic,” he posited, offered “a propitious opportunity for the verification” of the answer to this que...
School’s Out Forever May 20, 2025
‘Five years after the global COVID pandemic was declared, there is widespread agreement that closing classrooms was devastating for children,” read a March 16 article in the New York Times titled “What We’ve Learned About School Closures for the Next...
What Were We Thinking? May 19, 2025
In the early spring of 2020, freelance writer David Zweig was, like most suburban dads, willing to follow the advice of experts. “People were dying from a scary new disease, and my family and my neighbors were readily compliant with the governor’s or...
America’s Puritans Are Back May 15, 2025
Of the many unpleasant truths about humanity that the Covid pandemic brought to light, one of the more astonishing was how many people seemed to have forgotten they were going to die. A more philosophical age might have been grateful for this reminde...
Glass Century by Ross Barkan May 05, 2025
It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife ...
A Midsummer Night’s Stream May 02, 2025
There’s no real substitute for live theater, but during the pandemic lockdown, companies across America hastily threw together online performances to keep their audiences engaged and their actors at least partially employed. “Zoom theater” grew incre...
