pandemic

Students in Massachusetts are outperforming their peers across the country according to the latest national report card — which shows some troubling trends overall.

“Day” is the first novel in a decade from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham. It’s a family saga set in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and takes place on three separate days in April, one each in the years 2019-2021.

“Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today,” says a character in “The Vulnerables,” the ninth novel by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez. “The Vulnerables” offers a meditation on our contemporary era, asking how present reality affects the way a person looks back on their past.

Albany County's Health Commissioner is leaving her post this month.

The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Dutchess County recently held a virtual talk about using machine intelligence to predict the next pandemic.

In 2020, the world experienced massive change. Millions of lives were ended—and millions more upended—by the Covid-19 pandemic. The shocking police killings of Black men and women gave rise to powerful social movements and widespread collective action to rectify centuries of injustice and racism in the United States and globally. Together, these three colossal events tested the resilience of the social fabric bringing us all together.Attempting to illuminate and make sense of this new reality, photographers from around the world documented these transformational moments as they unfolded.Curated by the founders of Scopio, a community-based image marketplace, a stunning and unforgettable visual history that captures the world’s response to major events that defined 2020: the COVID pandemic and the sweeping movements for racial and social justice.

In March 2020, COVID-19 overtook the United States, and life changed for America. In a matter of weeks the virus impacted millions, with lockdown measures radically reshaping the lives of even those who did not become infected. Yet despite the fear, hardship, and heartbreak from this period of collective struggle, there was hope.In "The Helpers" (W. W. Norton Company), journalist Kathy Gilsinan profiles eight individuals on the front lines of the coronavirus battle.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic. Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Booker Prize–winning author Roddy Doyle’s latest is Life Without Children. The book is a warm and witty portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heartrending short stories.Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone.

Jodi Picoult is the author of twenty-five internationally bestselling novels. Her latest, Wish You Were Here, begins in New York City, March 2020 as young art professional Diana O’Toole is about to embark on a trip to the Galapagos with her surgical resident boyfriend-soon-to-be-fiancé. But then a virus that felt worlds away appears in the city.