Tag: pandemic hit
Has Alcohol Left Humanity Better or Worse Off?
“At this point in my life, the pros outweigh the cons,” one reader argued.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked readers, “Are humans better or worse off for having beer, wine, and spirits?
The Case for Love-Life Balance
If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?
Either way,
What Squirrels Taught Me About Life After Divorce
Noah likes to feed the squirrels naked. I don’t know if he does it this way when I am not here. But like clockwork on the weekend mornings we spend together, the squirrels will start to tap on the window. And Noah will rise from the bed as if responding to a baby monitor. He will stumble to the kitchen, grab a handful of unsalted almonds from a jar in the cabinet, return to the bedroom, and crack the
Is America Simply Sicker Now?
The most haunting memory of the pandemic for Laura, a doctor who practices internal medicine in New York, is a patient who never got COVID at all. A middle-aged man diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019, he underwent surgery and a round of successful chemotherapy and was due for regular checkups to make sure the tumor wasn’t growing. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. So
Pandemic Parenting’s Crisis of Inequality
At the start of the 2020 lockdown, we had a 3-year-old who needed near-constant supervision. My third grader, in public school, generally had about an hour’s worth of unchallenging remote lessons a day. We were grateful that our downstairs tenant, who lives alone and is a freelancer, agreed to share a bubble with us and provide 20 hours a week of child care in exchange for a break on rent.
My husband has a challenging job and makes more
How Coronavirus Politics Tore Apart a Luxury Vacation Town
Joni Reynolds often wonders how things in Gunnison County got so out of hand. How did she, the top health official of a sparsely populated county deep in the Rocky Mountains, end up the target of national fury, and frightened enough to sleep with a gun on her nightstand?
Joni and her husband, Dennis, moved to Gunnison in 2015 to be closer to nature: the smooth waters of the Blue Mesa Reservoir; the craggy, snow-capped peaks of the Rockies;
California Won’t Just Let Outdoor Dining Be
If outdoor dining can flourish anywhere, surely it can do so in California—where the weather is temperate and a wildly diverse corps of chefs has year-round access to high-quality produce, seafood, and wine. Yet before the pandemic hit, the Golden State had long been outclassed in offering congenial surroundings for alfresco dining. Yes, I’m thinking of Paris and its famous sidewalk cafés. But even smaller cities in France, Spain, and Italy offered a higher density of pleasant outdoor seats than