11 of Our Best Weekend Reads

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/arts/11-of-our-best-weekend-reads.html

Version 0 of 1.

Welcome to the weekend. Where I am, the sound of construction is in the air for the first time in a few weeks and traffic is up. Signs, perhaps, that some things are beginning to move forward. It’s a tricky path, one that will include masks and learning to navigate sidewalks, parks and grocery stores with a six-foot buffer. But we can do it! Let’s start with some amazing journalism.

The startling discovery that the virus was responsible for a Feb. 6 death in California raises questions about where else it might have been spreading undetected.

[Also read: “Covid-19 Arrived in Seattle. Where It Went From There Stunned the Scientists” and “Amid Signs the Virus Came Earlier, Americans Ask: Did I Already Have It?”]

____

The idea has been around for centuries. But it took a high school science fair, George W. Bush, history lessons and some determined researchers to overcome skepticism and make it federal policy.

________

Denis Hayes organized the original Earth Day in 1970. Recently, he has drawn a connection between the coronavirus and climate change, and the failure of the federal government to effectively deal with either one.

[Also read: “The Year You Finally Read a Book About Climate Change.”]

____

President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.

____

This is what it’s like inside a South Bronx apartment when you have Covid-19 and a family of eight to care for.

____

With New York City funeral homes overwhelmed by the coronavirus, a professor from an upstate town has been transporting bodies so families don’t have to wait weeks for cremation services.

____

Forced to shutter Prune, I’ve been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

____

In Silicon Valley, gearing up for the apocalypse was a cliché. Now it’s a credential.

____

“The Plot Against America” on HBO is the latest production to reimagine the past. These alternative histories tell us both what could have been — and what might be.

____

A visual diary by the artist Geoff McFetridge.

____

Broadway was booming. Then the virus turned New York’s theater district into a ghost town.