The origin of the coronavirus, a podcast on Teresa of Calcutta, readings for the summer and much more for the weekend.
Sometimes life goes off the rails in the blink of an eye.
Can be the red moon in the sky, which in ancient times heralded change and disruption; an early death; the sudden detour of a plane; the instant a projectile hits the eye.
And nothing is the same again.
Sinead O’Connor was a rising rock star until the day in 1992 when he appeared in front of the cameras of a television program and tore a photograph of Pope John Paul II to shreds. Our critic Amanda Hess has a great profile on O’Connor’s cultural wreck, his new memoirs and his denunciation of the abuses of the Catholic Church in the light of the present.
Corinne Rey was looking for her little daughter at the nursery one day in 2015 when armed men forced her to enter the access code to their office in Paris. Then they carried out a massacre against the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine. Rey, known as Coco, has spent years rising from the abyss into which it plunged after that moment.
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–Jose Solís was in a New York movie theater when an alert on his Apple Watch warned him that Broadway had just closed. It was March 12, 2020, the virus was spreading through the city and, at that time, the theater critic did not imagine that he would spend weeks locked up in his apartment or that, after an absence of almost a decade, he would return to his native Honduras to take refuge from the loneliness of confinement. It was there, 409 days after that interrupted movie, who returned to sit in an armchair and to reconcile with his country.
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–Julio Lumbreras was admitted to a Madrid hospital in February last year with a respiratory problem. He spent 57 days in a coma, and when he woke up, the world was in the throes of a pandemic and he had become one of the first covid patients in Spain. His family prepared a short documentary to help him recover the memory of those moments of anxiety in which he slept and the doctors struggled to help him survive.
President Joe Biden, who has been characterized by his restraint, has proposed comprehensive legislative packages, something that makes some wonder if the president has changed his principles since he arrived at the White House. David Brooks, a Times columnist, called to ask.
But, in general, we are not so clear when our lives change forever, or why.
Consider the current debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19: was it an accident in a laboratory or the spread of an animal to a person? Still there is no scientific consensus or a clear report And, as our colleague David Leonhardt explained yesterday, it is worth insisting on knowing the truth.
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–PS: Could you use a change? It doesn’t matter if it’s a big transformation or something small, don’t wait until later. Tara Parker-Pope and the Well team have designed a simple program to help you get off to a fresh start in 10 days. If you missed the challenge before, here you have the instructions and all the challenges. Y Tell us how’s it going.
The youngest victims
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–The faces of victims of violence in the Middle East are often shadowed by a sad figure in news reports. Our team compiled the names, ages and portraits of the 68 children who died in Gaza and Israel in the days of the most recent conflict. With the help of your teachers, family, and others, they rescued the hopes and dreams that were lost with their lives.
And in Opinion, the journalist Laila Al-Arian writes about his grandfather’s house in Gaza, devastated by an Israeli bombing, and the “struggle to build a new home while preserving the memory of the one that was taken from you.”
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