Table of contents for June 1, 2020 in TIME Magazine

MY GRANDFATHER’S LIFE, LIKE THOSE OF SO many of his generation, was shaped by war. He was 11 when World War I broke out in his native Germany and often recounted the lasting effects of that period on his future, beginning with the disruption in his schooling. “Our young and energetic teachers followed the call to the army,” he wrote in a detailed account of his life. “Our education naturally suffered, and I went from an excellent student to a borderline one.” I’ve thought of him frequently these past weeks, watching my own kids—the oldest of them 11 and the youngest named for him—adjust to this strange new reality. The crisis we find ourselves in is of course quite different from the wars he lived through (although I now regret…

FOR YEARS, JENNELL LÉVÊQUE HAS BEEN GETTING UP EARLY and swiping through her phone in the hope that Amazon Flex would drop some delivery shifts and she’d be quick enough to nab one. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, even with six apps open for various delivery platforms, Lévêque has gotten barely any jobs bringing packages, meals or groceries to customers. The problem is competition: the Facebook group she helps run for Instacart workers is deluged with requests from people suddenly wanting to shop for others. Before the pandemic, there were millions of people like Lévêque who could make a living, or at least earn decent pocket money, off gig work: driving people from the airport to their homes, delivering dinners, designing logos for strangers half a world away. But…

Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, on how the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization is adapting: Can you tell us about the reality on the ground? Around the U.S., we’ve seen precipitous increases in demand. Some of our food banks have seen as much as 200% overall increase in demand. And at [the height of need] so far, it went up to an average of 70% increase. Food banks are not receiving as many donations. How is Feeding America dealing with that? Our estimates are that over the course of the first six months of this pandemic [the funding shortfall for our] network is going to be to the tune of about $1.5 billion. What do we do as a country that is supposed to be the wealthiest in the…

WITH NO END IN SIGHT TO THE COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. seems to be faced with an unappealing choice: If we prioritize saving lives, we court economic ruin. If we opt for economic recovery, we lose friends, colleagues and loved ones. The available options need not be so grim. With the right policy decisions, and well-coordinated action to implement them, America’s possibilities can improve substantially. In a recently released National Bureau of Economic Research paper, we report on our research focusing on one strategy that can yield large gains: targeting lockdowns based on health risks—specifically, age. As is well documented, the mortality risk from COVID-19 is highly correlated to age. Because those over 65 years of age have around 60 times the mortality rate of those ages 20 to…

ON MAY 9, BRAZIL’S DEATH TOLL FROM the coronavirus topped 10,000. Instead of marking the grim milestone with an address or a sign of respect for the victims, President Jair Bolsonaro took a spin on a jet ski. Video footage widely circulated on social media shows Brazil’s leader grinning as he pulls up to a boat on Brasília’s Paranoá Lake where supporters are having a cookout. As he grips onto their boat, Bolsonaro jokes about the “neurosis” of Brazilians worried about the virus. “There’s nothing to be done [about it],” he shrugs. “It’s madness.” Even by the standards of other right-wing populists who have sought to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s defiance of reality was shocking. From the favelas of densely packed cities like Rio de Janeiro to the remote…

IN THE AGE OF QUARANTINE, URBAN parks are magnets for controversy. Which park activities constitute appropriate social-distancing behavior? Should they be open at all? If you’ve never lived in a densely populated city, the intensity of these debates might be baffling. But public parks are the pressure valves of any major metropolis—and never more so than when the bars are closed. They make cheek-by-jowl living bearable. Whether you enter the park for a birthday barbecue or just to read a book in the midday sun, you leave feeling like part of a community. That sense of civic pride suffuses Central Park, a delightful Apple TV+ animated comedy created by Bob’s Burgers team Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith with Josh Gad (Frozen). As in Burgers, a family of lovable oddballs does…

FACE PALM A statue of two clasped hands was removed from its position straddling a path in Salisbury, England, in February 2016 because people kept bumping into it while looking down at their cell phones, according to the sculptor. NO LOUVRE LOST In Paris, overcrowding in the Louvre—where, according to one survey, 80% of visitors on any given day are there to see the Mona Lisa—led gallery workers to strike in 2019. Some have called for Leonardo’s best-known painting to be moved elsewhere. MURAL SUPPORT A painting on a garage wall in Port Talbot, Wales, by the graffiti artist Banksy was removed and relocated to a gallery in 2019 following months behind a protective screen after someone attempted (unsuccessfully) to remove it the previous year.…

EVERY THREE MONTHS, PUBLICLY TRADED companies report both their actual financial earnings and their expected prospects over the near future. Investors closely watch these reports for signs of promise or trouble, in a ritual not unlike reading tea leaves. But with the COVID-19 crisis upending business plans left and right, interpreting those leaves is more challenging than ever. Looking at first-quarter earnings reports from the nearly 90% of S&P 500 companies that have reported them so far reveals signs of trouble, but not cataclysmic shock: revenue rose an aggregate 0.6%, while net income fell 14%, according to FactSet. But COVID-19 shutdowns only began in late March, meaning their economic effects won’t truly show up until the next earnings season. Right now, far more telling is the fact that only…

An additional 2.98 million people filed for unemployment in the beginning of May, bringing the total lost jobs to at least 36 million by official tallies, and likely significantly more once discouraged and gig workers are factored in. Until this March, the most unemployment claims ever filed in one week was fewer than 700,000. The primary reason for this massive surge in unemployment is of course the pandemic and the economic shutdowns to contain it. But government policy is also to blame. The virus has exposed the shambles of how the U.S. has structured its safety nets since the Great Depression. It is a system that barely works in stable times but which in a crisis creates incentives for companies to fire people even if they intend to rehire them…

I MISS SMILING. I DON’T MISS IT IN THE INSPIRATIONAL poster “the whole world smiles with me” way. I don’t miss it, as another poster says, because I can no longer “intimidate those who wish to destroy me.” I don’t miss it because “happiness looks gorgeous on me,” although I did put in three very formative years of hard time in the orthodontia trenches—20 months of braces and six retainers—so it looks at least marginally better than it used to. I miss smiling because it’s one of the handiest utensils in the communication drawer and my mask has locked it away. Yes, it’s just a facial expression: a deployment of the zygomaticus muscles, sometimes authentic, sometimes a placeholder because the real emotion we’re feeling is best not expressed. But…

IN MAY, I EXPERIENCED WHAT FELT LIKE A personal concert by two of my favorite performers. Really, I was sitting in my living room, and 700,000 other people were watching too. It was the latest “Verzuz” battle—in which two artists perform from their homes while fans egg them on in the comments—and the competitors were Jill Scott and Erykah Badu. But the event felt more like a celebration than a duel. Scott and Badu discussed homeschooling their children, shared stories behind hit songs and complimented each other’s work. Michelle Obama even left comments and tagged her husband. The series was launched in March by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, and whenever one of these battles happens, I see all the black people on my Twitter feed talking about it. Despite our…

MUCH OF NEW YORK CITY HAS BEEN IDLE SINCE the coronavirus lockdown was declared two months ago, but not the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, an 88-acre shipping and distribution hub built in the 1960s on the east side of the city’s inner harbor, opposite the Statue of Liberty. Day and night, trucks back up to loading bays while 130 workers scamper between three football-field-size warehouses, waving in drivers and inspecting their freight. The traffic here is no longer in goods arriving from around the world, however. It is in the dead. The corpses arrive from across the city. Since mid-April, the bodies of New Yorkers have been pulled from homes, hospitals and alleyways, zipped up in black body bags and brought here for processing. Some died hours earlier; others…

DIED Fred Willard Singular satirist FRED WILLARD, WHO DIED ON MAY 15 AT 86, WAS A BRILLIANT satirist, and he did what I think is the best kind of satire; it’s very close to the bone. You didn’t know if it was supposed to be funny or if he was telling you an honest truth. We tried to do that with This Is Spinal Tap, and he did it with everything. When we were doing Spinal Tap, the cinematographer kept saying, “What’s funny about this? This is what really happens,” and I said, “No no no, it’s a little bent.” And that’s what was great about Fred. You need great observational skills to see a character like that—in Best in Show or with any of the characters Fred played,…

IN A NEAR EMPTY ARENA IN JACKSONVILLE, FLA., ON MAY 9, Ultimate Fighting Championship held its first event in the U.S. since COVID-19 dealt American pro sports a knockout blow. One of the two dozen fighters on the card—and two of his cornermen—had been removed from the lineup after testing positive for the virus, but UFC 249 carried on. The event ended up drawing more than 700,000 pay-per-view purchases, according to the Sports Business Journal, confirmation—as if any were needed—of the country’s pent-up demand for live sports. About a week later, NASCAR staged its first pandemic-era race on May 17 in Darlington, S.C., with safety measures in place. Pit road crew members, for example, wore either fireproof masks or face screens. Kevin Harvick won the Real Heroes 400, whose…

MEXICO FACES MORE than its share of threats these days. The human and economic toll of the country’s coronavirus crisis is rising. Low oil prices have cut deeply into its oil exports, a crucial source of government revenue. Criminal gangs continue their spree of violence across the country. So why is Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, still so popular? How long can his popularity last? Begin with the oil story. For the first three months of this year, Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, reported its worst quarter ever, in part because of COVID-19’s impact on oil demand, the Russian-Saudi price war and a steep fall in Mexico’s currency. That’s a heavy blow to the political agenda of a President who sees Pemex and future oil production as central…

THIS MORNING I ROSE FROM MY SLEEPLESS BED, MY BARE feet padding along the wooden floors to arrive at my bathroom sink. There, I brushed the nighttime off my teeth, took my temperature and ran a comb through my hair. More gray crept from my center part. Little estuaries of silver trickling through. I silently cheered their progress. After about two months of sheltering in place under government order, I’m contemplating making the break. What if I no longer colored my hair? What if I gave up on the formula my stylist perfected, over years, to achieve my honey-wheat-blond base with ribbons of “natural” highlights? Against the backdrop of life-and-death decisions made during this coronavirus pandemic, my question must seem trivial. But for me, it’s a meaningful, potentially pivotal…

Beier, a photography major in the Drexel University Class of 2020, has been virtually photographing her classmates in quarantine. She directed this series of portraits over FaceTime. THEY CALL IT COMMENCEMENT BECAUSE IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A NEW BEGINNING. College graduation is one of life’s last clean transitions, a final passage from adolescence to adulthood that is predictable in ways other transitions rarely are. Relationships end with breakups or death, jobs often end with quitting or firing, but college is one of the only things in life that ends with a fresh start. Except when it doesn’t. One morning in March, Clavey Robertson took a study break and climbed onto the roof of his dorm at the University of California, Berkeley. He had spent the past year working on his…

DESPITE THEIR SEEMING LIGHTNESS, OR MAYBE because of it, screwball comedies are complicated to make. It’s much easier for Hollywood to throw pots of money at an action picture than to find two actors with great chemistry who can sustain a hamster-wheeling plot for 90 minutes. Little wonder the screwball comedy is practically a lost genre. That’s why The Lovebirds, in all its harebrained glory, is such a delight. The plot is dumb—but then, it’s just a conveyor belt for the performers’ charm. Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae play Jibran and Leilani, a New Orleans couple who, when we first meet them, are falling deeply and convincingly in love. That part lasts for about four minutes. Next thing we know, they’re four years into the relationship and their nerves are…