Mosques, Mutations, and the Return of Banksy
A roundup of Covid-19 stories we’re reading today
Published in
1 min readApr 16, 2020
- A video from The Guardian takes an on-the-ground look at life inside a Birmingham mosque, where dedicated volunteers have rapidly transformed the space into a food bank and makeshift morgue for the area’s Muslim community.
- While some researchers argue that it’s unlikely the coronavirus will mutate to become more difficult to control, it remains a possibility. In an opinion piece, the New York Times beautifully animates the ways mutation can wreak havoc.
- For many people, the coronavirus pandemic will reshape family life, writes Rachel Donadio at The Atlantic, reflecting on the story of Patient One in Italy, a nation of “intricate family and community ties.” Patient One was a superspreader who infected scores of people, driving home the imperative to stay far apart, especially from the people closest to you.
- In the New Yorker, the renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben proposes a plan to build a stronger, safer world after the pandemic. There’s a lesson we can learn from coronavirus patients with underlying conditions, which made them vulnerable to severe illness. “Societies, too, come with underlying conditions, and the two that haunt our planet right now are inequality and ecological turmoil,” he writes.
- But as the BBC reports, even a global pandemic can’t stop the British artist Banksy, whose latest artwork shows rats in a bathroom and bears the caption: “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
