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QAnon, Fine Dining in Greenhouses, and the Return of NASCAR
A roundup of Covid-19 stories we’re reading today
Published in
2 min readMay 15, 2020
- American belief in conspiracy theories is mounting, writes Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, in an expansive feature on the pervasive conspiracy theory QAnon and its dangerous assertions about the coronavirus pandemic, which suggest it’s all a scheme to prevent President Donald Trump from being reelected. Ludicrous as it may sound, to some people it may as well be the word of god. “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion,” she writes.
- “Good morning! Hope this finds you” — nah, scratch that. Hello, the pandemic is changing the way we send emails, texts, and Slack messages, reports the Wall Street Journal, which means we’re leaving out overly cheerful messages, using fewer exclamation points and emojis, and expressing more genuine care and concern. Fortunately, one expert says it also means people are using less jargon, like “synergistic opportunities” or “cross-promotion.”
- The surreal near future of dining out may have just debuted in Amsterdam, where a pop-up restaurant is seating diners in private miniature greenhouses built alongside a canal. As Dezeen reports, each greenhouse seats a pair of diners from the same household, and waiters clad in face shields serve a four-course, plant-based menu on the ends of long wooden planks so they don’t have to step into the glass dining pods.
- This Sunday marks the return of one of the most beloved sports in the United States: NASCAR. The car racing organization hasn’t put wheels on the racetrack since a pandemic-induced shutdown on March 13, reports ESPN, but executives are now ready to kick off the season, albeit with a couple of key tweaks: Teams will be restricted to an unusually small 16 crew members, and, crucially, fans won’t be allowed in the grandstand.
