Is It Possible to Be Just Terrified Enough This COVID Halloween?

A Biologist of Animal Behavior Explains Why This Primordial Emotion Can Help Guide Us Through an Especially Spooky Season

It’s Halloween, the season when we go out and try to spook each other—at least in normal years. Indeed, fears of contracting and spreading the novel coronavirus have drastically impacted many of our Halloween plans. Should they? And more importantly, how do our fears impact our behavior to make us safe? I’m a biologist who studies animal behavior—including what scares creatures ranging from giant clams and other immobile marine invertebrates to a variety of birds and mammals, and why. Animals’ responses to frightening things—reactions that have helped species survive over …

by Daniel T. Blumstein | October 28, 2020

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How COVID-19 Will Reshape Us

The Pandemic Will Wane. Ins and Outs of Daily Life Are Staying on Zoom

by Debora Spar | October 26, 2020

Those of us who have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic will almost certainly never forget it. Like my father-in-law who lived through the Depression and could never bear to use …

The Woman Who Faced Down the Mob and Championed a Union

Min Matheson Brought Her Transformative Vision to an Unlikely Corner of America

by Catherine Rios and David Witwer | October 21, 2020

Labor leader Min Lurye Matheson made her name facing down the mob. She arrived in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1944, dispatched by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or ILGWU, to …

In Venezuela, Dystopian Fiction Hits Close to Home

J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise Shows What Happens When a Liberal Democracy Crumbles and Its Worst Vices Take Over

by José González Vargas | October 19, 2020

There’s a certain absurdity that comes with trying to explain—in calm, simple, and objective words—a life that has become too strange to be real. At least, that’s how I feel …

In Zimbabwe, Literature Is Protest

A New Generation of Authors Are Giving Voice to the Post-Mugabe Reality

by Beaven Tapureta | October 5, 2020

In November 2017, when a military coup removed Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s head of state after 37 years of rule, euphoria gripped the whole country. Many saw it as an …

Coming Home to the Holocaust

My Mother Barely Escaped Nazi Germany. I Returned to Remember Those Who Didn’t and to Reclaim Them as My Own

by Kim Fellner | October 1, 2020

In the town hall of Fischach, a village in southern Germany with a population of 2,500, I am staring at a glass display case holding the detritus of the Jews …

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