(Reuters) – Various countries around the world are wondering when and how to ease coronavirus lockdowns, though the World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that should be done slowly and only when there is capacity to isolate cases and trace contacts. FILE PHOTO: People work on a construction site at …

Ukrainian contemporary artists, brothers Nikita and Egor Zigura work in their workroom during an online auction in Kiev, Ukraine, April 13, 2020. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian brothers Nikita and Egor Zigura work on their sculpture of a giant fingerprint as art enthusiasts look on via a live-streaming internet …

A LUMINOUS REPUBLIC By Andrés Barba “When I’m asked about the 32 children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor,” explains the narrator in the first sentence of the novel “A Luminous Republic,” by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba. Containing …

KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982By Cho Nam-Joo I hated reading “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” the debut novel by Cho Nam-Joo, which is the opposite of saying that I hated the book itself. The story of a young stay-at-home mother driven to a psychotic break, it laid bare my own Korean childhood …

[ Read an excerpt from “The Address Book.” ] ImageDeirdre Mask populates her daunting inquiries with a cast of stirring meddlers whose curiosity, outrage and ambition inspire them to confront problems ignored by indifferent bureaucracies.Credit…via Deirdre Mask Mask, an American journalist who lives in London, pops in on historians, scientists, …

Interning at the podcasting company Odeo, a 22-year-old Systrom sat next to a 29-year-old engineer, Jack Dorsey. Improbably, this N.Y.U. dropout “with an anarchist tattoo and a nose ring” befriended him. Odeo eventually gave rise to Twitter, an idea he’d dismissed (“They’re crazy, Systrom thought. Nobody is going to use …

BRAISED PORKBy An Yu After her husband dies in a bathtub at home, Jia Jia finds a sketch of a half-man, half-fish sitting atop a stack of towels. “Braised Pork,” by An Yu, opens with the mystery of this man’s death — was it a suicide? did he drown? — …

Even when the Strokes were a brand-new band, nostalgia was a big part of their appeal. “In many ways, they’ll miss the good old days/Someday,” Julian Casablancas sang on “Someday” from the Strokes’s 2001 debut album, “Is This It.” At the time, the Strokes were already being hailed as a …

Image THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE Surviving the Crisis By Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac The first question to ask when reading “The Future We Choose” is, Who exactly is the “we” of the title? Figueres, who helped facilitate the passage of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and Rivett-Carnac, a …

There’s a bit of both Frederick Seidel and T.S. Eliot in the press of her sentences, the crisp progress of her rhyming couplets. They capture the city in what seems to be the early aughts: Once a year you go in a cab to the Bohemian Beer GardenAnd eat pink, …