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Avoid public transportation when possible, limit nonessential travel, work from home and skip social gatherings. Don’t go to crowded restaurants or busy gyms. You can go outside, as long as you avoid being in close contact with people.

If you develop a high fever, shortness of breath or another, more serious symptom, call your doctor. (Testing for coronavirus is still inconsistent — there are not enough kits, and it’s dangerous to go into a doctor’s office and risk infecting others.) Then, check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and your local health department for advice about how and where to be tested.

Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. That splash-under-water flick won’t cut it anymore.

Also, clean “high-touch” surfaces, like phones, tablets and handles. Apple recommends using 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, wiping gently. “Don’t use bleach,” the company said.

To disinfect any surface, the C.D.C. recommends wearing disposable gloves and washing hands thoroughly immediately after removing the gloves. Most household disinfectants registered by the Environmental Protection Agency will work.

There’s a lot of information flying around, and knowing what is going on will go a long way toward protecting your family.

Right now, there’s no reason for parents to worry, the experts say; coronavirus cases in children have been very rare. The flu vaccine is a must, as vaccinating children is good protection for older people. And take the same precautions you would during a normal flu season: Encourage frequent hand-washing, move away from people who appear sick and get the flu shot.

Unless you are already infected, face masks won’t helpFace masks have become a symbol of coronavirus, but stockpiling them might do more harm than good. First, they don’t do much to protect you. Most surgical masks are too loose to prevent inhalation of the virus. (Masks can help prevent the spread of a virus if you are infected. The most effective are the so-called N95 masks, which block 95 percent of very small particles.)Second, health care workers and those caring for sick people are on the front lines. Last month, the surgeon general urged the public to stop stockpiling masks, warning that it might limit the amount of resources available to doctors, nurses and emergency professionals.

Stock up on a 30-day supply of groceries, household supplies and prescriptions, just in case.That doesn’t mean you’ll need to eat only beans and ramen. Here are tips to stock a pantry with shelf-stable and tasty foods

No. The first testing in humans of an experimental vaccine began in mid-March. Such rapid development of a potential vaccine is unprecedented, but even if it is proved safe and effective, it probably will not be available for 12 to18 months.

If you’re sick and you think you’ve been exposed to the new coronavirus, the C.D.C. recommends that you call your healthcare provider and explain your symptoms and fears. They will decide if you need to be tested. Keep in mind that there’s a chance — because of a lack of testing kits or because you’re asymptomatic, for instance — you won’t be able to get tested.

That’s not a good idea. Even if you’re retired, having a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds so that your money keeps up with inflation, or even grows, makes sense. But retirees may want to think about having enough cash set aside for a year’s worth of living expenses and big payments needed over the next five years.

A few days before, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had rescinded tough Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault, saying they violated principles of fairness, particularly for accused students like their own sons.

Women’s groups and victims’ advocates have deplored Ms. DeVos’s moves, saying they will allow colleges to wash their hands of the problem.

But a growing corps of legal experts and defense lawyers have argued that the Obama rules created a culture in which accused students, most of them men, were presumed guilty.

Away from the public eye, families have spent tens of thousands of dollars and dipped into retirement savings to hire lawyers and therapists for their sons.

Seefeld

“I was willing to do everything and anything,” Ms. Seefeld said.

The mothers’ resolve comes from their raw maternal instinct to protect their children.

Their sons may not have been falsely accused, the mothers said, but they had been wrongly accused. They made a distinction.

The most active mothers said they stepped forward because they often had more time than their husbands, and because they made a strategic decision that they could be effective on the issue of sexual assault precisely because they are women and, as some described themselves, feminists. “We recognized that power,” Ms. Seefeld said.

Many women, however, feel exactly the opposite way.

They have not been shy about expressing their view of the mothers as “rape deniers” and misogynists who blame women for inviting male violence against them.

But if the mothers do not defend their sons, she said, who will?

“And pretty much the most significant weapon I had was the weapon of public opinion, so that was the weapon I was wielding the hardest.”

traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.

Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness

Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.

I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

“I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People

His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.

Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”

His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.

“I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”

Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”

Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.

In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.

“I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”

In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”

Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”

In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.

Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”

His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.

“hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave

His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”

He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”

I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape.

It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day

We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries. The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor, and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor.

Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.

The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents

American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.

An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it

Midcentury science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an oppressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui. But these authors’ prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality; they’d forgotten that the world is ordered not by reason or decency but by rapacious avarice.

In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.

Everyone knows how productive you can be when you’re avoiding something. We are currently experiencing the civilizational equivalent of that anxiety you feel when you have something due the next day that you haven’t even started thinking about and yet still you sit there, helplessly watching whole seasons of mediocre TV or compulsively clicking through quintillions of memes even as your brain screams at you — the same way we scream at our politicians about guns and abortion and climate change — to do something.

Enough with the busywork already. We’ve been “productive” enough — produced way too much, in fact. And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.

“My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”

, “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.

Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”

We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  

We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources

In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology

and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.

Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”

By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.

, the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.

“The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”

Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.

people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.

Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.

just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.

While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.

doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.

With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.

To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.

If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.

t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.

The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.

The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.

Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  

The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,

If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic

If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled

It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.

For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying

Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions

t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.

it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise

In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized

respiratory conditions.

Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had

 A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.

If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.

An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.

now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,

“The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”

“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.

Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”

The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”

The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”

some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.

Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?

“the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)

“It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”

Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”

Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.

this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”

Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”

Defining the Anthropocene: nine sites are in the running to be given the ‘golden spike’ designation

Mentioning the Jurassic period, for instance, helps scientists to picture plants and animals that were alive during that time

“The Anthropocene represents an umbrella for all of these different changes that humans have made to the planet,”

Typically, researchers will agree that a specific change in Earth’s geology must be captured in the official timeline. The ICS will then determine which set of rock layers, called strata, best illustrates that change, and it will choose which layer marks its lower boundary

This is called the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), and it is defined by a signal, such as the first appearance of a fossil species, trapped in the rock, mud or other material. One location is chosen to represent the boundary, and researchers mark this site physically with a golden spike, to commemorate it.

“It’s a label,” says Colin Waters, who chairs the AWG and is a geologist at the University of Leicester, UK. “It’s a great way of summarizing a lot of concepts into one word.”

But the Anthropocene has posed problems. Geologists want to capture it in the timeline, but its beginning isn’t obvious in Earth’s strata, and signs of human activity have never before been part of the defining process.

“We had a vague idea about what it might be, [but] we didn’t know what kind of hard evidence would go into it.”

Years of debate among the group’s multidisciplinary members led them to identify a host of signals — radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests, ash from fossil-fuel combustion, microplastics, pesticides — that would be trapped in the strata of an Anthropocene-defining site. These began to appear in the early 1950s, when a booming human population started consuming materials and creating new ones faster than ever.

Why do some geologists oppose the Anthropocene as a new epoch?“It misrepresents what we do” in the ICS, says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University, Long Beach, and secretary-general for the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The AWG is working backwards, Finney says: normally, geologists identify strata that should enter the geological timescale before considering a golden spike; in this case, they’re seeking out the lower boundary of an undefined set of geological layers.

Lucy Edwards, a palaeontologist who retired in 2008 from the Florence Bascom Geoscience Center in Reston, Virginia, agrees. For her, the strata that might define the Anthropocene do not yet exist because the proposed epoch is so young. “There is no geologic record of tomorrow,”

Edwards, Finney and other researchers have instead proposed calling the Anthropocene a geological ‘event’, a flexible term that can stretch in time, depending on human impact. “It’s all-encompassing,” Edwards says.

Zalasiewicz disagrees. “The word ‘event’ has been used and stretched to mean all kinds of things,” he says. “So simply calling something an event doesn’t give it any wider meaning.”