● How Anthony Fauci became America’s doctor:Michael Specter draws on three decades of reporting in this profile of the infectious-disease expert and his crusadeagainst some of humanity’s most virulent threats.
● Zadie Smith on the American exception: “Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.”
● How did the U.S. end up with nurses wearing garbage bags? Susan B. Glasser examines the race to obtain protective gear for medical workers. “Where was the U.S. government?”
● The price of the pandemic: The virus will leave behind a severe economic crisis, Nick Paumgarten writes. But, as always, some people will profit.
● The black plague: “The old African-American aphorism ‘When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia’ has a new, morbid twist: when white America catches the novel coronavirus, black Americans die,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes.
● The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis.It’s also an ecological one.
● David Remnick on the preëxisting condition in the Oval Office: “The Trump Administration has waged war on science and expertise, making a great nation particularly vulnerable.”
● Ten million undocumented people live in the United States—and they face new risks. E.C., a maintenance worker from Guatemala, says, “If we get sick or something, how will we go to the hospital?”
● Recently, a conservative online magazine has been publishing pseudoscientific takes such as “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result in More Coronavirus Deaths.” Charles Bethea on the Federalist as a “medical journal.”