Rural America The story of a rural Oregon family – told in the Feb. 10 Monitor Weekly’s book review “Working-class Americans on a tightrope” – isn’t typical, but it is symptomatic. A century of industrialization has left cities and the countryside in shambles, both socially and

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On Thursday, the U.S. Labor Department reported that 3.3 million Americans filed initial jobless claims, a record in more than 50 years of data and more than four times the previous record. It’s a sign of how the stay-at-home orders that 21 states will have in place by the end of this week

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The best children’s movies work equally well for grown-ups. Almost nothing is more inspiriting than seeing a great movie as a wide-eyed youngster and then, years later, rewatching it as an adult and experiencing the same joy all over again. The experience is validating, as if, despite all we

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Meet Margaret of Beverley. She was likely born during the 12th century in the Middle East to Frankish parents and raised in northern England. As an adult, she returned to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, setting in motion events that would turn her into a historical figure remembered by Christians

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As it leads the global battle against the coronavirus, the World Health Organization has advised people to manage their mental well-being as much as their physical health. The advice is especially true for the hundreds of millions of people who have self-isolated during the pandemic. WHO

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Beijing As the fight against COVID-19 shifts to Europe and beyond, China is supplying millions of masks and other desperately needed items to struggling governments, hoping to build political ties and defuse criticism that it allowed the disease to spread early on. Serbia’s president

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Our Jan. 20 cover story, “Taming a wild controversy,” elicited many reader letters. Here’s a selection of the responses. Difficult decisions I have been a horse lover my whole life, but I have had personal experience with seeing the consequence of too many horses on range land. Sadly, the wild

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Worldwide  Carbon emissions from the global electricity system fell by 2% in 2019, the largest such drop in 30 years, according to a report from the climate think tank Ember. The decrease comes as the United States and European Union increasingly eschew coal-generated electricity in

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Washington, Berlin, and Mexico City It’s a seemingly intractable dilemma, suddenly as salient in Berlin or Tokyo as it is in Washington: How do you save people’s economic livelihoods while telling those same people to stay home?  A global recession, many forecasters say, is already here

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It’s one thing to quarantine people, it’s another to contain the fear and false information that’s gone viral in the world’s first social media pandemic. Conspiracy theories have spread faster than the virus itself. Scientific papers are being hastily released – and debunked. The Trump

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Are the best garden vegetables – the juiciest tomatoes, the spiciest peppers, the crunchiest cucumbers – the result of what happens in the warmth of summer? Many gardeners believe that the most productive gardens have their roots in winter. That’s when they think about helpful advice they’ve

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Washington; Austin, Texas; and Rutledge, Ga. When crisis hits, people often look to government for guidance and answers. In the American federalist system – with power divided among national, state, and local government – the layers can make for confusion and an uneven initial response. But

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Rome Daily life came to a grinding halt around much of the world Sunday amid new travel restrictions, border shutdowns and sweeping closures of restaurants and bars aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The numbers of cases and deaths continued to rise, including in hard-hit

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Solutions for conflict Ryan Lenora Brown’s report on and extended interview with anthropologist Julienne Anoko – “Amid distrust of Ebola responders, she leads by quiet example” in the Jan. 13 Monitor Weekly – is no less than a revelation. Respecting and listening to the people involved in

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Washington President Donald Trump on Friday declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, as Washington struggles with providing Americans with relief and officials race to slow the spread of the outbreak. Speaking from the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said, “I am officially declaring a

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New York The escalating coronavirus emergency sent the stock market Thursday into its worst slide since the Black Monday crash of 1987, extending a sell-off that has now wiped out most of Wall Street’s big gains since President Donald Trump took office. The S&P 500 plummeted 9.5%, for

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Two weeks ago, Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy was almost dead. Today he looks like the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. What happened? In part it was geographic – the former vice president’s core supporters were scarce in early voting states, but more prevalent from South

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On Sunday, tens of thousands of protesters, mostly women, clogged the streets of Mexico City in a purple-clad march against gender-based violence, inequality, and a widespread culture of machismo. But by Monday, the streets were eerily quiet. Women stayed home in a demonstration of what they

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If South Carolina once looked like Joe Biden’s last stand, Michigan is now looking like Bernie Sanders’. After underperforming on Super Tuesday, Senator Sanders badly needs a win here – the state with the biggest cache of delegates on March 10 – or he may wind up too far behind the former vice

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Rome Italy took a page from China’s playbook Sunday, attempting to lock down 16 million people — more than a quarter of its population — for nearly a month to halt new coronavirus. Weddings and museums, movie theaters and shopping malls are all affected by the new restrictions, which focus on a

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