In 2010, Dung Nguyen, a 39-year-old Vietnamese fisherman living in Dickinson, Texas, decided to take his boat out early in the season. Peak shrimping in Texas’s Galveston Bay wouldn’t begin until mid-August, but Nguyen was saving to send his three children to college, so in April, he began heading out for four or five days at a time. Nguyen was accustomed to long days; he had come to America as a refugee in 1992 and had saved for years to buy his first boat.

On rounds in a 20-bed intensive care unit (ICU) one recent day, physician Joshua Denson assessed two patients with seizures, many with respiratory failure and others whose kidneys were on a dangerous downhill slide. Days earlier, his rounds had been interrupted as his team tried, and failed, to resuscitate a young woman whose heart had stopped. All shared one thing, says Denson, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Tulane University School of Medicine. “They are all COVID positive.”

As a kid growing up in northern Utah, Chet Olsen would often take his older brother’s shotgun shells, empty out the pellets, and spread them across a flat surface. He would then guide the pellets around, pretending that each one was a sheep he had to tend to. Olsen, now 62, has a salt-and-pepper mustache that accents his serious demeanor, and his boots display telltale signs of a lifetime of hard, hands-on work.

You might not want to spend your quarantine in a city. But the rural places many Americans treat as playgrounds, and the workers who keep them running, will suffer for it.

It’s hard to think of a symbol of COVID-19 more fraught than the N95 respirator. The mask fits tightly around the face and is capable of filtering 95% of airborne particles, such as viruses, from the air, which other protective equipment (such as surgical masks) can’t do. It’s a life-saving device that is now in dangerously short supply. As such, it has come to represent the extreme challenges of the global response to COVID-19.

The long read: Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it

Sarah Miller thinks about climate change and other current horrors, and what it’s like just being sad forever.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 report on the Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918, which reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

One Friday night last month, some artists at the video game studio Naughty Dog were working on their latest game when they heard a crash. A large metal pipe had fallen from above them and landed right next to their desks. If it had dropped a few feet closer, the consequences might have been dire. It was late, past 9 p.m., and the construction workers above had perhaps recklessly assumed that nobody was there. But at Naughty Dog, people were always there.

The long read: After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious

This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames.

From her reporting on the first ascent of Everest to her acclaimed career as writer and historian, Jan Morris – who transitioned from male to female in the 70s – has led an extraordinary life. Now, at 93, she is publishing what may be her last book.

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

The long read: For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others...

In the Midwest, Christian entrepreneurs are searching for relief from the corrosive grind of company-building—while some faith leaders preach the gospel of crushing it.

In December of 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made history with their bi-plane contraption that managed to do the seemingly impossible: it gave man the ability to fly. The concept was so unearthly, in fact, that private aviation first took off not as a means of transportation, but as a sideshow of sorts. In those pioneer days, seeing a man use technology to overcome gravity was such a novelty that early aviators made their living mostly through exhibition flights.

Last year at this time, Westbrook, Maine, made headlines when a 100-yard-wide ice circle appeared on the surface of the Presumpscot River, drawing thousands of people to see the phenomenon for themselves. Its popularity on social media and its resemblance to the moon helped make it the poster child for ice circles, and even now, a year later, locals wait with anticipation in hopes that it will form again.

Some of the world’s most ancient rainforests lie in the north of the Australian state of New South Wales. Continually wet since the time of the dinosaurs, these forests once covered the supercontinent Gondwana. Today, vestiges harbor many endemic and evolutionarily unique plants and animals.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

With McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and every major UK supermarket now selling their own ranges of ‘authentic’ meat substitutes, plant‑based food is booming.