BROOKHAVEN, N.Y.—The crowd grew restless at Brookhaven Town Hall on Long Island as residents voiced their concerns about groundwater contamination from a nearby landfill that has spread beneath parts of their community. At the meeting in late March, speakers criticizing the landfill’s operations were met with applause and shouts of support from the audience. Monique [...]
Ever since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve been eager to read novels that explore what COVID was, and continues to be like. At the time, writers joked incessantly about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during an episode of plague in Renaissance England. How would we all use our time? Would we be writing masterpieces? Would the COVID pandemic generate a new, thrilling era of artistic production? Would everyone be writing a pandemic novel?