State borders that were previously little more than photo opportunities are now fortified in a bid to keep out residents from Covid-hit places. Separated family members are defying police orders by hugging each other across the barricades, and some Australians have been denied the right to retrieve their children or visit dying relatives.

As news of the blast spread around the world, her Instagram account lit up, urgent WhatsApp messages poured in, and her phone started to ring nonstop. Friends and acquaintances were checking in, wanting news of Wehbe and her family and—more important—asking how they might help. “Initially I said, ‘Call the Red Cross,’ but they said, ‘No, we want to help you,’” Wehbe recalls, nodding at the concrete hulk of the port’s grain silos outside her window, still in ruins amid the twisted remains of warehouses. “I thought: What do people really need right now? Doors and windows.”

Over a Zoom call from sunny Los Angeles, Donald Shoup—sporting a big white beard, a brown cardigan sweater, and a marketer’s telephone headset—was yelling at me. “Oh, how terrible, you have to move your car, so they can sweep the road. I think that’s just awful,” he said, with audible italics. “To overcome the base desires of people like you”—people like me?—“you have to give the money back to the neighborhood.”

I’d made the mistake of griping to the bona fide king of parking reform that owning a car in New York City was annoying. Twice-weekly street sweeping forces a large group of people to fight for a small number of free curbside spots that they must then vacate frequently. It’s the rare game of musical chairs that requires insurance. And for most people, exorbitantly priced garages aren’t really an option. The free spaces are the only way to make owning a car in New York feel sustainable.

These form the blueprints for the basic functions of our existence, as well as our personalities, ideas and relationships, Schwarzlose argues. They also hold the potential for technologies that

Teachers returning to classrooms for another year of pandemic disruptions are facing additional stress in the U.S: overwhelming debt.

Come February, an estimated one in four of the country’s 8.1 million educators will start making payments on their roughly $105 billion in outstanding student loans again after a moratorium ends. The burden is the heaviest for young teachers and Black teachers, who take on significantly more debt than other race groups.

Caracas once looked like a glimpse of Latin America’s future.

When petrodollars flowed into Venezuela in the 1960s and ’70s, the nation’s capital experienced a building boom. Highways ringed the growing metropolis, which boasted a university suffused with public art and the region’s tallest skyscrapers. Big American cars prowled the streets, thanks to generous fuel subsidies, while world-class museums and theaters and state-managed housing complexes were built.

In this special issue, Bloomberg Businessweek examines the seismic changes to urban life as cities sought to survive the virus. In March 2020, after outbreaks of Covid-19 in China, Italy, and Iran, cases mounted rapidly elsewhere. With 95 cases confirmed in New York City by March 12, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency but said he would “fight tooth and nail” to keep schools open. Three days later, confirmed cases in the city had jumped to 329, and New York City public schools—the largest system in the nation—sent home its 1 million pupils for remote instruction.

Adidas AG’s Kasper Rorsted doesn’t yet know how much his employees will keep working from home in the years to come, but he’s pretty sure those at other companies will start resembling his sportswear-clad staff.

“It’s going to be very difficult to persuade people that have been sitting at home in flip flops and a jogging suit to get into brown shoes and a normal suit,” the chief executive officer of the German company said on a call with reporters Friday.

New York (AP) -- The very brief Mike Richards era on “Jeopardy!” began on Monday as the beleaguered game show dealt with the embarrassment of opening its 38th season with a host that its fans already know is toast.

Richards stepped down as Alex Trebek's replacement on Aug. 20, and was ousted as the show's executive producer a week and a half later, after it was discovered podcasts he had made in 2013 and 2014 contained demeaning remarks about women and minorities.

About seven years ago, Vince Allen barged into the garage he shared with some flatmates in a Sydney suburb and set about trying to shake up the solar industry. He was at the time a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, and he had an idea for making solar panels

When Broadway shut down in March 2020, the cast and crew of the musical Six dispersed, some returning to homes as far away as London, others hanging out in New York City and teaching classes over Zoom. Only the show’s set stayed in place, lit by a single ghost light in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, a block from Times Square.

Frackers in America’s largest oil field are letting massive amounts of natural gas spill into the atmosphere. Scientists and activists are trying to find the leaks and get them plugged before they cook the planet further.

“I’d seen so much corruption in politics when I was younger, I didn’t want to become a politician,” says Chandrashekhar Azad. “But I knew I wanted to go into activism.” He ended up doing both. Azad, 34, is a well-known activist for the rights of

For digital currencies to continue that upward trajectory, however, they need to “expand the investor base”—a euphemism for finding new and, almost by definition, less sophisticated investors willing to pump up the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and any other cryptocurrency that is the flavor of the day.

He became one even though, until recently, he expected inflation to be low and stable. Correctly so: In recent years, the U.S. consumer price index has often grown below 2% annually. Ashton says his measured outlook irritated his bosses at Barclays, who viewed it as an impediment to drumming up business. He thought it didn’t matter: Inflation was an ever-present risk, he was inventing ways to insure against it, and low inflation made it cheap to do so. But while the market grew, and Ashton in 2009 founded an advisory business for hedging large or unusual inflation risks, he remained a voice in the desert crying out that he had rain boots for sale. “The lack of interest was amazing,” he says. “It’s...

The chaos in Cincinnati started, in earnest, at a budget hearing three weeks after the murder of George Floyd. The topic was a million-dollar bump for the Cincinnati Police Department, a hugely controversial proposition amid nationwide calls for drastically cutting police budgets.

Residents filed into the Duke Energy Convention Center on a Thursday night in June 2020. One by one, people took the floor, using their two minutes of allotted time to shout down the increase. “To know as a taxpayer that CPD is receiving my hard-earned money to continue and consistently oppress my brothers and sisters is sickening,” said a woman named Mecca, joining via Zoom. “At this point we are paying slave masters with badges.” Cincinnati police had killed nine people, most of them Black, in the past five years. In 2018, a video of an officer

A woman in Istanbul sent a panicked message to her lawyer: Her ex-husband was on his way to pick up their 9-year-old daughter. He threatened to kill her if she tried to stop him.

This was three days after Turkey announced in March that it was

In 2013 then-Representative Cynthia Lummis first heard about a new form of currency from her daughter and son-in-law, who helped Lummis buy her first Bitcoin for $330. Eight years later the first-term Republican senator from Wyoming has become one of Capitol Hill’s most ardent supporters of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology that powers them. Her state is at the forefront of trying to regulate the fast-evolving digital asset sector after the passage of a slate of crypto-friendly laws in 2018 and 2019.

Driven by curiosity about the subject and advocacy for her state, Lummis, 66, who’s combined a career in government with tending steer on her family’s

In 2020, women who worked full-time earned 83 cents for ever dollar men took home, up from 82.3 cents the year prior. Earlier this year, Pew Research Center found

It’s a pledge that countless purveyors of medicine, meditation apps, herbal supplements, and therapy have made: less stress and a good night’s rest. Chances are you’ve tried a few of these, with middling success—we’ve all got fatigue-fighting fatigue.

But the $490