Women wear face masks and sunglasses outdoors in public. Some are reluctant to give up the face covering. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
She’s been fully vaccinated for three weeks, but Francesca, a 46-year-old professor, does not plan to abandon the face mask that she’s come to view as a kind of “invisibility cloak” just yet.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker or maybe it’s because I always feel like I have to present my best self to the world, but it has been such a relief to feel anonymous,” she said. “It’s like having a force field around me that says ‘don’t see me’.”
Summary: The Motherhood in the Military panel discussion, sponsored by the Veterans History Project, explores the dual roles of mother and soldier through the personal experiences of four service connected women.
This event encourages women veterans to contribute their oral histories to the national collections of the Library of Congress.
Event Date May 06, 2021, Running Time 1 hours 4 minutes 33 seconds Online Format, video image
Feelings of exhaustion, irritability and mental fogginess are our bodies’ normal response to an abnormal year of pandemic life. Wenjin Chen/Getty Images
In recent weeks, Dr. Kali Cyrus has struggled with periods of exhaustion.
“I am taking a nap in between patients,” says Cyrus, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University.
“I’m going to bed earlier. It’s hard to even just get out of bed. I don’t feel like being active again.”
Exhaustion is also one of the top complaints she hears from her patients these days. They say things like, “It’s just so hard to get out of bed” or “I’ve been misplacing things more often,” she says.
When Howard Rheingold was on our podcast last year, he offered a holistic view of how history weaves technology, the human mind, and society together. Given all that is happening with the coronavirus and the state of daily life right now, we decided to invite Howard back onto the podcast to ask him for his perspective on this moment in history.
Seeing as Howard was the one to coin the term “virtual community” many years ago, we asked him for his thoughts on the current profusion of online learning and online communities. He shares his predictions for how our world might change for the long-term—from conferences to learning to human cooperation—even after this virus is long gone. Enjoy hearing from this man who is a champion of hope, community, and the belief that we’re all in this together.
