In the annus horribilis of 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, a generation that had yet to experience a cataclysm of precisely this scale turned to art for insight into how we might survive it. Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from Ling Ma's novel Severance to Steven Soderbergh's movie Contagion, surged in popularity. Readers also turned to tales of pestilence past: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. But no dusty tome got a bigger boost than Giovanni Boccaccio's early-Renaissance classic The Decameron. Virtual book clubs sprung up to dissect it. The New York Times commissioned stories from Margaret Atwood and Tommy Orange for its own Decameron Project. "Six Centuries Later, The Decameron Is Suddenly the Book of the Moment," Vogue reported.
This story is from the August 05, 2024 edition of Time.
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This story is from the August 05, 2024 edition of Time.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The New Apprentice - J.D. Vance's juggling act
J.D. Vance looks annoyed. it's a tuesday afternoon in August, and we're sitting near the front of his campaign plane, flying from a rally in Michigan to a fundraiser in Tennessee. Across the aisle is his mother Bev, whose role in Vance's traumatic and disruptive childhood he chronicled in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. As flight attendants serve Chick-fil-A, Vance gripes about the ongoing controversy over his three-year-old comments complaining that the U.S.is being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and childless cat ladies who don't really have a direct stake in the country's future. As with his boss, Vance's instincts are to punch back. I think it's a ridiculous thing to focus on, he says, instead of the underlying argument I was trying to make.
The Hunt for Life on a Moon of Jupiter Begins - Nearly half a billion miles from Earth, a world may be stirring.
Europa has fascinated astronomers and exobiologists at least since 1979, when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft reconnoitered the moon and photographed an icy white surface shot through with cracks and fractures, suggesting a churning ocean disrupting the frozen crust. The later Galileo mission, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, discovered that Jupiter's magnetic field is disrupted in the vicinity of Europa in a way consistent with a deep, electrically conductive liquid beneath the surface of the moon. The Juno mission, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, has been studying Europa more closely still, documenting ice walls, scarps, and ridges, all pointing to a surface in constant motion. Astronomers now believe that Europa has an ice shell up to 15 miles thick, covering a global ocean up to 100 miles deep.
Why is going to the pharmacy so miserable these days? - If you've been to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription lately, you might have wanted to bang your head against the wall.
Chains and independent pharmacies alike are shortstaffed, leading to long lines. Customers are finding empty shelves and chaotic operations. Satisfaction with brick-andmortar pharmacies in the U.S. dropped 10 points in 2024 alone, a study by J.D. Power found.Running the businesses is getting harder too. Without a doubt, this is the worst it's ever been, says Enrique Reynoso, who has been a pharmacist since 1991 and owns Beacon Wellness Pharmacy, a small shop in upstate New York. Reynoso has tried to do everything he can to stay afloatputting drugs in smaller bottles to save costs, asking customers to pay by Venmo since creditcard fees are so high, diversifying the merchandise he sells in the front of his stores.
Inside Ukraine's Troubled Outreach to Trump - Many nations keep a nervous eye on U.S.presidential races, but none have as much at stake this time as the Ukrainians.
Zelensky's first public event that day was a visit to an arms factory in Scranton, Pa., which he toured alongside the state's Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro. The visit allowed Zelensky to express his gratitude to all the American workers producing weapons for Ukraine. But the optics did not sit well with the Trump campaign. It seems he took offense, one member of Zelensky's entourage tells TIME.
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Artists - From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
She may claim to be short and sweet, but never underestimate the mighty power behind Sabrina Carpenter's talent. It's the reason she has catapulted to her earned spot as one of today's leading pop artists. She proves great things come in small packages. As a fellow 5-ft. female with a similar working-adolescent Disney history, I firsthand recognize and respect what it takes to maintain clarity while delivering within the demands of this business.Sabrina handles the task with seemingly effortless ease and charisma while promoting, performing, and handling press with a smile and her signature coy charm. I wanted to get to know the person beyond the undeniable worldwide successincluding her newest single, Taste-to see how she operates on a personal level. When we met, the woman I discovered was refreshingly calm, collected, down to earth, and focused. Sabrina is where she is for a reason and ahead of her years.
Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Innovators
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Leaders
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Advocates
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
