On the pathology:

What it does when it gets down to the lungs is similar in some respects to what respiratory viruses do, although much remains unknown. Like SARS-CoV and influenza, it infects and destroys the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs that shuttle oxygen into the bloodstream. As the cellular barrier dividing these sacs from blood vessels break down, liquid from the vessels leaks in, blocking oxygen from getting to the blood. Other cells, including white blood cells, plug up the airway further. A robust immune response will clear all this out in some patients, but overreaction of the immune system can make the tissue damage worse. If the inflammation and tissue damage are too severe, the lungs never recover and the person dies or is left with scarred lungs, says Xiao. “From a pathological point of view, we don’t see a lot of uniqueness here.”

On the epidemiology:

“By far the most likely scenario is that the virus will continue to spread and infect most of the world population in a relatively short period of time,” says Stöhr, meaning one to two years. “Afterwards, the virus will continue to spread in the human population, likely forever.” Like the four generally mild human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 would then circulate constantly and cause mainly mild upper respiratory tract infections, says Stöhr. For that reason, he adds, vaccines won’t be necessary.

— Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic, David Cyranoski in Nature

My therapist used to tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. Our bodies and brains are consistently attuned to war, so we look paranoid or hypervigilant in peacetime. But in times of crisis, PTSD is an incredible survival mechanism that our genius bodies created to help us adapt.

— My PTSD can be a weight. But in this pandemic, it feels like a superpower., Stephanie Foo in Vox

I’m not proud about how any of the rest of this went down. I broke one of my own cardinal rules and snooped through the Boyfriend’s email. I learned that Kimberly had already forwarded my original email to him with a note that read, ‘I’m sorry, I had to tell her.’ My mind rebelled past the idea of the Boyfriend cheating on me, and kept returning to this Negroni Season business. I wasn’t even sure if I knew what a Negroni was — how could it have a whole season? I sat in my boss’s office, who was a real grown-up, who wore blue blazers and aftershave, and told him everything. Did he know anything about a Negroni Season? He looked down his glasses at me. “Only a total boozehound whore would even dream up such a thing as Negroni Season,” he said.

— Negroni Season, Everlyn Everlane in The Awl

Through much of the 20th century, oil derricks towered over homes, schools, golf courses, and even orange groves across the Los Angeles Basin, once among the nation’s top-oil producing regions. Beginning in 1892, when Edward L. Doheny and his associates opened the region’s first free-flowing well, each new strike would quickly attract a cluster of the wooden structures, which supported the drills that bored deep into the Southland’s sedimentary strata.

— When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape, Nathan Masters in Lost L.A.

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” Buck admits while cycling through facts and figures about casualty rates in the event of a Russian tactical strike. This line—and many others in Kubrick’s masterpiece—have been invoked in recent weeks in the context of a very different sort of international catastrophe and its dubiously motivated overseers; this currency speaks to the timelessness of Dr. Strangelove’s vision even as everything in it is rigorously specific to the mid-’60s: the wryly sacrilegious use of Vera Lynn’s World War II standard “We’ll Meet Again,” a song dedicated to British soldiers leaving their loved ones, to soundtrack a mushroom cloud; the Playboy magazines strewn in the cockpit of the B-52 bomber; the political power vacuum in which the lack of a Kennedy-esque stalwart prefigures mutually assured destruction. But if Kennedy is Dr. Strangelove’s structuring absence, Scott’s jowly, Southern-fried shtick as General Turgidson manifests a weirdly prescient riff on LBJ, who’d shortly be advocating his own callous calculus during the onset and development of the Vietnam War.

— ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘Strangelove,’ and the Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking, Adam Nayman in The Ringer

‘I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure,’ Mooney said. ‘The problem is it’s not 1883. You can’t do that anymore. You have to follow the rules.’

— This boat don’t float, Lora Pabst in Star Tribune

Next week, we’ll start the action proper by taking a look at Th�oden’s trip to Helm’s Deep and the additional film action-sequence of a cavalry-on-cavalry engagement (a surprisingly rare thing to see in film, despite how many times the cavalry rides to the rescue).

— Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part I: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brit Devereaux

The message is clear: The storage of empty vehicles is more important than the neighborhood’s fundamental mode of transport. Which is why some of the tensions that have flared during the coronavirus crisis-over runners using the sidewalk, or pedestrians using the bike lane-are particularly tragic. These confrontations are often ascribed to some personality flaw of the runner or pedestrian herself-she’s rude or entitled-rather than seen as an indictment of the misguided system that pits two people on a narrow sidewalk against each other in the first place. No one yells at a parked car, and the driver who scuttles by in the road gets a free pass, even as his driving imposes noise, pollution, and elevated climate risk upon those around him.

— The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars, Tom Vanderbilt in The Atlantic

As many users pointed out online, the much lower interest rate means that the most effective way of making money is now to gamble on the game’s internal ‘stalk’ market - a bourse in which the only commodity is turnips, sold to investors during a single session on Sundays. The root vegetables rot and their value drops to zero after a week.

— Virtual rate cut forces Nintendo gamers into riskier assets, Leo Lewis in FT

But with coronavirus deaths soaring and the real economy tanking, Animal Crossing might inspire Americans to reclaim structure and routine, and to motivate it toward modest rather than remarkable ends. Nobody really wants to live a pastoral-capitalist equilibrium of humdrum labor-unless that’s what everyone wants, actually, and not even so secretly. Civic life, after all, coheres not in abstract fantasies about politician-heroes, but in habitual practices that take place in real communities. All video games aestheticize busywork. But few make it feel like freedom.

— Animal Crossing Isn’t Escapist; It’s Political - The Atlantic, Ian Bogost in The Atlantic