We’re working with London’s boroughs to identify places where temporary changes are needed to support social distancing or that would benefit from cycling and walking improvements.

To help our customers walk and cycle wherever possible, we’re concentrating on three key areas:

• Quickly building a strategic cycling network, using temporary materials and including new routes, to help reduce crowding on the Tube and trains and on busy bus routes
• Changing town centres so local journeys can be safely walked and cycled where possible, for example with wider pavements on high streets to give space for queues outside shops as people safely walk past while socially distancing
• Reducing traffic on residential streets, creating low-traffic corridors right across London so more people can walk and cycle as part of their daily routine

Some of the temporary changes we’re making could become permanent.

— Streetspace for London, Transport for London

‘Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,’ says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. ‘That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.’

— Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown, Edward Luce in The Financial Times

And I found more recently when I dug into the Cohen story that for all Mr. Farrow’s attraction to screenplay-ready narratives, he missed one that was made for this moment. The real story of John Fry, the I.R.S. employee who leaked Mr. Cohen’s records, went like this: Amid the swirl of the scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mr. Avenatti, her lawyer, took to Twitter one day in May 2018, and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records.

Mr. Fry, a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, was one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts. Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. ‘John: I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate this. Thank you,’’ Mr. Avenatti wrote to Mr. Fry, according to the documents, then pressed him for more.

Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January. In Mr. Fry’s defense, his lawyer said he had been watching ‘hours and hours’ of television, and described him as ‘a victim of cable news.’

— Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?, Ben Smith in The New York Times

Nowadays when everyone is on lockdown and there are days with nothing but spaces of time to pass, nights too, and you can make a hot tea or a coffee and sit down but when you look there’s nothing to read. You can’t access those unique voices writing about the things they care about, that are happening to them.

— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs, TTTThis

Sale goes on to list four ways in which cities should think about slowing traffic down:

1. Cities should not try to move people to facilities but provide facilities where the people are.

2. Cities should be small enough so that inter-community trips, when necessary, could be managed either on foot, by bike, or with some simple subway or trolley system.

3. Cities should attempt to slow down the flow of traffic, particularly with plenty of squares and plazas and parks, places where wheeled vehicles are forced to halt, endpoints that invite stopping and resting.

4. Cities should try to bring home and workplace back together.

— Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic, Jason Kottke quoting Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book Human Scale

In one of the biggest car-free initiatives of any city in the world, the capital’s mayor announced on Friday that main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists.

— Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased, Matthew Taylor in The Guardian

I was prompted to write this article by the experience of a friend of mine who was somewhat embarrassed by having his full, legal name called out in front of a room full of people who only knew him by another name. The was the result of a software system suffering from precisely the ailment I described: someone used the ’name’ field for the name displayed to kitchen workers who were preparing an order. There was no need for his legal name to be used there, but either the integration was made before the ‘preferred name’ field was added, or the developer of the integration simply didn’t think to use it.

— Names, Legal Names, and Fractally Deferred Responsibility, Nora Codes

So, in adapting on the fly through March and April, the Spinach Bus partners took an ancient flower - evidence of cultivation goes back more than 1,000 years, and seed banks in the Netherlands, the heart of the global industry, have specimens grown continuously since the late 1500s - and ignored much of what had been done before in selling it.

— Mother’s Day Bouquets: How Five Friends Saved a Tulip Farm From Covid-19, Kirk Johnson in The New York Times

Q: Aside from Hudson’s ship, what do we see?

A: Whales and porpoises. One of the earliest sketches we have of Manhattan shows a whale in the Hudson River. The charter of Trinity Church includes a provision specifically saying dead whales found on beaches in the province of New York are property of the church, which could use them to make oil and whale bone. So whales were clearly a meaningful part of the local economy and ecosystem.

— When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times

But like my friends and I, not everyone browsing Chatroulette is doing so alone-we flipped by the occasional scantily clad couple, the young person ignoring an offscreen parent’s command, or the roommates crowding around a screen, eager for a break from movie marathons and videogames. ‘We have nothing to do, we’re just here like, stuck in here,’ said Hugo, isolating with his roommates Joel and Ignacio in North Carolina. ‘It’s fun conversations. There’s some shit out there, but the people we’ve met… they’re pretty cool.’

— How to Talk to Strangers During Quarantine - VICE