If the global coronavirus pandemic is good for anything, it’s how we may rediscover the experience of immersive reading. With millions in the United States and around world who are confined to their homes, finding a short story collection, novel, or nonfiction tome that transports us to new, vibrant worlds can provide us with a blissful way to while away the hours. “Immersive” can mean books of great length or short stories you can read in an afternoon.

The Food and Drug Administration has been in contentious conflict with e-cigarette makers, attempting numerous times to regulate the product, sometimes effectively and other times not. E-cigarette companies successfully contended in a lawsuit against the FDA that they are tobacco products, and the FDA therefore has no jurisdiction over their regulation because it infringes Congress’s intent to withhold FDA’s authority over tobacco products

Martin Emond was a cartoon illustrator and fine artist who combined elements of old school tattoo and classic sign painting into a sequential art style that drastically changed the look of alternative comics, and whose untimely death occurred as he was on the cusp of achieving mainstream success. Emond’s work was darkly sardonic, and after a stint on the comic strip Accident Man for Toxic! he rose to fame in the United States with Gordon Rennie’s White Trash – the fictional adventures of Elvis Presley and Axl Rose (renamed so as to avoid litigation) on a debaucherous road trip across the southern United States in the former’s pink Cadillac.

Jacqueline Lambert and her husband were just about to wrap up a vacation in Italy when the borders locked down. They decided to stay, renting an apartment in the Aosta Valley in Northern Italy. "We're going to enjoy the weather and beautiful scenery, which we have all to ourselves," says Lambert, a guide book author. Others are changing their itineraries before they leave. That's what happened to me last week. I had planned to spend a month in Italy, with stops in Bologna, Venice, Rome and Südtirol. Then the entire country turned into a red zone. 

U.S. movie theaters have closed nationwide as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, turning dark nearly all of the country's 40,000-plus screens in an unprecedented shutdown. With most of Hollywood's March and April releases already postponed, the Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday also cleared out its May releases as well, including Marvel's Black Widow. The largest chains had tried to remain open even as Hollywood postponed its upcoming release plans and guidelines for social distancing steadily diminished the recommended size of crowds.

The celebrity-favorite and Instagram-famous teamLab Planets Tokyo has become the world’s most popular single-artist destination, drawing in more than 2 million visitors in its first year. The sprawling interactive digital artwork space allows guests to virtually walk through water and immerse themselves in an enhanced world that responds to live movement. Visitors enter the museum barefoot and become completely immersed with other visitors in the vast, enthralling spaces. The artwork is manipulated in real time by a computer program so previous visual states can never be replicated and will never reoccur -- each visitor’s experience is completely unique.

There will be time for an outbreak postmortem once the U.S. gets past the threat of the coronavirus  --  and the nation will move past it, just as it has countless challenges in the past. The question now is how many Americans will suffer and how many will die unnecessarily. Our goal should be to protect as many fellow citizens as possible, regardless of political affiliation, race, age, gender, etc. Viruses neither care about nor recognize these traits, nor should we when addressing a crisis. Unfortunately, our efforts to safeguard the populace have been seriously undermined by the current social and political climate, rife with division and prejudice, and this climate has been not only fostered, but furthered, by the current administration.

As with efforts at the state and city level, the U.S. Census Bureau is focused on encouraging Native Americans to self-respond, which yields the most accurate data. For that, Behler said, the most important step has been educating and enlisting tribal leaders who can then spread the message to their people about the importance of filling out the Census and press tribal resources into that effort. For instance, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, located in Akwesasne by the border with Canada, will use a community center to help their members fill out the Census online, he said.

Machine Man Memories is the newest series of fantastical paintings by Joyner, of Robots and Donuts fame. Joyner’s work, which has been licensed from the likes of Disney, Warner Brothers, and the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, depicts the tenuous conflict between children’s toys and adulthood as a portrait of another reality. His work is characterized by his playful and surrealistic style that creates harmony between the mix of cartoon characters, especially Japanese tin robots and colorful donuts (directly inspired by the film Pleasantville) inserted in all kinds of landscapes from the Age of Dinosaurs to the bottom of the ocean.