Opinion | How to Grieve Everything We Lost to Covid – The New York Times

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

The covid pandemic was at least as positive as negative for me, and I suspect, for some others too. I didn’t lose any close relatives or friends to covid yet, but the big changes, cancelling my dance and singing and martial arts groups, made me aware for the first time in years, that I had been way too busy, and the reset was useful, since I was slowing down almost unnoticing, as I turned 68, then 69. Being in a beautiful, new relationship, and being able to play tennis almost daily, made all the difference. If I had just gotten divorced, and was single during this pandemic, it would have been a different story. One of misery and depression, and I would have fit into the narrative of this video, which I must point out, is almost all negative, and misses the positive. As a climate hawk who writes and performs about climate change and the sixth extinction, I worry daily that 7.9 billion humans is endangering life as we know it, and extermination other species by the hundreds. The fact is that the pandemic slowed our economic activity, and it also briefly reduced our carbon footprint. But, from a cerebral, analytical point of view, it didn’t terminate nearly enough humans, to ensure that humans will survive going forward. One way or the other, we need to get the human pupulation way down, to stop the sixth extinction.

David blogs at InconvenietNews.net

Lindsay Crouse | Naomi Osaka’s French Open Power Move – The New York Times

By Lindsay Crouse

Ms. Crouse is an Opinion writer and producer.

“When Naomi Osaka dropped out of the French Open on Monday, after declining to attend media interviews that she said could trigger her anxiety, she wasn’t just protecting her mental health. She was sending a message to the establishment of one of the world’s most elite sports: I will not be controlled.

This was a power move — and it packed more punch coming from a young woman of color. When the system hasn’t historically stood for you, why sacrifice yourself to uphold it? Especially when you have the power to change it instead.

Women have long functioned as bit players in sports industries designed by and for men. Now Ms. Osaka, who at 23 is the top-earning female athlete in history, is part of a growing group of female athletes who are betting that they’ll be happier — and maybe perform better, too — by setting their own terms. Increasingly, they have the stature and influence to do so.

In 2019, the runner Mary Cain, now 25, explained how rather than continue to harm her mental health by competing for Nike’s famed track coach Alberto Salazar, she left the sport in 2017 for a few years — and wound up changing it. She is starting a new kind of women’s track team, in which the athletes are employees of a nonprofit instead of working for a corporation.  . . .”

Lindsay Crouse | My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend Is Lady Gaga – The New York Times

By Lindsay Crouse

Ms. Crouse is a senior staff editor in Opinion.

“I was eating bodega grapes at my desk on a recent Monday morning, gearing up to wrangle my inbox, when my phone started buzzing:

“Check Facebook.”

“Check Twitter.”

“Are you OK?”

It was an emergency: My ex-boyfriend, I learned, had a new girlfriend.

Lady Gaga.

“Lolol” if you want. (Everyone I know did.)

But it was true. While I’d been watching the Super Bowl on television in New York, they were snuggling in her private box at the Hard Rock Stadium at Miami Gardens. There were the paparazzi as he escorted her away, her pink hair flowing and sequins pasted around her eyes.  . . . “