The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust all us into unexpected circumstances that are stretching our capacity for resilience, empathy and grit. For some, it presented a unique opportunity to enlist in a statewide “army” of more than 1,200 virus contact tracers.

Listening to Tracey Chapman’s 1988 debut album on a morning run is a reminder of its relevance to recent events that could practically stop you in your tracks.

Back in the late 1960s, one of the ways my father and I bonded was to bike around suburban Florida and sometimes peek inside the houses under construction. Ahmaud Arbery, the young black man recently shot dead while jogging in a Georgia, seems to have been doing exactly the same thing.

Today, with the Covid-19 pandemic having confined most of us to our homes for the past seven weeks and counting, the frustration felt by Cambridge residents over access to public open space may never have been greater. We should open the public golf course immediately for walking and jogging.

No doubt, the experience of living through a viral pandemic will have a lasting effect on our worldview and behavior – which got me thinking about the questions a children’s classic such as Dr. Seuss’ 1957 “The Cat in the Hat” might prompt in readers today. 

March 2020 is a month none of us will soon forget, ending with at least 93 local cases of coronavirus and one death. And I have a sinking feeling it will come to seem like a warmup lap in a grim race that’s been called both a sprint and a marathon.

With time running short to control carbon emissions and stave off catastrophic effects of global warming, there’s a compelling reason not to reelect Donald Trump: A second term could very well be a death sentence for our planet.

Whether you have school-age children, plan to start a family in the future or care about how a quarter-billion of our local tax dollars will be spent, I hope you are paying close attention to debate over the design of a new Tobin Montessori-Vassal Lane Upper School and Callanan Park.

Our global plastic crisis has reached a scale that makes it nearly impossible to imagine that our individual actions can have a meaningful impact. That’s why we are all in this together, and history will be made by individuals inspiring others to take action and to make change when change is hard.

Even people who have lived in Cambridge for many years may not have heard so much as a whisper about one of the community’s longest-running philanthropic and intellectual traditions: the Thursday Morning Talks benefiting Mount Auburn Hospital.