Good afternoon. First the news, then some great weekend reads.

Playing video games used to make entertainment reporter Adam Epstein feel vaguely guilty—but no longer. Entering a virtual world has become a welcome respite, he writes, and gives him a small sense of control in a world where everything feels out of control. He's also begun following video-game streamers—online celebrities who have created a new form of entertainment by playing video games for an audience.

If I had $1 for every time a government in history has said “we will relinquish this power after the crisis is averted”. COVID-19 is a serious health safety threat, but governments around the world are using the opportunity to make huge land-grabs around invasion of privacy and control of their local economies. The US government swooped in and forced multiple industries to re-tool privately owned factories to make supplies for circulation by the federal gov., Taiwan’s government is tracking citizens in a modern day version of George Orwell’s 1984 telescreen, and citizens across the world are applauding the changes and asking for more.

Strong democracies do, in fact, release restrictions after the threat is over (think US, UK, Canada, etc after WWII). But certainly authoritarian regimes will take advantage (eg repressive regimes claiming “terrorist crackdowns”). The key is an informed and empowered electorate supported by a strong press that is not being demonized.

Taiwan is one of many countries leveraging cellphone location data to monitor the movements of people during the coronavirus pandemic—but its quick, coordinated response has set it apart. In total, some 55,000 people are being kept at home through a "digital fence." Mary Hui explains the tech that has helped keep infections low in the country of 24 million.

So far, the only coronavirus-related food shortages in the US have resulted from a surge in demand for staples like yeast. But as Chase Purdy reports, there’s evidence that farmers aren’t yet taking adequate measures to protect agricultural workers from infection, which could impact food at the supply level as Covid-19 spreads to rural farming communities.

The unscrupulous state of farm workforce practices (astoundingly low worker pay, overlooking a systemically undocumented workforce, etc) has been a tinderbox for a long time. Coronavirus could be the match. Del Monte and the other major labels can claim they’ve created worker safety rules, but they’ll simply fall by the wayside like employment laws and every other workforce rule by the time they get down the chain to field workers. The farms in the California valleys are likely to be hit first - they’re right next to LA, have many of the manual-labor oriented crops like lettuce and grapes, and thus have more undocumented workers than other parts of the country.

On hold, but not ended! I have hope that when we are past this, those who had been actively fighting for more often than not, the most basic right to well-being, will re-emerge with more passion and more allies then we have seen in a very long time. Strategies of mutual aid, affinity groups, and the types of direct actions long thought to be the domain of radicals alone are being rediscovered and newly appreciated by larger elements of society. This year has been a wake up call for so many, and they will not hit snooze!

Just weeks (a lifetime) ago, we scrolled through Instagram enviously. But where we once found posts about the lives of the famous and beautiful aspirational, in the pandemic era they increasingly strike us as gauche, excessive, tone-deaf, and out of touch, writes Amanda Hess in the New York Times. Will this mark the end of celebrity idolatry in our culture?

The Fed has taken radical action to combat Covid-19. As Donald Trump dawdled, Fed chair Jay Powell began cutting interest rates to near zero, buying more than $1 trillion in debt, and propping up lending markets.

The Wall Street Journal gives a blow-by-blow account of how the "mild-mannered," guitar-playing lawyer has handled the crisis from his home in the Maryland suburbs—and won the begrudging praise of Trump, a longtime critic.

As an award-winning photojournalist, Alessio Mamo has traveled the world telling stories of war and famine, but in a photo essay for the Guardian, he offers a glimpse into what it’s like when the world’s biggest story arrives on your own doorstep. His black-and-white photographs could be stills from a Fellini movie, showing Catania’s empty streets and the harsh realities of life with the virus.

While everyone else in the world gets accustomed to staying six feet away from others, Billy Barr (*not* Trump's AG), the lone full-time resident of Gothic, Colorado, has lived a solitary life for the past 50 years. NPR spoke with Barr about his daily routine and how it might help others. But even though he lives almost entirely in isolation, the notes Barr has taken during his years alone have been used for climate research by the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab.