Symptoms, diagnosis of coronavirus

My mother-in-law, Malka, came to Toronto in 1958 from postwar Poland. She came with unbearable losses authored by the Third Reich fascist fantasies that had destroyed her world.

She suffered the murder of her husband and second child, a newborn. She endured a hatred of her very being that defies reason and reckoning, yet she came, nonetheless, with profound wits about her and a courage groomed by the black market in Siberia where she somehow kept her first-born toddler alive by placing her in an unlit closet where the child would be safe while Malka bartered for food.

After the war, she married a survivor whose wife and children and been exterminated. Together, they had a son; I married that son, his story and the longest hatred it embodied.

Even given the profound and forbidding ugliness of the world Malka fled, she somehow created, in her third act, a single piece of art she found beautiful.

VIENNA — Roger Bannister, 1954. Eliud Kipchoge, 2019?

Like the sub-four-minute mile, running a marathon in less than two hours had seemed impossible — until Saturday. But this time, there’s an asterisk: Olympic champion Kipchoge performed his feat under conditions so tightly controlled to maximize his success that it won’t appear in the record books.

The 34-year-old Kenyan completed the 42.195 kilometres (26.2 miles) in one hour, 59 minutes, 40.2 seconds at the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, an event set up for the attempt.

Ahead of the event, Kipchoge even compared the feat to being “like the first man on the moon.”