John Brown's Notes and Essays

With lots of down time and a bountiful harvest, mushrooming mushrooms in forests around Moscow and St. Petersburg   By Yuliya Chernova, The Wall Street Journal , Sept. 30, 2020 10:15 am ET; original article contains additional illustrations For many people around the world, the coronavirus pandemic has been an excuse to learn a homey new skill like knitting or pastry-making. For Russians, it’s all about the mushrooms. Foraging for mushrooms is a longstanding tradition in Russia. According to a 2019 survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, nearly half the population in the biggest cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, participate. “I go every other day and can’t get enough. I want more, more, more,” says Svetlana Gladysheva, who has had more time than usual to hunt for fungi in the woods, because the theater where she runs a cafeteria was closed. “My husband told me: ‘I’m afraid to lose you. Mushrooms have kidnapped you,’ ” she adds.  That was before the pandemic...

A comprehensive new study by McKinsey and Lean In suggests that many women—especially mothers—may have to step back or away from jobs because of the pandemic’s impact on their lives  By Lauren Weber and Vanessa Fuhrmans, The Wall Street Journal , Sept. 30, 2020 12:01 am  Kate Deisseroth spent two decades building a career as an orthopedic surgeon that now, in the Covid era, looks precarious.  As the single mother of twin 10-year-olds in Lebanon, Pa., the Air Force veteran made pre-pandemic life run like clockwork with an intricate schedule of early school drop-off, after-school programs and babysitters who watched her sons when she was called to the hospital for emergencies. That support system all fell away when the pandemic struck and her boys’ school went online. Though her boss and colleagues rallied around her, helping her lobby for permission to consult with patients from home and taking on some of her work, she is looking into nonclinical jobs with predictable hour...