New York Times reporter Joseph Giovanni memorializes the life and work of MIT alumnus Michael Sorkin. Sorkin was “one of architecture’s most outspoken public intellectuals, a polymath whose prodigious output of essays, lectures and designs, all promoting social justice, established him as the political conscience in the field.”

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with NBC News about how the Covid-19 pandemic has inspired people around the world to use the Internet in new and creative ways to connect. "Every group I'm in is trying to reinvent itself in an online form," says Turkle. "You see people trying to find something of themselves that they can use as the medium to express themselves."

Guardian reporter Oliver Wainwright writes that Prof. Carlo Ratti is developing a prototype for transforming shipping containers into portable pods that could be used to expand a hospital’s intensive care space for Covid-19 patients. “The key thing is the ease with which you can move these pods around,” says Ratti. “The advantage of the shipping container is that the infrastructure for moving them already exists.”

Profs. Simon Johnson and Retsef Levi write for The Boston Globe about how they are developing risk analytics tools to help government officials determine the Covid-19 risk for specific communities. “There’s more we can and should do to focus on high-risk patients and high-risk clusters,” they write. “It’s essential we pursue these strategies immediately to avoid choosing between collapsing our economy or our health care system.”

MIT researchers have launched a mobile phone app aimed at tracking the spread of Covid-19, reports Douglas Belkin and Kirsten Grind for The Wall Street Journal. “Stopping epidemics is a game of numbers. It’s not about getting everybody or nobody (quarantined),” explains Prof. Ramesh Raskar. “The models show that even at 10% there will be gains.”

A new paper co-authored by Prof. Emil Verner finds that public health measures like social distancing aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19 may be better for economic growth than laxer measures, reports Max Reyes for Bloomberg. The researchers found that “cities that implemented more rapid and forceful non-pharmaceutical health interventions do not experience worse downturns.”

New York Times reporter William J. Broad writes that MIT has joined a new research consortium that seeks to “put top scientists onto gargantuan social problems with the help of A.I. — its first challenge being the pandemic.”