The fact that I felt some version of this horror-struck compulsion about moving to Massachusetts, rather than flinging myself into the annihilating embrace of an F5 superstorm, probably says everything about how sheltered and helpless I was. But then, that’s why art exists: to remake our most humiliating secret feelings into very expensive metaphors generated by Industrial Light & Magic.

Not long ago, I watched Twister for the first time since I saw it in the theater. Very little of it brought back any of the feeling of the summer of 1995 to me, though, of course, that was never Twister’s purpose. (That said, what else do we mean when we say we’re “nostalgic” for a movie? What is it that we miss?) The movie is a lot of fairly garden-variety male-protagonist worship—Bill Paxton’s character communes with tornadoes by running dirt through his fingers; everyone is constantly talking about ho

People were extremely tickled at the thought of appearing in a movie. Sign-up instructions were passed around the bank lobby. A lot of my friends put their names down. I didn’t, because I had decided to process

Cary Elwes would go shopping at the bookstore where a couple of my friends worked. They got to know him a little. Just imagine, they’d say. You’re going about your shift. You’re shelving Pet Sematary ahead of The Tommyknockers or whatever. And who should stroll in but your old regular customer, Westley from The Princess Bride!

A tornado might be powerful, frightening, dangerous; it might be a force that carved scars in the earth and ripped towns in half. I just didn’t see how it could be a story, when it was so obvious what stories were. Stories were things that happened somewhere else.

the strange after-hours feeling of being stuck in the school when the school was closed, being stuck in the school with my family, being stuck in the school when I didn’t even go to that school anymore. Playing catch with crushed paper water cups to pass the time until the hail stopped clattering, and the radio said we could go home.

Tornadoes were like the commercial country music of weather. They were unstoppable but in no way thrilling. We’d been dealing with them, hiding from them, our whole lives.

To my friends and me, it was even stranger that they were making a movie about tornadoes—a movie not only set in Oklahoma but centered, literally, on the weather. Our stupid weather! This was completely confounding. It was like finding out Steven Spielberg wants to produce a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster about your parents’ dishwasher.

dollars that the bank had seen fit to entrust me, a teenager, with. I set up my window, with its noisy adding machine, its tub of fingertip moistener, and its bowl of rubber bands. Then I spent the day mak

“is that they put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Even”—she raised her eyebrows while she flicked through a stack of twenties—“even Miz Helen.”

I hadn’t seen any Hollywood people myself, and that whole summer, I never did, but I knew everything that happened with them, or at least everything everyone said happened.

Everyone had a story. Everyone had seen Bill Paxton at the bowling alley or knew someone who had. People came in to share their tidbits and talk about who was nice and who wasn’t. I found myself at the center of a local celebrity-gossip industry that had never buzzed like this before, because it had not existed.

Now—before we’d even gone out in search of them—the movie stars were coming to us.

I’d fantasized about moving away for as long as I could remember. What I craved, what I wanted more than anything, was “culture.” We thought of Ponca City as this podunk little nowhere, which it basically was, and we imagined our lives taking place somewhere “relevant,”

In May 1995, right after I graduated from high school, a Hollywood film crew moved to my hometown, Ponca City, Oklahoma, to shoot Twister. Nothing like this had ever happened to Ponca City before and it was strange that it was happening now,

that consumers would choose to drive themselves rather than share a car with a ride-hail driver and risk spreading the virus.

Despite the downturn in business, Lyft’s stock was up more than 20 percent on Thursday as it exceeded investors’ expectations for revenue in the first quarter and reassured them with its layoffs last month that it would cut costs. Uber’s stock was up more than 8 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.

“Lime has indicated that they plan to offer interview opportunities to a few members of our team, while others will receive severance packages,” Dennis Cinelli, the head of Uber’s micromobility team, said in an email to employees that was seen by The Times.

Its bike and scooter business is another weak point, and Uber invested $85 million in a competing service, Lime, that would allow it to offload its bikes and scooters while still offering Lime’s fleet in its app.

Mr. Khosrowshahi will not take a salary for the rest of the year. He said in an email to remaining employees, seen by The New York Times, that the company continued to look for ways to cut costs and may eliminate more jobs over the next two weeks.

Use of Uber’s ride service was down 80 percent in April, he said. But Uber saw a bright spot in its food delivery, which grew 89 percent

If passengers continued to stay away from the service at similar rates, Lyft predicted it would lose nearly $360 million on an adjusted basis, which excludes stock-based compensation and

In an effort to bolster confidence in its listings, the company announced a set of new cleaning standards for its rentals in April. Guests can also opt for a 72- or 24-hour vacancy period before they enter.

If the lawsuit is successful, the companies could have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties and back wages for drivers.

said Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.

Even when people return to the office and start traveling, the pandemic could change how they behave for years to come.

The companies, founded on the notion that they should become as big as possible as quickly as possible and worry about making a profit somewhere down the line

ompany Airbnb, which investors valued at $31 billion, had planned to go public this year. Instead, the company has slashed costs and raised emergency funding, and on Tuesday it laid off 1,900 employees, about 25 percent of its staff. It also reduced its revenue forecast for this year to half of what it brought in last year.

It is not likely to return anytime soon.

has gutted the so-called sharing economy.

There is so much complexity to biology and there is so much information out there, it is hard — if not impossible — for one person to put together the clues that are already there in the literature,” he said.

Unaware of what was happening in Atlanta, Dr. Mario Corbellino administered the drug as a compassionate measure at a hospital in Milan after reviewing the research from BenevolentAI and soon proposed another clinical trial. He and other infectious-disease specialists, he said, feel more comfortable testing this kind of drug if it has the potential to not just reduce an immune system response but prevent the viral infection.

‘Who are these people? Does anyone know them?’”

Marconi opened an email from a colleague, Dr. Raymond Schinazi, that pointed him and other colleagues to the paper. They had spent eight years exploring baricitinib and other drugs as a treatment for H.I.V., and they knew such drugs could potentially help coronavirus patients.

The company said it had no expectations for making money from the research and had no prior relationship with Eli Lilly.

Drawing on what the technology found in the literature, Dr. Richardson could map out the connections between particular human genes and the biological processes affected by the coronavirus. As a multicolored map appeared on his computer screen, two genes leapt out at him.“They stood up and said: ‘Look, we’re here,’” Dr. Richardson said.Once the genes were identified, he and his colleagues could pinpoint the way that existing medications targeted the genes, visualizing the process through a kind of digital flow chart. They identified baricitinib, made by the American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

“It is not like we have this giant button and we just smack it and stuff comes out the other end,” said Olly Oechsle, 37, the software engineer who oversees the design of these tools. “Peter has been working in this area since before I was born.”

These A.I. systems are rapidly improving everything from the Google Search engine to automated “chatbots” designed to carry on a conversation.

had spent the past several years building technology that could help find information buried in vast troves of academic papers and other scientific literature.

BenevolentAI quickly joined a race to identify drugs that can block the virus from entering the body’s cells. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and many others labs are looking into similar treatments.

well-funded sectors of the tech industry, pursing visions of autonomous vehicles and machines that can learn by themselves. Now, they are simply trying to be helpful — working on technology that augments human experts instead of replacing them.

A.I. researchers and data scientists around the world who have turned their attention to the coronavirus,

Though many questions hang over its potential use as a coronavirus treatment, it will soon be tested in an accelerated clinical trial with the National Institutes of Health. It is also being studied in Canada, Italy and other countries.

with speed that surprised both the company that makes the drug and many doctors who had spent years exploring its effect on other viruses.