End-of-life conversations. Grieving for a lost sense of taste. A devastating side effect. And a new vision of the world.

We didn’t have choices — or, to put it differently, the choices were taken from us. In his book “ The Paradox of Choice ,” psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the idea that too many choices produce paralysis and then often discontent. Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.

Wendy Nicole Villatoro, a former public official in Washington, D.C., has been sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for fraudulently obtaining $844,000 in COVID-19 relief funds. The funds were meant to help struggling businesses survive the economic impact of the pandemic.

Metro is seeing the highest ridership this week since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to return-to-work orders for federal workers. This week, the