Brendan Hoffman

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Kim Barker |Brendan Hoffman

Eric Schmieman worked for 15 years on the modern engineering equivalent of the Great Pyramid - building a giant protective shield for a damaged reactor at Chernobyl that would protect the world from further fallout from the worst ever nuclear disaster. The steel shell, slid into place over Reactor No. 4 on railroad tracks in 2016, is the world's largest movable structure. It is as tall as a football field and weighs almost 40,000 tons.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Cassandra Vinograd |Dzvinka Pinchuk |Brendan Hoffman

Serhii Kovalov doesn't like sushi. Nor does the sushi chef at his restaurant in eastern Ukraine. But when customers started asking for it, Mr. Kovalov navigated both enemy shelling and ordinary supply-chain issues to get fresh fish for Philadelphia rolls to his frontline town, Sloviansk. Now, as Russian forces have drawn closer and life gets more bleak, many Sloviansk residents are weighing whether to flee. Not Mr. Kovalov.