When Debra O’Neall gets home from her overnight shift at a nursing home in Danbury, she removes her scrubs and jumps in the shower before she does anything else. Later, she settles in on the sofa, turns on the news, picks up a sketchbook from the coffee table and begins to draw.

This fall, Logan Dancey, an associate professor at Wesleyan University, asked his students to work with three other schools to comb the websites of candidates for state Senate in Georgia, Minnesota and Connecticut. He was curious about how candidates featured issues like voting on their websites.

The state’s new color-coded COVID alert system has designated 19 Connecticut towns as “red alert towns” for having positive test rates exceeding 15 per 100,000 residents for a two-week period. Gov. Ned Lamont has given these towns the option of pulling back from Phase 3 reopening to Phase 2.

The day after the 2016 presidential election, David Nastri, like many, couldn’t believe his candidate had won. Then he ran into one of his friends. She was crying, in disbelief that so many Americans had chosen Donald Trump.

Turkey growers describe this time of year as the industry’s Super Bowl, when orders for turkeys start rolling in. But Thanksgiving will be different this year because of the pandemic. Rick Hermonot said it’s still a little early to know how many people will order smaller turkeys from his farm in Sterling.

What if the work-at-home trend becomes permanent? What will happen to Connecticut’s downtowns? Economist Victor Calanog of Moody’s Analytics joined All Things Considered to opine on whether downtowns are as good as dead. He also broke down what he thinks city planners should be doing right now to prepare.

Liliana Cruz of Boston has just been selected for a school desegregation program. At dawn, she takes the bus to a mostly-white high school in the suburbs. There she makes friends, endures microagressions and racism, wrestles with her identity and finds her voice. That's the premise of Jennifer De Leon 's debut novel “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From,” which came out this year.

Halloween is right around the corner and many gardeners are decorating pumpkins for the holiday. A fun way to decorate is to make a pumpkin planter filled with succulents.

Hartford Public Schools will continue to offer an in-person learning option for at least two more weeks. Since September, there have been 52 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the city’s schools but only one probable case of in-school transmission, officials said.

The timeline on a COVID-19 vaccine is generally unknown, but whether one is approved this year or the next, Wizdom Powell said it won’t help much if Black residents lack confidence in its safety and effectiveness. “There’s so many stories of Black folks surrendering their bodies to medical institutions and coming out worse after,” said Powell, who is director of the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health.