When my family returned to our home in Santa Monica last Sunday night, we breathed a sigh of relief. Our house was fine, and the air quality was in the “good” category. Schools would reopen the next day. But as we unpacked, I noticed what looked like salt-and-pepper snow delicately dancing over the street. Ash from the Palisades Fire, burning just five miles north of us, was descending all around, coating the car we had left behind.
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
Stingray 12 is surprisingly calm for an animal that’s getting squeegeed. The ray, roughly the size of a dinner plate, is submerged in the sand of a tank about the size of a chest freezer; even the golden eyes on top of her head are buried in the sediment.
On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.
Ryan McAdams, a neonatologist in Madison, Wisconsin, had a complex case to handle: A tiny newborn with a heart defect needed surgery. The baby had been struggling to feed, so doctors planned to insert a gastronomy tube directly into the stomach to assist in supplementary feeding. The baby’s mother was around all the time to care for the infant, until she tested positive for COVID-19 and wasn’t allowed to be in the hospital.
On a warm September afternoon, on San Juan Island off the northwestern coast of Washington State, I boarded J2, a sleek black-and-white whale-watching vessel. The boat was named after a locally famous orca, or killer whale, affectionately known as “Granny.” Until her disappearance in 2016, Granny was the matriarch of J-pod, one of the three resident orca groups, or pods, that live in the surrounding Salish Sea.
So much is still unknown about pregnancy and COVID-19. We do know that contracting the disease comes with increased risk of severe illness, and a higher risk of preterm birth. But how an infection affects a person at different stages of pregnancy? Or a developing fetus? No one knows for sure. Would vaccination help mitigate these risks? The vaccines were never tested on pregnant people.