In COVID terms, the middle of last autumn looked a lot like this one. After a rough summer, SARS-CoV-2 infections were down; hospitalizations and deaths were in a relative trough. Kids and workers were back in schools and offices, and another round of COVID shots was rolling out. Things weren’t great … but they weren’t the most terrible they’d ever been. There were vaccines; there were tests; there were drugs.
This weekend, I’ll be waking up to one of my favorite days of the year: a government-sanctioned 25-hour Sunday. Forget birthdays, forget my anniversary; heck, forget the magic of Christmas. On Sunday, I’ll get to do a bit of time traveling as most of the United States transitions out of daylight saving time back into glorious, glorious standard time.I may be a standard-time stan, but I’m no monster. I feel for the die-hard fans of DST.
It was December of 1996 when Karen Lips turned up the first bodies—and finally felt an ember of hope. As a graduate student working in the muggy forests of Central America, she’d noticed that an as-yet-unnamed culprit had been stripping the area of its frogs. Regions that had once rung with a chorus of croaks were silent and still, but no one had found the carcasses that could speak to a cause.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as lines of ambulances roared down the streets and freezer vans packed into parking lots, the pediatric emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was quiet.It was an eerie juxtaposition, says Chris Woodward, a pediatric-emergency-medicine specialist at the hospital, given what was happening just a few doors down.
For the first couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis was marked by a succession of variants that pummeled us one at a time. The original virus rapidly gave way to D614G, before ceding the stage to Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and then Omicron’s many offshoots. But as our next COVID winter looms, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 may be swapping its lead-antagonist approach for an ensemble cast: Several subvariants are now vying for top billing.In the United States, BA.
Last week, just a couple of hours into a house-sitting stint in Massachusetts for my cousin and his wife, I received from them a flummoxed text: “Dude,” it read. “We are the only people in masks.” Upon arriving at the airport, and then boarding their flight, they’d been shocked to find themselves virtually alone in wearing masks of any kind.
Of all the nicknames I have for my cat Calvin—Fluffernutter, Chonk-a-Donk, Fuzzy Lumpkin, Jerky McJerkface—Bumpus Maximus may be the most apt. Every night, when I crawl into bed, Calvin hops onto my pillow, purrs, and bonks his head affectionately against mine. It’s adorable, and a little bit gross. Tiny tufts of fur jet into my nose; flecks of spittle smear onto my cheeks.Just shy of a decade ago, cuddling a cat this aggressively would have left me in dire straits.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.It’s October. It’s cold. And the days are only getting shorter. Take a break from the news with me as I dive into my ever-growing cat obsession.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
New scandals may not sink Herschel Walker’s Senate chances.
When people die, our whole body dies with us. The heart stops pumping; the gut stops digesting; every cell that carries a person’s genetic blueprint eventually extinguishes, until their molecular signature is extinct. This is the curse of humans’—really, most animals’—multicellular makeup: The cells within our bodies are so specialized, so interdependent, that their fates are lashed together even in death.Multicellularity does not have to manifest this way, however.
At a press briefing earlier this month, Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID czar, laid out some pretty lofty expectations for America’s immunity this fall. “Millions” of Americans, he said, would be flocking to pharmacies for the newest version of the COVID vaccine in September and October, at the same appointment where they’d get their yearly flu shot. “It’s actually a good idea,” he told the press.
In October of 1894, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, the renowned physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey showed a series of photographs that sent his colleagues into collective uproar. In the flurry of accounts that followed, one conference attendee proclaimed that Marey had presented a scientific paradox that violated the fundamental laws of how objects moved.At the center of the controversy was a cat. Specifically, a dropped cat that had, in midair, twisted to land on its feet.
On the not-so-infrequent nights when I’m plagued by insomnia, no combination of melatonin, weighted blankets, and white noise will do. Just one cure for my affliction exists: my cat Calvin, lying atop my shoulder, lulling me to sleep with his purrs.For veteran members of Club Purr, the reasons are clear. A purr is warm tea, a roaring fire, and fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies, all rolled into a fleece-lined hug; it is the auditory salve of a babbling brook; it is coffee brewing at dawn.
America’s first-ever reformulated COVID-19 vaccines are coming, very ahead of schedule, and in some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. Pfizer’s version of the shot, which combines the original recipe with ingredients targeting the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, may be available to people 12 and older as early as the week after Labor Day; Moderna’s adult-only brew seems to be on a similar track. The schedule slates the shots to debut at a time when BA.
The transition from Monkeypox Inoculation Plan A to Monkeypox Inoculation Plan B has been a smashing success—at least, if you ask federal officials. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. had nowhere near enough of the Jynneos vaccine to doubly dose even a quarter of the Americans at highest risk of monkeypox, roughly 1.6 million men who have sex with men.
On the list of perfect pet parents, Mikel Delgado, a professional feline-behavior consultant, probably ranks high. The Ph.D. expert in animal cognition spends half an hour each evening playing with her three torbie cats, Ruby, Coriander, and Professor Scribbles. She’s trained them to take pills in gelatin capsules, just in case they eventually need meds. She even commissioned a screened-in backyard catio so that the girls can safely venture outside.
Nothing gets a female mosquito going quite like the stench of human BO. The chase can begin from more than 100 feet away, with a plume of breath that wafts carbon dioxide onto the nubby sensory organ atop the insect’s mouth. Her senses snared, she flies person-ward, until her antennae start to buzz with the pungent perfume of skin. Lured closer still, she homes in on her host’s body heat, then touches down on a landing pad of flesh that she can taste with her legs.
Deep in the loamy soil of forests around the world, there exists a fungus called the honey mushroom that makes its living on death. A parasite that preys on weak trees, it sucks its victims dry of nutrients, then feasts on their postmortem flesh. Orchards and vineyards have fallen to it; gardeners, farmers, and foresters spend their days fruitlessly fighting the pesticide-resistant scourge.
Once again, the United States is messing up its approach to vaccines. Three months into its monkeypox outbreak, just 620,000 doses of the two-injection Jynneos shot—the nation’s current best immune defense against the virus—have been shipped to states, not nearly enough to immunize the 1.6 million to 1.7 million Americans that the CDC considers at highest risk. The next deliveries from the manufacturer aren’t slated until September at the earliest.
Today’s most elderly bats aren’t supposed to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals; according to the evolutionary rules that hold across species, they should be short-lived, like other small-bodied creatures.And yet, many of Earth’s winged mammals buck this trend, sometimes blowing decades past their anticipated expiration date.
Seventy-eight days and more than 7,000 documented cases into the United States’s 2022 outbreak of monkeypox, federal officials have declared the disease a nationwide public-health emergency. With COVID-19 (you know, the other ongoing viral public-health emergency) still very much raging, the U.S. is officially in the midst of two infectious-disease crises, and must now, with limited funds, wrangle both at once.
In the 1980s, shortly before I was born, my father killed a male white-tailed deer in the woods of Oklahoma, harvested his flesh, and mounted his head. Years later, my brothers regaled me with the tale of Tony, as they posthumously named the buck. “Dad shot him,” they told me, with glee. “And then he made us eat him.” I hated the circumstances of Tony’s death. But I was also entranced.
When the monkeypox outbreak was first detected in the United States, it seemed, as far as infectious-disease epidemics go, like one this country should be able to handle. Tests and antivirals for the virus already existed; the government had stockpiled vaccines. Unlike SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox was a known entity, a relative softball on the pathogenic field.
And there it is: President Joe Biden has tested positive for the coronavirus, the White House announced Thursday morning, and is dosing up with Paxlovid to keep his so-far “very mild symptoms” from turning severe.In some ways, this is one of the cases the entire world has been waiting for—not sadistically, necessarily, but simply because, like so many other infections as of late, it has felt inevitable.
Among spiders, sex doesn’t just create life; it can also end it. Males of many species—including orb-weaving spiders, widow spiders, and wolf spiders—find their fortunes turning on a dime, as the females they’ve seduced begin to devour them alive, sometimes even before insemination is complete.
Not so long ago, America’s next COVID fall looked almost tidy. Sure, cases might rise as the weather chills and dries, and people flock indoors. But Pfizer and Moderna were already cooking up America’s very first retooled COVID vaccines, better matched to Omicron and its offshoots, and a new inoculation campaign was brewing.
Of all the eyeballs in Glen Jeffery’s office, only a very small minority are his.“Oh, I’ve got an office full of eyes,” Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London, told me. Over Skype, he fished one of his favorites out of an opaque vial: About the size of a golf ball and fringed with white tissue, it looked a bit like a poached egg with a slate-hued yolk.
In one sense, this is how it was always supposed to go: When viruses evolve, vaccines should follow, and sometimes try to leap ahead. The COVID-19 shots that the U.S. has used to inoculate hundreds of millions of people are simply so new that they’ve never had to undergo a metamorphosis; up until now, their original-recipe ingredients have stood up to SARS-CoV-2 well enough. But the virus they fight has changed quite radically, and this fall, the vaccines will finally, finally follow suit.
In the summer of 2003, just weeks after an outbreak of monkeypox sickened about 70 people across the Midwest, Mark Slifka visited “the super-spreader,” he told me, “who infected half of Wisconsin’s cases.”Chewy, a prairie dog, had by that point succumbed to the disease, which he’d almost certainly caught in an exotic-animal facility that he’d shared with infected pouched rats from Ghana.
Two years ago, Juan Díaz Ricaurte was hiking through the mountains of Brazil when a male yellow cururu toad affixed itself to his boot. Díaz Ricaurte gently detached the frog and set it back on the ground, several feet away; undeterred, it bounded back over and wrapped its arms around the shoe again. “It was super focused on grabbing Juan’s boot,” says Filipe Serrano, Díaz Ricaurte’s fellow biologist, who witnessed the meet-cute.
Updated at 2:55 p.m. on May 10, 2022In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs, supplements, and therapies” to try to keep her long-COVID symptoms at bay.