There was the home health attendant who sucked her thumb before touching household items. And the one who brought her unvaccinated 4-year-old into the apartment where Mary and her immunocompromised husband live, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the one who came by after her day shift at a nursing home.Many of the aides who circulated through Mary’s household were vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax; many wore their mask improperly while in the apartment, she told me.

National political reporter Elaina Plott, who covered the Trump presidency for The Atlantic in 2018 and 2019, is rejoining The Atlantic. Elaina will become a staff writer this summer; she currently covers politics in Washington for The New York Times.“Elaina is one of the finest young magazine journalists in America. We are delighted to welcome her back to The Atlantic,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

There is a peculiar modern tendency to describe things we don’t like as belonging to the past. The Taliban are medieval, Donald Trump supporters backward, Brexiteers nostalgic for empire. Under this rubric, Vladimir Putin is a Soviet throwback and the war he may soon start in Ukraine, as John Kerry once remarked, is like some 19th-century skirmish transplanted into the 21st.

When researchers consider the classic five categories of taste—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—there’s little disagreement over which of them is the least understood. Creatures crave sweet for sugar and calories. A yen for umami, or savoriness, keeps many animals nourished with protein. Salt’s essential for bodies to stay in fluid balance, and for nerve cells to signal. And a sensitivity to bitterness can come in handy with the whole not-poisoning-yourself thing.

Karasik, the largest underwater mountain in the Arctic, was meant to be dead. Volcanically, it is. But biologically, it’s home to a teeming community of creatures, surviving in an environment with barely any food, through means that no one expected.The mountain lies 300 kilometers from the North Pole, at a ridge where the tectonic plates that hold Europe and North America are slowly drifting apart.

In a damning 58-page class-action lawsuit against the NFL, Brian Flores presents screenshots of a text-message exchange that crystallizes the dilemma Black coaches routinely find themselves in: They’re supposed to play along with a hiring system that officially requires teams to consider minority candidates for top jobs but that, in practice, is plainly biased against them.