The best immune systems thrive on a healthy dose of paranoia. The instant that defensive cells spot something unfamiliar in their midst—be it a living microbe or a harmless mote of schmutz—they will whip themselves into a frenzy, detonating microscopic bombs, sparking bouts of inflammation, even engaging in some casual cannibalism until they are certain that the threat has passed.

The Atlantic is the first publisher to partner with Knotch, a next-generation content intelligence platform that enables media outlets to provide advertisers with deep insights about the performance of sponsor content.

Throughout the pandemic, people have had to make impossibly tough decisions. Kathleen Turner, a 52-year-old intensive-care nurse in San Francisco, has been haunted by hers. Since COVID-19 patients started overwhelming her hospital last spring, she has had to give patients sedatives knowing they would likely have lasting negative health consequences, and systematically deny relatives a chance to say goodbye to dying loved ones.

Many Americans woke up this morning to discover that some of the most popular sites on the web were down. CNN, The New York Times, Reddit—even The Atlantic—all suffered issues. Was it a coordinated cyberattack? Something to do with Amazon Web Services? No, it was because of Fastly. As NPR explained, Fastly “provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites.

Seventeen years ago, just as the periodic cicadas were getting ready to arrive in droves in the eastern United States, Google announced Gmail, an exciting new email service. It had three key features: search, making it easy to find emails; storage, with what was then a mind-blowing 1 gigabyte; and speed, with emails threaded into conversations that ostensibly eliminated the need for cumbersome folders. Today, as the cicadas have seemingly taken over parts of the eastern U.S.