Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.GO NAKAMURA / GETTYThis pandemic never stopped being serious. But the situation just got more so.COVID-19 hospitalizations are up to an all-time high, and with them, fears that America’s hospitals could be overwhelmed.

It’s pretty hard to catch single-celled organisms in the middle of sex.“It’s sort of like if you put a male and a female together in the zoo. You can’t necessarily get them to do the thing,” John Logsdon, an early-eukaryotic-sex expert at the University of Iowa, told me. “If you were a Martian looking down on Earth and asking if humans were sexual or not, if you couldn’t look through the windows, you’d never see humans having sex. Well, rarely.

The second year of the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition has just come to a close, and the winners have been announced. The contest “celebrates close-up, macro, and micro photography,” among seven separate categories. More than 6,500 entries were received from 52 countries this year. Organizers have been kind enough to share some of the winners and finalists with us below.

Every year, incoming first-year law students are told a simple truth: You can sue anyone at any time for anything, anywhere.That does not mean you will win. And it does not mean doing so is always consistent with a lawyer’s ethical and professional obligations.

Early in its fourth season, The Crown finds Britain at a low. It’s 1982, and the so-called , but the 2006 drama covers the aftermath of Diana’s death, sympathizing with Elizabeth as she learns to change her perspective on public opinion. In this season, he’s less generous with the Queen, showing how her rigid adherence to duty contributed as much to Charles and Diana’s crumbling marriage as the young couple’s affairs and incompatibility did.