Of all the news about bird flu, this month has brought some of the most concerning yet. Six people working on a chicken farm in Colorado have tested positive for the virus—the biggest human outbreak detected in the U.S. The country’s tally is now up to 11 since 2022, but that’s almost certainly a significant undercount considering the lack of routine testing. Since the current strain of bird flu, known as “highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” began spreading around the world in late 2021, it has become something like a “super virus” in its spread among animals, Richard Webby, an influenza ..read more

A well-stocked grocery store is a wondrous place. Among the gleaming pyramids of fruit, golden rows of bread, and freezers crammed with ice cream, time and space collapse. A perfectly ripe apple might have been picked a year ago; a cut of beef may have come from an Australian cow. Grocery stores defy seasons and geography to assure shoppers that they can have anything they want, anytime. For a moment last year, those promises no longer seemed to hold up: The egg case at my local supermarket in New York City was stripped bare. Bird flu had decimated chickens across the country, and the egg supp ..read more

A large digital thermometer sits at the entrance to the gleaming mid-century-modern visitor center in Furnace Creek, California. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was thronged with people with their phones out, taking pictures. A mood of anticipation hummed through the crowd. A few hours east of us, in Las Vegas, temperatures would rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, smashing that city’s record by three degrees. But news reports suggested that here in the heart of Death Valley National Park, the high could reach 130, matching the hottest-ever day reliably measured on Earth. At 1 p.m., the big ..read more

For just $65, the skin-care company Selfmade will sell you a kit that will purportedly help you feel more stable and confident in your relationships—and get better skin all the while. According to the kit’s marketing copy, it comes with a serum that enhances “safety and comfort with self,” a moisturizer that “promotes awareness that past negative experience and emotional states can carry throughout your life,” and the best-selling relationship-psychology book Attached. Together, the “Securely Attached Kit” is a “ritual” that promises to reframe your attitudes to both your skin and self. It’s c ..read more

J o Franco still remembers the moment she realized that her nose worked. Growing up in Wilmington, a Los Angeles neighborhood dotted with oil refineries and next to one of the largest port complexes in the country, she’d always assumed she had a fever, or allergies: “I could never breathe through my nose at all,” she told me. But when she moved away from the city for college, her breathing suddenly got easier. “It was this wonderful surprise,” she said. “I could smell lemons.” Franco can still map Wilmington’s refineries, and still remembers the chemicals they’d release into the sky. At 28, af ..read more

Joe Biden’s problem isn’t his age. It’s his ability to function. America has known a number of exceptional octogenarians who have demonstrated the cognitive and physical stamina to serve in demanding leadership roles. In 1787, at age 81, Benjamin Franklin, who a few years earlier had negotiated a highly advantageous treaty to end the Revolutionary War and had recently invented bifocals, played a pivotal role at the Constitutional Convention, persuading the delegates to allow citizens of the brand-new United States to vote without any property qualification. At the convention’s closing, Frankli ..read more

Several years ago, in my work as a palliative-care doctor, I cared for a man in his 60s who had been mostly healthy before he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After three different treatments had failed him, his oncologist and I told him that a fourth treatment might buy him a few weeks at best. “Send me back to Boston,” he said immediately. He wanted to smell the Atlantic, see his childhood home. He made it there, dying a week later. My patient died on his own terms: He was comfortable, fully informed about his worsening cancer, and able to decide where he wanted to die, whom he wanted to b ..read more

Last Thursday was not a good day for Joe Biden. During the president’s shaky and at times incoherent debate performance, he appeared weaker and frailer in real time than the American public had ever seen. Friday appears to have been a much better day. At a campaign rally in North Carolina, clips of which his campaign distributed online, the president seemed like an entirely different man. Lively and invigorated, he spoke with a ferocity that had eluded him on the debate stage. Both his supporters and detractors have turned this yo-yoing into a talking point that has come up frequently in the d ..read more

Times are tough for omnivores. By now, you’ve heard all the reasons to eat less meat: your health, the planet, the animals. All that might be true, but for many meat-eaters, vegetables aren’t always delicious on their own. Pitiful are the collards without the ham hock, the peppers without the sausage, the snap peas without the shrimp. In my family’s universe, meat is the sun around which vegetables, beans, and grains revolve. Take it away, and dinner descends into chaos. As the cook of the family, I’m constantly trying to find ways to reduce our meat consumption. But the mouths I feed, mine in ..read more

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine. For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier. It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog told me, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer ..read more