Scientists Tried to Break Cuddling. Instead, They Broke 30 Years of Research.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      Of the dozens of hormones found in the human body, oxytocin might just be the most overrated. Linked to the pleasures of romance, orgasms, philanthropy, and more, the...

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The Flu-ification of COVID Policy Is Almost Complete

For all the legwork that public-health experts have done over the past few years to quash comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu, there sure seems to be a lot of effort nowadays to equate the two. In an advisory meeting convened earlier today, the FDA signaled its intention to start doling out COVID vaccines just like flu shots: once a year in autumn,...

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Whatever Happened to Toilet Plumes?

In the dark early days of the pandemic, when we knew almost nothing and feared almost everything, there was a moment when people became very, very worried about toilets. More specifically, they were worried about the possibility that the cloud of particles toilets spew into the air when flushed—known in the scientific literature as “toilet plume”—might...

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Please Don’t Call My Cervix Incompetent

If you haven’t been pregnant, you’d be forgiven for thinking the language of pregnancy is all baby bumps, bundles of joy, and comparisons to variously sized fruits. But in the doctor’s office, it’s a different story. The medical lexicon for moms-to-be can be downright harsh. Case in point: the phrase geriatric pregnancy, which, until recently, was used...

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Wait, Is This Winter Going … Okay?

Updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on January 26, 2023For months, the winter forecast in the United States seemed to be nothing but viral storm clouds. A gale of RSV swept in at the start of autumn, sickening infants and children in droves and flooding ICUs. After a multiyear hiatus, flu, too, returned in force, before many Americans received their annual shot....

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Get Used to Expensive Eggs

Over the past week, my breakfast routine has been scrambled. I have had overnight oats, beans on sourdough, corned-beef hash and fried rice, and, on a particularly weird morning, leftover cream-of-broccoli soup. Under normal circumstances, I would be eating eggs. But right now, I’m in hoarding mode, jealously guarding the four that remain from a carton...

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The Coffee Alternative Americans Just Can’t Get Behind

It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the pope. I’m drinking yerba mate...

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Trying to Stop Long COVID Before It Even Starts

Three years into the global fight against SARS-CoV-2, the arsenal to combat long COVID remains depressingly bare. Being vaccinated seems to reduce people’s chances of developing the condition, but the only surefire option for avoiding long COVID is to avoid catching the coronavirus at all—a proposition that feels ever more improbable. For anyone who...

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Let’s Shake On It

Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re...

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May the Best Stove Win

Somehow, in a few short days, gas stoves have gone from a thing that some people cook with to, depending on your politics, either a child-poisoning death machine or a treasured piece of national patrimony. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion. Gas stoves! Who could have predicted it?The roots of the present controversy can be traced back to late December,...

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