Celebrity Life

Each year, as Memorial Day approaches, Holly Thaggard braces herself for the headlines. About how sunscreen may be damaging coral reefs. About the possible flammability of spray-on sunscreen. Headlines—as there were this year—about how sunscreen contains chemicals that could harm your health. “This has happened every single year for the last decade of my life,”…

It’s safe to say that before the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, most people hadn’t thought about messenger RNA, or mRNA, since high school science class—if ever. The molecule plays a pivotal role in the body, carrying the recipes for making various proteins to the parts of cells that produce them. But…

In the midst of catastrophe, mass recreations of normalcy can deepen our sense of unease

What to do about the U.S. vaccine uptake rate? Even with what appears to be a slight increase as people try to protect themselves against the more transmissible Delta variant now spreading through many parts of the country, only a pitiful 0.1% or so of Americans are currently getting their first dose every day. That’s…

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. It’s a high bar to clear, but this is one of the most depressing facts I’ve read as a climate journalist: the Amazon rainforest—a region known as “the lungs…

Heatwaves, wildfires, floods. If there’s still any doubt that the summer of 2021 is a turning point for a global awakening over the looming climate crisis, you can add one more plague of biblical proportions to the list: famine. The southern part of the island nation of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, is…