Tag: open question
Doctors May Soon Be Able to Screen for Preeclampsia and Preterm Birth
This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
For expectant parents, pregnancy can be a time filled with joyful anticipation: hearing the beating of a tiny heart, watching the fetus wiggling through the black-and-white blur of an ultrasound, feeling the jostling of a little being in the belly as it swells.
But for many, pregnancy also comes with serious health issues that can endanger both parent and child. In May, for example, the U.S. Olympic sprinter Tori Bowie died
No One Really Knows Why COVID Spikes in Summer
Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter
Will It Matter If Republican Leadership Unites Against Trump?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Well-placed Republican insiders are mobilizing to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination.
For instance, Trump is conspicuously excluded from the roster of potential 2024 candidates whom the Club for Growth has invited to speak this weekend at a retreat the conservative group is hosting for its biggest donors in Palm Beach, Florida—Trump’s backyard. Likewise, the sprawling network of donors associated with the Koch brothers declared last month that it
A Football Memoir, With Tears
Toward the end of Tom Coughlin’s new memoir about Super Bowl XLII, when his New York Giants defeated the previously unbeaten New England Patriots in arguably the greatest upset in pro-football history, he recalls the immediate aftermath of that 17–14 victory. “The moments afterward are kind of a blur,” he writes. “The confetti rains down, you raise the Lombardi trophy at a midfield podium, and for the next few hours it’s like you’re in a dream world, being taken from
Why the January 6 Investigation Is Weirdly Static
It was almost a year ago that rioters forced their way into the United States Capitol, smashing windows, threatening the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, and aiming to overturn the results of a democratic election in order to keep Donald Trump in power. In the intervening months, the Justice Department has filed charges against more than 680 people out of the “approximately 2000” whom the FBI estimates were involved in the attack. Meanwhile, the House
The Delta Variant: What You Can Do If You’re Vaccinated
For the past year and a half, humans around the world have been asked to do something we’re pretty bad at, even in the best of circumstances: figure out what constitutes safety, and act accordingly. A well-understood risk doesn’t necessarily improve our thought processes, thanks to a host of cognitive biases and external pressures that pull some people away from the lowest-level danger and push others toward clear peril. In the United States, at least, the circumstances for making these
Influencers With Tourette’s Find a Niche on TikTok
Halfway through our conversation, Glen Cooney calls me a four-letter word often cited as the most offensive in the English language. But that’s okay. He doesn’t mean it.
Cooney has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes tics, twitches, and—in some people—a symptom called coprolalia, which the Tourette Association of America characterizes as “the involuntary outburst of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.” Living with the disorder is tiring, because of both the tics themselves and the effort of trying to