Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

The Washington Post: One Million Covid Deaths: Visualizing 114 Lives, Cut Short. 
One million Americans have died of covid-19, an incomprehensible weight. So we’re remembering one person for each week of the pandemic: what brought them joy and what they wanted to do next. And how that was cut short. Each of their stories stands for all who died the same week, those numbers marked by the exact point where the sentence cuts off. (5/18)

Politico: ‘Where Was The Strategy For Getting People Ready To Start Taking The Vaccine?’ 
Gus Perna is a national hero, and no one talks about it. The now-retired Army four-star general served as chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s massive public-private effort to develop, approve and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine in the record time of less than a year. (The prior record, for the mumps vaccine, was more than four years.) At a time when U.S. generals are mostly famous for losing wars, Perna helped lead a mission that has saved easily a million American lives. Can any other recent endeavor involving the U.S. military say that? (Gilsinan, 5/12)

The Washington Post: Why The Pandemic Has Made It So Hard And Exhausting To Make Decisions
You want to sit down for an indoor dinner with friends. A couple of years ago, this was a simple enough activity that required minimal planning. That is not the case in today’s world. Many people face a stream of further considerations about benefits and risks. Will I enjoy the experience? What are the potential downsides? Am I comfortable with the restaurant’s pandemic-related policies? What’s the ventilation like? Is it very busy there at this time of day? Am I planning to see lots of people, or people with compromised immune systems, in the near future? This is exhausting. As scientists at the Learning & Decision-Making Lab at Rutgers University-Newark, we’ve noticed how many decision-making processes are affected by the pandemic. The accumulation of choices people are making throughout the day leads to what psychologists call decision fatigue — you can end up feeling overwhelmed and make bad decisions. (Tricomi and Ameden, 5/14)

Bloomberg: This Is How China Rounds Up Thousands Of People For Covid Quarantine
Thousands of people in a village near the Chinese port city of Tianjin were ordered into government quarantine, with videos circulated on social media showing residents being marched through streets and onto buses as officials continue to deploy the country’s strict Covid Zero playbook on new outbreaks. Residents of Liuanzhuang village in northern Tianjin were ordered on Monday to pack their belongings and prepare to be transported into isolation centers, a voice can be heard saying over a loudspeaker in one of the videos, after dozens of Covid-19 cases were detected in their district. Footage shared on social media networks like Weibo and Twitter showed crowds of people, luggage in tow, walking toward or waiting in line for buses. (Lew, 5/18)

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The New York Times: Targeting The Uneven Burden Of Kidney Disease On Black Americans 
Kidney specialists have long known that Black Americans are disproportionately affected by kidney disease. While Black people make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 35 percent of Americans with kidney failure. Black patients tend to contract kidney disease at younger ages, and damage to their organs often progresses faster. ... But there is hope now that much of this suffering can be alleviated. As many as 10 companies are working on drugs to target the APOL1 variants. And Dr. Opeyemi Olabisi, a kidney specialist at Duke University, has a federal grant to test whether baricitinib, a drug that treats rheumatoid arthritis, can help kidney patients with the variants. Yet the promise of treatments comes with difficult questions. (Kolata, 5/17)

The New York Times: Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided To Live With Her Voices. 
Caroline Mazel-Carlton began hearing voices when she was in day care. Mornings, by the time she was in middle school, a bowl of oatmeal awaited her for breakfast next to a white saucer of colorful pills. Her voices remained vibrant. They weren’t within her head; they spoke and screamed from outside her skull. They belonged to beings she could not see. The voice who had been with her longest warned of catastrophes coming for her family in Zionsville, a town north of Indianapolis, calamities tied in some unspecified way to TV images from the gulf war: fighter planes, flashes in the sky, explosions on the ground, luminous and all-consuming. A woman’s voice castigated her at school, telling her that her clothes smelled and that she had better keep her hand down, no matter that she knew the answers to the teacher’s questions. Another voice tracked her every move, its tone faintly mocking. “She’s getting out of bed now; oh, she’s walking down the hall now.” (Bergner, 5/17)

The Washington Post: What Is Topical Steroid Withdrawal? 
A recent social media trend is raising awareness — and perhaps stoking fears — about a relatively rare and potentially debilitating condition known as topical steroid withdrawal (TSW). As of mid-March, there had been more than 168 million views of TikTok videos with the hashtag #topicalsteroidwithdrawal, which show dramatic footage of people — many of them young — with red, cracked, scaling skin on their faces, torsos and feet describing the challenges of dealing with this often painful condition. We spoke with a dermatologist and a family medicine practitioner for a better understanding of TSW and to put the condition into perspective. (Russell, 5/16)

The New York Times: Poppers, Once A Fixture At Gay Clubs, Now A ‘Party Girl’ Favorite 
The party blogger and aspiring “It” girl known as Meg Superstar Princess was at Rash, a club with a tiny dance floor in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in March, when someone spilled a bottle of alkyl nitrites — better known as “poppers” — on the dance floor. “The whole place fumed up, it was amazing” said Meg, 24, whose real name is Meg Yates. “I feel like at any party I go to, eventually someone’s going to pull out the poppers.” ... For those unfamiliar with the inhalant, poppers were popularized by gay men during the 1970s for sex and partying. Sold in little brown bottles, the alkyl nitrite is inhaled by the user. It typically causes a head rush and can be a muscle relaxant. (O'Neill, 5/18)

The Washington Post: Recipe For Healthy Students: Add Garden And Cooking Class To School
The seven young chefs, all between 10 and 12 years old, mesmerized the audience. They sliced and diced onions, peppers, tomatoes and garlic. They sauteed spinach, boiled noodles and toasted tortillas. They worked with hot skillets and sharp knives, preparing tasty meals using their own recipes. They were finalists in the Future Chefs Challenge, a healthy cooking contest sponsored by SodexoMagic, a partnership between former National Basketball Association star Earvin “Magic” Johnson and the Sodexo food services company. The event was held last week at Kimball Elementary School in Southeast Washington — a nutrition education powerhouse that produced all of this year’s finalists from a field of 50 contestants citywide. (Milloy, 5/17)

CBS News: Chef José Andrés On Serving Meals In A War Zone
In the sea of despair that is Ukraine, Chef José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen are a lifeline. They have been on the ground there for months, feeding thousands of Ukrainians whose lives have been upended by the war. Since Russia's invasion began in February, Andrés has traveled back and forth, spending more than 40 days in Ukraine. And for him, that's not all that unusual. For the past 12 years, Andrés has brought his not-for-profit kitchen to the front lines of catastrophe. They have served more than 60 million meals, from earthquake-ravaged Haiti to hurricane-battered Houston. (5/15)

The New York Times: In Ukraine, Gruesome Injuries And Not Enough Doctors To Treat Them
Days after Russian forces invaded, Yaroslav Bohak, a young cardiovascular surgeon, was at home with his family in the relative safety of western Ukraine, when a colleague placed a desperate call from the east, pleading with him to come help. Many doctors had fled the fighting, his friend said, and conditions at the hospital resembled a bygone era of warfare, with the surgeons who remained amputating limbs, instead of trying to repair them, to save grievously wounded soldiers. “He called me and said he could no longer cut off the arms of young people,” Dr. Bohak said, as he stood in an operating room of a hospital in Kramatorsk. “When I came here, I had surgery on the first day.” (Schwirtz and Addario, 5/18)