September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the…

Covid-19 is upending our lives and forcing us to make complex decisions with little information and conflicting guidance from authorities. Summer, typically the season of staying up late and popsicles in the park, offers no escape. Many of us are already turning to the fall, and the fate of schools. What will we do with…

Covid-19 testing in the US improved dramatically over the first half of 2020, but things now appear to be breaking down once more as coronavirus cases rise and outstrip capacity — to the point that the mayor of a major American city can’t get testing quickly enough to potentially avoid spreading the virus. “We FINALLY…

In late March, when Covid-19 was first surging, Jake Suett, a doctor of anesthesiology and intensive care medicine with the National Health Service in Norfolk, England, had seen plenty of patients with the disease — and intubated a few of them. Then one day, he started to feel unwell, tired, with a sore throat. He…

Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19. In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well. In Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, for example, there have been at least 80 positive cases since August 3, and more than…

Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Phil Nichols doesn’t get a lot of unannounced visitors at the long-term sober-living house in Cincinnati where he lives. The two US marshals waiting at the door on a March afternoon in 2018 told Nichols they had information…

In the past half-century, the global production of meat has undergone a seismic shift. While meat was once mostly raised on small farms, today almost all the meat we eat comes from industrialized “factory” farms, known as “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. More than 90 percent of the world’s meat supply comes from CAFOs….

Remember Sharpiegate? It turns out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may still be reeling from that episode, when President Trump’s refusal to admit he was wrong ballooned into an actual scandal at one of the nation’s premier scientific institutions. The New York Times reported this week that NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig…

Most people who get the coronavirus will fully recover and go right back to their lives. But the latest research suggests that at least 10 percent have long-term symptoms, even after their body has apparently cleared the virus. The condition, known as “long Covid,” has emerged as a scary feature of the pandemic — a…

The US rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine was halted Tuesday as regulators race to investigate rare blood-clotting complications linked to the shot. The move may force thousands of people scheduled to receive the shot this week to scramble for an alternative. Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease…