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When Jess Mah’s boyfriend died by suicide last April, she logged on to Slack and told her team about the loss—and that she would be taking two days off. “How ridiculous,” she says now. The 31-year-old, then the chief executive of accounting software firm inDinero Inc., quickly found herself enveloped in grief. She couldn’t sleep. Her brain felt like it had shut down, she says. Faced with project roadblocks and squabbles between colleagues, she couldn’t summon patience or empathy—or really, the energy to care all that much. (Feintzeig, 2/7)

We Americans have rarely known what to do with shows of emotion. Something about the “show.” It can feel like a tell — of insincerity, of opportunism. Of politics. For some time, we’ve existed in a cynical zone in which any public tears bespeak performance. The weeping families and classmates of massacred schoolchildren are ridiculed because some of them support legislation that would change gun laws. Those mourners found themselves slapped with a new designation: crisis actors. Can public tears ever be pure? Could any leader now risk more than a cracked voice? A woman rarely gets away with even the crack. There was that one time somebody at a campaign stop asked Hillary Clinton about how she manages it all, and the tears came, along with a debate that boiled down to whether she was scheming to appear feminine and what took her so long. (Morris, 2/8)

It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws. (Barry, 2/6)

Q: I have my phone with me at all times and check it hundreds of times a day. Are there any proven ways to treat screen addiction? Our work, social lives and entertainment have become inextricably tied to our devices, and the pandemic has made matters worse. One Pew Research Center survey conducted in April, for instance, found that among the 81 percent of adults in the United States who used video calls to connect with others since the beginning of the pandemic, 40 percent said they felt “worn out or fatigued” from those calls, and 33 percent said they’ve tried to scale back the amount of time they spent on the internet or on their smartphones. (Sneed, 2/8)

On the afternoon of July 28, the Homeland Security Investigations tip line received a call about a sensitive matter on an island off the coast of Washington state: “the suspected female genital mutilation of an infant by her Turkish mother.” A babysitter on San Juan Island had seen what she considered an “abnormality” while changing the girl’s diaper, according to law enforcement reports. The sitter enlisted a friend to also inspect the child’s vagina, without the parents’ knowledge or consent. That friend then called the tip line, allegedly telling authorities she was acting on the sitter’s behalf. (Allam, 2/6)

Just as with human families, scientists can generate family trees for viruses, showing how each member (or variant) is related to the others. Children are connected to parents by branches, and cousins are connected through their grandparents. For viruses, these family trees give biologists insights into how a virus has evolved over time and what changes to expect in the future. During the pandemic, the family tree of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, has produced more surprises than anyone expected. It turns out the SARS-CoV-2 family had two black sheep that it kept hidden from the world. When those relatives appeared, seemingly out of the blue this autumn, they not only shocked the world, but they also made evolutionary biologists question their understanding of the pandemic's future. (Doucleff, 2/9)

The COVID-19 patients slumped in chairs in a hallway outside the emergency room of the Desert Valley Hospital in Victorville. There were no gurneys for them, no beds and no rooms. Doctors and nurses dashed back and forth from the ER to treat them, dodging one another and medical equipment being wheeled about. “This is not ideal for us,” said emergency room Dr. Leroy Pascal. “But we’re having to see patients wherever we can.” (Vives, 2/6)

Just before Christmas, a right-wing journalist named Ben Bergquam became seriously ill with COVID-19. "My Christmas gift was losing my [sense of] taste and smell and having a 105 degree fever, and just feeling like garbage," Bergquam said in a Facebook video that he shot as he lay in a California hospital. "It's scary. When you can't breathe, it's not a fun place to be," he said. Bergquam told his audience he wasn't vaccinated, despite having had childhood asthma, a potentially dangerous underlying condition. Instead, he held up a bottle of the drug ivermectin. Almost all doctors do not recommend taking ivermectin for COVID, but many individuals on the political right believe that it works. (Brumfiel, 2/9)

Asking someone to stick something up their nose isn’t usually polite first-, second- or even third-date behavior. But when Jamie Gloyne’s date called an hour before they planned to meet up for an art exhibit in downtown San Francisco, saying she had a headache, he swooped in with a nose swab. Gloyne had several covid-19 rapid tests on hand, so he took one to her apartment. As soon as his date’s drops hit the test strip, two pink lines appeared. She was positive. (Bonos, 2/8)