Health Trotter

April 29, 2021 at 09:37PM Nobody ever believed the pandemic would go easy on children. The virus might target them less directly than it targets older people, but other challenges—the loss of school, the loss of play, the loss of time with friends—would exact their own emotional toll. A study published April 29 in JAMA Network Open sheds light on how serious that harm has been. The work, led by psychologist Tali Raviv at Northwestern University, involved a survey of more than 32,000 caregivers looking after children from kindergarten to grade 12 in the Chicago public school system. The definition of “caregiver” was broad, including parents and grandparents as well as anyone 18 or older with principal responsibility of caring for children in a household. The sample group of the families was ethnically and racially diverse—39.3% white, 30.2% Latinx; 22.4% Black; and 8.1% mixed. The pivot point of the research was March 21, 2020: the day that in-person instruction ended in...

April 29, 2021 at 12:26AM Few people think about the time Michael Collins didn’t go to the moon. Collins, who died of cancer on April 28 at age 90, is best remembered as Apollo 11’s command module pilot—in some ways the unluckiest man on the luckiest mission of all time. It was Apollo 11 that, in the summer of 1969, stuck the first crewed lunar landing, taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface, while Collins, bless him, stayed aloft in the command module orbiting 60 miles above, keeping his uniform clean and white while his crewmates got dirty on the endless gray beach that is the moon. All three men got the credit, all three got the parades and the medals and the world tour and the TV appearances. But Armstrong and Aldrin were the two truly limned in the light of history. Collins? Well, said many, his was a yeoman’s job. It wasn’t, of course, but never mind. History had other plans for Collins, and in some ways he had already made his mark—a much subtle...