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The concept of herd immunity is at the heart of global vaccination efforts and discussions about next steps in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic and bringing back economies. For the pandemic to stop, the coronavirus has to run out of susceptible hosts to infect. Herd immunity occurs when enough people in a population develop an immune response, either through previous infection or vaccination, so that the virus can’t spread easily and even those who aren’t immune have protection. (Abbott and Douglas, 9/20)

The year 2020 was supposed to be a big one for Pilgrims. Dozens of events — from art exhibits and festivals to lectures and a maritime regatta featuring the Mayflower II, a full-scale replica refitted over the past three years at a cost of more than $11 million — were planned to mark the 400th anniversary of the religious separatists’ arrival at what we now know as Plymouth, Massachusetts. But many of those activities have been postponed or canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. And historian Elizabeth Fenn finds a certain perverse poetry in that. “The irony obviously runs quite deep,” says Fenn, a history professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied disease in Colonial America. “Novel infections did MOST of the dirty work of colonization.” (Breed, 9/22)

On a sweaty Sunday morning in August of last year, Jamilah George was on the 16th floor of the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville, leading a spiritual service of sorts. George, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Connecticut who also holds a master’s degree in divinity from Yale University, asked the audience to shout out the names of ancestors or people they admired. With each name, George performed a libation ritual, pouring water into a leafy green plant, stationed at the front of the podium, as a gesture of thanks. “Maya Angelou,” called out one audience member. “Mama Lola,” called another. The names kept coming: Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde. Mahatma Gandhi. Harriet Tubman. George, who had been part of a team at U-Conn. running the only clinical trial to study the effects of the psychotropic drug MDMA on post-traumatic stress disorder with participants of color, wanted the audience to connect with its cultural lineages before she started her presentation — a bracing call for inclusion and social justice within the burgeoning world of psychedelic healing. It’s a world that holds great promise but is overwhelmingly White and economically privileged. Part of the problem, as George sees it, is that academia has lost its connection to the histories of these consciousness-altering substances (also known as entheogens), many of which have been used by Indigenous cultures for physical and psychological healing for thousands of years. (Joiner, 9/21)

I am the mother of four, but addiction is my ever-present extra child. My grandparents died of alcoholism. My father-in-law did, too. My 43-year-old brother died of a heroin overdose in May. He became addicted after taking prescribed OxyContin following an appendectomy. When my 13-year-old daughter needed hernia surgery as my brother was hitting rock bottom, it wasn’t the operation I feared. It was the opiates that would be part of her recovery. A 2018 study in the journal Pediatrics reported “persistent” opiate use by nearly 5 percent of patients age 13 to 21 following surgery, as compared to 0.1 percent in the nonsurgical group. I wanted to figure out a way to help my daughter through the pain without resorting to using opiates. (Burke, 9/18)

Dr. Joel Zivot stared at the autopsy reports. The language was dry and clinical, in stark contrast to the weight of what they contained — detailed, graphic accounts of the bodies of inmates executed by lethal injection in Georgia. It was 2016, and the autopsy reports had been given to him by lawyers representing inmates on death row. He had received simple instructions: Interpret the levels of an anesthetic in the blood to determine whether the inmates were conscious during their execution. As an anesthesiologist at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Zivot specialized in reading these levels. But as he looked beyond the toxicology reports, something else caught his eye. The lungs were way too heavy. (Caldwell, Chang and Myers, 9/21)

Consumers will still be heading to malls in the future. But their trips might have little or nothing to do with shopping. With mall vacancies accelerating at a rapid clip amid a surge in online shopping, landlords are quickly looking for other ways to reuse the glut of empty stores that will help boost traffic to shopping centers. ... "Pre-Covid there was an oversupply of retail space across the US," said Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities, which owns and manages hundreds of retail properties across the United States, including enclosed malls, free-standing stores and open air malls. "Now, supply of available space is up and retailer demand is softer. So you have to be nimble and creative with who to lease it to and go out there and pull in a different type of tenant," he said. At one of its properties -- The Landings in Columbus, Georgia -- Ziff said the company is signing leases with local retailers and restaurateurs but noted that there's been an increase of doctors and dentist offices signing leases across Time Equities' portfolio. (Kavilanz, 9/18)

David Jay is the oldest of 12 cousins on one side of his family and the third-oldest of 24 cousins on the other. As a kid, family to Jay meant having a lot of people around, a feeling of community, and crucially, a sense of permanence, that these people would always be in his life. Later, as an adult living in collective housing, he could access the feeling of family with those around him, but the permanence was gone. His roommates started finding romantic partners, having children, and dispersing. Jay had always wanted his own family with kids—and had known, for almost as long, that he wouldn’t be able to build one the usual way. Jay is the founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network and one of the most prominent people in the asexual movement. (Asexual people, or aces, don’t experience sexual attraction, though many do have sex and form romantic relationships.) After starting AVEN as a freshman at Wesleyan University in 2001, Jay spent years explaining asexuality to the public, speaking at events and talking to the press. As he grew older, the questions on his mind moved beyond identity and attraction to issues of parenting and family life. (Chen, 9/22)

More than half a year into the coronavirus pandemic, millions of U.S. families are struggling to pay for basic necessities. Right now, nearly one in eight households doesn’t have enough to eat. Parents in search of their children’s next meal have queued up in lines outside of food banks that have stretched for miles. (Caron, 9/17)

It can be tempting to say yes to things you just don't want to do. Might as well just get it done so nothing bad happens, right? But there's a high price for constantly aiming to make other people happy. "We suppress and repress who we are to please others," says Natalie Lue. She coaches people to curb their people-pleasing tendencies. (Keane and Nguyen, 9/22)

My friend Adam Nemett and I became close friends in college, when I basically lived in the house he shared with my then-boyfriend. We saw each other constantly—at home, on campus, over dinner. We got drunk together; took the train to New York City to go clubbing together; emailed during our summer vacations. The last night of college, the three of us wrapped our arms around one another, feeling the weight of this intimacy’s end. This proximity, we knew, would be lost to time and adulthood. But almost 20 years later, after children (for him) and a divorce (for me), Adam and I have rediscovered a new intimacy. The pandemic has deepened our bond, even though we have abandoned proximity entirely. We keep an almost weekly FaceTime appointment to watch TV together. During those video calls, I see his house and his wife, and he sees my apartment—or, more recently, my friend’s apartment, where I’m crashing because of the divorce. It’s the most time we’ve spent in conversation since we lived together all those years ago. In fact, we’ve never been closer. (Hagberg, 9/22)

Instead of going to summer camp this year, Ava Littman hiked on trails with her mother, Tara Cook-Littman, listening to stories about her mom’s childhood and opening up about how much she missed her friends. “We got so much closer.” says Ms. Cook-Littman. With her days free of driving to school and sporting events and doing advocacy work, she had time to teach 15-year-old Ava how to make smoothies and watch movies like “Pretty in Pink” with her. (Ansberry, 9/22)