The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

A dispatch from a caretaker.

Before you ever feel it.

Forty-five days of avoiding the coronavirus.

It wasn’t until death rates began to soar that society began to take the outbreak seriously enough.

Punitive notions of disease have a long history, and such notions are particularly active with cancer. There is the “fight” or “crusade” against cancer; cancer is the “killer” disease; people who have cancer are “cancer victims.” Ostensibly, the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable.

Inside the National Quarantine Center, there Is no fear of Coronavirus.

The Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

Like major contagions throughout history, the new coronavirus causes fear as well as illness. The remedy for both, it turns out, is the same.

Anatomy of an outbreak.

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

From legal battles to securing vendors to getting the walls painted, every budget line is a struggle.

Mountain athletes face death and grief more often than most of us. One therapist thinks he can help.

Medical examiners provide crucial insights into public health and safety. What happens when we don’t have enough of them?

A former NBA player describes his own unraveling.

Orthopedic surgery would have bankrupted us in the United States. So we went to Mexico instead.

For decades, one company has ruled the world of tampons. But a new wave of brands has emerged, selling themselves as more ethical, more feminist and more ecological.

Carrying babies for foreign couples was once touted as a win-win for everyone involved. Indian women, however, were often left with little to show for their efforts.

Is the oldest person who ever lived a fraud?

The wrong way to fight the opioid crisis.

An organ transplant recipient cycles across the country to meet the people who gave him his heart.

Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

How is it that literature has produced a wealth of information about the sex lives of straight white men and yet so little about the abortions they have or have not paid for?

On the plight of indigenous suicide in Alaska.

A new genetic engineering technology could help eliminate malaria and stave off extinctions — if humanity decides to unleash it.