Light At The End
Hello, all. It’s the last month of this sordid year, 2020. (As I like to say: Fuck him, and everyone who looks like him. In this case, “him” is the year.)
Welcome to December’s Zaleski Minute. Strap in. If this takes you longer than 60 seconds, complain to management.
What I Was Writing:
For Elemental: What many men consider their life’s greatest project — having and raising children, their own children — is something Scott Burkholder can never do. One of the bravest and kindhearted people I know, Burkholder shared his story with me about finding out he is infertile.
For Popular Science: They come in the night, the bee thieves, swooping in and bugging out quicker than the wings of the insects they steal. That’s right. People steal honeybees in California, which uses billions of bees to pollinate the state’s almond orchards. Fortunately, one man is on the case: Detective Rowdy Freeman.
For STAT News: Could copper surfaces in hospitals cut down on infections (and possibly kill SARS-CoV-2)? A short dispatch on the benefits of Cu.
Buy This
At age 6, Tanner Collins had one-sixth of his brain removed. Doctors wondered whether he would recognize objects ever again. His parents wondered if he would remember their faces. Then something miraculous happened — his brain literally changed, and he turned out to be fine. And now you can read my story in the 2020 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The anthology is a collection of articles written by some of the best science journalists in the U.S., and you can buy it now.
And now, the only appropriate way to leave you, given that a vaccine is (slowly) getting out into the world:
