Updated at 7:43 p.m. on Feb. 25, 2020.

In May 1997, a 3-year-old boy developed what at first seemed like the common cold. When his symptoms—sore throat, fever, and cough—persisted for six days, he was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong. There his cough worsened, and he began gasping for air. Despite intensive care, the boy died.

Puzzled by his rapid deterioration, doctors sent a sample of the boy’s sputum to China’s Department of Health. But the standard testing protocol couldn’t fully identify the virus that had caused the disease. The chief virologist decided to ship some of the sample to colleagues in other countries.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the boy’s sputum sat for a month, waiting for its turn in a slow process of antibody-matching analysis. The results eventually confirmed that this was a variant of influenza, the virus that has killed more people than any in history. But this type had never before been seen in humans. It was H5N1, or “avian flu,” discovered two decades prior, but known only to infect birds.

Ever since her last relationship ended this past August, Liz has been consciously trying not to treat dating as a “numbers game.” By the 30-year-old Alaskan’s own admission, however, it hasn’t been going great.

Liz has been going on Tinder dates frequently, sometimes multiple times a week—one of her New Year’s resolutions was to go on every date she was invited on. But Liz, who asked to be identified only by her first name in order to avoid harassment, can’t escape a feeling of impersonal, businesslike detachment from the whole pursuit.

“It’s like, ‘If this doesn’t go well, there are 20 other guys who look like you in my inbox.’ And I’m sure they feel the same way—that there are 20 other girls who are willing to hang out, or whatever,” she said. “People are seen as commodities, as opposed to individuals.”

Last month, Juan Guaidó appeared in Washington in the role of political totem. Venezuela’s main opposition leader—the man who is recognized by that country’s National Assembly, millions of his fellow citizens, and several dozen foreign countries as the rightful president of Venezuela—was one of the special guests at the State of the Union address. President Donald Trump welcomed Guaidó as living evidence that his own administration was “standing up for freedom in our hemisphere” and had “reversed the failed policies of the previous administration”; he called Venezuela’s current leader, Nicolás Maduro, an illegitimate ruler whose “grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken.” He gave no details of how that would happen. Trump, who has never been to Venezuela or shown any prior interest in it—or, for that matter, shown any interest in freedom anywhere else —presumably knows that the country matters to some voters in South Florida. To their credit, members of Congress gave a bipartisan standing ovation to Guaidó nevertheless.

Erin Pizzey ought to be a feminist hero. In 1971, she founded the first women’s refuge in Britain, with no money and no official support beyond the use of a run-down public-housing block with four rooms, a galley kitchen, and a toilet. At that house in Chiswick, West London, hundreds of women received help to escape abusive partners and rebuild their lives. It was also a community center where women could get help with claiming welfare benefits, starting divorce proceedings, and dealing with alcohol and drug abuse.

By 2017, there were 276 such sites in England, with 3,798 beds. Pizzey’s work in Chiswick led to the creation of Refuge, which is now the largest charity of its kind in England. It has an annual income of £13.3 million ($17 million) and employs more than 200 people.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

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The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

Some bad outcomes, you half expect: This time the mammogram will detect an abnormality; this time the cop will notice you were 10 miles over the speed limit; this time the IRS is serious about a total audit. But you don’t expect that your luxury cruise from Japan will harbor a killer virus resulting in your being returned to the U.S. in a cargo plane that lands at a remote Air Force base where you are ordered into federal quarantine for a minimum of two weeks, leaving you without rights, without agency, and on the wrong side of a heavily guarded fence.

At least, I didn’t expect any of this, even though I wrote a thriller set on a cruise ship—or perhaps in part because I wrote a thriller set on a cruise ship, and figured my imagination was more fevered than reality. I had imagined a murder mystery with medical clues, but I had not imagined this. I had prepared for everything, but I had not prepared for this.

When it comes to the National Security Council, even a deeply divided Washington has generally agreed on two things. The first is that the staff serves at the president’s pleasure. The second is that the NSC has grown far too large over the past 20 years, bloated by the demands of presidents and forever war. Despite this agreement, however, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien’s recent downsizing of the staff has rightly caused unease.

Critics worried not just about the timing of the cuts but their targets, which suggest that O’Brien’s reforms had less to do with making government better than with making it purer. The NSC’s downsizing appears to be part of Donald Trump’s wider revenge campaign against what the president has reportedly called “snakes” in Washington, and it reveals not just how much and how long the president has been intent on purifying the government, but also how much Trump has changed the way Washington works.

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln stood before a simple wooden lectern in New York City’s Cooper Union and delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his life. He offered a ringing condemnation of slavery, an unapologetic appeal to the righteous position of the free states, and a clear-eyed assessment of the dark and dangerous years ahead.

When the tall prairie lawyer began this speech, he was to many little more than a failed candidate for the U.S. Senate. By the end of his 56-minute oration before New York’s GOP grandees, Lincoln was on track to win the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.

Read: The place of Abraham Lincoln in history

For Lincoln, and the Republican Party of his day, there was no moral compromise to be sought or attained on slavery. It was wrong. It was evil. It was un-American. By the acts and deeds of the Founding Fathers, the federal government had the authority to, at the very least, forbid the spread of involuntary servitude, whether the South liked it or not. Lincoln sought not to mollify the South or to compromise with the culture of slaveholding, but to draw a clear line.

China is in the grip of a momentous crisis. The novel coronavirus that emerged late last year has already claimed three times more lives than the SARS outbreak in 2003, and it is still spreading. More than 50 million people (more than the combined metro populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco) remain under historically unprecedented lockdown, unable to leave their city—and in many cases, even their apartment. Many countries no longer accept visiting Chinese nationals, or if they do, quarantine them for weeks. Big companies are pulling out of trade shows. Production is suffering. Profound economic consequences are bound to ensue, not just in China but around the world.

Bernie Sanders faced more pointed attacks last night over his potential vulnerabilities than he ever has at a debate. But the blustery and disorderly session once again failed to fully explore what could be the Vermont senator’s greatest general-election weakness: the massive size and scope of his spending and tax proposals, which, depending on the estimate, would cost $50 trillion to $60 trillion over the next 10 years. That would roughly double the size of the federal government, an unprecedented increase outside of wartime.

More so than in any previous session, Sanders at times seemed rattled and tentative as his rivals subjected him to a crossfire of criticism—over his record on gun control; my colleague Edward-Isaac Dovere’s report that he seriously considered a primary challenge to Barack Obama in 2012; his praise for aspects of Fidel Castro’s record in Cuba; and his success, or lack thereof, at getting things done in Washington. The evening showed “the first sign of uneasiness” for Sanders on a debate stage in this election cycle, says Lily Adams, the former communications director for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “For the first time, we saw moments where he was not 100 percent sure of what his rebuttal was going to be.”