Last summer, I spent a shocking amount of time at my local D.C. pool reading about the Ebola virus. As my friends tanned on nearby chairs and tweens did cannonballs, I sat happily in the water, arms and e-reader barely staying dry, learning the details of an outbreak of a terrifying disease just two dozen miles from where I was wading. That's how I tore through Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, a nonfiction story about the origins of filoviruses such as Ebola, the scientists who study them, and a potential disaster on U.S. soil. This mismatch between dangerous tales and leisurely environs makes up a significant part of my reading life'flipping through Adam Higginbotham's book about Chernobyl at the beach, for example, or picking up Maurice Herzog's classic account of the first ascent of the Himalayan mountain Annapurna during a romantic vacation. I agree fully with what Eva Holland wrote in The Atlantic this week: 'Life-and-death stakes' Dangerous mysteries' Motley crews pitting themselves against impossible odds' Sign me up'but only vicariously, please. I like my adventures paired with a cup of tea and my softest blanket.'...

Good caregivers are often in short supply, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, staff levels at nursing homes dropped by 10 percent. What was a simple personnel shortage has moved closer to being a nursing-care crisis. As it happens, about one-fifth of health care support workers in the U.S. are immigrants. And as a newly published study of the nation's metro areas shows, changes in immigration levels can affect how much nursing care the elderly receive. Overall, Gruber and his colleagues determined that when there is more immigration, registered nurses and other aides work more hours at nursing homes, without displacing already-employed caregivers, while patient outcomes improve. Essentially, a 10 percent increase in female immigrants in a given metro area leads to a 1.1 percent increase in hours that registered nurses spend with elderly patients, while hospitalizations for those patients drop, among other things. 'Even if immigration actually increases labor supply to the medical sector, it was an open question if that would improve outcomes, and it does,' adds Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the MIT Department of Economics....

While the official press release did not disclose the terms of the deal, Frost (who had previously left the company), posted on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram that his startup walked with $105 million cash and had only raised $8 million from investors. That's a healthy return by any measure. Frost had not been running the company for about two years, according to a LinkedIn post by Skio's current CEO, Aidan Thibodeaux, who began as the startup's first COO. When he took over, he described a grind that involved no spend on marketing, ads, or a sales team. Instead, they focused spending exclusively on building the product. He and the founding CTO, Andrew Chen, made every sales call themselves, he wrote. Frost's story is even more stirring. In his Instagram post, he wrote that he solo-founded the startup after having a panic attack that caused him to leave his job as an engineer at Pinterest. COVID shut the world down two weeks later. Frost got into YC and says in another post that he 'completely failed during the batch,' until he pivoted to this subscription idea. In three years, he got the company to $10 million in ARR and, he says, profitable. Then another 'team came together and turned this early traction into a real company,' he credits....

Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump's resort in Doral, Florida. The backlash was fierce, and somehow the then'Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney's dismissive attitude''Get over it''failed to quell concerns, including among Republicans. Two days later, Trump gave up and moved the event to Camp David. (In the end, it was canceled because of COVID.) Things are different in Trump's second term. Later this year, the United States will host the G20 summit'an offshoot of the G7 that includes approximately 20 leaders of the world's largest economies'and the president has selected Trump National Doral as the location. A few days ago, The Washington Post reported that Trump even intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, a global pariah, to the meeting. But the Doral G20 has gotten nowhere near the same amount of attention, and much less backlash. The way the two summits have been received feels like a case study in the differences between the first and second Trump presidencies. In 2019, neither the press nor the public was yet so fatigued by news and numb to outrage, as New York magazine observed this week, nor were they yet accustomed to a president using his position to openly enrich himself. (The Atlantic's headline about the G7 announcement was 'Trump's Most Shameless Act of Profiteering.' How young we were!) The Republican Party also had more leaders who were willing to criticize the president, either publicly or privately. Finally, although Trump has never seemed especially vulnerable to shame, the president and his aides could still be swayed by sufficient embarrassment back then. The phrase shameless corruption gets used a lot, but Trump's second term embodies it....