Over the next year, hundreds of millions of Americans will be stabbed. Willingly! For most patients, the relief of finally being vaccinated against the coronavirus will overcome any anxiety or concerns about small very sharp needles being inserted into their arms, twice. But as more and more vaccines get doled out across the country, I wondered: What’s the difference between a good shot and a bad one? What do health care providers do to make shots as comfortable as possible? I asked Lindsay Gainer, a registered nurse, a vice president at Mass General Brigham Ambulatory Care, and a longtime instructor at the University of North Carolina School of Nursing. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
In the first week of January 2020, the United States and Iran were on the brink of war. A week later, Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial began. In a normal year, those two events might have been among the defining moments, but this year, it’s hard to even keep track of them amid the chaos that followed.
Simply put, 2020 was a year of “news hyperinflation.” The U.S. experienced three of the most consequential events in recent history COVID-19, the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election in a cascade of overlapping crises.
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Predictably, these three topics dominated Slate’s most popular stories of 2020, as readers sought to make sense of the unprecedented circumstances we all found ourselves in. The stories on this list are prime examples of Slate’s journalistic ethos. They offer a rigorously curious approach to decoding the news, cutting through the noise to explain what really matters.
Episode Notes
Welcome to The Authority, Slate’s deep dive into the world(s) of HBO’s
His Dark Materials. Each week, Slate’s scholars of experimental theology Dan Kois and Laura Miller discuss the HBO series and Philip Pullman’s original trilogy. This week, they cover the Season 2 finale, “Æsahættr,” in which Will finally meets his father, Lee Scoresby visits the Alamo, and Mrs. Coulter puts a kid in a trunk. Plus: an interview with Jack Thorne, the adaptor-in-chief of Philip Pullman’s books.