What it’s like to bleed in protective gear "You know, I’ve become so shameless these days, I exchanged my duty with a male doctor and told him, ‘I’m on my period, I won’t be able to do it, I’ll do your duty, you do mine.’" Rituparna Chatterjee’s story drags an aspect of the pandemic out from the shadows that needs urgent attention: the pain of menstruating frontline workers.

She brings to light the shameful lack of thought that goes into designing public facilities, and the callousness with which women’s reproductive health is treated, despite all the noise about keeping them in the workforce. The image of women health workers bleeding in cumbersome protective gear haunted me because my mother worked as a nurse for three decades. A story everyone – especially people in power – needs to read.

Tanmoy, Sanity correspondent YKA: ‘Frontline workers explain what it’s like to bleed in protective gear during Covid’ (reading time: nine minutes)
How a medical disease called nostalgia became a universal feeling We must have entered the nostalgic age when a tweet asking people to share their “last normal photo” manages to capture the global imagination: everybody and their cat instantly knew what that meant. Those "last" images of drunken hugs in bars, festive dances, or people together are infused with a deft dose of nostalgia now that the structures and social mores that made them possible are dead and gone. Well, on life support, while we’re awaiting their government-approved reincarnation.

As David Berry puts it in his exploration of nostalgic sensibility throughout the ages: “One of the bitterer truths that nostalgia helps us deal with is the fact that we so rarely know when things are ending.” He beautifully and humorously recounts the history of nostalgia from a medical condition connected to place (at some point, they thought it was a Swiss thing, possibly triggered by the sound of cowbells on green pastures), to something much less physical and more ubiquitous that’s entered the popular consciousness but is nevertheless acutely felt by the afflicted, which is most of us at many points in our lives.

I really enjoyed how Berry distills nostalgia to one of humanity’s pesky conundrums that the medical community has given up on and left to the philosophers to deal with: the eternal quest to be at peace with our station in life when deep down we all know that the only way is down.

Carmen, member support manager The Walrus: ‘Why nostalgia is our new normal’ (reading time: 13 minutes)
The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on Earth It’s almost a cliché to say it at this point, but it’s still pretty amazing to think about: we can map the surface of Mars better than the floors of our oceans. This thought occupied adventurer Victor Vescovo so much that he set out to visit the deepest point in every ocean – and succeeded.

And as this edge-of-your-seat long-read by Ben Taub makes clear, it was no easy task and demonstrates just how far deep-sea design has come. Taub brings the reader on thrilling a ride through one man’s obsession into the deepest depths on the planet.

Shaun, copy editor The New Yorker: ‘36,000 feet under the sea’ (reading time: 23 minutes)

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