They Always Felt Like a Couple

Remley Johnson and Robert Flock like to say that they met the old-fashioned way: out on the town, through mutual friends, at a piano bar. And a few days later they actually bumped into each other in Washington, where he lived and where she was working as a summer intern, as a program assistant at…

Finding True Love Again

Joe Smith admitted that during his nearly 50-year marriage to Claranel Smith, who died in January 2017, he had been seeing another woman — his psychologist. “Throughout my entire marriage, my entire life, really, I knew I was gay,” said Mr. Smith, 76, a retired associate district court judge who lived in Des Moines before…

Staying in New York

Jim Curtis was a man in conflict this past spring as he watched the pandemic-panicked flee New York City for their country homes. “You start to see everyone leaving, and you think you need to leave too,” said Mr. Curtis, 44, brand head at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, a health coaching business, who divides…

Stayin’ Alive: How Disco Saved Daddy

After he and Mom divorced, Dad went out some weekends with a group from church. The group, made up entirely of divorced people, was called “Singles Again,” an unfortunate name for a collection of people whose failed marriages had already caused them enough trauma. The church might as well have gone all-out “Scarlet Letter” and…

Single-cell RNA sequencing outlines the immune landscape of severe COVID-19

A new single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of more than 59,000 cells from three different patient cohorts provides a detailed look at patients’ immune responses to severe cases of COVID-19. The results suggest that patients with severe COVID-19 experience increased regulation of the type I interferon (IFN-I) inflammation-triggering pathway – a signature that the researchers also…

More than meets the eye

The ability to recognize faces is a complex neurocognitive skill with important social implications. The disorder, which, according to some estimates, affects more than 2 percent of the population, can lead to isolation and anxiety and impair personal and work relationships. The traditional view of face blindness–prosopagnosia in scientific parlance–has held that the disorder arises…