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The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

The one I bought looked like any old antiperspirant, a solid white cream encased in a plastic applicator. But its instructions seemed unusual: “For best results, apply every night before bed and again in the morning.”

Every night?

I swiped it across my armpits before bed, and to my surprise, they were dry all the next day. I kept poking them in disbelief—deserts. But I would later discover that there isn’t anything particularly special about this product. Nighttime application improves the effects of any traditional antiperspirant, including those combined with deodorant (the former blocks sweat while the latter masks smell). Research has shown this for at least 20 years; none of the experts I spoke with disagreed. Yet many of us swipe our armpits in the morning before we head out for the day. Somehow, Americans are trapped in a perspiration delusion.

Putting on antiperspirant in the evening feels roughly akin to styling your hair right before bed. Both are acts of personal maintenance that people take not only for their own well-being but also in anticipation of interactions with others. This idea is reinforced by ads for antiperspirants, which tend to feature half-dressed actors getting ready in bathrooms or changing rooms; see, for example, the Old Spice guy. These ads also tend to mention how long their products work—24 hours, 36 hours—implying that their effectiveness starts to fade once they are applied. In a recent Secret commercial, a woman rolls on antiperspirant in a daylit bathroom, then scrambles to make her bus, relieved that she is prepared for such sweaty moments for the next 72 hours.

What these ads don’t say is that these products need the right conditions to work effectively. Antiperspirant isn’t a film on the surface of the armpit that stops moisture from leaking through, like a tarp over wet grass. Instead, it functions like a bunch of microscopic champagne corks, temporarily sealing sweat glands from spraying their contents. The active ingredient in most antiperspirants is some form of aluminum salt, compounds that combine with moisture on the skin to form “gel plugs” that dam up the sweat glands. These gel plugs prevent not only wetness but also odors, because bacteria responsible for foul smells thrive best in moist (and hairy) conditions, according to Dee Anna Glaser, a dermatologist and board member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, a group that advocates for patients with excessive sweatiness.

Gel plugs are finicky. They need a little bit of sweat in order to form—but not too much. Antiperspirant applied in the morning isn’t ideal, because people sweat more during waking hours, when they’re active. If the armpits are too sweaty in the hours after application, the product gets washed away before it can form the plugs. The body is cooler and calmer during sleep. For gel plugs to form, “baseline sweating is optimal at nighttime before bed,” Glaser told me. Nighttime application has been shown to increase the sweat-reduction ability of normal antiperspirant from 56 percent to 73 percent.

But wait, I can already hear you thinking, what happens if I shower in the morning? Here’s the thing: Antiperspirant lasts through a shower. “The plugs won’t wash away much,” even though the residue and scent probably will, Mike Thomas, a former scientist with Procter & Gamble and an advocate for the International Hyperhidrosis Society, told me. After 24 hours or more, the plug naturally dissolves. Reapplying antiperspirant during the day can be beneficial, Shoshana Marmon, a dermatology professor at New York Medical College, told me. Still, it works best if applied to dry armpits that, ideally, stay dry enough for the plugs to form. For most people, Marmon added, putting it on “clean, dry skin at night” provides enough protection to last through the next day.

Again, none of this information is new or hard to find. One of the earliest studies demonstrating the value of nighttime application was published in 2004; it showed that applying antiperspirant in the evening, or twice daily, was significantly more effective than morning-only use. Indeed, the stance of the American Academy of Dermatology is that it’s best to put antiperspirant on at night. Media outlets have covered this guidance since at least 2009.

For the perpetually sweaty, discovering this guidance only now, after decades of embarrassing photos and ruined shirts, might spark belief in a grand conspiracy: They don’t want you to know the truth about armpit sweat. Indeed, it isn’t mentioned on the labels of most regular-strength antiperspirants. The reasons for this are more banal than nefarious. Most people don’t sweat excessively, so applying antiperspirant the usual way is sufficient. “Manufacturers may keep instructions simple to fit general habits, so the idea of using antiperspirant at night doesn’t always make it into mainstream awareness,” Danilo C. Del Campo, a dermatologist at Chicago Skin Clinic, told me. The difference between antiperspirant and deodorant still eludes many people and, in fact, may bolster the insistence on morning application. Deodorant is essentially perfume and has no impact on sweat production. It’s “best applied when odor control is most needed, typically in the mornings,” Marmon said.

When I asked brand representatives why so many antiperspirants don’t mention nighttime use in the directions, they pointed to the potential for confusion. “It’s a bit counterintuitive for people to use antiperspirant at night, because most people think of applying it as part of their morning routine,” Maiysha Jones, a principal scientist at P&G North America Personal Care, which owns brands such as Secret and Old Spice, told me. But, she added, it is indeed best to use it at night. “Antiperspirants are commonly assumed to be a morning-only product and applied during the morning routine,” Megan Smith, a principal scientist at Degree Deodorant, told me.

In other words, people are used to applying antiperspirant in the morning because companies don’t tell them about the nighttime hack … but companies don’t tell them because people are used to putting it on in the morning. Omitting helpful instructions just because they might be confusing isn’t doing America’s perspirers any favors. Anyone who’s ever experienced an overly moist underarm can surely be coaxed into shifting armpit maintenance back a measly eight hours. People go to far greater lengths to self-optimize, whether it’s teens adopting multistep skin-care routines, or wellness bros taking dozens of supplements.

The science is well established, and the guidance is clear. But the ranks of nighttime swipers may not increase immediately. Routines have to be reset, assumptions picked apart. Some evenings, I find it exhilarating to buck the orthodoxy of personal hygiene. Other nights, it gives me pause. Applicator hovers over armpit, brain stumbles on belief. Will this really last past the sunrise, through a shower, beyond the hustle of the day? Even after learning about the science, “some people just don’t believe,” Thomas said. All there is to do is try. In go the corks, out go the lights.

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When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene linked to hereditary breast cancer in 1990, she also got to decide its name. She settled on the four letters BRCA, which had three distinct meanings. The name paid homage to UC Berkeley, where King worked at the time; more to the point, it was a nod to Paul Broca, the 19th-century French physician whose work established a link between family history and breast cancer. It was also an abbreviation for breast cancer.

A few years after King discovered BRCA1, a second BRCA gene, BRCA2, was identified. Together, they now have more name recognition than probably any other gene, their profile boosted by research that has shown staggering effects on cancer risk. Awareness campaigns followed. A 2013 New York Times op-ed in which Angelina Jolie revealed she’d had a preventive double mastectomy because of her own BRCA mutation drove many women to seek DNA tests themselves. The BRCA genes became inextricably linked with breasts, as much as the pink ribbons that have become an international symbol of breast cancer. And in driving more women to find out if they have BRCA mutations, it’s helped to greatly reduce the risk of hereditary breast cancer.

But in the three decades since the genes were discovered, scientists have learned that BRCA mutations can also lead to cancer in the ovaries, the pancreas, and the prostate. More recently, they have been linked with cancers in other parts of the body, such as the esophagus, stomach, and skin. As many as 60 percent of men with changes in BRCA2 develop prostate cancer, yet men are generally far less aware than women that BRCA mutations can affect them at all.

“It’s a branding problem,” Colin Pritchard, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington, told me. Men with family histories of breast cancer may not realize that they should get screened. Physicians, too, lack awareness of which men should get tested, and what steps to take when a mutation is found. Now Pritchard and other researchers are working to rebrand BRCA and the syndrome associated with it so that more men and their doctors consider testing.

Normally, the BRCA genes produce proteins that help repair damaged DNA throughout the body. Most people who carry mutations that impair the gene’s function are diagnosed with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome. (Having HBOC means a person is at increased risk for cancer, not that they already have an illness.) Most breast-cancer cases have no known hereditary link, but more than 60 percent of women with a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer, compared with about 13 percent of the wider female population. Men, of course, can get breast cancer too, but it's rare, even among BRCA-mutation carriers.

[Read: Cancer supertests are here]

The full significance of the link between BRCA mutations and pancreatic and prostate cancer has become clear only recently—perhaps in the past decade, said Pritchard. The exact risk these mutations impart to men varies widely in studies. But it’s clearly significant: Not only are men with BRCA mutations more likely to develop prostate cancer, they are also more likely to develop the more aggressive forms of the disease.

Roughly one in 400 people carry a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2, and half of them are men. But women are far more likely to have been tested for the mutations—up to 10 times as likely, according to one study. “Beyoncé’s dad was the only man that I had ever heard of who had it,” Christian Anderson, a 46-year-old social-sciences professor in Washington State who carries a BRCA2 mutation, told me. Anderson got tested after his sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, but countless men like him go undetected. Only about half of Americans get an annual physical, and doctors aren’t always aware of BRCA-screening recommendations for men. Many men who do test for a BRCA mutation report doing it for their daughters, and studies have shown that they tend to be confused about their risks of developing cancer themselves.

BRCA-awareness campaigns have led many women to get tested; in the two weeks after Angelina Jolie’s viral op-ed, researchers found that BRCA-testing rates went up by 65 percent. In that case, more people may gotten tested than needed to, but in general, the rise in cancer screenings and elective surgical interventions have helped reduce the rates of deaths from breast and ovarian cancers. Education about the genes’ links to other cancers could do the same for men. To that end, Pritchard argued in a 2019 Nature commentary that Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer syndrome should be renamed King Syndrome after Mary-Claire King. “We need to really rethink this if we're going to educate the public about the importance of these genes for cancer risk for everyone, not just women,” he told me.

[Read: I’ll tell you the secret of cancer]

As understanding of BRCA’s risks for men has grown, Pritchard’s idea has started to catch on. King, who is now a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, demurred when I asked her whether the syndrome associated with the BRCA genes should be renamed after her, but agreed that awareness campaigns have focused too narrowly on breasts and ovaries. “We need to bring this awareness to men in the same way that we have for 30 years now to women,” she told me.

How exactly Pritchard’s plan might be put into action is unclear. Gene names are overseen by an international committee and rarely changed. That’s part of why Pritchard is suggesting that the name of the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations become King Syndrome—no single governing body oversees that. Recently, ClinGen, an international group of researchers that works to parse the medical significance of genes, recommended that HBOC be rechristened BRCA-related cancer predisposition. (Pritchard told me he thinks that name isn’t quite as “catchy” as King Syndrome.)

Uncoupling the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations from breasts would likely be only the first step in getting more at-risk men screened for cancer. It would also be an important step in understanding the full impact of BRCA mutations on men. Because fewer men than women have been tested for BRCA mutations, scientists still don’t have a complete picture of their risk. For example, Pritchard told me, it’s only as more attention has been drawn to male BRCA risk that researchers have discovered mutations are linked to especially aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Penn Medicine recently launched a program dedicated to men and BRCA in part to continue this sort of research.

[Read: Scientists have been studying cancers in a very strange way for decades]

BRCA’s name is a legacy of a time when scientists thought genetics would offer a simple way to diagnose and treat disease—that one specific mutation would point definitively to one specific cancer. But today, “the idea that a gene would only affect one type of cancer risk is probably outmoded,” Pritchard said. The more scientists explore the human genome, the more complex its connections to health appear. It turns out that when genes don’t work like they should, the possible consequences may very well be infinite.

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When I was teaching indoor cycling every week, an unexpected benefit of the gig was free ice cream. One of the class regulars had an ice-cream machine at home and sometimes brought samples for me to try, in flavors such as pumpkin and pistachio. I think he did this not only because he was a nice person but also because in class, I was the nicest version of myself: warm, welcoming, and encouraging to the point of profound corniness, despite my usual caustic tendencies.

I noticed this friendliness in others too. Two people who met in my class started dating. Strangers who became friends there went out for post-workout coffees. Two of the other class regulars invited me to go skiing with them. Many of the good friends I have at age 35 are people I met in exercise classes I attended regularly. These experiences have convinced me that group fitness classes are the best place to make friends as an adult—an idea supported by research that suggests that the glow of exercise’s feel-good chemicals has interpersonal benefits.

Once, countless friendships were born in what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places”: physical spaces that aren’t a home or a workplace, don’t charge (much) for entry, and exist in large part to foster conversation. Over the past several decades, though—and especially as a result of the pandemic—third places such as bars and cafés have begun playing a much smaller role in social life, depriving American adults of opportunities for chance encounters that can lead to friendships. Perhaps that’s partly why Americans rank improving their relationships among their top New Year’s resolutions.

Group fitness classes don’t exactly fit the definition of a third place: They cost money, and the primary activities within them are sweating, grunting, and skipping a few reps when the instructor isn’t looking. But they fulfill many conditions that social-psychology research has repeatedly shown to help forge meaningful connections between strangers: proximity (being in the same place), ritual (at the same time, over and over), accumulation (for many hours), and shared experiences or interests (because you do and like the same things).

[From the December 2019 issue: I joined a stationary-biker gang]

Sussing out shared interests can be horribly awkward when you meet someone new at work or even at a party. Group fitness classes make it a little easier, Stephanie Roth Goldberg, an athlete psychotherapist in New York, told me. “Automatically, when you walk into a fitness class, you likely are sharing the idea that ‘We like to exercise,’ or ‘We like to do this particular kind of exercise,’” she said. “It breaks the ice differently than standing in a bar or at someone’s house.” Of course, breaking the ice still requires someone to say something, which, if you’re sweaty and huffing, is frankly terrifying. Whether I’m an instructor or a classmate, one simple tactic has never failed me: I simply walk up to someone after class and say, “Hey, good job!”

Proximity, ritual, and accumulation all require a certain amount of time, which can be hard to come by in a country that requires and rewards long hours at work. But you’re already making time for exercise class, and it provides those conditions; benefitting from them mostly requires acknowledging that you’ve already set yourself up for friendship. Danielle Friedman, a journalist and the author of Let’s Get Physical, told me that breaking through what she calls the “social code of anonymity” is key to making friends. “If you’ve been going to the same class for a while and start seeing the same people, don’t pretend like you’ve never interacted before,” she said.

That kind of friendliness requires adopting the clichéd feel-goodery inherent in many group fitness classes. In my spin classes, I’d cringe whenever I caught myself doling out motivational platitudes—mostly “We’re all in this together!” because I needed the reminder too, as I tried to talk and spin at the same time. Inevitably, though, someone would “Woo!” in response and reenergize the whole room. I’d load up my playlists with high-tempo remixes of early-aughts Top 40 hits and catch people singing along. One of my favorite instructors in a class I attended regularly instituted “Fun Friday,” when we’d warm up by doing silly little relay races or grade-school-style games; my blood ran cold the first time she told us to partner up for this cheesefest, but I had a blast. Everyone did.

In a world that prizes ironic detachment, embracing such earnest silliness can feel deeply uncomfortable. But—and you might as well get used to hearing this kind of phrase now, if you’re going to start attending classes—you just have to push through. “When you’re sweating, feeling a little out of control of your physical self, whooping and yelling, there’s a vulnerability,” Friedman said. “If you buy in, then you’ve shared something. There aren’t that many contexts as adults where you have that opportunity to be vulnerable together.”

[Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard]

A room full of grown adults flailing, shouting, and running miles without ever going anywhere is a fundamentally ridiculous prospect. Ridiculous things, however, play a crucial role in connecting with others: They make us laugh. Studies show that laughing with others facilitates social connection by helping us feel that we have more in common. The “happy hormones” released during exercise—endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin—are also associated with bonding. In particular, exercising in sync with others promotes close relationships.

Even if you don’t find your next best friend at Zumba, getting into a fitness habit of some kind might help you meet people and make friends in other spaces. “The more that people can step out of their comfort zone in one setting, the less intimidating it is to do in other settings,” Goldberg said. Perhaps you’ll even become the version of yourself who inspires people to bring you homemade ice cream. Win-win.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called the nation’s declining child-immunization rates “good news,” and referred to parents’ lingering doubts about routine shots as COVID-19’s “silver lining.” Now Kennedy may soon be overseeing the cluster of federal agencies that license and recommend vaccines, as well as the multibillion-dollar program that covers the immunization of almost half the nation’s children.

Which is to say that America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic could have the power to upend, derail, or otherwise louse up a cornerstone of public health. Raising U.S. vaccination rates to where they are today took decades of investment: In 1991, for example, just 82 percent of toddlers were getting measles shots; by 2019, that number had increased to 92 percent. The first Trump administration actually presided over the historic high point for the nation’s immunization services; now the second may be focused on promoting vaccines’ alleged hidden harms. Kennedy has said that he doesn’t want to take any shots away, but even if he were to emphasize “choice,” his leadership would be a daunting test of Americans’ commitment to vaccines.

In many ways, the situation is unprecedented: No one with Kennedy’s mix of inexperience and paranoid distrust has ever held the reins at HHS. He was trained as a lawyer and has no training in biostatistics or any other research bona fides—the sorts of qualifications you’d expect from someone credibly evaluating vaccine efficacy. But the post-pandemic era has already given rise to at least one smaller-scale experiment along these lines. In Florida, vaccine policies have been overseen since 2021 by another noted skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. (Kennedy has likened Ladapo to Galileo—yes, the astronomer who faced down the Roman Inquisition.) Under Ladapo’s direction, the state has aggressively resisted federal guidance on COVID-19 vaccination, and its department of health has twice advised Floridians not to get mRNA-based booster shots. “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Ladapo declared in January. His public-health contrarianism has also started spilling over into more routine immunization practices. Last winter, during an active measles outbreak at a Florida school, Ladapo abandoned standard practice and allowed unvaccinated children to attend class. He also seemed to make a point of not recommending measles shots for any kids who might have needed them.

Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida and the former head of the Duval County health department, believes that this vaccine skepticism has had immense costs. “The deaths and suffering of thousands and thousands of Floridians” can be linked to Ladapo’s policies, he said, particularly regarding COVID shots. But in the years since Ladapo took office, Florida did not become an instant outlier in terms of COVID vaccination numbers, nor in terms of age-adjusted rates of death from COVID. And so far at least, the state’s performance on other immunization metrics is not far off from the rest of America’s. That doesn’t mean Florida’s numbers are good: Among the state’s kindergarteners, routine-vaccination rates have dropped from 93.3 percent for the kids who entered school in the fall of 2020 to 88.1 percent in 2023, and the rate at which kids are getting nonmedical exemptions from vaccine requirements went up from 2.7 to 4.5 percent over the same period. These changes elevate the risk of further outbreaks of measles, or of other infectious diseases that could end up killing children—but they’re not unique to Ladapo’s constituents. National statistics have been moving in the same direction. (To wit: The rate of nonmedical exemptions across the U.S. has gone up by about the same proportion as Florida’s.)

All of these disturbing trends may be tied to a growing suspicion of vaccines that was brought on during COVID and fanned by right-wing influencers. Or they could be a lingering effect of the widespread lapse in health care in 2020, during which time many young children were missing doses of vaccines. (Kids who entered public school in 2023 might still be catching up.)

In any case, other vaccination rates in Florida look pretty good. Under Ladapo, the state has actually been gaining on the nation as a whole in terms of flu shots for adults and holding its own on immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in toddlers. Even Ladapo’s outlandish choice last winter to allow unvaccinated kids back into a school with an active measles outbreak did not lead to any further cases of disease. In short, as I noted back in February, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has had few, if any, clear effects. (Ladapo did not respond when I reached out to ask why his policies might have failed to sabotage the state’s vaccination rates.)

  

If Florida’s immunization rates have been resilient, then America’s may hold up even better in the years to come. That’s because the most important vaccine policies are made at the state and local levels, Rupali Limaye, a professor and scholar of health behavior at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Each state decides whether and how to mandate vaccines to school-age children, or during a pandemic. The states and localities are then responsible for giving out (or choosing not to give out) whichever vaccines are recommended, and sometimes paid for, by the federal government.  

But the existence of vaccine-skeptical leadership in Washington, and throughout the Republican Party, could still end up putting pressure on local decision makers, she continued, and could encourage policies that support parental choice at the expense of maximizing immunization rates. As a member of the Cabinet, Kennedy would also have a platform that he’s never had before, from which he can continue to spread untruths about vaccines. “If you start to give people more of a choice, and they are exposed to disinformation and misinformation, then there is that propensity of people to make decisions that are not based on evidence,” Limaye said. (According to The New York Times, many experts say they “worry most” about this aspect of Kennedy’s leadership.)

How much will this really matter, though? The mere prominence of Kennedy’s ideas may not do much to drive down vaccination rates on its own. Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist and public-health professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, told me that attempts to change people’s thoughts and feelings about vaccines are often futile; research shows that talking up the value of getting shots has little impact on behavior. By the same token, one might reasonably expect that talking down the value of vaccines (as Kennedy and Ladapo are wont to do) would be wasted effort too. “It may be that having a public figure talking about this has little effect,” Brewer said.

Indeed, much has been made of Kennedy’s apparent intervention during the 2019 measles crisis in Samoa. He arrived there for a visit in the middle of that year, not long after measles immunizations had been suspended, and children’s immunization rates had plummeted. (The crisis began when two babies died from a vaccine-related medical error in 2018.) Kennedy has been linked to the deadly measles outbreak in the months that followed, but if his presence really did give succor to the local anti-vaccine movement, that movement’s broader aims were frustrated: The government declared a state of emergency that fall, and soon the measles-vaccination rate had more than doubled.

As head of HHS, though, Kennedy would have direct control over the federal programs that do the sort of work that has been necessary in Samoa, and provide access to vaccines to those who need them most. For example, he’d oversee the agencies that pay for and administer Vaccines for Children, which distributes shots to children in every state. All the experts I spoke with warned that interference with this program could have serious consequences. Other potential actions, such as demanding further safety studies of vaccines and evidence reviews, could slow down decision making and delay the introduction of new vaccines.

Kennedy would also have a chance to influence the nation’s vaccine requirements for children, as well as its safety-and-monitoring system, at the highest levels. He’d be in charge of selecting members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccines that are usually adopted by the states and result in standardized insurance coverage. He’d also oversee the head of the CDC, who in turn has the authority to overrule or amend individual ACIP recommendations.

Even if he’s not inclined to squelch any determinations outright, Kennedy’s goal of giving parents latitude might play out in other ways. Brewer, who is currently a voting member of ACIP (but emphasized that he was not speaking in that capacity), said that the committee can issue several different types of rulings, some of which roughly correspond to ACIP saying that Americans should rather than may get a certain vaccine. That distinction can be very consequential, Brewer said: Shots that are made “routine” by ACIP get prioritized in doctor’s offices, for instance, while those that are subject to “shared clinical decision-making” may be held for patients who ask for them specifically. Shifting the country’s vaccination program from a should to a may regime “would destroy uptake,” Brewer told me.

Those would seem to be the stakes. The case study of vaccine-skeptical governance that we have in Florida may not look so dire—at least in the specifics. But Kennedy’s ascendancy could be something more than that: He could steer the public-health establishment off the course that it’s been on for many years, and getting back to where we are today could take more years still.

Today The Atlantic is launching Being Human, a new section and newsletter at TheAtlantic.com as part of a major expansion of its writing and reporting on health. The name describes The Atlantic’s wide-ranging approach to health coverage, on what it means to live a life bound up in a body and conducted by a mysterious, fallible brain.

The Atlantic grew its health-reporting team significantly ahead of this launch, and Being Human will broaden the magazine’s existing coverage of the ideas and issues that readers encounter every day: wellness culture, human behavior, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind.

Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said of the expansion: “The Atlantic’s health team produces the smartest, most analytically acute, and best-written stories of any journalism outfit nationally, and with this new expansion, we’re going to be comprehensive in a way we haven’t been before. In an age of mass confusion––not just about health, of course––I think our team is perfectly positioned to bring clarity to this important coverage area.”

Being Human launches with new reporting on the BRCA gene needing a rebrand, by Kristen V. Brown; how the broad support for vaccines in America may be tested by the incoming Trump administration, by Daniel Engber; and the way people are thinking about deodorant all wrong, from Yasmin Tayag.

Find more stories at the Being Human section, and please reach out with questions or interest in interviewing our writers about their reporting.

Press Contact: Anna Bross | press@theatlantic.com