One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors.
About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.
On a frigid January day, Ella Flagg Young—the first woman to serve as superintendent of the Chicago public-school system—took the stage in front of a room of school principals and announced that she had come up with a new solution to an old problem. “I have simply solved a need that has been long impending,” she said.
At the LGBTQ senior community where John James lives in Philadelphia, residents keep busy with trips to the garden or—before the pandemic—screenings of Strangers on a Train in the rec room. James does not care for any of that right now. Each morning, he combs through medical-research databases and downloads every paper he can find on COVID-19 treatments, scribbling notes about the parts that stand out. Most days, he reads papers at his desk until 1 a.m.