By Lisa Bonos
The Washington Post

A sticker on a wall caught Katya Gratcheva’s attention last fall: “No dating or networking. Just breakfast.”

It led the married 52-year-old, tired of the transactional networking she encountered at home in Washington, D.C., to download an app called The Breakfast. For a fee, it pairs strangers seeking deep conversation for morning meals in 17 cities worldwide.

Gratcheva, who is Russian, ultimately matched with a young Ukrainian woman whose willingness to discuss the conflict between their two countries felt transformational. “She was able to see a friend in me even though I represent the nation that bombed her country and killed her friends,” Gratcheva said.

Gratcheva estimates that she’s attended about 30 such breakfasts with strangers in the past nine months. She has lots of company: Apps that offer to connect strangers seeking platonic connections are having a moment. Although they share many features with dating apps, they bill themselves as tools for networking or community-building, not for finding romance, with many like Breakfast targeting isolated remote workers and digital nomads.

In July, the dating app Bumble, which also has modes for networking and friend-finding, completed its acquisition of Geneva, an app designed to help people make new friends to spend time with offline. Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said on an earnings call that fostering platonic bonds is core to the company’s future business. “What we are hearing from our young users is that they are feeling lonely and disconnected,” she said.

Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Timeleft, an app that arranges Wednesday night dinners for six-person groups in 170 cities across 37 countries, says fatigue with dating apps is driving people toward in-person, friends-only meetups. “We can see that people are craving something that is not a dating app,” he said.

These services are proliferating at a time when loneliness is common and city dwellers report feeling detached from their local communities.

According to a February survey from Gallup, 1 in 5 workers experiences loneliness. Fully remote workers are more likely to feel lonely (25%), the survey found, compared to those who work fully on-site (16%) and hybrid employees (21%).

A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that urban Americans are less likely to feel they have local connections. Forty-nine percent of city dwellers reported feeling close to people in their local community, compared with 55% of those in the suburbs and 58% of people in rural areas.

Raymond Ou is one of those city dwellers who’s had a hard time making friends. The 41-year-old used to attend tech events to meet people, but since he became a broadcast producer at a local television station whose workday starts at 7 p.m., his evenings are no longer free for happy hours or mixers. “I’ve sacrificed my social life for this job,” Ou said over tofu and veggies, adding that though sacrifice was worth it, he’d still like more friends, especially those with availability during the day.

Ou signed up for the Creative Lunch Club app after seeing an ad on Instagram that promised to connect people in similar industries. In his first three months as a member, he paid $11 to be matched with two others for a small group lunch. On the day of the meeting, one of those Ou was due to meet canceled citing a work emergency — and the other turned out to be this Washington Post reporter.

Ou, who also works as a documentary filmmaker, said he wanted to try the Creative Lunch Club because it offered a space separate from the tech scene. “It’s providing opportunities for different people we want to meet,” Ou said.

Ou told me that he usually eats lunch alone, making him part of a pattern that spurred Klaus Heller, the founder of Creative Lunch Club, to start the app. “I was thinking this could be a good time of the day … to meet other people or to be used better,” Heller said in a phone interview.

Heller, a freelance social media marketer, also had a hunch that people in creative industries would find a lot to connect on. That was true for me and Ou.

Having spent much of my 20s working nights in journalism, I was able to tell Ou that I knew intimately how an unorthodox work schedule can make it hard to have a social life. We also spoke about the challenges of convincing sources to confide in journalists, how we go about cultivating trust with people we’ve just barely met — and bonded over our love of the Japanese clothing brand, Sou Sou. Meeting Ou was enjoyable, but at times I found myself thinking that a larger group would have helped round out the conversation.

Kasley Killam, a social scientist and author of “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier and Happier,” estimated in a phone interview that there are now hundreds of apps trying to address the loneliness epidemic by helping people connect with others. Just about every week, she hears about a new one. It’s easy to meet new people while in college or your 20s, Killam said, “but what if you move to a new city or go through a breakup? A lot of people struggle for where to turn for that.”

Damian Jacobs, a 44-year-old lawyer, faced that conundrum after a recent move from Hong Kong to San Francisco. His wife and children are still thousands of miles away, visiting occasionally as the family finalizes its plans to relocate.

Jacobs tried taking himself out to bars and restaurants and striking up conversations with strangers, but that didn’t take. “People at my age tend to be married with kids. They’re not going out to bars on a Saturday night and mingling with strangers,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “I’ve found that places I’ve gone to, folks are much younger than I am, hanging out with their friends.”

Things felt very different at his first dinner arranged via Timeleft. “Everybody at the table is there to meet strangers,” he said. Jacobs paid $25 to access a month of meetups, which combine a different group each week.

After each dinner, Timeleft picks a place for the group to move on to for an optional after-party. At the dinner Jacobs attended in San Francisco’s Japantown, his dining partners, including this reporter, chose a nearby karaoke bar instead. “If you told me I would’ve ended up at a karaoke bar afterward, I would’ve laughed you out of the room,” said Jacobs, who isn’t normally a fan of the art.

Still, he got up on the stage and mouthed the words to “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers with the rest of his dinner-mates, later calling the performance “a testament to the power of peer pressure.”

He’s not sure if he’ll see that group again. But he has a three-month subscription to Timeleft and will be going for another dinner with a new group soon.

By Chris Dong
Special to The Washington Post

It happens all the time: You’ve just arrived at the airport and your flight gets massively delayed.

For many fliers, that means having to kill hours of time by strolling through the terminal or scrolling through your phone. But if you’re savvy, and more than a little lucky, you instead might get yourself on the standby list for an earlier flight — and get to your destination before you’d even planned.

Flying standby can be like a game of airport roulette, in which your time is money, and it comes with fewer of the risks. You’re hoping that a seat may become available on another flight. As long as you’re trying to get on an earlier flight and not a later one, though, you won’t lose your original seat if you prove unsuccessful.

Flights in general are fuller these days, which means fewer spots are available for standby passengers. And travel mishaps, weather delays and mass disruptions like this summer’s CrowdStrike IT outage can hamstring flights’ capacity further, said Gary Leff, founder of the blog View from the Wing.

“Your flight might get canceled, and your airline may not have seats for days,” Leff said. “At peak travel times, other airlines may not have seats available to help out, either.”

In the past, it would be normal to walk up to the gate of any flight headed for your destination and try to get on it. But changes to airline rules in recent years have restricted and complicated standby flying, said Julian Kheel, the founder and chief executive of Points Path, a company that helps people utilize their travel rewards.

Learn these rules and tips to navigate the standby hustle — and give yourself a better chance:

Know airlines’ policies

Standby policies are not the most straightforward, and they can differ from airline to airline. But there are some constants.

Almost always, you can fly standby only on the same day and with the same airline as your original flight, which means your airline has to have multiple flights to your destination. Flying standby also is a very American phenomenon; it’s generally only available when you’re ticketed on a domestic carrier, and the itinerary usually needs to stay within the United States.

“Many European airlines don’t allow it at all, at least unless you have a fully flexible ticket, which most customers don’t,” Leff said.

If your original itinerary has a connection, you may not be able to fly standby for a nonstop flight to your destination, Kheel said. And some carriers, like Delta Air Lines, don’t let customers fly standby if they originally purchased a basic economy ticket.

Another key component is your luggage. Some carriers, like American Airlines, won’t let passengers stand by for a flight if they have checked a bag, unless they have elite status.

“Even for airlines that do allow it, it complicates the process and can mean your checked bag arrives on a different flight than you do,” Kheel said.

How airlines rank standby fliers

With limited seats available on other flights, beating fellow standby hopefuls is part of the game. Kheel said travelers who get that will check for other departures ahead of time and monitor their flight’s status closely. Besides subscribing to notifications from the airline directly, consider downloading a third-party app like Flighty or FlightAware, which can provide up-to-the-minute flight alerts.

It’s not a full-on meritocracy from there, though. By and large, frequent fliers get first dibs when airlines prioritize their standby lists. “Having status with an airline helps, since it puts you to the top of standby lists most of the time, meaning you’ll clear ahead of other passengers trying to do the same thing that you are,” Leff said.

There can be other factors, too, such as what class of service you’re flying in, how expensive your ticket was and whether you hold the airline’s credit card.

Standby rules for paying passengers differ from the rules for airline employees and their companions (called nonrevenue passengers). A bit confusingly, both groups are listed on the same standby list you see on airport monitors and airline apps.

One exception that can upend a standby list’s rules: A nonstatus passenger whose travel was canceled or disrupted typically will get priority over a status-holding passenger who’s just choosing to get on that flight. So, if you’re on a standby list and wonder why so many passengers suddenly jumped ahead of you in the queue, the reason might be a previous flight’s delay or cancellation.

Consider alternatives

When a traveler flies standby, it typically means something made them want to change their flight in the first place. If that’s your situation, there are some other options to consider. Kheel advised checking whether your reservation has same-day confirmed availability, which operates similarly to standby but comes with a guaranteed seat.

“The downside is that unless you have elite status with the airline, you’ll likely pay a fee for a same-day confirmed change, while flying standby is typically free,” Kheel said. United Airlines, for instance, charges up to $75 for confirmed same-day changes if you don’t have Premier status.

It’s important to think ahead because how you book a flight can make all the difference. When flight delays and cancellations occur because of mechanical issues or bad weather, a credit card that includes embedded travel insurance coverage can potentially save the day. In these cases, you’d be able to book a new flight under the terms of the policy — and you won’t have to deal with the airline’s policies directly. To qualify for coverage, a traveler must use that specific card to make their travel purchases and provide proof of a disruption, as with any type of insurance.

For a more advanced hack, consider booking a backup flight using airline miles. Just ensure, if you do, that the backup reservation isn’t on the same airline as your primary flight.

“Most airlines have computer algorithms in place that can spot and automatically cancel duplicate reservations made for the same passenger on the same day,” Kheel said. Also, make sure you’re booking a backup ticket that can be canceled, so those miles can be redeposited free.

By Julia Carmel
Special to The Washington Post

Jeff West was looking for a change of pace. After decades of running clubs and restaurants in West Hollywood, he left California in search of peace and quiet. He had been to Laguna Beach and Palm Springs, but a new gay-friendly destination was calling to him — twin vacation towns on Lake Michigan with a population of less than 2,500 people.

“I arrived in the winter, and I was so amazed by it,” said West, 67, who grew up in Texas and spent his life in Southern California. “Seeing snow was just so beautiful. I remember feeling my shoulders relax.”

In the summers, West celebrates with friends on the lake. During winter, he’s part of a gay bowling team called the Gutter Queens. Since relocating in 2021, he’s become a real estate agent, spending his days selling other people on the joys of life here.

Saugatuck and its neighboring town, Douglas, form a rainbow bubble within Michigan’s Bible Belt. The area is off the beaten path compared to the coastal hangs that typically attract huge gay crowds, yet its reputation rivals spots like Provincetown and Fire Island.

Drive through the lush, wooded roads in the warmer months and you’ll find a summer camp atmosphere. Hammocks hang outside a popular coffee shop. Kids spill floats purchased from the Douglas Root Beer Barrel out of their parents’ car windows.

Pride flags fly from many businesses and homes, a stark difference from the conservative towns in Western Michigan. At the Dunes Resort, the pool is packed with Speedo-clad gay men all summer long, and disco balls light up the confetti-filled dance floor every weekend.

“This is a small community where we get to enjoy the finer things in life and be comfortable and free,” West said. “It’s paradise for somebody like me to be able to come to a place and just feel so welcome.”

‘Fire Island of the Midwest’

There’s evidence of queer tourists and residents flocking here since the late 19th century, thanks to a long and colorful cast of eclectic artists, eccentric couples and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs.

According to the Chicago Tribune, it really hit its stride in the 1960s as “a loosey-goosey mecca for pleasure-seekers, gay or straight.” During that era, the town was seen as a party destination for motorcyclists, college kids and queer people from near and far.

Gay travel guides like Bob Damron’s Address Book began ramping up around the same time, dubbing Saugatuck “The Fire Island of the Midwest.” Though a state law prohibited bars from hosting groups of gay people, a local jazz venue called The Blue Tempo became known for serving gay patrons.

Eric Gollannek, executive director of the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center, said the second edition of Bob Damron’s Address Book references The Blue Tempo as a mixed crowd bar and also mentions “an interesting beach” nearby — a strip of sand that stretched from the north side of Saugatuck’s popular Oval Beach to the mouth of the Kalamazoo River.

“They collected $5 to use their beach for the day,” said John Rossi, facilities manager for Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, a program that’s affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “You could sunbathe nude, as long as you were not visible to the public.”

Rossi visited Denison’s Beach, owned by a local Marine businessman named Frank Denison, for the first time in the 1970s. “It was mostly gay, but there was a mix, I could tell,” Rossi said. “Sometimes there were lesbians that frequented it, and occasionally you might see a straight couple.”

Rossi, 68, grew up about 40 miles away in Grand Rapids. He said word-of-mouth recommendations initially brought him to the area.

“There was this network — people told you, you knew what was safe and what wasn’t,” Rossi said. “I mean, there were three bars in Grand Rapids. There were two bars in Lansing you could go to. There were a lot of bars in Detroit we used to go to.”

One of the people who began frequenting The Blue Tempo was Carl Jennings, who was living near Grand Rapids with his wife and children. Though he was closeted at the time, he would spend his weekends tending bar in Saugatuck.

“Back then, you had to live and lead two lives. You had to be a straight person or at least appear to be that way,” Jennings told Michigan Public Radio in 2016. “And then, if you’re fortunate enough to find something like Saugatuck, it just felt warming and accepting.”

Eartha Kitt and ‘tea dances’

The Blue Tempo burned down in 1976, and the loss of that de facto gay space was felt immediately. By the early 1980s, Jennings had come out to his family and found his life partner, Larry Gammons. The couple decided to go into business together.

“We thought, ‘You know what, we should open a gay resort,’” said Gammons, who is now 77.

They originally set their sights on a hotel in Saugatuck, but the Saugatuck town council didn’t want to issue a liquor license to a gay business. After they were turned down for a third time, they found a shuttered roadside motel in Douglas and quickly made an offer on the property. At the first Douglas council meeting, they were able to secure their liquor license.

The Douglas Dunes finally opened in 1981, becoming one of the largest LGBTQ+ resorts in the country.

“May 1 was our grand opening, and we laughed about the fact that the city didn’t know what hit ’em because cars were lined up and down the highway,” Gammons said. “All these people. They just showed up.”

“As you well know, all you’ve got to do is tell a gay person and they spread the news. It spreads like crazy,” he added. “And everybody was so excited about a new big place opening up.”

Gammons and Jennings wanted the resort to be as safe as possible, so they hired their own security to make sure that homophobes wouldn’t get inside to harass patrons. They also made it clear to local police that they’d expect help with external issues. Over the years, the Dunes was targeted by gay bashers, received a bomb threat and even got a threatening call from the Ku Klux Klan.

Nonetheless, the resort was popular and quickly earned a reputation for throwing huge parties with fantastic entertainment.

“The music was so much better at The Dunes than in Grand Rapids,” Rossi said. “I used to talk to the DJs and I’d just tip them a couple bucks, and I’d say, ‘What was that you just played?’”

They booked performers such as Eartha Kitt, Linda Clifford and The Weather Girls (though the latter had to cancel at the last minute) and hosted tea dances every Sunday.

“We turned down Madonna,” Gammons said. “Her brother lived in the Detroit area, and he was gay, and Carl was DJing. She was just a punk rocker, and she went up to (Carl) when he took a little break and said, ‘I’m better than that girl. You know, you ought to put me onstage.’”

“We turned her down, and it was about six, eight months after that, she went to New York and got discovered,” he added.

The parties raged on for decades, with Gammons telling The Chicago Tribune in 1995 that gay tourism was bringing “an estimated $6 million annually to the area.” Gammons and Jennings sold The Douglas Dunes in 1998 to Danny Esterline, Greg Trzybinski and Mike Jones, who renamed it The Dunes Resort.

Though there is a widely cited statistic about Saugatuck-Douglas being home to more than 140 gay-owned and gay-friendly businesses, Jones said in an email that number was “made up” for press releases and websites to “promote the area as gay-friendly.”

Jones, 58, still remembers visiting the Dunes — which he calls a “little Midwestern gay Mecca” — for the first time in 1990.

“It really stood out as like, ‘this isn’t normal.’ Even in Chicago in the late 90s, guys weren’t holding hands walking downtown,” he said. “And you’re really right in the middle of God’s Christian reform, Southwest Michigan. So it’s almost like there’s a bubble over us. You have to remember that the whole world isn’t like this.”

Though Jones had visited many of the popular gay hot spots and swore he’d never live in a small town, he felt differently at the Dunes.

“I’ve been to P-town, and we’ve been to Fire Island, and we’ve been to Key West, and Rehoboth, but they’re just a different attitude,” Jones said. “And I never thought when I was in Fire Island or P-town or Rehoboth, ‘This place is great. I want to live here.’”

Nude bathers in the 1890s

With a bit of close reading, the queer history in Saugatuck and Douglas dates back more than 120 years. Gollannek, the director of the local history center, said there are examples of same-sex relationships from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

Some gay tourism can be attributed to the rise of steamboat travel, which made it easier for visitors to make their way over from Chicago. But the most obvious influence on the area’s emerging queerness was a woman named Elizabeth Bandle.

“She and her family had land in Saugatuck on a farm,” said Shanley Poole, 27, engagement liaison and storyteller for Ox-Bow. “She invited a few students and professors up to do plein-air painting because the lighting there was just gorgeous, and it kind of became a tradition year after year.”

Among the people who visited Bandle Farm in the early 1900s were Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall Clute, artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who went on to found Ox-Bow in 1910. Since artists and city-dwellers were typically more accepting of queer people at the time, it created an environment that fostered gay tourism.

“In 1910, we have these groups of artists and free-thinking individuals — bohemian folk — coming to a secluded area,” Gollannek said. “Avant-garde artists coming here, painting plein-air, working with nude models, and this becomes a place where there’s some openness.”

The Saugatuck-Douglas History Center has records of LGBTQ+ people living in the area starting in 1917, with interior designer Florence “Dannie” Ely Hunn purchasing a cottage near Saugatuck-Douglas with Mabel “Jims” Warren, her partner of more than 50 years.

Many locals can also recall LGBTQ+ people and couples who they met during their first trips to Saugatuck.

“We have had members within GLBTQ community that go back to probably the ’30s, ’40s, like Mary Kay Bettles,’” Rossi said. “She met her lover at a place over by where the chain ferry is now. It used to be a gas station and an ice cream shop.”

Bettles and her partner, Jean Palmer, were not the kind of couple that flew under the radar.

“Jean would wear ball gowns and fur coats and sit on her really rustic cabin porch during the summertime, and Mary Kay Bettles was like, wearing jean shirts and trousers and loved her dogs,” Poole said. “And (Bettles) would wear a Sheriff’s Badge and kind of dubbed herself the Sheriff of Ox-Bow and would chase people off campus if they didn’t have a reason to be there.”

Some visitors and residents were closeted in their hometowns, but felt safe to live with their partners and express affection in Saugatuck-Douglas. Burr Tillstrom, the Chicago-based puppeteer, kept his private life quiet, but purchased a barn in Saugatuck during the 1960s, which allowed him to loosen up as he spent his summers teaching at Ox-Bow.

Rossi, who’s now 68, also grew up during an era that lacked the language and freedoms that many LGBTQ+ people have today.

“Among artists, there was more of a tolerance for ‘less traditional lifestyles,’ as they would call it,” he said. “The definition of gay didn’t really come until maybe the ’50s or ’60s.”

“Saugatuck was sort of used to the fact that there was an eclectic crowd that came here. They painted, they partied, they spent money,” Rossi said. “And you know, when people spend money, and money’s to be made, money does not have sexual orientation.”

These days, Saugatuck-Douglas is a bit different.

It’s more expensive than it once was, with many hotels charging upward of $500 per night, and the frisky nude beach became a thing of the past when the Land Conservancy of West Michigan purchased Denison’s old land around 2009.

“Now the city owns it,” Gammons said, “so no nudity, no hanky-panky, no liquor, no nothing.”

By Rachel Tashjian
The Washington Post

Tim Walz wore a navy suit, white shirt and blue tie to formally accept the Democratic nomination for vice president on Wednesday night in Chicago. Big whoop. That’s what all the men wear for a moment like that.

But in the two weeks since Walz was catapulted to the national stage, Democrats have seized on his offstage style as evidence of his authenticity. Walz’s casual attire has been a constant refrain this week at the Democratic National Convention. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) spoke just before Walz, saying that Minnesotans “love a dad in plaid.” A video narrated by Walz’s wife, Gwen, depicted him in the orange and camo of hunting mode. Former president Barack Obama touted Walz’s workwear Tuesday night: “You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from his political career. They come from his closet – and they have been through some stuff.”

On Monday, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, described Walz as doing his work “with a big heart, a buffalo-plaid jacket, and a bottomless bag of snacks” – as if he’s running instead for World’s Greatest Dad.

The campaign has played up this aesthetic, too. Hours after Walz’s first public appearance as the Veep candidate, in Philadelphia, the campaign started selling a camo-print hat emblazoned with “HARRIS-WALZ” in hunting-season orange. Walz was wearing a camo hat when Harris offered him the job by phone, according to a video of the exchange (which might’ve been staged, for all we know).

The idea is that these workwear clothes make him relatable and even “real” – that his wardrobe isn’t politically motivated but something pure.

Workwear is prone to adaptation and ironic styling. (Now that conversations about appropriation have made most people hesitant to remix most kinds of culture-specific dress, rural White culture may be the last “safe” aesthetic to remix.) Workwear brands like Realtree and Carhartt have been worn and remixed by Japanese subcultures, Bushwick hipsters and designer brands such as Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. You can see nearly as much Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops merch in downtown Manhattan as you can in rural Pennsylvania. But the Harris-Walz campaign wants us to know that there’s nothing ironic or cloying about Coach Walz wearing it: This guy is the genuine article, wearing genuine articles.

Does Walz’s sartorial reputation create a foil for JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, who claims to be in touch with the working and middle classes but has spent much of his adult life in the realms of Silicon Valley and the Ivy League? Vance is usually seen in a blue suit and red or blue tie, although he did wear a plaid shirt and jeans during a visit to the southern border earlier this month. (And he has his own hang-ups about what constitutes authentic style: In one section of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” he dismisses pajamas as “an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cubes makers.”)

Walz wore an L.L. Bean barn jacket while touring a Minnesota farm with President Joe Biden last November. And he has campaigned in T-shirts, and shared photos of himself in hunting attire while, well, hunting. Democrats want to foreground that he wears these clothes not to appeal to a middle-class voter from middle America; he wears them because he is a middle-class voter from middle America.

Walz’s wardrobe is one of the Democrats’ best arguments that theirs is not the party of the coastal elite. Walz doesn’t need to do the usual pageantry of rolling up his shirtsleeves or loosening his tie to look relatable.

Politicians, especially those in a race for the White House, usually undergo some kind of glow-up. Edges are softened or sharpened. Designers make custom pieces. Stylists are consulted on fabrics, brands and hairstyles. Perhaps a uniform is established. These changes are sometimes successful, and sometimes the source of scandal. Hillary Clinton adopted a wardrobe of pantsuits in the 2016 election. John Edwards got a $1,250 haircut in 2008, while Sarah Palin’s campaign wardrobe cost $150,000. Even Harris – whose taste for boot cut pantsuits and boxy-shouldered pantsuits has remained largely unchanged for the past decade – has made perceptible updates to her look over the past year. As Harris’s allies salute Walz for being real with his Realtree, she is actually getting a bit fancier. She has incorporated more European luxury brands, such as Chloé and Valentino, into her wardrobe, and has even been criticized on social media for wearing a pricey necklace by Tiffany & Co.

But here’s the trick: Walz is rarely seen at public events wearing the Carhartt, plaid jackets and camo he’s so celebrated for. That may be why he’s touted for this wardrobe while Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) – whose Carhartt collection was at first a selling point – now looks stubborn instead of folksy. Walz is more willing to put on a tie. And the country has gotten to know him in the tieless shirts, blue suits, blazers, sneaker-soled dress shoes and khakis that high school teachers or government employees also wear. But the overall impression of Walz is that underneath the Brooks Brothers is a man who’d rather be field-dressing a deer.

It’s funny to imagine a political party foregrounding a woman’s down-to-earth wardrobe: We just love the senator for wearing those Lululemon leggings. To be taken more seriously, at this level of politics, a man dresses down and a woman dresses up.

Both Harris and Walz are reserved dressers. Harris wears ostensibly the same pantsuit in different colors, which has made it difficult to criticize or latch onto any detail of her attire, and she has largely (so far) sidestepped the sartorial scrutiny that many female politicians have experienced. But Democrats have politicized Walz’s clothes, describing them as essential to his identity. Why fixate on his clothes and not hers? Maybe the campaign wants to show Americans that Harris’s progressive vision pops best with an old-fashioned, even conservative look.

By Fenit Nirappil
The Washington Post

The Food and Drug Administration approved new mRNA coronavirus vaccines Thursday, clearing the way for shots manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to start hitting pharmacy shelves and doctor’s offices within a week.

Health officials encourage annual vaccination against the coronavirus, similar to yearly flu shots. Everyone 6 months and older should receive a new vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

The FDA has yet to approve an updated vaccine from Novavax, which uses a more conventional vaccine development method but has faced financial challenges.

Our scientific understanding of coronavirus vaccines has evolved since they debuted in late 2020. Here’s what to know about the new vaccines.

– – –

Why are there new vaccines?

Coronavirus keeps evolving to overcome our immune defenses, and the shield offered by vaccines weakens over time. That’s why federal health officials want people to get an annual updated coronavirus vaccine designed to target the latest variants. They approve them for release in late summer or early fall to coincide with flu shots that Americans are already used to getting.

The underlying vaccine technology and manufacturing process is the same, but components change to account for how the virus morphs. The new vaccines target the KP.2 variant because most recent covid cases are caused by that strain or closely related ones.

Covid is less dangerous overall than it was earlier in the pandemic because our bodies have become used to fighting the virus off and nearly everyone has some degree of immunity from receiving shots or getting sick. A new shot is meant to shore up existing defenses.

“It’s an opportunity to mitigate or to reduce that risk even further rather than just relying on what happened in the past,” said Robert Hopkins Jr., medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a physician in Arkansas.

– – –

Who needs a new coronavirus vaccine?

The United States differs from other countries in recommending an updated coronavirus vaccine for everyone except young infants, rather than just those at heightened risk for severe disease because they are 65 and older and people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised or have serious medical conditions.

Health officials rejected a more targeted recommendation, some contending it’s easier to tell everyone to get vaccinated rather than try to define what makes a person high-risk. Most Americans have a risk factor for severe covid, such as being overweight or having diabetes.

Critics of this approach, including Paul A. Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, worry that it detracts from the urgency of vaccinating vulnerable people who have a harder time mounting an immune response to coronavirus.

– – –

Do the vaccines prevent infection?

You probably know by now that vaccinated people can still get covid. But the shots do offer some protection against infection, just not the kind of foolproof protection you get from highly effective vaccines for other diseases such as measles.

The 2023-2024 vaccine provided 54 percent increased protection against symptomatic covid infections, according to a CDC study of people who tested for the coronavirus at pharmacies during the first four months after that year’s shot was released.

“People who get vaccinated are much less likely to get infected in the first place,” said David J. Topham, director of the University of Rochester Translational Immunology and Infectious Disease Institute. “We’d love vaccines to be perfect, but Mother Nature is pretty damn smart.”

A nasal vaccine could be more effective at stopping infections outright by increasing immunity where they take hold, and one is being studied in a trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

If you really want to dodge covid, don’t rely on the vaccine alone and take other precautions such as masking or avoiding crowds. But if you want to carry on with life as normal, a new vaccine lowers your risk of getting covid – at least in the short term.

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Do the vaccines help prevent transmission?

You may remember from early coverage of coronavirus vaccines that it was unclear whether shots would prevent transmission. Now, scientists say the answer is yes – even when vaccinated people get sick.

That’s because the vaccine creates antibodies that reduce the amount of virus entering your cells, limiting how much the virus can replicate and make you even sicker. When vaccination prevents symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, people expel fewer respiratory droplets carrying the virus. When it reduces the viral load in an infected person, people become less contagious.

That’s why Peter Hotez, a physician and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said he feels more comfortable in crowded medical conferences where attendees are probably up to date on their vaccines than in a crowded airport.

“By having so many vaccinated people, it’s decreasing the number of days you are shedding virus if you get a breakthrough infection, and it decreases the amount of virus you are shedding,” Hotez said.

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How long does vaccine protection last?

CDC data shows the effectiveness of the 2023-2024 vaccine against emergency room visits and hospitalizations declined sharply more than four months after receiving it. But the risk of hospitalization still remains low for most people, which made it harder for the CDC to compare outcomes for people who received an updated shot with those who did not.

The CDC usually recommends a second dose for those at greatest risk, rather than everyone.

Vaccines create antibodies that target the spike protein of a virus that enters a cell, but the spike protein is often evolving to overcome them or avoid detection. Other elements of the immune response, such as killer T cells, are more durable and recognize the additional parts of the virus that are not mutating.

“Once the virus gets in, they can kill off infected cells,” Topham said. “They can slow the infection down. They can prevent it from spreading throughout the body. It shortens your disease.”

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Do vaccines prevent long covid?

While the threat of acute serious respiratory covid disease has faded, the lingering symptoms creating a condition known as long covid remain a concern for people who develop mild cases. The CDC says vaccination is the “best available tool” to reduce the risk of long covid in children and adults. The exact mechanism is unclear, but experts theorize that vaccines help by reducing the severity of illness, which is a major risk factor for long covid.

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When is the best time to get a new coronavirus vaccine?

It depends on your circumstances, including risk factors for severe disease, when you were last infected or vaccinated and plans for the months ahead, and it’s best to talk these issues through with a doctor.

If you are at high risk and have not recently been vaccinated or infected, you may want to get a shot as soon as possible while cases remain high. The summer wave has shown signs of peaking, but cases can still be elevated and take weeks to return to low levels. It’s hard to predict when a winter wave will begin.

If your priority is to avoid getting sick ahead of the holidays or a major event such as an international vacation, you could time your vaccine to receive it a month ahead of the event to increase your protection against infection.

Health officials have yet to advise how long to wait to get a new vaccine if you were infected or received a shot this summer, but usually the guidance is between two and four months.

Manisha Juthani, Connecticut’s public health commissioner, said people who recently had covid could time their next vaccine several weeks before a holiday when they will be exposed to a lot of people, whether that’s Halloween, Thanksgiving or end-of-year celebrations.

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Where do I find vaccines?

Coronavirus vaccines are sold as a commercial product and are no longer purchased and distributed by the federal government free. That means they won’t be as readily accessible as they once were, but they shouldn’t be too hard to find.

While major pharmacy chains should stock coronavirus vaccines, availability at doctor’s offices might take longer. Finding shots for infants and toddlers could be more difficult because many pharmacies do not administer them and not every pediatrician’s office will stock them given low demand and limited storage space.

Updated coronavirus vaccines are supposed to have a longer shelf life this year, which eases the financial pressures of stocking them.

CDC plans to relaunch its vaccine locator when the new vaccines are widely available, and similar services are offered by Moderna and Pfizer.

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Are coronavirus vaccines free?

Most insurance plans are required to cover recommended vaccines under the Affordable Care Act, but some may not cover shots administered by out-of-network providers. Officials say billing code errors and failure to updates systems that led to improper charges last year should mostly be resolved, but if you are still getting charged for vaccines, you or your provider should contact your insurance company or appeal to the agency that regulates your plan.

The federal Bridge Access Program, which provided free coronavirus vaccines to people without health insurance, ends this month. People might be able to find other assistance through federally qualified health centers, local health departments or nonprofits.

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Can you get your covid and flu shot together?

Public health officials encourage receiving covid and flu shots in the same visit as a way to increase vaccination rates and say no serious side effects associated with co-administering the vaccines have been identified.

But if you are someone who will get both vaccines no matter what, it could be beneficial to space them apart. Flu shots are best administered in September or October, so it might make sense to get a flu shot first with a coronavirus vaccination shot later.

Coronavirus vaccine manufacturers are working on combination flu/coronavirus shots to protect against both viruses with a single needle prick. Moderna reported promising results from trials that keep it on track to go to market as early as fall 2025. Pfizer-BioNTech reported mixed results from its trials, a setback.

By Lindsey Bever
The Washington Post

Generation X and millennials are at an increased risk of developing certain cancers compared with older generations, a shift that is probably due to generational changes in diet, lifestyle and environmental exposures, a large new study suggests.

In a new study published in the Lancet Public Health journal, researchers from the American Cancer Society reported that cancer rates for 17 of the 34 most common cancers are increasing in progressively younger generations. The findings included:

• Cancers with the most significant increased risk are kidney, pancreatic and small intestine, which are two to three times as high for millennial men and women as baby boomers.

• Millennial women also are at higher risk of liver and bile duct cancers compared with baby boomers.

• Although the risk of getting cancer is rising, for most cancers, the risk of dying of the disease stabilized or declined among younger people. But mortality rates increased for gallbladder, colorectal, testicular and uterine cancers, as well as for liver cancer among younger women.

“It is a concern,” said Ahmedin Jemal, senior vice president of the American Cancer Society’s surveillance and health equity science department, who was the senior author of the study.

If the current trend continues, the increased cancer and mortality rates among younger people may “halt or even reverse the progress that we have made in reducing cancer mortality over the past several decades,” he added.

While there is no clear explanation for the increased cancer rates among younger people, the researchers suggest that there may be several contributing factors, including rising obesity rates; altered microbiomes from unhealthy diets high in saturated fats, red meat and ultra-processed foods or antibiotic use; poor sleep; sedentary lifestyles; and environmental factors, including exposure to pollutants and carcinogenic chemicals.

Two decades of cancer data

Researchers analyzed data from more than 23.5 million patients who had been diagnosed with 34 types of cancer from 2000 to 2019. They also studied mortality data that included 7 million deaths from 25 types of cancer among people ages 25 to 84 in the United States.

Expanding on their previous research, which had identified eight types of cancer in which incidence rates increased with each successive generation, the researchers have found an additional nine, including some that had previously declined among older birth cohorts before rising in younger populations.

The study did not examine factors including household income, insurance status, race or ethnicity.

Younger people, or those under 50, represent a minority of the overall population of those who develop cancer, “but the concern is that cancer is occurring at younger and younger ages, so this increased incidence raises very real concerns as that population continues to age,” said Ernest Hawk, vice president and head of the division of cancer prevention and population sciences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

At the same time, the researchers also noted that there has been a drop in cervical cancer rates among younger women, which they attribute to vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Smoking-related cancers such as lung, larynx and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma also declined, though progress has slowed among the youngest age groups, the researchers said.

Difficulties with detection

Routine screening tests are recommended for only four cancers — colon, cervical, breast and, for some people, lung — and a number of younger people who are at average risk do not meet the age requirements or, for various reasons, are not getting screened. Some experts have pointed to potential harms from widespread screening, including false positives that may take a psychological toll and lead to unnecessary follow-up tests and procedures.

“The problem becomes that patients are getting younger and younger, we don’t always have good screening to begin with, and then we can’t really screen such large populations,” said Andrea Cercek, a gastrointestinal oncologist and co-director of the Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

In the new study, breast, gallbladder and other biliary cancers, and uterine cancer rates increased across almost all age groups, rising faster among younger generations. While breast cancer rates among women younger than 40 remain low, in a separate study, breast cancer still accounted for the highest number of early-onset cancer cases.

Lowering screening ages

Recent and growing evidence showing that more women in their 40s are getting breast cancer prompted the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force last year to change its previous guidance, lowering the age for routine screening mammograms from age 50 to 40.

Routine mammograms are not as effective for women with dense breasts, however, which is more common among those who are younger, said Elizabeth Comen, a breast cancer oncologist and associate professor at New York University Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center.

“Understanding how we can better screen and detect cancers in younger patients is a massive unmet need,” said Comen, who added that many of her younger patients find their own breast cancer.

In recent years, the recommended age for colorectal cancer screening was also lowered, from age 50 to 45, as research has shown a trend toward diagnoses at younger ages. The new study found that increases in stomach and colorectal cancer rates were confined to younger age groups, meaning that while colorectal cancer rates are declining overall, there is a rise in incidence in younger populations.

But many people who are eligible are not getting colorectal cancer screenings. A 2021 study reported that fewer than 4 million of the eligible 19 million adults ages 45 to 49 years were up-to-date on screenings, which can include a newly approved blood test, a stool test or a visual test such as a colonoscopy or CT colonography.

Even when symptoms arise, “I think many younger folks ignore them, thinking they cannot get cancer because they’re young,” said Rashmi Verma, an oncologist who specializes in gastrointestinal cancers at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California at Davis, adding that she has treated patients as young as 20.

Others may be uninsured or not aware that screening tests are recommended for them, experts said.

Missed diagnoses

When some younger patients seek care for gastrointestinal symptoms, they are misdiagnosed with other conditions such as hemorrhoids or irritable bowel syndrome, so it is important to consult a gastroenterologist, Verma said.

But for most cancers, including pancreatic cancer, there are no screening tests — at any age — which can lead to late diagnoses and more limited treatment options, experts said.

While there have been advances in diagnostics and treatment, oftentimes, malignant pancreatic tumors (and some others) are discovered incidentally during imaging for other issues, said Charles J. Yeo, a professor and chair of the department of surgery at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.

The increasing cancer rates among younger generations highlights the need for further study to both pinpoint a cause for planning prevention as well as to develop better — and, in many cases, any — screening tests to help detect cancers in younger people earlier in the course of disease when treatment is often more effective, experts said.

The rising rates also raise questions about what happens to younger patients in survivorship.

“There are going to be young cancer survivors who are deeply impacted biologically, physically and psychologically from these diagnoses,” Comen said. “And that’s going to have a ripple effect in our society that our medical community needs to be equipped to address.”