In a whisper, the vocal cords don’t vibrate, but air passes through the larynx with enough turbulence to be audible—at close range, anyway. And so whispers are definitionally intimate. All talking is made of breath, but when someone whispers you are hearing the breath. People sometimes whisper due to laryngitis or other disorders, but usually we whisper because we want to speak to one person without risking everyone hearing. We whisper secrets, yes, but also rumors and cruelties and fears.

Our species has probably been whispering since we began speaking—in fact, we aren’t even the only animal to whisper. Some gophers do, as well as some monkeys, including the critically endangered cotton-top tamarin.

But I haven’t been whispering much lately. In early March of 2020, my brother and I were performing a live version of our podcast in Columbus, Ohio. Just before I went on stage, our colleague Monica Gaspar whispered something to me. She was reminding me which mic to pick up, I think. At any rate, I remember that moment because it was the last time I would hear a whisper from someone outside of my immediate family for . . . years? I suppose I’ve heard a whisper or two over video or phone chat during the pandemic, but not many of them. I miss the whisper. I was a germophobe long before the pandemic, and I know that another person’s breath against my skin is a surefire sign of respiratory droplet transferal. But still, I miss it.

These days, when my kids whisper to me, it is usually to share a worry they find embarrassing or frightening. It takes courage even to whisper those fears, and I am so grateful when they trust me with them, even if I don’t know quite how to answer. I want to say, “You don’t have any cause for concern,” but they do have cause for concern. I want to say, “There’s nothing to be scared about,” but there’s plenty to be scared about. When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it. But I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff.

I give whispering four stars.

VIRAL MENINGITIS

I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO GRASP the size of viruses. As individuals, they are tiny: A red blood cell is about a thousand times bigger than a SARS-CoV-2 virus. But as a group, viruses are unfathomably numerous. There are about ten million viruses in a single drop of seawater. For every grain of sand on Earth, there are trillions of viruses. According to Philipp Dettmer’s book Immune, there are so many viruses on Earth that “if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years—around 500 Milky Way galaxies put next to each other.”*

Viruses are just single strands of RNA or DNA lying around. They can’t replicate until and unless they find a cell to hijack. So they aren’t alive, but they also aren’t not alive. Once a virus invades a cell, it does what life does—it uses energy to make more of itself. Viruses remind me that life is more of a continuum than a duality. Sure, viruses aren’t living, because they need host cells to replicate. But then again, many bacteria also can’t survive without hosts, and stranger still, many hosts can’t survive without bacteria. Cattle, for example, will die if deprived of the gut microbes that help them digest food. All life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.