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Winning elections — or achieving any success — often is about being in the right spot at the right moment. (George Skelton, 6/8)

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to end all federally funded animal testing after concluding that “the predictivity of animal models is very, very poor for human health outcomes.” (Joshua Mezrich, 6/9)

Recently, one of my friends asked me, “How do you connect with Skye if she can’t talk?” I thought, Well, that’s easy — there are plenty of things we do together that naturally don’t require much speech. I’ve had the privilege of growing up with her and, to the best of my knowledge, learning what she needs from her body language and facial expressions. But to someone who hasn’t, it can be hard to imagine how that type of connection is possible. (Cheyenne Buckingham, 6/9)

My niece Jill’s death at age 45 was unexpected. She had battled alcoholism for decades. After several years of sobriety, she relapsed last summer. We (the family) knew she was drinking, but she stayed in contact and maintained her job. We had hopes that she would go back to rehab soon. Jill’s death was all the more stunning because her mother, my sister Linda, died from the same disease, from drinking the same liquor, exactly twenty years earlier. (Suzanne B. Robotti, 6/8)

Michael Callen was famous. And important. He saved a lot of lives through his AIDS self-empowerment messages, his book Surviving AIDS, and originating “safer sex” through How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach with Richard Berkowitz and their doctor and mentor, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend. On a trip back home from a doctor’s appointment, Michael asked me if I would help him die. (Karen Ocamb, 6/8)