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☀️Mostly sunny and pleasant, with highs in the 50s.

Five years ago today, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We won’t rehash what happened next — you probably remember it. But the anniversary has us looking back on what changes, from the early days of COVID, ended up becoming permanent. 

“Plagues are not new to our species; they’re just new to us,” Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and physician at Yale University, told Callie Crossley on Under the Radar. “What happens with plagues is that there is a kind of regime of public forgetting and private remembrance. Each of us remembers our plague experience, but the country as a whole kind of wants to forget and put it behind us.”

Four Things to Know

Middleborough, Marshfield and Wrentham filed lawsuits over the MBTA Communities Act — the law that requires cities and towns to zone for more multifamily housing near transit stops. Middleborough is arguing that its zoning code is already in compliance, and Marshfield and Wrentham are saying they should not have to pay for zoning changes, citing State Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s determination the law is an “unfunded mandate” which asks cities and towns to change their infrastructure without financial support. Worth noting: 177 cities and towns fall under the law, and most of them are in compliance.

A precarious landscape for men: A report from The Boston Foundation’s research arm and The American Institute for Boys and Men compared men’s and women’s physical health, mental health, education, wages and economic prospects — and found that men are falling behind women in ways that range from high school and college graduation rates to health insurance coverage and life expectancy. Those gaps are wider for Black and Latino men. Luc Schuster, executive director for the Boston Indicators, said he’d like to see more conversations about what it means to be a man in America today. Otherwise, he said, “we are ceding that conversation to more reactionary voices that are very directly pushing for a return to rigid gender roles. And, I think we’ve seen the rise of things like the 'manosphere’ podcasts that are really attractive to young men.”

Birth control and prenatal vitamins: Eligible people who get their health insurance through MassHealth and Health Safety Net will be able to receive prenatal vitamins and over-the-counter birth control at no cost. The orders from Gov. Maura Healey’s office are expected to cover approximately half a million patients. Right now, MassHealth helps cover the costs of about 40 percent of births in Massachusetts. “Removing barriers like this is one of the simplest ways we can work toward better health outcomes for mothers and infants in our state,” said Kate Walsh, Health and Human Services Secretary.

Deep dive: A new type of underwater vehicle, invented at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and built at a start-up space in New Bedford, is helping scientists map the ocean floor. The vehicle is called Orpheus . It’s about 5 ½ feet long and designed to land on the ocean floor at depths of up to 36,000 feet — roughly equivalent to the deepest known part of the Mariana Trench.

Colleges quietly review DEI majors and courses, leaving students in limbo

When Jaychele Nicole was applying for colleges, Bentley University’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion major was appealing: it includes classes on history, law, communication, sociology, psychology and more, with a focus on how discrimination related to gender, race, disability and sexuality shape our world. She got accepted and enrolled.

Bentley was among the first schools in the country to offer a degree in diversity, equity and inclusion, a response to more companies launching diversity initiatives and looking for employees to run them. Tufts, Harvard and Cornell launched DEI certificate programs, and the University of Kentucky created a DEI Ph.D track.

Now, as the Trump administration threatens to cut funding from universities who don’t comply with the president’s executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Jaychele and other students wonder if all their work will end with the university taking away their ability to graduate with the degree they earned.

“Honestly our school has been, like, relatively silent,” Jaychele said. “We haven’t really got any assurance about whether our degree is going to be valid or not.”

She has already added a second major in public relations and a minor in marketing.

“I could still go into DEI after I graduate if I wanted to,” she said. “But obviously all this pushback makes me feel like I definitely don’t want to do that, because I don’t want to be out of a job one day out of the blue.”

Another Bentley student, Anyshja Villegas-Brown, said she transferred to Bentley specifically for the school’s DEI major.

“It gets frustrating,” she said, “especially when you’re in a class that supports your major, like Intro to DEI, and you hear your professor say ‘Your degree might mean something. It might not.’”

Read more of Kirk Carapezza’s reporting here.