You sleep eight hours and still need a nap by 2pm. You took a long weekend and came back feeling exactly the same as when you left. You cut the alcohol, downloaded the meditation app, bought the magnesium gummies. Still: a low, grinding tiredness that doesn’t shift. If that sounds familiar, the explanation probably has...
Most of us have been eating cheese the same way our whole lives without giving it a second thought. Melted on toast, pulled across pizza, bubbling under a grill – cooked cheese is comfort food in its most elemental form. The idea that how you eat your cheese could matter as much as whether you...
Most of us learn, somewhere along the way, that death is a line. A moment. The heart stops, and that’s the end of the story. It’s a tidy concept that helps us organize the bewildering fact of mortality into something manageable, a before and an after with a clear dividing point between them. But biology...
Most of us spend a fair amount of time thinking about what we put into our bodies. The food we eat, the water we drink, the supplements we take. What we don’t tend to think about is what’s getting in without our permission – and doing so quietly, steadily, for years. Microplastics are everywhere now....
You’ve tried one antidepressant. Then another. Maybe a third, with a different mechanism, a different dosage, a different promise. And while some people do find meaningful relief through that trial-and-error process, a sobering number of people don’t. They go through the months of waiting to see if a drug “kicks in,” the side effects, the...
Dengue fever has been circulating in the tropics for centuries, and for most of U.S. history it was a disease that Americans encountered only in textbooks or on international news segments. Not something you picked up at home. Not something a doctor in suburban Florida needed to keep in the front of their mind during...
If you had to guess which states are most stressful to live in, you’d probably think of New York or Los Angeles, somewhere with gridlock traffic and sky-high rent. The actual answer looks quite different. The states where residents report the highest stress levels tend to be quieter, slower, and largely out of the national...
Most of us can remember a time when our social lives seemed to run themselves. Friends appeared through school hallways and college dorm rooms. Neighbors waved from front porches. The office had its own built-in cast of characters. Connection didn’t require scheduling, because it was simply the background noise of being alive. Something has quietly...
Most of us step out of bed in the morning and reach for a pair of shoes almost on autopilot. It’s just what you do. You shuffle to the kitchen in your slippers, maybe pull on sneakers to walk the dog, and by the time you sit down for breakfast your feet haven’t touched the...
Most of us spend years planning for retirement – saving money, picturing the house on the coast, imagining the trips we’ll finally take. But there’s a version of retirement planning almost nobody does: thinking carefully about where in America you’ll actually live the longest. Which states give older adults the best shot at a long,...
