It’s both clichéd and pretentious to trot out a Benjamin Franklin quote at the start of an article, but here it comes anyway: “There are three things extremely hard: Steel, a diamond and to know one’s self.” In Franklin’s day, displaying a crushing lack of self-awareness in...
No fewer than six of the last nine covers of Men’s Health have featured cavernous, chiseled abs — November, October, August, July, May and April. But just as Barbie’s dimensions are wildly unrealistic for a real-life woman (she would stand 6 feet tall and weigh 100 pounds, with 36D...
Last year, more than 300,000 people went into sudden cardiac arrest, during which their heart stops and doesn’t start again without CPR or medical treatment. That is, they died — if just for a few minutes. The survival rate — or, revival rate — is bleak: According to the American Heart Association, only...
For most of us, the eight hours of the day we spend at the office are not our own. They belong to the entity that pays our rent, provides our health care and gives us a reason to go on vacation. It can get existentially exhausting to...
On Friday, November 11, scores of Facebook users logged into their accounts to find that they were dead. With the simple addition of the word “Remembering,” placed in front of a name along the top of the that user’s profile page, their accounts became memorials, with banners...
In 2008, the late multimillionaire and creator of Maxim magazine, Felix Dennis, told a reporter from The Times of London that he had once killed a man by pushing him off a cliff in Connecticut. Committing the murder, “Weren’t ’ard,” the Brit boasted in his West London...
While the first use of “boobs” in reference to female anatomy occurred in 1929, the mass mocking of their male equivalent is a quintessentially 21st-century obsession — one that can be traced back to a particular episode of Seinfeld. In the Season Six classic “The Doorman,” which first aired...
If you look at the internet today, there are a few things that you can learn about humanity: 1. Our political systems have serious problems. 2. Communicating without using real faces or names can strip us of our empathy and turn us into cruelty machines. 3. We...
The idea that you need an average of eight hours of sleep each night is for most of us so ingrained that it might as well be embroidered on the insides of our eyelids. But it hasn’t always been this way. Most of our ancestors, in fact,...
What if your Fitbit, or Apple Watch, or whatever other doodad you use to obsessively track how many steps you take each day didn’t just keep tabs on your body, but actually made you money in the process? That’s the premise of a new paper out of...
Last week a first-time Tinder date postponed me in favor of getting stoned . “Hey my friend has just turned up with some weed, I think therefore it’s unlikely I’m going to make it to the pub later,” she wrote. I’ll be honest: it’s not the most...
Work sucks. But work is especially terrible when you’re the office outcast. Office misfits live in “perpetual stress,” says Ryan Vogel, assistant professor of management at Penn State-Erie. Vogel has studied office misfits (his term for people whose personal values don’t coincide with their employer’s) since 2010,...