Sometimes I look in the mirror mid-afternoon while working from home, still wearing the giant band T-shirt I slept in the night before, greasy hair in a bun, no makeup on and wonder when precisely I let quarantine turn me into a cousin of Oscar the Grouch. Other days, I shower,...
Maybe the human body is a miracle of scientific wonder, but I feel like we’ve got some serious design flaws. Sleep is the biggest one for me. Like, we have to be totally unconscious for a third of our total day, and when we return to consciousness, we sometimes...
Hard seltzer was just the beginning. Now we’ve got hard coconut water, hard herbal tea, hard juice, hard whatever iteration of a refreshing beverage you can think of. Part of this, of course, is the result of our endless quest for new thrills. It’s the same phenomenon responsible...
The World Health Organization has made it official: You can skip your dental checkups for the next few months. While dentists in most areas have been given the green light to be open for weeks now, the WHO is recommending that dentists in any area where community spread is...
I’ve been sunburnt plenty of times before, but there’s one occasion seared deepest into my memory. I was probably 14 or so, and had made a day trip down to the beaches of Connecticut. It was all pretty innocuous; I ended up with a relatively mild burn on my chest and...
People have warned against airplane coffee and tea for decades. Yet, the airlines continue to serve it, and passengers continue to drink it. So the question seems not to be whether the water that runs from the taps of airplane sinks is actually gross, but if consuming gross water is really...
Contrary to popular belief, your personal skincare routine can be whatever you want it to be. There are some options that might eventually give you a rash (like wiping your face with disinfectant) or maybe encourage the signs of aging to reveal themselves faster, but it’s still your decision....
You are here because one little sperm beat out the rest on its journey to the egg. In order to do so, that sperm had to be the best of the bunch, faster and more agile than its brethren. What scientists have recently learned, though, is that those sperm who qualify...
In addition to a very cool mustache, my boyfriend has acquired newly scratchy, calloused hands during quarantine. They have become rough and blistered from repeated pull-ups and a 10-minute ab video he’s been doing on the floor. In most cases, hand blisters form from similar types of friction — e.g., gripping...
I quite honestly don’t remember the last time I unplugged my phone charger. I keep it right next to my side of the bed, ready to support my hours of doom-scrolling before my brain gives me permission to sleep. I’m lucky that I don’t have to pay much...
My sense of smell is probably the sense I think about the least. Seeing, hearing and touching all feel most essential to my lived experience, and I’m constantly bound to the whims of my tastebuds. But smelling always seems passive. It’s something that’s happening to me, not something I’m actively...
At its core, anxiety is psychological. But in our day-to-day lives, much of our experience with anxiety is physical. It can be less of an emotion than an overall bodily feeling of tension or unease, marked by symptoms like a racing heart or shaky hands. It’s not...