Contact lens manufacturers take all the guesswork out of determining how long each lens can be worn: Look right on the box, where the lifespan is clearly spelled out. Done, question answered. But for reasons of frugality, laziness, curiosity or our unwavering desire to push the human...
Just how popular is cereal in this country? Pretty freakin’ popular — that’s how much. According to industry researcher IBISWorld, cereal is a $10 billion business, annually. Not impressed? Well, did you know that more than 2.5 billion boxes of cereal are sold each year? Yeah, that’s...
Certain things in life are a given: Wearing clothes in public, brushing your teeth in the morning (and hopefully at night), closing the door behind you when you leave your house. But amongst these general acts of societal indoctrination is perhaps the most basic — that of...
If you’ve ever seen a man in a yoga class, or one of the millions of kids who had to “sit and reach” for the now-defunct Presidential Fitness Test or one of the many male YouTubers who film themselves trying — and largely failing — to touch their toes, chances...
Whether it’s seeing our home team lose or splitting up with a partner, we’ve all had a cry at some point in our lives. Those big drops of sadness even have their own name, and are distinct from regular eye moisture: They’re referred to as emotional tears,...
Stress will literally make you sick. You feel it emotionally, of course, but its effects creep into your ability to eat well, get enough sleep or maintain healthy relationships. Over time, stress can even kill you. But for some people, one of the more immediate manifestations of stress appears right on...
As we proceed into the post-lockdown phase of the COVID-19 crisis, single people will soon be able to finally break up with their dominant hand. (“It was an intense three months, Palmela!”) And when they do, they’ll hit a new market of slightly plumper beings who’ve grown thirsty in...
Studies have long suggested that eating properly, in addition to making your body feel good, can improve your overall mental health. For example, one study found that people who eat hardly any fruits and vegetables can experience a boost in happiness equivalent to what an unemployed person feels when...
Despite the fact that the country is reopening at a startling rate, we still don’t know much about COVID-19. Cases remain relatively steady, and there’s no vaccine or cure in sight. As such, people are basically scrambling for some kind of magic wand that makes everything safe again. And some companies...
This week, at long last, I received a much expected email from my gym alerting me to the fact that it was reopening — with a long list of modifications, of course: Also expected was the small print at the bottom of the email, which stated that the...
We tend to enforce this cultural binary of city versus nature, dirty versus clean. We see nature as this pure, separate place, but really, the grass growing through the concrete on the sidewalk outside our apartment is nature, too. COVID-19 seems to have only strengthened this binary, with people fleeing the...
These past two-plus months of quarantine have been an exercise in “making the best of a difficult situation,” and how we work out is now different. The giant, potential coronavirus breeding grounds formerly known as “gyms” are currently closed. Home gyms, on the other hand, are all...
