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Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar

Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy

But I’m talking about joke structure; you’re asking about the purpose of comedy as a whole. When my first book came out, people would ask me in interviews, “Why is comedy important?” I don’t know that it is. There are lots of people, believe it or not, who don’t care about comedy. And they can live to the age of eighty or ninety.

Down in the Valley

Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

Is This Desire?

Clarissa Smith on the Intersection of Human Sexuality and Pornography

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

Tangled Avenues

Wade Graham on the Interlocking Challenges of the Modern City

Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.

Under Fire

Thor Hanson on How Animals and Plants are Adapting to a Warming World

We’ve got changes playing out now with astounding rapidity. Biologists can see natural selection occurring over the course of a field season. . . . Studying these adaptations can help us identify the issues that are most important and the species that need the most help. This may not make us worry less, but it can help us worry smarter.

Speak, Memory

Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

Burning Questions

Meg Krawchuk On Our Changing Relationship With Fire

A fire manager making a decision may look like they’re in a position of power, but often they really have only one choice: to suppress the fire. If they don’t, they are opening themselves up to a Russian roulette of consequences depending on how the wind blows, quite literally.

Local Haunts

Colin Dickey On Place And Meaning In Ghost Stories

I think every place is haunted to one degree or another. And there will always be people who have a feeling when they visit a place, or believers who will say that they’ve seen something.

No Small Wonder

Dacher Keltner On The Science Of Awe

Emotions aren’t discrete bubbles. They are blending into each other all the time. You might be feeling awe and wonder at the miracle of life, and also realizing that we all die, which perhaps moves you closer to terror. In our work we try to find what’s true in it all.