Author: Jack Ward

Certain types of fame conceal their true costs. For years, Paula Abdul has had to deal with that paradox. None of it fully captures the story, not even the choreography, her flawless smile under the stage lights, or the way she still throws herself into a hook from “Cold Hearted” at sixty-three. Unbeknownst to most fans, the body behind it has been argued with, medicated, surgically corrected, and persuaded to return to work numerous times. She has openly discussed several circumstances that most people would find difficult to handle one at a time, both in fragments and over time. osteoarthritis.…

When a writer who has spent her career discussing grief suddenly claims she is unable to speak, a certain kind of silence descends. At the end of April, Cheryl Strayed found herself in that situation, announcing on Instagram that her husband, Portland filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, had been diagnosed with a “serious, fatal illness.” She didn’t say what it was. She didn’t have to. She obviously meant for the words to have the weight they did. The foundation of Strayed’s 57-year-old literary career has been personal loss. The 2012 memoir Wild, later adapted into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, was about…

After every Grand Prix, there is a brief moment that is rarely shown on television. After exiting the vehicle and removing the balaclava, the driver stands on the scales. Like a boxer at a weigh-in, it appears almost ceremonial, but the goal is completely different. How much of him has vanished over the past two hours is what the FIA wants to know. Most of the time, the weight falls between two and three kilograms. That’s about four to six and a half pounds lost, mostly through perspiration. It may be closer to two in the cooler races, such as…

There has always been a churchlike silence around The Crucible. Part of its peculiar power is that. You can hear the kiss of one ball against another because there are two players, a green table, and a crowd that has been trained for decades to remain motionless. The silence didn’t simply end on Sunday afternoon when a woman vaulted the barrier in the third frame and began yelling about the television license. Like something tangible falling off a shelf, it appeared to collapse all at once. At the table was Shaun Murphy. Wu Yize was seated in his chair. Before…

People seem to be carrying a certain kind of fatigue these days. It’s evident in the slow exhale that precedes someone opening the news app and in the way that conversations at dinner inadvertently veer toward distant events. It’s neither quite fear nor quite grief. The low hum of a world that no longer pretends to be steady sits in between the two. The emotion beneath it is referred to by therapists as existential. Of course, existential fear is nothing new. Since Frankl wrote about meaning and Kierkegaard wrote about dread, it has been studied. Maybe the volume is different.…

Talking to people in the UK energy sector right now, the first thing you notice is how exhausted they are. Something more subdued than the dramatic, headline-grabbing tiredness of a man pulled from a burning rig. An Aberdeen control-room engineer tells you, half-laughing, that he hasn’t slept well since late February. During a coffee break, a logistics planner in Canary Wharf checks her phone and browses a Telegram channel where stranded crews post grainy pictures of grey ships and grey water. Quarterly reports don’t reflect this type of strain. The quiet in between sentences is where it manifests. In actuality,…

In some areas, it is difficult to ignore how quiet Dubai has become. Not the airport lines at three in the morning, not the shopping centers, not the marinas. They continue to hum. However, the conversations that take place at dinner tables in Jumeirah, in the Discovery Gardens subletting Pakistani home, and in the midnight WhatsApp group of the Filipino nurse have changed. Those who have lived here for ten years or longer sense something is wrong before they can identify it. The official narrative remains certain. The dirham has a peg. The skyline is getting higher. By most accounts,…

Anyone who has spent time in private banking offices in Geneva and New York is aware of the unique silence that permeates those spaces these days. It’s not the quiet of assurance. It’s the silence that occurs when people watch something they don’t fully comprehend. Instead of champagne being uncorked at year-end client dinners, advisors are fielding anxious calls from people who already own gold and somehow feel worse for owning it. Gold has surpassed $4,500 per ounce and traded as high as $4,600. You can infer something from that. The asset is no longer the focus of the story…