A small whiteboard is kept behind the desk of a therapist I know in Karachi. There are two columns on it in faded marker. One is marked “yours.” Not you, but the other. She once told me that nearly every client over the past two years has at some point found themselves staring at that board, usually after bringing up the cost of cooking oil, which seems to increase every few weeks, the price of gasoline, or the electricity bill. “It’s not a fancy board,” she said. However, it is the only thing that constantly causes people to slow down.…
Author: Jack Ward
A certain kind of fear takes hold somewhere between the checkout cart and the headlines. When something dramatic occurs on the news, you can see it on the faces of people waiting in line outside coin dealers in strip malls. In reality, they are not there for the gold. The feeling that gold gives them is what draws them in. The entire product is that emotion. Some therapists have begun to refer to it as the “Gold Rush Mindset,” which predates markets. A quiet voice inside murmurs that the only sensible thing left to do is to grab something solid…
By lunchtime, the numbers on the screen had turned red, and a man in his fifties stopped using his phone’s trading app in a small Karachi office. He couldn’t sleep for three days after telling his wife, later that night, that he didn’t feel anything. This is the kind of story that doesn’t appear in financial publications. Seldom does it. However, any therapist who works with investors will tell you that in the weeks following a significant decline in the market, the consultation room quietly fills up. Economists perceive crashes as abstract occurrences, such as a percentage deducted from retirement…
It began with a dress, as these things frequently do. A custom Intimissimi rose-gold corseted gown with structured boning and sheer paneling for the 2025 Venice Film Festival. The majority of the hundreds of dresses Heidi Klum has worn on hundreds of red carpets vanish into the mist of awards season. This one didn’t. Social media quickly came up with the theory that she was expecting. In a matter of months, she was sitting in front of a camera for her own documentary series, stating simply, “I’m not pregnant.” I’ve gained a little weight. The menopause is to blame. Delivered…
After being scrutinized for over 50 years, Dolly Parton made the decision to quit pretending that the scrutiny did not influence her. She discusses her plastic surgery in the same way that most people discuss changing their oil. routine. essential. Funny sometimes. Observing her over the years gives me the impression that she realized something that other famous people are still afraid to acknowledge: lying is more draining than the truth. She has never asserted her inherent beauty. People miss that part. She stated unequivocally in a 2003 interview with Larry King and in numerous subsequent discussions that her figure…
A certain type of Hollywood moment comes out of nowhere. The internet abruptly stops as a well-known actor walks the red carpet and the cameras flash. When Justin Theroux appeared at the Los Angeles premiere of Fallout’s second season in December 2025, he looked, as one commenter put it, like someone you almost recognized. Tighter and smoother. A face that had lost some of its natural movement. After Nicole Brydon Bloom, his new wife, stood next to him, the discussion quickly shifted to the comment sections. It’s important to keep in mind how peculiar this specific tale is. Theroux was…
Faisal, a software engineer, keeps his phone face-up on the nightstand in a third-floor apartment in Hounslow. He used to turn it over. That ceased at some point in May of last year, when sorties between Indian and Pakistani aircraft seemed, for a moment, to be the start of something much worse. His mom is in Lahore. His cousins are dispersed throughout Sialkot and Rawalpindi. He informed me that he wakes up at three in the morning. Most nights now, not because of a dream, but rather because of the habit of checking, which began during the standoff and has…
Over the past few months, there has been an odd silence that you see in grocery aisles and waiting rooms, where strangers look at their phones and then sigh silently. The way people discuss the price of oil is similar to how they used to discuss the weather. In Karachi, a taxi driver almost casually mentioned that he now schedules his shifts based on fuel availability rather than customer demand. It’s a minor issue. However, these little things have begun to mount up. The world has been in a state of low-grade dread ever since the war started on February…