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…
Author: Jack Ward
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…
Last winter, a woman in her late thirties stood on the sidewalk outside a small therapy clinic in a more sedate area of London for nearly ten minutes before entering. She kept checking her phone, putting it away, and then checking it once more. The woman had taken her lunch break to make the appointment and was paying out of pocket because she didn’t want it on her insurance file, according to her therapist, who later mentioned the incident in passing. That brief moment has a subtle message. This is exactly what more people are doing in cities like Toronto…
If you drive far enough up PGA Boulevard, the South Florida strip-mall sprawl begins to fade away and is replaced by low, well-kept buildings that give the impression that money lives more quietly here. Located on the second floor of one of those buildings, Lickstein Plastic Surgery has unassuming signage. Maybe that’s the point. Speaking with patients in the area, it seems that word of mouth is the main way that Dr. David Lickstein’s name spreads in Palm Beach Gardens, where he has been practicing for many years. He is mentioned by a retired Jupiter investor. A Wellington real estate…
The building that houses Syracuse Plastic Surgery is situated among unremarkable brick neighbors on a small section of East Genesee Street in Syracuse, where traffic slows almost arbitrarily. If you weren’t looking, you would miss it. However, people do look. Walking through the same modest entrance that has served patients for more than 20 years, they come from all over Central New York, sometimes even farther. The constant focal point of it all has been Dr. Dean DeRoberts. It’s difficult to ignore how uncommon such longevity is in the field of cosmetic medicine. The field follows trends out of Miami…
There are two common venues for discussing the true cost of plastic surgery in Dallas: quiet conversations among friends and boisterous Reddit threads. Phillip Dauwe, MD, is situated in the middle of those two extremes. His Preston Road practice has come to serve as a kind of benchmark for anyone attempting to determine the cost of looking different. The numbers that are published are neat. The actual figures, which patients share with screenshots of their invoices months later, are more disorganized. On paper, a tummy tuck at Dauwe Plastic Surgery costs about $7,000, with an extended version costing about $9,000.…
Recently, therapists have been talking about a specific type of patient. She has been in weekly therapy for years, is in her late thirties, and has a stable job. She enters, takes a seat, and ten minutes later is in tears over a child she has never met in a city she has never been to. Last night, the child was using her phone. As they listen, the therapist realizes that the child on the screen isn’t the real target of the tears. They are intended for a much older, closer, or more distant person. Vicarious traumatization is the term…