The limp wasn’t the first thing that people noticed. The face was the culprit. Something didn’t seem right when Tyrese Haliburton sat down in front of the cameras during the Pacers’ exit interviews in April. His eye appeared swollen. There seemed to be a missing portion of an eyebrow. His quiet, slightly worn-out appearance didn’t quite match the carefree, beaming guard who had almost led Indiana to a championship the previous season. Then there was the weight. The body that participated in Game 7 against Oklahoma City was about thirty pounds lighter. The mean little monikers had already done their…
Author: Jack Ward
For many years, insomnia was confined to a peculiar area of medicine. Patients talked about it almost apologetically, as if it were something to manage rather than treat, similar to how they would talk about an old knee injury or a sore back. Physicians prescribed melatonin, advised avoiding caffeine after 3 p.m., and may have written a brief prescription for zolpidem if conditions worsened. The weather was viewed as unpleasant, sometimes severe, but generally something to wait out. Silently, that framing is disintegrating. If you walk into a psychiatric clinic today, you’ll see a different dialogue emerging, one in which…
It had been three days since the woman on the screen had dressed, and she was crying. Her therapist, a Brooklyn-based clinical psychologist with 19 years of experience, told me that she now frequently encounters this type of situation. She always saw that, not the crying. The pajamas. The hair was unbrushed at 2:00 PM. Weekdays and weekends blend slowly, almost imperceptibly, into what looks like a long, beige tunnel. “She used to come into my office in heels,” the therapist recalled. “Now I’m not sure she owns a pair anymore.” We’ve been telling ourselves a story about working remotely…
Smoggy mornings and a sort of bureaucratic stillness are typical of late winter in Beijing, and this year was no exception. However, missiles were falling on Tehran from all over the continent. The contrast seemed almost intentional. Chinese state media continued to report on agricultural targets and provincial congresses while Washington and Tel Aviv conducted press briefings regarding Operation Epic Fury. Beijing seemed to want the world to take notice of the quiet. It turns out that the silence is a tactic. These days, analysts refer to it as strategic opportunism, which is a diplomatic way of saying that China…
It was a Tuesday when I first saw people hoarding cooking oil at the corner store close to my apartment. Not very dramatic. The shopkeeper, who usually complains about slow afternoons, was suddenly counting inventory under his breath while a woman in her fifties was packing four tins into a plastic bag. Three weeks had passed since the closure at that point. The gesture has by now quietly spread from kitchen to kitchen, as these things do. It’s difficult to ignore how the anxiety has permeated everyday situations. Dinner conversations now revolve around the Strait of Hormuz, a stretch of…
When I first saw someone update a brokerage app over dinner in 2020, the world had just taken a strange turn. His thumb would twitch every few minutes while he kept his phone face-up by the bread basket. The figures were in red. He placed another wine order. He didn’t eat much. Even back then, I recall thinking that this could not possibly be a healthy way of living, but after six years, it has almost returned to normal. Nowadays, a whole generation of investors views market news in the same way that previous generations did the weather, with the…
Nowadays, the majority of therapists describe a similar moment. A patient takes a seat, turns on their phone, and places it face down on the side table as though it were radioactive. They sigh. Then, as though it had happened to them directly, they discuss an event that occurred eight thousand miles away. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently this scene occurs in different cities, at different income levels, and in different political contexts. There is no agreed-upon clinical term for what is occurring. Some refer to it as anxiety related to war. Some people favor moral harm, vicarious trauma,…
When the index turns red, a certain silence descends upon Dubai. It’s evident in the DIFC tower lobbies, where men wearing pressed shirts spend a bit too much time staring at their phones before entering meetings. It’s evident at Madinat Jumeirah brunches, where the laughter is still present but seems a little staged. Between February and mid-March of this year, the Dubai Financial Market lost more than a fifth of its value, officially entering bear territory. The city has been reacting to the news in the same way that Dubai typically handles bad news: with calm on the outside and…