A couple seated at a restaurant table, both gazing at their phones, exudes a certain stillness. The glasses clink and the food arrives hot, but there’s something else between them that’s silent, weighty, and unsaid. It’s not rage. It’s distance. Ironically, it may feel safer to be that distance away than to ask, “Are we okay?” while bending across the table. Rarely does emotional distance make a big statement. It enters subtly, sometimes courteously. This is a missed conversation. There was a suppressed emotion. Closeness eventually starts to feel more like exposure than comfort. Intimacy may not register as warmth…
Author: Jack Ward
In Findlay, Ohio, a slim injection pen rests next to a partially empty coffee mug on a kitchen counter. Its metallic tip catches the morning light. Ozempic, a weekly ritual that promises lower blood sugar, smaller waistlines, and improved heart markers, has become as commonplace for millions of people as brushing their teeth. Fewer people anticipated that some would start to notice a change in mood, which is more difficult to quantify. Semaglutide, the active component of Ozempic and its higher-dose cousin Wegovy, is causing several psychological changes in some patients, according to doctors. Some people talk about increased anxiety.…
Before dawn, a line gathered outside an Ohio suburban pharmacy. As if willing it to change, a mother wearing yoga pants kept checking her phone and refreshing the prescription tracker app. The pharmacist inside discreetly reiterated that the shipment had not yet arrived. Birmingham, Manchester, and London have all seen similar scenes. The tension in those conversations is difficult to ignore. Once a regular prescription for millions of people, ADHD medication has evolved into something completely different: limited, contentious, and politicized. A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers. Over the past ten years, prescriptions for stimulant drugs…
In a split second, the noise in the Milano Ice Skating Arena changed. At one point, during the women’s 1500m quarterfinal, blades were cutting tight arcs into the ice. The next was a sharp, uncontrollable, nearly synchronized collective gasp. Kamila Sellier, sprawled on the ice following a collision that seemed both unexpected and inevitable in the chaotic geometry of short track, was at the center of it all. There has always been a hint of danger in short track. With their shoulders almost touching and their blades cutting the air just inches from one another’s faces, skaters move in close…
Short-track speed skating has the problem of appearing clean until it isn’t. A sort of sleek logic is sold by the sport from the stands: clean passes, tight lines, and skaters’ shoulders dipping in unison like a school of fish. The physics then makes a comeback. The edges catch. The bodies tangle. The thin, sharp, and subtly menacing blades cease to resemble athletic gear and instead resemble instruments you would prefer to keep out of sight. That explains why the scene at the Milano Cortina Games involving Kamila Sellier of Poland came as such a sickening thud. The women’s 1,500-meter…
A woman in her early thirties is in a small Brooklyn café on a rainy Tuesday night when she makes her sixth phone refresh. A straightforward message sent two hours ago has not received a response from her date. The foam has collapsed into the dark liquid, and the cappuccino before her has gone cold. She maintains that she is simply “bad at waiting.” However, it’s difficult not to think that something older is stirring as you watch her jaw tighten. According to attachment theory, which was developed by Mary Ainsworth and pioneered by John Bowlby, the emotional ties we…
It’s simple to identify couples who have unintentionally turned love into surgery on a weeknight in late winter, when the sky darkens before dinner. Like coworkers wrapping up a shift, they move through the apartment, one quietly unloading groceries while the other scrolls through a shared calendar, while the oven preheats. The tile gets a little glow from the refrigerator light. Exactly no one is angry. However, nobody is weak either. It seems that because modern life is so demanding, relationships are becoming more logistical. The expenses are greater, the schedules are more rigid, the phone is constantly ringing, and…
Steam rises from two unopened coffee mugs as a couple sits across from one another at a kitchen island on a calm Sunday morning in a Boston suburb. The dishwasher is humming. Beneath the table, the dog moves. They talk about the logistics, including groceries, a dentist appointment, and who gets to call the plumber. They don’t talk about the argument that nearly broke out the previous evening, when one of them turned to the TV and said, “It’s fine.” Those two words—”It’s fine”—may have put an end to more intimacy than any argument ever could. It often feels mature…