The fact that a writer who could conjure up an entire alternate 19th-century England, complete with magic, footnotes, and made-up history, was unable to leave a darkened room for more than ten years is somewhat ironic. The illness that befell Susanna Clarke did not develop gradually. She claims that she just passed out while attending a dinner party. The ensuing fatigue did not go away for weeks, and what had started as a vague feeling of exhaustion eventually solidified into a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, which is occasionally discussed alongside Lyme disease and Epstein-Barr virus, though the exact cause…
Author: Jack Ward
When a member of the football community comes forward with news like this, there’s a certain kind of silence that descends. In January, Lamisha Musonda, one of three brothers who showed great promise upon arriving at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, posted a message that read more like a farewell letter than an update from a football player. He did not identify the disease. He didn’t have to. The phrases “fighting to stay alive,” “only a few days left,” and “a request for prayers rather than headlines” were sufficient on their own. The excitement surrounding his family name was never quite…
Even after years of being questioned about her body, Lauren Goodger still exhibits a certain level of fatigue when discussing it. She has been living what she has described as a “party girl lifestyle” in public since 2010, when TOWIE first placed her in front of cameras. She drinks, eats, and doesn’t think twice about either. No one in the tabloids allowed her to forget that version of herself, which gradually reached a size 16. Most people agree that 2015 was the pivotal year. She was photographed by paparazzi in a coral pink bikini on an Egyptian beach, and the…
Jeňena Ostapenko’s body has become a topic of discussion that seems to outlive the majority of her actual match results, somewhere between the baseline and the comment section. It doesn’t take long to find someone speculating about her weight, diet, whether she’s “let herself go,” or whether it’s all a calculated tactic to hit the ball harder when you browse tennis forums or a WTA video on social media. To be honest, it’s weird to watch in real time as strangers who have never set foot on a WTA practice court analyze the physique of a professional athlete. The conversation…
When a general manager stands in front of reporters and says something like “it kind of resets the whole thing,” a certain kind of dread descends upon the fan base. That’s exactly what Brian Cashman said at Tropicana Field on Thursday, and it came with the weight of bad news disguised as clarification. It turns out that what the Yankees had been referring to as a setback in Giancarlo Stanton’s recovery was actually nothing of the sort. It was a new injury, a calf strain in a slightly different location than the one that kept him out of action back…
Observing a public figure vanish from sight without any explanation is a subtly unsettling experience, and Dingdong Avanzado experienced something similar over the past few weeks. His absence was noticed by Filipino listeners who grew up hearing his voice on the radio before anyone could confirm the reason. The silence was finally broken by his wife of more than 20 years, Jessa Zaragoza, who wrote on Instagram that she had been “MIA” due to what she called “todo pasang kaganapan sa life”—a phrase that, when translated loosely, suggests life throwing everything at her at once. Her timeline is both detailed…
This is a good way to describe Fidji Simo’s story. She was born in Sète, a small town on the coast in the south of France. She was the first person in her family to finish high school, and she went on to get a management degree from HEC Paris and finish part of her program at UCLA. Eventually, she ran one of the most important product divisions in Silicon Valley. She was the CEO of Instacart when it went public on Nasdaq and one of the top leaders at OpenAI by the time she was 40. It only bends…
Imagine a gray Tuesday morning in Manchester or Milton Keynes at a general practitioner’s office. The waiting area is packed by 8:30 a.m., appointments take ten minutes each, and a dozen patients are carrying items they can hardly identify. They’re having trouble sleeping. They are no longer interested in anything. They no longer have the willpower necessary to get out of bed. After listening and nodding, the GP goes over the standard PHQ-9 screening questions before writing a prescription. Depression is the diagnosis. A box of SSRIs and a referral that will take four months to process are given to…