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…
Author: Jack Ward
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…
The term “tired” is insufficient to describe it. Not the kind of exhaustion described by ME/CFS sufferers, where taking a shower necessitates a period of rest, where a quick stroll causes days of collapse, and where the brain is unable to recall words that were previously automatic. It’s not a fleeting annoyance, but exhaustion as a state of being. For years, medical professionals were unable to explain, frequently relying on the notion that individuals experiencing these symptoms were depressed, anxious, or somehow psychologically responsible for their suffering. As it turned out, that assumption was harmful as well as false. However,…
Most people can identify this moment: the anxious nausea before something you’ve been dreading for weeks, or the morning of a challenging meeting when your stomach turns before you’ve said a word. We have always used gut metaphors to describe these experiences, such as “gut feelings,” “gut-wrenching moments,” and “a knot in the stomach,” and we have quietly assumed that these metaphors are merely figures of speech. As it happens, no one realized how literal the language was. The dense, bidirectional network of nerves, hormones, and immune signals that links the digestive tract to the central nervous system is known…
If you walk into any therapist’s waiting room in Chicago, Sydney, or London, there’s a good chance the person there has received CBT training. It will most likely be identified by the diplomas on the wall. It may be described in the intake paperwork. It has become so ingrained in Western mental health care that challenging it can feel almost rude, similar to voicing concerns about antibiotics during a medical conference. However, a thorough reading of the research reveals a more nuanced narrative than the one typically summed up in clinical brochures. Certain aspects of CBT have been proven beyond…