The picture of a woman crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon in November 2023, her husband waiting to embrace her, and neither of them explicitly stating what they already knew is almost intolerable. Only a few weeks prior, he had received a glioblastoma diagnosis. Carrying that weight, she ran 26.2 miles before grinning on television the following morning. Sheinelle Jones got up early, drove to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, sat on the Today show couch, and laughed at her co-hosts’ jokes for almost a year. After that, she and her husband, Uche Ojeh, got back in a…
Author: Jack Ward
For years, the term “Vanessa Paradis’ illness” has been subtly rising in search results, but oddly, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. According to all reliable accounts, she is doing well. working. traveling. Seated in the front row at Chanel in Paris in October, she appears to be a woman who intends to stay for some time. Nevertheless, the rumor continues to evolve, fueled by YouTube channel thumbnails that claim she is “between life and death,” only to present thirty seconds of stock footage with a voiceover that defies the headline. Because no one ever finishes reading it, this type of…
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…
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…