After 2020, something changed, and although most people are unable to pinpoint it, they can sense it. When you enter a clinic in Madrid or a pharmacy in Karachi, you’ll hear the same quiet conversations at the counter and requests for something to “calm the nerves.” On paper, the pandemic was over years ago. It’s still catching up with the nervous systems it shook. Early on, the World Health Organization assigned a number to the change. Global rates of anxiety and depression increased by about 25% in the first year of COVID-19. This increase was so dramatic that researchers referred…
Author: Michael Martinez
The way Jeff Bezos has recently been photographed has an almost theatrical quality. Not the fortune, not the rockets, not even the village-sized yacht. It’s the face. Walking next to Lauren Sánchez at Paris Fashion Week in October while wearing a gray outfit that matched, he appeared tighter and plumper, seemingly pausing in the middle of a sentence between two different versions of himself. People took notice. These days, they always do. The conversation is not brand-new. Actually, it all began in 2017 when Bezos showed up at the Sun Valley Conference with arms that didn’t match the man who…
Around the time of Lauren Sánchez’s engagement to Jeff Bezos in 2023, most people likely took a close look at her for the first time. Before that, she was a well-known television personality whose face you might have seen without a second thought flashing across a Fox affiliate at ten o’clock at night. In a regional news sense, she was attractive. The majority of American TV anchors are professionally trained to be attractive, polished, and unremarkable. The pictures of the yacht followed. Next, the marble-sized engagement ring. Then there was the Venice wedding, which managed to irritate half of the…
The building on East Galbraith Road has a subtle vintage feel to it. There isn’t much signage. As soon as you enter the parking lot, you forget about it. However, a patient starts to notice the difference between the waiting area and the consultation chair. It’s not flashy. It’s not the sophisticated advertising of a Beverly Hills clinic trying to go viral on Instagram. In a way that is becoming less common, Kurtzman Plastic Surgery feels like a real doctor’s office. Dr. Lawrence Kurtzman has been doing this for more than 40 years, which is a long time in any…
The narrative reads almost like a cautionary tale that no one wanted to hear. On a Wednesday morning in August of last year, Joy Barbera, 48, entered an outpatient facility in Houston. Her husband was riding a motorcycle through the Rockies the following afternoon when his phone rang with news that no one ever prepares for. Her breathing had stopped. Someone had tried CPR. The voice on the line said that things were not going well. The way it started has a very commonplace quality. a FaceTime conversation before the procedure. A grin. The phrase “I love you.” Like many…
When John Kruk isn’t present, a certain silence descends upon a Phillies broadcast. Within an inning or two, seasoned viewers usually notice that the booth feels sharper around the edges and emptier. Fans have noticed more than they would like lately. Due to a recent episode of food poisoning that kept him off the air for a considerable amount of time, comment threads began to fill with the same question: “Where’s Krukker?” in a dozen different ways, all with a hint of mild concern. According to most accounts, the food poisoning was unpleasant but common. A stomach ailment, the kind…
The news came in the manner of these days, with a brief social media post followed by a slower trickle of obituaries that provided very little context. John Force’s eldest daughter, Adria Force Hight, passed away at the age of 56. According to the family, she died quietly in Indianapolis on April 28 while surrounded by family members. They didn’t explain how she got there. And that quiet has been the part that people keep going back to in a sport where practically everything else is loud. If you read the obituary carefully, you get the impression that the family…
Hannah Murray was seventeen when most people first saw her face. She was straying through the first few episodes of Skins as Cassie Ainsworth, a girl who was secretly starving herself in a bedroom in Bristol. Her body was used as a plot device in the show. It turned out that the audience continued to do the same. Murray’s weight is still a topic of discussion nearly twenty years later, and it reveals more about us than it does about her. When you search for her name, you’ll come across an odd archive: 2019 tabloid rumors about whether she was…