The Pentagon’s stated cost of Operation Epic Fury, $25 billion, has a way of sounding huge until you consider what it leaves out. Economists subtly destroy it in footnotes, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth makes headlines about it. When you take into account the disruption of the oil market, the decline in consumer confidence, and the grinding drag on economic output, a typical American household may be absorbing thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in true costs, according to Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan. He admits that’s a wide range. But in some ways, the true story…
Author: Michael Martinez
The way energy bills are delivered is especially cruel. They don’t make dramatic announcements about themselves. A single sheet of paper has the power to upend a week, a month, and a family’s sense of security when it falls silently into an inbox or through a letterbox. Those letters have been arriving more frequently than usual since March, when Iranian strikes struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex and UK gas prices more than doubled in four days. This second shock has affected more than just wallets for households already burdened with debt from the 2022 Russian gas crisis. It has…
A picture of Hang Mioku was taken before the surgeries. She is young and conventionally attractive by any measure, with clear skin, sharp cheekbones, and a face that could easily land a job. Then there’s the picture that was taken twenty years later. It is hard to stare at for very long. In the second picture, the face is nearly unrecognizable due to swelling, with layers of foreign material covering its features. When she returned from Japan, her own parents were unaware of her identity. You remember that particular detail. It says something about how far things had gone and…
A quiet, nearly unremarkable photo of a young Tehrani woman with dark eyes, soft features, and an expression that says very little is making the rounds on the internet. No jaw deformity. There were no skeletal cheekbones that reached impossible angles. No pallor from a horror movie. By all standards, it is a typical face. However, it comes as something of a shock to millions of people worldwide who first saw Sahar Tabar through viral photos in the late 2010s. Tabar, who was born Fatemeh Khishvand in Tehran in 2001, rose to prominence on the internet despite the fact that…
Women who appear on reality television are subject to a specific type of scrutiny. It begins as soon as the show concludes, with screenshots, side-by-side comparisons, and comment sections full of self-assured diagnoses from non-medical professionals. Maura Higgins is more familiar with this than most, having recently charmed a whole new continent on The Traitors after first entering a villa in Majorca in 2019. Her appearance has changed since she was twenty-eight. There are theories on the internet, of course. Higgins herself claims that the majority of those theories are incorrect. The 35-year-old Irish celebrity responded to the rumors in…
There is a specific type of fatigue that results from watching too much rather than from doing too much. Scrolling through headlines about missile strikes, ceasefire collapses, and troop movements while sitting in a quiet kitchen in the morning, coffee cooling on the counter, and feeling, somewhere behind the sternum, a low-grade alarm that just won’t go off. It’s not overly dramatic. It doesn’t resemble a panic attack. Sitting down and settling in is just a feeling of dread. It is neither irrationality nor weakness that is occurring at those times. The amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection system, is as quick…
The way ovarian cancer typically manifests itself—quietly, disguised as everyday discomfort rather than loudly or dramatically—is extremely unsettling. a slight bloating following supper. Somewhere in the lower back, there was a dull ache. These are the kinds of issues that the majority of women over fifty have learned to ignore as inevitable drawbacks of aging. Even though it makes sense, this tendency of dismissal could be one of the more harmful aspects of this illness. The landscape of symptoms becomes especially challenging to interpret for postmenopausal women. Ovarian cancer symptoms can almost completely blend into the background noise of menopause’s…
The fact that the woman who co-signed Scotland’s national obesity strategy, standing next to health officials and promising to reduce childhood obesity by half before 2030, would eventually become someone whose body absorbed the obvious harm of governing under constant pressure is somewhat ironic. For years, Nicola Sturgeon advised Scotland to look after itself. Scotland may or may not have repaid the favor. Throughout Sturgeon’s career, people noticed weight changes, but they were never significant enough to make front pages by themselves. However, they were present. She lost what she called “a fair bit of weight” during the arduous and…