This story is written with alarm in one version. A professional athlete appears different, perhaps softer, and the internet decides it has opinions about that. The pictures go viral, the Reddit threads light up, and the takes multiply. Tyrese Haliburton has recently experienced that cycle, with fans observing his altered demeanor at courtside during Indiana Pacers games and engaging in the typical online behavior of making comments, conjecturing, and occasionally being rude. However, a before-and-after picture is not nearly as fascinating as the story Haliburton told himself on LeBron James and Steve Nash’s Mind the Game podcast in late January.…
Author: Michael Martinez
People who suffer from chronic illness are all too familiar with a certain type of morning. The kind where the body’s actions or inactions become too much to bear in silence. Rebecca King Crews had one of those mornings in July of last year. For several nights without getting enough sleep, she was kneeling by her bed, praying, sobbing, and running. By her own admission, she was prepared to die. At that moment, Terry, her husband, entered the room carrying his phone and informed her that he had read something she should know. Since 2015, Rebecca has had Parkinson’s disease.…
Joel Embiid woke up in Houston at around three in the morning on a Thursday with so much stomach pain that he was barely able to stand. He made contact with the team’s medical personnel. He was undergoing surgery by noon. The Philadelphia 76ers’ best player was in a hospital bed recuperating from an appendectomy by the time they took on the Houston Rockets that evening, with three games remaining in the regular season and a playoff seeding battle. Quietly but firmly, the season was over. It’s the type of thing that sounds fictional. However, it carries a somber, familiar…
When the preliminary results of a clinical trial are positive, a certain amount of tension arises. Not encouraging but cautious, not promising but complicated, but truly, quantifiably good. With data from a Phase 1 trial that decreased a crucial disease-linked protein by almost 60% in human patients without causing significant side effects, the Parkinson’s research community is currently in a similar situation. The medication is known as BIIB094. The majority of people are unaware of it. That might be about to change. Approximately 10 million people worldwide suffer from Parkinson’s disease. The choices for the majority of them haven’t changed…
It began with what appeared to be a plausible explanation, as these things occasionally do. Ben Sasse competes in sprint triathlons. He pushes his body and trains hard. When he started having chronic back and abdominal pain in late October 2025, his first thought was that he had pulled a muscle. He was fifty-three years old, physically fit, and used to experiencing discomfort as a consequence of maintaining his fitness. It took some time for the realization that something more serious was going on. Seldom does it. He went to the doctor in November because the pain had gotten so…
Most people who browse through Leigh McGowan’s videos would never guess this little detail about her everyday life. An alarm goes off every three hours. It doesn’t matter if she is traveling, sleeping, or recording a tirade in her Los Angeles kitchen. She is reminded to take her medication by the alarm. She describes it as a reminder that she is ill. That three-hour rhythm is a silent, unwavering counterbeat that underpins everything McGowan does in the world, especially for a woman who exudes such vigor and forward momentum. Since 2014, McGowan has gained popularity on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and…
No one in the C-suite truly gets ready for a certain kind of internet fame. It doesn’t originate from a shareholder letter or a product launch. It shows up out of the blue when someone records you biting into a hamburger, and something about the way you do it strikes seventeen million people as profoundly, mysteriously incorrect. In the first few months of 2026, Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s, had to deal with that circumstance. He was seen tasting the chain’s new Big Arch burger, which consists of two quarter-pound beef patties, white cheddar cheese, and tart sauce, in a…
The speed at which the internet betrays someone it once loved is particularly cruel. For years, Lana Condor established herself as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken voices on body image, candidly talking about eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and the particular harm that ballet training can do to a young woman’s self-perception. Then, when her body began to change in ways that TikTok could see, the comment sections were filled with precisely the kind of language that she had been resisting for the majority of her adult life. The irony is almost too clever to be true. Nearly. You need to…