A specific type of scrolling occurs in the bedrooms of teenagers who ought to be sleeping late at night, typically after midnight. The light from the phone pierces the darkness. A video of a person their age speaking softly to the camera and describing in precise, almost clinical terms what it’s like to suffer from anxiety, depression, ADHD, or borderline personality disorder is shown. The audience observes. then observes another. Something has changed by the time they put down the phone. They now have a new vocabulary to describe their emotions. One of the more difficult issues surrounding child mental…
Author: Michael Martinez
Ten years ago, a certain type of conversation that is currently taking place in school hallways would have seemed odd. Fourteen-year-olds are comparing their symptoms. Sixteen-year-olds discussing the distinction between panic disorder and generalized anxiety. Kids who haven’t yet sat their GCSEs or earned a driver’s permit using language that, not long ago, belonged exclusively to clinicians. A TikTok algorithm caused something to change, and most parents weren’t fully aware of it until it was all over the place. It’s challenging to pinpoint the exact numbers underlying this trend, which is telling in and of itself. What researchers do know…
Parents all over the world seem to recognize a certain look without having to give it a name. The strange emotional flatness followed by an explosion of feeling, the glazed eyes, the meltdown that occurs the instant a device is taken away. Many may have thought that this was just typical of contemporary childhood—noisy, overstimulated, and difficult to control. According to a study that was published this month in the Psychological Bulletin, a more precise mechanism that has been developing covertly for years may be at play. Increased screen time in children under ten was consistently linked to what researchers…
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…
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…