Author: Lance Garrison
Ms. Lupi is an information designer who has been experiencing symptoms of long Covid for over three years. Dec. 14, 2023 Every morning, I wake up in my Brooklyn apartment, and for two seconds, I can remember the old me. The me without pain, the me with energy, the me who could do whatever she wanted.Then I’m shoved back into my new reality. As I fully come into consciousness, I feel dizzy, faint and nauseated. Pain pulses throughout my body, and my limbs feel simultaneously as heavy as concrete and weak as jelly. It feels as if a machine were…
A little after 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 23, a man stabbed three children and a woman outside a primary school in downtown Dublin. The woman and one of the children, a 5-year-old girl, were seriously injured. The suspect — who was injured while being subdued, and has yet to be interviewed — is originally from Algeria, a naturalized Irish citizen who has been here for two decades. The motive for the attack is still unclear.Messages speculating about the man’s nationality quickly started to circulate on the social platforms X and Telegram. Other messages called for people to descend on the…
Lindi Campbell remembers the date: Dec. 6, 2017. That was when she found out she had lung cancer. “I was so shocked,” she says. She had never smoked, and she didn’t know anyone with lung cancer, let alone any other “never-smokers” like her. That made her feel isolated.So besides taking care of her own health, she set out to connect with other people who could relate. A year after her diagnosis, she founded Breath of Hope Kentucky, a nonprofit lung cancer advocacy and outreach group. Campbell has connected with more than 20 never-smokers in or from her state. She noticed…
Anju Chandy was 18 years old when she left her Bakersfield, CA, home for a college far away. After years of frustration, the more miles she could put between her and her narcissistic mother, the better.“I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere near my mother. I needed to forge a path of my own away from her influence and control,” says Chandy, who’s now a musician living in Indianapolis.“I had spent almost all of high school fighting her. She wanted to control me. She wanted me to just stay home, sit still, look pretty, and do nothing. She had…
This data comes from the Program for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in almost 80 countries typically every three years — a long-running, unimpeachable, nearly global standardized test measure of student achievement among the world’s 15-year-olds in math, reading and science.And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have…
After his father died, Paul Marlow, a 36-year-old mental health advocate in Surrey, British Columbia, was at a turning point. “I saw I needed a change,” Marlow says. He wanted to let go of unhealthy habits and start fresh.“I found myself yearning to move away from the old me, the depressed and anxiety-filled me,” he says. But as he tried to move forward, his friends held him back. While Marlow was adopting a healthier lifestyle, his friends prioritized drinking and partying.As Marlow struggled emotionally, his friends reached out less and less, and he realized that it was time to move…
Around the world, authoritarianism is ascendant and democracy is in decline.A 2022 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that “over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy” and that nearly half of the 173 countries assessed were “experiencing declines” in at least one metric of democracy.The United States wasn’t impervious to this trend. The report found that America was “moderately backsliding” on its democracy.But I fear that we’re now on the precipice of fully turning away from democracy and toward a full…
As the saying goes, “Hindsight is 20/20.” When I finished chemo in February 2011, I knew a lot more than when I walked in for my first infusion 4 months earlier. I had learned things about myself and about cancer that I had never expected to learn. Because, of course, at the beginning, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.Now that I look back, here are some of the things I wish I had known as I started chemo:Cancer cases tend to change. Doctors may give you a prognosis and treatment plan after the first image or biopsy, but then…
Auctions of all kinds are a huge part of our lives. The ads that appear in Google searches are placed through auctions among advertisers (by computers, of course, not someone with a gavel). A survey of the auction field in 2021 looked at auctions in “timber, construction and services procurement, oil and gas leases, online auctions, internet advertising, electricity, financial securities, spectrum, as well as used goods.” The authors, Ali Hortaçsu and Isabelle Perrigne, wrote that “it is quite striking” that six of the people awarded Nobel prizes in economics since 2001 have publications on auctions.The kind of auction you…
Dec. 13, 2023 – Children with obesity issues should undergo “comprehensive, intensive behavioral interventions,” including supervised physical activity sessions for up to a year, a federal task force said. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – a team of independent, volunteer experts in disease prevention that guide doctors’ decisions and influence insurance coverage – issued a draft recommendation statement outlining the interventions that should be taken when a child or teen has a high body mass index. Nearly 20% of kids between 2 and 19 years old have what are considered high BMIs, according to CDC data. While adults who have a…