Tag: recent study
Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.
Jumping spiders are an obsession for me. But it wasn’t always so.
Although never a spider hater or an arachnophobe, I was pretty ambivalent about them for most of my life. Then I learned about jumping spiders: I’ve reported on their impressive vision (as good as a cat’s in some ways!), their surprising smarts (they make plans!), and the discovery that they have REM-like sleep (and may even dream!). I was hooked.
I
It’s the Best Time in History to Have a Migraine
Here is a straightforward, clinical description of a migraine: intense throbbing headache, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and noise, lasting for hours or days.
And here is a fuller, more honest picture: an intense, throbbing sense of annoyance as the pain around my eye blooms. Wondering what the trigger was this time. Popping my beloved Excedrin—a combination of acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine—and hoping it has a chance to percolate in my system before I start vomiting. There’s the drawing
The Enigma of ‘Heat-Related’ Deaths
The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a
What Kind of Villain Doesn’t Clean Up After Their Dog?
A certain substance is enjoying a renaissance in New York City. In a time of scarcity, it is newly abundant. In a period of economic inflation, it is free and distributed so generously that it might even be on your shoe right now. The substance is dog waste—and lots of people are mad about it.
In response to an uptick in complaints, the city’s Department of Sanitation announced in 2022 that it would crack down on human delinquents who leave
Tracy Chapman and a Country-Music Controversy
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What is the most constructive way for the press to cover race if its objectives include accurately informing citizens about the past and the present––no matter how awful or uncomfortable––and refraining from framing the news in ways that are needlessly polarizing or
The Growing Battle Over Infant Milk Allergies
This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
For Taylor Arnold, a registered dietitian nutritionist, feeding her second baby was not easy. At eight weeks old, he screamed when he ate and wouldn’t gain much weight. Arnold brought him to a gastroenterologist, who diagnosed him with allergic proctocolitis—an immune response to the proteins found in certain foods, which she narrowed down to cow’s milk.
Cow’s-milk-protein allergies, or CMPA, might be on the rise—following a similar trend in other children’s
The Next Crisis Will Start With Empty Office Buildings
“I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.” It was May 2021, and Jamie Dimon had had enough. The JPMorgan Chase CEO expected that “sometime in September, October,” the company’s office would “look just like it did before.” Two years later, his company is slashing its Manhattan footprint by a fifth.
Post-pandemic, kids are back in school, retirees are back on cruise ships, and physical stores are doing better than expected. But offices are struggling perhaps more than most casual
There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief
It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain.
His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death,
Is America Simply Sicker Now?
The most haunting memory of the pandemic for Laura, a doctor who practices internal medicine in New York, is a patient who never got COVID at all. A middle-aged man diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019, he underwent surgery and a round of successful chemotherapy and was due for regular checkups to make sure the tumor wasn’t growing. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. So
Buffalo Shows the Double Terror of Being Black
I loved strawberry shortcake as a child in New York City. The sliced strawberries, the juice, the softest of cake, that whipped cream. I loved it all individually. And together? Pure bliss.
Celestine Chaney loved strawberry shortcake too. A 65-year-old mother and grandmother of six, Chaney took strawberry-shortcake making to another level. She’d buy “those little cake cups,” her son, Wayne Jones, told The Buffalo News. “You cut the strawberries up, sprinkle sugar over them, and leave in the