Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Gratitude has a reputation problem. The word has been colonized by wellness culture to the point where it sounds like something that comes printed on a mug or posted over a sunset photograph. But the...
Read article →Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor in the 1890s who kept losing his voice during performances. Doctors found nothing wrong with him. In an era before performance video, he set up an...
Read article →Talk therapy works. The evidence for that is substantial and the therapeutic relationship — the quality of attunement between therapist and client — is one of the most consistent predictors of outcome...
Read article →Something interesting emerges from the data on populations that live longest: they tend to have something to do. Not necessarily in the sense of employment or productivity in the economic sense, but i...
Read article →Qigong is older than most of the medical systems that have tried to explain it. The practice dates to ancient China — references appear in texts going back more than two thousand years — and it has su...
Read article →There is a version of creativity we tend to associate with youth — the breakout novel, the gallery debut, the startup idea sketched on a napkin. But creative practice in older adulthood looks differen...
Read article →Dirt is underrated. We have spent decades treating soil as something to wash off rather than something to engage with, and there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that relationship with the gro...
Read article →Balance is one of those things you do not think about until you lose it. For most of early adulthood it operates invisibly — an automatic background process the nervous system handles without input fr...
Read article →There is an idea that floats through popular culture with more confidence than it deserves — the idea that the brain is essentially fixed by middle age, that what you have is what you have, and the on...
Read article →There is a reason hospitals have long banned pets from wards — cleanliness, allergies, logistics — and an equally good reason that policy is quietly reversing in many places. The evidence that animals...
Read article →Laughter is one of those things we tend to take for granted, like breathing or the way afternoon light slants through a window in October. We do it without thinking, and rarely stop to ask what it is...
Read article →Loneliness has moved from being a personal misfortune to being a public health crisis, and the cognitive consequences of social isolation are among the most alarming findings in aging research. The ev...
Read article →When a man is depressed, it often does not look like depression. Not to his family, not to his doctor, and often not to himself. The clinical image of depression, the tearfulness, the expressed sadnes...
Read article →Around the age of thirty, male testosterone levels begin a slow, gradual decline. This is normal. It is documented. And it has been transformed by a multi-billion dollar industry into a medical emerge...
Read article →The cultural image of an eating disorder typically involves a teenage girl. That image is clinically misleading and directly harmful to the men and boys who are suffering from conditions that look sim...
Read article →Nobody fully prepares you for what having a child does to your identity. There are books about the logistics, the sleep deprivation, the infant care. There are courses about birth and feeding. There i...
Read article →The evidence on exercise and brain health is, at this point, about as robust as any finding in behavioral medicine. It is not disputed. It is not provisional. It is one of the strongest modifiable fac...
Read article →Testosterone has acquired a peculiar mythology in popular culture. It is blamed for aggression, credited for ambition, marketed as the secret ingredient in male vitality, and sold in the form of suppl...
Read article →Body dysmorphic disorder in men is one of the most invisible mental health crises in contemporary culture. It sits at the intersection of conditions that men are rarely diagnosed with, a cultural cont...
Read article →Men cry less than women, on average, across most of the cultures where this has been measured. The research on this is consistent and fairly robust. What is far less certain is what that difference me...
Read article →The prostate cancer screening decision is one of the most psychologically loaded conversations in men's healthcare, and it rarely receives the kind of nuanced attention it deserves. It is not a simple...
Read article →Erectile dysfunction and anxiety exist in one of the most self-reinforcing negative feedback loops in all of men's health. An episode of ED, for whatever reason, creates anxiety about whether it will...
Read article →The waiting rooms of fertility clinics are filled with people who have been told, in various ways, to stay positive. Think good thoughts. Reduce stress. Visualize success. The advice is well-intention...
Read article →When people think about pelvic floor dysfunction, they typically think about physical symptoms: leaking when you sneeze, pain during sex, a heaviness in the pelvis that wasn't there before. What almos...
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