Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Bipolar disorder is already one of the more misunderstood conditions in mental health, but rapid cycling — a specifier that describes four or more mood episodes within a single year — adds a layer of...
Read article →When the pandemic arrived in 2020 and formal institutions seized up overnight, something else emerged in city after city: neighbors organizing to help neighbors without waiting for anyone's permission...
Read article →When adults describe extreme selectivity around food, they are often met with eye rolls or gentle suggestions to just try something new. The assumption is that picky eating is a preference, a phase, o...
Read article →Most people have experienced a fleeting sense of strangeness — a momentary feeling that the world looks slightly off, or that they are watching themselves from a slight distance. For most, these sensa...
Read article →Premenstrual syndrome is so widely referenced in everyday conversation that it has become something of a cultural shorthand — a catch-all explanation for mood changes in the days before menstruation....
Read article →Imagine a building where a twenty-two-year-old music student lives down the hall from an eighty-year-old retired librarian, where the student occasionally helps carry groceries and the librarian occas...
Read article →In most market economies, your value to others is expressed in money. You sell your time, your skills, your labor, and you receive a number in return that can be exchanged for anything else that also...
Read article →The loneliness crisis is often framed in terms of what people lack: community, purpose, close relationships, meaningful routine. Animal shelters offer all four inside a single building, and they despe...
Read article →For millions of older adults living alone, the telephone remains one of the most reliable threads connecting them to the outside world. Phone tree programs — organized networks where volunteers call a...
Read article →Most people, when they think of OCD, picture someone washing their hands repeatedly or checking the stove multiple times before leaving the house. These visible, repetitive behaviors are what popular...
Read article →There is a body of research, now substantial enough to constitute a consensus, showing that time in natural environments reliably reduces stress, improves mood, and lowers markers of physiological aro...
Read article →Somewhere in your city, there is probably a refrigerator on a sidewalk or attached to the outside of a building. It is stocked with food that someone left there on their way home from the grocery stor...
Read article →In sheds across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, something quiet and significant is happening. Men, most of them older, many of them recently retired or widowed or simp...
Read article →Most people have heard the pitch: Bumble BFF is like Bumble, but for friends. You set up a profile, swipe on people who seem like your kind of person, match, and then have to actually start a conversa...
Read article →A book club that meets over Zoom sounds, on the surface, like a consolation prize. The real thing — the one with wine and someone's living room and arguments that run past midnight — seems like what y...
Read article →Pen Pals in the Digital Age: Why Slow Letters Still Matter Somewhere right now, someone is sitting down to handwrite a letter to a person they have never met in person. They are choosing their words w...
Read article →There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a LinkedIn session that technically went well. You connected with someone interesting. You exchanged a few messages. You engaged with a thought...
Read article →When a member of a Destiny 2 clan died unexpectedly in 2019, his clanmates held a virtual memorial in the game. They gathered their avatars in a quiet corner of the map, stood together in the game wor...
Read article →Most people laugh because something is funny. Laughter yoga flips that logic on its head entirely. In laughter yoga, you laugh on purpose, without jokes, without punchlines, without anything being par...
Read article →There is something strange that happens when you press play on a voice note from someone you care about. Their breath is in it. The slight pause before they find the right word. The way their voice di...
Read article →The question of whether making art alone can address loneliness sounds almost paradoxical. Loneliness is, at its core, an absence of connection — and sitting by yourself with a sketchpad or a lump of...
Read article →Twitch Community and Belonging: Is Streaming Chat Real Connection? If you have never spent time in a Twitch chat during a live stream, it is easy to dismiss it as noise — thousands of identical emotes...
Read article →Parasocial Podcast Relationships: When Your Earbuds Feel Like Friendship Most people who listen to podcasts feel a little embarrassed admitting how well they think they know the hosts. You know their...
Read article →Reddit as Support Group: When Strangers Become Your Safety Net The post usually starts with some version of the same sentence: "I don't know if this is the right place but I didn't know where else to...
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