Social scientists will try to measure anything, it seems, and in the most recent issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, a professor at Arizona State has published a paper that attempts to quantify the disgust women feel with regard to body hair – their own, and that of other women. The scholar, named Breanne Fahs, […]

Last winter, while reporting a feature for this magazine, I was sitting in the Stanford office of Atul Butte, a pediatrician-slash-computer-scientist-slash-wunderkind, and he was touting the promise of the personal genetics revolution. Health care is on the brink of being totally transformed by the insights given to medicine by being able to see, and increasingly understand, […]

For some of us, stress is not an occasional condition, but a way of life. When friends tell us to “just relax,” they might as well be telling us to be taller or shorter or somebody else. And when we become pregnant? Nothing changes. We are fiercely anxious: fat, under-slept, and cranky, awaiting every blood […]

Bill de Blasio has called her the love of his life, his partner, his No. 1 adviser. and that’s not the half of it. For those entranced by the de Blasio–family fairy tale, in which a tall, goofy white dude married to a tiny, black former lesbian runs for mayor of a city managed for […]

Anne Wojcicki wants to bring health care into its sci-fi, Big Data era. First, she’ll need your DNA. Then comes vanquishing the FDA. When Eugenia Brin was young and still living in Moscow, her beloved aunt Serafima received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Serafima was just 50 years old, with no access to effective treatment, […]