What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain? Starting on April 6, a bearded and earnest neuroscientist at the University of Oregon named Philip Fisher began to send a digital questionnaire — at first weekly, and then, beginning in August, biweekly — to a representative group of a thousand American […]

Faced with actual, persistent chaos, I’ve realized there was never a way to outpace danger. Michelle Obama wants to know if I have a plan to vote. The financial-services company hopes I have a plan for retirement. (“Will the world always be this unpredictable?” its paternalistic print ad asks.) My family inquires about the plan

I’m not sure why I imagined Ruth Bader Ginsburg would live — not forever, maybe, but long enough to protect us. Long enough to vote to preserve Joe Biden’s victory in what will surely be a contested win and assure the expulsion, finally, of the troll from the throne and the resumption of recognizable government.

Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light. It’s an audacious choice to pause in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue and grant an impromptu interview to a video journalist shortly before you allegedly throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car. But the city was out of its

As Americans struggle to plan for the fall school term amid a pandemic that isn’t going away, New York City unveiled a preliminary protocol to bring students back and provide some much needed relief for parents. But it isn’t nearly enough. Ben Hart spoke with New York contributing editor Lisa Miller about the limitations of New York’s approach and the desperate need for more creative strategies in what is already a dire crisis.

It was early June when I first spoke to Rachel Noerdlinger, and she was worrying about the casket. George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis was to be held in 48 hours, and she was considering how images of the coffin, conspicuously placed at the front of the university sanctuary, might impact the national psyche after

At around the same time police officers outside the White House were spraying tear gas into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in order for the president to limp pugnaciously to a 200-year-old church and pose for a photo holding a Bible like a bowling trophy — or, as someone on my Twitter feed said, “a

Last spring, about three months after my breast-cancer diagnosis and six weeks after my mastectomy, I received my “oncotype report,” the document that calculated my mortality risk. The report would give me the odds of being healthy for the next decade and help my doctors advise me on what to do next: would I need

Some of my best friends own country houses. This is not a new discovery. One of the things I have loved best about my life in New York is exactly this, the wide diversity in the affluence of my friends — if you can call a group of mostly white, mostly college-educated, striving people living

A Brooklyn rabbi on what it’s like to officiate a funeral over Zoom. Two weeks ago, Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, New York (where I am a member), performed her first virtual burial service. A member of her congregation had died at home of COVID-19, and because they were quarantined, his