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 […]
The Making of a Molotov Cocktail
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 […]
Two Hours Daily to Sanitize, Two Hours to Cry
An emergency-room doctor struggles to keep it together — and find supplies. In the middle of the night, Emily Wolfe slipped away from her patients and into the break room. She was aching to get out of her mask. The virus was probably everywhere in the break room, all over everything — on the locker […]
One Night at Mount Sinai
Aja Newman went to the emergency room for shoulder pain. Her doctor was a superstar. What’s the worst that could happen? Sometime after 2 a.m. on January 12, 2016, Aja Newman roused herself from her hospital gurney and made her way down the long hallway to the bathroom. She had checked in at Mount Sinai’s […]
Dressing for a Wound: How my body and I reconciled after a mastectomy.
How do you dress for your mastectomy? The surgery itself is easy, actually. During the cutting, you’re wearing nothing at all, unconscious and strapped to a table in a martyr’s pose, arms out in a T, while an OR crew that looks like the cast of a reality show bustles around doing God knows what. […]
Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing
Several weeks ago I saw a young woman on the subway accidentally dump a full cup of iced coffee into the seat next to her. A large puddle rippled in the molded plastic divot, threatening to overflow at any moment. Panicked and helpless, the embarrassed woman gazed at her mess. She couldn’t disown it. And […]
Measles for the One Percent
On an unseasonably chilly morning in May, three dozen or so plaintiff-parents, most of them from the Green Meadow Waldorf School, showed up at the Rockland County Courthouse, looking, in their draped layers and comfortable shoes, like any PTA from Park Slope or Berkeley.