“It’s very hard to be a perfectionist growing up in the film world. It reinforces all of your worst fears about perfection and doing things right.”
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What It’s Like to Have Hypochondria
In a piece for Psychology Today, a man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder.
Wracked With Cancer, St. Petersburg Senior Has One Goal: Graduation
A teenager with cancer is fighting to make it to her high school graduation: “At the end of her junior year, the doctors said there was nothing more they could do for Lyndsey. ‘Six months to a year,’ they told her. She might not even be alive for her family to break the no-applause rule. […]
Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports
OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]
The Art of Arrival: Rebecca Solnit on Travel and Friendship
Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words) OrionOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this. Get a free trial issue Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) [ 1. ] The word “journey” used to mean a […]
Regulating the $1.5 Billion E-Cigarette Industry
Even without the combustion, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor that narrows blood vessels and drives up blood pressure. Doing that a dozen times a day is less bad than getting lung cancer, but it’s still not great. Besides, there is no study on what inhaling those “generally recognized as safe” compounds might do to your lungs […]
Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports
OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]
On Grieving: ‘If you think you’re doing okay, then you’re doing okay’
“Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience ‘chronic’ and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness […]
“In the days before this Halloween, it was especially hard for me to avoid interpreting its elements too bluntly. If you have cancer, if you’ve had it for a while, at some point you start really seeing all those skulls and skeletons and Styrofoam headstones, all those children in hooded capes, bearing scythes on their […]
A Tale of Two Drugs
A cancer drug offers no obvious advantages over an alternative drug, but is also twice as expensive. Why? The writer looks at how drug companies determine prices: “Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the […]
