July 2017

In 2013, Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Nevada had some of the highest rates of death from opioid overdoses, and they also had some of the country’s highest unemployment rates . A series of studies suggests that this joblessness might have been—at least in part—contributing to the high rates of drug addiction. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper I wrote about a few months ago found that as the unemployment rate increases by 1 percentage point in a given county, the opioid-death rate...

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and … diabetes . That’s right. The metabolic condition is about as American as you can get, according to a new national report card on diabetes released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The report shows that nearly half of Americans have diabetes or prediabetes, which puts them at high risk for the condition. A good number of these folks haven’t been diagnosed and don’t even realize their predicament. [For more of this story, written...

Roxane Gay is fat. Her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, tells the brutally raw story of how she got so fat and why. At 12 she was gang raped. She barely had words for what happened to her, and the words she could muster she couldn’t say to anyone, not even her parents. They loved her but she was a good Catholic girl, and good girls didn’t get raped. So she swallowed her secret and got big, big enough that she felt safe from male attention. Which is the response many girls have to...

In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti was working in a medical program to help obese patients lose weight. But, weeks into the study, he began to notice that the patients who he had expected to make the most progress were dropping out. So, he started asking them questions about their past, trying to understand what was going on. Were they overweight as kids? Did their weight change slowly, or suddenly? During these conversations, he discovered something that many of them had in common: “Nearly...

he loss of a job — or the fear a pink slip could arrive at any time — can be catastrophic, not only for the laid-off worker, but also for members of their family. As economic fears grow, teenagers experience an atmosphere of tension and anxiety at a stage of life when stability is critical . Clearly, the best route to economic stability for these kids is a college degree. But recent research reveals a sad irony: The disruption caused by layoffs results in fewer kids from poor families...

You don't normally think of mental illness as the stuff of games, but Alana Zablocki believes bringing the two together can be a powerful force for greater understanding. The 28-year-old transgender woman, who has been in and out of psychiatric wards for the last three years, has created an online game to help the people close to her better comprehend her experiences inside. Zablocki started writing Inpatient — A Psychiatric Story , a few months ago, just days after her last stay. She...

Many people spend their workdays indoors under fluorescent lights and in front of computers, then return home to bask in the glow of television screens. But spending too much time inside isn't good for us. And nature is beneficial - maybe essential - for human health. Psychologists and health researchers are finding more and more science-backed reasons we should spend time outside. In her recent book, The Nature Fix : Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, journalist...

One afternoon my wife, Giulia, asked me: “Mark, if I kill myself, will you promise me that you will find a new wife so that you can still be happy?” I sighed and leaned back into the chair next to her, unsure of what to say. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I had been saying it for eight months. It’s just that at that moment, I was so tired – tired from work, tired from worry, tired from so many conversations about suicide – that I didn’t have the...

In Brett Story’s documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, the camera journeys across the country, pausing in ordinary places where prisons affect our lives in ways so subtle that they almost seem invisible. In the film’s opening, we hear voices brimming with love, strained from loss, fragile with regret—sending messages to loved ones. “God loves you, and you know your Grandma does.” “All is well with the girls.” “Went fishing yesterday morning. Caught a couple of catfish …” As I watch, I...

On the Cleveland Clinic’s sprawling campus one day last year, the hospital’s brain trust sat in all-white rooms and under soaring ceilings, looking down on a park outside and planning the next expansion of the $8 billion health system. A level down, in the Clinic’s expansive alumni library, staff browsed century-old texts while exhausted doctors took naps in cubbies. And in the basement, a cutting-edge biorobotics lab was simulating how humans walk using a cyborg-like meld of metallic and...

Lisa Hamp is a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, in which 32 people died at the hands of student Seung-Hui Cho. Hamp and her classmates lived because they barricaded their classroom door. “The door did not have a lock,” Hamp says. “We used a desk and table to keep the shooter from entering.” Hamp recently joined a group in Washington, D.C., lobbying for funding to make U.S. public schools safer from such assaults. She joined representatives from organizations such as the Secure...

When 18-year-old Karolina Espinosa looks back to her freshman year at Buffalo’s Hutchinson Central Technical High School, graduation seemed like a long shot. “At the time,” she said, “both of my parents were incarcerated. I had trouble with reading, and I had problems with attendance.” But in May, sitting in the office of her school’s family support specialist, Joell Stubbe, Karolina talked excitedly about going to Buffalo State University, where she’s been accepted into the class of 2021.