“We need black blood.” I didn’t know what to say to this, not least because it had been said by the head of donor services at England’s National Health Service Blood and Transplant. The interview was for a book I was writing on blood, a topic I knew a little about by then, but the…
As a gymnast, Sophie Tillis felt held back. Though she loved competing, after seven years in the highly structured and closely judged sport — where every flexed foot and angle of the shoulder is scrutinized — the 14-year-old from Alabama quit gymnastics in the spring of 2018. “I still liked the flipping part, and I…
A single injection of antibiotics significantly reduces the risk of infections when women who are giving birth require the aid of forceps or vacuum extraction, a new study concludes. The routine use of the prophylactic shot actually reduces antibiotic use in the long run, the study found. British researchers randomly assigned 3,420 women who had…
We tend to recall the past not on its own merits but in terms of what it lacked in retrospect. Virtually the entire period of planetary existence is lumped into the condescending unit “before Christ.” Our hominid ancestors are described not as astonishing animals that harnessed the destructive force of fire, but “prehistoric” — people…
Evan Dando is dead. Those rumors were floating as far back as 1996, when heroin was chic, grunge was a thing, and Mr. Dando, the troubled 29-year-old lead singer of the punk-pop band the Lemonheads, seemed destined to follow Kurt Cobain to an early grave. On the face of it, that narrative seemed odd. In…
Every once in a while a fragrance comes along that causes a rupture in the history of olfaction as we know it, and suddenly it is clear that the scent of the world will never be exactly the same. Such was the case in October 1994, when CK One had its debut. It was the…
For those of us who grew up black in the 1980s, going to the movies meant picking a character to identify with and pretending that person was black. It was a great era for film: There was “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Back to the Future” and “Top Gun.” But black people…
It was the worst of times; just trust me on this. It was a time when almost every single movie ended with a wedding, no iota of nuance to be found anywhere, even if the woman in the movie had just spent 83 minutes prior making a case as to why she didn’t want to…
What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along. For the members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, that was never us. “They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover…
There were many reasons for a 16-year-old boy to love the noisy, brooding music known as grunge, but here’s a personal one: The bushy-bearded, drowsy-eyed guitarist for Soundgarden, Kim Thayil, looked like my uncle George. My father’s younger brother had been a sporadically employed welder and pot smoker who wore a ponytail, which was a…