For years, Claire Bien, a research associate at Yale, strained to manage the gossipy, mocking voices in her head and the ominous sense that other people were plotting against her. Told she had a psychotic disorder, she learned over time to manage her voices and fears with a lot of psychotherapy and, periodically, medication. But…
DAEGU, South Korea — The usually crowded shopping and partying district in this city of 2.4 million is quieter these days after officials urged citizens to stay home to contain an explosive outbreak of the coronavirus. But many restaurants and bars remain open, waiting for customers who seldom come. A noodle restaurant put out the…
HONG KONG — The hospital waiting room was filled with dozens of women wearing homemade hazmat suits. Their hair was tucked tightly under shower caps. Their rain ponchos zipped taut over winter coats. All of the women, anxious and pregnant during the coronavirus outbreak, had been waiting hours to see the same doctor. “I don’t…
Like many couples renting in highly desirable and increasingly expensive parts of Brooklyn, Eric Mailaender and Emily Lowe Mailaender waited too long to buy. But with their children, Stella, 9, and Bo, 6, in school in their Cobble Hill neighborhood, they felt tethered to the area. It was their search for something affordable that landed…
UNION, N.J. — Zahir Shabazz smokes about three packs of cigarettes each week. Each time, he hands a cashier $10, give or take, and a slim pack of Newports appears, feeding a habit of nearly 30 years. He said he knows it is time to quit. “It’s too much,” he said. But Mr. Shabazz, 42,…
“New York is a lonely, lonely, lonely city,” Yossy Morales said one recent Saturday, a morning so frigid that a bicycle deliveryman outside Burger Heaven on Lexington Avenue at 62nd Street was forced to pour scalding water over his Kryptonite lock to key it open. For the past decade Ms. Morales, 42 and a native…
For many travelers, packing a suitcase is a stressful endeavor; packing light, a perpetual fantasy. To help guests ditch excess baggage, hotels are partnering with fashion companies to deliver Instagram-worthy outfits directly to their guest rooms. Don’t pack it: rent it Last December, W Hotels teamed up with the subscription fashion service Rent the Runway…
The rules were simple. Whenever Madonna sang, we strutted our stuff up and down the matted blue carpet. If the music stopped, we struck a pose in front of the full-length mirror. “Your face is crooked!” my friend Diana shrieked. “Your legs are 10 feet long!” I yelled back. It wasn’t an insult; it was…
Barring admission to medical school or catastrophic injury, most of us will go our whole lives without much contemplating the grisly framework that enables and constrains our bodily movement. This is for the best. It is alarming to understand oneself as a heavy, precarious pile of discrete muscles adhering to bones and skin, performing rote…
“You’ll be so lonely,” says Nicole Gadon, 68, who was required to stay inside her house after testing positive for tuberculosis in 2014. If you come down with (or are exposed to) certain communicable diseases, including cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fever, SARS or a pandemic influenza, the state and…