Last year, my brother and his wife suffered a tragic loss when their young son drowned in an accident at their home. Since then, my sister-in-law has been extremely reluctant to travel to see our family, and I’m not sure why. My brother would love to visit, but I think he defers to her because…
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Courtesy of AppleGetty Images Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. In fashion, there’s normcore, there’s gorpcore, and there’s even Totoro-core. And then there’s carbon. It might be the most unlikely buzzword to pop up in the industry, but over the past few years it has been in…
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Sigrid Jakob showed up to Green-Wood Cemetery hot on the heels of a recent victory: The deer dung she was cultivating in her apartment had just yielded a particularly exciting specimen of fungi. She’d gathered the dung in a park in the Bronx, she said, and was currently storing it in Tupperware that once housed…
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Ever since the pandemic started, mental health experts have worried that grief, financial strain and social isolation may take an unbearable toll on American psyches. Some warned that the coronavirus had created the “perfect storm” for a rise in suicides. The concern was seized on by lawmakers who were eager to reopen the economy. In…
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Could anything better embody this liminal moment than a sweater vest? As the world dances between sickness and health, lockdown and freedom, winter and summer, this fence-straddling garment is sublimely attuned to these strange, in-between times. Last fall, when fashion designers presented their prognostications for an unforeseeable spring season, they threw their weight behind the…
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Have months of self-isolation, lockdown and working from home irrevocably changed what we will put on once we go out again? For a long time, the assumption was yes. Now, as restrictions ease and the opening up of offices and travel is dangled like a promise, that expectation is more like a qualified “maybe.” But…
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A new paper in the Review of Economic Studies indicates that disease can alter the social networks and economic growth of countries for generations, even after the disease itself is eradicated. Social networks are an important determinant of a country’s growth as they affect the diffusion of ideas and the rate of technological progress. But…
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An estimated 334,000 COVID-19 cases are attributable to meatpacking plants, resulting in $11.2 billion in economic damage, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study was published in the journal Food Policy. It found that beef- and pork-processing plants more than doubled per capita infection rates…
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Philadelphia, April 15, 2021 – A new study shows that markers of fear recall differ between men and women, but in a hormone-dependent manner. Aberrant fear-memory processing in the brain is thought to underlie anxiety disorders, which affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these disorders remain poorly understood, but recent…
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Fifty-five years ago, America’s death toll from automobile crashes was sky-high. Nearly 50,000 people died every year from motor vehicle crashes, at a time when the nation’s population was much smaller than today. But with help from data generated by legions of researchers, the country’s policymakers and industry made changes that brought the number killed…
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