In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air-conditioning. Other students, not so much — they were stuck in older dorms without…
Everyone feels lonely from time to time — after, say, a move to a new school or city, when a child leaves for college, or following the loss of a spouse. Some people, though, experience loneliness not just transiently but chronically. It becomes “a personality trait, something that’s pretty sticky,” said Dr. Ellen Lee, an…
It started with mild anxiety. Emily, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she was discussing her mental health, had just moved to New York City after graduate school, to start a marketing job at a big law firm. She knew it was normal to feel a little on edge. But…
In a 1991 segment of “60 Minutes,” the CBS correspondent Morley Safer asked how it could be that the French enjoyed high-fat foods like pâté, butter and triple crème Brie, yet had lower rates of heart disease than people in the United States. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie…
Spend time on any crowded sidewalk and you’ll see heads bent over and eyes cast downward. One recent study of college students found that a quarter of people crossing intersections were glued to a device. “I don’t think people are aware of how much they’re distracted and how much their situational awareness changes when they’re…
