The announcement from Starbucks that the coffee chain will phase out plastic drinking straws in all locations by 2020 expands the roster of places worldwide that have banned the once-ubiquitous disposable item. This is probably good for the environment (though certainly no panacea to solve the problem of ocean plastic).
War, migration, and other upheavals can distort a society’s gender ratio. A new study finds that the consequences of an imbalanced society can linger generations later, even once the proportions of men and women have equalized.
In 1999, a trio of researchers in the UK published a cost-benefit analysis on charity skydives, fundraisers in which regular people with zero skydiving experience collect pledges in exchange for the promise that they’ll hurl themselves from an airplane.
Every marriage is many marriages. A relationship feels different when experienced in different life stages, or when viewed through the eyes of one partner or another. But what does it look like as a whole? How do you chart the rise and fall of conflict, contentedness, and shared activities that make up a life together?
For people smack in the mad mid-life rush of managing full-time careers, dependent children, and aging parents, nothing feels so short in supply as time.
The end of World War II marked the beginning of beautiful love stories for thousands of US couples, as sweethearts who’d deferred marriage during the war rushed to wed in peacetime.
The forcible relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II is a shameful episode in US history. It also provides a necessary yet unsettling primer on how separation and internment affect families’ health in the long term.
There’s a scene early in the new Pixar movie The Incredibles 2 when Helen Parr—aka Elastigirl, aka Mrs. Incredible—calls home during her first business trip after going back to work full-time. (Her work, if you are unfamiliar with the franchise, is saving unsuspecting city folk from harm at the hands of nefarious villains.) Things at home are an utter shitshow, a fact that Mr. Incredible glosses over both to save his own pride and not to spoil his spouse’s evident delight at being back in the superhero game.
Behavioral economists have long recognized that humans have an extremely difficult time walking away from anything in which they’ve invested lots of time, money, or effort they can’t get back. But most research on the sunk-cost fallacy has focused on people’s attachments to their own investments.
Donald Trump turns 72 today (June 14). For a president who likes to describe his accomplishments in superlative terms, this is a good thing. Donald Trump is the oldest person ever elected president! Nobody has ever been so old at this point in their presidency!
Some 25 years into her long observation of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, primatologist Jane Goodall witnessed a unique and unsettling event: a permanent splinter of the once-peaceful chimpanzee community into two rival groups, followed by four bloody years of chimp-on-chimp violence.
The Wall Street Journal’s report on the troubled merger of Facebook and WhatsApp has all the ingredients of a doomed love story. There was the lavish proposal (Facebook’s $22 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014) and rosy honeymoon (during which time Facebook decorated a building in WhatsApp’s signature green to welcome employees to its Menlo Park campus).
For all the advantages of working from home, the blurring of lines between work and leisure time is a real drawback. Without clear boundaries and rituals to mark the workday’s start and end, it’s all too easy for remote workers to always be on the clock—or to feel guilty that they should be.
Remote workers: the state of Vermont wants you.
Summer’s almost here, and with Memorial Day in the US, the official start to the season of wearing white. Our Instagram feeds are about to be full of happy people in fluttery white garments who apparently exist in some unknown ecosystem in which there is no food, drink, dirt, grass, pets, or children.
Mussels are the filters of the sea. A single one of the mollusks filters up to two liters (about half a gallon) of water each day to extract microscopic algae and bacteria to eat. Pretty much whatever ends up in the sea eventually ends up in a mussel.
In the weeks leading up to Ireland’s referendum on legalizing abortion, polls indicated that up to one-fifth of the country’s population was undecided, putting a question mark next to the vote’s probable outcome.
There’s probably a perfectly good explanation for it, and there is absolutely no reason to be alarmed, but hundreds of great white sharks are congregating in a remote spot deep in the Pacific.
We enter into marriage with the full intent of realizing our professional goals and supporting our partner’s dreams, too. And then life happens.
Centuries from now, historians piecing together the narrative of this stretch of America’s existence will have to explain the curious four-decade (and counting) run in which an arena in an otherwise modest midwestern US city filled to capacity once a year for two aging billionaires talking about the stock market, life, and whatever else tickled their fancy.
Few professionals boast a pay gap as glaring as that in professional sports.
The first issue of Time magazine rolled off the presses on March 3, 1923, under the watchful eye of Time Inc.’s 23-year-old co-owner Henry Luce. For the rest of the 20th century, Luce’s company would be an indomitable force in media and culture, with a catalog of more than 100 print magazine titles including Life, People, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated.
I have a confession. Every four years I sit on my couch and watch several hours of Olympic figure skating. I watch professional athletes with decades of training under their spandex leap and twirl around the rink and I think: I bet I could do that.
On a recent Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, captain Tara Wright took the microphone to welcome her passengers onboard—and to alert them that they were part of a milestone moment in the fight for workplace inclusion.
