Eleanor Cummins

In a post-Dobbs world, pathologists who study pregnancy loss walk a thin line between medicine and the law

hen Mana Parast examines a placenta, she knows she may never find the answers she seeks. She’s hunting for clues — strips of dead tissue that signal autoimmune disease, white blood cells in the lining of the umbilical cord that point to an infection,…

How Did Yoga Get So Damn Expensive?

Rent, health insurance, and HVAC are all foregone conclusions. But there’s one payment I find myself reconsidering each month: the $175 that grants me unlimited access to my neighborhood yoga studio, fairy lights, hardwood floors, centering vibes,…

Empathy in the Age of AI

If you think your dog loves you, you’re a fool. If you feel a kinship with a tree, you’re a hippie. And if you over-empathize with a wild animal, you must be wearing cheetah prints and a flower crown, because you are Carole Baskin. The imperative to…

After decades of setbacks, scientists make strides toward the holy grail of male birth control

he headlines spelled the end of a short-lived scientific hope: “Male birth control study nixed after men can’t handle side effects women face daily,” USA Today announced. “Men Back Out of Male Birth Control Study Because They Couldn’t Handle the…

One Man’s Quest to Build the Perfect Near-Death Simulation

Why should the benefits of dying be limited to the dead (or nearly dead)? That’s the question that Mel Slater hasn’t been able to get out of his head. Slater, a distinguished investigator in clinical psychology at the University of Barcelona, had…

Symptom Scrolling

On TikTok, videos about Hashimoto’s disease, a thyroid disorder, are racking up hundreds of millions of views—and turning it into a brand Reading Time: 4 minutes Stella Aubert knows the secret to healing Hashimoto’s. The New Mexico–based chiropractor…

When Algorithms Promote Self-Harm, Who Is Held Responsible?

When 14-year-old Molly Russell died in 2017, her cell phone contained graphic images of self-harm, an email roundup of “depression pins you might like,” and advice on concealing mental illness from loved ones. Investigators initially ruled the…

This Time Capsule of Famous Writers’ Unseen Work Will Grow in Norway for a Century. What Does It Tell Us About the Anthropocene?

On a sweater-weather Saturday in June, a crowd of several hundred gathered at a trailhead near the Line 1 rapid transit out of Oslo. The scruffy grad students, smiling parents, and snowsuit-wearing toddlers had made the 45-minute trek from the…

Will self-driving cars make police chases a thing of the past?

THE BRAND-NEW Ford DeLuxe Fordor that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow plucked from a Topeka, Kansas, driveway in 1934 was top-shelf: Cordoba gray paint, a big chrome grill, and a sumptuous leather interior. But what really attracted the car-savvy bank…

Inside one of the world’s first human composting facilities

Rachel Gerberding has a green thumb. So when her mother died this April, Gerberding decided to compost her. Gerberding, who lives in Washington state in a house surrounded by flowers, had heard about a newly legal method to turn human remains into…

Why Therapy Is Broken

An hour a week in a shrink’s office is increasingly treated as a prerequisite for a healthy, happy life. There, we imagine, friends learn new coping skills and enemies realize the errors of their ways. Everyone is “healed.” Therapy has been marketed…

The Huge Perk of Being a Beauty Reporter That Isn’t a Perk at All

This June, just a few days after publishing a story about the possible dangers of silicone breast implants, I got an email from a New York City plastic surgeon’s public relations team. No—it wasn’t pushback against the facts or framing of my piece.…

Against “Preventative” Botox

There comes a time in every middle- to upper-class American woman’s life when she must ask herself if it’s time to start doing Botox. This time is coming earlier and earlier, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which found that 19…

It’s Good When Science Confirms That Depression Is Complicated

Can you really blame your sadness on your serotonin levels? Recent research says “probably not.” While the public has been led to believe that depression is due to an “imbalance” of one or more chemicals in the brain, a paper in the journal Molecular…

Nurses Are Quitting the ER to Do Botox

Medical Examiner They got into health care work to help people—some say cosmetic injections is the best way for them to do it. Janet Gedjeyan’s first job after nursing school was as a bedside nurse in the heart and lung transplant division at a Los…

Why Do We Expect People to Disclose Having Genital Herpes?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that those with genital herpes must disclose it. But those who actually harbor the virus—a sizable chunk of the population!—may bristle under the stigmatizing status quo. Given everything we know about its…

“This Is the Little Power That I Can Take Back”: The Rare and Wonderful Feeling of Irreversible Birth Control

Medical Examiner Courtney, age 33, has known she does not want kids since high school. But how, exactly, she would prevent pregnancy in the long term remained an open question. If something went wrong with her birth control in the interim, she could…

Against ‘Public Health’

These days, everything is said to be a public health issue: gun violence, disinformation, and climate change. An ongoing opioid epidemic, an epidemic of loneliness, and an “epidemic of hate.” Kids are “addicted” to social media and that, too, is a…

Last Century’s Approach to Journalism Is Useless in a Climate Crisis

When was the last time you expected to see something good on the front page of the paper? Certainly not in this decade. Roughly four in 10 people globally now say they sometimes or often avoid contact with the news, according to a new poll conducted…

Meet the Men Obsessed With Looking Younger

Medical Examiner An expensive cosmetic treatment for guys has been around for decades. Paul is a macho dude. Fabio, Saturday Night Fever—“That’s the hair I grew up around,” the 63-year-old told me on a recent call. So when Paul began to lose his