TimeMagazine

On a Monday afternoon in early October about 100 years ago, a special meeting of the Baltimore school board was held to decide whether schools should close. Some 30,000 children—more than 60% of the city’s students—had reported absent that day, along with 219 teachers. It’s unknown how many students stayed home because they were already … Read more

When European governments began to end harsh coronavirus lockdowns in May and June, officials stressed that they would only keep easing measures so long as new infection numbers remained low. But daily case numbers in several western European countries have begun to tick upward again. On Thursday France and Germany both recorded their highest daily … Read more

In a small room without windows, I am instructed to breathe in sync with a colorful bar on a screen in front of me. Six counts in. Six counts out. Electrodes tie me to a machine whirring on the table. My hands and feet are bare, wiped clean and placed atop silver boards. My finger … Read more

It starts on a crisp winter night. Outside it’s dark and cold, the grass already coated with a thick, white layer of hoarfrost. Inside I sit–wrapped in a blanket, drinking my hot chocolate, surrounded by the orange glow of candlelight, with lavender incense diffusing into the air–slowly and purposefully crafting a tale. One designed to … Read more

Each of us carts around a 3-lb. universe that orchestrates everything we do: directing our conscious actions of moving, thinking and sensing, while also managing body functions we take for granted, like breathing, keeping our hearts beating and digesting our food. It makes sense that such a bustling world of activity would need rest. Which … Read more

For as long as Seemay Chou can remember, she has gone to bed at midnight and woken around 4:30 a.m. Chou long assumed that meant she was a bad sleeper. Not that she felt bad. In fact, sleeping just four hours a night left her feeling full of energy and with free time to get … Read more

The scariest dream my now-college-age daughter ever had was the one about the running legs—or, as they became known in our family, The Running Legs, almost audibly capitalized. She was in kindergarten at the time and the dream amounted to little more than an image of a pair of black tights, filled by an invisible … Read more

Singer-songwriter Jewel didn’t have an easy upbringing. Her childhood was marked by neglect, abuse and anxiety. At 18, she became homeless. Jewel started writing songs because she didn’t know how else to cope, and when she sang them at bars for an audience, she saw her own anguish reflected back at her. “I watched people … Read more

Nobody foresaw the COVID-19 curveball nature was going to throw at us 2020—which is one of the reasons the world has had so much trouble ducking the pitch. But we’ve know for years that another disease, known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), would hit hard this year—beginning this month, in fact. The U.S. Centers for … Read more

In 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum … Read more