Essays Health

I grew up in the Southern Baptist church of the '90s during the height of the True Love Waits movement, accompanied by Joshua Harris’ best seller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. If you don’t know what I am referring to, consider yourself blessed. Many of the ideas perpetuated by this culture were infused with fear and shame, offering no practical help or guidance in equipping young people to become healthy sexual human beings.

From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through...

A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant’s journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family’s garment factory in...

In The Selfishness of Others, the essayist Kristin Dombek provides a clear-sighted account of how a rare clinical diagnosis became a fluid cultural phenomenon, a repository for our deepest fears about love, friendship, and family. She cuts through hysteria in search of the razor-thin line between pathology and common selfishness, writing with robust skepticism toward the prophets of NPD and genuine empathy for those who see themselves as its victims. And finally, she shares her own story in a candid effort to find a path away from the cycle of fear and blame.

For readers seeking solutions to finally end the gun violence that kills tens of thousands of people each year in the United States— from a Harvard-trained trauma surgeon treating victims in Chicago If hope for ending gun violence can take hold in Chicago’s South Side, then it can take hold...

"Take What You Can is so brilliantly, unbelievably good I have a burning in my heart.... Love is utterly bewildering, and nobody writes about it better than Naima Coster."—Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich From the New York Times bestselling author of What’s...

Dr. Dino Martins, an awarding-winning entomologist of Kenya's Turkana Basin, where life was born, unspools the hidden, squirming world of parasites—some of the most misunderstood, and important, creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies!). “May this tusk root out the lice of the...

This book helps you see, think, and feel back together those parts of yourself the Western mind reduced to rubble. If you feel integration to be unnatural, that’s your problem at a glance. I apologize that the day is dawning and there’s work we need to do, but hello. It’s time to wake up.

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.

A young queer millennial physicist unveils some of the most mind-bending physics concepts in the universe—and uses them to illuminate their own fascinating life story “I see physics everywhere,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan writes. “It offers itself to me when I try to make sense of all the...

A tender, searching collection of poems that breaks open notions of faith to ask how a daughter, alienated from kin, can find love and a home in the world, from the award-winning author of If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters at the edge of an edge is an edge. at that edge is a cliff...

Parenting is a journey of self-discovery as much as it is about raising children. In this book, psychotherapist Riri G. Trivedi and parent coach Anagha Nagpal draw on years of expertise in psychotherapy and positive parenting to provide valuable insights and much-needed support for Indian...

When the wild strips everything away, what’s left is who you are. In the raw, untamed wilds of Alaska—where the wind howls, predators hunt, and the sun disappears for months—only a rare few figure out how to survive. Sue Aikens, the breakout star of National Geographic’s long-running TV...

From the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, a fierce and unforgettable novel about a Tamil refugee family stealing from corporations to survive until their lives are up-ended by a day-trading scam, threatening what little security they have left. It’s hard to be a teenager at the...

A collection of short stories from the National Book Award-winning author of Mating "Powerful and original...always convincingly authentic. The ironies keep cutting in new directions." —The New York Times Whether they are Americans, Brits, or a stubborn and suicidally moral Dutchman...

Told through raw, hilarious, and uncomfortably honest essays, Joseph Tito peels back the layers of adulthood, identity, parenting, aging, and emotional chaos. One minute you’re laughing about childproof pill bottles, the next you’re quietly spiraling over your purpose in life—just like he did. And still does.

Culled from Bodett's syndicated radio show, these interconnected stories captures the essence of life in America--especially Homer, Alaska, the sort of place where the keys are left in the snowplow in case someone gets stuck after hours...

Early in her career, Katie Pryal learned that being a professor isn’t easy if your brain isn’t quite right. “I was a junior in college when I finally realized that I was different in a way that my medically inclined parents would call ‘clinical.’” In these deeply personal, fiery essays, Pryal tells her story of transformation that began the moment she chose to publicly disclose her own mental illness and leave her career in higher education to begin fighting for a better world for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Let Dan help you dig a little deeper into how life’s truths show up in the weight room and on the field of play. What you learn in this selection will get you thinking more broadly into how it all fits together - fitness, health, longevity, and easy strength.

A searing debut novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream. Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She has a well-paid job, a nice boyfriend, and plans to marry and move into a luxury high-rise apartment...