As that cool-weather crackle finally enters the air, another seasonal cycle begins: the desire to partner up in winter. The annual urge to crawl into bed with a special someone in the cooler months, for a relationship that lasts at least as long as there is frost on the ground, has become immortalized as “cuffing…
How to Recreate Your Lost Family Recipes, According to Historians and Chefs
Michael Twitty was leading a conversation on African diasporic food when the woman he was speaking to broke into tears. Twitty, a food writer, historian, and historical interpreter, had just explained that the word for “eat” in Wolof, a West African language, is nyam. The woman, a Massachusetts resident from an African-American and Puerto Rican family, had…
25 Years of Intuitive Eating
In 1993, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch were dietitians working next to each other in the same office. Both of them, in keeping with the wisdom of the time, spent their days counseling their clients on nutrition and meal planning, all with the aim of helping their clients lose weight. Yet both of them had…
Why This Election is Not “Just” Politics
As votes are cast and tallied in all fifty states, the air itself feels thick with tension. With so much at stake — a pandemic revealing our society’s deepest disparities, ongoing racial justice protests, an eviction crisis looming — it’s apparent to most of us that politics isn’t something we can ignore or tune out….
How to Spot — And Heal From — Political Burnout
There’s a reason they call it “hitting the wall.” Burnout really does feel like a whole-body experience, like physically running into an impassable barrier. You may be chugging along, telling yourself that you can push through whatever it is that’s plaguing you: the isolation of quarantine, the exhaustion of racial justice organizing, the difficulty concentrating on work…
How to Survive a Political Breakup
Every four years around election season — and particularly this year — the media fills with appeals: Why can’t we just get along? Sure, we may have strong opinions about politics, but that shouldn’t get in the way of our unity as family members, neighbors, or friends. In an ideal world, that’s true. Yet in…
What to Do When You’ve Hurt Your Partner
For the six darkest months of the relationship, there was me, and then there was shadow me. She walked beside me, an image of myself if every action and motivation were filtered through the least flattering lens. Her generosity was self-serving; her love was patronizing; her promises were false. In those months, she trailed me…
A Historical Dig Sheds Light on the Food of the Underground Railroad
ON NOVEMBER 4, 1857, A notice appeared in the Cambridge Democrat, the local newspaper of Cambridge, Maryland. Submitted by one Dr. Alexander Hamilton Bayly, it offered a $300 reward for anyone who could locate and kidnap a 28-year-old woman named Lizzie Amby, whom Bayly had enslaved. She had fled Bayly’s house some days before, bound north, along with her…
Investing in Community Well-Being On World Mental Health Day
“That was an old joke you hear in some communities: I’m going to go to jail to get my tooth fixed,” said Lorenzo Jones. Jones is Co-Executive Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, a New York- and Connecticut-based nonprofit that advocates for public health solutions to end mass incarceration and the drug…
How to Talk to a New Sexual Partner About COVID-19 Risk
Your heart is beating fast. Your palms are sweating. You can hear your partner’s breath speed up, and you know it’s going to happen: for the first time, you and that special someone are about to take your face masks off. Dating has been a little different during the coronavirus pandemic, to say the least. While…
