life
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There is a clinical trial running right now in which GLP-1 drugs, the same molecules behind Ozempic and Wegovy, are being tested for their effect on emotional blunting. Separately, consumer neurostimulation headsets are being marketed to flatten anxiety on demand. A startup in San Francisco is offering a subscription that adjusts your baseline mood the…
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The five-day week feels like a law of nature. It is not. It is an invention, roughly a century old, and like most inventions it was a compromise between what was technically possible and what the people of the time could imagine. For most of the twentieth century the working week got steadily shorter, and…
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The hospital as we know it, a large institution where sick people are concentrated together under professional supervision, is a relatively recent invention. For most of human history, serious illness was managed at home, with the practitioner coming to the patient rather than the patient going to the practitioner. The shift toward institutional care accelerated…