Author: Errica Jensen

When I first heard a 12-year-old call Ross Geller “walking red flag energy,” I did not find it funny. We all knew deep down that Ross was a petulant, possessive, and possibly the worst Friend, and it felt like a humorous, contemporary translation of that knowledge. However, the criticism didn’t end there. Friends is more than just a dated comedy with awful hair for Generation Alpha, the group born after 2013 who are currently navigating middle school with smartphones in hand. It’s a cultural relic that seems essentially “off,” a holdover from a world people don’t particularly like or recognize.…

One sound that lingers in a community is the quiet of a nursery that ought to be filled with a newborn’s cries. That quiet has turned into a scathing critique of a wellness movement that has gone horribly wrong in New Mexico. A newborn baby’s death from a listeria infection was recently confirmed by state health officials, who believe the mother’s consumption of raw, unpasteurized milk during pregnancy is directly responsible for the tragedy. For a movement that has cloaked itself in the sultry aesthetics of cottagecore and the rebellious vocabulary of “food freedom,” it is a harsh, harsh reality…

The café menu board promises redemption in a cup and is written in that omnipresent looping chalk language. Nestled between the matcha and the flat whites is the “Golden Milk Latte,” which costs only $7 and is advertised as a mood enhancer, detoxifier, and anti-inflammatory elixir. When it is delivered, it appears to be sunlight preserved in pottery, with a dash of cinnamon added for visual appeal. You sip. It is reassuring, earthy, warm, and faintly spicy. A question remains, though, as the yellow liquid makes its way into your stomach: am I genuinely benefiting from this, or have I…

The register terminal’s digital display blinks with a number that seems off, a software bug that undoubtedly needs a manager’s override. It doesn’t. A carton of eggs that feels lighter than it used to be the last item the cashier scans, and the total comes to a sum that ten years ago in the Midwest would have paid for a mortgage. The grocery run is a monthly ritual in modern America, yet the customer standing in the aisle rarely understands the math. The receipt in your palm tells a different, far more costly story than the government press releases and…

A shutter that can snap shut and pull back thousands of times a day without losing its shape, the human eyelid is an engineering marvel of tension and release. We never consider our face’s structural integrity until it breaks in a way that doesn’t seem imaginable from a biological standpoint. That was a visceral and horrifying failure for a 39-year-old Brooklyn woman. She went into an ophthalmology clinic and said that her eyes had been wet and gritty for six weeks. This is a fairly frequent complaint in a city full of screens and dry air. Then she showed the…

Traditional sports purists might not have expected a medal event to have the energy that was inside the Hangzhou Esports Centre. It was filled with the loud, artificial thrum of bass and the screech of thousands of fans waving multicolored light sticks, yet it didn’t smell of newly cut grass or chlorine water. The noise was so loud that it could have been heard in any European football stadium when China’s team took the stage for the Arena of Valor final against Malaysia. When esport received its first official gold medal at the Asian Games in 2023, it seemed less…

There is a real sense of urgency in the shipyards of Ulsan and Yeongam, a frenetic energy that feels less like building and more like a space race. South Korea, a nation that has historically dominated the global shipbuilding sector, is not happy to just ride the wave of present orders. Rather, the next one is being intentionally engineered. The recent launch of the Hydro Zenith was a declaration of intent rather than merely the christening of another vessel. As the globe grapples with maritime decarbonization, Seoul has decided that the future of shipping will be written in hydrogen, and…

For the greater part of a decade, we have been collectively infatuated with a metabolic state that was originally developed to treat childhood epilepsy. The ketogenic diet, with its stringent exclusion of carbohydrates and its celebration of butter-laced coffee, promised a biological hack that would turn us into fat-burning machines. However, there has been a noticeable shift in the nutritional landscape in recent days. The lethargy that results from social isolation and the gastrointestinal pain caused by neglecting a whole macronutrient group has set in. We are witnessing the birth of a more nuanced, sustainable, and notably enhanced approach to…

We have been fighting a gastronomic civil war against carbs for the past 20 years. We banned the bread basket, demonized the pasta bowl, and made “grain” into a terrible word. The reasoning seemed reasonable enough: we were becoming lethargic, irritated, and constantly hungry due to modern, highly processed wheat. But when we were busily purging our pantries of anything beige, we unintentionally threw out the metabolic master switch along with the Wonder Bread. We created a “fiber famine,” a nutritional shortfall so extreme that 95 percent of us are now unable to feed our internal ecosystems. Now, the pendulum…

When the temperature rises over what people can tolerate, a certain type of quiet falls over a city. It is the stillness of survival, where movement becomes a liability and the air itself feels like a bodily weight, rather than the silence of tranquility. That quiet descended upon Juba, South Sudan, in March 2024. The administration took the rare step of closing schools for two weeks, not because of a virus or a coup, but because the thermometer had reached over 45 degrees Celsius (113°F) and stayed there. It was a choice that marked a terrible change in the day-to-day…