How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization.

Everyone wants women to be mindful, calm, and deliberate. But sometimes a little chaos gets things done.

24 hours inside San Francisco’s homelessness crisis.

For 30 years, Paul Shuen was one of the city’s most respected obstetricians. Then his nurses noticed something unusual about the way he delivered babies.

Life in America without dental care.

What happens when illness becomes an identity?

Inside the fight for safe cannabis for all.

In experiments on pig organs, scientists at Yale made a discovery that could someday challenge our understanding of what it means to die.

Online startups can send you pills to cure anxiety. But is it safe to buy them?

When patients turn to crowdfunding for medical costs, whoever has the most heartrending story wins.

How a disease came back.

With state legislatures passing new abortion restrictions, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund follows its own compass on how to best help clients.

On the suicide crisis in rural East Texas.

Vivia, an intellectually disabled woman, had long wanted a child but decided instead to adopt a doll.

For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers.

“Incels” are going under the knife to reshape their faces, and their dating prospects.

The University of Maryland waited 18 days to inform students of a virus on campus. That decision left vulnerable students like Olivia Paregol in the dark.

A yearlong investigation by BuzzFeed News, based on leaked recordings, internal documents, and dozens of interviews with fans and insiders, reveals how Robbins has berated abuse victims and subjected his followers to unorthodox and potentially dangerous techniques. And former female fans and staffers have accused him of inappropriate sexual advances.

I find myself in a strange situation where people I love were traumatized and devastated by what happened to me, but I—the dude who actually suffered the injury—fell into a two-week time warp before waking up strapped to a gurney: emaciated, woozy, confused, and irritable.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s “monkey island.” The surviving primates could help scientists learn about the psychological response to traumatizing events.

How well-meaning donations end up fueling an unproven, virtually unregulated $2 billion stem cell industry.

Anatomy of an outbreak.

Is all water created equal? It depends on who you believe.

There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.

In late 1960s London, famed psychoanalyst R.D. Laing created a radical asylum—one with no doctors, no locks, and no limits.