In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.

On the confines of masculinity.

When the author’s wife was dying, his best friend moved in.

Can a college course teach us how to be happy?

Jennifer Warren promised people counseling and recovery for free. When they arrived, she put them to work 16 hours a day for no pay at adult care homes for the elderly and disabled.

The people bringing psychedelic drugs into the mental health mainstream.

Can we treat psychosis by listening to the voices in our heads?

On the cusp of delivery, a mother-to-be recounts the anxiety-laden path to parenthood.

In the midst of a national crisis, mothers addicted to drugs struggle to get off them — for their babies’ sake, and their own.

Kids have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.

Coming to terms with eating disorders.

On getting weight reduction surgery.

The science on the link is clear, but the alcohol industry has worked hard to downplay it.

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

How contemporary medicine is testing us to death.

The case against decluttering.

Born at a barely viable 24 weeks, Owen’s life began as a battle for survival. His future is a test for how far neonatal medicine has come.

A secret network of women is working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide safe, cheap home abortions.

“It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the ‘right’ way to eat.”

What we get wrong about the opioid crisis.

The author faces this question as she emerges from alcoholism.

What we know (and don’t), more than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba.

On the ground in Wilmington.

The same “Stephen Hawking voice” is used by little girls, old men, and people of every racial and ethnic background. Inside the quest to give people a voice of their own.