Today, I spilled my ground beans while making today’s coffee. Yesterday, after finishing work, I laid down on my bed and fell asleep for three hours—something I never do unless I’m sick. If that’s not an apt description for my week, I don’t know what is.

Some weeks, everything goes smoothly. Other weeks, we’re barely holding it together. I know I’ll eventually resume my balance on the tightrope that is work-life balance (or at least the illusion thereof). But these weeks also remind me that life can be like that, and we just have to get to the next day as best we can, whether it’s sprinting, walking or crawling.

I’ve cleared my calendar for the next couple of days and am going to prioritize rest and other restorative activities, including gardening and watching “Widow’s Bay” on Apple. Whatever race you’re running this week, I hope you can make it and find some peace and quiet after you reach the finish line.

Until next time, stay safe, keep healthy and be kind!

Injury Recovery

There were so many remarkable feats during the 2026 Winter Olympics, but one we didn’t see—that fueled many of these athletes—was the rapid development of sports medicine.

Aside from the Olympics, I don’t watch sports, but I did find this article about sports injuries and recoveries from Devin Gordon a fascinating read. There were so many great passages and points, such as this one featuring a quote from Glenn Fleisig, the director of biomechanical research at the American Sports Medicine Institute:

“In the past, being a successful pro athlete all but required a delusion of invincibility. Now it’s more like the reverse: If anything, athletes have grown too comfortable with the high likelihood of their body parts’ exploding. ‘They’re not trying to avoid injury at all cost,’ says Fleisig says. ‘It’s an accepted trade-off,’ even though research abounds showing that the strongest predictor of future injury is a previous one.” 

I can remember when athletes endured pain in silence, convinced that speaking up would be the end of their career. Now, it’s less a stigma and more of an accepted truth: injuries happen. There’s also more of a playbook for how to deal with, and recover from, them.

Although there is a still a limit to how far the human body can be pushed, it’s incredible to think of the improvements that have been made in such a short time—and how athletes are helping to pioneer less invasive surgeries and more successful treatments for the rest of us, too.

Read the article here.

A Medical Breakthrough

I didn’t know before reading this interactive article, but chronic low-level inflammation is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the world. Not cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes or neurodegenerative diseases. However, inflammation is at least partly responsible for the development of these and other conditions.

Our understanding of inflammation and the ways in which it affects our bodies is rudimentary. But already, experts are speculating that we may be on the cusp of one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the century.

I recently wrote about how weight-loss medications are upending the landscape, partly because their efficacy is being studied for other illnesses and chronic conditions. One reason for all the interest is that GLP-1s are directly influencing pathways throughout the body that cause inflammation. Other drugs are also showing promise for chronic inflammation, but the widespread usage of weight-loss drugs is offering additional insights.

Researchers at Northwestern University are going to pilot inflammation monitors, similar to continuous glucose monitors, in 2027 to study for or five proteins that are involved in inflammation.

Kim Tingley’s deep dive, aided by illustrations from Cecilia Erlich offers a fascinating glimpse at some of the incredible things our bodies do every day. The interactive piece also helps to understand why treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease have eluded researchers for so long.

I highly recommend reading this piece and doing so with a proper mouse, as there is a lot of scrolling.

A Dog’s Gaze

In June, I went to three different art museums. I’m a big dog lover, as I’ve written before, so perhaps this will not come as a surprise. But, as is often the case, once I saw something, I couldn’t unsee it. What I noticed was the frequent occurrence of our four-legged friends in paintings, photographs and tapestries.

As I filled up with camera reel of close ups of these eternal good bois, I thought to myself, “Gee, I wish there was a book about dogs in art.” In a sheer stroke of serendipity (for me, at least), historian Thomas W. Laqueur’s has done just that.

The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History is a love letter that tracks our relationship with dogs through the centuries. Laqueur writes: “Animals can teach us to see, but dogs actively point the way. When they are present in a picture, ‘we are led by them to believe what the artist sees.’”

Dogs are often the addition to, not the main subject of, a work of art. But they usually add a certain je ne sais quoi that would otherwise feel missing in the artwork—just as their mere presence does to our daily lives. I can tell from the cover, which features Bartolomeo’s “Portrait of a Man with a Dog,” that Laqueur’s book is going to be a glorious ode to dogs.

Read a review here, then request it from your local library, as I have.