Health Tips Line

If you ask me what I think of as “ so American ,” my brain short-circuits a little bit. Visions of flags, fireworks and all things red, white and blue on the 4th of July immediately pop into my head. But beyond that, I draw a blank. Everything else is pretty universal, as far as I can tell. Well, my friends who live overseas would like a word. They remind me quite how American something like football is. Not soccer —American football, which you don’t actually use your feet for. OK, I’ll give them that one. But then there are things like prom, homecoming and red Solo cups. Wide, open highways and cross-country road trips. Greasy-spoon diners, county fairs and trick-or-treating. And let’s not forget malls, where I spent the better part of my very ordinary and apparently very American teenage years. While we know that life is different elsewhere, we don’t quite realize it until someone looks at us like we’re nuts and we have to explain why Bl...

It’s all over the news: The president stands accused of raiding federal funds for personal projects. Members of Congress are caught paying and accepting bribes. Rival parties divide voters, then submit multiple conflicting sets of election results from the same state. Florida, predictably, is at the center of the mess. There are riots. The whole dispute ultimately gets handed to a special commission to sort out, and the country doesn’t have a new president for months after the election. Sound familiar? This tale of electoral chaos isn’t from 2020. Brace yourself: We’re talking about 1876 . “It is unquestionably the most corrupt presidential election we have ever had,” says historian Greg Jackson, an associate history professor at Utah Valley University and the host of the wildly popular podcast History That Doesn’t Suck . “And by a margin that makes everything else pale.” Jackson would know. He spent three years deep-diving into Am...

As someone who is used to text invitations or “fancy” evites, I was delighted to get a real paper invitation in the mail that was legit fancy. Like, the kind of fancy where I stood in my closet for 20 minutes wondering if my nicest going-out blouse would cut it. It was a milestone birthday party for a wealthy acquaintance—not a close friend, but someone I was hoping might become one—and the invite was very clear: No gifts, please. Fine! Great! Easy! Except the closer the party got, the more I spiraled. It just feels wrong to show up to a gift-giving occasion without a gift. What if everyone else brought something? So I pulled into a grocery-store parking lot on the way there, stared into the middle distance for approximately 45 seconds and then decided to get a bouquet of flowers. It felt like a good middle ground between a hostess gift and a birthday gift. Just in case. It was the right call. At least half the guests had brought something. The birthday girl did...

A few months ago, I was scrolling through cleaning videos before bed when I came across one that made me stop mid-swipe. A cleaning content creator I’ve followed for years was covering a mattress with shaving cream. My first thought was that it had to be another one of those internet hacks destined to create a bigger mess than the problem it was trying to solve. But judging by the comments, plenty of people had already tried it and were surprisingly impressed by the results. Of course, the internet isn’t exactly known for separating good advice from bad . For every genuinely useful household trick, there are a dozen others that leave you wondering who volunteered to test them in the first place. But as it turns out, that can of shaving cream sitting in your bathroom cabinet may have more uses than just shaving. To find out whether this mattress hack actually works or if it’s just another viral cleaning myth, I spoke with cleaning expert Isabella Flores, the co-owner o...