Posts:
By Nicole Ruf (with Lydia Lovell) On the drive from Quito to the coast, somewhere where the mountains start turning into hills, right before the road starts to smell like salt, you’ll find people waving a fan of mixed CDs at your window. The CDs come in plastic...
If you sit with newcomers at a café near Parque Calderón, you can almost hear the expectations they carried when they first arrived. Some imagined peaceful days where everything feels slower and lighter. Others pictured a neat, organized city where life runs smoothly....
Editor’s note: This is the third of a four-part series about Married at First Sight, the international reality television show. The show originated in Denmark in 2013 and now has franchises in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The first part was My...
By Richard Sima You might think spending time on your smartphone or computer is bad for your brain. Indeed, “brain rot” — the slang term for a mental decline caused by mindlessly consuming social media or digital dreck — was Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year....
Editor’s note: This is the second of a four-part series about Married at First Sight, the international reality television show. The show originated in Denmark in 2013 and now has franchises in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Part 1 is My VPN took...
by Mark A. Mahoney, Ph.D., R.D.N. As our society (as well as other Nations) continue to have significant issues related to basic kindness and civility amongst groups of citizens we should all focus more on the overall benefits that may occur if we just take time to...
Editor's note: This is the first of a four-part series about Married at First Sight, the international reality television show. The show originated in Denmark in 2013 and now has franchises in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. I never meant to...
There are moments in Cuenca when you discover something that feels like a secret. A simple household discovery that makes you wonder why the rest of the world has not caught on. My latest discovery is cacao. The real stuff. The kind that comes in rough blocks or bags...
If you sit long enough in a café near Parque Calderón, you can watch an entire story unfold about expat life in Cuenca. One table hums with newcomers comparing apartment rents and favorite bakeries. Another hosts the veterans, trading tales of how things “used to be.”...
By Steven Barrie-Anthony For the vast majority of my psychotherapy patients, the gravitational pull of phones and social media alters the most important aspects of who they are, their relationships with others and how they move through the world. This is true for most...
The Americans have finally done it. After more than two centuries, the last US penny is rolling off the line, and the mint workers in Philadelphia are putting away the stamping machines for good. Perhaps they will reappear on E-bay and eventually be exported to China...
By Mikkael A. Sekeres, MD As an oncologist, I see patients who report both common and uncommon symptoms. The symptoms most commonly linked to a cancer diagnosis, not surprisingly, reflect the incidence rates of the world’s most prevalent cancers. These include feeling...
Everyone in the world wants to know the same thing about Cuenca, but few can answer it clearly: what is the standard of living really like? Not the tourist version, not the realtor’s pitch, but the daily reality for ordinary people and how it feels to buy groceries,...
By Andrew Hazzard Business bustled on a sunny fall afternoon at Miriam’s cevichochos food stand on a northeast Minneapolis streetcorner. About a dozen customers bought a bowl, squeezing fresh lime and dusting aji chili powder and salt over the dish. Cevichochos, a...
I spent part of my working life in Florida’s correctional world. Not as a guard and not as an inmate, but somewhere in between, in health-care administration. My job was to keep people alive, at least to make the paperwork look like we were trying to be professional,...
Something special happens when you walk through a Latin American neighborhood in the morning. The bakery is already open. People greet each other by name. The pace is unhurried. There’s time for a smile, a short chat, a real connection. In a world that feels faster,...
Opposite Feria Libre, squeezed between a pharmacy and a scanner joint, I found a dingy doorway that didn’t look like the path to dental salvation, although a small sign that mentioned family dentistry gave away the game. But up two flights of concrete stairs it opened...
If you want to take the pulse of a city, don’t bother with opinion polls or traffic counts. Just count how many homes have washing machines. Here in Cuenca, about two-thirds of homes now have one. That’s roughly where Britain stood in 1967, when half the population...
By Miriam Drake, M.Ed., L.M.H.C., N.C.C. To be a good caregiver, first and foremost, you need to be good to yourself. I cannot emphasize this enough! This is extremely important. It is not being selfish! It is simply practical. If you are not there, or burned out...
There comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes he’s no longer a hunter but a retired park ranger. These days, even though I am living in the Garden of Eden, I’m more likely to be offered hibiscus flowers than ripe figs, yet I feel it’s my duty to pass on a...
