Wellness

It was the ritual that was important—the acupuncturist’s thorough examination, the couple’s elaborate date, the mother’s comforting home remedy, the ceremonial mixing of the absinthe. It was in these observances that the placebo effect activated and materialized: the transubstantiation of belief into reality, of story into truth, a metaphor made fl

Step 4: Locate the Leader. It had been Elizabeth’s experience that all social groups—no matter how egalitarian they seemed on the surface—had one person who was, at any given moment, on some deep and perhaps even unconscious level, in charge. A kind of social conductor that the group tacitly elevated.

Someday, he thought, he’ll have digested enough Derrida, and he’ll have read all the right books, and heard all the right music, and watched all the right films, and seen all the right art, and through a kind of inner alchemy he’ll find himself being exactly who he right now hoped to become: publicly recognized, shown in galleries, reviewed ecstati

“You know, when I was young,” Jack said, “none of my friends wanted corporate sponsorship.” “Why?” “They called it selling out. It meant you were fake.” Toby snorted. “That’s dumb.” “You think so?” “It doesn’t mean you’re fake. It means you’re good.”

“Nobody understood their real motivations.” “And isn’t that the truth! Over the years, I’ve found that people tend to act automatically and think automatically, but when they’re pressed to explain why they act or think a certain way, they rush into the void and invent a story. And then, incredibly, they believe that story.” “Even if the story isn’t

Elizabeth called this phenomenon the “meaning effect,” a term she much preferred to “placebo effect.” Because to say that these effects arose from placebo implied that they arose from nothing—for that’s what placebo traditionally was, an inert substance, literally and intentionally useless—when in fact the placebo effect was elicited by the strong

she got up and pulled the covers over him and kissed him on the forehead and said her customary farewell, which was not “Good night” or “Sweet dreams” or anything like that. Those tended to agitate Toby, who generally considered nighttime to be scary and treacherous. No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on

This is what it felt like to not belong: the anxiety, the constant low-level wariness, trying to avoid that shame Jack felt when it was revealed to him that he’d been doing something horribly crude, or thinking something horribly shallow. Like this photograph, which was apparently perpetuating violent American dominance, and here he’d thought it wa

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves.