Author: Shekari Philemon

There is a particular kind of toughness that gets celebrated in Black male culture — the man who handles everything quietly, never complains, never asks for help, never shows weakness. It is not without its origins. It developed for reasons that made sense. Showing vulnerability in environments that penalized it was genuinely dangerous, and strength became both armor and identity. But that same toughness, applied to a doctor’s office, is killing people. Black men in the United States have shorter life expectancies than almost every other demographic group. They die from heart disease, prostate cancer, diabetes and stroke at rates…

You made it through the hard years. The impossible job, the relationship that drained everything, the period of sustained crisis that seemed to have no end. You survived it. You came out the other side. And your body, apparently, did not get the memo that the emergency is over — because the weight gained during that period is not moving the way weight is supposed to move. This is not a metabolism mystery. It is the body doing something deliberate, and understanding why it does it changes how you approach getting it to stop. How the body decides to store…

Anywhere from a dusting to two feet of snow — forecasters are not in agreement and neither is the weather Washington D.C. residents hoping for a quiet weekend may want to revisit those plans. A coastal storm is taking aim at the Mid-Atlantic region starting Sunday, Feb. 22, and while forecasters can agree that something is coming, they are having considerably more trouble agreeing on what exactly that something will be. The range of possible outcomes is wide enough to be genuinely unhelpful: scenarios currently on the table run from minor accumulations that amount to little more than an inconvenience…

Here is something the diet industry prefers not to lead with: every time you severely restrict calories and lose weight quickly, your body files a detailed incident report and updates its operating settings accordingly. It does not forget. It does not reset. It adapts — and that adaptation is specifically designed to make the next attempt harder than the last. This is not a willpower problem. It is biology doing exactly what biology is supposed to do. What metabolic adaptation actually means When caloric intake drops sharply, the body reads the situation as a resource emergency. It responds by becoming…

Costco, the warehouse retailer best known for bulk toilet paper, $1.50 hot dogs and the particular joy of finding a designer handbag next to a pallet of canned beans, is now flirting with a $1,000 stock price. Shares have climbed 15 percent so far this year, sitting at $983 as of Thursday and giving the company a market value of $438 billion — making it one of the most valuable retailers on the planet. The business performance behind that number is genuinely impressive. The concern is whether the stock price has gotten so far ahead of even impressive performance that…

It started with a warning on Instagram Stories and ended — if it has ended — with three people publicly at odds, a pregnancy rumor circulating and a four-word response from the man at the center of it all that addressed nothing and satisfied no one. Diamond Brown, the mother of Chris Brown’s three-year-old daughter Lovely, posted a pointed message this week that set off one of the messier public exchanges surrounding the singer in recent memory. What she described as a private frustration became very public very fast, pulling in Brown’s rumored girlfriend Jada Wallace and Brown himself before…

The United Nations confirmed this week that the United States has paid approximately $160 million toward its outstanding dues — a number that sounds significant until it sits next to the full figure. The US currently owes the UN close to $4 billion in unpaid contributions, making the payment less a resolution than a gesture toward one. The partial payment applies to the UN’s regular operating budget. It arrives at a moment when the organization’s financial situation has become genuinely precarious, with senior UN officials warning that the regular operating budget could be depleted as early as July without a…

The U.S. Supreme Court could rule as early as Friday on whether President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs are legal — and if the answer is no, the financial fallout would be staggering. Economists at the Penn-Wharton Budget Model estimate that more than $175 billion in tariff collections would need to be refunded to importers, a figure that exceeds the combined annual budgets of the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice. That is not a rounding error. That is a potential fiscal event with no recent precedent. Where the $175 billion figure comes from The estimate was produced by…

Eighty percent. That is the share of Black women who will develop uterine fibroids at some point in their lifetime, according to the National Institutes of Health. It is one of the most striking statistics in women’s reproductive health — and one of the least discussed outside of clinical settings. Fibroids are noncancerous growths that develop in or around the uterus. They range from barely detectable to significantly large, and their symptoms range from manageable to genuinely debilitating. Heavy bleeding, persistent pelvic pain, frequent urination and complications with fertility are all part of the picture for many women living with…

The hair is growing. The retention is the real problem  The frustration is real and it is common. You are consistent with your routine, you are taking the vitamins and you have watched your hair sit at the same length for what feels like an unreasonable amount of time. It is easy to conclude that Black hair simply does not grow as fast as other hair types. That conclusion, while understandable, is not accurate — and the distinction matters enormously for how the problem gets addressed. Black hair grows at approximately the same rate as other hair types — roughly…