Collecting nail polishes is a fun hobby—but it can also get expensive. Fortunately, there are only a few colors you really need. That’s why we rounded up the beauty industry’s most timeless shades and most raved about formulas. Gather these polishes first and then make your way to more exotic colors and textures.
The sharper the point, the more ambitious this lipstick’s owner is. Those with pointy tips are usually helpful (except when the tip is too sharp-that suggests they have turned mean and hard-edged). If the tip has a roundness, they’re happy in their job and their life. This is what your favorite lipstick color says about your personality.
But how exactly do you make them? This video gives the how-to. After you ice the cupcake, cake, or cookie (or try any of these easy desserts) push the pointy part of a golf pick through the dessert’s center. Next, place the fidget spinner on top of the pick’s round head. Once you give it a spin, these desserts will be ready to take off—into your mouth. Yum!
And if you’re feeling creative, check out even more genius ideas for adding decorations to boring desserts.
There’s a new foodie trend on the rise, and it’s poised to break the Internet. Behold: the charcoal pizza, a dark-crusted, low-carb, guilt-free twist to everyone’s favorite comfort food. And yes, the crust is actually infused with charcoal.
We can thank the Italians for Instagram’s latest craze. Naples native Salvatore Olivella just launched his original recipe for the pie at his New Jersey pizza joint, Olivella Restaurant. He first caught whiff of the trend back in Italy, but it’s now spread to places like Japan, Indonesia, the UK, and Canada.
Want to try it right in your own backyard? Restaurants in Florida and California are also serving this delicious dish. And if you’re willing to branch out, Olivella offers pasta and mozzarella cheese made with the same unconventional ingredient.
According to Olivella, not only is charcoal safe (and yummy!) to eat, but it offers impressive health perks, as well.
“Activated charcoal has been used to treat poisonings for years, but only recently has it been added to food, drinks, and cosmetics,” Olivella told Well+Good. “It is reputed to aid digestion, reduce gas and bloating, and absorb toxins in the body.”
But buyer beware—charcoal pizzas may not be any more nutritious than the carb-loaded kind, says Kelly Hogan, RD, CDN, clinical nutrition and wellness manager at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. While it’s true that charcoal can prevent poisons from being absorbed in the body, it can also inhibit important nutrients from being absorbed, too. Charcoal can also cause diarrhea and GI distress, according to Hogan. (For those on a health kick, you might want to try these healthy pizza crust recipes, instead.)
Nutritional doubts aside, if you’re looking to satisfy your pizza craving (and get a good photo op in the process), be sure to make the charcoal pizza your next Instagram destination.
It’s possible that Philip Roth’s bestselling, critically acclaimed novel of a young man’s bawdy, outrageous, confessional monologue to a new psychiatrist might have won as many readers under the titles The Jewboy or Wacking Off, but it would have been a lot more embarrassing to read in public. And A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis, which sounds more like a dull non-fiction manual, might not have made the best-seller list at all. These are the books that will change your life.
Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world, with nearly 800,000 cases diagnosed in 2012, according to the World Cancer Research Fund. It’s most prevalent in Asia and Africa, and is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.
The BMJ Open journal recently published a study in which researchers from the University of Southampton and University of Edinburgh found that people who drink coffee (both caffeinated and decaffeinated) were less likely to develop hepatocellular cancer, the most common form of liver cancer.
After examining data collected from 26 studies, involving more than two million participants, the researchers found that coffee reduces cirrhosis and liver cancer in a “dose-dependent” manner, meaning the more you drink, the greater its cancer-preventing powers. Among their findings: An extra cup of coffee was linked to a 20 percent reduction in risk; an extra two cups of coffee a day was linked to a 35 percent reduction in hepatocellular cancer risk; and up to five cups of coffee daily was associated with a halving of the risk.
According to MedicalXpress, “the compound molecules found in coffee possess antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic and other beneficial properties which scientists believe may explain the lower rates of chronic liver disease and liver cancer experienced by coffee-drinkers.
The authors suggest that developing coffee as a lifestyle intervention method for chronic liver disease is important, even if people consume decaf, which has a lesser effect but is still somewhat protective, according to guardian.com. Lead author of the study, Dr. Oliver Kennedy from the University of Southampton, told the Guardian, “Coffee is widely believed to possess a range of health benefits, and these latest findings suggest it could have a significant effect on liver cancer risk.”
This finding adds to the large body or research showing that coffee has numerous health benefits, but it’s not license to guzzle five cups a day, as more research is needed to understand coffee’s effects on different groups, such as pregnant women.
Whether you’re not taking advantage of coffee, there are other ways you may be hurting your liver.
Bond with dad at a local fishing hole or make a weekend out of it at some of America’s best fishing spots. When else do you get to stand side by side and catch up on life while you enjoy the outdoors? Try this neat fishing trick: Use WD-40 to spray your lures. It attracts fish and masks human odor that can scare them off.
With the amount of time it takes to book a manicure, you want a nail polish that will hold up to a busy lifestyle. But that does mean you have to shell out big bucks. One Consumer Reports study found that the longest-lasting nail polish on the market is sold for just $2 a bottle.
For the study, CR recruited 10 volunteers and had each person wear two brands of polish simultaneously, one on every other fingernail of each hand. On the seventh, 10th and 14th days of the manicures—which were applied by a professional manicurist—two trained testers evaluated the polishes’ wear. They found that Sinful Brands, CND Vinylux, and Revlon looked good up to day 10. Sally Hansen and Covergirl looked good at day seven and fair at day 10.
They found that Sinful Colors ($2), CND Vinylux ($5), and Revlon ($2) looked good up to day 10. Sally Hansen ($2) and Covergirl ($5) looked good at day seven and fair at day 10. As for Chanel Le Vernis, which is priced at $27 per bottle, four of the 10 volunteers said it chipped the day it was applied.
What’s the takeaway? A fancy label does not a perfect manicure make—and Sinful Colors, which merchandises at just $2 per bottle, was ultimately crowned the CR Best Buy.
Shop the brand online here.
Owners Gabriel & Abi Nathan pose with Herbie, after finally finishing to apply the graphics that made him “come alive.”
If you work in the mental health field for long enough, eventually you’ll hear the word “mindfulness” so often that, one day, you’ll be sitting in a treatment team meeting or at a continuing education conference somewhere and someone will say it and you’ll just start vomiting uncontrollably and you’ll never stop.
But at least you’ll be doing so mindfully.
Mental health is no different than any other field — all professions latch onto abbreviations, tropes, or fads — we’re all very susceptible to buzz-words and trends. Mental Health First Aid is thing now. “Trauma-informed care” is another one. Everything has to be “trauma-informed.” It’s not enough to do yoga with hospitalized psychiatric patients — it has to be “trauma-informed yoga.” The art on the walls has to be “trauma-sensitive.” So does the paint on those walls. And the plants in the corner.
If I sound cynical, it’s because I am. For five years, I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital and that, I suppose, will do a number on you if you’re not careful — and even if you are. When started, I was wide-eyed, innocent, and nice. A bright-eyed, warm-hearted, angelic colleague of mine, early on in my inpatient adventure, said to me in a quiet moment in the nurses’ station, “I’m so glad that you work here. You’re very good for this place.” I was touched by that comment, because I felt the same way about her. By the time I left, though, this woman no longer worked there, and I’m not sure that she would have said the same thing to me if she’d known me, five years in and about to make my own exit. In the words of another colleague, I had gone from “green, to brown, to black. And that’s okay,” he assured me, “you have to do that if you want to survive here.”
But I didn’t want to survive there; I wanted to get the hell out. Just like the patients.
I was burnt out, and I was angry that I was burnt out, which didn’t help. I was angry at myself because I had let things — like the same patients getting re-admitted constantly, getting assaulted, being around depressed colleagues, responding to frightening emergencies — get to me, when there were folks who had endured far worse and were still clocking in and out after twenty-five or thirty years. I allowed my inner-monologue to joyfully and constantly berate me.
You loser.
You phony.
You disgraceful coward.
That was in 2015. I foundered around in the darkness of depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and, probably, PTSD from the things I had seen and done and experienced at the psych hospital. I took a job at a theatre company in downtown Philly and resigned after three weeks. I handed my dazed supervisor the key to the theatre door on the sidewalk and apologized profusely. She hugged me. I took another job, and stayed for a year. I started to feel better, more confident. Then Trump got elected, and my wife’s mental health took a nosedive, too, along with a good portion of the country’s. I was mindful of what was going on around me and in my head and in my house. Despair and fear had settled in and had gotten comfortable on the couch next to the basset hound once again. I had to do something.
So I did what any stable, former mental health professional, father-of-two in his mid-thirties would do in that particular situation: I convinced my wife that it was the right time to buy a white, 1963 Volkswagen Beetle and turn it into Herbie: the Love Bug.
Surprisingly, my wife, who is typically fiscally conservative and hyper-rational, did not require any inordinate amount of cajoling or convincing to allow this momentous purchase to take place. She, too, was mindful of her emotional state and was ready to acknowledge that it was time for some joy to be injected into not only our lives, but the lives of random people in the neighborhood out walking their dogs or taking their children to school. It was time for their muddled and negative internal monologues to be interrupted by the roaring, rhythmic sounds of a 1600cc air-cooled engine approaching, time to turn their heads and see a black “53” in a white circle, some red, white, and blue stripes, and two innocent, round headlights coming down the street. Time to take a spin down Memory Lane, in Herbie.
There are lots of different kinds of smiles — there is a wry smile when your brain processes the punch-line of an off-color joke, there is a pure, Jesus-ray smile when you hear your baby laugh for the first time, there is a post-coital smile and a post-midterms smile. There is also Herbie Smile, and it’s unmistakable and, for me, it has a narcotic effect. The more of them I see, the more I want. When it’s beautiful out, I’ll take an hour and drive him up and down the main drag of this town or that town. If people give me a Herbie Smile, they get two quick toots of his endearing little horn; that’s the transaction, though it’s far from transactional. It’s more transcendent.
Herbie is good for people, and he is good for me. For my mental health. You can’t hide from people when you’re noodling around in The Love Bug, and why would you want to anyway? When I’m not driving Herbie, the part of me that wants desperately to be invisible dominates. My head is kept down. I avoid meeting people’s eyes. I stumble through routine social interactions and small-talk while sweat trickles down the center of my back. When I get behind that ivory-colored steering wheel and settle into that squishy, vinyl-covered driver’s seat, though, another part of me wins out. I don’t know if it’s a child part of me, or an exhibitionist part of me, an attention-seeking or impish part of me but, whatever it is, I can feel it in my chest and in my hands as I let down the parking brake, push down on the clutch, and gently move the gearshift lever up into First. Prepare for take-off. “Okay, Herb,” I saw, giving the steering wheel a pat, “let’s go to work.” The job of making merry. We take it very seriously.
Driving a 54-year-old movie star on wheels is a singular experience for many reasons, and there is so much that we miss, puttering around in our Subarus and Toyotas, and I try to be mindful of every single thought that passes through my mind when I’m in Herbie. I try to soak in and imprint ever Herbie Smile I see, every thumbs-up — the guy who bowed down on the sidewalk as he was about to get into his Mazda and his world just stopped when he saw us coming. Me and my little boy.
Around a month ago, a police officer from a neighboring town stopped Herbie and I as we were parking at a supermarket. I thought I had done something wrong, but he just wanted to talk about the car, about how happy it made him. We ended up talking in that parking lot for an hour, while his Chipotle lunch went cold and ignored on the passenger seat of his patrol car. We talked about parenting, about politics, about the perceptions of policing in America — about mental health, about PTSD, and trauma. He told me that he’d shot and killed someone last year who was trying to commit suicide-by-cop. He’d exited his patrol car, the guy was coming at him with a knife, and he killed him — the whole thing took fifteen seconds. Herbie and I listened as this officer talked — he talked and talked. He needed to talk. As he talked, I remembered some of the things I had tried to forget about the psych hospital. Patients trying to kill themselves on the unit. Patients attacking my friends — people I loved. Staff members screaming at each other over scandals created by borderline patients; experts at splitting and dividing and creating chaos. Tackles, restraints, injections, the floor — rolling around on the floor, trying to subdue, dodging blows or bites.
Everybody’s seen things and done things and said things in their lives that have caused pain. I’m mindful of that. And I’m mindful, too, of how, sometimes, in a small way, a small, round Volkswagen with a Hollywood pedigree can help you forget, can help you heal, can help you begin again.
Daniel’s way of killing a spider may have been on the extreme side, but her fear was real. Seeing a spider would send her into a panic, making her palms sweat, raising her heart rate, and causing her to flee the room. “I couldn’t sleep if I knew there was a spider in the house,” she says. If she saw a spider crawling along the interior of her car or on the windshield, she would have to pull over. “My fear was so bad that I almost wrecked my car more than once.”
Her fear was irrational, Daniel freely admits, and she lived her life trying to bury or overcome her fear of spiders on her own—with no success. In May 2016, Daniel took action by volunteering to be hypnotized on WFLA’s Daytime news show by hypnotist Richard Barker. “I had always been skeptical of hypnosis and was not sure that I would be able to be hypnotized,” says Daniel, “But I have always been arachnophobic and it was causing a lot of anxiety, so I thought ‘what the heck,’ I’ll step out of my comfort zone.”
Barker performed a hypnotherapy session with Daniel as the cameras rolled. When she was awoken from her session, she felt relaxed and calm. “I actually told the newscasters that I felt like I had been to a spa.” When a handler placed a tarantula in front of her, she didn’t flee—or reach for a lighter and a can of hairspray. She told Barker that she wasn’t worried. Daniel was able to handle the tarantula, letting it crawl across her hand. “Since the session, spiders no longer paralyze me—I see spiders at my house and I no longer get tachycardia or freak out,” says Daniel. “I don’t love them, but I can tolerate them.” As for hypnosis, it took just the one session to learn how to deal with her fear of spiders and she now considers herself a believer of the practice of hypnosis. “I learned that the brain is a powerful thing.”
Chock-full of direct language, plenty of cuss words, and simple, digestible quotes, the new book, You’re a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start living an Awesome Life, delves straight into what you need to do to ensure you live life as the best version of yourself. The self-help book is easy to read and reminds you of life lessons you know, but perhaps did not grasp the first time.
My friend’s thoughts were not original of course. Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, has been quoted as saying “change is the only constant in life.”
I think many of us have a love-hate relationship with change. I know I do. Certainly when things are going poorly for us, we can take solace in the fact that, no matter what, things are not going to stay the same. They might get better, or they might get worse, but they are going to be different. It’s important to note that this will happen whether we proactively try to change our situation or not.
Conversely, when life is going great for us, we “want things to stay this way forever.” Let’s keep everything the same, and these happy times will continue indefinitely. Unfortunately, that’s not the way life works. Again, whether we actively try to keep things as they are or not, change is going to happen.
If change is unavoidable, what’s the point of even talking about it? Well, we are all not only affected by change, we are affected by how we feel about change. Do we embrace it? Fear it? Resist it? Avoid it as much as possible?
Obviously, how we feel about change often depends on the situation, as alluded to above. In our day-to-day lives, however, a healthy attitude toward the idea of change is important if we want to live our lives to the fullest. We all need to follow our hearts and live our lives according to our values. If fear of change is hindering us from doing this, we can work hard to change our way of thinking.
One way we can develop a more positive outlook on change is through mindfulness. Simply put, mindfulness is the act of focusing on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. It involves noticing and accepting what is. This awareness can apply to our minds as well. We can pay attention to the choices we make (or do not make) and how they bring about change.
With change comes the unknown, and uncertainty can be difficult to accept for some people. Change often involves risks as well, and for those who are not natural risk-takers, this fact might add to the challenge of embracing change. We can use mindfulness when facing these challenges, and work toward a better relationship with change.
Life is all about choices. If you find you are not living the life you want for yourself because you are having trouble accepting and making changes, please consider therapy to help you move forward. And since we are talking about change it is interesting to note that our brains can actually change as well. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and adapt through the creation of new neural connections.
Perhaps the best thing we can all do is to live our lives in line with our values, and not be afraid to embrace change to achieve our goals. If we do this, we not only have the potential to affect change in our personal lives, but in the lives of others as well.
By now you’re probably storing a bottle of apple cider vinegar in your pantry and your medicine cabinet so that you can use the natural cure-all as part of your diet and beauty routine. But did you know that there may be another vinegar that’s just as beneficial as your beloved apple cider vinegar? Meet coconut vinegar, its hipper cousin.
A popular acidic condiment in Southeast Asia and some regions of India, coconut vinegar is a natural product produced from fermentable coconut sap and the oxidation of ethanol into acetic acid. Healthwise, it has a lot going for it, according to Lynnley Huey, MPH, RD, a registered dietician and a nutritionist on Maven.
When it comes to healthful living, both apple cider vinegar and coconut vinegar can live amicably on your shelf. Although there’s a lot more research about the power of apple cider vinegar to lower blood sugar levels and aid in digestion, coconut vinegar is thought to have similar benefits. Huey cautions that we’ll need more scientific evidence to prove any specific health claims, and you should always ask your doctor before using coconut vinegar as part of your health regimen, especially if you already take blood pressure-lowering medication.
As a beauty treatment, coconut vinegar works similarly to apple cider vinegar, as all vinegar types have antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. You can apply it topically, but studies haven’t shown it to be a proven or safe treatment for conditions like acne or sunburn, according to Huey.
Like apple cider vinegar, coconut vinegar is too acidic to be enjoyed straight up, as it can damage your esophagus (not to mention erode the enamel on your teeth), so mix it with a little mustard and oil for a salad dressing or dilute it with water and honey and drink it as a morning cleanse. (Learn how to drink apple cider vinegar). And if you don’t want to have to think before you drink, then check out the new line of drinking vinegars from Suja, which are premixed. Huey recommends keeping your intake of coconut vinegar to 1 to 2 teaspoons and up to 1 to 2 tablespoons daily, to avoid potential side effects.
If you opt to go for plain coconut vinegar, then be sure to read the label carefully. For the full benefits, coconut vinegar should be created from coconut sap, rather than water. Coconut sap contains high levels of amino acids and probiotics and enzymes, whereas coconut water is diluted.
Sleep doesn’t just feel good—it’s a vitally important part of your health. People who consistently don’t get seven or more hours of shuteye are more at risk for obesity, heart disease, depression, diabetes, and more. But sometimes, long hours at work make it seem impossible to get a decent night’s rest.
The CDC analyzed how many working adults failed to get at least seven hours of sleep in different jobs. They used self-reported data from 179,621 adults to find out which positions were most (and least) likely to get enough sleep.
After adjusting for age, sex, marital status, and education level, the survey found communications equipment operators had the worst jobs for sleep, with 58 percent saying they didn’t get at least seven hours per day. Right behind them were other transportation workers (54 percent) and rail transportation workers (53 percent).
On the flip side, air transportation workers got enough sleep most often, with just 21 percent saying they didn’t get at least seven hours. Meanwhile, only about 22 percent of religious workers, and first-line supervisors/managers and protective service workers said they didn’t sleep enough.
Surprised that air transportation jobs were the best for sleep, while rail and other transportation positions were among the worst? The Federal Aviation Administration protects pilots, limiting them to flying just eight or nine hours at a time. Pilots also need at least ten hours between shifts, with a realistic opportunity for at least eight hours of sleep. So an hour and a half commute should factor into how much time off they have.
Most of the jobs worst for sleep happened to be shift work, which could mean trouble sleeping when trying to switch “time zone” for a work shifts, says Michael Breus, PhD, clinical sleep specialist and author of The Power of When. The condition is common enough to have its own name: shift work disorder.
Jobs with inconsistent hours or graveyard shifts throw off workers’ internal clocks. “The body can never really understand when it is supposed to be sleeping,” says says W. Christopher Winter, MD, president of the Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Clinic and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It. After working a midday shift and then switching to a graveyard shift, for instance, employees might have trouble falling asleep, then feel exhausted on the job.
And shift work doesn’t have to mean late-night hours, either. It could mean working an 11-hour day, having an inconsistent schedule, or even getting a graveyard shift every other week, says Dr. Winter.
It’s not just the time clocked in that’s taxing. A commute could mean even longer hours committed to work, says Dr. Winter. “One of the worst patients I’ve seen is a train conductor,” he says. “Trains don’t leave from every city, so he had to travel to another city.” More time traveling means less time available for sleep.
Plus, graveyard shift workers often force themselves awake earlier on their days off, which actually makes things worse when they do go back to work. “They are trying to sleep when everyone else that matters in their lives is awake, so often they will ‘switch’ on their days off, and this can make sleep really tough,” says Dr. Breus.
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On the other hand, jobs like religious workers, protective service workers, and teachers might have more consistent hours. “All seem to have a definite ‘end’ to their day,” says Dr. Breus. Other than teachers, who need to bring grading home with them, most positions with the best sleep habits probably don’t need to bring paperwork home for more late-night hours, says Dr. Winter.
Even if you do need work night shifts, sticking with a consistently late schedule is actually better than taking irregular graveyard shifts, says Dr. Winter. If your job doesn’t allow the same hours every day, encourage your employer to build schedules that get gradually later through the week. “It’s a lot easier for us to push a little later than to go to bed earlier,” says Dr. Winter. You’ll find it easier to fall asleep before work, so you’ll be more alert on the job.
If all else fails and you can’t get a solid seven or more hours of sleep a night, ask your doctor about shift work disorder medications. The FDA-approved drugs will keep you from dozing off on the job. “You have a better shift and can make it home without hurting yourself,” says Dr. Winter. “Because you’re not nodding off [on the job], at home it’s easier to sleep.”
But just as the Queen has a few fascinating secrets about herself, there’s more to these purses than meets the eye. In a fashion that echoes the suave subtlety of James Bond, Queen Elizabeth uses her purse to send secret messages to her staff.
Let’s just hope Her Majesty doesn’t send any of these signals if we happen to converse with her.
As for what the Queen keeps in her bag, royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith says the items aren’t all that different from what normal women carry with them: a mirror, lipstick, mint lozenges, and reading glasses. That just proves Her Majesty knows how to be practical and fashionable.
Want to pack your purse like the Queen? Here’s what you shouldn’t carry with you and what you should pack to be insanely more productive.
The researchers looked at 683 men and women ages 18 to 73 from the Food4Me trial, a U.K.-based trial that delivers personalized nutrition and support via the Internet to adults. All the participants were screened for the FTO genetic variation, a trait that’s associated with weight gain. One group was told that they carried this variation, and they received personalized nutrition guidance. In previous research, people who carry the trait are particularly susceptible to saturated fats, benefit from increasing their intake of healthy omega-3 fats (the kind in fish and walnuts, for example), and respond well to exercise.
While the differences between the groups were small—the FTO group lost about a half-pound more and trimmed an additional inch of their waistlines compared to a control group after six months—the researchers were nonetheless enthusiastic about the results. “We think that personalized (nutrition) advice is more effective because it engages each individual better and motivates them to make specific behavioral changes and to sustain those changes,” says study author John C. Mathers, director of the Human Nutrition Research Centre at Newcastle University.
Getting tested for this genetic susceptibility probably isn’t worth the advantages suggested by these results. In fact, past research indicates genetic status as a whole may not make a major difference in weight loss. Mathers points to a larger analysis of data from eight major trials involving nearly 10,000 people published in BMJ in 2016. The results in a nutshell: “We found that FTO [gene] status did not affect weight loss,” he says.
One other positive takeaway from Mathers: “We think this is good news since it suggests that even if the genetic variation made the person a bit heavier, it would not be a barrier to losing weight,” he says. “Genetics matters but not as much as many people assume,” he says. Translation: if you’re overweight, it may not be your genes preventing you from losing it.
The bottom line: Your lifestyle matters more. The diet you eat every day makes a bigger difference in your weight, says Mathers. If you’re overweight and want to lose pounds, the advice to eat fewer fatty and sugary foods and more fruits and veggies still stands, he says. “Most people gain weight gradually over many months and years. Weight loss can take a while so patience and determination are keys to success,” Mathers adds. Plateaued? Here are 17 ways to start losing again.
His secret? Stock photo sites.
“In 2012, I uploaded around 300 of my best photos to five microstock sites. It was a tedious process of keywording, uploading, categorizing, and submitting but I was able to get them all uploaded in my spare time within a month,” the photographer wrote. “Some of the sites rejected about half the photos as not being high enough quality but enough got accepted for me to start making about $100 month in sales across the sites.” (Here’s how to take postcard-perfect pictures on your phone.)
And while Wheeler’s on the more experienced end of the amateur photography spectrum, he makes it clear that all it takes is one hit photo to bring in a sizable amount of cash. The photo for him is a landscape shot of Moraine Lake in Alberta, Canada, which has made $4,000.
“If someone buys your photo when searching a specific term, then your photo will rank higher for that term on future searches. As more people buy, the photo can move up to the first page. Once a photo is on the first page for a popular keyword then it will often stay there for a while as more sales come in.”
That said, the more generic your photos are, the more traffic they’ll get. “Shots of famous landmarks, landscapes, and photos people can’t find anywhere else are all safe bets to make a few bucks,” writes Travel + Leisure.
As for where to post, istockphoto.com and shutterstock.com are both great options and pay photographers around 15 percent on the sale of each photo.
If you’ve ever gagged at the thought of a “bloody” steak, you might want to consider medium-rare a second try. That red liquid isn’t blood.
Practically all of the blood is taken out of meat during slaughter, according to Today I Found Out. If that red juice were blood, even poultry would have that rosy color.
The red hue comes from a protein called myoglobin, which helps muscle tissue store oxygen, like hemoglobin does in your blood. And like hemoglobin, the iron in myoglobin turns red when it binds with oxygen, giving raw meat that red hue, according to the New York Times. Most mammals have high amounts of myoglobin in their tissue, which is why they’re known as “red meat.” Learn what happens when you give up red meat.
Once you throw that fresh steak on the grill, though, the heat changes myoglobin’s chemical structure, and the food turns from red to brown. When steak is red and done rare, it hasn’t lost its moisture. But heat squeezes those juices out, so by the time the meat turns brown, that well-done steak also isn’t as tender.
As it loses its freshness, even uncooked meat will start turning an unappetizing shade of gray-brown when it’s exposed to air. That’s why some meat packers treat raw steak with carbon monoxide, which prevents it from interacting with oxygen, according to The Daily Meal. As a result, the meat holds on to that rosy color—and makes you more likely to buy. Meanwhile, cured meats like hot dogs get a nitric oxide treatment to keep them looking pink.
So if you turn down rare steak to avoid food poisoning, we commend you—just don’t claim your fellow diners are swallowing blood.
MORE: 19 Secrets Your Butcher Won’t Tell You
Your father, a Dutch immigrant, owns a profitable lamp shop in downtown Philadelphia, where you’ve learned a thing or two about silver-plating and exploiting the power of light. You decide to set up your selfie studio in the shop’s backyard. And by “studio,” you mean “box”—a tin box, sealed shut except for one hole where you’ve inserted a tiny circular lens that you wrenched out of a pair of opera glasses (you can beg mom’s forgiveness later). If all goes to plan when you remove the lens cap, the day’s modest sunlight will filter into the box and etch your image—your selfie—onto a silver-plated piece of copper inside the box, a fragile canvas treated with iodine and bromine and other magical fumes you learned about in chemistry lectures.
Does this all sound crazy? Maybe so—but science says it should work! A Frenchman named Daguerre made it work (that’s what the newest journals say, anyway) so why can’t you? What does a Frenchman have that you, a 30-year-old, privately educated American polymath, don’t have? Daguerre probably didn’t go to school for chemistry. Daguerre probably doesn’t have beautifully-tousled hair.
Your box steadily situated outside, you remove the lens cap. Action! You sprint around to the front of your homemade camera, position yourself handsomely in front of the little opera glass, and cross your arms. Then, you wait. Motionless. A minute passes. Five minutes. How long do you have to hold this pose, again? You’re pretty sure it’s less than fifteen minutes, but who’s to say? Nobody has ever done this before.
After ten minutes without so much as scratching your handsome American nose, you call it. You rush back to the camera, return the lens cap over the glass, and wipe your brow. Your selfie — the world’s first selfie — is somewhere in that box, yearning to reveal your tousled hair, your brooding eyebrows, your chill, devil-may-care style. Finally, it’s almost time to share your selfie with your social network: All you have to do first is take the copper plate inside, fume it with mercury vapor to expose the latent image, remove its sensitivity to light with a special chemical treatment you read about in your science journals, rinse it, dry it, mount it on paper, then seal it behind glass for the rest of your life lest a single fingerprint smudge its delicate surface and ruin it forever.
And so, that’s what you do.
Congratulations! You are Robert Cornelius, and you have just taken the world’s first-known photographic self portrait—the world’s first selfie. On the back of the photo’s paper mounting, you write, “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.” Friends and strangers who see your selfie will encourage your craft. Next year, in 1840, you will open Philadelphia’s first portrait studio—the second such studio in all of America. You will take many portraits of pompous-looking men in black coats, but none of them look as cool or as chill as you do in your selfie. Perhaps you think of this each time a bespectacled old man sits down in front of your camera. Perhaps the fun was in the self-discovery. After a few years of this, you will abandon your studio and return to the family lamp trade.
You will die old and wealthy in 1893, remembered for bringing light into thousands of homes. But 120 years later, when “selfie” is declared the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, the world will owe far more to the light you captured on that bright, cool October day, with your tin box in your dad’s backyard.
Go. Stop. Go. Stop. The travel signals in my head were mixed, conflicting. “Are you sure you want to head to Greece this November with Kathleen?” asked my husband. “The weather could be unpleasant.”
A take-charge kind of person, my daughter quickly Googled “November weather for Athens.” “Temperatures will be slightly warmer than in New York City,” she said. “And rainfall for the month—in the two-inch range—doesn’t sound like a monsoon. As for rough winter seas, let’s hop on planes instead. We’ll have endless hot-from-the-oven, spinachy spanakopita, imagine that, and be fine.”
“You must go,” said my friend Larry, who raved about having spent Thanksgiving on Santorini. “Sunsets are among the most gorgeous in the world and the island is the legendary location of the lost city of Atlantis. It’s a paradise. All you’ll need is a warm hooded jacket.”
With his encouraging words, I booked our flights to Athens and included two Greek islands: Santorini (how could we resist such a place?) and Crete. Renowned for beaches and an abundance of ancient ruins that my parents had delighted in seeing years earlier, such as the Palace of Knossos, Crete was the furthest south of all of Greece’s islands. Translation: It has a high sun-warmth factor, a way to increase odds for a successful trip.
Go, go, go….
Sunshine and a brisk Saturday afternoon welcomed us to Eleftherios Venizelos Airport in Athens. During the next days Kathleen and I devoured the crispiest spanakopita imaginable; we ranked our favorite feta, cucumber, tomato and olive-studded salads, and tried unknown-to-us foods. No annoying lines of tourists either, as we saw sights on the Athens “A” list: from the Acropolis and Archeological Museum to the ancient Panathenaic Stadium. We poked around the ruins at Delphi, home of the famed Oracle and once considered the center of the universe.
And then came Tuesday. Heavy rain kept us dashing between museums and stores. The next day’s flight to Santorini was yo-yoed by wind gusts up to forty miles an hour, our stomachs bumping up and down, our view obscured by squalls. “I’m truly sorry,” the flight attendant said. “The storm has stalled.”
Unnerved, unsettled, we fled into the cave-like rooms. We tried to read. We heated up tea with honey to settle our queasy stomachs. Read a little more. “This isn’t how I want to spend my vacation,” said Kathleen, who hadn’t smiled in hours. “Maybe Crete isn’t experiencing the same storm. Can we fly out later today?”
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Her question mirrored my own thoughts, and yet I felt trapped by commitments. We couldn’t leave. We’d just arrived. Payments for the hotel and rental car would be lost, and costly last-minute plane reservations needed. And, oh yeah, I could hear myself telling my husband, who’d thought the trip ill-advised, that we’d never actually seen Santorini’s famous views. Like the photo in our bungalow showing a white-walled Cycladic church with a brilliant blue dome overlooking the sea, one of the more than 250 churches on the 11-mile-long island. “Nope,” I’d have to tell him, “we didn’t see anything.”
“Let’s not decide right now,” I suggested to Kathleen, trying to put pep into my voice. “At least let’s give the place a day.”
“Okay,” said Kathleen.
What? Where did her change of heart, her sense of grace come from? To my surprise, and now sounding as cool as a Greek cucumber, she added: “Let’s give it a try. I just came to a realization. I want adventures when I travel—not predictable beach vacations. I want experiences that are awakening and exciting. So, if not too cold and rainy, I’d like to explore the island and see what makes people call it a paradise.
“But,” she continued pragmatically, “maybe we needn’t stay the whole time.”
We were a silly sight—our colorful plumage of clothing consisting of long-sleeved shirts under hooded sweatshirts, and puffy vests, pashminas and gloves. And thus warmly adorned, we sped off on adventures:
… Up a rocky hill to ruins at ancient Thira. With the rain easing, we drove to the southern side of the island and then climbed up rugged switchbacks. To reach the old hill-topper village with the remains of a few houses and the agora, or market, we had to inch cautiously over a thin slippery land bridge with an unsettling 1,200-foot precipice on one side and a jagged slope on the other.
“Can you believe this?” asked Kathleen, exhilarated by crossing safely. “We’re retracing steps Greeks made thousands of years earlier, perhaps daily since their farms were on flat land along the sea far below.”
… To another cliff-side village, Oia. Despite more showers, we stayed another day and ventured to Oia. A friendly woman corralled us on a deserted street and in excellent English asked, “Would you like to attend my church’s feast day?” The tiny Greek Orthodox church she attended was the size of a very large American kitchen. Several dozen black-clad women were singing and talking in one corner, more people than we’d seen in the entire town. They pressed glasses of sweet red mavro wine into our wet hands. Showers lifting, we stepped back outside and marveled at the town’s precarious perch on the cliff’s edge.
“The earthquake of 1956 caused immense damage,” said the woman, pointing to abandoned cliff cave houses, known as skafta. “It was the Aegean’s largest quake of the twentieth century. It wasn’t as damaging, of course, as the volcanic eruption of 1650 BC that blasted out the center of the island, but homes crumbled, some tumbled into the sea, and yet as before our lives somehow went on.”
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As we imagined such an occurrence, the woman disappeared into the church. She emerged carrying two platters. “Try these buns,” she said. They were filled with a pocket of crispy sesame seeds. Her hospitality was like a warm embrace of friendship, especially when she added, “The seeds will bring you good luck.”
… To black sand beaches. Red sand, too. The boarded-up restaurants and villas along the beach didn’t bother us. The wonderful upside of this emptiness meant the beaches were ours alone. In damp black sand our footprints edged deeper.
… To VERY leisurely meals. No reservations needed. At a restaurant named Poseidon, on our third night (yes, we stayed the full time and did see Fira’s iconic blue-domed church), we waited and waited, and waited some more, for dinner: artichoke-stuffed squid and grilled grouper with a tomato-olive sauce. “The chef is now back,” our waiter explained sheepishly. “Your dinner will be out shortly. The chef was busy studying something beautiful.”
Seeing our puzzled look, the waiter then confessed, “He went out for a smoke, saw a beautiful girl and began to flirt until the owner started to yell and, and, and….”
Suddenly, Kathleen laughed. Instead of reprimanding the waiter impatiently, she leaned back and smiled, and out came a loud, happy sound. A joyful laugh.
Several days later on Crete, sunny and warm as anticipated, we continued to relish the off-season travel pleasures of uncrowded beaches, museums and historical sites. In driving merely half an hour out of the modern city of Irakleio, for instance, we visited the Palace of Knossos—in essence, time traveling back to around 1700 BC, or so it felt because again we were virtually the only ones there. Well, and the ticket-taker and four strutting, trilling, iridescent blue-green plumaged peacocks.
“Give me a pinch,” said Kathleen. We were now facing a charging bull, actually on an ancient fresco. “I can’t believe we’re in the same palace once visited by Grandma June and Grampa John,” she said. “I’m so glad we traveled to Greece in the off-season.”
Grace surrounds us. The challenge is to let go of anxieties and worries, the tendency to complain, that can hover nearby like a Greek fog. A sunny disposition—your sunny disposition, wherever you are—can let grace shine and clear the air for everyone. That and a hooded jacket!
It was August 11 2015, peak season for the family’s Viking-style, fjord-side hotel-restaurant at Gudvangen, Western Norway. Olav was expecting up to 500 guests, mostly Asian tourists, to eat there before boarding a ferry. He was about to cancel the appointment when he remembered the van they’d just bought, a big Mercedes Sprinter. No-one was using it and Olav jumped in.
Leaving the hotel, he turned onto the main road with the Gudvanga tunnel 300 meters ahead. The 11.4 kilometer-tunnel is one of many that perforate Norway’s mountains. Two years earlier a truck caught fire inside it: 67 people were evacuated, many with serious smoke inhalation injuries. The tunnel’s closure for repairs was a disastrous blow to Olav’s business. The road to his hotel was blocked and the stream of tourists halted. Although it was difficult, they managed to keep their staff on.
The Gudvangen Fjordtell was his life’s work. His family ran the business before him and the current and unique “Old Norse” building was designed by his wife, Torill. The absence of bookings during this season resulted in their darkest hour but they had survived. Once business started to take off again Olav had little time to dwell on the accident.
This day was no different. Inside the tunnel everything seemed normal. When almost through, Olav spotted an unusual light some 50 meters ahead. Then he saw something burning.
Horrified, he stopped dead. A tour bus was on fire, at the back where the engine was, dozens of Asian-looking tourists were stumbling towards him, getting away from the flames. They’re going the wrong way, Olav thought, knowing the tunnel exit was just 500 meters ahead round a bend ahead of him. Then he realized the bus was now blazing so fiercely they couldn’t get round it.
A former volunteer firefighter, Olav first had to raise the alarm. Grabbing his cell phone, he entered the codes with adrenalin-shaking hands. “A bus is on fire! Close the gates!” He knew there could be many vehicles inside the tunnel already. He also knew that the automatic system would ventilate the smoke back towards Gudvangen to ease access for the fire brigade stationed near the exit ahead.
Thick smoke poured into the tunnel. Every second counted. There was no way the tourists could outrun the choking, blinding fumes.
Quickly, Olav started to turn the van round. On all sides desperate tourists blundered about, making the u-turn painfully slow. Finally in position, Olav jumped out and opened the sliding doors to the empty cargo space.
“Get in here!” he shouted, pointing and waving; the tourists were Chinese and he knew they usually spoke little English. At last they started to pile in. Olav ran round the van to make sure no-one was left behind. He pushed the last two tourists into the front passenger seats.
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The tour bus driver was still trying to kill the flames with a fire extinguisher. It was futile.
“Leave it!” Olav shouted but the man waved him off.
There was no time to argue. The smoke could black out the tunnel any minute. As he started the van, Olav noticed the tourist next to him had a torch. Instantly he made the man shine it on the tunnel roof to check the smoke. Hot smoke will first creep along the ceiling and then, as it cools, sink to the ground to suffocate anyone there and blind any driver. As he took off, the smoke started sinking to the floor of the tunnel, closing in on the van.
Racing to outrun the smoke, Olav met new challenges. Unsuspecting drivers were coming towards him. He flashed his lights, leaned out, yelled: “Fire ahead! Turn round!”
Most of the dozen or so drivers got the point and turned, including a shuttle bus with 50 cruise ship passengers. But some ignored the warnings and continued.
Packed like sardines, the tourists bumped about for a nerve-racking stop-and-go 20 minutes before the van finally left the tunnel. Olav stopped at the nearby gas station. Inside the van the shocked passengers were silent, but when he opened the doors to Gudvangen’s heavenly, postcard-perfect scenery, out they came, dazed but little by little smiling.
Olav located their guide and made him count the group. They were all there. Olav told them to walk to his hotel and wait in the lounge as they had now missed their boat to their next destination, the village of Flåm. After briefing emergency workers, then in his capacity as the local harbourmaster, Olav arranged for a charter boat to take them to Flåm. Medics had been called out to meet them there.
That’s it, Olav thought, back in his hotel, taking a breath. But it wasn’t quite over. A few hours later he was summoned to Flåm. With the tunnel closed, a helicopter hired by a TV channel took him over the mountain. Surrounded by all 32 Chinese tourists, the embarrassed Norwegian was hugged by each in turn and greeted as their hero. All their luggage was lost in the burned-out bus, including some passports, but they were alive and unharmed. As tour guide James He concluded for the local press: “He gave us a second life.”
“I just did what anyone would do,” Olav says modestly.
Torill believes the drama shows her husband in a nutshell: always determined to help people. “The locals say it’s good he took the van that day because if he’d taken the car, he’d have pushed all 32 into it!”
Another five people were later rescued from the Gudvanga tunnel. Four, including the bus driver, suffered serious smoke inhalation. Olav Hylland was awarded a Carnegie Diploma for heroism. Fortunately this tunnel fire didn’t hurt his business as much as the earlier one. Indeed, the rescue has made him a popular attraction among Chinese tourists.
“I was very active and ran a full marathon at 26 weeks pregnant. I ran a 5K even pushing my two year old in a stroller during the race, the day before my symptoms started, around my 33rd week,” Dr. Dillhoff says. “I downplayed my symptoms, attributing it to pregnancy. However, the shortness of breath was significant enough that I could no longer run, and was short of breath simply carrying on a conversation,” she recalls.
The swelling continued and didn’t improve over the next two weeks. At this point, given the severity of her symptoms and lack of improvement on blood thinners, her vascular surgeon and obstetrician recommended Dr. Dillhoff have a surgical treatment for her DVT, but there was a catch: Having it while pregnant would have been very dangerous for her unborn baby. So at 37 weeks (considered full term), Dr. Dillhoff was induced.
“My biggest fear that day was dying. I’m a surgeon myself and have seen many people with DVT and pulmonary embolism, but I was as scared as I’ve ever been the day I went in for induction. I was so worried about the baby and my long term health at that point.” Thankfully, the birth happened without a hitch and her newborn son, Jackson, was perfectly healthy.
After being released from the maternity ward of the hospital, Dr. Dillhoff was readmitted to a heart hospital five days after giving birth for treatment of her life-threatening DVT. A catheter was placed into the vein and medication was given to help break up the clot. “This was done for 24 hours and then a stent was placed, because I had a condition that predisposed me to getting a blood clot called May Thurner syndrome, where the right iliac artery compresses the left iliac vein.”
Since her newborn son was only days old, Jackson went with her to the new hospital and stayed by her side. “He got all kinds of attention from the nurses since they were used to a much older population and never really have babies over there,” she recalls.
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After receiving the stent, her condition quickly improved. She recalls, “The swelling in my leg was better immediately. I went home after two nights and was running within a week.” Dr. Dillhoff tells Reader’s Digest that she remains on blood thinners and will continue them until it has been six months past the original diagnosis date.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 900,000 people annually are affected by DVT, and 10 to 30 percent of those affected will die within one month of diagnosis. The risk of developing deep vein thrombosis is four to five times greater during pregnancy, and symptoms of the potentially deadly condition include sudden shortness of breath, swelling in one or both legs, chest pain during breathing or coughing (that may produce blood), dizziness and faintness, and rapid pulse. Sudden death is the first symptom for a quarter of all DVT cases, a chilling statistic that highlights the importance of awareness of the condition. DVT symptoms can often masquerade as other conditions, and awareness of the dangerous condition is key.
Dr. Dillhoff explains, “It is very serious and I knew how serious it could have been. The risk of death from a pulmonary embolism is about 10 percent, so I knew this was a big deal.” Though death is a concern, the affects of a blood clot can stay long after the condition has been resolved. Dr. Dillhoff says, “With a clot in the leg, a significant portion of patients get post thrombotic syndrome, which causes swelling and pain. I was concerned I would no longer be able to function normally and work as I had or take care of my kids, let alone run like I was accustomed to.” Today, Dr. Dillhoff is grateful for her complete recovery. She says, “Our life is really back to normal. We are so lucky to have gotten the care we got and had a great outcome.”
Although anyone can develop a deadly blood clot, pregnant women in particular need to pay careful attention to any painful swelling of the legs, as their risk is greater and pregnancy can often mask the subtle symptoms of the condition. Here are pains you should pretty much never ignore.
