A change of address does not reliably produce desire. The research on holidays finds small average gains in wellbeing that fade soon after ordinary life resumes. The research on women's desire keeps returning to conditions — sleep, quiet, the absence of low-grade vigilance — rather than to scenery.

The three things working against comfort on a long-haul flight are dry air, reduced cabin pressure, and hours of stillness in one position. Two of them are decided before you leave the house — by what you wear and what sits in the seat pocket rather than in the overhead bin. The third is decided by…

For most of the twentieth century, the largest structure in the human body devoted entirely to sensation went unmapped, unlabelled, and in several editions of the standard anatomy text, unmentioned altogether.

Ask an older woman in your family how she kept her figure through decades of raising children, and she will rarely mention a number. She will talk about supper at a set hour, about bread that took time to rise, about not leaving the table hungry and not returning to it out of boredom.

Somewhere around 1:40 in the morning, in a bedroom that looks entirely unremarkable from the street, a woman is performing a manoeuvre she has never once described out loud. Slowly, in increments, using the weight of one shin as an anchor, she is reclaiming eleven inches of duvet. Her husband is…

For most of human history, women wore far less against their skin than they do today, and what they did wear was made from cotton, linen, and wool — fabrics that let air move. The tight, synthetic, shape-holding pieces filling store shelves now are a very recent arrival. They look polished under…

There is a browser tab that almost never survives the evening. It gets opened somewhere between the first date ending well and the second one being agreed to, it stays open for anywhere from four minutes to a slightly embarrassing forty, and then it gets closed with the particular efficiency of a…

V-Diaries  |  As told by Lilly J. My mother taught me the most important lesson of my life in about ninety seconds, standing in a hallway, holding a bag of oranges.

Why did the 1948 edition delete what 19th-century anatomists had already drawn in full? Imagine a medical student in the autumn of 1948, sitting at a desk with the newest edition of the book every physician owned. She turns to the section on female anatomy, and something is not there. Not…