Well Happy Thrive

Summer awe, in three acts: spectacle, the cosmos, and nature. From eclipses, meteor showers, and fireflies to s’mores beside soaring redwoods and music under the stars, we explore the science of awe, talk with the Hollywood Bowl about how they create their famous summertime fireworks spectacular, and share ways to find more wonder before summer ends. Ah, summer. A season filled with outdoor concerts. Fireflies and fireworks. The Perseid meteor shower and star-filled skies.

Calling all knitters, needle-pointers, gardeners, and potters! Woodworkers, birdwatchers, archers, and amateur bakers! Quilters, musicians, jigsaw-puzzle enthusiasts, gamers, and more! Are you someone who has become emotionally invested in the success of a single tomato plant? Perfecting your great-grandmother’s lemon meringue recipe? Surprisingly competitive about your pickleball game? For years, hobbies got filed under “nice to have” — something squeezed in after the “real” work of life was done.

Get thee to a museum! Get thee to a piano lesson! Stop to smell the roses. Literally. Surround yourself with flowers, music, beauty, and moments of awe. They may be nourishing us in ways science is only beginning to understand. Earlier this year, I reported a story on the recent science of How Beauty Changes the Beholder. Researchers shared how aesthetic experiences affect attention, emotion, and the sense of self — that beauty is far from just decorative.

What once felt like fantasy is starting to take shape, in ways we are only beginning to understand. For years, I’ve found myself asking people a simple question—sometimes at dinner parties, sometimes to close loved ones: If you could have one superpower, what would it be? Flying comes up often. So does invisibility. My answer has always been the same: to speak every language on Earth.

The Artemis II crew. Ages 47 to 50. Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote a feature for CNN with a headline that quietly pushed back on a cultural narrative: “Generation X Is Balanced and Happy.” Far from the “slacker” moniker the media foisted upon us, we were working, building families, staying connected—and, by most measures, doing just fine. I’ve spent much of my career reporting on how people live—how we work, love, adapt, and make meaning over time.

Springtime, the season of a symphony of flowers in a kaleidoscope of color, new growth budding in neon green, birds singing and darting, butterflies dancing. The earth, alive. New life emerging. The light stretches, illuminating what was once dark. For many, this season of renewal symbolizes second chances and the hope that we, too, can begin again. Research suggests that hope isn’t just something we feel in response to what’s happening around us, but something we can practice and build.

Beauty is often treated as a luxury—something extra, something optional. But what if it isn’t? What if beauty is quietly shaping how we think, feel, and even who we’re becoming? I grew up with a deep respect for beauty. Not just in the obvious ways—my parents immersed me in art, music, museums, theatre, ballet, the symphony, even the opera—from a very early age.

Four-leaf clovers have long symbolized luck. But behavioral scientists suggest that some of the habits of “lucky” people may help create more opportunities. Luck often seems mysterious — a fortunate break, an unexpected opportunity, a chance encounter that opens a new path. Across cultures and throughout the ages, humans have tried to conjure it, from four-leaf clovers, lucky coins, and horseshoes, to the numbers seven and eight. Many people live by superstitions.

Wellness & Mind What science suggests about sustaining love long after the flowers fade Ah February. The month of Valentine’s Day, when love is celebrated at its most demonstrative — roses, bouquets of balloon hearts, oxytocin-inciting dinners, chocolate that lickably sticks to your fingers, love poems, and grand gestures. But once the decorations disappear, the flowers fade, and daily life resumes, what truly sustains a loving connection over time?

On Thursday, Team USA's 20-year-old Alysa Liu became the first American woman to win an individual figure skating gold medal since 2002. Her effervescent joy was contagious. With bold, dyed "halo" stripes in her hair, a "smiley" frenulum piercing, and a free skate set to disco-goddess Donna Summer's MacArthur Park Suite, she seemed to skate on her own terms - fearless, expressive, unmistakably herself. What made the victory remarkable was not only the performance but the path.