That Lingering ‘Meh’ Feeling Has a Name -    

Persistent depressive disorder is underdiagnosed, and many who suffer from it have never heard of it.

By the time Amanda Stern was in her mid-40s, she no longer suffered from clinical depression. And her panic attacks, which had started in childhood, were mostly gone. But instead of feeling happier, she said, “I felt wallpapered in an endless, flat sadness.”

Confused, she turned to her therapist, who suggested that she had dysthymia, a mild version of persistent depressive disorder, or P.D.D.

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Most Fitness Influencers Are Doing More Harm Than Good -    

Research suggests that many exercise-themed social media can be harmful to mental health. Here’s how to find #fitspiration you can trust.

According to some estimates, Instagram is home to around 50,000 fitness influencers, most claiming to have the secrets to a healthy lifestyle. While some share science-backed helpful tips, others promote fitness advice that’s misguided at best and dangerous at worst.

In a new study, researchers found that nearly two-thirds of the 100 most popular “fitfluencers” — a term that can describe any influencer who posts content related to fitness — lacked sound advice or posted messages that could negatively affect people’s mental and physical health by, say, promoting exercise as a tool to become skinnier.

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A new tool supported by OpenAI will help parents access paid leave - Fortune   

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Johnson & Johnson’s Jennifer Taubert is reportedly one of two candidates in line for the CEO spot, women are suing the New Jersey State Police for gender bias, and OpenAI supports a new tool that will help parents access paid leave. Have a terrific Tuesday!– Power of paid leave. As ChatGPT gained popularity with consumers over the past year—and conversations about the safety risks of AI got louder—Reshma Saujani started to think about other ways AI could impact society. As the founder of Girls Who Code, she was well-connected in the tech industry, and as the leader of a new nonprofit called Moms First, these days she had one issue on her mind: paid family leave.

So Saujani reached out to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to pitch an idea: an AI tool that would help parents access paid leave. While there are plenty of parental leave fact sheets and guidelines out there, she envisioned a more comprehensive tool that would rely on the technology of ChatGPT to answer users’ questions from “Do I have paid leave and how much?” to “Do I still qualify for ‘birthing parent’ paid leave if I have a C-section?”

Altman—well before his dramatic OpenAI ouster and return—liked Saujani’s idea and connected Moms First with Novy.ai, an OpenAI-connected startup that helps scale AI projects. The project was also supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

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Revisiting New York’s Historic Abortion Law in “Deciding Vote” - The New Yorker   

In April, 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, New York passed the most expansive abortion law in the U.S. Three other states passed similar bills in the same year, but New York's was of particular national significance because it allowed patients to get an abortion even if they weren't residents. This made the state a hub for people from other parts of the country seeking to safely end their pregnancies. That role has become a lasting element of New York's political identity—in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe, in 2022, it passed a suite of laws to again become a sanctuary state for those seeking abortions—but that 1970 law almost fizzled out in the state legislature.

An earlier version of the bill, co-sponsored by a Democrat and a Republican, had already been defeated, and pressure from constituents and religious groups who opposed the measure was intensifying as the second vote neared. Several Assembly members who had supported the bill told the New York Times that they had been denounced in sermons at their churches as murderers. When the bill returned to the legislature a week later, the proceedings were televised, and it was debated for four hours. Three members reconsidered their affirmative votes, leaving the bill likely to fail by a margin of one. The outcome seemed so inevitable that observers had already started filing out of the chamber when George Michaels, a member from Auburn, a city of roughly thirty-five thousand people in the Finger Lakes, asked to speak. Michaels was a Jewish Democrat from a largely Catholic and Republican district, and he had originally voted against the bill, in keeping with the views of most of his constituents. When the bill had seemed certain to lose, Michaels was content to vote against it—but he didn't want to be single-handedly responsible for its defeat. Michaels reversed his vote, knowing that his decision would cut his political career short and endanger his law practice. The consequences came quickly. Nine days later, the Democratic Party in his county declined to endorse him for reëlection.

Jeremy Workman and Robert Lyons learned about Michaels in 2019, and, Workman told me, found his actions both "simple and startling." They decided to make a documentary about him when they realized how little was remembered about his role in the events leading up to Roe. Lyons told me that, when they watched his speech on the Assembly floor, they wanted to "roll it back to figure out how this man got to this moment." They initially expected that they would draw only on archival footage, but, when they began speaking with Michaels's family members and discovered how influential they had been in forming his views on the legalization of abortion, the scope of the film, "Deciding Vote," grew. Workman and Lyons spent the following three years conducting interviews with Michaels's relatives, former colleagues, and a volunteer archivist who has maintained a file on him in the attic of a local museum.

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