Kirk Peffer, 39, started noticeably losing his hair in his late twenties.

“It was just like a slow, gradual decline to a point where you’re like, ‘Man, I really wish I could do something about this,’” says the on-air jockey for 94.5 Bay FM in San Jose, CA. “For the longest time I kind of defined myself by my hair, and so losing it was a blow to me as a person, or at least, my confidence.”

Male-pattern baldness impacts an estimated 50 million men in the United States, and more and more men like Peffer are turning to surgical…

Trusting the internet for medical advice has always been a crapshoot. A runny nose paired with a vivid imagination can quickly metastasize to a terminal prognosis from a number of sources, and often you don’t know the qualifications and motivations of social media advice-givers. But 27.5 million Americans don’t have health insurance, and even those with health care can find the out-of-pocket costs of physical therapy to be an insurmountable barrier. Sometimes it feels there’s nowhere else to go, really, but online.

When I was a marketing manager at a small San Francisco startup, I used my employer-provided insurance to…

Cory, a 26-year-old emergency medical services professional, had been working in southern California for several years when he started seeing teal ambulances, emblazoned with the words “Ambulnz,” zipping around Los Angeles. Founded in 2015, Ambulnz transplanted the push-button ride hailing model to non-emergency medical transport, offering on-demand patient transport services for hospitals and other care providers. The majority of Ambulnz business involves moving patients from hospitals to their homes, or transferring patients between medical facilities. This type of service is called interfacility transfer, or IFT.

Cory, who requested anonymity for this piece, was enrolled in paramedic school at the time…

On the r/LegalAdvice subreddit, readers can “ask simple legal questions” like how to handle a $60,000 inheritance, or what to do when your car is repossessed, or whether an individual has legal recourse if an ex deletes a college thesis. On January 7, 2016, a poster sought advice on the shipment of unsanctioned contraband. “…the company refuses to sell it here,” wrote Reddit user orochiman. “Just wondering if the feds will come shoot my dog if I order it from Europe.” The substance in question? Toothpaste.

Sensodyne Repair & Protect with NovaMin has established a cult following among those seeking…

I was never particularly curious to experience the sensation of falling out of an airplane. But in the summer of 2015, out of a sense of obligation, I stood in front a vertical wind tunnel in Tukwila, Washington.

At the time, I was working at Amazon as a marketing specialist, and our team had signed up for a corporate group activity at iFLY, an indoor skydiving facility. For roughly 60 seconds, iFLY simulates the sensation of free fall via a system of fans circulating air through a plexiglass tube, known as a vertical wind tunnel. …

I’m not mad, exactly. And betrayed isn’t the right word, either — I don’t really seek out advice columns, and I’m not a regular Dear Abby reader, so her recent highly publicized, casually racist edition doesn’t make me feel like anyone has let me down. But as someone whose life is closely tied to the question discussed in said column, I do feel some very specific things.

Last month, an advice-seeker nicknamed “Making Life Easy” wrote to ask Dear Abby about starting a family. The wife, born and raised in India, wants to give their future children Indian names. Making…

It’s a simple phenomenon, but once you see it, it’s impossible to ignore. A large social media account posts something vaguely race-related, like, say, a CNN report on Colin Kaepernick. Scroll down through the replies and you’ll find thinly veiled or just blatantly racist statements. Note the profile photo (the avatar) on that trash opinion. What is it?

A dog.

Raffi Cavoukian warned us. He warned us about the dangers of capitalism, the robot apocalypse, climate change, and most of all, the rise of fascism in the Trump era. Have you been paying attention, or are you still just humming “Down by the Bay” like a fool?

We’re in an era where our childhood heroes are being exposed as deeply evil, morally absent monsters and abusers by the day. Hungry for something pure in this god-forsaken world, I wondered what the 70-year-old folk singer behind “Bananaphone” and “Baby Beluga” was up to. In short, we never should’ve stopped listening…