Look up from your screens—sitting is the new smoking, warns this commonsense guide to incorporating movement into daily life.
An argument for building small bursts of movement into the day—an antidote to stalled-out health resolutions and a reminder that sustainable change need not be grand to be transformative.
For Zomorodi, host of NPR’s “TED Radio Hour,” the evidence is stark: Long hours of typing, scrolling, and sitting are harming our health. Without abandoning our devices, embracing brief, regular movement—walking or simply moving around the house or office—can offset sedentary time. With colleagues at NPR and Columbia University, she launched the Body Electric study, which drew more than 20,000 participants from around the world. Zomorodi joined as well and found that even for a healthy person, doing five minutes of movement every 30 minutes significantly lowered blood pressure and blood sugar. Environmental factors can also foster better health. She points to “blue zones,” including Sardinia, Greece, and Costa Rica, where many residents enjoy high-quality lives past age 100. Studies, she notes, link happiness and social connection to longer life, and “People who maintain responsibilities as they age—whether it’s preparing meals, helping raise grandchildren, or tending gardens—tend to age better.” Such engagement helps sustain a “fluffy,” resilient brain. Communities can also contribute. In 2009, the community of Albert Lea, Minnesota, redesigned infrastructure to encourage walking. “By the end of the project, 1,100 residents had joined walking groups, and remarkably, 60 percent of them were still active five years later. Collectively, Albert Lea residents self-reported losing 7,280 pounds. The city reported a 40 percent reduction in healthcare costs for its workers.” Zomorodi argues that such changes can radically improve public health. She concludes, “underneath all the data and advice, it really comes down to this: What kind of old person do you want to be?” This upbeat, lively volume heartily encourages all ages to take a stand.
Look up from your screens—sitting is the new smoking, warns this commonsense guide to incorporating movement into daily life.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781250411204
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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