It was just before closing time at a Verizon store in Bushwick, New York last May when I burst through the door, sweaty and exasperated. I had just sprinted—okay I walked, but briskly—from another Verizon outlet a few blocks away in the hopes I’d make it before they closed shop for the night. I was looking for a SIM card that would fit a refurbished 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 that I had recently purchased on eBay, but the previous three Verizon stores I visited didn’t have any chips that would fit such an old model.

“Waiting isn’t a hurdle keeping us from intimacy and from living our lives to our fullest. Instead, waiting is essential to how we connect as humans through the messages we send.”

Self restraint is necessary to reach goals. But the modern world constantly tests our willpower and hinders our productivity–whether with social media, chatty colleagues, or old-fashioned daydreaming. And people with better self restraint are more successful than those with less. So how can you increase your self restraint and build the willpower to more successfully complete your goals?

In 1985, a premature baby was born in Maryland who needed surgery to tie off a dangerous blood vessel near his heart. The newborn, Jeffrey, died weeks after the procedure. His family learned afterwards that none of the procedures had been performed with analgesics; the only drug administered was a muscle relaxant. The press ran with the story, alerting Americans to the grim realization that hospitals in the United States routinely operated on critically ill premature babies without giving them painkillers.

“Are we ready to open the doors?” an event producer in a skintight catsuit asked into a headset. As EDM blasted over a PA system, hundreds flooded into the ballroom of San Diego’s Town & Country resort: tanned-and-toned millennials, a group of friends from Venezuela, an engineer from Lagos, Botoxed retirees, and elderly couples pushing Zimmer frames. They took their seats, awaiting the good news:

When Johansson gets punched in the face, Heidi Moneymaker takes the hit. When Elizabeth Olsen crashes through a window, it's C.C. Ice who ends up with scratches. Hollywood's most unsung behind-the-scenes heroes star in a Hollywood Reporter photo portfolio.

Juan Sanchez grew up along the Mexican border in a two-bedroom house so crowded with children that he didn’t have a bed. But he fought his way to another life. He earned three degrees, including a doctorate in education from Harvard, before starting a nonprofit in his Texas hometown. Mr. Sanchez has built an empire on the back of a crisis.

When it comes to events in space, 2019 is going to be an extraordinary year. That’s not to say 2018 will be an easy act to follow. After all, SpaceX debuted the world’s most powerful operational launch system (called Falcon Heavy), sent a car beyond Mars, and helped lift off more orbital rockets than in any year since 1990.

On a late-summer day in Los Angeles, I plan to meet Terry Crews at the Getty Museum because, in addition to everything else Crews does—which, seriously, is everything—he’s a hugely talented visual artist. I figure we’ll go deep on the photography exhibit. I’ll ask: “Terry, what’s the inner monologue of the person in this picture?” Really get my Barbara Walters on. What happens instead is that we get nine steps into the Getty Center, turn to one another, and talk for five solid hours—about toxic masculinity...

False rape accusations loom large in the cultural imagination. We don’t forget the big ones: The widely-read 2014 Rolling Stone article, later retracted, about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia; the 2006 accusations against innocent members of the Duke University lacrosse team. These cases are readily cited by defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers and anyone else who wants a reason to discuss the dangers of false allegations.

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

Gas station hotdogs don't take breaks. You may pull into a rest stop, refill your car’s tank, empty your own, grab some snacks, and peel out again. The whole time, the dogs will have been rotating, slowly, on their shiny metal rollers. When you finally turn in for the night, they may be turning still.

I was born with the usual set of limbs. When I was nine months old, I contracted meningococcal septicaemia, a dangerous infection of the blood, which very nearly killed me. I survived, but because I had sustained major tissue damage, it became necessary to amputate my right leg below the knee, all of the fingers on my left hand and the second and third digits on my right hand. I learned to walk on a prosthetic leg at the age of 14 months, and have gone through my life wearing a succession of artificial limbs.

In July 1999, Jim Wright and his wife Joyce were traveling along a New Mexico roadway in their 1995 Fleetwood American Eagle RV when, suddenly, the vehicle’s left-front tire failed. The tire was a Goodyear G159, a tire now linked to numerous fatal crashes but has never been recalled and has never faced a serious federal investigation until recently. Wright tried—and failed—to regain control of his RV, which eventually slammed into another motorhome head-on.

Nearly every measurement of weight you’ve ever made, from peeking at your bathroom scale to measuring out flour for a recipe, can be traced back to just a single object: a metal kilogram made of platinum and iridium that resides under lock and key in an underground vault in Paris. It’s called the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, and since its creation in 1889 it has been the standard by which the world’s weights are defined. But not for much longer.

The president of the United States was both a racist and a very difficult man to get along with. He routinely called blacks inferior. He bluntly stated that no matter how much progress they made, they must remain so. He openly called critics disloyal, even treasonous. He liberally threw insults like candy during public speeches. He rudely ignored answers he didn’t like. He regularly put other people into positions they didn’t want to be in, then blamed them when things went sour.

The persistent haze over many of our cities is a reminder of the polluted air that we breathe. Over 80% of the world’s urban population is breathing air that fails to meet World Health Organisation guidelines, and an estimated 4.5 million people died prematurely from outdoor air pollution in 2015.

If you gauge the climate inside the Democratic Party merely by which candidates won its 2018 primaries, you might think reports of its leftward lurch are exaggerated. Despite the hoopla about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Ayanna Pressley’s upset victories in congressional races in New York and Massachusetts, not a single incumbent Democratic governor or senator lost a primary to a left-leaning challenger.

Soya, almond, oat... Whether for health issues, animal welfare or the future of the planet, ‘alt-milks’ have never been more popular. Are we approaching dairy’s final days? A couple of weeks ago, some eye-catching billboards began appearing around central and east London. Entire tunnels of the underground were plastered with the adverts; the sides of large buildings were covered.

My wife, Laura Levis, did everything she could to save herself when the asthma attack began. She went to Somerville Hospital and called 911, too. How could she have been left to die just outside the emergency room?