Author: Reporter

Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said in May, in declaring the latest public health epidemic. About half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an 81-page report from his office. “We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told The Associated Press in an...

At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. As the closing music swells, Wayne’s character looks around at his kin and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone. It is a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale — that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way. In...

A bipartisan congressional group from Nevada and California asked the Biden administration in late April to fast-track federal funds for a private company to build a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area. All six of Nevada’s elected federal lawmakers and four House members from California sent the letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. They said they were on board with a proposal from Brightline West to spend more than $10 billion to lay tracks along the Interstate 15 corridor. Traffic jams on the interstate often stretch for 15 miles (24 kilometers) near the...