INNOVATION  Two years ago, Bernadette Popella and her husband, Hubertus, packed their bags and left Germany. After three decades as a licensed pharmacist and owner of a pharmacy in Hamburg, Bernadette had finally given up.

“I was always disappointed, because I found that I couldn’t really help people. I found myself … a slave of the pharmaceutical industry,” says Popella, through speech tinged with a German accent. “And I didn’t want that anymore.” Read More>>

Poet Mary Jane Nealon always had big dreams. “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a nurse or a saint. I wanted to be heroic,” she writes in the first line of her memoir, Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life, which won Middlebury College’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for nonfiction. Read More>>

Say you’re just not happy with the quality of hair that sprouts from your head — it’s plain unruly, or too curly, or frizzy. What you want are silky, straight strands that move as one, like a sheet of captured light. But blow-drying and flat-ironing your hair for 45 minutes every day doesn’t fit your lifestyle. Enter the Brazilian Blowout. The 90-minute treatment promises to make your hair smooth and shiny for up to 12 weeks. The product is put on the hair, and a blowdryer and flat iron are used to smooth it out. Sounds simple enough.

Not so fast. Read More>>