Stories from the Edge

Wellness Is Now a $7.5 Trillion Economy. The Part Your Boss Pays For Stopped Growing.

The global wellness economy hit a record $7.5 trillion in 2025, according to figures the Global Wellness Institute released this week, up 8.9 percent in a single year and projected to approach $11 trillion by 2030. It is now nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry and equal to roughly 61 percent of everything the world spends on health. Buried in the same report is a smaller number that says more: of eleven sectors, exactly one has stalled. Workplace wellness, the part your employer pays for, has grown 1.3 percent a year since 2019. Everything else is booming because people are buying it themselves.

The Doctor in Your Feed Was Never Real

Somewhere in your feed right now, a doctor who does not exist is explaining why the pill in his hand fixed what your real doctor couldn't. He has a white coat, a warm bedside voice, and a face built by a machine that has never attended medical school,

The Plant That “Witnessed” a Murder — And the Ones That Actually Did

Near-Death Experiences Are Being Studied in Hospital ICUs. The Results Aren't What Skeptics Expected.

The standard explanation for near-death experiences is that they are a product of the dying brain — oxygen deprivation, neurotransmitter floods, the mind's last-ditch attempt to make sense of its own shutdown. It's a clean, materialist explanation, and for decades it was enough to stop

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