Science
Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?
You made it , longer than about percent of readers so far.
The Painting
As you may recall, the painting you just spent time with is “Nocturne in Blue and Silver,” by the American artist James McNeill Whistler. (You may be familiar with one of Whistler’s more famous paintings — a portrait of his mother.)
The one you just spent time with currently hangs on the second floor of the Harvard Art Museums:
Lauren O’Neil for The New York Times
The painting, part of a series that Whistler started in the late 1860s, shows the industrial banks of the River Thames in London in hazy blue tones.
In an 1885 lecture on the interaction between nature and the artist, Whistler spoke of the transition from day to night, “when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.”
That mark we just saw is Whistler’s “signature,” and we see a version of it in many of his paintings. It is derived from the form of a butterfly; he iterated on the symbol throughout his life.
And the second reflection? Well, this is where things get fun. You may crave a definitive answer, but the painting itself doesn’t really provide one.
Kate Smith, a senior conservator of paintings and head of the paintings lab at the Harvard Art Museums, has looked at infrared photographs of the painting. She has a theory of her own.
She believes Whistler may have started the painting one way and then simply changed his mind, flipped the panel upside down and started over.
Ms. Smith explained that this mystery reflection could be what’s called a pentimento — a change to a piece of art that slowly emerges over time. It’s possible that when this painting was finished, this reflection wasn’t there — by design. It may have emerged only decades later.
Or Whistler may have intentionally left the ghostly reflection in for us to see. He described the paintings in this series as arrangements of “line, form and color first.” Once, he was asked to confirm if figures in another painting were people. He wouldn’t say one way or another.
“They are just what you like,” he said.
(If you want, look again now that you know more.)
The Point
This painting was well suited as a subject of our experiment: It has mysteries revealed upon close inspection. But the point of the exercise was not exactly for you to notice the mysteries. It was just to get you to notice at all.
The act of focusing is both possible and valuable, researchers say, no matter how intimidating or pointless it might seem. That’s particularly important in a world where typical office workers spend an average of less than a minute at a time on any one screen, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span.”
When you’re used to a manic social media feed, “it’s hard to pay attention to content that doesn’t change,” she said.
Think again about the time you spent looking at the painting.
At first, you may have felt that it was too dull to hold your interest for even 10 seconds, much less 10 minutes.
When Professor Roberts at Harvard first conceived of this assignment — the three-hour version — she saw it as a launching point to help students write an art history research paper. But these days she also sees it as a way to teach patience. (She recommended this Whistler painting for our exercise.)
Many of her students, she says, react to the assignment with “horror.” (This may have happened to you, too.)
“It’s a combination of, ‘Oh, my God, that’s impossible,’” she said. “And also at the same time, the sense that it’s remedial.”
But they usually find the experience, as you may have, neither too difficult nor too simple. The students see that they did not notice everything worth seeing in the painting at first glance, she said. And they find that by being a little bored, and a little outside their comfort zone, they can see something new.
If you liked the way you felt, try the exercise again with any piece of art. Or, if you’re feeling bolder, print out Professor Roberts’s original assignment. Then go to a museum, pick a work of art and settle in.
Consider also a song, or a poem. Or skip art altogether.
“You can just go look at a tree,” she said. “You can look at a rock.”
Your attention is a product of a lot of things, said Professor Mark, not all of which are in your power. But a little practice can help. “We do many behaviors that are automatic,” she said. “Becoming aware of such automatic behaviors is a skill, and we can then better control where we place our attention.”
And with that skill honed, you may linger more, and better.
The sun had barely risen over the Pacific Ocean when a small motorboat carrying a team of Indigenous artisans and Mexican biologists dropped anchor in a rocky cove near Bahías de Huatulco.
Mauro Habacuc Avendaño Luis, one of the craftsmen, was the first to wade to shore. With an agility belying his age, he struck out over the boulders exposed by low tide. Crouching on a slippery ledge pounded by surf, he reached inside a crevice between two rocks. There, lodged among the urchins, was a snail with a knobby gray shell the size of a walnut. The sight might not dazzle tourists who travel here to see humpback whales, but for Mr. Avendaño, 85, these drab little mollusks represent a way of life.
Marine snails in the genus Plicopurpura are sacred to the Mixtec people of Pinotepa de Don Luis, a small town in southwestern Oaxaca. Men like Mr. Avendaño have been sustainably “milking” them for radiant purple dye for at least 1,500 years. The color suffuses Mixtec textiles and spiritual beliefs. Called tixinda, it symbolizes fertility and death, as well as mythic ties between lunar cycles, women and the sea.
The future of these traditions — and the fate of the snails — are uncertain. The mollusks are subject to intense poaching pressure despite federal protections intended to protect them. Fishermen break them (and the other mollusks they eat) open and sell the meat to local restaurants. Tourists who comb the beaches pluck snails off the rocks and toss them aside.
A severe earthquake in 2020 thrust formerly submerged parts of their habitat above sea level, fatally tossing other mollusks in the snail’s food web to the air, and making once inaccessible places more available to poachers.
Decades ago, dense clusters of snails the size of doorknobs were easy to find, according to Mr. Avendaño. “Full of snails,” he said, sweeping a calloused, violet-stained hand across the coves. Now, most of the snails he finds are small, just over an inch, and yield only a few milliliters of dye.
new video loaded: This Parrot Has No Beak, But Is at the Top of the Pecking Order
By Meg Felling and Carl Zimmer
April 20, 2026
For months now, menopausal women across the U.S. have been unable to fill prescriptions for the estradiol patch, a long-established and safe hormone treatment. The news media has whipped up a frenzy over this scarcity, warning of a long-lasting nationwide shortage. The problem is real — but the explanations in the media coverage miss the mark. Real solutions depend on an accurate understanding of the causes.
Reporters, pharmaceutical companies and even some doctors have blamed women for causing the shortage, saying they were inspired by a “menopause moment” that has driven unprecedented demand. Such framing does a dangerous disservice to essential health advocacy.
In this narrative, there has been unprecedented demand, and it is explained in part by the Food and Drug Administration’s recent removal of the “black-box warning” from estradiol patches’ packaging. That inaccurate (and, quite frankly, terrifying) label had been required since a 2002 announcement overstated the link between certain menopause hormone treatments and breast cancer. Right-sizing and rewording the warning was long overdue. But the trouble with this narrative is that even after the black-box warning was removed, there has not been unprecedented demand.
Around 40% of menopausal women were prescribed hormone treatments in some form before the 2002 announcement. Use plummeted in its aftermath, dipping to less than 5% in 2020 and just 1.8% in 2024. According to the most recent data, the number has now settled back at the 5% mark. Unprecedented? Hardly. Modest at best.
Nor is estradiol a new or complex drug; the patch formulation has existed for decades, and generic versions are widely manufactured. There is no exotic ingredient, no rare supply chain dependency, no fluke that explains why women are suddenly being told their pharmacy is out of stock month after month.
The story is far more an indictment of the broken insurance industry: market concentration, perverse incentives and the consequences of allowing insurance companies to own the pharmacy benefit managers that effectively control drug access for the majority of users. Three companies — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRx — manage 79% of all prescription drug claims in the United States. Those companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of three insurance behemoths: CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group, respectively. This means that the same corporation that sells you your insurance plan also decides which drugs get covered, at what price, and whether your pharmacy can stock them. This is called vertical integration. In another era, we might have called it a cartel. The resulting problems are not unique to hormone treatments; they have affected widely used medications including blood thinners, inhalers and antibiotics. When a low-cost generic such as estradiol — a medication with no blockbuster profit margins and no patent protection — runs into friction in this system, the friction is not random. It is structural. Every decision in that chain is filtered through the same corporate profit motive. And when the drug in question is an off-patent estradiol patch that has negligible profit margins because of generic competition but requires logistical investment to keep consistently in stock? The math on “how much does this company care about ensuring access” is not complicated.
Unfortunately, there is little financial incentive to ensure smooth, consistent access. There is, however, significant financial incentive to steer patients toward branded alternatives, or simply to let supply tighten — because the companies aren’t losing much profit if sales of that product dwindle. This is not a conspiracy theory: The Federal Trade Commission noted this dynamic in a report that documented how pharmacy benefit managers’ practices inflate costs, reduce competition and harm patient access, particularly for independent pharmacies and for generic drugs.
Any claim that the estradiol patch shortage is meaningfully caused by more women now demanding hormone treatments is a distraction. It is also misogyny, pure and simple, to imply that the solution to the shortage is for women’s health advocates to dial it down and for women to temper their expectations. The scarcity of estradiol patches is the outcome of a broken system refusing to provide adequate supply.
Meanwhile, there are a few strategies to cope.
- Ask your prescriber about alternatives. Estradiol is available in multiple formulations, including gel, spray, cream, oral tablet, vaginal ring and weekly transdermal patch, which is a different product from the twice-weekly patch and may be more consistently available depending on manufacturer and region.
- Consider an online pharmacy. Many are doing a good job locating and filling these prescriptions from outside the pharmacy benefit manager system.
- Call ahead. Patch shortages are inconsistent across regions and distributors. A call to pharmacies in your area, or a broader geographic radius if you’re able, can locate stock that your regular pharmacy doesn’t have.
- Consider a compounding pharmacy. These sources can sometimes meet needs when commercially manufactured products are inaccessible. The hormones used are the same FDA-regulated bulk ingredients.
Beyond those Band-Aid solutions, more Americans need to fight for systemic change. The FTC report exists because Congress asked for it and committed to legislation that will address at least some of the problems. The FDA took action to change the labeling on estrogen in the face of citizen and medical experts’ pressure; it should do more now to demand transparency from patch manufacturers.
Most importantly, it is on all of us to call out the cracks in the current system. Instead of repeating “there’s a patch shortage” or a “surge in demand,” say that a shockingly small minority of menopausal women still even get hormonal treatments prescribed at all, and three drug companies control the vast majority of claims in this country. Those are the real problems that need real solutions.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, the executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at New York University School of Law, is the author of the forthcoming book “When in Menopause: A User’s Manual & Citizen’s Guide.” Suzanne Gilberg, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Los Angeles, is the author of “Menopause Bootcamp.”
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