A small magazine for people who would rather feel well than be optimized.

Founding

How we got here.

Common Hours began in the spring of 2019 as a Tuesday-evening newsletter sent to 213 readers — mostly former Asheville Citizen–Times subscribers who had followed Margaret Whelan’s weekly health column when the paper still ran one.

The pitch was modest. One essay a week. No listicles, no affiliate links, no sponsored “wellness” anything. The early letters were written from a kitchen table in West Asheville and edited on Sunday mornings by a friend who happened to be a copy editor at a magazine in Atlanta. The first cover image was a photograph of a coffee cup that Margaret had taken from her porch.

Seven years later, the format has changed but the temperament has not. We’ve added two editors and a small roster of contributing writers, moved to a one-room office on Broadway, and started publishing on the open web in addition to the inbox. We’ve turned down offers from three supplement companies and one mattress company. Subscribers now number somewhere in the low five figures, which feels about right.

We are not a wellness brand. We do not sell a course. We do not have an “ecosystem.” We publish writing about staying alive in a body, and we try to do it honestly.

What we cover

Five sections, written slowly.

We organize our work around the parts of health most people can actually influence, and where the literature is rich enough to argue with.

• i.SleepArchitecture, timing, the gap between what sleep research has established and what sleep marketing has done with it.
• ii.MovementRunning, lifting, walking, and the unglamorous middle ground — how to train for a life, not a screenshot.
• iii.NutritionWhat the evidence actually supports about protein, carbohydrate, fiber, timing, and the social context of eating.
• iv.Mental HealthAnxiety, depression, attention, grief — written carefully and without prescription.
• v.RecoveryThe work the body does when you stop. Sleep’s sibling, and a section we treat with as much seriousness as training.

The team

Three editors and a handful of regulars.

Common Hours is run by three full-time editors and supported by a small group of contributors — physicians, dietitians, coaches, and writers we’ve come to trust.

Margaret Whelan

Editor in Chief

Founded the newsletter in 2019. Spent eleven years writing the health column at the Asheville Citizen–Times. Reads too much sleep research and walks five miles before answering email.

Daniel Park

Senior Editor, Movement

Came to Common Hours from a physical therapy practice in Greenville. Writes about running, strength, and the long, boring middle of training that nobody photographs.

Aisha Reyes, RD

Contributing Editor, Nutrition

Registered dietitian. Splits her week between a clinical practice in Charlotte and writing for Common Hours. Has strong opinions about how the protein conversation has been mishandled.

Editorial standards

What you can expect from anything published here.

These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They’re not novel; they’re just the ones we have found are easiest to violate when the work gets busy.

• 01We don’t take payment for coverage.No affiliate links, no sponsored posts, no product seeded for review without disclosure. If you see a product mentioned by name, no one paid us to put it there.
• 02We cite primary sources.Where a claim depends on research, we link to the study, not the press release or the blog post that summarized it. We try to read the methods, and we’ll tell you when we can’t.
• 03We write slowly.Most pieces sit with an editor for two to four weeks before publication. We’d rather be late than wrong about a metabolic pathway.
• 04We correct openly.Corrections are posted at the bottom of the piece with a date and a short note explaining what changed and why. Nothing is silently rewritten after publication.
• 05We’re honest about uncertainty.A lot of what gets written about health is more confident than the underlying evidence supports. We try not to do that, even when it would make a better headline.
• 06We don’t prescribe.Nothing on this site is medical advice. We write to inform a conversation between you and the people who actually know your body.