Learning requires inefficiency.
In the early twentieth century it had been used to remove the hair of children with scalp infections, such as ringworm, so that doctors could see and treat the fungus. But that practice had been aband...
In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries th...
Imagination enlarges us—as though our nervous systems could be made vast and at home in the world, if not at ease with its cruelties and losses. Comfort is dangerous. You can be overwhelmed by sufferi...
Did you know that way back in the 1980s some scientists proposed an ambitious effort called the Human Protein Project to map all human proteins? It never happened. Instead, the NIH backed the Human Ge...
We and all the others and everyone—regardless of the lives we’d led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wante...
That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend the next morning to find out whether he is still alive.
Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.