Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.
We can spend sixty-eight thousand dollars per TB patient in New York City, but if you start giving watches or radios to patients here, suddenly the international health community jumps on you for crea...
Too much protocol.
Infections and Inequalities
If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility.
He recites the names of the trees, vines, shrubs, flowers that he’s planted here over the years. I count about forty different species. Finally, in the dim light from the patio, he studies a new fern...
How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the I that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
Engineers want to produce something, said Wallach. I didn’t go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering’s all about, the hell with it. He went to nigh...
Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.
Virchow would write, ‘My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.’ He had a knack for aphorism. ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medici...
Money is a fictional thing that is supposed to go around. Hoarding it is a sin
Little sleep, no investment portfolio, no family around, no hot water. On an evening a few days after arriving in Cange, I wondered aloud what compensation he got for these various hardships. He told...
A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough’s basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company...
The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb Beyond mountains there are mountains, which meant that when you’d solved one problem, you couldn’t rest because you had to go on and solve the next.
Sure, I said. But some people would ask, ‘How can you expect others to replicate what you’re doing here?’ What would be your answer to that? He turned back and, smiling sweetly, said, Fuck you. Then,...
Si los oías sólo dos veces, los recuerdos de Lou podían parecer monótonos. Si los oías muchas, se convertían en viejos amigos. Eran reconfortantes.
Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the...
If two smart and logical people disagree it's because they are acting on different information
Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.
Quixotic,