April 5, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – The Food and Drug Administration is making plans to significantly expand the number of gay and bisexual men who could donate sperm anonymously. Longstanding agency rules ban anonymous sperm donations by men who acknowledged having sex … Read More
March 8, 2024
(New York Times) – More than 230 million women and girls around the world have undergone female genital cutting, according to a new analysis by UNICEF, an increase of 30 million since the organization’s last global estimate in 2016. While … Read More
March 4, 2024
(The New Atlantis) – Transhumanism is so over. Wrinkles are so back. Young women’s social media feeds are flooded with plugs for Botox. By our early twenties, modernity is already dangling opportunities in front of us to flee from a … Read More
February 28, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Opposing technology isn’t antithetical to progress. See illustrated story here.
February 21, 2024
(Center for Humane Technology) – We usually talk about tech in terms of economics or policy, but the casual language tech leaders often use to describe AI — summoning an inanimate force with the powers of code — sounds more… … Read More
February 19, 2024
(Medscape) – How big is the problem? According to the first-ever European Union (EU)–wide survey on loneliness, EU-LS 2022, conducted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), around 13% of 20,000 respondents reported feeling lonely most or all of the time … Read More
February 12, 2024
(NPR) – A new film streaming on Hulu considers a subject that’s sometimes in the news, but not often in entertainment: hospice end-of-life care. Suncoast is writer-director Laura Chinn’s fictional account of her life in the early 2000s as a … Read More
December 18, 2023
(Wired) – When Spike Jonze’s Her came out in 2013, the film about a lonely man falling for an artificially intelligent operating system won widespread praise. Watching today, the qualities critics celebrated at the time are still there—it’s a gentle, … Read More
December 6, 2023
(Science) – The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is launching a new series today examining its own complicity in perpetuating slavery and its legacy in the United States. In doing so, the 211-year-old journal joins several other publications and … Read More
December 4, 2023
(Vox) – Uncertainty is normal. Becoming a parent is a life-changing decision, after all. But this moment is unlike any women have faced before. Today, the question of whether to have kids generates anxiety far more intense than your garden-variety … Read More
November 16, 2023
(MedPage Today) – In some tragic instances, taking a selfie for social media can be fatal. A study by Australian researchers, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, makes the bold claim that such selfie-related deaths — particularly falls … Read More
November 7, 2023
(Washington Post) – Longevity has become an industry, a subject of bestsellers, podcasts and newsletters. But is a life meted out in metrics, often for a price, worth it? (Read More)
November 6, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer, which had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera on Friday, would seem to have the most improbable operatic subject imaginable. It is based … Read More
November 3, 2023
(The Guardian) – Raphael takes her reasoning a step further and argues that wellness has become a new form of faith. As organized religion has retreated from everyday life, she argues, wellness has rushed in to fill the void. “It’s … Read More
October 31, 2023
(The Free Press) – MrBeast’s act of kindness exposed one of the big debates roiling the medical profession: should disabilities be fixed—or celebrated? (Read More)
October 23, 2023
(Axios) – A new, more expansive definition of “infertility” could lead to more help for hopeful LGBTQ+ or single parents. Why it matters: The decision by an influential organization of reproductive health providers to redefine the condition could lead to … Read More
October 11, 2023
(New York Times) – Ten months ago, Ms. Chapin was thrust into the center of the nation’s obsession with true crime, as armies of podcast listeners, internet commentators and amateur sleuths were consumed by the mystery of how Ethan Chapin … Read More
September 19, 2023
(Aeon) – All of this exposes the lie of efforts by mainstream charities to glamorise breast cancer – to celebrate ‘survivors’ with a barrage of pink merchandise, pink-themed events, and pink-ribbon fundraising. It’s a vehicle for the promotion of heteronormative … Read More
September 14, 2023
(STAT News) – For 40 years, researchers have unsuccessfully tried to explain — or debunk — the “Hispanic Paradox,” the finding that Hispanic Americans live several years longer than white Americans on average, despite having far less income and health … Read More
July 24, 2023
(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – Writing about Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists requires a few disclosures first. The history of the Bulletin is inseparable from the history of the making of the nuclear bomb, … Read More
June 1, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro has provided a temporary home for people who plan to set up a new jurisdiction to encourage biohacking and fast-track drugs that slow or reverse aging.
June 1, 2023
(Vice) – The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) has taken its chatbot called Tessa offline, two days before it was set to replace human associates who ran the organization’s hotline.
May 16, 2023
(TIME) – Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, still remembers an advertisement for cold medicine he saw in late 2019. The ad showed a visibly sick businessman walking through an airport, “and the message was, ‘You can solider … Read More
March 30, 2023
(The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) – The Terminator series of films and other media, for example, began with a sci-fi film about a humanoid killing machine sent back in time by a hostile artificial-intelligence network of the future. For … Read More
March 29, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – But like a couple of creative obstetricians, Israeli filmmakers Ruthie Shatz and Adi Barash have instead delivered “Emergency NYC,” a healthy, bouncing, eight-part spinoff that looks at the medical system not only from the perspective of … Read More