In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
A U.S. Senator mistakenly tweeted that 14% of UNC students have COVID-19. A local news station fact-checked that tweet, explained the math, and the Senator didn’t back down. Sigh… The University of North Carolina made national news after reporting a coronavirus outbreak shortly after students returned to campus. Before students could even get their first…
Here is a news article from Canada, experiencing the kind of healthcare inflation that causes them to call experts in the U.S. for advice—people like me, but also some actual credible authorities! Some see it as an eternal struggle: the goodhearted doctor championing the best treatments, no matter the cost, while doing battle against the…
Here are some projections on what illnesses Medicare enrollees are experiencing now, and what they will be experiencing 20 years from now, courtesy of the Brookings Institute:
It would have been a difficult ending under the best of circumstances. Composing what would be his last opera, Giacomo Puccini was struggling to humanize Turandot, daughter of the Emperor and a woman of mesmerizing beauty. Early in the opera, she had cruelly disposed of a series of want-to-be suitors, beheading some and torturing others,…
Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades: Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.