Until I moved to North Carolina, it never struck me as odd that people talk about “April showers bring May flowers.” That nice little bit of rhyming doesn’t make sense down here in the south. Which made me think: but what would this phrase look like in different parts of the country? Here are my…
My heart was warmed by a new, and very positive, review of a Critical Decisions. I always find myself agreeing with people who liked my book. Funny thing. Anyway, here is the review: “This is a very belated review. And I mean that as a compliment. As soon as I finished reading Peter Ubel’s Critical Decisions,…
“If you insure them, they will come.” Those words might as well be the mantra of hospitals across the country, because they can expect an onslaught of customers thanks to the expansion of health insurance under Obamacare. A recent study published in Science showed increased emergency room use among people in Oregon who became eligible…
As a behavioral scientist, I have long been interested in self-deception. But I’ve never thought about it this way before, as pictured in a tremendous drawing by Jonathan Bartlett: (Click here to view comments)
Thanks to science, we are confronted with new discoveries every day. But there are some things that science can’t teach us, and which we need to learn without its help. This point was made marvelously in an essay in the Atlantic monthly by Clancy Martin, who was discussing the increasing number of popular books written by…
I read for lots of reasons, of course. For entertainment. For information. For intellectual stimulation. To fill up a rainy day, since I can’t play piano for eight hours at a time. But another reason to read is to make me a better writer. In a wonderful essay in the Atlantic monthly, Richard Bausch makes…
Do you think this will work to get people to stop texting and driving? (Click here to view comments)
The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid eligibility this year in those states which decided to follow its provisions. That means lots of people are now newly eligible for Medicaid. However, the number of people signing up for Medicaid in the states has been underwhelming. Which raises a question: how much can we expect enrollment numbers…
The Cornell Alumni Magazine had a wonderful article recently, on its famous former professor, Carl Sagan. Here is my favorite Sagan quote from that article: Look again at that dot. . . . On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their…
First a quick apology – this post is a bit outside of my normal range of topics. But I thought I would share it with you anyway. This is a picture from the University of Chicago Magazine, showing spending on federal contracts by week of the year. That tall bar on the very right –…