“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters
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…
Back in early February, Brown authored an article on the North Dakota oil boom. It is a great piece of reporting. Also, a fine bit of writing, as captured by this sentence: In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood…
1. I didn’t turn 50 Rinse and repeat that blessing for two more years! 2. Healthcare reform has provided plenty to blog about for the whole year! Rinse and repeat for . . . ? 🙁 3. Neither of my children are adolescents . . . yet! 4. Two…
I remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…
I recently spoke with Duke University’s The Chronicle about gender pay disparity in research medicine.
Click here to see the Q&A…
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…