In his wonderful 1992 book – Lincoln at Gettysburg – Gary Wills explains that one of the reasons the Gettysburg address was so powerful is that Lincoln did not use any proper names – that’s right any – in the entire address. Consider this portion of the speech: Now we are engaged in a great…
In an article from the Atlantic last January, Joshua Lang wrote a wonderful article about the challenge of deciding whether surgical anesthesia actually makes people unconscious, or whether people remember parts of their surgery and are traumatized by them later. In the article, he quotes George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated…
In a recent edition of the New Yorker, the magazine published a story by Dashiell Hammett and one of the paragraphs in that wonderful story nicely captures the way that waiting for something bad to happen can be worse than experiencing that bad thing. In the scene, a group of people stand on the sidewalk…
I am not going to be posting any new blogs for a while, because I will be traveling – a nice mixture of vacation and writing, mostly out of reach of desktop computers and laptops. I expect to return in August, refreshed and reinvigorated. I hope all of you find some summer relaxation time too….
I have been thinking a lot about C Everett Koop lately, ever since his death on February 25 at the ripe old age of 96 and more recently with the announcement that our current Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, is planning to step down from that post. In particular, I have been pondering what made Koop…
In an article about Natalie Maine, the former lead singer for The Dixie Chicks, Hiatt writes about the way her conservative, country fan base reacted when she spoke negatively about President George W. Bush. I thought it was worth sharing this sentence: It was as if she’d French-kissed Saddam Hussein while setting fire to a…
The war of 1812 was sometimes called “Madison’s war” by those who opposed the President’s call for military action against Great Britain. A whole slew of grievances was building up between the two countries, especially with Britain’s bullying behavior in the seas. But it was also clear that Pres. Madison was itching for war, and…
I was recently struck by two news headlines that hit my email inbox on the same day: “Most Doctors Don’t Meet U.S. Push for Electronic Records” and “Sebelius touts new emphasis on healthcare data“. Do you see the problem here? If we really want to leverage “big data” to improve health care, we need physicians…
I recently quoted a couple sentences from Mann’s provocative article on the energy industry. Here is another gem I thought I’d pass on: To ask utilities to take in large amounts of solar power–electricity generated by hundreds or thousands of small installations, many on neighborhood roofs and lawns, whose output is affected by clouds–is like…
I have long been a fan of single sentence paragraphs. I really have. When used properly, an occasional one-off sentence can really stand out, amidst the tumble of longer paragraphs made up of complicated sentences. Here’s a good example from The Power Broker. In this part of the book, Robert Moses has spent an intense…