A Sane Person’s Privacy Nightmare
At Slate today I examine the potential privacy nightmare posed by the emerging healthcare sector that wants to use data gathered from smartphone use to spot men...
Category: Writing
Smartphone psychiatry? How NIMH director Tom Insel turned from brain scanners to social tech
Around this time, Insel told me recently, he’d just finished a talk describing the wonderful things the NIMH was discovering about the brain when a man in the a...
John Berger and Susan Sontag’s delicious shoptalk and big hair
What a fabulous conversation this is, between two giants we’ve lost. You see here, in this quiet, quietly intense, intensely curious conversation — in which (a ...
On Ending Blindness
I spent much of last winter working on a story about what it might take to end global blindness. I’m tickled to see the result now on and inside the cover...
Ernest Hemingway, Clutterbug
“Like his father, he saved every totem that touched his hand.” “Hemingway was someone who felt the talismanic power of objects, of things, of the materiality of...
How you read, Alice Munro writes, and war comes home
Here are three of the five items on today’s edition of my semi-regular “Read 2 of these and call me in the morning” mailing. The life, death, and resurrection o...
Is SCOTUS’s gambit to wreck healthcare unprecedented?
Linda Greenhouse says it is — and that next to SCOTUS’s decision to put Obamacare on the choppping block, Bush v. Gore was nothing. There was no urgency. There ...
Yaba-daba – my “Social Life of Genomes” story won a AAAS award.
A good day (so far). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that “The Social Life of Genes” (Pacific Standard, Sept/Oct ...
Biology/Brains and Behavior/Culture/Culture of Science/Genetics/History of science/Medicine/Readings/Writing
Christine Kenneally’s Rich, Rompy Read on Genes
Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanis...
Philip Seymour Hoffman says goodbye
As David Denby notes in a satisfying review, “A Most Wanted Man,” made from the John le Carre film of the same title, makes an apt goodbye from Philip Seymour H...