Category: Uncategorized

My friend Danny Black was over for lunch yesterday and I accidentally let drop that, although both my eyes work, my brain only uses one eye at a time, which means I have no binocular vision. This came up because we were talking about a place the mate loves to stop for lunch when he’s…

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and seeing as how I don’t have to do any cooking (a fellow gluten-and-milk intolerant friend is having us for dinner later), I thought I’d write a short blog about one of the many things for which I am thankful: people who have used my work to carry out extraordinary teaching. One…

My friend and colleague Kiira Triea died two days ago. Several people have asked me to provide an obituary that they can share, so I am trying. I find I have begun by turning on far more lights than the morning daylight really requires. Kiira probably would have approved of me summing up her extraordinary…

[If you want the background to why I wrote and posted this, read my book Galileo’s Middle Finger.] Slate’s Amanda Schaffer has a sharp new article out on the paper I just published with Ellen Feder, PhD, and Anne Tamar-Mattis, JD. In response to our indictment of what’s happened at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM), spokesperson Ian Michaels of…

When I was about thirteen, my mother gave me Calvin Trillin’s book Alice, Let’s Eat. My guess is she gave it to me for three reasons: (1) my mother loved good writing; (2) she had named me Alice; (3) I loved to eat. My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as…

Yes, the book is finally done. Well, “done,” anyway. The manuscript is a whole manuscript. Twelve (ack) chapters, 370 pages double-spaced. Four years. (?!) It still needs a little tweaking based on what my seven highly trusted first-readers have said, and I have to finish the source approvals and fact-checking, and have it lawyered, and,…

There’s an old adage about how pyromaniacs become firefighters, criminals become cops, and crazy people become psychiatrists. Let’s talk about ethicists. When I accidentally fell into the field of medical ethics by virtue of doing patient advocacy from within academia, I was struck by how many bioethicists proper were afraid of being seen as “the…

My muse Pixie is making me cut school again. I’m on the train to the office (a four-hour affair), and I’m supposed to be rereading my book manuscript to figure out what the conclusion should say. I’ve finished the narrative chapters—eleven chapters that were supposed to be six; three years that were supposed to be…

This really does have to be brief, because I’m supposed to be doing Nothing But The Book in terms of writing. But a good friend is facing a book deadline of her own, and I offered to be her book nag, and so I found myself sharing with her my tips on how to manage…

Here’s hoping Aron and Ellen don’t wander over to my site and discover this blog. The two have them have been charged with a special task (Ellen filling in for when Aron is out of reach) and have been doing it well: every time I say to one of them, “I think I should take…