Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of…
When I was in my 20s, I remember my therapist patiently listening to me complain about how out-of-my-depth I often felt around other gay men. I was asking her why they always seemed so effortlessly aloof and cool, whereas I was – and to some extent, still am – a slobbering golden retriever of a…
WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump is weighing naming as Food and Drug Administration commissioner a staunch libertarian who has called for eliminating the agency’s mandate to determine whether new medicines are effective before approving them for sale. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” the candidate, Jim O’Neill, said in a 2014 speech to a biotech…
On a cool October evening in 2012, Samantha Trimble walked into the lobby of Millwood Hospital, a low-slung brick building on the side of a road in Arlington, Texas, seeking a free mental health assessment. A few weeks earlier in the AP world history class Trimble taught, after a kid started acting childish, she put a…
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself. Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been…
Scientific research has a gender gap, and not just among humans. In many disciplines, the animals used to study diseases and drugs are overwhelmingly male, which may significantly reduce the reliability of research and lead to drugs that won’t work in half the population. A new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that research done…
Daughter Earth.Photo: John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images There are a lot of reasons to rue the fact that Donald Trump will be our next president. But if you accept the reality of man-made climate change — and are fond of human civilization and/or coral reefs — the president-elect’s indifference to the Earth’s warming should…
President-elect Donald Trump promised to drive down the cost of medicines, defying investors who saw a boon in his election last month and injecting himself again into a contentious economic debate. “I’m going to bring down drug prices,” Trump said, according to a transcript of an interview posted on Time magazine’s website as it named him its…
Laura June Dec—02—2016 04:12AM EST Of the fringe groups given encouragement with the election of fringe man Donald Trump to the highest office in the land (US), possibly none are more sad or more inherently-potentially-theoretically dangerous than the anti-vaxxers: those opposed to vaccines because they “don’t work,” they “cause autism,” or they’re “part of a…
Earth, captured by NASA spacecraft DSCOVR. Image: NASA/NOAA Earth: It’s the planet we live on. Understanding its complex dynamics is essential to the continuation of human civilization on our home world, and beyond it. That’s why NASA has spent the last decade heavily investing in its Earth Science Division, with the support of the…