Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Visitors flock to the New York Botanical Garden all summer long for a whiff of its fragrant blooms. On Friday, they were drawn to an altogether less inviting odour. Known as the “corpse flower”, it emits a pungent odour of rotting meat, luring pollinators that feed on dead animals. The six-foot plant – it…
Science is in big trouble. Or so we’re told. In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted with a serious case of doubt — doubt in the very institution of science. As reporters covering medicine, psychology, climate change, and other areas of research, we wanted to understand this epidemic of doubt. So we…
Had there been a male contraceptive pill in 1976, I probably wouldn’t be here to write this. That was the year when, after my mum–may she rest in peace–had been on the pill for 12 years, health worries made her doctor tell her to come off it. “She said to the doctor, ‘I’ll get pregnant’,”…
One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and…
As an unmarried woman approaching 30, I’m increasingly aware of the looming biological deadline that might make it difficult to have both a career and a family. Or at least what I thought was the biological deadline. In fact, as this video shows, the belief that you’re taking a lot of risk with your fertility…
Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the…
Photo Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and chief executive of Theranos, has seen her personal wealth fall from $4.5 billion to zero. Credit Brendan McDermid/Reuters United States regulators have banned Elizabeth Holmes, the chief executive of Theranos, from owning or operating a medical laboratory for at least two years, in a major setback for the embattled…
AC isn’t just about one’s social status and affiliation; it’s a matter of public health: Heat waves kill at least as readily as cold, causing hundreds of deaths every year in the U.S.Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images “Why is America so over air-conditioned?” asks the New York Times in last weekend’s Sunday Review. The…
Giulia’s second hospitalization was even harder than the first. On the quiet nights I spent at home, after Jonas fell asleep, the reality hit: This isn’t going away. In the psych ward Giulia took to collecting leaves and scattering them throughout her room. When I’d visit, she’d unleash a flood of paranoid questions and accusations,…
(iStock) On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.” Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy….