Part the First: Beware of Resting on the Shoulders of Atlas. Dr. Scott Atlas is a radiologist who is now ensconced in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford (naturally, and in the tower, no less). One can only surmise from the general run of their work product that (true) Revolution and […]
Read more...Part the First: Jessica Wildfire on Apathetic Americans. As a paid-up member of the Professional Managerial Class who came from a thoroughly working-class background, I tend to hear and see things differently from most of my colleagues. An enduring theme among them is “They just don’t seem to care…” Not exactly. From Heads Above Water: […]
Read more...Cancer has been recognized as an environmental disease since the first description of chimney sweep’s cancer by Percivall Pott in 1775. The primary social determinant of this disease is described well in this article Lancet Oncology (Abstract then unfortunately a paywall), even if the “social determinants of health” are anathema during our MAHA Moment. More […]
Read more...Part the First: More Cognitive Surrender Where It Just Won’t Do. Last week we considered an essay on AI that used the term “cognitive surrender.” That sums up the current state of that art and the term should gain a following. Last week Nature published Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – […]
Read more...Part the First: Back to the Past in Science and Medicine. The future of basic science in the United States looks grim for everyone from the aspiring graduate student to the full professor who has met her potential and has several graduate students, postdocs, and technicians working in her laboratory. The precipitous and arbitrary Big […]
Read more...Glen Campbell, who was a member of The Wrecking Crew, once remarked that he had worked hard for ten years to become an overnight success in 1967, with thanks to John Hartford. Without stretching too much, this same trajectory, extended by more than ten years, has been illustrated recently in biomedical research by the case […]
Read more...Part the First: The Sabotage of American Science. For much of the past forty years I have been in the “business” of writing grant proposals and/or doing research that has been publicly funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This includes work supported by the American Cancer Society (ACS) and […]
Read more...Part the First: Pope Leo XIV and the Larger World. Of the academic historians currently writing for both their colleagues and students and the general reader, Greg Grandin is among the finest. In The Education of Pope Leo XIV he places the former Father Bob Prevost and current Pope Leo XIV in context of our […]
Read more...It is clear that in much of the so-called developed world, food has largely lost its meaning beyond nourishment. Julian Baggini has written about this, ten years ago in The Virtues of the Table, which is especially useful in considering how and why we eat. More recently Baggini has expanded his range in How the […]
Read more...Part the First: Functional Art from the Enigmatic Daunians. William Morris famously wrote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Of course, his beauty in response to the immiseration of the working class was for the English rich but nothing is perfect. Our old […]
Read more...Today’s Coffee Break on a holiday weekend in the US is the simple recommendation that you go straight to this long essay in Front Porch Republic by W. Aaron Vandiver of Carbondale, Colorado: Trump and the Furies of Empire –– Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have […]
Read more...On Independence Day of 2025 President Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law. Something that has not gotten much attention, so far, are the consequences OBBBA will have on students who must borrow money to attend college/university, graduate school, and/or professional school. Should American students be forced to go into debt […]
Read more...Dear gentle readers: Apologies for a somewhat ragged Coffee Break today. Traveling in Scotland and time has been taken up with details (all good) along with a few unexpected disconnects (as in stuff happens). Part the First: Scientists to the Rescue? Economic growth is not the answer to any of our problems in this finite […]
Read more...Part the First: Paper Mills and the Corruption of Research. No not Hammermill. I don’t think I have actually known of someone buying a “scholarly” paper for publication, and I remember reading (a few paragraphs) only a few that seemed to be purpose built. But following up on The Credibility Crisis in Science from earlier […]
Read more...Albert Einstein was chosen by Time magazine as the Person of the Twentieth Century. It was a good choice (and now is a good time to read Einstein more than seventy years after his death in April 1955, here and here). As noted by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer in their newly published book, The […]
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