Part the First: War Begets War, A Conversation. Daedalus hosted a conversation among Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025), Neta C. Crawford, and Matthew Evangelista last year. It was preprinted recently in The MIT Press Reader. I immediately noticed the participation of Robert Jay Lifton. Back in my dark ages, when the university had a University Bookstore […]
Read more...Why is the United States at war with Iran in 2026? Several excuses have been used by the current administration to justify the spiral of conflict and ratchet of escalation over the past five weeks. These include but are probably not limited to: Iran exports terrorism across the globe. Iran is not a democracy and […]
Read more...Good afternoon. Time for a break. Given the wall-to-wall coverage by Yves and others here, nothing explicit on this Good Friday about the Ramadan War in West Asia. Instead, herewith a few reflections during holy season of the three great Abrahamic traditions. Part the First: Ethical Capitalism? Some argue about whether business can be ethical. […]
Read more...Part the First: The War in West Asia Viewed from East Asia. The daily updates compiled here have been essential for cutting through the fog of war associated with the current War in West Asia. Many people have marveled at the sheer stupidity of another unnecessary (to be redundant) war of choice in the Middle […]
Read more...We discussed Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben earlier this year. His message is that climate catastrophe is not foreordained, even if the current “weather” is odd and suggests that something in seriously amiss. I grew up in the American South, where “hot” is the normal state of being from April through October. One […]
Read more...Part the First: The Slow Death of Biomedical Research Continues in the United States. We have covered this before, but the entire unfolding situation gets more surreal by the week. STAT News has been a go-to source, as in NIH will spend its full budget this year, agency director promises House appropriators. The first shot […]
Read more...Part the First: Nutrition and Medicine. The current Secretary of Health and Human Services is not wrong in his emphasis on nutrition (a stopped analog clock is right twice a day). I don’t know where Lauren Rice is attending medical school in New York City, but her editorial take seems about half right in I’m […]
Read more...It is a curious thing that our politicians and economists in the Uniparty believe that economic growth, now and forevermore, will solve all our problems and cure all our ills. One looks around and it’s clear this is not so. Still, this economics truth was stated with utmost, if utterly spurious, clarity by a former […]
Read more...Part the First: As Giants Still Walk the Earth. Stanley Plotkin began practicing medicine in the 1950s. When he was an intern, outcomes for patients such as this little boy were frightening and devastating: Stanley Plotkin recalls a night in 1957, during his pediatrics internship, when a father brought a gravely ill toddler into the […]
Read more...Only one part this Friday. The president announced Casey Means, MD, would be his nominee for Surgeon General of the United States hearings in the middle of 2025. The US Senate began considering her nomination this week. The back and forth has been interesting. Where to begin? First we can start with the previous nine […]
Read more...The Great American Food System™ is productive when measured by output, but it is not particularly good at producing wholesome and healthy food for the American people. The nature of healthy food has been argued for the past sixty years, with various food plates, pyramids, and other arrays used to illustrate recommendations of the day. […]
Read more...Part the First: What is Landscape? I have heard of John Stilgoe but have never gotten around to reading his work. That will change as soon as possible. His book What is Landscape? is described in the MIT Press newsletter in a series of questions, the first being: You place enormous weight on etymology and […]
Read more...Part the First: Confirmation the Scientific Literature Has Entered Terminal Decline? In an update from last week’s Coffee Break, Cabell’s Predatory Reports database passes 20,000-journal milestone: The US-based information services company reports that Predatory Reports has grown by more than 300% since its launch in 2017. Having reached 10,000 journals in 2019 and 15,000 in […]
Read more...In this modern world, sometimes it seems that everyone has “something,” and many of these conditions are relatively “new” and their incidence is increasing. Leading diagnoses from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), include ADHD, autism, depression, and anxiety. Conditions that have become more common in recent years that have no primary […]
Read more...Part the First: Predatory or Not? Over the past six years the biomedical literature has accumulated 494,547 scientific “publications” with “COVID” (case insensitive) somewhere in the paper. A search using “AIDS HIV” as the query returns 204,559 papers over the past forty-five years. Something does not add up here. And that something is the nature […]
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