Hope is not a simple “denial” of reality, but something that is painstakingly cultivated. Part of the struggle for hope involves a shift of perception in light of changing circumstances.
Pain and grief are among our most private, isolating experiences.
Depression’s prevalence can be attributed to the reduced importance of the notion of conflict.
Recent studies suggest that working on happiness may be counterproductive.
A controversial campaign in 2013 aimed at teen pregnancy in New York City.
Hoping for a richer, particularistic philosophy of medicine.
Mysteriously, biologically, men and women want, or want to want, “the same thing.”
The normative appeal of the new gerontology to individual autonomy and responsibility makes it even clearer that “failure” is precisely what is at stake.
A human person is a historical being, in whom the past remains immanent in the present, and whom the wear and tear of time enhances rather than diminishes.
The personal diet has become not only a cult; it has become a political statement.
We are coming to see our world as increasingly discontinuous with the twentieth century.
Technology always holds the key to our salvation. The question is whether it also played a role in our original sin.
Genuine risks to public health are commingled with selective punishment and prejudice.
Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.
We shouldn’t assume that the measures we take to combat the coronavirus today are temporary.
Awareness is not the opposite of ignorance. Rather, it’s a stand-in for performative gestures of all kinds.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the health of the community is essential to the health of the individual.
Understanding how the shambolic marriage of private and public coverage costs so much and delivers so little.
Every critique of self-care is true. Unfortunately, you still have to take care of yourself.
Studying art taught me to think differently about medical procedures.
Our identity—insofar as it may be thought of as a fortress—is less adept at resisting life’s various microassaults at 3 am.
Defenders of abortion might more wisely reframe their case around the central importance of care.
More disorder, more screening, more care: the familiar talking points, all dutifully repeated.
COVID made visible the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological.
We would do well to challenge the headlong adoption of predictive medicine.
While focusing on the categories it generates through analysis, science sometimes overlooks those aspects of individuals that cannot easily be summed up in a word.
Cutting anti-natalists down is one thing, but building up the left’s case for children is more difficult.
Racing to catch hold of the boons of progress, we trust in our power to secure our lives, singly and together, through “smart” decisions.
The enthusiasm for precision medicine actually reveals an uneasy tension: A particular patient’s disease combination is as unique as she is and may thus defy categorization.
Is plain packaging for cigarettes a barrier to trade?
We can’t take CEOs’ high-flown gestures at face value.
In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space.
The return to normalcy will be long, and we might even change our mind along the way.
Our exploitive relationship to the natural order is greatly magnifying the possibility of spillover and increasing virus virulence.
The solitude of sickness is not a waste of time but rather a compression of it, a bundle the size of a pill bottle.
The COVID crisis has changed our perceptions of assisted living communities, perhaps permanently.
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
The face we present to the world is the primary signifier we possess.
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.
I have a very hard time believing that most people can see things.
Doctors need a medical humanities that does more than just help them see health and disease through a patient’s eyes.
The strength of ideologies and fads in the US helps to explain why physician involvement in public life has declined.