Pain and grief are among our most private, isolating experiences.
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.
Industrial capitalism is but a stepping-stone on the path to a service economy and so-called knowledge work.
Every critique of self-care is true. Unfortunately, you still have to take care of yourself.
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.