One of medicine’s great textbook cases concerns a 25-year-old railroad construction foreman named Phineas P. Gage. Gage’s company, the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was laying new tracks across Vermont in the summer of 1848, and Gage was in charge of overseeing the controlled explosions used to blast through the layers of stratified rock covering the [...]

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Green Valley, Nevada, one of the US’s burgeoning number of ‘master-planned’ and gated communities, with a population of 60,000 – the size of many middle-sized towns – is one of the world’s fastest growing types of neighborhoods, constructed with the primacy of the individual specifically in mind. Walls of extremely precise design and construction have [...]

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Recently, I received the latest issue of Eureka magazine, from the London Times, a periodic science publication, with a photo of cancerous lungs in a museum case. The article featured inside promised that scientists were making such magnificent discoveries about cancer that they were soon to consign specimens such as this to a museum curio.

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“What makes Iago evil?” Joan Didion asks, opening her novel Play it As it Lays. The more interesting question, to my mind, is what makes Desdemona – or indeed anyone — good? Every story that we are told ingrains in us the idea that we were born to be selfish.  Left to our own devices, [...]

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Normally, I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the politics of my adopted country, usually because I happen to disagree with some aspect of policy pretty much most of the time.  My indifference also stems from the fact that I can’t do anything about the state of affairs here, since, as an American [...]

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