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by Jerry Menikoff The recent front-page story told of a tantalizing possibility: although almost all women with breast cancer are now advised to get treated with chemotherapy, in the future more than two-thirds of them may be able to avoid that treatment. However, as the New York Times reported, the evidence supporting this change is […]
Last month, Jill Quadagno was invited to present her take on the US healthcare system, specifically addressing the question ‘why do so many Americans not have healthcare?’, to a group of leading Democratic senators. Prof. Quadagno has graciously allowed us to publish the text of her presentation below. A few years ago my friend Connie’s […]
Time Magazine chose Kerry Emanuel for the “Time 100: People Who Shape Our World” feature that hits newsstands today. Emanuel will surely take issue with being called “the man who saw Katrina coming,” but such conclusions are inevitable for the man who published a paper in Nature last summer just before Katrina pointing to the […]
John D. Barrow, a long-time Oxford author, has won the prestigious Templeton Prize, one of the world’s best known religious prizes. The prize recognizes Barrow’s distinguised career as a cosmologist at Cambridge and his prolific writings on time, space, the universe and the limits of science and human understanding. In announcing the award, the Templeton […]
by Jill Quadagno Last year 46 million Americans were uninsured and health care costs continued their inexorable upward climb. These two problems, rising costs and increasing numbers of uninsured people, have bedeviled every president since Nixon, each of whom has sought solutions by regulating health care providers and insurance companies. In his State of the […]
by Jill Quadagno Last year nearly a million more people were uninsured compared to the year before. The employer-based system that most people of working age have relied on since the 1950s is unraveling at the seams. Each year for more than a decade the percentage of employers offering health benefits has declined. The only […]
Resolute we are, usually from January 1st, until just about now, right around Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps it is no coincidence that our individual, personal resolve founders just as we’re celebrating a holiday commemorating one of America’s great heroes—a man who was committed to combating the systemic forces at the heart of so many individual troubles.
The New York Times carried a Q&A entitled “Conversation with Kerry Emanuel” yesterday. The lead was Emanuel’s apparent shift on the connection between warmer oceans and the intensity of hurricane winds. Still, Emanuel says “not so fast” to those who see Katrina as evidence of global warming. But conservatives should take note that America’s inability […]
Some items of note from the weekend… Tim Harford, aka The Undercover Economist, gave Slate.com readers a peek behind the Starbucks curtain on Friday. Careful OUP Blog readers may recognize Harford’s economizing tip (we gave you a link to it back in November): Ask for a “short” at the counter and you’ll save money. Harford […]
by Gale E. Christianson In the weeks following Isaac Newton’s death, in March of 1727, Dr. Thomas Pellet, a member of the Royal Society, was contracted by Newton’s heirs to inventory the voluminous papers left behind by the great man. Nothwithstanding his respected credentials, the good doctor was in well over his head. Across sheaf […]
Mencken: The American Iconoclast Reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle who called it “memorable and engaging”. Picked for the “Top Biographies” list compiled by The Denver Post. Also on that list, Cushing: A Life in Surgery Stephen Goddard at Historywire.com says that Mencken “may become the definitive work on the life of this luminous personality” […]
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina exposed an array of glaring deficiencies in America’s infrastructure – the slow response from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and the fragile state of the New Orleans levees are perhaps the most prominent. But, according to Jill Quadagno, the most imposing challenge brought to light by Katrina […]
Kerry Emanuel, author of Divine Wind, spoke to the Miami Herald over the weekend and discussed one of the more promising ideas for pushing potentially devastating storms back out to sea. The most promising [idea] is from [atmospheric researcher] Ross Hoffman. His idea is based on the ”butterfly effect” — introducing a perturbation — a […]
It was Harvey Cushing who, while still in his early thirties, introduced the notion of routinely monitoring the blood pressure during operations, something that had never been done before. This innovation was presented at about the same time that he undertook the difficult treatment of tic douloureux-a debilitating form of facial neuralgia-by the exquisitely delicate maneuver of removing the mass of nerve tissue at the very edge of the brain, called the Gasserian ganglion, through which the agonizing pain passed.
The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT will host a powerhouse symposium on December 1 which it is calling “The Future of the Brain.” The event will be moderated by Ira Flatow of NPR’s Science Friday, who has had a number of Oxford authors on his show of late, and even though the […]
The Wall Street Journal features a review of Terrors of the Table by Walter Gratzer today (Normally, WSJ Online is by subscription only, but it is open to anyone this week, so enjoy!). Gratzer’s book comes on a swell of anti-diet-faddism and gives the long view of how things like the Atkins and South Beach […]