How the West Lost COVID
“In Europe, North America, and South America: nearly universal failure. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: high caseloads and low death rates, owing largely to the age structure of populations. In East Asia, South-East Asia and Oceania: inarguable success.”
Reasons to Believe
One reason to believe that UFOs exist is terrifying enough, but these thirteen reasons make too strong a case to ignore.
When JFK Airport Was Shut Down Because of a Terror Attack that Wasn’t
A false alarm in New York’s biggest airport causes stampedes and delays, and makes one passenger wonder about the War on Terror’s effect on our collective psyche.
A Brain with a Heart
Inside the life and work of Oliver Sacks, whose newest book is Hallucinations:
“He has been in psychoanalysis, continuously and with the same Freudian interlocutor, for 46 years—remarkable for a materialist neurologist. ‘We were both young men, and now we’re old men. There’s a longitudinal study for you,’ he says. The two remain on formal terms: ‘He’s still Dr. Shengold, and I am still Dr. Sacks,’ he says. ‘I think that a patient can become a friend, but that one shouldn’t be a doctor to a friend—there is a distance, which paradoxically allows closeness, as I feel with my own patients.'”
“Sacks says his shyness simply ‘doesn’t occur’ in those interactions, which may be one reason he is so good with his patients and another reason he so loves them. In his work as a physician, the social landscape is unusually even-planed, for him and for them, and he has an uncanny ability to put his patients at ease—with sustained attention; curiosity and empathy; and a physician’s bag, stuffed with balls, a reflex hammer, and magazines, that could serve a clown. ‘Among other things, I’m a good and sometimes involuntary imitator,’ Sacks says a little mischievously.”
