The Best Longreads of 2010: Science, Medicine & Technology Third and final round in our “Best #longreads of 2010” collaboration with BrainPickings.org. Today: Science, Medicine & Tech—with stories from Amy Harmon, Andrew Rice, Jerome Groopman, Logan Ward, The Oil Drum, Lawrence Lessig, and more.
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The Decline Effect
The Decline Effect But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from […]
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In Haiti, a Relationship Built on Adversity
In Haiti, a Relationship Built on Adversity He asked me whether I would be his daughter’s godfather and I said no, foreseeing how that would be used to wheedle more money out of me. Joe, you can’t let your goddaughter suffer. I know he was hurt by that. The disturbing part was that his family […]
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What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor
What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, […]
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Forty Years Later: How 'Oregon Trail' Was Born
Forty Years Later: How ‘Oregon Trail’ Was Born For the next two weeks, Dillenberger and Heinemann spent each night wedged into a tiny computer office—a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School—tapping code into a teletype machine. The teletype was a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue […]
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If neither party is proposing effective solutions to the cost crisis, and political deadlock in Washington is preventing the consideration of new ideas, are we doomed to witness a slowly collapsing health care system that eventually will provide adequate care only to those who can afford to pay? In his latest book on health care, […]
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Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits that predisposed […]
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Featured Longreader: Jalees Rehman, associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. See his story picks from National Geographic, Intelligent Life Magazine, n+1 and more on his #longreads page.
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Matthias Rascher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a high school in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter. He is also a longtime contributor to the #Longreads community and an author for Open Culture. *** • “The Possibilian: David Eagleman and […]
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Mental Floss Editors: Our Top Longreads of 2011
The editors of mental_floss magazine: Mangesh Hattikudur, Ethan Trex, Stephanie Meyers, and Jessanne Collins. They’re also on Twitter and Tumblr. *** “Deep Intellect,” Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine) Is it weird to say we enjoyed this trek “inside the mind of an octopus” because it was so sensual? Who knew the octopus can taste with all of […]
