From Pandemic Facts to Pandemic Policies
This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new book, Thinking in a Pandemic. Order A Copy Today Editors’ Note: This is the final installment in an exchange on the epidemiology and public health policy...
View ArticleWho Pays for Cheap Language Instruction?
When the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread from country to country, and governments began to close borders, headlines erupted with speculations about deglobalization. The implications felt uncommonly...
View ArticleCOVID-19 Is Changing What It Means to Be a Doctor
At the peak of the pandemic in Connecticut, I was walking to my car after a shift in the emergency room, and I couldn’t shake one of my patients from my thoughts. He was a father who’d been having...
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Climate Change’s New Ally: Big Finance
Over the past two years a striking change has taken place in the boardrooms of greenhouse-gas producers: a growing number of large companies have announced commitments to achieve “net zero” emissions...
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Steps to a Better COVID-19 Response
This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new book, Thinking in a Pandemic. Preorder A Copy Today Half a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 150,000 Americans have died from the disease. Over...
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The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture
This past Memorial Day, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the throat of a Black man, George Floyd, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Seventy-five years ago, an American pilot dropped an atomic bomb on...
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The Economic Case for a People’s Vaccine
Many have called for a people’s vaccine for COVID-19—a vaccine provided universally and accessibly to the entire world population. The moral arguments may be familiar, but economics supports the case,...
View ArticleHow Early Modern Empire Changed Medicine
COVID-19 has made the connections between population health, labor, and political economy so clear that the notion that bad health is bad for the economy can be heard across the political spectrum. The...
View ArticleThe Trouble with Carbon Pricing
Over a decade ago, California put a price on carbon pollution. At first glance the policy appears to be a success: since it began in 2013, emissions have declined by more than 8 percent. Today the...
View ArticleTo Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity
Many decades ago electricity became the new oxygen, and the vast majority of Americans today believe they need it every moment of every waking or sleeping hour. The United States has built a vast...
View ArticleHow to Talk about COVID-19 in Africa
“Why aren’t more Africans dying of COVID-19?” Almost every major international news outlet has asked a variation of the question. Some speculate that something structural or physiological has dampened...
View ArticleHow to Fix the Climate
This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new book, Climate Action. Order A Copy Today Can the world meet the challenge of climate change? After more than three decades of global negotiations, the...
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Our Vaccine Infrastructure Needs a Radical Overhaul
Nearly a year into a pandemic that has killed more than a million people and laid waste to both public health systems and the global economy, many have turned their hopes to a vaccine. Optimism has...
View ArticleHow to Fix the Climate
Can the world meet the challenge of climate change? After more than three decades of global negotiations, the prognosis looks bleak. The most ambitious diplomatic efforts have focused on a series of...
View ArticleRacism and Respiration
In the early 1930s two thousand predominantly Black workers were sent to tunnel through a mountain in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. The mountain was made of silica, a crystalline compound in rock and...
View ArticleHow Americans Came to Distrust Science
Science is under fire as never before in the United States. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump and his Republican allies dismiss the findings of health experts as casually as those of...
View ArticleMedicine’s Machine Learning Problem
Data science is remaking countless aspects of society, and medicine is no exception. The range of potential applications is already large and only growing by the day. Machine learning is now being used...
View ArticleDNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors
Some of my ancestors might live just up the street. They are the people who own the black camper van with a decal brandishing the words “Irish Pride.” I pass their house on my walks, a little unsure...
View ArticleUse Sunlight Locally (or Lose It)
The Biden Administration is currently considering alternatives to the large and mostly private electric grid. From Puerto Rico to California to Texas, that infrastructure increasingly fails, leaving...
View ArticleAn Antiracist Agenda for Medicine
We are experienced physicians. But in the early days of the pandemic, when we felt like fresh interns nervously awaiting a flood of disease presentations we had never seen before, we had a nagging...
View ArticleMedicine for the People
When psychiatrist Frantz Fanon reflected on the role of doctors during the Algerian struggle for liberation in his 1959 essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” he emphasized the consequences of physicians’...
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The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience
Where do you place the boundary between “science” and “pseudoscience”? The question is more than academic. The answers we give have consequences—in part because, as health policy scholar Timothy...
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The Meaning of the FTX Meltdown
The spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX earlier this month has dramatized the folly of unregulated markets. It has also prompted a predictably myopic form of social criticism. Many are...
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The Death and Life of the Author
What is an author? When Michel Foucault posed this question in 1969, it was largely philosophical. Along with Roland Barthes, who a few years earlier announced “the death of the author,” Foucualt...
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