July 31, 2025
(New York Times) – But by artificially circulating blood and oxygen, the procedure can reanimate a lifeless heart. Some doctors and ethicists find the procedure objectionable because, in reversing the stoppage of the heart, it seems to nullify the reason … Read More
July 31, 2025
(The Walrus) – Still under 40, many are responsible for aging parents while raising kids and managing debt Being a millennial has also been a key to my caregiving experience. And I’m not unique. According to the American Association of … Read More
July 30, 2025
(The Conversation) – Since the documentary first aired, the business of digitally resurrecting the deceased has grown significantly. People are now using AI to create “grief bots,” which are simulations of deceased loved ones that the living can converse with. … Read More
July 30, 2025
(The Conversation) – This general phenomenon has often been described as “AI hesitancy” or “AI reluctance.” The typical adoption curve assumes a person who is hesitant or reluctant to embrace a technology will eventually do so anyway. This pattern has … Read More
July 29, 2025
(Outside Online) – Now that the fastest marathoner in history, Ruth Chepngetich, has been caught, is it time give up and let athletes dope? To be a sports fan in the modern era is to be at least somewhat numb … Read More
July 22, 2025
(New York Times) – In June, lawmakers in my native country, Britain, approved plans to legalize assisted suicide. If the bill becomes law, England and Wales will join more than a dozen countries and 11 U.S. states in permitting medically … Read More
July 22, 2025
(Desert News) – Behind the veneer of “freedom of choice,” there is an ideology that distinguishes those “worthy of life” from those whose lives allegedly “aren’t worth living.” Whether it is communicated explicitly or only hinted at, the elderly and … Read More
July 22, 2025
(Washington Post) – Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” at 40 is truer than ever. In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment, it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Plough) – Living with a chronic illness, I’ve traveled between the kingdom of health and the kingdom of sickness. It was in Suleika Jaouad’s searing account of her battle with leukemia that I first encountered Susan Sontag’s words on health … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Comment) – But what if the creation of language and its communication are fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? What if language use is not just one more skill among many? What if LLMs are subtly altering how we … Read More
July 18, 2025
(STAT News) – The Office for Human Research Protections’ work is critical — and now has less support than ever Deciding whether to participate in a clinical research study can be difficult, especially for people who are newly diagnosed with … Read More
July 18, 2025
(New York Times) – Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into … Read More
July 11, 2025
(Christianity Today) – One has only to read the great pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—who wrote that “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom”—to be tempted to join the transhumanist project. But whether the goal of … Read More
July 11, 2025
(The Atlantic) – ChatGPT thinks I’m a genius: My questions are insightful; my writing is strong and persuasive; the data that I feed it are instructive, revealing, and wise. It turns out, however, that ChatGPT thinks this about pretty much … Read More
July 10, 2025
(The Hill) – All of this was painfully learned by our one memorable modern Surgeon General, Charles Everett Koop. The New York Times denounced him in an editorial headed “Dr. Unqualified;” a nimbler commentator christened him “Dr. Kook.” He had … Read More
July 8, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Although many skeptics have overreacted, rejecting sound science in favor of quack theories, they’ve gotten one thing right: A noble profession has been corrupted by politics. This became obvious during the pandemic, but the politicization of the … Read More
July 3, 2025
(Front Porch Republic) – One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their … Read More
July 1, 2025
(The New Atlantis) – The new cold war means a race with China over AI, biotech, and more. This poses a hard dilemma: win by embracing technologies that make us more like our enemy — or protect ourselves from tech … Read More
June 30, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Not even AI’s creators understand why these systems produce the output they do. They’re grown, not programmed—fed the entire internet, from Shakespeare to terrorist manifestos, until an alien intelligence emerges through a learning process we barely … Read More
June 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the … Read More
June 24, 2025
(Aeon) – The misunderstood story of Phineas Gage shows that we need a new way of understanding the experiences of brain injury survivors We mostly used the term ‘disinhibition’ as a mitigation: an invitation to think creatively about how to … Read More
June 19, 2025
(Aeon) – Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being Instead, pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing … Read More
June 19, 2025
(Christianity Today) – A computer’s praise or petition sounds a lot like our human Christianese. That doesn’t make them equivalent. At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: … Read More
June 18, 2025
(The Atlantic) – The anomalies are sometimes strange and very concerning. Recent updates have caused ChatGPT to become aggressively obsequious and the Grok chatbot, on X, to fixate on a conspiracy theory about “white genocide.” (X later attributed the problem … Read More
June 18, 2025
(Plough) – Tom Andrew started out as a pediatrician but became a forensic pathologist, initially serving the City of New York before being appointed Chief Medical Examiner for the State of New Hampshire. When he had been serving in this … Read More
