April 28, 2025
(New York Times) – As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious. One of my most deeply held values as a tech columnist is humanism. I believe … Read More
April 25, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – Ars Moriendi for the Twenty-first Century There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his … Read More
April 16, 2025
(The Atlantic) – The kids and their caretaker got off on their floor, leaving me to ponder the cootie phenomenon for the first time in many decades. Beyond being amused, I was struck by the morbid salience of a children’s … Read More
April 14, 2025
(Slate) – More than a decade later, the movie’s message isn’t what I remembered—and it’s way more unnerving than I expected. We’ve all been Theo and we’ve all been her. Idealizing the perfect relationship but never quite facing ourselves to … Read More
April 11, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – The health consumer and the illusion of control. Did you know that we can take charge of our health? I myself had not realized this. I had thought that health was a force that mostly percolated along … Read More
April 8, 2025
(Nature) – The 50th anniversary of a landmark biosafety conference is an opportunity to ensure its spirit lives on in today’s scientists. In 2008, Nature published a six-part essay series called Meetings that Changed the World. One of our choices … Read More
April 8, 2025
(New York Times) – If the current legal landscape when it comes to embryos seems messy, it’s a result, in no small part, of the unsettled nature of what preceded it. For over a century, courts generally did not grant … Read More
April 3, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Backers of the new tech say it will free us to be creative, but studies show that avoiding mental effort can cause your brain to atrophy. After years of building up my ability to articulate nuanced … Read More
April 1, 2025
(The Atlantic) – In my case, that person who was in mind-numbing pain, unable to read, unable to write, unable to Google things or look at screens, unable to drive, drained by talking on the phone, spiraling in despair, and … Read More
March 31, 2025
(The Conversation) – Americans are increasingly waiting weeks or even months to get an appointment to see a health care specialist. This delay comes at a time when the population of aging adults is rising dramatically. By 2050, the number … Read More
March 31, 2025
(Plough) – In Baltimore, the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing gets med students talking. Studying medicine forces students in health professions to grapple directly with philosophical questions. These include questions about the nature of being human, the essence of … Read More
March 25, 2025
(New York Times) – On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing … Read More
March 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Three arguments for taking progress toward artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., more seriously — whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I believe that whether you think A.G.I. will be great or terrible for humanity — … Read More
March 21, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was … Read More
March 19, 2025
(Undark) – Fertility clinics should provide easy access to mental health support for those undergoing IVF treatments. Although literature from my fertility clinic acknowledged that in vitro fertilization would be stressful on the body and mind, those words did not … Read More
March 14, 2025
(The Conversation) – There is much debate about whether AI can augment human creativity, but emerging data suggests that the technology can boost research and development where creativity typically plays an important role. A recent study by MIT economics doctoral … Read More
March 11, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The term is everywhere this week, but its meaning is as vague as ever. Working on a definition matters. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as … Read More
March 10, 2025
(The Verge) – ChatGPT has a trolley problem problem. ChatGPT’s ethics framework, which is probably the most extensive outline of a commercial chatbot’s moral vantage point, was bad for my blood pressure. First of all, lip service to nuance aside, … Read More
March 6, 2025
(The Walrus) – Recently, a new kind of Magic Bag has found its way into the real world. For some years, I have taught philosophy, mostly ethics, at a university in California. I teach a mix of in-person and online … Read More
March 6, 2025
(New York Times) – A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial … Read More
March 5, 2025
(Aeon) – For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t Several years ago, I left my medical practice for a long vacation. On the morning of my first day back, my … Read More
March 4, 2025
(The Conversation) – Scientists already know that extreme heat increases the risk of heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, kidney dysfunction and even death. I see these effects often in my work as a researcher studying how environmental stressors influence the aging … Read More
March 3, 2025
(The Conversation) – Scientists have long suspected that gut bacteria may influence a person’s risk of developing multiple sclerosis. But studies so far have had inconsistent findings. To address these inconsistencies, my colleagues and I used what researchers call a … Read More
February 24, 2025
(New York Times) – The writing teachers I know struggle to persuade their students not to use these tools. They are everywhere now, impossible to swat away. Who could blame a young writer for wondering how using these “assistants” is … Read More
February 18, 2025
(JAMA) – In this issue of JAMA, 2 articles characterize the impact of recent state abortion restrictions. Applying observational causal inference methods, the authors estimate a 1.7% increase in birth rates from abortion restrictions in affected states (corresponding to about 22 000 excess … Read More
