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The Atlantic | December 2014 IT IS 1976. Brad Stuart is in his third year of medical school at Stanford, doing his first clinical rotation. He is told to look at an elderly man with advanced lymphoma. The patient is feeble and near death, his bone marrow eviscerated by cancer. The supervising oncologist has ordered a…
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The Economist | October 11, 2014 IN SEPTEMBER 1995 eBay was founded, the Unabomber’s manifesto was published, and a memo crossed the desk of the editor of The Economist asking him which of a handful of article ideas were worth pursuing. He circled “gay marriage”. At the time his choice seemed idiosyncratic, to say the…
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The Atlantic | July-August 2014 A FEW months ago, an odd news story out of St. Louis caught my eye. A Christian-owned dog-walking business had fired, so to speak, a customer who supported legalizing marijuana. “We simply said it was against the idea of being clean and sober-minded and treating your body as a temple to…
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Reason | December 2013 In 1993, Reason published an essay by Jonathan Rauch derived from his book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. In it, he defended what he called “liberal science”-liberal societies’ open-ended, decentralized system for developing knowledge by subjecting ideas, and often their proponents, to public criticism-from then-newfangled attacks by those who sought to protect…
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The Atlantic | November 2013 ENDER’S GAME comes out November 1. If you live in a cave, you may not be aware that this likely blockbuster is based on a classic 1985 sci-fi novel by Orson Scott Card. The movie version features Harrison Ford, copious digital effects, and a boycott. Recently, a group of gay activists launched a…
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National Affairs | Fall 2013 A FUNNY thing happened on the way to legislative gridlock and fiscal meltdown in the past few years. In paralyzed, polarized Washington, where Democrats refuse to reduce spending without revenue increases that Republicans peremptorily reject, Democrats have accepted spending cuts, Republicans have accepted tax increases, and deficits have come down. It is…
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What accounts for the dramatic shift in favour of same-sex marriage across the United States? The American Review (Australia) | August 2013 THE FALL of 1995 does not really seem all that long ago, does it? To me, it is as vivid as yesterday, yet also ancient as Babylon. I am walking with my father in…
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Angelo Volandes’s low-tech, high-empathy plan to revolutionize end-of-life care The Atlantic | May 2013 DR. ANGELO VOLANDES is making a film that he believes will change the way you die. The studio is his living room in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston; the control panel is his laptop; the camera crew is a 24-year-old guy…
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The Atlantic | March 2013 THE government shutdown last fall wasted billions of dollars, upset innumerable plans, and besmirched both political parties. But it did have one constructive effect. Surveying the wreckage, grown-ups in both parties realized that the politics of public confrontation is a lot better at closing the government than running it. So, to…
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The New Republic | December 12, 2012 DEAR Supreme Court Justices, Last week, you agreed to hear two landmark cases about gay marriage. In the broader of the two cases, which comes out of California, you could establish same-sex marriage nationwide as a matter of constitutional right. This is a ruling that most gay Americans would celebrate…