The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost.…

Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been…

On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed…

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene…

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to…

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. When I was teaching indoor cycling every…

The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles…

When I was taking German in college in the early years of this millennium, I once stumbled upon a word that appeared foreign even when translated into English: Diphtherie, or…

A person who is “on the couch” is known to be in therapy, but most therapists these days don’t ask their clients to lie down. The first time mine did,…