Well, I’m outta here. It’s been fun. They say every academic’s secret desire is to write freelance magazine articles, and I figured this blog would be a good place to start. I don’t imagine J.K. Rowling is losing any sleep over me, but I’m gratified that every o… Read full post »

One of the unintended effects of the debate on healthcare “reform” is to highlight just how out of touch our rulers are with the rest of us.

In a statement, Senator Max Baucus told the Senate Finance Committee “All Americans should have access to quality, affordable… Read full post »

”The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by author Ursula K. LeGuin may be the most disturbing short story ever written. The story begins with the opening of the Festival of Summer in Omelas, a shining city on the sea (set in the future? The past? Some alternate reality?… Read full post »

Ana Sofia Joanes’s film Fresh forms an obvious counterpoint to Food Inc. Both films detail the manifold problems created by modern industrial-scale agriculture. Both feature shots of cows, chickens, and pigs forced to endure the unspeakable conditions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Ope… Read full post »

In this country, going to the doctor for a checkup is like being shot at by someone – the best you can hope for is that he misses, and you end up the same as you were before.

I don’t know why people voluntarily go to… Read full post »

Here’s an article in the New York Times which exemplifies so much of what is wrong with our nation’s healthcare system – and the debate on how to fix it.

The article profiles 62-year-old Bob Collier, a sort of everyman from rural Georgia who… Read full post »

 In a sane society, “Comparative Effectiveness Research” would not even be controversial, let alone be held up as the moral equivalent of murder. Hell yes, of course we need to evaluate clinical treatments for their effectiveness, and discard those which are not effective. Tha… Read full post »

Here’s an article in the Baltimore Examiner by Delia Chiaramonte, M.D. According to the article, a web community of physicians, sermo.com, has posted a “Letter from physicians to the American people,” which has been signed by over 4,000 physicians.

You can’t even ge… Read full post »

Amid the paranoia about “death squads” and irrelevant rants about illegal immigrants is one legitimate objection to single-payer health care: what about the people who are satisfied with their employer-based health insurance?

Enrollment in employer-based health insurance… Read full post »

The health care debate has revealed a lot about our national character, most of it not very flattering. I’ve watched the clips on YouTube, and I’ve attended two town hall meetings – one of which I wrote about here -- and nothing sums up the prevailing mood… Read full post »

 Tonight I went to the Towson University Center for the Arts, where Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland was holding a town meeting on the subject of health care reform. Don’t ask me what the Hell happened at the meeting, because the didn’t let me or about 1,000 other people… Read full post »

According to this article in the New York Times, lobbyists for the nation’s pharmaceutical industry plan to spend $150 million on television commercials touting President Obama’s health care plan.

That’s really bad news for the rest of us.

PhRMA President &… Read full post »

None of my four jobs provides health insurance. Recently I purchased at my own expense a policy with a $10,000 deductible (not a typo) which I suspect will turn out to be like an umbrella that folds up as soon as it starts to rain, should I ever actually need… Read full post »

“The way we eat has changed more in the past fifty years than in the previous ten thousand.”

That’s an astonishing statement, but Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. does a good job of making that charge stick. Most of us here in the overdeveloped world have no… Read full post »

The message is clear: socialized medicine kills.

At least, that’s the inference the writer of this Associated Press article obviously wants us to draw: “More serious problems in Britain's health care were reported last month, when cancer researchers announced that as many as… Read full post »

According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, the makers of Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Cocktail have replaced the high-fructose corn syrup in their product with sucrose, or table sugar. Ocean Spray is the latest in a long list of giant corporations which have made the switch, incl… Read full post »

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs by Melody Peterson

The pharmaceutical industry is out of control. Soaring prices threaten to bankrupt us, both individually and as a society. A mu… Read full post »

 America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying organization for the health insurance industry, has blasted President Obama’s proposal to create a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. In a press release, the organization stated that “A govern… Read full post »

In a sane society, the absurdity of “screening” for depression would immediately be apparent. You mean, you don’t know how you feel? And if you really don’t know, doesn’t that mean you need to spend some time in open and honest consultation with yourself?

Nevert… Read full post »

Poker players call it the “tell” – a subtle, nonverbal signal that your opponent is holding a really good hand – or a really bad one. Recently, the health care industry dropped its poker face just long enough to let us all know just how lousy the hand they’re hol… Read full post »

Click here to see Part 1 of this post.

Enjoying the sort of adulation usually reserved for rock stars, Michael Pollan., author of In Defense of Food spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of about 900 last night at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

Pollan elaborated… Read full post »

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

 Those simple words, which constitute the opening line of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food could revolutionize the way we eat. Pollan’s book is a manifesto against the modern Western Diet and its companion ideolog… Read full post »

According to this story in the Baltimore Sun, on the 25th of February of this year, police stormed the home of Andrew Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist residing in Medfield, a leafy neighborhood in north Baltimore. Leonard and his wife were watching television and relaxing after attending… Read full post »

 Just before I left for Africa for the first time, my mother told me the story about how she came to be an atheist. Her father had been born in the old country in 1891. He left home at the age of eleven (people grew up faster in those days)… Read full post »

On December 1, 2008, Lorain County Sherriff’s deputies stormed the home of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio, where they run a natural foods co-op called the Manna Storehouse, which distributes locally produced food, including grass-fed beef and lamb, free-range chicken, or… Read full post »