Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Want to know how to lose weight, and keep it off, without surgery, supplements, weird diets or extreme exercise? The answer, for addressing weight gain and many other ills, lies in behavioural technology
In the Brazilian rainforest there is a town built around a church where worshippers drink hallucinogenic tea. "At the church entrance I was served a cup of the brew. I swigged it down straight away. Then I drank another cup"
Son's plea to let his mother go. "By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state nearly as remote from life as death"
"I would rather have been strung up naked by my toes, in the middle of the town square, have my naked body slathered in honey, and then have an entire battalion of honey-starved Winnie the Pooh bears set loose to devour me"
Addiction assessed via philosophy. "For Socrates, ‘yielding to temptation’ is not being unwillingly overpowered, but is the experience of being a willing participant choosing what is at that moment wrongly thought to be best"
American obesity explained. Simply. "The price of food plummeted while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day. What do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it!"
One August night in 2008, Marko Cheseto walked onto a plane in Nairobi bound for Alaska. He had $100 and a cross-country and track scholarship to college in Anchorage. But events soon took a tragic turn for the talented runner
Nine year old Michael is unlike others. His parents took him to see psychologist Dan Waschbusch. Who diagnosed him as a psychopath. "Even if accurate, it’s a ruinous diagnosis. No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath"
"Half a century after the first wave of lawsuits were filed for illnesses linked to exposure to asbestos and 40 years after new regulation curtailed use of the mineral, the asbestos-litigation business is booming"
In America, eccentrics are not born, but made. Usually by ingesting large quantities of illegal drugs. "When I landed in the People’s Republic of Berkeley in 1970 it felt as though I had followed Alice down the rabbit hole"
American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" does its best to define what counts as a mental illness, and what does not. The fifth edition comes out next year. Here's what to expect
Review of "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History", a "surprisingly emotional book" by Florence Williams. A mother's breasts supply a baby in the first year of life with enough energy to move 100 trucks at 100 miles per hour
"This is what it's like to get old: You still feel 19, except your knees hurt"
