Gabriel Weston in Undark Magazine:
The most immutable fact they teach you in medical school is that anatomy is the absolute bedrock of surgery. As an eager young surgical intern, I often got doused in my patients’ vomit and shit. I tried to see the clinical bright side: Maybe the old man’s feces contained blood or the teen who had barfed up the offending Tylenol would avoid a liver transplant. Otherwise, the contents of normal guts were of less interest.
Back then, we were taught that the sole purpose of the gastrointestinal tract was to extract nutrients from food. What I didn’t expect, after practicing as a surgeon myself for over 20 years, is that what we think we know about human anatomy is actually changing all the time and that our bodies are more varied, more full of wonders and magical revelations, than we could ever have imagined.
More here.
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New research has identified
My favorite thing to do at Krispy Kreme to stave off the boredom is stack the donuts on top of each other and then squish them down into a “sandwich.” When they are hot, they flatten in an extreme way. I can get about twelve in the pile before things get messy. Some days, this donut sandwich is all I eat, other than maybe one other thing, a giant slice of pizza from Sbarro or orange chicken from Panda Express in the mall across the vast parking lot, which I pay for with my meager tip money. I also drink excessive amounts of the whole chocolate milk we sell. This anorexic, sugary diet means I weigh just under 110 pounds and am always jittery.
For hard as it still may be to believe, let alone process, in barely one hundred days we have already fallen into a form of governance in which legally resident individuals (currently by and large immigrants of one sort or another—mothers, fathers, students with entirely current green cards or asylum claims—but with every indication that such tactics will presently be getting extended to full-fledged citizens as well) are literally being spirited off the streets by masked men in unmarked cars and, without the slightest due process or the most tenuous access to any sort of recourse, whisked off to prisons, both at home and abroad, seemingly beyond the sanction of any sort of judicial oversight (the rulings of judges flagrantly ignored and the judges themselves now starting to get subjected to arbitrary arrest as well simply for even having expressed them), the legislative branch cowed into impotence by the abject servitude of its barely majority party, the executive branch a whipsaw of whims and tantrums, with no end in sight.
The lead singer and primary lyricist of the long-running rock band U2, Bono has never exactly been the shy type. Outside of Elvis posing with Nixon, no rock star has seemed so comfortable posing with so many politicians, and Bono has perhaps set the record for the most Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction speeches given.3 A preacherly ambition propels Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, as the book chronicles U2’s forty-odd-year career, and the book’s impact hinges on your openness to Bono’s expansiveness. While no fruit is thrown at rock royalty, Surrender as a whole offers a smart and charmingly self-deprecating portrait of Bono and his three friends from Dublin as they propel themselves from scruffy post-punk band to one of the last of the great rock ’n’ roll acts, one of the few bands from their era that can stand with the Stones and the McCartneys in the cavernous sports arenas around the world. If a talking head is needed to wax poetic on America, rock ’n’ roll, debt relief, religion, sex, life, death—I am sure he has an opinion on cross-stitching—Bono is the person to turn to.
For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of
I have deep affection for the people of both India and Pakistan, and am dismayed by what I see as a looming train wreck on the Indus, with disastrous consequences for both countries. I will outline why there is no objective conflict of interests between the countries over the waters of the Indus Basin, make some observations of the need for a change in public discourse, and suggest how the drivers of the train can put on the brakes before it is too late.
A few years ago
It is almost certainly the most consequential 100 days that scientists in the United States have experienced since the end of World War II.