Haim Watzman
Ice People is ostensibly a documentary about geologists in Antarctica, but beyond than that it’s a work of art about the continent’s landscapes. More than informing us about south pole science, director Anne Ahgion tells us something important about the processes of artistic and scientific creation.

In a central scene, the four geologists she [...]

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Poor God. You created the world, you are the power and glory, but everyone thinks you’re a Republican.
But the association of the Most High with the most right-wing doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Conservatives, after all, love order. They want today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like the day before yesterday.
But [...]

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Here’s an update in the value of doubt from veteran health journalist and muckraker (the word is a medal of honor) Shannon Brownlee, writing in the Washington Post:
Striking fear… serves pharmaceutical companies, which want you to worry about diseases, because people who worry are more likely to go to their doctors and ask for drugs [...]

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Purim is the Hebrew calendar’s brush with postmodernism. No other observance is so full of contradictions, alternative readings, ambiguities. Nahafokh hu, as the Book of Esther says—every character, event, and ritual comes along with its mirror image. We expunge the ultimate evil, Amalek, from our memories by remembering; we are commanded to recite a story [...]

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What makes a medical procedure scientific? What makes it quackery?
Unlike many of my friends, I’m a conventional medicine guy. I don’t have any patience for homeopathy and reflexology and the like because they have no scientific backing. And as a writer about science, I’m convinced that the scientific method—which in the case of medicine centers [...]

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“This unhealable self in myself who knows what I should know.” A man visiting an exhibition of exposed human tissue reflects despairingly on the disconnect between  his body and his soul, and between his soul and his self.
The poem is “Dissections,” the poet C. K. Williams. When it appeared in The Atlantic in November 2002 [...]

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