Six months ago, I did something foolish. I ran a five-mile race with little training. I figured five miles wasn’t going to kill me, and it didn’t. But after the race, I had a nagging ache in my ankle. So I took a break from running, and the ankle pain went away. I thought I […]
In 2013, I attended a lecture by Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a physician who believes vaccination is the cause of many, many evils. Four years later, Palevsky is still railing against vaccines. His latest newsletter, which arrived in my inbox a couple of days ago, highlights a story that celebrates the defeat of several vaccine bills […]
We haven’t had a post in our occasional ‘Thank God It’s Penis Friday‘ series in quite awhile, so here’s one that we first published in 2013. Warning: images in links may be unsuitable for some. (Oh who am I kidding? Images in links may be unsuitable for most). By the time dermatologist Sanjeev Vaishampayan met […]
Three weeks ago I came down with the flu. I was sicker than I have been in years. For a full five days, I could only manage to quiver on the couch and binge watch old seasons of Scandal. One episode would end and the next would automatically begin until Netflix asked incredulously, “Are you […]
Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?” The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s […]
When I was five or six years old, my mom’s boyfriend took us ice fishing. He drove his Jeep to the edge of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes and then he kept going, down the boat ramp and out onto the glittering expanse of white. He stopped next to a small ice shanty, and […]
Five years ago I wrote a post about Pat Elliott, a woman with chronic leukemia. She was trying to figure out how to pay for her medication. At the time, Gleevec cost about $5,000 a month. A generic version of Gleevec went on the market in 2016, but it still costs more than $4,000 a […]
Donut the dog has always been a bit of a lemon. “She hates kids. She hates other dogs. She hates physical activity,” says Julia Gilden. Gilden adopted the 80-pound Bearded Collie seven years ago. All the things people love about dogs? Donut didn’t really have many of those attributes. But she was sweet and goofy […]