Health

How to Save the NIH

Public science too often serves private profits, making it vulnerable to attacks like Trump’s.

Ugly Truths

The politics of the mad memoir. 

Blood Ties

Trump’s “invasion” narrative and the real story of pain in America.

My Father, the Cyborg

The seductions of medical surveillance.

How Not to Do Industrial Policy

Instead of pouring public funds into private industry—as the U.S. did with COVID-19 vaccines—we must build public capacity and prioritize public objectives.

How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair

A Nobel Prize–winning economist reflects on the dire consequences of libertarian economics.

Killer Heat Waves Are Coming

But awareness alone won’t solve the problem. Here’s what we should do.

Keeping the Faith

Even in states without bans on abortion or gender-affirming care, hidden religious restrictions in secular hospitals harm patients.

Is There a Cure for Medical Racism?

From unequal rates of COVID-19 death and hospitalization to biased pulse oximeters, medicine must reckon with the racism in its midst.

Escape from the Closed Loop

Protests in China are shining a light not only on the country’s draconian population management but restrictions on workers everywhere.

What the AIDS Crisis Can Teach Us About Monkeypox

Harm reduction strategies have the best chance of stopping this disease.

Nine Ways That Capitalism Is Ruining Sex

Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.

After Dobbs

An interview on the post-Dobbs legal landscape—and how the federal government can respond.

Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head

Decades of biological research haven’t improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.

Roe Was Never Enough Anyway

It is long past time for law and policy to facilitate affordable and accessible services.

The Racial Capitalism of Care

A recording and transcript of our event on inequities in medicine and child welfare.

How the Other Half Dies

Until COVID-19, tuberculosis killed more people each year than any other infectious disease. Its rising toll is increasingly fueled by mass incarceration.

Selling Hope

A cancer diagnosis reveals how pervasive consumerism has become, infecting even the stuff meant to heal us.

How Medicine Must Change for Endemic COVID-19

To meet the challenge of enduring spread in the years to come, we must prioritize primary care and community health over the profit-driven status quo.

Neither Chaos Nor Quest: Toward a Nonnarrative Medicine

Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.

Abortion Is Not a “Choice” Without Racial Justice

After Roe v. Wade, Angela Davis wrote about how the reproductive rights movement was failing women of color. As Roe is dismantled, her diagnosis is more crucial than ever.

Why I Provide Abortions

My patients and I don’t use words like “choice” or “viability.”

What Health Care Should Be

Physicians have been fighting for health justice for decades. To succeed, we need practical models for collectively remaking our systems of care.

Abortion Is a Public Good

The right to reproductive health and agency is a compelling state interest.

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