Tag: Stanford University
David Brooks: The New Old Age
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Anne Kenner worked for many years as a federal prosecutor, first in the Eastern District of New York, and then in the Northern District of California, trying mobsters and drug dealers. “I like the hairy edge,” she told me. Her job was meaningful to her; it made
Doctors May Soon Be Able to Screen for Preeclampsia and Preterm Birth
This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
For expectant parents, pregnancy can be a time filled with joyful anticipation: hearing the beating of a tiny heart, watching the fetus wiggling through the black-and-white blur of an ultrasound, feeling the jostling of a little being in the belly as it swells.
But for many, pregnancy also comes with serious health issues that can endanger both parent and child. In May, for example, the U.S. Olympic sprinter Tori Bowie died
The Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto
Not long before his death in 2007, my father told me that he “thought he might have” coined the term information technology. It turns out he was right. In an article titled “Management in the 1980’s,” published in the November, 1958, issue of the Harvard Business Review, Harold J. Leavitt and his co-author, Thomas L. Whisler, identify a “new technology” that “has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to
What Stanford Law’s DEI Dean Got Wrong
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Question of the Week
I was overwhelmed by your responses to last week’s question on cars! So for now, I’m going to hold off on a new question and promise to send out your excellent thoughts in the next newsletter.
American Science Is Broken. Here’s How We Can Fix It.
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In April 2020, when the coronavirus first swept across the United States, many of America’s top scientists struggled to get funding to answer basic and urgent questions about the disease it caused. Patrick Collison, the chief executive of the payment-processing company Stripe, spied an opportunity in this market failure. He co-founded a program called Fast Grants, which raised more than $50 million that was quickly distributed to hundreds of projects. In its first
America Is Running Out of New Ideas
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Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?
Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4,
Josh Hawley’s ‘Attack on Men’
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri surprised even some allies when he recently devoted his entire speech at a high-profile national conference of conservatives to an extended analysis of why so many men appear stuck in a cycle of “idleness and pornography and video games,” as he put it.
Hawley’s warnings against what he called liberals’ “attack on men” could open a new front in the culture wars that Republicans have used to consolidate their support among the voters most alienated
Coronavirus Variants Can’t Survive on Speed Forever
If evolution is a numbers game, the coronavirus is especially good at playing it. Over the past year and a half, it’s copied itself quickly and sloppily in hundreds of millions of hosts, and hit upon a glut of genetic jackpots that further facilitate its spread. Delta, the hyper-contagious variant that has swept the globe in recent months, is undoubtedly one of the virus’s most daring moves to date. This variant is the product of unfettered transmission, and will thrive
What Germany Can Teach America About Polarization
When Edmund Schechter, a Viennese Jew who fled the Nazis, arrived in postwar Germany in 1945, he encountered a “wasteland”—not just physically, he said, but “psychologically.”
All newspapers had ceased publication. Radio stations were destroyed and devoid of their Nazi staff. The “silent” media landscape provided “virgin territory” to “do all sorts of things really from scratch,” recalled Schechter, who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp to the United States only to head to Germany after World War II