“Sick or not sick?” This is the question that preoccupied me throughout my emergency medicine subinternships as a fourth-year medical student. Simple in concept, yet vexing interpretation, save for extremes at each end of spectrum. On away rotation, I am easing into rhythm an evening shift and browsing board new patient. One pops up whose triage vitals are all highlighted red: febrile, tachypne...

A row of small white volumes marches along one bookshelf in my cluttered office. It is flanked on both ends by slightly larger volumes. The first is labeled “Processing of RNA, Brookhaven Symposia in Biology, Number 26,” the proceedings of a meeting I attended in May, 1974, as a relatively new assistant professor with my undergraduate student David Ginsburg. The other larger volume is “RNA ’96,...

Deception is a popular and useful technique for examining a variety of important social psychological phenomena. Indeed, deception has proved to be indispensable in studying and establishing causality within a variety of important human social phenomena (e.g., aggression, prejudice, obedience, conformity, impression management). Upwards of 81% of studies published in the top social psychologica...

Reading the exchange between Halpin, Savulescu, Talbot, Turner and Talman reminds one starkly and uncomfortably of the issues AIDS activists faced in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the trial designs in those days were sufficiently bad that patients could not be recruited in the numbers required to run them, the sacrifices they demanded from patients in terms of their very survival were simply too...

addicted.pregnant.poor. by medical anthropologist Kelly Ray Knight is a poignant glimpse into the lives of pregnant addicts living in daily-rent hotels San Francisco's Mission District. Through interviews and participant observation, collects stories—past present—of these women's struggles as they navigate unstable housing, hazardous health conditions, crack addiction (as well other substance a...

Veganism is commonly described as the attempt to avoid, far possible, exploitation and consumption of animals animal products. While some people choose plant-based diet associated with veganism for health or other self-interested reasons, majority philosophical work on topic has been devoted discussion ethical justification (i.e., ‘ethical veganism’). Some argue that it a moral imperative if we...

This article describes a new course (Environmental Justice Movement) initiated at the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 1995. It was designed as a companion to another course, Environmental Planning. The course objectives are to prepare planning students to engage in the environmental policy debate by exposing them to its historical, moral, an...

Competition obscures the realities and significance of play, in particular, the bodily play originating in infancy and typical of young children. A multidisciplinary perspective on child’s play elucidates the nature of child’s play and validates the distinction between competition and play. The article begins with a consideration of ethological research on play in young human and nonhuman anima...