“The battle over health care focuses on access to insurance, or tempests like the one that erupted over new mammogram guidelines.”
“But what about broader public health challenges? What if breast cancer in the United States has less to do with insurance or mammograms and more to do with contaminants in our water or air — or in certain plastic containers in our kitchens? What if the surge in asthma and childhood leukemia reflect, in part, the poisons we impose upon ourselves?”
“When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.”
“And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.”
“But he’s a rare case…”
“In this remarkable and fully rockin’ video, an Italian singer performs a rock piece whose lyrics are gibberish intended to sound like English. Entitled “What English Sounds Like to Foreigners,” the video is meant to illustrate which English phonemes and syllables carry into the foreign ear, but I tell you what, it sounded like English to me, too, though like English as sung in such a way as to make it hard to decipher.”