I’ve been blogging for nearly eleven years now—and continuously at that, with only brief breaks for vacations or when the vagaries of life and career (particularly grant deadlines) interfered with the writing impulse. It’s true that I’ve slowed down a bit. I rarely post on weekends any more and not infrequently miss a weekday, but […]
Bullying. You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Yes, I do so love to co-opt that famous line from The Princess Bride for my own nefarious purposes, but it’s so perfect for this particular topic, which comes up every so often when I’m writing about the […]
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the antivaccine movement over the decade-plus that I’ve been following and commenting on it, it’s that there are many flavors of antivaccine beliefs. These range from the “loud and proud” (and, invariably, incredibly stupid) antivaccine activists who aren’t afraid of the label. They’ll tell you that they’re antivaccine […]
It is an article of faith among the antivaccine movement that vaccines are degrading the health of our children, such that vaccines cause autism, asthma, diabetes, and a number of other chronic diseases. You won’t have to look far on most antivaccine websites to find claims that today’s children are the sickest in history and […]
As a surgeon and skeptic, I find neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson to be particularly troubling. I realize that I’ve said this before, but it’s hard for me not to revisit his strange case given that the New York Times just ran a rather revealing profile of him over the weekend, part of which […]
