Beauty to the Rescue

January 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

In a letter to The New Yorker (January 9, 2012 edition), Dr. Joshua Bamberger writes that the Department of Public Health in San Francisco has:

observed that people who are housed in more aesthetically pleasing and functional buildings, and in those which are in safer neighborhoods, have had more dramatic reductions in health-care utilization than people directed to less pleasant housing….most people know intuitively that safety and beauty can help cure the ills of modern society…

Not just the good kind of beauty that can be used to sell shampoo, but the other kind of beauty that can improve well-being. Give me some of that!

Filed under Politics Tagged with , ,

Brain Decline

January 10, 2012 by Leave a comment

When people tell me how their minds are no longer the steel traps that they used to be, I start to worry, as mine has never been more than a flimsy stopgap. My brother once told me that the trick to remembering people’s names is to repeat the name as soon as you hear it, but both of us get stymied by the time we reach the end of the sentence. As in, “Oh, nice to meet you…uh…what was that name again?”

Read more of this post

Filed under Science Tagged with , ,

Ben Breedlove’s Story

December 29, 2011 by Leave a comment

Ben Breedlove died on Christmas Day from a heart condition, at the age of 18.

Ben tells his story in the following two YouTube videos. The story is told on index cards, the soundtrack is an instrumental of “Mad World,” and the smile is touching.

Ben’s videos after the jump

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

France Pays to Fix Breasts

December 26, 2011 by Leave a comment

News that France has agreed to pay for women with faulty breast implants to have them fixed could be viewed by the anti-health advocates as evidence of government waste, but it’s ridiculous to frame it against the European debt crisis, as the Times of India does. $78 million simply isn’t a large expenditure for France when it comes to the health of its people. This is a case of the government paying to fix the problems caused by an out-of-control private industry that puts profit ahead of people.

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 398 other followers