All Posts
‘Tis the Season of Joy
Do you get charged up over holidays? For most of them I don’t, but the pair now approaching always key me up in the right way, sharpening my focus on family and friends, and intensifying a feeling of – there’s no better word for it – JOY. I can’t explain what triggers it, but genuine […]
A Harvard Professor and Wuhan
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (See here) has earned its badge of notoriety. Now a prominent Harvard professor is likely to draw attention to another Wuhan establishment, The Wuhan University of Technology (See here). Professor Charles Lieber, a renowned authority on nanotechnology, had a decade-long academic partnership with that Wuhan Technical University. Today a federal […]
My First Year of Blogging, and My Books (Part 2)
Below is the second installment from the beginning of my revised memoir. This part is newly added and does not appear in the original Bending the Twig (See here). As I explained in my previous post, the revised manuscript is as yet unpublished. I was twenty-six when I enrolled in medical school, older than […]
My First Year of Blogging, and My Books
I passed a minor milestone about a month ago. I noted it silently at the time, but, as I said, it was a minor event, so I didn’t even celebrate the occasion with a Manhattan, my favorite drink. What was that minor achievement? Drum roll, please. I completed my first year of blogging with a […]
Wuhan Waltz #4
Those of you who have been reading this blog may remember I’ve written about the virus from Wuhan a number of times. On the basis of earlier evidence, I concluded that Covid‑19 likely originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Those posts can be found by clicking here, here, and here). As a rule, scientists […]
Fishing in Finland
How many times has this happened to you? Your mind is stuck on a specific thought pattern and then “boom,” up pops a made-to-order complementary object that tops off your thought as neatly as a cherry tops off a sundae. That happened to me yesterday. I was thinking of fishing in Finland with a […]
Joys from a Finnish Smoke Sauna
My friends, Martti and Kaarina, as is common for many Finnish families, own a summer cottage on a lake shore. When I first visited their site a few decades ago, the only building standing was a rough-hewn log cabin, its left side walled off and made into an authentic smoke sauna, the type most prized […]
Casualty Numbers from the Covid-19 Vaccine Battlefield
“Mr. Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings institution, argues that human beings have a natural tendency to believe what they wish, irrespective of evidence.” (From a book review in the October 13, 2021, Wall Street Journal) Let’s look at some specific evidence related to our nasty battle over the virus vaccine. According to the […]
Tribute to a Friendship
It began in Illinois decades ago, four young men having no idea they were forming a lifelong friendship. They were just having fun. “Friendship does not arise out of necessity, but out of pleasure,” wrote one of my favorite contemporary writers, Joseph Epstein, in Friendship: An Exposé (Link), a delightful discourse on the subject. The […]
Ben Franklin on inoculation
From time to time, when itching for a snippet of diversion, I’ll head to one of my book cases and scan the spines, searching for something to perk me up. I found myself doing that this afternoon. While skimming along a neglected lower shelf, I zeroed in on a small paperback I hadn’t touched in […]
