In 1971, when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, “conquering this dread disease” must have seemed like an ambitious but reasonable goal. Within his lifetime, man had split the atom and walked on the moon; now it was time to ...

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If you are reading this, the odds are high that you are a member of the animal kingdom: phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, species Homo sapiens. We all know this, even if we’ve forgotten our high school biology. So why did ...

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It’s been a quarter-century, and I can still hear clearly the sound of my voice that night. It wavered with a plaintive, childish note as I spoke into the phone: “He hit me.” That sound, which I had never before ...

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It’s probably not surprising that the sad case of Alfie Evans — the 23-month-old boy who died in Britain this weekend after he was taken off life support over his parents’ objections — quickly devolved into mud-slinging about the health ...

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Cable providers are possibly America’s most unlovable monopoly. Small wonder, then, that so many people are so eager to cut the cable cord. Or that Netflix’s Monday earnings call boasted record profit growth, with 7.4 million more subscribers added in ...

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Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the scars of the riots that followed are only now fully healed in Washington. In other cities, they still aren’t. And we still don’t know exactly ...

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Pop quiz: What percentage of bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills? If you lived through the debate over passing Obamacare, you probably answered something like “half.” That was the figure in common currency among advocates of ...

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For anyone who grew up in the ’70s or ’80s, Toys R Us was a sort of a magic kingdom, like a candy store in its powers to enchant. So many aisles of delightful things to play with. You could ...

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Me too. Me too. Me too. When our friends and colleagues are the accusers, when our neighbors and peers are the accused, the problem stares us in the face from a proximity so intimate that we cannot dismiss it with ...

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Thanks to the unexpected death of Antonin Scalia, they were so close to flipping the balance of the Supreme Court that they could taste it. Vast possibilities seemed to be opening up to move us towards a government that was ...

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