“Do you like vagina?” A resident physician asked me that when I was a third-year medical student in New York two years ago. He took obvious pleasure in making me squirm. I had just started hospital rotations after two years in the classroom, and over lunch, we were discussing possible areas of specialization, including internal […]

WASHINGTON — As the body count mounts in the Philippines’ deadly war on drugs, and its combative president’s rhetoric plumbs new depths, the mood in Washington toward a key Asian ally is hardening. Influential U.S. lawmakers are warning that the extra-judicial killings in the drug war — President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday compared it to […]

Andrew Sullivan confesses that he “used to be a human being.” In a provocative essay in New York magazine, Sullivan writes about the ways smartphone technology and its constant connectedness have disconnected us from our sense of our humanity and from one another.I was most intrigued by Sullivan’s proposals for the church to be a […]

It was no surprise that in the first hours after the New York and New Jersey bombing attacks, the culprit was widely suggested to be a “lone wolf.” The term, used to describe an individual inspired by others but acting on his or her own, has become the counterterrorism metaphor-of-choice in the age of the […]

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. —Ben Ferencz pops a cough drop into his mouth, “to loosen my ancient throat.” Where to begin his improbable story?“I was born in a small village in Transylvania in the Carpathian Mountains,” he says, sitting in the living room of his modestretirement home. “It was a small house with a thatched roof, […]

Workers need a stronger voice at the table, or risklosing more to craftycorporate behemoths Work, life, and community formed a living mosaic in communities dominated by a major industry. The demise of such an industry reveals that the psychological and social costs are as important as are the economic losses which draw first and most attention. […]

My last column was the first part of a review of what will likely be the most comprehensive published study of the remarkable career of Maine’s Sen. George Mitchell.  When an author like Rooks sets out to cover such a broad subject, there’s always a risk of mishaps in the process of assembling the product. […]

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils . . . the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open” –Victor Frankenstein On a […]

How they vote on Nov. 8 will shape the politicallandscape for years to come The oldest millennials — nearing 20 when airplanes slammed into New York City’s Twin Towers — are old enough to remember the relative economic prosperity of the 1990s, and when a different Clinton was running for president. The nation’s youngest adults — […]