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In the 1990s, I traveled on three separate occasions to Halle Germany, which is in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in the former East Germany. My MD/PhD student at the time spent two months in a research lab in Halle. At that time, Halle was experiencing the flush of new money that flooded in after reunification. There were cranes all over the city, signifying new buildings. People were replacing their Trabants with BMWs (although I photographed over a dozen Trabbies around town during a three-week visit. But now the picture in Saxony-Anhalt looks different. “ The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.   “Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help real...

Is modern life really so complicated? What most Americans do is get themselves into lots of credit-card debt. Which if you understood what cumulative interest means, that is, if you had just the most elementary calculus or even just really understood your multiplication tables, maybe you would be able to avoid. The best defense of the working class in general is arithmetic. And that therefore social policy, just looking at it this way, has to include making sure that people can do their own math.   ~Timothy Snyder

It really is very, very unwise indeed, in the practical ethics of international relations for democracies to make war unprompted—on preemptive grounds—when alternative strategies are available to them. Because that is corrosive, not only of the exemplary quality of democracies—without which they cannot lecture dictatorships—but is also internally corrosive of what democracies are supposed to be about. ~Tony Judt  

My department is named for Edward A. Doisy, who shared the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of vitamin K. He was the founding chair of my department, which was 100 years old in 2024. Naturally, I have more than average appreciation for this discovery and its medical impact. “The rate of newborns not receiving the vitamin K shot within a day of birth in hospitals jumped more than 57% from January through June, a review of health records for more than 1 ​million births nationwide by health data and analytics company Truveta revealed. “While vitamin K refusals have been on the rise for years, the Truveta analysis shows that in the first half of 2026, the rate of non-receipt was 2.5 times higher than the average rate from 2019 to 2024. It was 1.4 times higher than in 2025.”   OK, but so what? “ Babies are born with very low levels of vitamin K, which helps blood to clot, and are unprotected up until about six months of age, according to the Centers for Dise...

“President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration previously called on conservatives to create new academic journals and to fund science that would explicitly back right-wing policy goals. “Heidi Overton made the comments in a December 2023 appearance on The Tank, a podcast by the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute. Overton, who has a medical degree and is now a White House aide, was previously chief policy officer at the think tank. There she led health care policy and was director of the institute’s Center for a Healthy America.   “In the 2023 interview, Overton called for new science journals that would be dedicated to “conservative-based” science and described a 20-year vision for changing the infrastructure of funding and research to make it more aligned with conservative policy. This vision included “alternate systems” for publishing research.”   I’m an actual, you know, scientist. Real science is evidence-based. What she's ad...

What happens when Claude talks to Claude? Peak AI. Click the link and find out! https://www.thisamericanlife.org/896/i-know-what-you-need/act-two-2?fbclid=IwY2xjawUCXcZwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5kLIBRB2pTfjTJRPk8HY6qA1Gn6GpC_5NJkD5AGYV9XTdHeaqCaDfxy49BuA_aem_uSCafsocyeOPBJe9Ud4iAQ