The New Atlantis

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The New Atlantis

Why I, a Physician, Write

I remember my first encounter with great literature. Before bedtime, my father would read Great Expectations to me, using different voices for different characters. I remember Pip and Miss Havisham, though I don’t think I fully understood Miss Havisham’s peremptory and eery commandment to Pip to love Stella. I remember the stygian scene with the convict in the graveyard. I also remember reading Sherlock Holmes under my covers, enamored with his brilliance and the game that was afoot. I remember tearing through the Lord of the Rings books and the first few books of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time... The post Why I, a Physician, Write appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Aaron RothsteinJun 4, 2019

The New Atlantis

The Absent Oncologist

We admitted the patient to our service from the emergency room to treat her for thrombocytopenia (an abnormally low platelet count) and spontaneous bruising. The patient, in her fifties, was otherwise healthy. True, she had been treated for stomach cancer nearly seven years ago, but it was in remission and had been for a while. She had no issues eating or drinking, no problems going to the bathroom, no blood in her stool, no vomiting, no bloating, no severe acid reflux. In other words, she had no residual gastrointestinal symptoms. Over the next two days, we ordered other labs, and... The post The Absent Oncologist appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Aaron RothsteinFeb 26, 2020

The New Atlantis

A Journal of the Plague Months

From 1665 to 1666, the Great Plague spread through London. Caused by a bacteria transmitted by the bite of a rat flea, it killed nearly a quarter of London’s population in the span of 18 months. Such a deadly conflagration must have seemed strange and terrifying to its victims; there was no germ theory to explain its spread, and the bacteria wasn’t even discovered until the late 19th century. Lack of understanding must have greatly amplified the terror caused by the symptoms: fevers, chills, headache, swollen lymph nodes, gangrenous limbs, and a tortuous journey to the other side. Attempts to ward off the disease included bonfires to cleanse... The post A Journal of the Plague Months appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Samuel MatlackApr 15, 2020

The New Atlantis

The Other Victims of Covid-19

“I just want to run this case by you,” the emergency room doctor at the other hospital told me on the phone. We frequently get these calls from other hospitals. Smaller emergency rooms with fewer resources often don’t know what to do in complex situations. After all, scientific literature in medical subspecialties changes rapidly and for a non-specialist these cases offer difficult conundrums. Moreover, smaller institutions don’t have access to specialists around the clock. Consequently, they turn to other medical centers for help. The physician told me the details of the case. A woman in her sixties with high cholesterol,... The post The Other Victims of Covid-19 appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Samuel MatlackApr 30, 2020

The New Atlantis

Are Doctors Heroes?

The effervescent rays of sunshine spread their warmth across my back as I walk along Omaha Beach in Normandy. French children kick around a soccer ball, shouting and giggling across a fifty-yard stretch of sand. A tranquil ocean extends into the horizon, effortlessly mingling with the sky making it impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends. Looking out across the serene water, I imagine June 6, 1944 and the chaos that once enveloped these beaches. The young American soldiers landing here faced an onslaught of bullets from Nazi pillboxes — concrete bunkers with holes to fire through... The post Are Doctors Heroes? appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Samuel MatlackMay 21, 2020

The New Atlantis

Let Them Visit

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, hospital administrators behaved as cautiously as possible to avoid transmission and dissemination of the virus. They strictly limited or eliminated hospital visitors. This was one of the most devastating policies enacted by healthcare institutions. As a consequence, not only were patients left without family at their bedside to advocate for them, but they were, alas, left without family at bedside to say goodbye to them as they passed. Families needed to FaceTime their loved ones near the end; no hands were held, no one gathered around the bedside. At their most vulnerable moments,... The post Let Them Visit appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Brendan FohtMar 8, 2021

The New Atlantis

Death in the Young

In war, those with their lives yet to be lived are also those most urgently needed to fight. It is one of the tragic ironies of conflict. In the U.S. Civil War, the average soldier was 26 and approximately 620,000 soldiers died. In World War I, over 2 million German soldiers died, and 40 percent of German combatants were between 21 and 25 years old. In the Vietnam War, 58,193 American servicemen died — approximately 24 percent of those killed were 20, and roughly 17 percent of those killed were 21. We comprehend the risk in sending young soldiers off... The post Death in the Young appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Brendan FohtMar 15, 2021

The New Atlantis

The Art of Prognostication

Her oncologist sent her in to the emergency room. The diagnosis was metastatic gallbladder cancer aggressively invading her liver, resulting in liver failure. I went down to the emergency room to see her. She only spoke Bengali, so every conversation required a phone interpreter. As I walked up to the patient’s bed I immediately noticed her jaundiced skin. Bilirubin, or breakdown products of red blood cells, above a certain level causes a yellowing of the eyes, the gums, and the skin where it deposits. It is frightening to see, the scarlet letter of illness. It is unclear what the patient... The post The Art of Prognostication appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Brendan FohtMar 22, 2021

The New Atlantis

A White Doctor Goes to Africa

“I am departing totally convinced,” the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote to a professional acquaintance in March of 1890, “that my trip will yield a valuable contribution neither to literature nor to science.” Chekhov prepared to leave for Sakhalin Island, a distant part of the Russian Empire north of Japan filled with convicts and criminal exiles. If this trip would offer nothing to literature or science, what could Chekhov, a physician and member of the literati, gain from this sojourn? He knew he would see suffering and pain there, the nadir of human existence. Why descend on that path?... The post A White Doctor Goes to Africa appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Brendan FohtMar 29, 2021

The New Atlantis

How Finitude Makes Us Happy — My Final Post

She looked her age — 27, startlingly close to my own age. Did we share acquaintances or friends of friends? She fixed her hair in a ponytail and wore jeans and a collared shirt with a sweater, a preppy and youthful fashion statement consistent with her budding career as an architect. Polite but slightly withdrawn she looked uncomfortable, out of place. And indeed she was. No one had ever been sick in her immediate family. The hospital felt strange. She exercised daily and strictly adhered to a diet of fruits, vegetables, and fish. Why did she need to be here?... The post How Finitude Makes Us Happy — My Final Post appeared first on The New Atlantis.

Brendan FohtApr 5, 2021

The New Atlantis

backup strategies — The New Atlantis

Here’s an odd post by Gina Barreca about a student of hers whose completely un-backed-up computer died. Everything was lost: documents of all kinds, photos, email, etc. Barreca’s response: See, this is why you should print everything out. (Everything? Even the photos?) Barreca says she pays for a backup service, though she seems to make a point of emphasizing that she doesn’t understand it: “one of those companies which (I am told) will keep my stuff safe in the ether or the cloud or the memory of one really smart guy who’ll be able to recite everything I have on...

Alan JacobsMay 4, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

more on curation — The New Atlantis

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s not all curation. And don’t neglect this post.

Alan JacobsJun 7, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

advice for writers (1) — The New Atlantis

Say, here are “Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 22 Brilliant Authors”. Some good advice may be found there; also some ridiculous stuff. I have always been annoyed by the tendency some writers have to make writing a book sound like hard labor in Siberia. Thus an anonymous “author of notable books on science and psychology”: [I didn’t know] how hard writing a book would be on my body — two major illnesses and two surgeries in two years, a health record unprecedented in my life, and unrepeated in the two years since. No idea what to do differently,...

Alan JacobsJun 7, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

finishing — The New Atlantis

I like the suggestion here: Two months into 2011, The New York Times tech reporter (and former Wired reporter Jenna Wortham) wrote excitedly that she had finally finished her first e-book — how is such technological tardiness possible for someone so plugged in? Wortham had an excellent explanation: She kept forgetting to pick up any e-book she had started reading. It took the solemn determination of a New Year’s resolution to break that spell. E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started. They do not serve as constant, embarrassing reminders to...

Alan JacobsJun 6, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

my D.C. visit, storified — The New Atlantis

In an earlier post I used Storify to present a Twitter conversation. But I’m a piker at storification in comparison to my friend Tim Carmody, who transformed my recent visit to D.C. — and my first meeting with him — into a work of art. Check it out. I am very grateful to my friends at The New Atlantis — Adam Keiper, Caitrin Nicol, Ari Schulman, and Barrett Bowdre — for making my visit an exceptionally enjoyable one. And also to Oxford University Press for putting me up in a really funky hotel with leopard- and zebra-print robes.

Alan JacobsJun 5, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

commencements — The New Atlantis

Interesting to see both Jonathan Franzen and David Brooks speaking to and about college graduates in ways that suggest an attempt to channel David Foster Wallace’s great Kenyon commencement speech — Brooks in substance only, Franzen in substance and tone alike. Neither of them work very well. Brooks’s essay, while thoughtful and even wise, comes off as a bit hectoring; Franzen just seems self-absorbed. Ancient rhetorical theory — Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, for example — said that a speaker may persuade by the employment of logos (reasoning), pathos (emotional appeal), and ethos (his or her own personal character). Of the three,...

Alan JacobsJun 2, 20112 min read

The New Atlantis

Google good and bad — The New Atlantis

People who have been using a Mac for a long time can find Google Chrome painful to look at. Some of the reasons for that are outlined in this post by Majd Taby, but there are others. There’s a general lack of fit and finish: for instance, if you have folders in your bookmark bar in Chrome, click on one of them; then do the same in Safari. The drop-down menu in Chrome is as bare-bones as it gets: there’s a general close-enough-for-government-work feel to Chrome’s whole UI. But beneath the hood? Within a few minutes of reading Taby’s post...

Alan JacobsJun 1, 20112 min read

The New Atlantis

curators and imitators — The New Atlantis

You know what annoys me? Well, actually, that would be a long list. You know one thing that annoys me? The way some people on the internet use the word “curator.” People find cool stuff online and put links to that cool stuff on their website, and they say that they’re “curating” the internet. When Jorn Barger invented that kind of thing he was content to call it a weblog — a record or “log” of interesting stuff he found online. Now, one might argue that the weblog or blog has changed its character since Barger invented it: instead of...

Alan JacobsMay 31, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

memory and forgetting — The New Atlantis

This essay by Margaret Morganroth Gullette on memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease has a provocative title: “Our Irrational Fear of Forgetting.” So, what’s irrational about a fear of forgetting? At one point Gullette says “People over 55 dread getting Alzheimer’s more than any other disease, according to a 2010 survey by the MetLife Foundation. The fact that only 1 in 8 Americans older than 65 has Alzheimer’s fails to register.” So it’s irrational to fear Alzheimer’s because you’re not likely to get it. Yes, it’s not likely — but 1 in 8 is not a negligible number. That’s higher than I...

Alan JacobsMay 27, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

dead and dying — The New Atlantis

Bill Pannapacker writes about the dying grandmother problem — and for college teachers it’s a big one. Every semester, just as the big end-of-term assignments come around, the grandparents start dropping like flies. I haven’t known how to handle this any better than Pannapacker does, but a few weeks before his essay came out I was thinking of adding an item to my Frequently Asked Questions page along these lines: “If you tell me you can’t complete an assignment because of the death of a grandparent, I will need to have confirmation of that sad loss from one of your...

Alan JacobsMay 25, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

banner! — The New Atlantis

Hey everyone, look at the awesome new banner my friend Brad Cathey of Highgate Cross made for the blog. Cool, is it not? Brad, by the way, is also responsible for the beautiful design of Gospel of the Trees. I am once again in his debt.

Alan JacobsMay 25, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

sunk costs — The New Atlantis

There are some excellent and helpful thoughts in this post by Megan McArdle, for instance: A lot of the reaction to any new technology is simply that many of us invested a lot of effort in learning how to use the old technology well. That’s especially true of books. (It’s no accident that so many of the complaints come from journalists, academics, and other writers). For years, in school and at work, we constructed increasingly elaborate personal reference systems from notes, flags, and dog-ears, and our brains are now very nimble at using them. Change is hard. Moreover, it involves...

Alan JacobsMay 23, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

benighted — The New Atlantis

When I read this introductory paragraph to a story by John Noble Wilford — In the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the springtime of the Renaissance, science and other branches of learning took a holiday throughout Europe. It was a benighted time in the history most of us raced through in school, skipping lightly through Charlemagne and Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Norman Conquest and the Crusades, and arriving none too soon at the time of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Columbus and da Gama, Erasmus and Luther. — I thought it was the set-up to a joke. No informed...

Alan JacobsMay 22, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

what I love about Twitter (and Storify) — The New Atlantis

[View the story “The NYT in India” on Storify] These things just surge and fade — they appear out of nowhere and then, after a flurry of exchanges, they subside. It’s an insult to the intrinsically ephemerality of the thing to preserve an exchange in this way — but just for purposes of illustration I’ll do it this once. I love it. I just love it.

Alan JacobsMay 20, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

rediscovered — The New Atlantis

Huckleberry Finn, illustrated, from a 1961 English edition.

Alan JacobsMay 20, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

aloud — The New Atlantis

Erin O’Connor on the great power of a simple idea: Teaching high school for a year at a very interesting little Berkshire boarding school got me onto shared class reading projects–the kids I was teaching were very smart, but, like most kids these days, just didn’t have much experience reading. So we read and read out loud together, stopping from time to time to talk about the language and the ideas and so on. I have very fond memories of doing that with “Song of Myself” in winter time, the whole class clustered around the wood-burning stove in our otherwise...

Alan JacobsMay 20, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

attention deficits and thick descriptions — The New Atlantis

A few days late, but this is an interesting article: It’s an assertion I’ve heard many times when a child has attention problems. Sometimes parents make the same point about television: My child can sit and watch for hours — he can’t have A.D.H.D. In fact, a child’s ability to stay focused on a screen, though not anywhere else, is actually characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are complex behavioral and neurological connections linking screens and attention, and many experts believe that these children do spend more time playing video games and watching television than their peers. But is...

Alan JacobsMay 20, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

Jonah Lehrer makes me vaguely uneasy — The New Atlantis

Jonah Lehrer writes in praise of vagueness: The problem with precision, though, is that it can often be discouraging. Let’s say you want to lose 10 pounds. After following a strict diet for a few days, you then decide to weigh yourself. The good news is that you have lost weight. The bad news is that you’ve only lost 4 pounds. While that represents progress, it probably feels pretty disappointing, since you’ve already worked hard and you’re not even half way to the goal. As a result, you might become a little less motivated, which means that you start to...

Alan JacobsAug 1, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

a theological interlude — The New Atlantis

Theology is very important to me: it’s central to my life and to much of my work, though I don’t say much about it on this blog. However, I do have a comment about this quasi-theological conversation between Kevin Kelly and Nick Carr: I think I would want to disagree with KK at an earlier stage in the debate than where Nick picks it up. I take KK’s core assertion to be this: Technology is a (the?) chief means by which God now intervenes in history to help people to realize their full potential. My problem with that assertion starts long before...

Alan JacobsJul 30, 20111 min read

The New Atlantis

on the plusses and minuses of a social backbone — The New Atlantis

I don’t get this article by Edd Dumbill. He wants to argue that “The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels.” He tries to support that bold claim by arguing that Google+ is a big step towards “interoperability”: Currently, we have all [our social] groups siloed. Because we have many different contexts and levels of intimacy with people in these groups, we’re inclined to use different systems to interact with them. Facebook for gaming,...

Alan JacobsJul 22, 20112 min read