Society
essay
Public health
It’s dirty work
In caring for and bearing with human suffering, hospital staff perform extreme emotional labour. Is there a better way?
Susanna Crossman
essay
Economics
Who bears the risk?
Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, politicians and business are offloading lifethreatening risk to individuals
Suzanne Schneider
essay
Mental health
The right to bathe
Water is a great healer. Can New York’s public pools and ‘blue spaces’ be engineered for collective hydrotherapy?
Rebecca Hayes Jacobs
video
Sex and sexuality
For ages, solo sex was hardly taboo. What led to its centuries-long dry spell?
4 minutes
essay
Language and linguistics
Language is medicine
For First Nations people, health is not a matter of mechanical fitness of the body, but of language, identity and belonging
Erica X Eisen
essay
Cities
Sick city
My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives
Katie Mulkowsky
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Analysis for the people
Group therapy promised to be both democratic and radical, but it failed to take hold. Has its time finally come?
Jess Cotton
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Tōjisha-kenkyū
This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves
Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka
essay
Illness and disease
The war on cancer
Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’ from patients and their doctors alike?
Elaine Schattner
essay
History
Medieval babycare
From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas
Katherine Harvey
essay
The environment
Our contaminated future
In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all
Maxime Polleri
essay
Addiction
Why we crave
The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist
Zoey Lavallee
essay
History of technology
Care from afar
For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person?
Jeremy A Greene
video
Human rights and justice
The staggering cruelty of Ireland’s Church-run ‘mother and baby homes’
18 minutes
essay
Environmental history
Contaminated kinship
If your hometown were beset with toxic dust, like Australia’s Broken Hill, would you feel any less connected to it?
Lilian Pearce
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
The humane asylum
As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care
Madeleine Ritts & Daniel Rosenbaum
essay
Education
Sex on the curriculum
Sex education is a battlefield over morals and young bodies, and has exposed fractures in American life for over a century
Kristy Slominski
video
Work
Emergency first responders meet chaos with dissonant calm in this gripping short
9 minutes
video
Public health
When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued
27 minutes
essay
Anthropology
Safety is fatal
Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?
David Napier
essay
Anthropology
Longhouse lockdown
On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them?
Andrew Beatty
essay
Illness and disease
The wisdom of pandemics
Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story
David Waltner-Toews
essay
Economic history
Economics for the people
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view
Dirk Philipsen
essay
Public health
It didn’t have to be this way
A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the tradeoffs of the lockdown?
Silvia Camporesi