Here are some things I’ve read recently that you may also find interesting:
1. When Going to Jail Means Giving Up The Meds That Saved Your Life. “Pesce worried that while he went through withdrawal from methadone in jail, someone would offer him drugs, and he wouldn’t be able to refuse. He turned to the courts for a solution: Pesce sued the Essex County sheriff on the grounds that his addiction was a disability and that denying him treatment was a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as cruel and unusual punishment.”
2. Though I do not follow sports, I enjoy sports writing. Here is a pair of articles related to baseball and economics: Why Isn’t Anyone Bidding for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado? (“… and now owners are squeezing players on either end like so many papayas in a juicer”) and Baseball Doesn’t Need Collusion To Turn Off The Hot Stove.
3. I recently saw the play M. Butterfly (and was one of the few apparent Asians in the audience…) and wanted to learn more about the curious events that inspired this work: The True Story of M. Butterfly; The Spy Who Fell in Love With a Shadow. “… Bernard Boursicot, as he has always wanted to be, becomes a man of extraordinary distinction: the man who made love to another man for 18 years and did not know.”
4. I much prefer prose to poetry, though occasionally a poem will catch my attention. Here’s David Whyte’s Everything Is Waiting For You.
5. I only learned of Donella Meadows after her death. Here’s one of her columns where she discusses “What Makes a Great Leader?” One wonders what she would say about the current President.
6. The first book I finished reading in 2019 is Language in Thought and Action. This is one of the best books I have read in my life. Many of the ideas are familiar to me from my clinical training, but Mr. Hayakawa discusses the impacts of language and word choice from a non-clinical perspective that is more accessible. The first edition was published in 1941; it still has potent relevance today.
Maria Yang, MD 