Public health

essayTechnology and the self
The unseen
Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being
Allison J Pugh

essayAddiction
The kratom question
Millions are turning to an unregulated herbal extract to curb their opioid addiction. But do the risks outweigh the benefits?
Xi Chen

essayPublic health
A very American fear
Moral panics about erotica have coursed through the country’s history. Why do so many Americans think of porn as harm?
Rebecca L Davis

essayPublic health
Hearts and brains
Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane in the Amazon basin tell us
Ben Daitz

essayPublic 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

essayEconomics
Who bears the risk?
Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, politicians and business are offloading lifethreatening risk to individuals
Suzanne Schneider

essayMental 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

videoSex and sexuality
For ages, solo sex was hardly taboo. What led to its centuries-long dry spell?
4 minutes

essayLanguage 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

essayCities
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

essayPsychiatry 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

essayPsychiatry 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

essayIllness 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

essayHistory
Medieval babycare
From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas
Katherine Harvey

essayThe 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

essayAddiction
Why we crave
The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist
Zoey Lavallee

essayHistory 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

videoHuman rights and justice
The staggering cruelty of Ireland’s Church-run ‘mother and baby homes’
18 minutes

essayEnvironmental 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

essayPsychiatry 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

essayEducation
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

videoWork
Emergency first responders meet chaos with dissonant calm in this gripping short
9 minutes

videoPublic health
When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued
27 minutes

essayAnthropology
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