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How will you remember 2011?
The year 2011 was a dismal time in American public life. The nation came close to defaulting and lost its AAA credit rating for the first time ever. The do-nothing Congress did—well, nothing. The GOP seriously offered up the likes of Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain as its best and brightest for the country’s future. Policemen in riot gear pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors. And public discourse sank to an all-time low in coarseness and partisanship. So how will we recall 2011 when we look back on it? Most likely with warmth and good cheer. Say what? That’s right. We will most likely remember the end of 2011—the next couple weeks—positively, simply because it is the end of the year.
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Hand Washing: A Deadly Dilemma
New Yorker essayist Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a prestigious teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A couple years ago, he wrote a profile of his hospital’s infection-control team, whose full-time job it is to control the spread of infectious disease in the hospital. The focus of the piece was hand washing—or more accurately, the team’s failed efforts to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands. They tried everything. They repositioned sinks, and had new, automated ones installed. They bought $5000 “precaution carts” to make washing, gloving and gowning easy and efficient.
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It’s flu season. Watch your prejudices.
I tried not to breathe too much on the elevator this morning. I was trying to avoid the germs of a fellow who clearly had the flu—or at least a nasty cold. There seems to be a lot of sickness going around right now, and I’m just being prudent. I know it would have been rude to cover my face or turn my back to this guy, so I just held my breath for the 10-story ride. That’s my behavioral immune system kicking in. Behavioral immune system is just a fancy way of summarizing what the mind and body have long known, that one of the most powerful tools we have for staying well is to watch out for sick people, and then give them wide berth.
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The Psychology of Health Screening
Imagine it’s time for your annual physical. You visit your family doctor, and along with all the usual probes and tests and queries, your doctor tells you about a disease you’ve never heard of before. Called thioamine acetlyase, or TAA, deficiency, it affects the body’s normal ability to process nutrients, and can lead to severe medical complications—exhaustion, physical deterioration, even early death. Although studies indicate that one in five adults suffers from TAA deficiency, most are unaware that they even have the disease. But there is a test that screens for TAA deficiency, your physician tells you.
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Why Do We Have Religion Anyway?
The vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people practice some kind of religion, ranging from massive worldwide churches to obscure spiritual traditions and local sects. Nobody really knows how many religions there are on the planet, but whatever the number, there are at least that many theories about why we have religion at all. One idea is that, as humans evolved from small hunter-gatherer tribes into large agrarian cultures, our ancestors needed to encourage cooperation and tolerance among relative strangers. Religion then—along with the belief in a moralizing God—was a cultural adaptation to these challenges. But that’s just one idea. There are many others—or make up your own.
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How Social Is Social Networking?
I like Facebook. I’ve been signing into the site fairly regularly for a couple years now, and it has become my large extended family’s primary form of communication. It also keeps me connected with friends and former colleagues—people I like a lot but would never stay in touch with otherwise. We share photos, update personal news, comment on politics and pop culture—nothing serious, but it’s still more connection than I would have in a previous era. In that sense, Facebook is certainly a social lubricant for many of its 500 million users, facilitating fast and effortless and widespread connection. But does this innovative technology actually change the quality and texture of relationships?
