Selected Essays
"Was Samuel Johnson a Robot?"
Raritan Quarterly,
On the dangers of neuro-reductionism in our AI times
(in press).
"Collective Trauma and Commemoration - A Moment of Silence, Please"
New England Journal of Medicine.
On our failed mourning of Covid, and the need for memory rituals, (co-authored with Richard Friedman)
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"Busting Genre, in Style: Geoff Dyer on the Joy of Writing 'Unpublishable' Books."
Literary Hub
Exploring Dyer's relationship to genre-breaking and making
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"It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic."
The Atlantic
Joe Biden and unprocessed Covid grief (co-authored with Richard A. Friedman)
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"A Different Language: A Conversation with Percival Everett,"
Los Angeles Review of Books
On naming, categories, race, and the nature of the imagination
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"What COVID Revealed About American Psychiatry,"
The New Yorker
The pandemic destabilized us - and exposed the fractures in our country's approach to mental health
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"On Kinds of Minds and Kinds of Racism,"
Los Angeles Review of Books
Varieties of racism distinguished by their underlying assumptions
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"The Invention of Xenophobia,"
Los Angeles Review of Books
On an obscure stenographer and this term's upside down birth
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"A Malady Called Nationalism,"
Lapham's Quarterly
On nationalism and early national phobias
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"How Richard Wright Grappled with Behaviorism, Racism, and Trauma in Native Son,"
Literary Hub
A novel reading of Richard Wright's great novel
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"At Home in the Unseen World"
Los Angeles Review of Books
On COVID and my father
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"Notes from Psychiatry's Battle Lines"
New York Times
On the dueling ideologies confronting psychiatry.
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"How What it Means to be Human Has Changed Over TIme"
Time Magazine
Since the dawn of Western modernity, there have been three competing notions of who we are and what we mean.
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"The Man Who Made America: Reason, Religion and the Brilliant Mind of John Locke"
Salon.com
An excerpt from Soul Machine on the spread of Locke's thinking thing, the mind.
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"A Brief History of Religious Toleration: Gay Marriage, Kim Davis, and the Birth of the Secular Mind"
Literary Hub
Surprisingly, liberalism was born alongside the modern mind.
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"Psychiatry's Mind-Brain Problem"
The New York Times
A new study reminds us that psychiatry has veered off course, as it has numerous times before.
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"The Soul of the Human Machine"
The Boston Globe
Computer brains? Machine man? "Despite centuries of eager analogizing, this equation has never added up."
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"In the Arcadian Woods"
The New York Times
"Often I sense its electric energy during the initial phone call. Anxiety is like that. It leaps from you to me then back again like some unruly spirit."
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"On the Shifting Boundaries of Medicine"
The Lancet
"In an age of exploding biological knowledge, why bother with the study of medical history, ethics, and literature? What role, if any, should these areas of study play in the formation of a doctor?"
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The Lancet
"In an age of exploding biological knowledge, why bother with the study of medical history, ethics, and literature? What role, if any, should these areas of study play in the formation of a doctor?"
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"Unspeakable Subjects"
Cabinet
"While researching my history of psychoanalysis,1 I stumbled onto this: the FBI was spying on an European émigré, a socialist, who had resettled in this country. As the Cold War built to a crescendo, the word went out to the local mailman and the neighborhood informants to report any suspicious activity at the foreigner’s residence. They did. Every fifty minutes of so, the undercover agents noted, a car would pull up and a stranger would enter the house. Often these visitors looked nervous, as if they did not want to be seen."
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"The Most Forgotten Alien Land"
The Massachussets Review
Reading Paul Kalanithi's heartbreaking When Breath Becomes Air brought back a flood of memories, and reminded me of my attempt to put into words that nearly unutterable experience of confronting death as a young doctor.
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Cabinet
"While researching my history of psychoanalysis,1 I stumbled onto this: the FBI was spying on an European émigré, a socialist, who had resettled in this country. As the Cold War built to a crescendo, the word went out to the local mailman and the neighborhood informants to report any suspicious activity at the foreigner’s residence. They did. Every fifty minutes of so, the undercover agents noted, a car would pull up and a stranger would enter the house. Often these visitors looked nervous, as if they did not want to be seen."
Read Full Essay
"The Most Forgotten Alien Land"
The Massachussets Review
Reading Paul Kalanithi's heartbreaking When Breath Becomes Air brought back a flood of memories, and reminded me of my attempt to put into words that nearly unutterable experience of confronting death as a young doctor.
Read Full Essay
"How I Became a Historian"
h-madness Blog
"I came from a family of doctors and it was always assumed that I would become a doctor too; I actually got into medical school out of high school, so there was a road paved in front of me. However, when I was doing my undergraduate studies I became very interested in history, literary studies and writing. Part of the challenge then was to integrate these two interests."
Read Full Essay
h-madness Blog
"I came from a family of doctors and it was always assumed that I would become a doctor too; I actually got into medical school out of high school, so there was a road paved in front of me. However, when I was doing my undergraduate studies I became very interested in history, literary studies and writing. Part of the challenge then was to integrate these two interests."
Read Full Essay