Aaron Rothstein

More patient autonomy means higher demand for quality health care. More data from scientific studies and further efforts within hospitals to promote quality care means patients and physicians can make the right decisions and expect the right outcomes.

With Rorschach results and interview notes in hand, did Kelley and Gilbert solve the enigma of Nazi pathology, or, at least, provide the materials for such a solution? Or, to put the question even more modestly, what did their investigations teach us about what Dimsdale calls “the anatomy of malice”? 

Advocates for “death with dignity” seem to deny reality, since no human death is truly dignified—even if a person chooses or accepts it. Instead, what ultimately gives death dignity is the kind of life that preceded it.

Why skeptics believe what they believe

Despite our ignorance about Solomon and his wisdom, we are drawn to this story of a quintessentially enigmatic human figure, with a life that “mirrors our own strivings and doubts.”

Read this article on the Wall Street Journal.

Embracing, not fixing, mental differences

Our world is even more complex, despite having closed many of Seneca’s thousands of doors that open onto death—and this is good.

In Stalin’s Genocides, Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford, wonders why Lemkin, and those who followed his analysis at the United Nations in writing the Genocide Convention, created a concept that incorporated Hitler’s killings—the attempt to extirpate the Jews was an attempt to exterminate an ethnic group (and nation)—but did not extend as far as Stalin’s murders.

We have come very far in medicine, but have still barely plunged into the depths of knowledge of medical science.

A review of Sam Harris’s “The Moral Landscape”

Aaron Rothstein reviews Jonathan Weiner’s “Long for This World”