Sleep is good, but when, how, where, how much? Matthew Wolf-Meyer has a new book, an ethnography of sleep, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life, that is amazing to read. The favorite bit of wisdom I heard about sleep types was that some people are popcorn and others are flowers. Popcorn people POP! awake Continue reading…
Coffee has amazing health benefits in quantity and might help you see ghosts And The Atlantic agrees (Dec 2012): The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like More ghosts Drink More Coffee – Live Longer… Here’s the link to the New England Journal of Medicine Study, “Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Continue reading…
We really don’t know what a body can do. Spinoza said this centuries ago and it is still true today. Writing a book about brain imaging I learned that we don’t even know how much of human life can be attributed to the brain (or genes). Training in massage therapy at the hands-on Davis Massage Continue reading…
Playing with gravity, exploring physics using bodies, finding the limits of attention and expanding them. Contact Improvisation may be a dance of improvising and partnering based on the physics of touch, balance, weight, momentum, flow and resistance. It tunes our senses to be ready to respond in an ever-shifting dialogue of movement. Sometimes quiet and Continue reading…
I volunteer at Yolo Hospice. It is a non-profit organization that helps those who have less than six months to live and want to have that time as comfortably as possible, often at home. I hadn’t known about hospice growing up, but the more I learned about the larger medical system we live in, the Continue reading…
STS as Equipment for Literature: Sitzfleisch Material Semiosis (draft for 4S talk for panel, “Get your theories up and running with lively machines” – comments welcome) the title is a variation on rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s brilliant piece, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” describing the uses of inspirational and self-help books, noting that most people read Continue reading…
Compliance’s usefulness as a measure of prescribed treatment adherence by a patient has been its ability to index treatment success, and therefore help in ensuring and governing health. What these anthropologists have discovered, however, is that because of its function as an index, compliance has been itself instrumentalized and made to serve goals sometimes quite far from health.
How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (2012 Duke University Press) Kindle version is now out! Hear my radio interview about Drugs for Life on BBC 4 Thinking Allowed Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product Continue reading…
These tips are aimed primarily at interdisciplinary researchers in the social sciences & humanities, but will hopefully be helpful for many others. They are based on years of sitting on grant panels, reading over a thousand grants, discussions and tips from colleagues about their experiences, and lots of presentations at STS camp and proposal writing Continue reading…