Epistemology
Show Producer’s Blog: Kony 2012
I have written for years about heartbreaking issues of war and atrocity and the shortfall between international rhetoric and action. I’ve often struggled with the apparent mismatch between the horror of what’s going on and people’s blithe ignorance of it. But knowledge isn’t everything […]
The Origin of AIDS: 60 Years Before the First Documented Case
By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In “The Origins of […]
The Nature of Death
Given our complex language and reasoning abilities, do human beings understand more about death and mortality than other animals…or do we just think we do? Upon witnessing the death of several small creatures, commentator Tom Montgomery-Fate reflects on what we may not know about the ending of life.