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Pulling a Feeding Tube from a 16-Year-Old?

This is a terribly tragic case: Javona Peters has been diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (a terrible name for a diagnosis, the only one I know of which contains a pejorative, a derivation of the V word). She became unconscious less than three months ago, and so the diagnosis seems . . . . Continue Reading »

Stem Cells, Then and Now

In the January issue of Commentary , there’s a fascinating article called “Stem Cells and the President—An Inside Account,” written by Jay Lefkowitz, who was the official “primarily responsible for advising the President” on the issue of stem cells during the . . . . Continue Reading »

Notes on Atonement

? It’s late thirties England and a little rich girl named Briony Tallis with an overlarge vocabulary and pretensions to literary greatness tells a big fat lie to the police and ruins the life of her sister’s love interest (James McAvoy) because, well, she’s got a crush on him too, . . . . Continue Reading »

Prayers of a Superstar

Over at Beliefnet , Michael Kress has a coup of an interview —one that includes audio clips—with Denzel Washington, who starred in two films this year: American Gangster and the just-released The Great Debaters —both based on true stories. Like all the Bnet interviews, which have . . . . Continue Reading »

Remembering Amnesia

Repressed-memory syndrome—a claim that dissociative amnesia follows a traumatic experience—was one of the most popular psychiatric diagnosis in the 1980s and 1990s. Back in 2003, Paul McHugh wrote what was probably the definitive account of the long struggle by a handful of psychiatrists . . . . Continue Reading »

Evil Intentions

So, the actor Will Smith tells a British newspaper that “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’” Whereupon he is pilloried for praising Hitler. Roger Kimball has a solid roundup of the supposed scandal. Will Smith is, at the . . . . Continue Reading »

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