Category: In The World Today

At the easternmost part of the United States mainland sits a lighthouse whose lens transforms its surroundings in a catadioptric spectrum 83 feet above sea level. At the end of this remote rainbow in this remote land–– The “actual” easternmost part of the country changes with tides, erosion, accretion, environmental degradation, the accumulation of effluvia,…

It will always be presumptuous of the visitor upon their return home to say they understood a locale, and to claim capture of a jewel as gleaming as Shanghai within the ornate crown of China is certainly brazen, but after 99 days in Shanghai I feel I understood something of the locale. Sensations, too fleeting, words, too…

With all this talk of soon™-to-be-approved Covid vaccines and their extra half a percent of efficacy, we might miss data recently published by Blue Cross Blue Shield indicating a 26% decline in childhood vaccinations year over year in the United States. The current pandemic was cited as a common reason for missing routine medical care.…

While our species has never lacked for places they imagine themselves after life (1), these days the options for where one physically goes when shuffled off the mortal coil come down to roughly “buried” or “burned” (2). Thanks to the collective efforts of The Urban Death Project (now “Recompose”), lawmakers in Washington, and quite a…

The internet has not made everything better. While not a controversial opinion, it tends to bin one in with the Luddites and seems to keep the technocrats (those most needing to hear it) from hearing it. Very rarely in life is an app the answer. Rarely is it even an answer. Digitization does not mean progress.…

Flex, a company which tries to solve a little bit of everything, has recently developed a set of secure and managed solutions, called BrightInsight, that leverages Google’s Cloud Platform to aggregate medical data and deliver real-time insight into the efficacy of a drug, a device, a combination, etc. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that healthcare…

On March 1, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a first-of-its-kind decision upholding that federal law can (and does) preempt state law claims in suits brought against medical device manufacturers over medical devices containing components of differing regulatory classifications. The case, Shuker v. Smith & Nephew, arose when a Mr.…