I’ve been taking my health for granted. I’m well into my thirties now and I’ve yet to have been hospitalized for any illness. On the rare occasion I do fall ill, it’s most likely a quick flu that lingers around for a day or two. Even then, it’s an event that seems to happen around […]
Chris Cornell’s work has always been soaked in death. The first time I caught a glimpse of the guy, he was lurching around on a cloudy beach with Eddie Vedder in the video for Hunger Strike, the lead single off Temple of the Dog—a tribute album dedicated to the memory of Cornell’s friend and ex-roommate, […]
I’ve been fascinated with complicated surgeries and the surgeons who are capable of doing them since I was a kid — especially neurosurgeons, cardiovascular surgeons and transplant surgeons. I scour the internet for videos of brain surgery with some regularity. I enjoy watching them for the same reason I enjoy watching a symphony or a […]
I’ve been spread thin these past few months. I slipped away a bit from my intellectual pursuits. When that happens, I can always feel a part of myself being dragged away. It’s like watching someone you love drift off on a boat whilst standing on shore, belting out a tearful goodbye. There I go. This kind of stuff […]
I was on my way to Vegas when I read the news that David Bowie had died. I was hurtling through the pitch black desert in the middle of the night, the outlines of the Joshua trees flashing out of my peripheral vision. I put my favorite record of his, Station to Station, on and spaced […]
Life is terrifying in its brevity. The sheer vastness of the world — the fact that there is just so much to take in and make sense of and then find something to dedicate your life to — is overwhelming. And what you choose better be the right thing. There isn’t really a whole lot of […]
Here is a playlist of all our episodes on plague so far. In these videos I discuss how plague infects a human host and how it spreads, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, the organized response to the Black Death, and the third wave of plague that hit in the 19th century.
Now that the Ebola videos are all wrapped up, I thought I’d compile them all here in one easy post. In this first video, I talk about how the disease is transmitted. Next, I talk about what the disease does to the body. And finally, I talk about the reasons for the current outbreak. I […]
Here is my most recent history video on plague. This time it’s about the Black Death, the plague that we all know and love. This is a very important event that helped to shape Europe and the rest of the world. I talk about the impact of plague on society here:
Growing up, my old man always told me, “if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.” That was the word in the house pretty much any time a wasp would fly inside or a creepy spider was in the basement. Just let it be. It’s more scared of you than you are of it. […]
Terrifying World 