Death used to be simple. Your heart stopped, you stopped breathing, the doctor sighed, closed your eyes with two fingers, and that was it. Now we have ventilators, defibrillators, ECMO machines, organ transplantation laws, fMRI scanners and ethics committees. The border between life and death did not move; we just started to see how fuzzy it always was.
Underneath the drama there are very boring facts: cells need oxygen, neurons … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
“The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” – Horace Walpole
“Only the Lonely” was the signature song of a guy named Roy Orbison, a star in the early rock’ n’ roll era. Orbison died in 1988 of a heart attack at the age of 52. Songs are full of lonely guys; they were back … Read the rest
If the universe had a mood, it would be Monday. Entropy marches, coffee cools, batteries drain, and socks vanish into an event horizon behind the washing machine. Against this cosmic backdrop, optimism can feel like a form of bad arithmetic. Yet here we are—hairless apes who invented anesthesia and sourdough starters—still arguing about whether the glass is half full, half empty, or a … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I remember working in a pub in Crawley, near Gatwick airport in London. Many years ago. I was by then probably in my early 30s. Yet, as they say, ‘everybody gets old, but you can stay immature forever.’ That would have been me back then.
I had lived in Bath during the 1970s, returned to the US to do a Master’s degree … Read the rest
