On a winter evening quite a few years ago, I sat in a rented room—one of those temporary places where the furniture is chosen to survive, not to comfort. The radiator clicked like an impatient metronome. Outside, a streetlamp made the wet pavement shine. I had no plan except to hear a familiar language. I turned on the television.
Within minutes I was watching two countries that occupied the same … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
The universe was once a black hole so small that not even a microscope would have detected it. If my feeble grasp of science is right on this one, then it makes it all the more amazing when that cacophonous “Who Let the Dogs Out? moment occurred. All hell broke loose, literally and metaphorically. Night and nothingness made way for light and somethingness.
And … Read the rest
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
