Posts by Jack El-Hai
In Love with a Delusion
Jacob Moreno, the psychiatrist who created psychodrama group therapy, put on the therapeutic stage a patient infatuated with an imaginary lover In the early 1940s, a psychiatrist heard about a…
Read MoreObscured by Smoke
A wonderful writer and friend of mine named Burl Gilyard died in May 2025. Burl’s career was varied and admirable, and you can read about it here. His death made me…
Read MoreThey’re trying to turn me into a novelist!
I’ll have a new book coming out a year from now. Titled Face in the Mirror: A Surgeon, a Patient, and a Second Chance at Life, it tells the story…
Read MoreOrigins: How I wrote about three nudist sisters
How I discovered, wrote, and sold a strikingly distinctive magazine article to The Atlantic In 2018, I published an article in The Atlantic about three middle-aged sisters, long estranged from one another, who reunited and…
Read MoreOrigins: Three Nudist Sisters
How I discovered, wrote, and sold a strikingly distinctive magazine article to The Atlantic In 2018, I published an article in The Atlantic about three middle-aged sisters, long estranged from one another, who reunited and…
Read MoreResolutions for journalists and everyone else
In 1955, TV newsman Chet Huntley was worried about the state of journalism. He decided to try to change his own behavior. We can adapt his resolutions to change ours.…
Read MoreA virtual funeral changes perspective
An eminent neuroscientist died last week at the age of 95. He made important discoveries and helped countless people with complicated medical conditions. But he died during the COVID-19 pandemic in…
Read MoreThe Short and Wondrous Career of Harry Glicken
When I knew Harry Glicken during the mid-1970s at Venice High School in Los Angeles, I could not imagine my classmate as a history-maker of the future. He was disheveled,…
Read MoreThe U.S. Vice President Who Wrote a Pop Music Hit
Barry Manilow, Van Morrison, the Four Tops, Cass Elliot, Isaac Hayes, Bing Crosby and Nat “King” Cole all owe a lot to a now obscure United States vice president and…
Read MoreThe Black Stork: A physician’s cinematic argument for eugenics
This year marks the centennial of one of the most infamous movies of the silent era, which made a case for allowing disabled infants to die and sparked a national…
Read More