Posts by Jack El-Hai
They’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 MoreAmerica’s First Pop Psychologist
When Joseph Jastrow died in 1944 at age 80, he was almost a forgotten figure in American psychology and certainly an irrelevant one to many minds. Decades earlier he had…
Read MoreIs There Any Truth to Truth Serum?
Remember the routine from black and white espionage dramas of the 1940s and ‘50s? The bad guys detain a suspected spy, who won’t talk even after a rough interrogation. Soon,…
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