Articles

I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.

Aza’s American Journey

She was an eight-year-old Russian orphan who thought she had finally found a family. But then they changed their minds.

Aza wants to show me her bedroom. Full of pink and purple, it looks like it belongs to a ten-year-old girl, though maybe not this particular one. A slender tomboy with close-cropped dark hair wearing black jeans and sneakers, Aza perches on a trundle bed covered with stuffed animals as…

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Heart O’ Gold

No one has done more for Chernobyl’s children than Ireland’s prodding, passionate Adi Roche

At a glance they could be any 50 or so Irish kids, fair, some of them freckled, running sack races and raising holy heck at a July picnic north of Dublin. Look closer, though, and a different picture emerges. They speak not English but Russian. Some of them suffer physical…

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Tony Blair

Eye on the prize, Britain’s Labour party leader plans a change of address—to 10 Downing Street

In 1974, British college student Tony Blair walked into an Oxford University dorm room to audition for a rock band, the Ugly Rumours. “What we really needed was a front man,” recalls bass player Mark Ellen, now a London editor. Blair, it turned out, was perfect. The shaggy-haired undergrad had…

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T.V. Cooking, a la francaise

She is not exactly a gourmet, but Maite Ordonez provides just what the French want in a television chef.

There is a place in France where old-fashioned eating is still the order of the day. A place where margarine is scorned and salt embraced, where food is hearty and heaping. A place where the voluptuous cooking has been described by a French newspaper as “a gastronomic Rubens.” And best…

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Splashing in the Gene Pool

Biotechnology finds a home in the grocery store

Radishes as big as yams!  Skim milk right from the cow!  Carrots that taste like apples, cucumbers that taste like something, cotton plants that taste like rayon (to boll weevils).  In the early 1970s, when scientists discovered the principles of recombinanat DNA, the only miracle that seemed beyond the reach…

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Doctoring Without Drugs

Alternative medicine is based on the theory that the body has a natural healing ability

Arline Merola’s 2-year-old son Matthew had a classic case of chronic ear infections.  And he was treated in the classic way: antibiotics most of each winter and the threat of surgically implanted tubes to drain his ears.  Last October Merola decided to try something else.  She went to Paul Mittman,…

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