It started with doctored videos and fetal tissue. It could end with hundreds of thousands of women losing access to health care, says the Congressional Budget Office. Right now, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015 is making its way through the halls of Congress. This bill is one in a long line of attempts…
Gone Girl. Some call it a traditional gothic horror tale that reveals the truth of marriage. Others have derided it as a misandrist revenge fantasy or a misogynist validation of every paranoia American culture teaches men to hold. Certainly, this controversy highlights gendered double-standards in the United States. But more, Amy Dunne, the main character,…
Imagine: Salmonella breaks out, people go mad, hundreds become ill. You, alone in your basement, have all the tools to design a simple biological test that determines the presence of Salmonella bacteria in your food; the tools to solve this particular problem, excluding the fancier machines already present in your laboratory, cost no more than…
On good days, St. Louis’s Air Quality Index sits on the high end of green—polluted, but not dangerously so. During these days, the city’s air is often just about to slip from the green “good,” to the yellow “moderate.” As summer intensifies, the year-round pollution caused by the coal industry, tobacco use, and radon gas…
Doctor House. Doctor Cox. Doctor Lecter. These names, these titles—they have weight. Some of it is their pop culture clout: they are fun, they are snarky, they say it like it is (even if one of them does eat people, and another is a space alien). But there is something more than that. “Doctor.” We…
Reflection. You’re familiar with it, in its various forms. Your face in the mirror, your thoughts on a page; as the Latin suggests, little pieces of you are bent back on themselves and aligned on a surface for convenient viewing. Reflection often seems like arbitrary testing or busy work, the sort from which it would…