By Emily Anthes/Undark

Nearly two decades ago, Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s immune system launched a misguided attack on her own body. Her white blood cells – which typically fight off invading pathogens – went to war against her nerves, destroying the layer of fatty insulation that helps nerve cells transmit their signals. Nakazawa, a journalist and author, had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition that caused muscle spasms and left her temporarily unable to walk.
But alongside these physical symptoms, she also began to feel as though something had gone amiss in her mind. She developed severe anxiety and began experiencing troubling memory lapses, even forgetting how to tie her daughter’s shoes.
“I could not shake the feeling that just as my body had been altered, something physical had also shifted in my brain,” Nakazawa writes in her new book, The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed The Course of Medicine.

Read More

Posted on February 23, 2020

By Michael Winship/Common Dreams

Sitting here next to my computer right now are two, small paperbound books.
One of them is On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder.
The other is the screenplay from the movie Jojo Rabbit, written and directed by Taika Waititi and based on the novel Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens.
At first, these two slim volumes may seem an odd combination. But one is a warning of encroaching dictatorship written by an academic, the other, “an anti-hate satire” in which Adolf Hitler is the imaginary pal of Jojo Betzler, a 10-year-old boy who is a devoted little Nazi.
So maybe not so odd a combination after all, especially in light of every American day’s further descent into anti-democratic madness. Because, as Timothy Egan of The New York Times wrote last month, “The Trump presidency has shown just how many ostensibly good people will do nothing, and how evil, when given a free rein at the top, trickles down.”

Read More

Posted on February 18, 2020

By Christie Aschwanden/Undark

Their secrets are out – the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to undermine the science linking their products to cancer and other deadly diseases has been the subject of numerous media reports, scholarly papers, books, documentary films, and even a Hollywood movie.
In his meticulously documented new book, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, David Michaels shows that Big Tobacco’s well-known denial tactics have not faded into history, but instead have become an integral part of corporate America’s standard business practices.

Read More

Posted on February 14, 2020