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It was during one of my return visits home from college, and I was in the vulnerable seat that is the barber’s chair. I sometimes imagine a barber offering an old-fashioned lather and shave with a sharp blade – a man submits his neck to a stranger with a knife, trusting that no harm will follow. It’s an interesting exercise, …
I recently reconnected with someone I’d been out of touch with since the start of the COVID pandemic. On paper, he’s a cliche of a 1950s American male – works in tech, married with kids and a non-working spouse, living on the east coast. He and his wife have a traditional marriage more characteristic of prior generations – a division …
My wife and I belong to a book club where we enjoy our role as being the youngest members. At one point, there was a 47 year difference between the youngest an oldest person in attendance. Having such a diverse range of life experience offering insight on a shared bit of literature is a delight (at least until the point …
As an ER doc and birdwatcher, I find that the breadth of human behaviors have a great deal in common with the variety of birds. Many years ago I enjoyed explaining to a faculty interviewer at a residency program that a short observation period, applied pattern recognition and a need to think quickly on one’s feet are inherent to both …
It’s my lot in life to be the last to know. I find out about relationships in the ER after an engagement ring has been presented, a child has been born or a staff member has departed. There are ambivalent aspects to my naivete – it’s arguably more difficult to enter the line of fire when you never knew where …
What are your superpowers? One of mine, cultivated from early childhood and strengthened routinely in my role as an emergency physician, is the ability to frame a situation in a way that allows me to move beyond aggravations, real and imagined. (Excluded from this claim is the ability to deal with preteens and adolescents, which I consider a universally shared …
Chief Wellness Officers are administrative leaders tasked with ensuring that organizational culture and executive leadership align to produce a healthy practice of medicine for those tasked with working in the clinical environment. That is a complicated way to say they are supposed to help doctors either like their work more or resent it less. Structural incentives are important in helping …
Dad, can we play Monopoly? Dad, will you take a look at my bike please? It’s making a funny noise but I want to go for a ride. Dad, want to watch this video I made? Dad, can I teach you this new dance a friend sent me? Being a parent is a time sink. If I thought I wasn’t …
Last night my son and I took turns reading short stories before bedtime, as is our longstanding ritual. We’d finished The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy last year, and needed some lighter fare. We’re currently halfway through a book of folk tales from around the world. I received it as a gift from a third grade student’s …
I just finished reading Barbarian Days, a delicately wrought memoir by William Finnegan, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. Finnegan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2016 for this book. Finnegan’s gift is to use his lifelong obsession with surfing as a lens to explore the eventual unfurling of a unique and distinguished life path. His …