Essay Food
Somewhere along the way, food got very noisy. Not just the eating of it, but the whole conversation around it: what to eat, what not to eat, what counts as healthy, what counts as indulgent, what is clean, suspect, allowed, and what must be defended. A meal can become...Essay Hospital
I keep coming back to this phrase: Care is an ecology. Not because it sounds pretty, though it does have that faint smell of a conference brochure if we are not careful. I mean it in the most ordinary, practical, deeply human sense. Care is the field around a person....Essay Hospital
There’s a strange moment when a person finally becomes visible to a system. Not visible as a neighbor or as someone trying to keep a life together. Rather, visible as a problem that now has a form, a referral, a discharge plan, a risk category, or a hospital...Essay Hospital
I have been thinking about hospitals with a lot of tenderness lately, especially because the conversation so often begins with pressure, waiting lists, discharge delays, staff shortages, and that uneasy sense that the whole thing is being held together by caffeine,...Essay Systems
One of the strangest things about being human is that we can get used to almost anything. Even the things that shrink us. At first, something feels wrong. The pace feels too fast, the room too cold, the conversation too sharp, the expectation too unreasonable, or the...