Anyone who knows me knows that I’m apt to try my hand at just about any minutiae-driven hobby. From astrophotography to aquascaping to insect taxidermy, my adult life is riddled with the detritus of myriad intellectual deep dives. Some people measure life as a series of cars or dogs; I measure mine by the steady

Iconic vistas, hikes, and attractions like Glacier Point in Yosemite or the General Sherman Tree in Sequoia offer transporting experiences that can connect you to the Earth and remind you of your place in the world. That is, until a gaggle of screaming teenagers flouting social distancing guidelines disrupts your chi. In true Millennial fashion,

A patient came to me a few weeks ago with a new chief complaint. A “free” dermatology app, driven by artificial intelligence, told him that one of his moles was concerning and should be evaluated by a doctor. He’d snapped a quick picture of it and some neural network spat out that it was “80%

If you’ve spent any real time with me (or even booked a 10-minute appointment in my clinic), you’ve probably noticed that I like to refer to humans as “talking apes” and occasionally mention that we’re all just “glorified worms.” The former helps me remember that we remain eternally beholden to our biological/sociological needs and often

As a dermatologist, I spend much of my time helping patients understand the myriad bumps, blemishes, and spots on their skin. Patients step out of their lunch break and into my exam room; i.e., a world of strange growths with stranger names, where an eccentric doctor tells them some really gross stuff. Our most visible

Doctors, especially single organ specialists, like to proselytize about the importance of their organ. Cardiologists crow about how human life can’t exist without a pump, while neurosurgeons back-pat about their role in facilitating consciousness and maintaining our agency in the physical world. Hepatologists and nephrologists have an obviously lesser argument but for some reason still

Whenever you open your eyes, photons stream by the trillions through the four-millimeter-wide windows into your central nervous system otherwise known as pupils.  Those photons—the bizarre yet ubiquitous packets of light that famously behave as both particles and waves—trigger an impossibly complex series of electrochemical signals that imbue emotion, meaning, and practical knowledge into our