Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus

 Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus   My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…

The Way of Seizures

Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water.   There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…

The Language of Smell

Naomi Michalowicz // My two-year-old daughter has two words with which to describe food: yummy and yucky. For sound, she can distinguish between “big noise” and “very quiet.” She has a significantly broader vocabulary when it comes to sight: big and small, green, blue, or red, and the capacious description that may apply to anything…

Stranger Things; or, Why ’80s Nostalgia is Good For You

Naomi Michalowicz // Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit show about kids fighting eldritch terrors in 1980s suburbia, has just concluded its fourth season. An obvious appeal of the show is its shameless indulgence in ’80s nostalgia, hitting every cliche of representing the decade—bicycles, arcades, music, quaint technology, bad hair, and of course, the full range of…

From Jane Austen to Chatbots: Using Conversation to Judge Intelligence

Naomi Michalowicz // Chatbots, those little pop-up virtual assistance you encounter at the bottom of every page on every website of every company, who cheerfully ask “what can I help you with?”, are not as smart as we’d like them to be. Often frustratingly obtuse, the virtual assistant is incapable of answering your questions or…

My Anxious Brain Inspires Me

Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // “A writer….must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument…This is even stronger in the case of the artist that happens, including humiliations. embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art.” -Jorge Luis Borges This story offers a snapshot into my head to provide a humanistic…