Gavin Francis

What Do You Expect?

The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

The Babel Within

Two memoirs consider what’s gained and lost when a new language is acquired and a mother tongue is all but forgotten.

Intimate and Invasive

The prostate has caused difficulty for men and medicine for centuries. A new “biography of the prostate” examines the haunting terror it creates.

Human Diagnostics

“Life in lockdown is not natural for the majority of Homo sapiens. In the ballooning of mental health problems this year, we’ve seen just how deleterious those kinds of restrictions are.”

Scrolling

Even tech optimists admit that human capacities are limited in comparison with the digital edifice we have built, with potentially grave implications for our health.

The Real Problems with 1970s Psychology

Changing Psychiatry’s Mind

Two books investigate the science and pseudoscience of diagnosing mental illness.

Pandemic Journal

The latest edition of our brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Coco Fusco in Brooklyn, Lucas Adams in Brooklyn, Sara Nović in Philadelphia, Gavin Francis in Edinburgh, and more.

The Value of a Cell

Resistance to Immunity

Opposition to vaccines has been around for as long as vaccines themselves. What can be done to convince the public that infectious disease is not a private concern?

LOL

Flower Garden of the Brain

It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that brain structures began to be uncovered, by a Spanish microscopist called Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Learn to Sign!

The Mysterious World of the Deaf

Lydia Denworth’s ‘I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language’