A groundbreaking study, conducted over eight decades, has shed light on what makes some of us live longer than others from the same socio-economic background -- and many of the results are quite surprising. Leslie Martin, one of the scientists involved in the Longevity Project, discusses the findings, which challenge conventional wisdom about the links between long lives and optimistic personalities, as well as marriage, divorce, religious belief, and work.

Clichés about hope and individual responsibility pervade popular-culture narratives about cancer in the US. Lochlann Jain critiques what she calls "the cultural management of cancer terror" and suggests alternative, more politically conscious ways of discussing disease. She also relates prevailing cancer rhetorics to notions of time, progress, and accumulation under capitalism.

There's plenty of talk, given the changing political environment, about the fate of healthcare reform. But Wendell Potter, a former insurance executive, would have you consider something more: the way health insurance companies in this country distort facts, spread fear, and put profits before healthcare.

For more than ten years, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg became part of the daily lives of two dozen homeless heroin injectors in San Francisco. Their book is an account of those individuals' experiences and relationships; a photo-ethnography of drugs, poverty, race and social exclusion; and a revealing look at the larger structural forces that operate on vulnerable populations.

Death has become something to be avoided at all costs. But what are the costs of having, and acting upon, that mindset? Nancy Scheper-Hughes comments on the culture of fear around death and dying in the US, and puts it into historical and cultural context. She also talks about body theft, the Terri Schiavo case, and her and her parents' experiences as the latter's health declined.

For more than ten years, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg became part of the daily lives of two dozen homeless heroin injectors in San Francisco. Their book is an account of those individuals' experiences and relationships; a photo-ethnography of drugs, poverty, race and social exclusion; and a revealing look at the larger structural forces that operate on vulnerable populations.