Public Health Archives - Public Seminar

Public Health

Death Rights

The risks of New York State’s new Medical Aid in Dying law

February 19, 2026 • by Megan Robinson

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act (MAiD) into state law in early February, months after the legislation passed the state Senate in June 2025. The bill’s passing prompted an extended period of debate, advocacy, and amending, centered on whether mentally competent, terminally ill New ...

Climate & Ecology

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Psyche

“Masc Only”

When gender conformity is enforced everywhere from laws to dating apps, opacity becomes a site of resistance

September 30, 2025 • by Yann Phesans

A gay man lowers his voice in the boardroom. A trans woman is detained at border control when her appearance does not match her passport photo. A nonbinary teenager avoids mirrors. A butch lesbian is asked to leave the women’s changing room for “making others uncomfortable.” These are not moments of ...

Literature

“A vulnerable, she called me”

An excerpt from the award-winning author’s new novel

March 11, 2024 • by Sigrid Nunez

In an excerpt from The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, a writer contemplates the first spring of the COVID-19 pandemic....

Disability

Against Technoableism

In an excerpt from her new book, Ashley Shew rethinks who needs improvement

October 24, 2023 • by Ashley Shew

It should go without saying that we need to center disabled people as experts about disability and technology. Yet if we do, we really trouble some underlying assumptions of the ableist world we’re in. In its simplest definition, ableism is bias or discrimination against disabled people or stigma against the ...

Public Health

After We Wash Our Hands, What Do We Do Next?

The racist structure of international relations condemns countries like Haiti to cycles of epidemics

May 3, 2023 • by Guilberly Louissaint

Guilberly Louissaint writes about the the racist structure of international relations that condemns countries like Haiti to epidemics....

After We Wash Our Hands, What Do We Do Next?

Activism

Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries

An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

February 6, 2023 • by Camilla Fitzsimons and Sinéad Kennedy

Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening. ...

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Art & Design

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

May 13, 2021 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...

History

The AIDS Capital of the World

As a pandemic escalated in 1984, one South Florida town predicted the calamity AIDS would become

December 1, 2020 • by Dan Royles

In 1985 researchers and reporters alike focused their attention on the city with the highest rate of AIDS diagnoses anywhere, a city that had become colloquially known as the “AIDS Capital of the World.” This city was neither New York City nor San Francisco, nor was it to be found ...

Psyche

How to be Thankful in 2020

Making the best of video conferencing, social distancing, and Star Trek

November 24, 2020 • by Linus Glenhaber

Ten years ago, I remember trying to coordinate watching a TV show with a friend who was across the country from me. He was in San Diego at the time while I was in Boston; while social distancing would not be a phrase for a decade, we were certainly physical ...

North America

Trump, Coronavirus, and Presidential Health

Past Present Podcast, Episode 250

October 13, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: President Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, and much of his inner circle quickly reported positive diagnoses as well. Natalia referred to this Vanity Fair article linking the slow response to the pandemic to its early prevalence in blue ...