ParaDoxa: Digests

Weekly Digest #173

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:00:25 GMT

Human hair grows through ‘pulling’ not pushing, study shows
A lot of population numbers are fake (Do we have any idea how many people there are in the world?)
Welcome to post-Darwinism: AI fires silver bullet for creating new life. In a breakthrough experiment, molecular biologists and tech entrepreneurs have teamed up to write the genetic code of a virus that destroys killer bacteria Link
How Generative AI in Healthcare Mobilises Its Assemblages
The housewife is a Victorian invention
‘This might be the most important year of your career. Work accordingly’ Link and this
Addressing ableism in healthcare: integrating critical disability theory into health services research
India Cuts Healthcare Burden as Out-of-Pocket Costs Drop Sharply
‘We need a government that can hold two truths at once: the immediate, visible urgencies (cost of living, housing, NHS waits) and the structural shifts already transforming what “work” and “opportunity” mean. These aren’t competing priorities — they’re the same priority seen from two distances’ Link
Sauna science and this
Reflections on Healthism and Medicalization 45 Years Later
Philosophy and Clinical Reasoning in Rehabilitation Sciences: Bridging the Gap
Critical Pedagogy in Health Education (2014–2025): A Scoping Review of Themes, Trends and Transformations
‘Phenomenology and Medicine. Exploring the Lived Experience of Illness and Care’ – June 8-12, 2026. Palazzo Mauri in Spoleto
An interdisciplinary perspective of the built-environment microbiome

Weekly Digest #172

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:00:47 GMT

Weekly Digest #171

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:00:53 GMT

“All economic sanctions ultimately function as sanctions on health.”
In order to better understand our human nature, we must attempt to build a robot capable of robust subjective experiences Link
The shape of time
From Case Study Conflict to Many-Sided Conditions of Care Through Process and Jain Metaphysics
‘“Neuroscience has only cared about neurons for a century now, and we don’t yet have a cure for a single brain disorder,” says Thomas Papouin, the author of one of the papers. The way to change that, he says, is to accept the influence of non-neuronal cells such as astrocytes, and to include them in experiments and models’ Link
Earth Rover Program seeks to track the world’s soil health
Pain as first consciousness
‘Perk Up Your Looks and You Along With It’: Postpartum Depression and the Body in 1980s and 1990s US Self-Help Books
The Moral Authority Of Animals
Why Philosophy Matters
The Poverty of the Mushroom: On the New Organicisms
‘What this moment makes clear is that social media has not distracted Gen Z from civic life but, instead, placed political participation in the palm of their hands’ Link
Welcome to post-Darwinism: AI fires silver bullet for creating new life
The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls
A ‘complete alternative to standard’ MSK physiotherapy comes to the NHS

Weekly Digest #170

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:01:13 GMT

Free Healing: Pop-up clinics for the uninsured
The Ancient Art of Nasal Rinsing Might Protect You From a Cold
Progress made on AI-powered humanoid robots
Adamson’s “Rules” for Writing Philosophy
Jacques Lacan: First writings
Make Something Heavy: We’re creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing
A philosopher’s case for living playfully without keeping score
Language in Sport: Real-Time Talk in Training and Games
Abstinence From AI Is Not the Answer and this
How Our Treatment of Human Skeletons Reveals the Politics of the Body
Groundbreaking visuals capture how our bodies repair damaged DNA
Has modern neuroscience proved Freud right?
‘Everything we see and touch day to day conspires to shape our moods. When places are too antiseptic, we grow unaccustomed to noticing visceral details. We start to use less of our senses. Over time, our surface for pleasure thins’ Link
Object-Oriented Ontology and the Nature of Reality with Graham Harman
Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books

Weekly Digest #169

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:01:06 GMT

Aged care centre confronts racism, improves staff retention with cultural celebrations
‘[T]he most valuable resource we have isn’t oil, water, gold, or land – it’s our stockpile of useful ideas, and our continually growing capacity to expand them’ Link
A historical perspective of the development of public hospitals in China (1949–2024)
‘Feet are comprised of fifty-two bones, one for every week of the year, a quarter of the total number of bones in an entire human body. There are around 8,000 nerves and 125,000 sweat glands in each one. There are sixty-six joints, and thirty-four muscles. With so many moving parts, it is not hyperbole to argue that the foot is the most engineered structure in the human body’ Link
Bergson’s “Creative Evolution”, (video)
The Risks of Phenomenology in Qualitative Research: Methods and Concepts
‘The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95% of the global load [in plastic debris] into the sea’ Link
The worship of billionaires has become our shittiest religion
Do sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and light truck vehicles (LTVs) cause more severe injuries to pedestrians and cyclists than passenger cars in the case of a crash? A systematic review and meta-analysis (Spoiler: Yes! When hit by an SUV or light truck rather than a standard passenger car, adults face 44% higher odds of death, while children face 82% higher odds)
Workplace violence against healthcare workers: a narrative review of evidence to inform policy and legislation in India
Is philosophy of education Western? Views from Asia and beyond
Molly Joyce – August 6, 1999
Data poems
English has become easier to read (It’s not shorter sentences)
Why I am immortal

Weekly Digest #168

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:00:57 GMT

Intersectionality, Decoloniality, Indigenous Localism: A Critique
‘Intelligence’ before ‘intelligence tests’: Alfred Binet’s experiments on his daughters, 1890–1903
‘Being short is a curse’: the men paying thousands to get their legs broken – and lengthened
European research Priorities for Osteopathic Care (PROCare): a sequential exploratory investigation and survey
‘Phenomenology’ is Blue: The Synaesthetic Dynamics of Being-in-the-World
‘Beckert calls his book an “actor-centred history” about a phenomenon “made by people”, but it is ultimately a kind of horror story about a monster that eats men’ Link
Defining Success in American Fitness: Physical Culture in Early Twentieth–Century America
Rock Steady Boxing benefits both individuals and the community by empowering countless individuals battling Parkinson’s disease Link
The impossible patient
The Year in Biology (2025) and a year in AI consciousness
The Depth of the Body
Philosophical and Scientific Reflections on Pain
Haptic nostalgia
‘Of course I’m scared’: people confront their final days – in pictures
‘It Serves More Than One Purpose’: Pastoral power and the instrumentality of caring leadership

Weekly Digest #167

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:01:18 GMT

Weekly Digest #166

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:01:11 GMT

20th Century Theories of Scientific Explanation
A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing
Should Aging Be Treated?
Socialism after AI
Meditate your way through the climate crisis
How Many Humans Have Ever Lived, and How Many Are Alive Right Now?
What are we searching for — a visual essay
What we lose when casual nudity disappears
Bibliotherapy
US health insurance premiums rose nearly 3x the rate of worker earnings over the past 25 years
Long live the aeonophiles
Machines: Global Village Construction Set
Coffee biochar makes for lower-carbon, stronger concrete
Closer Look: Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1
Are doctors replaceable? Medical error kills hundreds of thousands yearly. If AI is sophisticated enough to help, doctors must not stand in the way Link

Weekly Digest #165

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:00:58 GMT

Retraction Watch
Maternal paradox
Psychiatry has finally found an objective way to spot mental illness
Size of life
Steep decline in TB, malaria, infant and maternal deaths in India
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Joy for families as cystic fibrosis drug prices fall within reach
The NIH is hiring (read the replies!)
Despite what you might think, America’s social safety net has grown consistently and dramatically in the last 50 years Link
The Barren Midwife: On Socratic Method and Psychotherapeutic Art
Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty
‘What is assumed in all these ideas about pain is a tacit and powerful premise: those who can suffer must have bodies. Flesh, blood and a nervous system are treated as preconditions for experience. The possibility that non-biological entities might experience something akin to suffering is rarely entertained. Clouds, rocks, digital simulations or hypothetical intelligences without bodies have traditionally fallen outside the moral circle, precisely because suffering has historically been equated with corporeality. The moral puzzles of the 21st century are pushing against that assumption: what if experience, awareness or distress could exist without the warmth and flesh of a body? How should we engage entities whose pain we cannot detect with the senses we are built to trust?’ Link
I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being
A (partial) history of the present – Tracing (some) of the roots of musculoskeletal physiotherapy practice
Can machines suffer?

Weekly Digest #164

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:00:38 GMT

Spinoza on Wonder
The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access
CFP: Seeking Disability Scholars for The Handbook of Ecofeminism
Pregnant with Monsters
‘Gainty demonstrates how, rather than as a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, medicine came to be understood as modern through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization’ Link
The Problem With Self-Help: Critical Psychology, Philosophy, and the Real Causes of Distress
Brain implants smaller than cells
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Why We Are Better Off Than a Century Ago
‘Digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us. For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. … kids spent their time together, largely beyond the prying eyes of grown-ups. But in the West, the grown-ups have paved over the forests and creeks where children would have once hidden. They have exposed the secret places. So the children seek out a world of their own, as they have for millennia, if not longer’ Link
Pastoral Power: Perspectives on the Present
Book Time #26: How I Read
All the Little Data
There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists
Object-Oriented Feminism

Weekly Digest #163

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:00:31 GMT

Open-ended and unresolved: Criticality as a practice and a process
‘Across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, as well as attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and mitigation measures like mask wearing and social distancing, results indicate that those with the highest levels of opposition have the lowest levels of objective knowledge but the highest levels of subjective knowledge’ Link
Australia set for world-first cervical cancer elimination and this
What is health? A deconstruction of the World Health Organization 1948 definition
The Quest for Universal Flu Vaccines
‘In September, The Lancet released a report with one of the most extraordinary statistics I’ve ever seen: since 2010, humanity’s total burden of illness and early death has dropped by 12.6 percent, driven by declining deaths from the world's deadliest infectious diseases: tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, diarrhoea, HIV/AIDS, all down by between 25 and 49 percent’ Link
Special issue — Pastoral Power: Perspectives on the Present
10 Perspectives | On Work
How Chiropractors Became the Backbone of MAHA
Deepities and deepifuls
‘If climate change and war are the result of inter-state competition, greater cooperation can lead to a solution. If they are the result of capitalism, instead, they will remain unresolved until we do away with the economic system itself’ Link
Exploring Post-Qualitative Inquiry as ‘Research-in-Becoming’
Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures
Art of Illness: Malingering and Inventing Health Conditions
Generative AI for Academics

Weekly Digest #162

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:00:22 GMT

Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame
The general practitioner as epidemiologist in Britain, 1930–1960
Review of Jessica Begon’s Disability Through the Lens of Justice
Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History
Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity
The inflammation age
Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason
Special issue: Exploring state socialist governmentality: Eastern European examples from medicine and health care
The Steamy, Sweaty, Towel-Spinning Weirdness of the World Sauna Championships
We built a d drifting wheelchair
Computer Chips in Our Bodies Could Be the Future of Medicine. These Patients Are Already There
A Photographer Spent 18 Months Documenting an LA Psychiatric Hospital in the 1970s
The CDC’s Website Is Anti-Vaccine Now
The enshittification of labor
‘Since 2019, rates of adolescent e-cigarette use have increased in 22 of the 25 EU countries reviewed, and in every member state, girls report higher use than boys’ Link and this

Weekly Digest #161

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:01:03 GMT

Weekly Digest #160

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:00:55 GMT

Photos from an equine rehabilitation center near Nantes in the West of France
“One of the things we know is that men communicate more comfortably with each other shoulder to shoulder, as opposed to face to face. When men are face to face with each other, that’s quite a threatening position. Now, if I tell you this, you won’t be able to unsee it. If you want to communicate with young men, go fishing, go for a drive, go for a hike.” Link
The strange history of the anti-vaccine movement
A food tax shift could save lives – without a price hike in the average shopping basket
Reframing the discipline: Praxis, legitimacy, and the future of philosophy of education
Thinking with Michel Foucault in Educational Leadership
Methodological and Conceptual Challenges
My Spiritual Journey from Roman Catholicism to Élan Vitalism
Why Does Light Exist?
The Mystery of Transformation in Nature
“Actually,” said the intern. “You’re showing all of the signs of Parkinson’s.” Link
Governing the factory: microhistories of the present
Stone Simulator – Just Be a Rock
Exoskeletons including high-tech glove trialled to reduce workplace injuries
CfP: Fifty Years of The History of Sexuality, May 26–29, 2026, at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Salvador
Knowledge culture in the postdigital era: Reclaiming knowledge as a public good

Weekly Digest #159

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:00:31 GMT

The world has become surprisingly less grumpy
The Engine of Our Redemption: Nick Cave on How to Use Your Suffering
On the Simple Life of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Philosophy as “Neverending Therapy”
Thirty years after the Sokal affair
“The goal was the hardest and best thing in the world: to read a book together and try to understand it” Link
Neuroscience-Based Footwear and this
Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
Claude Goes to Therapy and this
Men may have to exercise more than women to get same heart benefits
In Praise Of Useless Robots
Practicings of Person-Centred Care in Physiotherapy
As struggles over the human body escalate, we should return to the work of cinema’s greatest anatomist: David Cronenberg
‘The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind’ Link
Holiday from Hospital virtual reality to transport patients to Australia’s north-west
So you want to try psychotherapy. But what does it actually do?

Weekly Digest #158

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:01:38 GMT

Scientists Just Created a $10 Gluten Test That Works in 2 Minutes
James Cyriax: Villain or Hero?
People commute an average of 78 minutes per day—regardless of living standards
McGill scientists build world’s smallest 3D Bioprinter
All Consuming: Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now
Ushering in a new era of suture-free tissue reconstruction for better healing
Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care
This Robot Hand has Fingernails
“The mother of all campaigns”: inside Nigeria’s 100 million child vaccine drive
‘We demonstrate that first names actually evoke perceptions beyond gender and show that certain names are consistently and significantly perceived as more prosocial, assertive, or positive / negative than other common and timeless first names of the same gender’ Link
An NIH-backed effort aims to decode how the nervous system monitors internal organs
Pictures from Andy Warhol and Velvet Underground’s first ever gig at the 1966 Annual Dinner of the New York Society Clinical Psychiatry Link
When telemedicine outperforms in-person care
There were more births in Nigeria in 2023 than the whole of Europe (UN)
Life satisfaction used to be U-shaped, now youth satisfaction has fallen and life satisfaction is rising with age Link

Weekly Digest #157

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 19:00:31 GMT

An AI bot develops leukaemia
How Big Should Your Tent Be?
‘The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens’ Link
This new gym costs $2,000 a month - and you have to write an essay to join
The end of progress against extreme poverty?
Rejuvenating the nation: health resorts, baths, and biopolitics in Fascist Italy
The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes (I liked this line, ‘Others might have celebrated with a victory lap, a glass of wine, or the afternoon off. Not Šobat. He changed, packed his gear, and met his wife and daughter in the parking lot. They didn’t mention the record once. And besides, it was his turn to clean the bathroom’).
Anatomy of a kvetch
Radical Displacements: Mobilizing Critical Physiotherapy in Practice and Research Dr. Barbara Gibson
Substrates unbound
Ann Oakley, The Science of Housework: The Home and Public Health, 1880–1940
Artificial Touch in Contemporary Art and Culture
The Flu Pandemic of 1918–1919: A Political and Cultural Approach from a Covid World
The Therapy That Can Break You
Grading is broken

Weekly Digest #156

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:00:51 GMT

Weekly Digest #155

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:00:49 GMT

A Treatise on the All-Healing Qualities of Earth Bathing
The Neurodivergent Genius Who Invented Formula 1 For Marbles
‘Few people care about being an educated person, let alone about educating the populace at large. Plus, most people—even many in the university itself—don’t distinguish between being educated and being trained for a job’ Link
What Isn’t Intelligence?
Practicings of Person-Centred Care in Physiotherapy
Navigating the complexity of AI use in fitness to practice processes
Low-tech plan to patch humanity’s greatest weakness
Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems
A collection of untranslatable words
Endurance running coaching’s mechanical topography: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of coaches’ knowledges
The Body Keeps The Score sequel just got an eight figure deal
How a Hospital Librarian Spends Their Days
The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear
Personhood and Community: African Philosophical Perspectives
Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine

Weekly Digest #154

Dave Nicholls — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:01:43 GMT

How TikTok keeps its users hooked
Is Philosophy Tube Trustworthy?
Skewed Transgender Narratives in Western Media
Victorian Bodybuilding
‘academics have not done a great job confronting the most confounding aspect of populism, which is that the more it gets criticized by intellectuals, the more powerful it becomes. As a result, most of us are still playing the same old game, with the same old strategies, without realizing that the metagame has changed’ Link
10 questions to answer before you die
Cultivating taste in an age of capability
Getting Better: The Policy and Politics of Reducing Health Inequalities
Philosophy and Disability, Special Issue of Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies
FDA Approves First Nasal Spray for Treatment of Anaphylaxis
What Isn’t Intelligence?
On the relation between medicine and medical humanities
‘In 1985, Arber and Sawyer described the discretionary rationing power of general practice receptionists. Our paper revisits this territory’ Link
What Isn’t Intelligence?
‘Only incidentally concerned with the environment, 21st-century environmentalism is another iteration of the anthropocentric boosterism that has brought the world to its present impasse. There is an urgent need for heterodox thinking, asserting the intrinsic worth of the biosphere while ruthlessly shredding the comforting pieties of respectable Greenery’ Link