Often it is some brush with mortality that awakens the heart. Annie Dillard lived a long time beside Tinker Creek, but it wasn’t until she nearly died of pneumonia that she began to go down and sit by that creek, watching the frogs and the bugs, the birds and wildflowers. She jotted down notes, kept…
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Everybody knows about placebos and the placebo effect. If you think the little pill will help you, it often does—even when there’s no medicine in it. But I’d never heard of a nocebo, until last week when it showed up in my email box. “Nocebo” was my word for the day. “A substance producing harmful…
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