Danielle Teller

According to a Fox News article written by Suzanne Venker, women’s achievements in the workplace are dooming their marriages. As women are increasingly “groomed to be leaders rather than to be wives, [they] become too much like men. They’re too competitive. Too masculine. Too alpha.” The author’s premise is that the husband is meant to be the alpha in the household, and cohabiting alphas are like “like two bulls hanging out in the same pen together.”

As 2016 drew to a close last month, I opened my newsfeed with dread, braced for more gloomy tidings. Sure enough, amidst the news round-ups and “best of” lists was The New York Times’ most popular article of the year: “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”

Have you ever heard of Rosalind Franklin? Probably not. But you certainly know of James Watson and Francis Crick.

After the US congress recently failed to pass any of the latest gun control bills, Arizona senator Jeff Flake argued on National Public Radio  that if we’re going to bar people on a federal terrorism watch list from buying guns, “that argument could go further and say just put every American on the list.” His statement infuriated me, but not primarily because I am among the 90% of Americans who support more scrutiny of gun buyers. I was infuriated because Senator Flake used the dirtiest of all weapons to obliterate reasonable political discourse: the slippery slope fallacy.

I loved Mother’s Day when I was a child. I loved it so much that I once gave a beribboned pot of wild violets and a big paper heart that said, “Happy Mother’s Day!” to a childless neighbor. I didn’t understand why she looked at me strangely until my mom explained that “mother” and “woman” are not synonymous. It came as a shock to realize that not all women are defined by their children.

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,

At Silicon Valley’s inaugural Comic Con, we gave a talk called “Superbabies vs. AI.” Astro, who is captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X division, argued that genetically engineered babies are going to destroy civilization as we know it. He sees the horror of eugenics, X-Men, and a planet entirely populated by the sort of kids who beat him up in middle school, all rolled into one. Danielle, a physician-scientist and wife of said captain of moonshots, argued that the robot apocalypse is going to annihilate humanity. Super intelligent computers will eventually destroy us all, no matter what sort of Asimovian instructions we try to give them. The jury is out about who won the debate, but here are the most important issues we explored.

Something is rotten in the state of biomedical research. Everyone who works in the field knows this on some level. We applaud presentations by colleagues at conferences, hoping that they will extend the same courtesy to us, but we know in our hearts that the majority or even the vast majority of our research claims are false.

The United States of America has arguably done more to advance science in the modern world than any other country on earth. From the nimble ingenuity of Silicon Valley to the ascendency of US military technology, this nation has impeccable high-tech bona fides. Many of the world’s top engineering schools are located on American soil, and we are even hanging onto our supremacy in medical research—though our lead is slipping quickly. If countries were students, America would have an A+ in science. We would win the egghead olympiad and do pretty well in the robotics competition. We might even get a place on the Asia-dominated mathlete team if every single European country decided to bow out because, I’m guessing, Europe is too cool for something as nerdy as mathletics.

Our 12-year-old daughter who, like us, is a big fan of The Martian by Andy Weir, said, “I can’t stand that people think we’re all going to live on Mars after we destroy our own planet. Even after we’ve made the Earth too hot and polluted for humans, it still won’t be as bad as Mars. At least there’s plenty of water here, and the atmosphere won’t make your head explode.”

When I was traveling in Pakistan, I received a lot of pity for being North American. People would ask with horror, “Is it true that you live in a different city from your parents and siblings?” When I said yes, they would shake their heads mournfully and tell me how sad it was that I lived such a bleak, empty life. I was surprised that they felt sorry for me, because I belong to a wonderful, close-knit family. I was also pretty sure that if I ever got married, I wouldn’t want to have to move in with my mother-in-law and do her bidding, as is the tradition in Pakistan.

“If I die” is a quintessentially American phrase, a bit of semantic sloppiness that reveals our state of denial about death. We don’t use the phrase to boast of immortality, but to avoid the twinge of uneasiness that comes from saying, “When I die.” Acknowledging the inevitability of death raises questions about when and how it will happen, and that is not something that we are comfortable thinking about.

“Angelina Jolie has raised a polite teenager!” is not a headline we’re likely to see on the cover of celebrity magazines ever. Jolie’s baby bump in 2006, on the other hand, was huge news! The monotone beep of grocery barcode scanners still evokes images in my mind of the celebrity’s tumescent belly, which was featured on glossy magazine covers for months.

Yet another story recently surfaced about how doctors don’t die like everyone else. Doctors die quietly at home, surrounded by family—not in the hospital like most Americans. This difference has been ascribed to knowledge about the limits of modern medicine and experience with the horror of lingering deaths on life support, and there is doubtless truth in those ascriptions. As a physician and writer, I believe that there is also another more subtle but equally important contributor, and that has to do with the stories we tell ourselves about death.

It’s not clear who dreads the Sex Talk more, parents or children. Parents know that it’s important to impart their values and arm kids with knowledge, but they don’t know how to approach the subject or how much to say.

There has been a lot of chatter in the media lately about the threat of designer babies to the future of the human race. The United Kingdom recently voted to legalize “three person babies” created from the nuclear DNA of two parents and the mitochondria of a third donor, and more recently, American scientists have been calling for a moratorium on human germline manipulations due to fears that genetic editing techniques are becoming too easy and cheap. The risk, apparently, is that a rogue investigator will get his or her hands on embryos and try to create a race of hyperintelligent blue-eyed superbabies. Or, alternatively, that the experiment will go awry and we will end up with real-life Professor X and Magneto battling it out on the streets of New York City.

Disney has just released a live-action version of Cinderella, a retread of the beloved 1950s animated classic, complete with poofy gowns, glass slippers, anthropomorphic mice, and a magic pumpkin. This version of the fairy tale, based largely upon Charles Perrault’s 1697 publication of Cendrillion, has so permeated our culture that virtually everybody in America, be they male, female, young or old, is familiar with the story. It’s little wonder that the tale is so popular, since we all like a rags-to-riches narrative, and, as Mickey and Minnie Mouse have amply proven, we like anthropomorphic mice too.

The divorce rate in America is rising. Do you think that statement is true? If you do, you’re not alone. As Claire Cain Miller recently pointed out in an article for The New York Times, we hear about the rising divorce rate in the news all of the time. This is curious, because as it happens, the divorce rate isn’t rising.

En algún momento entre nuestra niñez y cuando tuvimos a nuestros propios hijos, la paternidad se convirtió en una religión en los Estados Unidos. Al igual que en muchas religiones, los practicantes deben tener una devoción completa y sin reflexión. No se permite que nada en la vida sea más importante que nuestros hijos, y nunca debemos mencionar una palabra desleal sobre nuestras relaciones con ellos. Los niños son siempre lo primero. Hoy en día, aceptamos esta premisa en forma tan automática que nos olvidamos de que no siempre fue así.

Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America. As with many religions, complete unthinking devotion is required from its practitioners. Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children, and we must never speak a disloyal word about our relationships with our offspring. Children always come first. We accept this premise so reflexively today that we forget that it was not always so.

Throughout most of recorded human history, marriage was a means for consolidating wealth, improving social status and creating a miniature labor force from the fruits of one’s loins. Marriage contracts detailed the exchange of money, land and goods and the obligations of each party; there was little or no expectation of romance. Divorce was rare, because few individuals (women in particular) could prosper outside the institution of marriage.

Greater gender equality leads to divorce. Women’s increased earning power leads to divorce. Men shouldering the burden of household chores leads to lower marital satisfaction and increased risk of divorce.

It is common knowledge that research studies have demonstrated the harmful effects of divorce on children. Surprisingly, that common knowledge turns out not to be supported by evidence. Although proponents of marriage would like us to believe that kids with divorced parents have more emotional, academic and psychological problems than they would have had if their parents had stayed together, no credible data exist to back up those claims.