The Booming Business of Cutting Babies’ Tongues

American healthcare is commonly known to be in a deplorable state, costing 18% of GDP while underperforming in quality among developed nations. Changing the situation systemically also seems intractable—passing new regulation is a political landmine, and costs continue to rise without a clear winning strategy.

American Sickness unpacks how US healthcare got to this state. It examines the competing interests of the major blocs in healthcare - hospitals and doctors, pharmaceuticals and devices, and insurers. Written by a Harvard-trained doctor and New York Times reporter, this book clarifies how deeply entrenched the interests are and why it’s so difficult to change anything.

In the 21st century, we can do extraordinary things: We can predict dangerous storms, explore distant planets, and save people from life-threatening conditions and injuries. Yet highly trained, experienced, and capable people regularly make avoidable mistakes.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Boston surgeon Atul Gawande contends the reason is that knowledge and complexity in many fields have exceeded the capacity of any individual to get everything right. Under pressure, we make simple mistakes and overlook the obvious. Drawing lessons from spectacular successes and failures in recent years, he argues that the solution is a checklist. The book builds the case for checklists and issues a plea for adopting this backstop to human fallibility.

In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that learning from failure drives human progress, from innovation in science and business to individual and organizational growth. Yet other areas of society—including the political, judicial, and health care systems—have yet to benefit from this process of rational learning.

As long as these institutions stigmatize failure, they create a culture of misguided exceptionalism that prevents them from improving. And if we neglect to improve our stagnating institutions, they’ll continue to take the lives of innocents—whether it’s death due to preventable medical error or wrongful conviction that leads to life in prison.

Syed explains how an organization’s culture and systems either promote or prevent learning, and he lays out several steps for learning from failure in our complex world. Any organization can change its culture and systems by embracing failure as a powerful source of learning. We’ve rounded out Syed’s ideas with advice from Tribal Leadership and The Fifth Discipline, which discuss the cultures and systems of effective businesses.

Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian. Westover gains the strength to break free from the ideological chains of her youth and discovers the agency to make her own choices about how she sees and experiences the world.

While it is about one individual’s journey, Educated speaks to universal themes of self-liberation, the power of education, the perils of extreme ideology, and the trauma of domestic abuse.

In 1951, a 30-year-old African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks entered Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated for cervical cancer. In a matter of months she was dead, overcome by her cancer’s malignancy. Her cancer cells, however, would prove immortal—and change medicine forever.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, her family, and her incredible cells. Tracking both the scientific advances owed to “HeLa” cells and the struggles of Henrietta’s descendants, author Rebecca Skloot leads readers through the history of cell research, the ethical implications of scientific study, and the human story of a poor and ailing family whose matriarch contributed to some of 20th-century science’s greatest achievements.

American healthcare is commonly known to be in a deplorable state, costing 18% of GDP while underperforming in quality among developed nations. Changing the situation systemically also seems intractable—passing new regulation is a political landmine, and costs continue to rise without a clear winning strategy.

American Sickness unpacks how US healthcare got to this state. It examines the competing interests of the major blocs in healthcare - hospitals and doctors, pharmaceuticals and devices, and insurers. Written by a Harvard-trained doctor and New York Times reporter, this book clarifies how deeply entrenched the interests are and why it’s so difficult to change anything.

In the 21st century, we can do extraordinary things: We can predict dangerous storms, explore distant planets, and save people from life-threatening conditions and injuries. Yet highly trained, experienced, and capable people regularly make avoidable mistakes.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Boston surgeon Atul Gawande contends the reason is that knowledge and complexity in many fields have exceeded the capacity of any individual to get everything right. Under pressure, we make simple mistakes and overlook the obvious. Drawing lessons from spectacular successes and failures in recent years, he argues that the solution is a checklist. The book builds the case for checklists and issues a plea for adopting this backstop to human fallibility.

In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that learning from failure drives human progress, from innovation in science and business to individual and organizational growth. Yet other areas of society—including the political, judicial, and health care systems—have yet to benefit from this process of rational learning.

As long as these institutions stigmatize failure, they create a culture of misguided exceptionalism that prevents them from improving. And if we neglect to improve our stagnating institutions, they’ll continue to take the lives of innocents—whether it’s death due to preventable medical error or wrongful conviction that leads to life in prison.

Syed explains how an organization’s culture and systems either promote or prevent learning, and he lays out several steps for learning from failure in our complex world. Any organization can change its culture and systems by embracing failure as a powerful source of learning. We’ve rounded out Syed’s ideas with advice from Tribal Leadership and The Fifth Discipline, which discuss the cultures and systems of effective businesses.