Word: thingness
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...reason. A study in the Netherlands found that one in four doctors said they had killed patients without an explicit request--including one doctor who believed that a dying Dutch nun was prevented from requesting euthanasia because of her religion, so he felt the just and merciful thing to do was to decide...
...that such a bad thing? Except for physicians - whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year - penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand. The Emily Post Institute recommends sending a handwritten thank-you but says it doesn't matter whether the note is in cursive or print, as long as it looks tidy. But with the declining emphasis in schools, neatness is becoming a rarity...
Open-mike-night performers always have to worry about audience members stealing their shtick. But a joke is one thing; what about a business plan? That's a risk for budding entrepreneurs who pay $15 at the door or $20 a month to hone their 90-second pitches onstage. Attendees at the biweekly open-mike events in Philadelphia and Los Angeles offer feedback over booze and pizza, while simulcast viewers weigh in via Twitter. The wide reach makes some participants nervous. "You have no control over who's listening," says Michael Riordan, 26, who unveiled his plan...
...anyone who thinks the guidelines will make it easier for people to travel to commit suicide, experts point out that with clarity could come a rigidity that ends up punishing people who have up until now escaped prosecution. In practice, ambiguity can be a good thing, says Emily Jackson, a professor of law at the London School of Economics. "The ambiguity in the law has allowed a degree of discretion to be exercised on compassionate grounds," she says. "If there is a very clear set of criteria, there may be pressure to prosecute any case which might look...
...thing is for sure, though: the clarified rules will deal only with people who travel overseas to assist with suicide and won't change the fact that helping someone die in Britain is illegal. And that, says Dominic Wilkinson, a medical-research fellow at Oxford University, raises other ethical considerations. "If we think it's O.K. for people to go overseas to end their lives, and it's not illegal for them to do it or for people to help them do it," he asks, "why do we think that people who want to do the same thing in this...