Author: Warren Szewczyk

As is the case with all contagious epidemics, the 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) began with a single person—Patient Zero. According to a Sept. 19 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the patient was a two-year-old boy living in the Guinean border town of Guéckédou.

With the 2014 Alumni Weekend rolling in and the thoroughfares of Claremont suddenly full of even more elderly and middle-age individuals, one question that has been on my mind between the increasing intensity of both my classes and my social life is: What the hell am I going to look like

It was a calm Monday evening. The sun was riding low over Pomona College’s Frary Dining Hall as people sat outside enjoying their dinner in the warm twilight. Then, without warning, a long, rolling groan filled the air. It lasted about a second or two and was followed by a

A star high school athlete, Kevin Breel was, to the onlooker, bright and successful. But beneath his outgoing exterior he harbored a dark secret: suicidal depression. After a TED talk video in which he shared his story garnered millions of views, Breel has spent his time touring the United States and

Time is winding down. Each second’s tick off the clock portends an impending doom for your team. You’re down one point, and the ball is in your hands. Everything seems to slow as you feel the pulsing of your heart beat harder, harder, harder in your chest.  Next thing you

On the night of Jan. 29, 2014, an exhausted, heavily bearded man washed ashore on an uninhabited beach in the Marshall Islands. His name was Jose Salvador Alvarenga, and, incredibly, he was alive, despite having spent 14 months stranded on the open ocean. The next morning, Alvarenga shouted and waved his arms

“This Baby Will Live to be 120”: so read the headline, accompanied by an image of a precious smiling baby, that ran across the cover of the May 2013 National Geographic Magazine. The associated article profiled scientists who scan the DNA of centenarians with the goal of identifying genes that are correlated

Whenever I hear talk of marijuana legalization on this campus, I am a little dismayed. This is not because I have a particular opinion that is challenged by my peers, but because I tend to only hear one or two arguments surrounding the issue.  One is sociopolitical, involving discussions about

In 2011, the world witnessed perhaps the most important game of Jeopardy! that has ever been played. The contestants were two Jeopardy!-made millionaires, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and an untested newcomer—a supercomputer named Watson. Through the course of two matches, Watson completely dismantled his creative and brilliant human counterparts.

Imagine you wake up one morning and as you get out of bed you notice something strange—your left leg. It looks totally normal, like a mirror image of your right leg. But something is different, wrong about it. You see it attached to your body, but, inexplicably, you know that