iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Thomas D. Carroll @thomasdcarroll.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

In case you need a little more John Coltrane in your day... This streaming channel is pretty wonderful. www.youtube.com/live/TVEYASJ...

youtube.com

John Coltrane 100: The Essential Station

YouTube video by John Coltrane

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I thought this was an Onion article at first (1) "AI has become my reading buddy as I've plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose." www.axios.com/2026/08/11/r...

axios.com

Robot book club

Reading books with an AI partner

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Vast and Trunkless Leg of Stone, Standing in the Desert from classic poem Ozymandias.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The ever thoughtful Laura Kolbe on the interstitium @parisreview.bsky.social "I’m not immune to this mindset, but I also see how it creates its own voracious momentum—a need to assign to each cluster of cells a kind of tactical vigor or productivity." www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/07...

theparisreview.org

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Interstitium by Laura Kolbe

July 23, 2026 – “The interstitium seems plotless, an entity that, as Auden claimed of poetry, ‘makes nothing happen.’ ”

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

"The belief that every field in the humanities is secretly controlled by social justice warriors has always been a false conspiracy theory, but to make these fantastical claims during the middle of a war against the humanities is a particularly dangerous delusion."

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Listen, early HBO series slapped. and had something to say. Oz. Rome. Deadwood. The Wire. Treme. REMEMBER Treme?

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André Picard @picardonhealth @picardonhealth.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject Vitamin K Shot. The lifesaving injection, given to newborns to prevent uncontrollable bleeding, has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement, by @deldeib.bsky.social www.propublica.org/article/more... via @propublica.org

propublica.org

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/05/2026

a thought i had while talking to a friend is that a federal end to partisan gerrymandering has to be at the top of the democratic party's agenda, and may likely get there because of threat the status quo poises to black representation, and thus black political involvement altogether.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

The scholarly follow up to my 2025 @statnews.com piece, now out in Diagnosis (with Chris Cassel). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41996201/

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. -Delmore Schwartz, closing lines of “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” #everynightapoem #farewellapril

Shadows of spring branches on my bedroom wall - monochrome

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damasterchief @damasterchief.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Ninth Grader Demi Johnson receives National Geographic award for plan to save Mississippi's oyster reef population. The ninth grader has produced 1,100 oysters that will in turn spawn millions of larvae into the ecosystem, a huge ecological impact

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

This makes me angry on such a cellular level. I WISH we could build a system around taking care of each other. Thinking about my mom, managing my dad's Parkinson's & cancer meds, taking him to appts, fighting with insurance. Thinking about my patients and their loved ones. tinyurl.com/3t8ebx7v

nbcnews.com

RFK Jr. draws backlash for ripping Medicaid programs that pay people to care for relatives

Advocates for disabled people and those who care for them said they were insulted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s allegations that the programs are "rife with fraud."

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

*reviews sources on pandemic influenza in the military* (1918)

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I love this. Artemis as goddess of the Untrammeled Wild. and laughing at gods having portfolios

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Christos Lynteris @visualplague.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

2 great postdoc vacancies with Jules Skotnes-Brown's new Wellcome project in Liverpool - a brilliant opportunity for scholars interested in bringing together medical and environmental history!

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

I really do think it's existential at this point - for *our* neural networks.

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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Me logging onto the internet/Me finding out RFK Jr. is starting a taxpayer-funded podcast, re-enacted by my dog Zoey.

Photo composed of two pictures of a black lab. One the left the dog is sitting relaxed with gentle eyes. It says “started” above her in black. On the right the dog has squinted eyes. It says “going” above her head.

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 08/04/2026

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Dustrial @dustrial.net · 07/04/2026

The self and the cyberself in quiet introspection

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

There is a particular dense green color to the landscape of Kerala that I miss very much at certain times when I get homesick (only for Kerala). It makes me feel like I can breathe deeper. Don’t know how else to describe it

A color photo taken from a houseboat showing a shoreline of a river, densely planted with coconut trees, mango and other trees.

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

the incredible @travisclau.bsky.social last night, sharing his gorgeous poetry to a completely full room at Georgetown 💙

Travis Chi Wing Lau in a full room at Georgetown responding to a question, blue light background

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Terrance @stickysweett.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

SINNERS 🏆🎥 #Oscars

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

A truly beautiful, polyglot essay @bmj.com on the gap between technocratic / bioscientific language and poetic language in care, drawing upon (among others) Ngũgĩ, Spenser, Césaire

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404 Media @404media.co · 12/03/2026

This is Nathan Cavanaugh, another DOGE staffer explaining how he flagged grants at NEH for "DEI" which would be reviewed for termination. 404 Media has reviewed hours of this footage and we'll have more soon. Part of a lawsuit by @acls1919.bsky.social, @modernlanguage.bsky.social + @historians.org

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

theguardian.com

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Trisha Elliott @trishaelliott.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

In the @bmj.com last month, @thelakshmik.bsky.social considers the film Hamnet and how Maggie O’Farrell’s book offers remembrance of another plague at another time in history. Published in 2020, does the story help us to process what happened during the Covid years? #MedSky #BookSky

Hamnet is about a plague from another time, but it resounds with audiences who lived through covid-19’s horrors, argues Lakshmi Krishnan

The plague is a bystander in Chloé Zhao’s recent film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet, published in 2020 at the dark dawn of the covid-19 pandemic. Those were days of grim sterility: the world in social isolation, our feeds awash with images of ventilators and pale mortuary trucks, families bidding farewell over the phone. Healthcare workers still grapple with those memories: the screams of those outside rooms they couldn’t enter, the terrible silence within.

Almost six years on, it seems that what we have lost and endured must find its way out. Where is the great covid-19 novel?1 Literature has often responded to contagion and walked alongside our horror, frailty, and fear.2 In audiences’ overwhelming, emotional response to Hamnet there may be a telescoping at work: we who lived through a pandemic have a keen sensitivity to the aftermath of another.

In Hamnet it is the Black Death, or second bubonic plague pandemic, which haunted Eurasia for centuries to follow.3 In Zhao’s film, the plague skulks in shadows: macabre puppetry of children given seraph wings by Death and glimpses of shrouded bodies. People lived with the dread that this revenant would return to claim their young, elders, or, with cruel caprice, the heartiest among them. Set during such an outbreak in 16th century Stratford-upon-Avon, Hamnet tells of the death of a child. Only this particular child belongs to William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, and lent his name (as suggested by Stephen Greenblatt) to Shakespeare’s tragedy of youthful folly, familial dysfunction, and retribution

(played by a fearless Jessie Buckley, whom O'Farrell recovers from walled archives of Shakespearean history as a vivid, untrammelled woman. Agnes and Will marry and have twins, Hamnet and Judith. Judith is sweet and sickly. Hamnet is a sunny child with golden ways. When it is Hamnet, not Judith, who succumbs to the sickness, Agnes is horrified that her vigilance was for the wrong twin. She is the healer of this world, and she cannot heal-neither her son nor herselt.
Is it any wonder that many have wept their way through Zhao's lyrical, so-sorrowful-it's-pleasurable film? In Hamnet's pathos is a shared remembrance. The book enraptured us in 2020; the film is a cathartic in 2026.

Is it any wonder that many have wept their way through Zhao’s lyrical, so-sorrowful-it’s-pleasurable film?5 In Hamnet’s pathos is a shared remembrance. The book enraptured us in 2020; the film is a cathartic in 2026.

Agnes recites a healing incantation to her children as they pestle plants: “you defy poison, you defy ailment, you defy the horror that stalks the world.” The charm foretells the action of Hamnet and Hamlet: poison-tipped sword, disease-haunted world, and a tale that defies disease and death. It offers up language as a kind of panacea to these horrors.

Hamnet is about another plague from another time, but it resounds now, recovering both past lives and the afterlives of crisis. Covid-19 reminded us that pandemics seldom end tidily: “biological” and “social” endings differ and aftermaths are “seemingly endless periods during which life has to be recomposed.”6 We are still in that recomposition phase. Such great personal and collective loss demands a container: a record of what has come to pass, testimony, refuge, and imagination of what might have been.

Deep in grief, Agnes experiences what her husband birthed on stage, both losing her son anew and imagining a different story for him. “In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,” a dying Hamlet tells Horatio, “To tell my story.” And it is upon story that we must rely. It gives form and words to those things we struggle to speak, the losses we cannot mourn or share. It lives on, defying disease, even death.

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

ACLU @aclu.org · 18/02/2026

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Measles outbreaks in SC and (not at RFK's door, I guess), in North London. Highly contagious, nasty, and with potential long-term complications. This is not where we want to be...

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

2026. I have just returned from a visit to my local movie theatre... I have no clue what I just watched. I feel like I ate a pile of cotton candy and got lost in a Wes Anderson version of Yorkshire. Was it genius, or to quote Margot Robbie's Cathy, "silly nonsense?" #WutheringHeights

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this is.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I reviewed Hamnet (Maggie O'Farrell) for @bmj.com. Chloé Zhao's film is sweeping awards season. Not without criticism – many have found it too weepy & criticize its use of “cheat codes” like Max Richter’s score. But I see in Hamnet’s pathos something else – remembrance, our collective aftermath.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper, That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, .... This is the strangers’ case; And this your mountainish inhumanity.

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Reposted by Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Nicholas Thompson @nxthompson.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

An extraordinary paragraph. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

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The BMJ @bmj.com · 07/01/2026

Kim Stanley Robinson’s "The Ministry for the Future" is a book about decisions that determine not just who lives and dies now, but who will live and die in the future. Lakshmi Krishnan sets the scene for our first issue of 2026 www.bmj.com/content/392/...

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Honored to be part of @bmj.com New Year’s Resolutions for the #climateemergency issue, kicking off 2026 with an exploration of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future See @kamranabbasi.bsky.social's editorial & my piece below: tinyurl.com/4b2efbjj www.bmj.com/content/392/...

tinyurl.com

New Year’s resolutions for the climate emergency

How do we resolve the great challenges to health and wellbeing? Welcome to a BMJ special issue of resolutions. Our aim is to begin each year with a range of short essays on one of these great challeng...

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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Summary of what happened at Temu ACIP this morning: As expected, they overturned the 30+ year recommendation for the birth dose of HepB vaccine, which has reduced the incidence of pediatric HepB by 99%. They provided no credible evidence to support this decision.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Excited to share new work first authored by Georgetown medical student Sweta Ghatti, comparing how medical humanities vs. empirical research approaches health disparities in DC. Congrats to our entire author team: Christopher King @charlescott.bsky.social, Xue Geng www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Mapping DC health inequities: a scoping review comparing scientific and medical humanities approaches - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Mapping DC health inequities: a scoping review comparing scientific and medical humanities approaches

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

"For this reason I shall probably be called a trimmer by some and a sentimental extremist by others. But poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective ’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty." Louis MacNeice, Note Autumn Journal, 1939.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

RFK JR: "We're doing the studies to make the proof." Saying the quiet part out loud.

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Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD @thelakshmik.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

I sat down with @vinayakjain.bsky.social & Kayla Zamanian to talk about our new piece in @jama.com & why the humanities & social sciences are fundamental to health research and innovation. Check out the article: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... drlakshmikrishnan.substack.com/p/the-new-cl...

drlakshmikrishnan.substack.com

The New Clinician Scholars: A Q&A with Vinayak Jain and Kayla Zamanian

Why the intersection of medicine & the humanities produces better research, better healthcare, and better thinking

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