A New Vision for Public Health with Ashwin Vasan

Howie and Harlan are joined by Yale School of Public Health senior fellow Ashwin Vasan to discuss the ambitious agenda he pursued as New York City health commissioner: helping New Yorkers live longer, transforming mental healthcare, and rethinking what government can do to make people healthier. Howie examines the blood clots suffered by Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and the questions they raise about player safety; Harlan discusses the financial…

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Never Let Them See You Sweat? Maybe That’s The Problem

This commentary was originally published on Forbes.com. The views expressed are the author’s own.Have you ever heard this kind of career advice?“Never let them see you sweat.”“Keep your cards close to your chest.”“Don’t say anything until you have the solution.”For decades these mantras have shaped how many of us show up at work: polished, composed, carefully edited. The implicit message is that credibility depends, at least in part, on how…

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Flying a National Airline Through Bankruptcy

You’ve had a remarkably varied career that included finance, e-commerce, CPG, and outsourcing. But prior to joining Philippine Airlines (PAL) in 2019 as president and COO, you had never worked in aviation.I didn’t have any airline experience. Philippine Airlines’ billionaire owner, Lucio Tan, better known as Kapitan, recruited me because the airline was losing money and I’ve always been a turnaround guy.Looking at the financials, I saw that the company…

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Cleaning Up Contaminated Land Unlocks Local Economic Growth

Around the corner from one of Cameron LaPoint’s favorite sushi restaurants is a parking lot that looks much like any other. But LaPoint recently learned that a portion of this particular parking lot in New Haven is classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as a brownfield, a property thought to contain a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.Right now, the lot “probably isn’t suitable to be used for other things, because…

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Long COVID, Regulating AI Medical Advice, and the Hidden Costs of Prior Authorization

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare.Harlan Krumholz: Howie, today is a special day because we get to do a podcast together. We don’t actually have a special guest. Well, I have a special guest, Howie Forman.Howard Forman: I know. And I…

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What Finance Can Tell Us About the ‘Twin Crises’ of Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Your research has covered a remarkable range of topics, from housing markets to patterns in volatility to discount rates to the economics of biodiversity loss and climate change. What draws you to these issues?I do have eclectic research interests. I was drawn to finance because I’ve always loved math, and finance works on challenging problems that are mathematical in nature but involve deep economic questions and serve an important social…

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AI Evaluations Look Unbiased Without Being Fair

Companies seeking to fill job openings are increasingly “drinking through a fire hose of applications,” in the words of one hiring expert, with some popular postings receiving 1,000 applications in a single weekend.Amid this surge, some companies have begun using artificial-intelligence tools, including large language models (LLMs), to help identify promising candidates. And it isn’t just hiring: Under pressure to find needles in mounting haystacks, venture capital firms reviewing startup…

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The Revolution in Heart Care with Eric Velazquez

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We are physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare.Harlan Krumholz: Today, we have the chief of cardiology, Eric Velasquez, as our guest. But first, Howie Forman, what’s on your mind this week?Howard Forman: Yeah. God, plague, Harlan. Plague.Harlan Krumholz: Plague, plague.Howard Forman:…

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A Low-Tech Intervention Can Help Migrant Families Survive the ‘Lean Season’

Poverty is often studied as a chronic condition that affects a person or a household uniformly day to day and season to season. But in agrarian areas across the developing world, hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers and landless families experience regular cycles of seasonal deprivation. During a lean season that occurs between planting crops and harvesting them, work grows scarce, wages decrease, and food becomes more expensive. Some families…

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Learning from Your Own Health Data with Sara Riggare and Gary Wolf

Howie and Harlan are joined by journalist Gary Wolf, author of the new book The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe, and patient researcher Sara Riggare, who has spent years studying her own experience with Parkinson’s disease to better understand and manage her health. They discuss how systematic self-observation can help people ask better questions and learn more about their own health. Howie examines Sweden’s use of AI as a second…

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How the New York Times’ Framing Shaped the Story of the Israel-Hamas War

In the eight months after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the New York Times published more than 1,500 articles about the ensuing conflict. New research from Edieal Pinker, BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research and special advisor to the dean, finds that the framing of that coverage presented Israel as the driving force in the ongoing war, while Hamas largely receded from view. The result, Pinker argues, was a…

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Will AI Eliminate Jobs or Create New Ones? Probably Both.

By some estimates, one out of every 13 working women in the United States in 1950 was employed as a telephone switchboard operator. But with the rise of automatic switching systems in the 1960s, the job all but disappeared.A decade later, as computers gradually moved to the center of American working life, the ranks of information technology workers, such as computer programmers, began to swell—from 450,000 in 1970 to 4.6…

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Slowing Frontier AI Won’t Hold Back the AI Economy

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors’ own.Washington and Silicon Valley have found a new fight to pick over artificial intelligence in “pacing,” or the deliberate throttling of frontier model development until safety, alignment, and society at large can catch up. To its detractors, pacing is unilateral disarmament in the race with China. To its champions, pacing is the only responsible path for a…

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Expanding the Reach of Pediatric Cardiology with Emily Bucholz

Howie and Harlan are joined by pediatric cardiologist Emily Bucholz to discuss her work treating fetal heart abnormalities across a multistate region and the challenges of bringing specialized pediatric care to patients far from major medical centers. For Suicide Prevention Month, Howie examines evidence that restricting access to lethal means can prevent suicide; Harlan pays tribute to the late Yale political scientist Theodore Marmor and remembers a moment when Marmor’s…

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The Little Decisions that Make Big School Districts Work

Becoming a school principal is not an obvious path to take out of business school. How does the role draw on the skills of an MBA?Principals have enormous management and leadership responsibilities, especially in Chicago, where individual schools have more autonomy than in many other districts. In my first job as an elementary school principal, I had a budget of $4 million and 35 educators I was responsible for evaluating—as…

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Mission, Margin, and the Tradeoffs Facing Hospitals with Omar Lateef

Howie and Harlan are joined by Omar Lateef, CEO of Chicago’s Rush University System for Health, to discuss balancing the financial pressures facing hospitals with commitments to patient care, community health, and research—and why healthcare leaders will need to rethink traditional models of care. Howie examines how proposed changes to student and exchange visitor visas could affect international researchers and physicians; Harlan discusses proposed changes to Medicare payment for remote…

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Taking a Principled Approach to Private Equity through Relationships with Organized Labor

Private equity firms took notice when the State Group, a multi-trade contracting company, went up for sale in 2017. Owned by a family office and employing electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, carpenters, and other skilled tradespeople for large projects, the State Group clearly had growth potential—especially in a moment when companies and governments across North America were investing heavily in energy infrastructure and manufacturing.But it wasn’t going to be a straightforward…

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Restoring Faith in Capitalism Starts with How Companies Create Value

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors’ own.Gallup tracking data shows that positive views of capitalism have slipped to 54%, marking a 15-year low since they began tracking the metric. The finding reflects a zero-sum view of the corporation: that companies prosper by extracting value rather than creating it.It is no surprise that the more than 200 CEOs we have interviewed over six years…

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The Future of Heart Care with Aakriti Gupta

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Howie, we’re back, baby. Hi, we’re back from hiatus. And to everyone else, welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. First of all, welcome back to everybody. Welcome back to you, Harlan. It’s our sixth season, and we are excited to…

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A Relational Journey: You and We with Jim Ferrell

In this episode, Heidi Brooks talks with Jim Ferrell, who invites us to notice the invisible default of individualism that fragments our organizations and our lives. He describes a process for groups to map, measure, and manage the relational space—the “space between us”—for collective impact. Jim challenges us to see relationships fundamentally as the primary unit of analysis in work and life rather than the individual, arguing that everything we…

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Greater Transparency Brought Change to Police Departments—And Then a Reversal

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was stopped by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Within minutes, Brown had been shot and killed. In the wake of the killing—and as more deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police officers made headlines—the Black Lives Matter movement, which had begun as a social media campaign the previous year, grew into a nationwide protest movement.The…

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How Communities Can Get a Better Deal from Data Centers

This commentary was originally published in Time. The views expressed are the authors’ own.Data center companies “dug their own grave,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Sunday, and “that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.” Nine months ago, Abbott crowned Texas the epicenter of AI development, alongside Google executives announcing a $40 billion investment in the state. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who actively recruited Amazon’s $20 billion commitment to…

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How the Right Business Model Can Fuel Creativity

Would you each introduce your company and your role?Snow Rui: I’m president, CFO, and general counsel of Hooded Horse, a video game publisher that I co-founded in 2019 with my husband, Tim Bender, who is CEO. Our first release was in 2022. Today, we have about 40 people distributed globally. We’ve released 30 games with several of them selling over a million copies. I wear a lot of hats because…

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Putting a Price on Climate Risk

Your recent work has focused on unpriced risk. Would you explain what that is?It’s a risk that’s apparent—it’s not hidden or unrealistic, it doesn’t require a black-swan event to be relevant—but for some reason, there’s a lag in pricing it. Maybe the data needed to price it is difficult. There might be significant cost to quantifying the risk. Or the complexity of the issue might be daunting.There is often unpriced…

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How Cooling the Planet with Geoengineering Would Upend Climate Economics

Climate scientists and policymakers have long warned of a dangerous threshold: If global temperatures rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, we risk devastating consequences, including severe flooding, heat waves, and drought. Yet surpassing that grim marker now seems almost inevitable.One potential way to keep the harms of climate change at bay is geoengineering—deliberate intervention in the Earth’s climate system. The most widely studied form of geoengineering, called…

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Who Trains Junior Employees in the Age of AI?

This commentary originally appeared in K. Sudhir’s Substack newsletter The Slow Part. The views expressed are the author’s own.Many senior people are noticing the same thing lately: their junior staff are doing better work than ever—cleaner drafts, faster models, fewer mistakes—because AI now handles the grinding first pass, the rough draft that used to eat a junior’s week. And then, often in the same breath, comes the hesitation: they’re not…

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The Problems with the Paramount–Warner Merger

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors' own.David Ellison finally got the “yes” he wanted. After eight rejections, a hostile tender offer, a Delaware lawsuit, and a bidding war that Netflix declined to escalate, Paramount Skydance signed its $110 billion agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in February. In Hollywood romance terms, the boy got the girl. But every must-watch franchise gets a sequel.…

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Can Investors Make a Profit by Saving Bats?

In a 2022 agreement, an international coalition of countries set a daunting goal: to come up with an additional $700 billion per year to address biodiversity loss. These funds are needed to stave off extinctions of about one million species and preserve nature’s benefits to humanity, including food, medicine, clean water, and protection from floods and other hazards. “Biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and economic prosperity…

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Fads, Outbreaks, and Health Policy

Howie and Harlan discuss health headlines including the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak; a recent FDA decision allowing pharmacies to compound certain peptides; and a concerning report from Medicare trustees on the program’s financial future. They also dive into the health habits they’re changing this year and a new feature from ChatGPT allowing users to connect medical records and health data to the platform. Show Notes: Healthy Habits Health & Veritas: Ezekiel…

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The Possibility of ‘Both/And’: Talking Paradox with Dr. Wendy K. Smith

Organizational leaders are often under constant pressure to deliver simple solutions in the face of deeply complex challenges, with confidence and speed. You may experience this as a kind of “either/or” decision-making, a tension between doing things this way or that way. A leader pressured to decide quickly may miss insights that emerge from sitting with the tension within the paradox they face. Amidst these dynamics, can leaders hold the…

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How Much Is Crawling Your Content Worth to an AI Bot?

“Best recipe for banana bread.” “How to fix running toilet.” “Is Harry Styles engaged?”For decades, a well-established business model allowed internet users to answer big life questions like these. Search engines directed readers to content on other websites—and those visits helped support content through advertisements, subscriptions, and product sales.AI-assisted search is already threatening the once-symbiotic relationship between search engines and content producers. On Google, for example, many queries now result…

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Melanie Matheu: Turning Science into Impact

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Our guest today is Dr. Melanie Matheu. But first, we’re always checking in on whatever the current or hot topics in health and healthcare are. So, Harlan, where do you start?Harlan Krumholz: Well, there’s…

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To Reduce Emissions, the Carbon Offsets Market Needs One Crucial Fix

Over the past decade, thousands of companies have taken public positions on climate change. Airlines, banks, tech giants, and consumer brands have pledged to reach “net zero,” promising to bring their greenhouse gas emissions down to nothing—or close to it—by some future date.But few companies can actually eliminate all of their emissions. Some activities—flying planes, making cement, running global supply chains—are difficult or impossible to fully decarbonize with today's technology.…

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A Prescription for Rebuilding Trust in the FDA

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the authors’ own.The FDA occupies a unique position at the intersection of science, medicine, public health, and innovation. Patients depend on the agency to evaluate therapies rigorously and fairly; innovators depend on predictable regulatory pathways; and investors depend on confidence that scientific evidence will guide decision-making.That’s why it’s so disappointing and disheartening to see that only about half of…

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Shivan Mehta: Designing Better Healthcare Decisions

Howie and Harlan are joined by Shivan Mehta, associate chief innovation officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, to discuss how healthcare organizations can use behavioral science to remove barriers that keep patients from getting recommended care. Harlan warns that ill-defined rules governing scientific collaboration with China could chill medical research; Howie revisits the discovery of Legionnaires’ disease 50 years ago as New York confronts a new outbreak. Show…

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When Essential Infrastructure Projects Involve Exceptional Risk, No Sector Can Go It Alone

The M10 industrial park looks much like the warehouses and fulfillment centers lining highways across America. A sprawling complex studded with loading bays, it offers local businesses space to conduct manufacturing, logistics, and technological operations.But unlike most industrial parks, M10—which opened in 2024 in Lviv, Ukraine—was built as an economic lifeline for a country in crisis. For Ukraine, a major exporter of agricultural products long known as “the breadbasket of…

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What Keeps Women Artists Out of the Art World’s Top Echelon?

A painting by Joan Mitchell recently set a record for the highest sale price for a single work by a woman artist in Asia. Can you put that news in the context of the market for women’s art more generally?Joan Mitchell’s $17.6 million sale is an important moment, but it doesn’t change the overall structure of the market. The gap at the very top remains enormous: the highest prices for…

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What Critics Get Wrong About Dual-Class Shares

This commentary was originally published in Fortune. The views expressed are the author’s own.The recent high-profile IPO of SpaceX, which famously utilizes dual-class shares to give Elon Musk nearly 85% control, has reignited debate over dual-class shares themselves, and whether they hurt or help shareholders.Some of the most revered and successful business builders have dual-class share structures at their companies, from Michael Dell at Dell to Warren Buffett at Berkshire…

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Kate Heilpern: Redefining the Hospital’s Role

Howie and Harlan are joined by Kate Heilpern, president of Yale New Haven Hospital, to discuss the hospital’s 200-year history, the financial pressures facing health systems, and how Yale New Haven is balancing innovation with its mission to serve the local community. Harlan examines the growing burden of U.S. healthcare costs; Howie highlights encouraging trends in infant mortality, life expectancy, overdose deaths, and cancer survival. Show notes: Healthcare Costs “National…

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Selwyn Rogers: Bearing Witness to Violence (Encore)

Transcript Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz. I’m here with Howard Forman. We’ve got a special episode today. It actually reprises something that we did before because we talked a lot with Selwyn Rogers about his book and now it’s coming out. But I’m going to hand it over to Howie who’s going to tee this up for us.Howard Forman: Yeah, we’re really excited about this.…

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