Sophie McBain

1 week ago | msn.com | Sophie McBain

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me.

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Until the early 17th century, scientists believed that the heart operated a bit like a lamp, warming blood that had been produced by the liver. In 1616, when the English physician William Harvey corrected this misconception and explained how the heart works, the audience at the Royal College of Physicians booed him. Why did it take so long for scientists to understand the heart’s real function?

2 months ago | newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain

During the first Donald Trump presidency – when Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress that the president’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh,had sexually assaulted her, and he was appointed anyway – the American writer Pagan Kennedy found herself thinking about all the man-made objects that seemed specifically designed to let men get away with rape: date rape drugs, stalkerware software and car doors with driver-controlled locks.