Constructing Belief

When I was in high school I wrote a paper about Big Pharma hiding a cure for cancer, and I genuinely believed it. A big part of that came from the idea that there is just way too much money in cancer treatment for companies to ever let a cure come out. I remember thinking, “If cancer suddenly had a cheap natural cure, think about all the money drug companies, hospitals, insurance companies, and research institutions would lose.” To me back then, it felt almost obvious. Cancer treatment is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and I assumed the system cared more about profit than people. Conspiratorial thinking about health is widespread. A 2014 research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that 37% of Americans believe that the Food and Drug Administration is suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure. Honestly, I still get where that suspicion comes from. The financial side of healthcare can be frustrating and even jaw-dropping at times. We see sky-hi...

Watching Catch Me If You Can for the first time, I expected a clever crime movie. I thought it would just be Leonardo DiCaprio charming his way across countries in fancy suits, flying planes and cashing checks like it was a game. And yes, the movie has this exciting aspect, but what surprised me most was how sad it felt underneath all of that. Instead of watching a confident con artist, I felt like I was watching a kid try desperately to keep his heart from breaking. The thing that stayed with me was not the schemes or the travel or even the fear of getting caught. It was the loneliness. Frank runs because he cannot sit still long enough to feel what is happening in his real life. Every identity he tries on seems less about fooling the world and more about protecting himself from feeling abandoned and powerless. The Christmas scenes made that really clear. No matter how much money he has or what persona he puts on, he ends up alone in a quiet room, calling the one person who might see ...

A few weeks ago in class, we had a guest speaker who I still cannot stop thinking about. Jeff Guin came to talk about the Waco Siege, and before this presentation I thought I already knew a good amount about what happened. I grew up hearing bits about it, and I have always been fascinated by it. But hearing someone who has really lived in that history, studied it, and written about it talk in person felt completely different. He did not just tell the story. He made it feel alive and complicated and human. One thing I really appreciated was how balanced his perspective was. So many conversations about Waco turn into either “the government was right” or “the government was the bad guy.” Guin did not do that. He broke down the motivations and beliefs of the Branch Davidians, but he also explained the pressures and mistakes made by the government. He talked about how fear and certainty on both sides fueled the situation and how everything snowballed into tragedy. It really showed how messy...