Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and New Yorker staff writer, has recently become a leading voice in public health policy. His essay last year on the high cost of care in McAllen, Texas—where entrepreneurial doctors overuse expensive imaging machines—helped explain why fee-for-service reimbursement systems may need to be overhauled. His 2007 essay on how stupid mistakes in surgery can be largely eliminated through the use of pre-operative checklists was a startling reminder of the big effects that simple reforms can have. He has now expanded the essay into a book, "The Checklist Manifesto," in which he seeks, less successfully, to generalize the checklist lesson to many other human activities.