June 26: See key additions at bottom. For those heading to or curious about the World Conference of Science Journalists starting on Monday in Doha, here’s a reading list related to the “Unveiling Arab Science,” Monday’s opening plenary. (Mo and I plead guilty to use of reductive metaphor in that title; it’s really about science…
Monthly Archives: June 2011
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Aglitter in the Net: Behavioral Immune Systems, Central Dogmas, and Other Bad News
by David Dobbs •
Some recent sparkly things from the net: That particularly confounding photo above is via Vaughn Bell at Mind Hacks: An amazing picture from Jeff Arris that plays havoc with our face perception system – grabbed from Twitter and which lives on Flickr here. I’m not quite sure what to make of this next item myself yet, but…
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Naked Innocence & the Voice of War: Making Story at The Atavist
by David Dobbs •
One of the pleasures of writing My Mother’s Lover, my recent Atavist story about my mother’s reverberant World War II love affair, was discovering how much the enhanced eBook format could add to longform narrative. Knowing the story would come out in both a media-rich iPad/iPhone/iTouch version and simpler Kindle and Nook versions, I wrote…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Reef Madness 5: How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray
by David Dobbs •
I bring here the sixth entry in my partial serialization of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which finds Louis Agassiz facing off against Asa Gray in a decisive argument over Darwin’s theory of evolution. I first ran this excerpt back on April 28, independently, before I began…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
The Arabick Roots of Science, and Their Fruit to Come
by David Dobbs •
If asked to trace the roots of modern Western science, most educated Westerners will point to the scientific revolution that flowered in Europe following the Renaissance, with Copernicus’s 1543 “On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” the main marker. There and then, it is thought, science began asserting an account of nature separate from that of…
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With An Especially Emotional Jungleland, Clarence Clemons Bids Adieu
by David Dobbs •
An especially spirited 1978 performance in Passaic; these were the shows that made Bruce such a legend. The Big Man rips a particularly majestic solo starting at around 4:05. This is pretty much the lithe and kinetic young Bruce I first saw in 1972 or 3 in a small venue in Houston called Liberty Hall…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
Choke on Your Putts? Don’t Think About It. Better Yet, Here’s HOW to Think About It
by David Dobbs •
A few months ago I posted a feature here about the science of choking under pressure, focusing on the work of University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock. A few days ago Bill Pennington ran a Times post about her work focusing on putting — a skill she uses in her labs to study the different ways…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Reef Madness 4: Alexander Agassiz Comes of Age
by David Dobbs •
This, the fifth in a series of posts extracted from my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, introduces the book’s main figure, Alexander Agassiz. In the book I track Alex from birth. In this abridged serialization, I skip that and we pick him here as a 12-year-old boy. Abandoned…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Reef Madness 3: Louis Agassiz, TED Wet Dream, Conquers America
by David Dobbs •
This is the third of several installments of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. The first two brought us Louis Agassiz, Alexander’s father, who yearned to be “the first naturalist of his generation,” and the Rumble at Glen Roy, in which the young Louis, wielding ice, bests a…
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What Mom Was Like – A eulogy for the woman in ‘My Mother’s Lover”
by David Dobbs •
The reception so far given “My Mother’s Lover,” my story at The Atavist of my mother’s WWII romance, has been immensely gratifying. Published late yesterday at Amazon, it shot by this afternoon to the #1 spot among Amazon’s Kindle Singles and 61st among all Kindle sales. “In uncovering and unraveling his family’s secrets, Dobbs draws…
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