[Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly "Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus")] Popular Science has run what strikes me as a nicely nuanced profile on Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young scientist who, along with senior collaborators, made strong claims last December that they induced Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for…
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Culture, Readings, Writing
Why I Love Hemingway (and Why I Write)
by David Dobbs •
Hemingway’s reputation has suffered immensely over the last two or three decades. Read around enough and you’ll see this. And I can feel it when I occasionally confess to people — for you don’t tell this, you confess it — that I love him and his writing. I always sense a bit of a surprise,…
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How the Fraudulent Dr Fox Fooled The Shrinks
by David Dobbs •
You’re looking at footage at a somewhat infamous scam lecture an actor gave to a group of psychiatrists, about game theory. The actor was trained the day before — trained so that he wouldn’t say much that made sense. But he had such a convincing presence that toward the end, even after the fraud was…
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How to Write Like Nicolas Cage
by David Dobbs •
Actually, Charlie Kaufman. Or Nick Cage playing Charlie Kaufman as written by Charlie Kaufman taking evolutionary liberties with Susan Orlean. In any case, I tried to write about three different posts yesterday, and never really quite got going well on my main-burner project … and then, first thing this morning (thinking about coffee and a…
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The Brain as a Slum
by David Dobbs •
This re-imagined human brain seems more analogous to a slum than to any conventional urban ideal. Like a slum, the brain does not reveal its intricacies by exposing its design. Instead, it works in mysterious ways, moving through invisible systems and unseen channels that escape explanation. An installation by Yaron Steinburg, via Architizer and John Rennie.
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A Troubling Adaptation: The Beautiful Teenage Brain
by David Dobbs •
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What eBooks Can Offer — and Take Away
by David Dobbs •
The New York Observer today has an article on what new longform e-pub venues like the Atavist and Byliner offer writers like me: When the journalist David Dobbs first had the idea of writing an article about his mother’s love affair with a flight surgeon during World War II, he initially went the traditional route:…
Sports
Djokovic & Nadal Even Better Than You Think: A Story About Spin
by David Dobbs •
[Sept 13, 2011] Last night’s US Open final showed brilliantly what makes today’s men’s game so exciting: Much as I love the serve-and-volley game, these long, kinetic, full-court exchanges of sharply angled groundstrokes make great viewing. How on earth, you ask yourself, are Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic hitting the ball so hard and keeping it…
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You Call This Thing Adaptive? Yep: Behold the Teen Brain
by David Dobbs •
Ever since the late 1990s, when researchers discovered that the human brain takes into our mid-20s to fully develop — far longer than previously thought — the teen brain has been getting a bad rap. Teens, the emerging dominant narrative insisted, were “works in progress” whose “immature brains” left them in a state “akin to mental…
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Android App Lets You See Invisible Space
by David Dobbs •
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