Boing-Boing has a snip from Nick Bilton’s I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted, which is an incredibly long title for what sounds like a fun book. The excerpt looks at a study that suggests surgeons who play video games do better at…
Monthly Archives: October 2011
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How Led Zeppelin + Franz Schubert = Writing
by David Dobbs •
Can you use the music of Led Zeppelin or Franz Schubert as models for writing? Of course you can! So I argued this past Saturday in a talk about structuring long nonfiction pieces at ScienceWriters 2011, the meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, held this year in Flagstaff. I hope to post a…
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Listen: Hemingway’s Short, Moving Nobel Prize Speech
by David Dobbs •
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“It’s Just a F**king Little 16th Note. But You Have to Play It.”
by David Dobbs •
The fine writer Steve Silberman has posted a collective homage to good teachers at his blog NeuroTribes. The loveliest is his tribute to his husband Keith, who holds a PhD from Berkeley and teaches science in a high school. Lucky be his students. Steve asked several writers to answer the question, What’s the most important…
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Don’t Think About It! ‘Tight Collar’ Makes Best American Sports Writing
by David Dobbs •
Today’s a good day: The Tight Collar, my story about choking under pressure, is officially published in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Sports Writing 2011. I’m thrilled that it was selected by guest editor Jane Leavy, who wrote the incomparable bio Sandy Koufax. And I’m deeply honored that my story will run alongside The Patch, a…
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Tom Clynes on His Pop Sci Profile of Wolfe-Simon
by David Dobbs •
Last week I wrote Arsenic is Life and the View from Nowhere, about a long, complicated story that journalist and photographer Tom Clynes wrote in Popular Science about Felisa Wolfe-Simon and the #arseniclife controversy. As my post noted, the story generated a complex reaction in me — and a distressingly oversimplified reaction in many of its…
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Fraudulent Docs, Tennis Secrets, and Beautiful Teens: The Best of September
by David Dobbs •
September’s Top Five How the Fraudulent Dr Fox Fooled The Shrinks Above. Actor gives nonsensical short talk at a psychiatrist’s conference. Audience eats it up. Android App Lets You See Invisible Space Definitely the month’s top tech buzz, and a gorgeous film. Djokovic & Nadal Even Better Than You Think: A Story About Spin My…
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fMRI Shows My Bullshit Detector Going Ape Shit Over iPhone Lust
by David Dobbs •
The fMRI scan above shows my brain* reading a truly horrific NY Times Op-Ed piece. The piece, written by a man named Martin Lindstrom, who calls himself a “fan of the consumer” (meaning what? he blows on us?), is called You Love Your iPhone. Literally. Literally. Lindstrom claims to see actual love for iPhones declared by the insulas of…