Australia RadioNational’s “All in the Mind” program has long been a favorite of mine, so it was a pleasure last week to be on the program discussing the up- and downsides of so-called ‘orchid genes’ — the gene variants long associated with vulnerability to things like depression, but now increasingly seen as producing not just…
Monthly Archives: April 2012
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Oliver Sacks & Cab Calloway Wake The Dead
by David Dobbs •
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to this wonderful man: this lovely man is clearly not dead in the literal sense. But this is an extraordinary transformation: the music revives him from a sort of depressive coma,* barely aware or responsive, to an articulate, engaged man again. It quickens both his thinking and his emotions —…
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Madness Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be: A Corrective
by David Dobbs •
My post two days ago on the links between depression and creativity sparked some smart comments. Perhaps the best was sent to me privately by the excellent blogger The NeuroCritic, and I am highlighting it in its own post here, with The Neurocritic’s permission, because it makes a an important point that I failed to note…
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DNA Ain’t Destiny. No Kidding.
by David Dobbs •
Many in the genetico-literary science world have been gnashing their teeth over a recent New York Times story that remarks the unremarkable: a Study Says DNA’s Power to Predict Illness Is Limited>. (The article elaborates on a Science Translational Medicine paper, The Predictive Capacity of Personal Genome Sequencing.) Erika Check Hayden (a must-follow for good writing on genomics…
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Jonah Lehrer Meets Stephen Fry – The Paradoxes of Bipolar and Creativity
by David Dobbs •
Last night, reading the wonderful third chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine,* I came across some material, new to me, on the links between melancholy and creativity. I’m fairly familiar with this literature, but not the the last couple years’ worth, and in that time the stack has grown. Experimental work by researchers like Joe Forgas…
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At Last — A Clean, Mean eBook App: Robin Sloan’s Fish
by David Dobbs •
Novelist and blogger Robin Sloan had something he wanted to say about three things he loves — writing, reading, and the Internet. He wanted people to really absorb it. Seems safe to say he wanted us to love it. The usual path to such love is to write a great blog post, then track the…
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Jeffrey Toobin: SCOTUS Hails Its True Constituency
by David Dobbs •
Language tells. And the phrasing the conservative Supreme Court judges used in challenging the Affordable Health care act, as collected her by the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, speaks volumes about who they seem to feel they work for and whom law is supposed to protect. Again and again they speak of the problems the law…
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Is Airport Security Killing 500 People a Year?
by David Dobbs •
So asserts cryptographer and security critic Bruce Schneier in a recent smack at the costly security theater inflicted on us at airports. “Security theater” is actually too kind a term; it makes light of a heavy burden that includes not only enormous cost and trouble with little benefit, but the erosion of dignity, civility, personal liberty,…
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How to Unwrap A Mummy Mammoth
by David Dobbs •
With wonder. Hat-tip to Ferris Jabr, who noted the beauty of its “soft marmalade locks & padded feet.” Which are irresistible indeed.
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Spurts and Other Eruptions Funner Than Bullets Through Balloons
by David Dobbs •
Sand Spurts and Other Granular Eruptions. Really. A reminder that even when we look closely, we miss a lot. This one is also fun:
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