Last week a small group of scientists and journalists signed a secret pact to do a bad, bad, really bad thing to science, journalism, and everyone that depends on either of those things, which is to say everybody, including you. The authors of a small, weak study of genetically modified crops managed to warp media…
Monthly Archives: September 2012
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Querying Quammen on Craft: My Upcoming Talk with David Quammen on His Deadly Spillover
by David Dobbs •
Calendar note of jubilation: AT 5:15 pm on Saturday, October 27, in Raleigh, North Carolina, I’ll be doing a live interview and Q&A on craft with David Quammen, whose book Spillover will be published October 1. The 60-minute talk, sponsored by The Open Notebook, is sited and scheduled to fall during a 90-minute break in the…
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What Aging Looks Like: Watch a Man Speed Through Twelve Years
by David Dobbs •
From FlowingData: Remember photographer Noah Kalina? He took a picture of himself every day for six years and made a time-lapse video with the photos. The Simpsons even did a spoof that showed Homer’s life over a couple of minutes. Kalina’s kept the picture-taking going, and it’s been twelve and a half years now. He made a new…
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Physicist Yanks Sheets Off Sex Scandal
by David Dobbs •
I’m speaking of cosmologist and writer Sean Carroll, who gently informs his peers that Scientists, Your Gender Bias Is Showing: I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not. That’s the…
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To Win at Olympics, Go Commie or Stay Home
by David Dobbs •
Now this is fun: Over at Pascal’s Pensées, Lascap talies medal totals since 1988 among five big medal-winning countries and finds some interesting trends. Most interesting to my eyes: Communism pays; home-field advantage counts for a lot. The communism/central funding advantage shows not just in China’s rise, but in the most startling negative result: the…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
The “Vagina” Scientist Strikes Back: Dr. Jim Pfaus’s Defense of Naomi Wolf, Fact-Checked
by David Dobbs •
Earlier this week, I wrote a post criticizing Naomi Wolf’s use of science in her book “Vagina: A New Biography.” (See Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon.) My complaint was that Wolf treated an incredibly complex and ambiguous body of science — the neurobiology of…
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In Bold Move, Apple Goes Retro: Meet aBook.
by David Dobbs •
Insanely great. From the good folk at Horrible Histories, which is some of the best TV evah. Like, really evah, in all of history. H/t my kids.
Brains and Behavior, Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon
by David Dobbs •
Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller explains in her smart, raucous, ripping review in The New York Review of Books, [Wolf's] original plan was to write a book surveying cultural representations of the vagina through the ages.…
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The Glory of Straphanging, Obscured in America
by David Dobbs •
Note 9/9/12 3:37 pm: After I posted this, a couple people on Twitter pointed out that the Thatcher quote may be wrongly attributed to Thatcher instead of Brian Howard. I changed my copy accordingly (see strikeouts below), but left the quote from review intact. Two days ago PD Smith, author of the magnificent City: A Guidebook…