I wrote fewer features than usual this year, to give more time to my work on “Orchids and Dandelions,” the book I’m now slaving away at. But I was still able to find ten piece I wrote either here or for other publications that I feel good about offering in a “best of 2012″ spirit.…
Monthly Archives: December 2012
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Truly OMG: Neil deGrasse Tyson CAN DANCE
by David Dobbs •
Per his Twitter feed: I don’t dance often. But when I do, it’s shoeless, it’s at my Department’s Holiday party, and it’s to MJ bit.ly/ZKVIiF
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Mad Bad Science on the Radio
by David Dobbs •
Are all years in science and science writing this weird? Just on my own self-assigned beats, I found myself writing and thinking about bad science and bad writing about vaginas; madness and murder; a psychiatric manual that actually accelerates psychiatry’s race into the weeds; and the media’s insistence on simple, clean fables about both neuroscience and…
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Climate Change Real & Gorgeous
by David Dobbs •
When “Chasing Ice” finished, my 10-year-old son, sitting next to me in the almost empty theater, said, “That was sobering.” He was right: Sobering, but also beautiful and inspiring. “Chasing Ice” documents both the earth’s current warming and one man’s obsessive efforts to show that warming in terms everyone can understand: visual, immediate, dramatic. National Geographic photographer…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
I Grip the Gun and the Gun Grips Me
by David Dobbs •
“Happiness is a warm gun.” – John Lennon “You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it.” – Bruno Latour I’ve been on an Elmore Leonard tear of late. Right now I’m reading his Split Images, in which a good cop and a good magazine journalist (heh) try…
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Who Owns Your Memories – You or Your iPhone?
by David Dobbs •
Who owns your memories? You’d think that would be you. But in a short interview with Claudia Dreifus at the New York Times, neuroethicist Matthew Liao notes that to the extent our devices are serving as outsourced personal memory banks, you may be sharing ownership with, say, Facebook: Lately, you’ve been writing about this question:…
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Murder, Memory, and Memoir on the Prairie
by David Dobbs •
Someone just directed me to Maggie Koerth-Baker’s examination of a riveting example of the differences between a life lived and a life recalled — in this case, the life memorialized, fictively, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s splendid Little House on the Prairie. Koerth-Baker, a Little House fan (like much of my household), writes of coming across a transcript…
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Serotonin, the Zombie Chemical
by David Dobbs •
Neurotransmitters are highly important and mind-bendingly complex. That’s why now and then I hip-check writers who boil neurotransmitters down to simple stories. Neurotransmitters are multi-purpose messengers. They’re versatile enough, in fact, to get hijacked by parasitic worms who use them to enslave perfectly innocent shrimplike creatures called gammarids. As Carl Zimmer relates, in Parasites Use…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
Is Psychology Stuck In a Paradigm Shaft?
by David Dobbs •
As the fallout over DSM-V continues, UK psychologist Graham Davey probes the question: Once scientists establish a paradigm in a particular area this has the effect of (1) framing the questions to be asked, (2) defining the procedures to answer them, and (3) mainstreams the models, theories and constructs within which new facts should be…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
Psychiatry Throws a Tantrum
by David Dobbs •
Over at Slate I have a story, “The New Temper Tantrum Disorder,” about the “Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder” I wrote about more briefly here a couple weeks ago, when DMDD was still a proposed diagnosis. Last week the DMDD diagnosis was approved for inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association’s forthcoming Diagnostic Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition —…