The wonderful actor and writer Stephen Fry attempted suicide last year. Yesterday — by chance the same day a story of mine about suicide came out in the Times — he wrote a beautiful post about that attempt. The post gets at several of the many strange and contradictory mysteries of suicide, and dwelt with…
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Biology, Brains and Behavior, Psychiatry
Spring’s Darkest Bloom: Suicide
by David Dobbs •
On average, about 700 Americans kill themselves each week — but in the fine-weather weeks of May and June, the toll rises closer to 800, sometimes higher. Every year, suicide peaks with the tulips and lilacs — increasing roughly 15 percent over the annual average to create one of psychiatry’s most consistent epidemiological patterns. It…
Readings, Side Tracks
Research Outtakes: Lynching the Irish
by David Dobbs •
Research offers so many diversions from the main thread one is following. Yesterday it was Blériot flying the Channel. This morning produced this distracting oddity, from the Wikipedia entry for Northampton, MA (link below): In 1805 a crowd of 15,000 gathered in Northampton to watch the executions of two Irishmen convicted of murder: Dominic Daley,…
Photography, Readings, Side Tracks
Blériot Over the Channel
by David Dobbs •
Planes, boats, waves, an opportunistic photographer — what’s not to like? I ran into this lovely photo while researching early monoplanes: Louis Blériot crossing the English Channel 1909 in his Blériot XI, one of the best early single-wings. A few years later, the Swiss aviator Oskar Bider flew one over the Alps and the Pyrenees; the photo below shows…
Healthcare policy, History of science, Medicine
Why Autopsy Gandolfini? My cut on autopsies, at Nautilus
by David Dobbs •
The good folk at Nautilus, the luscious new(ish) online science magazine, asked me to write something for their issue on uncertainty. The vague mystification over the call for an autopsy of James Gandolfini, may he RIP, gave me my cue: When Italian authorities confirmed Wednesday that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an…
Writing
How I Write: With Spies, Revolvers, Whiskey, and Luck
by David Dobbs •
The good folks at Matter and Medium asked me how I got started writing and how I write. My answer, which they first ran at Medium (and an enormous photo), is reproduced below. See the Medium feed for other writer interviews, such as that with Alexis Madrigal (and his cat). Was there a specific moment that…
Biology, Medicine
Naked Mole Rats Get Their Day in the Sun, Because Cancer
by David Dobbs •
Turns out one of the world’s ugliest creatures, the naked mole rat, does not get cancer, even if you really hard to make it happen. The coverage is fabulous: Ed Yong, at National Geographic’s Phenomena: Put aside their inability to feel pain in their skin, their tolerance for chokingly low oxygen levels, their bizarrely rubbish…
Brains and Behavior, Culture of Science
How The Deniers Win: Question Motives
by David Dobbs •
Updated 06/17/2013 11:16am EDT (see tail end of story) James Gilbert has the goods over at The Conversation: Climate sceptics have won, Martin Wolf lamented in the Financial Times, despite near-universal scientific consensus against them. The sheer longevity of this “debate” indicates deniers attract disproportionate attention – partly due to one of their main lines of attack: scientific bias.…
Writing
How To End a Story – One Minute Wisdom via The Open Notebook
by David Dobbs •
The fabulous writing how-to site The Open Notebook recently asked a bunch of writers what their single best piece of writing advice was. My 58-second answer had to do with how to end a story:
Single Best Dobbs from The Open Notebook on Vimeo.
As I note in the interview, I picked up this nugget from Atavist co-founder Evan Ratliff, who suggested it to me while I was writing (and he editing) My Mother’s Lover, my account of my mother’s secret WWII romance, which went on to become a #1-selling Kindle Single.
This and much more writerly goodness is at The Open Notebook. .
Readings, Writing
Patrick O’Brian on Finding Your Own Voice
by David Dobbs •
Earlier, in the wicious pride of my youth, I sometimes threw myself into postures, imitating writers I admired and producing a certain amount of Proust and water (the recipe for the Avignon lark pâté comes to mind: one lark, one horse) to Joyce and very small beer; but none of this survived the war,…
Page 1 of 3
1 2 3 »