Culture, Photography
62 of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries, via Mental Floss
by David Dobbs •
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Readings
Today’s Reads: Berlin photofest, awesome genetics, poisonous solitary, funky smell, and Foucaultian creationism
by David Dobbs •
The first in a semi-daily posting of links I’ve enjoyed. Genetics Are Awesome – Imgur Mind-blowing photos that stitch together faces of close relatives. Vid version here. Berlin and Munich Revisited - A photoblog by the fabulous PD Smith, author of City, as he (re)visits one of the great ones. Is long-term solitary confinement torture?…
Brains and Behavior, Culture
Is Solitary Confinement Torture? If So, We’re Torturing 80,000 Prisoners.
by David Dobbs •
Humans are deeply social organisms; they need company almost as badly as they need food and water. I confess I thought this was obvious enough that, though I knew the U.S. puts some people in solitary confinement, I figured it was at most a few hundred. It’s 80,000. Brandon Keim brings the story: In the…
Biology, Brains and Behavior, Culture of Science, Readings
Chickens, William Blake, and Why The Limits of Science Don’t Matter
by David Dobbs •
I’ve been slowly reading Roy Bedichek’s splendid and horrifically overlooked Adventures With A Texas Naturalist — a 50-year-old book fresh as any new bloom, packed with smart talk about science slipped into fine-grained observations about swallows, frogs, or, in this case, chickens. His family kept chickens when he was a boy growing up in Texas. How,…
Culture, Readings
A Life Well-Lived & Remembered: John Wires 1922-2013 | Bryan Pfeiffer
by David Dobbs •
A couple days ago my wee small town lost one of its most colorful, interesting, and widely inquisitive and experienced citizens, John Wires, who was 91. My good friend and fellow writer Bryan Pfeiffer, who soaked up John’s company and wisdoms far more thoroughly than I did, has a wonderful remembrance: John Wires spent a…
Readings, Writing
How To Pick Apart Great Writing: Joan Didion on Ernest Hemingway
by David Dobbs •
Can you pick apart the magic in a great piece of writing? Not completely, perhaps. But you can learn a hell of a lot trying. Watch Joan Didion, back in 1998 in The New Yorker, do so with one of Hemingway’s most mysteriously gorgeous passages: In the late summer of that year we lived in…