An unprecedently large genetic study of schizophrenia has linked a bunch of new genes to this confusing ailment. This’ll take years, decades maybe, to sort out, partly because if you repeated the study with a different set of 36,989 people, you might find a different set of 80 genes associated. NIMH director Tom Insel says […]
Continue reading →My journalist friend and colleague David Goodman had me on his radio show “The Vermont Conversation” this past Wednesday, over at WDEV’s fine studios in Waterbury, Vermont, and we spent a few minutes discussing writing about science; my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance; depression and neurology; and my mother’s lover. My segment starts shortly after the 2-minute mark and runs to about minute […]
Continue reading →The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science.… What was interesting to Selye was that no […]
Continue reading →As my own review of Nicholas Wade’s book suggested, his treatment of genetics has many deep and fundamental problems. And as my blog post noted, many others have called some of those out. I want to call out here a particularly clean such account, which came from evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen a few weeks ago. He cuts […]
Continue reading →Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed this book elsewhere, with particularly sharp takes coming from Jennifer Raff, Eric Johnson, Michael Eisen, H. Allen Orr, Jerry Coyne, and, also at the Times, Arthur Allen. You’ll find a fuller […]
Continue reading →Best of the Week: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem. by Patrick Clarkin. We’ve built a wall between genes and environment. Clarkin tears it down. And in Does Nature Need to be Nurtured?, Eric Johnson shows why such questions are important. The Racism Beat, by Jefferson Cord. Important and heartbreaking. Lean Out: The Dangers for Women […]
Continue reading →Ever since Marc Hauser’s 2011 resignation from Harvard amid findings of scientific misconduct, observers, critics, colleagues, and defenders have argued about Just How Bad His Behavior Was or Wasn’t. Harvard’s refusal to release its full report encouraged this, since people could speculate freely about the actual evidence behind the findings. Did he commit minor or common transgressions […]
Continue reading →The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie – NYTimes.com I can’t stop thinking about this article. Beautifully written deep-dive search for the identity of two iconic blues-women, the history of blues, the history of the history of blues, and the fuzzy line where digging for information becomes thievery. Hats off to John Jeremiah Sullivan, for enthralling writing, and to the New […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 7, 5 pm, at the University of Vermont, I’ll talk about how to shape a mess of reading and reporting into a magazine story — specifically, “Beautiful Brains,” my National Geographic cover story about adolescent brain and behavior. If you’re around Burlington, come join us. Event is free and open to the public. Here’s […]
Continue reading →Is mental illness a product of biology or culture? Ethan Watters, over at Pacific Standard, argues that whatever the biology involved in mental illness, its expression and our responses to it are shaped by culture far more than we realize. The resounding lesson of the history of mental illness is that psychiatric theories and diagnostic […]
Continue reading →