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 →Humans are hard-wired not to be hard-wired. That phrase, drawn from Ken Weiss, is perhaps the simplest of the many ways that Patrick Clarkin tries to convey, in his wonderful post “Developmental Plasticity and the ‘Hard-Wired’ Problem,” how thoroughly entwined are genetics and experience in shaping and constantly reshaping any organism. It’s silly, in a way, to […]
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 →A not-comprehensive sampling of the good stuff I found this week. (I spent most of my reading time reading Virginia Woolf.) Oh do, do watch this: A poultry farmer, one I could listen to all day, tells Maryn McKenna why he’s preserving the genes, carried in the squawking, beautiful birds all around him, of heritage poultry breeds that Big […]
Continue reading →Much ado lately about the challenges of replicating key findings in social psychology. Almost everyone agrees it’s a good idea to test these key findings to see how they hold up; foundation stones should be solid. Cambridge University social psychologist Simone Schnall, for instance, thought it was a good idea, and cooperated when a high-profile replication project attempted […]
Continue reading →Fixin’ to find out. Cold Storage Teaser Trailer from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo. Out at the Harvard Depository in Southborough, Massachusetts there are many stories to tell. How do the books come to and from campus nearly an hour away? What is the best way to store a library collection whose offsite holdings alone are mounting […]
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 →T. Delene Beeland’s essay on post-baby depression is among of the best such I’ve read. I judged myself against other mothers. It seemed everyone cared for their babies better than did I. They had secret ways to jiggle a baby asleep and entire repertories of nursery songs at the ready. I cared for my […]
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 […]
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