In the clip above, filmed in the lab of University of California, Berkeley, cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik, a particularly charming 4-year-old girl named Esther is playing a game that Gopnik made up. The game is called Blickets. The goal is to figure out which of the clay figures are blickets, as indicated by which clay […]
Continue reading →Bookwork and some other issues have limited my blogging lately, and I thank my followers for patience on this front. Yet if I can’t relay all I’m thinking and reading about this and that, I can try to relay more of what I’m reading. Here, in at last a temporary revival of my sporadic “Aglitter […]
Continue reading →From Autism, Inside and Out, Steve Silberman’s review of Amy Harmon’s Byliner hit “Asperger Love”: Anyone who has spent time with autistic people can tell you that they’re intensely concerned with how other people are feeling, to the point of being overwhelmed. But they often can’t piece those feelings together from the usual clues of […]
Continue reading →When you need health care, you enter not a market but a con game in which you’re first a guarantor and source of profit, and second a patient. Wired Science blogger David Dobbs explains why the government needs to step up.
Continue reading →There are so many ways to go wrong in evolutionary psychology. Kate Clancy does us the tremendous favor of specifying how to do evo psych right. Invaluable reading. Here’s the pith: For something to be an evolutionarily stable strategy it has to fit a few conditions: You need clear evidence it is an adaption, which […]
Continue reading →The real action starts at 6.55 into the vid. (Though the whole thing’s great.) Military efforts often create some cool stuff that never gets used. Some you take one look at and know why. Others you wonder why you haven’t seen them IRL. This one, I’m thinking, would serve well up here in Vermont […]
Continue reading →On Tuesday, I posted here an excerpt of a longer transcript of an interview I did with author David Quammen recently about his writing. We covered the blessings of scissors and notebooks, the complexity of viruses and deadly diseases, the dangers of staring open-mouthed at bats, the nuances of narrative strategy, and that special moment when you suddenly […]
Continue reading →The wonderful shop-talk site for science writers, The Open Notebook, just published the first of two interviews I did recently with author David Quammen about how he researched and wrote his magnificent new book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. This first installment covers how Quammen gathers the raw materials for his work; next week’s […]
Continue reading →At a publication like The Atlantic, a writer earns the right to occupy editorial space through merit, not a sheaf of twenties slipped to the editor. Wired Science blogger David Dobbs explains why The Atlantic’s sale of editorial space to the Church of Scientology is a blow to the publication’s credibility.
Continue reading →Note: This post first appeared at Slate this past December 28, where it came at the end of a fine series on Pandemics; it seeks to direct you to the best reading and tweeting about the bugs out to kill us. Other Pandemic series highlights included Carl Zimmer’s Koala pandemic genetics: Viruses have inserted themselves into the human genome […]
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