A little slow compiling last month’s best-of, as I was traveling first to the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, and then to Cairo, where I helped with a science writing workshop and saw Egypt’s past (the Egyptian Museum) and future (Tahrir Square). More on those later. Meantime, a quick look back at June’s […]
Continue reading →A few months ago I posted a feature here about the science of choking under pressure, focusing on the work of University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock. A few days ago Bill Pennington ran a Times post about her work focusing on putting — a skill she uses in her labs to study the different ways […]
Continue reading →Sian Beilock, the author of “Choke” whose work I wrote about in a feature-length post published a few days ago, knows a lot of ways to make a person fail under pressure. Below, in a slightly tweaked version of an alternative opening for the feature, one I eventually left on the cutting-room floor for structural […]
Continue reading →The Collar Late in May 2008, perched in superb seats a few rows behind home plate at Chicago’s Cellular Field, I took in a White Sox-Indians game with Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who studies what is surely, other than serious injury, the most feared catastrophe in sports: the […]
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