I’ve been reading some of Harry Harlow’s papers, and am in wonder at his seminal “The Nature of Love,” his 1958 Presidential Lecture to the American Psychological Association, to what had to be a stunned room, about cloth-versus-wire mesh monkey mother studies with which he famously kicked aside a behaviorist view of infant love and […]
Continue reading →Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller explains in her smart, raucous, ripping review in The New York Review of Books, [Wolf’s] original plan was to write a book surveying cultural representations of the vagina through the ages. […]
Continue reading →Q: Is that a real skull? A: Yes Q: Just how full of shit are they — like, completely? A: Completely. What kinds of questions do writers ask? Particularly when writing a book about science? The writer Charles Quoi asked that question of me and several other writers the other day for an article at […]
Continue reading →The fine writer Steve Silberman has posted a collective homage to good teachers at his blog NeuroTribes. The loveliest is his tribute to his husband Keith, who holds a PhD from Berkeley and teaches science in a high school. Lucky be his students. Steve asked several writers to answer the question, What’s the most important […]
Continue reading →If you’re looking for good reading, you can find plenty — including some stellar science pieces — in Conor Friedersdorf’s post of Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism at the Atlantic. Here is my short list taken from his long one. Italicized comments are mine. Last Days Of The Comanches by S.C. Gwynne | Texas Monthly […]
Continue reading →We had not been at that paper very long when stupid actions by his supervisors confronted him with a choice that no one who loves their work wants to make: Stay and be ethically compromised, or leave with intact standards and an empty wallet. … All these venues — and more are being formed as you read this — are all trying to figure out how to make money, and in doing so, must confront old questions (how to make money in a way that doesn’t compromise content) amid new financial and publications structures.
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