Last month, the UN announced that the conflict in Syria has killed at least 92,901 people. The number has been widely picked up. Yet many reports miss how crucial the “at least” really is. 92,901 is the number of confirmed deaths – that is, a count. Mostly likely, considerably more people have died. Soon, the […]
Behavior
Today, in light of gay pride month and all the gay marriage business all over the news, I thought it might be time we at LWON weigh in on this most hot-button of issues. We look to biology to explain so much about how we interact and why we act how we do. But what does it have […]
Ann: May I introduce my friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger. She once wrote a book about her trips to the world’s various nuclear test sites and it sold reasonably well, probably to boys. But recently somebody else’s book, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold History of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, […]
Yesterday I confessed my fear of magicians. Today I confront that fear by going to the source: Alex Stone, a magician I met at a party who, at my prompting, was kind enough to perform an impromptu set that thrilled me but that also, on the walk home, left me feeling uneasy. I later learned […]
Magicians scare me. Not magic. Magic is cool. I was at a party recently when I asked someone what he did and he said he was a magician and I said I hope he didn’t mind but would he possibly—and even before the request was out of my mouth he had produced a deck of […]
David Brooks has done it again. In his New York Times op-ed column last Monday, Brooks portrayed psychiatry as a “semi-science” suffering from “Physics Envy.” He pointed to the publication of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—or DSM-5—as evidence that psychiatry misrepresents itself as hard science. The column opens, “We’re living in an empirical age,” and it goes […]
I recently witnessed one of the kindest, gentlest people I know fly into a momentary rage over a parking space. Such transformations used to baffle me, but after writing a Discover story about embodied cognition, I’m starting to understand why normally mild-mannered people can become uncharacteristically aggressive behind the wheel of a large automobile. The […]
For the last five years, I’ve been letting psychology graduate students experiment on my children. That, of course, sounds much worse than the reality that I take them to participate in experiments at the University of Colorado lab that probes early language development in toddlers. Still, I have a lingering unease when it comes to […]
