Marriage is like a sweater. A yellow sweater you bought, and couldn’t return. So says Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, and one of the 20 outrageously accomplished behavioral scientists who spoke at a 1-day summit at Stanford last week. Gilbert studies happiness, not knitwear. And his main point is that we humans are terrible […]
Mind/Brain
I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years . And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and […]
A while back, I was giving my three-year-old daughter, Brynn, a bath when she laid back in the tub and announced, “Look, Daddy, I’m a princess!” When I asked what that meant, she replied that it was her job to just lounge around until some prince (any prince would do) came along to save her. […]
(Update below) I write mostly about neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. That means I spend most of my time talking to and writing about men. In May of 2011 (chosen arbitrarily just because it was a year ago and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about this gender gap then), 89 percent of my phone interviews […]
** The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods. Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5” (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.
I spent the past two days at the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The event explored the phenomenon of denial and what it means for science writers. How can journalists effectively convey science when its uncomfortable truths face organized resistance?
The granddaughters came to visit for the weekend. They’re hitting puberty hard. One of them suddenly has a throaty voice, long magenta hair that she wants to cut all off, just leave the bangs, and is currently grounded for injudicial actions. The other one’s glasses slide down her nose; she’s wearing white cut-off leggings with […]
When I was in junior high, my family moved to a house in the country. The dining room table sat beneath a vent designed to allow heat to rise from the main floor into my mom’s bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately the vent also served as a conduit for noise. The soft clink of metal spoons against […]