A year on and many thousands of leaked documents later, it’s easy to forget how Wikileaks first came to wide international attention. But a recent paper in Psychological Science brought the memory back to me with a sharpness and intensity out of all proportion with the grainy YouTube video at the incident’s core. The memory […]
Mind/Brain
Pam is a former methamphetamine user. On a website for recovering addicts, she posted an entry from a journal she kept at the height of her problem, when she was 19 years old. It’s an engrossing story about how meth — snorted throughout the day, but always at lunch time, in a parking lot — […]
January 3rd was a bad day for Cee. That morning she had a colonoscopy. The procedure went smoothly. But afterward, Cee felt ill. Something wasn’t right. She had a bite to eat, poured a glass of milk, and told her husband she was going to lie down. She set the milk on her nightstand. Then […]
First week of January. Like everybody else in America, I’m on a diet. I’ve tried lots of diets over the years, and no matter how simple the particular rules — Fat is bad: stick to salads, whole grains and fruit! No no no, fat is good: lay off carbs, and eat lots of meat. Count […]
Virginia wrote one of Nature‘s (very prestigious outfit) ten best features last year. Nature‘s editors said so. The feature, “Science in Court: Head Case,” was about the dicey use of MRI in death sentences for psychopathic murderers. Fascinating science, real-world implications. Go read it. Photo: Gabriel Pollard
Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read. What […]
I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills. I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally. Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell […]
Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed. I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!). ‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of […]
