It’s the end of October—a dark time, and not only because of Halloween ghouls. Today in New York City, we won’t see the sun until 7:19am, and we’ll have to say good-bye at 6:00pm. Each passing day will be distressingly shorter than the day before, until December 21, when the sun will set at 4:31pm, […]
Mind/Brain
In his October 8 New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks offered his assessment of the character of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie The Social Network: “It’s not that he’s a bad person. He’s just never been house-trained. He’s been raised in a culture reticent to talk about social and moral conduct.” This […]
In the mid-1990s, neuroscientist Marcus Raichle noticed something funny going on in some of his brain-scanning experiments. Here’s what usually happens, more or less: someone lies inside of the scanner and performs a specific task, like pressing a button. In response to that particular task, some parts of the brain become more active. Voilà: you […]
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, two decades after he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, Lance Johnson felt the tremors of San Francisco’s Loma Prieta Earthquake from his apartment in Marin County. He took his cup of coffee to the couch, switched on the news and saw a live feed of the […]
