We are overjoyed to announce that Roberta Kwok has become the newest person of LWON (or LaWONian, as some of us like to say). You’ve seen her here before. Her first guest post explained how a study to detect traffic patterns gave investigators new insight into a fatal car crash. Elsewhere, she’s written about synthetic […]
Miscellaneous
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 […]
June 3 -7, 2013 This week, Erik took on the Singularitarians. Cassie saw the ugly future of drone journalism. When you look out your kitchen window in winter, what’s out there looks simple. But Cameron told us what’s really going on under the snow. If you’re a Neanderthal, you’ll like guest poster Jude Isabella’s dating […]
Humans might someday become cyborgs and live forever. Really, that might happen. This was my take on a recent New York Times profile about Dmitry Itskov and his quirky quest to upload human brains into machines by 2045. It seems that this Russian former media magnate and propagandist has started a project to upload a human consciousness into […]
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 […]
May 27 – 31, 2013 Heather’s last post is a case-in-point for why we’re going to miss her so much. It’s something you’ve never heard of before, told expertly and with great empathy: India’s great population explosion is being calmed by — who knew? — soap operas. Come back soon, Heather, and tell us another […]
I used to think M.T. Anderson was prescient. Now I’m convinced he’s psychic. Anderson is the author of the young-adult novel Feed, a very funny — and deeply disturbing — book about the seductive power of social media. In the world of the novel, the fortunate have a “feed” implanted in their brains at birth, […]
