The Golden Notebooks: An Awards Show for Us

Dear TV Executives: I hear you’re desperate to get people to watch your channels in real time these days. Apparently I’m not the only one who waits for everything to come out on Netflix. As a result, I heard on NPR yesterday, you’re televising more and more shows that people prefer to watch live, like […]

Debunking Hollywood: Headshot

Last month, Erik took a hard look at a staple in Hollywood’s menu of plot devices: the knockout shot. Now we turn to a movie trope that hits a little closer to home. Our very own Sally needs your help in the investigation: Dear LWON readers, I’m a boxer with a problem: I can’t punch […]

“Reading Minds” with fMRI

Some of you, I suspect, have read in Time, Slate, NPR, Popular Science, Wired, or dozens of other news outlets that scientists have figured out how to read minds. I hate to always be the neuro–tech downer, but that claim is just false. Laughably false. That’s not to say that the study behind all of the commotion, published late […]

Talk to the Animals

For animal lovers, there may be no one more heroic than Dr. Dolittle, the title character of Hugh Lofting’s charming children’s books and Richard Fleischer’s schmaltzy movie (one of my childhood favorites). Dolittle’s patients are people, at first, until they get fed up with his growing number of house pets — rabbits, mice, pigeons, a […]