Now on ScienceBlogs: Let the War on Christmas being. Atheist style.
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
November 26, 2008
Speaking of decisions, I've got to make a rather difficult one today: beer for the Thanksgiving table. I was inspired by a totally wonderful Burkhard Bilger article in the New Yorker on the rise of "extreme beer" and the sheer...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:33 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 25, 2008
The next few months are going to be full of news and riffs on my next book, How We Decide, which comes out in February. As a result, I'm trying to pace myself and limit the shameless self-promotion, at least...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:30 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lincoln Center recently featured a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Here's what Ben Brantley had to say in the Times: Life unfolds in a series of exquisite contradictions in "Waves," a remarkable, genre-defying work from the National Theater...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 24, 2008
I have a feeling that this holiday season there will be even more drinking than usual, as people self-medicate with booze. Worried about your 401(k)? Have some egg nog. The good news is that there's a new studyshowing, once again,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 21, 2008
I know I've written about the virtues of art-science interactions, but I never imagined that the AAAS would sponsor a "dance your dissertation" competition, and that one of the winners would feature an interpretative dance inspired by the "cerebral activation...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:59 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This American Life recently featured an astonishing series of recordings from Hard Times, the radio series created by Studs Terkel. It featured a variety of American voices, from the short order cook in Arkansas to the migrant worker in Texas...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:30 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 20, 2008
I'm a contributor to Very Short List: Science, the latest offshoot of the VSL brand. (David Dobbs is another contributor.) For those who don't know, VSL is a very short email on something interesting sent daily to your inbox. We...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:59 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2008
It's one of those modern taboos: pregnant women must abstain from alcohol. Even a sip of wine in a restaurant can lead to menacing glances from passerby, as they imagine a fetus drunk on Chardonnay. According to a new study,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2008
A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species: [Marc] Hauser describes animals as having "laser-beam" intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:21 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 14, 2008
It's one of the more annoying side-effects of the financial collapse: instant updates of the Dow Jones Industrial Average are suddenly everywhere, popping up in the corner of cable news shows, in between weather reports on the radio, highlighted on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:55 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neurophilosophy 11.19.2009
The Island of Doubt 11.20.2009
Greg Laden's Blog 11.20.2009
The World's Fair 11.19.2009
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