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David Dobbs

Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, nature, education, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. He is also the author of three books (see below), most recently Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.

Posts by this author

I've moved to Wired
July 28, 2010
This blog has moved. I am now cultivating Neuron Culture at Wired Science Blogs. Main link above. Please adjust your bookmarks, subscriptions, or RSS reader settings accordingly. You can read subscribe to the feed here.You can also follow me at Twitter. Thanks, David Dobbs
A food blog I can't digest
July 7, 2010
Hoo boy. I never thought I'd have to resign a blogging position in protest. But so I find. I'm dismayed at ScienceBlogs' decision to run material written by PepsiCo as what amounts to editorial content â equivalent, that is, to the dozens of blogs written by scientists, bloggers, and writers who…
Sullivan & Jefferson on blogospheric chaos and the press
July 5, 2010
  A Happy 4th from Andrew Sullivan: The rise of this type of citizen journalism [i.e., journalism via blogs] has, in my view, increasingly exposed some of the laziness and corruption in the professional version - even as there is still a huge amount to treasure and value in the legacy media, and…
Ozzy! Ozzy! Ozzy! -- Neuron Culture's Top 5 in June
July 1, 2010
  You just never know what'll catch fire. Then again, maybe I should have figured "Ozzy Osbourne" and "genome" would have. In any case, Ozzy simply buried every other contender this past month, racking up 7 times as many hits as any other entry ever did in one month -- and accounting for two-…
Aglitter in the net: reading, writing, genes, and leaving your desk
June 29, 2010
Reading isn't just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on "The Shallows" » Nieman Journalism Lab More on Carr's ideas from "The Shallows" BoraZ interviews Eric Roston and gets some good ideas about journalism and reporting, past, present and future. The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk.…
Tourette's, goalie timing, and downside & upsides
June 28, 2010
  A few days ago Jonah Lehrer put up a lovely post about stuttering and Tourette's syndrome. He looks at stuttering, Updike, Kanye  -- and a couple papers suggesting that many people with Tourette's (and by extension, I suppose, perhaps stuttering) develop a compensatory change ... whereby the…
An interview in which I'm on the wrong side of the table
June 28, 2010
Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come. On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:…
Paul Bloom: Pleasure is a by-product
June 26, 2010
Many significant human pleasures are universal," Bloom writes. "But they are not biological adaptations. They are byproducts of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes." Evolutionary psychologists like Bloom are fond of explaining perplexing psychological attributes this way. These…
David Foster Wallace is, indeed, Smarter than You Think
June 25, 2010
Every time I read David Foster Wallace, I think, that's just classic David Foster Wallace. Which is to say it's completely unexpected, novel, different from the way almost anyone else thinks, including David Foster Wallace the last time I read him. This is a fun review in the NY Review of Books of…
Best sit in a soft chair to read this
June 25, 2010
    Ed Yong offers a particularly nice write-up of some studies about how physical experience shapes emotion, opinion, thinking, and so on. TKTK: When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six…
What glitters in the net today
June 23, 2010
I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day: A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and…
Get inside mind-bloggers' heads with this interview series
June 22, 2010
Research Digest blog, the highly useful and content-rich site that tracks all things psych, just opened its "The Bloggers Behind the Blogs," series, which will run ten interviews with bloggers of mind and brain. It's with a nice interview of Jesse Bering, of Bering in Mind. It's a dandy line-up (of…
20,000 genes a surprise? Heck, this guy knew that long ago
June 21, 2010
John Hawks, in his paleodreams. I mean that in the best way. John Hawks bumps into a prescient estimate of the total gene number in humans: While doing some other research, I ran across a remarkable short paper by James Spuhler, "On the number of genes in man," printed in Science in 1948. We've…
Does Shirky's Cognitive Surplus undervalue meatspace?
June 19, 2010
  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been…
One path to the Nobel
June 18, 2010
At the age of 21, as a Moeid, I believed that behind every universal phenomenon there must be beauty and simplicity in its description via nobelprize.org Ahmed Zewail, who won a 1999 Nobel for his work chemistry, wrote a quite charming memoir for the Nobel site. Posted via web from David…
Fungus amongus & other gleanings
June 17, 2010
    Fungis Danicis, a lovely collection at the beautiful Bibliodyysey Mind Hacks offers a reminder (we can't get too many) that expressions of distress vary across culture and history. Separately he considers an interesting study showing that Tylenol reduces the pain of social rejection.…
Carr, Pinker, the shallows, and the nature-nurture canard
June 17, 2010
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-…
Ozzy Osbourne. Now genomics is getting somewhere.
June 16, 2010
Ozzy Osbourne, preparing to grasp the meaning of his genome. There's been much attention lately to the failure of genomics advances to create many medical advances. From rock'n'roll comes  hope. THE mystery of why Ozzy Osbourne is still alive after decades of drug and alcohol abuse may finally…
The New York Review goes bloggy
June 14, 2010
A still from Visconti's The Leopard, via NYRB This is not new, but seems to me overlooked (and underlinked) in the blogosphere: The New York Review of Books â a long, longtime favorite of mine â has a blog stable that offers a nice variety of goodies. The current line-up gives a sense of the…
Locals & tourists living mashed all together
June 11, 2010
    A clever fellow named Eric Fischer tapped Flickr geotag data to map where locals and tourists take photos in major cities. Above -- the wiggly Thames declares it instantly to lovers of this city -- is London, where I'm moving (for a time, anyway) in just a few weeks. Blue denotes photos…
Gleanings: mayfly radar, tennis memoir, et alia
June 11, 2010
    Unbelieveble! Department, via SciencePunk:  Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar NYRB reviews what sounds like an especially moving memoir from Andre Agassi. Whatever It Takes Department, via Ed Yong: Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence. The climate-change doubt…
iPad, therefore iKludge
June 10, 2010
  Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me: For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad…
Gleanings: genetic goofs & mutts, and where good ideas come from
June 9, 2010
  The photo above isone of several posted by NeuroDojo, who has a lovely post on them. Genetic Future ponders the 23andMe Oops-wrong-data event. Turns out it was a flipped tray. "I'm frankly astonished that this was possible at an accredited genotyping facility - plate-flipping is an age-old…
Are we living in a neuroculture?
June 9, 2010
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org   Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do! Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question. It…
Gleaned - acupuncture, HeLa, linkage debates, psychos, and the FBI
June 1, 2010
A biological basis for acupuncture, or more evidence for a placebo effect? Ed Yong ponders acupuncture, placebos, and context. This I like, and there's a nice meta dimension here as well: placebos being all about context. Abel Pharmboy reports on Marking the magnificient memory of Henrietta Lacks…
Neuron Culture top 5 hits for May
June 1, 2010
In reverse order: 5.  David Sloan Wilson, pissing off the angry atheists. "I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist." This sparked some lively action in the comments. 4. Lively or not, Wilson and Dawkins lost fourth place to snail jokes. A turtle gets mugged…
Scientific excuse for favorite snail jokes
May 28, 2010
  A press release about Snails on methamphetamines works for me.  The story is about memory. The jokes are about snails:   Snail Joke #1 A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. Cop is interviewing the turtle afterwards, still at the scene. Turtle still flustered. Cop asks, "Just start at…
The Divided House of Psychiatry
May 28, 2010
Danny Carlat reports a stimulating time at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans: She took a look at my name tag, and said, "Oh, I've heard about you."Since her expression was somewhere between stern and outright hostile, I queried, "In a good way or a bad way?""In…
Biophemera on civility and tensions among blogospheria
May 28, 2010
  When Jessica Palmer gave a talk at the "Unruly Democracy" conference last month, she gave what appears, from her after-the-fact blog post excerpted here, to have been a semi-contrarian take on blogospheric civiility: What I did endeavor to convey in my brief talk was the difficulty of blogging…
Gleaned: Suspicious women, sneaky cops, fair-minded children. Plus flu.
May 28, 2010
Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home. Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo. New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but…