Gleanings - storms, vegetables, violence, grace, and a correction : Neuron Culture

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I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

You're encouraged to check out my third book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career; subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my work at my main website ; or track Twitter feed, my Google Reader shared items, or my Tumblr log, which gets it all.

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Gleanings - storms, vegetables, violence, grace, and a correction

Posted on: March 18, 2010 8:05 AM, by David Dobbs

The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com
Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies.

You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV.

We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians.

Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan.

I am finding Instapaper's newsroll suprisingly well-targeted. Along with news, it coughs up keepers such as:

1. The Atlantic looks at the contributions of a particularly distinguished investigative journalist, John Crewsdon, who was recently released from the Chicago Tribune.

2. David Foster Wallace's delicious profile of Roger Federer.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.⁽¹⁾