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David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
I write 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. (Find clips here.)
I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years. Oliver Sacks found Reef Madness "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant." Check it out.
If you'd like, you can subscribe to Neuron Culture by email. You might also want to see more of my work at my main website or check out my Tumblr log.
Category: Brains and minds
A robot writes a sports story -- but misses the lede. Still working on the forest/trees thing
Posted by David Dobbs at 6:20 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
This shouldn't be something that flu experts feel compelled to discuss sotto voce. If the journal has good reasons to sit on the paper for now, it should declare them. If not, it should get the paper out in the open so the data and findings can be examined and vetted openly.
Posted by David Dobbs at 3:58 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates, while -- no fault of Eric's -- the flu, the end of publishing, and the death of the uninsured march on. Plus some great old surgery footage.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:46 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Swine flu
As the World Health Organisation meets in Hong-Kong to discuss, among other things, swine flu, here are a couple that make good follow-ups to my Slate piece on how adjuvants gobble up vaccine antigen supply.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:05 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Digital culture
In the intro to his self-published (on Lulu.com) collection of blog posts, The Wreck of the Henry Clay, New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain sums up nicely the anxieties shared by at least one other writer-with-blogging-addon about blogging, and, by extension about self-publishing books.
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:23 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Digital culture
This is how life works. So it's how the blogosphere works too.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:37 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: PTSD
Our current approach to post-combat distress is failing just as completely as the Rumsfled approach did. But in the halls that count, there's no sign a change in thinking.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:35 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
A look at runners who forget suffering, writers who forget they're stealing, mountain scenes that aren't, and swine flu that resists Tamiflu.
Posted by David Dobbs at 5:51 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Digital culture
In case you missed them (or miss them, and want to read again ...)
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:22 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
