Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2007.
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Posts by this author
November 28, 2006
I had no idea such things were even possible:
One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate,…
November 27, 2006
Jacques Barzun was right.
Once upon a time, Christie's auctioned off great literary manuscripts. I'm particularly covetous of this Proust galley:
Ah, how times change. Christie's is now auctioning off a masterpiece of our own disenlightened and decadent age, a junior high school essay by Britney…
November 27, 2006
Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton, is the brain behind the animal rights movement. He has provided their sole moral argument - animals have the same rights as humans - with a rigorous philosophical foundation. But now he appears to modifying his stance:
One of the most important figures in…
November 27, 2006
Last week, I wrote about how the Nintendo Wii is the first emotional video game system, since it forces your body to become involved in playing the game. (Fans of Wiliam James and Antonio Damasio will know what I'm talking about: all of our feelings actually begin in the flesh.)
But now it turns…
November 27, 2006
What ever happened to the public intellectual? Yesterday, Tom Wolfe expended a few thousand breathless words on the New York Times editorial page bemoaning the construction of another condo on the Upper East Side. Wolfe will no longer have an unobstructed view of Central Park. The whole world weeps…
November 27, 2006
The power of self-fulfilling prophesies:
According to Vietnamese astrology, your year of birth shapes your chances in life. Some years are good luck, others are bad luck, and your prospects for health and professional success are dim if you happen to be born in the wrong year. A new study sponsored…
November 24, 2006
Regardless of your political stance on abortion, I think we can all come together and agree that this fetus should be terminated.
A boy has been born in Chile with a fetus in his stomach in what doctors said was a rare case of "fetus in fetu" in which one twin becomes trapped inside another during…
November 24, 2006
Tis the season to be generous, to count our blessing and and remember the more needy. In that spirit, it's worth noting that conservatives are more generous than us liberals. According to a new book by Arthur Brooks, a behavioral economist at Syracuse, people on the right side of the political…
November 24, 2006
Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday with a regrettable meat. Turkey is the sawdust of protein, a big bird with a bad breast-to-leg ratio, which means that you have to dry out the breast before you can fully cook the leg. (And yes, I've tried every foil trick in the book.)
But why is turkey so dry?…
November 22, 2006
Since we came up with a pretty good "Best Science Books of All Time" list, it's only fair that we contemplate the worst science books, too. John Horgan has already gotten started. His list isn't a bad beginning, although I would definitely remove The Tipping Point and The Elegant Universe. In their…
November 22, 2006
Speaking of Los Angeles, the city just announced that they are weaning themselves off cheap coal power:
Southern California is gambling its future power needs on its constant sunshine, wind and the ability of engineers to effectively harness those and other alternative energy sources.
Officials in…
November 22, 2006
There are few arguments quite as futile, or fun, as debating the merits of cities. I've spent many hours discussing the virtues of New York City pizza versus Mexican food in Los Angeles, or the views from the Brooklyn Bridge versus Mulholland. Personally, I take great pleasure in knowing both…
November 22, 2006
Over at The American Scene, Ross Douthat argues that scientists should try treating our spiritual experiences of the divine as literal events. In other words, the crazy people who see God might not be crazy:
Atheistically-inclined scientists and philosophers have all manner of complicated theories…
November 21, 2006
The MILF phenomenon, biologically explained. From the National Post:
Female chimpanzees become more sexually attractive as they age, even into old age, according to research published today.
By studying the mating habits of our closest living evolutionary cousin, anthropologists from Harvard and…
November 21, 2006
Did you know that 1 percent of hospital patients account for nearly a quarter of all medical expenses? This graph is a sobering glance at the real problems facing our health care industry. It's the 80-20 rule come to life:
The worst part is that these problems don't have an easy answer. They won't…
November 21, 2006
In the new New York Review of Books, there is a fascinating review of Nancy Segal's new book on twins. (Caveat: I haven't read the book yet.) The review is full of choice anecdotes like these:
The "Fireman Twins" were adopted by separate families living just thirty miles apart and who both grew up…
November 17, 2006
Here's a perfect example of The Winner's Curse at work. From Bill Simmons, writing about the Boston Red Sox bid for Japanese pitching phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka:
My favorite part about their $51.1 million bid was that they originally wanted to bid $50 million, then they decided on $50.1 just in case…
November 17, 2006
I've got a short essay on the Nintendo Wii, William James and Antonio Damasio over at seedmagazine.com. It's fun for the whole family. (And don't believe the Sony Playstation 3 hype, unless you really care about how realistically your basketball players sweat. The Wii is a much cooler system.)
This…
November 17, 2006
Milton Friedman was a magnificent economist, and I'll defer to other economists to sing his praises. But it's worth noting that, besides being an evangelical for free-markets, he was also a proponent of the rational-agent model. Those two facts aren't a coincidence. Friedman firmly believed that,…
November 17, 2006
For whatever strange reason, Crescent City, California is prone to tsunamis. In 1964, the town was devastated by a freakish tidal wave. Yesterday, more than 24 hours after a massive earthquake rocked the coast of Russia, another wave rolled into the small fishing town causing significant damage.…
November 17, 2006
This is the most depressing story I've read in a while. I normally don't worry about the fate of my future grandchildren, but Elizabeth Kolbert's new New Yorker article kept me up late last night, fretting about their dismal world. The article isn't on-line, but here's an excerpt:
Since the start…
November 17, 2006
Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for his new novel, The Echo Maker. Powers writes science fiction at its most literal and important level: he interweaves scientific sub-plots (the nature of consciousness, the genetic code, the curvature of space-time, the logic of computer…
November 16, 2006
How long before professional cyclists start swallowing concentrated resveratrol? And will we ban red wine as an illegal performance enhancing substance?
An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer -- five-eights of a mile -- on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given…
November 16, 2006
When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election. (Who could blame him?) He also grew a beard.
However, by December of 2002,…
November 16, 2006
Have I mentioned that I love lists? They bring order to an inchoate world. Anyways, here's a rather arbitary list of the Top 40 Bands of the year, as chosen by some music bloggers.
There's a lot I agree with here, and a lot I just don't know. (One of the saddest parts of leaving college is losing…
November 16, 2006
Larry Summers was wrong. It's not about innate cognitive differences, it's about fertility:
Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and…
November 16, 2006
Now that we've got a sizable number of Democrats in Congress who aren't pro-choice, people have begun to wonder what sort of rhetorical and philosophical position the Democratic party should take on abortion. Some argue that Democrats should resort to the Clintonian mantra that abortion should be "…
November 15, 2006
In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.
That's from Slate. Read more about…
November 15, 2006
I think the Democrats should insist on revampling the Medicare drug bill. It's just plain silly that the government can't negotiate directly with the drug companies for lower prices. After all, the government negotiates big discounts for drugs for Medicaid and the VA administration, and Medicare…
November 15, 2006
Phantom limbs are one of the strangest phenomenon you'll ever hear about. As far as I can tell, phantom limbs were first described by Herman Melville, who gave Ahab, the gnarly sea captain of Moby Dick, a "sensory ghost". Ahab is missing a leg (Moby Dick ate it), and in Chapter 108, he summons a…