cortex | January 10, 2008One of the many reasons I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan's work, including his latest manifesto, is that he's one of the few science journalists who emphasizes what science doesn't know. Here's an interview from Gourmet:
CH: When your piece first came out in the Times Magazine urging people to ignore all the nutritional claims and eat only things their great-grandmothers would have recognized as food, some readers accused you of being anti-science. But you do actually reference a lot of scientific studies in this book--particularly agricultural and environmental science, and quite a few…
cortex | January 9, 2008From a very interesting interview with Anthony Bourdain:
AVC: Do you ever feel like your sense of taste or smell was diminished by your drug use?
Bourdain: Who knows? I think, technically, male palates start to decline very early anyway, around 27 or 28. That's what God made salt for.
On a related note, I used to work in restaurants, and was always fascinated by how my perception of saltiness would fluctuate over the course of a night. You get really sweaty working the line and, by the end of a hectic shift, nothing would taste salty enough for me. I'd sweated out so many electrolytes that my…
cortex | January 9, 2008Needless to say, the political pundits were hilariously wrong about the New Hampshire primary. I won't hypothesize about what actually happened, other than to say that I think many voters here wanted a longer primary. They didn't want an Obama coronation in the beginning of January. This says less about Obama and Clinton and more about the over-hyped press coverage and shortened primary schedule. I voted for Obama, but I'm looking forward to a drawn out race for the Democratic nomination. This whole democracy thing is pretty entertaining.
But back to the failures of the political pundits.…
cortex | January 8, 2008I agree with Jeffrey Goldberg: the first episode of The Wire's final season was disappointing.
I was enjoying myself just fine for the first 20 minutes or so, becoming reacquainted with some of my favorite drug dealers--the intensely lovable psycho-killer Snoop most of all--and scandalous cops. But then we entered the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, and it was straight-up whiskey-tango-foxtrot time for me. I thought the show stopped dead, just about the time we were introduced to the saintly city editor and the darkly ambitious white-boy reporter.
In our early glimpse of the Sun newsroom, we'…
cortex | January 8, 2008The Times has an interesting interview with Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan:
Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?
A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.
People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call "tools." The sum of these tools is far more powerful in…
cortex | January 7, 2008A lovely appreciation:
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
via 3qd
cortex | January 7, 2008Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of glossy campaign mailers. In the last 48 hours, Obama has appeared at the local high school and Richardson showed up at my favorite pub. McCain practically lives in my zipcode.
Over the last year, I've had the privilege of attending numerous political events. (And I say this as someone who grew up in LA and lived in NYC and never, ever saw a…
cortex | January 4, 2008Daniel Davies has compiled a smart list of arguments that he is no longer going to have. He explains:
While not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views are no longer up for argument, pending absolutely spectacular new evidence. I've had a number of arguments on all of these points over the last year; I've heard all sides, and I've made up my mind. If anyone has an argument which they genuinely believe to be new, go ahead, but don't expect much. Please note also that I am no longer interested in methodological debates over the merits of statistical studies…
cortex | January 4, 2008A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate:
The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades, a severely depressed patient--even one on the brink of suicide--might not have been offered the therapy, or if her doctors had proposed it, she or her family might well have declined it. In explaining why, the authors demonstrate that though we may assume medical treatments get adopted or rejected…
cortex | January 3, 2008Phantom limb syndrome has always been intertwined with war. It was first discovered by Silas Weir Mitchell after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the hospitals of Philadelphia were overwhelmed by soldiers with amputated limbs. Many of these soldiers said that they still felt their missing arms and legs, even though they were clearly gone. As Weir Mitchell put it, the soldiers were afflicted with "sensory ghosts".*
After the Civil War, Weir Mitchell's clinical observations fell into obscurity. Because phantom limbs had no material explanation, medical science continued to ignore the phenomenon.…
cortex | January 3, 2008One of my resolutions for the new year was spending less time googling myself. (Such are the vanities of an insecure writer.) So far, I'm off to a bad start. I apologize for the self-promotion, but there have recently been some very nice reviews of the book that I thought I'd share. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post review:
Jonah Lehrer's smart, elegantly written little book expresses an appealing faith that art and science offer different but complementary views of the world. His main argument, that artists have often intuited essential truths about human nature that are later…
cortex | January 2, 2008Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section:
In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people who come out as gay almost always stick with that gay identity for the rest of their lives. Diamond's research reveals that - at least for some females - that story might be wrong.
She followed dozens of women for 10 years, as they graduated from college, worked their first jobs, fell in love, changed their minds, and tumbled into the arms of…
cortex | January 2, 2008If, like me, you're sorely missing new episodes of The Office, then I've got the novel for you. It's Joshua Ferris' fantastic debut novel, and it's a sad/funny tour of office life. (Keep in mind that I've never worked in an office, so I have no idea how authentic the novel really is. But it feels authentic, and that's even more important.) I won't bore you with a summary of the plot, since what really interests me about the novel is the narration, which unfolds from the first person plural. Consider this excerpt:
We knew what "Your anger" meant because we suffered from the same anger from…
cortex | December 31, 2007Just wanted to thank everyone for making this blog such a consistent source of pleasure for me. I don't deserve such a smart audience, but I'm endlessly grateful for it. And thanks for putting up with all the shameless self-horn tooting over the past few months. I hope everyone out there has a happy and healthy new year.
cortex | December 31, 2007One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely affects political discourse. On a hot summer day, just about every presidential stump speech - and I'm referring here to the speeches of Clinton, Obama, Edwards and McCain - referred at least once to the prospect of global warming. However, when the outside world is coated in a thick slick of ice, I've found that presidential candidates tend to steer away…
cortex | December 31, 2007Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This post was originally going to be about how I now understand why the Inuit language has split "snow" into so many different and specific nouns: there really are that many different types of snow. (Keep in mind that I'm a native Southern Californian, so I thought snow was something they manufactured on cold days for ski slopes.)
But then I discovered this…
cortex | December 28, 2007I'm certainly no music critic, but since it's the season of top 10 lists, I thought I'd share my favorite songs of the year, even if my list is bound to typecast me as yet another overeducated twentysomething with a soft spot for indy music, American Apparel and thick-rimmed glasses. The list is in no particular order:
Okkervil River, "(Shannon Wilsey On The) Starry Stairs," The Stage Names
Feist, "I Feel It All," The Reminder
Bright Eyes, "If The Brakeman Turns My Way," Cassadaga
Bruce Springsteen, "Long Walk Home," Magic
Jeff Tweedy, "Simple Twist of Fate," I'm Not There
The National, "Fake…
cortex | December 27, 2007So I'm browsing the juice section at my local supermarket, trying to figure out if I like pulpy bits in my orange juice, when I notice that Minute Maid has a new line of "enhanced juices". I couldn't help but laugh at the tag line for the Pomegranate Blueberry drink: "Help Nourish Your Brain!" The label explains:
Minute Maid Enhanced Pomegranate Blueberry is a great tasting flavored 100 percent juice blend with 50mg of Omega-3/DHA per 8 fl. oz. serving to help nourish your brain. DHA is a key building block in the brain.
I think it's now clear that the omega-3 hype has gotten out of control.…
cortex | December 27, 2007Terry McDermott, who penned that great series on neuroscientist Gary Lynch earlier this year, has written another illuminating article on Alzheimer's. The news is bleak: scientists have yet to understand the disease. In fact, we still don't even know what causes the cellular degeneration in the first place:
It's been 101 years since Alzheimer's disease was first theorized, and 30 years since the federal government began funding research on it, spending, to date, more than $8 billion. Private industry has spent billions more. What has been learned?
The answer is perplexing. There have been…