This is the type of book perfect for someone like me who thinks: Golly, another year gone by. And worries: I surely missed some of the best stories in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine. From lie detectors to dinosaurs and butterflies to neuroeconomics, this book is full of excellent writing. For evidence, I'm including some great passages here. This one is from Stacey Burling's article "Probing a Mind for a Cure" about Alzheimer's and could be the description for shifting baselines:
"Their frame of reference is disappearing, " said Christopher Clark, director of Penn's Memory Disorders Clinic and Bob Moore's doctor after his diagnosis. "You know who you are based on your past. You use that to project what's going to happen in the future. As your past disappears, your ability to project into the future essentially disappears, too."
From Denise Grady's description in "Doctors Race to Save a Young Man's Brain," I want to befriend Dr. Tulleken:
Dr. Tulleken, gaunt and wry at 66, is a man of formidable eyebrows, and a fan of Spinoza and The New York Review of Books. He spends one day a week in the laboratory practicing microsurgical techniques, and he believes that neurosurgery should not be "rude," because the brain does not like being manhandled or having its blood supply clamped off.
Oliver Sacks gives a shout out to the cuttlefish in his article on stereoptic vision called "Stereo Sue":
An astonishing strategy is found in cuttlefish, whose wide-set eyes normally permit a large degree of panoramic vision but can be rotated forward by a special muscular mechanism when the animal is about to attack, giving it the binocular vision it needs for shooting out its tentacles with deadly aim.
In Elizabeth Kolbert's piece on "Butterfly Lessons" she talks about how climate change is changing things:
Darwin never imagined that the effects of climate change could be observed in a human lifetime, yet, almost anywhere you go in the world today, it is possible to observe changes comparable to the northern expansion of the comma [a butterfly]. A recent study of common frogs living near Ithaca, New York, for example, found that four out of six species were calling, which is to say mating, at least ten days earlier than at the start of the nineteen-hundreds, while at the Arnold Arboretum, in Boston, the peak blooming date for spring-flowering shrumbs has advanced, on average, by eight days. In Costa Rica, birds like the keel-billed toucan, once confined to the lowlands and foothills, have started to nest on mountain slopes; in the Alps, plants like purple saxifrage and Austrian draba have been creeping up toward the summits; and in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California the average Edith's checker-spot butterfly is now found at an elevation of three hundred feet higher than it was a hundred years ago. To what extent life will be transformed by the warming expected in the coming years is, at this point, still a matter of speculation. Clearly, though, the process has begun.
Convinced yet? If you're looking for a Christmas gift (or even if you're not), spend the $14.95 (and think of the money saved on magazines) and give this year's best science writing.
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Sounds great! So if you're still looking for a last-minute gift ideas for me, I'd be happy to receive a copy! (Does it include anything about blood-clotting mutations???)
With an endorsement from someone who uses the word "golly," you know it has to be a good book.
Nice post Thanks for sharing