Reading
ddobbs | January 29, 2010Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
ddobbs | January 5, 2010I rarely take direct exception to anything my friend Jonah Lehrer writes, and I fully recognize he's just quick-riffing on a Hollywood movie. But if I understand his Avatar post correctly, my good man Jonah is arguing, at least in a minddump-at-the-bar sort of way, that James Cameron's latest movie is a pretty full neuro-aesthetico-art-critico realization of film's medium. His is a fun post, and worthwhile just to see Cameron crammed onto the same page, with appropriate apologies, with Clement Greenburg, Clint Eastwood, and Jorge Luis Borges. But I must differ. In Avatar, which I saw last…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That's just one reason -- among many -- why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years.
When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way,…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009If you need a neurohook, think language acquisition, attention, mirror neurons, make your pick. No need. This one wins on entertainment value alone. via the twitter feed of the fine writer P.D. Smith.
When you're done, tune into RadioLab's stunning piece on Hamlet's last utterings.
ddobbs | December 7, 2009
I'm happy to announce that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of many a fine book over the decades, will be publishing "The Orchid and the Dandelion" (working title), in which I'll explore further the emerging "orchid-dandelion hypothesis" I wrote about in my recent Atlantic story. (In brief, that hypothesis -- a simple but deeply transformative amendment of current views -- hoids that many 'risk genes' for behavior and mental problems magnify not just maladaptive responses to bad environments but advantageous responses to good environments. That is, these "risk genes" confer not just…
edyong | October 14, 2009In the 1990s, Colombia reintegrated five left-wing guerrilla groups back into mainstream society after decades of conflict. Education was a big priority - many of the guerrillas had spent their entire lives fighting and were more familiar with the grasp of a gun than a pencil. Reintegration offered them the chance to learn to read and write for the first time in their lives, but it also offered Manuel Carreiras a chance to study what happens in the human brain as we become literate.
Of course, millions of people - children - learn to read every year but this new skill arrives in the context…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers,…
ddobbs | September 21, 2009 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. Which I may just do myself soon -- a collection -- because I CAN. Ellipses are mine.
I came to blogging ... as a veteran of print.... [and so] came to blogging nervous about losing what footing I had there... The quandary: If I wanted to communicate an important discovery, shouldn't I write it up formally,…
sciencewoman | September 11, 2009Did you know that after a 26 year run, Reading Rainbow is no longer producing episodes? "Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high. Take a look, it's in a book, a reading rainbow" is no longer enchanting thousands of young children. The series, in case you never watched it, featured the reading of a children's book, a related adventure, and reccomendations of other books by child reviewers. The whole thing was wonderful for creating future bibliophiles. Apparently, it's no longer the educational mission of public television to encourage a love of reading, rather the focus of educational…
ddobbs | September 4, 2009
photo: U.S. Forest Service
Notables of the day:
John Hawks ponders the (bad) art of citing papers you've never read.
Clive Thompson ponders the new literacy spawned of engagement with many keyboards.
A poll on public education shows how much opinion depends on framing, context -- and who else thinks an idea is good. In this case, people liked the idea of merit pay more if told Obama likes it.
Mind Hacks works the placebo circuit.
And Effect Measure weighs in on the weird contrasts and (limited) parallels between swine flu and avian flu.
And for fun, fire lookout towers, from BLDGBLOG. You…
ddobbs | July 2, 2009What's been distracting me lately from the big story I really really need to finish writing ...
A splendid, rich fracas over Chris Anderson's Free, set off particularly by a pan from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The net fairly exploded -- search, and ye shall find -- with many noting that a pot was calling a kettle black. E.g., Itâs like War of the Speakerâs Bureaus and a more gently titled but equally damning (to Gladwell) post by Anil Dash. ,And one young writer accused Anderson of being a feudal lord. Anderson himself has been remarkably unfiltered in his tweet-pointers to reviews,…
ddobbs | June 3, 2009Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
bioephemera | April 28, 2009How much more successful would Gravity's Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box?
Want to become a high-profile Twitter superstar? McSweeney's tells you exactly how. Maybe Google is making everyone stupid, but if so, the bar for a successful writer is now much lower! w00t!
ddobbs | April 28, 2009Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.)
Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.
The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project.
His book, called Emotional…
ddobbs | April 8, 2009The 10,000-year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Evolution, of which I've so far read about 1000 words -- but I just got it. Appears to be The Beak of the Finch (faster than expected evolutionary changes) in humans, but with this delicious addtion: the idea that culture can drive evolution, so that the line between "nature" (biology) and "nurture" (culture) finally vanishes. We'll see.
Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures, which got pre-empted (for work reasons) by the above-named Explosion. Looks quite juicy.
The Dangerous River, R.M. Patterson's account of his time exploring the…
ddobbs | March 9, 2009"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends.
People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an association -- people with good reading skills more quickly come up with or absorb textual shortcuts.
Does "pay for performance" work in learning? For a bit, then not. "A number of the kids who received tokens didn't even return to reading at all," Dr. Marinak said. From the Times.
Babies can…
sciencewoman | March 1, 2009Nothing to do with my age this time, just a quick note to say that I can now add 1 to my count on the BBC book lists. Two very enjoyable evenings were spent in the delightful society of Miss Elizabeth Bennett and company.
sciencewoman | February 22, 2009 BBC Book Meme
As seen everywhere.
BBC Book List
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (I'll bold those I've read and italicize those of which I only read part.)
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
My list is below the fold.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*8 Nineteen Eighty Four…
ddobbs | February 13, 2009
In a wonderful post at Mind Hacks, Vaughn, writing on "The myth of the concentration oasis" makes an argument that rather challenges my resistance to it:
The 'modern technology is hurting our brain' argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It's based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.
The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.
He's been doing just that -- spending time in…
ddobbs | February 1, 2009In an interesting essay at Slate's The Big Money, Jill Priluck argues that book authors must "transcend their words and become brands" if they're to sell books. Andrew Sullivan agrees :
My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the…