Virginia Woolf
ddobbs | June 9, 2010
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org
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Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do!
Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question.
It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form.
Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…
ddobbs | March 9, 2010
Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and…
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 | January 28, 2009
John Updike, 1955
Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, via NYMag
The 'net is fairly bursting with Updike appreciations, but I especially like this one from Sam Anderson at New York, which notes that amid what can seem an intimidating body of work, Updike's essays offer an easy and richly satisfying introduction or revisit.
I always go back, first, to his essays, which strike me as the purest expression of his personality: easy, sociable, curious, smart, funny, generous, and almost pathologically cheerful. He was, for my money, one of the greatest belletrists of all time -- a master of the…