Clik here to view.
Beauty, Brains, Bodies, and Poultry – The Week’s Brightest Glitter
Photo by Maryn McKenna, all rights reserved, used here by permission. A not-comprehensive sampling of the good stuff I found this week. (I spent most of my reading time reading Virginia Woolf.) Oh do,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Virginia Woolf Takes a Walk, Finds a Novel
The Cornwall coast near St. Ives. Photo by John Stratford (john47kent at Flickr), via Creative Commons In 1905, a year after her father died, Virginia Woolf, then 23, took a vacation with her sister...
View ArticleVirginia Woolf on Happiness Among the Plain
Virginia Woolf on people that you might think that she would think plain, and does, but then again, not. This while on holiday visiting some in-laws: a banker and his wife. Why do I pity and deride the...
View ArticleCan A Pilot Save Medicine From Its Fatal Mistakes? He Can Try
Fabulous story from Ian Leslie: Martin Bromiley is a modest man with an immodest ambition: to change the way medicine is practised in the UK. I first met him in a Birmingham hotel, at a meeting of the...
View ArticleThe Net’s Brightest Glitter, from Bonobos to Nabokov
Best of the Week: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem. by Patrick Clarkin. We’ve built a wall between genes and environment. Clarkin tears it down. And in Does Nature Need to be...
View ArticleWhites Win, Because Genes. My Times review of “A Troublesome Inheritance”
Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed...
View ArticleTalking Genetics and Writing with David Goodman
My journalist friend and colleague David Goodman had me on his radio show “The Vermont Conversation” this past Wednesday, over at WDEV’s fine studios in Waterbury, Vermont, and we spent a few minutes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Daily Reads: Dolphins v sharks, moms v babies, war photos, sex dolls
War photographer Tyler Hicks on how he gets the goods (but no pictures of Hamas). A Q&A with James Estrin at the NY Times Lens blog. This is a war fought largely behind the scenes. Hamas fighters...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Read Two: Severed heads, runaway PR, math gender, minimalism
How to Take a Picture of a Severed Head Or not. IS is working very hard to manage its media presence, and it’s working. By Sebastian Meyer and Alicia P.Q. Whitmeyer at Foreign Policy. H/t Alex Horton....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Philip Seymour Hoffman says goodbye
Philip Seymour Hoffman in “A Man Most Wanted” As David Denby notes in a satisfying review, “A Most Wanted Man,” made from the John le Carre film of the same title, makes an apt goodbye from Philip...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Christine Kenneally’s Rich, Rompy Read on Genes
Illo by Eric Nyquist, via NY Times. Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished —...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Yaba-daba – my “Social Life of Genomes” story won a AAAS award.
A good day (so far). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that “The Social Life of Genes” (Pacific Standard, Sept/Oct 2013), my article on how the genome...
View ArticleIs SCOTUS’s gambit to wreck healthcare unprecedented?
Linda Greenhouse says it is — and that next to SCOTUS’s decision to put Obamacare on the choppping block, Bush v. Gore was nothing. There was no urgency. There was no crisis of governance, not even a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How you read, Alice Munro writes, and war comes home
Here are three of the five items on today’s edition of my semi-regular “Read 2 of these and call me in the morning” mailing. The life, death, and resurrection of Alice Munro’s stories. By Alice Munro....
View ArticleErnest Hemingway, Clutterbug
“Like his father, he saved every totem that touched his hand.” “Hemingway was someone who felt the talismanic power of objects, of things, of the materiality of experience,” Declan Kiely, who is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Ending Blindness
Christian Guardino, sighted and singing. Photo by Brent Stirton, National Geographic, all rights reserved. I spent much of last winter working on a story about what it might take to end global...
View ArticleJohn Berger and Susan Sontag’s delicious shoptalk and big hair
What a fabulous conversation this is, between two giants we’ve lost. You see here, in this quiet, quietly intense, intensely curious conversation — in which (a true rarity) the act of listening is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Smartphone psychiatry? How NIMH director Tom Insel turned from brain scanners...
Thomas Insel, photo courtesy of The Atlantic. Around this time, Insel told me recently, he’d just finished a talk describing the wonderful things the NIMH was discovering about the brain when a man in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Sane Person’s Privacy Nightmare
A LinkNYC wifi tower. Photo by Billie Grace Ward, via flickr, some rights reserved. At Slate today I examine the potential privacy nightmare posed by the emerging healthcare sector that wants to use...
View Article
