Ideas about the gene, genetics and genetic engineering get splashed around in the media routinely now. Often the gene is cast up as a simple determinant of behaviour, such as a ‘criminal gene’, or a ‘homosexual gene’. Not many subjects have occasioned as much confusion and misunderstanding. A clear, accurate, and up-to-date popular science […]
Flim-Flam! explains that not one shard of evidence exists to prove that the Bermuda Triangle poses any special menace to ships and planes, that earth is being visited by alien spacecraft, that the unassisted power of mind can read closed books, predict our future or induce levitation. It shows that the ‘psychic surgeons’ of the Philippines have relieved their
Flim-Flam! by James Randi Read More »
Elif Batuman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman) is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Her 2017 novel The Idiot concerns a college undergraduate, Selin, attending Harvard. The title is a conscious echo of the novel by Dostoyevski. Selin has a conversation with her university friend Svetlana about whether or not one’s life should be thought of
Here is something to unsettle your conviction that there is any real ‘self’ reading these words. V.S. Ramachandran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran) shows how strikingly simple experiments can illuminate the ways the brain establishes the illusion of a self. In avuncular style, he snatches territory from philosophers on the certainty of knowledge. In one experiment, stroking an amputee’s cheek produces sensations
Phantoms in the Brain Read More »
Transport yourself to a place somewhat hotter and drier than Clydesdale in March 2018. The Sheltering Desert is about two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, who seek refuge in the Namib Desert and live a bushman existence for two and a half years. Martin and Korn had left Nazi Germany for Namibia to conduct field
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Min Jin Lee (https://www.minjinlee.com/) was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up in New York. In 2017 Lee released this novel , which is an epic historical tale following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. It is the
This book puts forward the case that a thorough-going understanding of human evolution by medical professionals is likely to give us better medicine. The book starts by explaining the essentials of Darwinian natural selection and then embarks on showing how these ideas illuminate the reasons why we become ill. The front runner example is the
Evolution and Healing Read More »
Pablo Neruda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda) is greatly revered by aficionados of Spanish poetry. You may have enjoyed his work in the original language, or read a translation. But what is entailed in translating a poem? How much is lost, and what, if anything, is gained? Usually the process gets forgotten once a newly translated poem is published.
Translating Neruda by John Felstiner Read More »
Five hundred years ago Europeans were exploring their world like never before by crossing the oceans. In the second half of the twentieth century humans broke out of Earth’s atmosphere. It was all part of man’s great adventure – landing on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the
This New Ocean by William E. Burrows Read More »
