Love, love, love
Well, you can tell Valentine’s Day is coming up; after blogging a couple of stories that came out last week about mating and sex, I now find that the Amer...
Author: Mary
How do we know someone’s in there?
A couple of researchers at Harvard have investigated people’s perceptions of other people’s minds. Volunteers had to consider 13 different entities:...
Judging a book by its cover
It’s tempting to guess personality traits from a person’s face, and novelists sometimes will give a character facial features that supposedly indica...
Existentialism and hope
This essay from Robert Solomon in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled) argues against the popular perception of existentialism as a pessimistic philoso...
The human race(s)?
A week or two ago I ran across a news item from Scientific American about how genetic differences between ethnic groups are probably accounted for by difference...
What happens to your first language when you learn a second?
If you immerse yourself in the early stages of learning a new language, you might start to lose your grasp on the old one for awhile; this phenomenon has the de...
So what are you optimistic about?
Every year Edge.org asks a variety of smart people a thought-provoking question and posts the brief essays they write in response. The question for 2007 is R...
Thinking meat celebrates the holidays
When I was a child, one of the things I loved best about Christmas was the music, particularly the old hymns and carols. I didn’t care very much for Rudol...
Using psychology to improve transportation
Twice a day I have to cross a freeway bypass on foot; I’ve been doing this for over seven years so I’ve developed a technique for (and an attitude a...
Proud to be a human today
At Harvard, a Report of the Committee on General Education was released to faculty recently, and although I haven’t been able to find the report online ye...