Troublesome terms in psychology
A group of authors has put together an article that gives an excellent primer on problematic terminology used in psychology and psychiatry. Although it’s ...
Author: Mary
Fiction and real life
I ran across this in Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist: The compelling nature of the great tragedies stems from the fact that their heroes, in...
Personality testing and healthcare
This opinion piece by Anna North in the New York Times talks about how medical treatment and disease prevention might be tailored according to a person’s ...
Depression as a physical illness
One of the articles in the recent Nature issue on depression compared research on cancer with research on depression. The former has made big advances over the ...
The geology of impermanence
A few months ago, I saw a post about Cape Cod on NASA’s Earth Observatory. The post showed a pair of satellite images of Cape Cod separated by nearly 30 y...
The trees are balding
In fact, many of the trees are already bald. Autumn is well advanced. Last week we celebrated Halloween, which is followed by the Christian feasts of All Saints...
Plantigrade animals
I was browsing through the dictionary the other day with a friend, as people do, and we learned about something that bears and humans have in common. I had just...
Book review: Paleofantasy, by Marlene Zuk
Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, by Marlene Zuk The myth of the golden age dies hard. People who espouse a Paleo l...
Of rocks and humans
If you love science, history, and words, it’s not every day that you find a book that addresses all of those interests, and it’s even rarer to find ...
The seahorse in your brain
I knew about the hippocampus in the brain, but until I started reading The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World Through Evolutionary Eyes, by Christopher Wills ...