In response to my last post, which proposed that Transcendental Meditation and other cults might be exploiting the placebo effect, some readers cited studies supposedly showing that TM has therapeutic benefits...
I'm a child of the Sixties, so I've known lots of people over the years who've joined cults. One of the most popular was Transcendental Meditation, which the Indian-born guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began marketing to westerners, notably the Beatles, a half century ago...
Before I get to Margaret Mead, a bit of breaking news about the Napoleon Chagnon controversy, the subject of my previous post. Chagnon and his supporters have described his election last year to the National Academy of Sciences as "vindication," as The New York Times Magazine put it ...
I have a few things to get off my chest regarding Napoleon Chagnon, who is back in the news with a score-settling memoir, Noble Savages . On Sunday, Savages was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review , and Chagnon was profiled in a Times Magazine article: "How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist." Both pieces focus on the 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado by Chagnon's nemesis, journalist Patrick Tierney...
Are drones far down on your list of anxieties? Do lethal flying robots seem like something Pakistanis, Afghans and other inhabitants of faraway lands need to fear but not Americans?
Every February, anxiety. Valentine's Day looms and I agonize over what to get/do for my girlfriend. I'll call her Veronica.* Funny/sexy/romantic card?
I'm getting worried, again, about the future of "pure science," which seeks knowledge for its own sake rather than for practical applications, like thermonuclear bombs and erectile-dysfunction treatments...
When it comes to science, ours is a paradoxical era. On the one hand, prominent physicists proclaim that they are solving the riddle of reality and hence finally displacing religious myths of creation...
In my last post, I defended mega-pundit Jared Diamond against his critics, especially social scientists who imply that a book may be scholarly or a bestseller but not both.
During my seven years at Stevens Institute, I've often asked students to write a response to the following query: Would you rather have lived in the Stone Age than today?
Recent events have me rethinking the benefits of a fully transparent world, in which everyone electronically monitors everyone else. In 2010, I blogged about my hopes that "grassroots spying" could help us create a safer, more just society, in which citizens can spy on people in power rather than just vice versa...
We're approaching the end of one year and the beginning of another, when people resolve to quit smoking, swill less booze, gobble less ice cream, jog every day, or every other day, work harder, or less hard, be nicer to kids, spouses, ex-spouses, co-workers, read more books, watch less TV, except Homeland , which is awesome ...
I've beaten up on opponents of gun control in posts published on the day of the Newtown massacre and again on Sunday. In both posts, I strongly implied that more guns mean more shootings...
It's the day before the doomsday, as supposedly prophesied by ancient Mayans. Scientific American has been dutifully mocking the prediction, while also cannily capitalizing on it by offering discounted subscriptions in an "End of the World Flash Sale." Brilliant!I figured I'd take advantage of apocalypse fever by reprinting something I posted last June about a prominent popularizer of the 2012 meme, psychedelic scholar-entertainer-guru- Scientific-American -fan Terence McKenna...
I'm still brooding over the Connecticut massacre. Here are some points I'd like to add to those I raised in my column on Friday:One respondent to my previous post chided me for my inflammatory language...
It's happened again: a lone gunman has carried out a massacre, this time in an elementary school in Newtown, CT. A young man killed 18 children and eight adults, reportedly including his mother, a teacher at the school, before taking his own life.And so once again I'm dragging out my plea for gun control, just as I did last summer, after James Holmes shot 12 people to death in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and in January 2011, after Jared Laughner killed six people and wounded 14 others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, Arizona.Every time a deranged American male goes on a rampage, shooting down dozens of people, gun lovers trot out the familiar excuses: Guns don’t kill people, people do...
I'm pondering complexity again. The proximate cause is the December 11 launch at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, of a Center for Complex Systems & Enterprises.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb can be a pain in the ass. After I invited him to speak at Stevens Institute of Technology a year ago, he made all kinds of demands about where, when and how the event should take place and be publicized—or rather, not publicized...
Is heaven real? Eben Alexander thinks so. He is a neurosurgeon who learned his craft at Duke and honed it at Harvard. In 2008 he fell into a coma, his brain infected by bacterial meningitis...
The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.
