Off to the Galapagos
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends, and a great week to the rest of you. I will not be blogging for a bit, because I’ll be vacationing in the Galapagos, with my favorite evolutionary biology books no doubt at my side.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends, and a great week to the rest of you. I will not be blogging for a bit, because I’ll be vacationing in the Galapagos, with my favorite evolutionary biology books no doubt at my side.
In his wonderful 1992 book – Lincoln at Gettysburg – Gary Wills explains that one of the reasons the Gettysburg address was so powerful is that Lincoln did not use any proper names – that’s right any – in the entire address. Consider this portion of the speech: Now we are engaged in a great…
I have conducted a number of studies on a phenomenon sometimes referred to as emotional adaptation. The basic idea behind this phenomenon is that people often respond with strong emotions to significant changes in their circumstances, but these emotions tend to diminish over time. Moreover, people often fail to anticipate this change in emotions, a failure…
Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today: All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the…
I remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…
You might be interested in some coverage my research team got in Qatar, for our study on oncology decision making. (Link) Maybe one of you can translate it for me?

The best thing about bad art is that it makes fodder for great reviews. Take the opening line of Mina Strohminger’s review of Colin McGee’s “The Meaning of Disgust”: “In disgust research,” she writes in The Journal of Aesthetics and Critical Art, “there is shit, and then there is bullshit.”
Guess which category she thinks McGee’s book falls under?
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