The Morality of Sports Fans
Like many Patriots fans, I’ve been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick’s taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the...
View ArticleSupply and Demand
Loss aversion is so easy to understand – it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds – and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football...
View ArticleTwo Recommendations
1) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It’s the best written new novel you’ll read this year, and that’s saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting...
View ArticleThe Perfect Yawn
Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious? A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55...
View ArticleReligion and Morality
Here’s Drake Bennett: In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego,...
View ArticleIrrational Fears and Global Warming
Fear isn’t our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming: I...
View ArticleHomosexuality, Iran and Identity
In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad’s recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia: What seems more...
View ArticleBrain Augmentation
Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation: It’s arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab,...
View ArticleTraining the Tongue
It’s not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way: Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain’s...
View ArticleComatose?
In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients: For four months, Kate...
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