What is mental health? And what is its flip side, mental illness? What can be done to ease mental suffering? In Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, author Anne Harrington doesn’t seek to answer these questions. Instead, she provides two centuries worth of history, describing how health professionals have sought to identify, describe, … [Read more...] about Mind Fixers
Talk on the Wild Side
Some linguists study the histories of words and the histories of languages. Others ask how children learn first or second languages and wonder why that learning seems so different for adults. Some ponder the language capabilities of non-humans. Some study language as it relates to gestures or brain activity, while others ask where language comes from in the first place. Lane … [Read more...] about Talk on the Wild Side
Those Bees and Bugs
In the earliest pages of Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees, Thor Hanson laments the way that most people seem to be more aware of the plight of bees than of the bees themselves. Furthermore, when people think of bees, they tend to think of honeybees, a domesticated species, different from wild bee species in the way that an owls and hummingbirds are different from … [Read more...] about Those Bees and Bugs
Lawn Boy
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. Some people get parents—two of them!—who have the time, experience, and resources to help them think through the choices they must make as they approach adulthood. Mike, the central character and narrator of Lawn Boy, doesn’t have that. His mother loves him and wants the best for him and his brother. So she works multiple jobs, misses holiday … [Read more...] about Lawn Boy
Extended Heredity
Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution In grade-school science the first thing we were taught about evolution was to snigger at a picture of a giraffe straining to reach the single remaining leaf on a tall tree. It was silly to think that a creature could stretch its neck reaching for food and later give birth to a creature with an even longer … [Read more...] about Extended Heredity