All posts
-
On family (my own) and music videos.
I had planned to post something serious today. Maybe a piece on Freeman Dyson’s writing about amnesty; I wrote & scheduled it a few weeks ago but have been bumping it since. Or an essay about the evolution of skin color that I’ve been taking notes for ever since reading early press coverage about the new human genomics data.…
-
On memory (part 2).
Read part 1 here. Midway through spring, we found ourselves in Chicago for a wedding. K was asked to be best man, and since N was (is) still breastfeeding, she and I had to tag along. I’m not a big fan of weddings, but I did sneak in a lovely conversation with the groom’s younger…
analyzing a brain to see stored memories, Anthony Zador, differences between scientific findings and press releases, memory, mind reading, neurons, neuroscience, Quiojie Xiong, recovering data from broken brain, recovering data from broken computer, recovering data from dead brain, recovering memories, recovering memories from dead brain, Selective corticostriatal plasticity during acquisition of an auditory discrimination task, synaptic strength, wedding conversations -
On Charleston, the morning after.
tl;dr — This is horrible. To anyone who lost someone yesterday, & to anyone who finds the world a little more terrifying after seeing this in the news, you have my sincerest condolences, although I know they count for very little. I’m sorry. ************************ Given that I’ve written several posts about race & racial conflict…
-
On Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the current legality of slavery in the United States.
The prologue to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout is twenty-two pages of absolutely incendiary writing. The closest literary parallel I can think of is Mark Leyner; Beatty’s writing is hyperkinetic and reference-dense in the vein of Leyner’s “I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot” or Et Tu, Babe. Really beautiful, powerful stuff — and better…
-
On fire myths and the origin of knowledge
EDIT 5/4/2018: a finished essay based on this research was published here. If you’re writing about conflicts between religious and scientific worldviews, there is absolutely no reason why you’d be forced to write about fire. But, c’mon… fire is cool. Eventually you probably would. While researching myths about the origin of fire, I realized that…
-
On killer line breaks.
Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars is excellent, combining bursts of science-fiction weirdness with totally non-speculative emotional clarity. If you chance upon a copy, you might try flipping to her poems “The Museum of Obselencence,” or “Sci-Fi,” or “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” particularly the fifth strophe of that last one; those are…
-
On Alice Goffman’s ‘On the Run’ and extrapolate-able truth.
Many people have criticized Alice Goffman’s ethnography On the Run. The first set of criticisms I noticed were from people who claimed that she misrepresented black urban life by studying the particular group of people on whom she centered her book (examples here and here). Now Goffman is being accused of felony-level crimes and, by virtue…
-
On Boyhood (the film), specifically the eleven seconds between 2:34:11 and 2:34:22.
One quick remark before I launch into this essay: I typically type these while N is playing at the YMCA, so I had to take several screenshots of the film before coming here so I could consult them alongside my other notes. But Apple’s built-in screencapture won’t function if the DVD player is open; I’d…
Adele Exarchopoulos, appearance changes after ingesting psychedelics, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Boxtrolls, Boyhood, cinema, computer workarounds, criticism, Do No Harm, Family of the Year, film, fire hydrant photographs, fire hydrants, harms caused by U.S. drug policy, Hero, hydrants, iminent arrival of Gargantua, intentional lack of functionality, Jack Kerouack, losing good words, On the Road, philosophy of the present moment, photography, psilocin, psilocybin, puberty as a special effect, screencapture with DVD player open, special effects, sucks, The Dreamers, the loneliness of artistic pursuits, unintentionally homophobic language, unintentionally misogynistic language -
On Jon Krakauer’s Missoula
I am obviously thrilled that Jon Krakauer’s Missoula has been getting so much press. There are still a wide variety of pernicious misperceptions out there, and Krakauer does an excellent job of addressing them in a very accessible format. I hope lots of people read his book, and, like Nicholas Kristof, encourage their friends and…
-
On biomedical research (and why I no longer do it).
Getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford is excellent preparation for two careers. One, becoming a research professor at one of our nation’s universities, in which case you get to help mint more Ph.D.s because the workforce employed by research professors is primarily composed of doctoral candidates. Two, conducting bioscience science research at one of…
Frank Brown Cloud 