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On Ross Gay’s “The Burden” and forcing mice to swim.
Let’s say you were trying to develop a new antidepressant. Then you’d need a screen to know if your compound or cocktail of compounds was working. Eventually, you’d be doing that screen in humans – give some depressed people your medicine, see if they feel better, see if they feel better than they would’ve felt…
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On the creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression – as inspired by a passage from Karen Armstrong’s “Fields of Blood.”
“If, as has been shown for ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, women in the most meat-dependent foraging societies spend less time procuring food and more time engaged in the production of technology and performing nonsubsistence tasks, then Clovis women likely spent the majority of their time not gathering plants. In this sense, equating women solely with plant…
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Excerpts from some other book: Volume 2.
I carried the king of hearts around with me from when I was twelve until I was thirty. It was in the flip-up portrait part of my wallet, where my driver’s license should have been I guess. I was twelve when my mother took me to the store and I bought that wallet, so there…
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On Y chromosomes, surnames, and reproduction.
For me, the most interesting section of Christine Kenneally’s “The Invisible History of the Human Race” was the section on Y chromosomes. Because, sure, if I’d spent a moment thinking about it I would have realized that sons of sons of sons carry the same Y chromosomes as their forebears… but it isn’t something I’d…
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On losing good words.
“I just lost ‘troglodyte.’” “What?” “It was probably my favorite insult back in high school. I’d, like, you know how people make fun of people for reading the dictionary? I never did that, but I’d read through the thesaurus during English class, and that one was in the list for ‘idiot.’ ” “Sure.” “But, right,…
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On evolution and League of Legends.
Okay, here’s something that I feel like the Cosmos show did nicely – when they showed a tree representing evolutionary lineage, humans were on a branch jutting out seemingly at random to the side. Whereas many popular science presentations of evolution depict humans as the pinnacle – we’re here at the top, and if you…
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Excerpts from some other book: Volume 1.
My favorite animal is the sutured double camel. Takes only three camels to make, and they can live for almost two weeks. Type of guy who says she’s got jugs like an Amazon when he’s not talking asymmetry but rather sheer size of the gazongas. Sitting in a lecture hall, the course was apparently something…
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On personhood, in the Ramayana and in court.
I’ve been working on a modern retelling of the Ramayana. Mostly because the myth provided a framework for approaching a number of issues that I wanted to discuss, like free will: numerous commentators think the Ramayana is primarily a story about fate, and the structure of Valmiki’s telling, in which an episode of the gods…
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On returning books unread.
I would’ve liked to write a post about Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” because it seemed like he had an interesting thesis. From what I gathered reading the first five chapters and the short blurb on the dust jacket, he wanted to write about the contribution of the American slave trade, especially…
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Frank Brown Cloud 