Update: I’ve put the story online as a pdf here.
In this month’s “Environmental Affairs” column at Men’s Journal, I took a crack at deciphering the debate over the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, and whether it should come off of the Endangered Species List. The decision — which looks most likely to be a done deal in favor of taking it off — has some environmentalists up in arms. Surprisingly, though, other conservationists back “delisting.” Have the bears “recovered” enough to declare a kind of victory? Or are the threats to their survival still grave enough warrant keeping them on the list?
The story isn’t online, so you’ll have to pick up a copy if you’re interested. Here are the first couple paragraphs: Post continued…
Posted at 6:15 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Environment/Energy, Men's Journal, Recent stories |
Here’s the full déjà vu story, for those who don’t have a Times account:
Déjà Vu, Again and Again
Pat Shapiro is a vibrant woman of 77, with silver hair, animated blue eyes and a certain air of elegance about her. She lives with her husband, Don, in a white two-story Colonial in Dover, Mass., a picturesque town set on the Charles River east west of Boston. After 56 years of marriage, Pat and Don have a playful repartee that borders on “Ozzie and Harriet,” and her still-sharp mind is on display in their running banter. “Don, we haven’t had an ‘icebox’ in years,” she’ll say, interrupting one of his winding stories. “It’s called a refrigerator.”Her short-term memory isn’t quite what it used to be, she says, but it’s nothing that impacts her life. “Her long-term memory is meticulous,” Don says. “She can remember details from our trips to Europe years ago that I can’t.”
Posted at 3:01 pm | 4 Comments | Filed under Deja vu, New York Times, Recent stories |
Left out of my recent story on déjà vecu were some of the more interesting studies trying to create déjà vu-like sensations in a laboratory, in order to better understand what causes the everyday version of the phenomenon. Akira O’Connor, a grad student of Chris Moulin (the déjà vecu researcher in the article) has had success using hypnosis to create a similar strange sensation of familiarity. Alan Brown at SMU and Elizabeth Marsh at Duke University also have a clever experiment, testing the theory that actual memories can sometimes trigger déjà vu. Here’s my outtake section on the research:
“There is almost a bit of a loneliness about déjà vu to start with,” Akira O’Connor, Moulin’s graduate student, told me one morning at the University. “When you get it, you wonder if you are the only person in the world to have had that feeling.” O’Connor, whose research involves trying to induce déjà vu through hypnosis, was bothered by frequent déjà vus as a teenager. Then he read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, with its lengthy discussions of what Heller describes as “a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence.” Reading Catch 22, O’Connor says, “let me know that I wasn’t going mad.”
Posted at 12:24 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Deja vu, New York Times, Recent stories |
The worst thing about researching or writing about déjà vu? The jokes. “It’s f*&#ing terrible,” Chris Moulin said when I asked him about the barrage of déjà vu humor faced by any scientist who decides to tackle it as a serious scientific topic. Even I’ve pretty much heard them all over the last couple of months, including from the British customs agent who asked me what my purpose was in the country
“I’m here interviewing a scientist about déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu, eh?” Pause. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”
And then, of course, there is the forever-quoted line from Yogi Berra, “it’s like déjà vu all over again,” and the use of the term to describe anything familiar. Try doing a Google search on it, you’ll get a sense of the frustration that Moulin described to me:
“I get the Google alerts, ‘déjà vu all over again, Yankees beat Red Sox,’” he said. “In Medline or Pubmed, it’s things like ‘Phsophorization and Myelination: Déjà Vu All Over Again.’ It must be hilarious in biochemistry.” Perhaps most frustrating from a scientific perspective, he pointed out, “is that it’s not even bloody déjà vu!”
I should post this twice, just to drive home the point. But you get the idea.
Posted at 8:57 am | 1 Comment | Filed under Deja vu, New York Times, Recent stories |
Earlier this summer, for Wired, I interviewed Larry Brilliant, the new head of the Google Foundation, about his plans for the foundation’s billion dollar bankroll. Besides being a fascinating character — former head of the smallpox eradication effort in India and elsewhere (something his guru in an Indian monastery told him to pursue), founder of “The Well” and two technology companies, personal physician to Jerry Garcia, and a participant in a number of other public health initiatives, including the polio eradication effort — he’s got some interesting ideas about mixing for-profit and non-profit ventures to tackle global problems like poverty and global warming.
What’s your mandate?
We’ll have three big areas: climate crisis, global public heath, and global poverty, not necessarily in that order. I’m going to approach this the way a venture capitalist would – map out the industry to see what the gaps are. You fund an initiative, learn what works, and ask, “Will it scale?”What makes Google.org different from, say, the Gates foundation?
We are not really a foundation. It’s a bit of a 501(c)3, a bit of a C corp, and a bit of an academic environment. I can play more of the keys on the keyboard. A 501(c)3 can’t lobby. A 501(c)3 can’t invest in a company or build an industry. It may be that the only way to deal with climate change is to create an industry or build companies.
Read the rest.
Posted at 8:11 am | Comments Off | Filed under Recent stories, Wired |
