Ann Gibbons in National Geographic on how our diets have evolved and whether returning to a “Stone Age diet” would help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens When You Remove Half a Brain from Someone
Jeff and Tiernae Buttars made a difficult decision to have a portion of their son’s brain surgically removed to eliminate his seizures. William Buttars was 11 months old when he endured the nine-hour surgery. In Indianapolis Monthly, Michael Rubino reports about how this decision changed the lives of everyone involved and how William, now a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Lovers and Haters of the Pumpkin Spice Latte
The pumpkin spice latte has reemerged. Seattle Met’s Allecia Vermillion looks at the origin story of the popular fall beverage, which actually contains little discernible pumpkin. Since the pumpkin spice latte’s inception 11 years ago, customers have ordered more than 200 million, each topped with whipped cream and a parting shake of spices. It arrives […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Probabilities Mess With Our Heads’
Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers. But as Kent realized back in the 1950s, we are even worse with words. In one study that Fischhoff co-authored, people had trouble understanding a 30-percent chance of rain. It wasn’t the probability that tripped them up, but the word: rain. Are we talking drizzle […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Can Time Inc. Save Itself By Becoming the Next Facebook?
When [Joe] Ripp first discussed taking the CEO job with Bewkes, he said that Time Inc. needed to stop thinking of itself as a magazine company. But what exactly Time Inc. will become depends on who is talking. Ripp tells me it will be a significant player in video. (The company has backed the online […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Cop Movies, Race, and Ferguson
Nonetheless, whenever I see masked and helmeted police in photographs and movies or on the street going after protesters, I wonder, as I did during a battle royal between peasants and cops in the summer’s class-war sleeper Snowpiercer: “Who are these hidden people?” It crosses my mind anytime I see a helmet swing a nightstick […]
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Journalist Austin Tice Is Still Missing Two Years After Being Kidnapped
Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the […]
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The Movement to ‘Unschool’ Children
There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is. It is already obvious that […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lauren Bacall: The Last ‘Eyewitness to the Golden Age’
“My son tells me, ‘Do you realize you are the last one? The last person who was an eyewitness to the golden age?’ Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, ‘Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?’ ‘Well, yes, I think I was,’ I reply. You realize yourself when you start reflecting—because I don’t live […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘I Will Try to Hold on to the Intense Feeling’
It’s been a meta-adolescence. Tavi has enacted a camera-ready high-school life, one in which her fashion experimentations looked fantastic rather than just ill-fitting and strange, and the whole thing was seen as a lark, hilarity worth preserving. She’s been adopted by the pop intelligentsia, who perhaps see in her a younger version of themselves, either […]