David Shenk

From a short essay of mine that appears in this month's Brown Alumni Magazine:More than ever, we need public intellectuals willing to bridge different worlds. As complexity threatens to overwhelm us, an increasingly distracted public needs to understand how genes really work, how markets can be both encouraged and reined in, how history teaches us about politics . . . . Whether we like it or not, we need more sound bites--and more creative metaphors and… More »

I was honored to be part of a discussion panel at The Franklin Institute this past weekend to kick off this year's EduCon conference. The conference is an offshoot of the Science Leadership Academy, an amazing new Philadelphia public high school, and its visionary founder Chris Lehmann. The open-ended question posed to the panel was: "What is Smart?" Here are my slightly-edited opening remarks:What is smart? This is a really exciting time to ask that question. For… More »

My wife's iPhone was snatched a few weeks ago on the sidewalk in front of our house (reenactment for our local paper, above). I almost had mine swiped the other night in the exact same way. Our downstairs neighbor has had several taken. Both of my brothers have had their iPhones stolen, and several close friends. I haven't seen national data, but in our Brooklyn neighborhood, iPhone theft is rampant.On one level, this is not surprising at all. The iPhone is… More »

Our hearts go out to the Haitian people, and of course we all must help. Here's a link to donate to CARE, one very reliable aid group. (There are many others; check up on charities' reputations at Charity Navigator.) This tragedy should also be a giant reminder that, when it comes to natural disasters, past is prologue. This shocking map shows how many regions in the U.S. have experienced a major earthquake since 1750. This list shows the major known world… More »

The New Yorker's cover illustration this week by Javier Mariscal is entitled "New Worlds," alluding to the visionaries covered in the "World Changers" special issue. But, forgive me, what I see is a cool alternative cover for my forthcoming book, The Genius in All of Us. Take a look: All those in favor of replacing my original book cover, below, with Mariscal's brilliant image above, say "Aye." (This is impossible to do, but what the hell.) More »

In response to this month's Atlantic feature "The Science of Success," by David Dobbs, which I admired, I invited Dobbs to engage in short back-and-forth over one particular gripe I had. He graciously accepted. Children, avert your eyes. This is literary brawling the likes of which haven't been seen since Norman Mailer head-butted Gore Vidal.Shenk alights from behind a doorway with his first jab:Congratulations on your beautifully rendered "Orchid" piece. You do a… More »

December 11, 2009Once upon a time, in a city [not so] far, far away, I became friends with an ordinary someone named Laurie Strongin, who was pretty much like the rest of us in a good kind of way -- smart, kind, funny, mildly ambitious. In our post-college youth, we lived near each other in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. In the morning, we all went to work as interns and assistants and junior thises and thats, and in the evenings we all gathered… More »

Being an actual hero has never been easier or more painless. Thanks to a couple of small leaps in technology, it is now crazy easy, ridiculously easy, fantastically easy, to join the blood marrow donation registry in order to save someone dying of leukemia. If you do turn out to be a patient's match, it's almost as easy to actually make the donation. In the past, all marrow donors had to give actual bone marrow, which is extracted from the hip bone. Now, most… More »

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, let's meet the man who arguably did more to corrupt his ideas than any figure in history: his half-cousin Francis Galton. Galton was an influential anthropologist and statistician who lived about 40 miles from Darwin's home in Kent, and who interacted with him frequently. After the publication of Darwin's 1859 landmark work, which introduced the first coherent… More »

One of the things I hope to do in this space is facilitate communication between scientists and science writers about how to best describe complex scientific research to the public. After hearing some concern from University of Iowa neuroscientist and Behavioral Neuroscience Editor-in-Chief Mark Blumberg about Nicholas Wade's recent New York Times story, "Speech gene shows his bossy nature," I invited Blumberg to submit an open letter to Wade. Here it is, along… More »

I was very proud to be included in this year's "Great Nonfiction Writers Lecture Series" at Brown University, my alma mater. This was a very unusual event for me. I often get to speak on the content of my books but pretty rarely speak about the process of writing them. Here's a slightly-edited version of my prepared remarks, delivered Wednesday, November 11, 2009, in a lecture room about thirty yards away from where, twenty-five years before, I first used my… More »

A new study from Duke and the University of Michigan shows that McCain voters experienced an immediate drop in testosterone levels in the hour after his '08 loss to Obama, while testosterone levels in Obama voters stayed steady.Makes for a nice news blip and some cute headlines. But what does it actually mean?One very basic lesson is how all sorts of events in our lives--big and small, far and near, personal and political--affect our biochemistry. And even though… More »

We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of "intelligent design."Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery. No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save… More »

In the late afternoon of September, 24, 2009, I spent about 90 minutes talking with Keith Jarrett in his home studio in rural New Jersey. Through thick glass, we could see his two grand pianos which, through more thick glass, watched over a lake. Next door was his old farmhouse. The entire compound is wooded, secluded, and peaceful in exactly the way you'd imagine. I approached the conversation with two aims. On the surface, I hoped to engage Jarrett about the idea… More »

And now...the exciting conclusion of the dialogue between New York Times science writer Robin Marantz Henig and myself, about some word choices in Henig's excellent piece about the science of anxiety in Sunday's Times Magazine. We'll begin with Henig's last published answer:RMH: "Worry comes early" is a better phrase, but guess what -- that's not really accurate, either. Kagan is not saying that these high-reactive infants are worrying. What he's saying… More »

Beginning today, I'm trying a new experiment with the Comments section of this blog. I'm going to screen all submitted comments and allow in all that are polite and respectful. Criticism will be welcome, and even embraced. Arrogant dismissiveness will not be. Challenge my facts or my interpretation of the facts. Offer your own point of view. But don't be rude about it.Yes, screening is inherently elitist. But so are publications, print or otherwise. The old… More »

The accomplished science writer Robin Marantz Henig has a fascinating piece about the science of anxiety in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, entitled "Understanding the Anxious Mind." Henig and I have been acquainted for a few years and, I think it's fair to say, have admired each other's work. So when I got in touch to take issue with a few of her word choices, she was open--even eager--to discussing my gripes. We both thought it might be interesting to… More »

When I was 10, my eye caught a curious title on my school library shelves. It was A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. To make a long story short, I read it and fell in love with words and ideas.Later, I learned that this splendid piece of literature has often been banned because its ideas about witchcraft may be too powerful for an impressionable child's mind. I also became vaguely aware that other highly-acclaimed books were occasionally banned in… More »

KJ: When I was a teenager, my youngest brother had a lot of issues, and didn't go to school. He couldn't go outside, so he couldn't have friends, so he was basically a prisoner in my mother's house. There was an upright piano there. And occasionally, my brother, knowing zero -- meaning really zero -- about piano, would work out anger or frustration, which he must have had gobs of, by going to the keyboard and just playing some shit. He didn't know what notes he was… More »

Today is World Alzheimer's Day, which very likely means nothing to you. That's because if you have Alzheimer's disease in your family, you already know how ruthless the disease is and you already spend every day thinking about it. Conversely, if you're not currently facing the disease in some way, you are way too terrified to think about it and you'd do anything not to. You'd rather read every word in the phonebook. You'd rather re-take the SATs. You'd rather eat… More »