Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

500 years after his death he can still teach us to create what doesn’t exist yet

This celebrity treatment of Leonardo da Vinci misses why his work really matters. Whether or not the most recent discoveries survive the test of time (some attributions have been short-lived, as scholars’ opinions about authorship evolved), they are scheduled to be included in several major exhibitions in museums around the ...
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Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

A review of Aaron Panofsky’s Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a social theorist of our generation, possessed of rich data and much sociological insight, must be in want of Bourdieu. In what follows, I will try to explicate why I think the ironic meaning of this statement is as true as its literal ...
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The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

Can Behavior Genetics Free Itself From Racial Supremacy?

An excerpt from “Misbehaving Science”

Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its ...
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Can Behavior Genetics Free Itself From Racial Supremacy?

What To Do About Racial Supremacy in Behavior Genetics?

An interview with Aaron Panofsky

Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its ...
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What To Do About Racial Supremacy in Behavior Genetics?

Rise for the Climate

Shouting marchers took to lower Manhattan on 9/6 to protest Climate Change

Roughly a thousand people marched in lower Manhattan on Thursday, September 6 demanding that the world pay attention to climate change. This was the earliest in a series of climate marches around the globe to draw attention to a summit in San Francisco the following week. When people gathered in Battery ...
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Rise for the Climate

Science Fake and Real

On Enlightenment scientists and the forgotten role of imagination

Headlines today pop with accusations that traditional sources of knowledge and even experts are biased, ideological, and unreliable. Accusations of “fake science” have become particularly commonplace. The Heritage Foundation think tank reports on the pervasiveness of fake science, laying the blame on scientists themselves. In their view, climate change isn’t caused by ...
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Science Fake and Real

The Racism of Climate Denial

Creating uncertainty about evidence is an injustice

Climate justice demands we acknowledge that the fossil-fuel economy distributes its costs unequally across racial lines. For example, race, not poverty, is correlated with exposure to PM 2.5, a health-damaging particle produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change itself, the planetary effect of fossil-fuel consumption, also affects people unequally ...
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The Racism of Climate Denial

What’s So Natural About Natural Medicine?

A historical exploration of natural medicine

Susannah Meadows’ young son, Shepherd, was afflicted with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Conventional drug treatments (naproxen and methotrexate) seemed to exacerbate his condition, but after regular doses of an ancient Chinese herbal remedy called “four-marvels powder,” his disease went into remission.[i] In 2013, the  New York Times Magazine published an article detailing Shepherd’s miraculous ...
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What’s So Natural About Natural Medicine?

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

A Review of Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

As new technologies course towards cultural and economic supremacy, Silicon Valley CEOs and digital advocates have become increasingly circumspect about the question of risk. Many leaders in the industry like Apple CEO Tim Cook have effectively banished the word from their lexicon. As he noted in a recent keynote address ...
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We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

The Climate of Post-Truth Populism

Science vs. the People

Has politics ever been about telling the truth? Recent declarations of the rise of a “post-truth” era irresistibly provoke this question. Declared the 2016 Word of the Year, “post-truth” describes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One of ...
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The Climate of Post-Truth Populism

Not Everything Political is Politics

Reflection on the March for Science

Mark B. Brown is a professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009), as well as various publications on the politics of expertise, political representation, and climate change.
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Not Everything Political is Politics