Category: Uncategorized

That’s what David Dobbs has called my book–“a rowdy, harrowing, vital book.” Dobbs’ review for The New York Timesis the kind of review I dreamed of as I was writing the book (and struggling with living it). About a week ago, I got to see an early copy of this review, and so naturally I thought that its appearance this…

My “what’s new” page provides a running list of hotlinks about my work. This page provides the occasional narrative update. My new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger, came out about four weeks ago, and the reception has been . . . well, nothing short of amazing. Sorta like a dream. Just after it came out, Amazon named the book…

I was more than a bit incredulous yesterday when a stranger on Twitter sent me news that anti-vaxxers are passing around a particular Guardian article from 14 years ago as if it contains fresh and accurate “vaccine harm” news. The hat-tipper knew that I’d written about this article—“Scientists ‘Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory’”—in my Human Nature account of the American Anthropology Association’s…

File this one under “games medical researchers play.” In a recent essay for the BMJ (pointed out on Twitter by 1boringyoungman), Stuart Buck criticizes the Institute of Medicine for not being bold enough with regard to review of medical research data. The Institute of Medicine (IOM)—the medical branch of the National Academies—is calling for a new system in…

What’s a woman allowed to say? That’s a question I wrestled with a lot while I was writing and revising my new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. Really ironic; so much of the book deals with struggles over who gets to say what gender means—and the whole book is written…

What’s new? This whole freakin’ website! Apple stopped supporting iWeb, the platform on which my site was running, so I had to recreate the whole site. Because iWeb did not create importable pages, I had to recreate all of the pages. But it gave me a chance to redesign the site and to think about how…

I’m a lot like Sheryl Sandberg, or at least her public persona. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I’m a hard-driving, productive, leadership-prone woman who believes it is critically important for women to be confident, unashamed of their talents, and serious about careers they want. I have worked my ass off to…

(I wrote this before my book Galileo’s Middle Finger. You can consult that for more details about this. You can also see this open access article: Darkness’ Descent on the American Anthropological Association.) The documentary film “Secrets of the Tribe” contains major historical errors, which is odd, because the filmmaker apparently knew well of the historical scholarship…

This morning, Dan Ryan and I did a live radio interview on WKAR’s “Current State” with Mark Bashore. (Listen to it here.) Dan Ryan is the great guy from Lansing who took it upon himself to figure out who still needed power restoration during the huge Board of Water and Light (BWL) outage a couple of weeks…

Recon suggests everybody in East Lansing is now restored to power, as of a couple of hours ago. Today marks 11 days since electrical power went out here–spectacularly in the case of our block, where a down wire arced for 30 minutes of sheer bright terror. (It lit up like a rocket launch every few…