NYTimes Science Times : Yet more on Pinker?; Trompe l’eyewitness; and other second looks
From top: Imperial, Ivory Billed, and Pileated woodpeckers
This site here went on a one-day NYTimes Sci Times strike yesterday. One glance at its lineup leader, a big profile of Steven Pinker, and this tracker thought bah! and enough on him, what’s new to say and hasn’t he had more than his quota of attention already?! Surely there are better things to do than read this. Peevish of me, overly resentful and suspicious of a guy who seems so suddenly blessed by wide if not quite universal media worship. So I spent some extra time trying to find a thread of meaning in coverage of the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
All better now. Anyway, the Pinker profile is from Carl Zimmer, another pretty much universally admired but outwardly modest writer (inside, nearly all of us are pathetically egomaniacal) of intellectual worth, so I read it. Yes, Pinker gets another buffing. But it has a lively anecdote on him as a teenager to start off, and it persuades further that the Harvard psychologist is on to something and not for the first time. Plus, I after all did go with some pals in a small group we preeningly (with a giggle) call a solon and listened to Pinker’s book-tour talk in a dignified old club rent-a-hall in the Berkeley hills a month or so ago. Pinker, pale gray mane flashing, convinced me against expectation that our species has gotten more amiable with its own kind in the last millennium or more (while, one notes, we’re killing off other species about as fast as an asteroid). Students might read this to see how a not-so-old old pro, Zimmer, keeps a reader’s eyes moving through a profile, weaving personal anecdote about somebody’s full life with a thread on his or her long list of c.v. achievements. A fine example of craft, it is.
Other Science Times headlines to note:
- Andrew Pollack: New Hope Of a Cure For H.I.V.: No breakthroughs asserted – Berlin patient and promising work on gene therapy employing zinc finger proteases – but an encouraging progress report.
- Laura Beil: The Certainty Of Memory Has Its Day In Court ; This too is not news, but bears repeating again and again. Lawyers need to be able to challenge, and have some public skepticism already planted, by declaring that just because a witness is honest and certain that doesn’t make him or her reliable. One wonders if many trials already include expert witnesses who say pshaw to eyewitness testimony as worth much. Although, one supposes, people who say they saw somebody they know really well already as in “It was my neighbor Bob, at it again and wearing that stupid shirt he likes so much,” and in clear light and fairly close, well, that ought to get some respect at the bar whether before it or sitting on a stool.
- Ritchie S. King: A Bacterial Platoon with Fungi Engineers ; A spritely brief, nifty picture, and it’s something other news outlets don’t seem to have had. Off a PNAS paper. Maybe there’s a press release? Couldn’t find one but if so, let us know. I looked for and found Mr. King’s site – this is a newbie with promise, not long out of NYU and Dartmouth. He has a little snark to him too – check his essay on what currently – that’s word play - is my passion to have an electric car and it is now on order. It grounded me a bit (another one). He’s not on the NYT SciTimes staff list. Maybe an intern.
- Cornelia Dean – A Venerable Birding Club, at an Epicenter of All Things Feathered ; Man, what a tony club that Nutter Ornithological outfit is. I read one paragraph and, being engrossed in a book about Teddy Roosevelt’s post-Bullmoose, ghastly-difficult adventure in S. America (The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard), I looked to see if America’s greatest birder president was a member. Yep. Cory doesn’t mention that, but the story is a brush with 19th century upper-crust naturalist fervor still going strong. And, one hopes, not so snooty anymore.
- Robert Garisto – How Do Eminent Physicists Tackle the Higgs Boson? With Chocolate ; Guest essay. The man is an editor (at a top science journal). He has style.
As usual, lots more. Whole Section.
- Charlie Petit
