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I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.

T.V. Cooking, a la francaise

She is not exactly a gourmet, but Maite Ordonez provides just what the French want in a television chef.

There is a place in France where old-fashioned eating is still the order of the day. A place where margarine is scorned and salt embraced, where food is hearty and heaping. A place where the voluptuous cooking has been described by a French newspaper as “a gastronomic Rubens.” And best…

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Splashing in the Gene Pool

Biotechnology finds a home in the grocery store

Radishes as big as yams!  Skim milk right from the cow!  Carrots that taste like apples, cucumbers that taste like something, cotton plants that taste like rayon (to boll weevils).  In the early 1970s, when scientists discovered the principles of recombinanat DNA, the only miracle that seemed beyond the reach…

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Doctoring Without Drugs

Alternative medicine is based on the theory that the body has a natural healing ability

Arline Merola’s 2-year-old son Matthew had a classic case of chronic ear infections.  And he was treated in the classic way: antibiotics most of each winter and the threat of surgically implanted tubes to drain his ears.  Last October Merola decided to try something else.  She went to Paul Mittman,…

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A (Vague) Sense of HISTORY September 1990

Ignorance of history affects our future as a democratic nation and as individuals

Historians tend to tell the same joke when they’re describing history education in America.  It’s the one about the teacher standing in the shoolroom door waving goodbye to students for the summer and calling after them, “By the way, we won World War II.” The problem with the joke, of…

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