Doubt the Experts

I haven't been reading much lately or had much to report. Pretty soon I'll start on the biography of Rousseau that I mentioned earli...

Approximately the first half of the book discusses Plomin's research with adopted children and twins, which he uses to identify the heri...

Robert Plomin, the behavioral geneticist, has written this book to sum up several decades of his research for general readers. So far, I...

I was dragged into a household distraction regarding the midterm elections, and now that they're over it will be easier for me to think ...

One of the most notable features of this era is the facility with which people can inhabit a reality that is far narrower than they would ha...

I strongly recommend this short new book by Martin Rees, the British astronomer. There probably isn't a better one addressing the major ...

Lost in Math , I think, is of the greatest interest to working theoretical physicists, because it examines the main challenges currently fac...

In order to have some idea of what is going on in physics, I periodically read popular books on the subject. I read A Brief History of Time ...

I have been going through another drought with nothing suitable on hand to read, and some new books have finally arrived. I should begin com...

I've been reading an academic book on poetry by William Logan, Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Pa...

This volume, which includes several of the later short stories of Katherine Mansfield, has turned out to be better than I expected. Mansfiel...

The arrival of fall is palpable here. Suddenly the nights turn cool, dew drenches everything and the skies are clear again. Last night I got...

One of the disadvantages of buying cheap used books online is that they take a long time to deliver. I have a couple on order that should ar...

I am alone in the house again for a few days, though I may have preferred going on a short trip myself. Since 2016, when I visited Washingto...

Politics isn't exactly one of my favorite topics, but the current situation in the U.S. seems extraordinary, so I'll continue to com...

As I've said, I have a hard time finding things that I enjoy reading, mainly in areas other than nonfiction that is written specifically...

The bulk of the book is devoted to describing experiments that have studied evolutionary changes in specific species over short periods of t...

I'm moving along in this medium-length book by the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos. Losos surveys current research trends in the f...

The visitors have departed, my bout of shingles has almost healed and I am just about back to normal. However, it is still hot in Vermont, a...

I have officially entered what might be called the summer doldrums. It started with a heatwave that left me enervated, not wanting either to...

I found this book, by Yvonne Daley, informative regarding this period in Vermont. There isn't much analysis, and it consists mainly of v...