archive

Most of what we know

A new issue of The Incongruous Quarterly is out. From Numeracy, Dorothy Wallace (Dartmouth): Parts of the Whole: Cognition, Schemas, and Quantitative Reasoning. Kent Slinker, Jared Lee Loughner's philosophy professor, on the shooting in Arizona. The mathematics of beauty: Christian Rudder investigates female attractiveness, without the usual photo analysis stuff, past a woman's picture, into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male. The Commandments: Jill Lepore on the Constitution and its worshippers. Science: Most of what we know about how the world 
thinks comes from research on a handful 
of American undergrads. Rules for Rascals: David Weigel on why Republicans are better at fomenting outrage, real and pretend, than Democrats are. Some hasty wording was hyped as a feud within anthropology, but the hysteria was misleading, and the field's real enemies remain at large. Prominent intellectuals rate President Obama after two years. Social animal: David Brooks on how the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life. A look at what psychology could add to the Wikileaks debate. The Best of Times: What’s bad for liberals has been very good for Bill Maher. An article on Mario Vargas Llosa, the stateless statesman. Liberals should target the casual assumption that the only real terrorist threat we face is from jihadist Islam — not good old-fashioned white Americans.