Neuron Culture's top five from December

'Twas the month of orchidness. I had a spotty month posting in December, as book bidness and then the holidays massacred blog production, but got some good traffic despite. The leaders:

1. Are "orchid kids" the same as "gifted children"? was my blog reaction to Lisa Belkin's' blog reaction at the Times to my Atlantic piece, "The Orchid Children." The short answer to the question was No. See the post for why that doesn't quite cover it.

2. Coming sort of soon to a bookstore near you: "The Orchid and the Dandelion" announced my deal to do a book on the orchid or 'sensitivity' hypothesis. But the real interest was clearly in how this hypothesis can change one's approach to parenting.

3. Does the "orchid-dandelion" metaphor work for you? My duel with David Shenk is a smackdown between me and David Shenk over the pros and cons of the orchid-dandelion metaphor. Shenk (and some other readers) worried the metaphor does more than I want it to, to bad effect. Most readers urged me to stay with it. I'm still thinking.

4. Two-year-old Hamlet: A toddler takes on Shakespeare.

In which we get cute and Hamlet in one package. Irresistible. See for yourself:

5. Stress is an old, old companion Which shouldn't be news, but sort of is.

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Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in: Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-…
Over at the Times Magazine Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin ran a short post about my Atlantic "Orchid Children" piece a couple days ago, and some of the responses she got strike to an issue that has come up quite a few other places. I posted a note on this at Motherlode, and wanted to expand on it a…
I'm happy to announce that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of many a fine book over the decades, will be publishing "The Orchid and the Dandelion" (working title), in which I'll explore further the emerging "orchid-dandelion hypothesis" I wrote about in my recent Atlantic story. (In brief,…
The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website -- and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping -- about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics. This emerging hypothesis, which draws on…

Twas the month of orchidness. I had a spotty month posting in December, as book bidness and then the holidays massacred blog production, but got some good traffic despite. The leaders: