Steven Pinker
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.
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I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…
grrlscientist | August 31, 2007tags: books, linguistics,Steven Pinker
"Cathartic swearing," is analogous to the earsplitting shrieks of rats, cats, and monkeys, and is part of a primal, embedded rage circuit, and likely evolved to startle and unnerve an attacker, according to Steven Pinker. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of a book entitled The Stuff of Thought (2007) that will appear in your bookstores within a week or so.
"If you want to intimidate someone," Pinker says, "then talking about sexual acts he does with his mother and advising him to engage in various other…