Showing posts with label Steven Pinker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steven Pinker. Show all posts
Thursday, November 14, 2024

Sensible Style: Writing in the 21st Century

›
Last week I reread Steven Pinker's THE SENSE OF STYLE (2014), subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Cen...
Thursday, March 03, 2022

Ranking Dangers

›
The March-April issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains an article titled "The World's Most Deadly Animal," by Harriet Hall. The ...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 17, 2021

Canine Conversations

›
A speech language pathologist, Christina Hunger, claims to have taught her dog, Stella, to "talk": Can That Dog on Instagram Rea...
Thursday, May 30, 2019

The Omnivore's Dilemma

›
No, not the book of that name, which was the only reference that popped up on a full page of Google results. I first encountered this term i...
Thursday, April 18, 2019

Hopeful Futures

›
Kameron Hurley's column for the April issue of LOCUS explains how her writing has recently shifted from a pessimistic to an optimistic v...
Thursday, August 09, 2018

Defining Deviancy

›
In sociological discourse, we encounter the term "defining deviancy down." This phrase refers to behavior that used to be condemne...
Thursday, July 05, 2018

Illusions of Safety

›
Last week, five people on the staff of our local newspaper were killed by a gunman who attacked their office because he had a long-standing ...
Thursday, June 07, 2018

Common Assumptions

›
In his essay "On the Reading of Old Books" (written as the introduction to a 1943 translation of St. Athanasius's book on the ...
Thursday, February 22, 2018

Is the World Improving?

›
Psychologist Steven Pinker has just published a new book, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, a follow-up to his 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: W...
Thursday, September 14, 2017

Mundane Psionics

›
Many characters in fantasy and science fiction possess psychic superpowers. They can read thoughts, view events at a distance or (maybe by t...
Thursday, June 29, 2017

The Sense of Style

›
I've been rereading THE SENSE OF STYLE, by Steven Pinker, published in 2014. The lucid and witty cognitive scientist Pinker, one of my f...